ANOTHER VOICE
Mr Major shows the tired face of democracy
CHARLES MOORE
The press decided at the weekend that Mr Major is tired and not feeling well, and Mrs Major confirmed it. This was an observation which I made when he was a candidate for the leadership in November, but it was considered unpatriotic then, and indeed the thought also occurred to some Tory MPs and induced them to support Mr Heseltine, so perhaps it was. Now it is the orthodoxy, and there are numerous articles by doctors advising him to sleep more and eat less junk food.
Mr Major has brought this advice on himself by his cultivation of the press.
Whenever he goes abroad he makes a point of leaving the posh part of the aeroplane and descending, all smiles, to the lower depths where my colleagues are gathered. This is one of those gestures which is much appreciated at first, but after a bit becomes a nuisance, rather as the Pope, having made a great impression by kissing the soil of the first country he visited, now has to struggle to his knees and get a mouthful of runway on every foreign visit for the rest of his life. On the flight back from Bermuda, Mr Major did his usual routine, but he had nothing to tell the press, and so, hunting for something to write, they noticed his husky voice. Mr Major had impacted wisdom teeth removed less than a fortnight before he became Prime Minister. When I had the same operation in 1983, I needed two weeks off from my arduous duties as political correspondent of The Spectator (which frequently included arriving as ear- ly as ten o'clock and leaving as late as five). Poor Mr Major, with rather heavier re- sponsibilities, has had no chance to recov- er. Just when he should have been in bed, he was busy calling for a 'a country that is at ease with itself on the steps of No 10. And since then, no respite. The wider point is that there is no respite for any of them. There has been hyperac- tive Conservative government for 12 years, and although no member of the present Cabinet was in it at the beginning, all have spent the period climbing the ministerial ladder. None has had the chance to linger at lunch with a journalist until four o'clock — the infallible mark of a politician in opposition. It has been all work and no play for almost a generation. It shows. Almost the chief characteristic of a modern politician is that he is tired. Many of them are strong enough not to be made ill by it, but even so there are physical symptoms. They tend to go a funny colour, dividing broadly into two camps — red, like Lord Whitelaw or Mr MacGregor, or rubescent at least, like Mr Chris Patten; and waxy white, like Mr Gummer or Mr Lamont or Mr Major himself. Modern politicians are deprived of most of the sensory experiences of people in general. They spend a great deal of time breathing air which is pumped through the systems of aeroplanes, sitting under the lights of television more often than the light of common day, eating food which could most politely be described as official. They tend to look like what they are — people who seldom sleep and never walk.
In this way, democracy has made politi- cians more distant from ordinary human beings than their more oligarchic predeces- sors were. Security cuts them off too, as does the instant recognition that television brings. It probably is not true that Vanessa Bell, placed next to Asquith, asked him if he was interested in politics and he said, 'Unfortunately, I have to be. I'm the Prime Minister', but it is at least imaginable. Today, even if the equivalent guest was not quite sure what Mr Major looked like, she would be alerted by the sniffer dog and car-load of policemen that preceded him. Above all, time. Most people spend more of their waking hours at leisure than at work. This is so far from a politician's experience that he can have little concep- tion of what it means. Indeed, in a demo- cracy, a politician's leisure is work. The constituency wine-and-cheese, the attend- ance at the football match, even the tending of one's own garden, all have to furnish the evidence required by the public that the politician is a normal bloke — evidence contradicted by the fact that he is doing that job in the first place. At the end of the evening most people go to bed: ministers go to their desk where there is at least one, generally two red boxes. These boxes are symbols of power, but one suspects that the civil servants, as they 'This is all very well, but can it be corrobo- cram them full of worthless paper, intend them as scarlet badges of humiliation.
In return for their not terribly long working weeks, most people insist on holidays, six weeks, plus public ones, being quite common. Ministers in theory have much longer breaks, with Parliament off for three months in the summer, but they do not take them. They snatch perhaps a fortnight, frequently interrupted by the telephone. Mrs Thatcher took even less. Mr Major has been compared to Stanley Baldwin. If only he would have the cour- age of the comparison and spend 12 weeks of the year in Aix-les-Bains. But I expect the hypocritical puritanism of democracy will have its way. He will take two weeks of the summer off in his Huntingdon consti- tuency and have to cut the holiday short because reasons of state — an air crash killing British holidaymakers, perhaps — recall him.
If the lives of ministers are as I describe, two things follow. The first is that they are much too tired to think. If you are on breakfast television and then in a series of meetings and then giving a lunch for the trade minister of Indonesia and then visit- ing a factory in Watford and then speaking at a dinner of the South London Chamber of Commerce and then voting in the House of Commons at ten and then opening the red boxes, when can you sit and reflect on the value of what you are doing? The system prevents you, and those who frame it presumably intend that it should do so.
The second consequence is that as the politician has less and less sense of what it is like to be an individual member of the public, so the power of 'public opinion' grows. Polls and lobbies and pressure groups are democracy's substitute for what a minister in a less busy age would have had the time to collect — the evidence of his own eyes.
It is interesting to look at those eyes. Take a newspaper photograph of a politi- cian and cover half of his face, study the result, and then do the same thing with the other half. Power quickly accentuates the difference between the two halves. One side tends to look more and more wicked, the other more and more sad. Play this trick on Mr Major and you are frustrated, partly because of his strong spectacles. The only difference that I can detect is that in November his right eye looked small and reticent and tired. Now that is the way they both look.
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