SHARED OPINION
The Royal College of Spin Doctors plans to make gynaecological history
FRANK JOHNSON
Last week I suggested, in this space, that trouble lay ahead for the Prime Minis- ter's hitherto untroubled career. Mr Living- stone will become London Mayor. He might form an independent Labour party. That would split the Labour or anti-Tory vote at the general election. I could have added that Labour would also lose plenty of seats to Nationalists in Scotland and Wales, and that the Liberal Democrats would lose them to Conservatives in Eng- land. Blair's preposterous 1997 majority would thus be greatly reduced. His next term will be much more precarious than this one. The trouble is about to begin. On 4 May, as well as losing London to Mr Liv- ingstone, Mr Blair will lose a lot of England to the Tories in the local elections. In May we would see, for the first time, how Mr Blair copes with adversity. So I thought last week. But I had forgotten one little thing, or rather, one little person. I had forgotten: The Baby.
This week it dawned on me that in May, shortly after those election results, the Blairs' child will enter this world. With it Mr Blair's popularity will return as if it had never gone. Only Mr Livingstone, old Labour and the nastier Tories will retain their ill-will towards him. Among the rest of us, all will be forgotten and forgiven. For as yet we can but imagine the publicity which will attend the birth and first year — a pre- election year — of this child. The Blairs will ensure the most expensive media intrusion into their family life.
Handel chose the appropriate sacred words to set to a chorus in Messiah: Tor unto us a child is born. Unto us a son [or daughter] is given. And the government shall be upon his [or her] shoulder.' This will be the first time in gynaecological his- tory that a child has been delivered, not by a family doctor, but by a spin doctor. All the leading practitioners in the complex field of advanced spin will be aside the natal bed. They will be led by Dr Peter Mandelson, president of the Royal College of Spin Doctors. He performed the recent operation removing the chins of hundreds of soldiers of the Household Division. The operation was filmed by Irish television. Dr Mandelson is New Labour's Dr Christiaan Barnard, becoming in 1997 the first sur- geon to carry out — from the Conservative middle classes to Labour — a successful votes transplant. All cynical press comment on the birth will be rendered somnolent by a Dr Alastair Campbell, anaesthetist.
These dedicated men have supervised the accouchement since the moment of concep- tion. This latter, it may be remembered, was at first reported as having taken place while Mr and Mrs Blair were on holiday in France last summer. At which Dr Mandel- son and his colleagues noted that France contained no marginal seats likely to affect a British general election. Conception was therefore changed to a more suitable place in Britain. At the moment the team is divid- ed over whether to imply that that place is a middle-class South-Eastern marginal, or close to one of those industrial museums exhibiting spinning jennies and simulated slag-heaps, in one of those 'Labour heart- lands' about whose loyalty the doctors are at present so worried. In either case the location will become a place of pilgrimage for the simple corporate chief executives who make up New Labour's backbone.
In due course, after the birth, Mr and Mrs Blair will tell their story to a tabloid, preferably a Tory one: how they had given up all hope of a child who would make their majority complete; then they submit- ted to Dr Mandelson, who prescribed the treatment that gave them the miracle child (pictured). In the Commons, Mr Hague will offer the Prime Minister graceful congratu- lations at the first opportunity. For months, Mr Blair, if in trouble at Question Time, will imply that he is not at his best because his sleep was not entirely untroubled the previous night. We shall all, save those aforementioned unrelenting enemies, be charmed.
I know that I will. I believe that what Bagehot wrote on a royal wedding is also true of a royal birth. It is 'the princely edi- tion of a universal fact and as such it rivets [by which Bagehot meant brings together] mankind'. Not since 1849, when Lord John Russell was the father, has a child been born to a prime minister in office, though presumably we cannot be sure about Lloyd George. The Russell child became the father of Bertrand Russell. The New Labour faithful, who do not much prize philosophers, will hope that the Blair child will become the mother or father of the mid-21st century's equivalent of the head of an Internet company specialising in focus groups and 'corporate presentation'. What can Mr Hague do to rival the renewed pop- ularity which this babe — the ultimate Blair babe — will bring Mr Blair? The remedy I phrase it as delicately as I can — is in his own hands.
Amemorial service took place last week for Richard Lamb, who died in November aged 88. Wiltshire landowner, soldier, perennial Liberal candidate, Spec- tator book reviewer, author of a first book at 74 (Montgomery in Europe) — he is men- tioned here now, in particular, because he started one of the most brilliant correspon- dences in this magazine's history. I can claim to have provoked it — to have been its Gavrillo Princip. On this page I had reminisced about a conversation with Sir Edward Heath in which I had supported the 1938 Munich agreement and Sir Edward Heath, who had campaigned against it as a young man, still denounced it.
`Edward Heath is correct; Frank Johnson is wrong,' began Lamb's first letter. But I found a formidable ally in Mr Michael McAllen, someone unknown to me, writing from Norfolk and quoting Hitler as saying: `In 1938 I ought to have seized the initia- tive, instead of letting it be thrust upon me in 1939.' Lamb struck back: 'Michael McAllen should know that Hitler seldom spoke the truth.' Lamb and Mr McAllen fought a series of hand-to-hand letters across our correspondence page for months. Mr McAllen, like Britain in 1941, found a Russian ally from the East: Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who attacked Lamb's claim that the Soviet Union was serious about aiding Czechoslovakia in 1938. Lamb fired back official documents from the archives of several nations. During the struggle, he would tell me on the telephone, 'I think we've got them on the run.' In vain did I remind him that I was one of the 'them'. Being a typical Englishman, he could not believe that a typical Englishman, as he saw me, could support Munich. Then I ceased to be editor and the war suddenly ended; both sides probably believing, like the Ger- mans after 1918, that they had not lost on the battlefield but were stabbed in the back by the collapse of authority on the home front. There must be still more to say about Munich. Will my remarks here now be seen as an attempt to re-open old wounds? Richard Lamb's shade will hope so.
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