Street credible?
Paul Johnson
Writing in the Times on Monday, the most sensible of the Labour leaders, Gerald Kaufman, noted sombrely: 'Among all the challenges the Labour Party faces as it enters into this long dark night of pro- longed opposition, the greatest is the recovery of credibility.' Very true, to be sure; though I don't like that word 'credi- ble' and its derivations, now among the most overworked in the language. Out of date, too, since the current phrase is 'street credible'. I gather this from the cor- respondence page of the Guardian, where a Ms Dominy Hamilton has been complain- ing that, on account of her unusual name, she has been described, in the New Musical Express, as 'lacking street credibility'. Labour lost the election because, among other things, it lacked street credibility, especially — one might add — Coronation Street credibility.
So what is Labour going to do about it? Judging by developments so far, not much. As the Sunday Times leader put it: 'Labour has learnt nothing from the election.' While the Conservatives settle down comfortably as the natural party of government again, Labour proposes to devote a long, hot sum- mer entirely to a leadership contest. Moreover, by a union-dominated voting process which is, and is seen to be, undemocratic — and may well provoke recourse to the courts — it seems likely to end up with Neil Kinnock. I like the look of Neil Kinnock — as leader of the Labour Party, that is. Anthony Howard, a confirm- ed Hattersley supporter, writing of Kinnock in this week's Observer, was justified in say- ing of him: ... in Downing Street and Smith Square he has almost as dedicated supporters as those he finds in the Labour Party'.
Does Kinnock have Coronation Street 'Do you, Roger, take this other woman . .?'
credibility? I should say not. What he does have is party conference credibility, howl The two, increasingly, are mutual)}' exclusive. After Foot, Kinnock has everything needed to become Son of Foot: hurricanes of Celtic wind, a taste for verbal class warfare and the kind of sectarian zealotry that has delegates howling f°,1 more in the Blackpool Winter Garden and the Brighton Conference Centre. Jill Foot' in a giveaway contribution to BBC Radio's Midweek, compared Kinnock approvinglY, to Lloyd George, 'the Welsh Wizard'. Hu' LG's oratory (and Aneurin Bevan's for that matter) was of quite a different kind to KW" nock's: it was intended, often successfully, to persuade and convert opponents rather than just rally the faithful. And it was allied, of course, to a knowledge of the world, first gained as a sharp small-town solicitor, a unique capacity to understal and so manipulate men and women, an huge administrative powers. Kinnock, like Foot, does not seem interested in the nuts and bolts ofgoverning and both men ad- dress their words essentially to co-believers. Indeed Kinnock gives the impression this he assumes anyone who does not share views must be motivated by self-interest, malice or some kind of mental blockage,: Just before the election I debated at length with him on TV-am's Parkinson Showy °,11 which occasion he advanced the p tion that anyone who failed to embrace th Labour Party in youth was guilty of '1:11?„- longed adolescence', or who abandoned it to middle age was 'suffering frornrnal menopause'. One gathers, then, that nt', now Kinnock has moved in fairly restricteo circles of fellow-fanatics, and if he sticks t.,°, this level of argument Mrs Thatcher On have nothing to fear; nor will David Owelli. But if Son of Foot is no threat, what Roy Hattersley? Is he Son of Healey? of Gaitskell? Actually, as he has been tell, l ing readers of the Observer, he is thRoman Father Hattersley, a self-unfrocked Catholic priest. He told this fascinating _ tale, so redolent of what Elizabethans calit, ed 'the inward-looking North', suprerne, well, but I doubt if he is prudent to t.a,""a such pride in his wayward sire: for 11 al father renounces sacred and PerPet", vows, why should a son be expected to keep mere electio promises? Moreover,n one detects in Hattersle.):5_ voluminous autobiographical oeuvre cer- tain dustiness of heart. To be sure,. Hif tersley has a degree of street credibility,. by that we mean an early familiarityHills- the1t Labour-voting wards of the 13tit borough constituency in Sheffield. se what are we to make of a lad Av13ho0,,,
boyhood hero was not Drake or the i3
Prince or Nelson, but Albert Ballard, the local Labour agent; and whose supreme adolescent ambition was achieved when he was sworn in as an Official Scrutineer at the 1950 general election? He had, he told bObserver readers this week, a girl-friend, ut on Polling day, It had been love at first sight — not with Rosemary Emans, but with the irresistible canvass cards and the marked-up registers, a love that could not
be denied'.
Nor will it be denied, if Hattersley can help it. But with all his cunning and un- doubted ability, he still faces Labour's unresolved dilemma: how to win elections With a party whose whole constitutional machinery is now geared to pleasing its militants and spitting in the faces of the voters? I thought Hattersley's well-timed and riveting appearance on Tyne-Tees's Meet the Press — a programme which,
the after a shaky start, is now among the best of
th. current affairs output on TV — was, in is respect, distinctly ominous, both for himself and for Labour's prospects. Now, if ever, was the time for a self-confident right-winger to point the real moral of Labour's calamitous defeat and to indicate firmly that the party can operate successful- ly in a democracy only by scrapping the ridiculous secretarianism of recent years. But not a bit of it. Roy dodged and hedged, fudged and nudged. In the words of Auberon Waugh in the Sunday Telegraph, `Has anyone ever seen such a grotesque display of deviousness, opportunism and naked ambiton?' Particularly significant, I thought, was Hattersley's refusal to give a straight answer to questions about what he would do to Labour's newly-elected Mili- tant MPs, and his irritation that the topic, which many people rightly regard as an ex- cellent test of a leader's resolution and courage, should occupy so much of the pro- gramme. I have the impression that Hat- tersley could make himself street credible and would if he dared, but for the moment prefers to be credible in those smoke-filled hotel rooms where the union godfathers meet.
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