I CANNOT SAY my eye was drawn, on the morning of March 30, 1979, to a small report in one corner of the front page of the
Daily Mirror, for I was looking at the paper’s main story: about my own disgrace. Splashed across the paper was my offensive reply to a tiresome complainant from Kent, written on behalf of my then boss, Margaret Thatcher, the Leader of the Opposition, and her embarrassed apology.
But big though that story momentarily seemed, certainly to me, it told us less about the British political weather than the one-paragraph report it all but elbowed from the front page. The Liberals had captured Liverpool Edge Hill in a by-election. Edge Hill had been a comfortably held Labour seat.
The result surprised commentators. The Liberal Party was in a dreadful mess. Its former leader had been facing charges for conspiracy to murder. Yet here it was in Liverpool, bouncing back with almost 13,000 votes and a 32 per cent swing from Labour. The Tories came a bad third.
The Tory result was a big disappointment, for this was the “winter of discontent”. Jim Callaghan’s Government looked vulnerable. Under their untested new Opposition leader, Tories were hoping to oust Labour at the coming election. Still, they put on a brave face and pointed out that Liverpool voters intent on giving a kicking to the Labour Government had naturally cast their ballots for the challenger who stood a chance: David Alton, the local Liberal.
Labour too put a brave face on the reverse. As I run briefly through their excuses you may say to yourself: “Why do I need to know this?” You don’t. It is rightly forgotten. See it no more than as an illustration of the detail we must screen out, lest we be distracted from the bigger picture.
Just as today, in the aftermath of Thursday’s Dunfermline & West Fife by-election, the Labour Government then insisted that the Edge Hill by-election had been a very “local” contest. The result was a freak, they said: skewed by special Merseyside factors. The sitting Labour MP, Sir Arthur Irvine, had stood down in protest against the Labour Left. Mr Alton had worked hard in Edge Hill and his party’s campaign had been a shrewd blitzkrieg. Defeat, Labour said, should be seen not as a verdict on Jim Callaghan’s Government but as a reward for a hard-working and well-known resident Liberal, and a warning to a local Labour party that they were losing touch.
And the funny thing is that, on one level, all this special pleading was perfectly true — even interesting. The more you zoomed in on Edge Hill as a place, the more you focused on the leading players as individuals, the more you narrowed your gaze to the doorstep issues that worried this particular, tiny and atypical electorate, the less possible it seemed to draw general conclusions about the big picture — namely, Labour’s prospects at the coming general election. Hotheads might rant that for Labour Edge Hill was a portent of doom, but the wise knew more: that on closer examination it meant little. It was all just “local”.
The coming general election came. Labour lost badly — in Liverpool and in most other places too. It hadn’t been all that local, after all.
To wise up in politics, it is sometimes necessary to dumb down. A by-election has just given Gordon Brown and Tony Blair a smack in the mouth. People did it the most effective way they could: by electing Labour’s only serious challenger there. A chimpanzee, in Willie Rennie’s place, would have had a magnificent result too.
Everybody says that the victorious Liberal Democrat was much better than a chimpanzee. No doubt. Everyone says that neighbouring Sir Menzies Campbell helped. No doubt, and hopefully this result will help him beat off a leadership challenge from the mysteriously and indefinably ghastly Chris Huhne. But as Mr Rennie himself emphasised in his victory speech, the voters wanted to show a mailed fist to Labour. Any candidate with a credible fist would have found that the force was with them.
Everybody says there were local reasons for Labour’s unpopularity — anxiety about the town centre, anger about huge rumoured increases in bridge tolls. No doubt. But as fellow commentators over decades of by-elections will confirm, campaign teams always assure you that in this particular contest “the big issues are local” and always insist that local engagement will give their candidate the edge.
And sometimes local issues do seem to swing it and sometimes they don’t; and when they do, we opine with savvy smiles that it was the gasworks controversy wot won it; and when they don’t, we opine with savvy smiles that you can’t buck the trend. And the truth is that there’s no knowing how far or why local issues sometimes do appear to loom large in voters’ calculations, and sometimes don’t. Perhaps there is little more to be said.
Except this. When the wind is behind a party in power the electorate is readier to see their local gripes as gripes, and set them to one side if an election has wider implications. But when the wind is against a party in power, every damn thing looms large in the voter’s mind as he fingers his pencil in vague hopes of stabbing it somewhere in the vicinity of the Government’s chest. Gordon Brown did know that the Forth Road Bridge toll was worrying the local electors. He did “step in” and try to kill anxieties. But voters there were not disposed to credit his intervention. They could have blamed anyone for the bridge-toll cock-up — not least the Liberal Democrat in charge of transport at the Scottish Executive — but they chose to visit their annoyance on the Labour candidate. You have to ask why.
I remember keenly the latter years of the last Conservative epoch. As the late 80s and early 90s roll by, government seat after government seat falls — to a miscellany of Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP candidates: whichever looked (to voters) best placed to beat the Tory. Each by-election seemed at the time to present its own story: zoom in and take a close and intelligent look at these stories, case by case, and you will encounter much about “local issues”, about personalities and about campaign strategies.
But now zoom out and look at the list, cold, stark, distant and unembroidered with local colour. In the last general election column appear the letters CON, time after time; and in the by-election column appear the names of candidates and parties whose virtue in the voters’ eyes was that, whatever they were, they were not CON.
Embattled Tory party spokesmen were ready with explanations every time — reasons why this or that result had no wider implications; particular reasons; local explanations.
But there are always explanations. There are explanations why this Government lost the 90-day detention proposals — reasons more particular than a general backbench and media sense of a Cabinet losing its way. There are explanations why Tony Blair is in trouble over ID cards, over education, even over such piffling issues as smoking in pubs. It is always possible to explain dissent as anchored only to the measure in question. Dissenters usually tell themselves that their dissent is anchored thus.
But blur that focus, smudge the precision, step back and blearily survey the whole wood, losing sight of each ID (or Education, or Dunfermline) tree — and what do you see? Trouble. Loss of command. Loss of respect. That smudged sense of failure lingers even after the detail fades.
Dunfermline & West Fife was not about the Liberal Democrats, or David Cameron, or the Forth Road Bridge, or out-of-town shopping centres. Smudge the picture and understand that it was about two men, this Prime Minister and the next one, losing their grip. For Labour, the next general election is surely lost.
