It ought to be possible to feel sorry for William Hague. No ordinary human being should be expected to bear the humiliation that has been heaped upon him in the past year. The trouble is, however, that politicians are not ordinary. They choose the job. They seek the power. They bring difficulties upon themselves. The only solace that can be offered to Mr Hague is that which is ritually given to pregnant women: things will have to get worse before they get better.
Some politicians are, of course, luckier than others. Mr Hague has had the extraordinary misfortune to have been chosen as Conservative Party leader after a lengthy period of Conservative Government with which the electorate is now highly dissatisfied. He followed an ineffectual Prime Minister, who had been unable to match his own predecessor. He inherited a tired party, a pathetically-diminished group of MPs, and an organisation that had no purpose, no policy, and no agreed political direction.
And as if all that was not bad enough, he has been pitted against a Prime Minister whose personal popularity with the electorate at large has broken all records.
The Conservative Party did not know what it wanted a year ago. It did not even really know whether it wanted Mr Hague. The party membership outside Westminster in fact did not want him at all. His victory in securing the job was attributed to the desire of the party's MPs to choose a young man, untarnished by the recent past, to raise their eyes and look to the sunlit uplands ahead.
But the way in which he has been treated ever since rather suggests that the losers in the leadership contest were the lucky ones. That impression is more than amply fulfilled by the first instalment of the latest episode in this grisly morality tale which was published yesterday. It is an account of the leadership campaign last summer written by Hywel Williams, a former chief of staff to John Redwood, and a man who knows where just about every single one of the relevant bodies is buried.
Mr Williams has recounted in telling detail exactly what Mr Redwood, currently the Shadow President of the Board of Trade, thinks of Mr Hague. He has thrown in some other interestingly malicious stuff about some of the other
bit-players as well.
It is a juicy read. It will do the Tories absolutely no good at all and it will be devastating for the party leader. Worse, because it is being serialised by the Times newspaper
- with timely releases for the competition so all the other papers have a version of events each morning as well - it promises to run and run.
And it is worth pointing out that it is the state of the Conservative Party which is itself now the story. Officials may wring their hands, but the MPs are shrugging their shoulders.
There is no discipline which they are required to observe. There is no respect for the leadership or the front bench. There is no risk for any individual political future when it is hard to see if the party has a future. Everyone gossips with relish about the state of the party, knowing that this is likely to find its way into print.
In other circumstances it would be appropriate to wonder why such a book had been written. What sort of Tory supporter is Mr Williams? Why wasn't the book suppressed - at least for long enough until it was perhaps no longer quite so interesting because the memory and relevance of the events reported had faded? What is John Redwood's part in all of this and how can William Hague maintain civil relations with him in his Shadow team, knowing as a fact what he may well previously only have suspected?
The answer, however, is that the state of the Conservative Party is so appalling its traditional loyalties have disappeared. They no longer exist. Many of those who would ordinarily have ensured that Mr Williams was somehow diverted from his dangerous plan have disappeared - or, quite simply, couldn't care less. According to the latest reports, a Conservative Central Office spokesman has dismissed the contents of the book as ''nonsense'' which does not befit comment. But that is scarcely a satisfactory response.
It is not nonsense. It is the uncomfortable reality. And that is what Mr Williams is about. He is a young and extremely able, right-wing, free-thinking academic. He is appropriately concerned about what he regards as the failures of the Major Government.
This is why the book is called Guilty Men. He is also worried that the Conservative Party has not learned the lessons that it should from those failures, nor from the drubbing handed out by the electorate a year ago. He decided that the way to draw attention to all of this was by writing his account of the state of the party, and thus possibly shocking people into confronting its own past mistakes and likely future problems if nothing was done. He could be right. He is certainly correct in assuming that there is little more possible damage that could be inflicted on the Conservatives.
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