Clarke Throws Hat into Ring for Tory Leadership

The Conservative Party of the UK is searching for a new leader. Kenneth Clarke, who has twice before stood for the position and failed to secure it, has decided that he isn’t too old, too pro-Europe or too tainted by tobacco money to be Prime Minister. Most Tories think otherwise. However, Mr. Clarke is offering the Conservatives a chance to do some deep thinking about what it is to be a Tory in New Labour’s Cool Britannia. They must seize for their own good and the good of the nation.

The problem with the Conservatives turned up during the John Major years. A vibrant and philosophically driven party had come to power in 1979, and by 1990, when Mr. Major entered Number 10 Downing Street after the party turned on Mrs. Thatcher (as she then was), it had implemented most of the free-market changes it had offered the public. What does a political party stand for when it accomplishes its goals?

Of course, for some Tories, there is a never-ending fight for the resurrection of England’s past, what George Orwell called “the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.” For most Britons, though, the England (and there are damned few Tory MPs in Scotland or Wales) of yesterday (if it ever really existed) isn’t the future.

And that is where the New Labour folks come in. No longer is Labour known for Militant Tendency; the Red Flag has been replaced by the royalist Red Rose as the party’s symbol; and Labour under Tony Blair sounds a lot like the Tories under Sir Alec Douglas-Home (PM in 1963-64). When the other side steals one’s clothes, and when one has accomplished one’s political goals, there is no more party – merely a brand.

In the end, Mr. Clarke is likely to be a three-time loser, which in politics is not inherently bad. While David Davis or David Cameron take over the job of leading the party, Mr. Clarke will be able to say that he kept himself true to his ideals. As Senator Henry Clay said in the 1840s that he’d rather be right than president, and Mr. Clarke’s opposition to the Iraq War, his pro-European views and his pro-civil rights views (“You don't beat the enemies of freedom by taking the freedom away,") certainly make him right. But they won’t make him leader of the Tories. Actually, they make him a Liberal Democrat.



© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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