Presenting: the Balfour Beatty Barbie doll

'David Cameron' - Conservatives on Flickr

The room of measured thoughts once again
Bears paper trails of defeated whims upon the floor
Let this not be another

I can’t remember the first time I thought about blogging. I think it was reading Paul Carr that convinced me of the potential, but before then I had thought of writing and blogging as two very different things. I was happy as a writer. Writing is of course that thing that some people do when something has happened to anger or embarrass them. We write a narrative and describe our own part in it with far less culpability, and far more cool, than we actually had. Blogging is that thing that some people do. That’s all you’re getting from me for the moment. Here I intend to merge the two, or something; the aforementioned difference was little more than a conceit, deployed to acknowledge that you are reading my first blog post.

David Cameron. I felt the time was right for me to tackle the subject in some form or other. Though only after passing on the opinion of Jonathan Meades, whose three-part series on Scotland seemed more explicitly grounded in current affairs than is usual for him. His narration is unrelentingly sublime, though the details of his parlance are usually, and frustratingly, absent from your mind the minute the programme ends. Struck by the impracticality of regurgitating quotes from the programme, quotes with which one would have otherwise impressed one’s colleagues or perhaps the odd, fecklessly hip onsite manager of a large-scale public works project, one finds oneself instead mimicking Meades’ habitual, or rather knowingly habitual, use of run-ons in his sentences. But enough of that; Meades was discussing the possible implications for British politics (or rather English politics) should the Conservatives win next year’s election and support Scottish secession:

‘Newly independent England might lose oil revenue; it would definitely lose Scotland’s thitherto-disenfranchised MPs, two-thirds of them Labour, including the Right Honourable Gordon Brown. The demography of the Commons would be changed overnight. Call Me Dave would thereby ensure his party a yawningly long mandate. This tantalising prospectus is less fantastical then it might seem. Of course, Call Me Dave might himself get Boris-ed in the back or Gove-ed in the front…we shall see.' (Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter, episode three, BBC4, September 2009)

Conservatives: now and forever, a yawningly long mandate—what a thought. I remember John Major of course. I can remember him getting a brand new energy saving bulb in his desk lamp, an event filmed for Newsround. That was the extent of my politics then and I was happier for it. In my innocence John Major was The Permanent Prime Minister, like mum was mum and dad was dad; now and forever. But…David Cameron: when he was in his mid-twenties he was briefing John Major for Prime Minister’s Questions, he has a rich heritage, or rather he has rich ancestors, his silver and black Scott bicycle has been nicked twice, and he could very well be the next Prime Minister. That possibility, if fulfilled, would make him the ‘first Eton and Oxford Prime Minister’ since Alec Douglas-Home (1963-1964), as noted on Radio Four’s Broadcasting House of 4^th October.

But that is not so important; Professor Byron Criddle, who noted that Cameron fact, was arguing that Cameron’s social background can no more explain his election as party leader (most of today’s Conservatives have never been anywhere near Eton) than it can predict the nature of his possible tenure as PM. Cameron was elected, Criddle said, ‘because he is a rather effective public relations man, which is what he will be as Prime Minister.’ Call Me Dave: the PR man. While I would not want to repeat that description to Paul Weller, I do tend to agree with it. David Cameron would not, I suspect, be one to turn the public against itself. He would not want to divide us through his policymaking, and so his rhetoric would always seek to offer solace to his government’s critics and sceptics within the electorate rather than alienate them from the non-complainers.

This pleasing appeasement has not always been the case. The Conservative bookends of the 1970s—the energetic little puppy that was Ted Heath (1970-1974), and the adjective and metaphor inviting premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990)—were boat rocking. Their terms in office bore witness to huge political events and consequent tough (tough: difficult and tough: harsh) decision-making. Those decisions were packaged in such extremely polarizing rhetoric, one-sided PR, that those who disagreed and/or lost homes, money or employment in the wake of it all maintain epically murderous thoughts to this day, thoughts in some cases passed on to their children and grandchildren. Ted Heath, miners’ strikes, Northern Ireland, the Three-Day Week and the UK’s entry into the EEC: bit of a row. Margaret Thatcher, the Miner’s Strike, unions, Poll Tax: res ipsa loquitur. John Major never quite managed to goad the public in the same way (whether the political and economic events that fell on his watch justified this calm or not). Neither, it seems, would David Cameron: happy daze, bi-lateral PR, closet Conservatives in the industrial heartland coming out.

This is not a criticism; there is much to be said for the ability of a leader to speak to the working man, particularly if that leader is willing to acknowledge that, by ‘the working man,’ they refer to the working woman, the working non white person, the working non British-born person, and the working non heterosexual person alongside any Collins Gem British masculinity. Working people do have a tendency to be ‘vanished’ from political discourse; if they can be inferred from the promises on education, health, infrastructure etc. they do not need to be perceived as anything other than a user of these services. Workers then have no individual needs or ‘special interests’ separate from the rest of the voting population, and will certainly not have any particular hold over government policy that might be a concern to employers, investors, and, ironically enough, workers when they think of themselves as taxpayers.

The school of thought here might be: why dwell on the gritty imagery, or reality, of the factory floor or retail outlet carpet when you can play on universal aspirations for traditional family values, nice homes with cat-swinging gaps between them, and not dying of terrorism before you can achieve all of the above. Would David Cameron spark the PR solution to such misdirection: Hug a steelworker? High-visibility jacketed Balfour Beatty Barbie dolls? —Probably not. That said, workers are often in the media now, particularly those who are newly ex-workers. As political issues presented to the nation, workers’ grievances and union affiliations are currently sympathised with more than they are condemned, so there is a chance.

Of course, those not working aren’t the same as those who have been freshly laid-off. For a start they do not fit the model of PR appeasement above; few will complain if a government pits the working nation against its long-term unemployed. The latter also have quite a high media profile at the moment, if not all that glamorous: ‘This is George, he earns three times as much as you and watches a 50-inch plasma screen TV, and he has claimed Incapacity Benefit ever since he left school…in 1987.’ (The reporter, in respect of objectivity, comments no further, merely raising eyebrows and overworking their intonation during the entire segment. Only natural, really, considering how disgusting George’s attitude and burden on the hard working taxpayer is). Now the Conservatives and Labour are complementing each other in being tough (tough: hard hitting) in cutting benefits of those who won’t, rather than can’t, work.

In the media narrative of Cameron he becomes the more predisposed to be doing this. He’s an old Etonian, an elitist Tory: of course the unemployed need a firm hand. The populism of invoking public anger at benefit cheats also fits the other image of Cameron as style over substance. But benefit dependants have long been knitted into a neat little layabout narrative, alongside ASBO kids: ‘talk to the middle finger ‘cos the giro-drawing adolescent ain’t listening, yeah?’ They are all part of the same problem. Cut off the benefits to them and their sofa-beached parents and you strike at the medulla of teenage pregnancy, knife crime, booze culture, and anti-social behaviour. The genius of this isn’t whether or not it works, but that combining benefit cheats and anti-social behaviour takes two highly recognisable indicators of national disgrace and baits the populace with them, prior to pacifying us all through corrective policy announcements.

Many are worried that David Cameron and his Notting Hill set of Cameroons (his press officer, his director of strategy, etc) would, if elected, run around like spoilt, grab-assing public schoolboy toffs, partying with the richest, jeering at the poorest, and setting everyone in between on a path of simultaneous aspiration towards the higher and rage towards the lower. Well, Cameron and the Cameroons may or may not live and breathe that creed in the comfort of their own homes or private clubs (for all I know so might you, dear reader), but they would not be likely to express it in their speeches or policies, at least no more than new Labour.