The Meaning of Recognition (27 page)

There was comparatively little media coverage in ancient times: a concept difficult to explain to some of our young people today. Even for us adults it is sometimes hard to believe that there
were no
Big Brother
cameras in the Garden of Eden to get the pictures of Adam and Eve being ejected naked. Nobody was watching. If
Survivor
had been there nobody would have been
watching either, but
Big Brother
could have done a lot for Eve’s subsequent career as a lap-dancer. We are so accustomed by now to seeing people in toe-curling circumstances right
there on television that we think it normal. But in the pre-electronic world, Hague would have been able to say ‘It’s a campaign that’s going very well’ and nobody would
have caught the moment except the flabbergasted inhabitants of the Wirral. Today we can all watch and wonder. We can even wonder if he might be right.

For Hague to snatch a victory, the Queensland gambit would have to work. On the weekend, the press told us a lot about the Queensland gambit, a stratagem which can be outlined in a single
sentence if you don’t mind doing without the graphs and pie-charts. The side sure to lose warns against the dictatorial ambitions of the side sure to win, whereupon everyone votes for the
side sure to lose, which then wins. It worked in Queensland, but you have to remember that Australia’s most fun-filled state is also the place where the responsible authorities took a long
look at the first cane toad and decided it was environmentally friendly. By the time they found out that it could poison a moving car and couldn’t be killed with a flame-thrower, it had
spawned a million children and learned to vote.

For the Queensland gambit to work this week, Hague would have to distract our attention from a blatant contradiction in logic. If he means anything by saying that his campaign has gone very
well, he must mean that the Tory faithful at which it was aimed have come back to the fold. If he simultaneously paints the picture of a triumphalist Labour government taking its overwhelming
majority as a mandate to extinguish liberty, he must mean that there are no longer enough Tory faithful to vote their beloved party in. The second part of the anomaly concedes that the natural
constituency of the Tories has shrunk to a rump, and thus concedes that he was wrong to aim his campaign at its traditional hopes and fears. Therefore the campaign was ill conceived and could never
have gone well.

The Tories had made the capital strategic mistake of falling back to reinforce their base camp when it was already overrun, instead of staying out in the field, living off the land, and
maintaining contact with the enemy. By late last week the Smith Square general staff had realized this, but they still hadn’t persuaded their field marshal, whose ebullience aroused memories
of Montgomery during the Arnhem operation. Montgomery was still claiming a masterstroke after it turned out that he had dropped his paratroopers on top of a Panzer division. On Friday night Hague
started lacing his speeches with some stuff about the public services, but was still banging on about asylum and the euro. By Sunday night, using God knows what combination of drugs and threats,
his frantic lieutenants had persuaded him.

It must have been his toughest weekend: he has the guts to fight a losing battle forever, but to admit to your friends that you’ve been wrong takes character. Anyway, he did it, and on
Monday he switched his themes to the central ground on which some of us had been expecting him to fight from the beginning. The new Tory PEB backed him on both strands: there was new stuff about
the public services, emphasizing the undoubted fact that Labour’s claims to having made a good start were open to question. There was also some old stuff about undeserving interlopers and the
threat to the pound, thus to reassure the diehards that their saviour was not repudiating his earlier stand. So the PEB was trying to attract the central vote without abandoning the faithful.
Unfortunately the Queensland gambit tacitly admitted that not even both groups put together would be enough to swing it unless some of the central voters switched. It went without saying that if
they did switch, they would switch to the Conservatives.

This was a big thing to go without saying, because there was always the chance that they would switch to the Lib Dems. Over in Labour’s Fortress Millbank, the anti-apathy scare campaign
had the same drawback. If the sleeping voters piled out of their cots to stop the Tories by voting Labour, that would be OK. But what if they decided to stop the Tories by voting Lib Dem? Both main
parties were thus running the risk of reinforcing the Lib Dems in the marginal seats. All Monday afternoon on
Sky News
you could watch the three leaders preaching to the nation through
stump speeches in the marginals.
Sky News
has had a good election. As a lean operation it likes nothing better than free talent, and here were the three top performers each doing their
full cabaret act live to camera for no fee. It was like getting the Three Tenors to sing at your daughter’s wedding under the delusion that it was a charity appearance.

Hague, as we have seen, was in the Wirral, warning the country against the dreadful consequences of the Labour landslide that wouldn’t happen because his campaign was going very well.
Blair was at Enfield Southgate in London, the seat Portillo lost in 1997. Blair was talking to schoolchildren again: as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. ‘We’ve still
got a massive amount to do, but we’ve made a start.’ It was the same vulnerable message, but the man delivering it was at his best yet. He talked to the kids without talking down.
‘When I was young, anyone who owned a house voted Conservative.’ It would have been too complicated to explain to them that Margaret Thatcher had inadvertently created the new
house-owning constituency that was now voting Labour, but there was not much he shirked.

You could see why Alastair Campbell loathes the idea of uncontrolled access. A big kid said that the local hospital had beds but no nurses. ‘We are recruiting,’ said Blair. If Jeremy
Paxman had been standing there in short pants he would have pointed out that the nurses, doctors and teachers were being recruited anywhere in the world except Britain, whose education system had
ceased to produce them. This kind of off-the-cuff stump confab can be lethally dangerous when the cameras are watching, but you can’t help feeling it ought to be the real stuff of politics,
especially when even Blair was being forced to talk turkey. Another big kid – a black girl facing the daunting prospect of university tuition fees – was given a masterly answer that
left none of the difficulties out. For once Blair had got it right: talking to the punter and letting the news crew overhear it, instead of talking past the punter into the camera. At last his
campaign was going very well. But there was someone else whose campaign was going even better.

Charles Kennedy was at Cheddar Gorge in Wells, where the Lib Dem majority over the Tories is a mere 528. This was incubus territory for the two main parties, because if the dozy swing voters
they are trying to motivate should make their mark for the Lib Dems instead, the Tories will have worked to their own ruin and Labour will reinforce a new opposition. But a nightmare for them was
dreamland for Kennedy. It was easy to predict, when the Lib Dem manifesto proposed raising taxes, that Kennedy was running for second spot. With the Lib Dem poll figures in the low teens the idea
looked romantic. Now their poll figures were in the high teens and it looked classical: a flanking run on the wing with a smile of pity for the opposing forwards as they moved across too late.
‘They need sensible and worthwhile opposition,’ he said, meaning Labour. ‘They’re not going to get it from the Conservatives.’ He said the Tories were heading for
civil war. Meanwhile the media were heading for him. By this time he didn’t need Honor Blackman to help him hog the screen-time. Up there in Hartlepool, Peter Mandelson must have been shaking
his elegant head in admiration, like one of the Wright Brothers watching newsreel footage of Baron von Richthofen. Look what the new boys were doing with his invention.

Monday was probably the crucial day of the election. In the evening, Blair went up against Paxman on
Newsnight
. The previous week, Paxman had pounded Hague into the floor of a setting
that looked like
Pebble Mill At One
in the days when the local punters pressed their noses against the window to watch an alderman being interviewed about the exciting prospects in store
for Birmingham. The Prime Minister was in a position to stipulate a more dignified ambience, but he must have been well aware that the one-on-one with a career hard-arse like Paxman is his most
perilous gig. Up-country on Friday afternoon, Jon Snow had hammered Blair on the transport issue: the issue the Tories had had to lay off because they invented the mess. Snow was less hampered by
guilt. When Blair recounted what Labour had set out to do, Snow said, ‘You didn’t do it.’ Blair had had no answer ready, but he was ready for Paxman.

Diving at you with a screaming snarl, Paxman carries all kinds of ordnance under his wings – smart bombs, rockets, napalm canisters – but the weapon to watch out for is the toffee
apple. Blair dodged everything except the sticky question about why he let Mandelson resign if Mandelson had done nothing wrong. But otherwise the triumph of his defence was the way he turned to
the attack. Paxo was out to lunch about the gap between rich and poor. Blair was needlessly windy in his answer. He could have just said that if the poor get richer it doesn’t matter how rich
the rich get: it’s the only way to tax them progressively, because if you hike the rate they dodge it or decamp. (The same message worked for Ronald Reagan: it multiplied the deficit, but it
kept him in office.) Blair couldn’t get that idea into a snappy line, but at least he had an answer. Paxo was out to lunch, dinner and the next breakfast when he asked Blair to feel sympathy
for Hague, and this time Blair said exactly the right thing. ‘I sympathize with anybody who leads the Conservative party.’ Across the lower half of Paxman’s features, a smile of
acknowledgment appeared: fleeting but with a hint of warmth, like summer in England.

As they settled down for the run to the judge – such was the catchphrase of the great Australian race commentator Ken ‘Magic Eye’ Howard – there was time for speculation
about the future. Back at the start of all this I made the large prediction that it would be the most fascinating election of modern times, because although almost nothing would happen beforehand,
almost everything would happen afterwards. It was an easy sooth to say: clearly the Tories will have to start again. You can have a lot of fun fiddling with the chess pieces. The longer Hague
stays, the better for Portillo, especially if a euro referendum comes up: if Portillo has to lead against that, his hands are tied by what he has already said while backing Hague. Kenneth Clarke
would be free to argue on terms instead of attacking the principle, but he can’t be brought back until Central Office gives up altogether on the Little England thing, which means saying
goodbye to home base for keeps. They should have drafted Chris Patten any way they could: he is bound to be their Grey Eminence, but with an official post he could have done something to shut up
the Black Widow, whose ‘Never’ speech left Hague’s ankles tied with his own trousers.

But the realignment might go far beyond that. If the Tories are wrecked, it is because they have been replaced by Labour as the wealth party. If Labour can be opposed only from the left, it
won’t be by its own left, which is irrevocably wedded to a chimera: an unaspiring working class that had to be fobbed off with social justice because it could never get preferment. Now that
the whole country is either middle class or on benefits, the natural New Left are the Lib Dems. Kennedy has everything to play for, including the delicious possibility of offering the Tories an
alliance instead of asking for one. He went into this election as Prince Hal, a joker of the panel games who stayed too long in the hospitality rooms afterwards because the girls were pretty and
the talk was good. He will come out of it as Henry V, with Labour as the French army: overconfident, overmanned, and above all overmanaged.

Too thoroughly convinced by its own success in managing its bid for supremacy, Labour is still under the illusion that the public service departments can be managed the same way. Labour is
already talking of a new, supreme management layer to manage the management layers. The Millennium Dome not only hasn’t gone away: it’s expanding. Unless Professor Quatermass can find a
way to stop it, the damned thing will cover the entire country. As the grisly envelope eats its way outwards, its quisling minions will be open to ridicule from anywhere except the old right wing
that wants to cut the public sector back. The public doesn’t want the public sector cut back. The public wants the public sector fixed, and by now everyone belongs to the public. There are no
leafy enclaves: there is no house, be it ever so grand and well protected, that can’t be reached by
Big Brother
, a cold call, a dope dealer or a thief. The British are all in it
together at long last.

Speaking as an Australian by birth and upbringing, I can promise you that equality won’t be as bad as you think. It just means giving up on the idea that there is a class born to rule. The
idea had some attractive aspects: the born rulers were often cultivated and public-spirited, and their women gracious and well-spoken. Goodbye to all that. What you have to watch out for is the new
rulers: getting there took fanatical application, and now they find it hard to stop being fanatical. Last week I tailed one of the Blair press buses up to Stafford. Now Millbank wants to charge the
Independent
£540 for a bus ride I wasn’t even on. It would appear that my name is on a list. Free men don’t like lists, and confident rulers don’t keep them.

6. Standing on a Landslide