Television
Nailed into a navy suit
Martyn Harris
Neil Kinnock: The Inside Story (ITV, Sunday, 10.50 p.m.) was not as bad as expected in spite of having been produced by Ted Morgan, a Kinnock crony. Most impressive was Kinnock's candid self- assessment as `a personal and political fail- ure' which demanded even his enemies rush to deny it. One enemy did not, of course: 'Mr Kinnock's principal achieve- ment was to make sure the Conservatives won in '87 and '92,' smirked Sir Norman Tebbit, best remembered for being relieved of his command halfway through the '87 campaign.
The puzzle for future historians is why exactly Kinnock did fail. As the son of a South Wales miner and a spiritual legatee of Bevan and Foot he had an impeccable pedigree. In his early years in politics, and later in private, he was an extremely witty man, and remained one of the most effec- tive public speakers Labour has ever had. He was also a good bully, a good butcher, and a first-rate party manager who pulled off the trick, which eluded Gaitskell and Wilson, of marginalising the loony Left without splitting the party.
The anti-Kinnock arguments have always been flimsy. With his pass degree in indus- trial relations he was deemed `no intellec- tual', but neither was Attlee or Callaghan, while the accession of John Major with his controversial 0 levels should have buried the matter forever. Kinnock is supposed to have 'abandoned his principles' over issues like CND, but what were the principles of Mrs Thatcher when she signed the Single European Act, and let rip inflation in the late 1980s? What are the principles of John Major who puts the ERM at the centre of government policy then celebrates its demise, or who subscribes to monetarism and runs a deficit which would make Keynes blink?
Kinnock does have defects, in particular a lack of self-confidence which allowed spin doctors to remould him, reining in his wit and spontaneity and nailing him into navy suits, which inevitably gave a feeling of falsity to his public appearances, like the ring of a cracked cup. Denis Healey said, 'His great disadvantage was he didn't look like a Prime Minister', but I think it was this sense of shiftiness — of unease with his adopted self — which undermined him. All this may just be a roundabout way of saying Kinnock lacks character, and that lack may be enough to bar him from leadership, but it seems a harsh definition of character which disqualifies this able and decent man from politics and leaves us with the leaders we have.
Road Scholar on Channel 4 (Monday, 9 p.m.) was all about the adoption of new selves, which is central to the American Dream. The formula was hackneyed (man drives Cadillac from New York to San Francisco) but it worked because of the freshness and obliquity of the guide, Rumanian-American poet Andrei Codres- cu. His first sight of Manhattan had been in a third-grade communist textbook
'Look, see the ugly buildings where the capitalists live' — and his second was flying into New York in 1965 'with 160 salami- chomping Yugoslays who broke sponta- neously into a Serbian rendition of "America The Beautiful".'
On his journey he interviewed a family of crack-smokers living in a hole in the wall on the Upper East Side (`You get real free- dom here in America'); he took machine- gun instruction from Bo, a former Pent- house model (`To be an American in America owning a machine-gun is the best thing in the world'), and he met the first Post-menopausal punk rock band in the retirement centre of Sun City. They sang him a song which went: 'Sex with my hus- band is getting rare/Never give him his sex- ual share/Say hello to life's frustrations/Say goodbye to menstruation'.
What Codrescu was saying, in his non- explicit, unemphatic way, was that America Is about diversity, incoherence, self- invention. The price of liberty, as Orwell said, is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt, to which you might add crack and crackpots and geriatric punks. The characteristic poetry of America — of Whitman and Kerouac — is not dissection but accretion. Its pleasures are the covering of ground and accumulation of difference, and that simple pleasure was just what Codrescu gave us.
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