Greasy Pole: Getting on at Westminster (2012)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

How would an ambitious politician make their way in the world if not through attracting the maximum of attention to themselves? Regardless of the effect on our limited reserves of patience and of the cruel reality that whatever attention they get only reveals their self-publicity as a substitute for any kind of talent?

Louise Mensch is the Conservative MP for Corby in Northamptonshire, a seat which she wrested from Labour junior minister Phil Hope (whose talents include tap-dancing and juggling) in the 2010 election. Corby was a steel town stricken with unemployment when the industry was shut down in the early eighties. Mensch benefited from David Cameron’s controversial “A” list designed to ensure that Tory constituencies select their candidates free of any bias about their race or gender. One of their MPs protested about the party choosing such a “minor celebrity” – possibly a reference to Mensch being the author of (and making a lot of money from) a series of “chic-lit” novels with names like Glitz and Glamour. Since arriving at Westminster she has arranged to have herself persistently in the news, among other things aligning herself as one of a group of “Tory feminists” who may have had their reservations about a member who profited so well from what she described as ”escapist female fantasy”. Similarly in 1998, when she was in the United States churning out another of her financial masterpieces – Venus Envy – she wrote in the Daily Telegraph about her intention to flush out a suitable husband. This produced an acceptably wealthy property developer, Anthony LeCicero.  He was replaced in 2011 by Peter Mensch, promoter of rock stars, who aroused in her “strong feelings of hero-worship”.

Tory and Labour

Born into a family described as “Catholic gentry”, with a stockbroker father, Mensch was prepared by boarding school in Surrey for the boisterous style of her employment and political career. When she was 14 she was inspired enough by Margaret Thatcher to join the Conservative Party but after about ten years she was equally impressed by Tony Blair as “socially liberal but an economic Tory” and switched to the Labour Party, only to return to the Tories a year later. Justifying these changes, bewildering even to anyone who had been able to follow them, she said, “I’m proud to say I was once in the Labour Party. It shows I think for myself…” which was rather weakened by “…but I don’t judge anyone, and I don’t like politicians who do”. During this time she was working in the press office of EMI Classics, from which she was later fired because she was said to be a “bad influence” on their client, the famous violinist Nigel Kennedy. The matter of who was being influenced was confused by the allegation that they had been taking drugs together in a night club – which, she agreed, “…sounds highly probable …we all do idiotic things when we are young” – the same evasion as used by David Cameron when that same question was put to him.

Commons Committee

But how has she fared in her new, exciting job as a representative of the people at Westminster? Her most prominent role has been as a member of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee which at one time might have been a kind of refuge for insomniac Members but now, with the probing of the Murdoch empire’s phone hacking, has become a focal point of popular attention. Well, Mensch has been alive to the opportunity before her, casting off that avowal about not judging others while she busily probed and condemned, so that the normally staid Economist  eulogised her as the: “surprise star,” with her “sharp, precise, coolly scornful questions”. Perhaps this praise was too much for Mensch for she was impulsive enough to say in the committee that the ex-editor of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan, had stated in his autobiography that in that job he oversaw phone hacking. Morgan angrily challenged this but Mensch refused to back down and tried to take refuge in parliamentary privilege, making matters worse by misquoting a page from Morgan’s diaries. Eventually she had to withdraw her accusation and retire to soothe her wounded conceit. Until, that is, she popped into the news again after the August riots in London and elsewhere, suggesting that at times of such crises the Twitter and Facebook services should be closed down to prevent them being used as a method of summoning and directing the rioters. She did not seem to be aware, until it was gently pointed out to her, that the police use those services themselves at such times.

Starbucks

The anti-capitalist demonstrations outside the Stock Exchange and St. Paul’s gave Mensch another chance to expose her impetuous need for self-exposure when during the 22 October edition of Have I Got News For You she complained that while the demonstrators claim to oppose capitalism they are happy to accept what the system brings to them: for example coffee from the nearby Starbucks and nights spent in “very smart tents” on the pavements. The Have I Got News For You  regulars Ian Hislop and Paul Martin had problems dealing with such a naïve, ignorant, undeveloped argument so that at one stage Hislop said he would have to give up trying: “It’s all so obvious,” while Mensch did her best to conceal her chagrin behind a succession of grotesquely fixed and humourless “smiles”. For some politicians the experience of repeated exposure to such ridicule and contempt might have been overwhelming, but Mensch is driven by an unusual energy. A couple of months later she was whinging to GQ:  “I’m not even a Parliamentary Private Secretary. It’s kind of annoying. What do I have to do to get promoted here?” Well perhaps she might start by recognising that she has chosen to immerse herself in the business of capitalist politics where remorseless failure has seen off so many before her. Then she might make a clean breast of it to the voters of Corby.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: How Not to Spoil Your Vote. And Why (2013)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The General Election of 1992. A reminiscence. Going to the local polling station after all the experts had used their surveys and samples and focus groups to let us know that our one and only choice had to be between the hysterical bluster of Neil Kinnock and the plaintive reticence of John Major. Planning to use my voting paper to state the socialist reasons to reject all of them and set out the real alternative. My six-year old son Tom agreed to come with me, probably after his own expert analyses had led him to hope for a consequent happy visit to the local Game Boy stockist; he had not then read any Upton Sinclair or George Orwell or The Communist Manifesto. The polling station was pretty busy with so many people hunched over their voting paper. Not long after I had begun my contribution, when I had barely had time to deal with the negatives of Kinnock and Major, Tom became impatient and embarrassed by my being immobile while so many others were so quickly in and out. When his muttering and sleeve tugging became too intrusive I cut short my mini-manifesto and we headed off for the Game Boy. I blamed the politicians.

This was brought to mind by the low voter turn-out in some of the recent by-elections – Corby, Manchester Central, Cardiff South – and the reasons suggested by the political pundits, who so often claim to be The Voice Of The People, that the voters were suffering from a compound of habitual apathy and election weariness. Which did not take enough account of the reports that an interesting number of those who did go to the polls completed their ballot paper not by a cross but a statement of their reasoned opposition to all the candidates and in some cases their disgust with the entire media-obsessed game of politics and its players. This was not apathy but an active statement of choice. Truly, it could have been better – more effective and encouraging – had it been driven by a conscious intention to point towards the valid alternative but it was enough to allow a tremble of optimism that as a habit it might catch on.

Corby

Meanwhile in Corby there was a notable turn-out of 42 percent to hint that the one-time steel town had shaken off its flirtation with the undeviatingly self-promoting Tory Louise Mensch. It says enough about David Cameron’s vaunted “A” List of candidates that it should throw up somebody like Mensch and it was to widespread relief that she announced her intention to resign the seat as soon as possible to spend more time with her trans-Atlantic family and her heavily prosperous pop-star manager husband. Which aroused some rumours about the reasons for Cameron failing to make himself aware of her glittering talents. And – perhaps crucially – about the evidence that had she clung on she would have been crushed in the next general election. None of this prevented her, during the by-election, praising her aspiring successor Tory Christine Emmett as “… a true local girl … she’d be a wonderful MP”, apparently unaware that this might have lost Emmett a bunch of votes.

Manchester Central

In Manchester Central, had she dared to show her face, Louise Mensch would not have received a warm welcome. This constituency’s turn-out of 18.16 percent was the lowest since the by-election in Poplar during the unusual circumstances of 1942; it is a place which has never before had a woman Labour MP. In a constituency where, according to one voter, the party could “put a rosette on a dustbin and it would win” Labour offered one Lucy Powell who, although undoubtedly a woman, was considered to be steeped enough in Labour politics – Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign manager and then Deputy Chief of Staff – to be welcomed as a “Labour Party apparatchik”. There was however one niggling doubt about her; in the neighbouring Manchester Withington in 2010 she surprised a lot of people by failing to unseat the LibDem MP John Leech. So that in the recent by-election her candidacy needed to be nourished enough for her to trot out banalities like “We have to think in terms of empowering communities to make decisions for themselves and get people involved so they feel they can aspire”. Well in the end it all went according to plan; the dustbin came out on top and Manchester Central has a new woman MP.

Rotherham

As the polling stations closed their doors and Louise Mensch faded away across the Atlantic attention switched to three other by-elections: Croydon North, (turn-out 26.5 percent) Middlesbrough (25.91 percent) and Rotherham (33.63 percent). The last of these contests was unusually piquant because of its similarity to Corby in the voters’ assumed anger over its MP’s behaviour. Denis MacShane was forced to resign over a succession of matters including some typically extravagant expense claims which brought his integrity into question. One example was a clutch of 19 false invoices which he submitted, described by a Parliamentary Committee as “plainly intended to deceive”. Little wonder that the Respect candidate ran a poster van publicising “Denis MacShame”. Rotherham’s reputation is as a tough town where once they dug coal and smelted steel; it has not elected a Conservative since Labour’s disaster days of 1931. And it has never before had a woman MP. Which raised some searching questions (and a walk-out of members) when the locally prominent Maroof Hussain was beaten to the nomination by a national party favourite Sarah Champion, who went on to win with a delighted UKIP in second place.

None of these elections would have caused any abstinent electors or polling booth essayists to doubt that, at the least, they had appropriate consistency on their side. If capitalism’s current crises have done nothing else they expose the impotent panic among the self-appointed experts – the economists, politicians, analysts and the like – as each of their preferred remedies is exposed as a discredited sham. It is in contrast to that feeble confusion that those who stand aside to put forward the case for a different, cohesively humane system can truly be described as the radicals.

Ivan