POLITICS: Do even the Liberals deserve Portilloites?
And might Jon Snow be less than entirely neutral?
And take your stinking quotas with you
Assorted Liberals are keeping themselves busy at their party conference by going round claiming that every last person on the Cchange mailing list is about to defect. This is a happy thought. We should perhaps pause momentarily and think on it some more. Mmmmn, nice. Sadly no more than we were by the SAPs are we likely to be delivered of this Portilloite plague by outside intervention. This is one mess we’re going to have to take care of ourselves. Charles Kennedy’s speech was the usual waffle — though effectively delivered — but you’ve a feeling he’s on to something (or, at least, is rolling out a rhetorical trope we’ll hear over and over again) here:
[T]oo much silence is much more ominous than too much noise in a parliamentary democracy.I sat in the chamber of the House of Commons, at our recall session, on Tuesday. I listened with great care and attention to a detailed and lengthy statement from the Prime Minister. The night before I had read carefully here [in Brighton] the advance copy of the dossier made available to the opposition party leaders on Privy Council terms.
And then I listened to the leader of the other opposition party. And the sound I heard? The sound of parliamentary silence.
If the predominant party of power throughout most of the twentieth century finds itself reduced to brief banalities on one of the early defining issues of the twenty first — if it has scarcely any questions to ask of the government of the day — then I say that's a party which is rendering itself redundant and irrelevant in the body politic of our country.
At that recall session (and what a waste of time it was) Mr Kennedy went on a little bit too long and when he uttered the pedestrian formulation, ‘and finally’, there were Tory cheers. His answer to this cat-calling, was positively spat at the official opposition: ‘We are only asking the questions that man failed to ask’. And there’s more truth too in the Liberal Democrat leader’s conference speech than any of us could like when he concluded of the Tory party, ‘In fact there's very little that they seem to want to talk about at all these days’.
It’s long overdue that we started opposing; but sadly Bournemouth is far more likely to see the leadership opposing the voluntary party.
What gives?
There’s not a tremendous amount [see above] happening in the world at the moment, but isn’t that all the more reason why Jon Snow and Channel Four News might try to raise their game a bit, to make a little extra effort? For wasn’t it just too wearily predictable, and obvious, and dully left wing even for them that their 7pm bulletin led, and led big, on Jeffrey Archer’s latest crime against humanity? Was this really the single most important news story in Britain and the wider world today? I'm not saying it shouldn't be illegal to have lunch with Mrs Shepherd, just that, strictly speaking, it isn't yet.
Think how many hands must have gone into the making of this waste of time and effort: the fresh faced young researchers, the haggard old producer, the programme’s editor, and then old red socks himself fronting it all up. Didn’t someone, at some point, even if only ever so quietly to themselves, want to whisper: ‘Jeffrey Archer having a gin and tonic with Gillian Shepherd is not headline news’? We shall never know. Though it does give us something to ponder when next Jon Snow tells us about his news values, and their barely concealed nobility. Is it really too much to hope for some right wing telly?
Kit Kildare, ERO’s political correspondent, will be in Bournemouth throughout the Tory conference, and he wants your gossip
Kit Kildare, February 26, 2002 07:35 PM