Nonchalanguage the anatomy of political jokes
Ferdinand Mount
Political debate is peculiarly vulnerable to good jokes. For one thing, good jokes are rare. Political activity is so incessant and time-consuming and the politician called on to assume attitudes of solemnity towards so many things that it is not often he can muster either the wit or the detachment to make a first-class wisecrack. At the same time, the tedium of politics is often so mind-numbing and the flow of words so relentless that the audience's resistance is low, If the joke really is any good, the audience — I mean the professional audience of MPs, journalists, academics and administrators — breaks up, falls about, rolls in the aisles and raises the roof.
The political joke thus acquires the explosive force of a land-mine. With one massive whoomph it destroys the most carefully planned attack and renders the road unusable. It is characteristically the weapon of the side which already holds the ground in politics, therefore of the governing side. The Opposition may let off the most brilliant fusillade of wisecracks, but when the smoke has cleared the government is still left in occupation of power. One joke by a Prime Minister, however, can totally demolish an Opposition attack and, More significantly still, render that particular line of attack ineffective for a useful period.
It is essential then for a Prime Minister to master that special type of brutal nonchalance which is his indispensable last line of defence. Mr Callaghan has it to a T — or rather to a Mrs T, At the height of the argument about direct elections to the European Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister whether he stood by his clearly given dictum that collective Cabinet responsibility 'includes all Ministers who must be prepared to defend government policy at all times.' Mr Callaghan replied: 'Yes, Sir. I certainly think that the doctrine should apply, except in cases where I announce that it does not,' Collapse of Opposition party. Helpless mirth. House corpses.
Mr Callaghan's reply includes several elements which complement one another to produce the desired effect: effrontery, indifference to principle and assertion of power. There is implicit in this kind of joke an assumption of largeness, of rising above and beyond trivial questions of doctrine and policy. The remark may seem also to contain some element of self-contradiction. After all, a doctrine which applies to all Ministers at all times cannot apply only some of the time. The doctrine that Mr Callaghan really intends to apply is that of his own overarching supremacy, his right to transcend these petty political guidelines. The Prime Minister's technique was again well shown last week when Mrs Thatcher asked him to repudiate the views expressed in the Morning Star by his fellow Labour MP, Mr Sydney Bidwell — a recent chairman of the Tribune group — views which Mr Bidwell said were virtually identical with those of the Communist Party except that Mr Bidwell would not rule out civil war to achieve his aims. The Prime Minister replied that he had always regarded Mr Bidwell 'as a philosophical revolutionary rather than one who really understands how a machine gun works'. Was Mr Callaghan then, Mrs Thatcher persisted, 'content to rely on the support of such fellow travellers to keep him in power'? Mr Callaghan replied: 'I could, of course, give the right hon. lady my views on these matters, but unfortunately I do not seem able to endow her with a sense of humour.'
Howls of mirth. Sides held. Thighs slapped. Here I should quote from the letter of protest written to the Guardian by Mr Douglas Eden, of the Social Democratic Alliance, on the reactions of the press to Mrs Thatcher's questioning: 'Michael White (Guardian 6 July) found her argument "melodramatic" and overruled by her "lack of feel for the mood of the Commons"; according to John O'Sullivan (Daily Telegraph) Mrs Thatcher took "schoolgirl pluck to an unwise extreme"; Hugh Noyes (The Times) saw her in one of her "reds under the bed" phases with "much to learn about political repartee", and "rashly pursuing her point". Thus was Mrs Thatcher written off by the denizens of the press gallery who reserved their approval for the elegant evasive footwork of the Prime Minister, apparently more impressed by stylish entertainment and jokes than by content and truth.
'We can perhaps discount parliamentary sketch writers on the grounds that, in the main, they are legitimately a branch of the entertainment industry: to be taken rather less seriously than theatre critics. The tragedy (though a compliment to them) is that they were, so far as we can tell, reflecting accurately the "mood" of the House. It did not want to believe Mr Bidwell and his statements were of any significance, and the Prime Minister obligingly relieved the tension of a subject which many MPs, not all of them Labour, find very uncomfortable.'
Well, you may say, and whose fault is that? If politicians do not know how to take care of themselves and how to pursue a serious point effectively in the teeth of flippancy, that is their look-out. The trouble is that it is our look-out too. This brutal nonchalance — or Nonchalanguage — is no novelty. Wasn't Henry Ford talking Nonchalanguage when he said 'You can have one of my cars any colour so long as it's black'? Stalin was a consummate Nonchalinguist too. 'How many divisions has the Pope?' is pure Noncha. Caligula spoke Noncha, not least when he appointed his horse a consul. I do not know whether the genial Mr Victor Matthews had something of the same intention when he said on taking office as the new chairman of Beaverbrook Newspapers: `By and large, the editors will have complete freedom as long as they agree with the policy I have laid down.' Certainly Harold Macmillan's description of the resignation of his entire Treasury team as 'a little local difficulty' was in the Noncha tradition, • Even academic disquiet about the growth of public expenditure remained muted throughout the early 1960s, as Macmillan was translated into Supermac. Peter Thorneycroft's reasons for resigning from the Treasury sank below the surface and stayed there long after he himself bobbed up again. With hindsight, it now seems obvious that the failure to realise the dangers of government overspending destroyed the Heath administration as well as blighting the British economy for ten or fifteen years. Mr Macmillan's effective squashing of the argument about the causes of inflation cannot be excluded from blame. And it could well be argued that 'a little local difficulty' was the single most disastrous phrase uttered by a British politician since the war. Yet at the time, how we all roared!
It may sound curmudgeonly to complain about jokes in a world which is commonly thought (though not by me) to contain an insufficient supply of them. But the truth is that Noncha is not in essence a branch of wit or humour. It is really a type of disguised egoism. The element of surprise masks the awfulness of the self-assertion. Noncha belongs to the same category of ghastly fun as the story told by almost every celebrity in which the celebrity is lavishly flattered by a stranger who eventually turns out to have mistaken him for another equally famous celebrity. The story purports to be at the narrator's expense; in fact, its underlying point is to confirm that he enjoys the same status as the other celebrity. The long-term effect of Noncha is to degrade the level of political debate and impoverish its vocabulary. For Noncha draws attention to the facts of power while sneering at any discussion of the moral credentials of that power or the uses to which it might best be put. Noncha makes any attempt at seriousness seem pompous and academic. Instead, it imposes a flat, cynical and flippant mode of political conversation. A community habituated to Noncha is liable over a period to get out of practice at justifying its own existence, to lose touch with its moral origins and so to become fatally vulnerable to any strong external challenge.
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