As the Prime Minister considers how to respond to an expected dismal showing in Thursday’s local elections, which could provide the focus for renewed Tory turmoil, how can he go about turning his and his party’s fortunes round?
Proclaim the tide has turnedThe local elections seem set to frustrate even the best spin-doctors. Last week a council by-election at Over Wallop, in Test Valley Borough Council in Hampshire, saw a 0.2 per cent swing to the Liberal Democrats since last year, which was the worst Tory performance in local elections yet. Some Tories have pointed out there is nothing in party rules which says they have to put the party name on their posters and leaflets.Luton MP John Carlisle said yesterday after knocking on doors in his constituency: “I have to say that if there was an election tomorrow I would have the word ‘Conservative’ in the very smallest print.”Challenge his critics in a leadership electionHe has done that already and, in any case, his leadership is not the issue in the sense that neither Euro-sceptics nor pro-Europeans want to replace him. Simon Heffer in Saturday’s Daily Mail set out the hardline sceptics’ position: they want Mr Major to stay so he, rather than they, takes the blame for the election defeat they regard as inevitable.Change policyHe has already shifted to the most Euro-sceptical stance which is possible, given the Cabinet’s make-up. This was demonstrated by the huge fuss Chancellor Kenneth Clarke made about the apparently minor concession of promising a referendum if (as now seems inconceivable) a future Tory government recommends entry to a single European currency. A single-currency referendum was one of the concerted pledges right-wing Tory backbenchers were planning for their election addresses – now it will be in the official manifesto.Reshuffle the CabinetOne solution to the above problem would be to ditch leading pro-Europeans in the Cabinet, Kenneth Clarke and/or Michael Heseltine, the Deputy Prime Minister.

Either would be a sign of weakness and might precipitate the split Mr Major fears.A more minor reshuffle would not shift what right-wing Tory newspapers have identified as the “left-wing lock” on the commanding heights of the Government. The recent Telegraph editorial which attacked Mr Major’s administration as “a disaster” said four of the top five jobs were held by “the left”, by which the editor, Charles Moore, meant pro-Europeans (he added the semi-sceptical Mr Major and the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, to the list, exempting only Home Secretary Michael Howard).Woo the Tory PressOne of the Government’s most difficult problems, as identified by the Chancellor last week, is that the former Tory press is now solidly Euro- sceptical and disparaging about Mr Major’s leadership qualities, while being only notionally anti-Labour.One pro-European Tory MP commented bitterly on yesterday’s openly biased Sunday Express: “There’s a saying that those whom the gods want to destroy they first make mad. As Kenneth [Clarke] said last week on the Today programme, the Tory press has gone off the rails, feeding off the witless ones Every column has something about John Redwood in it.”. Tony Blair looks increasingly likely to risk an internal row in the Labour Party by refusing to support the lifting of the ban on homosexuality in the armed forces when it is put to the vote in the Commons next week. The Shadow Cabinet has decided Labour MPs will have a free vote on the controversial issue when the five-yearly Armed Forces Bill reaches its report stage on 9 May.
The leadership will face a dilemma over whether the free vote should apply to members of the Shadow Cabinet or whether they should hold a common line.There is strong support for lifting the ban at many levels of the Labour Party, including some Labour members of the select committee that has examined the issue. If Mr Blair does not support lifting the ban then it is certain to cause dismay among some of his backbenchers.Labour strategists are conscious of the difficulties faced by President Bill Clinton early in his first term when he sought to legislate to remove a similar ban in the US military.No final decisions have yet been taken on the leadership stance but there is speculation that Mr Blair is unlikely to run counter to the hostility of the armed services chiefs to lifting the ban.

Support for overturning the ban could be seen as tantamount to a moral commitment to do away with it if Labour wins the general election.The main parties are also conscious that the Government after the next election may have to reconsider the ban in the light of a European Court of Human Rights’ decision on four complaints of discrimination by gay British servicemen.The Tory-dominated Special Select Committee which has been considering the Bill will report on 7 May and is expected to recommend that the ban remains in force. Nicholas Soames, the Minister for the Armed Forces, is a member of the committee and has made clear the Government’s opposition to lifting the ban.However, the committee may recommend the easing of some of the ban’s harshest restrictions. It may, for example, recommend a right for gay servicemen to confide privately in Army chaplains and counsellors, in total confidentiality.. The Government and the Irish republican movement both denied yesterday that two meetings between a former minister and Sinn Fein amounted to “a secret new channel of communication with the IRA”. A Sunday newspaper had claimed that former Northern Ireland Office minister Michael Mates had been on a secret mission as part of British and Irish government moves aimed at restoring the IRA ceasefire.
Sinn Fein yesterday said that Mr Mates had held two meetings, in a period of nine months, with its chairman, Mitchel McLaughlin, and Gerry Kelly.