Lefties, disloyal to our betters, unlikely to be in adhesive television attendance at the royal wedding – gloated over the pictures of Dave as he then was, in full Bullingdon blue and grey plus white waistcoat, and said: “Yah, privileged. Nob or, rather, noblet, member of the social elite – with bar and oak leaves.”
Per Contra there were people, not by any means all booked-in Tories, who said: ‘No. Not having a shopkeeper father, not aspiring because nothing to aspire to, who knows, he may represent a return to something softer-edged than Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit. Noblesse oblige and all that. He may have a social conscience, understand the bigger picture and have a feeling for the have-nots. Remember Harold Macmillan? He was a toff, Eton and Oxford, inherited money and all, but he pulled back from the harder edges of Conservatism. Perhaps young Cameron… ?”
“Well”, as God says in the old Scottish hellfire sermon, “ye ken noo”. Perhaps not. Health and education slashed and charged for. Good causes abolished – witness the wildlife protection law. Meanness done deep and done with pleasure. Noblesse n’oblige. Scrooge on horseback. This we know and know full well and do not love thee, Dr Fell.
And since last week, we know something else. The extraordinarily insulting remarks tossed out at Angela Eagle are eloquent against Cameron beyond anything a dedicated enemy could say. “Calm down, dear.” Feminists, even the most moderate feminists, will have their own things to say about that thick-skinned, thick-headed, insulting word. But they won’t mind me joining in. You don’t use “dear” to women outside the context of actual love because it carries a burden of acknowledged patronage and demission. It packs the nine syllables of “Don’t trouble your pretty little head” into one. Can you hear Harold Macmillan, pre-feminist but readily chivalrous, saying that? Incidentally, note the crass populism of the source, a stale TV advertisement.
Macmillan making return of parliamentary service might have cited Herodotus. Cameron quotes Michael Winner. However, what matters above and beyond the insensitivity to women, is the overall arrogance of Cameron. It comes out in things done. Does anyone doubt that he denied endorsement of Gordon Brown for the top job at the International Monetary Fund, to which the Prime Minister who did indeed in 2008 make the essential moves to stop the bank crisis spinning into orbit, does have a bit of a claim? No one can think that Her Majesty or Prince Charles barred two immediate prime minsters from that wedding. There is only one possible mover of that motion, although he lacks the courage to avow what he slyly, meanly did. That is the second time I have used the word “mean”. It seems natural in this context – as does “petty”.
Mean acts are accompanied by a voice and tone in debate proclaiming an authority which come out as swagger, as a jarring, affront-giving assertion of plain insolence. There is no good humour, no banter. Macmillan is a touchstone here. Compare and contrast “Calm down, dear” with the words addressed by the then Prime Minister at a plenary session of the United Nations to a furious Nikita Khrushchev who had interrupted him by beating the desk with his shoe. “Could we have a translation, please?”Alistair Horne’s deeply enjoyable biography of Macmillan ends with a chapter entitled Le Style, c’est l’homme. Exactly.
But the man, Macmillan, had lived a real life. He had fought through the First World War, seen death all around him and come close to it himself. He had led Durham miners through that conflict and although, cunning old thing, he cheerfully exploited the experience, it had genuinely marked him with an understanding which a smoothly cruising social balloonist will never know. He was in Parliament right through the Great Depression, as the fortuitous holder of a natural Labour seat, Stockton in County Durham. He had disagreed with his party and made trouble. He had run an actual working business, but having a genuine, disinterested high culture, he had been happy in the family trade of selling books. Cameron’s life experience is of the outer offices of other politicians.
Paradoxically, the jarring triumphalism of his discourse, the ferrule-in-ribs approach to opponents reflects the smoothness of a man off whom rough edges have not been knocked. Macmillan did his share of tricky politics, knew how to trail a leg behind an ankle: Anthony Eden’s, Hugh Gaitskell’s, and especially Rab Butler’s. He made no claims on angelic status. But he was a humane, civilised man who came to power late and enlightened by life or, as he put it: “Events dear boy, events.” He managed more than a touch of grace. Compare and contrast.
