Greasy Pole: Something in common (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here is a question. Can anyone think of anything in common between Asil Nadir and about half the voting population of Britain? For those of you who have forgotten. Nadir— a particularly apposite name considering what happened to him—was once a man who convinced a lot of people that capitalism does not have to work in the way in which it naturally, inexorably does work. He was what is known as a tycoon, who devoted a lot of this time to developing a business conglomerate called Polly Peck. This was such a profitable company that it was often mentioned as evidence that there is really no need for the economic cycle of boom and slump. There is no need for any business ever to be anything but profitable, no need for it ever to make a loss or go out of existence. All that is necessary to have at the head someone like Asil Nadir, who will ensure that the enterprise will be endlessly profitable. The City loved it. They loved Asil Nadir. They rushed to invest in his business empire.

For his part Asil Nadir loved the City and he must have pleased many of his admirers there, when he gave £400,000 to the Conservative Party, presumably in the hope that the money would help the Tories to foster this mutually attractive and remunerative relationship. However this cosy set-up began to look less comfortable when Asil Nadir’s methods came under the detailed scrutiny of the Serious Fraud Office. Not to put too fine a point on it, the glamorous tycoon was suspected of running a highly unstable operation, which was not improved by his alleged tendency to help himself from the till. The investors in Polly Peck were rudely awakened from their dream of an eternally prosperous capitalism by the reality of losing hundreds of millions of pounds in the company’s collapse.

Jumping bail

Facing trial on 13 charges of fraud and false accounting, Asil Nadir decided that he could no longer rely on a little help from his friends, whether in the City or the Tory Party. Discretion, he decided, was the better part of valour and he jumped bail, fleeing to Northern Cyprus to make sympathetic noises at the news that his former aide in Polly Peck, Elizabeth Forsyth, had collected a five-year prison sentence for helping to launder some of the money Nadir was said to have stolen.

Let us leave, for the moment, the disgraced and hunted tycoon in his Mediterranean hideaway and consider the other part of our question—the half of the voting population in Britain. We refer to the millions of people who support the Labour Party whose vote at elections, give or take a bit, usually amounts to about half of those cast. Now these people are not business tycoons, they are not popular in the City and they don't have readily available hideaways in the sun. If they appear in court it is not for helping themselves to large sums of somebody else's money but normally for shoplifting or burglary or stealing a mobile phone from a parked car.

These people can’t give hundreds of thousands of pounds away because after they’ve paid the rent or the mortgage and the cost of gas and water and electricity and they've bought some clothes and food there is very little left. They pass their lives in poverty, on the knife-edge of destitution so that if something disastrous happens, like losing their job or getting chronically sick, they slip down into a kind of sub-existence where malnutrition and fear are such everyday features of their lives that they become almost inured to them.

Coping with poverty

But this is achieved at considerable cost. The Observer, in a recent article about food and poverty, quoted parents who are struggling to survive, and to protect their children, on Income Support: ”. . . I don’t eat . . . I've walked about with holes in my shoes, no winter coat and haven’t eaten for three days to look after them . . . I won’t let my kids go without." A recent government survey found that among the unemployed 20 percent of men and 38 percent of women had suffered a neurotic disorder. And for those who are in work stress is still a potent factor, not least because of their fear of losing their job.

So let us return, now that we know who we’re talking about, to our original question about what is common to Asil Nadir and the Labour voters of Britain. Well Nadir has recently informed the world that while he does not regret giving all that money to the Tories ("I never regret anything that I have done in my life") he is no longer among their supporters. "No government is in power for ever," he says. "Thank God there is a certain amount of democratic election and we know the elections are approaching. I hope the British public will give their view of what they think of the British Government.” In fact, if the Labour Party win the next election. Nadir says, he will return to Britain (although it is not clear whether this is intended to attract support for Labour or drive it away).

The point about this is that both Asil Nadir the opulent wheeler-and-dealer and the stressed and exploited Labour voters are agreed that a different government here will bring some significant changes to capitalism in Britain.

Labour wheezes

Now this is very unkind to Tony Blair and all his spin doctors and hangers-on who are labouring night and day to convince us that a Labour government will be so similar to the Conservatives that we may hardly notice there has been an election. Gordon Brown will sit in the Treasury searching for new ways to disappoint his supporter's expectations by slashing government spending. His latest wheeze—to abolish Child Benefit for those aged between 16 and 19—has provoked even Peter Lilley to a kind of protest, describing Brown’s proposal as “. . . deeply unpopular in the country . . . a pernicious tax on learning". Jack Straw will occupy the Home Office and try to outdo Michael Howard’s reputation for bashing criminals, perhaps creating a new offence of washing someone's windscreen at traffic lights when they haven’t asked you to. Tony Blair will be in Number Ten thinking up new phrases like stakeholding society to convince us that it isn’t happening and if we are sure that it is then it’s not what we think it is.

So that’s what they have in common— misconceptions about what Labour will rule capitalism means. Of course there are differences between Asil Nadir and Labour voters. He has reason to think he may benefit from a Labour government. They may also think like that but have no reason to.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Good News For The Tories (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here is some good news for the Tories. All is not lost for them. It is true that, as their conference this year abundantly showed, they are at a very low ebb. Nowadays few people take them seriously – and they themselves are having a struggle doing just that. The term shadow ministers is particularly apt for their front bench because in the shadows is where they stay. Their leader, Iain Duncan Smith, shows every sign of growing more desperate by the day; as a climax to their conference he actually made a virtue of being a quiet man – a reputation a politician will usually try hard to avoid. They have rummaged out 25 policies to offer the voters but these are little more than tardy admissions that when they were last in power they were indeed the “nasty party” (as if there are any “nice” ones). An example of a party being nasty was in a letter written in 1996 by Ted Heath’s election agent, which warned him about the benefits we were all enjoying during those years of Tory rule:

“Younger, traditionally Conservative supporters have mostly had a very difficult time over the last 6 or 7 years . . . having had to face, in worse cases, redundancy, negative equity, failing businesses or even bankruptcy.”

A man with much to be quiet about

At this year’s conference we had the nauseating spectacle of David “Two Brains” Willetts, the shadow Work and Pensions Minister, declaring that “. . . the Tory war on lone parents is over”. It would, of course, have been better for those lone parents if he had said this at the time the war was being waged so enthusiastically by his party. One speaker after another rushed to the microphone to confess to past “mistakes” and to promise a brighter, more caring future as if the days had never been, when Tory conferences cheered and stamped their feet at Thatcher defiantly telling them that she -her policies – were “not for turning” and when she insisted, in the face of powerful opposition, that “there is no alternative”.

Then there is the matter of sleaze, which cost the Tories so many votes in 1997 and which they had fervently hoped had died the death. Any ideas they had on that score were brutally suppressed by Edwina Currie spilling the beans about her relationship with John Major. In this scandalous soil were nourished a thousand saloon bar jokes – it was David Mellor all over again but much worse. Smutty humour does not contribute to a political party being taken seriously.

Nineteen Forty Five

It has always been very difficult for the Tories to reconcile themselves to the fact that they are occasionally out of power; they regard such episodes as brief, insane interludes in the natural order of things. There was a time when this was perhaps a more valid attitude because, as in the Thatcher years, they seemed to be there for all time, to be the natural party of power. The difference now is that Labour’s majority has endured, and looks like continuing that way for some time. Voting Conservative is simply not fashionable at present, as if the natural order of things political has undergone a change. It means that Blair’s majority, founded on Labour’s success in making themselves almost indistinguishable from the Tories, must be chipped at because it is unlikely to quickly crumble away.

In some respects there was a parallel to this before 1945. The previous election to that, in November 1935, had produced a House of Commons with 425 Tories and allies against 180 opposition MPs, of which 154 were Labour. Had an election been possible in 1940, the Conservative majority may have been reduced but, on the evidence of past elections, it would have been very unlikely for it to have been overturned for some time. The crucial element in bringing about the change which produced the massive Labour majority in 1945 was, of course, the war. The working class had been promised that if they buckled down to the war effort – worked hard, coped with all the hardship, fear and grief, if they fought and died – they would be rewarded with a better world free of the mistakes of the past. It was seductive stuff, which benefited the Labour Party – and the working class were vulnerable to it, electing the Attlee government by an emphatic margin. Ted Heath, who had to rethink his plans to start a career in politics because of the size of that Labour majority, described the mood in a letter:

“. . . the average man who had been fully employed during the war thought of the unemployment he suffered before the war and decided he would not have the Tories again”.

Even so, for some people the result was a shock. “They have elected a Labour government” wailed a bejewelled woman in an exclusive London club, “ and the people will not stand for it”. The Tory MP Henry Channon – a rich, pampered, useless heir to a fortune who married into the Guinness family thus making himself even richer and enabling him to inherit the safe Tory seat of Southend which had been “represented” by one or other member of the family since 1918 – and which passed on to his son who was equally rich and useless – moaned that he was “. . . too ill and angry to reflect seriously on the disastrous Election results. I am stunned and shocked by the country’s treachery”. Within a fortnight there was some relief for his shock and anger because “the Stock Market has recovered and is actually soaring. Evidently it does not fear the Socialist [sic] Government”. With all this going on it was not entirely surprising that about a month later he came away from a meeting of the 1922 Committee “fearing that the Tory party was definitely dead”.

Pessimism

But that was too pessimistic from the Tory point of view because the party quickly got down to the arduous process of recasting itself in policies and attitudes designed to answer the doubts of Heath’s “average man”. In this they had some political talent to call on – like Heath himself, Enoch Powell, Iain Macleod – whose abilities in the murky world of politics helped them later to become high profile leaders of the party. These people, along with those who had been hardened by their time as ministers in the wartime government, were skilled at touching on the most sensitive nerves of the Attlee government, who were themselves exhausted by the stress of being in that government and then re-building British capitalism after the war. And all that Tory effort bore fruit when, at the next election in 1950, they came within a whisker of success.

In the aftermath of 1945 and later during the late 1960s, the Tories showed great ability in asserting themselves as the supremely natural party of government over British capitalism. So they can take comfort from the memory of that recovery, in the knowledge that although they have been out of power before they have not lost their talent to dupe the working class and can do it again. This opens the all important question of whether it matters. Capitalism is too vast, too powerful, too intrusive, to be affected to any significant degree by which party holds the job of trying to control it. Whoever sits in power over it capitalism continues to impoverish and repress most of its people. There are many symptoms of poverty – none of which ever troubled the likes of Henry Channon. For example the Institute for Public Policy Research recently found that children living in the more deprived neighbourhoods are three times more likely to be knocked down in a road accident than those who live in richer areas. This is not because poorer children don’t understand how to cross the road safely but because they lack access to safe playing areas like good gardens or playgrounds. Their playground is the street, where they socialise without safe adult supervision and sometimes – too often – get knocked down. So poverty – capitalism – is unsafe, it frightens and it injures and it kills. That is what being vulnerable – to use one of the Tories’ favourite buzz words – really means.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Money for stale words (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare a thought for Michael Portillo. Hounded by an ungrateful electorate from his unassailable seat in Southgate, he was forced to spend years in the wilderness until the Tories of Kensington and Chelsea took him to their affluent bosoms. And even then it was not entirely easy for him because there were a few curmudgeons in the party muttering about being forced to accept, in contrast to Alan Clark and Nicholas Scott, so vulgar a standard bearer. Some of them were even mean enough to dwell on Portillos’s Iberian origins. In the event the Portillo won them over – or perhaps they hoped to share in the glory of having an MP who was so clearly the next leader of the Conservative Party and so, in the dim and distant future, Prime Minister. At the time it seemed as if Portillo had only to wait until the Tories got the inevitable thrashing at the next general election for him to win the leadership which destiny – not to mention a bit of back-stabbing and arm-twisting – had set out for him. Except that the Tory membership was as rejecting as the Southgate voters. Back in the wilderness, Portillo was devastated.

What next, he might have asked himself. A life as a run-of-the-mill, barely noticed, constituency MP, holding mind-numbing surgeries listening to the voters’ complaints about rubbish collection and nightmare neighbours, spending his evenings struggling to digest fibrous chicken and Black Forest gateau at ward party dinners? Hardly the stuff of an exciting destiny. Happily, the BBC have come to his rescue, encouraging the prime minister who never was and never will be to develop into a kind of mini Melvin Bragg (well at least they have similar hair styles) by presenting a programme on Wagner. This generated enough publicity to indicate that there may well be more opportunities to enjoy such nice little earners. And in case anyone in still feeling anxious about how Portillo will make ends meet, there is the little matter of his fees for making speeches.

Value For Money

Paying a politician to speak, when that is what they are supposed to do anyway, may seem a little odd. For his words of wisdom Portillo could demand £8,000. Even if he stayed for a while after speaking, pressing the flesh, graciously accepting congratulations, that is still an hourly rate several times what many workers bring home in an entire month (according to the Guardian, a special needs teaching assistant gets £13,800 a year, a refuse truck driver £12,500 a year). So what about that concept, so dear to Tory hearts when Portillo was in government, of Value for Money? He has changed his mind so often, turned his back on so many cherished “principles” , that it must be difficult, for even his most ardent admirers, to give any weight to what he says, let alone pay to hear him say it. This is the man who, when he was a minister, was notorious for being among the most arid of the Tory dries, described by Thatcher as “. . . beyond any questioning a passionate supporter of everything we stood for”, who abruptly became passionate in the opposite direction when he was looking to get back into parliament. This is the man who denied any intention of standing in the leadership election in 1997 while he was busily setting up a campaign office. This is the man who tried to win the gay vote by remembering past homosexual experiences but who did not stand out against the homophobic Clause 28 when his opposition might have counted. This is the man who championed the poll tax on the grounds that it would be a massive vote winner for the Tories.

There are of course other members giving similar value for money in this cosily lucrative way. Thatcher herself, before her doctors forbade her to speak in public, could ask for as much as £60,000 to instruct an audience in how to run capitalism her way, so that the rich stay like that while the poor keep their place. She was never famous for taking a tolerant, balanced view of things so in her speeches she probably made much of her success in hobbling the unions, in tightening the poverty screw so that being on the dole became as stigmatising as having a disease, in arousing the jingoist hysteria about the Falklands which, over the bodies of the dead, did so much to help her smashing win in 1983. She may then have moved on (because she seems quite unable to resist doing so, such is her enduring bitterness) to rail against those she left behind in the Tory Party – including Portillo – who faint-heartedly betrayed the one and only faith. She would not have dwelled on the deep misery of the unemployment which her government presided over, nor on the economic switchback which they were quite unable to control, which led her to describe her Chancellor Nigel Lawson as “. . . brilliant, brilliant” shortly before it all collapsed about him and she changed her opinion to say “ Nigel and I no longer had that broad identity of views or mutual trust which a Chancellor and prime minister should”. She would not have elaborated on the social despair which erupted into soaring crime and street riots in the 1980s. Nor would she have examined in any depth the fact that her party ditched her because she was seen, however inaccurately, as personally responsible for all that suffering and so had become an electoral liability who had to be got rid of, quickly.

Sleaze

There seemed little prospect that Thatcher’s successor would fare any better, which was a sure sign that he would not lack for invitations to earn a little extra by telling audiences about it. For one thing, John Major did not match up to the Iron Lady for a strident talent in blanketing over harsh reality. Faced with capitalism’s typical problems, Major would whinge and wriggle and blunder. It was predictable that his premiership should end in a swamp of sleaze, aggravated by his routine paralysis when confronted with clear evidence of what his ministers and MPs were getting up to. Towards the end he was a wretched man, patently out of control, harassed by members of his own party (including Portillo) who he described as “bastards”. He then led the Tories into historic defeat, leaving them as a party whose enduring grip on power had been transformed into a period of opposition likely to run into decades. None of this affected his reputation as a speaker; to give his doctored account of his catastrophic time at the helm and his advice on how the Tories might do better in future, he can trouser the sum of £28,000.

This racket – for that is what it is – is not confined to the Tories. On the Labour benches and a long way down the tariff is Peter Mandelson, who is one of the ex-ministers to have earned the right to have the prefix “disgraced” to their name. In fact Mandelson went one better than the others because, as distinct from most of the ministers who lose their jobs after being found out in some unparliamentary manipulations, he was twice disgraced. Even without those episodes he would have been forever notorious as one of the most ruthless of spin doctors – one whose financial re-arrangements were tailored to assuage his appetite for swanning around the salons of the rich and famous. Like the others who rake in the money from their speeches, Mandelson can use his freedom from governmental responsibilities to criticise those who are still in power – as if he were ever different, more effective, less blundering than they are. Like any other soiled goods, he goes at a knock-down price – to listen to one of his speeches costs a mere £5,000.

At a price

Nobody would bother to listen to a medical analysis by a surgeon with a reputation for having his patients die on the operating table. Nobody would want to fly in an aircraft where the pilot had a nice line in chat but was unable to keep the thing in the air. Yet politicians are allowed, when they have been exposed in all their impotence and in their attempts to conceal how useless they are, to turn their hand to self-justification – at a price. If this is a kind of madness it is because that is typical of what they represent – a social system which works against the interests of the mass of its people.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: The Hard Life and Times of Alan Duncan (2009)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

At this distance the coming general election promises – or should that be threatens – to become a contest between Gordon Brown and David Cameron over who can be trusted to be the more ruthless and speedy as a slasher and sacker. After his expeditious dealing with the crazier expense claims of the more arrogant Tory MPs, Cameron could be seen as a nose ahead – which may explain the manner in which he firmly bumped Alan Duncan down the greasy pole, from Shadow Leader of the House to Shadow Justice Minister. It was all to do with Duncan allowing himself to be recorded, by a man named Heydon Prowse, moaning about the mistreatment and malnourishment of MPs: “No one who has done anything on the outside world, or is capable of doing such a thing, will ever come into this place again, the way we are going. Basically it’s being nationalised. You have to live on rations and are treated like shit”. This raises the question of why there are always so many candidates, in every constituency, fighting each other for a life of rations and abuse  – but never mind. Cameron at first tried to draw a veil over the problem by saying that he had “made  it clear in no uncertain terms that when it comes to the mess of expenses, the words we use, just as the actions we take, have got to demonstrate completely that we share the public’s real fury at what went on in Parliament. Alan made a bad mistake and he has acknowledged that…I think we should leave it at that”. But then Cameron returned from holiday in a slightly different mood, demoting Duncan rather than condemning him to the impoverishment of the back benches. This may have had something to do with Duncan’s erratic background and standing as a Tory MP.

Obscurity

Elected in John Major’s surprise 1992 election win for the rock-solid Conservative seat of Rutland and Melton – a nice reward for the offer of his home in Westminster as headquarters for Major’s leadership campaign after Thatcher’s resignation in 1990 – Duncan spent some time in relative obscurity as a faultlessly handsome, immaculate and fixedly smiling participant in group photographs until in December 1993 he blossomed as Parliamentary Private Secretary at the then Ministry of Health. However any celebration of this promising start was cruelly cut off just a month later after the embarrassing news that he had lent an elderly neighbour the money to buy his council house at a cut price under the right-to-buy scheme so beloved of Thatcher’s Tories.

But three years later Duncan, who described himself as a libertarian member of the Thatcherite Conservative Way Forward, cashed in on the deal by buying the house from the neighbour – again at a very attractive price. His unavoidable resignation was greeted, with typical asperity, by Giles Brandreth: “little Duncan has fallen on his sword…swiftly and with good grace”. Which characteristic probably also featured in another episode when, as the owner of Harcourt Consultants – advising companies, governments and whoever can afford to pay on matters concerning oil and gas supplies – he made over £1 million through involvement in supplying oil to Pakistan after disruption of the flow from Kuwait in the Gulf War. It might be thought that this said more about the reasons for the British involvement in that war than all the inflated nonsense about rooting out terrorists. And “good grace” again last year, when it emerged that while he was Shadow Business Secretary, responsible for Tory policy on energy, Duncan’s private office received donations from the chairman of Vitol – one of the world’s top crude oil traders.

Taliban

To put it moderately Duncan enjoys – and expends a lot of energy in – being the centre of attention. However much this may please him it has also cultivated a significant number of rivals and enemies. After the 2005 general election he declared himself to be a candidate for the Tory leadership in place of the defeated Michael Howard but had to withdraw rapidly after it was clear that there was no support for him – which he put down to the “Tory Taliban”. So it was to be expected, when the MP’s expenses scam was dragged into the open Duncan’s claims would be closely scrutinised – especially in view of the fact that, as Shadow Leader of the House, he oversaw the party’s reform policy on the matter. The Daily Telegraph reported that he had claimed £1400 a month mortgage interest on his Rutland home, recouped over £4000 for gardening expenses during a three year period and claimed £598 for maintenance of a ride-on lawn mower with £41 to repair a puncture in the machine. Some residents in his constituency saw this as nauseating enough to justify inviting passers-by to take a ride on a lawn mower which they had set up in the street – and Heydon Prowse to cut a £ sign in Duncan’s lawn. Last May Have I Got News For You pursued Duncan by showing a passage from a previous appearance when he boasted about his Second Home Allowance (he also owns two properties in Westminster) and described it as “a great system” –  until Cameron went after him, when he agreed to refund the money and called for “the system” to be changed. According to the website ConservativeHome – notable for its combative style – a poll of 1600 grassroot Tories in Duncan’s constituency thought he should be sacked.

Comfort

Members of Parliament come in many shapes, sizes and origins. Duncan’s replacement as Shadow Leader of the House is Sir George Young, an Old Etonian who once complained of having to declare, as an MP, a gift of bottles of champagne and who  revealed the depth of his understanding of the meaning of poverty when he described the homeless as “people you step over when you leave the opera”. Young was chairman of the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges when, in 2003, it gave judgement in the matter of the false expense claims by the Tory MP for Windsor, Michael Trend, amounting to over £90,000. Trend, apologising to the Commons, put it all down to his being “muddled and naive”. Young’s committee were not unsympathetic and just suspended Trend for two weeks. A memory to comfort Alan Duncan in the darkest days of his struggles to survive on his rations. 

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Sex, lies and leadership (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

What was remarkable about the Monica Lewinsky affair was not that Clinton had what he called a “not appropriate” relationship with here, nor that he then lied about it but that there are people—so many people—who profess to be surprised, shocked, outraged by his behaviour.

It does not have to be said, that Clinton is not the first politician to be exposed in this way and obviously he will not be the last. The sexual and political conditioning of capitalism work in combination to encourage relationships based on a recognition that, in the words of Henry Kissinger (who, it was said, knew what he was talking about) power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This was put in another way by Antonia Sanchez, who experienced—whether she enjoyed it or not is another matter—a lot of attention over her affair with David Mellor, which did so much to undermine the Tories’ Back To Basics campaign. Ms Sanchez explained Mellor’s attraction for her by reference to his influence; he could, she said, “make things happen”. This influence—power would be a better word in the case of the President of America—is given to political leaders by the workers who vote for them, who surrender their own power to change human society to a few people mandated to keep the social system in being. There are so many elements in this for what is called the misuse of this power that the abnormal becomes the normal—the misuse becomes an appropriate use of the power. So we had all those Tory sleaze merchants and their hypocrisy about personal morality. So we had John Kennedy; so we have Bill Clinton.

Lies

Of course it would have been more than remarkable if Clinton had, from the first day of his exposure, told the truth and owned up to the affair. Because part of the job of a politician is to tell lies. (When they don’t in the House of Commons—or rather when they are caught out doing it—they describe it as “misleading the House”.) all their promises, which amount to an assurance that they can control, capitalism so that it stops being an anarchic, human-destructive social system and becomes an ordered, beneficial one instead, are lies. When the promises become discredited they try to cover it all up with more lies; they blame the depredations of greedy workers or foreign speculators or mad dictators in faraway countries ...

Imagine, if we can, the speech a political leader would need to make in order to tell the truth, in order to confess to their impotence and to the deceptions they have practised to hide it. Imagine, as well, how this suicide statement would be received by the workers who had voted for the leader. Millions of people vote for capitalism because they think their leaders are not impotent and don’t tell lies.That is why the same people who were so eager to denounce Clinton over his deceptions in the Lewinsky affair were falling over themselves in their eagerness to believe him when he said the American missiles recently sent into Sudan had destroyed a factory making material to be used in biological warfare and not pharmaceutical products.

Tough

This raises the question of what kind of leader the working class would like to have ruling over them—and what kind they think they get. “Strong” leadership is usually one of the most popular kinds—except that the “strong” leaders always have to be on your side and not on your adversary’s. For example foreign leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein are famous for, among other things, a certain lack of tolerance of opposition. In fact anyone who opposed them was usually killed—and you can’t get much stronger then that. But for some reason such leaders are always known as madmen, or megalomaniacs or some such description when all they are doing is taking the theory of strong leadership to its logical end.

A Guardian/ICM Opinion poll published on 8 September assessed how strong—or rather “tough”—the voters rate Tony Blair. The prime minister will not go down in history as one of those leaders who has his opponents executed but he does give them quite a rough time, which gives him the reputation of being tough. So there would have been some dismay at Labour headquarters to see that Blair’s toughness rating has fallen from 57 percent in 1997 to 42 percent today. It is difficult to know what Blair was doing in August and September last year to justify a reputation for toughness, which he is not doing now. The only thing that comes to mind is his intervention over the funeral arrangements for Princess Diana— forcing her family to have a big public event, making sure that flags were flown at half-mast, that sort of thing. And of course coming up with the wheeze of calling a neurotic parasite the “people’s princess”.

Nonsense

If all the verbiage about leadership— about the lies, hypocrisy, toughness and weakness—sounds like nonsense that is because that is what it is. No leader, whatever their character and style, has been able to make any significant impression on the problems and the deficiencies of capitalism. That is why today tough, decisive Tony Blair confronts the same situation as weak and dithering John Major. Bill Clinton’s campaign to save his presidency was centred on the fact that as president he had the job of running American capitalism, beside which personal sexual difficulties are insignificant. Another way of putting that is that the working class should ignore such irrelevant issues and concentrate on the fact that they can themselves change society, without leaders of any kind.

Ivan

Press Exposure: Private parts (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What would you do. if your home was suddenly besieged by a mob of complete strangers with cameras and tape recorders and notebooks, who were trampling up to your front door, shouting at you through the letterbox, trying to get in through the windows and the backdoor, offering you loads of money just to talk to them or be photographed by them?

Well the first thing you ought to do is find out whether you were a notorious sex criminal or having an affair with a member of the royal family or had won the national lottery. Because those raucous strangers would be newspaper reporters desperate for an exclusive story from you. And to get it they are perfectly willing to do something called Invading Your Privacy.

Which has caused a lot of fuss lately—so much that Tory MPs who have been caught out in some extramarital adventures or financial jiggery-pokery have defended themselves by saying that the evidence against them was accumulated only by the media intruding on their private business. That is why so many of them are suddenly so strongly in favour of a law to protect their privacy. Of course their panic is understandable when we remember how many reputations have recently suffered by exposure of the facts which privacy was supposed to hide—the "cash for questions" MPs. junior ministers like Tim Yeo, Lord Caithness and Michael Mates and—most prized, most exposed, of all—David Mellor.

Hospital and royalty

But none of this is new. One member of the Calcutt Committee, set up in 1989 to look into the media and privacy and related matters, commented that "Many of the most appalling cases that were sent to us . . . came from way back in the 1930s and even earlier than that. . ." In June 1988. as Russell Harty was dying in hospital, reporters working on the well-tried principle that there’s nothing money won’t do, bribed a window cleaner to take pictures of him. They posed as doctors, in white coats, and tried to persuade a nurse to hand over Harty’s medical records. In January 1990, when the TV actor Gorden Kaye was in intensive care, seriously injured and not expected to live, two reporters got to his bedside, took photographs of him and tried to interview him.

In all this it would be unnatural if the privacy of the greatest media stars of them all were left unviolated. Prince Charles in August 1990 was photographed by a long-range camera seemingly canoodling with a woman. This apparent triumph of the papparazzi's art turned out to be a massive embarrassment because Charles was comforting the woman, in the presence of her husband, when they told him their child had cancer. The People lost its abhorrent editor—Wendy Henry— when it published a picture of Prince William urinating in a park with the headline (a typical Wendy Henry one) "The Royal Wee". When the Press Complaints Commission, set up on the recommendation of the Calcutt Committee. opened for business in January 1991 one of its first calls was from Sandringham—a complaint about press harassment from the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Double standards

This was in fact an example of hypocrisy such as the sleazier tabloids would be proud of. One thing which has been clear about the current turmoil in the lives of the royals—their affairs, their crumbling marriages, their nervous disorders—is the eagerness of some of them to use the media to publicise their side of the story. Apart from specific episodes like Charles’s selective television soul-baring in interview with Jonathan Dimbleby there has been a steady leak of carefully constructed information to favoured journalists. People who manipulate the media in this way can’t be taken seriously when they also complain about it invading their privacy.

Neither can those MPs. who scream about the unfair violation of their personal privacy when the press spotlights one of their sleazier activities. To begin with, as upholders of capitalism's morality about the sanctity of property they shouldn’t do the things which lay them open to such exposure. And when they are exposed they should remember that it’s all in the day’s work to a social system where what is profitable is good and what is unprofitable is bad. Newspapers make profits by being bold and those which produce the scoop-stories about scandalous politicians, or hypocritical royals or whatever, are likely to sell more.

Humiliation

The politicians tell us that this system is the most effective way of running human affairs. In fact they say there really is no other way. Of course there is the matter of what capitalism and its profit motive does to us—its prisons, weapons, pollution, the indignities which people like journalists will endure in order to obey the law about the production of goods for sale. Under that law the working class—who clamorously vote for those politicians—suffer massive humiliation and abuse, so that they don’t ever have what might properly be called any privacy to be intruded upon. 

Ivan

Two Minutes to Midnight (2019)

From the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1980s I was not alone in having recurring nightmares of a nuclear Armageddon which might leave the survivors envying the dead. The Cold War upheld a doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD) as a fragile protection against the use of weapons which would kill many millions of people. The government issued a booklet, Protect And Survive, giving chilling advice about how to act when the time for nuclear conflict came, and CND responded with ‘Protest And Survive’. The film, When The Wind Blows, based on Raymond Briggs’ book (and featuring music from David Bowie, amongst others) was a moving and powerful satire on the fear we lived with. The women of Greenham Common camped by the RAF base there in protest at its arsenal of nuclear weapons. Some of us voiced the view then, as now, that the terrifying drive toward war was a basic feature of the form of society which exists, and could only be dealt with by changing the basis of society.

That view was almost universally mocked by the pragmatists who prefer piecemeal reform. As a result, here we are, forty years later, and the threats facing humanity are even worse. The Trump administration has withdrawn from the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987 to limit nuclear proliferation, opening the possibility of a new arms race and the prospect of the US preparing for war with China. Against this background, Theresa May’s Defence Secretary, a hideous caricature of a war-monger in the form of former fireplace salesman Gavin Williamson, declared an intention to send warships to frighten China. Unsurprisingly, days later, China indicated it was pulling out of trade talks with Britain. So much for the Brexiteers’ diplomacy in wooing new trading partners to replace Europe.

In February last year, this same Gavin Williamson dined with Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of a former Putin minister, in exchange for £30,000 to Tory funds. Brexit, says Williamson, ‘has brought us to a great moment in our history’, when we must be ready to deploy ‘hard power’ against those who ‘flout international law’. In addition he wants to build two British military bases, one in Asia and the other ‘in the Caribbean’. They are to ‘strengthen our global presence, enhance our lethality and increase our mass’. This little weasel is in the worst tradition of jingoistic speechifying to send innocent millions to their deaths. He wants to ‘enhance our lethality’. What a shameful blot on the face of humanity he is.

Talking of lethality, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists states in its longstanding and highly respected ‘Doomsday Clock’ report for 2019: ‘Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.’ Since 1947 they have calculated the level of risk of nuclear apocalypse, and set a nominal clock each year, on which midnight represents peak danger, and midday would be safety. They now put this clock at two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever been. The report is written by a panel of the world’s most senior and accomplished scientists and analysts across all fields, the height of intelligent expertise, and this is their collective conclusion.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Silver spoon (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Silver spoon
Clean-cut prefect type that he is, the thought could never have entered the Brylcreemed head of Cecil Parkinson that he would one day be the subject of nationwide salacious jokes. As usually happens, there was much misunderstanding about the affair between Parkinson and Sarah Keays and the lucky child who as a result will find itself born into the British ruling class.

Parkinson's extra-marital activities were denounced as inconsistent with the Tories’ well-advertised concern for what they called Victorian values, particularly with the sanctity of the monogamous, nuclear family. Should he, repentant, leave the government? The party? The country? All of this on the assumption that politicians operate on consistent, absolute principles.

But of course the Thatcher concern with the capitalist family was designed as a vote-winner and in any case applied only to that class in society (which does not include Parkinson) which has a subservient role and must be disciplined into it, by one method or another. Now this is perfectly in line with the values of capitalism, whoever is on the throne. It was so in Victorian times and it is so today. Capitalism now, as then, is a society of two conflicting classes, one of them socially superior and privileged and the other socially inferior and disadvantaged.

Parkinson and Keays enjoy a life-style, and assumptions about their futures which result from the exploitation of the working class. It is instructive to compare the treatment of Keays with that of a working-class female who conceives a child without being married. Keays negotiated through her solicitors — which means with a lot of legal protection and comfort — for what Parkinson assured us would be an adequate financial arrangement for her and the child. A spacious cottage near the home of her rich family in the lush Cotswold countryside was renovated for her.

Meanwhile, in magistrates courts throughout the land unmarried female workers apply for maintenance orders against similarly impoverished fathers of their children. In most cases, the courts award them a few pounds a week — which is all the father can afford — which is promptly deducted from their Social Security "benefit”. The working class should attend to the repression and the indignity represented by that rather than to the personal peccadillos of their arrogant masters.


A black hope
Jesse Jackson is tall, handsome, energetic and he believes in the American Way, so nobody should be surprised that he is a possible candidate in the next Presidential election.

In fact, the mere possibility is driving thousands of American workers into a frenzy of enthusiasm because Jesse Jackson is not only tall, energetic, etc. etc, but also black. Even more; he says he was there on the balcony when Martin Luther King was shot and that King died in his arms; he kept on a bloodstained T-shirt for a highly-charged TV appearance soon after the assassination. American blacks love him; “Run, Jesse, run" they urge him onwards to the nominating conventions.

Jackson is being lauded, not just as the new hope of American blacks; he is said to have something to offer whites as well — an unprecedented insight into their problems and a unique ability to come up with the answers. “In America,” he said during a recent visit to Brixton, "our struggle has shifted from a focus on freedom to the drive for real equality”.

It would be most remarkable if a politician who aspires to power did not try to arouse passion and enthusiasm by claims to have a novel solution to the problems which have been troubling the enthusiasts for such a long time. It is only when the power is won and the reality of trying to run capitalism strikes home that the ardour dies and the hero wilts, sometimes into obscurity.

Even before he gets near the convention there are questions hanging over Jackson. In particular, his claim to have been with King when he was shot is denied by fellow black Andrew Young, who undoubtedly was on the balcony. But it is important to consider more than questions. It is time the workers, in America and all over the world, refused to be misled into hysteria by the promises, the deceits and the charisma of leaders. Real experience shows that capitalism cannot be other than a divided, repressive social system of impoverishment and fear. No leader can change that.

Run Jesse run? Where to?


Method unimportant
After their defeat in 1979 the Labour Party went through a Benn-inspired reassessment of their constitution which was supposed to make them a more democratic and more effective organisation. This was as agonising for them as a bad illness and after the treatment they decided, among other changes, on a new method of electing their leader. No longer would this be through the preferences of only Labour MPs; now the whole party, affiliated trade unions and all, would have a vote on the issue.

Triumphant left wing Labourites claimed that they now had a serenely democratic party, better fitted to take power and. in some unexplained way, to force socialism on us. Some of their leaders, on the grounds that too much democracy was a bad thing, left the party to take their place at what they hoped would be the foot of Labour’s death-bed. And out of this marvellous new method has emerged Neil Kinnock, who has not so far been justified on the grounds that he is the fruit of a more democratic method of election but because his party hopes that he has the formula to win them back into power.

Whatever system the Labour Party used, the leader who emerged would have carried the same hopes. Kinnock, for his youth and his carefully constructed reputation, would always have been a very strong candidate for the succession. Labour's new constitution, born amid so much pain and dispute, has really changed nothing.

Labour's elected leader is expected to be enough of a crafty opportunist to play the electoral game of deceiving the working class to such effect that it results in a Labour win. As long as the workers — who vote for Labour and Tory governments over British capitalism — continue to acquiesce in this cynicism the problems of modern society will remain. The method through which leaders emerge is unimportant; what matters is the social system which they serve and which they try to control — and the urgent need to abolish it.

Greasy Pole: Slags and Swamps (2014)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

To get on in what they see as their exclusive world a politician should popularise a word or phrase by which they can be readily identified and remembered – even if it turns out to work against them. Like Tony Blair and ‘education, education, education…’ Or David Cameron and ‘We are all in this together’… And Theresa May, when she was in opposition and usually relying on her flowery shoes to promote herself, telling the Tory conference that they had earned themselves the title of ‘The Nasty Party’ (although recently her Minister of State Lib Dem Norman Baker resigned because he had found that working for her was ‘like walking through mud’ – which may turn out to be his exclusive phrase). And with that same preoccupation with mud there has been the persistently striving Defence Secretary Michael Fallon uttering a warning about the British people being ‘swamped’ by an influx of immigrants which makes them feel that they are ‘. . . under siege with large numbers of migrant workers and people claiming benefits’.

Blunkett

These comments, just when Nigel Farage is grinning so boozily and hopefully on the side-lines, did not appeal to David Cameron. Naturally he had to step up to defend Fallon, if only because he had so recently promoted him: ‘It is right for politicians to raise concerns about immigration but we should always choose our language carefully’ he advised the Commons. Less heartening for Fallon would have been the support from one of Labour’s most spectacular ministerial failures: ‘I believe both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out on the issue’ offered ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett in the Daily Mail, also suggesting that all UK citizens should be expected to be able to speak English and restricted to benefits based on what they have ‘contributed’ to the country. Whatever changes Blunkett has been through since he was relieved of the stress of ministerial life have not included any development of insight or socially therapeutic thinking.

Rottweiler

In spite of the risks that another speech from him may have stimulated more responses like Blunkett’s, Fallon did his best to apologise, confessing to Radio Five listeners that ‘I misspoke yesterday, I used words I wouldn’t normally have used’. He did not expand on his use of ‘normally’, which might have raised the matter of his reputation, which helped so much towards his promotion as ‘The Thinking Man’s Rottweiler’. And he made no comment on his use of the word ‘swamp’ with its connotations of a cruelly prolonged, widely destructive and epidemical disaster. Was it related to his background as an ardent ‘No Turning Back’ devotee of the Iron Lady (who herself in1978 gave voice to her thoughts about ‘…people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’)? Years later, as Thatcher was being ousted from Number Ten, Fallon called on her to try to convince her that ‘all was not lost’. At first he was turned away, told that she was too busy but when she knew he had called she had him brought back to make his obeisances. On the anniversary of that day, which is stubbornly celebrated by some of the areas laid waste by the harsher poverty under Thatcher governments, Fallon demonstrates his unchanging devotion to her memory by wearing a black tie.

Defence

Fallon was first elected in 1983, he lost that seat in 1992 but came back, for Sevenoaks in Kent, in 1997. He was soon embarked on a ministerial career, probably in recognition of his talents as a ‘fire-fighter’ to douse any smouldering rebels on the Tory benches. His big chance has been his promotion to his present job as Minister of Defence, after only two years in Business and Enterprise. In his time he has held a series of directorships one of which was in brokers Tullett Prebon, a major donor to the Tory Party and involved in the FSA investigation into what in the City is bashfully called malpractice such as the notorious LIBOR interest fixing operation. Another interest of Fallon has been Quality Care Homes whose comforting title overlays its reputation for paying its workers less than the proposed minimum wage and its low assessment on some matters by the Care Quality Commission.

Slag

For a couple of years leading up to Thatcher’s resignation Fallon was a Tory Whip, so that experienced Members had to learn how to handle him while aware that, as one of them put it, ‘…If he said that everything is going swimmingly’ he was actually saying ‘It’s a fucking disaster’. One example of what was on that Honourable Member’s mind was an incident soon after the Tory victory in 2010, when Cameron was strutting his stuff as the leader of a ‘female friendly’ government. It involved one Bryony Gordon, a journalist who had worked for the Daily Telegraph and whose material and style was represented by the title of one of her major autobiographical works The Wrong Knickers; A Decade Of Chaos. She was at a leaving party in a ‘grotty bar’ in Westminster when Fallon, who had been drinking at another party, arrived and told her that she was a ‘slag’. The uproar, inflamed by Gordon, was not appeased by Fallon’s minders assuring everyone that he had used the word ‘slattern’ – a distinction too fine to be of any help to the floundering minister. In another incident a couple of years later Fallon arrived at a Christmas party thrown by a wealthy Tory MP. He was an uninvited guest and had already been drinking. He quickly clamped himself to a young woman noticeable in a dramatic party dress. Again it was necessary for him to be extracted by a minder, anxious because the woman was employed by the Russian energy industry while Fallon was the Minister of State for Energy.

As they approach their final general election the Cameron government will intensify their campaign to re-write history by convincing us that they are in progress to cure the blundering chaos of the Labour government. This, they will argue, is due to their insightful policies and sublime personalities. Included in this will be Michael Fallon, now revealing himself in a ministry where his earliest predecessor Liam Fox slipped from a strong contender as a future leader into obscurity. The politics of capitalism will always be scattered with miserable, exposed failures.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: In the chair (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wonder Boy William Hague is determined to make some changes in the party into whose leadership he was suddenly catapulted after the events of 1 May. "The Conservative party that I lead", he wrote in the Sunday Times on 5 October, “will be broad where it was narrow, young where it was old. caring where it was arrogant". Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? After the drubbing they got at the polls the Tories can hardly pretend that all is well with them, that there is no need to change anything, that they need only wait a while and the voters will obediently go back to supporting the Party of Gentlemen, the Natural Party of Government or however else it is known.

In any case Hague’s zeal to reform the party is a back-handed way of blaming their defeat onto his predecessor who apparently allowed the Tories to get narrow, old and arrogant. There is a snag to those tactics however. Why did Hague keep his enthusiasm for changing the Conservative Party in check for so long? Why didn’t he go for modernising it before the election, when he was busily playing his part along with all the other leaders telling us what a wonderful party they were and how lucky we were to have the chance of returning them to power yet again? It is rather late now. after the votes have been counted, to tell us that "the electorate believed we were arrogant and out of touch . . we were divided among ourselves . . . they questioned motives and sometimes our competence”.

Chairmen

One of Hague’s first acts, in this great age of reform was to appoint a new chairman of the party. Now this is not a job which invariably brings success and widespread esteem in the party. In fact some of the people to have held it in recent times have been, by the cynical standards of politics, disastrous flops. There was Norman Tebbit, whose reputation as chief organiser at Tory Central Office was not exactly glowing and who spent much of his time in the job locked in dispute with his deputy. David Young. There was Selwyn Gummer, whose inadequacies were the subject of widespread complaint, including among the 1922 Committee. The Major era brought in Jeremy Hanley, who quickly became famous for his hilarious gaffes, like describing a huge punch-up among the audience at a boxing match as over-exuberance. Hanley was followed by Brian Mawhinney. who is a doctor although not one you would be comfortable to have operating on you. Mawhinney’s arrogance went with an overbearing, browbeating attitude to his staff and a monumental incompetence in dealing with—by which we mean explaining away—the many crises which afflicted the Major government. Of course when he did try to explain them away he did not help matters by smiling—if that was what it was—like a piranha who has not had a square meal for a while. Inextricably linked as he was to the Tory collapse in May. Mawhinney had to be prised away from the chairmanship. He is now Shadow Home Secretary—which has probably converted thousands of prisoners, prison governors and prison officers to ardent Labour voters. So who should replace him? Well Hague was intending to make his party younger, fresher, looking to a rosy future untainted by a wretched past. So he chose Cecil Parkinson.

Immaculate

"Cecil who?" may have been the reaction of many of the young people Hague is hoping to attract to the Tory party, when the news broke about the new chairman. Well this Cecil once seemed to be surging irresistibly towards the Tory leadership and to being Prime Minister. In his entire life Parkinson made not a single mistake, nor a mis-judgement, nor was he ever responsible for any mean or selfish or underhand behaviour. He was. simply, immaculate—or at least that is the impression he gives in his autobiography.

Even the town he grew up in— Carnforth in Lancashire—was "surrounded by beautiful countryside . . .  almost totally devoid of pretentiousness and jealousy".There is the small problem about the young Parkinson being an active member of the Labour Party League of Youth, an enthusiastic admirer of Stalinist Russia and, when he was doing his National Service, "virtually a pacifist”. But these are glossed over as surprising rather than damaging. In any case it turned out alright in the end because young Parkinson saw the error of his ways in time to shin up the greasy pole of Tory politics, almost to the very top.

His climb was, in fact, almost what is now called seamless. At school he excelled in his studies and as an athlete. He went to Cambridge, did well as an accountant and then in the take-over business. In 1970 he was elected to Parliament, where his rise was again predictably smooth. It became rather faster when Parkinson caught Thatcher’s attention, until in 1981 she appointed him (no nonsense about elections) party chairman with a place in the Cabinet. In the 1983 election, when the so-called Falklands factor was supposed to have won another spell of power for the Tories, Parkinson was at the height of his powers, with even better to come.

Affair 

Except that he had had an affair with his secretary Sara Keays, who was pregnant by him and who was expecting him to do something about his stated intention to divorce his wife and marry her. It all came out, in the most damaging way for Parkinson, when he tried to backpedal on his promise and Keays made it obvious that she would not take this lying down. (The affair gave her an opportunity to see how ruthless the party she supported and wanted to represent in Parliament, operates when it sees its facade of genteel integrity under threat.) Parkinson’s response to this was to pass over some money and turn his back on the matter. Keays is now hedged about by restrictions Parkinson has put in place. For example, it is not possible legally to publish anything about the condition or welfare of her— and Parkinson’s—child. Which may serve Parkinson’s interests and those of his party but does not fit in with his image as the clean, caring and responsible exemplar of Tory morality. Hague’s appointment of a sleazy has-been as his party chairman says a lot about the Tories and about the other parties of capitalism and about the system itself.

Ivan

Is Laughter All You Need? (1997)

TV Review from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political coverage since the polls closed on 1 May has been considerably more entertaining than it was in the period immediately before, though given the tedium of the election campaign this is actually no great achievement. For starters, election night itself was certainly more interesting than usual. The fact that the working class had once again chosen to put their class enemies in charge of the machinery of government and the armed forces was tempered to an extent by the sight of some of the most loathsome specimens that have been doing the bidding for the capitalist class recently being unceremoniously shunted out of office. No socialist is going to weep any tears for the likes of Michael Portillo, David Evans, Michael Forsyth or David Shaw, all enemies of the working class to their very core. But unlike the Trots and reformers we couldn't and shan't raise a cheer for the new Labour team cither. We are fully aware that in five or ten years' time the ashen face of Portillo on BBC's election night coverage is likely to be replaced by that of an equally implacable opponent of the workers—Jack Straw, perhaps, or Peter Mandelson. And though we might raise a brief midnight cheer at the time for that too, it will be in the full knowledge that getting rid of one set of masters simply to replace them with another lot is the way to frustration not emancipation.

It was pretty obvious long before election night itself that Labour was going to win fairly convincingly, having been backed by influential sections of the capitalist class—and most significantly of all—the majority of the media. It will be truly fascinating to see how the media reacts to New Labour in office when the honeymoon period dies down, but so far old habits die hard. Kicking the Tory Party while it is lying prostrate on the floor with blood gushing from its head is the name of the game and bashing right-wing head-bangers the current trend set by programmes like Have I Got News For You, Rory Bremner and A Week In Politics.

Lady Hamilton and friend

Having stated this, the 10 May edition of Have I Got News For You was more akin to a ritualistic public hanging. For those who didn't see it, it featured smarmy Neil Hamilton and his barmy wife as two of the panellists. You can probably guess the rest. What on earth possessed the two of them to appear on this programme is a topic worthy of an Arthur C. Clarke investigation. The pittance they would have received by way of an appearance fee could have in no way compensated for the humiliation they received at the hands of Ian Hislop. editor of Private Eye, which along [with] the Guardian had led the campaign against “cash for questions".That the Hamiltons are clearly buffoons of the highest order only served to make Hislop's task easier and more enjoyable.

However, there are worrying aspects to this entire business with the Hamiltons. The electors of Tatton, in the main, thought Hamilton's actions in the last Parliament reprehensible, and this is not surprising. But the vast majority didn't seem overly perturbed by Hamilton's links with the far right, his support for the Monday Club and his long-standing and inflammatory views on immigration. Neither, for that matter, did most of the press which ended up hounding him—indeed, why should they when so many of them hold similar views to him? The idea that taking freebies or bribes as an MP is disgraceful conduct whereas stirring up racial hatred is entirely permissible illuminates the hypocrisy of the press as much as it does of Hamilton himself. It was a great pity this wasn't brought out by Have I Got News For You, a significant fact bypassed in the headlong Gadarene rush to damn a helpless victim.

Still, while Hislop and co's antics were hilarious and election night entertaining enough in itself, the lesson is that the bigger picture should not be lost amid a welter of emotionalism and point-scoring. It does the working class no harm in itself to rejoice at the misfortunes of our enemies, although it is always important to remember that while these people are enemies they do not in themselves constitute the enemy. There are issues at stake here that are bigger than Hamilton's clowning or Portillo's pomposity. And in order to tackle them we will have to engage our brains and thereby advance beyond a situation where we are simply helpless with laughter. Unless we do that the joke will be on us in election after election.

Dave Perrin