WEAK in POLITICS

“The last throw of the dice” is the main headline on today’s Guardian front page over a report on the PM’s conference speech. I immediately banged off my letter to the paper: “I didn’t realize the general election was this week”. They won’t run it, though. They don’t much care for my letters haranguing them for their coverage.

The continuing assumption in the media that the election is already lost is seriously damaging the credibility of the media itself as well as undermining the Prime Minister. That the Tories will win is entrenched as a foregone conclusion so that it gradually transforms into a self-fulfilling prophesy: there will come a point when so many natural and potential Labour voters take as read, consciously or subconsciously, that it’s all over bar the shouting that they won’t bother to go out to vote; the no-shows will mount into such numbers that the more motivated Tory vote must prevail.

The standfirst on Polly Toynbee’s column yesterday said it all: “The election may be lost, but an inspired fightback could give its bright young candidates the chance to rebuild the party”. That isn’t actually what she wrote in her piece – standfirsts, like extracted quotes, frequently rewrite or paraphrase the source and then the meaning changes – but it fairly summarises the stance that she and every other Guardian columnist has taken for a year and more.

You might expect them to remember their electoral history. We’ve all seen the famous wire photograph of President Harry S Truman holding aloft like a victory emblem the premature front page story “Dewey Wins”, another result that was a foregone conclusion. I vividly recall a double-page spread in The Observer (not then The Guardian’s stable-mate) the Sunday before the election of 1970: it was headlined “The agony of Edward Heath”. The following Sunday, Heath was forming his government. That story was wrong five days before the election, not eight months. But, as I’ve noted here before, the BBC’s exit poll gave Labour the victory on the night of the 1992 election and Bob Worcester called the presidency for John Kerry on the night of the 2004 American elections. Angela Merkel was not expected to be comfortably re-elected last weekend in Germany, even after the polls closed. It ain’t over till it’s over.

Now admittedly all but the first of these failed predictions are over-estimations of the vote won by parties of the centre-left, whether in government or opposition. Electorates everywhere tend to the cautious and conservative and indeed Conservative. Parties of the right – including old Communist parties and other reactionary forces – tend to think of themselves and to be seen by their electorates as “the natural party of government”. Parties that are liberal in fact as well as in name – the Liberal Parties in Australia and Canada would not be deemed very liberal by most liberal-inclined people in Britain – tend to be elected only as brief respites from long-serving and/or corrupt right-wing regimes that have lost significant support in the largely apolitical middle ground.

Even after 13 years in power – its longest stint ever in Britain – Labour is objectively the alternative rather than the default ruling party. If the Tories don’t come back in 2010, that really will signal a seismic shift in Britain’s political landscape.

What we voters need to bear in mind – and the politicians even more so – is that the election won’t be won and lost until election day itself. What happens then is what counts and nothing before then – no opinion poll, no columnist’s opinion, no conventional wisdom among the chattering classes – means diddly-shit. Until then, as William Goldman wrote repeatedly in his enthralling account of working in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade: “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING” [his caps]. The confident assumption of all the commentators is futile and pointless. If they turn out to be wrong, they look incredibly foolish (and I shall be writing another letter for The Guardian to decline to publish, urging the paper to sack its high-paid “experts”). If they turn out to be right, where’s the triumph in subscribing to so commonplace an opinion? Who will have the neck to crow “told you so”? Perhaps only me if Labour is returned.

To her credit (although, frankly, it’s not much credit, now, is it?), Toynbee did, in her piece today, address some of the policy both stated in and omitted from Brown’s conference speech yesterday. But she still described it, at the outset, as “not ‘the speech of a lifetime’ they said he must make. But it was probably the last prime ministerial conference speech of his lifetime”. Her paper’s coverage didn’t quote a key passage in Brown’s address – “ the election to come will not be about my future. It’s about your future: your job, your home, your children’s school, your hospital, your community. It’s about the future of your country” – because it doesn’t suit the media’s concentration on personalities, crises and party manoeuvres. If the media chose to concentrate on policy and ideology, it would have to forego the simpler fun of constructing the verbal equivalent of a Steve Bell cartoon version of politics.

The danger is that, in following broadcasting’s reduction of politics to a kind of game show for (political) celebrities, the written media changes the nature of the democratic process. If the election of 2010 becomes an X Factor final between Brown, Cameron and Clegg rather than a well-informed national reaction to the direction of national policy, a rather different question is being asked and answered even than was resolved by the American electorate as recently as last November.

At least one distraction has been laid to rest by the conference – temporarily, anyway. Last weekend, the media was again speculating about Brown’s chances of actually leading Labour into the next election. Already, that fox has been shot. It shows how a couple of days can rewrite the agenda. Now Labour needs to despatch another canard, the one that says that Labour “cannot” win the election. Actually, this is not so difficult. The media has long experience of striking a stance that is completely antithetical to the pose it adopted just last week and assuming that its audience will notice no discrepancy. “There is nothing in life that is inevitable” Gordon Brown concluded yesterday. “It is the change you choose”. He’s not wrong.