“And in the Blue-eyed corner . . .”

Blair sweats it out
When Charles Kennedy waddled on to the stage, as the first of the party leaders to appear on BBC1’s Question Time, he received raucous cheers. Whether it was a side effect of listening to 27 or so minutes of this campaign’s ‘themes’ being discussed, by the time Michael Howard slithered out next, we were in baby bear territory. His reaction from the audience was in one sense, just right. No great whoops of delight, but then again, surely it was more a serious, sober contemplation of a grown-up contender? The real contrast was with the prime minister, who emerged to a substantial volley of catcalls and sustained booing. We each take to this sort of thing in our own way, but if you’re the right age, it brings back indescribably pleasurable memories of Mrs Thatcher. And whether you were shouting abuse at her in the streets, or savouring the spittle-flecked impotence of those who did, you felt the passion, you knew the commitment, you enjoyed it. Of course with Mrs Thatcher, no audience would ever have dared to behave in the mannerless way the BBC’s notion of the voting viewership did towards Tony Blair. But that’s neither here nor there. Tony Blair is in so many ways a nicer man than Mrs Thatcher, and therefore can’t possibly hope for the fear and respect she encouraged. Yet the boos tell their own story. It was the prime minister whom the public, even the hideously skewed version thereof produced by the Beeb, rightly and instinctively knew to be the sole source of interest in the studio. He in turn regarded them in a way far too kind for their own good, for Tony Blair’s benevolent and concerned reaction to their lumpen complaints and whinges owed more to the way an unusually humane Czar would have treated with his serfs. We really don’t deserve him.

Another thing, mind you, we didn’t deserve, was to hear quite so much twittering on about Iraq. It’s not so much the boredom of the BBC’s utterly intentional editorial decision (remember, the producer and presenter controlled exactly the questions that could be asked: the BBC, not the random impulses of the audience, determined the agenda of the programme) to drone about it that irks. What depresses is that, though totally divorced from either issues that matter, or are amenable to a general election, it’s that yet again no sudden new insight was delivered, to make all this repetitive suffering in any way worthwhile. I suppose it’s all part of the great mistake progressive opinion has made about the prime minister’s Middle Eastern adventure. Because, habitually, left wing journalists in the higher press are cut from the same cloth as Tony Blair (self-dramatising moralists one and all), they have wanted their heedless pursuit of him over Iraq to serve an exemplary purpose for the dead-eyed mass. Just as Tony Blair quite enjoyed acting out the role of war leader and bringer of civilisation’s fruit to those without the law, so too have his hunters engaged in precisely the same category delusion. They have assumed that the public would be interested in their sanctimony against the war, when in truth the great British public cared not desperately much for the prime minister’s sanctimony in favour of the war. Iraq, for the vast bulk of the electorate has been BBC2 or Channel 4 kabuki, and there honestly always has been something better on Sky Mix to watch instead. And believe me, although the preceding sentence barely rises to the level of metaphor, anyone who thinks most British people care whether we are, or are not engaged in the business of killing foreigners is happily detached from their own country.

As much as anyone else, however, I marvel at the fact that Labour are going to win the majority they’re going to. Obviously Tony Blair, to resurrect a cliché I always thought useful, has engaged in any number of “u-turns” (students fees, assorted taxes, etc, etc). Once upon a time, a school of liberal opinion used to denounce as ‘inflexible’ those who proclaimed themselves incapable of U-turning. While they certainly weren’t right to make that criticism of Her in the 80s, maybe they are right today? Maybe in contented, prosperous twenty first century Britain, it truly is the prime minister’s effortless flexibility that accounts for his vast ongoing political success? Not, from the sweat on the poor man, that you’ve have mostly been saying, ‘hmmmn, equitable’, about Tony Blair’s state of mind. Myself, I put it down to the strain his good manners imposed upon him, as he rose above the petty, ugly, unhappy emotions brewed up by the BBC. The sheer cheapness of David Dimbleby trying to ambush the prime minister at the end — for daring to decline the BBC’s preferred option of a concurrent, three-way debate between the main party leaders — just shows the unabashed arrogance of a man who has been chuntering on at prime ministers since Heath’s day. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing that makes some of us very happy that at least we’re odds on to have another strong majority government, for seeing what the press were able to do to John Major should please no one.

One image though should provide the key, to the true tone of debate in Britain. And it’s this: such is the absence of strife that we enjoy, who was actually surprised that, as the closing credits rolled, various of the punters jumped up from their seats and swarmed round the prime minister? There are some countries close to us on the other side of the channel, there are, in fact, some friendly English speaking democracies, where the head of government would neither have been well-advised to let that sort of thing happen, nor indeed would he have let it happen. People don’t fear our present prime minister; they don’t dislike him beyond the unwholesome way they’re legitimised, by BBC-sanctioned discourse, to drone on about anyone and everyone ‘political’. Tony Blair is the leader of a peaceful, unheroic age. Near certainly he regrets that. We shouldn’t, and will, I suspect, prove again next Thursday that we don’t.

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.