Britain's struggling Conservative Party, stifling more than a decade of feuding, united yesterday to make former Cabinet minister Michael Howard its new leader.
Howard, 62, who stood unopposed to succeed Iain Duncan Smith at the helm of the once-mighty party, has promised to ``lead from the center'' to challenge Prime Minister Tony Blair's government.
The traumatized party, which has failed to recover from crushing election defeats in 1997 and 2001, rallied behind Howard in the hope that he could revive its sagging fortunes.
Senior Tories hope the witty and articulate Cambridge-educated lawyer will mount a serious challenge to Prime Minister Tony Blair and help the party claw its way back up the opinion polls.
But Howard, who served as a junior minister under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and as Britain's home-affairs minister under John Major, has warned the party it faces a long, steep climb to catch up with Blair's powerful Labour Party.
"We have begun to renew our policies, but we are still only in the foothills of our ascent. The hard climb still lies head," said Howard, as he announced his intention last week to succeed Iain Duncan Smith as party leader.
The Tories dominated British politics for most of the 20th century, most recently from 1979 to 1997.
Under Thatcher, who championed individual initiative and the free market, the party commanded an unassailable majority in the House of Commons, with 397 seats to Labour's 209 in the early 1980s.
But the party's popularity slipped throughout the 1990s, due to an unpopular new local tax, internal feuding over European integration, an economic recession and repeated sleaze scandals which damaged its credibility.
It has failed to recover from a landslide election defeat in 1997, repeated in 2001, and now only has 165 seats in the Commons.
Party membership has slumped massively since the 1950s, when it stood at almost a million. Officials are cagey about today's level, saying it stands at more than 300,000.
But Anthony Seldon, a historian and author of "Conservative Century," puts membership below 100,000 and notes that the average age of party members is over 60.
Howard was right "in saying it is going to be a long, long road to climb," said Seldon, adding that the Tories faced "formidable, unprecedented problems."
Duncan Smith, who led the Tories for two years, was ousted in a secret ballot last week by lawmakers angry their party was still trailing Labour in the polls, despite the government's woes over the unpopular war in Iraq.
Howard was regarded as a tough right-winger when he oversaw a 15 percent reduction in crime as home secretary from 1993-97. But he appears to have softened and has promised to lead from the center. He has proposed lower taxes to stimulate enterprise, but has also vowed to help the poorest in society and improve public services.
RSS