Greasy Pole: The way they tell ’em (2002)

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

One year into his leadership of the Conservative Party, how is Iain Duncan Smith to be assessed? There is unlikely to be any point in asking people at large because so few have noticed him. But what about his own party? They may well feel that the traditional “could do better” does not apply because, no matter how pathetic his showing in the jungle world of politics it is clear that Duncan Smith could not improve on it. And if the leader is so little known what can be said about his team of shadow ministers? David Davis, the man he appointed party chairman, gained some transient prominence as a week-end member of the SAS, which means that on Saturdays and Sundays he can kill with his bare hands. In spite of such spasmodic power he showed some unsoldierly sentiments – like envy. Somewhat peeved at being passed over for the leadership Davis turned his back on all those comfortable theories about loyalty being the Tories’ secret weapon and conspired to unseat Duncan Smith. Unluckily for him he did this without a soldier’s due regard for camouflage; Duncan Smith observed it all from his bunker and promptly reduced Davis to the ranks.

The humiliation of Davis is not the only sign that Duncan Smith is getting desperate. Is there no policy, no day-to-day issue, he could exploit to get some favourable publicity? In one ill-advised venture he suddenly claimed that the Tory Party would stand up for vulnerable people. The names at Lloyds, currency dealers and property speculators, all anxious about the remorseless daily slide on the Stock Exchange, may have thought Duncan Smith had some good news in store for them. In fact the poor man was only trying to steal a few votes by promising to take special care of anyone struggling to get by on the lower slopes of poverty – the sick, the benefit claimants, the elderly – who qualify in the Tory lexicon as vulnerable (but who have learned to be wary of Tory politicians bearing gifts). So of course nobody with any sense took any notice of what Duncan Smith said, except to apply it as a measure of his desperation.

Platform

Another attempt to convince us that he has radically changed his party was the decision to keep party leaders off the platform at this year’s annual conference, banishing them to a place among the lower orders in the body of the hall. Now this was serious. A seat on the conference platform is not just a privilege. It is an assertion of rank, of being one of the elite. It means exposure to the blissful publicity of the TV cameras, being beamed into a million homes leading the applause in the obligatory standing ovations. For the very privileged few it means dosing the audience with great dollops of platitudes, half-truths and tantrums which in combination are called a great speech.

An example of the power of a presence on the platform was at the conference in 1991. On the Tuesday of the conference Margaret Thatcher fumed and smouldered in her hotel room, still smarting from the men in grey suits wheedling her out of the job of prime minister. Watching the proceedings on TV she muttered and moaned about the treachery and impotence of the new leaders; none of them were any good, John Major, for one, was all vanity. On the following day she took her revenge. Dressed to the nines in true Tory blue and displaying her finest jewellery she left for the conference. “I’m not going to make a speech,” she promised, to widespread relief, “I’ll just go there.” And “go there” was what she did, taking her place on the platform, which was enough to provoke an ovation from the floor which the leaders she despised had difficulty in bringing to a halt.

Well she was accustomed to holding a favoured place on the platform, to making the kind of speeches so loved by the Tory grass roots that they were a kind of punctuation in her reign over the party. She was accustomed to politically challenged Tories hanging adoringly on her every word, cheering themselves hoarse at every jingoistic allusion and roaring with laughter at every joke, no matter how feeble. They loved it in 1983 when she told them, revelling in her Falklands triumph, that “the spirit of the South Atlantic is the spirit that made Great Britain great”. They brayed with laughter in 1980, when she was under enormous pressure from people who were misled into a belief that governments are able to control the economy, and defied them with these words:

To those watching with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase “the U-turn”, I have only one thing to say. “You turn if you want to. The lady is not for turning.”

Speeches

That leaden-footed attempt at humour was not Thatcher’s work but that of Ronnie Millar, one of her speech-writers. In fact none of her conference speeches were hers; putting them together was a long, tortuous process and not the spontaneous, heartfelt declaration the conference members assumed it to be. To begin with Thatcher and her staff would spend several months collecting a file of ideas and reports of the speeches of other people. During the summer, as the conference drew near, she asked for contributions from her ministers, sympathetic journalists, advisers and the like. All of this was drawn together at Chequers on the weekend before the conference; draft sections of the proposed speech – sometimes as many as twelve – and big files of background material were laid out on a table and put together. With pieces written to link up the sections she at last had a speech to send the members into raptures. (Not that that had anything to do with the content of the speech; they would have cheered almost anything she said.) Spontaneous it was not – and in any case it was finally read from an autocue.

An essential of Tory conferences (although it is not always achieved) is a show of loyalty. Behind the scenes it is rather different. The leaders usually get only one chance in the limelight and they must use it to assert and defend their standing in the party; otherwise there are always plenty of hopefuls eager to challenge for a place at the top. So every speaker needs at some time to attack the Labour Party and the LibDems, with painfully heavy-handed jokes intended to stay in the members’ minds for when the next leadership election comes along. Naturally this can lead to some outrageous clowning. At Brighton in 1957 Lord Hailsham, who was then party chairman, attracted the kind of publicity most politicians would shun by appearing on the beach in the early morning wearing a gruesomely baggy pair of swimming trunks and skipping across the pebbles for a swim. By coincidence this juvenile behaviour was witnessed by a number of newspaper hacks – not people usually known for standing on a cold beach in the first light of day – who kindly arranged for Hailsham’s photograph to appear in the press the next day. On the following morning, perhaps stimulated by the media attention, Hailsham seized the chairman’s bell and began to shake it violently into a crescendo of sound while he boomed out a warning about the impending doom of the Labour Party. It was buffoonery of the highest order and the members obediently leapt to their feet, stamping and cheering.

Heseltine and Hamilton

A similar rapture greeted Michael Heseltine’s 1975 attack on the Labour Party, suitably acted out on stage, as “. . .a one-legged army limping away from the storm they have created. Left, left-left, left . . .” Even opponents of the Labour Party might have regarded such clowning as an excuse for a convincing argument but it did Heseltine’s career no harm and to the end of his days as a leader he was a favourite of the conference. And then there was Neil “Cash For Questions” Hamilton, whose conference speech celebrated the fact that Heseltine, who was his boss at the Department of Trade and Industry, had given him the job of overseeing the drive for deregulation. Hamilton’s climax had the audience applauding wildly as he symbolically ripped up piles of paper (none of it, it is to be hoped, brown envelopes from Harrods). Heseltine, in blissful ignorance of the future, described this episode as Hamilton’s “greatest political triumph”. Well there weren’t many others, were there?

An appropriate end to these examples of the unpleasant, if typical, episodes in the history of the mindless jamborees which are Tory conferences is Portillo’s raving about the SAS in 1995. Even by the abysmal standards of capitalist politics Portillo must have been extremely stupid, or desperate for attention, to have so much as considered such a speech, which caused enduring damage to his prospects. Ted Heath rumblingly denounced it as a speech which “. . . hit new heights of offensiveness”. But then Heath was by no means a darling of the conference. In 1988, after he had attacked the Tory Eurosceptics, he was a victim of a blatant piece of manipulation by the party officials, who changed the order of speaking so that Jonathan “Sword Of Truth” Aitken was put up to reply, contemptuously adapting Heath’s own phrase to describe him as “the unacceptable face of Conservatism”. It was not long before Aitken himself became unacceptable as a minister, as an MP, as a bearer of truth.

A Passing Drunk

In 1984 at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the top Tory brass were staying for the conference, a bomb came close to wiping out much of the government, including Thatcher herself. Among the injured taken to hospital was a man who was clearly not of their class – he had none of the arrogance and the cynicism which are so essential to survival in the world of capitalist politics. So it was assumed that he was the hotel porter and the great and the good of the party came to patronisingly shake his hand and graciously thank and congratulate him for his courage. It is to be hoped that he made a speedy recovery from whatever he was in hospital for because he was in fact a nameless drunk who happened to be passing the hotel when the bomb went off and could not remember why he had been there. The episode was an appropriate comment on the party conferences, for their separation from the real world of analysing and solving society’s problems, for their ignorance of what they actually are or how they came to be there or where they are supposed to be going, driven by the intoxication of power. And making the most of it, before the rest catch on.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Two brains? (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a prime minister takes over after winning an election victory, what are the jobs awaiting attention? There is the triumphant waving to the crowd, there is the speech saying how humbly proud they are to be given this sacred trust which they will keep by running a government of all the people. There are the ministerial jobs to be dished out, to award faithful acolytes on the one hand and to pay off old scores on the other. Then, very soon, there is the business of planning the next election. Because that must never be far from their mind. Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor supremo of this government, recently told the magazine Vanity Fair that every morning he and Tony Blair get up thinking “Right, how can we lose the election”. That may not be exactly true but it does illustrate the fact that any government must be persistently pre-occupied with pulling off at the next election the same kind of confidence trick which succeeded before.

As the election gets nearer the matter takes on a greater urgency. We are subjected to a kind of electoral auction, in which Tories and Labour make bids to buy off votes with extravagant promises to solve economic and social problems, as if it was all suddenly blindingly obvious and simple.

Criminals and Immigrants

An ever-popular subject of the electoral auction is crime, with each party bidding to outdo the other with schemes which are presented as the final, all-consuming remedy. No more drug addicts mugging old ladies for their pension. No more burglaries while we sleep in our beds at the dead of night. No more stolen cars. The inhabitants of inner city slums, of high rise housing estates, will learn to live with their misery without taking it all out in offending. The last Tory Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was a past master at thinking up such schemes and his Labour successor has carried on where he left off and beyond.

Since the Fifties immigration has been another item at the auction. From the first Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 both parties have rolled out laws to cut immigration which have had the effect of pandering to, or stimulating, some of the ugliest of racist prejudice. In the Nineties the immigrants have become asylum seekers, who are often characterised as “bogus” or “economic”. Ace auctioneer Jack Straw has been most active here, restricting the income of the asylum seekers and forcibly dispersing them around the country, often to places where they have no family or friends. Straw’s Tory rival, Ann Widdecombe, has tried to outbid him with her call to slap all asylum seekers into detention centres—a sort of “lock up first and ask questions afterwards” policy.

Pensioners

At one time it seemed that this government had written pensioners off as a significant source of votes so it didn’t really matter if they upset them, for example by upping the basic pension by the staggering sum of 75p a week. There had to be a re-assessment when it became clear that this miserly rise had provoked a lot of anger and then when the Tories saw that there were votes in the issue. Pensions, like most state benefits, are not simple. A pension starts at a basic sum which can be increased or reduced according to the pensioner’s circumstances. In addition there is an extra £10 a week at Christmas, which would not even buy a bottle of whisky and each winter £150 to pay for extra fuel. Anyone over 75 gets their TV free of a licence fee. Taking everything into account, it needs a mathematically alert brain and a calculator to work out exactly how much a pensioner should get.

The Tories put the matter into the auction with William Hague’s bid to raise the basic pension by between £5 and £10 a week—at once, if the Tories win the next election, which could mean next April. This may have sounded pretty tempting to anyone eking out a spartan existence on their pension but when Labour ministers had got their breath back they were able to show that Hague was not really offering a rise because his offer was intended to replace the £10 Christmas pay-out, the fuel payment, the free TV licence and a few other things. The Tory scheme was based on the argument that pensioners don’t like being forced to accept a bonus for Christmas, for winter fuel and so on and would prefer a straightforward increase to spend how they like. Anyone who thinks that people who struggle to get by on a state pension are able to spend their money how they like—blow it all on a luxury cruise instead of on food, perhaps—is seriously out of touch with reality.

How Many Brains Have You Got?

The person responsible for the Tory bid was not William Hague but his social security spokesman David Willetts, who is known as “Two Brains” Willetts because he is so much cleverer than normal people.

He went to Oxford, where they know when they are in the presence of a great mind so they gave him a first class degree. After Oxford he became one of John Major’s earliest gurus, which would mean a lot more were it not that Major was famous for making disastrous choices in the people he promoted. In the 1992 election Willetts was elected as MP for the safe Tory seat of Havant. His progress in penetrating into the world of the brash and brilliant was illustrated when he became a regular at Peregrine Worsthorne’s lunches at the Sunday Telegraph, where they may well have discussed clever ideas like raising pensions with one hand and lowering them with the other. Willetts was welcome at these exercises in pretentious futility until his overbearing conceit got on everyone’s nerves—which, since none of those present were short of self-esteem, is saying quite a lot. The crunch came when he put his feet on the lunch table and began lecturing Michael Howard on how to run his ministry—something which Howard, who was hated by his civil servants and a few million other people, did not need. “No further invitations,” recorded Worsthorne, “were forthcoming for Mr. Willetts.”

Dissembling

It took Willetts rather longer to reach serious fame when, as a junior Tory whip, he earned the severe displeasure of the House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee. This committee, as its name implies, is supposed to watch over the standards of conduct of those people quaintly called Honourable Members, which means that anyone who deals with them is supposed to tell the truth. In October 1994 the committee were expecting to get a complaint about the conduct of Neil “Cash for Questions” Hamilton. It was an embarrassing episode for the government. It is at such times that whips, especially if they got a first at Oxford, come into their own. Putting both his brains to work at the same time, Willetts came up with a brilliant idea designed to obstruct the work of the committee and so get the government off the hook.

In a note to the Tory Chief Whip, he suggested that the committee should either set aside the complaint against Hamilton until the MP’s libel action against the Guardian had been settled—by which time much of the embarrassment should have subsided—or investigate the complaint as quickly as possible “…exploiting the good Tory majority at present”. Referring to the Tory chairman of the committee, Willetts wrote “He wants our advice”—in other words the chairman wanted to be told the best way of stopping the committee doing the job it had been set up to do.

Unluckily for Willetts the note was leaked and he was hauled up before the committee to explain himself, when he was stupid enough, instead of making a clean breast of the matter, to try to get away with the feeble excuse that his phrase “he wants our advice” really meant “he is in want of advice”. With the media hot on the trail, this attempt to wriggle out of the problem had no chance of succeeding. The chairman sensibly wanted none of it; he described Willetts version of the affair as “astonishing”. Left hanging in the wind, Willetts had to absorb the committee’s censure: “. . . very concerned . . . dissemble on his account . . . substantially aggravate the original offence”.

Comeback

For anyone with fewer brains—or with less arrogance—that might have been a crushing blow. But not so for Willetts, who came bouncing back and is now shadow spokesman for social security—which cannot be reassuring for anyone who depends on state benefits for their survival. But that is the reality of life under capitalism, for the millions of people who do all the useful work in society and whose lot is to be exploited in the interests of sustaining the system responsible for it all—and to be patronised by arrogant, conceited cynics into what might be called the bargain.

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