Tory Wets pull a Gang of Four

I've been reading about the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, a brief and somewhat shoddy effort to break off the Tory left during the Hague years. The group got some backing but mainly from ex-MPs and they failed to get the backing of the likes of Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine as they hoped. They did however get an 11% showing in polls before the 1999 European elections. They ended up with 1.4% of the vote.

Now despite their weakness they're intriguing and I was wondering is their anyway post-1979, for the wets to break off from the Conservative Party, either to create a new party or join up with the Liberal Democrats as many seemed keen to do. could you get big names like Clarke to jump ship if a suitably nasty figure took the Party hard right?
 
V-J will answer this more fully, but I think it's difficult, especially given the 1997-2005 Conservative Party is at an absolute rump anyway. I can't see someone being elected as party leader who'll go much further to the Right than the 2001 campaign allowed.

Blackadder's TL features a Heath-led plot by a number of MPs to defect to the Liberals in the 1980s, perhaps he could elaborate on this?
 
There really isn't room for another centre party: the existence of the Lib Dems and New Labour makes a pro-Euro or One-Nation Conservative party redundant throughout that period, unless there's a particular wedge issue they can latch onto (the most tangiable reason the Labour/SDP Gang of Four didn't just join the Liberals, for instance, was defence policy).
 
V-J will answer this more fully, but I think it's difficult, especially given the 1997-2005 Conservative Party is at an absolute rump anyway. I can't see someone being elected as party leader who'll go much further to the Right than the 2001 campaign allowed.

Blackadder's TL features a Heath-led plot by a number of MPs to defect to the Liberals in the 1980s, perhaps he could elaborate on this?

Well the short answer is for everyone to read the TL in the sig (the Cecil Parkinson bit for those who don't know).

But the more polite answer would be to elaborate. Heath IOTL had chats with Cyril Smith about forming a new party of the Centre during the late 70s and early 80s to counteract the growing radicalism of the Labour Party and the Conservatives but nothing happened. In "With Nowhere Else To Turn", due to Healey smashing Thatcher in PMQs and Labour doing much better than their already good standing in the polls by 1980-81 ITTL, Heath's group of "wets" began planning to bail from the Conservatives and work with the Liberals to become an alternative for soft Tory voters.

This fails due to a number of factors depending on who you ask by 2013 ITTL. Conservatives will claim that the potential defectors were turned off due to Heath's history of egotism and having a large grudge against Thatcher for daring to defeat him in 1975, Labour would say that the Tories wanted to stick together in the face of being rightfully wiped off the electoral map to allow centuries of Labour, the Liberals will say that the defectors chickened out due to being afraid that they may face some bad press. These are all true with many of the potential defectors finding Heath unbearable (IOTL he even said that he was the better candidate and should be leader when approached by close friends about joining with Thatcher during the 70s, according to Hailsham's biography), realising that First Past the Post isn't exactly kind to the Liberals, Healey's style of debating and condemning the Tories has made them slightly defensive and they can just get rid of Thatcher when they lose.

This means that when it comes time to defect only the MP who was supposed to trigger the mass defection, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler, does so and loses his seat in 1983 just like IOTL. The second defection is caused by a reaction to a certain event in the TL which I won't mention (you'll have to find that out yourself ;)) and is more due to Thatcher probably never leaving and a particular anti-terrorism bill which means that the government can overrule the courts on certain issues.

What happens then, read the TL to find out. :p
 
Very difficult to see IMO.

The Wets were not very cohesive about what they wanted, other than they were in vague opposition to Thatcherism, principally in policy terms the monetarist experiment of her first term. That was a passing policy, so you don't have the overriding series of permanent wedge issues which are going to lead to the Wets bailing from the party that you had with Labour. The whole train of the Labour party was pushing people like the Gang of Four totally to the margins, personally and in policy terms. Some Bennites even said they should be purged from the party. Is it any wonder they defected? The Wets really believed it was their party. And, frankly, they were pretty much right. Moderate Toryism had a long history; Thatcherism did not. Ian Gilmour, and I think he was pretty much typical, was always expecting her to somehow cock-up and precipitate her own downfall, after which the party would revert to type. And she did, in fairness, even though it took fifteen years. You couldn't be that sanguine about Labour in the early eighties. It really did look like the party institutionally was heading towards a permanent shift to the left.

Frankly you can overstate the differences, and people usually do, and this arises largely because it has been in everyone's interest for it to be so. It's such an opaque situation that sometimes people become confused about who was and who was not a Wet. I have seen, for example, Howe described as a Wet, despite him being the father of said early monetarist experiment as Chancellor. With Hezza, often also called a Wet, there was not a cigarette paper of difference between him and Thatcher on privatisation and trade union reform. The real Wets were people like St. John-Stevas, Gilmour, Soames etc, and their power was never very great. The real story of the downfall of Thatcher is one of her mishandling and utterly alienating her own natural Cabinet supporters, rather than giving people who always wanted to see the back of her the means to do just that.

To mirror the Gang of Four process, I think the party would have to look like it was going Powellite, and somehow perma-Powellite a la Gordon Banks, to have people seriously contemplating splitting off. And that is very difficult to concieve of.

In terms of a 1997-2005, split, you can totally forget that, the number of proto-modernisers could be pretty much counted on two hands, and most of them weren't even elected anyway. What we got IOTL with the Pro-Euro Tories was as big a split as you were going to get in that period.
 
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One thing that I tried to do was to show that while there were many wets in the party, finding the ones who would have left otherwise is tricky and I had to get rid of certain elements that kept hope of taking the party back among said wets in Nowhere Else to Turn, even then most would probably have defected back in the 90s during the Parkinson or Lamont leadership.

EDIT: On Hesletine, I remember reading the Alan Clark Diaries about how the "wets" and Heathites in the party were expecting Michael to fight John Major to the end or at least get them some promotions, only to find out that Hezza had instead got himself the spot of Deputy Prime Minister and left them back in the cold.
 
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