The real losers

ITV couldn’t have done it any worse
The format of the campaign’s first and only great, ‘meet the public’ debate was perfectly sensible. Under the aegis of BBC1’s Question Time, each party leader consecutively got half an hour in front of the same studio audience. You do have to wonder quite what lack of drive exists within ITN that they weren’t braying for some similar event to be staged on commercial television. I suppose, given the tenor of the campaign, the shareholders of independent broadcasting in this country ought to be jolly glad they’ve avoided any more rating-killing exposure to this painfully boring contest. Still, that this meant things were left to state television had the usual, predictable results. To get the first out of the way: because television masquerades as politically neutral (when it is anything but) there was no way to exclude Charles Kennedy, even though there is no way he is going to be the next prime minister. He would have sued and won if any national station had tried to stitch up a deal with just Labour and the Tories. So there the ginger void was, affable and irrelevant as ever, but no more than an un-ordered course until the real business started with the appearance of Michael Howard. I’m no great admirer of Mr Howard’s skills as a politician, so I have to strain overly to be fair here, but, can anyone make a case for him on the basis of his performance? Was a vote won for the Conservative party? Were prejudices against the Tories dismissed from many minds? It’s not that the leader of the opposition put in an atrocious performance, though it wasn’t good. The disaster for the official opposition is that its leader put in a mildly inadequate one when what his party needed was a superhuman effort.

As a matter of high minded, policy-based criticism, the great glaring problem for Michael Howard was that he, frankly enough, admitted that his Tory government would mean an increase in the total tax take. Whatever case there is for changing the government of this country, it really isn’t, ‘for more of the same, but with less popular people involved’. His constant, grating assertions about what a straight fellow he was, how he told it as it was, as he proceeded to navigate his way through a position on the Iraq war that owed more to a council debate amongst 5th century fathers of the church than it did to honest injunry, well, it was just silly, wasn’t it? Maybe more people ought to regard Michael Howard as an honest politician, but they will have to be forgiven if they didn’t leap to that conclusion on the basis of seeing this slimy, legalistic performance.

Michael Howard’s least significant problem was his make-up. On his jutting, almost Mussolini-like forehead, there was an inverted pyramid of brown gunk smeared there, which had the effect of making him look like an early Star Trek Klingon. The thing, however, he appears thus far to have got away with, and it represents an amazing piece of luck, was his response to ‘Ahmed’s’ question. Ahmed merely asked the Conservative leader, “if you knew then what you know now about the Iraq war, would you still have supported it?” There was no inflection to the question beyond that, there was no statement of opinion by Ahmed as to what his attitude to the war was, whether he was a Kurd perhaps, or an Iraqi dissident or any one of any number of things that might also have accompanied the brown skin that went along with his name. What was Howard’s response? “Well”, he said, “you and I probably don’t agree about the war Ahmed . . .” — where on earth did that come from? The blatant, colour-based assumption about the questioner’s politics, simply on the basis, we have to assume, of his ethnic background. This hardly means that Michael Howard is a racist, but it does mean that he is an incompetent politician, lacking any too great feel for the society he seeks to help run.

How then can I put this as bluntly as I can for Conservative supporters, a great many of whom are still, despite everything, going to be bewildered by their party’s defeat next week? I know: Tony Blair wouldn’t have made this mistake. It’s not the only reason why he’s going to stay prime minister, but it is one of them. And to spell out the difference in a word, it’s — quality.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.