A fatal weakness for second-rate leaders

Brought up in the rational piety, relatively speaking, of the Church in Wales, I would nevertheless venture occasionally with a few friends to the wilder shores of evangelical Nonconformity. We did this partly to acquaint ourselves with the varieties of religious experience but mainly, I confess, to look for girls.

We were, the preacher would inform us, miserable sinners, conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. We would undoubtedly spend the rest of eternity burning in Hell. It was no use thinking we could avert this painful fate simply by changing our wicked ways. We had first to be saved by the Lord Jesus. Our ways would then change as the result of our salvation.

After a good half-hour of this, perhaps more, a procession of men and women would make their way to the front to give an account of their experiences in this field. These were rather disappointing, lacking as they did any significant detail. The men would confess in general terms to smoking, drinking, gambling or swearing: behaviour that would arouse no adverse comment in, say, the Garrick Club. The women would confine themselves merely to a claim that they had been bad. Sexual adventures played no part in these admissions. There was nothing to make your hair stand on end. Suddenly, they had been saved by Jesus, their lives changed for ever. To conclude the proceedings, the preacher would invite all those who had been saved that evening to come to the front of the chapel. Whereupon half-a-dozen or so would advance sheepishly towards him, to receive his warm congratulations, as if they had just hit the coconut and won the fake crystal sugar-bowl at the local fair.

Last week at Bournemouth Mrs Theresa May was not dressed like these preachers, who tended to favour very dark grey three-piece suits with all three buttons done up. And the standard of speaking was much lower at the seaside. But the message was the same. The Tories must first find salvation – they must be saved – and then they would change, when they might start winning elections again, not next time round perhaps, but the time after that.

It was a mood, subdued and puzzled, which I had not sensed before. It was not like this after Harold Wilson won in 1964, 1966 or 1974 or after Mr Tony Blair won in 1997. It was not even like this last year, after Mr Blair's second landslide, at Mr Iain Duncan Smith's first conference. People seemed to be writing as if last week had seen his first appearance as leader. In a sense, perhaps, it was, for the events of 11 September hung over last autumn; while the Tories were still in a state of shock after their defeat.

When the Conservatives are out of office they tend to nominate a hate-figure, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes deliberately. Occasionally such a person is put in the pillory even when they are in government. The representatives proceed to throw missiles at him throughout the week. The BBC provided the week's nearest thing to a hate-figure. The list from earlier times is honourable and eclectic: Aneurin Bevan, Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, Ken Livingstone, Bernie Grant. Sometimes a more central figure is selected for punishment. Wilson had a brief spell in the stocks.

The Conservatives in office even had a go at Mr Blair. They are now terrified of him. They wish they – or, rather, Mr Duncan Smith – could be more like him. They try to use his diffuse language; though, to be fair, Mr Blair tries to use theirs as well. Indeed, there were passages in Mr Blair's Blackpool performance, notably those on respect for authority and so forth, which might have come straight out of any Conservative leader's speech over the last 20 years.

It was not surprising that they gave Mr Blair a wide berth. What was odder was that they spared Mr Charles Kennedy their attentions as well. And yet, talk to any serious Conservative and he or she will tell you that the fear is that, between now and the election, the Liberal Democrats will overtake the Conservatives as the second party. If that happens, not only is there the argument that a vote for them is a "wasted vote". Worse, there is the possibility that, after the election, the Liberal Democrats will replace the Conservatives as the official Opposition, with all that means for positions of pomp and power.

For the last 40 years the Conservatives have consistently chosen second-rate leaders when they could have had the first-rate instead. They chose Alec Home rather than R A Butler; Edward Heath rather than Reginald Maudling; John Major rather than Michael Heseltine or Douglas Hurd; William Hague and then Iain Duncan Smith rather than Kenneth Clarke. Even Margaret Thatcher looked second-rate to begin with: but she was a goose who turned into a dragon.

Mr Duncan Smith differs from the others not only in being third-rate rather than second-rate but also in having been the choice of the members. Moreover, they were at odds with the MPs, who would have preferred Mr Clarke, even by a narrow majority. Mr Hague, by contrast, was chosen by the MPs alone; in his case the party activists would have preferred Mr Clarke instead.

Last year Mr Duncan Smith was chosen not because he was nice but, on the contrary, because he was thoroughly nasty, or fondly imagined to be so. For instance, he is a believer both in capital and in corporal punishment. He keeps quiet about these preferences: partly, no doubt, because they would be disapproved of by his spokesman on home affairs, Mr Oliver Letwin, one of last week's successes, who was treated as a long lost brother by Mr Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.

Mr Letwin could stand for the leadership of the Nice Party, if that is what the Conservatives sincerely want themselves to be. Mr Duncan Smith is a natural leader of the Nasty Party. True, he was not nearly as nasty as some towards Mr Major over the Maastricht Treaty. But he was quite nasty enough to be going on with. Indeed, when he mentioned this period of his life in Thursday's speech, spontaneous applause broke out, exceeded only by the response to his stuff about being a quiet man. This was perhaps a modified lift from Dryden's "Beware the fury of a patient man", which was much used of Geoffrey Howe during the fall of Margaret Thatcher.

Mr Duncan Smith may be quiet but he is certainly not nice. In any case, the position of leader of the Nice Party is already occupied by Mr Kennedy. Nice people, such as the residents of Guildford and Winchester, now vote Lib Dem. Happily – or alas – there are not enough of them around to vote a government in. But two nice Tory ladies were leaving a Bournemouth party:

"Filthy white wine."
"Free white wine."
"Filthy free white wine."

Some things never change.