You couldn’t make this stuff up…
Between June 4th and June 7th, Europeans from twenty-seven member states will go to the polls to elect a new European Parliament. One man, however, is more likely to tip the balance of power in Strasbourg than the electorates of most individual countries. That man is David Cameron. In 2005, when campaigning for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Cameron sought to ingratiate himself to the Eurosceptic wing of his party by making a pledge. Choose me, he assured them, and I’ll bring the Conservatives out of the mainstream centre-right political grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP (European People’s Party), after the next elections. The icing on this isolation cake was the surreptitious deselection and suspicious retirements of old-style pro-European Tory MEPs, and the imposition of control from Central Office during the MEP corruption scandals of Summer 2008.
Why exactly did the Cameroonian plan tug on the heartstrings of the John Redwoods and William Hagues of this world? Above all, it’s important to remember that the modern-day British correlation between Left and Right and Europhile and Eurosceptic is an anomaly in international terms as well as historically (Labour’s 1983 manifesto promised, for example, to pull Britain out of the then-EEC). Your most ardent Superstaters are likely to be found, not in the Socialist bloc, but within Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats or Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP. The Tories smell a federalist scent wafting around the hemicycle, and it gives them the jitters. For them, there’s nothing worse than the familiar refrain of common security, immigration and foreign policies. And don’t get the anti-Maastricht veterans started on the Lisbon Treaty (no really, please don’t).
As far as intriguing American politicians go, Jon Huntsman is one to watch. Huntsman is the Republican governor of Utah and in the running for his party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Given that he governs a state where only 34% of the populace voted for Obama and which is generally considered to be the most blood-red Republican state in the union, you might expect the rhetoric of his initial forays into presidential contention to be positively prehistoric. But you’d be wrong. Last month he made national news by coming out in support of civil unions, even though he ran for governor in 2004 on a platform of opposing them. He also criticised Republican leaders for attacking the economic stimulus package after its passage, and other Republican governors for refusing to take parts of the stimulus money. He has said Republicans need to move to the centre on the environment and he’s making noises about delaying the passage of a hard-line immigration bill he signed last year. What is Jon Huntsman up to?
In a recent Huntsman interview, Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted that his thinking resembles a “Republican brand of Clintonism: practical solutions, softened rhetorical edges aimed to appeal to the center and an overall modernization of a party badly in need of a new image.” If you think this sounds like the tactics of a certain Eton-attending, bicycle-loving British opposition leader, you’d be right:
“I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the U.K.,” Huntsman explained. “The defeat in ’97, John Major to Tony Blair, after years of strong, conservative rule with Margaret Thatcher setting the mark. They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the U.K. really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost. You cannot succeed being a party of the South and a couple of Western states. It just – it isn’t long-term sustainable.”
Okay, so Huntsman is trying to do a David Cameron – get his party to embrace (or appear to embrace) a more moderate, compassionate platform in order to win over the demographics necessary to get into power. It seems to be working for Cameron - so will it work for the Republican party?
Suddenly she’s everywhere. Docu-dramas on the Beeb (and what could be more thrilling than Portillo on Thatcher?); a New Statesman special issue; op-eds from the Guardian to the Telegraph; portrait hangings at No. 10. Yep, apparently we have Thatcher Fever. What accounts for the sudden revivalism of a legacy which has been spurned for two decades? I don’t buy the argument that this is a matter of simple anniversaries. Sure, it’s almost 30 years since Sunny Jim miscalculated the election date, but I don’t recall a similar fiesta in 1999.
Nor, it would now seem, does the mere mention of “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie” elict the Pavlovian response “Out Out Out!” The BBC’s sympathetic portrayal, and Gordon’s acceptance of the idea of not only a Downing Street portrait, but even a state funeral, seem to imply that after Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy, an election campaign based around Thatcher’s hair on Hague’s head and spontaneous celebration when she quit, it’s finally OK to be a bit soft on the Iron Lady. Just when did it go out of fashion to hate Tories?
How has this happened? Well, as Martin Kettle points out in his Guardian column, part of the explanation is that, unlike in 1999, we’re now on the precipice of a Conservative comeback. David Cameron is poised to become the next Prime Minister, so, the media seem to be presuming, we’re all a bit nostalgic for the last era of Conservative hegemony, if not (as in the case of my generation) curious about what it was actually like.
