The remarkable hostility of George W. Bush towards Gordon Brown
The biggest point about last month’s general election was not really that New Labour won, but that democracy lost. The low turnout, debased calibre of debate and half-hearted result amounted as much to a repudiation of politicians as an endorsement of Tony Blair. Government ministers and opposition spokesmen despairingly agree that they have forgotten how to communicate with the voters. There are some faint signs within the Tory party that this sense of alienation from the electorate is beginning to feed into the internal debate that has followed Michael Howard’s decision to quit. But the really serious thinking is going on inside New Labour, whose public intellectuals have embarked on an agonised argument about how to reclaim British democracy. One central theme has already emerged.
New Labour politicians are conscious that politicians have been forced out of the public space that they once had to themselves. It has been stolen from them by the media, by public relations men, by charities and lobbyists and by the arrival of celebrity culture. All of these seem to enjoy a mystical connection with public opinion that politicians can only dream of.
Craig Brown captured this point quite brilliantly in his Telegraph column last Saturday when he wrote, ‘Watching Bob Geldof being interviewed by Kirsty Wark about the G8 summit on Newsnight the other day, I was struck by how closely it resembled one of those quaintly deferential political interviews from the 1950s, in which the interviewer kicks off by asking Mr Macmillan whether he minds awfully answering a question or two.’ Only celebrities — pop stars, footballers, television personalities, novelists once they have reached a certain status — can now rely on the respectful attention that used to be the exclusive lot of the politician. As Tom Bentley of the think-tank Demos notes in his new pamphlet Everyday Democracy, ‘Politics is fighting a losing battle against forms of theatre and spectacle that are more entertaining, and forms of conversation and social exchange that are more meaningful to citizens.’* Tony Blair has understood this point right from the first. Liam and Noel Gallagher of the pop group Oasis were among the earliest visitors to Downing Street after the 1997 election landslide. It is only necessary to cast one’s eyes down the Chequers guest list to see how assiduously the Prime Minister cultivates even B-list celebrities. This month he has taken this tactic one stage further, and allowed a celebrity to set the policy agenda. He and Gordon Brown have made Bob Geldof’s Make Poverty History campaign their own.
The broader political significance of this poverty agenda has not yet been noticed. It has its roots in the terror all mainstream politicians feel at the collapse of mass party politics. The Labour party and the Tory party, which both enjoyed memberships of over one million voters barely a generation ago, today cannot count on more than 500,000 between them. By contrast, the four largest aid agencies — Oxfam, Christian Aid, Action Aid and Save the Children — have the best part of three million members.
This stark contrast explains almost everything. Just before the general election the ace Labour strategist Douglas Alexander, now minister for Europe, delineated the problem in a pamphlet, Telling It Like It Could Be.† ‘Citizens are increasingly participating in activities such as single issue campaigns,’ wrote Alexander, ‘without seeing these as activities in which party politics should or could play a role. Labour needs to engage these people in our vision of the good society.’ Alexander, a key adviser to Chancellor Gordon Brown, argues that Labour must take full advantage of all this energy. His pamphlet, though published before the election, was a manifesto for much that has happened since. It explains exactly why the British government is so mesmerised by the Geldof agenda, and accounts for the perplexing collusion that will take place when the G8 summit takes place in Scotland: the British government conspiring with protesters by urging them to come and disrupt its own event. For New Labour, Make Poverty History will win back the voters lost over Iraq.
It is, of course, good that we should think about Africa, and there is no denying that Bob Geldof is a wonderful man. Nevertheless, there are substantial reasons for concern at this new method of making policy. For one thing, it is not democratic. Africa did not loom large during the general election campaign. Pretty well all MPs report that alarm about mass immigration was a much bigger issue. And yet we have heard nothing about immigration since 5 May. The day after the election Tony Blair announced that he had been chastened by the result, and would spend much more time addressing the domestic agenda. Instead, he has set about the prodigious task, which has frustrated all politicians since Alfred Milner a century ago, of how to solve the African problem. This project is about re-energising lost activists, not appealing to the average voter.
Giving way to pressure groups like Make Poverty History is as bad a way of making policy as surrendering to corporate lobbyists. Its agenda — debt forgiveness and a huge increase in aid — is very hard to defend. As Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society notes, ‘If aid were the solution to Africa’s problems it would be a rich continent by now.’ Tony Blair is open to the same criticism over Africa as over Iraq: that he is guilty of a naive belief in interventionism. The contrast between the British insistence on aid and the American focus on proper governance is very striking.
Nevertheless George Bush did his best for Tony Blair this week in Washington. He is extremely fond of the British Prime Minister, and the real venom is felt towards Gordon Brown. The Chancellor badly upset the White House when he tried to railroad Condoleezza Rice over Africa at a meeting in the British Foreign Office on 4 February. According to well-placed sources, he treated Rice with the same contempt that he normally hands out to Cabinet colleagues. Afterwards the Americans briefed that Brown’s financing plan was poorly thought through and would ‘be forgotten within a year’.
Well-informed sources say that President Bush is proud of what he has done for Africa, and is ‘affronted by the way Gordon Brown is trying to get cheap publicity ahead of the G8’. The US President may well have spent a portion of his private meeting with Tony Blair this week urging the British Prime Minister to remain in power as long as possible. Meanwhile the volume of private briefing against the Chancellor from within the White House is remarkable by any standards.
None of this will do Gordon Brown any harm at all with the Labour party. Quite the reverse: falling out in such a spectacular fashion with the White House, and the prospect of a sharp cooling in the special relationship with Brown at No. 10, will help ensure him the succession. Even so, the Chancellor’s clumsy, bullying diplomacy raises real questions about whether he has the calibre to be prime minister.
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