Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse

by David Mitchell

  The fact that these opinions are to do with party politics doesn’t make them invalidly “partisan”. They’re still his views about what is right and wrong – the same as if he’d said he regards theft and murder as immoral. And I don’t imagine the Tories would criticise him for writing an article that was openly anti-BNP – and that’s a party political view, however much it’s self-evident to all but a few thousand weirdos.

  But as soon as the opinions become subtle enough to be of any interest, the Conservatives claim Sugar shouldn’t be allowed to express them, merely because he hosts a pantomime version of a business show. It would help no one if every TV face were chosen from the tiny minority whose views are so bland that they tread a perfect median between left and right.

  What is Jeremy Hunt’s real fear here? Does he think that Sir Alan will start adding a quick “Vote Labour!” every time he says “You’re fired!”? He can’t be genuinely worried that the show will turn into a party political broadcast, because people would stop watching if it did.

  No, the Tories are just desperate to rob Labour of its little publicity coup because Sir Alan Sugar comes across on TV as exactly the sort of cock who Tory voters like. His brand of “no-nonsense” nonsense and secondhand rhetoric, and his public affirmation that wealth makes what you say more important, are perfectly judged to appeal to the sort of idiot who thinks David Cameron talks a lot of sense, even though all he does is repeatedly bleat “change” like a tramp in a doorway, and his only stated policy is “to become prime minister”.

  I’m now sounding like exactly the kind of person who the Tories think shouldn’t be allowed on the BBC. But let me assure Jeremy Hunt that it’s not because I’m “biased” that I say that Cameron is a chancer who’s even more woefully unfit for government than Gordon Brown. It’s because I sincerely think it – just like I think that grilled tomatoes are nicer than tinned and Sean Connery was the best Bond. I honestly, unpromptedly believe it. Maybe I’m wrong. It looks like I’m going to get the chance to find out.

  The real problem with Sugar’s new appointment is that it’s such an obvious and grim attempt at populism. Brown is either so short of ideas or so despises the electorate that he thinks the best way to demonstrate that the government is coping with the biggest business crisis in a century is to make it the responsibility of a man whose day job is telling self-regarding mediocrities that they should take off their Mexican hats before trying to put on their jumpers. A man who has made himself rich, but whose career as a tycoon has gone sufficiently quiet that he’s got time to do TV.

  Top-end billionaires are too busy for that – Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson don’t have their own programmes, they have their own channels. Alan Sugar is no longer primarily a businessman – he portrays one on TV. Brown might as well have given the new tsardom to the bloke who played Boycie in Only Fools and Horses.

  What is even more depressing than Brown thinking that this might impress people is that the Tories, the only plausible alternative government, agree. That’s how to survive in politics: don’t focus on the country’s problems, get someone shouty from the telly to talk stridently about them. And then go on GMTV and say you’re personally concerned about Susan Boyle’s health “because she’s a really, really nice person”.

  Does Brown honestly believe that’s how to get people to respect him? To make them think that, in the middle of the greatest crisis in his career, he’s still taking a personal interest in the health of a random middle-aged woman he hardly knows? Does that kind of prioritisation play well with voters? What is still more depressing is that it might.

  Sir Alan Sugar is perfectly suited to the job of “enterprise tsar” because it’s not a job – it’s an exercise in presentation, just like his role on the BBC. In less bewildered times, an ambitious opposition would welcome the opportunity to ridicule such a disastrously craven government appointment. Instead, they’re meanly trying to block it because they’re annoyed they didn’t think of it themselves.

  *

  As the election campaign got under way, I found myself watching another bunch of entitled men tire themselves out …

  I went to the Boat Race for the first time this year. It turned out to be an exciting one – quite close. “Not like those deathly dull processional contests of the 1990s!” everyone said. I remember watching those on TV: Cambridge would take an early lead and then gradually increase it until, after about halfway, you couldn’t get both crews in the same helicopter shot. By the time the exhausted and heartbroken Oxford boat heaved itself over the line, the Cambridge rowers had already necked an aperitif and ordered their starters. In those years, it was difficult to understand how Oxford weren’t better, considering how much longer they seemed to spend rowing.

  I didn’t find that dull – I thought it was great. I don’t give a damn about the quality of the race, I just want Cambridge to win. I don’t completely understand why. “Because I went to university there” doesn’t seem reason enough. I suppose there’s something comforting in any long-held allegiance, however arbitrary. That’s why people support football clubs – it gives a sense of belonging, of shared achievements and disappointment. We allow ourselves to enjoy a victory we didn’t contribute to because we know that in the event of defeat, we’d also have felt the pain.

  But I can see that to people who don’t have a connection with Oxford or Cambridge, it’s just the close Boat Races that are diverting. Similarly, to an exhaustedly indifferent electorate, only the close elections are worth following.

  1997 was an exciting election, even though it was a foregone conclusion, because the result pleased a lot of people. Everyone is saying how exciting this year’s is going to be because you genuinely can’t predict the result. This is a reason to engage, to enthuse, to speculate – all of which activity, like organising a wedding to breathe life into a failing relationship, disguises the awful truth that we don’t much care any more.

  A regime which has led us into recession, debt and open-ended war is difficult to get behind, even if some of the crises weren’t primarily its fault. And the likely alternative seems almost wilfully unappealing: slick but lacking substance and desperate to avoid expressing any kind of opinion in case it puts some voters off.

  I can see the wisdom of that when they’ve got the likes of Chris Grayling knocking around. I don’t think his suggestion that B&B owners, perhaps balking at how those initials might be interpreted by gay couples, should be allowed to turn homosexuals away makes him a homophobe. It just means that he hopes homophobes will vote for him. The fact that he thought he could secure their support without repelling the rest of us shows a curious mixture of cynicism and ineptitude.

  It’s unfair to harp on about how posh a lot of the shadow cabinet are – there’s nothing wrong with being posh. Some people have been kind enough to say that I come across as a bit posh sometimes. Eton is a good school – I see no reason why someone who went to Eton shouldn’t be prime minister. That’s the kind of broadminded guy I am.

  But it does seem a devil of a coincidence that David Cameron – the dynamic new Tory who is going to lead his party out of the wilderness and his country into a sort of loving Thatcherism (which must be the political equivalent of S&M) – should have such a similar background to many of the old Tories whom he claims to be so unlike. It’s an irony that you’d think he might have referred to amid all his talk of change.

  The key Cameron claim slipped out on Tuesday when he said of the government: “Frankly, we couldn’t be any worse.” It’s also an admission that they might be no better. “But even in that eventuality, what have you lost?” he’s imploring. Meanwhile, Labour’s contention is that these difficult times call, as Lord Mandelson put it, for Brown’s granite rather than Cameron’s plastic. (It depends if we’re making an iPhone or a tomb, I suppose.) Cameron plugged this into the Central Office Witulator™, which came out with the brilliant riposte: “Well, I would say it’s rust versus steel.”

  What awful
, awful people. A few days into the campaign and I want to scream at them all to shut up. Even poor Nick Clegg, who hasn’t got a chance, can’t help being deeply annoying. One of his campaign launch soundbites was: “Our change is change that really does make a difference to ordinary people and families.” Apart from the blandness, it’s the “and families” that’s maddening. Doesn’t “people” cover families? Of course it does, but he’s got to say “families” because some research document has suggested that that’s a word that people (and families) want to hear.

  The endless talk of “fairness” and “hard-working families” and “change” has become dispiritingly meaningless. Politicians are completely failing to connect, even when they’re saying “Politicians are completely failing to connect.” They make words worthless; they all say that they don’t go in for negative campaigning while standing in the shadow of hoardings smearing their opponents. Do they think we don’t notice that blatant lie? If so, how much must they despise us?

  I know I’m stumbling into the cliché that politicians are all as bad as each other, but I can’t remember ever feeling it more strongly. Increasingly, they, and much of the media that scrutinise them, seem to come from an insular political community, which explains so much of the razzmatazz surrounding the election: they’re genuinely excited – they haven’t noticed that Britain is weary and sceptical. We’re supposed to be countering political apathy, and yet several TV channels devoted hours of broadcasting to Brown’s car journey to and from Buckingham Palace to confirm an election date that everyone already knew. Compared to that, the state opening of parliament is like The West Wing.

  Yet it’s important. Understanding the tiny differences between one drably plausible group and another may be crucial to our future happiness. Our past failures to do so have had horrible consequences: one of the many truths that politicians will never utter is that their mediocrity is, ultimately, a reflection of our own – our failure to understand, scrutinise and care, which is then exacerbated by the disappointing people that that failure allows to come to prominence.

  This election race isn’t going to be close in a good way. It may be tense, but the standard won’t be high. They’re not rowing so much as messing about in boats – hurling abuse and trying to ram each other. Millions so despair of the fixture that we’re glumly hoping for a draw.

  *

  When I first heard someone say “No publicity is bad publicity”, my instant response was: “Yeah, I bet that’s right!” It sounded so clever and cynical. “Life’s all about grabbing people’s attention and keeping it,” I thought. The squeaky hinge gets the oil, the country that threatens nuclear proliferation gets the aid, the most-papped glamour model gets the book deal.

  It’s an old saw that seems horrible enough to be true, and whoever’s running the Cambridge Union Society clearly subscribes to it: the debating society has announced that it’s offering pole-dancing lessons to female students. They’re to be held in the Blue Room, which, I assume, someone thinks is humorously apt – unless it was chosen over the “Boobs Library” or “Legs Akimbo Lounge and Conference Suite”.

  A spokeswoman said: “We are of the opinion that classes like these are a way of empowering women … if an intelligent, independent woman wishes to learn a particular form of dance in respectable surroundings –” I’d be very surprised? No: “… we see nothing degrading in that.” And I suppose if some stupid or impressionable women want to join in, that’s fine as well.

  So far, so undergraduate. They’ve correctly identified that received wisdoms, such as the view that pole dancing is degrading, shouldn’t be taken as read. But they’ve confused being contrarian with forming a reasoned opinion. Having stumbled upon the word “empowering”, which can be deployed under so many circumstances – I use it about charging my phone – they’ve let it trick them into thinking that they’ve framed an argument.

  I expect they’re feeling a bit smug that it made the papers. When I was a student, I made up a story about a cat crapping on the script of a play I was trying to publicise. This duly appeared in the gossip column of the student newspaper and was subsequently picked up by the Times Diary. I thought this basically made me Matthew Freud. More people would be aware of the show, I reasoned. True. And they’d associate it with cat shit. If it made anyone buy a ticket, I don’t want to meet them. But I’m sure that Juan de Francisco, the union entertainments officer who’s organising the classes, thinks he’s done himself and the society good by getting this mischievous idea some coverage.

  He hasn’t but that’s all right. Being dickishly flippant is one of the joys of student life. The Union Society, in particular, is an institution where persuasively advocating things you disagree with or don’t care about is all part of the game. It may be idiotic, but no more so than stealing road signs, guzzling so many Creme Eggs that you throw up or crawling around the floor dribbling and eating from the dog’s bowl. It’s all part of growing up. Or, in my case, a Friday night out.

  And it’s understandable that if you’re, say, a 20-year-old woman at Cambridge and a committee member of the Union Society, you may not think that the world is quite as sexist as people claim. It probably doesn’t feel like it. So why not use your looks, surely as eternal as your intellect, to further “empower” yourself by making men ogle you as well as admire your keen grasp of tort law? That’s not a policy with a shelf life, is it?

  Pole dancing is grim and I don’t see anything empowering about learning it. Even if you say that it’s just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs? And if, as de Francisco claims, it’s “not intended to be sexual”, why is it only for women? Shouldn’t men get the chance to be empowered too? I told you it was sexist!

  People talk about sexism against men quite a lot. Everything from being officially excluded from MP selection shortlists to getting turned away from nightclubs is cited as if it demonstrated the utter hypocrisy of all feminist aims. The reactionary view is that it’s all gone so ridiculously far – political correctness has gone so distressingly, dangerously and self-harmingly insane – that occasionally, would you believe it, things are now unfair on men! This doesn’t seem to take into account that if situations weren’t sometimes unfair on men too, it wouldn’t be fair.

  But, as this election campaign is demonstrating, when it comes to sexism, “PC gone mad” is a long way from power – it’s still a minority party compared to “chauvinism gone senile”. Just look at the horrible way that the leaders’ wives are treated. To go with our medieval monarchy, we have politicians and news media whose attitudes to marriage are stuck in the 1950s. Those poor women should have nothing to do with this election beyond voting – they’re not employees of the state or political parties and they should be getting on with their own lives.

  I refuse to accept the argument that we need to know about the personal circumstances of potential leaders in order to trust them. There is no evidence that being “a good family man” is a necessary precursor to competent government or precludes incompetence and tyranny. Yet we insist they present a bland and dated image of family life, and complain when it looks affected.

  Beyond that, we treat these women, who are paid nothing for their time, with an insolence we wouldn’t adopt with a drunk tramp pissing in a bus shelter. There have been whole articles devoted to the apparently unacceptable condition of Sarah Brown’s bare feet, which were revealed when she took her shoes off in a Hindu temple. In what way is a critique of the Labour leader’s wife’s toes in the public interest? It’s just being incredibly, vindictively rude to someone who can’t avoid the public gaze, and is unable to answer back.

  Just as stupid and sad was the spectacle of the new female parliamentary candidates from the main parties all posing for a magazine shoot. I don’t blame them for agreeing to it, but their male equivalents would never be asked – or only as the sort of ironic and tokenistic objectification of men c
urrently in vogue as a gesture towards redressing sexism.

  These normal-looking women, wearing their best clothes and smiling politely, never wanted to be in magazines. They’re standing for parliament – they want to be empowered. I doubt they started with pole dancing.

  *

  I wrote the following article roughly two weeks before the 2010 general election. The politics nerds among you may note that my predictions weren’t 100% accurate.

  David Cameron’s career is cursed by fate. With his privileged background, excellent education and meteoric rise, he may find it hard to believe but he’ll be sensing something unpleasant by now. He may misattribute it and waste months taking allergy tests or eating bacterial yoghurts to reinvigorate his gut. There’s no point changing your diet, David. What you’re feeling is the hand of history – yanking your scrotum.

  Such agony is familiar to the millions throughout the millennia who’ve found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time: rural weavers on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, devout polytheists on the accession of the Emperor Constantine, Incas in the early 16th century, homeopaths in about six months’ time (if there’s any justice), most Russians at pretty much any point (there isn’t).

  This is the only explanation for Cameron’s startling lack of success in the current election campaign. That may seem an odd remark to make about a man whose party is ahead in most opinion polls but, given how British politics has worked for most of the last 100 years, that’s much worse than he should be doing.

  The current government has undergone a horrendous series of crises: sudden and massive financial meltdown just as the man who was associated with the country’s finances became prime minister; an expenses scandal discrediting the whole House of Commons at a time when most of its members were Labour; the war in Afghanistan becoming ever bloodier and more intractable; and finally the mass grounding of aircraft caused by an act of God that must have finally convinced Gordon Brown that there isn’t one.