Mandelson is to the National Spin Service what Bevan was to the NHS
FRANK JOHNSON
Reform system of spin doctors, say MPs' (Independent, 13 March). It is all very well for MPs to say that, but how? We all want reform of the spin-doctor service, It has been clear for years that the taxpayer cannot afford to provide round-the-clock spin-doctoring, free at the point of consumption, to every citizen simply because he or she happens to be a Cabinet minister.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. I believe that, when we become Cabinet ministers, we all have a right to a spin doctor, especially in old age. I merely question whether the system of financing is right. A spin doctor for every secretary of state, irrespective of ability to pay, is perhaps New Labour's greatest legacy. The service will forever be associated with the name of Peter Mandelson. He is to the National Spin Service what Bevan was to the NHS. It is doubtful whether the system would have come into being, in its present form, without him.
An idealist, Mr Mandelson lived through the years when Mr Michael Foot had to lead the Labour party without treatment. Mr Foot was left to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph while wearing what the press was allowed to describe as a donkey jacket. Had Mandelson been his doctor, the press would have described it as an Armani mourning jacket. The next thing we knew, soap stars would have been wearing them to fashionable show-business cremations. They would instantly have become known as the coat to die for.
Mr Mandelson vowed that no Labour leader should ever again be allowed to endure such suffering. Mr Mandelson has been adversely criticised, as was Bevan, for having the interests of only one class at heart. It is true that Mr Mandelson cared passionately for the interests of the rich. As a result of his work, Mayfair became to New Labour what Merthyr Tydfil was to Old Labour. Before the last election, every time a Tory charged that a Labour government would increase capital gains tax, a spin doctor was rushed to the scene to announce that, on the contrary, Labour was the party of wealth, provided of course that it was illgotten. New Labour became the party of the ordinary dodgy multi-millionaire.
The service satisfied the needs of the average shadow minister. But, in government, new and more elaborate treatments were constantly needed. The greatest strain on the system came when, of all people, Mr Mandelson himself twice fell critically ill with bad publicity. On each occasion, he treated himself. The first time the therapy enabled him to return to government only about a year after having to resign in apparent disgrace. The second time, by drawing attention towards the conclusions, and away from the detailed text, he was able to spin Sir Anthony Hammond's 115 deeply ambiguous pages in his favour. This course of treatment was so successful that in the Commons this week, Miss Widdecombe, shadow home secretary, reversed traditional Conservative policy on Mr Mandelson. She suggested that, in being accused of having told an untruth about the Hinduja passports, he had been wronged, and that the Prime Minister should apologise to him.
But inevitably every Cabinet minister has come to demand treatment of this quality. If caught out in some skulduggery, afflicting them with bad publicity, they want their illness to be spun in such a way as to make Miss Widdecombe announce that the Prime Minister had infected them rather than they him. Such demands place impossible strains on the system.
What plans do the Tories have for spindoctor reform? None that appear convincing. Most of us who have studied the subject know that the only answer is some form of private insurance. But the Tories are too frightened to come out in favour of that. Instead, they say that they would somehow 'manage' spin doctors more efficiently. Is it any wonder that, coming up to the general election, they are so low in the polls?
Can right-wing leaders win elections? Can leaders win elections by being rightwing? The two questions are prompted by Mr Hague's 'foreign land' speech. And two questions they are — not one. A leader can be right-wing without, in the election, saying right-wing things. A leader can also say right-wing things without being right-wing. That, we may suspect, is true of Mr Hague.
Can either form of right-wingely bring victory? Of course, say right-wingers; Mrs Thatcher in 1979, Mr Reagan in 1980? Being right-wing, or at least talking right-wing, is Mr Hague's only hope. There is truth in the right-wingers' claims about both the 1979 and 1980 elections, but it is not the whole truth.
The Thatcher case, the more one looks back on it, is the rule-proving exception. She won because, perhaps uniquely in our history since the coming of a wide franchise in the late 1860s, enough voters believed that the country was in as bad a way as opposition politicians said it was. The latter had always cried enemy within and enemy without. In 1979, for once, and only once, both were true. The enemy within was in the unions. The enemy without was the Soviet Union. It took that much to make a right-winger Prime Minister. Even then, she was sparing, in the election campaign, with the right-wingery. 'The National Health Service is safe with us,' she reassured us. That was not what right-wingers wanted, then or since. Why did she go on to win two more elections? The opposition vote being split between Labour, Liberal and Social Democratic had as much to do with it as anything else.
Mr Reagan's case is still less a justification of the right-wing theory of elections. He was undoubtedly, in the modern sense, a rightwinger. He had been the Republican right's de facto leader since 1964. But in 1980 the right-wing vote would not have been enough to elect him. So he campaigned as much as a disillusioned Democrat as he did a Republican right-winger. It had been safe to entrust the presidency to a Democrat when the Democrats were the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman; two names reviled by the Republican right less than a generation earlier than 1980. That was a theme, not only of his campaign speeches, but of his acceptance speech at the Detroit convention. Even then, Mr Reagan won because there was both inflation and unemployment at home, and because, uniquely among postwar presidents, Mr Carter gave the impression of being weak towards America's presumed enemies abroad; the Iran hostages embodying the latter.
But Mr Reagan would not have won at all had he not been good-natured and unthreatening. Those are the only kind of right-wingers who can win other than when the country is falling apart and the opposition is split. Mr Gingrich's fate proves that. Once he became recognised as the Right's national leader — which was only after the 1994 mid-term Congressional elections which he claimed to have won — his apparent ill-nature doomed him. Mr Hague's tragedy is that he is indeed good-natured and unthreatening. But for some reason he does not look it, and keeps saying things that make voters think he is not.
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