WHAT A LOAD OF WINKERS!
Anne McElvoy moves among the
spin doctors, their patients and the splitters-in-waiting
Blackpool It had to happen. The only wonder is that it took so long. Three young men approached in the hoarse maw of a Black- pool soirée. They had that visionary, slight- ly deranged look that will be familiar to anyone who ever experienced university branches of the ultra-Tory Monday Club in its triumphalist heyday of the 1980s. Through the crowd they moved with the prim self-consciousness of three little maids on their first social outing. There was an element of swagger too.
They produced pamphlets of an outfit called Labour 2000. It bristled with storm- trooper diction. 'Resolution, standing orders, references back . . who needs them?' foghorned an article proposing that the 'ugly seaside bunfight' of the Labour Party conference should be abolished and replaced by a straightforward love-fest in honour of the leadership, modelled on the conventions of the American parties.
Conference, shmonference. Who needs it anyway, all those untidy delegates with their stubborn belief that Whitney CLP is entitled to a view on the Kashmir question and the fate of state pensions? Abolishing voting, explained Nick Pryor, the group's dapper convenor, would 'lessen the risk of embarrassment for the leadership'. Yes indeed. Abolishing elections generally has that effect. Other pronouncements rang with the same shrill, callow confidence. There was an appeal to Labour to embrace private finance for the NHS and a call to `End the anarchy of public sector strikes'. Mr Pryor wants 'an end to the nanny- state', a merger with the Liberal Demo- crats (he is not free of contradictions) and enforcement of binding arbitration in pub- lic sector disputes.
The wonderful and bizarre thing about the Labour Party nowadays is that you have absolutely no idea what will happen to it next. In olden days a glimpse of indi- vidualism was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, they'll be banning trade unions and sending babies onto the hills of Sparta to see which ones survive. Coming face to face with post- Labour's shock troops, I wondered whether they might not be just a touch too ready with the ideological jackboot, even for the fearless Mr Blair. Best consult a spin-doctor and find out.
Say what you will about the reliability of Labour's promises on health care, they have cut the waiting lists for spin doctors. A junior one was immediately at hand, nobly agreeing to cut short a hot date to hasten to the aid of the party. I confided to feelings of disorientation and dizziness, the result of meeting people in Labour who are so far to the Right that one won- dered why they didn't just join John Red- wood's Conservative 2000 and have done with it. Was this a healthy outgrowth of Blairite reform, or a malign malforma- tion? The junior doctor made sympathetic clucking sounds and said there was no cause for alarm. 'They're just taking the logic of Blair through to its conclusion,' he soothed. 'Look, it's tactically good for Tony if he is not the most right-wing per- son in his own party. For years, all the extremists were on the Left. It's much healthier for us to be seen to have a chal- lenge from the ultra-modernisers. They can say things which are still unsayable for the leadership, like, "Let's really put the boot into the unions." That breaks the taboos for us.'
There is some truth in all of this. Mr Blair sometimes underestimates how smug he can appear and makes the mistake of thinking that to woo Labour's natural ene- mies you have to appear as much like them as possible. They rarely like it. I recall a prominent industrialist complain- ing to me that Tony Blair's fatal flaw in his encounters with endemically conservative institutions was that the Labour leader liked to present himself as being just as right-wing as anyone else present. My interlocutor was affronted. 'I'm the most reactionary person I know,' he thundered. `I won't have some jumped-up Labour politician telling me he thinks like me.'
Whether or not Labour 2000 with its embryonic 200 members turns out to be a boon or a headache for Mr Blair, there is historic inevitability about its very exis- tence. It presages the broader battle which will take place for the soul of the party in the next few years, namely the one between budding neo-liberals and the Social Democrats.
There are already adumbrations of con- flict, even within New Labour. At a fringe meeting on 'The stakeholder society versus the enterprise society', Peter Mandelson introduced the Tory peer Lard Skidelsky, who would speak for the latter and thought that the former was a threadbare construct. Will Hutton, the Cassandra of short- termism, would speak for the stakeholder society and against untrammelled free enterprise. Mr Mandelson sided formally with Mr Hutton because both have written books about stakeholding and because Mr Hutton supports Labour. But you could tell (mainly by his looking as if he would fall asleep during Mr Hutton's exegesis on state-enforced corporate benevolence) that he was naturally drawn to the antiseptic market solutions of Lord Skidelsky instead.
A good number of thinkers in Labour now want the party to abandon its special burden of responsibility for society's unfortunates beyond a vague Tory-ish paternalism. Mr Blair's 'Age of Achievement' speech exhibit- ed trace elements of social Darwinism. It was so insistent about self-improvement that one began to wonder who is going to speak up for society's Mr Doolittles — the undeserv- ing poor or just downright lazy. They are going to have an awful time, with lifelong learning imposed on them and their dim off- spring hauled off to mandatory summer reading schools. The basic message of Blair's Britain is: no slacking.
In this past week, two Labour confer- ences have been proceeding simultaneous- ly. One consists of the delegates moving motions abhorring this, condemning that and upholding the other. No one outside the hall takes a blind bit of notice of all of this. It is as enclosed a world as a child's video-game, circumscribed by its own rules, compelling for as long as you watch it, but instantly forgotten as soon as you walk away. The other is the carefully controlled realm of Mr Brown and Mr Blair's perfor- mances, the smooth façade of party unity, reinforced by time-honoured behind-the- scenes deals to avoid inconvenient defeats. Constituency parties were given model motions to submit, a practice which effi- ciently 'minimised embarrassment' at Com- munist Party conferences in the old Eastern bloc.
The sole link between these two worlds was Clare Short, the chairwoman. This was an inspired choice, given that she has recently been downgraded in the Shadow Cabinet pecking order despite enjoying the unalloyed warmth of the party faithful. It showed that not only had Miss Short received her punishment for occasional lapses into honesty, but she had accepted the necessity of it. She ran the proceedings with a large woman's bonhomie, reminis- cent of the television comedienne, Victoria Wood. Her resistance has dwindled to occasional acts of sabotage. 'We've got to watch one of these now, I'm afraid,' she announced scathingly as yet another con- tent-free 'New Labour, New Britain' video showing happy families and willing workers was beamed onto the screen. The abiding memory of this conference was the way in which Labour's cast came together, as well- rehearsed as a West End musical. John Prescott smiled at Mr Blair and vice versa, Robin Cook slapped an astonished Gordon Brown on the shoulder after Mr Brown's speech. The more fertile the enmity In practice, the more compelling were the gestures of amity.
The real PR triumph since last year, however, is the make-over of Mr Mandel- son. The prince of darkness has become, in the words of his favoured aide, 'a pussycat'. Journalists who used to compare wounds inflicted by the man now boast about their closeness to him. The delegates are similar- ly fascinated. 'Oh it's that man Mandy,' says the pleasant middle-aged woman from a Nottingham constituency next to me at a fringe meeting. 'He invented spinning, You know. Mind you, he spun for Neil 1Cinnock ana look what happened. He's very vain, isn't he?' Mr Mandelson obligingly turned his perfectly coiffured head in our direction and delivered a large wink. My neighbour squeaked with excitement. New Labour, New Wink. You might even say that they are the men who wink too much. Mr Blair does it. Mr Mandelson does it. The trainee spin doctors are honing their winking skills. It is the perfect gesture for the polite party — at once conspiratorial but unbinding, flirtatious but sexually unthreatening. The fear and loathing is still there, of course. These days it is conducted in the sibilant whispers of Dangerous Liaisons rather than in the raucous tones of the con- ference floor. The splits-in-waiting are exhibited at barely attended fringes or late at night in the hotel bars. A tired and very emotional pro-European MP mutters dark- ly that some Eurosceptics are funded by the CIA which wants to bring down Fortress Europe. Later, a leading Labour Eurosceptic tells me just as firmly that the pro-European MP is paid by American intelligence.
The most serious challenge for Labour will be knowing where and when to stop dismantling the party's traditions. People like to be able to identify a difference between being Tory and being Labour. If they can't, I imagine they'd prefer to vote for the devil they know. Mr Blair shares the problem of revisionists everywhere, namely that the process of change he has set in motion has no obvious conclusion beyond the dissolution of the thing he set out to reform. The collapse of the Soviet Commu- nist Party in 1991 began back in 1956 when Khrushchev admitted to its errors under Stalin. In a tribute to Labour's veterans in his speech in Blackpool, Mr Blair noted that his party 'only survived for the new members to join because the old members stuck by it through thick and thin'. It sounded like an obituary.
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