Harold Wilson once said, in the course of an election speech: “That is not an idle promise – it is a pledge.” The phrase became part of the lexicon of Wilsonisms which so entertained his political rivals. It encapsulated an eternal truism about politics and politicians – namely, that there are gradations in political sincerity extending from mere promises, which voters shouldn’t believe, right up to pledges, which they should.
The phrase came back to me when I was listening to the otherwise rather boring edition of Desert Island Discs last weekend, in which Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was the castaway. His wonderful Wilsonian moment came when Kirsty Young asked him about the document he and all the other Liberal Democrat candidates had signed during the general election campaign promising that they would never support an increase in university tuition fees. Yet now, in government, they were doing exactly that.
“I made a promise that I now find I can’t keep”, said Clegg, in tones of deep sincerity. Then he added, even more sanctimoniously: “You don’t do that lightly.”
Not even dear old Harold, the master of such moral ambiguities, could have improved on that, for it contains two distinct elements. First, it is not clear whether it was the failure to keep the promise which Clegg didn’t do lightly or whether it was the making of the promise in the first place; there is a difference. And the second, Clegg is plainly implying that, so long as you don’t do it lightly, breaking promises is not just right but is actually morally superior to keeping them.
This would be a pretty slippery moral doctrine coming from anyone in public life. It is especially so coming from the leader of a party which has specialised in moral superiority over all the others. For the Lib Dems, whatever else they may be, are above all the party of moral superiority. They inherited a double dose of it from their predecessors, the old Liberal Party and the “Gang of Four’s” Social Democratic Party. No one has ever done moral superiority more loftily than Jo Grimond or more scornfully than David Owen.
So there has been a particular joy – almost the only pleasure in an otherwise ghastly six months – in watching the tortured antics of Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and the rest of the Lib Dem contingent in the coalition as they struggle to explain themselves to their more innocent colleagues on the backbenches, to their party faithful, and to the tens of thousands of voters who were foolish enough to follow The Guardian’s advice and vote for them last May. I somehow doubt whether many of them will be prepared to accept Clegg’s assurance that he didn’t do it lightly, and say: “Oh well, as long as you didn’t do it lightly, I suppose that’s all right.”
The essential feature of this whole episode is that the Lib Dems have at last been forced to face the truth about themselves – that their whole existence as the third party has been founded on a lie. As their opponents have constantly argued, they have cheerfully promised all sorts of desirable things to the voters, in the confident knowledge that they would never be required to put them into effect. Now, suddenly, thanks to the peculiar mathematics of last May’s voting pattern, they find themselves facing the necessity to deliver. But they can’t – or not if they also want to keep their jobs at the Cabinet table. That dilemma seems to have been a no-brainer for Clegg, Cable and company.
Happily, they will probably be wiped out at the next general election. But probably not before catastrophic damage has been done to the social and economic structure of this country.
* * *
The poor old Royal Navy, in which I spent nearly three quite jolly years of my young life, hasn’t had much luck lately. First, the Government’s programme of cuts has awarded it a gigantic aircraft carrier (cheers from the mess deck), but has decided to withhold the jet fighters which would have provided its raison d’etre (boos from the mess deck). And now a monster-sized, nuclear-powered, billion-pound hunter-killer submarine which was loitering off Skye has bumped into a shingle bank which had hitherto gone undetected – at least by the navy, if not by the locals.
God knows what the brown-jobs (the army) and the Brylcreem boys (the RAF) are saying these days to our poor lads in blue, but it must be pretty wounding. I bet some joker will run off a batch of cap bands for the new, aircraft-less aircraft carrier bearing the legend: HMS Mary Celeste. And a few more for the unfortunate submarine, renaming it HMS Whoops.
So I was delighted to see a very good idea for the future of aircraft-less aircraft carriers advanced by a letter writer in The Guardian. Tom Poole of Leominster pointed out that such a vessel would have loads of space for civilian emergency equipment and supplies, which would turn the otherwise embarrassingly useless ship into a means of delivering rapid aid to disaster-hit areas like Haiti.
Perhaps her cap bands could then read: HMS Mercy.
