ANOTHER VOICE
How real leadership means never having to say never
MATTHEW PARRIS
But what the archivist cannot do is tell us why. History books will offer facts, — land- marks — but if we wish not so much to know as to understand, what is usually lack- ing among all these 'landmark' facts is any sense of how it all felt at the time. Being there gives you a window onto events quite peculiar to the moment. Unless we can find again that vantage-point, we struggle to know why something seemed important or trivial, why a speech captured the public imagination or failed to, why a television interview was well-judged, or ill-judged, or wholly unremarked.
Tories of my acquaintance have been complaining that, even after five months in power, Tony Blair and his ministers are devoting inordinate time to gratuitous attacks on the record of the last administra- tion. This, they conclude, suggests that the new government are secretly short of self- confidence — or ideas. I suspect the con- clusion is right, but is the evidence on which my friends base it well-founded?
Indeed, is the evidence there at all? Is the time Labour has been devoting to attacks on the last government's record really 'inordinate'? To help answer this I instructed my tireless and ingenious researcher, Julian Glover, to assemble the front pages of the Daily Telegraph for Mar- garet Thatcher's first 100 days, and to do the same for Tony Blair's. We would check the record and compare.
We have tried. It sounds as if it should be possible. Yet the project has crumbled in our hands and it is hard to explain why. Confronted by acres of text, photographs and headlines from 1979, and assisted by a pocket calculator and a ruler, we found it too slippery a task to determine, from bare records of the utterances of ministers, what in 1979 was 'negative' and backward-look- ing, and what was optimistic and positive. What counted as an attack? What was fac- tual and what tendentious? What was essential historical background to a minis- ter's argument and what a 'gratuitous' attack on James Callaghan's fallen adminis- tration? Unable to recreate in our imagina- tions any real feeling for an era in which I believe I was a Conservative MP, we lacked the bearings needed to compare.
The exercise has not, however, been entirely pointless. What can certainly be demonstrated is that there was less politics altogether on the front pages of newspa- pers. The future of Rhodesia did seem to interest the Daily Telegraph, but Mrs Thatcher's domestic plans, and what the opposition thought of them, were, if report- ed at all, usually relegated to the inside pages.
The tone was less breathless, the vocabu- lary and metaphor cooler, the whole tone less excitable. Government was presumably going on, and there was a new government, but the editor does not appear to have required his staff to present a blow-by-blow account of the battle of ambitions and per- sonalities in Mrs Thatcher's first adminis- tration. Yet this was a critical juncture in modern British history. One philosophy of politics lay in ruins and a new one was being born. Ideas and policies which were to dominate the rest of the century were being discussed and tried. A slow-burning revolution was starting. More was actually happening than is happening now.
And I am able to venture one conclusion, if only tentatively, about the feeling (as opposed to the facts) of this present chap- ter, as compared with Thatcher's first 100 days. This is, I believe, an extraordinarily febrile time.
What politicians say is being picked over in an obsessive and faintly hysterical way, even when it is quite commonplace. People are being asked to affirm or deny, to make statements, declarations — vows, even concerning matters which, were we all to calm down a bit, might seem better dealt with in less portentous ways. I think Eng- land in the time of Titus Oates and his Continental Catholic plots must have felt rather like this.
Take the single European currency. Some, including me, are so doubtful about the wisdom of joining as to be all but cer- tain that Britain never should and pretty confident Britain never will. But I cannot for the life of me see why everyone is screaming for Mr Blair or his Chancellor to `rule it out' — as though anyone could rule out an eventuality four years into the future, anyway. Then William Hague is asked to go one stage further than 'ruling it out' in this Parliament, and 'rule it out' for the period which follows that, assuming he is elected anyway.
How perfectly absurd! Presumably the only circumstances in which a prime minis- ter would ever recommend joining a single currency, or anything else, would be those in which he had concluded that this would be a good thing to do. Are we, then, asking Mr Blair, Mr Brown and Mr Hague to promise us that they will not recommend joining, even if they should come to believe we ought to?
And to make these stupid promises, we squeal, is to show 'leadership'. On the con- trary, no true leader would accede to any demand that he promise to do, or refrain from doing, anything at all except apply his own best judgment to events as they arose. To insist that Tony Blair show 'leadership' by binding himself to a future decision is covertly to say that we do not trust his lead- ership, and to wrest leadership from him. Fine. Maybe we should. But let him not suppose that by signing the covenant we place before him he is showing leadership. He is renouncing it.
ast month I quoted newspaper reports that David Mellor was to criticise John Major on television for failing to dismiss him quickly enough. The reports were wrong. Mr Mellor made no such criticism. I am sorry I implied otherwise.
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and columnist of the Times.
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