POLITICS
Is politics more than just keeping the other lot out?
NOEL MALCOLM
statistics show that suicides happen most frequently in the spring. At first sight this is a very puzzling fact. Surely, when spirits are rising, things are getting better and days are growing longer, one should expect fewer suicides, not more? The answer seems to be that the cheering effects of spring are precisely the explana- tion: when gloomy people see everyone else becoming happier, they feel their own gloominess all the more keenly.
Something similar might be suspected of a political correspondent who, just as the air begins to be charged with the excite- ments of a general election campaign, ceas- es to be a political correspondent. This is my last column on this page; in future my contributions will be found a few pages fur- ther on. One happy consequence is that I shall at last be able to hold my head up high in the company of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who on two separate occa- sions has informed me that in his day domestic political affairs were written about by dull people who had made their way up from the news desk, while anyone with claims to intellectual distinction wrote about world events and foreign policy.
This is a valediction, then, denying gloominess; but also admitting, if I am to be truthful, that the general nature of British politics today strikes me as less interesting than at most other times during the four years in which I have been writing this column. The years 1987-90 were anni mirabiles in their way: not as extraordinary as the depths of the Thatcher-Howe Depression or the height of the Scargill Insurrection, but action-packed and inci- dent-filled nonetheless. What was most remarkable (and this is quite a serious reproach) was that after eight years of self- styled 'conviction' government, so many important issues still awaited attention: large-scale privatisations, the reform of education, the first real efforts to bring financial efficiency into the Health Service, and the disastrous reform of local govern- ment taxation. The big policy issues rolled past like places on the itinerary of a high- speed coach tour. If it's Tuesday, it must he a new benefits system, or perhaps the reform of the Official Secrets Act.
It may have been interesting, and it cer- tainly gave me plenty to write about; but was it politics? Early on in my brief career as a political commentator I received a gen-
tle reproof from a Tory MP. 'The trouble with you', he said, is that you seem to think that politics is about ideas.' I countered rather feebly that I thought writing about politics was about ideas. 'Anyway, what do you think politics is about?' I asked. 'Keep- ing the other lot out,' he said, with all the easily affordable cynicism of a man with a safe seat. If his definition was correct, then the Thatcher Government spent curiously little of its time engaged in politics. For all its populist reflexes, it was something more like a government of ideas (not 'a single master-ideology, but ideas about how to change things, how to do things, how to stop doing things) than anything this coun- try had seen since the 1945 Labour Govern- ment. There was a political naivety about the way it pushed through the poll tax, and a kind of recklessness (either zealous or ingenu, it was difficult to tell which) about the way it stamped on the toes of so many professions and interest-groups.
Something of this attitude rubbed off on its relations with the press. No doubt in some parts of the popular imagination the wicked Thatcherite regime was engaged in a constant conspiracy of manipulation; I can only say that that is not what it felt like from my end. Mr (now Sir) Bernard Ing- ham cared about what appeared in the news stories, and understood the impor- tance of the tabloids; but neither he nor his mistress showed any interest in what was said at the 'ideas' end of the journalistic spectrum. Even when I had described gov- ernment policies as half-witted and com- pared Mrs Thatcher to Dame Edna Ever- age, I never had the faintest sense of being leant on by Bernard Ingham nor by any representative of the Government's views.
Curiously, this state of affairs altered within a few months of the resignation of Mrs Thatcher. One or two pieces I wrote criticising developments in government policy (especially Mr Major's attempted, love-in with Herr Kohl) seem to have enraged the new powers-that-be. The `My parents split up, too.' Chairman of the Conservative Party com- plained about me to people whom he wrongly imagined to be my employers, and in other quarters I came across the signs of what a left-wing journalist would have described, with a frisson of delight, as a `smear campaign'. One government Whip was assuring people that I had said I would vote Labour at the next election, implying that I was a member of some sort of diehard Thatcherite conspiracy to bring the Government down.
Quite coincidentally, I happened to be invited to a dinner with Mrs Thatcher and a few other journalists. It was the first time I had ever spoken to her; we talked about various things, but her own political future was not among them. A week later I read in the Evening Standard that I had gone to see Mrs Thatcher to implore her to stay on in Parliament. Messages started to appear on my answerphone from television news pro- ducers, asking me to appear on their pro- grammes to describe my `advice' to Mrs Thatcher. I began to feel like Mr Chancy Gardener, the character played by Peter Sellers in Being There, who became a 'key adviser' to the American President by a rather similar process. The `Thatcherite conspiracy' made a good story for the press, and it also seemed to satisfy the limited understandings of some members of the Government, who believed what they read in the papers and acted accordingly.
Those who hope (as I do) that the Con- servatives will win the next election, should be relieved, I suppose, to think that this Government is prepared to be a little more manipulative than it used to be. At least the Tories have not entirely forgotten that poli- tics is about keeping the other lot out. No government can spend all its time breathing the pure air of ideas; it must come down into the valleys occasionally to practise its low cunning. Nor is it part of the Conserva- tive tradition to think of the application of new ideas as an essential role of govern- ment. It just happened to be part of the duty of a Conservative Government in the 1980s to undo the effects of some of the false ideas which had so distorted the social and economic development of this country/ in the post-war period. Not enough undo- ing was done but just enough to make me think that life under the next Major Gov- ernment will be ever so slightly boring in comparison.
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