POLITICS: Where are Tony’s Tory friends now?
Here, oddly enough
ERO’s editorial comment
The passion of Matthew d’Ancona
During the war against Iraq, a strange thing happened. A whole host of Tory partisans in the press, young, ambitious men with Tory futures finally broke cover and admitted something they’d long wanted to deny about themselves: their admiration for Tony Blair. Their excuse was that this was Tony Blair, war leader, they admired, but there was more to it than that. First of all, they really only got up the guts to break cover because, to a man, they loathed the weak leadership the Tory opposition was saddled with during the war. But the urge to power that Mr Duncan Smith encouraged, in others, to go in the opposite direction from him, revealed an even more complicated picture than that. Namely, that the sort of self-declared Conservatives coming out for Blair, habitual Blair baiters all, were, to put it mildly, conflicted. For the thing they were admitting their love for was in truth something they had long wanted to deny even to themselves. Put simply, to many of the Tory party’s camp followers in the press, the urbane, metropolitan, educated, yet-still-soundly Atlanticist Prime Minister they finally faced up to having was, well, the leader and solitary successful embodiment of the kind of ‘right’ they really wanted to follow.
Yet now they find themselves back inside the Tory tent — who wouldn’t, what with our current forensic leadership, and its abandonment of bad opportunistic opposition? — peering at their former Achilles. Sadly though, just as soon as they withdrew from Mr Blair’s embrace, far from being left desolate, he seems to thrive. His lumpen party gets by, on subjects as precious as university education, without the vanguard of lovestruck Tories urging him on to ever greater Thatcherite excess. Worse still, the cathartic moment of release, when at last Tony Blair is crucified for the emptiness Blairite Tories see and crave and hate themselves for wanting, well, that’s no closer to happening either.
The Prime Minister’s latest great escape, no, that hardly does it justice — his latest transfiguration, is of course Hutton. To go from entirely justified headlines exposing the fatal independence of Gordon Brown, to utter triumph in just a day, speaks of skills beyond all ordinary politicians. In fact, you can see why our most modern friends developed their crush on him. But just as relentless Tory partisanship has stranded principled Conservative advocates of, say, sane funding mechanisms for higher education behind failed parliamentary tactics, so too is this terrible victory the fault of the Tory leadership. For without the inexcusably foolish attempt to blame the prime Minister for a war his accusers prided themselves on wanting before he did, on the basis of still less information, the Hutton report could have been what it ought rightly to be regarded as: the most important Tory success in years.
You can’t kill them one bee at a time
Any fool could have told you the following half a year ago: Lord Hutton was never going to unseat the Prime Minister; a retiring Alistair Campbell only played up as he did because he knew he was on solid ground; the public don’t care; and, whatever this absurdly misconceived tribunal told us about the unfortunate Dr Kelly, the light it shone on the war was never going to redound to the credit of the Tory party. In the absence of ERO, however, error was rampant. ‘Tony Blair’s 24 hours of doom’ was very much the order of the day. Not, ‘Tony Blair neutralises Brownite acid with Alkaline law Lord’. (Oh we never should have trusted the party to look after itself.)
As a sullen air settles on the Tory party (all Mr Howard’s broadcast interviews booked for this afternoon were pretty suddenly cancelled after he left the Commons chamber) let’s not lose sight of the fact that, despite our hapless performance, we are potentially by far the biggest winners from what happened today. Anyone who listened later to the legions of backbench Tory MPs, giving tongue to their true feelings (invariably hostile to the BBC), rather than being needlessly clever-clever like the frontbench, will have seen that, at root, the Tory party knows when its real enemy has been hurt. And the biggest enemy the Tory party faces, darker even than a hundred imploding Norris campaigns, is the BBC. Today marked the BBC’s biggest defeat by politicians since the end of World War II. This, even if media class Tories don’t want to face up to why, is the best thing that could have happened by the future good health of Conservatism.
There is no point in rehearsing here again all the manifold ways in which the state broadcaster is inimical to the Conservative Party, whether in terms of antagonism to its ideals, or, more importantly, in naked, caste hatred of its possible if unlikely ambitions (ie the philistinism, the commercialism, the assured provincialism, the hearty xenophobia). Only Toryism, either through its disavowal of the personal being political, or in its more naked willingness to advance free market rivals to the Corporation, poses a direct threat to the BBC’s political and cultural pre-eminence. That the BBC has undoubtedly obtained such hegemony is easy enough to spot, or rather to see and to hear. Consider only this, if the Prime Minister had been defeated on tuition fees yesterday, or alternatively, he had received comparable censure from Hutton today, would this have received the attention the BBC has given itself? The BBC’s self-absorption is entirely forgivable in this instance, for it merely reflects reality. The Corporation has sought to acquire all the trappings of political centrality in Britain, and now it faces the consequences.
What regime change hopefully looks like
In true rolling news fashion, as the actual scale of the BBC’s defeat began to chaotically emerge, even its own couldn’t help but slip into oddly truthful descriptions of the Corporation. At one stage, we were informed by a BBC hack that ‘none of the Corporation’s leaders can be found to make a statement’. When eventually a truculent Greg Dyke did emerge [sic], it was in best Bin Laden fashion, being in the form of an unexpected video tape filmed in an unknown location. Just imagine the reaction there would have been from the BBC if an officially bollocked minister had tried the same sort of stunt! In this, we have in microcosm, the problem with the BBC: its own morals don’t apply to it. What would have been scourgingly good for others (Greg Dyke, for instance, being harangued at a press conference, being sneered at in studio after studio across the Beeb’s vast empire, being the victim of casual editorialising by pontifical BBC anchors) weirdly enough wasn’t the criterion to which they were ever going to subject themselves. This tells us something rotten.
To no avail, for the rest of the media have suffered their condescension and dominance long enough (think on, the explosion of resentment at Britain during the Boer War) and have now the tools to finish the job, the BBC did have enough pride to try and fight back. Soon enough we discovered that the previously lionised Lord Hutton could, conceivably, have been a stuffed establishment shirt. The childish obviousness of this particular tactic — if it were true now, it was as true when he was appointed, and in the intervening half year, not once has the BBC seen fit to abuse Hutton’s credentials — verges on the pathetic however. It, at best, does nothing for the stature of, say, Jeremy Paxman or his programme that his juvenile inquiry to the first politician he met was to snort, ‘hmmn, the judge appointed by the government cleared the government’. Think again simply on the ‘Hutton’ we would have heard about had he come down on the BBC’s side! More plangent still was the cry of Andrew Marr, probably sincerely meant, that Lord Hutton could have done something as inconceivable as ‘taken the word of politicians at higher value than that of journalists’. Fancy.
All the way through Hutton, the BBC has proven itself characteristically incapable of reporting on itself. Not, note, of being unable to endlessly witter on about itself, but the ability to exert any form of critical self-examination has been even more frighteningly absent than even the Corporation’s stiffest foes might have supposed. When Hutton was previewed, for months and months this has been, on the BBC, with a view to what it meant for the Government. Not one time in 50 was it conceded by the BBC in its many reports that quite possibly Hutton was going to mean something for them too. This framing of the terms of political reference inevitably succeeds in contemporary Britain: the narrative becomes the BBC’s occupied territory; to engage is to submit. You know, ‘Michael Howard was a harsh right winger [bad], but now he’s become more liberal on many issues [good]’ — that sort of thing. Goes on all the time. Washes right off most folk. Thank goodness that Lord Hutton set his own terms of reference, and thus political impact, by sticking so closely to the remit given to him by Lord Falconer. By standing outside the BBC’s game — or by ‘not understanding’ how journalism properly conceived works, as the Corporation slowly evolved its offensive line during the course of the evening — by more than anything else, not grandstanding on the war, Lord Hutton in effect forgot to take his pills. As a result he saw the world all too clearly for the BBC’s liking.
The degree to which the BBC succeeded in establishing how Hutton was to be understood was evident in what was popularly expected of the outgoing Law Lord. Polishing off Geoff Hoon was naturally a given, hence why the BBC had ticked him off its little list and had moved firmly onto whether or not it was going to be able to give the thumbs up or the thumbs down to the Prime Minister. This apparent truth, that Hoon was doomed, dissolved very quickly however. Geoff Hoon isn’t going anywhere soon, but Gavyn Davies has. Even this represents the BBC attempting to absolve itself of corporate responsibility. Incidentally, any takers for past BBC enthusiasms for dubious notions like, say, ‘institutional racism’? Scarcely credibly, the institutional defects which can supposedly blight personally blameless individuals who happen to work for collectively disagreeable bodies doesn’t, couldn’t — you know. Maybe they recruit a higher class of graduate? Or just possibly, no one’s morally fit to watch this watchman. The way, in case you were wondering, that the actions of Mr Davies reflects still further BBC perfidy lies in what he is trying to do. This being that, as his resignation statement made explicitly clear, he should be the blood sacrifice, and that no further sackings are needed.
In the crudest sense, Gavyn Davies is trying to protect the job of his friend and fellow Labour-donating media millionaire, Greg Dyke. More widely, he is trying to protect the entire officer corps of his army. Again, and thanks largely to that wrongly abused institution, the Board of Governors (its deliberate neglect by self-important managers and broadcasters is what has allowed the BBC to stray irresponsibly far from its leash), this isn’t going to work. Somewhere between Dame Pauline Neville Jones and Richard Ryder, the dismal news which will assuredly make up tomorrow’s front pages is going to come home to Mr Dyke. So he’s a goner too, but even that hardly suffices. Had this been the armed forces, the courts martial would have gone all the way down the line. Perhaps Richard Sambrook will fall too, but the idea that Kevin Marsh is in trouble appears to be remote, despite being the officer-in-charge when an out of control Today allowed the disgraced Andrew Gilligan to work his magic.
At this point we should probably acknowledge that though little more than 15 years ago, BBC executives were still sufficiently aware of their proper place in the scheme of politics that, for instance, an especially bumptious Brian Redhead would be reprimanded, it had become a world very much a long time ago and far, far away. What the chicken and egg of the observable decline in the number of listeners who would write in to complain (an increasingly redundant activity as the 90s progressed) about eg Today arrogance is hard to know. Denying now that Today above all other programmes, even Red Kirsty Wark’s stints doing the boys’ bit of Newsnight, was out of control, increasingly takes nerves most liberals don’t have. Naturally Jon Snow’s Channel 4 News is worse, but then no one bothers now to deny his fellow travelling, and his programme hardly impacts upon the rest of the press, let alone upon the public at large.
Hear Today groan tomorrow
In some ways, a not very bright cynic could claim that Michael Howard has done the Lord’s work. That by falling on his own sword of reputation (though when, pace his solicitude for civil servants, and how ministers can best treat them, did this epiphany happen? a month after his imbroglio with Derek Lewes? a Year? more? you do wonder) he has accentuated the Prime Minister’s glorious smashing of the BBC, and thereby increased the real, salient pressure on our most dangerous foe. A cynic could, but then cynicism has never been enough.
Some of the rodents who shelter in the lee of the BBC have tried comforting themselves with hysteria. Notably Channel Four’s, or more precisely, ITN’s Jon Snow raved about the ‘new rules for the press’ that the wicked neo-Bismarckian Hutton was inflicting upon the fourth estate. Poor Andrew Neil was reduced to that most over played record in his collection: that the BBC was suffering from concerted attacks by something he called ‘the establishment’ — as if one were possible that did not have at its heart exactly the Corporation. All this froth in reward for Lord Hutton’s tyrannical injunction to the press that, ideally, they shouldn’t make quite so much stuff up.
Just as Alistair Campbell was always right to observe, in effect, that the BBC doesn’t like it up ‘em, so too was our fluent, relaxed, charming and incontestably correct Prime Minister right in what he said. In parliament Tony Blair asked rhetorically the two questions which were always going to become apparent to Lord Hutton, and which, his ignorance of the arcane rituals of the press to one side, he was always going to seek to answer. The first was, what should the MoD have done once it knew the identity of the then mystery source whose name was demanded by the entirety of Fleet Street (and the whiter than white BBC)? God knows, they could hardly dare have ‘covered it up’. His second question was to ask, who seriously imagines that the dossier was the tipping point for war? It was neither functionally instrumental, nor, as the Prime Minister ruefully admitted (such confidence, such élan, you almost see what the wannacons saw in him) was it at the time significantly convincing. In other words, it entered public debate, then sank like a stone.
Michael Howard will recover from accusing Tony Blair of having lied. Indeed, being grimly honest about the world as it is, he’ll undoubtedly benefit as some of this unfair mud will stick (where other mud should have clung ages ago). The Leader of the Opposition’s public profile, whatever some of his more lunatic special friends may have tried to bring themselves to believe, does not rest on him being ‘nice’ so he has lost nothing by not being so. Any Tory with any wit should devoutly wish that BBC News & Current Affairs will recover as little of its former poise as possible.
ERO, January 28, 2004 11:58 PM