“WINS BUNCH”. That is what I said to my friend when Manchester United stumbled to a draw against lowly Sunderland a couple of weeks or so back. And I said it again a few days ago when Patricia Hewitt, Charles Clarke and John Prescott all got into trouble at exactly the same moment. “Wins bunch,” I said sagely to all my colleagues willing to listen (none). “That is what you have to keep in mind.”
“You what?” my friend exclaimed, not unreasonably. So I explained myself to him, and if you would like, I’ll do the same for you.
Before Sunderland’s visit to Manchester, United had won ten Premiership games in a row. They seemed to be catching up with league leaders Chelsea who had dropped a few points with some clumsy performances. Sunderland, the bottom club and pretty hopeless, shouldn’t have given their hosts much trouble. But they did. United’s winning streak came to an end and the chance of overtaking Chelsea disappeared.
The point I was making to my friend was that everyone had taken United’s winning streak and Chelsea’s few setbacks too seriously. Nothing had really changed. It was all in the timing. Teams do not win and lose in some kind of smooth, consistent pattern. They win a few then lose a few, possibly when you least expect it. Everyone was confusing the sequence of United’s and Chelsea’s results with their underlying ability. United weren’t catching Chelsea at all. It’s just that wins bunch. And so do losses.
When the news came through about Hewitt, Clarke and Prescott, I repeated this observation. That all three incidents were exposed on the same day is irrelevant. All governments face difficulties, have embarrassments, make mistakes; and these may emerge all at once. Triumphs and disasters bunch. When considering how they reflect upon the Government, it is not the timing that matters or even the surprising nature of the individual events. What matters is whether the Government is doing or has done something that may have changed the average number of such events or their seriousness.
Let me give you another example, one from a completely different field — the tenure of Michael Eisner as the head of the Disney corporation.
After Mr Eisner arrived at Disney in 1984, his leadership produced a burst of creativity. Suddenly everything Disney touched seemed to go right. In particular, its movie divisions turned out a string of hit pictures, an extraordinary run in a notoriously up-and-down business. The company realised, or seemed to, that its luck wouldn’t hold. “We are going to run into a bad streak,” said Jeff Katzenberg, the head of the studios, in 1987, “just so the scales get balanced.” Yet by the time the bad streak began, this warning had been long forgotten.
When Disney ousted Mr Eisner last year, an extended losing streak in films was one of the main reasons. There were other considerations, to be sure, but the fact that wins and losses occur in random order was just ignored.
So, when assessing the Government’s travails, try not to be overwhelmed by the properties of the individual incidents. Focus instead on how the long-term strategy of the Government may have made them more or less likely.
John Prescott’s affair (and incidentally isn’t “Lardy and the Tramp” one of the great tabloid headlines?) is an example of a scandal that can and does occur with any government. Whatever view one takes of the individuals involved, it doesn’t seem that anything the Government as a whole is doing has made such an incident either more probable or more serious.
The other incidents are different. Why? Because of James Stimson’s zone of acquiescence. Professor Stimson, a US political theorist, argues that the electorate is willing to support a limited range of possible policies and solutions to problems, and he describes those as lying inside what he calls the zone of acquiescence. Politicians who select from solutions lying outside this zone do so at their peril.
One can expand this idea — political parties also have their zones of acquiescence, policies that their activists are prepared to accept. It is hard for any leader to go outside this zone, too, even though it may be very different from that of the public.
This is where Tony Blair’s brilliance as a politician comes into it. He has shown a superb ability to identify and then promote those few policies that lie in the area where the public’s zone of acquiescence and that of his party intersect.
Such positions are very difficult for any opponent to defeat, which is why in the early days of new Labour it carried all before it. Yet there is a small but important flaw in its political strategy. Just because a policy may lie in both the public’s zone of acquiescence and that of the Labour Party, doesn’t mean that it will work.
Take the NHS. The public and the Labour Party supported greater spending on healthcare. Voters were prepared (at least in theory) to accept fairly radical health reforms, while Labour activists were pretty resistant. Yet Mr Blair identified a policy they would both accept — much greater spending coupled with extremely modest reform. Perfect.
There is just one problem — the policy doesn’t work. The radical improvements to the NHS that voters hoped to see have not transpired.
Similarly, take asylum. Focusing on driving down numbers of applicants is one of the few policies that both public and party will accept. The only difficulty is, again, that as a method of dealing with the basic problem, it doesn’t work. The collapse of the deportation system is just one indication of this.
In other words, the string of government mishaps is not just bad luck. It is a result of their method of governing.Any government could be hit by a bunch of troubles all at once, but this one, by its own actions, by its own way of governing, has increased both the average number of such incidents and their seriousness.
All just a media feeding frenzy? Not as far as I am concerned.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
