POLITICS
Chariots come to the rescue of Labour's defence policy
FERDINAND MOUNT
One place you used to be able to get away from piped music was the party political broadcast. Long after airport lounges and saloon bars had been colo- nised by muzak, those five- or ten-minute spots were oases of peace and quite. A nervous, gulping politician would point to a graph made up of little houses or I. signs. Whenever he paused, there was a deathly hush. Nothing worked terribly well. The general production standards were those of `Acorn Antiques'. The nearest they got to an outside broadcast was a bumpy trip up the Ml — to indicate modern-mindedness — the politician's statistics drowned out by engine noise. Then back to the studio, where some television-star-turned-MP would reassure the viewer by his smile that it would all soon be over. The whole thing was honestly dishonest; here was a chap getting through his lines, not putting much into it or expecting you to believe the half of it, clearly longing for a stiff gin-and- tonic — rather the sort of alienation effect aimed for by the late Berthold Brecht.
All this is now a pleasant, jerky memory. with Kinnock and the Red Rose, directed by Hugh 'Chariots' Hudson, election broadcasts have joined the mainstream of yuck. Your sitting-room is invaded not merely by Neil and Glenys and Neil's Auntie Sadie and Uncle Bill, but, far, far, worse, by Uncle Jim and Auntie Barbara, all glued together by globs of Brahms and Beethoven and the man who did the score for Mona Lisa. Now Uncle Jim spent most of his political life fighting Mr Kinnock and his friends with a venom which would make a cobra retire to its basket; to see him comparing young Neil to the Younger Pitt taking office (in fact, Neil is nearly the same age as Pitt was when he died). . . . And as for Auntie Barbara's impersona- tion of the dear old body in the corner shop who knew the boy when he was a lad. . . . I'm told the Tories have a patriotic video with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, but please say I don't have to see it. We political correspondents may seem tough, but we have our breaking point like other men.
How exquisitely the roles are reversed. The Tories used to be good at burbling and looked relaxed with pets, while Labour men looked stiff in shiny suits and would insist on talking about politics. Now to see most members of the Cabinet meeting a Real Person on television is hot-making. By comparison, Mr Kinnock is brilliant at looking regal, but, alas, still not so good at all that dreary policy stuff. Take, for example, his response to Mr David Frost's only moderately searching question as to how he proposed to defend Britain without nuclear weapons: Yes, what you're then suggesting is that the alternatives are between the gesture, the threat, or the use of nuclear weapons — and surrender. In these circumstances the choice is posed, and this is a classical choice, between exterminating everything you stand for and the flower of your youth, or using all the resources you have to make any occupation totally untenable: Well, it seems more yes and no, really. The next day, Mr Kinnock indignantly denied that he had advised us to 'take to the hills' (Mr George Younger), or repel boarders by 'the threat of guerrillas in Penge High Street' (Mr John Cartwright for the Alliance). He was apparently refer- ring to the deterrent effect of Labour's policy of strengthening Britain's conven- tional forces. A funny way of referring to it, you may think. I mean, one usually hopes to start using one's conventional forces before being occupied.
And you may also begin to see why Mr Kinnock has been sent on an extended tour of Britain, most of the time meeting only the friendlier questions of the local press, while Bryan Gould fields the rougher stuff at Transport House — and very capably too. Mr Gould had the better of Norman Tebbit in the exchange about whether Mr Tebbit had said at the last election that, if unemployment was still above three mil- lion at the next general election, they did not deserve to be re-elected. It seemed from the tape, unearthed allegedly by chance from the bowels of Labour HQ, that Mr Tebbit had indeed said something not wholly dissimilar, and his second line of defence, that unemployment would soon be dipping below three million, scarcely wiped out the embarrassment.
The Conservative leaders look rather uncomfortably crammed on to the Central Office stage, and none of them has spark- led so far, certainly not Mrs Thatcher herself. She has managed to make her radical new policies for choice in education and housing sound discouragingly compli- cated. All she needed to say was that they intend to give the council tenants a right to choose their landlord just as they have already been given the right to buy, and that schools which choose to opt out would be run on the same lines as the existing and popular — voluntary aided Church schools. But then this may be one inevit- able disadvantage of a detailed manifesto. We hacks prefer large, bright simplicities.
But I do not think that the Tory clumsi- ness is the cause of Labour's advance in the early stages. After all, Dr Owen is in tolerably good form, and the Alliance is still making no progress in the polls. All that has happened so far, if anything, is that Labour has recovered from the Alliance a proportion of those voters who never really stopped being Labour but found Michael Foot's hopelessness too appalling to bear and who find Mr Kinnock by contrast reasonably presentable. I doubt whether you could dignify this by the name of tactical voting. At 33-34 per cent, Labour's recovery is so far pretty relative. That sort of result would still be their worst since 1931, except for 1983.
What has yet to be seen is the combined effect of the Conservatives and Alliance both attacking Labour. The Conservatives spent the first week trying to prove that they had not run out of ideas, while the Alliance started by attempting to show that it was the responsible alternative to the Tories. More by accident than design, Labour was left to cultivate the red rose undisturbed. We do not yet know whether it is a rose that blooms only in sheltered nooks.
From now on, the air will be thick with hidden manifestos and lists of crypto- Militants. Labour's leaders are well aware how vulnerable they still are on the loony Left front. Why else would they have taken what must be the unique step of including in the Kinnock weepie a clip of his famous attack on Derek Hatton at Bournemouth — an advertisement of deep party disunity which only desperation could justify?
But lying deeper still and harder to deal with is the vacuousness of the Kinnock leadership. There still seems to be no there there. True, Harold Wilson turned out to be more or less hollow after he squeaked home in 1964. But in that white-hot dawn he at least seemed substantial. Why, even Sir William Rees-Mogg confessed that he could think of no good reason to advise young engineers to vote Conservative in that election. Young engineers still hang- ing on Sir William's words would not, I think, be left in the same quandary today.
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