To become even a modest success in politics you need a wide range of qualities. Some of them are rather grand, even Churchillian. But quite a lot of them are pretty trivial, although they are no less crucial to the politician’s armoury than the grand ones.
Into the less grand category, for example, falls a heroic capacity to tolerate mind-numbing boredom – as at endless committee meetings, or while listening to other people’s speeches. Indeed, some ministers I have known have even confessed to being bored by their own speeches.
I can’t say that I was ever really equipped to be a politician, mainly because of a total lack of Churchillian qualities such as ambition. But even if I had matched up to Winston in that department, I would still have steered clear of a career in politics, because I couldn’t have endured the level of boredom routinely tolerated by MPs – and especially ministers.
However, I discovered last week that there is another trivial quality which is essential to the trade – and which I also lack. To even perform, let alone succeed, you need to be immune to the common human emotion of embarrassment or shame.
This realisation came to me as I was reading an interview in The Guardian with Andy Burnham about his pitch to become the next leader of the Labour Party. The bull point in the piece was that Comrade Andy wants to exhume Labour’s socialist roots. Under his leadership, he wants us to become the party of “aspirational socialism”.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t on a bus at the time, because I let out such a loud bray of incredulous laughter that the driver would probably have asked me to leave. I mean, really! An arch-Blairite asking us to believe that he wants the party to get back to its socialist roots? You couldn’t make it up.
Except that Burnham did make it up. He went on to tell The Guardian: “I make no apology for rehabilitating the s-word – it’s on our party card, it’s what I think we all are, except that we haven’t been able to say it for 16 years.”
And this is where the quality of unembarrassability comes in. Did it not cross Comrade Andy’s mind that the reason why we (or, rather, he) hadn’t been able to mention it for 16 years was that New Labour, of which he was a devoted standard-bearer, had based pretty well the whole of its manifesto on the proposition that all that socialist stuff was really just romantic window dressing?
That was why Tony Blair’s first major act as leader of the party was to launch his campaign to amend Clause IV of the Labour constitution. He succeeded, amid many assurances that the change didn’t really make much difference in practice. But it did. Almost everything Blair did from that point onward made it clear that New Labour was not a socialist party in any commonly accepted sense of the word.
Now, I’m not saying that Burnham doesn’t have some quite good ideas in his manifesto. But most of them could have been in a Liberal Democrat conference resolution, at least until Nick Clegg threw his party’s weight behind George Osborne’s spending bloodbath. Most of his proposals are based on the admirable idea that we should all look after each other a bit more – which, to me, looks more like Christianity than socialism.
I’m not much of a Marxist. But I subscribe to the view that the ultimate source of inequality is the ownership of the means of production by the few, who then go on to exploit those who own nothing but their capacity to work. Socialism, in my book, is more than being nice to each other – it is an attempt to change the rules of private ownership and private profit. In the case of the public utilities, including the banks, that probably means some form of public ownership. In private industry, it must involve much higher taxes on profits and far greater workers’ participation.
But in the present climate, all that looks pretty utopian. The immediate task is to do everything possible to obstruct the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s insane onslaught on the entire structure of the state, involving unimaginable numbers in the dole queues and the strong probability of a double-dip recession.
Ironically, it begins to look as if Labour’s most effective allies in warning of these dangers may prove to be the very people the Tories were trying to please with their savage measures – the financial markets. A recent report reveals that finance directors of Britain’s biggest companies have been frightened by the scale of the cuts And the stock markets don’t look too good, either.
But if George Osborne and his disgraceful Lib Dem henchmen get away with it, and the double-dip recession becomes a reality, the idea of a socialist remedy may look a great deal more appealing than it did in the boom years. The Chancellor may yet become a victim of the law of unintended consequences. And then Comrade Andy will be able to sing “The Red Flag” with conviction.
