Sunday 16 December 2007

MAJOR'S INTERVENTION

I confess that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for John Major. I honestly believe him to be one of that increasingly rare breed in modern politics: a genuinely decent, honest and sincere man. He may have been grey and (not to put too fine a point on it) unspectacular - who can ever forget his 'Spitting Image' puppet - during his period in office but he did entrench the reforms of the Thatcher years without many of which (like it or not) the UK would still be the 'basket case' of Europe (if not the world) and, with that 'legacy', I suspect that, down the line, history will be kinder to his Prime Ministership than the intense criticism it received at the time - and still receives. Remember too that, if he had not won the 1992 election, we would have ended up with the axis of the dread Kinnockios ... and that really doesn't bear thinking about. So, when he does the rounds of the TV studios to opine about sleaze, I actually sit up and take notice. After all, he does know a thing or two about the subject matter!

Of course, his intervention has provoked an entirely predictable rant from the left-wing/New Labour blogosphere (e.g. "Pot, Kettle, Black, Mr Major?" from Kerron Cross). I have no difficulty in them saying that Major's period in office was tainted by various scandals of one sort or another (as Kerron points out, "cash for questions", Edwina Currie, &c). But, in turn, Major is quite right to point out that, while "lots of people misbehaved" on his watch, they did so on an individual rather than a collective party and/or government basis. The difficulties that New Labour - and the Great Bottler - are now facing over sleaze are very much worse because - call it ignorance, incompetence, arrogance (maybe downright criminality) whatever you like - they appear to have infected the machinery of the party at every level - from the Cabinet (Harman, Hain, &c) all the way down to the grass roots and individual donors (i.e. Donorgate). As John Major says, they are mired in sleaze at a systemic/institutional level. And the 'evidence' (in fact, taken over the last 10 years, the list is as long as your arm - the Ecclestone Affair, Mandelson, Blunkett, cash-for-peerages, donorgate, &c, &c) is there for all to see. It's just that it's taken rather a long time for the mud to stick - no doubt partly because of Bliar's undoubted skill as an actor/politician and partly because of a compliant media. So, paradoxically, for the likes of Kerron Cross to be slagging Major off in this way is in fact they themselves indulging in a healthy dose of the pot calling the kettle black!?!

You have to remember too that NuLabour's 1997 Manifesto - yes, I'm that much of an anorak that I looked it up! - contained these pearls of wisdom, most of them from Bliar's foreword:
  • "The Conservatives' broken promises taint all politics. That is why we have made it our guiding rule not to promise what we cannot deliver; and to deliver what we promise. What follows is not the politics of a 100 days that dazzles for a time, then fizzles out. It is not the politics of a revolution, but of a fresh start ...";
  • "We are a broad-based movement for progress and justice. New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole.";
  • "Our mission in politics is to rebuild this bond of trust between government and the people. That is the only way democracy can flourish.";
  • "We will clean up politics, decentralise political power throughout the United Kingdom and put the funding of political parties on a proper and accountable basis.";
  • "There is unquestionably a national crisis of confidence in our political system, to which Labour will respond in a measured and sensible way.";
  • "This is the purpose of the bond of trust I set out at the end of this introduction, in which ten specific commitments are put before you. Hold us to them. They are our covenant with you."
This was all of a piece with trying to paint NuLabour as "whiter than white" in contrast with the image/perception of the Conservatives being "sleazy"/"untrustworthy"/"corrupt"/"failing"?&c. And it was a line that was always going to come back to haunt them (a la Viscount Falkland's "power corrupts" dictum); what goes around, comes around. Little wonder that this tripe now sounds so hollow and empty!

Bliar knows this - now that he's moved on to bigger and better things. His acknowledgement that he over-played the sleaze card in opposition is as much (in its own way) an admission of this as it is an attempt to distance himself (in advance) from NuLabour's current woes. You've got to hand it to him. He is nothing if not shrewd - but always aimed at protecting his own back. So, officially, the NuLabour Party itself really has no option - and this speaks volumes about the pile of manure they are up to the pretty little necks in - other than to keep shtum on Major's intervention.

Of course, that won't stop them from trying to spin the narrative over the next few days, even weeks, but I'm uncertain that's going to help them much. The situation (as it did with the Tories in the '90s) has passed the point where the facts of the matter are relevant; regardless of them the perception of sleaze is now firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. So the stark realities they have to face up to is that Major has got it absolutely spot on and they're just going to have to live with the principle of the biter bit.

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