Was anything so old-fashioned as Labour’s response to its drubbing at last week’s polls? For the past four days the prime minister and his colleagues have sat stunned in a time warp. He appeared besuited on a Sunday television sofa, looking like a wet afternoon and talking about ”getting our message across” and telling ”the truth about the Tories”. His friends spoke of relaunches and policy revamps, of ”reconnecting with core voters” and deriding people they called ”toffs”. This is not so much a repeat of John Major in the mid-1990s as of Harold Macmillan in the early-1960s, who just wished that the 20th century would go away. The Brownites clearly wish the same of the 21st.
Just when Brown was moaning about the horrors of being ”a private person in a public arena” his youthful nemesis, Boris Johnson, was camping it up in a policeman’s hat at a Sikh festival in Trafalgar Square. It was Labour’s nightmare, an Etonian politician behaving like a human being rather than a political nerd, and being cheered for it.
When Brown wakes up in the morning, so he told BBC radio, he first thinks of people’s hardship and mortgage rates. Most people think of a cup of tea. While Brown never apologises, Johnson says, ”Oh gosh, crikey, I’ve done it again. I’m sorry, let’s rerun that.” The truth is that people seem not to mind a politician’s accent if he can just contrive to sound reasonably normal, and nothing does normal better than humour. The only Labour politician who could handle it was Ken Livingstone and he is gone, ”out-sincered” by Johnson.
The strategists of Brown’s counter-revolution still miss the point about the new politics. They echo their leader about communicating policy messages as if all they needed was a touch of the Alastair Campbells. They demand that Brown rid the Labour party of unpopular measures and take that old carthorse, ”the policy agenda”, out of its shed, put young James Purnell in the saddle and feed it with Treasury hay. Small wonder the electorate’s eyelids fall shut.
For a minority of low-income voters I can see that the end of the 10% tax rate was a burning issue. It also demoralised party workers charged with getting out the vote, a factor always underrated by Westminster politicians. But the time to kill it was when Brown announced it in 2007, to the sycophantic applause of those who voted it through and to whom he could do no wrong. A man then greeted as the authentic reaffirmation of old Labour after Tony Blair’s charismatic cul-de-sac is now dismissed as dumb, directionless and depressing. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The truth is that Labour MPs and their constituency parties are paying the price for the evisceration of their vital organs by the Blairites (including Brown) in the mid-1990s. A virtue of the old party constitution was that warnings of dissent were flashed to headquarters overnight. New Labour has no equipment to handle rebellion, turning each mishap into a humiliating public climb-down by the leadership.
The glory of democratic politics is its constant self-redefinition. The legacy of Blair and his court to the British Constitution was the electoral supremacy of persons over programmes, of likability and familiarity, vision and abstract nouns over the machinery of the governmental engine room.
The political theorist David Runciman refers to this in his new book, Political Hypocrisy, as ”the necessary mask of power”. Blair was a superb salesman of the compromises (and hypocrisies) of leadership and there is no point, says Runciman, in ”denouncing it, or taking sides, or seeking some sort of personal insulation from it”. Today’s democrats must rather decide ”what sort of hypocrites we want our politicians to be”. The given answer is those aware of their own hypocrisy and able to share its pretences with the electorate.
From the moment David Cameron took over the Conservative party in 2005 he was advised to steer clear of policy, to stick instead to such vacuities as compassionate conservatism and ”social responsibility”. Every pollster asserted that, with democracy no longer about some great clash of class or economic interest, voters wanted their leaders to be reassuring, celebrated, pleasant on television and somehow therefore trustworthy in a crisis. This was a truth, not some transient Blairite quirk. Watch any American election.
Voters may claim crime and law and order, immigration, health and education as ”important issues” when asked. But there is no evidence that these are electoral determinants. Besides, parties steal such policies from each other with abandon. Livingstone and Johnson in London were swapping policies like Christmas presents.
More ominous for Labour is the poor personal rating of Brown as a leader, that and a widespread disbelief in what the government says and in its ability to make Britain a better place or improve its public services — so says Ipsos Mori’s end-of-year review. Above all, people want government to be competent — or at least to appear to be. They do not want ever more policies, but rather a plausible navigator of their comfort zones. Nor is there any point in damning them for it.
Brown’s friends are demanding that he now declare petrol cheaper, housing more expensive (through subsidised purchase) and rubbish disposal more wasteful. This desperate scurrying beneath the bribery counter is the ultimate retreat from the radical honesty that was once Brown’s strongest suit. He would be better advised to cheer up, stick to his guns and attempt some charisma implant, like Major’s summoning of Michael Heseltine from the backbenches in 1990. He needs to borrow some of what his ever-chirpy critic, Jon Cruddas MP, this week called Cameron’s ”emotional literacy”.
There is a tide in the affairs of politicians and, when it passes, ”all the voyage of their life /Is bound in shallows and in miseries”. Last week the Brown and Livingstone campaigns looked old and tired, and the electorate noticed. It wants novelty and is without prejudice. Despite the jeers of the commentariat people seem happy to give the toffs a turn at the wheel. Besides, they don’t mind an occasional joke, and even quite like it. — Â