ANOTHER VOICE

At last, arguments against Mr Blair with which people in the pub might agree

MATTHEW PARRIS

Aly writer will tell you, one can check and recheck a finished article, confident that mistakes have been ironed out. Then one relaxes. A cup of coffee calls, a chat to a friend on the telephone. . . . friend on the telephone. . . .

. . . And, while chatting, an eye cast idly over a copy of the piece still lying on the desk — starting, perhaps, in the middle. Typographical errors, infelicities of style, howlers and non-sequiturs leap from the page. Any reader must spot them. Where were they hiding 20 minutes ago?

The mystery is almost certainly explained by the observer's changed frame of mind. It is because we stand back from the work that we are able for the first time to come to it as the casual reader will come.

So it is with arguments. You may burn the midnight oil making out a very cogent case. You lay head to pillow convinced the case is unanswerable. The following evening, over a drink with a friend, you rehearse it. The car is noisy, some of your words are lost, your friend's attention-span is limited . . . and you hear the argument dying on your lips. The reasoning is the same, but your filly doesn't look half so impressive on this canter out into the real world as when you put her through her paces in the paddock.

Something like this happened to all of us in the Parliamentary Conservative party during the ghastly campaign to market the Community Charge. We had pressed for reform, discussing what shape it might take obsessively and for years. We had read the briefs on the Community Charge. The argument was impeccable; the status quo (domestic rates) untenable; the philosophi- cal case unimpeachable; the objections sur- mountable.

In came the Community Charge, and immediately began to sink. For a start, nobody called it the Community Charge. 'Poll Tax' fitted the tabloid headlines, and stuck. And all the principled arguments we had assembled for making those who used council services pay for them seemed to fall limply to the floor as, from the platform, we faced the anger of the army of losers from the scheme — while the gainers, who had urged us forward, somehow melted away.

A facile phrase masquerading as an argu- ment — 'a duke pays the same as a dust- man!' — caught the press and public imagi- nation. Practical objections, which we had dismissed as teething problems, swelled. Soon everyone was saying it 'had always been obvious' that the idea was a non- starter. Few could be found who remem- bered ever having supported it in the first place.

Every governing party meets their share of ideas whose wheels come off on the open road. Watching the debate on Lords reform open in the Upper Chamber last week, I had the strongest of presentiments that this will be one of them. The wheels began to wobble from the moment that Baroness Jay of Paddington, opening the debate, said it was unacceptable that people could join a legislature on account of an accident of birth. Quentin Letts, the Telegraph's sketch writer, leaned across to me and hissed, 'But she's Jim Callaghan's daughter!' and we both giggled.

I shall not try either to defend the status quo with the Lords, or defend Mr Blair's reforms, or any other reforms — but report to you as an anthropologist watching tribal behaviour from a small rise set back from the battlefield, behind a mosquito net. I detect confusion. The argument for making a 'transitional' step (by removing the hered- itary peers) without deciding what the step is a transition to, is struggling.

The arguments just don't sound as good as expected. The objections just feel stronger. No new points have been made. All the objections to an 'appointed' cham- ber were raised from the moment Mr Blair's plans were floated. And his support- ers' contention that heredity is a shocking way of selecting legislators, has — equally — been urged from the outset. Both argu- ments have merit, neither has 'won' and neither has been rebutted; no further facts have emerged; so why are the government troops, who know that with the Commons behind them they should prevail, flustered? Why are the objectors, who are surely doomed by the rules of procedure, in such good voice?

Most observers would agree on the answer. It is because disquiet about the cre- ation of what in popular lingo is being called a 'super-quango of Tony's Cronies' has proved deeper than might a few years ago have been expected.

Maybe I'm discerning in the shifting clouds shapes which are not there, but I believe this unease is linked with two others into a larger design, which intimidates. One is the unsubtle way in which Mr Blair's Commons enforcers are bending the Lower Chamber to his will; the process has become a popular joke, though told indignantly.

The other stems from excitable talk about a 'new politics', whose missionaries seem to mean an end to the ding- dong battle of Tories-in/Labour-out, Labour in/Tories-out, and its replacement with a grand coalition of centre-left forces. The coalition is to be entrenched, we are told, by proportional representation, a new voting system which will deliver perpetual command to leaders like Mr Blair.

For two decades I have been arguing about proportional representation. Sure as many of us feel that first past the post is best, objections to what the Liberals used to call 'fair votes' have seldom prospered when put to the saloon-bar test.

But the other week I heard one which worked, if not in pure logic, then in the field. If there's a referendum on PR, declared a bar-room sage, the no-change side can win it. They will win by warning that this referendum is the last chance the British people have of stopping a one-party state. If this referendum is won by Mr Blair, he will never again have to submit himself to the popular will in any election he can lose. This warning will actually begin to scare people. Hyperbole? Undoubtedly. I can only report, however, that the argu- ment turned heads, and dismayed the other fellow proposing reform.

A little of the same dismay began to sur- face in the Lords last week, among those obliged to make the case for a wholly appointed second chamber. In any seminar you could shoot my argument to pieces, I know, but growing in me is the feeling that a simple, cruelly distorted, appeal could serve William Hague well: 'Tony Blair is trying to lure us into a trap. He wants a one-party state. He wants to trick us into changing the rules and renouncing our right to remove him. Accept these constitu- tional changes and you may never properly vote again.' 'Wake up!' did well for John Major in 1992. A variant on that simple theme might do better for Mr Hague than any policY- wonking session at Smith Square might sug- gest. He should pop round the corner into the Barley Mow, and try it.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.