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Janet Daley 23 July 2022 1:00pm BST When exactly did vituperative argument become politically unacceptable? I thought disagreement was the essence of democracy. What is the point of

electoral choices if they are not between significantly differing views? In fact, it has been clear for generations that the population is most likely to become engaged with the political

process when those disagreements are impassioned and when people believe that they are likely to have serious consequences for their own lives. So can we stop - or rather, can the broadcast

media stop - acting as if the occasional sparks of genuine annoyance and exasperation which have enlivened the Tory leadership debates somehow discredit the participants? If Rishi Sunak

actually does believe that Liz Truss is offering an irresponsible economic fantasy when she claims that tax rises are unnecessary, then he is quite right to become incensed. If Liz Truss

believes that persevering with Rishi Sunak’s tax increases would prohibit economic growth and push the country into recession, then she is right to be infuriated by his defence of them. This

is not a tea party. It is a debate about the most urgent national matter of the moment. When, as the more unimaginative narrators put it, “sparks have flown” during these “blue-on-blue

clashes”, they have not tended to be personal or gratuitous. (The closest anyone came to this was Sunak’s sarcastic question to Truss about which of her previous associations - with the

Liberal Democrats or Remain - she regretted most, which she rebutted successfully without resorting to unseemly malice.) Yes, there was some nasty maneuvering going on in the back channels

but that is pretty standard stuff in a leadership campaign, and yes, there were some frank and blatant attempts to discredit Penny Mordaunt. But again, if ex-colleagues of hers sincerely

believed that she should not become prime minister, then they were justified in saying so. That is tough, but honest, politics. So let’s get to the supposedly controversial matter of heated

debate itself. Listening to all those experienced political correspondents gasp in horror at the “unprecedented” degree of hostility that this internal party dispute has generated, you would

think that they knew nothing of the 1980s and 90s. Actually maybe some of them don’t, so let’s have a history lesson. The Conservative party which repeatedly triumphed electorally during

the first of those decades was riven with blood curdling internecine warfare for most of it. The seminal battle was between the Thacherites and the Wets who were the party establishment.

They saw her as a vulgarian peddling an outrageous, unorthodox economic theory invented by dubious unBritish intellectuals. Her cabinet (it was noted with undisguised anti-Semitism)

consisted of “more Estonians than Etonians”, Her privatisation project in which backward, failing, strike-ridden nationalised industries were broken up was famously described by Harold

Macmillan (who put the “grand” in grandee) as selling off the family silver. Then followed the fatal party rift - a hint of things to come - between the EU enthusiasts and the guardians of

British sovereignty which eventually brought her down. Those of us who lived through those vicious times, riddled with snobbery and entitled arrogance, can only marvel at the mildness and

civility of today’s disputation. In the 1990s it was Labour’s turn to rend itself apart - and this was over a point which had been a founding principle of the party. Clause IV of Labour’s

constitution had, since 1918, committed it to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. That meant not only the state ownership of industry and the system

of distributing the goods it produced, but a command economy in which government authorities controlled the levers of financial exchange. This programme had never, of course, been fully

instituted under any Labour government but it was regarded as a sacred statement of intent - until Tony Blair reinvented his party as New Labour and fought a totemic battle to the death to

remove it. Clause IV would almost certainly never have been implemented by any Parliament, but the momentousness of that change created a bitter divide with the Left - and much of the trade

union movement - which has never been reconciled. And that, boys and girls, is the real thing: an internal party power struggle that leaves bodies on the ground. While we are engaged in this

attempt to reconstruct What Really Happened in the past, we might remind those who think Ms Truss deluded if she casts herself as the new Thatcher, of how her remarkable predecessor was

seen when she was a leadership candidate. Mrs Thatcher was despised by whole sections of the party (not just the upper class bigots) because she and her team were determined to displace

Edward Heath - who then, believe it or not, was revered as the very model of modern Conservatism. He had made a doomed attempt to deal with the catastrophic industrial relations crippling

the country which had the effect of propelling Harold Wilson’s Labour party back into power. But more important, he was the architect of Britain’s entry into what was then the Common Market

which Tories who thought themselves forward-thinking hugely approved. Mrs Thatcher had been regarded, until her startlingly successful challenge for the leadership, as an undistinguished

Education Secretary whose best known achievement was removing free milk from school children. Ms Truss has a far more impressive record at this point in her career. But most pertinently, the

Thatcher personality was thought to be deadly: her prissy, grating voice and stilted manner would surely repel working class voters and be a gift to Labour. So what happened? In office, the

lack of warmth was revealed to be cover for solid steel. She looked the unions, and the Russians, in the eye and never blinked. She led the original breach of the Red Wall. Eventually she

was respected (even by her opponents) more than she was liked - and in the end, that is what matters, especially in a time of crisis.