MICHAEL WHITE
0 ne of the several advantages you have over me is that you know what was in the Budget. The best insight I can offer is a glimpse just an hour ago of the man of the moment. I refer, of course, to Derek Wanless, the very ex-NatWest banker whose intellectually incestuous report on the NHS for Gordon Brown was unhelpfully published hours before the Chancellor's statement. I am pro-NHS and would like to believe the gloomy (Arise, Sir Derek?) Wanless when he says that health care will cost less in 20 years' time if we, as well as our wallets, get more involved in our own health instead of remaining 40-a-day couch potatoes. Fewer vices, more exercise, that sort of thing. If all goes well, waiting-lists could be down to two weeks, though there may still be a shortfall of 25,000 doctors in 2020, when even the editor of The Spectator will be 58 and worrying about his prostate.
The Tories are cheering up (at last) because they think that Iron Gordon's leap from the closet as a naked 'tax and invest' social democrat will prove to be a fatal exposure when public services fail to justify his cash infusions. It is far too early to say who is right. But London's buses are certainly getting better under his friend, Mayor Ken. Summoned to a Japanese restaurant near the Guardian's Clerkenwell HQ at short notice the other day, I covered the 2'h-mile journey by Tube and bus in 16 minutes. What's more, since my kids gently demolished my 30-year prejudice against season tickets, it was free. A cab, if available at that hour, would have taken much longer and cost at least £7.
The Tate Gallery, above Porthmeor beach in our ancestral metropolis of St Ives. is also a public service of sorts. It is proving a welcome Keynesian pump primer, boosting year-round takings for B&Bs, hotels and increasingly upmarket restaurants in a lovely town I have known all my life. Our clan (35 of us this year) always spends Easter there, and this month we were delighted to sample the smartest new restaurant yet. Located in the old lifeboat house, it's called the Alba, presumably after the still occasionally visible local shipwreck immortalised by the primitive painter, Alfred Wallis. Since my Cornish grandmother's name was Wallis, I once asked Tom Wedge, my twice-torpedoed uncle, if we were related. Certainly not, he replied with a shudder. Wallis's Alba is in the Tate close to a newly-arrived seascape by J.M.W. Turner, the first proper painter to discover St Ives. I enjoy Cousin Alt's stuff. But Turner is better and raises the tone of the Tate's often-indifferent exhibitions. Icame home early from Cornwall to go to Texas with Tony Blair. Having seen George Bush, Snr, at close quarters in the 1980s I was struck by how much more at ease with himself is George Jnr, the prodigal son who wasn't meant to end up president. In human affairs that is generally a good sign, so keep an open mind. 'Shrub', as Texas Dems dubbed him, even called ITN's John Sergeant 'a fine lad' without being introduced and allowed the Prime Minister to refer to him in public as 'George', which is definitely lese-majesty in this elective monarchy. How nice, too, of Mr President to allow Cherie's mum and babysitter, the redoubtable Gale Booth, to stay in one of the converted barns on the (very modest) ranch at Crawford (pop. 705), together with Kathryn (14) and Master Leo. Kathryn and Gran even attended the power dinner on Saturday night, which. I think, reflects well on all concerned.
Ahas been reported, the travelling hacks were far from Crawford, holed up either in Waco or. even further away, in Temple in a motel on the commercial neon strip which disfigures most American towns and cities. As the Blairs tucked into their pecan-smoked tenderloin, we Temple-ites cast around for somewhere, anywhere to eat amid the Burger Kings, Dennys and Popeyes of Middle America. Italian reporters among us were especially demoralised by the quality of food available ('How did these barbarians ever become No. 1 nation?') when after 45 minutes we couldn't even find a steak, let alone a St Ives pasty. My dinner bill for burger and fries came to only $4.10 (£2.88) because I declined the drinks on offer. The incident reminded me that, for all its ceaseless talk of 'the middle class' (they really mean skilled working class), America has some very thin patches of middle between its elite and its masses. No Radio Four, few proper newspapers and a lot of bad food, to name but three gaps in the free market. Two pounds 88 pence, incidentally, is 38p more than the NHS spends a day on each patient's food, according to Sir Derek.
In recent weeks I have been persecuted in at least three media columns for the offence of 'trying to be helpful' to the Downing Street spokesman during daily lobby briefings for political reporters. My tormentors miss the point. When Alastair Campbell briefed in person he used to bully the lobby. Now that the burden is borne by civil servants, the gentle Godric Smith alternating with Tom Kelly, the lobby sometimes bullies the briefers. A.J.P. Taylor once explained it thus: 'I have no beliefs. But I am on the side of the underdog.'
Underdogs do not include Israeli white settlers on the West Bank. But nor do they include the combative critic, Tom Paulin, who is reported to have told Al-Ahram of Cairo that he'd like to see those Nazi racists shot dead. Had his words been uttered by a Bradford factory worker, instead of an Oxford don, would he now be facing prosecution for incitement, as the late Michael X once did? The only time I met young Tom he provoked such an unexpected quarrel over Ireland that I had to behave almost as badly as he did to defend myself. Deeply ashamed, I only later learnt that he makes a habit of over-excitement, as he did at the Index on Censorship awards the other evening. If Gale Booth had been his babysitter, she'd have sorted Tom out.
Score-settling pre-publicity for her book is a sad reminder that Mo Mowlam is close to leaving public life. It underlines the shortage of New Labour ministers with endearing human foibles. I wish to nominate to Mo's vacancy the erudite, ever-so-slightly vain Foreign Office minister, Dr Denis MacShane. This week MacShame managed to praise Venezuela's fallen leader, Hugo Chavez, while condemning his Mussolini-like platform style, only to rejoice at Chavez's sudden restoration. Nimble footwork from the FO's Tigger, a man trusting enough to praise the Queen's legs in front of Gyles Brandreth.
Michael White is political editor of the Guardian.
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