The Real Lesson?
By ALAN WATKINS
ALi- that remains is for the party workers to knock up the voters; and then, for a few hours, the officials come into their own. The local bank employees count the votes; the town clerk reads out the result; and Schofield on Elections assumes a greater importance than all the party literature of the past few years. What will be made of the way this election was fought? Will Mr. Wilson, will Sir Alec, go down in political history as a great electoral innovator? What difference will their campaigns make to the general elections of the future?
Let us have a look, first, at the question of public meetings addressed by the party leaders. According to last Saturday's "Times, the fashion came in with the Trish Repealers and the Corn Law League. Even as late as 1879, however, there was a reluctance to accept mass meetings. A Minister described Gladstone's first Mid- lothian campaign as 'a positive danger to the Commonwealth.' Tory critics,' writes Morley, 'solemnly declared that such performances were an innovation on the constitution, and aggra- vated the evil tendencies of democracy.' And here one should notice another feature of the Midlothian campaign: it was relatively short. During its course Gladstone made only five major speeches. Compared with Mr. Wilson, corn- pared with Sir Alec, he was a man of few words.
Almost every day, for the past three weeks, the speeches have poured from the two leaders. There has been little rest. Some performances, certainly, have been better reported than others: but all, in intent at least, have been major speeches. And, oddly enough, people do not seem to have become bored. Four-figure audiences have been commonplace. Indeed, one of the fallacies which this election should have disposed of is that the public meeting is finished. Not so long ago it used to be confidently asserted that, of post-war politicians, only Aneurin Bevan and Sir Winston Churchill could attract a mass audience. Sir Alec and Mr. Wilson, an unlikely pair, have between them shown otherwise.
But, though both leaders have succeeded in winning large audiences, they have managed it in very different ways. Mr. Wilson has concentrated his efforts on indoor evening meetings; and his choice has been completely justified. To the politician, one of the attractions of these meet- ings is that they can (quite legitimately) be packed with party supporters. The hecklers are bound to be in a small and easily controllable minority. The speaker convinces the converted, and everyone goes home happy. So it has proved with Mr. Wilson's meetings. Even in that first week of the campaign, which was supposed to have gone so badly for Labour, Mr. Wilson's performances were highly successful. It tended to be forgotten by those correspondents who followed Mr. Wilson's progress day by day that, whereas they had heard a speech on several occasions, the audience to whom it was addressed were hearing it for the first time.
Sir Alec, on the other hand, deliberately denied himself the, advantages of organised indoor meet- ings. By their very nature, 'whistle-stop' gather- ings in car parks and market squares are subject to all kinds of hazards. Hecklers—or wreckers— cannot be excluded. Scuffles may break out in the crowd. People start arguing with one another. The traffic sometimes triumphs over the amplifying equipment. Nor are these perils counterbalanced by the advantages of 'meeting the people.' Sir Alec was surrounded by hordes of lesser Conservatives, all anxious to hurry him on to his next speaking-point. In the future, per- haps, the decision that Sir Alec should tour the country will be seen as an error. Through choos- ing a vulnerable method of campaigning, the Conservatives brought on themselves a good deal of the trouble they encountered.
Very much the same kind of mistake may have been made by the Conservatives with their morn- ing press conferences. Here there were com- plaints, both from the Central Office staff and from the staider elements among the lobby journalists, that newspapermen were daring to express political views of their own. Ministers such as Mr. Edward Heath were actually being contradicted in public. What blasphemy! But really it was inevitable. The Conservative press conferences were held in a small room. There were no microphones. The journalist did not stand to ask his question, nor the Minister to reply. The chairman, Lord Blakenham, was happily or unhappily inaudible most of the time.
In contrast, the press conference at Transport House was a model of formality and decorum. The hall was largish. The politicians sat on a platform. There were microphones galore. Mr. Len Williams presided with a rod of iron: there was no chance of anyone starting a free-for-111 with him. Above all, there was Mr. Wilson, ever- ready to stifle further discussion with a reminder that he had gone into this subject in great detail in his Swansea speech, which would no doubt be familiar to the questioner . . . But did Labour's superiority in the handling of the press conferences and of the leader's speeches have any real effect on the way the elec- tion went? Would it have made any difference to the campaign in the constituencies if the Con- servative press conferences had been more firmly disciplined, or if Sir Alec's meetings had been better arranged? This election seems to have been fought on two completely different levels, almost in two different worlds. There has been the world of the television studios and big meet- ings and the daily press conferences. There has been the world if canvass cards and cold school- rooms. And the dissociation between the two has been almost complete. The politicians in London and the workers in the constituencies might almost have been fighting two different elections. Though the voters have gone to the meetings of Sir Alec and Mr. Wilson, they have gone, not as the Scots went to hear Gladstone at Mid- lothian, but as members of the TV studio audience.
Of course, one must not exaggerate. A British general election inevitably consists of a national campaign and 630 local campaigns. It is equally inevitable that there should be a separa- tion between them. But in this election the separation seems to have been greater than ever before. There has been much exhortation, little communication. Neither the public meeting nor television has completely succeeded in telling the voter what the election is about. And perhaps this is the real lesson of the campaign.
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