Bunnies can and will eat humble pie

#99048614 / gettyimages.com

I often think it's comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little liberal Or else a little conservative

Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘When all night long a chap remains,’ Iolanthe, 1882

We are two weeks into our coalition government, and it is very refreshing; the weather is scorching, the children are playing and the Dailies are printing pro-government cartoons again (“If Cameron says ‘I told you so’ one more time…” say the cartoon European leaders on a sinking 1 euro coin. Sunday Express, 23^rd May). The coalition’s Programme for Government came out last week, and yesterday our new Chancellor George Osborne faced his albatross of debt, introducing the cuts to be made across government. Finally, the Queen opened the new session of parliament today, and made her speech outlining the government’s plans.

The sun is not quite shining out of the backsides of our new government, but equally they have yet to be compared with the stuff that more commonly comes out of that area. The coalition seems to be a corrective government at present, with the country set to make its difficult recovery under their careful helm. But to get here required a fascinating, if dismally reported, mess of politics and base level human behaviour.

I was genuinely intrigued about the uncertain consequences for our country’s government, now that the most recent batch of traditional ‘bad as each other’ complaints about the main parties had resulted in nobody winning hearts and minds at the election. Instead of exploring this, I had to watch election night coverage that was poised to examine the swings, clearly refusing to allow the already mooted hung parliament to deter the normal practice of analysing patterns.

Irrelevance isn’t irredeemable though. Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night might not have offered the satirized results coverage I had hoped for, but the BBC rose to the challenge with its wonderful, self-parodying boat party. The satire was so spot on that some viewers complained, imagining that the banter barge was a genuine segment of the Election 2010 programming. Bruce Forsyth’s offering was so so bad, it’s funny that it appeared on the next day’s Have I Got News For You (but not, it seems, the clip of Ian Hislop, well into the early hours, with his hair looking pwned.)

Channel 4’s show had some excellent Charlie Brooker comments, ‘Gordon Brown played by a haunted elephant’ for one, but the programme had much more of Jimmy Carr (admittedly I chuckled at something he added to a point about Geoff Hoon: ‘And traditionally voters have been put off by total fucking cunts’). As it turned out, much of the programme’s political humour was kept to laboured one-liners, all with about as much political savvy as a balding toothbrush.

In fairness, political savvy wasn’t abounding that night. The BBC’s Nick Robinson valiantly forwent sleep to do what he always does - telling us what the party leaders were likely to be doing, and likely to be thinking about while they might be doing it. He noted how interesting it was that Peter Mandelson had chosen that particular word in the interview we’d just seen - perhaps it meant that something Nick had surmised earlier might possibly have been likely at some point after all.

The BBC’s trump cards were actually Peter Hennessey and Vernon Bogdanor, historian and professor of government respectively (David Cameron is a former student of Bogdanor’s). They added more detail - and qualifiers - to the oft-touted precedents for this election: hung Parliament in 1974, and what Ted Heath/Jeremy Thorpe/Harold Wilson were doing at the equivalent of this moment back then. David Dimbleby was wry in places, clearly nonplussed by what his earpiece was telling him to announce: ‘oh look, Nick Clegg’s Leylandii,’ ‘and we’ve got to cut to another shot of David Cameron’s car going along the motorway.’

The night was a void in both politics and political coverage. A media that over-analyses the parties’ daily doings - and the electorate’s opinions of the same - sets too much store by trends in voter intentions and perceived perceptions of the parties. Neither parties nor media could explain why our votes hadn’t produced a majority. Surely that is more of a real change to the country’s recent politics than any presidential copies, like leaders’ debates or the bottom up, grassroots makeovers that the parties’ upper echelons have only a half-arsed awareness of.

Over the weekend there were official Liberal Democrat-Conservative meetings, and unofficial Liberal Democrat-Labour meetings. Old passageways - the footprints of Henry VIII’s reign and the Palace of Whitehall - afforded discreet exits and entrances from Downing Street via the Cabinet Office, and made for cracking titbits for Radio Four political features. With little else to go on, the media got even more over-imaginative during all of this:

Don't stitch us up, Tory MPs warn Cameron... but Osborne may have to be sacrificed to seal the deal

General election 2010: I'm still expecting a Conservative minority government

The secret of Dimbleby’s 16-hour stint? Honey

The lack of reportable action temporarily broke the regular 24-hour news cycle treatment of politics. The rushed, controversy-seeking news bulletins that normally scrutinize political stories – where party spokespersons have to deny everything that is happening - were replaced by nothing: standby reporters outside on the grass. The key figures - the party leaders and ‘their people’ - could convene out of view, daring the media to find a scandal to report.

After Gordon Brown nearly stood down on the Monday, we had a further 24 hours of the exciting possibility that the four-day stale election outcome was still up in the air. Then all alternatives and speculative combinations were forgotten as Gordon Brown left Downing Street to go to the palace. The cars of Brown and then Cameron were followed around London in bird’s eye view like the earlier generation of GTA games. Cameron goes to see the Queen, some wag takes a picture and iZaps it to the media – much to the dismay/awe of Peter Hennessey (unprecedented look at a meeting no one has ever been privy to), GTA back to Downing Street, speech, off sod, over.

The Independent noted Nick Clegg’s stated surprise at the abruptness of Gordon Brown’s resignation. Aides had apparently described several calls between the two, where Clegg had urged Brown to delay his departure: ‘Eventually, an exasperated Mr Brown told him: ‘Nick, Nick, I can't hold on any longer. I've got to go to the Palace. The country expects me to do that. I can't hold on any longer. Whatever happens, I'm going to the Palace.’ The suggestion is that the Liberal Democrats wanted Labour to hold on to power, because - with Labour still an alternative - the Conservatives would be more obliging to Lib Dem conditions for a coalition. The Indy was keen to point out that Clegg’s current surprise clashes with his previous comments about seeking a deal with the party with the most votes. ‘It would be preposterous for Gordon Brown to end up like some squatter in No 10’, he had said back then.

Juicy stuff, but slightly in competition with all of the current juicy stuff about Liberal and Conservative MPs being upset anyway - because of the compromises already made. Presumably, if Clegg had had Labour as a threatening rival bidder for a bit longer, the Conservatives would have ceded so much – practically turning into Liberals themselves - that call me Dave would have ended up assassinated (and perhaps not just politically) by disenchanted, embittered and deranged party right-wingers. Now we are supposed to be waiting for the coalition government to tear itself apart – watch those backbenchers.

But then David Cameron and (according to Cameron) Nick Clegg can and will eat humble pie over comments said about each other prior to the election. Well why not -it’s easier to be humble when you’re the PM or Deputy PM; you’ve got a far bigger sense of self-worth to endure a denting than lesser beings, whose self-esteem might be rubbed out completely by a similar eating of own words.

Personally, instead of fragmentation I’m waiting for a good, pun-inducing policy hash up, which is surely far more likely. For instance, the coalition’s programme says: ‘We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution’ [1]. I can already see the stock picture of Dick Emery or Are You Being Served’s Mr. Humphries grinning back at me from the Daily Excess - illustrations for a statistically dubious article about LGBT immigrants camping out in the nation’s beauty spots.

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[1] HM Government, The Coalition: Our programme for government, (London; Cabinet Office, 2010) p.18.

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.