Campaign Commentary
The leaders and their vulnerabilities
Patrick Cosgrave
Since it is at the moment fashionable not merely to deride our political leaders, but to assume that one's derision is widely shared by everybody else, including the politically inarticulate, the middle period of an election campaign seems a useful moment to point out, not so much their qualities as their odd and very human vulnerabilities and the way they use them. Many reporters on the Wilson campaign trail have begun to groan at the endless repetition and endless honing of the same jokes — particularly the one about the nail which the Leader of the Opposition broke while trying to discover the sticker bearing last week's price for some household item underneath the new sticker, carrying this week's tariff; and if Mr Heath tells his morning press conference once more how often he has been "up and down the country," adding to this movable geographical feast a homely anecdote indicating how solidly the people — the ordinary people — back him, there will be more journalists groaning with bordeom than ever before at a press conference; and more inclined to echo the heartfelt wish of one of his aides last week that he would make some effort to break free from the monotonous repetitiveness of his phraseology.
Nonetheless, in the exposed position of a political leader repetitiveness is unavoidable. Repetition, as Mr John Peyton is fond of saying, is the essence of politics; and some metronomic hammer is certainly necessary to get a message, either positive or negative, across. But the repetitive tricks of style come from another source — physical tiredness. American presidential candidates, it is said, tend to collapse at the end of a presidential campaign, but they, at least, have had the gradual if gruelling physical preparation of Primary elections. British political leaders have little in the ordinary way of business to prepare them for the crowded rush of a general election campaign and by the end of one, though their voices have usually deepened, and the words are usually coming in a steadier if somewhat glazed flow, the body and the mind are both tired. By the end
of the first week, thus, Mr Heath, who had set a cracking pace, was showing signs of wear which issued in irritation on Saturday — an irritation which was not altogether the product of the national and political reaction to price figures announced on Friday — while Mr Wilson, who had started more cannily and more slowly, was beginning to hit form. It was natural, therefore, that we should begin to see signs of stylistic repetition, from Mr Heath because he was beginning to fall back mechanically on little tricks of style which knit together his character as a speaker; from Mr .Wilson because, as he began to get his timing right, he began to be tempted to stick to the jokes that worked.
The trouble about tricks of campaigning style is that, while being as revelatory as most things about the inner character of the candidates, they show some of their worst as well as best aspects. There has always been something curiously unreal, physically and intellectually, about Mr Heath, and it was most strongly revealed when, outside Chequers on Sunday, he referred to a "splendid old age pensioner" who had assured him of support earlier in the week. The tone was a tone that could be got away with by, perhaps, the Duke of Omnium or Sir Alec DouglasHome: it was an upper-class tone, one not patronising exactly, but setting a sort of divide between Mr Heath and pensioners, or perhaps between pensioners and other people. I am not suggesting for a moment that Mr Heath was insincere or hypocritical in any way — indeed, throughout his career he has shown more effective compassion for the lot of the old than any post-war prime minister — simply that something about the tone grated.
Likewise, Mr Wilson. Through the sticky first few days of the campaign he looked less like a politician seeking to define issues and articulate solutions than an actor trying to recover his timing. He has rarely, since the 1966 campaign, been able for very long periods to regain his mastery of the throwaway line, the wounding thrust that cuts into the opponent, and reduces audiences to tears of contemptuous laughter. But you can see the shadow of it about him. There is an infinitesimal pause before the crack comes, and another after its gabbled delivery, but the thing itself gets lost. Thus, at an early press conference he had an aside about the Tory manifesto being called "an infirm and unfair Britain, or something like that," which Mr Wilson in his heyday could have used to wring appreciative laughter from even a hardened press corps. As it was the line was lost, and people whispered to one another to discover what exactly he had said.
By the end of the week, on the other hand, on Sunday, he was back in predatory form with hecklers at Leicester, leaning on his little lectern and inviting them to come at him so that he could crush them, and through them crush Mr Heath. rie was in that special kind of top form which enables a political speaker to destroy hecklers not so much by his wit as by his authority. "You can't blame that on decimalisation," he told one man who had referred to the price of sausages, "They haven't decimalised the sausage, they've marmalised it," and the whole thing was inexpressibly funny.
Now, these little tricks of style are not trivial things, for they reveal a great deal about how the two men think about themselves, each other, and the people. The "splendid pensioner" is a necessary product of Mr Heath's imagination. I do not say that such people do not exist and, indeed, it would be a more than ordinarily rational act on the part of any pensioner to vote Conservative on
the grounds that, whatever faults there have been in the record of this government, it has done more that is practical for pensioners than any other post-war government. But the pensioner, like all the other people to whoel, he refers, comes from inside Mr Heath's milw' He had also last week, a butcher from Perp Barr, whom he quoted on the subject of he ingratitude of customers in the face o' reduced meat prices. By the Sunday, that butcher had been referred to several tintes and Mr Heath, jocosely and wonderingly, h,L begun to suggest that he might attain til` same folk status as the man on the ClaPhalli, omnibus, suggesting by his tone that this some doubt on the poor man's reality. But Ivo Heath himself first invoked the Clapham °Ill,' nibus comparison, as though ponderillf whether he could not create such a figur'' Thus is the Prime Minister particularlY inclined, because of his authoritative hut, wooden nature, and strongly self-righter:11T; sense, to create abstracts of his public, desti a rhetoric of which that abstract woille approve, and attempt to persuade real POe to live up to it. The style, and particularlY traces in the style of a class that is not Iv" Heath's own, is the style of a man who ill; vents the people he addresses rather tha
responds to them. but
Mr Wilson responds to them all right, 5 only as an audience. He is acutely consciotitit of the truth of what I have said above al)°to Mr Heath, and never loses an opporturlifY,4 rub home the fact that, though the Priwer Minister was born far away from spoons, and lived out his young life, h0'bie some ducal mansion but in relatively horn ce circumstances, there is some curious distal? 0 between him and ordinary people. Refetr111,11 to the announcement of price increases °er Friday, and to the fact that the Prime Minis tby had, naturally, been given the details Ili government statisticians, he gibed that t„Id "was the only way the Prime Minister COL'tti have heard," implying that poor Mr He8or. never entered a shop like the rest of us cis dinary folk save on his political walk-arourt.t. But there is every reason to suppose tho'ps whether he accompanies his wife to the shoe or no, Mr Wilson's contact with real life is as lived by the great mass of the people quite as vestigial as that of Mr Heath. 0 Wilson truly himself is Mr Wilson before to audience, the keen antennae probing discover its essential character, the iMPe':„to ble timing separating that character different strands of the violin of politics which he plucks, the whole making up the Wilson the connoisseurs of political tactics the old manner love to study and analyse•ost And thus Mr Wilson hit form this Pie) weekend, because the immensely cothPely details of prices provided him with Precii„50 the same gut material he has had be00i material to play with, to joke sharplY a''eut and to mobilise in support of the argil that Tories are different from the rest 1,0 and callous about our sufferings. Mr A" -or sees himself as a constitutionalist, arlu„ist ceives dimly an army of constitution' is a waiting to lend him their aid. Mr Wilson pie. populist, reaching out hands to his ,P,efd, These two roles will become more denn' by, more detached from reality, as the days Owill It remains to be seen which the people prefer.
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