The Meaning of Recognition (28 page)

On Thursday morning there was finally time to think. Media people who had spent weeks on the press buses awoke to the strange spectacle of a view through the window that did not
move. It would be a long day before the polls closed, and the mind was free to ponder the paradoxes of democracy, the sweep of history, the vanity of human wishes and the startling beauty of David
Beckham.

In Athens on Wednesday night, Beckham was a poetic thing to see. He didn’t have to be scoring a goal to look poetic. He looked poetic just trapping a lobbed ball with his chest, as if
rising to sacrifice himself by intercepting a meteorite. He looked poetic just standing there, while the missiles sportingly thrown by the Greek fans bounced around him. He looked too poetic to be
the incarnation of a socio-political trend, but he was.

So was Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but Hitler didn’t get the point. Blinded by racial science, Hitler stuck to his conviction that America was decadent. He couldn’t
see that a nation able to produce so beautiful and accomplished a human being out of its own underclass had a lot better chance of dominating the world than he did. If Owens had been white, Hitler
might have seen the truth.

If David Beckham talked and dressed like Edward Fox, we might see it too. But the self-mutilating haircuts, the hunger for tattoos, the marriage to one fifth of a pop act and the lifestyle out
of Graceland by way of Playboy Mansion West all combine to delude us that he is a prisoner of vulgarity, a clumsy aspirant to the standards of his betters. Forget about it. This is a man who knows
his place in a new sense: that there is no place above his he would care to reach. Half a century ago, he would been been six inches shorter, worn shorts as long as his little legs, earned a fixed
wage, saved up for a bungalow and counted it a great day if he shook hands with royalty. Now he
is
royalty. He is a king, and Victoria is his queen: he’s got a better deal than
Prince Albert. There is scarcely a man in the land who would not like to be him, up to and including the Duke of York, who would love to shine on the golf course as Beckham does on the football
field, but has been held back by his birth.

Rewind the tape sixty years, to a conversation between Churchill and Lord Halifax. Churchill was no social radical, and Halifax was so reactionary he would have handed the country to the Nazis
if they had guaranteed to preserve his privileges. But the two true-blue Tories were agreed that ‘the boys from the state schools’ had done well in the Battle of Britain, and that when
the day came they should have their chance to rule.

Since they were presaging nothing less than doom for the Old Establishment of which they were parts of the furniture, their colloquy was a pretty generous gesture, perhaps made easier by the
likelihood that it would take a long time to come true. And such, indeed, was to be the case. The Prime Minister of today is still one of the boys from the private schools. But Tony Blair presides
over a country that has changed on just the lines those Old-Boy old boys predicted, although it took every contentious minute of the elapsed time for Britain to get to where it is now.

The welfare state was an Establishment invention: Lord Beveridge was an Old Boy par excellence. The retreat from Empire was managed by the Conservatives, not by Labour: Iain MacLeod, although
sulphurously branded with the sign of the intellectual, was a Tory grandee in all other respects. Over-impressed less by Marxism than by the planning that won the war, the Labour party wedded
itself to a command economy. Hugh Gaitskell joined his name to Rab Butler’s, but Butskellism could fly only so far from Labour’s traditional expectations before the chain on its leg
brought it back. Harold Wilson, the only Labour Prime Minister before this one who ever got used to winning, did so because he was a juggler who could placate the union block votes by allowing them
to think that some day their dream would come true.

But their dream could never come true, and the Labour party’s best minds knew it. Finally Roy Jenkins, the key man in the whole reforming process that has led Labour to its present command
of the centre instead of an unenviable domination of the left edge, headed the breakaway. He is still often condemned for being a would-be Establishment figure himself, a sucker for the hallowed
ploy by which the landed ascendancy absorbed its enemies on the left, gagging them with ermine. Certainly the present Chancellor of Oxford University has had a lifelong interest in filling his
place at high tables. But he was a true rebel.

Both Gordon Brown and Michael Portillo have no doubt studied Jenkins’s use of the chancellorship as a training ground and a launching pad. Whether or not Jenkins guessed that his Social
Democratic Party would have only a limited life is a nice question. But he certainly knew that his personally created
fronde
would force Labour to think again about the command economy.
Labour’s switch to the centre was already under way when Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands gave her the boldness to launch free market economics. Michael Foot was thrown as a
sacrifice on to the guttering pyre of Old Labour’s incinerated delusions. Clause 4, the sacred text of universal nationalization, was kept on the party card only as a talisman: not as an
article of faith, but as a gesture to past legitimacy. Kinnock got stuck with the gesture.

Kinnock didn’t win the country, but he won the party that rules it now. Labour was set free from its dragging links to the industrial proletariat, which Thatcherism had atomized: the lower
orders had divided into the prosperous and the unemployed, and the only answer to unemployment was expansion. John Major was the Tories’ first overt answer to Labour’s drive into the
centre: ever since the cautionary tale of Sir Alec Douglas-Home the Tories had fielded leaders of relatively humble origins – the boys and girls from the state schools – but they had
all behaved as if their eventual place in the Establishment was the destiny that had shaped them from the start. Major looked shaped by the humble origins. His fate was to be lampooned by the new
media ascendancy that likes its politics drawn as a cartoon, with the grandees in their great houses and the representatives of the common people sullen at the gates. But reality was no longer like
that. By countenancing Major’s leadership at all, the Tories were already saying goodbye to their perennial snobberies.

*

They just didn’t say goodbye fast enough, and Labour got in. But goodbye – a long goodbye, admittedly – is what the more enlightened Tories had been saying
ever since the war. It was in giving up their empire, their privileges and their prejudices that they had been at their best. If they had studied their own history better, they would be doing
better now. The dumbest of them needed total disaster as a teaching aid. But the cleverest, and the best, have provided for decades an example that Cool Britannia would do well to study. The Tories
who believed in public service were cultivated enough to want a cultivated country. Their civilized enclave was not enough for them. I can remember a time when Tory peers vied with Labour peers for
the honour of raising the taste of the people: which was, after all, the same ideal that the red radical Gramsci died cherishing.

The New Britain is philistine to the core. It is one of the cruellest paradoxes of my time in Britain that its once fruitful broadcasting system now reinforces the stupidities it was brought
into being to ameliorate. To compound the paradox, a woman who thinks of herself as a Conservative started the rot: when Margaret Thatcher removed the quality requirement from the ITV franchise
bids, she blew the whistle for the rush to triviality. It was a crime bred from the capital error of thinking that an ideology can be a view of life. The free market has an unrivalled capacity to
harness brains. But the free market does not have a mind, and its bastard child, managerialism, is not a thing of the spirit: just a toy for the untalented.

Such aberrations would matter less if Britain, at governmental level, had any real management tradition to draw upon. But since the war Britain has had an almost flawless record of being unable
to assemble its technologists under a competent technocrat. Instead it has assembled them under incompetent committees, and the results lie rotting and rusting in a crowded chronological line: the
groundnut scheme, the Brabazon, Blue Streak, Skybolt, the TSR2, the tilting train, Nimrod. So many and huge have been the fiascos that they would scarcely fit into the Millennium Dome – the
supreme fiasco, and the true symbol of the Blair government’s first term of office. Labour’s only excuse for the Dome is that the Tories planned it. In that respect as in so many
others, the two great parties are squeezed together by intimate historic bonds. It will be interesting to see if a third great party, if there is to be one, will know how to detach itself from the
Dome culture, which can be defined as the unfortunate tendency to engage in gigantically superfluous schemes when the essential matters of public welfare are smothered in paperwork.

The broadcasting system showed a hint of its old glory on Thursday night, when the election programmes took over the studios of the main channels and managed to include some actual human beings
along with the virtual technology. The lesson that the viewing public does not give a shit about virtual technology will probably never be learned: it runs counter to every channel
controller’s unshakeable belief that the small screen must be made large by the flash of gadgets, or else the fatally distractable punters will switch off to watch something else – a
pin-ball machine, say, or their washing machine on its second rinse.

Sky News
had done well throughout the campaign season, but on the big night even they decided that the droll Adam Boulton needed assistance from tables that lit up, walls that
swivelled, and hovering gizmos that represented the state of the parties with creepily contracting and expanding suppositories: a visual pain in the arse. I wanted to see Boulton shooting the bull
with Ann Leslie and the press babes, but no chance. Nobody can compete with the Beeb when it comes to doodads, so there is no point trying. At BBC1, David Dimbleby, born under the old Establishment
in the days when it knew what it was doing, presided over a studio gone bananas.

Peter Snow’s tomato sauce shirt was the closest touch with reality. Everything else was virtual. There were neon staircases in the sky with robotic simulacra of the party leaders climbing
up them or threatening to fall off the edge. A staircase that was presumably real – unless Snow himself was virtual, a distinct possibility – was wheeled on so that he could run up and
down it, shrieking and choking simultaneously while his artificial paradise swirled and swam with images utterly stunning in their irrelevance. There was also a new laser version of the
Swingometer. In the long-gone reign of Bob Mackenzie, the Swingometer was a piece of cardboard and it told you something. Now it can shoot down a flying saucer but it tells you nothing.

In keeping with the election’s strange mood of misogyny, the whole demented Beeb scene was all but babe-free. Boys’ toys it had in plenty, but you looked in vain for the swell of a
breast. Unfortunately for the cause of the banished women, David Dimbleby’s one and only female aidette completely missed the point about the return from Oldham West, which revealed the
sudden and shocking electoral presence of more than 5,000 potential Nazis. David wanted to talk to her about that, but she wanted to talk about something else.

Elsewhere in the asylum, Jeremy Paxman was in charge of a mezzanine area called The Café. No refreshments were served, perhaps as a gesture to Paxo’s satiated state. (He was still
digesting William Hague.) But the human conviviality was a welcome relief from the dingbat electronics. One of Paxo’s guests was Neil Kinnock. In a moment of brain-fade, Paxo drew
Kinnock’s attention to the beamed-in image of Blair’s car arriving at the count in Sedgfield. Paxo said that the car contained Neil Kinnock. The delighted Kinnock said, ‘I should
be so lucky.’ You could see what Kinnock has that Blair hasn’t: an unstudied amiability. You could also see what Blair has that Kinnock hasn’t: the Prime Ministership.

Over on ITV, David Dimbleby’s brother Jonathan had an out-of-body experience to match Paxo’s. Jonathan screwed up his commentary on the Torbay declaration by mixing up the parties.
He owned up like a man. ‘I’m a complete nana.’ In all other respects he was running the superior studio. John Sergeant, all on his own, did the work of six people in the Beeb
studio, and did it better. Losing Sergeant can be counted as one of those little triumphs that are steadily lobotomizing the Corporation. ITV had plenty of Beeb-style virtual hoo-hah but
Sergeant’s presence made up for it. He is not beautiful, but he is bright. Mary Nightingale was there too, and she is both. Good looks ought not to matter in female television presenters, but
at three o’clock in the morning I couldn’t see the harm.

The studios turned red as the night wore on, with proportionately less blue and a startling amount of yellow. As with the election campaign, there was much pizzazz but little tension.
Speculation on the aftermath was already rife. At BBC1, Paddy Ashdown used a startling word about the Tory future. The word was ‘split’. He wasn’t pursued on the point, but he
ought to have been. Surely the Europhile and Europhobe wings of the Conservative party can’t be reconciled: they spring not from two opinions, but from two separate views of the modern world.
Here was a topic begging, nay barking, to be discussed. It was decided that the topic of when Hague would be dumped was more interesting.

The new era dawned with Blair’s arrival at Millbank. At 7 a.m. Blair was hailing Gordon Brown as ‘a brilliant chancellor’ but their warm embrace lasted 0.006 seconds on my
laser chronometer. If they have made a secret deal about the succession, God help them both. A secret deal between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating bedevilled Australian politics for a decade. At Smith
Square, Hague was closeted with his advisers. What were they advising now? Perhaps he was advising them. ‘Call to me all my sad captains,’ said Mark Antony at the moment when he, the
saddest captain of them all, realized what he had to do. Hague came out, addressed the cameras, and fell on his sword. He went the way he fought, with bravery. What Sven Goran Eriksson said about
David Beckham in victory applied to Hague in his defeat. ‘He behaved like a captain.’