In which displacement activity takes the form of political pondering

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The Co-Writer calls. ‘How are you?’ she says.

‘Quite grumpy,’ I say.

‘Ah well,’ she says. ‘It is scientifically proven that this is the most depressing week of the year.’

The weather is in a gloom too, flat and low and grey. But then a miracle occurs. As I take The Pigeon out, the sun puts in a late appearance, and suddenly the landscape is transformed, lit with amber light, bright and new and clean.

Perhaps it’s not so bad, I think. I start to contemplate a way through the maze of my next bit of work. This is the graft part. There was all the giddy excitement of first draft time, when I was inventing something out of nothing. There is a headiness to that first deadline. Then, the editorial notes come back, and life is earnest, life is real, and I have to remind myself that I am a professional, not just someone doing this for a whim or a bet.

Restructuring is called for; cutting, shaping, the filling in of gaping holes. It is where indulgence ends, and seriousness begins. ‘We are pros,’ I say, rather plaintively, to The Man of Letters, trying to convince myself. ‘This is what we do.’

Of course, my irrational mind is not so biddable. It casts about frantically for diversion tactics. Oh yes, it thinks, cunningly, let’s do a really long and convoluted blog about the nature of conservatism. That will use up an hour, so you don’t have to think about the weaknesses in Chapter Three.

It is such an evil genius, my irrational mind, because it knows that when I spend time doing the blog, it feels a bit like work. I am typing and thinking, at least. I'm not looking at videos of children doing comical things on the internets, or blatantly checking my Twitter feed. Even cleverer, it knows that if I choose a serious subject, then there is a closer correlation to actual achievement.

I did wake up thinking about conservatism this morning. The naughty Stepfather, who is an old school One Nation Tory, with a libertarian, slightly contrarian streak, which I think comes from his Canadian blood, likes to tease me by cutting out articles from The Telegraph and dropping them round in serious white envelopes. His latest is a piece which contains the line: ‘the facts of life are conservative’.

The old liberal lefty in me is a little gentled by time; I lean more to pragmatism as I get older. I am less shouty and ideological; I even have a bit of a utilitarian streak. Despite my love for theory, I have a growing fondness for things that work. Even so, when I read a sentence like that, all my ancient instincts rise up in revolt. No, no, I think; that really can’t be true.

I start arguing it in my head. The very tiring thing about this is that I have the fatal liberal disease of insisting on seeing both sides of an argument. I can’t just go into a tribal crouch. The criticism of the leftist belief in the state, which can sometimes veer towards blind faith, is that it leads to inefficiencies, unintended consequences, and muddled bureaucracy. There is absolute merit in this argument. On the other hand, the hard belief of the right wing in the diamond brilliance of the free market is equally flawed. I give you: Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers.

Then, as I am batting this back and forth, I think: but what does conservative mean, anyway? I’m not sure that Left and Right tell us very much any more. It’s all fractured, and relative. I have heard a perfectly nice, intelligent woman tell me, with horror on her face: ‘But Barack Obama is a socialist’. I have seen absolutely no signs that he wants to nationalise the means of production. In this country, he would probably be on the wet side of the Tory party. ‘But he’s a pragmatic centrist,’ I cry, to no avail.

The right in America has very little relation to the right here; there is no equivalent of God and guns in British politics. British conservatism can mean ten different things. There are the old guard small-C conservatives, who want traditions preserved, the countryside cherished, children to learn Latin; who take the word seriously, and wish to conserve all they see as true and good. There are purist free marketeers, who believe that Keynes is bad and mad. Social conservatism is a dying breed, but does still exist, and worries about ladies and gays.

Social conservatism always strikes me as a complete contradiction. The defining thing of the right is supposedly its distrust of government. People know better how to run their lives than the state, except when it comes to Elton John and unmarried mothers and a lesbian couple with 2.2 children. In that case, government must loom very big indeed, and instruct people to get married at once, to someone of the opposite gender.

There is laissez-faire conservatism, and paternalist conservatism, with its old Whiggish dash of noblesse oblige. (It is often forgotten that Burke, now considered the founder of modern Conservatism, was a Whig.) There are the big business Conservatives, and the small battalions Conservatives. There is the libertarian wing, which blames all ills on regulation, and the little England wing, which blames all ills on pesky foreign workers, coming here to take our jobs and steal our women. (I exaggerate for effect, but only slightly.)

There is the tendency which believes that global warming is a scam thought up by scientists to stop Ordinary Decent Britons flying abroad on their holidays. There is still the occasional whiff of social Darwinism. 

Just as the left has its strengths and failings, so does the right. At its best, it has faith in the individual, distrusts unaccountable authority, believes in Burke's liberty under law. At its worst, it can lack empathy, pander to vested interests, show a narrow, moralising tendency. It can also have an oddly conspiratorial streak. It always accuses the left of being victimish, but then insists it is assailed by liberal bias in the media, particularly from the irredeemable pinkos at the BBC.

I should now draw myself up, take a deep breath, and come to my magisterial conclusion. Always go for the big finish, my writer’s instinct tells me. Except there isn’t really one. I just think it is interesting.

And even as I make my thesis, I wonder if anything really changes. I think Left and Right might not mean much now, that we can no longer divide politics neatly into a game of two halves. But then I remember my history, and the rage and fury that Peel inspired in his own party when he repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. He managed to split the Tories for twenty years.

Conservatism meant ten different things, even then. Tories in the 19^th century saw the world in such radically different ways that they could not even manage to hold themselves together for political advantage. It was like some crazed family argument, where drunk Uncle Bernie does something unforgivable at Christmas.

Even if one could work out exactly what conservatism is, I’m not sure the facts of life are it. I admit, I believe in government. For all its flaws, it is a part of what stitches a society together. I don’t want that atomised, libertarian dream, with the free market galloping away over the Steppes like an unbroken bronco. You might say this is my sentimental, bleeding heart self gone amok, but in every list of success – national well-being, low corruption, literacy – the Scandinavian countries come out on top, year after year, with their social contracts and their sturdy governments. I can’t help it. I dream of the Danes.


And now for some pictures of the lovely light, on the morning walk:













Off goes The Pigeon, completely out of focus, but rather delightful for all that:



And, sitting for her close-up:




One of the Dear Readers asked how old The Pigeon was, on a hopeless day when I did not get round to replying to comments. The answer is: thirteen. Not bad for an old girl, is she?

The hill, almost lost in the glimmering:

In which I declare an interest

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I suddenly realise it is positively perverse that I have not written a word about British politics since May, despite it being the most febrile and fascinating political season since the Old Queen died. And I suddenly realise why. It is that: some of my best friends are Tories.

I KNOW.

Actually, it should not make a blind bit of difference. The two I love the most are serious men of conviction who are far too busy trying to work out thorny policy problems to pay attention to flaky blogs. But you see, I am an unreconstructed old lefty liberal bleeding heart. I think I have been hampered by an absurd subliminal desire not to upset my right of centre buddies.

Luckily, the truth will set you free, and now I have worked out this fabulously stupid reluctance to overturn any applecarts, it is going to be psephology a go-go. Obviously with a bit of dog thrown in. I am not abandoning first principles.

Actually, what I want to talk about is in fact slightly related to dogs. It is what political geeks like me call the dog whistle. Dog whistle politics is a right wing phenomenon which some people say was invented by an Australian called Lynton Crosby, who was the Karl Rove to ex-prime minister John Howard. It was a sinister way for the Right to say hard-line things whilst sounding perfectly reasonable. In the last election, the Tory leader Michal Howard (no relation) used it when he asked: 'Are you thinking what we are thinking?' It had a nasty little taint of John Bull to it, an underlying suggestion that maybe all those pesky foreigners were coming over here and taking the jobs and stealing the women. To its great credit, the good British public took not the blindest bit of notice.

The new Tories have, I think, decided to go back to their One Nation roots, and are now talking about things like social inclusion and co-operatives. They have put the Little Englander dog whistle in a drawer. But the irony is that it is still working against them.

The great puzzle of the last month is why the Conservatives are not miles ahead in the polls. The economy is trashed, unemployment is a joke, the prime minister is being accused of bullying, cussing, briefing against his own chancellor and generally going bonkers. It reminds me of what Evelyn Waugh once said about James Joyce: 'You can hear him going mad, sentence by sentence.' The whole administration seems tired and cranky and out of ideas. Even old Labour loyalists like me look at the debt and look at the war and think: what is the party for? And there are the Tories, all clean and respectable and untainted by power. They don't seem to be scared by women and homosexuals and people who are not Anglo-Saxon any more. Why not give them a go?

And just as I am thinking this perfectly reasonable thing, I turn on the television and there is Ann Widdecombe. (For my international readers: she is of the ship in full sail school of politics; old Tory to her fingertips; religious; Manichean; proud to be a battleaxe.) 'Will you cut the size of the state?' Andrew Neil asks her. Cuts are the absolute battleground at the moment, but the usual thing is to hedge and be diplomatic about it, to talk of how the lovely nurses and teachers and soldiers and policeman must be protected, while the evil quangos must go and ghastly bureaucracy be slashed. But Miss Widdecombe did not get the memo. 'Oh yes,' she says, with indecent glee, in her strange querulous voice. And the dog whistle blows. I think: I can't I can't I can't. In a feverish liberal panic I imagine thousands of poor civil servants begging on the streets. I think: the Conservatives have not changed at all; they still hate and loathe government and we shall all be thrown on the mercy of the free market, which is as ruthless and unpredictable as a gangland killer with a pocket full of razor blades. This is what the whistle does: it flings sensible centrist people like me into a frenzy of hyperbole.

I think this is what is doing the Tories in. The old guard is let out, blinking, into the light and, without meaning to at all, blows the whistle, and everyone runs inside and bolts the doors and contemplates sticking with the devil they know.

The most interesting and least known thing about David Cameron is that his hero is Robert Peel. Peel is my hero too. When I was reading history, all young and foolish and idealistic, I worshipped Peel like other people adored pop stars. He might not have won any charm contests, but he stood up, almost alone, to the howling might of the vested interests when he repealed the egregious Corn Laws in 1846. He put the people before politics. He placed the national interest above loyalty to his own class. He split his party rather than do the wrong thing. There should be parades for him. That's a Tory that all good people can believe in. I think the central question of this election is whether Peel will trump Widdecombe. I admit that no one else in the entire political firmament is asking this question. I admit it might be the wrong question altogether. But it is the one to which I would most like the answer.

Picture of the day is in honour of the great Sir Robert:



And his magnificent wife Julia, who he adored:



Bonus facts about Sir Robert Peel:

As well as repealing the Corn Laws, he also passed the Factory Act, which protected women and children from the worst depredations of ruthless industrialists, emancipated the Catholics, and invented the police force, which is why they are called Bobbies to this day.