JUST about the most hackneyed of contemporary political quotations is the one in which Harold Macmillan is supposed to have pinpointed the cause of his greatest worry as Prime Minister: “Events, dear boy, events.”
In fact, the old showman was merely responding to a question put by a young journalist, who asked what sort of pressures had most often steered his administration off course.
But the damage was done. It is now generally assumed that, in his world-weary way, the best-read Prime Minister of the past 50 years was asserting his conviction that it was outside factors that determined the fate of governments far more than their own actions or policies.
Yet that is surely a doctrine that the first full week of the current election campaign has confounded. Consider what has occurred. A government seeking to make its stewardship of the economy the centrepiece of its case has had the rug suddenly pulled out from under its feet.
The collapse of MG Rover — and the end of Longbridge as a car plant — could not have come at a less happy moment for the Prime Minister and his colleagues. No wonder Tony Blair and his Chancellor rushed up not once but twice to the scene of the tragedy to offer tea and sympathy. There was nothing more, frankly, that they could do, even if this savage blow to British manufacturing was in its origins very much of their own devising. The remarkable fact remains, however, that the fiasco of Longbridge under its Phoenix consortium ownership appears to have left barely a bruise on the Government’s reputation for economic competence.
Or take arguably the most contentious issue of this general election, the number of asylum-seekers able (often illegally) to secure entry to Britain. Could there be a more devastating illustration of the dangers involved here than the revelation that they included an al-Qaeda operative who murdered a policeman and was planning to kill countless civilians with poisons and explosives manufactured in a London flat? The fact that Kamel Bourgass had managed to melt into the community, despite having two applications for asylum refused, could not have reflected worse on the vigilance with which the Home Office seeks to enforce what, in any case, its opponents claim is a thoroughly unsatisfactory policy. Yet once again, at least if the polls are to be believed, the entire episode has failed to leave any scar tissue on the Government’s skin.
This is starting to look like a very curious election indeed, where what interest there is concentrates entirely on questions of personality. Rarely can any party leader have received a worse press drubbing than that which poor Charles Kennedy got for fluffing his lines at his party’s manifesto press conference last Thursday. To judge by the stories that appeared in the next day’s newspapers — and, even more damagingly, the photographs that accompanied them — you would have thought that he had been found drunk and incapable at the podium. But, if he appeared “over-tired”, it was only because he was an exhausted first-time father who had managed to secure only a couple of hours’ sleep over the previous two nights. If that ranked as a crime in the eyes of the media, the public will, I suspect, prove a lot more forbearing and forgiving.
Yet whatever the surge of sympathy that may come his way, it is hard to claim that in political terms it was Kennedy’s week. Indeed, if it belonged to anyone, it was to Blair and Labour. Speculation as to a majority of 100-plus may as yet be excessive, but in the light of last week’s events there does seem to be a Teflon effect at work. It is possible, however, that something else has been going on. Future political historians may well come to the conclusion that in this election Labour has been the prime beneficiary of the tactics adopted by Michael Howard and the Tories (at, it is said, the behest of the electoral witch doctor they have imported from Australia). I have never met Lynton Crosby, the supposed miracle-worker from Down Under brought in to drive the Conservative campaign, but I am prepared to bet that his immortality (at least in political reference books) is now assured. Anyone who can invent and patent the concept of “dog-whistle issues” — meaning, roughly, those points of grievance the ventilation of which is guaranteed to bring disillusioned voters running in your direction — does not have to fear for his future at the hands of posterity.
But by putting that strategy into such blatant operation, Crosby and the Tories may well find that they have created a backlash. If Labour has solidified its own support over this opening phase of the election campaign, it must be because there remain enough decent, fair-minded people left in Britain who find themselves repelled by the sight of the deliberate “mugging” of minorities — all in the name of what is self-righteously referred to as “the forgotten majority”.
A breath of fresh air
MY award for the most capable performer in the election so far goes to Stephanie Flanders, the economics correspondent of BBC Two’s Newsnight. Fluent and lucid, she makes effortless sense of the more abstruse issues of taxation and public expenditure. She is such a breath of fresh air in the dusty world of “the dismal science” that I made it my business to try to find out something about her.
She is, I learnt, 36, of Anglo-American parentage, educated at both Balliol and Harvard, and has divided her career ever since between each side of the Atlantic. She worked first for the Financial Times, then for the US Treasury, whence she went on to be an economics writer on The New York Times. It was from there that Newsnight shrewdly poached her to take the place of Evan Davis, promoted to the old Peter Jay post of the BBC’s economics editor. She is, for my money, the most valuable acquisition the corporation has made from the sphere of print journalism since Andrew Marr fled the Daily Express and The Observer to join it just five years ago.
THERE is already certain to be one casualty of this election. Although Sir Gerald Kaufman is unlikely to lose his seat in Manchester in the next Parliament, he will no longer be the chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
Parliamentary rules prevent any MP from being a select committee chairman for more than three successive parliaments and the 74-year-old Sir Gerald’s time is simply up.
I confess to mixed feelings about his departure. He had a certain Torquemada touch, but at least he knew how to afflict the comfortable of the arts world. There are those, particularly former dignitaries of the Royal Opera House, who have never really recovered from their treatment at his hands.
FINALLY, a word of praise for an invisible figure. David Hill has been director of communications at No 10 for nearly two years but I doubt if anyone outside the Westminster village has even heard of him. In the goldfish bowl era of the Blairs that is no mean achievement. I salute him for giving people in general — and his predecessor, Alastair Campbell, in particular — an object lesson in how all the best official spokesman go about their business in an anonymous way.
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