Paul Routledge - Out of the cage

NATURALLY, the incompetents at the BBC flashed up a shot of the wrong Angela Smith when Angela Smith, the unknown Sheffield MP, staged her on-off resignation from the Government while Ir’n Broon was in Washington. They showed a photo of gorgeous ex-minister Angela E Smith, as she is now obliged to call herself. She would be an unlikely rebel: remember, she was a whip.

The farce prompts recollections. It seems light years ago now, but it was only March 1997 when I was summoned to hear Gordon Brown’s plan for a new 10p rate of income tax. A general election was just round the corner and the then Shadow Chancellor was spraying good news stories round like a firefighter on speed.

The meeting took place on a Friday afternoon in a small, ornate stone pavilion in the House of Commons, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an aristocrat’s garden. Brown’s office was where Oliver Cromwell signed the death warrant for King Charles – or, at any rate, a Gothic reconstruction of the same.

Brown spoke without notes for about 40 minutes and I took several volumes of shorthand, still legible despite a twobbler (a two-bottle lunch with his spin-doctor, Charlie Whelan).

The only problem was that Big Gordie, while conducting an interesting tour d’horizon of the world economy, didn’t actually mention the 10p tax rate for the poor – the whole point of my story for the Independent on Sunday.

I pointed out this slight difficulty to Charlie as we made our way to the Strangers’ Bar and he gripped his head in his hands, muttering: “I know, I know. He’s always doing this.” Then he brightened and said: “Well, we’ll just have to make it up.”

There is no doubt that Brown had intended the story to be written. He’d just, well, got carried away with economic exegesis to the point where his point had disappeared like the Cheshire cat, leaving only Charlie Whelan’s wide grin.

Ever resourceful, we cobbled up a form of words for the paper, firmly stating that, in his first Budget, the Chancellor would announce “his intention of moving in the direction” of a 10p starting rate of tax with the aim of encouraging more people to come off benefit and go back to work. The story duly appeared, a double column top on page two. I have the cutting in front of me as I write. And it all happened.

That was how we did things in those days. It worked for the politicians, it worked for political journalists and, above all, it worked for the people at the bottom of the pile who voted Labour for a better way of life.

So why doesn’t it work now? If it was good enough for a pre-election booster, it’s good enough for today, when the country is immeasurably better off after 11 years of sound economic stewardship.

The trouble is two-fold: the Government has lost touch with political reality on the ground and the Midas presentation touch has deserted it. There is nothing wrong with spin when you have a good story to tell and the 10p rate was a humdinger.

But not only is scrapping the low starter rate a bad story, it has been badly told. No matter how often Alistair Darling goes on the Today programme to proclaim that everything is already perfect – and will get better – the brutal fact is that millions of workers on low wages and pensioners will be worse off under Labour.

This is a gift of terrifying proportions to the bloody Tories, who are capitalising on it big time. The sight of David Cameron posturing as the defender of the low-paid is as nauseating as it is untrue, but it works in the same way that Brown’s original idea worked – because people want to believe it.

And that’s when the trouble really starts, because when the voters simply switch off their belief systems, then it doesn’t matter what the message is. If, as seems to be the case, we are at this stage, then the Government is in terminal decline.
ODD, then, that I should seek to begin my own political career at this point, at the age of 64. In the May 1 elections, I am Labour’s candidate for my village of Cowling in north Yorkshire, which you may remember is the birthplace of Labour’s first Chancellor, Philip Snowden.

A Labour gain is not on the cards, although in politics you never know. The fact that the poll is on May Day gives me heart, but I don’t suppose anyone else has noticed. I have not asked party headquarters for any help, since – as the card in shops advising customers not to ask for credit used to say – “a refusal often offends”.