One Sunday morning a few years ago, I found myself doing a newspaper review for Sky News, in the way you do when you’ve got a book out and you feel obliged to do whatever your publisher’s publicity department tells you in order to whore the damn thing. I’ve no idea if my appearance sold a single extra copy, but I remember standing in the green room watching the monitor, on which the guest appearing before me was being grilled by Adam Boulton about some now forgotten issue of the day.
As I sipped gingerly at my cardboard cup full of weak yet scaldingly hot tea, I grew increasingly agitated by the guest’s performance. She was none other than Patricia Hewitt, twin architect of last week’s “Night of the Long Rubber Knives”. She was churning out the standard “new” Labour female minister shtick – the head cocked at a slight angle to one side, the voice deep and modulated and carefully explaining things as if her interlocutor was either deaf or stupid or both – and I remember finally shouting at the screen something along the lines of how I agreed with what she was saying, but by God I’d fight to the death to prevent her from saying it in that way.
There was another person in the green room with me, also there to review the papers, and when I turned round, exasperated, and said that someone really should subject Hewitt to a bit of media training, Barbara Follett (for it was she) told me rather grandly that she, personally, had trained Hewitt to look and sound like that.
I can’t now remember how I responded to Follett, but the point of telling you all this is to demonstrate, once more, how debased our politics has become.
The failed Hoon/Hewitt (Hewn/Hoot?) Putsch was, after all, solely about “presentation” rather than “direction”, beyond the minutiae of whether the older or younger Miliband would look less of a prat on the telly than Gordon Brown does.
But if, to stand the old Bennite formulations on its head, politics is solely about personalities and not issues, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt seem to me to be the least qualified assassins imaginable, having between them a highly grating personality and no personality at all.
That personal attack on these bungling Brutuses is, of course, grossly unfair, but there you go. And it may indeed be the case that Brown’s personality will render Labour unelectable; it is, presumably, some deep aspect of his personality that compels him to talk and behave in the way he does, that drives him again and again to hoist up witheringly unpopular populist proposals and then forget all about them, to jabber meaninglessly about “aspiration” rather than social justice and believe it when Ed Balls tells him he’s great.
However, I doubt if any other potential Labour leader would do anything much different, although they might do it differently. What none of them is likely to do is explode the myth of aspiration by pointing out that because there will never be room enough at the top for everyone, it would be better all round to replace vacuous dreams of social mobility with plans to obviate the need for it by making society as a whole more equal, bearing in mind that the unspoken truth about social mobility is that you can go down as well as up.
But that would never do. It grates against the kind of displacement politics we currently endure, where a crisis of capitalism, instigated by capitalists, has mutated into a pissing contest about slashing a deficit created to save the capitalists, which in its turn will harm everyone except the capitalists.
Likewise, after a political scandal which succeeded against all the odds in making politicians even more universally despised than bankers, politicians on all sides of the divide (however narrow that divide truly is) have decided the thing we absolutely need more than anything else is five solid months of the bastards mouthing unbelievable platitudes at the rest of us.
One response to an “unofficial election campaign” could be an “unofficial election”, but that’s about as likely as any of the mainstream parties recognising that the real issue is a corrupt and corrupting economic system and an equally corrupt politics which has ossified into a condition similar to that pertaining before the Great Reform Act. Still, despite the weather conveniently mirroring the icy chill of the displaced priorities which pass for politics in 2010, here’s a simple reform – which will also obviously never happen – which could transform things overnight.
Why don’t we simply abolish the post of Prime Minister? We’ve forgotten that, like the words “Tory” and “Christian”, the phrase “Prime Minister” was originally coined as an insult, hurled at Robert Walpole, “Old Corruption” himself.
The office, which had no previous constitutional existence, simply emerged as Walpole accumulated offices and accrued power to himself. So let’s reform this constitutional anomaly, restore collective responsibility, cabinet government, collegiate politics and watch, with joy, as our shallow obsession with personalities is finally replaced by concentrating on the issues.
It’ll never happen, but happy new year anyway.
