Hugo Chavez: a man with the perfect name to be a Cameroon MP
Two weeks ago I mentioned here the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez; I think he is the international Left’s best hope at present: anti-American without being bin Laden.
He causes trouble for the United States, but in the old-fashioned Cold War way for a Latin American: delivering two-hour speeches about gringo imperialism to various mobs, attributing Latin American poverty to American corporations, being lauded by the former Mrs Jagger, and being written up by the evergreen Richard Gott in the Guardian, who did the same for Che Guevara so many years ago. All Camden could rally to such a leader. Soon he will receive the greatest honour which the British Left can at present bestow — dinner here with London’s Chavez: Mr Livingstone.
We may also suspect that those big Latino demonstrations in the United States the other day have been vaguely good for the cause; holding out the hope that at some distant date independent states, allied to Señor Chavez or his successors, would be set up in southern California, Arizona and New Mexico by all those Latino nannies, handymen and waiters at present forced to attend to the wishes of Joan Collins and Michael Winner around successive Hollywood swimming pools.
But it is to be doubted that Señor Chavez is the man to lead the movement. The problem, to anyone who — like me — thinks that superficial concerns such as names are important in politics, is his first name. Hugo is not right for a revolutionary. There is at least one British MP named Hugo, but he is a Conservative. More: he follows the old Tory profession of art auctioneer. Those two facts are crucial. They show that Hugo is a Conservative name. Revolutionaries must have revolutionary-sounding names, such as Che and Fidel. Lenin would not have became the power he was had his first name been Tristram. He would have tried to change it, as he changed his surname to Lenin from Ulyanov. But we in the reactionary press would have known that he was really a Hugo, and would have taunted him about it. He would have lost the confidence of the masses, just as a Tory Tristram would if the Tories were unwise to put one up as a candidate in Bolton or any of those northern seats which they must win if they are to form a government. Someone named Hugo Chavez could in fact be a Cameroon Tory candidate. We could imagine him being presented for inspection at a Sunday evening kitchen supper in Notting Hill. ‘Dave, Angelina and I would very much like you to meet Hugo Chavez. You remember, the chap Francis Maude mentioned to you as being worth an A-list candidacy. He’s got the lot. He’s from an ethnic minority — Filipino, I’d imagine. He’s gay. He works in Old Masters at Christie’s.’ Of course the Tories could not run him in the north. Except in special parts of the north. ‘Hugo for Harrogate’ would be satisfactory. Nor would he work in Tebbit country in Essex. And there would be an additional ethnic complication there. ‘Chavez for Chingford’? Risky.
One of the reasons that the Iranian President Mr Ahmadinejad might not prove as troublesome in the long term as he looks like being at the moment is his surname. So complex is it, hardly anyone can remember it, let alone spell it. I confided my fear to a friend of ours who is a master of language, Sally Aspinall, widow of John. If Mr Ahmadinejad became more important I would have to grasp it. She once explained that I was out of date in referring to Kent as the Garden of England. ‘Patio of England,’ she corrected.
She immediately resolved the problem of how to remember Mr Ahmadinejad. Just think of him, she counselled, as Mr I’m-in-adinner-jacket. Thus, if the theory of the importance of names is right, she has either destroyed or created him.
Iwould claim to be the first, or one of the first, to point out that British politics since 1997 is very much like it was in the middle decades of the 19th century. What was, for want of a better analogy with today, the nominally left-of-centre party, the Whigs, came up with a leader, Palmerston, who captured Tory support by not much threatening to change average Tory lives. The Conservatives had to wait nearly 20 years — until Palmerston’s death in office and Gladstone, a Liberal leader whom they could depict as radical — before winning an election. Mr Blair is Palmerston. Mr Brown is Gladstone. A further similarity is that Gladstone was Palmerston’s Chancellor, and that there was tension between them.
So far the comparison between the two periods has stood up rather well. It could last, and today’s Conservatives could be out for almost as long as they were then. But Conservatives will be relieved to hear that the theory is developing problems. Palmerston never became as unpopular as Mr Blair seems to have become now. There is no evidence to show that, had he lived to fight another election, Palmerston would have lost whereas, for the time being, Mr Cameron could just about beat Mr Blair.
All now depends on whether Mr Brown will allow himself to be depicted, Gladstonelike, as a radical and threat to the middle classes. There the difficulty for Mr Brown is not so much himself as his supporters. They look and sound anti-middle class. But today’s electorate is almost as middle class as it was in the mid-19th century. Unlike then, today’s working class can vote, but choses not to. Mr Brown could try the alternative: a reliance on getting out the working-class vote. But that would be dangerous to him. He could well direct his policies, or at least his rhetoric, at them, and they still would not vote for him, so used are they to abstention. That would finish him with the middle class.
But, in my historical analogy, he can find comfort. At the first election (1868) after Palmerston’s death, the new Liberal leader, Gladstone, beat Disraeli. But there is comfort for Mr Cameron, too. At the general election after that, Disraeli beat Gladstone. That was six years later (1874) — the then length of a parliament. Mr Cameron would just have to hold on to the leadership: harder for a Tory now than then. If Mr Cameron became leader after such a length of time, today’s Tories would have been out for almost as long as they were then; thus offering comfort for me too — though for my analogy rather than for my politics.
Previous page
