POLITICS
Mid-term in Mid-Staffordshire: a closer-run thing than they think
NOEL MALCOLM
Lichfield veryone is going to be so confused at the election,' a young politician told me in Bucharest last week. 'There are so many parties now, even I don't know who half of them are. You don't realise how lucky you are to have the British political system.' Twenty-four hours later. inspecting the list of candidates for the mid-Staffordshire parliamentary by-election, I did at least realise how lucky I was not to have to explain it all to a Rumanian.
How would one elucidate, for example, the precise difference in political comple- xion between Mr David Sutch (Official Monster Raving Loony Party) and Mr Stuart Basil Fawlty Hughes (Raving Loony Green Giant Supercalifragilistic Anti-Poll Tax Party)? What about Miss Lindi St Claire Love (National Independent Cor- rective Edification)? The typesetters of the Rugeley Newsletter were sufficiently mysti- fied by that last one to print it as the `National Independent Correct Edifice' Party — which suggests either that they lead sheltered lives in this part of Stafford- shire, or that they think at least one party should be there to represent Prince Char- les's views on architecture. And with 14 parties in the ring, who would be- grudge another one?
Fortunately for the commentator, only five of these parties are worthy of serious consideration; and three of those five (Liberal Democrats, Greens and SDP) have been jogging along in the opinion polls at 5 per cent or less. This may be fortunate for commentators, but is a mis- fortune for the Liberal Democrat candi- date, Mr Tim Jones. A pleasant, mild- mannered man with beady eyes and a rather care-worn look, he has fought this constituency at the last two general elec- tions, polling more than 25 per cent of the vote in 1983 and over 23 per cent in 1987. If recent opinion polls giving him 2 per cent are at all accurate, this must mean that the support for the old Liberal-SDP Alliance here came mainly from disaffected Labour voters, and that those voters have now been re-affected. But I suspect that Mr Jones's local reputation, combined with some rather foxy campaigning (for exam- ple, an anti-poll tax petition in his name which people are encouraged to sign whether or not they agree with his party's idea of a local income tax) will chip away several more percentage points from the Labour vote on 22 March.
If the election were held now, of course, all the evidence suggests that Labour would win it. If it had been held on the very first day of campaigning, the evidence then suggested that Labour would have won a colossal victory. On Sports Day at my prep school there was a curious event in the swimming competitions, which in- volved diving into the pool and then drifting, head down and motionless, to see who could travel furthest before either halting altogether or raising his head for air. The Labour candidate, Mrs Sylvia Heal, seems to be similarly hoping that her initial impetus will carry her to victory and similarly keeping her mouth shut.
The Tory accusation that Mrs Heal will not answer questions is unfair. Mrs Heal does answer questions (from journalists, anyway), and these answers are distinctive because they are the only occasions, it seems, when she will actually speak with- out a prepared text in front of her. Even her little pep-talks at the morning press conferences are read from a script. Asked about this, she said the scripts were all her own work. Some of my colleagues doubted that claim, but I was convinced by a couple of lines from her speech on provision for the handicapped, which even the bathos- mongers of Walworth Road would surely have blenched at: 'Mrs Thatcher talks about standing on your own two feet. How do you think that makes disabled people feel?'
`Cool', 'composed', 'immaculately pre- sented': these are some of the phrases that have been used to describe her, but the truth is that Mrs Heal looks like a cross between a clothes-conscious headmistress and Glenys Kinnock on Valium. Her adherence to the Kinnockian party line is also punctilious — so much so that she seems afraid to project any personal views at all. At one press conference a Guardian journalist asked a not-too-difficult trick question: 'If you are elected, will the people of mid-Staffordshire be getting an independently minded MP?' They will be getting a Labour MP', she replied, in the tones, more patient than reproving, of someone correcting a foreigner with an inadequate grasp of English.
Charles Prior, the Tory candidate, is also a loyalist. 'I am fully supportive of Mar- garet Thatcher' is a phrase he repeats at regular intervals. He knows, of course, that Mr Michael Heseltine is too canny a politician to want to do any observable damage to his party in this by-election (which is more than can be said for some of Mr Kinnock's troublesome MPs). But Mr Prior's campaign also takes care to present him as something other than a hard-line Thatcherite, harping on about his child- hood experience of pastoral visits with his father (a Church of England vicar) and suggesting that the damp mantle of his uncle (Lord Prior) now rests on his shoul- ders, and he does at least have the face and manner to go with it: red, beefy features, an engagingly goofy, boggle-eyed grin, a forthright style of public speaking and a willingness to admit mistakes.
The one mistake which Mr Prior is unfortunately unable to admit is the im- position of the poll tax — which, by common consent, is the leading issue of this campaign. 'I find that it's politicising people who would never have talked about politics before,' Mrs Heal told me. 'They come up to me to speak about the poll tax, and then they start talking about the general nature of government policy.' This may simply mean that people feel happier clothing their financial self-interest in the garments of ideology or morality. It can work both ways: many of the people I have spoken to here have begun by telling me that they will be better off under the poll tax, and gone on to say that it is a fairer system for old people on their own, or more just towards households with several earners.
Unfortunately for Mr Prior, it is in the nature of by-elections that those who wish to protest against government policy have more of a motive to go to the polling booths than those who are content. By- election voters are also less concerned with the inadequacy of opposition policies, be- cause they know that they are electing only a new MP, not a new government. Given Labour's huge and sustained lead in the polls, it is hard to foresee anything other than a Labour victory here. Nevertheless, I believe it will be a much closer-run thing than the pollsters are allowing at present. A rise in support for Mr Jones, a slacken- ing of interest in Mrs Heal's inertial, line-toeing campaign, and above all the superior organisation of the local Tory party workers in getting the vote out: all this suggests to me a very narrow margin- Mr Prior is still in with a chance.
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