I used to love Elections. But now I say a plague on all their houses!
From the columnist who refuses to be in anyone’s pocket, a view that’ll strike a chord with many. . .
THE grimmest horror story read * I have ever tells of a man in despair who hangs himself efficiently and lethally. After a brief, painless moment, he awakes to find he is still very much alive, in exactly the same place he was in before he tried to end it all. Well, almost exactly. It is a lot darker. Dawn never seems to arrive, and things are stirring in the shadows that he does not much like the look of. But what is quite clear is that he has not solved his problems at all.
So it is with our Parliament and our political class. Too weak, irresponsible and cowardly to put their names to the compromise with the EU that was always going to be the outcome, they have sought oblivion by placing all the responsibilities on someone else – in this case, you and me.
They hope that in yet another national poll – the fourth since 2015 – they can somehow escape the moral and political debts and obligations they had before the General Election was called. It is as if an Election was some sort of cleansing ritual, in which a flurry of votes washes away the wicked past and leaves MPs born again and free from all the stupid things they have done (or the things they have stupidly not done) in the past few years.
But it is not. The debts all remain. They will be collected. The compromise still has to be accepted, and the consequences undergone. They will all pay. Alas, so must we. I will personally play no part in this. I long ago ceased to care who won or lost. The major policies available from the major parties, on important subjects, are miles from anything I could possibly desire. There may be a few marginal things I like, but they are not enough.
I do not buy goods I do not want. So why would I vote for parties I despise? More tellingly, the only thing which gives these people power over me is the vote. With the monarchy more or less dead, the only foundation of political power in this country is the ballot box.
We vote for them, so that they can ignore us.
Think what we might achieve if we simply declined to grant this power to the current political elite. What if they held an Election and nobody came? Nothing would make me laugh more than if we woke up on the morning of December 13 and nobody had any votes at all. It might force the great reform of our politics we so badly need. But you won’t risk it, will you? In which case you will get exactly what you deserve, hot and strong.
I used to love General Elections. I can just recall the thrill of adult uncertainty on the brightly moonlit night of October 8, 1959, when I was first conscious of one of these events. My parents, as it happened, owed little or nothing to Harold Macmillan, the Tory who won that night. But in those days there was no reliable polling, and nobody knew who would win.
Five years later, on October 15, 1964, my prep-school headmaster added to my education by taking me with him (probably illegally) into a Devon polling booth. He teased me (at that time I was a little, treble-voiced Tory) by lett i n g his hand hover over t he Labour candidate’s name for a second, before casting his ballot for an ancient stalwart of oldfashioned Conservatism called Sir Henry Studholme.
But at dawn the following day, we were all (rightly as it turned out), appalled by the news on the BBC Home Service that Labour’s Harold Wilson was likely to win office by a tiny margin. We felt stricken, and unsure what the future would bring – little knowing the scale and nature of what would, in fact, follow.
Yet, just over a year later, in March 1966, I had become an ungrateful, difficult teenager and so had switched sides, offering my services to the Labour Party’s committee rooms in East Road, Cambridge, where I was then at school, and a few days later to their counterparts in Oxford, where I lived. I can, even now, see and feel in my mind’s eye that thrilling windy, grey evening of March 31, and the astonishing dawn, in which the Tories were in full flight, losing seats they had held for generations.
By June 1970 I had actually acquired a vote, thanks to that same pestilent Harold Wilson, who had adopted the Monster Raving Loony Party’s policy and introduced votes at 18. So I was outraged to find myself on the losing side when Labour suffered an almost wholly unexpected defeat.
How shocked I was, standing outside Oxford Town Hall in the warm darkness towards midnight (polls closed earlier in those days) as the returning officer announced that the Tory Monty Woodhouse had clawed the seat back from Labour. (I did not then know that Woodhouse was a retired MI6 agent who had once overthrown the government of Iran).
Next came 1974, that year of endless thrills for anyone who was politically interested and did not have any responsibilities.
Then we had two Elections in eight months, and after the first of them I found time to go to London and heckle the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe as he emerged from 10 Downing Street after failing to make a deal with the defeated Tory Prime Minister, Ted Heath.
I didn’t know the meeting had gone badly but resented Heath’s attempt to stay in office through a deal with Thorpe, when he’d really lost. In those lost days, anyone could walk into Downing Street, a matter of pride in our free capital, and heckle, too. How I still miss that.
In 1979, as one of the two most Right- wing members of Hampstead Labour Party (Mrs Hitchens was the other) I tried and utterly failed to prevent the selection of one Ken Livingstone as our candidate. I loyally worked for him, secure in the certainty that he would lose, as he did. I quit the Left for good, not long afterwards. If Ken Livingstone was its future, I did not want to be part of it.
After that, Elections were often work rather than play. In 1983 I followed the mobile catastrophe that was Michael Foot’s campaign and have ever afterwards felt sorry for the personal humiliation (much of it achieved by his own side) of a decent, kindly, freedomloving, educated and patriotic man, a survivor of the 1930s who had no real place in slick modern politics.
I can still hear him trying to communicate his thoughtful, ancient principles to half-empty halls. He might as well have been addressing the ocean.
In 1992 I found myself called back from Moscow, where I was then working, in the correct belief that my mere presence would irritate Neil Kinnock in some explosive fashion. Mr Kinnock and I never got on, and somehow our mutual chemistry led to an event called ‘ G r o mmet g a t e ’ . T h i s engulfed Mr Kinnock and me in a crazy row about a broadcast in which the true case of a small girl with glue ear had been distorted.
The whole Labour campaign, until then as smooth as hair oil, shuddered and halted. At one point Mr Kinnock’s angry aides fell on me when I tried to approach him with a question, and they were so zealous that the Leader of the Opposition actually had to physically rescue me from them, putting his arm pro
I don’t buy goods I do not want. So why would I vote for parties that I despise?
tectively round my shoulder – which must have cost him a lot.
What was it all about? I am less and less sure. But it all went so mad that I actually found myself giving a press conference instead of asking questions at one. Some Labour people accused me at t he t i me of winning the Election for John Major. Later, some Tories (when they realised what a disaster he was) accused me of the same thing. It’s flattering, but I doubt it. Mr Kinnock was quite capable of losing any Election alone and unaided.
So don’t tell me that I am uninterested i n politics, or unengaged. And I think I can say that, until 1992, I enjoyed every Election that touched me.
It was like Derby Day, only for people unhealthily preoccupied with Westminster.
There was a time in the 1960s when I could match every MP to his or her constituency, and identify obscure Cabinet members without difficulty.
But when I grasped – too late – who and what John Major was, I felt that I had been diddled in 1992, and wrong to be gleeful at his unexpected triumph (as I was). Nineteen- ninety- seven was a grimly foregone conclusion and 2001 even worse. Since then, these events have become increasingly unbearable.
What did I care, in a choice between David Cameron and Gordon Brown? Or David Cameron and Ed Miliband? What did I care at all about Theresa May? For all this closeness to politics had opened my eyes to the awful truth.
As a child and a teenager and a young man, I had still been beguiled by the idea that a General Election was a majestic process in which great ideas were tested and significant men and women competed chivalrously for office in a great tournament of ideas.
I also loved (and still love) the way that our wrongly derided first-past-the-post system can deliver a peaceful revolution, and leave the defeated Prime
Minister in the street with his soft furnishings, out in the cold and stripped of all authority, when an hour before he was a demigod of power.
But I had found out some terrible things. The parties had no interest in any of the ideas I favour, and a lot of interest in aims I loathe.
There was no way of changing this. They had chosen a mistaken dogma and they were not going to shift.
We now lived in a curious world where David Cameron, rich, Etonian, superficially reassuring, pursued policies more radical than those of Jeremy Corbyn. Politics is also a closed circle, where candidates are, in reality, picked by small cliques. Then, at General Elections, this choice is confirmed by an electorate that still votes according to tribe, not ideas.
Very few of the constituencies are really contested. And those that are, are more or less rigged.
As far as I can see, the law now winks at huge invasions of these battlefields by outside canvassers, and at all kinds of ultra-sophisticated and vastly expensive targeting of individual voters. Technically, there are tight spending limits to keep things fair. Actually, these are almost never enforced.
What I had been watching was an increasingly futile pantomime, the image of an Election but not the reality. They had slogans for the simple which were often the opposite of their true policies. And all those policies were disastrous.
The more they talk of education, the worse the schools get. The louder they talk of law and order, the more locks I put on my house and the more care I take on the way home. The louder they talk of the health service, the more private medical insurance I use. The louder they talk of their economic policies, the more I fear for my savings. The more they claim to favour peace, the more I fear war.
You are welcome to it, if you want it. I see nothing left to gain.
I see a country that, during all these Elections, has lost almost everything precious it had.
Its tolerant freedom under law, frayed and tattered. Its manufacturing industry gone, so that we use almost nothing made by our fellow countrymen.
Its excellent, disciplined schools are destroyed. Modest competent local government has been replaced by grandiose, posturing authorities that cannot even collect garbage.
Its unarmed, friendly police force has been replaced by a glowering, absent militia. Stable family life is replaced by a fatherless chaos, which in turn demands a limitless welfare state to pick up the pieces.
We could face it, if we had wholly different leaders. But how can we find them through this process?
This Election is not designed to find leaders, just to provide an escape hatch for those who have failed to lead. But there is, in fact, no real escape.
The story features in the novel Descent Into Hell, by Charles Williams.
The louder they talk of law and order, the more locks I put on my house