eurealist.co.uk

Many thanks to Dennis Cooper for sending this to me from the Telegraph

Clarke has a hinterland: it’s his foreground that’s the problem
By Ferdinand Mount
(Filed: 24/08/2005)
There is, we know, more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth and we are supposed to carry home the lost sheep on our shoulders rejoicing. But when the lost sheep in question has frisked away from all its would-be saviours and got stuck in a crevasse so deep that the chap from air sea rescue has to dangle on a line to haul it out, then surely we may be forgiven a sigh of exasperation.

Kenneth Clarke now says, in an interview with the journal Central Banking, that the euro is a failure, that the right conditions for Britain joining never existed, that the European constitution is dead and there is no point in talking about another one, and that the European Central Bank hasn’t a clue.

In other words, “I was wrong” - not just a tiny bit mistaken, or in need of modest reformulation, but hopelessly, catastrophically wrong.

This extraordinary recantation is really rather poignant. For if Clarke had expressed these views looking forward with the clarity and forcefulness with which he now expresses them looking back, the Tory leadership would have been his for the asking when John Major resigned after the 1997 election.

Alas, now he tells us, when he is gearing up for a third try at the hollow crown. There is something not so much poignant as pathetic about his cunning plan to let the news of his volte-face seep out during the holidays, perhaps hoping that he can reposition himself without anyone noticing much. First comes the discreet little hint three paragraphs down in a piece by the Guardian political editor, then the interview in a periodical so esoteric that it takes a week for anyone to pick it up.

I am afraid nobody is fooled. One cannot help recalling the heckler who replied to Harold Wilson’s rhetorical question “Why am I standing up for the Royal Navy?” with the words “Because you’re in Chatham”.

It would be kind to accept Mr Clarke’s conversion gracefully and “move on”, as we are always being instructed to these days by politicians who want to get away from the scene of the disaster as fast as their little legs will carry them. But since it seems that Clarke, incurably, is about to offer himself for the leadership of the Conservative Party again, we must steel our hearts and dwell a little, if we are properly to assess his vision, leadership and officer-like qualities.

The year after the euro was launched, Clarke was triumphant: “The euro has already created wider and deeper capital markets. It has done what I thought it would do: speed up the essential restructuring of western European economies. It has also stimulated trade and investment across borders. It is leading to liberalisation in every area. Euroland economies are achieving rapidly accelerating rates of growth. I never thought that the disadvantages of our having to wait would become apparent so soon.”

Now he says that virtually none of this has turned out to be true.

Two years later, he was further exulting in The Times: “There has been a decisive swing to the pro-euro cause. The public mood is changing as people can see the success of the new currency on the mainland and the alarming fall in inward investment into Britain.”

None of that has turned out to be true either. It was not just his forecasts of what was going to happen, but his analyses of what was actually happening before his eyes that were so wildly adrift.

He tries to recoup his position a bit by claiming that he never thought that the economic conditions were right for joining in 1997. All he wanted Tony Blair to do was to hold a referendum not actually inviting voters to say Yes to joining but asking them “Do you accept that there are no insuperable political objections to Britain ever joining the single currency?” What a bizarre coitus interruptus of a referendum that would have been.

At this point, we have to remind ourselves that, whatever his faults, Ken Clarke is a decent bloke, the goodest of good eggs, as well as the only big beast in the Tory jungle - a habitat that has been so sadly deforested by the ruthless loggers of international Blairism.

And so he is. There is nobody you would rather crouch with on the banks of the Massa Lagoon in the hope of spotting a bald ibis, no better companion for sinking a pint of Theakston’s Old Peculiar, no one whose Hush Puppy you would rather see tapping beside you at Ronnie Scott’s. And that is why I used to warm to the idea of his taking over. But now, like him, I am having second thoughts.

Yes, Clarke has acres of hinterland. It is his foreground that is the worry.

Of course great politicians are always liable to be wrong about something, and the more people tell them they are wrong, the more stubbornly they defend their error. Churchill was wrong about India, Margaret Thatcher was wrong about the poll tax.

But Clarke seems to be afflicted by a more endemic sort of pigheadedness. He does not stop to think or to listen. His famous intellectual laziness is not so much sloth as a kind of wilful disregard.

Most thinking Tories (all right, I know they’re an endangered species) welcomed Gordon Brown’s decision to hand over the management of interest rates to the Bank of England. They had toyed with the idea themselves and wished they had done it. Clarke bitterly opposed the move, though he has now recanted on that, too.

As education secretary, he blocked any attempt to devolve real power to parents by some sort of education voucher - now increasingly recognised as the last-resort answer to poor standards in state secondary schools.

As chancellor, he began the erosion of the married couple’s tax allowance, denouncing such support of marriage through the tax system as “an anomaly”. Now it is not only Tories who have woken up to the fact that Britain has the least marriage-friendly tax system in Europe.

Above all, in office Clarke was consistently contemptuous of the performance and potential of local government. In all his senior posts, he supported centralisation with unabashed vigour. Now the new localism is the hottest fashion in politics.

In fact, if there is a single former minister whose errors the Tory party is now trying to recover from, he’s your man. It’s not a question of Left versus Right, or Wet and Dry, or even Thatcherites v the rest (quite often he and Mrs Thatcher were on the same side, sometimes the wrong one). It is more that Clarke seems to have a poor grasp of how to make limited government work and little enthusiasm for spreading power downwards.

Beneath that endearing Quangle Wangle hat there lurks a man with a rather Continental view of the proper role of the state, more Bismarck than Baldwin. It seems unlikely that this bias will have softened in his old age, or that his instinct for what Britain really needs will be any surer in this century than it was in the last one.

He might make a splendid President of France. I just don’t think he’s one for us.