ANOTHER VOICE
From the Battle of Hastings to the prattle of Heseltine
CHARLES MOORE
We also have cuttings from the local press at the time. The texts of my ancestor's speeches are reprinted. In a microscopic typeface, they fill column after column and page after page. The speeches must have gone on for several hours.
It is extraordinary to think that we once had a political culture so serious and so patient. I find it moving to think of R.R.R. Moore, who had no chance of winning, expending so much intellectual effort on so few, and to think of those few actually actively wanting to sit and listen to what he had to say. That seriousness has now more or less completely died out.
But before we all start to nod our heads in complacent agreeement about the trivi- ality of our times, one might raise the heretical thought that the modern system actually suits the voter better. It is rather like the argument that life was so much better before television because 'we all made our own entertainment'. If it was so marvellous making our own entertainment, why did we gratefully stop doing so as soon as we had the chance?
In the same way, why did the Hastings Observer report my ancestor's effusions so fully? Because nothing else was happening, or ever happened, in Hastings. (Marx and Engels used to go on holiday there at about that time, but the local reporters were not to know that that was a story.) Politicians were operating in a seller's market.
Now it is a buyer's market. We, the vot- ers, are not so starved of other experiences that we have to listen to what politicians say. The politicians are there, almost the whole time, somewhere in the system of communication, but we can always flick a switch or turn a page if we do not find them
very interesting. It's all there if we want it, and if we don't want it that may not show brutish apathy, but simply that people are reasonably content. Only about half the electorate bothers to vote in US presiden- tial elections. I take that for a sign of stabil- ity, not of disillusionment.
But isn't the whole thing so stage-man- aged? comes the retort. Isn't it just a beauty contest, a trading of misleading images? Where are the great public meetings when politicians were really tested by hecklers? Yes, but the stage management is pointed out by the press, the images are poked at, and the hecklers are the interviewers and the opinion polls. It is far more difficult for a politician to face the questions of the daily campaign press conference than to put down stray interjections from the back of a large hall. Mr Major's aides can't hus- tle Mr Tony Bevins of the Independent out of the room. The Prime Minister has to sit there and smile and pretend to enjoy the man's skilful bullying. Modern elections are unbelievably humiliating for the candi- dates. Without wishing to be sadistic, one can surely argue that this is the right way round. The election is the one time we get to remind the politicians who is master. So although I, personally, prefer the Victorian sonorities, I think the people's choice is better served by the sound-bite.
There is only one strong objection to this argument, but unfortunately it is very strong indeed. It is that modern elections mean that only fairly frightful people are prepared to become politicians. Mr John Smith says smugly that he only earns £30,000 a year, and that he is happy to pay more tax on that. If he is telling the truth, he shows how far he is separated from his fellow men. It is not self-sacrificing, but subhuman to be prepared to work so hard for power with so little prospect of material reward, and to boast about how you want even less. (By the way, I don't think it is true in Mr Smith's case. Until the latest excitements, he had some useful earnings as a barrister: he is, thank goodness, more human than he admits.) Most people in modern politics do nothing else but politics, have done almost nothing else throughout their adult lives, talk about little else, know no one else beyond those connected with the trade, and think of the whole thing in terms of jobs because there is no other job for them to go to. And they have to endure so much exposure of their privacy that they can only contemplate doing so because they do not really understand what it is to be private in the first place. Once politicians were confined to a particular class: now they are increasingly confined to a particu- lar psychopathological type. All the nicest ones I know suffer constantly as a result, asking themselves in the small hours whether they can stand the wretched busi- ness a moment longer.
These strains mean that most politicians become incredibly cautious. You have to have the heroic self-confidence of a Mrs Thatcher not to worry about being caught out by a journalist on a minor inconsisten- cy. As Mr Major travels the country, he hardly dares to touch the products which he inspects for fear of a negative photo- opportunity. As Mr Kinnock does the same, he avoids all impromptu conversa- tion. Messages are as careful, and banal, as it is possible to be.
In the circumstances, one is tempted to admire anyone who is more daring and colourful, which, in this campaign, means Mr Heseltine. He is widely believed to be a good speaker. At Torquay, he had them all cheering with his passage about Labour resembling the Charge of the Light Brigade. 'Taxes to the right of them. Taxes to the left of them. Into the valley of taxes rode the Labour Party!' But if labour have taxes, surely those taxes are not the enemy cannon, and surely the Light Brigade, though foolhardy, was heroic? Think about the joke, and it falls apart. At Corby, he said, 'John Smith would squeeze national taxes — not until the pips squeaked — but until the oranges themselves ran blood-red under the weight of them.' Loud cheers. But surely only blood oranges can run blood-red, and they do so long before they have been squeezed so hard that the pips squeak. People seem to think that sort of thing is good, which must must mean that something about the present system is bad.
Words mean precise things, and that is what modern elections try to make us for- get. I remember an answer of Mr Tebbit, the clearest mind in politics, during the fight to overthrow Mrs Thatcher. Funnily enough, he was speaking of Mr Heseltine, who had just come second in the first ballot and was now campaigning to come first in the second. 'They say there's an avalanche for Mr Heseltine,' said the interviewer. 'First time,' said Norman, 'that I've heard of an avalanche going uphill.'
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