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WE ARE ALL GUILTY
We also said, and here we blush to remember the puffed-up priggish pompos- ity with which we ventured the thought, that the New Millennium Experience would nonetheless prove immensely popu- lar. The crowds would be vast, we groaned; it would make pots of money, we forecast (and so did many other commentators), and the whole operation would prove the adage that no one ever went bust by underestimating the taste of the public. What fools we were. How little we under- stood the intelligence and discernment of the people. We have been proved right in the first prediction, but ludicrously wrong in the second.
Stuffed though the Dome is with mind- less ephemeral babble, and video games of all kinds, the crowds have not come, or not in anything like the numbers predicted. True, the Dome had one bumper day recently, when the place was crammed, North Korean-style, with trade unionists. But poor Monsieur Pierre-Yves Gerbeau has been forced to go back to the govern- ment for more money, and no one now seriously believes that it will reach its break-even target of ten million visitors. Yes, Blair condescended to the public in thinking they would just lurve the Dome, and we made the mistake of thinking he must be right. In its wisdom, its love of his- tory, its basic prejudice that a millennial celebration of Britain's achievement ought to contain something about the country's past, the public has proved us all wrong. We lacerate ourselves when a gorgeous television presenter does not know in which Play Toby Belch appears, and we succumb to orgies of self-recrimination when a few yobs are allowed to give Sir Winston Churchill a Mohican haircut made of turf. What we perhaps ignore, in the mist of fury, is what that indignation itself implies. What is truly amazing, and inspiring, is how many people do know that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night, and that Winston Churchill was the man who did much to win the second world war. It is really rather wonderful, after three years of 'mod- ernising' under Tony Blair, in which the new and the young are endlessly exalted over the old, how culturally conservative the British people seem to be. If Tony Blair were to live up to his words, and bang on about the Dome in the next Labour manifesto, the Tories might have a chance of winning.
Except, of course, that on present form they don't. Blair has failed to eradicate the cultural 'forces of conservatism'; of course he has. But the forces of conservatism have, for the last three years, been exceedingly slow to recover. At the time of going to press, we do not know the results from Romsey, London or the local elections. But whatever the strength of the Tory come- back, two things will be as true at the end of the week as they were at the beginning. The chance to oppose Tony Blair in London has been lost to the giant grinning mutant newt, and Blair still seems to be cruising at roughly 20 points ahead of the Tories in the polls. Why?
For the last three years the Tories have tried to do to Labour more or less what Labour did to the Tories. Rather than cut any particular attitude on the issues, they have relied on fomenting a general discon- tent against the government, steadily build- ing a coalition of the disaffected. The hope seems to have been that people will be so peeved with the government that they will hurl them into space, just as they hurled the Tories into space in 1997.
In a climate of broad economic satisfac- tion, this has not worked. Moreover, peo- ple's memories of the various infamies of the last Tory administration are too fresh. That is why, in recent weeks, William Hague has embarked on a new and inter- esting strategy. The Tories are expanding their repertoire of issues where they are prepared to differ sharply from Labour: not just Europe, but now asylum and crime. The strategy is potentially risky, and many moderate Tories will be nervous of language on asylum-seekers that could be construed as xenophobic, even though Mr Hague has been careful to avoid any such thing. Labour will say that by droning on about crime, and tax, and the Union, and Europe, the Tories are 'pandering' to their core vote.
But it is more oddly arrogant of Labour, surely, to believe that these questions are exclusively of interest to the Tory faithful, and that no Labour voter could be moved to vote Tory on the strength of them. That is condescension for you.
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