Yesterday, at a rallying speech, Eric Pickles proclaimed that the Conservatives were the true home of Liberal Democracy.  It was another masterstroke on the road to Pickles electoral strategy to secure David Cameron the keys to No.10

With Labour on the ropes, plunging personal popularity for Gordon Brown, the Conservatives needed to start to turn their guns on the Liberal Democrats, on the eve of their Conference.  Over the past few days the temperature has been bubbling up around the Lib Dems.  Reports are surfacing that the Labour Party have been making discreet enquiries as to whether the Liberal Democrats would be happy to support the Labour Party in a Coalition government in the result of a Hung parliament.  The last desperate acts of a dying Government.

Of course, Pickles wanted to strike and ensure that Liberal Demorat voters, who felt mightily disenchanted with this news, realised that they have a home with the Conservative Party.  Genius.  Right on cue, Pickles paraded James Keeley, Lib Dems PPC in Skipton & Ripon, a defector to the Tories to reinforce his message.  Keeley is the ninth LibDem PPC to quit the LibDems forthe Tories in the last couple of years, along with one MEP and more than 50 councillors.  becoming a trend….and a great message to hammer home just on the eve of the Lib Dems Conference.

I was fortunate to attend Eric’s speech at Broadway House.  Eric Pickles is a man larger than life.  His persona lights a room on entry.  He was in fine form yesterday.  Addressing the audience as ‘chums’ , he ensured that he spend time meeting those from the audience who wanted to bend his ear.  His speech was typical Pickles.  As ever he left plenty of time for audience Q&A.  I asked him a question: ‘Why is Gordon Brown running scared of a Sky News Leaders Debate’?  His reply focused of course on Brown’s record and the astounding level of debt.  But Pickles made us all laugh when he stated that he thinks Brown has no option but to accept ’and I wont miss this debate for the world.  I will buy a bucket of pop corn and enjoy the entertainment’!  He is a jolly man who inspires those around him, but equally he can be a bloody tough customer.  He is perfect for the role of Tory Chairman. 

Looking back  at the history of Conservative Party Chairman, some great people have held the office.  Who is the Greatest Party Chairman is open to debate.  Those most regularly attributed as top performers in the role include:  Arthur Steel-Maitland, who radically restructured the Party following the thumping electoral defeats of 1906 and 1910, hence creating, in many ways, the foundations of the modern Conservative Party; Frederick Marquis, (Lord Woolton), Party Chairman from 1946-1955, again reorganising the Conservative Party after Churchill’s defeat in 1945; Peter Thorneycroft, Party Chairman from 1975-1981, creating the formidable Party Machinery that saw Margaret Thatcher sweep to a historic victory in 1979.  Thorneycroft came to be known as the ‘Rolls Royce’ of political campaigning; the 3 names mentioned thus far were known for their reforming of the Party machine and setting up future electoral success for the Party, however, other Chairman like Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson and Chris Patten, helped to deliver strong electoral success and results that many could not predict the scale. 

Turning to Eric Pickles, he has been extremely influential in turning round the Party machinery and hence electoral fortunes.  Candidate selection today, after a series of reforms is so much more professional than years back.  Candidates are now professionally assessed via Parliamentary Assessment Boards.  The move towards open primaries eg Totnes again shows that the Party Machinery is moving in the right direction.

Is Pickles the finest Conservative Party Chairman in history?  He may well be……but only if he delivers a strong electoral victory next year.  He has been as reforming of the Party and its machinery as Steel-Maitland, Lord Woolton or indeed Peter Thorneycroft.  That in itself is a big tribute.  But like these names and the likes of Tebbit, Parkinson or Patten, he next has to deliver that electoral success for the Party.  And it looks like he will.

Party Conference is a crucial test for Eric next month.  He needs to ensure the Conference acts as a springboard for the Conservatives leap to Power.  Delegates will be in positive mood.  Pickles has to ensure delegates appear confident but not arrogant and certainly not taking anything for granted.  Triumphalism is the biggest of electoral turn offs…and Pickles knows that.  But we expect the Chairman to deliver nothing less than a tub thumping speech that rallies the party faithful and inspires.

Deliver the keys to Number 10 to Cameron next year and job done for Pickles.  That will certainly place him in history as one of the best Conservative Party Chairman..if not THE best.  But that’s a matter for your own subjectivity!

For those that missed Eric’s speech yesterday……….

Text of the Speech, provided by CCHQ, of Eric Pickles Address at Broadway house, 18th september 12.00pm.

‘The Chingford Skinhead’…..’Semi house-trained pole cat’.  Most of all a stalwart for Conservatism

Margaret Thatcher said of Norman Tebbit, (in her memoirs The Downing Street Years).  ‘Norman is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He will never deviate on a point of principle—and those principles are ones which even the least articulate Tory knows he shares’.

Yesterday got me reflecting.  Whilst Norman Tebbit’s recommendation to send a protest message to the House of Commons by voting for any party apart from Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems, was at best foolish, it got me thinking as to the man and his achievements.

As mentioned yesterday I was disappointed with Norman’s statement.  The Party cannot tolerate people, whatever their standing, recommending the electorate not vote for us.  My personal frustration with Tebbit’s comment is mostly driven from the frustration that the Conservatives have been in opposition for far too long and I, like all of us, are desperately tired of the incompetence of this Labour administration and don’t want anything to derail our chances of a strong majority.  But his foolish statement should never mask his achievements for our Party and the country.  He is a politician to be held in awe and we should not lose sight of that.

Tebbit has always been a polite man to meet.  Despite his tough public personification, he is a kind man with a superb sense of humour.  When he speaks he does so quietly, calmly, (devoid of aggressive emotion), he speaks with authority and his views always deserve to be listened to.  I remember the great West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding.  He had the nickname ‘whispering death’ because his run up was so smooth, calm and beautiful to behold then he unleashed a ball of such menacing ferocity that batsman the world over were savaged by this quiet unassuming man.  Tebbit is the same.  Speaks quietly but when he tears into something or someone, they are left shredded to pieces.  Hence why he was so effective as Margaret’s right hand man.

Tebbit in his prime was a formidable politician.  No question.  For many the biggest regret was that he never stood for the leadership after Thatcher was so unceremoniously ousted from office.  Tebbit would have been a formidable opponent against Tony Blair.  Tebbit held Blair in contempt and summed him up beautifully: ‘I don’t think he’s a liar, just a fantasist. He says whatever he likes, and then he believes it’.   Brown can also be said today to fall into this camp ie says whatever he likes and believes it!

Tebbit, in his prime, like Thatcher, had his finger on the pulse of the working man & woman.  As ‘The Sun’ newspaper would say…he was the voice of the people.  He could speak to them in terms they emphasized with.  Tebbit was born into a working class family and this meant he could inspire and motivate many of them to vote for the Conservative Party.  The working class has always been suspicious of the Conservative Party and the Etonion and Oxbridge roots but Tebbit & Thatcher blew these concerns away.

In an interview with The New Statesman in 2000 Tebbit responded to why he supported John Major post Thatcher and did not stand himself…..  ‘I helped him. If I’d opposed him, he wouldn’t have been on the radar screen. I’d have been opposing Michael Heseltine. I had to make the decision quickly. I didn’t want to go back on my word to my wife that I’d retired from front-line politics. How would it all work? Was No 10 suitable for someone in a wheelchair? All these things go through one’s mind. Then if Michael had won…he would have had to ask me to join his government, and I didn’t want that. I asked myself: why am I risking all this? And I made my decision…I might have been an absolute disaster in the job. It’s possible. So I am left there. You can’t rewrite it. You can’t rerun it.”

For those too young to remember Norman, a basic overview of his life is:  Born in Enfield, worked as a journalist for the Financial Times, before spending 4 years with the RAF and later joining the BOAC as a pilot.  He entered politics in 1970.  He served as Secretary of State for Employment, Secretary of State for Trade & Industry & President of the Board of Trade (Oct 1983 – Sept 1985), and Party Chairman (1985-87).  During a Conservative Party Conference in Brighton he was injured and his wife, Margaret, was permanently disabled by an IRA bomb.  Like Margaret Thatcher, he retired from the House of Commons in 1992 and entered the House of Lords as Baron Tebbit of Chingford.

What was endearing and refreshing about Tebbit was that he was (and is)  a no nonsense politician.  A plain speaker.  No messing around.  In the aftermath of urban riots in the summer of 1981, with media suggestions linking riots to high levels of unemployment, Tebbit, so memorably, but capturing the mood said:  ‘I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father.  He did not riot.  He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it’.  A quote that resonates to this very day.  The quote today is more distorted to ‘On yer bike and find work’, but emphasizes the need for self help and personal drive.

The real question of why Tebbit never pursued a more senior role ie Leadership of the Party and being the PM, must lie back to the shocking night when the IRA tried to take out the Conservative Cabinet.  The Brighton bomb really redefined Tebbit’s political life.  Margaret Thatcher reportedly told Woodrow Wyatt (this is when Tebbit decided to leave the Cabinet after the 1987 election to look after his wife and support the Government from the back benches), that:  “He’ll carry the scar of that Brighton bombing all his life. I didn’t want him to go. Whenever he is away from her he can’t even attend to business properly. He’s always ringing up to find out if the nurses are looking after his wife all right”.  Thatcher lost a great support from her right hand side in 1987 from Cabinet.  Some see this as the first seed in the decline of Thatcher as she lost that close guiding steer.

Tebbit has always courted controversy.  In 1990 he proposed the now infamous, ‘Cricket Test’.  This also became known as ‘Tebbit’s test’.  Tebbit’s proposition was that seeing which cricket team people from ethnic minorities supported, ie whether they would support England or the team closest to their ethnic origins.  He argued this was the barometer to judge their allegiance and integration into society.  This inevitably caused a shit storm in the media, with Tebbit being accused of racism.  The British media are a difficult beast when it comes to discussing integration and immigration issues and are quick to call people racist the moment they discuss these issues…however constructively. 

Tebbit will be remembered for many things.  One of his biggest passions, to this day, is the loss of British Sovereignty to the cancerous growth of the federalist European Union.  Tebbit will fight on this issue until the last breath in his body.  Tebbit in 2007 summed up his views:  ‘”From being a supporter of British membership of the Common Market in 1970 I have come to believe that the United Kingdom would be Better Off Out of the developing European Republic of the 21st century. We British have a thousand year history of self-government. We have been free and democratic longer than any other nation. The European Union is too diverse, too bureaucratic, too corporatist and too centralist to be a functioning democracy. We are happy to trade with our European friends and the rest of the world – but we would prefer to govern ourselves.”

It is true that Tebbit is no fan of Cameron.  He supported David Davis in the leadership campaign and loathes Camerons attempts to reposition the Conservative Party on the ‘left of the middle ground’.   A return to the ‘wets’.

Tebbit’s big concern for the modern Conservative Party is that despite a lead in the polls, (due he sees to the unpopularity of Labour and not a positive endorsement for Conservatives), is that he sees Cameron and many of the front bench as being out of touch with common people, the working class.  Tebbit told the Times that: ‘”what a lot of people will suggest is that they don’t know how the other half lives. David and his colleagues — the very clever young men they have in Central Office these days — are very intellectually clever but they have no experience of the world whatsoever. He has spent much of his time in the Conservative Party and as a public relations guy. Well, it’s not the experience of most people in the streets. That’s the real attack and that’s damaging to him, I think”.

Tebbit is a free thinker.  He is principled.  He is his own man.  Takes no bs.  And lived up to Thatchers values as a ‘conviction politician’.  Despite his comments yesterday, I remember his achievements with fondness and look forward to him uniting behind the Party and fighting hard for the general election victory this country so desperately needs. 

As a reminder of the great man in action.  This is a video posted by the Bruges Group to YouTube, with Norman in humorous and reflective mood, as he speaks at a dinner in the Presence of Baroness Thatcher.

Let’s leave the last word to Norman.  Taken from his Disraeli lecture in 1985, defining his principles:

‘The path away from economic freedom is, as Hayek long ago demonstrated, the road to serfdom. The road may be a long one: the pace may be swift or slow: but the destination cannot be changed. State ownership, state monopolies, state regulation and state planning, through the centralisation of economic power, inevitably lead to economic failure. They inevitably increase both the temptation and the scope for abuses of political power until freedom itself is threatened. The planned economies, the controlled societies which socialism requires, pervert what are truly economic decisions for the market into political decisions for the politician or the bureaucrat. The fruits of centralised economics are corruption, poverty and servility—and in the socialist society the only medicine which may be prescribed is heavier doses of the same socialist poison’.

The shaming of a great man

Norman Tebbit is a great man.  He has achieved many great things for the Conservative Party and been a loyal supporter for Margaret Thatcher.  The Party owes him a great deal for his many achievements but his article in the Daily Mail and subsequent interview on Radio Four do not reflect well on him and damage his integrity and place at risk the legacy he has within the Party. 

Grassroots is a huge fan of Norman Tebbit.  Politically we agree on many issues but not this……Perhaps Norman is a little out of touch with modern politics?  Perhaps his age makes him more prone to gaffes?  But to say that voters should use the forthcoming European elections as ‘an ideal oppotunity’ to send a message to all three political parties by not voting for any of them is plainly stupid.  Norman says that voters should use the local elections ‘as normal elections’ and vote how they would.  But in the Europeans protest over the ‘welfare junkies’ in the Palace of Westminster. 

Norman actually went one step further on Radio 4 by saying that in the European elections voters should vote for UKIP.

I know Norman well, have spent some great time in his company, but this is a step many of us find deplorable.  Whilst, I would absolutely hate and regret to see Norman expelled from the Conservative Party, David Cameron, should meet with him and then take the call.  Will Norman apologise and support the Party that has always supported him.  Will he retract his comments?  If not…then David, regrettably has to act and expel Norman from the Party.  A real tragedy but we cannot have Party figures recommending voters to cast their ballot for other Parties.

This does not make the Conservative devoid of free speech and authoritarian.  We are a broad church, cater for many views.  But we fight and debate and reach consensus on issues.  We do not ever recommend others to vote for other parties.  Norman should be constructive and recommend solutions for the current expenses debacle.  Not just throw a misconstrued comments out to vote for another Party.  That’s not the comment that THE Norman Tebbit of the past, at his prime, would make.

These European elections are important as we need to ensure more accountability is brought to the European Parliament.  Conservative MEP’s do a great job is trying to put the spotlight on the gross injustices of the EU.  Do we really want to see the likes of the great Dan Hannan replaced by an idiot from UKIP?  NEVER.

Come on Norman, retract your comments….if not…thanks for the memories…….