Politics

Guilty men: conservative decline and fall

1992-1997

Hywel Williams

Aurum, #18.95

Sub-titled ''Conservative Decline and Fall 1992-1997'', the opening words in Guilty Men are: ''This is the story of an incompetent Government, a petulant Prime Minister, and an arrogant party.'' That's how Mr Williams starts, and by golly, that's how he goes on.

He has a gift for telling phrases, and displays great know-ledge. Whether he is always fair, and whether his overall judgment is sound, is another matter.

However, this is a very readable book, and, if only because it shows how fiercely some

contemporary Conservatives recriminate about each other in public, politically significant.

The individual who comes out worst in the book is John Major. ''This extraordinary ordinary man, the first British Prime Minister to portray himself as a victim, is at the heart of the Tory horror of 1992 to 1998 . . . The Tory Party gave him everything he had, and he destroyed it . . . The Tories' humiliation on the 1st of May 1997 was the worst defeat in their history . . .''

Margaret Thatcher, too, comes in for some awful swipes. ''Thatcher-talk was dangerous because it fashioned a misleading picture . . . of State activity receding. It was also misleading because it led the Tories to believe that they were the happy consequence of an inevitable and irreversible change in the history of human belief and conduct . . . This collective illusion, fostered by rhetorical excess, was one of Margaret Thatcher's worst legacies to her Party.'' Mr Williams also makes it clear there were plenty of other Thatcher legacies that were

pretty ghastly too.

Mr Williams devotes the last section of his book to a list of his 20 ''Guilty Men'', though these, apparently, are only the top 20 of a much larger number of miscreants.

Among them - no favouritism here - is John Redwood, the author's former boss.

Poor old Ted Heath is hauled out of near oblivion for a wigging: ''Heath's Liberal Toryism became associated with an illiberal regime of State control and doomed policies on prices and incomes . . . [Its] collapse was largely the result of Heath's abrasive personality.'' Sorry, Ted, but that's what he says.

Others on the hit list are Douglas Hogg - ''Like his father, Hogg was an amalgam of cleverness and foolishness'' - and his wife Sarah - ''She was Bottomley with brains . . . she used her power-base in Number 10 to aggrandise herself, and it suited her that the Political Office in Number 10 was staffed by weak men.'' Hague ''lacked creative political imagination and surrounded himself with a tight circle of friends''. Hague gets off comparatively lightly.

Mr Williams's publishers tell us that he has had a ''ringside seat'' in the political arena. He was ''the Cabinet Special Adviser'' to John Redwood when he was Secretary of State for Wales from 1993 to 1995, and he was political adviser to Redwood, 1995 to 1997.

Before that he was a don at Cambridge, later a Sixth Form Master at Rugby - there is a certain schoolmasterly ''disappointing-must-do-better'' tone about his comments on the entries on the hit list, except that in his reports, though their past is bad, there seems no hope of them doing better in future.

In his preface, Mr Williams mentions the book, Guilty Men, published in 1940, which recorded ''the appeasing politics and the myopic self-absorption of England's governing classes on the eve of its dissolution . . .'' This book, he says, ''has been a happy inspiration for my work''.

Well, well. The first Guilty Men was written by Michael Foot and Frank Owen, two able and amiable writers, who are not acclaimed for their objectivity or common sense, and not for success in politics.

Perhaps the second Guilty Men will prove more reliable a guide to history than the first. Perhaps not.