Some folks are born silver spoon in hand.
Lord, don’t they help themselves?
But when the taxman comes to the door
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale.
- John Fogarty
1 May 1997 feels like a lifetime ago.
I spent Friday 2 May 1997 criss-crossing the country on trains for a series of job interviews and – it’s no exaggeration – people genuinely seemed optimistic and cheerful that day about the profound change to politics and society that the new administration were about to effect in our name.
I do not entirely subscribe to the views offered by some political commentators over the course of the weekend that the Crewe and Nantwich by-election will be seen as one of those epoch-making events that demonstrate a sizeable tectonic eruption to the established political order.
I do not, for instance, believe that one by-election result – however good for the Tories; and it was very good, make no mistake – compares with the Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle presided over by Major, Lamont and – oh yes – one David Cameron. The result of the 1996 or 1997 General Election became a foregone conclusion within the space of a few hours on the afternoon of 16 September 1992: the only remaining question was precisely how large Labour’s majority would be.
But when you consider that the electors of Crewe never returned a Conservative MP when the rest of the country was turning blue – an indication of just how badly the north-west of England’s manufacturing industry suffered under the 18 years that comprised the First Wave of Thatcherism – yet kicked Brown in the goolies at the first opportunity to do so, it is clear that things are changing.
William Keegan pointed out at the weekend one reason why the Labour campaign misfired so badly:
The epitome of New Labour’s misjudgment at Crewe was to have a go at the Bentleys driven by toffs – only to discover that the headquarters of Bentley Motors was in, well, Crewe.
It also didn’t help, of course, that Labour was proffering a candidate describing herself as a “single, unemployed mum” and slating her Tory opponent as a “toff” – when she is listed in Debretts Peerage and Mr. Timpson is not.
That schoolboy error aside, I cannot understand how or why the English electorate seems to be embracing so warmly Posh Boy Dave, a man whose background of wealth and privilege is so impeccable it could have seen him “emerge” as a Tory leader in the 1930s.
Attending public school should absolutely not debar anybody from running for political office provided they can prove themselves to be the best, most trustworthy and most appropriately experienced candidate. But I thought the Sixties cultural revolution had effectively seen a welcome end to the landed gentry lauding it over the plebs.
Andrew Rawnsley (Rugby School and Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) seems to think differently:
Labour’s inability to meet this challenge is a strategic failure that starts at the very top. Gordon Brown can’t bring himself to treat David Cameron seriously so he struggles to comprehend why he is losing votes to him. Because the Prime Minister can only see the Tories as shallow public-school boys he can’t understand why anyone would prefer them over him.
Frankly I’d prefer a lobotomy and an enema over PBD and George “Cunt” Osborne every time. And I’d prefer root canal work over a Shadow Cabinet made up of 10 Old Etonians, with another ensconced as Mayor of London. I appreciate I may be alone in this view.
But after suffering more than a decade of the Second Wave of Thatcherism at the hands of a shallow public school boy-cum-actor, crying out for half that time for a change in the approach to politics taken by its political leadership, why on Earth is the English public apparently so keen to vote into Number 10 another shallow public school boy-cum-ad man who will bring with him a Third Wave of Thatcherism?
Andrew Rawnsley (Rugby and Cambridge) failed to offer an explanation to that conundrum. He did, however, make this astute observation:
You have to be at least 30 years old to have spent any of your adult life living under a Conservative government. Young families struggling with the mortgage, the price of petrol and the weekly shopping bill aren’t interested in ancient history lessons about the last Conservative government. For those who do remember, whatever they feel about the Tories’ past is now eclipsed by their present hostility to Labour.
I still – and always will – remember what the Tories did to this country between 1979 and 1997 and feel viscerally hostile to that party’s continued existence, but there is now a generation of electors too young to know first hand of the Conservatives’ propensity towards corruption, social division and economic ruination.
Shame on Labour – New, Old, Blairite, Brownite, whatever – not only for allowing things to come to this sorry pass, but also for failing to address that particular need for education, education, education.
There’s an apparent contradiction in the association of Thatcherism with Old Toryism. Thatcher was supposed to have been, for all her faults, the death of Old Toryism. She was supposed to have removed forever the presumption of privilege in the political establishment. She was vulgar, state-educated, her father was in trade, she looked to America for her ideas, she reformed things rather than holding on to them (was there any government more conservative with a small c than that of public school alumnus James Callahan?), she played fast and loose with Democracy.
The problem was that she didn’t and wasn’t. The public school establishment fell in love with her and that included the likes of Tony Blair, who is pure establishment whatever Cherie says. But whilst Blair pissed all over British politics in the same way Thatch did, undermining parliament, undermining constitutional tenets, concentrating power in No. 10, he had no real desire to reform things in the same way Thatcher did, indeed he had no need to do so to stay in power.
Thatch presumably hired all the Etonians in her cabinet because they made up parliament and couldn’t be ignored (indeed some of them were capable as well, such as Geoffrey Howe and later Ken Clarke) and because she knew if she hired others like her, they wouldn’t let themselves be kicked around so easily.
What you get from the establishment is no-frills, no boat-upsetting, everything-will-be-alright approach to politics. Excepting the likes of Enoch Powell, who was marginalised, you don’t tend to get firebrands.
Cameron embraces this now and is actually trying to sell it to people (and apparently succeeding). Like Blair, he has no ideas at all about the way the country should go, only how to win power. Ideas would be far too dangerously ideological to get him elected. Ideas were what Kinnock had. There hasn’t been a reforming PM since Thatcher. Not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it seems to be a fact.
This is rambling nonsense, but just trying to point out that Thatcher was supposed to have been the end of the old political establishment, but she wasn’t.