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, 23rd 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:
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.
==============================================================================
[1] HM Government, The Coalition: Our programme for government, (London; Cabinet Office, 2010) p.18.
