Greasy Pole: New wives’ tales (1996)

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

Spare a thought, if you will, for the spin doctors. These shadowy figures labour without pause, shovelling up their platitudes, evasions and lies to divert our attention from the truth about the politicians they spin for. On one side they tell us that John Major is doing a marvellous job of running British capitalism and making us all healthier, richer and happier. Those who are enough in touch with reality to doubt that this is true may be unimpressed by the spin doctors on the other side, who want to convince us that Tony Blair is the man we can trust to clean up the mess which John Major is making— except that anyone who believes that is obviously not as much in touch with reality as they should be.

But spare a thought for the spin doctors, whose work is so often exposed and despised. For example, at the moment the Tones' campaign to convince us that Tony Blair, who was once derided as Bambi, is not a wimpish fawn but an evil-eyed devil, is not having the effect they hoped. Labour’s spin doctors are struggling with the confusion over the party's plans for devolution in Scotland. These things, they may reflect, are sent to try them. It never seems to occur to them to give it all up and begin dealing in facts and the real experience of an inhuman social system. Instead they go on shovelling, in the hope that they will throw up a positive nugget of deception.

Wives

An example of this may be the current contest over Norma Major and Cherie Blair, and its connection with Hilary Clinton. The American President’s wife is not known as the First Lady for nothing because she is a very powerful person who knows how to mix it politically. The Republicans have seized on this to promote the suspicion that Hilary Clinton is really the President, the person who actually decides all sorts of important issues like whether to press the button and blow the world to pieces. In making this propaganda the Republicans are obviously hoping that the American voters have forgotten all about Nancy Reagan and how she interfered in her husband’s presidency.

The wives of British prime ministers are not supposed to behave like Hilary Clinton and Nancy Reagan; their profile is supposed to be kept much lower. They can be their husband’s long-suffering and openly disapproving chauffeur, like Attlee’s wife. They can be background supports like Clemendine Churchill and Dorothy Macmillan. They can write insomnia-curing poetry like Mary Wilson. They can tell all to the women’s magazines about the prime minister’s dietary preferences. That is as far as they have been expected to go.

But none of that fits in with Cherie Blair, who overcame whatever problems may have stemmed from a wayward father who was famously the Liverpudlian butt of Alf Garnett’s abuse in Till Death Us Do Part to become a highly-paid barrister and a QC. Now she is starting to practice as a judge, overpowering the lives of people who transgress against capitalism’s laws. She once had ambitions to be a parliamentary candidate.

Cherie and Norma 

The sort of woman, in other words, to make her parents proud. And it may have stayed like that had the man she married not had ambitions to be prime minister. A clever and ruthless election- winning machine like the Conservative Party could not have overlooked the obvious comparison with Hilary Clinton. What if, their spin doctors asked themselves, the voters of both sexes were uneasy about powerful women? What if they had doubts about a female with Cherie Blair’s abilities and qualifications being so near the seat of power? Of course a campaign to undermine Cherie Blair would rely on the voters forgetting all about Margaret Thatcher, who was also a barrister and a lawyer as well as female, but no self-respecting spin doctor would allow so minor a detail to put them off.

So the work began—like the appeal by a Daily Express journalist for details of any embarrassingly radical political stances in Cherie Blair’s past. At the same time there has been an effort to put a little colour into the image of Major’s wife, Norma, who so far has been shoved into the background as an everyday housewife and mother who just happens to be married to the man in Number Ten and who may even have been happier if he had not failed, long ago. that test to be a bus conductor.

We have been allowed to know such fascinating details about Norma as to make any discerning voter desperate to get out and vote for her husband. She got A-levels in English and needlework. She prudently grates and freezes odd bits of cheese and uses tea bags more than once. She wears clothes that are comfy, perhaps because she does not think of herself as attractive. Anyone who thinks this is boring enough to be voter unfriendly is missing the point. Norma’s " . . . very ordinariness", said the Daily Telegraph, “makes her a huge electoral asset".

Fatuous

We don’t know what Cherie Blair thinks about all this except that she has made some sort of an effort at imitation. While Norma has been completing a book on Chequers, which may or may not include chapters on frozen cheese and second-hand tea bags, Cherie has been invited to the more glamorous job of guest editor for an edition of the magazine Prima. She took this opportunity to, apart from anything else, reassure us that she is almost as ordinary as Norma, whose A-level in needlework she can match by being keen on knitting. Norma and her tea bags? Cherie concerns herself with the techniques of producing interesting and nutritious meals in a short time.

Fatuous guff though this is it should be taken seriously because it reveals how the political parties regard the people who vote them into power. It illustrates the parties' contemptuous confidence that no matter how badly capitalism treats us, no matter how obvious their failure to control the system, they will be supported by millions of people on election day, with votes based on nothing more considerable than Norma Major's tea bags and Cherie Blair's knitting. That kind of propaganda may be sickening but it is no more fatuous and meaningless than the other kind, which is supposed to be weightier. Like Tony Blair, spouting his platitudes in Southwark Cathedral last January:

"To recover national purpose we need to start thinking and acting as one nation, one community again . . . Above all, we must create a society based on a notion of mutual rights and responsibilities."

And so on. And so on.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Mandelson – Coming Up For The Third Time? (2002)

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

With a little help from his friend in Number Ten, Stephen Byers kept afloat for as long as he could but in the end he was dragged down by the sheer weight of his exposure. This was an opportunity for Blair to re-arrange his ministers, unexpectedly promoting Paul Boateng to the influential, money-filtering job of Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Boateng does not have a reputation for being sympathetic but he is the first black Cabinet minister, which ensured that his appointment dominated the media. On the following day the front pages were given over to huge photographs of him and the inside pages were lavished on profiles of him. There was hardly a mention of Alistair Darling, the new minister in the hot seat of Transport and even less of the discredited and embarrassing Byers, who had now sunk almost without trace.

We have become accustomed to the Blair government’s aptitude for this kind of media manipulation. At one time it was the speciality of Peter Mandelson, who like Byers is now fallen from grace but who does not consent so easily to being airbrushed out of the reckoning. In fact Mandelson, although he was twice forced to resign from the government when he was blamed for some particularly blatant sleaze, rather fancied himself as a successor to Byers. In a recent interview he discussed his possible response if Blair were to offer him the Transport job: “ I love being a minister. I love being in government, it’s what I was put on earth to do.” This wistful musing was a change from his vengeful, tub-thumping reaction to being re-elected for Hartlepool in the election of 2001:

Before this campaign started, it was said that I was facing political oblivion, my career in tatters, apparently never to be part of political life again. Well they underestimated Hartlepool and they underestimated me, because I am a fighter and not a quitter.

Rewriting History 

Has Mandelson changed, then? Is he no longer the Prince of Darkness, the presence in the background who plotted his party’s rise to power with such diabolical skill – and then applied the same talents to undermine anyone who was less than ardent in their admiration for blessed Tony Blair? Is he re-assessing his essential role in politics, so that he is not a fighter or a quitter but a joiner? One step in this direction is the publication of an up-to-date version of his 1996 book The Blair Revolution, of which there were extracts in the Guardian on 17 and 18 May. When Mandelson originally wrote that book Labour had been out of government long enough to make it safe for Blair to spout meaningless promises about “. . . a new social order in Britain, a genuine modern civic society for our time, based on merit, commitment and inclusion”. A lot has happened since then, a lot of reality has penetrated the verbiage of Labour leaders; two landslide election victories for them, Mandelson twice in and twice out of government, the comprehensive exposure of New Labour as not significantly different to the Tories – even in the matter of sleaze, which in 1996 seemed to be exclusively Conservative territory.

And now we have him, perhaps because he sees it as the only way back into favour with the leadership, re-assessing the government’s record in a manner which must have demanded all his guile and talent for obfuscation. Too carping an approach would have made him seem to be sulking. Too obsequious and he would have been included in that contemptible bunch of lapdogs on the Labour benches. Something better mannered, more constructive was needed. Like this:

• In acquiring skills to deal with the media, we created spin
• In winning business to our side, we lost some workforce confidence
• . . . having promised less than we thought we could do, we started hyping more than we were actually achieving…
• . . . too many of the worst estates and deprived communities remain unchanged – bleak ghettos depressing the sprits of all who live in them . . . too often becoming centres of danger and desperation
• New Labour government mark one has been too controlling in the way it tries to run the country and Whitehall

Communist Party 

These comments will be recognised by many people whose reservations about New Labour in government have often provoked a dangerous hostility from Mandelson. So the apparent conversion of the man who, more than almost everyone else in politics was notorious for creating spin, control-freakery and “losing workforce confidence” must provoke a few questions. Should we take what he says at all seriously? Has he ever given us any reason to believe him? The evidence against him is overwhelming.

To begin with, Mandelson was once an active member of the Young Communist League. Nothing much wrong with that, it might be argued; we all have the right to change our minds if we have reason to and there are plenty of ardent Blairites in the government who cut their political teeth as left-wing hell-raisers. In Mandelson’s case that argument is weakened by his attempts to conceal this murky bit of his past, saying that he “. . . wasn’t sure whether I was technically a member” of the Communist Party.

Luckily, by the time he was in the government in 1998 he had transformed himself into a mature politician, assuring an audience of business executives, in case they had any qualms about New Labour having silly ideas about equality of access, that the government was “. . . intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. (The word “relaxed” was a favourite with New Labour just then – it was a handy euphemism for breaking promises and acting against what they had claimed were their sacred principles.) In fact Mandelson had been relaxed about getting into the Commons in the first place because, in June 1989, just before he sought out the nomination for the rock safe seat at Hartlepool, he “categorically” denied having any intention of standing for parliament.

Guacamole 

Hartlepool is not famous as a place where the rich have discreet villas and keep their yachts – which may have caused a few problems to its new Member of Parliament. During a visit there Mandelson was persuaded to enter a fish and chip shop. Blanketing any possible disdain at where he found himself, with a show of gourmet enthusiasm he asked for “some of that guacamole” – meaning a portion of good old working class mushy peas. (Guacamole, for those who do not frequent the same exalted circles as Mandelson, is made from avocado, tomatoes, mayonnaise and seasoning. It is a popular dish in the kind of trendy restaurants favoured by left-wingers). Rather than slumming it in a chippy Mandelson was more at home in another class of company. Like the ministers in the first Labour governments in the 1920s, he wallowed in the attentions of the filthy rich. His first parliamentary assistant, Derek Draper (who was no mean social climber himself) wrote that Mandelson “. . . loved mixing with rich, glamorous, exciting people. He seems to go ga-ga when he has anything to do with them”. His eagerness to have a home appropriate to his ambitions tempted him into borrowing all that money from Geoffrey Robinson (for the same price he could have bought something like a whole street in Hartlepool) and his reactive tendency to conceal the truth led him into the attempted cover up, which in the end cost him his ministry.

A readiness to double-cross made a bitter, implacable enemy of Gordon Brown. In the leadership election after the death of John Smith in 1994 Mandelson seemed to be assuring Brown of his support at a time when he was actually committed to Blair. Of course that’s politics – and so are the dark arts of lies and manipulation. Where does Mandelson stand on this? In 1986, when he was Labour’s Director of Campaigns and Communications, he wanted to get rid of his deputy, John Booth. It may have been that Booth was becoming a bit of an embarrassment to Mandelson; for one thing he had found out that his boss was in regular contact with the Times, in spite of a Labour Party executive decision to break contact with Murdoch’s papers over the sacking of hundreds of printers during the move to Wapping. Booth contested the matter, whereupon Mandelson assured him that if he had to be sacked “I will make any fabrication of the truth and stick by it faithfully”. To make the point clear to a wider audience, in August 1997 he informed us of the function and uses of spin doctoring: “to create the truth”.

Politics 

These matters are the tip of the very nasty Mandelson iceberg. But we should not lose sight of the fact that whatever he did was not briefly experimental. It was done with the collusion of his party’s leadership, because they saw it as an essential contribution to their victory. He fawned on the rich and socially parasitic while Blair told us that New Labour was on the side of “ordinary people, against privilege”. He specialised in underhand trickery to serve the interests of a party which promised “open government” (as if there can be such a thing). He did all this when he was a member of a government which was committed to turning its back on the years of Tory sleaze. It was at one time convenient to punish him so that New Labour could claim he was an isolated case. The truth – the uncreated, undoctored truth is that the politics of capitalism, like the system itself, must be founded in deceit.

Ivan

Opportunity knocks (1996)

Claire Short and Peter Mandelson

TV Review from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the next General Election on us within a year or so the bourgeois political parties and the TV companies are already preparing themselves for what might be a nasty campaign. Nasty, that is, and bitterly contested, but totally meaningless. The news teams at the BBC and ITN know what is in store for an angry and bewildered working class and so do the current affairs programme-makers. The two primary features of the last campaign will almost certainly be present in the next one—muckraking peppered with vacuous political assertions with little or no basis in fact. While the last election was bad the next one will be closer still—and therefore worse still.

Peter Horrocks, editor of BBC2's Newsnight, has confessed to his exasperation and disgust at the main parties for their increasingly authoritarian and devious handling of the news media. The Tories have, of course been masters at this for years, but writing in the Parliamentary Review, Horrocks claims that the Labour Party has become even worse:

  "Labour's internal machine has an iron grip. As a broadcaster and believer in open political discussion, one deplores such authoritarianism. Faced with polls we can't rely on and politicians who are prepared to be controlled like puppets, what do we provide for our audiences?"

What indeed? As an example of Labour ‘'fixing" Horrocks cited the Harriet Harman school-opt-out affair when the Labour leadership strongly advised its MPs to stay away from the studios. Many who initially agreed to appear on Newsnight and other programmes to criticise Harman changed their minds after being warned off by the leadership and Labour spin doctors. If this is the case—as it almost certainly is—then the MPs in question are just as culpable as those who now direct their media appearances. The only reason they can have for their behaviour is that of hanging on to their jobs and of a desire to win an election by default.

On the ball

Luckily, the television news media—for once—do not seem prepared to take this lying down. After taking political beatings from both Labour and the Tories previously with numerous accusations of bias and collusion, there are signs of a fight-back. Horrocks in particular has warned that the media will turn its attention away from the spin doctors and their puppets towards "genuine free spirits” out of their grasp as the election draws near. Most interestingly of all for those who offer a genuine alternative to the bogus socialism of New Labour, Horrocks writes:

  "Expect to see alternative politics covered. Tony Blair will attempt to portray himself as candid and realistic, but it will, be carefully controlled, designed to give nothing away."

If Horrocks really means this and is not just making idle threats, this is encouraging, particularly so for groups like the Socialist Party. In fact, if Horrocks and others like him are looking for a genuine alternative to the sterile politics of the capitalist parties, they need look no further than in our direction. Who else offers a serious alternative to the market economy and can provide the democratic debate and argument on which news programmes thrive? The Socialist Party will be standing candidates at the next General Election and we are willing and able to provide representatives to comment on a wide range of issues, all of whom will take the opportunity to expose the trickery and shallowness of capitalist politicians. Lively, democratic debate is assured—what more can Peter Horrocks want than that?

In the meantime we have lots of other suggestions to make. In particular we can offer a line of questioning guaranteed to expose the Tory twits and Labour fakers which still dominate the news media and which is to be particularly recommended to those interviewers with a reputation for integrity and tenacity:

• Which problems that beset the market economy e.g. unemployment, crime, poverty, war are capable of solution within the system?
• Why are previously tried policies on all these fronts being put forward when they failed in the past?
• Which policies offered by any of the parties now haven’t been offered in some shape or form in the past, both here and abroad?
• If there are any, did they solve the problems they intended to solve?
• If so, give examples. If not, why not?

We should no doubt be prepared for a long period of silence when politicians are asked of their successes in solving the problems of capitalism for we all already know the answer—there haven’t been any, as the problems are still there. Once their egos have been pricked and their policies exposed, the real opportunity for sustained and informed TV debate on the issues will then be upon us. But paradoxically, silence, as far as the tepid professional politicians go at least, would still—as likely as not—be golden. And not just for socialists, for it is clear that the “service’’ they give to supporters of the market economy is an increasingly embarrassing one and is recognised as such.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Jeremy Spanks the Baby (2012)

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

Every so often the political firmament witnesses the emergence of a Rising Star, suitably welcomed by the party leaders as evidence of their resolve to bring fresh minds with new ideas to their tortured deliberations. For the Rising Star as well, it can be exciting, with hardened journalists pursuing them for their behind-the-doors revelations on the latest Cabinet scandal, the anguish of rivals left beneath them as they ascend the Greasy Pole and, as climax to all this, assumptions about record sales for an audaciously revealing volume of memoirs. And of course there would be the quivering excitement from the terror of television appearances fending off a notoriously ruthless interviewer while defending government policies in some current emergency.

Accountant
Conservative MP for North Norwich, Chloe Smith, came into the Commons in July 2009 as a Rising Star and, aged 27, the Baby of the House. She took the seat previously held by Labour’s Ian Gibson, who resigned over irregularities exposed in his expense claims. Fresh-faced as a member of the school hockey team, flashing a wide, ready smile, Smith may have been a relief to the Norwich voters after the tawdry scandal of the fiddling by those outworn parliamentary manipulators. She held the seat at the 2010 election and, after a spell as a Conservative whip, was abruptly elevated to Economic Secretary to the Treasury – in fact benefiting from another scandal, that of Tory Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, who had to resign over his relationship to his ‘adviser’ Adam Werrity. Among the resentful mutterings of disappointed rivals (“inexperienced but super loyal” was one grouse) there were suggestions that perhaps Smith’s promotion was intended to pacify women voters after the cuts in Child Benefit rather than through any merits of hers. In fact, at the time the Prime Minister, Cameron, was under the impression that she was a Chartered Accountant – which seemed to be a recommendation to him on the theory that anyone qualified in that way was sure to be able to control and direct capitalism into an ordered, beneficial society – something his government was clearly unable to do. In any case, when Smith owned up to him that she was not an accountant he dismissed this as irrelevant, and with the words, “never mind!” he welcomed her into his Cabinet.

U Turn
Safely on the Front Bench, Smith had a name – the Ice Maiden – which she earned for her coolness under the kind of pressures which ministers are expected to meet pretty well daily. This was pretty seductive stuff and it may have persuaded her to put herself forward for an assignment which many of her colleagues would have gone to some lengths to avoid. This came when the government announced that it would postpone a rise in fuel tax the day after insisting that it would impose it. The move was hailed as yet another policy U-turn, symptoms of a government that was disastrously muddled in its efforts to manage the economy. Smith volunteered to appear on Newsnight in the hope of representing the U-turn as good news for everyone, although she knew this would expose her to being grilled by the merciless Jeremy Paxman, whose victims include the likes of Michael Howard, William Hague and Tony Blair. Smith seemed quite unable to have memorised the kind of transparent evasions which are commonly used by politicians when they are in such straits. Not at all the super-cool informed minister, she fumbled her way through, allowing Paxman to ask at one point: “Is this some sort of joke?” and at another: “You ever think you are incompetent?” Which in one sense helped Smith as it diverted some of the Tories’ anger onto Smith’s boss George Osborne who was taking a relaxed dinner at Number Eleven while she faced Paxman at his most rampant.

McBride
Such are the perils of a minister’s job it is often necessary for them to be ‘briefed’ before explaining away some embarrassing facts. A master practitioner of this art was Damian McBride, one of Gordon Brown’s most aggressive spin doctors, who recalls a session to prepare the new Prime Minister by shouting abuse at him in a private room at the Treasury: “Blood on your hands…!”; “You’re a murderer…!”; and, in summary: “Sod off you Scottish git!”. This degrading but typical episode is illustrative only of the brutal cynicism of capitalism and the demands of its politics. In any case, would it have helped Smith if she had been subjected to the same preparation? We might all have our own ideas about the style of the abuse she deserved, except that that would be no less futile than McBride’s sessions with Brown. And then there is the fact that Smith has presented herself as one Baby who could be pretty tough. At university her interests were not politics but “drinking and dancing with the best of them”. She expels any tensions playing badminton, swearing or “turning the air blue” as one opponent put it. She tells us that as a minister “I focus very hard on the job in hand,” which in her case includes child poverty, the size of which is testified by many published facts and figures. The Department for Communities and Local Government recently stated that there are still more than two million children living in what is officially termed as poverty, with a 14% rise to over 50 thousand in households officially accepted as homeless – the highest since 1998. There is no sign that this situation is about to get any less desperate but Smith is not impressed: there is, she says trendily, “no Plan B, certainly not” because “we know Plan A is working.”

Paxman’s job gives him an opportunity at times to rile us with his exposure of the deceptions and diversions of capitalism’s political leaders. Smith’s job is to lie her way through the system’s implacable misery and waste, even if at the cost of her humiliation. Neither of them is interested in a proper response to this – a valid, ready method of so changing society as to leave the politicians and preening media stars to a disreputable past.

Ivan