POLITICS
The need for a lack of style in politics
FE RDINAND MOUNT
The only poster to be stuck on our lamp-posts so far says 'LOST — small neutered ginger tom cat'. This may of course have been put up by the Cat Population Control Party in response to signs of tactical voting for the Anti- Castration Alliance (`Don't meddle with our pussies' — leader, Dr Alan Watkins), but it does not sound very political. To judge by the stickers in the windows, this constituency will be a runaway gain for Neighbourhood Watch.
Things seem to be passing off pretty quietly in Islington South and Finsbury. Yet for the Alliance, this is the most marginal Labour-held seat in Britain. If they are to make any kind of headway, the redoubtable George Cunningham must re- capture it from the classic loony-Leftist Chris Smith.
I describe Mr Cunningham as redoubt- able with some hesitation. Not that he isn't, but he has taken, like struggling Shaftesbury Avenue productions, to quot- ing favourable snippets about himself from the newspapers: 'exceedingly honest . . . fairly prickly' — Simon Hoggart, Punch. Dr Owen does the same thing down in Plymouth: 'statesmanlike' — Western Morning Herald, 'engagingly honest' the Sun. I am not sure this is such a good idea. It strays into one's mind that some less engagingly or exceedingly honest politicians might also copy the Shaftesbury Avenue trick of selective quotation: 'while nobody but his own mother would dream of calling him honest and statesmanlike'.
We do seem to be at the stage in the campaign when the politicians begin to weary of barking their policies and start going in for character boasting and charac- ter assassination. In this election, nothing much else seems likely to shift the voters, who at the moment of writing appear to be stuck in much the same percentage ranges as they were at the beginning.
The Alliance tries to alleviate the gloom inspissating over the National Liberal Club by going back to their very first sales pitch and reminding us how nice they are. Morning after morning, it seems to be Shirley Williams and Rosie Barnes talking about the difficulties of bringing up teen- agers in a high-rise flat. David Owen does not care much for all this. Shirley begins to irritate him after about five minutes. He has taken to the more robust Nancy Seear, who is indeed a splendid old trout. It was Lady Seear who said that 'people are fed up with being told that Neil Kinnock is a nice guy. It's not enough for a Prime Minister. It's not even enough for a cook.' Lady Violet, and Saki, would be proud of her.
When it comes to personalities, the first one dodging the coconuts is naturally Mrs Thatcher who has, according to tradition, been compared to Genghiz Khan, Stalin and Hitler. Mr Bryan Gould has claimed that the personality of Mrs Thatcher is the campaign issue that encompasses All others and that 'her personality, her tempera- ment, her background, the narrowness of her outlook and her values, cut her off from ordinary people'. Oh well, we can't all come out of the right drawer.
These attacks upon Mrs Thatcher have to be delicate operations if they are to work. It is not simply a question of avoiding the appearance of bitchiness. It is hard to remind people of her defects without at the same time reminding them of her virtues. Bossy, arrogant, narrow, or decisive, energetic, concentrating — or inescapably, annoyingly both? Perhaps the most effective tribute so far was in one of those spiffing Guardian leaders of the old sort, which was full of the usual lofty criticisms but which yet conceded that `anyone who comes after Thatcher must confront seriously and agnostically the fact that such concepts as personal ownership, individual moral responsibility, willingness to innovate, impatience with bureaucracy and hostility to restrictive practices are much more firmly embedded in the nation- al mood then they were before Thatcher'. I don't know whether even Conservative Central Office would go that far.
But if this dramatic embedding in the national mood is the by-product of a shrill, hectoring, abrasive, uncaring, narrow `style of government', then ought we not to look again at what we mean by style in politics and at the importance we attach to it?
Mr John Biffen has adorned the Thatch- er Cabinet and the leadership of the House like no other holder of his office in living memory. His playful ironies, his gentle ambiguities (as feline as Rab Butler's), his sense of the mood of Parliament (as sensitive as Baldwin's), his occasional wild guffaw, how they have enlivened our after- noons. Almost all his prophecies turn out to be true; his judgment is as sound as a
pippin; he is usually right. But as all grown-ups know, being right is not enough. He has fallen out of favour, not for his Wet views (he was One of Us' before there was an Us) but for his dry wit. The much loved 'semi-attached member of the Cabinet' is, it seems, to be wholly detached after the general election.
To the insider's world of politicians and political journalists, that prospect is like the return of sweet-rationing. The gaiety, the sodality of Westminster would be diminished. Alas, to the outside world, all this seems to be a matter of relative indifference. In most voters' scale of priori- ties, verbal felicity ranks some way behind concrete results. For sodality, read sod all. The illusion about the importance of style in politics — a hangover, I suspect, from the club politics of the 19th century — is rather like the left-wing view of politics as a religion-substitute in which all political questions become profoundly and pas- sionately moral questions. Both views are too high-flown; they are futile attempts to rise above or escape from the prosy practi- calities of what voters actually want.
Labour's defence policy is a loser be- cause it does not hang together. Labour's policy of reviving mass picketing is simply unsaleable. The two-Davids structure of the Alliance is a loser because everyone knows that a government has to have a single head. The 'hung-Parliament' strategy is a loser because the steps leading up to a coalition committed to proportional representation — and hence to a perma- nent Alliance share in government — do not follow logically.
Mr Kinnock and Dr Owen have both, on the whole, fought competent campaigns. If neither in the end makes the hoped-for impact, I suspect it will be because they were too soft with their parties over the last four years, too stylish, too attractive, in other words, too Biffenish and not suffi- ciently Thatcherite. If Mr Kinnock had told the trade unions that their only hope was to accept the Tory trade union laws and if he had told the Left that decommis- sioning Polaris would only be possible as part of an East-West arms deal, he would doubtless have had a very unpleasant time, but did anyone imagine that political pow- er could be won or held without a little unpleasantness? Small ginger neutered toms may breed affection, but that is all they breed.
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