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I'm embarrassed to be a Tory
To me, as someone on the political right, the election campaign has felt oddly unreal, like a bad dream. As in a nightmare, there has been a certain perverse logic, but there have been bizarre incidents, and a persistent feeling of disorientation, as if people were talking about the wrong things, avoiding things, and offering explanations that don't quite make sense.
I'm talking about the Conservative campaign, though the same has been true of Labour's. It is not the prospect of a Conservative defeat that has seemed so nightmarish. It is the spectacle the party has been making of itself.
Some of what's wrong has been style. Unfortunately, style is more important than substance in electioneering, and that makes it more damaging, not less. There's the most obvious question of William Hague's voice. A voice ought not to matter so much, but it does, as anyone in telesales will tell you; politicians with any political nous should have recognised that long ago, and done something about it. To be so naive about public relations is in itself a sign of unfitness for office in this age of vulgar spin.
For all his eloquence, intelligence and courage, Hague's weirdly unreal inflection makes him sound as though he doesn't take anything seriously; from there it's only a single flat vowel to seeming not to care about anything. And being thought not to care is the Achilles heel of the Conservative party.
Even a man with the voice, looks and hair of Jude Law himself, however, could not have seduced the public out of their contempt for the Conservatives' insistence on asylum and the euro. That was a serious, perverse, embarrassing error. All senior Conservatives ought to accept responsibility for it, instead of preparing to duck it. They were warned against it, repeatedly. But they persisted, and they have made supporters like me look like xenophobic, bigoted, ignorant Little Englanders, and maybe even like racists too.
The arguments don't matter, good or bad. What anyone actually said doesn't matter. It was the emphasis, the deliberate choice of emphasis, that did the damage.
It was made much worse by the related lack of emphasis on what people most care about, and what it's been made to seem (quite wrongly) that Conservatives don't care about - schools, hospitals and social services. Why not put the record straight about the mythical Tory "cuts" of the past? Why not go in, all guns blazing, to attack Labour's lamentable record?
Instead, our attention was arrested by the bizarre story of the MP Oliver Letwin hiding away in the valleys of West Dorset, after a leak about tax cuts, hunted down by journalists, all too reminiscently of Keith Vaz. The Tories should have let him come out and say something openly, unashamedly about their views on tax. But they were, apparently, too timid to be truthful.
They don't appear to have a clear, coherent, radical Conservative policy on tax and benefits reform. And they don't appear to know, any more than Labour, how they will finance bigger spending on public services. So there were embarrassed disclaimers instead, and Labour was unnecessarily handed one of the best anti-Tory chants of its campaign - "pounds 20bn of cuts".
Meanwhile, there was that oddly unsophisticated, histrionic party political broadcast about roving rapists and feral schoolchildren. The message was ill-judged; the medium was laughable.
Then we had the dream-like sequence of Margaret Thatcher, swooping down (as she suggested herself in an ill-chosen joke) like a mummified corpse, to do untold damage to the Conservative campaign with her off-message cry of "Never to the euro". She managed both to show up and to bring down Tory prevarications. Europe has divided both major parties, and most people across all parties. The only electable position to take on the euro, whatever one's gut instincts, as both John Major and Tony Blair have understood, is on the fence, waiting uncomfortably upon events.
In any case, given Labour's promise of a referendum, Hague's warning of "only five days to save the pound" is almost as silly as Blair's shameful 1997 battle cry of "only 24 hours to save the NHS". Can these people be real?
There ought to have been a very important public conversation during this election about public services, and the Conservative view of how best to deliver them. There ought to have been a major debate about the limits of the state, and of bureaucracy and regulation. There could have been a relentless battery of triumphant attacks over the foot and mouth crisis, parliamentary reform, doctors' fury, teachers' fury, hospital patients' misery, Labour media manipulation, lies and sleaze. All this has been a gift to the Conservatives. Yet, if the polls are to be believed at all, they haven't even been able to make a dent in Labour's popularity.
This is the party I have always supported. I'd like to support it now. I am a convinced small c conservative. At the beginning of the campaign I thought it was hard to be a Tory; now it's beginning to be embarrassing. Reportedly the Conservatives think they've been running a good campaign; perhaps they are the ones who are dreaming.
The Guardian | Tuesday, June 05, 2001
