THE ELECTION
STIRRING THE TORPID VOTER
The press: Paul Johnson
examines a poor crop of election smears
NEWSPAPERS hate repetition just as nature abhors a vacuum. The media had been running the story that the Tories would win the election comfortably a good fortnight before Mrs Thatcher actually named the day and by the first week of the campaign they were thoroughly tired of it. So, almost by magic, a new theme appeared: Neil Kinnock, the underdog no-hoper, was actually a saleable commod- ity. Seven days into the campaign, the way in which Kinnock was putting himself across became the news. Manifestos and policies seem to have made no impact at all: this is an election about images, very much in the manner of an American presidential.
As it happened, I spent the first week of it in America and could find only two stories about our hustings in all the many newspapers I examined there; nothing at all on television — Robert Maxwell's attempt to take over Harcourt Brace was arousing far more interest. Yet there is what might be termed a British dimension to the current election debate over there as a result of the withdrawal of Gary Hart from the 1988 campaign. Harassment of politicians on account of their sexual diver- sions is supposed to be a peculiarly British practice. The Americans believe them- selves to be very grown up, like the French. Actually, this is self-delusion. As early as the 1828 election, the background to Andrew Jackson's marriage was a major issue. 'Ought a convicted adultress,' wrote the anti-Jackson editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, 'and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?' To which a Jackson paper, the United States Telegraph, replied with the accusation that his opponent, John Quincy Adams, had lived with Mrs Adams before they were married. And in Jack- son's first cabinet, the reputation of Mrs Eaton, wife of his war secretary, split the administration from top to bottom.
It may be more accurate for Americans to claim that the British specialise in the mechanics of the sex-and-politics story. I note that the documentation on Mrs Jack- son used by the Cincinnati Gazette was gathered by an English debt-collector cal- led May. Certainly the stake-out of a house in Washington by the Miami Herald, which revealed that Hart had spent ten hours with a stunning young woman, was re- garded as a piece of journalistic enterprise more worthy of the British tabloids than such a sober newspaper. US media pundits and ordinary members of the press are divided on whether it was legitimate. Most agreed it was badly done, since only the front door of the house was watched; a British Murdoch paper would have cov- ered the back one too.
As it happened, the News of the World was staking out a flat in Ashley Gardens inhabited by an American friend of Roy Hattersley, whose name (the paper alleged) mysteriously appeared in the elec- toral register under this address, as well as under his nearby home at 14 Gayfere Street, where he and Mrs Hattersley re- side. An accompanying photograph showed Hattersley emerging from the front entrance of the flats. The story, front page and two inside pages, was a typical British Sunday tabloid job, and the Hattersley camp reacted in equally characteristic Brit- ish fashion by announcing that a writ for libel would be issued at the earliest possi- ble moment. Indeed Hattersley himself was quoted by the paper as telling one of its reporters: `If a word of this is printed I'll be a very rich man. I will never need to work again'. He will doubtless be encour- aged by last week's settlement of David Steel's action against the Star; according to the London Daily News, the Liberal leader is to get a cool £100,000 (not so, says the Standard a mere £9,500).
The News of the World Hattersley story was the first real indication that the cam- paign, in default of riveting issues or political drama, would be punctuated by smears and 'exposures'. But so far the crop is of poor quality. Tiny Rowland's Obser- ver had two shots on Sunday. One was aimed at John Carlisle, Tory Candidate for Luton, and dealt with his business links in South Africa. But these amounted to small beer, at any rate by comparison with Tiny's own African ventures. The other story concerned John Browne, the Winchester Tory, and his efforts to lobby ministers over a Middle Eastern contract. Browne has made himself unpopular through his acrimonious financial dealings with his former wife but I doubt if the Observer's digging will add much to his difficulties. Its chief interest lay in the tone of Browne's letters to the lady in Downing Street: 'I only hope that I did not stay too long . . . I have so far had a 100 per cent failure rate in people that I have nominated for de- corations from my constituency'. But here again, Tiny's communications to ministers would make more compulsive reading.
The News on Sunday, happily still sur- viving after its shaky start — and much improved both in appearance and content — had a go at Mrs Thatcher herself, and in particular at her notorious 1950 paper, when she worked as a chemist in the food industry, On the Elasticity of Ice Cream. She was accused of providing 'the know- how for what later became Mr Whippy' and developing 'what is technically known as over-run — the pumping of air into ice cream'. The new voice on the Left thun- dered: 'Ice cream as we know it owes a lot to Mrs Thatcher'. This may well be a very damaging assertion among the people who read the News on Sunday, or at any rate among those who write it, chiefly middle- class puritans who regard eating ice cream as scarcely less reprehensible than smok- ing. But it is not the kind of smear that will alienate most voters, who, regardless of age or sex, stuff themselves with ice cream.
Experience suggests that election-time smears rarely work, especially if the politi- cian under attack faces them robustly. A lot of US pundits believe Hart would have survived perfectly well if he had simply sat tight and allowed the media, in effect, to sink into its own mud. It is worth re- .membering that in 1828 the attacks on Jackson did him no harm; he went on to win decisively the first mass-vote presiden- tial election. The adulteries of Melbourne and Palmerston had no effect on their popularity. True, Dilke and Parnell were both punished — but by their colleagues, not by the voters. Business exposures are much more damaging than sexual ones, as the destruction of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 showed. Her painful experience, rather than Hart's, may be the reason why Governor Cuomo, perhaps the most prom- ising Democratic leader today, swears he will not run. But it is hard to recall a British example. Smears fill empty spaces and amuse torpid electors but they do not seem to change votes.
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