SHARED OPINION
So do 20 per cent of the people think King Hague ordered the slaying of the first-born?
FRANK JOHNSON
The widespread ignorance among the under-thirties raises doubts about the intel- ligence of a large proportion of the people who answer opinion polls. Doubts about opinion polls have been expressed in this magazine before. There is, for example, the argument about the 'spiral of silence' or `spiral of fear': respondents do not like to tell interviewers that they would vote Tory for fear of appearing selfish, uncaring and greedy, especially since the sort of people who ask questions for opinion polls some- how look and sound as if they would disap- prove of Tories. That is not because they are consciously prejudiced. To a Conserva- tive, nearly everyone who has anything to do professionally with politics seems disap- proving of Tories: pollsters, academics, broadcasters, anyone in a modish London restaurant. It is at least as likely that it is the respondents who are prejudiced. They prejudge the prejudices of the interviewers.
I think there is much in the 'spiral of silence' theory. But that is not the point I am trying to make here. The spiral of silence is not bad for Mr Hague. It means that respondents talk New Labour to peo- ple from the polls, but vote Tory in the vot- ing booth. By-election and local election results suggest that this is what might have been happening in this Parliament. Rather it is my point here to postulate a 'spiral of ignorance'. Many respondents to opinion pollsters, especially respondents under 30, not only do not know who slew the first- born, but assume that, in order to demon- strate to the interviewer that they are not ignorant, they must make it clear that they are anti-Tory. To them, Toryism is synony- mous with 'bad' or 'greedy' or 'sleaze' or 'upper-class public-schoolboys from the South'. Mr Hague, according to a poll about a year ago, is considered to be a pub- lic schoolboy from the South, even though he is a state-schoolboy from the North. It is Mr Blair who is the public-schoolboy, and who has the southern accent, though less so when he is visiting the North.
To these opinion-poll respondents, Mr Hague, and even more so Mr Portillo, are probably demoniacal figures. Not being interested in history, the respondents have little conception of wickedness other than as represented by people of whom they disap- prove in the present, or of whom they think they are expected to disapprove. Almost the only dead bad person of whom they have heard is Hitler, who is often on television. Something of this lack of proportion is to be found in the United States. Mr Murdoch's New York Post — a favourite paper of mine which I read on the Internet because it is one of the few in that country with any life in it — had a poll last week showing that Hitler was the most evil person of the millennium, but that President Clinton was the second. The seventh, beaten by Stalin, Poi Pot and Mengele, was Mrs Clinton.
Mr Hague is lucky that that Ondigital poll, in response to the question about who slew the first-born, did not return a majori- ty of under-thirties answering King Hague. We may be sure that the same age-group, answering the question 'Which Spanish general overthrew democracy in his country in the 1930s?', would reply: 'General Por- tillo.' Or perhaps at best his father. This might be too much even for a Portillo-hat- ing opinion-poll interviewer.
'Wrong, Francol"What? Ole Franco Dobson? Nab, e's caring.'
But why should the spiral of ignorance be good for Mr Hague, since those caught in the spiral hate Tories? Because they do not vote. All the evidence suggests that voting is an activity of the middle-class, middle- aged, who like going to the theatre. That explains the low turnout at the general election and at by-elections. Though they vote Labour in opinion polls, the young and the proletariat no longer vote anything in polling booths. Mr Blair is in office at the behest of the voting classes: the middle- , class and middle-aged who defected to him from the Tories and are slowly returning to them. But the opinion polls ask all classes their opinions. Pollsters insist that they take account of intention to vote, but that is impossible to take account of. They seldom ask whether or how respondents voted at the last general election because non-voters would undoubtedly reply that they voted Labour, and if they were telling the truth the turnout would have been much higher. For pollsters to emphasise that question would give the game away. An alliance between the spiral of silence and the spiral of fear therefore makes the Tories' situa- tion look much worse than it really is.
The Kensington and Chelsea by-election result was written up as if it would do little harm to Mr Blair if it were repeated at a general election. It was said that the swing of just over 4 per cent to the Conservatives would still leave Labour with a majority of 70. It was not explained whether this was a majority of 70 over the Tories or over all other parties. If it meant over the Tories only, it is not especially good for Mr Blair. For we must take into account the likelihood that Labour will lose plenty of seats in Scot- land and Wales — as the Hamilton by-elec- tion and the Welsh Assembly elections sug- gested — and that the Liberals will lose seats to the Conservatives in England, as suggest- ed by the collapse of the Liberal vote in Kensington and Chelsea. That by-election result, if it points to anything, points to a hung Parliament or a small overall Labour majority.
True, it is risky to point this out if, like me, you did not think Labour would win the last election by nearly so much. But I commend a 1949 Washington Post editorial on the subject of President Truman's constant jibes at those who had predicted his defeat the previous year, which was everyone. Truman had pub- licly mocked a grand American publisher who had admitted to telling the Pope that Truman would lose. The Post commented: 'We hope that whatever triumphs and plea- sures he can extract from these admissions, he will allow the subject to rest. For though amusing for a while, it has long since become rather tiresome to everybody except Mr Tru- man himself.'
Not that Mr Blair is jibing away. We may assume that his advisers know that his power depends on the small conservative voting class, of both 'c' sizes. He probably knew that in the moment of his 1997 tri- umph. That explains this week's news that even then he toyed with coalition with the Liberal Democrats, his only regret being perhaps — that he could not form one with the Tories.
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