David Davis and the emergence of the new politics

It is fascinating to observe the fallout from the resignation yesterday from Parliament by David Davis, the shadow foreign secretary and runner-up to David Cameron in the Conservative leadership election of two years ago. The resignation, on what appears to be a matter of deepest principle, has induced in the reporting classes something close to collective nervous breakdown.

Those who make their living by commenting on politics always seek, by instinct, to look beneath the action for an ulterior motive, preferably one which is self-serving and venal. Psychologists call this “projection”. In Davis’s case, that community simply cannot bring itself to believe Davis’s explanation — namely, that he was so disgusted by the recent narrow vote in favour of extending detention without trial to 42 days, and the background whipping and bribing which seems to have taken place to ensure that narrow majority, that he felt obliged to resign his Parliamentary seat and hold a local election on the issue of civil liberties. Davis has said the vote was the last straw for him in a long decade of the erosion of civil rights under Labour, including the recent legislation for identity cards and the installation of one public surveillance camera for every 14 people in the country.

With superb cynicism, Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, claimed that the resignation was the result of internal tensions within the Conservative party. This might sound plausible enough, but Davis and Cameron are both in strong agreement in their opposition to the extension to 42 days.

Members of the commentariat have variously assumed as Davis’s motive uncontrolled egotism, a rush of blood to the head, the frustrations of acting as second fiddle to David Cameron, various hypothetical (and largely unsupported) divergences of political view within the shadow cabinet — anything, that is, but what appears to be the actual motive, which is to bring to public view the central issue of Labour’s systematic attack on civil liberties through the admittedly dramatic intervention of a local election precipitated by Davis’s resignation.

Something else may surprise the commentariat when it has recovered from its hysteria over the fact that a politician is capable, for once, of acting out of principle. It is a feature which, so far as we know, has not been commented upon. This emerges from the fact that Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has refused to allow his party to compete for the seat because he believes that the issues on which Davis are resigning are more important than simple party advantage. Clegg emphasises that he does not agree on much else with Davis, who is in favour of capital punishment for certain offences and has somewhat draconian views on the restriction of immigration. But this only serves to emphasise the point. The resignation episode is one of the first signs of the radical reordering of politics into libertarians and centralists. The “right-wing” Davis and the “centre-left” Clegg have found an issue of principle — the defence of civil liberties against an overbearing state — on which both, in their own ways, are prepared to make a stand. Meanwhile, while allowing time for the commentariat to recover from their collective hysteria about Davis’s motives, let us prepare ourselves for a remarkable few weeks of much-needed debate on a crucially important subject until the local election takes place.