One good speech is not enough; or, in which I risk derision by growing overly earnest

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Out of nowhere, Gordon Brown, battered, bewildered and beleaguered, summoned a magisterial speech. It was heartfelt, and stirring; a far, far better thing than he has done before. It set the blogosphere and the newspapers and the Twitterati alight.

I wish I could have believed one word of it.

I am not a bitter Labour voter. I am not all vicious and twisted up inside, like some of those far right Conservatives who are currently going postal over David Cameron dragging his party into the centre ground. I am not just throwing rotten tomatoes at Gordon in a frenzy of spurned ambition and dashed hopes. I am, however, sad and disappointed in the party for which I have always voted.

I am also alarmed. I believe in government. If the party that believes in the benign power of the state loses the argument by comprehensively screwing up, then we are at the mercy of the raw free market, red in all its snapping teeth and claws. I want Labour to lose this election because I think it needs a period in the wilderness to rethink, regroup, and come back stronger, with new ideas, and new people. This sounds awfully finger-wagging and piously judgemental, but I think it needs to be chastened.

Let us not forget the things that have improved in the last thirteen years. The NHS is better than it was, although that improvement has been hindered by too much bureaucracy and too many centralised targets. Inner city wastelands have been transformed. Peace did come to Northern Ireland, which I never believed I would see in my lifetime. Civil partnerships were a huge step forward for equity, although I still don't really understand why we couldn't just have gay marriage and be done with it. Despite the scare headlines in some of the more hysterical newspapers, crime has come down steeply and steadily over the last ten years. With all the lurid stories of guns and knives, you would hardly know that the murder rate is at a twenty-year low. (When I was looking up these figures I stumbled upon one of the facts of life that most baffles me in all the world: the British murder rate is 651 a year; in America, it is over 17,000, with a population only five times the size. I shall never understand this until the day I die. It's not just guns; the Canadians and the Swiss have quite as many firearms. I cannot identify anything in the American character that makes it so much more homicidal than its British equivalent. But that is an enduring mystery for another day.)

Then there are the things that did not go so well. The Iraq war has so far cost northwards of £7 billion. Put that together with the £12 billion wasted on the notorious NHS IT system that does not work, and you are talking about some real money that could have been used to pay down the deficit, or, oh, I don't know, build a school or set up some apprentice schemes, or something useful. There are 3,500 new criminal offences on the books, including a law that enables the police to declare demonstration illegal. (I have not checked this number, but it comes from George Monbiot, a man of the left, and I am going to believe that his figures are accurate.)

Inequality, under the party of social justice, is higher than it was under the last Conservative government, which is hysterically ironic when you still hear people saying that the Tories just live to look after their rich friends. The asylum system, which is something of which I would like to be proud, is byzantine and sometimes cruel. I know someone who has had personal experience of it, and his stories make Kafka look like Andy Pandy. Between 20% and 25% of our children cannot read. Last year, Professor Robin Alexander of the Cambridge Primary review went further, and called the entire education system 'fundamentally deficient'.

So when Mr Brown comes out and talks passionately of his commitment to the poor, as he did yesterday, I feel a little baffled. Soaring deficits and a national debt of over £900 billion did not just happen by accident. They have to be paid for somehow. Jobs will go, public services will suffer, direct and indirect taxes will be raised. The poorest will always suffer most in that situation. The problems in the education system also hit the most vulnerable disproportionately. More affluent parents may have the time or money to plug the gaps. A single mother on the minimum wage may not.

The most glaring disconnect came last night in the form of a mother and daughter. Before Gordon Brown's speech, a young girl spoke movingly of her mother's struggles on a very low income, breaking down into tears at the memory of spending a week living on nothing but lentils because they could not afford proper food. The Prime Minister put his arm round her in sympathy. Yet where did this poor mother work? She was a cleaner at The Treasury. Today, on The Daily Politics, Andrew Neil rightly asked Douglas Alexander how this could be, after thirteen years of a Labour government committed to ameliorating poverty. Mr Alexander, in an extraordinary statement, shifted responsibility by saying that the cleaning at The Treasury was done by contractors, as if that somehow made it nothing to do with him.

That is why, however passionately Gordon Brown spoke of justice and dignity and fairness, I could only look on and think: a day late and a dollar short. He spoke as if that mother and daughter's plight were nothing to do with him, because he was on the side of the angels. I think he really does believe that, in his own mind. But standing in front of him were two people who were living proof that words are  not enough.

In which character matters

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It has become fashionable to trot out the trope: personality does not matter, let's get to the substance. Everyone nods and clears their throat and goes rhubarb rhubarb as if this is just so damn true that no more words are necessary.

So what if Gordon throws telephones at secretaries, and Dave is a bit posh, and that other fellow said something about shagging thirty women? It's the deficit that counts.

Oddly, this morning, I find myself saying What. I suddenly think it matters like hell. We are in an awful lot of trouble in this country, and even though I hate jingoism, and know it is categorically a Good Thing that Britannia no longer rules the waves, I would like dear old Blighty to be able to hold her head up in public. Call me old-fashioned, but I would like the young people to have jobs. I would be awfully happy if only the children could read. I would die of joy if someone would come along and save the public libraries.

I think the reason that the pundits tend to dismiss the personality issue is because of sex. Yes, my darlings, you read that right. Look, look, everybody says, at JFK with his thousands of women, and Gladstone bringing the ladies of the street home for tea with his wife, and Lloyd George with his mistress. (You don't have to look at Bill and Monica, because that is just too nasty for a blameless Thursday.) They were all great leaders, despite their blatant flaws. The rider goes: if we had had the internet and the tabloids then they would not have been elected dog-catcher.

Well, yes, except I think there is a sand in the eyes thing going on here. I do judge infidelity to be a defect, but it is not the only mark of a person. It is not the most important defining feature. George W Bush appears to have been marvellously faithful to poor Laura, but I do not think he was a fine man. He was spoilt, intellectually lazy, excessively parti pris, and pig-headed. Kennedy, while not the gilded saint of Camelot myth, was, when he was not catting around, brave, stoic, loyal and oddly grown up. I say oddly, because the having of all the women is such a childish give it to me now trait. But when the chips were down, he took responsibility for his actions, which is the kite mark of an adult. He shouldered the blame for the Bay of Pigs, when he could have thrown any number of subordinates to the wolves. He stared down the rabid generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and quite possibly did literally save the world, which is not something you see every day.  One of the reasons I keep faith with President Obama is that I think he has character. He, too, has a lovely tendency to take responsibility for mistakes; 'I screwed up,' was one of the earliest and most memorable things he said in his presidency; no ifs or buts or it was really the other fellow. He is patient, thoughtful, resilient and still keeps his sense of humour when everyone about him is losing theirs.

Gordon Brown did two things yesterday which make me wonder very much about his character. He stood up in the House of Commons, denied that the troops in Afghanistan were ever short of kit or helicopters, and then, in the very same breath, blamed the generals. Not only did he refute something that twenty different sources say is true, but he  said it was nothing to do with him, guv. Then he went on Channel Four News and refused to answer any of nice Gary Gibbon's perfectly reasonable questions. Instead, he did that strange chewing thing with his mouth, as if he had just swallowed a handful of bees, and, even worse, kept remembering to break out a phoney smile. You could almost see him remembering the pollsters' advice: grin, Gordon, the voters like a happy warrior.

Oh, and just to cap it all off, he walked straight past a voter who was trying to ask him about schools, despite the fact that he has been banging on about how he is going to be transparent and accessible and get out and meet the public, because he is an 'ordinary middle class' person, just like the rest of us. As he strode away, he might as well have said: I am on the side of the people, until they start asking awkward questions.

People say that Brown can be very funny and nice in life. Years ago, I met someone who worked for him. 'Oh, I love Gordon,' the operative said, with as much swoon as if he were talking about Ava Gardner. I am perfectly certain that he would never cheat on his charming wife. But I think that he has a fatal crack in his character, because, in his world, nothing is ever his fault. The selling of the gold at rock bottom prices was not his fault; someone told him to do it. The trashing of the pensions was not his fault, for the same reason. The piling up of record debt was not his fault; it was the global meltdown. The refusal to pay for helicopters was not his fault; the generals made the decisions.

I believe in government. I believe in the power of politics to do good things. But I do not believe in Gordon Brown. Policies matter, but the people who implement them matter too. Is it too much to ask for someone to have the character to stand up and say the buck stops with me?

 

(Photograph by Getty Images.)

Mrs Brown speaks

Posted by Sarah Vine.

Sarah Brown’s short speech ahead of her husband’s at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton will inevitably draw controversy. For every viewer who thought it touching that Mrs Brown should introduce her husband as “my hero” there will be many who will be reminded of that old adage, “don’t put your wife on the stage, Mr Brown”.

In the event, she was good; but was she right? After all, it is one thing to have your wife join you at the podium, all smiles and kisses and beautifully blow-dried hair, at the end of a barnstorming set; it is quite another to unashamedly deploy her as a warm-up act. But it worked last year; not to do it again would have seemed like a vote of marital no confidence. Sarah Brown faced an impossible choice. Stand by her man; or stand down.

Her performance, polished and professional, owed more than a little to Michelle Obama, whose ability to support her husband without stealing the limelight played a significant part in his successful election campaign. Even sartorially Mrs B mirrored Mrs O. Her dress for yesterday’s speech was by Britain’s very own Jason Wu (the recherché, strategically correct young American designer championed by Michelle Obama): Brighton-based designer Erdem Moralioglu.

Erdem (he must be addressed by his first name, in the correct fashionista way) represents a marked departure from the cosy confines of Jaeger. His was one of the more exciting of the recent London shows, and Mrs Brown wore Erdem to her fashion week party at No 10. Paired with the Jimmy Choo shoes (guess what: Mrs Obama has the same in various heel heights) and the Astley Clarke jewellery, it all made for a high-end package, a look that demands the wearer be taken seriously.

Even the speech itself was true to the Obama model. A recent book about the Presidential marriage has referred to Mrs Obama chastising the soon-to-be leader of the free world for leaving his socks lying around; Mrs Brown talked about her husband being messy, noisy and getting up at an unearthly hour. The two men may have failed to get it together over at the G20; but at least they have one thing in common: they are both slobs.

There is, however, one crucial difference. Obama was a man on the way up, a rising star whose reputation has yet to be dimmed by the harsh realities of politics. Currently, Brown resembles more a black hole, sucking in all light and energy before collapsing in on himself. He is entropy in human form; it is going to take more than a little affectionate marital gloss, a gentle “if I can love him, then so can you” to pull him out of it. Likeable, intelligent and capable as Mrs Brown is, it’s not enough. She may be one of Brown’s best assets; but she does not have a mandate from the British people to be Prime Minister. Then again, neither does Brown...

In which I go all counter-intuitive. Health warning: this is very long, so you might like to get yourself a nice cup of tea first.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have a soulful black and white photograph of Martin Luther King on my wall. Why would I not? He spoke one of the greatest lines of the 20th century, that he dreamt that one day his children would not be judged on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. In an age where black people still had to ride at the back of the bus, it was an astonishingly bold statement. In any age, it was a one true thing. He was the youngest man ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His legacy still resonates today.

Martin Luther King was famously unfaithful to his wife. We know this from memoirs by his close associates and observation from a paranoid FBI, which was determined to paint him as an evil communist. There are rumours also of prostitutes and threesomes, which may or may not be true. An ugly subset of the racist internet likes to play up these rumours, to make their claim that the reverend was a phoney and a fraud, who liked paying for sex with white women, as if that would negate every single thing he did for the civil rights movement. The great congressman John Lewis, who walked over the Alabama bridge and got beaten half to death for his pains, knew King, and once said of him: ‘he was not a saint, he was just another human being’, so making the tacit acceptant that he might have not been flawless in his private life.

If even half of this is true, does it make any difference to the King legacy? He has a national holiday named after him in America; he made an incalculable difference to race relations in a land that was scarred with the memory of slaves picking cotton in the fields. If there had been no Martin Luther King, there would be no Barack Obama. Would I rather not know that he had catted around? Yes. Did my heart sink a little in disappointment? Certainly. I am not so cavalier as Christopher Hitchens, who once wrote that Dr King spent his last night in dissipation and why not? In the same way, I would like to think that the venerable Gladstone did not have some strange obsession with prostitutes. This great classical scholar had a habit of bringing fallen ladies home to tea with his wife, and then going into a room and flagellating himself for being aroused by them. (We know this from little Greek characters that he wrote in his diaries.) This is slightly pathological behaviour, by any lights. Yet Gladstone fought like a tiger, even when he was old and frail, for Irish Home Rule. He did not win that battle, but just imagine if he had. There would have been no IRA. There would have been no Omagh bombing, no knee-capping, no hunger strikes, Lord Mountbatten would not have been blown to smithereens while his grandchildren watched.

All of which is a very long way of saying: flawed people can do great things, and those great things are not diminished by the frailties of the human being who achieved them.

So I find it hard to understand the frenzy of self-righteous moralising that is going on among the media classes. I love the media classes, adore the BBC, and think there is nothing in the rumour that they are all chatterati hacks who know nothing of life beyond the Groucho. But sometimes a story comes along and produces a mad herd instinct where all reason is forgotten, groupthink prevails, and a collective wail of why oh why can be heard throughout the land. The current unquestioned narrative is predicated on the idea that the public wants a snow white polity. This is why all good hard-working decent Britons are enraged (enraged, I tell you) by what has been going on in their name. I am not sure this is quite true. The British have always held a sceptical and unsentimental attitude towards their politicians. They can be ruthless, even towards national heroes. They adored Winston Churchill when Britain stood alone and only the power of his oratory convinced them that the beleaguered island might prevail. But the moment the war was won, they chucked him out. Pundits and commentators are telling us, day after day, that the public has never been so disillusioned by, despairing of, and disgusted at their elected members. Yet look back and you will find polls and statistics that show public faith in politicians has always hovered around a low mark. Last week, when the expenses scandal started cooking up, a survey showed that 60% of the public was interested in the Ghurkha story, and only 40% in the expenses story.

Personally, I don’t really give a damn about Keith Vaz’s scatter cushions. I could not care less about Alan Duncan’s garden. I have very little interest in Gordon Brown paying £6000 to his cleaner. My own cleaner says, when I ask her what she thinks about the expenses scandal: ‘What expenses scandal?’ I explain it to her. She cocks her head. ‘You mean they are taking the piss?’ she says. I say that some of them could be described in this manner. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I suppose we all take the piss sometimes.’ She is bright, honest as the day, and a good mother to two small children. Here is what she worries about: her little boy and girl getting a good education, the damp in her council house, and the fact that she and her partner are paying more tax than they used to. This last revelation shocks me senseless: this was the government that I voted for, partly because it promised to relieve the burden on the low-paid. Everyone is kicking up a stink about class war and the new fifty percent top rate of tax, while none of the newspapers are whipping themselves up into a frenzy of indignation over the fact that a mother of two in a council house who works part time is getting hit up for more tax in the middle of the worst recession in living memory. You crusaders over at the Daily Telegraph – where is your righteous fury over the immorality of that?

Down in the village shop, I try out another little vox pop. Jake, who works the till, a young man with an open friendly face, says: ‘Well, they are human, aren’t they?’ I am slightly surprised. Where is the outrage, the fury, the sense of death of the Mother of Parliaments? ‘I expect if I had an expenses account, I might do the same thing,’ he says, cheerfully.

Would I rather that John Prescott had not claimed for faux Tudor beams at his constituency home? You betcha. There is something awfully de haut en bas about Barbara Follett charging the taxpayer £25,000 for ‘security’. The thing with the moat is absurd. There are clearly many elements that are ropey and creaking about the allowances system, and MPs were idiotic when they voted against expenses being published. My prescription would be: put the whole lot on the internet. Claim what you want, but know that your constituents will be able to see it all online. I am not defending MPs who truly abused the system. They are public officials and should be held to account. But the number of egregious cases is a small percentage of the 645 parliamentarians, probably the exact same proportion of people who might steal something from the stationary cupboard in any large company. This does not make it right, or excusable, but in an ironic twist, probably makes the House of Commons quite representative of the public it serves.

I do not whitewash the expenses revelations, but I do attack the crazed reaction to them. ‘Gerry Adams slams expenses gravy train’ yelled a headline on the BBC news website. In 1987 Adams told the Oxford Union: ‘I have never condemned the IRA, and I never will.’ So it is perfectly fine to blow people up, but claiming for a fridge is beyond any ethical pale. A day later, Stephen Fry dared to point out that there really are more important things to get hysterical about, like waging illegitimate wars, say. Ah I thought: a cool dose of perspective. But the papers called foul. ‘Stephen Fry and his big brain don’t get it’ roared the headline in The Telegraph. ‘Stephen Fry dismisses the expenses scandal in typical arrogant-luvvie style, says Liz Hunt,’ it went on. Apart from indulging in clichéd stereotyping, this entirely missed the point of what Fry was saying, but he was so demoralised by the savage reaction that he confessed dolefully on Twitter that he wished he had kept his mouth shut. (Interestingly, the majority of Twitterers came out of the closet and admitted that many of them were thinking the exact same thing.)

If you want real ocean-going, five-star, fur-lined scandal, try this: the government is currently wasting £20 billion on an NHS IT system that, according to one person involved in the project, ‘isn’t working and isn’t going to work’. It is a story with more turns and twists than a convention of corkscrews. One of its finer elements is that Richard Granger, who was originally in charge, on a meagre salary of £285,000, failed his computer studies course at Bristol. Pricelessly, this nugget was revealed by his own mother, who called up The Observer to talk about it. ‘It was pretty serious, so I had to write to Princess Anne,’ she said (possibly my favourite line in any story in the last five years). Granger is currently threatening Private Eye with legal action for a story they want to run on him. Why is this not on the front page for five days in a row? Why does the press not expect good hard-working Britons to be up in arms about this, which takes many more of their tax pounds and directly affects their lives? Could it be that a man with a tennis court and someone claiming for a chandelier is just a sexier story?

A slightly baffled Italian journalist said on the Today Programme this morning that what British MPs are doing is ‘inappropriate’ but that what Italian MPs do is often ‘illegal’. It is worth remembering, in the middle of all this, that no law has been broken. This is not the Arms to Iraq scandal of the Thatcher years: ‘secret government encouragement of arms sales to a dictator who gasses civilians; ministers misleading parliament; perhaps a quarter of the cabinet implicated,’ as the Economist put it at the time. It is not cooking up dodgy legal opinions to justify torture, as has been revealed in America over the last two weeks – a scandal so big and deep that it takes the breath away, and yet gets hardly a mention in our press. It is not government officials in the Department of Energy having sex with oil industry executives and snorting coke off toaster ovens – another unlovely American political outrage of the fag end of the Bush years. (I do not know quite what a toaster oven is, or if you can claim one on expenses, but I am perfectly certain that very few of our parliamentarians are in the habit of using them to chop out grade A pharmaceuticals.)

I must declare an interest. One of my dear friends is a Member of Parliament. I know him to be a good, honourable and clever man. The gap between the person I know, and the current media version of MPs as chiselling crooks, venally out for everything they can get, is so wide I cannot bridge it. Menzies Campbell, whom I do not know, is a former Olympic athlete who took a steady, principled stand against the Iraq war. Now it has been revealed that he claimed £10,000 for decorating a flat. This one act apparently throws him into the cesspit along with the other scum, so much so that the Daily Mail now refers to him as ‘moral’ Menzies Campbell. This is a man who has devoted his life to public service and always displayed thoughtfulness and rectitude; now he is reduced to having the word moral put against his name in inverted commas. Perhaps more than any other individual example, this demonstrates how mad the reaction to this affair has become.

It is not that the thing itself is not bad. It is. But it is not that bad. It could be so much worse. In the context of wider politics, it may even appear rather petty. What frightens me more than a questionable claim for mole removal is when every single part of the press is following an identical narrative. It worries me when journalists I really love and admire, from Andrew Rawnsley to Nick Cohen to Michael White, are all saying the same thing. The story of what was done over the Iraq war, the questions of intelligence, the practice of extraordinary rendition, the odd saga of the Niger uranium claim, was a true matter of ethics and morality; it was a matter of actual life and death. I can’t remember anyone saying, as Nick Robinson did this week, that those involved in the darker aspects of the war should no longer be known as ‘honourable’ members. Most importantly, many varying degrees of opinion were expressed about the conflict, across all the different newspapers, not necessarily depending on political allegiance. This is exactly how it should be in a democracy that prides itself on a free press. The alarming thing about the current saga is that dissenting voices against the prevailing opinion are not only hard to find, but are pilloried for daring even to question the agreed line. I’m not asking for someone to come out and insist that all MPs are perfect, but I do wish that the press might cock an ear to Stephen Fry, take a deep breath, and rummage under the bed to find its mislaid sense of perspective.