On Tuesday Gordon Brown asked for a dissolution of the British parliament and on Sunday I shall fly away. An engagement to lecture at the University of Texas means that I shall be out of the United Kingdom for most of the election campaign.
And I don’t care. I’ve realised that for the first time in my life that I can’t summon up any real interest in a general election.
Even as someone who has to write about politics as a trade, I feel barely a flicker of election fever coming on. What’s more, this ennui is clearly shared by my compatriots. We are bored, jaded, and fed up with politics and politicians, and with good reason.
Even if you didn’t wear a red or blue rosette, election campaigns used to be absorbing and election nights exciting.
The 1951 election came in what Freudian analysts would call my latency stage (that’s between the phallic and genital stages, by the way), and so I can’t really remember the sorrow that fell on Labour households when the Tories stole the election by gaining a parliamentary majority with fewer popular votes.
But I do remember the deeper gloom in 1959 when the Tories won their first postwar hat-trick, and then the false dawn of 1964, with Harold Wilson promising a new style of government, rather like Tony Blair 30 years later.
That was a fascinating campaign, and Labour only just won, less than a percentage point of the vote ahead even though the premier was Sir Alec Douglas-Home (the Conservatives’ last old Etonian leader until David Cameron).
In 1970 the Tory victory astonished Wilson, after he had won a larger majority in 1966. A curiously persistent myth holds that this election was influenced in Labour’s favour by England’s victory in the World Cup, which in fact came some months after polling day. But in 1970, England was ejected by West Germany before the election, and footballing defeat might just have dented Wilson’s appeal.
Then in 1974 the drama was not on polling day but the days that followed, as Edward Heath tried to hang on to power by cutting deals. And in terms of politics-as-theatre, the spring of 1979 was the most gripping of all, with the thwarted Scottish referendum, the Commons motion of no confidence in James Callaghan’s Labour government carried by one vote and Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the ensuing election.
You could dislike Wilson or Thatcher, but still regard them as real leaders. The mood now is quite different. We’re disgusted by Blair, more so than ever as we learn about his awe-inspiring avarice, and we’re depressed by Brown, but we haven’t taken to Cameron either.
Quite apart from a series of misjudgments on his part, and a line of accidents waiting to happen, Cameron and his gang have failed to convince the public. Perhaps that’s because they aren’t very convincing.
As the election approaches, the mood is thus rather like the old Viennese phrase: the situation was serious but not hopeless, now it’s hopeless but not serious.
You might not guess that when the volume of propaganda is turned up by the parties and a hysterical press. But then the saying that academic politics are so much more savage than any other kind because there’s so little at stake now applies to national politics, as the parties ape each other’s worst characteristics and fight for an illusory centre ground.
Can anyone honestly pretend that the choice between Brown and Cameron means as much as between Attlee and Churchill 60 years ago, or Callaghan and Thatcher 30 years ago?
A riposte goes roughly: “Yes, all right, the Labour government presided over a spurious economic miracle that was really no more than an explosion of household debt combined with criminal recklessness in the financial sector, it has created the most intrusive surveillance state in Europe, and it took us into a needless, illegal and disastrous war — but, hey, the Tories might be even worse.”
All I shall say is that this is not the most inspiring slogan to get us to the polling station — though nor, it must be said, is the alternative slogan: “Even if the Tories are pretty dodgy, anything to get rid of the present lot.”
But in truth there are hard choices ahead, from the economy to Afghanistan, and while “hopeless but not serious” may capture the public mood, it’s a form of denial.
No wonder the coming orgy of dishonesty and evasion from all our would-be rulers inspires such revulsion. No, deep in the heart of Texas is a good enough place to be: I really shan’t mind watching this unseemly contest from afar. —