Often was the time when delegates to a Labour Party conference would come up to me after reading coverage of the previous day’s debates (they had them, then) and ask: “Were these correspondents at the same meeting as us?” I used to parry the question with a joke and they would walk away shaking their heads.
But they had a point. The right-wing media deliberately and maliciously distorted events to suit the slant of their proprietors and their political friends of the day, who ranged from Norman Tebbit to the SDP, but never any further left. And the process works the other way round. A Tory row can be covered up – a Conservative leader’s speech can be reported as if it was the Sermon on the Mount.
So it was at Brighton. David Cameron’s address to the faithful at his party’s Spring Forum was billed in advance as the speech of his life, the great launch pad for a Tory revival in the polls, a beacon of vision and policy in a darkening world…you get my drift. Actually, it wasn’t mine but the spin-doctors’ and, as is the way of these things, it was nothing of the sort. Dave’s spinners ought to grasp Charlie Whelan’s first law of manipulation, which is not to oversell an event because itnever lives up to the advance billing.
This was no exception. It wasn’t a particularly bad speech, but it wasn’t much good either. There was nothing new in it, policy-wise. The gimmick of speaking without notes has lost any of the glamour it might once have had. Applause was modest, rising to a standing ovation only when Cameron praised British troops in Afghanistan. There were a couple of warnings. “Change will be tough and hard”, he cautioned. On whom? I wondered. “If you can work and are offered work and choose not to work, you cannot go on having benefits as before”, he did his best to bellow in that reedy voice of his, as if the hall were full of workshy layabouts. Actually, there were probably quite a few – of the idle rich.
“Immigration has been too high for too long”, he squeaked. “It needs to be cut and I will cut it.” Strangely, there was no applause even for this iconic Tory message. Once, around the middle of his rehearsed text, Cameron even faltered, as though he didn’t know what came next. He quickly recovered his poise – he’s a past master at that – but his hesitation chimed with a sense of indecision among his audience.
That morning, the latest opinion poll had put the Tories only two points ahead of Labour – the smallest lead since Gordon Brown’s election-that-never-was and the onset of recession. Something like panic was in the late February air. How could this possibly have happened? This wasn’t how the script was supposed to run. Dapper Dave was supposed to be on course for a historic victory over the old enemy. Indeed, as the leader declared in a promo video screened at ear-splitting decibel levels before his showbiz entry: “Nothing and no one can stop us”. That arrogant assertion almost belonged to a previous age.
But you wouldn’t have gleaned any of the above from the television coverage of Cameron on the Sunday evening or in the friendly media next day. His speech was a triumph. He had actually admitted that the general election might be a tight-run thing – “a real battle” – which was no more than a statement of the bleeding obvious. The banal was raised to a rhetorical level. I must have been at a different conference to the rest of my colleagues. They had seen a masterly performance. I saw something hugely underwhelming. On the way out, I observed to a delegate: “Did I really come 250 miles to hear that?” And he did not demur.
What conclusions, if any, are there to be drawn from this experience? Well, it confirms my belief that most of the press and all of the mainstream electronic media – including (indeed, especially) the BBC – have made their minds up that Cameron will be Prime Minister on May 7 and they might as well start sucking up to him now. Always back a winner, as Rupert Murdoch would advise.
This attitude isn’t fundamentally political. Most of the Westminster Lobby don’t have much in the way of politics – and perhaps that’s a good thing. There’s not a lot of point in filling the place with people like me. But they do have a quite short attention span and Labour has exceeded that allotted period. The story has got stale. They’re bored with – or contemptuous of – the party’s main players in government. After 13 years of Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, who can blame them?
So what they really want is a new story, which means a new party and a new government. Cameron isn’t all that new – he’s been around for five years in different guises – but he’s a damn sight more of a novelty than Jack Straw. And there is a herd instinct. Once the leaders pick up a different scent, the rest of the pack follows in short order. This may make for more interesting newspaper and TV coverage of the election, but it will be hard for Brown and company to overcome this mood shift when they present their bid for a fourth term of power. As for me, it looks like I will be at a different election from the rest of the gang.
