POLITICS
Brian Walden and the gentle art of suggestion
FERDINAND MOUNT
Was his father a bookmaker? or a Count of the Holy Roman Empire? How many wives has he had — three, four? At Oxford by the end of the 1950s, he was already a mystery and a minor legend. White-faced, tense, passionate (about what? I cannot now recall), when he came down to the Union, he drew audiences who would have stayed away for Cabinet minis- ters. Having thoroughly rattled Harold Wilson, he abandonded Parliament and took to television, a medium which has chewed up and reduced to pap many a good man. Yet Brian Walden's brilliant powers of invention have survived the grind of interviewing the same old politi- cians Sunday after Sunday. Indeed, he now invents the politicians with the same dazzling ingenuity as he once invented himself.
What is his secret? It is, I think, that nobody ever watches the programme. By 'nobody', I mean, of course, nobody ex- cept the politicians and journalists hard up for a weekend story. Bubble, bubble goes Mr Walden stirring his cauldron — that bright eye, that rude little mouth, those persuasive sibilants — but nobody actually sees him at it, until out steps an entirely new politician ready for Monday morning's papers. For example: B. W. You've really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian Values . . .
Mrs T. Oh exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great . . . etc. etc.
B. W. But a lot of people will say, 'Well, it's all very well Mrs Thatcher talking about Victorian values' . . . etc. etc.
It is lovely to watch, in an artificial sort of way, like a fly-fishing champion casting at a game fair. After all, the phrase itself is tremendously un-Conservative, being a compound of Lytton Strachey and sociologese. Nonetheless she snatched at the fly because she knew exactly what he meant — and so did everyone else.
That single phrase lights up the whole argument. A sense of personal responsibil- ity for one's actions, robust and passionate- ly felt, undimmed by Marx or Freud, uncapped by subsidy, unhobbled by bureaucracy — no more, no less. That really is what it is all about. But there is a superb ambiguity in Mr Walden's creation, for packed in with the luggage of Victorian values goes all the old Strachey stuff - narrow-mindedness, tight-fistedness, hypocrisy, sexual repression, indifference to child prostitution, etc, etc. Mr Walden always allows both sides a run for their money.
Now he has done it again.
B. W. Do you know more and more who you remind me of? . . . Franklin Roosevelt . . . Do you accept that the message you are putting across has very great similitar- ities to the sort of thing that Roosevelt was saying in the Thirties?
Mr Kinnock I think it has . . . Roosevelt's great genius . . . I see certain things in the same way . . . we actually have to talk in New Deal terms . . .
B. W. Your enthusiasm for Roosevelt exceeds even what I supposed it might be . . . If you are this enthusiastic for Roosevelt . . . and the basic way he tack- led the problems of the Thirties . . can I point out that you are therefore saying to the electorate in effect: 'I'm a socialist, and a sincere one but you don't have to be a socialist to vote for me.'
On reflection, it's less like fly fishing than the chap who comes up to you and says 'take a card, any card — it's the Queen of Hearts, am I right or am I right?' There is nothing else like it in British politics which will be thereby the poorer when Mr Walden packs it in this summer. For there we have seen Mr Kinnock and his intensely able entourage groping month after month for a positive theme, standard or slogan. Easy enough to say what Mr Kinnock is against (yobs and Trots and Mr Derek Hatton), but what is he for? And with one seductive twinkle, up pops Mr Walden with the answer.
You may object that FDR was immense- ly rich and grand and crippled and had an ugly wife with stronger views than his own, while Mr Kinnock is quite poor and very fit and has a pretty wife with stronger views than his own. You may say also — unless you are a rock-ribbed Republican — that FDR was never a socialist in any real sense. But, as with all Mr Walden's most brilliant feats of legerdemain, the compari- son is both flattering and fatal. Consider the bright broad vagueness of what might be regarded as Mr Kinnock's acceptance speech: 'Roosevelt's great genius was to take hold of the problem and to enable literally to put some means at the disposal not just to the great plants and all the rest of it but the means of justice defending rights of people to organise, to speak defending and advancing the rights of people to get opportunities regardless of their race, colour, creed or sex, marvellous breakthroughs . . That, I think, is authentic FDR — if in a South Wales translation — just as it is authentic Kinnock. It is the politics of nothing-to-fear-except-fear-itselfishness, big-hearted, benign and vacuous, incurious as to the relation between means and ends, or between cause and effect. In reality, Roosevelt's great genius was not to take hold of any problem (production rose far faster in Britain in the 1930s than in the USA, where it had barely regained 1929 levels by 1938 and where unemployment was still higher at the end of the 1930s than at the beginning). His genius was to make people feel good or at least better always a useful art for any politician, nowhere more so than in the United States. FDR was a responder, an improvis- er a la Wilson (Harold not Woodrow). He came to power with few promises except, ironically enough, to balance the budget and reduce government interference. The essential feature of the New Deal was that he made it up as he went along — a relatively harmless pastime in the United States where the glorious dispersal of checks and balances places limits on the real power of the most energetic national leader. Not so, alas, here.
Take Mr John Smith who performed so magnificently for Labour over the West- land affair and who is now leading the charge to 'save' British Leyland. For ages I have thought Mr Smith Labour's most persuasive front-bencher: decent, quick- witted, good-mannered, trustworthy. And yet what does Mr Smith dream of doing once he is in office? 'I don't see why we should just go round taking over clapped- out companies. It would be nice to get into the new profitable areas. Stuff that makes money.' And Mr Roy Hattersley, the prudent face of socialism, is now imploring every public body — local authorities, British Rail, water authorities, health au- thorities — well before the next election to prepare fresh programmes of investment and repair work 'that can be implemented immediately upon a Labour victory'. More valleys are to be drowned while existing reservoirs remain untapped, there will be new track and rolling-stock to carry fewer passengers, more schools for fewer pupils. FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority would be a mere puddle by comparison. You pays your money and you takes your choice: Victorian values or Tennessee Valley values. And do remember Mr Wal- den in your prayers for making it all so nice and clear.
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