The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Hague is a born fighter who will do a better job than Portillo of hazing Blair at the dispatch box for the next Parliament, and Portillo as Shadow Chancellor will have the opportunity to work on the plans that could rebuild the party in the only way it can be rebuilt: by proposing, in detail and without appeal to atavistic prejudice, an inclusive yet demonstrably workable order of social justice, thus to compete in the centre for voters who are no longer either the prisoners of their background or its privileged darlings. And to those who proclaim that there is nothing interesting about a centralized politics in which two similar parties are divided only by their proposed methods of achieving the same ends, there is a sharp answer. Those are the only politics worthy of the name, and we are very lucky to live in an epoch where they prevail.

  Just how lucky was revealed to me all over again next day in Sloane Square, where I met one of Portillo’s challengers for the Kensington and Chelsea constituency. If not the most formidable of his opponents, Julia Stephenson of the Green party is certainly the most unmanningly pretty. In a party whose candidates consist almost exclusively of pin-ups, she stands out for seeming to incarnate the thesis that being environmentally friendly is good for the skin. In her canvassing outfit of white plimsolls, clinging white pedal pushers and environmentally friendly velvety green top – it might well have been a piece of some environment, perhaps a swamp in Sri Lanka – she sprang along the King’s Road handing out Green leaflets, which were readily accepted, especially by the men. From her they would have accepted a subpoena. Here was clear case of a born Tory who had gone missing. Her moment of revelation had occurred ‘beside a Friends of the Earth skip in Haslemere. I was looking at the champagne-fuelled haze and I thought there is more to life.’ She was right; there is. That’s how the Tories lost her. Labour hasn’t got her yet, but there is only one way for the Tories to get her back. An appeal to grassroots loyalty won’t do. For her, that grass was never green enough. She wants a better world for everyone. Michael Portillo will beat her, but the best thing about him is that he has already joined her. She threw her class instincts into the skip, and so did he.

  3. Spontaneous Pint of Beer

  For any ageing correspondent whose feet were giving out, the second weekend of the General Election carnival was a time for contemplation, stocktaking and summary. To put it another way, it was a chance to watch television. Out there on the road you pick up a lot of resonant detail, but the big picture is still on the small screen, because that’s where the campaign teams are aiming their efforts if they’ve got any sense. Charles Kennedy’s team actually admits it: their man doesn’t tour the regions, he tours the television regions. Wherever there is a studio, no matter how far flung – Dartmoor, the Lizard, Scapa Flow – he will get to it. And that’s the way he gets to you.

  If he stuck to the national stuff, even Kennedy would be defined by how he stood up to getting worked over by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight. Though a Wark work-over must feel like being walked over by a water buffalo in stiletto heels, Kennedy handles it well. But he doesn’t have to care, because he’s already got the telly thing sewn up out there in the hinterland. If his points go up, you can bet that’s where it comes from.

  After years under the aegis of Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and their emulous oppos, it remains extraordinary how media-wise some of the leading politicians aren’t. Blair should have had a quotable paragraph ready for the woman at the hospital, and it wouldn’t have taken a tactical genius to figure out that John Prescott was eventually going to get hit with an egg. At Labour’s media training camp they should have rehearsed him with a few dozen cartons of Free Range hen-fruit, drumming it into him that when the inevitable albuminous missile made impact he should turn to the nearest camera, give it a wink, and say, ‘Labour prosperity means eggs to spare.’

  A campaign that tries to airbrush out the awkward moments in advance looks mechanical, and its works are always vulnerable to a mislaid spanner. But to be ready for the awkward moments isn’t mechanical, it’s common sense. Admittedly not all eventualities can be anticipated. The first President Bush, after he vomited into the Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s lap at a formal dinner in Tokyo, would have done well to say, ‘That sashimi was so good I couldn’t keep it to myself.’ But Bush’s scriptwriters didn’t see it coming. Neither, presumably, did Mr Miyazawa, or he would have had a towel ready on top of his napkin.

  The random stuff that happens on a walkabout would be a gift to the leaders if they had the sense of humour to enjoy the uncertainty, but only Kennedy has much of that. Faced with the unanticipated, Blair imitates the action of the goldfish, and Hague, for all his quickness of reflex, can only make debating points: he doesn’t engage with the punter, he disengages himself from the danger. But really it is an awful lot to ask of a politician that he should wing it like an improv actor. Even the best performers on Whose Line Is It Anyway? had a card-index of possibilities in their heads so that they couldn’t be stopped cold. You can’t blame the leadership back-up teams when they try to set the scene, vet the extras and repaint the décor. In their ideal world, a Party Election Broadcast would be the only kind of telly their blokes did.

  Here again, Kennedy has come over best, perhaps because, in an art-form whose whole impulse is to eliminate contingencies, nothing can eliminate the contingencies of his fundamentally merry face. The only way to do that would be to eliminate him altogether, as the Tories, in the first two weeks at any rate, pretty well did with Hague: their Party Election Broadcasts, shot and lit like Escape from New York or Assault on Precinct 13, projected Britain as a Blackboard Jungle in which Willie Horton sat behind every desk. No doubt, in the original scripts, Hague was flying the rescue helicopter to lift you out, but he ended up on the cutting room floor. In the Labour PEB that started screening on Sunday night, everything ended up on the cutting room floor except Blair. The action was shot to advertising standards: if there had been a fly on the wall, it would have been a member of Equity. Blair’s spontaneous pint of beer was lifted at exactly the right speed and angle. We have since been given Alastair Campbell’s assurance that hoisting a pint was just something Tony happened to do when the camera was around. Cue footage of flying pigs.

  On the scale leading down from calculation to chaos, the next rung under the PEB is the set speech to the faithful at which cameras happen to be present. The back-up team is in control of the setting and the leader is in control of what he says. Contingency, however, enters at the point where the evening networks decide which bits of the speech they will use. You can see a complete speech only on the fringe channels, where it usually turns out to be as boring as hell – a fair reason for the main channels not to run it holus bolus. But even if a leader’s oration is a heap of feldspar, it can sometimes be a gold mine of implication. On Friday evening, Sky News went live to Hague speaking in Manchester. ‘You know what I know, make no mistake about it, the Conservatives can win this General Election.’ A little of that went a long way, and a lot of it glazed the eyes like a Ming vase – not just your eyes but Hague’s too.

  Further down the script, however, a bell rang. Hague mentioned the great unmentionable, the Millennium Dome! He said that the present government was ‘too embarrassed to knock it down’. He forgot to add that the last Conservative government hadn’t been too embarrassed about the idea of putting it up. Nevertheless, here was a hint of what Hague’s campaign might conceivably be doing instead of trying to reassure the dwindling Tory faithful that their leadership elite still shares their prejudices: it could have been attacking Blair’s administration on the mess it had made out of actually running things. It would need boldness from the Hague squad to attack foul-ups whose origin can be traced to their own party, but boldness Hague has, if it could only be used. Instead, with a target like transport wide open to be bombed, all the Tories can say about John Prescott is that he has the wrong instincts about incoming eggs.

  As any Labour voter who rides the London tube is painfully aw
are, Prescott has a lot more to answer for than that. The transport snafu amounts to a national emergency, and few of the other public services are in much better shape. Yet the new all-Blair PEB is inviting an attack that never comes. ‘Work that we’ve started,’ burbles Blair, ‘and that we need to finish.’ You can say that again. And indeed he does say it again. ‘We’ve made a start, but haven’t finished it.’ How good a start? And how can you ever finish, if everything you have so far done compounds the shambles? The Tories never ask, and even the Lib Dems don’t go far beyond suggesting that more tax money is the solution. Although Portillo has given the occasional polite hint, there is nobody to say outright, and say often, that the public services are a question of organization. Labour is proposing a new way of organizing the health service, but Labour ought to look incredible about proposing a new way of organizing anything. Britain isn’t producing enough teachers to teach its own language. Britain can’t lay a railway line that doesn’t warp in the remorseless heat of its equatorial climate. Britain can’t get rid of a Dome that it didn’t know how to open for crowds that never came to see the marvels it did not contain. It’s Blair’s Britain that can’t do these things. So let’s get the bastard.

  That last sentiment is not one I share, finding as I do that Blair’s repertoire of special voices arouses sympathy, rather in the way that a chameleon crossing a tartan kilt might make you want to pick it up and give it a rest. But why the other parties aren’t beating the crap out of his reputation for competence is one of the great mysteries of this greatly fascinating election. On the whole they are proposing to do what he does but either use less money (Tories) or more (Lib Dems). That there might be different and less shambolic means to achieve the same ends seldom comes up. The level of debate between the parties has never been lower.

  The level of debate is higher on television, but not necessarily because the hard-arse interviewers have confirmed themselves in their new role as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The best you can say for them is that they are even-handed: they grill everyone at the same high temperature, taking the smell of charred flesh as a sign of success. If John Humphreys has his way, Keith Vaz will be deported as an illegal asylum-seeker. Jeremy Vine of Newsnight continues morphing himself into the new Paxo. The aforementioned Kirsty is a dominatrix out of the collective imagination of men whose idea of fulfilment is to be lashed around the parlour on all fours by a schoolmistress in leather underwear. But the torture is mainly about major money and minor detail. Eight billion, twenty billion, thirty-six billion. You didn’t deny that, does that mean you meant this?

  The inquisitors are keeping the politicians honest, but at the price of keeping them running backwards with their gloves up. Here again, Kennedy does best of the top men. Jonathan Dimbleby is as tough as any of the hard-arses and has a far more developed historic memory, but Kennedy came out well from a gruelling one-on-one. He has the art of getting his message out along with a defensive jab. Hague, though the quickest-witted of them all, is hampered by the fact that his atavistic messages have to be defended anyway, so he is already running backwards on his way from the dressing room to the ring. As for Blair, all he can do with a needling question is look stung, as if his tormentors were ignorant of Blair’s Britain’s towering achievements. But the achievements are what is in question. Do they tower, or are they Dome-shaped?

  It is hard for even the most choleric interviewer to inflict any real damage face-to-face, although he might enhance his own reputation by asking the same question umpteen times – the television equivalent of a ballerina’s thirty-two fouettés. Up-country, trailing Hague’s solitary school visit for Channel 4 News, Jon Snow capitalized niftily on the Tories’ Blackboard Jungle PEB by grabbing sound-bites from the kids in the playground. ‘You haven’t been burning any cars have you?’ The selected urchin had the perfect reply. ‘Not recently, no.’ At Smith Square they must have spat tacks when they saw that, but they ought to get their man ready for when he next meets Jon Snow on the road. Hague could ask, ‘You haven’t been burgled recently, have you?’ It is statistically almost certain that Snow’s reply will have to be ‘Quite recently, yes.’ But Snow is an old hand who can still outshine the new blood, like his namesake Peter, now equipped with a vampire-bait open-necked lemon shirt as he dodges emphatically among the virtual columns that show Labour right up here and everybody else right down there.

  The fringe channels are way ahead on election debates, a fact that would be generally acknowledged if more people were watching. Channel 5’s 5 Talk on Friday at 6 p.m. was exemplary, although you have to be aware that one of the things that the show is exemplary of is Blair’s Britain, where classless young people look and dress like Frank Skinner and Gail Porter when she is dressed at all. 5 Talk is fronted by two fledglings called James and Lucy (they don’t seem to have any second names) whose costive tones might lead you to expect strident vacuity. On the contrary, they are fast-thinking and well informed. James, in particular, is a pink-shirted walking encyclopaedia of political savvy. The programme costs fourpence – Sir David Steel came in from Scotland on the phone, not in vision – but gets high-quality results, thereby reversing the trend of Millennium Dome culture.

  The twin subjects on Friday were devolution and Europe. George from Norfolk had taught philosophy in Sweden for twenty-five years but still felt too British to join the euro. James asked: ‘Why would an economic policy wipe out a cultural heritage?’ Nobody in the Labour party has yet managed to put that thought into a single line. The discrepancy between yoof-struck format and adult argument was astonishing. The show looked like a mixture of The Big Breakfast and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but it sounded like Plato’s Symposium. Plumbing the depths of their tiny budget, its creators sent out a leg-man billed as The Man in the White Suit to do cod scientific research in the street. He smuggled a taxi driver into a Lib Dem press conference on the economy and measured the cabbie’s pulse as it dropped to five beats a minute. People watching paint dry were proved to have the same level of cardiac excitement. (A few punters roped in off the street, a piece of chipboard, a tin of white paint, and one camera: cost, negligible. Joke, fabulous. Why can’t the big channels be that funny? Because they can’t think any way but big.) Michael Portillo missed a trick here. The Man in the White Suit caught up with him while he was canvassing. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Portillo, ‘I’ve got voters to meet.’ He was polite as always, but if he had submitted to the pulse test and said ‘Conservative politicians have the hearts of lions’ he would have met a lot more voters and made his party look cheerful and creative, instead of like the Bismarck steaming in a circle with its rudder jammed.

  But the election show with most fun for grown-ups is The Boulton Factor, an annexe of Sky News. If you’re still looking for the women in this election, this is where they are. On the main channels you will see only Ann Widdecombe and the savagely divine Kirsty, who, you will have gathered by now, I have got on the brain. (In my dreams she interrogates me at the Ivy: ‘Why have you brought me here? What are your motives? What are these oysters for? Why won’t you answer the question?’) On The Boulton Factor you get the press babes as guests, and they are wonderful. Ann Leslie of the Mail dissects the candidates with the edge of a polished fingernail, and Julia Hartley-Brewer of the Mirror echoes the same unanswerable point she made in print: that the Tories have thrown their grappling hooks into their own ship. Terrific traffic, which the suavely thuggish Adam Boulton marshals like a master. He is never called Adam, by the way: he is just the Boulton Factor. This is the James Factor, saying watch out for Kennedy: if the big parties are dumb enough to go on playing follow-my-leader, the man in the middle could develop a column that will jolt Peter Snow out of his lemon shirt.

  4. Follow That Bus

  At the foot of the Millbank tower on Tuesday morning, we of the media gathered like a punishment battalion of termites briefed to attack a steel traffic bollard. We knew in advance that there wouldn’t be much to chew on. Soon Tony Blair’s bu
s would be heading out for an undisclosed destination. We would follow. When we got there, nothing much would happen, except in our dreams. We could dream of Blair being attacked with rocket launchers by half a dozen female OAPs screaming ‘Seventy-five p was a bloody insult, you grinning berk!’ There were shadowy figures within Millbank who believed that we might stop dreaming of something like that and start arranging it: that we might hire the Nolan Sisters, fit them out with a few lengths of plastic drainpipe, and let them loose at a photo op.

  In the Millbank mind, where media control was invented, the media out of control is the demon that never sleeps. Unless you had signed on the dotted line for a seat on one of the two press buses, you weren’t supposed to go. I linked up with ace freelance photographer Brian Harris, who was covering the day for the Indy along with me. His handsome features weathered from years of room service, Harris is the breed of smudger who gets the shot if has to wade through a swamp, surface through pack ice, dance with the seventh wife of the mad revolutionary general. But he wasn’t too keen to get on a press bus that charges £540 for a day trip, and neither was I. Why not just hire a car and follow the buses? After all, it was a free country.

  Patiently awaiting its precious cargo, the Blair bus was surrounded by demonstrators with signs saying KEEP CLAUSE 28. The kind of enthusiast who can surround you all on his own had a sign saying SEEK THE LORD WHILE HE MAY BE FOUND. Here was an argument for the prudence of keeping Blair’s various destinations a close secret: otherwise he would face torrents of this stuff when he got there, and perhaps worse. If Millbank overdid the caution vis-à-vis the press, Special Branch was merely being wise when it came to the loving public. In large letters, the back of the Blair bus was marked LEADERS TOUR. It was heading for the land where the possessive case has been abolished, and apostrophes are never used except incorrectly, to mark the plural. If I knew where Blair was going every day, I would be waiting there myself, holding my sign that says SO MUCH FOR YOUR EMPHASIS ON EDUCATION, DIMWIT.