W hen David and Samantha Cameron appeared in the newspapers on
Monday, photographed on the beach at Harlyn Bay in Cornwall, it was a ‘defining moment’. For the first time in our history, a British political leader has clearly benefited from a holiday snap. Harold Macmillan was pictured on a grouse moor, looking socially divisive. Harold Wilson, in shorts and sandals and with pipe on the Isles of Scilly, did not look like a leader of men. Jeremy Thorpe charged up holiday beaches in a hovercraft, wearing a three-piece suit and a trilby hat (am I making this up?). Mrs Thatcher, also in Cornwall, but in a headscarf, was visibly impatient with the whole business of holidays. I seem to remember a half-naked John Major disconsolately holding a beer can on the Costa del something. Then there was Tony Blair, who certainly seemed to enjoy his holidays, but made the mistake of getting free ones off posh people in foreign countries, and therefore exciting envy. The Camerons got it exactly right. They are fulfilling my prediction in pre-Cameron 2005 (I shall boast about it, since no one else will remember) that the Conservatives would only succeed when they started to exemplify the life celebrated in Boden clothing catalogues. This, I wrote, is a modern and relaxed but ‘tonally English’ world ‘in which good careers matter, but family and friends and holidays and jokes matter more’, and where the settings are ‘holiday-ish and chic without being ostentatiously exotic. People ride on bicycles, stroll on boardwalks, drape themselves on driftwood.’ This has come to pass. It helps, of course, that Mr Cameron is pleasant-looking and that Samantha is positively beautiful. But, again like Boden, they did not push it too far. It was a good decision that both were more or less fully clothed (she in long, slightly bohemian skirt), but also barefoot. The contrast with the Prime Minister and his wife was cruelly well calculated by Tory spin-doctors. Although Mrs Brown looks such a nice person, she suffered from being out in poor weather and therefore wearing a cardigan. As for her husband, he appeared pale and confused, like a post-operative patient having his first constitutional outdoors.
To test how the Cameron effect is working, I did an experiment on a friend who, I knew, was going to meet him for the first time at a public event last week. She is an independent-minded thirty-something with her own small company. Until now, she told me, she had thought of Cameron ‘as the sort of annoying I-know-you-fancy-me-really sort of man I would have dreaded being put next to at dinner ten years ago’. I asked her to text me her immediate impressions of her meeting. They were, in full: ‘Surprisingly handsome; not the egg head I xpected. V piercing stare that made me rather nervous & my hands shake. Doesn’t really listen. Def has X-factor but a bit Alice in Wndrland topsy turvey that he will b PM. What an odd world.’ It is odd. Exactly a year ago, the story was so strongly the other way that the media ignored any evidence that would contradict it, and old Tory friends of mine assured me that Mr Brown was a proper conservative patriot from whom we had nothing to fear. Is the same thing happening the other way round today? Could things be less unpromising for Labour than everyone at present thinks? There are two factors worth considering. One is that Labour has not yet regressed to the condition which made it unelectable for so long. It is not deeply divided on policy, not constantly threatened with takeover by the hard Left, and not in thrall to the trade unions. True, all these things are now moving in the wrong direction, but only gradually. The second point is that the electoral arithmetic remains very unfavourable for the Tories. They got only 8,772,598 votes last time (Labour, admittedly, got only 9.5 million). When they last won a general election, in 1992, they got 14,093,007. Although by-elections now show huge swings, the Labour position in this year’s less volatile local elections was not atrocious. In 1978, for example, the Conservatives had 24 seats in Liverpool, 33 in Newcastle and 46 in Manchester. Today, after what was considered their success in May, they have a total of one seat between the three (in Manchester). In the elections to the Greater London Assembly which took place at the same time as Boris Johnson won the mayoralty, Labour increased its vote in 12 out of the 14 boroughs. Yes, Mr Brown is terribly unpersuasive; yes, Labour will be blamed for economic woes; yes, the Labour tide is going out. But it does not automatically follow that, next time, it must lose.
It has become axiomatic ( I have found myself saying it, without thinking) that the public will not stand for yet another change of Labour leader without an election. Is this really true? We may well feel cross at the moment that it happens, but since there would be nothing we could do about it, we would quite quickly settle down if we liked the new person. If we did not, the government would be in no worse a pickle than it is at present. It is now too late for Labour to see through important changes in legislation, or even in policy, before the next election. As the governing party, it retains two key advantages. One is deciding, in effect, who is the Prime Minister and the other is deciding the date of the poll. It must be prepared to use both those powers with absolute ruthlessness.
Apologies for one of last week’s Notes in which I sloppily précised an aspect of my wife’s article for our parish news on the sex life of slugs. It is not, of course, the case that only slugs north of Manchester are hermaphrodites. All slugs are hermaphrodites: like Milton’s angels in Paradise Lost, they ‘can either sex assume, or both’. It is rather that, north of Manchester, self-reproduction is the only way.
Imay have mentioned before the key perception of modern public culture that everyone is always laughing, but nobody has a sense of humour. A prominent current example is the broadcast treatment of the credit crunch and other economic woes. Believing that news about finance is boring, the BBC seems to encourage its reporters — Robert Peston, for example — to punctuate their dispatches with little bursts of laughter. Thus, ‘Well, Evan, now that the — ha, ha — Libor/base rate spread has widened, experts are saying that the outlook for — ha, ha — liquidity going forward is gloomy.’ This trope is like Gordon Brown’s smile — random, inappropriate and therefore disturbing.
The press cannot make up its mind whether it is ‘Obamamania’ or ‘Obamania’. Surely it is the latter. Like the now forgotten ‘Henmania’, the coinage is snappy only if it commingles the two words, rather than simply sticking one onto the other.
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