The self-obsession of Tory bloggers knows few bounds. Which is why Malcolm lurks, shadowy, behind a thin alter ego. And in this game “ego” is le vrai mot.
It’s a cliché of the Tory Right, encouraged hourly by the blatherings of those loonies and loopies even further towards the fringe than Dale usually is (why does Malcolm suddenly start to mutter Remember, remember, the Fifth of November at this moment?).
And it’s nonsense.
Let’s stick to issues of policy. That’s if the Tories actually would recognise a “policy” rather than an “aspiration”, or one of the other weaselings that is their current mode.
However …
Churchill had his first heart attack in the White House in 1941. He was a manic-depressive (suffering from his “Black Dog”) and drank to excess. He had a major heart-attack in 1953; and was effectively incapacitated to the extent that Anthony Eden effectively ran the business until Churchill’s resignation.
Eden himself stoked himself on Benzedrine to cope with the Suez business. An operation, in 1952, for gall-stones was botched; and thereafter Eden was subject to recurrent fevers and pain. This combination caused his sleeplessness and violent mood-swings.
Macmillan, towards the end of his term, was suffering from what was believed to be prostate cancer, and being medicated throughout the final turmoil of the Profumo affair. That’s without one of the more colourful (and miserable) private lives.
Heath was uniquely fit and healthy until the last couple of years of his long life. Nobody, it seems to Malcolm, has yet plumbed the peculiarities of that personality. John Campbell wrestled with the problem for several pages of his turgid 1993 biography, and eventually pronounced Heath to be hopelessly introverted. That great authority, the present Mayor of Barnet, Brian Coleman once claimed that Heath had been warned off his “cottaging” on becoming a Privy Councillor. As with much of Coleman’s other outpourings, nobody else takes this particularly seriously.
Thatcher was (and apparently still is) an out-and-out alky. Her tipple of preference is Bell’s whisky. She allegedly (the source is her personal assistant, Cynthia Crawford), in moments of crisis, drank through the night and survived on injections of vitamin B12.
Which makes the grey, ordinary John Major the nearest thing to sanity and normality that can be found among Tory PMs of the last half-century.
And Malcolm used to think they were merely ignorant and misguided.
But Iain Dale thinks Gordon Brown is deranged, and surely, he is an honourable man.
That’s (as he then was) Général de division Ferdinand Foch, at the First Marne, back in 1914. More properly it should be:
Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j’attaque.
In passing, it seems that is another of those famous utterances which are, infamously, “attributed”. The source is Raymond Recouly’s immediate post-War biography of Foch, Le Vainqueur de la Guerre.
So, ma gauche recule?
Well, this weekend it’s a bit difficult to see the wood among all the fallen trees. The Tories are out there, from one horizon to the other. The all-conquering, unctuous Cameron:
… doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
That is because, in Enoch Powell’s truism, worthy of a Suetonius or a Juvenal:
All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
There’s a thought that deserved a better context than “the catastophe of [Beatrice Webb’s] life”, for it originates from Powell’s biography of Joseph Chamberlain.
Retrospect
Malcolm remembers this moment in 1969, when Labour were similarly going down before the Blue Rinse brigades (a Borough election for Bury St Edmunds Borough Council: everybody has to start somewhere).
Then, as now, excellent Labour candidates were being hounded out of sight by Tory goons. Find a stray; paint him blue; stick his moniker on the ballot paper; get him elected: trebles all round! Within days, reflect that you bought yourself a very peculiar pup indeed. Now you’re stuck with him for four years.
The jubilation among the Tory blog-artists this weekend will be insufferable and arrogant. Look at the sub-text and notice that the end they seek is little more than a one-party state. Any opposition is allowed only when it’s licensed and muzzled. Therein lies the first weakness of the Right: such swaggering does not go down well at the Rose and Crown. For written in the DNA of every true occupant of this archipelago is the question: “Who does this pompous toad think he is?”
Let’s remember Francis Pym
Pym was one of Thatcher’s loyal lieutenants (as he had been for Ted Heath), an honorable gentleman in all respects, descended from John Pym (the nemesis of Charles I in 1630-40).
In an Any Questions programme at the time of the 1983 General Election (itself, one of the Tories’ most cynical and opportunist political operations) Pym ruminated that large majorities can be dangerous, and he cited as example the 1945-50 Parliament. There were two consequences of that: Pym was sacked soon after; and — the supreme irony — Thatcher was caught echoing Pym in 2001.
The lesson there is that, in politics, the seeds of the next defeat are sown in the moment of victory.
Or, to put it another way, the pendulum swings equally both ways.
The immediate prospect
Quite frankly, whovever is the occupant of 10 Downing Street next week, next month, next year, Gordon Brown or A.N.Other, is itself of secondary importance. Far more significant will be the economic and social policies that person (or persons) follows.
At the moment the best any Labour Prime Minister can do is apply the same medication as before; and wait for the recovery. Even then, unemployment will continue to rise for any short-term future. The burden of that will fall, unjustly, on the younger cohort of the working-age population: we can expect them to be rancorous and radicalised: one instint is to react against: unless there is an ideological channel for that dissent, it amounts to sheer negativism The Economist is on just that topic this week (appropriately between articles on assisted suicide and financial regulation):
THERE were fresh signs this week that the economic outlook may be brightening. Manufacturing and construction fell again in May but they are no longer plunging, according to the latest surveys of purchasing managers. The finding that the big services sector expanded last month was especially encouraging.
But even if the economy does turn up before too long, the prospects for the jobless still look grim. So far employment has fallen by 1% since it peaked at 29.5m in the second quarter of 2008. That is about the same drop as at a similar stage in the economic downturn of the early 1980s, and a bit less than the 1.5% decline in the early 1990s. Employment carried on falling long after those two recessions had ended, to a trough more than 6% lower than the preceding peak …
The graph attached to that article models a fall in employment through three full years of a recession: that, Dave and his snake-oil merchants, might bear in mind, takes us to 2011. Nor do we get back to 2008 levels until, oooh!, the eighth year (that’s 2016).
If, in that period, we have the arrant nonsense propagated by the Tory Right (see ConHomepassim), a hypothetical Tory incoming Government would be going for immediate expenditure cuts, amounting to — wait for it — fifty billions a year! That should guarantee even lengthier queues of unemployed at the B’roo; vicious bite-back from public-service workers; health and education put to the sword (won’t that be a vote-winner in Middle England!); possible deflation (house prices again collapse); spending falls: the worst scenario from Monty Norman’s prescription in the 1930s); a double-dip recession; and anything short of were-wolves stalking the streets of Warrington, Wakefield and West Hartlepool. God help them in the “Celtic fringes” [sic], where (as the Tory lady said) “our people are few and far between”.
Oh, hey! — heh, heh! — we can save a bit by cutting funding to all those Tory-controlled Councils!
So what is Labour to do at this juncture?
All are agreed that the Telegraph cannot maintain its present agenda much longer. It has controlled the news-cycle now for an unprecedented three weeks, and engendered a mood which is both partial (favouring the Tories) and nihilistic. Already there are signs that other outlets are wrenching control away from the Barclay Brothers: the Mail is most keen to do so, for it is the Mail‘s readership which is being cannibalised (some suggest 200,000 copies a day) to feed the Telegraph‘s extended print-run.
… the fascination with bike-riding Cameron’s ‘£30million’ refuses to go away. As does gossip of his alleged personal family fortune, helped by the Mail on Sunday‘s disclosure that he paid off the £75,000 mortgage on the £1.5 million home in North Kensington, London, that he owns with his wife Samantha, after they took out a £350,000 taxpayer-funded HSBC mortgage on his designated Oxfordshire constituency second home.
While within the rules, this is precisely the kind of financial jiggery-pokery for which other MPs have been criticised in recent weeks, as details of the way they have abused their second homes allowances have been made public.
For his part, Cameron claims he was able to pay off the mortgage on his London home by selling shares. But he is still open to the charge that someone who’s clearly worth a few bob was ‘playing’ the system by claiming more than £21,200 from taxpayers in 2005-6, for the mortgage interest paid on his constituency home.
… nearly £200 that he mistakenly claimed on MPs’ expenses for the flat he owned in London.
The then Chancellor handed back £86.88 of taxpayers’ money for service charges on his apartment in Westminster while he was living in his grace-and-favour home in Downing Street…
Even Old Joe at the aforementioned Rose and Crown can’t for ever ignore the disparities between the different sums, and the behaviur of the two men. And, at some point, the Telegraph‘s lien on the stolen data runs out; and it’s Open House.
All of which amounts to a simple recipe:
Change the agenda!
So, Malcolm returns to Foch for a conclusion.
At one level, we should remember that we learn from our set-backs, as did Dick Crossman, one of the great Labour thinkers, who took the hit for the local-government disasters in 1967-9. All those defeated, but not — let us hope — despondent or disillusioned Labour candidates must expect that there is something positive here, or as Foch saw it:
It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.
After all, the Tories, sometime between 1997 and 200, eventually came to recognise that what they needed was a Tony Blair clone. To continue the strategic analogies, that reminds Malcolm:
There’s a saying in military circles — We always fight the last war. It means that too much focus on past enemy behavior can easily lead to misjudging an enemy capability in the future.
Foch had another axiom:
A battle won is a battle which we will not acknowledge to be lost.
So, all together now, with Billy Bragg and Dick Gaughan, for the wider perspective:
First Marne, back in 1914. More properly it should be:
Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service 