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I'm a Portillo woman
Both officers and men felt genuine respect for him.
I HAVE always had a soft spot for Michael Portillo. He is clever and charming, and unlike most politicians he is interested in the arts. In fact when he was Minister of Defence I even developed a bit of a crush on him, since anything to do with the armed forces makes me very sentimental. I followed him around, with other journalists I mean, on a tour of Bosnia for a couple of days, and thought, against every disrespectful journalistic instinct, how impressive he was. It was altogether a very strange experience.
I found myself on an army base surrounded by minefields in deep snow sharing a tiny hut with Anna Ford and Petronella Wyatt, apparently doing double duty both as journalists and as forces' sweethearts. There was an air of unreality about the whole thing. And soldiers behave in such an extraordinary way; for all their look-you-in the-eye frankness, it is impossible to know what they really feel. But as far as I could tell, both officers and men felt genuine respect for Portillo. He seemed to have exactly what it takes (and really rather more than what is usually thought necessary) to make it to the top of his party.
All that is history. Or at least I thought it was. But suddenly Portillo has sprung on to television with a new series "in search of a New Conservatism", boldly called Portillo's Progress. The second episode is being transmitted on Channel 4 tonight. I can't help being struck by the juxtaposition of "a new Conservatism" with Michael Portillo's personal progress. I suppose it is probably a mistake to read too much into it; television titles are usually imposed by the person who was least involved. But it is odd. And it's odd too, or reckless, or unthinkingly flamboyant to let your name be associated with progress with a capital P; obviously he was thinking of a Pilgrim's Progress - something penitential and to do with the getting of wisdom (not to mention the Promised Land) - but it also suggests a Princely Progress around one's domains. Media manipulation is so damn tricky.
I am not sure whether we really need a whole new Conservatism. I think the old Conservatism had a lot to be said for it, which is why the Labour party stole so much. What we do need is new and better presentation of Conservative ideas, an acceptable face and an acceptable style; some new integrity and conviction would help too. Conservatives have been quite astonishingly bad at explaining themselves, as Portillo says himself; had Blair made a remark like "there is no such thing as society" - and he could easily have done so, since he agrees with everything Thatcher said about society in that speech - the Labour Party publicity people would have gone into emergency overdrive, squared the press and turned it into a public relations triumph.
Yet the Conservatives, out of incompetence, laziness or arrogance, allowed this nightmare phrase to discredit them from that moment to this.
This is only one example of many. Thatcher, for instance, allowed herself to be hated more and more for "the cuts" in hospital spending, while each year spending more and more on the NHS - hardly a triumph of PR. I can hardly believe, in retrospect, that the Conservatives allowed themselves to be so naive and so unprofessional about style and media management. I was astonished that I was almost never approached by any Tory politicians trying to persuade me of the rightness of their cause, even though I was an obvious fellow traveller; I did not put this down to their dazzling integrity.
But however necessary, style is not enough, or not for long. What is needed is not a big new idea, but a return, in all kinds of smaller practical ways, to the old idea. And I think this is what interests Portillo. One which he discusses in tonight's programme, is a return to local, neighbourhood responsibilities, to those primary groupings of society in which Mrs Thatcher did believe, and to local government, to help the dispossessed help themselves. He visits a Saturday school for black children in Yorkshire, run by volunteers. And he visits the town of Clinton, Iowa, population 26,000, where people in the community are propping up a large problem family, mending their house and coaching their children, as part of a state-aided parent-aid scheme. No Conservative can disagree with this. If people are to be responsible for their own lives, they must be allowed to take responsibility, or taught to, supported by their neighbours and community schemes. It sounds wonderful - a real reinvigoration of local government.
We should be forgiven for feeling cynical. This is, of course, what they said they would do last time, and failed to do, maybe because it cannot be done.
There are two obvious problems. One is that local government tends to be incompetent and all too often corrupt; what is more it necessarily produces inequalities across the country. Portillo is talking about local government that is more local than the local authorities - the bureaucratic complications of funding and monitoring of such small units and projects hardly bear thinking about. The other problem is that many people won't accept this responsibility, as the poll tax fiasco made clear. There are no votes in it. If Michael Portillo's progress leads him to a solution to those problems, then he really will have gone somewhere towards a new conservatism.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 27, 1998
