SLEEPWALKING to DISASTER

I am far from sanguine about May 6th. I suspect the number who have made up their minds that they are definitely not going to vote Labour, even though they yet do not know what they will do, is going to prove decisive. It’s hard to believe that Gordon Brown will still be the prime minister come Ascension Day, which is a week after polling.

The pundits are now agreed that the days following the vote will be filled with horse-trading. I am not so sure. I would not be at all surprised if the Tory vote proved stronger than anticipated, strong enough to form an administration without having to go into a huddle with others. Or if there is a rough three-way split, I fear that Gordon Brown will figure he is justified in trying to cobble something together and will then spend several days in fraught mutual vituperation with other politicians (some of them surviving Labour ministers) before finding himself obliged to slink away abjectly and leave the mess for others to clear up, like Edward Heath did in the days after the first 1974 election.

Clegg as the Lib Dem emblem by Steve Bell 2008

The Tories are arguing hard against a three-way split, with Ken Clarke trying to frighten voters by talk of a hung parliament leading to economic meltdown. (We are at the stage, reached in most election campaigns, when parties try to stampede voters with dire warnings and, simultaneously, complain about smears). But of course “hung parliament” is not on the ballot paper and none of us will knowingly vote for stalemate. This is rather like appeals to the public to “stagger your journey” during transport disruption, as if one can stagger one’s journey all by oneself or, in rush hours on the underground, to “use all available doors”: how will I help to relieve the crush if I rush madly in and out of all the train’s doors one after the other?

Most of us will look at the ballot paper on election day and put our cross against either the representative of the party that we would most like to form the next government or against the representative of the party that we think will either benefit most from tactical voting or do the most damage to the party we hate. Some of us will do this knowing that our vote will be in vain, given that only the winner’s votes count in a first-past-the-post system. If the result is a hung parliament, it will not be by the will of the people so much as by the lack of a party and/or leader dominant in the public’s affections, coupled with the particular character of the way the votes are counted. If Ken Clarke and his mates would rather walk away than join with others to try to make one or more minority parties govern effectively, so be it. Cameron seems a little more circumspect on the matter than some of his lieutenants.

At several elections, the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors in the Liberal Party have dared to believe – and perhaps sometimes even had reason to believe – that they were on the verge of a significant electoral breakthrough. Notoriously, at his party conference in 1981, then leader of the Liberals David Steel, who had formed an alliance with the Social Democrats (a breakaway group from the Labour Party), called on his troops to “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government”. At the general election less than two years later, the Alliance won more than a quarter of the vote but less than one twenty-seventh of the seats, 23 in all.

The sudden rise in polling figures for the Lib Dems in the last ten days will not, I suspect, translate into many seats taken. The party has gained notional support at the expense of both the Tories and Labour, evidently more from the latter, though paradoxically this rise will probably hurt the Tories more.

Cameron the hoodie by David Parkins 2006

It is very hard to see why the rise should have come about. I know it’s because the Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, was widely said to have “won” the first of the televised debates; what I don’t understand is why he was so praised for his performance. Coming to it on-line a week late – I was away both on the night of the broadcast and subsequently – I watched in vain for this supposed star quality. I guess it was that most viewers had no sense of what Clegg was like before and were surprised that he was youngish, articulate and didn’t have two heads. As I had listened to him before, none of this knocked me sideways. All I can think is that it was, after all, just as well that the Lib Dems had unceremoniously dumped Ming Campbell because, sound and shrewd though he is, Sir Ming would have seemed even more antediluvian than Gordon Brown, and so David Cameron would have had the younger-than-59 vote all to himself.

In both televised debates so far, Cameron turned out to be unexpectedly ineffectual. In the first round, he barely laid a glove on Brown and left Clegg alone. In the second, he was a little more assertive, save that it came across a bit whiney. This is an objective assessment, not a party one. On a World at One phone-in the day after the second debate, I thought Cameron decisive, smart, nimble-footed, impeccably courteous and even quite sympathetic. If he’s going to make the last telly debate work for him, he’s going to have to up his game in that forum too.

Brown seemed largely in control in the second debate, even risking the odd joke (not always wisely) and riding roughshod over the debating points of the others. This seemed a good strategy but he still did least well in the instant polling so perhaps it is just that large numbers of people have already written him off. In the final debate, I wish he’d do two things. First, he should nail the issue of the increase in National Insurance rates, stop Cameron getting away with calling it “the jobs tax” and make the case for the rise that none of us knows (I certainly don’t), thereby refuting the Tory businessmen who wrote letters in Cameron’s support. As it stands, many viewers must be worrying about what this mysterious “jobs tax” is going to mean for them. The other need is for him to sound an upbeat note. At conference a year or two back, Brown gave a triumphant catalogue of Labour’s achievements in government that had the hall on its feet and gave the lie once and for all to “thirteen wasted years”. He should play that card again in his closing piece on Thursday. I wrote to him to pass on these two suggestions, but I doubt he will get them (in either sense of “get”).

Go Bro by Schrank 2009

Television news and the print media too have gone overboard for the television debates. They have also reinforced the sense that, the Chancellor and his shadows aside, the only politicians who really count are the three party leaders. Given the increasing likelihood that the next half-decade will be under a Conservative government, I think the electorate should have the chance to get a look what is certainly one of the lamest would-be government teams ever set before them. Even if Cameron and Clarke manage to make some sensible decisions between them, the rest will certainly make a hash of it. My prediction is that, by this time next year, the Cameron government will be one of the least popular this nation has ever had. That’ll be small comfort to Lord Brown of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath or Lord Darling of Edinburgh South West.

The emphasis on the battle for 10 Downing Street has squeezed out other aspects of the democratic process as well as other mere ministers and their shadows. I wrote this letter to The Guardian a few days ago: “Dear Sir, I am surprised at your lack of coverage of the important exercise in democracy taking place on May 6th. I refer of course to the local elections in various district and unitary authorities and mayoralties across England and all the English metropolitan and London boroughs. Yours faithfully etc”. Needless to report, the paper has not been pleased to publish it. I begin to wonder if we shall even find out what the local results are this time around.

In the contemporary world, we are told often enough how grave and significant is our democratic right and duty to exercise our voting power. One way and another, however, it seems that the democratic quality of the exercise is being squeezed out of it. Gordon Brown remarked jovially at the start of the second debate that it had the feel of a TV popularity contest and indeed that is just what the whole coverage has. It is the qualities that play well on television – facility, fluency, geniality, bantering without rancour, unflappability -– that increasingly determine the fate of politicians rather than those that used to count – authority, articulacy, forthrightness, reassurance, intellect.

Politicians like Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, John Biffen, Ian Gilmore, Peter Carrington, Ian Mcleod, Jo Grimond, David Penhaligon, Menzies Campbell, John Mackintosh, Bryan Gould, John Smith and others would surely not have thrived in this chat-show culture. It is a culture that values George W Bush over Al Gore or John Kerry, largely because, to many unreflective folk, he seemed like the pleasanter guy to have a beer with. No wonder, then, that Cameron has seemed relatively plausible and that the new kid on the block, Clegg, seems acceptable to large numbers. What a way to run a democracy.