When Tebbit says vote Labour, you know something’s gone very wrong
IN THE midst of the most fraudulent General Election I have ever experienced, a clear and honest voice speaks, and is drowned by a tornado of lies. After 40 years in the trade of journalism, I think I know what news is. And when Norman Tebbit, the fiercest and roughest anti-socialist streetfighter of the Thatcher years, suggests that Tories in Scotland vote Labour, that is news.
This is what he said: ‘From the Tories’ point of view we are not going to come home with a vast number of seats from Scotland. We know that. So the choice is, would we rather have a Scot Nat or Labour? I think, on balance, probably a Labour MP would be a more reasonable thing to have.’
Asked if he was advising Tory supporters to vote Labour where it is contesting seats with the SNP, he said: ‘I hesitate to say that. But it is logical from where I stand.’
Of course it is. Anyone who seriously wants to keep Scotland in the UK must seek to stop the rise of the SNP, not to fuel and encourage it.
Lord Tebbit is not the only Tory who has been appalled by the deliberate boosting of the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon by such figures as Chief Whip Michael Gove and Chancellor George Osborne.
Both these men have acted like student politicians, helping one enemy to do down another. This may work in the tail-coated silly-clever struggles of the Oxford Union. But it is quite wrong when a real country is at stake.
Lord Tebbit’s outburst was astonishing from a man who would have been a Tory Prime Minister, had an IRA death squad not confined his wife to a wheelchair and injured him far more badly than he has ever revealed.
So why haven’t we heard more about it? And why hasn’t the Tory Party expelled, or at least suspended him for this blatant defiance of his leader?
I mainly blame the squeaking multitudes of political journalists who, in my view, have settled on a line about what this Election is about and are reading from a script given to them by the Government spin doctors on whom they depend so much.
And Lord Tebbit’s amazing intervention doesn’t fit the script. In fact, it utterly destroys the official version, that this is a contest between a fiscally responsible, unionist Tory Party and a mad Trotskyist Labour Party in hock to the SNP and some trade union maniacs.
In fact, it’s the most amazing development in politics since another former Tory giant, Enoch Powell, urged his supporters to vote Labour in February 1974 and snarled ‘Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!’, in response to cries of ‘Judas!’
Yet it’s barely been mentioned, because it’s easier for commentators to ignore it than to explain it, and admit that their whole version of events is wrong. But it is.