A canny excuse to delay the general election .sx Julian Critchley .sx " WILL she not come back again ?sx " Bonnie Prince Charlie ended his days in Rome somewhat the worse for wear :sx but Mrs Thatcher has gone to the United States to be among friends .sx Her voice can be heard talking of " betrayal" , and she has not hesitated to give advice .sx Within a week of the Daily Mail's abject apology to those among Tory MPs whom Mr Gordon Greig called " the dirty dozen " , the Bruges Group , of which Mrs Thatcher is president , has made a savage attack on the foreign policies of her chosen successor .sx Had Mrs Thatcher been on her throne - or so the argument runs - the Kurds would not have risen ( for the umpteenth time ) against Saddam Hussein .sx They would not have dared .sx How times have changed .sx It is not yet five months since the 'liberation' , the Events of last November , when the earth moved , the sky fell , and Mrs Thatcher was seen off from Loch-na-Nuagh disguised as a man in the company of Sir Nicholas Fairbairn , an unlikely Flora MacDonald .sx The right wing of the Conservative Party , the arditi who had for so long sustained Mrs Thatcher in office , had found itself in some difficulty :sx Michael Heseltine had been the enemy within , and Douglas Hurd had gone to Eton , thus they had no choice save to vote for John Major about whom little was known .sx He was not rich and he certainly was not grand :sx could he then be safely relied upon to carry the sacred flame ?sx Apparently not .sx John Major has , not unreasonably , striven to be his own man , and the Government , which is run by the triumvirate Major/Heseltine/Hurd , has distanced itself from several aspects of Thatcherism .sx In matters of substance there is an pounds8 billion Budget deficit , the poll tax is dead , if not buried , and child benefit is to be indexed in line with inflation .sx The public services are back in fashion , and the 'social market' has been given the kiss of life .sx In matters of style , there is a world of difference .sx Understatement is the order of the day , confrontation for its own sake is no longer practised and the nation is not being told to pull up its socks .sx We should be profoundly grateful , but some of us who were once of us are not .sx The truth is that for as long as Mrs Thatcher keeps open the possibility that she will fight the next election as the Conservative candidate for Finchley , the dispossessed will continue to make trouble .sx Glasses , filled to the brim with Mateus Ros e will be raised in dining clubs downstairs to the Queen over the water , and groups such as Conservative Way Forward will look back to what they see as a golden age , when Sir Alfred Sherman was in his heaven and all was right with Lord Wyatt of Weeford's world .sx Conservative Way Forward ( by the '92' and out of the No Turning Back group ) , held its inaugural meeting at the end of last month .sx Mr Cecil Parkinson is in charge :sx his photograph , in a group which included Lord Joseph ( the John the Baptist of Thatcherism ) and a posse of large young men , many of whom were sipping Tartan ale out of cans , appeared in all the national newspapers .sx Can we sleep safely in our beds ?sx Mrs Thatcher , Norman Tebbit and Bruce Anderson were swift to dissociate themselves from the views of the Bruges Group .sx Anthony Beaumont-Dark on the World at One said he was going home to mother , while Neil Kinnock made what capital he could out of the party's embarrassment .sx It was the kind of storm in a tea cup once enjoyed by those Young Turks of the Bow Group - Mr Geoffrey Howe , Mr Patrick Jenkin and Mr Leon Britan - in those far off days when they were young and slim enough to run for buses and their pens threatened to bring down the Macmillan Government .sx Howe's tongue was later to succeed where his pen had failed .sx What will be the date of the next election ?sx We will have to wait , so say the pundits , until 3 May when the results of the local government elections will have been fed into Professor Anthony King's computer .sx There is an argument in favour of 10 October that has not yet been deployed :sx a June election would not kill the Tory Party's annual conference .sx Were John Major to be returned with a reduced majority , however , the goings-on at Blackpool would be properly muted , a fourth general election victory silencing dissent .sx But were the party to go to the country in June and be defeated , the Blackpool conference would become a battlefield , the salty air of that insalubrious resort ringing with the cries of " I told you so " , and Mrs Thatcher , smuggled onto the platform in a barrel , would be elected Leader of the Party by the acclamation of the mob .sx It really does not bear thinking about .sx A terrible revenge would be taken .sx John Major would be obliged to leave the Winter Gardens dressed in the uniform of a police constable , Michael Heseltine would be cast adrift in a small boat in the company of Edwina Currie , while parties of Rotarians would be dispatched to Warwickshire with orders to bring back the Howes , dead or alive .sx Mr Harvey Thomas would return from beyond the grave with orders to re-decorate the platform for the leader's speech in colours that would match Mrs Thatcher's eyes .sx A familiar slogan would be lifted above her head :sx " The Resolute Approach " .sx Perhaps I am frightening my readers unnecessarily .sx The Tories will win the next election , whenever it comes .sx The country is not ready for Mr Bryan Gould .sx In the meantime I have been casting my eye down the published list of those Tory MPs who will not be standing at the next election .sx Of the 47 who have so far declared their intention to retire , 24 are knights .sx The roll-call of their names has all the resonance of the Camelot war memorial .sx The flight of the knights into retirement must leave the Conservative Party changed almost beyond recognition .sx Room 14 , the home of the weekly meeting of the 1922 Committee , will come to resemble a Midlands sales conference of sanitary engineers .sx Musak will play continuously in the Whips' office , and the newly-elected will arrive at the Palace on the backs of their constituency agents' motor bicycles .sx Among those without handles to their names , we must say farewell to Norman Tebbit who is to go to the Lords where he will , no doubt , sink his teeth into the silken calves of unsound bishops .sx We shall not see his like again .sx Almost as much could be said for Cecil Parkinson .sx The events of November have turned me into a loyal backbencher .sx For the first time since 1974 , I am 'sound' .sx I may even stand for the executive of the 1922 Committee .sx I was lunching recently in St James's where I noticed Frank Johnson , the political columnist who has been writing regularly about " niceness " in the Sunday Telegraph , a newspaper that has doubts about the new Right .sx I told Frank , diffidently enough , that he should come to terms with the revolution .sx " You never did " was his reply .sx He has a point .sx But time is on my side .sx What keeps the monster in power .sx Michael Ignatieff .sx IN THE last days of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie , a courtier was employed to carry one of the emperor's dogs about on a small cushion and to wipe up whenever it raised its leg against the shoes of the emperor's Ministers .sx Ceausescu reportedly made one of his dogs a colonel in the army and gave him a full-time chauffeur .sx I'm interested in the chauffeur .sx How does a person manage to persuade himself to become a dog's chauffeur ?sx Self-respect , I guess , never stands in the way of survival .sx When a man is afraid , he'll do almost anything .sx But still , I find it puzzling .sx How does he tell his wife , how does he tell his friends , that he drives around a colonel in the Romanian army who happens to be a dog ?sx My colleague John Sweeney's fine study of the Ceausescu regime and Ryzard Kapuscinski's The Emperor - his account of Haile Selassie's last days - make it clear that tyranny is one big laboratory for the study of human malleability .sx If you think there are things you would never stoop to , you had better read these books and reconsider .sx Lately , I've been reading another inquiry into what tyranny does to people , Samil al-Khalil's The Monument :sx Art , Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq .sx It is about Saddam's masterpiece of authoritarian kitsch in downtown Baghdad , the vast victory arch of crossed swords , held aloft by gigantic bronze casts of the dictator's very own arms .sx But it also helps us understand how and why a tyrant manages to pluck victory - his own survival - from the jaws of military catastrophe .sx Fear is the simple answer , but it is not enough .sx All the dictators in the modern bestiary - Ceausescu , Enver Hoxha , Saddam , Pinochet - depended for their survival on terror , but they also managed to enlist some degree of popular support .sx No imperial power imposed Ba'ath rule on Iraq :sx it is an indigenous political invention , and if it has survived two catastrophic wars , it must be because it holds the place together .sx There is not reason to suppose that the ubiquitous posters of the leader to be seen in every caf e , in every sitting room in Iraq , are there simply to keep the secret police happy .sx Terror atomises a society :sx it destroys all loyalties , all forms of trust and leaves a psychological vacuum which a tyrant fills with love for his person .sx In Khalil's book there is a photograph of a man who makes portraits of the dictator drawn in the man's own blood .sx Crazy ?sx Of course , but it is a kind of craziness where fear and terror are transformed , horribly , into love .sx All tyrants depend for their survival on the layers of masochism in all of us .sx There are more rational levels of a tyrant's appeal as well .sx As Khalil's study shows , Saddam has exploited every iota of the Iraqi national tradition to make himself the symbol of national unity .sx He struts about claiming descent not only from Nebuchadnezzar , but also from Sa'ad ibn-abi-Waqas , the commander of the Muslim army that defeated the Persians in the battle of Qadissiyya in AD 637 .sx All of this should help us to understand a particularly grim aspect of the current massacre in the mountains :sx why a defeated and discredited leader should have been able to marshal a shattered army to carry out one more act of genocide .sx So successful has he been , over two decades , in making himself the symbol of national identity , that now , in his hour of need , Saddam has found little difficulty persuading many Iraqis to give their approval for his " final solution to the Kurdish problem " .sx Moreover , many Iraqis of Sunni faith will support their leader's massacre of the Shias in the south .sx In other words , a tyrant's capacity to play off the tribal hatreds of his own society to his own advantage is just as important to his survival as the secret police , the torture chambers and the execution squads .sx Saddam himself knows only too well that a tyrant has to tap reservoirs of admiration as well as fear .sx Khalil quotes a speech of Saddam's in which he speaks of " the need of the human being to look beyond what lies between his hands or to the spirit of what is visible , is a real human need .sx It explains why the human being sometimes turns his stone idols into spirits .sx " The great triumphal arch of swords was not just intended to terrify :sx it was intended to expropriate lofty human longings as well .sx Revolutions can only begin when the symbolic hold of tyranny is broken .sx That is why pulling down the statue in the public square , be it Ceausescu's , Hoxha's , Lenin's , Stalin's or Mao's , is such a critical moment in any revolution .sx