THE ELECTION
WHEN THE POLLING HAD TO STOP
The media: Paul Johnson
has some critical reflections on an unsatisfactory campaign
THIS has been a badly-fought and badly- covered election, in which the specific details of party policies have been slow to emerge and the public has been left vague about the decisive differences between them. The media is partly to blame for this. The long run-up to the campaign left viewers and readers bored before it offi- cially started, and both editors and televi- sion moguls have been complaining of strong resistance to the usual saturation coverage. Television, under tight legal obligations, is not flexible about reducing its election output but viewers are about watching it: they have been channel- shopping and video-watching to an unusual degree. Editors, on the other hand, can cut the election column-inches at will and have been doing so. Until the last few days, indeed, national newspapers, both broad- sheet and tabloid, have been playing down the contest. There have been exceptions: the Times among the qualities, the Mirror and Sun among the populars. But it has been striking how often, during a not particularly busy period for general news, all newspapers have turned to non-political subjects for the front-page splashes, and how regularly, too, election stories have been pushed to third or fourth place on television news bulletins.
One reason for the lack of excitement has been the IRA threat to the Prime Minister, which has been taken very seriously and has placed her in a narrow security-envelope throughout the cam- paign. With the best will in the world,, cameramen and reporters, let alone ordin- ary voters, have often been kept away from her, and this has had a severely limiting impact on her style — she thrives on contact, opposition and direct argument as well as making the television coverage of her appearances seem curiously remote and muted. Labour has good reason to be grateful to the IRA, and of course its many hard-left candidates are only too anxious to show it.
The Conservatives have also been under the handicap of longevity in office. Eight continuous years in power, especially under the same prime minister, are rare and produce a factor of hostility, or perhaps one should say irritation, which has nothing to do with logic or reason or the facts, and which to some extent trans- mits itself to the media. Throughout the campaign there was a steady stream of excellent economic figures which have received little coverage (virtually none on television) except in the financial columns. Then again, the longer a government has been in office, the less political, the more administrative, it becomes. On this occa- sion, the Tories have produced an excep- tionally full manifesto with detailed schemes on education and housing, for instance, but they have been presented in a governmental rather than a political man- ner and so have attracted little attention.
By contrast, the Labour manifesto was imprecise about details and some of its more disturbing plans — for instance, the scheme to tax the lump-sum provision of occupational and private pensions — be- gan to emerge only in the final phase of the campaign. Labour strategy, pursued with great consistency and determination and with no scruple at all, has been to say as _ft./ 'And now a prayer for all those on f15,000 and over . . little about its policies as possible, and to concentrate all its efforts on promoting the Leader. The party organisers have been helped in this by a self-denying ordinance among all its hate-figures to stick to the manifesto and otherwise keep mum. How many post-election blank cheques Kinnock has been forced to sign to buy their silence I do not know. In the case of the union bosses, of course, it is clear: repeal of all three of the Conservative reform bills. With the hard Left the answer is less obvious, though a minimum of two seats in the Cabinet is one theory. Kinnock fitted well into this strategy, for his own natural talents, such as they are, are for saying nothing at enormous length. One reason why he does not give clear and precise responses to specific questions is that he really does not know what the answers are. It was obvious last Friday, for instance, at one of his rare London press conferences, that he did not understand Labour's pension and tax plans. Our lad from the Valleys is not one for homework or mugging up. He is a broad-brush man, both for indignation and uplift, especially the latter. Indeed in much of his spouting there is an onwards and upwards note strongly reminiscent of Labour's Great Unmentionable: a Welsh Ramsay MacDo- nald, back from the shades to cloud in Celtic vapour any issue that is going. Watching Kinnock during this campaign has not improved my view of him. If he becomes Prime Minister I fear he will turn out to be secretive, locked in his kitchen cabinet, bad-tempered and vindictive, idle and windy. There is also an incipient streak of intolerance, which of course would grow with power, and a jealousy of colleagues which virtually excluded them — apart from the junior Bryan Gould — from the national campaign. It was Kinnock's per- sonal decision to show his 'presidential commercial' twice.
The inability or unwillingness of the media to cover this campaign properly led it to place undue stress on the polls, and thus confuse an imperfect image of the electorate with its reality. Politicians, too, were mesmerised by the polls, however much they denied it. My own suspicions grew, as the election progressed, that the polls are not a reliable guide to opinion, especially in detail, and that pollsters do a good deal of tinkering with their raw results when they turn out to be unex- pected, which they don't tell us about. Party leaders who allow themselves to be guided by the polls are inviting trouble. On this topic, the Bible (2 Kings xviii 21) is apt: 'Thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it.' Watching the party leaders, day by day, wince or exult at some dubious pollster's statistic left me with a poor opinion of the self-confidence of our ruling elites and their propensity to fall for any pseudo-science on offer.
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