The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  You could see why Alastair Campbell loathes the idea of uncontrolled access. A big kid said that the local hospital had beds but no nurses. ‘We are recruiting,’ said Blair. If Jeremy Paxman had been standing there in short pants he would have pointed out that the nurses, doctors and teachers were being recruited anywhere in the world except Britain, whose education system had ceased to produce them. This kind of off-the-cuff stump confab can be lethally dangerous when the cameras are watching, but you can’t help feeling it ought to be the real stuff of politics, especially when even Blair was being forced to talk turkey. Another big kid – a black girl facing the daunting prospect of university tuition fees – was given a masterly answer that left none of the difficulties out. For once Blair had got it right: talking to the punter and letting the news crew overhear it, instead of talking past the punter into the camera. At last his campaign was going very well. But there was someone else whose campaign was going even better.

  Charles Kennedy was at Cheddar Gorge in Wells, where the Lib Dem majority over the Tories is a mere 528. This was incubus territory for the two main parties, because if the dozy swing voters they are trying to motivate should make their mark for the Lib Dems instead, the Tories will have worked to their own ruin and Labour will reinforce a new opposition. But a nightmare for them was dreamland for Kennedy. It was easy to predict, when the Lib Dem manifesto proposed raising taxes, that Kennedy was running for second spot. With the Lib Dem poll figures in the low teens the idea looked romantic. Now their poll figures were in the high teens and it looked classical: a flanking run on the wing with a smile of pity for the opposing forwards as they moved across too late. ‘They need sensible and worthwhile opposition,’ he said, meaning Labour. ‘They’re not going to get it from the Conservatives.’ He said the Tories were heading for civil war. Meanwhile the media were heading for him. By this time he didn’t need Honor Blackman to help him hog the screen-time. Up there in Hartlepool, Peter Mandelson must have been shaking his elegant head in admiration, like one of the Wright Brothers watching newsreel footage of Baron von Richthofen. Look what the new boys were doing with his invention.

  Monday was probably the crucial day of the election. In the evening, Blair went up against Paxman on Newsnight. The previous week, Paxman had pounded Hague into the floor of a setting that looked like Pebble Mill At One in the days when the local punters pressed their noses against the window to watch an alderman being interviewed about the exciting prospects in store for Birmingham. The Prime Minister was in a position to stipulate a more dignified ambience, but he must have been well aware that the one-on-one with a career hard-arse like Paxman is his most perilous gig. Up-country on Friday afternoon, Jon Snow had hammered Blair on the transport issue: the issue the Tories had had to lay off because they invented the mess. Snow was less hampered by guilt. When Blair recounted what Labour had set out to do, Snow said, ‘You didn’t do it.’ Blair had had no answer ready, but he was ready for Paxman.

  Diving at you with a screaming snarl, Paxman carries all kinds of ordnance under his wings – smart bombs, rockets, napalm canisters – but the weapon to watch out for is the toffee apple. Blair dodged everything except the sticky question about why he let Mandelson resign if Mandelson had done nothing wrong. But otherwise the triumph of his defence was the way he turned to the attack. Paxo was out to lunch about the gap between rich and poor. Blair was needlessly windy in his answer. He could have just said that if the poor get richer it doesn’t matter how rich the rich get: it’s the only way to tax them progressively, because if you hike the rate they dodge it or decamp. (The same message worked for Ronald Reagan: it multiplied the deficit, but it kept him in office.) Blair couldn’t get that idea into a snappy line, but at least he had an answer. Paxo was out to lunch, dinner and the next breakfast when he asked Blair to feel sympathy for Hague, and this time Blair said exactly the right thing. ‘I sympathize with anybody who leads the Conservative party.’ Across the lower half of Paxman’s features, a smile of acknowledgment appeared: fleeting but with a hint of warmth, like summer in England.

  As they settled down for the run to the judge – such was the catchphrase of the great Australian race commentator Ken ‘Magic Eye’ Howard – there was time for speculation about the future. Back at the start of all this I made the large prediction that it would be the most fascinating election of modern times, because although almost nothing would happen beforehand, almost everything would happen afterwards. It was an easy sooth to say: clearly the Tories will have to start again. You can have a lot of fun fiddling with the chess pieces. The longer Hague stays, the better for Portillo, especially if a euro referendum comes up: if Portillo has to lead against that, his hands are tied by what he has already said while backing Hague. Kenneth Clarke would be free to argue on terms instead of attacking the principle, but he can’t be brought back until Central Office gives up altogether on the Little England thing, which means saying goodbye to home base for keeps. They should have drafted Chris Patten any way they could: he is bound to be their Grey Eminence, but with an official post he could have done something to shut up the Black Widow, whose ‘Never’ speech left Hague’s ankles tied with his own trousers.

  But the realignment might go far beyond that. If the Tories are wrecked, it is because they have been replaced by Labour as the wealth party. If Labour can be opposed only from the left, it won’t be by its own left, which is irrevocably wedded to a chimera: an unaspiring working class that had to be fobbed off with social justice because it could never get preferment. Now that the whole country is either middle class or on benefits, the natural New Left are the Lib Dems. Kennedy has everything to play for, including the delicious possibility of offering the Tories an alliance instead of asking for one. He went into this election as Prince Hal, a joker of the panel games who stayed too long in the hospitality rooms afterwards because the girls were pretty and the talk was good. He will come out of it as Henry V, with Labour as the French army: overconfident, overmanned, and above all overmanaged.

  Too thoroughly convinced by its own success in managing its bid for supremacy, Labour is still under the illusion that the public service departments can be managed the same way. Labour is already talking of a new, supreme management layer to manage the management layers. The Millennium Dome not only hasn’t gone away: it’s expanding. Unless Professor Quatermass can find a way to stop it, the damned thing will cover the entire country. As the grisly envelope eats its way outwards, its quisling minions will be open to ridicule from anywhere except the old right wing that wants to cut the public sector back. The public doesn’t want the public sector cut back. The public wants the public sector fixed, and by now everyone belongs to the public. There are no leafy enclaves: there is no house, be it ever so grand and well protected, that can’t be reached by Big Brother, a cold call, a dope dealer or a thief. The British are all in it together at long last.

  Speaking as an Australian by birth and upbringing, I can promise you that equality won’t be as bad as you think. It just means giving up on the idea that there is a class born to rule. The idea had some attractive aspects: the born rulers were often cultivated and public-spirited, and their women gracious and well-spoken. Goodbye to all that. What you have to watch out for is the new rulers: getting there took fanatical application, and now they find it hard to stop being fanatical. Last week I tailed one of the Blair press buses up to Stafford. Now Millbank wants to charge the Independent £540 for a bus ride I wasn’t even on. It would appear that my name is on a list. Free men don’t like lists, and confident rulers don’t keep them.

  6. Standing on a Landslide

  On Thursday morning there was finally time to think. Media people who had spent weeks on the press buses awoke to the strange spectacle of a view through the window that did not move. It would be a long day before the polls closed, and the mind was free to ponder the paradoxes of democracy, the sweep of history, the vanity of human wishes and the startling beauty of David Beckham.

  I
n Athens on Wednesday night, Beckham was a poetic thing to see. He didn’t have to be scoring a goal to look poetic. He looked poetic just trapping a lobbed ball with his chest, as if rising to sacrifice himself by intercepting a meteorite. He looked poetic just standing there, while the missiles sportingly thrown by the Greek fans bounced around him. He looked too poetic to be the incarnation of a socio-political trend, but he was.

  So was Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but Hitler didn’t get the point. Blinded by racial science, Hitler stuck to his conviction that America was decadent. He couldn’t see that a nation able to produce so beautiful and accomplished a human being out of its own underclass had a lot better chance of dominating the world than he did. If Owens had been white, Hitler might have seen the truth.

  If David Beckham talked and dressed like Edward Fox, we might see it too. But the self-mutilating haircuts, the hunger for tattoos, the marriage to one fifth of a pop act and the lifestyle out of Graceland by way of Playboy Mansion West all combine to delude us that he is a prisoner of vulgarity, a clumsy aspirant to the standards of his betters. Forget about it. This is a man who knows his place in a new sense: that there is no place above his he would care to reach. Half a century ago, he would been been six inches shorter, worn shorts as long as his little legs, earned a fixed wage, saved up for a bungalow and counted it a great day if he shook hands with royalty. Now he is royalty. He is a king, and Victoria is his queen: he’s got a better deal than Prince Albert. There is scarcely a man in the land who would not like to be him, up to and including the Duke of York, who would love to shine on the golf course as Beckham does on the football field, but has been held back by his birth.

  Rewind the tape sixty years, to a conversation between Churchill and Lord Halifax. Churchill was no social radical, and Halifax was so reactionary he would have handed the country to the Nazis if they had guaranteed to preserve his privileges. But the two true-blue Tories were agreed that ‘the boys from the state schools’ had done well in the Battle of Britain, and that when the day came they should have their chance to rule.

  Since they were presaging nothing less than doom for the Old Establishment of which they were parts of the furniture, their colloquy was a pretty generous gesture, perhaps made easier by the likelihood that it would take a long time to come true. And such, indeed, was to be the case. The Prime Minister of today is still one of the boys from the private schools. But Tony Blair presides over a country that has changed on just the lines those Old-Boy old boys predicted, although it took every contentious minute of the elapsed time for Britain to get to where it is now.

  The welfare state was an Establishment invention: Lord Beveridge was an Old Boy par excellence. The retreat from Empire was managed by the Conservatives, not by Labour: Iain MacLeod, although sulphurously branded with the sign of the intellectual, was a Tory grandee in all other respects. Over-impressed less by Marxism than by the planning that won the war, the Labour party wedded itself to a command economy. Hugh Gaitskell joined his name to Rab Butler’s, but Butskellism could fly only so far from Labour’s traditional expectations before the chain on its leg brought it back. Harold Wilson, the only Labour Prime Minister before this one who ever got used to winning, did so because he was a juggler who could placate the union block votes by allowing them to think that some day their dream would come true.

  But their dream could never come true, and the Labour party’s best minds knew it. Finally Roy Jenkins, the key man in the whole reforming process that has led Labour to its present command of the centre instead of an unenviable domination of the left edge, headed the breakaway. He is still often condemned for being a would-be Establishment figure himself, a sucker for the hallowed ploy by which the landed ascendancy absorbed its enemies on the left, gagging them with ermine. Certainly the present Chancellor of Oxford University has had a lifelong interest in filling his place at high tables. But he was a true rebel.

  Both Gordon Brown and Michael Portillo have no doubt studied Jenkins’s use of the chancellorship as a training ground and a launching pad. Whether or not Jenkins guessed that his Social Democratic Party would have only a limited life is a nice question. But he certainly knew that his personally created fronde would force Labour to think again about the command economy. Labour’s switch to the centre was already under way when Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands gave her the boldness to launch free market economics. Michael Foot was thrown as a sacrifice on to the guttering pyre of Old Labour’s incinerated delusions. Clause 4, the sacred text of universal nationalization, was kept on the party card only as a talisman: not as an article of faith, but as a gesture to past legitimacy. Kinnock got stuck with the gesture.

  Kinnock didn’t win the country, but he won the party that rules it now. Labour was set free from its dragging links to the industrial proletariat, which Thatcherism had atomized: the lower orders had divided into the prosperous and the unemployed, and the only answer to unemployment was expansion. John Major was the Tories’ first overt answer to Labour’s drive into the centre: ever since the cautionary tale of Sir Alec Douglas-Home the Tories had fielded leaders of relatively humble origins – the boys and girls from the state schools – but they had all behaved as if their eventual place in the Establishment was the destiny that had shaped them from the start. Major looked shaped by the humble origins. His fate was to be lampooned by the new media ascendancy that likes its politics drawn as a cartoon, with the grandees in their great houses and the representatives of the common people sullen at the gates. But reality was no longer like that. By countenancing Major’s leadership at all, the Tories were already saying goodbye to their perennial snobberies.

  *

  They just didn’t say goodbye fast enough, and Labour got in. But goodbye – a long goodbye, admittedly – is what the more enlightened Tories had been saying ever since the war. It was in giving up their empire, their privileges and their prejudices that they had been at their best. If they had studied their own history better, they would be doing better now. The dumbest of them needed total disaster as a teaching aid. But the cleverest, and the best, have provided for decades an example that Cool Britannia would do well to study. The Tories who believed in public service were cultivated enough to want a cultivated country. Their civilized enclave was not enough for them. I can remember a time when Tory peers vied with Labour peers for the honour of raising the taste of the people: which was, after all, the same ideal that the red radical Gramsci died cherishing.

  The New Britain is philistine to the core. It is one of the cruellest paradoxes of my time in Britain that its once fruitful broadcasting system now reinforces the stupidities it was brought into being to ameliorate. To compound the paradox, a woman who thinks of herself as a Conservative started the rot: when Margaret Thatcher removed the quality requirement from the ITV franchise bids, she blew the whistle for the rush to triviality. It was a crime bred from the capital error of thinking that an ideology can be a view of life. The free market has an unrivalled capacity to harness brains. But the free market does not have a mind, and its bastard child, managerialism, is not a thing of the spirit: just a toy for the untalented.

  Such aberrations would matter less if Britain, at governmental level, had any real management tradition to draw upon. But since the war Britain has had an almost flawless record of being unable to assemble its technologists under a competent technocrat. Instead it has assembled them under incompetent committees, and the results lie rotting and rusting in a crowded chronological line: the groundnut scheme, the Brabazon, Blue Streak, Skybolt, the TSR2, the tilting train, Nimrod. So many and huge have been the fiascos that they would scarcely fit into the Millennium Dome – the supreme fiasco, and the true symbol of the Blair government’s first term of office. Labour’s only excuse for the Dome is that the Tories planned it. In that respect as in so many others, the two great parties are squeezed together by intimate historic bonds. It will be interesting to see if a third great party, if there is to be one, will know
how to detach itself from the Dome culture, which can be defined as the unfortunate tendency to engage in gigantically superfluous schemes when the essential matters of public welfare are smothered in paperwork.

  The broadcasting system showed a hint of its old glory on Thursday night, when the election programmes took over the studios of the main channels and managed to include some actual human beings along with the virtual technology. The lesson that the viewing public does not give a shit about virtual technology will probably never be learned: it runs counter to every channel controller’s unshakeable belief that the small screen must be made large by the flash of gadgets, or else the fatally distractable punters will switch off to watch something else – a pin-ball machine, say, or their washing machine on its second rinse.

  Sky News had done well throughout the campaign season, but on the big night even they decided that the droll Adam Boulton needed assistance from tables that lit up, walls that swivelled, and hovering gizmos that represented the state of the parties with creepily contracting and expanding suppositories: a visual pain in the arse. I wanted to see Boulton shooting the bull with Ann Leslie and the press babes, but no chance. Nobody can compete with the Beeb when it comes to doodads, so there is no point trying. At BBC1, David Dimbleby, born under the old Establishment in the days when it knew what it was doing, presided over a studio gone bananas.

  Peter Snow’s tomato sauce shirt was the closest touch with reality. Everything else was virtual. There were neon staircases in the sky with robotic simulacra of the party leaders climbing up them or threatening to fall off the edge. A staircase that was presumably real – unless Snow himself was virtual, a distinct possibility – was wheeled on so that he could run up and down it, shrieking and choking simultaneously while his artificial paradise swirled and swam with images utterly stunning in their irrelevance. There was also a new laser version of the Swingometer. In the long-gone reign of Bob Mackenzie, the Swingometer was a piece of cardboard and it told you something. Now it can shoot down a flying saucer but it tells you nothing.