POLITICS
The unions will pay for making Mr Mandelson fetch the pudding
BRUCE ANDERSON
It was not a Blairite plot, but it might as well have been. Unusually for a general sec- retary of the boilermakers, John Edmonds is a graduate of Oriel College. This may explain why he feels the need to assert his proletarian credentials by boiler-mouthed oratory. On television, he sounds like a lit- tle Hitler trying to imitate the real one.
In real life, he is not as dislikable as that, though he has a lot of enemies in the Labour party. He is seen as having the same faults as his predecessor, David Bas- nett: vanity and truculence. But there is a crucial difference. Labour leaders had to humour Mr Basnett, whose block vote gave him considerable power. Mr Edmonds hardly matters, and this week's caricature performance made it even easier for the Labour modernisers to dismiss him. John Edmonds is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries. But he is never more of an antiquarian than when appear- ing on a TUC platform.
In the old days, trade union rant at Blackpool would have alarmed the public and damaged Labour's standing. Not any more. 'Nothing to do with us,' is the Blairite response. 'Fear not, you middle- class floating voters: we're not going to take any notice of the TUC, so why should you?'
Why indeed? The TUC is in the same position as the Tory party, in that it needs a recession in order to improve its standing. At the moment, however, a full-scale reces- sion — as opposed to a downturn in the business cycle — seems unlikely. There are still a lot of Labour MPs who do feel a sen- timental attachment to trade unionism, and are uneasy at Mr Blair's complete lack of it, but unless the economy goes badly wrong they are unlikely to rebel; the Blairites' dis- ciplinarian grip is too strong.
Mr Blair's lack of piety towards the TUC is reinforced by his new Industry Secretary, Peter Mandelson. In his youth, Mr Mandel- son was briefly a left-winger, and inclined to romanticise the Labour movement. But all such tendencies were brutally eradicated by shock therapy, when the young Mandel- son did something that no one who wants to idealise the TUC should ever do: he went to work for it. Around the same time, a girl I knew also took a job at Congress House. She too wanted to dedicate herself to the service of the people; she too found the reality somewhat less inspiring. Writing up the minutes of a deeply tedious commit- tee meeting, she put down the names of those present in alphabetical order: Len Lard, Sid Stoat, Ted Toad and so on. She promptly received a blasting. How dare she write Len Lard; it should have been Alder- man Leonard Lard, CBE, JP — and how dare she put Mr Theodore Toad behind Mr Sydney Stoat, MBE; Mr Toad had been on the General Council for much longer. My friend could not decide which she found more repulsive, the endlessly wearisome pen-pushing pernicketiness or the unshak- able belief of all these pompous, self-serv- ing mediocrities that they were entitled to give orders to the elected — Labour government.
Some time later, Peter Mandelson and I were colleagues on Weekend World, which always held a lunch at the party confer- ences. At Labour one year, we were both at the same table as Terry Duffy, a splendid trade unionist from a previous era; in his days, the unions did not often recruit their staff from Oxbridge. Young Peter was net- working away, displaying a due obsequious- ness towards this powerful figure, but Mr Duffy did not seem to be listening to all the flattery. He may have dimly remembered Mr Mandelson from his time at the TUC. He may even have thought that he was still dealing with a clerical minion from one of the more obscure corridors of Congress House — but anyway, he suddenly picked up his plate, thrust it at Peter Mandelson, and said, 'Get me some more pudding, lad.' The trade union movement is going to pay for that second helping of pudding.
This week's events at Blackpool have not disturbed the government's equanimity, nor is the Labour conference itself likely to do so. The Left will make a little trouble, which will exasperate the leadership, but there will be no return to the old days, when the left's antics during conference week could be guaranteed to clip five points off Labour's standing in the opinion polls. This time, the Labour leadership's annoyance will stem not from fear but from wrath, as they discover that their authori- tarian control is still not quite absolute.
Mr Hague might envy them that prob- lem. There will not be a revolt at the Tory conference, for two reasons. Tories are not natural rebels, and this year the discontent- ed element will be the Europhiles, who are better behaved than the Europhobes. We are told that John Gummer is to lead the Europhiles into action. Mr Gummer has many qualities, but he is not Norman Tebbit.
That said, the Europhiles can be relied on to compensate themselves for their rela- tively good behaviour by their rampant intellectual dishonesty, with Michael Hesel- tine as the latest and most brazen practi- tioner. Mr Heseltine now informs us that the Tories lost four million votes at the last election because the other parties were more Europhile. This will come as news to Tony Blair, who spent that entire election campaign concealing his Europhilia. That was not true of the Liberals, but no one has ever provided a rational explanation for the Liberal vote, and anyway, it fell last time.
Mr Heseltine's conclusion will also come as news to almost every Tory candidate who fought the last election, and spent hour after fruitless hour trying to persuade Euroscep- tics not to defect. Admittedly, there must have been a number of left-wingers who deserted the party because it was insuffi- ciently Europhile, but far from determining the outcome of the election there were probably just about enough of them to fill Michael Heseltine's drawing room.
Over many years, one of Mr Heseltine's most endearing qualities has been his shamelessness in debate. Like Dr Johnson, if his pistol misfires, he will knock his oppo- nent down with the butt end. But even by his own exalted standards, that claim about the last election is preposterous, as he well knows.
His intervention will not have improved the Tories' morale, nor was it meant to. There are mutterings in the party; there is alarm at the failure to make any headway against Mr Blair's poll lead. There were a few hopeful signs in a recent Guardian poll, but from a very low base, and there could be another factor. Governments usually do well in the holiday months, both because Parliament is not sitting, thus depriving the opposition of a platform, and because good weather improves the public mood: not this year.
The Tories have always been unhappy in opposition. They find it an unnatural state of affairs, which quickly exhausts their lim- ited reserves of patience. But they are going to have to put up with unhappiness and the unnatural for some time yet. It remains to be seen whether they can find the patience.
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