Political commentary
Aquestion of attitude
Charles Moore
Ido not envy Lady Glover. At consider- ..I. able inconvenience, she puts her lakeside castle at the disposal of the British Prime Minister for a bit of recuperation, only to find that recuperation is not what this par- ticular Prime Minister wants. Instead of perching on some lonely Alpine peak, like a figure by Caspar David Friedrich, lost in wonder and melancholy at the prospect of deep romantic chasms, Mrs Thatcher seems to have pined for the red dispatch boxes of home and to have made it pretty clear that 12 days in a Swiss mountain paradise was about as much as she could stand.
One's first reaction is to gasp at the ar- rogance which suggests that the Prime Minister's absence for a few days might gravely damage the national interest or, in- deed, make a blind bit of difference to anyone. But perhaps there is a more pathetic explanation. It may well be that Mrs Thatcher has no idea what to do with herself if she is not working flat out. A holi- day tends to be a time when busy people ask themselves, Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? sort of questions; it is also a time when you can pretend that you have no responsibilities. Mrs Thatcher must hate all that sort of thing. Stopping to think is the last thing she wants to do.
Everyone from the Prince of Wales downwards keeps saying that we are now a 'leigune society'. If so, politicians have been lift cwt. Even if their civil servants were not trylarglo break their spirits by loading ten nteti's work onto them, cabinet ministers would still get up at six in the morning and make work for themselves until midnight in order to impress one another, and to prove their usefulness to themselves. One suspects them of telling their chauffeurs to wait for 15 minutes in a nearby street so that they can arrive late enough for lunch to impress their host. Today's minister is the man who looks at his watch while he is talking to you.
All this working makes people sus- picious. The result is that when a politician becomes sufficiently prominent, he is ex- pected to produce evidence that he is an or- dinary human being. His day is described in the back of the Sunday Times colour sup- plement (he invariably makes breakfast for his wife). If he is Labour, he has to pretend that he is interested in football. If he is Chancellor of the Exchequer, he has to put on a loose jersey, go for a walk in the coun- try with his dog and family, and buy some beer in a pub on the Sunday before presen- ting his Budget. (It will be a great pleasure watching Mr Nigel Lawson searching for a suitable village and saloon bar.) If he is standing for his party's leadership, he will probably have to be photographed washing up. There would not be such an appetite for such pitiful scraps of normality if people believed them. Gladstone felt no need to write 'Hobbies: chopping down trees, reading theology before breakfast' in his Who's Who entry, not because a more deferential age did not dare to ask him im- pertinent questions about how he spent his time, but because no one was disposed to doubt that a prime minister could hold his office and still follow his customary amusements and maintain his intercourse with ordinary society. The fact that modern politicians so readily supply these shy- making titbits about themselves is only fur- ther evidence of their abnormality.
Numerous explanations have been ad- vanced for the fact that being a policitian is now a form of slave labour. The chief ones are that we have better and faster com- munications and that the scope of govern- ment is now so much larger than it was. There must be something in the com- munications argument, but one can also find it being deployed on the other side by all the 'leisure society' school of thought who claim that gadgets will keep us all at home occasionally tapping instructions into hard-working machines. Nowadays, one would have thought, Asquith would actual- ly waste less time communicating with Venetia Stanley, since he could ring rather than write. As for the growth of govern- ment, that is surely a symptom of the phenomenon discussed, not its cause. It is not new facts which have changed things; it is, as the housemaster loves to say, a ques- tion of attitude.
For some time now, politicians have been interested in 'modern management techni- ques'. Perhaps in reaction to Mr Mac- millan's affectation that his government was Edwardian, subsequent governments wanted to administer the electric shock of the new. For Mr Wilson, it was technology. For Mr Heath, it was abrasive company management. For Mrs Thatcher, it is ag- gressive marketing. The common element in these ideas has been a tendency to speak of government in terms of something that it isn't — a scientific instrument, a factory, a product — and to derive from that way of speaking a new idea about how the people who govern should behave. These attitudes even expressed themselves in little changes of appearance. Mr Wedgwood Benn became Minister of Technology and had a crew-cut like an American astronaut. Mr Barber (1 think) got a brand new budget box, though the old one was later restored by popular demand. Ministries, in Orwellian fashion, ceased to be for things like pensions and public works, and became Departments of Environment, Energy, Social Security.
The qualities that the new dispensation requires tend not to be those of character, such as judgment, detachment, courage, which were valued in the past, but abilities such as 'problem-solving' and `high pressure decision-making'. The capacity to operate governmental processes is rated more highly than the ability to make sensi- ble choices about political aims. Expertise is preferred to a general intelligence, with the result that ministers are allotted more and more 'aides' and that cabinets become weaker in objecting to schemes supported by unreadable accumulations of 'facts'. Politicians feel that they must 'cost their time', which means, of course, sacrificing talk with thoughtful people to meetings with officials. The great thing is, in the Reagan administration's phrase, to 'hit the ground running'. In which direction you run is not so important.
Hence the incessant work. If government is a factory, then of course it will produce more if it works longer hours. And in a good factory or business, it is well known by personnel experts that industrial rela- tions are improved if the bosses are seen to work as hard as anyone, rather than awarding themselves privileges. And if the bosses all imbibe the business school ethic, they will measure their own virtue by the simple criterion of the growth of the part of the company with which they are concern- ed. So they must only take enough time off to keep in good physical shape.
It is just a pity for all of us that these models of government happen to be ab- solutely false. On one of her much- discussed excursions in search of 'Victorian values', Mrs Thatcher might attend to the conduct of some of her predecessors. She would not like its rather slapdash quality. Lord Salisbury, for instance, offered Cosmo Lang (the future Archbishop) his first bishopric in a letter which went astray because he could not be bothered to find out Lang's correct address. Prime Ministers dined out without ceremony or security guards. And the holidays were gigantic. This was not because there was nothing to be done, but because few statesmen either aspired to run everyone's lives or imagined that their work would be the better for being incessant.
But such inquries would of course take up time that the Prime Minister believes she cannot spare. While she was reading Vic- torian lives and letters, mortgage rates might take advantage of her inattention and put themselves up. Unfriendly colleagues might steal a march on her. She, in com- mon with most modern politicians, does not have the confidence to relax. That sure- ly suggests that she does not have the con- fidence W divest herself or her Government of any of its functions. There is a paradox that the first Prime Minister since the war publicly devoted to reducing the power and scope of government should be so obsessed with it that she cannot keep away from it for a fortnight.
Previous page
