Brown, like Major, is falling prey to the media’s habit of linking unrelated stories
Before Christmas, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Sir John Major gave his thoughts on politics ancient and modern. Since leaving Downing Street Sir John has been sparing with his public appearances, and because he has always commanded personal respect and has a fair-minded way of talking, these occasional interventions get attention. The moderation of his language, however, should not distract us from the sharpness of his views.
What attracted the headlines this time were Major’s pointed remarks about ‘sleaze’. He said that in the case of the present government, but not (despite media impressions) his own, sleaze had become ‘systemic’. He did not deny that during the last years of Conservative government in the 20th century a relentless media and opposition barrage attached the word ‘sleaze’ indelibly to the word ‘Tory’, but Sir John insisted that corrupt behaviour in those days was associated with individuals rather than an entire party or government. There was no institutional culture of sleaze. Today, he said, it is different.
This set me thinking. Between 1993 and (for John Major) the end, such was the accumulation of unsavoury stories involving Conservative MPs that, when I was writing my book Great Parliamentary Scandals (now in its fourth edition), my researchers and I gave up individual chapter headings for many of the stories from the Major years, and included instead a bumper chapter called ‘Steve Norris, Tim Yeo, Uncle Tom Cobley & All — 199397. Back to Basics’. After that we had to write another chapter, ‘Graham Riddick, David Tredinnick & Many More — 1994-96. Cash for Questions’. And then another: ‘David Ashby — 1994-96, ‘They’re a Bunch of Shits’.
The tales were easily agglomerated thus. So what did Sir John mean when he remarked to Andrew Marr that in his own day sleaze was individual, whereas now it is ‘systemic’? I picked up an old edition of my book and reread — for the first time in a decade — all those chapters. How do the stories look now?
At the shallowest level they were systemic in this sense: they do not stand alone. Alone, any one of them would tumble immediately into insignificance. I could add the names Michael Mates, Harvey Proctor, Keith Best, Alan Amos and a few more besides, and their misdeeds too (if misdeeds they were) now seem barely worth recounting. Only as part of what felt at the time like a wave, after a decade that had offered the headline-writers bigger names and juicier stories, could they be seen as confirming a pattern.
Yet when we re-examine those bigger names and juicier stories — the ‘Iraqi supergun’ affair and Scott Report, David Mellor’s and (earlier) Cecil Parkinson’s marital misadventures, and some arguably more seriously inappropriate ministerial behaviour by Jonathan Aitken, still the impression persists that none of these stories (except just possibly the Aitken story, aggravated by perjury) is anything like as shocking as it seemed at the time. Highly embarrassing for the individual, no doubt, but were they ‘scandals’ that would deserve that name in a study of contemporary history?
Take that chapter on David Ashby. It is shaming that we even thought it worthy of note. Ashby, no minister but a Tory backbench MP, was said to have shared a hotel bed with a man in France. And that’s it — that’s all. Yet the story gripped the media for some time and was given new legs when Mr Ashby was unwise enough to sue the Sunday Times. But he only sued because the so-called sensation was ruining him.
I remind you of the detail because, for me, this story represents the moment when the media madness peaked. There were pictures in the quality newspapers of an artist’s impression of Mr Ashby as he appeared in the witness box, wearing an elephantine anti-snoring headset with a sort of breathing-trunk, to demonstrate just how unsexual a night with the MP would in fact have been. Later came the tale of another Tory backbench MP, Piers Merchant, who had (or hadn’t) kissed a girl on a park bench when the tabloid reporter who had organised the entrapment was in the bushes taking notes. Yet another Tory MP suffered media infamy when he didn’t — repeat, didn’t — have an affair with his secretary, but wrote her a romantic poem.
So, yes, ‘systemic’ in the sense that all these tales could be agglomerated into a single ‘narrative’ about Tory politicians in sexual or financial trouble; but the ‘system’ in the frame here is the news media, which the opposition was happy (always will be) to feed. Fleet Street created the ‘wave of sleaze’. That’s what newspapers do. It’s systemic in print journalism to introduce spurious links between unconnected stories in order to build a central narrative.
Our tools are expressions like ‘meanwhile’, ‘as’, ‘in the wake of’, ‘following’ and ‘after’ with the happy knack of conflating coinci dence with co-ordination, subsequence with consequence. After reports surfaced of a Tory minister’s twisting the truth about arms purchases, following accusations that a Tory backbencher had taken lobbyists’ money to put down questions in Parliament, and as John Major struggled to answer allegations about multiple share applications by a Tory MP, one of his backbench colleagues was accused of lying about his sexuality; meanwhile a Tory committee chairman has cheated on his wife; and all this in the wake of a Commons furore over another minister’s love child.
In the sense, however, that something about that particular government as a ‘system’ was conducive to sleaze, the charge does not stick. Major is right: most of this misbehaviour was furtive and solitary, not sponsored or encouraged by government or party. The media sensed and fed a growing national dislike of Tories, and a search began for sticks with which to beat them. ‘Sleaze’ was one. The source of the underlying dislike (I would submit) was a feeling that the Tories had been brutal and arrogant. But that’s another argument.
How about Major’s indictment of Labour today as systemically sleazy? I would not follow him so far. In its attitude to the rules about fundraising, Labour’s professional party organisation does seem to have become careless or heedless; and Tony Blair’s approach to the rich may have encouraged this. There have been isolated cases, too (like the Ecclestone affair, mentioned by Major), which suggest complicity by senior politicians. Cash-forhonours pushed one form of corruption in British politics too far, even if Labour did not invent it. But the surprise and horror evinced by Cabinet ministers when the proxy-donor scandal broke this winter appeared genuine, and I doubt it will be possible (or fair) to indict the entire party or its leadership.
The danger (I think) for Gordon Brown is different. Systemic demons do threaten his administration, but they threaten as they threatened John Major’s. Journalists are beginning to string together those little meanwhiles and in-the-wake-ofs.
As the year turns, and if the world were generally impressed by Gordon Brown and disposed to like him, little failures would not be being linked by little conjunctions into a big story. If ‘Labour sleaze’ becomes the story in 2008, it will be a consequence, not a cause, of this administration’s unpopularity.
Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.
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