POLITICS
New, special formula SLD: contains proactive Paddy.
NOEL MALCOLM
The story is told that when the present editor of The Spectator was guilty, as a schoolboy, of organising some particularly outrageous misdemeanour, his housemas- ter sighed and said: 'I don't know why it is that Charles has such influence over the other boys. I can't explain it. He's just one of those people who has . . . miasma.'
'Charisma' is a strange newcomer to the vocabulary of modern politics, borrowed from Greek theology via German sociolo- gy. English political life had managed perfectly well without this word for several centuries; but suddenly, it seems, the term has become indispensable. I suspect that 'miasma' would do just as well.
When I attended the first 'party hustings' of the SLD leadership election (a meeting in Birmingham at which both candidates gave speeches and answered questions), I was able to observe the making of miasma at close quarters. Mr Paddy Ashdown knows that his swashbuckling, leader-of- men image is his strongest suit, and he is trying hard to develop a style of speaking to go with it. As his voice hardens, his eyes narrow and his head tilts back slightly until he is staring into a distant sunset of the mind. A thrill runs through the audience as they realise that they are seeing a true orator in action. (They know that is what they are seeing, because it is how true orators look on television.) Gradually, Mr Ashdown's script fills up with those in- cantatory passages which are the favourite mannerism of Mrs Thatcher's speech- writers: strings of sentences, each one of which repeats the same opening formula.
Then, suddenly, the tone changes. An admonitory, head-shaking 'But I must tell you, colleagues . . .'; or a firmer, almost peremptory, 'And I tell you this . . . '; or perhaps a knowing, worldly-wise 'The fact of the matter is . . .'. This last phrase is invariably followed by a heavy pause: whatever the fact which he goes on to tell his listeners, they sense that it is less important than the fact that here is a man who tells people what the fact of the matter is.
At this point, comparison to Dr Owen is unavoidable. Although Mr Ashdown joins in the ritual denunciations of the doctor, he knows that his own popular support in the party draws deeply on the subliminal yearning for an Owen-substitute. He plays carefully on the leadership theme in his speeches; instead of talking about 'strong' leadership, which might be understood as dangerously authoritarian by tender Liber- al consciences, he says instead that he wants to be a 'proactive' leader. This is not understood at all, but it sounds energetic in a rather technological sort of way. (To me, it sounds like something you would find on a new washing powder or sun-tan lotion: 'Contains new, proactive Biomin'. It is in fact the opposite of 'reactive': a proactive leader, therefore, is a leader who leads.) When Dr Owen told you what the fact of the matter was, there was always a sense of iconoclasm about him: here, you felt, was a man who would admit the uncomfortable truths which other politicians preferred to ignore. It was in this spirit, for example, that he admitted last year that the Alliance could not expect to win an outright major- ity in the general election. When Mr Ashdown adopts the same you-know-as- well-as-I-do tone, however, he does so in order to assert all the comfortable untruths which do so little for the credibility of the SLD. It is now almost an article of faith, for example, that Dr Owen's remarks at the general election were one of the main reasons why the Alliance did not gain an absolute majority in Parliament. 'Our des- tiny', cries Mr Ashdown, 'is not to share government, but to be government'; 'des- tiny' is a rather indefinite term, you might feel, but the audience applauds so grateful- ly that you would think he had already booked the appointment. There is an air of unreality about all the grand theorising which is now on offer concerning the realignment of the Left or the Centre. When Mr Ashdown says that the SLD is a party of the Left, he simply means that it is opposed to Mrs Thatcher. If there had been a Labour government for the last nine years, he would no doubt be calling his party a party of the Right by now. There is little to choose between his position here and that of Mr Alan Beith, the only difference being that Mr Beith is less given to making grandiose claims about realignments and new directions. Even on the SLD's internal spectrum, which runs from ecologist opponents of economic growth at one end to free- marketeers at the other, both candidates are somewhere vaguely right-of-centre. Both will nod, when required to, in the direction of 'green' issues. Mr Beith sug- gests that market forces should be used to close down the nuclear industry, since no purely commercial outfit would now build nuclear power stations; and Mr Ashdown can become quite heated about the ozone layer. 'If you got it in this room', he said at Birmingham, 'it would be about one eighth of an inch thick.' In that case, I decided, it would at least be more substantial than Mr Ashdown's political philosophy.
It would not be fair to say that Mr Ashdown has no new ideas. He has one Memorably loony idie fixe, and a large part of his booklet, After the Alliance: the New Political Agenda is devoted to it.
On the one hand, it is technically possible for the government of the day to know every- thing about everybody all the time; on the other hand, it is technically possible to give all of us access to all the information in the world, through a data terminal in every house. The future nature of our society will crucially depend on which of those options we choose. This Government . . . will use the new technologies as the means by which it can know everything about a people deliberately kept in ignorance.
Mr Ashdown's top priority in govern- ment, he says, would be to spend £6 billion installing data terminals in every house, 'after which I would sit back confidently and watch the revolution happen'. The French, I believe, have already gone some of the way towards this ideal state of affairs by installing 'Minitel' terminals in every home, where they are used mainly for transmitting pornographic messages.
I have no doubt that Mr Ashdown will win the leadership election at the end of this month. He is a visionary, a dreamer of dreams. Mr Beith is merely an intelligent and articulate human being with a great deal of political experience — but no miasma.
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