Have you ever played a party game called “Margaret Thatcher’s dinner party”? It may have other names. Each guest must think of a famous person, alive or dead, fictional or real, of whom the whole group will have heard. Everyone then goes out of the room, one by one, to whisper the name they’ve come up with to a designated host who writes them all down and then reads them out to the group. The aim of the game is to guess who thought of which name, the last person guessed being the winner. Remembering all the names is surprisingly hard, particularly if heavy drinking is encouraged.
The key to victory is in your choice of name: it has to be well known but also somehow forgettable. A name that, when read out, will hardly be remarked upon. Not a surprising blast from the past, not the man or woman of the moment, but someone blandly in between. A name that can pass, without friction, into and then out of people’s brains. Which brings me to the Tory leadership contenders.
I’m sure they’d all love to have been invited to a dinner party by Margaret Thatcher – though not of course one of the ones that was attended by Jimmy Savile. But one of the other ones with Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson and, I don’t know, Lulu. Those were the days, they must all have been thinking last week as they shlepped round the Tory conference in Birmingham desperately trying to drum up a sense of excitement about themselves. But what wonderful ideas for Margaret Thatcher’s dinner party they are! Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat are names that, once read out by the host, will never be repeated.
Kemi Badenoch, on the other hand, feels more memorable. But then she’s been working hard on that. Last weekend she declared, in the Sunday Telegraph, that not all cultures are equally valid and also, on Times Radio, that women get too much maternity pay. That’s a lot of grist to the appalled-reaction-mill. The xenophobia went down better than the misogyny, with all of her three male opponents disagreeing with her on maternity leave, thereby further deepening their indistinguishability.
Badenoch is fighting a very energetic campaign, which is decent of her because it helps sustain the illusion that any of this matters, a psychologically helpful prop for all those people who turned up at the conference in the hope of a feeling of significance. But even she, just below the surface, can’t entirely avoid giving the impression that the stakes in this leadership contest are not enormously high. And by “just below the surface” I mean in her actual Sunday Telegraph article rather than in all the articles that have been written about it.
It’s a disappointing piece of writing. It’s about immigration. She says that she would get it under control. She doesn’t really say how she would get it under control but, to make up for this, she says that she would get it under control over and over again: “I will develop the fullest and most detailed plan to control immigration that any political party has ever proposed.” And later: “We will end illegal immigration by proper enforcement and inserting whatever deterrent is necessary into the system.” And also: “We need to deal with the culture in our public sector that does not like doing difficult things.”
Is that a culture? Not liking doing difficult things? Or is that just human nature? Then again, lots of people enjoy Sudokus and they can be tricky. It’s the issue of culture that’s her big pitch: she reckons immigrants need to leave their culture behind them, like shoes outside a mosque, and join in with British values. She talks a lot about those values without specifying what they are.
It irritates me when politicians do that. It makes me want to assert that my values may be different from theirs. There are millions of people in Britain and they have all sorts of different values. Obviously there are some that we pretty much all share. There are others that most of us share. And there are others that most of us don’t share. Could someone compile some lists? Then we’d need to find a way of deciding which values any immigrants have to have, and which ones we’d ideally like them to have but they’re not deal-breakers. While we’re at it, perhaps we should do a quick audit of the values of existing citizens. What if some of them turn out to have the wrong values? Could we get them exiled and replaced with some nice foreigners who have some much better values?
On the basis that the Conservatives just catastrophically lost an election, I’m not sure their values are passing muster with the public at the moment. For example, wouldn’t proper maternity leave and pay for pregnant women potentially qualify as a British value? Not for Badenoch, it seems, who reminisced on the radio: “There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.” There certainly was – in fact there were several such times: the Victorian era, the middle ages, the Tudor period… I could go on. Is she saying that was better? Where does she stand on the falling infant mortality rates that have been going on for the past 100 years or so? Is she in favour or against?
I’m not sure she’s really thought this through. She’s just taking a position. Trying to look dynamic, but she must know, win or lose the leadership election, that her chances of becoming prime minister remain low. It all feels like going through the motions so that someone can drag the party along for the next few bleak years before being replaced with a genuine contender who has yet to emerge. Badenoch betrays this when she writes, in setting out her stall: “Unlike others, I have a record of saying winning arguments against the leftwing establishment.” There’s something about the phrase “saying winning arguments” that’s so limp and exhausted, it makes you want to weep at the futility of it all.
