Why it is not fair to assume that all readers of
Asian Babes are middle-aged Tories The simple question is this: Mr Richard Desmond is prepared to give money to Mr Blair's party, but would he be happy for his daughter to work for Mr Blair?
Almost certainly, he would pretend that he was. He could hardly do otherwise. One can almost hear him saying it: there's a market Out there for what Blair purveys. Politics is not illegal. It's just a bit of fun. The only people being 'exploited' are consenting voters. If they want to buy Blair's stuff about no tax increases and an end to sleaze, they should be allowed to. Above all, Mr Desmond would want his daughter to be happy.
That may even be what he really thinks. He cannot please everyone. Many readers of Mr Desmond's magazine Asian Babes would have been shocked when he was allowed to acquire the Daily Express. Did this mean that Asian Babes would have to become less rude? If so, it would be further proof that concentration of ownership leads inevitably to a decline in standards. But so far such fears have been unjustified. Mr Desmond remains a fit proprietor of Asian Babes.
The magazine is, of course, the most famous of the publications owned by Mr Desmond. Its readership, however, is getting older and older. Many of them started reading it when the Asia supplying the babes was part of the British empire. Over breakfast in Delhi, or at his summer retreat in Simla, Lord Curzon, when Viceroy, would demand of his butler, 'Rajiv. has this month's Asian Babes yet arrived from Bombay?'
To give Mr Desmond his due, he has tried to end Asian Babes's association, in the public mind, with Lord Beaverbrook. The magazine now supports New Labour. It campaigns for more Asian women MPs, and women MPs in general, provided of course that they remain, at all times when in public, naked.
But most potential readers do not yet know any of that. This is a challenge for Mr Desmond's marketing people. The magazine must attract younger readers. The marketing people's job is to convince men that they can be seen with a copy of Asian Babes and not be assumed to be middle-aged Tories. This week has therefore been something of a public-relations disaster for Mr Desmond. He has been linked with a Prime Minister who is now supported only by middle-aged Tories.
He has also been revealed as giving money to people who publish Stephen Byers. But Mr Desmond does not make moral judgments. And just because he gave the Labour party £100,000, it does not mean that there were any clothes attached.
The New Labour pollster, Mr Philip Gould, argues elsewhere in this week's Spectator that the latest means of communication, such as the Internet and email, could help democracy. By means of them, voters would be better able to take part in politics, let politicians know their views, and so on. That, as I understand it, is his argument.
Certainly, these technologies are already making it easier for people to vote, and to make known their views. But is that democratic?
The first thing that should be said, when trying to answer that question, is that, if such technologies did lead to more democracy, it is not certain that Mr Gould would always be pleased with the more democracy that resulted. He is presumably a person of liberal views on what are called the 'social issues' by which these days people's liberalism or lack of it tends to be judged. (Hardly anyone is considered liberal, as people were in Gladstone's day, for favouring the liberal economy: that is, capitalism, the free market. But that discrepancy is another subject.)
Mr Gould's new technologies would easily enable the demos to make it clear, especially after a particularly horrific murder or terrorist outrage, that it wants the politicians to restore capital punishment. Presumably, Mr Gould would not favour the politicians doing so. He, and other liberals, would hope for the anger and passion to pass, and for the demos to return to accepting the rule of the parliamentary and administrative oligarchy that governs the country most of the time. Nor, historically, have new technologies conduced to democracy. They have helped destroy it just as often as they have helped defend it. Roosevelt and Churchill both made brilliant use of the new techno ogy of radio. But so did Hitler, who also benefited from the new technology of the newsreel.
The Demos is easily swayed, especially by the good communicator. Mark Antony was one such. Caesar's assassins unwisely, from the point of view of their cause, allowed him access to the main communications medium of the day: the orator's tribune. He used it to inflame the mob. Opinions may differ here as to who were the democrats. Some say it was the assassins who believed they had just stopped Caesar turning himself into a dictator. Others would say it was Antony who was opposing an unrepresentative junta that had just seized power by murder. Whatever the truth, there is no evidence that the mob so easily aroused by Antony that day was representative of the Roman empire or of Italy in general. In any case, for good or ill, Antony and his associates, when they eventually defeated Caesar's assassins, did not institute democracy. Their rule eventually issued in the sole imperiurn of one of their number, Augustus.
Tbucydides had much to say about fickle democracies. The Athenian assembly of which he wrote seems halfway between a mob and a parliament. To all opponents of direct democracy, his account of the Mytilenaean debate is particularly useful as evidence. The assembly, inflamed by the small city state of Mytilene's doing something contrary to the interests of Athens in her war with Sparta, voted that Athens should send an expedition putting to death all Mytilenaean men of military age and enslaving the rest. But the next day some Athenians had second thoughts, and the assembly was reconvened to think again.
The demagogue Cleon — another good communicator who had persuaded the assembly to the original course was especially contemptuous. But his speech could itself be taken as a warning against demagogues. He tells the assembly, 'You go to see an oration as you would see a sight, take your facts on hearsay, judge of the practicability of a project by the wit of its advocates, and trust for the truth about past events not to your eyes but to your ears — to some clever critics' words . . . slaves to the paradox of the moment. . . . more like the audience of a rhetorician than the council of a city.'
In between Thucydides and today, at least in Britain, there evolved the now much mocked idea of parliamentary democracy: democracy at one remove from the demos. Modern technology could replace that with an electronic mob.
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