I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, however dull the parade turns out to be, but as the Labour leadership race progresses from endless hustings to a
humid period of reflection and careful consideration, have you wondered: what’s the point?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not playing the role of one of the legion of boneheaded media Cassandras who foresee an eternity of opposition for the Labour Party, now New Labour is dead and the dynamic duo of David Cameron and Nick Clegg forge a bright new reconfiguration of British politics.
In fact, if you think my powers of foresight are worth an ounce of spit more your own, my prophecy is that the coalition will collapse in chaos soon after the party conferences, when the grassroots of both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties will rise up against their leaders for their temerity in disturbing the bliss of certainty with the annoying inconveniences of power and responsibility.
Or not, as the case may be. But that bash at prophecy brings me to my wider theme, which again requires us to question the point of the Labour leadership contest. And that is to question the need for having a leader at all.
I won’t bore you again with the details of a history lesson I’ve repeated several times in this column, about how for 95 per cent of our existence as a species, for nigh on a million generations, we survived quite happily in small, egalitarian groups, with the evidence pointing strongly to there being deliberate strategies employed to prevent the possibility of the emergence of an alpha male who would then impose his will on everyone else.
It’s only since we accidentally settled into the backbreaking tyranny of agriculture that this whole structure has developed, of potentates, princes, presidents, prelates, popes, priests, prime ministers and other titles beginning with the letter p.
Worse, in our heart of hearts, we all recognise this. Whatever epigenetic process it was that allowed the so-called Neolithic revolution to be, in fact, a counter-revolution that reduced human society back to the hierarchical condition of baboons, almost all of us harbour the bat-squeak of an echo of those prehistoric strategies against the accumulation of power.
My job as a satirist is a louder echo, but I suspect even the most timid lackey (someone such as Kelvin MacKenzie, for instance, whose entire career as a loudmouthed mockney has been dedicated to worshipping and lickspittling Rupert Murdoch) might have a hunch that the people in authority over them are actually just as stupid or useless or lazy as the rest of us.
And so they invariably prove to be. Forgive me if my profession betrays me here, but no amount of mealy-mouthed pleas from gimps on the make will ever convince me of the innate value of “leadership”. In fact, the more someone talks up the concept of “leadership”, the more everyone else close by should start sidling for the exit or reaching for something blunt yet heavy.
And the Labour Party should understand this better than most. New Labour, the epitome of top-down entryism, stole the Tories’ belief in the führerprincip, which is woven into their political DNA, but without realising that this kind of thing only really works if you combine it with a ruthless determination to kill off last week’s god the minute he or she starts going a bit loopy. You know, in the way leaders do when they stop being aware of the contempt and ridicule in which they are held by the majority of the led.
Labour’s bedazzlement by Tony Blair blinded it to the importance of keeping the leader in check, however much the lackeys surrounding the leader try to terrorise everyone into unquestioning adulation.
And Labour’s problems are all the fault of the leadership and its own worship of the idea of leadership. In any other circumstances except desperation, Blair should have been torn to shreds by collegiality and collective responsibility. Instead, moonstruck by anyone more powerful than himself, he gave us Iraq, New Labour’s supineness in the face of unfettered casino capitalism, its abject terror of the bad opinions of monopolist maniacs like Murdoch – and on it goes.
And Gordon Brown, if possible, was worse. The party seems to have become so slap-happy after the serial abuse of Blair, it was incapable of constraining Brown’s own worship of the fuhrerprincip, made flesh by his own delusional belief in his own leadership qualities, which delusion was reinforced by the gang of extraordinarily feeble thugs and gunsels he surrounded himself with.
Well, we all know where that got us. If it had all been down to Gordon – which is, of course, the lie at the heart of “leadership” – Labour would have been wiped out. As it was, the party and its members in the constituencies fought back, and the defeat was nowhere nearly as bad as everyone feared.
There are obvious lessons to be drawn from that, although I doubt that anyone will seriously go the whole hog and re-install a collective leadership. But before you make your mind up over the summer, just see which one of the candidates has the glint of destiny in his or her eye. Then make sure you vote for someone else.
