Both major parties have taken leave of their senses
IWAS given a thank-you card the other day. The slogan on the front was the ubiquitous Keep Calm And Carry On. Although its origins lie in the Second World War it came back into fashion again earlier this century on posters, mugs, cards, biscuit tins – you name it, it was there.
No wonder: in those five words Keep Calm And Carry On seems to sum up the very British characteristic of steadyas-she-goes calm and a refusal to be flustered, no matter what comes along. But when you look at the state of British politics today you have to ask: has there ever been a more inappropriate phrase?
Where once those British virtues of calm, moderation and basic common sense were the hallmarks of politics, today you look around and see only madness, bluster, extremism and manufactured outrage.
Our two main parties have taken leave of their collective senses. Take the Tories. Whatever their leaders’ various weaknesses, the Tories have always managed to find prime ministers who instinctively understood Middle England: that fabled political centre ground which exemplifies common sense and calm.
Baroness Thatcher was one of a kind but she was so electorally successful – winning landslides in 1979, 1983 and 1987 – precisely because she knew in her gut what she thought “her people” wanted and needed. David Cameron was moderation personified, even governing in coalition with the Lib Dems.
AND have there ever been two more obviously “British” PMs, in that Keep Calm And Carry On sense, than John Major and now Theresa May?
First John Major and then Mrs May have had to contend with constant infighting and MPs on their own benches ripping each other to shreds.
But both also behaved – at least in public – with a quiet dignity that must surely have struck a chord with most of us.
The videos of Mrs May dancing on her recent trip to Africa, for example, might have been mocked by the chattering classes but they were so very British – doing her best, however awkward, and not wanting to offend her hosts by not joining in. To me they showed not someone to laugh at but the very best of Mrs May.
And in one sense hers is actually a successful government. The economy, for example, is doing just fine. But in pretty much every other sense she is leading her party to electoral catastrophe because the Conservatives are behaving not so much like headless chickens as headless chickens determined to kick each other to death. While Mrs May is the embodiment of Keep Calm And Carry On the Tories are engaged in trench warfare – screaming at each other with venom and vitriol.
Remainers threaten to leave the party if Boris ever becomes leader. Brexiteers demand that Mrs May impale herself on a metaphorical sword. And the rest of us look on bewildered at how a party that used to be described as the greatest election-winning machine in the Western world has decided that it would rather destroy itself than get on with the day-today business of making Britain a better place to live in.
It’s deeply ironic that it’s now being reported that the EU is about to change the negotiating brief it has given to Michel Barnier: telling him he can start to compromise because the other EU governments are worried that Mrs May might be toppled if they don’t make concessions. But that’s far from the only irony. Because if the Tories have gone mad, Labour has gone completely round the bend.
The Tories are at least – just – within the bounds of mainstream electability. Labour, on the other hand, has turned itself into a Marxist revolutionary force that can be described as “institutionally racist” with no one even batting an eyelid because it is so obviously true.
LABOUR moderate Chuka Umunna this weekend labelled his own party as just that. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the label is that it is not remotely astonishing but a simple statement of fact. At a time when the Conservatives appear incapable of agreeing on even the time of day, a halfway competent, mainstream opposition would be ahead in the polls by 20 to 30 points.
Can you imagine what mincemeat a Tony Blair-like figure (such, perhaps, as Mr Umunna) would be making of the Tories?
But the party which turned centre-Left politics into a brand that won three landslide victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005 under Mr Blair is now controlled by a bunch of revolutionary socialists. Under Jeremy Corbyn the battle in Labour isn’t between the centre-Left and the hardLeft, it’s between Stalinists and Trotskyists.
Meanwhile the rest of us look on angry and frustrated that there is no party that looks worthy of power. In his intervention last week Tony Blair rightly pointed out that the centre ground cannot remain unoccupied. Nature abhors a vacuum, in politics as much as physics. Vince Cable, the LibDem leader, said last week he wants to turn his party into a “movement for moderates”, which is at least promising.
But the real worry is that the Tories’ mania for self-destruction will hand power to the extremist Labour Party, a party that in the three years since Mr Corbyn became leader has turned itself into the enemy of all those British virtues.
Labour is lost but there are many decent and honourable Labour MPs. They need to act.
So too do the sensible Tories who understand that their party’s greatest requirement is to get its act together and offer an alternative to Labour. Because if they don’t we are all in trouble.
‘Voters are now angry and frustrated’