Brylcreem Boys
To reconstruct a famous saying — Kenneth Baker has the looks of a politician designed by a committee. If we are to choose one short word to describe his appearance it would be smug, which is odd for a politician at a time when British capitalism is promising to slide into recession, when working class poverty, homelessness and sickness are as rampant as ever and — what is even worse — when the Conservative Party is in disarray. It is not so much his seriously fleshed body and face topped by a confection of hair battered into shape with generous applications of grease, nor the mouth which looks like the result of a surgical operation, an afterthought when the committee had adjourned, as his bravely persistent smile.
Baker's smiles do not spread over his face in order to prove that the surgeons have done a good job, connecting up all the muscles and nerves in the right order. They are his contribution to British politics, in his job as chairman of the Conservative Party. Confronted with some inconvenient news such as a crisis in the cabinet or a by-election defeat or a big lead for the Labour Party in the opinion polls, his conditioned response must be an expression of delight. It was in this way that he slickly misrepresented the Tories' heavy losses in the local election in May as a country-wide victory for them, making enough pleasureable noise about their results in Wandsworth, Westminster and Ealing to drown the wails of their defeated candidates in other areas and the panic-stricken twittering of Tory MPs who sit on thin majorities which they could see melting away in the warmth of the Baker smile.
Recanting
Of course Baker is only human which means that sometimes the genial mask slips to show the despondency beneath. This happened when he had to face the newsnounds in the street after Nigel Lawson had resigned. But he soon perked up — he was. after all on TV — to urge us to take comfort from the fact that we had a very good Chancellor and a very good Foreign Secretary so all was well. The Tories' humiliation in Bradford North was partly blamed on their candidate's inept practice of the deceits and posturing which are called electioneering — which meant that Baker had to be sent out to tell everyone how much he admired her and to brush off the defeat with the understatement that "out there we're not very popular at the moment". Baker's job got really difficult when Geoffrey Howe resigned because in face of this massive piece of evidence of a split in the cabinet he had to insist that they were united — which made him took a fool or a fraud.
The job of Conservative Party chairman (so far no woman has held this job and if one does, knowing the Tories they will probably still call her a chairman) calls for a measure of flexibility — which might better be called a readiness to tell lies. Baker has already proved how flexible he can be because from being one of Thatcher's inner opponents he has joined the sorry ranks of her ardent admirers. In 1986 he voiced his anxieties about one of Thatcher’s favourite policies — support for the American bombing of Libya. Shortly afterwards he gave out one of those coded warnings, which the Tories are so fond of and which it is really pointless to obscure in code because everyone knows what the speaker means, when he spoke about the government losing its "sense of direction". Privately he spoke of the coming day when the traditional Tory style of government would return with ministers like Hurd and Gilmour and, of course, Baker.
By the time of the 1987 election Baker had seen — or had pointed out to him — the error of his ways and was praising "acquisitive individualism". This typically Thatcherite phrase was intended to strike a chord with those workers who were about to vote Tory because they had one of those massive debts called a mortgage or were very briefly shareholders in some privatised state concern. These people — the working class — acquire very little in their lives apart from debts and delusions about capitalism and what individualism they may display has a hard time under the pressures of having to work for their living. But it sounded good. And by the time of Heseltine's challenge for the Tory leadership Baker's recantation was as complete as Winston Smith’s in 1984. "Mrs. Thatcher's leadership qualities," he grovelled, "Are the greatest political assets which the Conservative Party and our nation have".
Ambitions
Being Tory Party chairman can be enjoyable when things are going well for the Tories, like when the Treasury are able to roll out some reassuring statistics about things like inflation and the balance of trade which the voters believe are so vital to our wellbeing. In other circumstances — like nowadays — it can be what might be called a harrowing experience, not to be recommended to anyone who has not first consulted their doctor. Baker's time in the chair has done little or nothing to advance his ambitions to be Tory leader himself. The same can be said for his time as Minister for Education, when he managed to antagonise the teachers into militancy by his rearrangements of their jobs and his bullying tactics over their pay. Under the stress of all this, he was said to be making his policies on the hoof and it is something of a monument to him that the Labour Party are now making a big electoral issue of education. They are sure that such is the dissatisfaction among workers about how children are taught that there are votes to be won and lost. So Baker's career seems to have come to a dead-end and he will become yet another discarded hopeful. But he can be relied on, however messy his end may be, to keep smiling to it.
Brilliance
Another Brylcreem boy, who was slapping on the brilliantine when Baker was a baby being kissed by politicians instead of the other way around, was the late Richard Crossman who is the subject of a recently published biography by Anthony Howard. While he was still at school Crossman decided that he was exceptionally brilliant and therefore conducted his life on that assumption. When he was elected to the Commons he was marked down as an incorruptible left winger by hopeful Labour dupes who mistake boorish behaviour for principled radicalism. In fact it was Crossman's behaviour and not his principles — such as could be identified — which deterred Attlee from promoting him from the back benches. For that he had to wait for Harold Wilson and his crafty balancing act.
To the dismay of many of those we must call his colleagues Crossman kept a diary of his time as a minister and it does not make soothing reading for them. Anyone who has any lingering delusions about the comradeship in a Labour government or its crusade to the new society should purge themselves by reading Crossman’s barbed accounts of what actually happened. They might also consider what these diaries say about Crossman himself — about his open contempt not just for his Labour colleagues but also for the working class who endure the poverty and repression of capitalism yet vote for braggarts like Crossman in the hope that they will change things. And they could ask themselves how anyone like Crossman could be called — could call themselves — a socialist. They could think about the meaning of the word socialist and how it can validly be applied only to those who struggle to end capitalism and its fetish for leaders, whether oily like Baker or abrasive like Crossman. If enough do that, enough ask those questions, then those diaries, to reconstruct another famous phrase, will not have been written in vain.
Ivan
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