Beware the ghosts of Thatcher and Wilson

The Highcliff Hotel, Bournemouth, has a place in political history because it was where CR Attlee, Arthur Greenwood and Hugh Dalton went on a Friday in May 1940 to meet the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party during the conference. They decided Labour would serve under Winston Churchill or Lord Halifax but not under Neville Chamberlain. Labour mythology has it that they laid down that they would serve under Churchill only and that accordingly Labour made him Prime Minister. But this was not quite what happened.

For myself, however, I associate the hotel chiefly with scenes of Thatcherite triumphalism in the 1980s, more so than I do any comparable establishment in Blackpool or Brighton. It was full of young people, the men in suits, the women in attractive outfits, making a lot of noise and swaying alarmingly as they clutched glasses of beer or sparkling wine to which they were clearly unaccustomed.

Last week the young Liberal Democrats may have been nicer, less raucous, perhaps less expensively dressed, certainly more sober: but the general effect was much the same. They gave out the same smell. It was the odour of self-advancement. There would, they evidently thought, be something in it for them. There have, as we know, been similar gatherings in the past. There was, most famously, the conference at Llandudno in 1981, when David Steel instructed his fellow Liberals to go back to their constituencies and prepare for government. This was at a Liberal conference. But it was also the first conference of the newly formed Alliance with the Social Democrats, though the union was to be placed on a more formal footing later on. Certainly such figures as Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams were received with warmth and cheers all round; while Jo Grimond, as the father of the whole enterprise of realigning the left - which lasted till Paddy Ashdown - was given the reception of a hero of his time.

Then there was Torquay in 1985. That was the SDP alone. But by now the Alliance was going strong, having secured 26 per cent of the vote in the 1983 election, only a few points behind Labour. The conference was held in a marquee in the grounds of the Palace Hotel; the sun shone; and with Jenkins, the biographer of HH Asquith, taking a leading part in the proceedings, it seemed that the spirit of Liberal England was hovering over the lawns.

At that time, it may be remembered, it was held by enlightened persons generally that the Labour Party was finished, done for. Indeed, Robert Skidelsky asserted with the utmost confidence in The Spectator that the party would never hold office again. There is an argument that he and the others who made similar predictions have turned out to be right - that the party which sustains Mr Tony Blair's government is nearer to Lady Thatcher than it is to the party led by Mr Michael Foot. The Government is certainly nearer to Lady Thatcher, even if the party is not. That is why Mr Charles Kennedy is right not to move into a Conservative slot, for Labour has moved into it already.

Twenty years ago the fashionable prediction was that the Labour Party was about to be extinguished. Today the same fate is supposed to await the Tories. This was certainly the prevailing theme at Bournemouth. The wisdom of the wise was that the Liberal Democrats would gain 20 or 30 seats at the election, at the expense of both Labour and the Conservatives.

But the latter would do appallingly against their two rivals. This would leave the Liberal Democrats with an increased presence in the new House and Mr Blair in possession of an adequate, even if diminished, majority. This is more or less the view taken in the Westminster village, though Mr Blair himself is said to be more worried about the ungrateful electors.

Lord Rennard, the Liberal Democrat expert on matters electoral, helped me with a small question, though it could turn out to be important later on. The party traditionally has such a wonder-working figure to hand, often eccentric (as Lord Rennard is not), and the cause of alarm in the other parties. There are 659 MPs. But 13 Scottish seats are to disappear. Mrs Helen Liddell would not be relinquishing her Airdrie constituency and going out to govern New South Wales if this was not meant to happen.

In fact this somewhat alarming former aide to Robert Maxwell is, unaccountably, off to govern the entire subcontinent, but no matter. The redistribution has not occurred yet. Lord Rennard assures me it will, with the consequence that we are looking at 324 MPs rather than the present 330 needed for an absolute majority.

Several months ago now I predicted that Mr Blair would not manage it. It was then a minority view. Since then several others have climbed aboard, showing varying degrees of conviction: Mr Andreas Whittam Smith and Professor John Curtice in The Independent, and Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times. In the late 1960s the political classes quite failed to understand the degree to which Harold Wilson had lost the trust of the voters. At the same time the savants thought that Edward Heath was hopeless and would never be elected prime minister.

I am sometimes accused of overdoing the historical parallels (there may be something in it) and I do not want to push this comparison too far. But substitute Mr Blair for Wilson, and Mr Michael Howard for Sir Edward, and you have a similar state of affairs today. What is self-evident, a matter of simple arithmetic, is that you cannot have a rise in the Liberal Democrat vote in certain seats without putting in the Conservative at the expense of the sitting Labour MP. I am not going to cite seats - there are scores of them - because, in this world, illustration is taken to be the same as prediction. To this extent, Mr Peter Hain is quite right in saying that a vote for the Liberal Democrat may well amount to a vote for the Conservative.

Where he is wrong is in thinking that people regard this in the same way, as a lamentable consequence, as he understandably does himself. Most Liberal Democrats, including, it seems, Mr Kennedy (who had a good week), look at it in the same fashion. This is because we have been so programmed since the 1980s as to view tactical voting as an anti-Conservative device to advance either the Labour candidate or the Liberal Democrat. It arose out of a hatred of Lady Thatcher. But - alas! - Mr Blair now arouses exactly the same emotion, not least because of the war in Iraq. People can vote tactically against him too; just as they once tried to do against his heroine. And, in a hung parliament, the Lib Dems will be more powerful than their modest official line was predicting last week.