I am not on the whole keen on giving the
Tories (a very fitting description; they do not deserve to use the honourable
appellation of “Conservatives”) what I consider my expert advice. It may lead to
the end of one of the few blood sports I really do enjoy. Another blood sport
I’m hypnotised by is the compelling and hilarious one where unions pay the
“Labour” Party to kick their heads in and then, in between delirious
declarations of gratitude and arrangements for another appointment, lick clean
the “Labour” jackboots at the end of a sadomasochistic bashing that even the
Marquis de Sade would have found repelling. But, then, these are desperate
times, to borrow Gore Vidal’s
description of American politics for
our own two indistinguishable major political parties, for the blue half of the
Business Party, are they not, especially now that the red half is supported by
such progressive organs as the Financial Times, the Economist and the Sun? And
in any case, hating only the blue half of the Business Party is an exercise in
futility: it’s a bit like having an aversion to only one of the Chuckle Brothers
(Tony and Gordon?). The only non-expert, generalised advice I freely give is
that you should be wary of octogenarian German-speaking residents of South
America whose memories of the thirties and forties are inexplicably hazy, never
play pool with anyone whose first name is that of a U.S. city, and the grieving
relative (usually the stepfather) at a press conference for missing whoeveritis
almost certainly is the cause for the missing whoeveritis.
Whomever the Tories choose to lead them -
David Davis, currently the clear leader, would be a terrible choice for
regaining power as he would be on Territorial SAS training exercises most
weekends, a time usually reserved for lingerie, citrus fruits and weird
foot-controlled contraptions with a plastic bag attached at the end - the first
thing they must do is to get rid of their speechwriters (David Davis is capable
of breaking their necks with a flick of his wrist, or boring them to death by
merely speaking). That in itself would ensure the Tories a rise in the polls.
While they’re at it, they should distance themselves from “think tanks”, or get
Mr Davis to blow the shit out of them with a real tank. Memorably ridiculed as
“more tank than think” by Frank “Make My Day” Dobson, think tanks have
nevertheless undergone a miraculous transformation: their ravings are now taken
seriously. Speechwriters, by contrast, have always been taken seriously. No
matter what gibberish they put before a politician, the politician invariably
articulates it with the gusto reserved to Old Testament prophets revealing the
word of the Lord.
All the Tory leaders since Margaret Thatcher’s
demise have been utterly useless when it comes to writing, or having someone
write, a decent speech. Whatever one may think of the demented Thatcher (the
“enemy within”, for example, was a rather catchy and efficacious, though
quasi-fascist, phrase), she knew how to pick a speechwriter. Mr Major, for some
bizarre reason, spoke at length about creating a “cone hotline”. I’m no
political apparatchik but I’m cognisant enough to realise that one sure sign of
a political party starting to implode is when their leader, and the sitting
prime minister, starts discussing traffic cones to an electorate looking for
revenge. Given that Major was utterly useless at everything - look at who he
chose to have an affair with, leaving Norma the saucy minx all on her lonesome,
dreaming of a major john to keep her company - he surely employed a speechwriter
to scribble some gibberish about geometrical objects used in road vehicle
control. Incidentally, I never thought that Blair quoting Star Trek’s Mr Spock
would go unnoticed: “the many and not the few” is mouthed by both big-eared
killing machines. A phrase as bad as this can only be the handiwork of Alastair
Campbell, an incredibly dense man everyone mistook for a knowledgeable politico
- and, lest we forget, a former male prostitute (“providing it” for those
“gagging for it”, he bragged).
William Hague fared no better than John Major.
Although Hague was generally considered to have been blessed with oratorical
skills and a sardonic repartee to rival Churchill, his alleged razor-sharp wit
deserted him when he led the Tories to guaranteed annihilation under the
freakish slogan of “The Common Sense Revolution”. Has the noble word
“revolution” ever been used so shockingly? How he failed to notice such a good
joke (almost certainly courtesy of Michael Howard) is hard to fathom. His
“Common Sense Revolution” consisted of hating immigrants and asylum seekers,
single mothers, the poor and the mysterious creatures known as the “metropolitan
liberal elite”. That this hilariously stupid election strategy was the
brainchild of the brainless Amanda Platell is no surprise. At the 2001 general
election the Tories were humiliated as badly as they had in 1997, and Hague
resigned immediately to spend more time wrestling with the hard, firm body of
Seb Coe on judo mats.
Iain Duncan Smith had, it is true, many
serious failings, and it is also undeniably true that fellow Tory MPs had been
sharpening their chainsaws ever since his election as party leader. All in all,
IDS never stood much chance. But what exactly possessed IDS to go out of his way
to hire a team of sadistic assassins (almost certainly double agents for Michael
Howard) to do a job on himself? They certainly did their job well, taking great
pleasure in killing him slowly and embarrassingly before finally bringing to an
end IDS’s pathetic and dismal tenure. Take, for example, IDS’s mind boggling
character assassination of himself: “Do not underestimate the determination of a
quiet man”. The following year the speechwriters went two better. As an
hors-d’oeuvre IDS was informed that the best way forward was to threaten the
maniacs already undermining him with a call to “unite or die”. The maniacs,
known as the parliamentary Conservative Party, preferred death. IDS-style unity
was for them a fate worse than a fate worse than death. The best was, as ever,
left to last. After many late nights revising, polishing and revamping what was
considered to be a make or break conference speech, the semiconscious simpletons
within the IDS speechwriting camp imparted to the not yet doomed IDS that his
leadership would be assured if he would only give out a mortifying scream that
he was “turning up the volume”. Scream he did. Doomed he was. The volume was
permanently turned down. Michael Howard was at long last elected Tory leader.
Weirdly, Michael Howard succumbed to his own
IDS strategy: hire speechwriters who will make you look completely mad. Seeing
an astonishing opening to slash “Labour’s” obscenely large majority to next to
nothing, especially given that it is based almost solely on tactical and protest
voting (a protest vote for “Labour”! Wonders will never cease), Howard
decided to fight the 2005 general election on the great issue of the day -
gypsies. All in all, Howard is a strange man. For instance, the only occasions
when Michael “Ibuleve” Howard, fighting out of the blue corner, ran rings around
Tony “Five Times A Night” Blair, fighting out of the red corner (an event
brought to you and sponsored by Big Business), was when his researchers scoured
the leftwing press for juicy nuggets of information. The Spokesman seemed to be
a favourite; every new edition saw the Tories regurgitating the journal’s
findings on Iraq. But come the election there was no sign of slapping “Labour”
silly with all these leftie revelations. Voters were scared senseless into the
arms of a man most of the electorate consider a liar and someone who ought to
resign immediately. It takes real talent to achieve this, but Howard’s class
loyalty and all that, old boy, won the day.
Fast forward to the next leadership contest.
Unfortunately, my favourite Tory, the ridiculous Oliver Letwin, will not be
contesting the crown. Almost universally considered by a simpleton press to have
a brain to rival that of Marx and Einstein put together, Letwin has never
recovered from Rory Bremner’s wonderful parody of him as an eighteenth century
dandy. Disastrously for “Labour”, David Cameron and Ken Clarke, Davis’s main
contenders for the Tory leadership, seem to be savvy enough to have thus far
distanced themselves from the maddest speech-mongers, although Clarke’s
description of ambulance drivers as “glorified taxi drivers” is an insult he was
able to make up without any help from anyone. That is not to say that the new
Tory leader will not say awfully stupid things (they are Tories, after all!),
just that the gaffes and insults will be less frequent. Whether the Tories plump
for Cameron or Clarke - and for those who have been living under a rock for the
past eight years, Clarke would annihilate “Labour”, and on present form so might
Cameron - the prospect of another thumping “Labour” victory looks increasingly
faint.
If, however, the Tories choose David Davis, a
man who has no talent, no charisma, no vision, no political nous, yet can lay
strange claim to being championed by many of his parliamentary party colleagues
(the 2005 crop of new Tories must see something their 2001 colleagues could not:
in 2001 Davis came last in a field including the winning IDS), his hopes will
hinge on whether Tory Party members will have another IDS moment and choose
someone who will again lead them into opposition rather than out of it, Gordon
Brown can look forward to perhaps two terms as PM.
Now, as strange as it may seem, there is a
good argument, tactical as well as principled, that demands anyone with a
progressive bone in their body to briefly join the Tory Party so as to vote for
Clarke, who, in any case, is ostensibly more progressive than Blair or Brown or,
for that matter, any of the leading candidates hoping to replace Blair. The
result of a Clarke win will be yet another “Labour” purging of progressive
“preversions” and “deviated preverts” - what remains is already lamentable - to
quote Colonel “Bat” Guano from Dr Strangelove, that not even the most forgiving
and supine leftie or progressive will delude themselves into thinking that there
are any concrete differences between the blue and red halves of the Business
Party, or, comically, that “Labour” can be reclaimed (perhaps the
union-kneecapping, fascist-supporting halcyon days of Attlee, Wilson and
Callaghan can be regained? In that sense at least, New “Labour” is not so New).
The Left may then have no option but to try to build a genuinely progressive
Party. The “Labour” right will scuttle back to their spiritual home of rightwing
liberalism.
After all, Tories have on occasion - the years
of “Butskellism” are a fine example - been far less antagonistic to the “Labour
Movement” than the “Labour” Party has. This truth has always been rather
unpalatable to many. As is the economic fact that, in general, Tory governments
have been far more beneficial to workers (a secondary and almost accidental
outcome of capitalist dynamics) than when their “red” chums held power. That the
Tories refuse to proclaim this from the rooftops is testimony to their
overriding class hatred. Indeed, the very fact that the Tory Party is not
permanently in power, given the opposition, is almost paradoxical. Tory
policies, give or take, are chronically ensconced until workers decide otherwise
and enforce change, which the red half of the Business Party then takes credit
for. If the Tories could just swallow their pride, and banged on about how they
have made economic life better than “Labour”, then “Labour” would sink without a
trace (indeed, the Tory-supporting Alf Garnett did not know the half of it when
he would regularly face down his “Labour”-supporting son in law). By the way,
the shortest joke in the English language is “Labour Party”, a Party dedicated
to crushing a “Labour Movement”, as represented by the TUC, which funds, caps
doffed and forelocks tugged, its own destruction (pity the fool who can’t see
this glaring fact and how funny it is); the second shortest but most sadistic is
“Labour Friends Of Iraq”, having knocked “Cross-making Friends Of Jesus” into
second place and “BNP Friends of Pakis”
into third place.
The one “achievement” - the standard is that
low - the awesomely bad TUC persistently points to is that of nationalisation.
The brilliant socialist thinker Anton Pannekoek summed it up thus:
“nationalisation is a capitalist necessity, to which the name socialisation is
given” and that, in the case of British nationalisation, “a ‘socialist’ Labour
government was needed to establish capitalist efficiency”, so that “the reform
was not made” for the workers but “as a consequence of private ownership
encumbered with an entirely antiquated lack of organisation”. (My favourite
absurdity in which the TUC takes great pride is John Prescott: Yes! proud trade
unionist and deputy PM. Don’t it make you proud? That anyone can feel
anything other than shame and disgust that this half-baked halfwit is lauded by
anyone in the “Labour Movement” is something that will forever boggle my mind.)
The myth about nationalisation lingers since
it benefits both sides. In the same way that the USSR was called socialist by
both sides - the USSR endeavoured to arouse leftwing sympathy in its heroic
“socialist” battle against capitalism, and capitalists could denounce socialism
as the USSR. Furthermore, the one so-called “Labour” achievement is that of the
NHS. The fact that an embryonic NHS was started under the Tories, only to be
pursued by Attlee et al, is something both sides are too embarrassed to retell.
All in all, to misquote Marx, the history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggles, not of the Labour and Tory Parties. Or, as the
future Lord Hailsham so drastically put it, “Give them social reform or they
will give you social revolution”. That is to say, Tory or “Labour” would have to
throw the workers a bone or two - welfare state, NHS, etc - or face the possible
consequences of a radicalised populace. All industrial struggles, state
spending, civil liberties, etc, are, more or less, the result of capitalist
dynamics and fears, not the kind intentions of political parties. Thus
explaining the generally similar policies Tory and
“Labour” have followed while in office
(long before the appearance of Maggie, Thatcherite policies were pursued by
Wilson and Callaghan; overthrowing democracies and supporting dictatorships are
common to both, having little to do with Thatcher per se).
By now the reader will surely have realised
that the author has never had much time for the “Vote socialist where you can,
Labour where you must” brigade of socialism. It is plainly so stupid that it is
not worth saying any more on the matter. While I’m at it, I couldn’t quite
figure out why the unions that wanted to “democratise” their political funds
ruled out funding certain political parties. Where is the “democracy” in
pre-empting who the membership can fund? Why not have a straightforward motion
saying that the members can fund whomever they jolly well like? And if the
“Labour” Party doesn’t like it, it can find the money elsewhere, perhaps in the
same way Alastair Campbell used to during his days as a male prostitute. Or
decide not to have a political fund at all? The toadying to the “Labour” Party
was extraordinary.
To their shame, “leftwing” trade unionists
dreamt up this sop to “Labour”, but then traditionally - and traditions do die
hard - trade unions have never had much time for democracy: it might give the
workers funny ideas about democracy, and then where would the right and the
authoritarian “left” be when faced with workers’ power? The workers might even
be won over to socialism infused with real worker participation (libertarian
socialism, council communism, anarcho-syndicalism), for instance, rather than a
bureaucratic elite, allied to the bosses, making decisions for what they
consider the stupid workers who are unable to comprehend much beyond the racing
results and the big tits on page 3 of the Sun (Littlejohn and Kavanagh?). I
mean, name a Tory who could do a greater disservice to fire-fighters than, say,
Jim Fitzpatrick MP? Or, indeed, the cowardly FBU leadership, who were more
determined to kneecap their own brave members than to embarrass the “Labour”
Party and a supine TUC (a mystery that the cheesy biscuit can be so supine
without breaking apart. Yoga? Tantric Union Congress?).
The Tories and “Labour” are under the
impression that they are actually different. Very much in the same way that the
Guardian’s Andrew Anthony, in his futile attempt to be taken seriously and
radiate the appearance of an intelligent commentator, believes that he is not
saying exactly what Christopher Hitchens has already said, using almost exactly
the same words. If this were a country where free speech were protected, I might
even say that Anthony is a plagiarist and someone who can’t think for himself,
and is so sad that he even uses a very similar Hitchens-style by-line photo; no
lavish Vanity Fair expense account for you, you pathetic tenth-rate
Hitchens-wannabe. However, since this is not America, the only country with some
semblance of protection of free speech, I will not say something so manifestly
silly. I really don’t know why the Guardian doesn’t pay Hitchens to reprint his
stuff rather than continue to pay Mr Anthony for miraculously - what else but a
miracle that this “plagiarism” happens so often? - repeating, almost verbatim,
someone else’s increasingly weird journalism.
Hopefully, we shall see Ken Clarke at the next
election as Tory leader. The result will be a lot of constituencies turning
blue. The policies of a Clarke or a Brown premiership, in any case, will be
almost identical and so nothing will have actually changed. Progressives,
however, will continue to delude themselves that there is a difference, and, a
la the Kennedy assassination, will bemoan the loss of a Brown premiership as one
of indescribable privation to world history. Why anyone would be fussed by a
change in government, not policy, beats the hell out of me. And the only advice
I’m willing to offer a fellow jazz-loving football fan who wears Hush Puppies is
shoot the speechwriters and blow the shit out of the think tanks. If you follow
these wise words, Mr Clarke, the keys to 10 Downing Street will be yours.
Indeed, they will be in Tory Party hands indefinitely. Don’t forget me, Ken,
when you start handing out the juicy quango directorships, or decide that a new
face is needed at Tory Party HQ to run the show. And as we all have our price,
I’d be willing to stop being a “deviated prevert” and to denounce my leftwing “preversions”.
PS. The following question presents itself:
how much did Hague and IDS pay their speechwriters? The man to see if they want
their money back - and they undoubtedly have a cast iron claim for a refund - is
Michael Howard. Meanwhile, Mr Howard should contact, er, Mr Howard, or find a
gypsy to blame. And if Mr Major can find a decent speechwriter, maybe between
them they’ll be able to come up with an amusing joke about hot lines, traffic
cones and Curry.
