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What the Tories must do to avoid becoming history
Long ago, in the early 1980s, when I used to work for BBC Television, the head of my department used regularly to cross-examine me with amazement. "You can't really support that woman," he would say. "You can't mean it. You couldn't."
Nowadays this would be considered political harassment, especially since the man had my career in his control - in those days, it was absolutely standard, in my experience in the BBC, to point and jeer at people who supported Margaret Thatcher. Lots of people were nasty to me about it. I didn't mind too much, since I really did admire her, and I really did - in a way I had never dreamt of doing before - identify myself with the Conservative Party.
How astonishingly different things are today. People now despise Conservatives even more than then, yet Tories now have no true faith to cling to in their persecution. They have very little idea of what they are supposed to believe in, or of why it is so horribly despised, whatever it may be.
And there seems to be no one to articulate it with all the necessary eloquence and conviction. Listening to Iain Duncan Smith's debut at the Dispatch Box last week made me wonder not just whither the Conservative Party, but why. The whole thing is deeply embarrassing, especially at parties.
However, now may not be the moment to despair. Now may well be the moment to buy Conservative, while stocks are low. Overheated Labour shares will certainly plummet before long and there seem to be signs that the Conservatives are trying to reinvent themselves: I read an interesting collection of essays last week by various young Conservatives, called A Blue Tomorrow, highly recommended to the party mournful. It is always an exciting moment when things are so bad that people are forced to start thinking.
Thinking is always said to be something Tories are not very keen on. I don't agree. It's nonsense to say that the Tories are the stupid party; the best Conservative ideas have always been difficult to grasp and often counter-intuitive, unlike Labour platitudes such as "excellence for all", which is easy to grasp, oxymoronic and wrong. And Conservatives can sometimes take on ideology, if they must, as they did under Mrs Thatcher; hers was a revolution of ideology.
What Conservatism means to me, more than anything else, is freedom. I hate bullying, bossiness, snooping, tinkering and unnecessary, unwanted change, imposed by the arrogant man in Whitehall or in the town hall. I hate statism and look to Toryism for a defence against it.
Statists have an irresistible urge not only to interfere, but to change things for the sake of change, just as tree surgeons are driven to interfere with trees and hairdressers long to cut hair. That's why statists cannot help but be the enemies of conservation, of conserving what is good. (Tories should certainly hijack the conservation bandwagon.)
What is more, statists are always centralists and imposers of uniformity in the name of state policy, so they cannot help but be the enemies of what is quirky, local and pragmatic. Statism is the enemy of personal responsibility and personal enterprise, just as freedom is their protector.
All pretty obvious stuff, you may say. But the truth is that the Conservative Party has internalised too much of the statist mentality. There are lots of things the Conservatives have tried to control, thereby getting the worst of all possible worlds - the reputation for traditional Tory heartlessness without a compensating reputation for traditional Tory libertarianism. Harsh in the bedroom, lax in the marketplace - that is not my kind of Conservatism, and besides, it is a political suicide note.
The Conservatives have no business trying to favour family values, or sexual preferences, one way or another. These moral matters are none of the government's business. The idea of supporting marriage via minor tax breaks is both ludicrous and wrong. It is wrong for Tories to claim the power to decide who may and who may not marry; those who want to take on the responsibilities of marriage or of parenthood should not be prevented from doing so, whether or not they are homosexual.
The Tories ought never to have involved themselves with gay literature in schools and Section 28 - that is the business of school governors and head teachers; besides, their response has been out of all proportion to the facts, and driven more by emotion than by reason.
Supporting new religious schools at state expense is wrong: religion is not the business of the state. It is daft of Tories to go on supporting the whole, mad, tottering, gothic edifice of tax allowances and benefit qualifications, with all their intrusions and perverse incentives. And so on. Sadly Tories seem at heart all too often as bossy as the Left-of-centre statists. While that continues, they will continue to be without a constituency, and without interest.
Even worse than this tendency to interfere in private life has been the Tory failure to take on the deeply rooted statist mentality in public life - particularly in public services. Sometimes, I think that would have been quite impossible for anyone: it is probably as hopeless as ever.
But here is one heartfelt proposal for Tory thinkers. How about a serious investigation of the precise content of training courses in social services, probation services, education, nursing and so on, which is where the statist rot sets in? And how about some public exposure of it? That really would be of some service to the state.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 27, 2001 | Comments (0)
Cherie in the shadows
Cherie: The Perfect Life of Mrs Blair by Linda McDougall
Politico's, £17.99, 223 pp £15.99 (£1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222
The usual drill in journalism, when trying to write about something, is to give up when you cannot find out anything that most people don't already know. The same rule may not apply so strictly to biography proper, but in the grey area of bio-journalism, about people constantly in the public eye, the reader expects revelations, especially if paying pounds 17.99 for a book in hard covers.
Linda McDougall's problem, in writing this biography of Cherie Blair, is that she was actively prevented from finding things out. Everyone knows that the Blairs and their entourage exert strict control upon everyone around them, and guard their privacy very fiercely, except when it suits them to appear in glory as a latter-day Holy Family. Herself married to a long-standing Labour MP, Austin Mitchell, Miss McDougall can hardly have been surprised to be told very firmly by Mrs Blair's minder (who is also Alistair Campbell's partner) that Cherie did not want her biography written and planned to tell her friends not to co-operate.
Sure enough, they didn't. Only a few spoke off the record about their "good friend Cherie", and the few on-the-record comments the author records are bland. How could it be otherwise? Ms McDougall explains that she and her MP husband are distrusted outsiders, who have little to do with Blair's government. This is no doubt partly because soon after the 1997 victory she wrote a "light- hearted" newspaper article about a private New Labour gathering attended very briefly by Cherie, and was instantly cast into outer darkness for her disloyalty.
Ms McDougall is reduced to saying in her acknowledgements that "being thanked by me could well be the kiss of death for a Westminster politician or journalist, so . . . I have refrained from thanking some of the people who helped me most". This gives a chilly impression of the repressive paranoia controlling New Labour Westminster, but it is hardly the basis for a reliable book.
We learn nothing here of the many intriguing questions of Cherie Blair's life. Does she, for instance, still collect child benefit, rich as she is? Do people fall in love with her? How many minutes a day does she actually spend with her children, what with early morning gym, punishing hours as a QC, personal grooming sessions, grand receptions and international travel?
Anyone who has followed the strange story of the Blairs in the papers or on television will have come to many of the same conclusions as Ms McDougall: that Mrs Blair had a complicated Liverpool childhood, and an early acquaintance with celebrity through her notorious father Tony Booth; that she has done well as a lawyer; that, like many a Bollinger Bolshevik before her, she has developed a marked taste for luxury; that success has done a great deal for her dress sense and that she takes herself extremely seriously and is very tough. And so on.
Ms McDougall appears to have made some efforts to dig further, in Cherie Blair's hometown, in her school and elsewhere, and she managed to finesse a terrified constituency neighbour of the Blairs into admitting that Cherie now arrives in Sedgefield with a cook and a dresser; but almost nothing is considered in any depth. As to whether the young Cherie's ferocious ambition was encouraged at her excellent Liverpool convent school, for instance, there are conflicting accounts, but without any comment.
Ms McDougall says again and again that Cherie Blair could and should be a role model for other women, but refuses to be one. If only, she claims repeatedly, Cherie were not so determinedly silent in her role as the Prime Minister's wife, if only she did not guard her personal privacy so fiercely, if only she would throw away "the empty shell which is 'Mrs Blair' ", and reveal herself, she "could play a really useful part in the liberalisation of British society and start campaigning for some real equality for women".
But why on earth should she? Either this is sanctimonious humbug, or else the author, in the face of this silence, is desperately searching for a theme which could justify the book. One begins to feel that Mrs Blair and her minders were entirely right about Ms McDougall.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 21, 2001 | Comments (0)
The many wrongs committed in the name of human rights
Since we are, astonishingly, about to have a law that will curb our freedom to talk about religion, what I am about to say will soon be unsayable, without at the very least a police caution. So I must get it said quickly.
I believe that the idea of universal human rights is a bad and dangerous idea; for all its nobility, it tends to lead to terrible confusion and cross-purposes, and to the most bitter disappointment. It is clearly a religious idea: it is something in which people have faith, as a revealed truth, which neither has nor needs a rational basis; it is self-evident to good people. (Self-evident was, after all, the word used by the writers of the US Constitution.)
Believers believe in it passionately, and despise unbelievers. And it will soon become almost impossible to declare that you do not truly believe in the idea of universal human rights, whatever the Home Secretary may decree; it is the only form of passionate, unself-consciously proselytising religious faith left to the faithless West.
I found myself last week at a Human Rights Watch fundraising dinner at the Natural History Museum, talking to the celebrated QC Geoffrey Robertson, who has had a distinguished career specialising in human rights. I asked him what was the origin of universal human rights, meaning (rather rhetorically) to challenge the assumption that there is any objective basis for the idea.
But the cavernous room in the museum was very noisy, and I failed to make myself either audible or clear, because he said - or at least I think he said - that the modern idea of universal human rights was conceived in 1939 at a meeting of British socialists, including H G Wells, Barbara Wootton and A A Milne.
The memory of this fragment was rather faint in the cold light of the next day, but it was all too plausible. There is indeed something altogether utopian and fantastical (Wells), as well as child-like (Milne) about the concept of universal human rights.
I don't mean human rights as part of a social contract in a particular society; in such a case, human, or rather civil, rights are based on tradition, consent and law, and breaches can be punished. But universal human rights, applying to everyone in every society, have always seemed to me perfectly absurd. It is all very fine for the UN to declare that every child has a universal human right to a home and a square meal, but it is meaningless verbiage in the real world.
Who conferred those rights? Who is to fulfil them? And who can be prosecuted for the failure to fulfil them? Besides, societies and cultures do truly disagree on human rights. And by what universal human right may the universalists inflict human rights on countries and cultures that think differently? Besides, even when people do agree on human rights, one tends to conflict with another. Such conflict cannot be resolved universally, but only locally and pragmatically.
This has been a confusing week for anyone interested in human rights. The Government seems to be both absurdly over-mighty and absurdly weak. On the one hand, it has suddenly decided to remove our right to talk freely about religion, let alone joke about it - how innocent things were when Pamela Stephenson was able to sing "Ayatollah, don't Khomeini closer" on Not the Nine O'Clock News.
On the other hand, the Government is quite unable to support our universal human right to life, limb and unjudgmental religious chat by deporting or extraditing suspected terrorists from our shores, since the European Convention on Human Rights makes it pretty much impossible. Instead David Blunkett proposes new legislation to lock up suspected terrorists indefinitely. Brilliant. What I want to know is whether the suspected terrorists have been consulted on all this. Surely that is no less than their right. What would they prefer? I shall be writing to my MP about this.
It is all very confusing. On Thursday, I went to a lunch at the think-tank Politeia, for the launch of a lucid pamphlet by Martin Howe, QC, depressingly called Tackling Terrorism: The European Human Rights Convention and the Enemy Within and I found myself huffing and puffing against the human rights orthodoxy. Yet later the same day, I found myself supporting Human Rights Watch. Inconsistent though this sounds, I cannot think of any charity more worthy of support.
Human Rights Watch sends quite astonishingly brave researchers all over the world to record the terrible things that are done to people in war and in peace - in Chechnya and Sierra Leone, for example - and then to make the rest of the world pay attention.
It also supports heroic men and women who try to fight these evils in their own countries, often at great risk to themselves. I was particularly touched by an Indian lawyer, himself a Dalit (once called untouchable), describing the deliberate degradation of many millions of Dalits in peaceful, prospering India. Three of his colleagues have been shot.
I am not really being inconsistent about universal human rights. What this charity does is right and immensely important. It's just that its name isn't right. I think it should be called Human Wrongs Watch. It is so much easier to agree on what is wrong. It's almost always intuitively obvious. It is often local. And it is so much easier to deal with specific negatives, than with vague, all-embracing, codified all-purpose positives. As in medicine, the more universal a panacaea, the less it tends to work.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 20, 2001 | Comments (0)
Anne Robinson: a woman of her time - and a monster
Anne Robinson has a curiously powerful grip on the public imagination. Her programme The Weakest Link is one of the most popular ever, here and in America, and has made her rich and famous. Her Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, serialised here this past week, have been hugely discussed and read. I have been wondering why.
There must be something more interesting about her story than just another knickers-round-the-neck, vomit-on-the-cot confessional. Perhaps there is something - excuse the word - iconic about her. She is, perhaps, an anti-heroine of our time. Her struggles reflect, perhaps, the conflicts of her time.
So, interrupting my study of Cherie: The Perfect Life of Mrs Blair (unauthorised), I read what Ms Robinson has to say about her extremely imperfect life. I can't quite decide which is more repellent. Oddly enough, both women went to the same Catholic convent in Liverpool; what an awesome responsibility for all those nuns.
It is true that Ms Robinson has lived through an extraordinary time of change for women. She went from an extremely repressive provincial religious school into a flurry of Fleet Street, sex, pregnancy, early marriage, abortion, alcohol, adultery and divorce, at a time, in the late 1960s, when male chauvinist piggery was still quite astonishing. Men were amazingly patronising to women, not least to women much cleverer than themselves. Different rules applied then; women under 45 can hardly imagine what that was like.
I am beginning to wish that someone would make an oral history collection of the appalling things that men have said, let alone done, to women at work in the second part of the 20th century. So many of us kept these things quiet, determined not to get mad but to get even, or better still, ahead.
Of all the nasty, and now actionable, put-downs in my own working life, one of my favourites was let fall by a senior colleague in BBC TV in the early 1980s. He had just told me he had lost an audition tape I'd made a few weeks earlier; I asked for studio time to make another. "What? You?" he exclaimed incredulously. "You're pregnant. You're finished." For a moment I had a happy little fantasy of how very silly this Leftish liberal would look in an industrial tribunal.
So I have some considerable sympathy with the fury Ms Robinson felt about men's attitudes in the 1970s, when it was worse. I can believe that it may well be partly true that she lost custody of her baby daughter to her former husband, Charlie Wilson, because the judge disapproved of her ambition, though not (of course) of his. In those days - so recently - an ambitious father was normal; an ambitious mother was a heartless harridan. There was however, something else that, by her own account, made her an unfit mother - her drop-down drunkenness.
But astonishingly quickly, and particularly in journalism, women suddenly began to become powerful. The period since the mid-1970s has been a remarkably good time for female journalists, because of positive discrimination in all journalism, lookism in the expanding world of television and the feminisation of the media.
For most of her adult life, Ms Robinson has been a great beneficiary of all this - hence her enormous salary and celebrity, even in her mid-fifties. In her immense good fortune, she has been a woman of her time. In her misfortunes, to judge from her own account, she has simply been herself - something of a monster.
At least she reminds me of some of the female monsters I have known. And what I'm quite sure of about female monsters is that they are born, not made. Their individual circumstances cannot possibly explain their monstrous behaviour; monsters are just differently wired.
I quite like female monsters, in a way. I almost admire them. They have an enraged and desperate grandiosity, like Ms Robinson's, that can be rather exhilarating. We would all like to be flamboyantly outrageous, or brutally frank, or fiercely tough; for most of us it is a spectator sport. For Ms Robinson, it has been a way of life, and to wealth.
What is intriguing about the female monsters in my life has been their tormented relationship with control and self-control. Usually they are controlling of anyone around them, and capable of heroic self-discipline as well. But what actually distinguishes them is their tendency to abandon all self-control at the slightest provocation. I write as one who has been thrown out into the snow on Christmas Day, more than once and with nowhere to go, as a result of a very minor disagreement about the Radio Times listings.
Wondering about Ms Robinson, and what on earth she is doing publishing these monstrous memoirs, it occurs to me that there is a match between her temperament and a contemporary mood in popular culture. We have seen a growing emphasis on feeling - the sentimentalisation of culture - and an insistence on confession and victimhood.
What next? one might ask, as a person with a finger on the popular pulse. Why yes - humiliation! Humiliation, meaning of course public and media humiliation, is the rich seam that Ms Robinson is mining. She humiliates her guests on her monstrous show, and now she is going on digging, mining her own humiliation in her own humiliating confessions of an "unfit mother" - a very weak link.
The combination of voyeurism, sadism and sympathy she is exploiting is truly monstrous, truly lucrative and truly a sign of our times.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 13, 2001 | Comments (0)
Blair's cultural colonialism is the right-on man's burden
A man can be very deeply moved by his own rhetoric. Gladstone was said to have been inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity. And Tony Blair was also deeply, visibly moved and shaken by his own eloquence in his extraordinary speech at the Labour Party conference this week. He was not so much inebriated as carried away on the wings of deathless poesy, in this case his own, and transported into a distant, inspiring, undefined blue yonder. And he got away with it. It was astonishing. Almost everybody agreed that it was an extremely fine thing. Yet an important part of what he was saying was outrageous nonsense.
This is the moment to make all the obvious hasty disclaimers. I am not an admirer of the Prime Minister, but I must admit that he has been extremely impressive ever since he heard the news on September 11. He has consistently taken the right line. He has consistently appeared strikingly statesmanlike and resolute, and it seems that he has been a very useful and tactful support to President Bush in many ways. And so on and so on. I admit it.
I also admit that this is a time when it is right, for once, for a politician to talk in the highest moral terms. But our Prime Minister seems to be unable to keep his moral terms down merely to the highest; he soars irrepressibly into the Olympian, the stratospheric. From a simple, clear ultimatum to the Taliban, he suddenly soars to an entirely global plan of peace and prosperity. Another dimension is appearing, it seems. If the international community chose to come together, he explains, it could sort out all the awful things that are going on all over the world today, everywhere.
Together, for instance, he says we could sort out the continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; we could sort out the whole of Africa, in fact. "Our side" - that's to say, a new partnership of the "international community" - could give more aid and debt relief to Africa, plus our "help" with "good governance", infrastructure, military training and conflict resolution. Africans, on their side of the deal, would have to put a stop to dictatorship, human rights abuses, corruption and bad "governance", and start being properly democratic, like us. With our help.
And not only could we - and should we - "heal the scar" that is the state of Africa (Mr Blair's imagery plummeted for a minute here, since scars are already healed, but you get the idea). We would also have a duty to heal scars of one kind or another right across the globe, with our Prime Minister as one of the leading moral Medicins Sans Frontieres. From Aghanistan to the Cote d'Ivoire, from the Falls Road to the Negev, we could just sort things out. Even the weather. Get them to do things our way. The right way. Simple, really - put like that.
I've been told repeatedly that all this was just feelgood conference waffle; no one takes it seriously or thinks it matters. But I think it does matter that the Prime Minister allows himself at such a time to indulge in irresponsible adolescent waffle. Worse still, I suspect he takes it seriously.
Anyone contemplating the evils in the world must agree that there are countless obstacles in the way of all the best intentions. One, of which Mr Blair seems oddly unaware, is the spectre of imperialism. His high-minded talk sounded, even to me, like the crudest of neo-imperialist cultural colonialism. I thought everybody in the Labour Party knew about that, and how wrong and racist it is. They used to talk of nothing else, and these days cultural colonialism is still one of the top grievances of the multicultural brigade. So it's very odd to hear a Labour prime minister recommending it; what he is urging us, so earnestly, to take up is the neo-colonialist version of the white man's burden - the right-on man's burden. I don't think all those lesser breeds outside the law are going to like it very much, or even pay much attention, not least because most of them will be members of the very "international community" that is supposed to be sorting these things out. With us.
How, for example, in practice would this new international alliance sort out the child slave trade in Benin and Gabon, to mention only two of the African countries that permit it? Both countries are democracies, both have signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but still it goes on, entirely legally. We think it wrong, but they find it acceptable. So what could the international community do? Or, to put it another way, by what international agreement, or laws, could outsiders barge into those countries, override their laws, and use force against their citizens?
Do we have the will to do it, even if we believe we have the moral right? And where should we stop? Do we rescue tens of millions of little girls all over the world from the dangers of genital mutilation? Do we round up all their grannies and throw them into UN-sponsored jails? Do we install a UN bride-burning watch team in those Indian provinces where it might be useful? Do we drop international paras into Chinese gulags where prisoners are shot to provide spare body parts for the rich? And who is going to pay for these quixotic expeditions?
History has taught us that even with the right and the will and the money, most interventions, no matter how high minded, have done little but harm. Look no further than Northern Ireland: that should have shamed the Prime Minister into a little geopolitical modesty in his rhetoric; clearly, he cannot be shamed into a proper silence.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 06, 2001 | Comments (0)
