POLITICS: Digging deeper holes
Do we really need to have opinions on everything?
Some things are best left to Tony Blair
It would be a great mistake for the Tory party to try and fight cheese with cheese. And for one reason above all else: we’re never, ever going to find anyone who’s quite as good at is as the Prime Minister is. Take Mr Blair’s involvement in the launch of London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics this morning. When Tony stood up to give us his spiel, his started off with a harmless little routine about how clever it had been of the bid organisers to pledge to hold the Volleyball matches on Horseguards. So all very human and phone-in host and ‘if you swapped him for Kilroy would anyone notice?’ And so much more convincing than any of our lot would have been, even beery Ken, if they had tried their hand at the same material. This, after all, is what ACL Blair does best. Of course, as well as being terribly ITV2, it’s also not exactly true. Pedants and bores could easily point out that it’s the Mall, not ‘in front of the PM’s window’ where the Volleyball is due to be held. But that’s not the point: Tony Blair, sharing a platform with Ken Livingstone, needed to be fluently shamelessly in an appropriately lower middlebrow sort of way. And he was. Michael Howard, who can be both shameless and fluent, didn’t need to say anything at all, and doesn’t gain from having done so. So why did he, and what has it gained him?
Statementitis is the most superficial reason why CCO felt obliged to offer a not hugely expectant world its thoughts on the London bid. You employ press officers, they’ll send out faxes. It’s the news cycle of life. Nobody reads them, no one will care if they’re never sent, but someone’s being paid the salary of a moderately competent West End sous chef, so click-click-click goes the press office PC. There’s a deeper reason to do with “tone” obviously. Namely the Campbell/Wheelan-inculcated school of political media management that says, ‘we like sport, sport matters: on the head son’. Now neither the last idiot nor the current fellow is going to be able to keep it up in the air with Kevin Keegan, but should Opposition, let alone Tory leaders still try to get a touch on the ball?
What Michael Howard had put out under his name isn’t worth noticing. Though the implications, if he (a.) knew of the specific statement and (b.) believed in what it actually said, would be pretty depressing. For apparently winning the Olympics ‘would lead to regeneration, providing jobs and prosperity in London and beyond’. As, near certainly, would going to war with, say, Peru, but as public spending boondoggles go, the Olympics are likely to cause more traffic jams. No, what depresses isn’t the thought that we’re in for 24 months of carefully calibrated, not quite in the directors’ box, musings on premiership management. Nor that the words were as automatically empty as most good wishes are (no one doubts that Mr Howard is sincere in wishing to see the Olympics come to London — and little is more tedious than reflexive opposition). What, sadly, discourages is that nagging fear about just how wrong we’re capable of getting our sucking up to Subaru driving, Radio 5 Live listening, idealised blokeism. There’s little to disparage about this strain in our national life; there’s a lot to worry about how truly hopeless all post-Thatcher Tory politicians are at going about aping its manners.
This isn’t serious, just roll your eyes
Hyper-activity in opposition is mistaken to the point of being harmful. Getting involved, to the extent that one can, in every ‘issue’ going only increases your chances of making a mistake. When that, as every schoolboy avoiding the hard AS Levels and doing politics instead ought to know, is — the government’s job. They make mistakes, oppositions criticise them. Very simple system, worked quite well for a fairly long period of time. Yet today, however, the tendency is always to ‘participate’, to go with the cycle, to answer the phone, to give the silly girl from Millbank her seven second spoonful of sugar-coated nothingness. On one level the case is there to be made that the involvement of the state, and the seekers of government jobs (i.e. the opposition), with something like sport is a rotten habit twice over. From one direction we can surely see how the inclination of government is to systemise and bureaucratise and, well, nationalise an activity which as much as any other ought to be voluntary and disaggregate and individualistic? In other words, the state soils sport. But equally from the other direction, games are such a hopelessly trivial preoccupation that they diminish the state every time they’re allowed to preoccupy its politicians.
Neither should we wish to live in a country as unlucky as Australia (do we really want to go down the neurotic route of state-run sports academies and their dull-eyed epsilons? we’re too far in that direction already), nor should a healthy regime permit itself to be at the beck and call of tiddlywinks and Mah Jong and Tetris. And if not yet those latter pursuits, how long before they demand their place, and what intrinsic difference is there anyway between a mob howling over one such ‘hobby’ as compared to another?
If ‘games are for children, but sport’s for killing’ our current obsession with the former only serves to remind us how infantile British political discourse is. Childishness, pleasurable and familiar as it is, has its limits, and how sweet it would be if only our wise father the state didn’t indulge us quite as often as he presently does.
Thankfully Adrian Muldrew is back soon
Kit Kildare, January 16, 2004 06:34 PM