POLITICS
0 brave new world, that has such pictures in it
NOEL MALCOLM
When I asked one of this country's most distinguished political commentators whether he approved of the televising of the House of Commons, he thought about it long and hard, and then said, 'No'. 'Why not?' I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'the Press Gallery canteen used to be such a nice quiet place to have a cup of tea, Now it's going to be full of horrible BBC ladies with clip-boards. We'll have to queue for hours.'
The great debate about televising the House has thrown up some surprising arguments over the years, among which the foregoing must count as one of the most rational. The question 'ctii bono?' (who benefits?) can often cast light on an otherwise murky issue. At least it is clear that the BBC ladies with clip-boards will do well out of it.
Judging by his appearance on Tuesday afternoon, it looks as if Mr Kinnock thinks he will do well out of it too. Swaying from the hips rather more than usual, broadly grinning, intensely frowning, and running through his whole repertoire of hand sig- nals, he contrasted more strikingly than ever with the Prime Minister, whose sole concession to image-management was to fiddle with her specs and eventually take them off. Yet I would guess that in the long run it is Mrs Thatcher who will benefit more from the arrival of the cameras. Mr Kinnock's performance in Parliament is merely a heightened version of the way he performs all the time: he is stagey by nature, and people will not change their opinions of him when they see him being a little more stagey at the Despatch Box.
Mrs Thatcher, on the other hand, actual- ly seems more real and human in Parlia- ment than she does elsewhere. The simple reason for this is that in most of her extra-parliamentary appearances (party conferences, Walden interviews and so on) she comes across as colossally artificial. On those occasions she is not so much a stage performer playing to an audience, as a robot — either ignoring the audience or appealing to it only by means of a predeter- mined script. When the public sees her, as it could on Tuesday afternoon, thinking on her feet, answering hostile interventions, looking angry or impatient or flustered or triumphant, and occasionally even crack- ing what she believes to be a joke, it may warm to her ever so slightly.
That is, if the image-managers have not
got to her first. All predictions based on the way MPs behave at the moment are unreliable, because it is in the very nature of television to alter what it observes. Mrs Thatcher herself put this pithily on the day when the Bill for televising the House was debated in 1988: 'I do not think that television will ever televise this House. If it does televise it, it will televise only a televised House, which would be quite different from the House of Commons as we know it.'
The ways in which television will alter the nature of the Commons are many and various, and the more obvious and out- rageous ways are the ones which matter the least. The powdering of bald heads, or the avoidance of stroboscopic striped shirts, is neither here nor there. The occasional publicity-seeking stunt by an MP will not matter greatly, and the odd outrage or two in the public gallery can be brushed aside. (Those who claim that television will not attract any such demonstrations, however, should remember the abseiling lesbians in the House of Lords two years ago, and the demonstration by striking miners there on the first day that the Lords was televised.)
The real influence of television will be more subtle than that, and more far- reaching. The conduct of MPs in the House of Commons will be absorbed into the overall media campaign of their party. Back-benchers will be co-ordinated in a new way: not just whipped, but Mandel- sonised. Speeches will be directed not so much at changing the mood of the House, as at catching the eye of the news editor for the News at Ten. They will he constructed less in arguments and paragraphs, and more in slogans and punchlines. 'Hard- hitting' interventions, prepared in advance and therefore often irrelevant to the speech they interrupt, will increase. Prime Minister's Questions will become even more of a ritual bear-baiting than it is already. Spurious 'points of order' will multiply. And the timing of contributions will be dominated by the deadlines of the six o'clock, nine o'clock and ten o'clock
news. From being a debating chamber, the Commons will gradually transforni itself into a permanent media hustings.
The best defence of the televising of the House, therefore, is to argue that the Commons ceased to be a real debating chamber a long time ago. Introducing his Bill for televising the House in 1985, Mr Austin Mitchell (who has a much shrewder mind than his clownish manner suggests) put this argument as convincingly as he could:
We arc not a 19th—century debating cham- ber. We are not influencing and persuading each other. We cannot control the Execu- tive, because we cannot bring it down. We have a system of government by party in which the people alone choose the Execu- tive, and the people alone can bring it down. The House of Commons is the stage where the case for and against what the Govern- ment is doing is put before the people.
There is obviously some truth in this rather gloomy view of Parliament. We no longer live in the golden age when Mem- bers spoke as individuals and expected, every now and then, to change the minds of their opponents with their arguments. To some extent, the activities of Parlia- ment have been absorbed into the non-stop public campaigning and counter-cam- paigning which fills up the gaps between the general elections. We have exchanged our golden age for an age of bronze — but does that mean that we were obliged to make it even more brazen?
Of course it is true that in a mass democracy politics, in all its forms, is dependent on the media. The behaviour of the Commons has already been influenced both by the newspapers (who also have deadlines) and by the radio (which has transformed Prime Minister's Questions, for example). What this whole argument hinges on, however, is the peculiar nature of television. On both radio and the printed page, the word is paramount. Words are the substance of argument, the vehicle of ideas. On television the picture is supreme; and images either drive out words, or reduce them to a small residue of slogans. As I have said, when I watched Mrs Thatcher's performance on the small screen, I was pleasantly surprised by the human potential of her appearance when she replied to interventions from the Labour benches. But what did she actually say? I have forgotten.
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