Why big beast Denis could be a real menace

ARE our current politicians duller and more pedestrian than any that has gone before? To most of us, May, Corbyn and Farron seem very humdrum, pathetic shadows of the great beasts of yesteryear.

But it was ever thus. A century ago, the clever young Max Beerbohm despaired of his contemporary politicians.

‘Look at them, hark at them, poor dears!’ he wrote, after visiting the House of Commons.

‘See them clutching at their coats and shuffling from foot to foot in travail, while their ideas — ridiculous mice, for the most part — get jerked painfully out somehow and anyhow.’

This was 1909. Winston Churchill and Lloyd George were among those on the front benches. Future generations would look back on them as the giants against whom their own MPs would pale in comparison.

‘As a public speaker he is, compared to Winston, like a village fiddler after Paganini,’ the diarist Harold Nicolson said of Clement Attlee. He’s now regarded as the greatest of the postwar PMs.

No one ever thinks their own lot of politicians are up to scratch. Nowadays, it is impossible for us to imagine our grandchildren reminiscing about the passion and oratory of Philip Hammond, Liam Fox, and Diane Abbott. But will they prove us wrong?

It’s 30 years since the 1987 General Election. Margaret Thatcher was being challenged by Neil Kinnock and facing a threat from a coalition of the SDP/Liberal alliance led by the two Davids — Owen and Steel.

As a political sketchwriter, I spent each day of that election with a different politician.

One day, I would be with Mrs Thatcher at Alton Towers watching six hydraulic diggers performing a dance routine to a reggae version of the 1812 Overture.

The next day, I would be following Willie Whitelaw around a sweet factory in Batley. He was due to visit Liverpool the next day. ‘Dead loss for us, I’m afraid — but there we are,’ he said.

In Northern Ireland, I sprinted around a supermarket with Enoch Powell while he sounded off against Mrs Thatcher and ‘the evil of the Anglo-Irish agreement’.

‘I accused her of treachery,’ he told the bemused young man at the till. ‘And it is a word she has not forgotten.’

The next day, I dropped in on Ian Paisley, before flying to Glasgow, where Roy Jenkins was soliciting votes outside the Presto supermarket in Hillhead.

Thirty years on, these figures — Thatcher, Whitelaw, Powell, Paisley, Jenkins — are remembered as much bigger beasts than the ridiculous mice, to borrow Beerbohm’s phrase, we have today.

In Chesterfield, Tony Benn was fighting his 15th parliamentary election. Throughout that day, members of the public tackled him on local issues, such as the siting of a zebra crossing or a loose tile on the roof of a council house. But Mr Benn didn’t seem to notice this.

He ended the day by saying how encouraged he had been by the number of people who had praised Mr Gorbachev’s peace proposals.

Yet I had been with him all day and not a single person had mentioned either Gorbachev or his peace proposals. Benn’s idealism bordered on fantasy. Yet nowadays, we think of Benn, and his rival Denis Healey, as big beasts.

Healey (left) certainly proved it when I walked around with him on the stump in Cardiff. A voter came up and objected to Labour’s defence policy. ‘I was in the Forces,’ he added, politely. To everyone’s astonishment, Healey flew into a rage, rounding on the poor man, saying he was a liar.

‘You were never in the Armed Forces!’ The man said he had served in Aden, but Healey wouldn’t hear of it, and shouted ‘Drop dead!’ — a most unusual way to treat an ordinary voter. At this point, nostalgia begins to make way for something less starry-eyed.

We may hanker after big beasts, but quite how big, and how beastly, do we really want them to be?

In Rochdale market, I followed one of Britain’s best loved politicians as he went shopping for his enormous dinner with his mother and brother. The 28-stone Cyril Smith had a cheery word for everyone.

Back then, Cyril Smith was seen as a fat and jolly, no-nonsense sort of chap, the political equivalent of The Laughing Policeman, always described as ‘larger than life’. He is now remembered only as a sadist and paedophile.

Later the same week, I caught up with Clement Freud and Jeffrey Archer. By 2001, Archer was in prison for perjury. After Freud’s death a few years ago, it emerged that he had been sexually abusing girls over the course of a number of decades.

If the days of the big beasts are, indeed, now past, then perhaps we should be more grateful to the ‘ridiculous mice’ who have stepped into their shoes.