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As the unsayable becomes sayable, Tory fortunes rise
One opinion poll does not make a political new dawn. Last week an ICM poll in The Guardian found that Labour’s lead over the Conservatives had fallen from nine percentage points to only three. Then on Friday a Mori poll in the Financial Times suggested that Labour now had only a two-point lead.
Not surprisingly the Conservatives rejoiced. But all too soon it appeared to be a false dawn. Also on Friday a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph reported bad news for them. Whereas last month, according to YouGov, the two parties were only one percentage point apart, Labour had now regained its six-point lead and the Conservatives appeared to be back to where they were in the political doldrums.
All the same something new is happening. The political wind really is beginning to change; the tide is beginning to turn. After not months but years of despair and self-doubt — self-loathing even — the Conservatives are beginning to rediscover themselves.
They are beginning to abandon their modernist attempts to steal new Labour clothes. They are feeling less ashamed of naked Conservatism. They are even beginning — though who only a few weeks ago would have thought it remotely possible? — to set the agenda and to scare Labour strategists into defensive, copycat reactions.
I don’t think this has much to do with the Conservatives’ new political orgasmatron, the American Voter Vault database programme, or Lynton Crosby, their sophisticated new campaign director. I think his recent successes in rallying and marketing the Conservatives would have been impossible if the political tide had not subtly begun to turn already. The interesting question is what has been making it turn.
It is clearly not yet anything to do with the economy or with public contempt for the prime minister’s lies about Iraq.
This change is due to the persistent, indefatigable efforts over many years of many individuals and small groups — not focus groups or highly paid spin doctors and publicity juju men, but intelligent and idealistic people on the right and centre right — who have tried to understand what matters in British society and to explain it to others.
Some of them are even journalists. But most are independent-minded people in think tanks and research groups. They have quietly and unglamorously been carrying the small “c” conservative torch where most Conservative politicians have been failing to lead at all, or even to agree among themselves. In the midst of the bitter Tory rout they have been preparing the intellectual way for a real opposition.
If you consider immigration and asylum, the recent change in public and political perception is due almost entirely to one man.
In 2001 it was impossible to excite the electorate about the chaos of the immigration system. William Hague’s attempts to do so in his campaign blew up in his face. He was accused of playing the race card and even his middle-class supporters were embarrassed. But whatever his motives, he was right.
The unacceptable truth was (then as now) that there was no immigration policy: immigration into this country was largely out of control; the asylum system was being abused in huge numbers with impunity; great social strains were emerging as a result; and the public had been lied to for years about all this. However, the electorate simply wasn’t prepared at that time to hear the truth.
Now it is. The Mori poll for the Financial Times showed that immigration and asylum were now rated the single most important issue by 23% of the electorate and one of the most important two or three by 40%. And it is not only indigenous people who are worried — 52% of ethnic minorities are, too (according to Mori in 2003), and probably more today.
So when at the end of January this year Michael Howard started talking tough on immigration, the Labour strategists — instead of sneering about Tories playing the race card or the numbers game — were panicked into talking tough too. They find themselves on the back foot over immigration largely because of the work of Sir Andrew Green, a former diplomat who runs a small independent research group called Migrationwatch UK.
Almost single-handedly and by using the government’s own figures he has blasted away the nonsense and right-on platitudes about immigration numbers and asylum abuse. It cannot be much fun; the work is highly contentious and rather boring too. It is difficult to accuse him of racism, but he is loathed in Whitehall, not least because the mandarins can never find anything wrong with his figures. Now that the media trusts them too, and publicises them, and the public believes them, the Conservatives are able to campaign about immigration without being howled down as racists.
What’s more, new Labour is being forced by the facts on to conservative territory, to follow a Tory lead. The change of mood here is almost amazing. The unsayable has become sayable and Labour policy. In mid-February the Conservatives revealed plans for compulsory health checks on migrants — taking a leaf from new Labour, they were announcing something they’d announced before — and Labour responded, almost incredibly, by saying that such health checks were its policy too.
There are signs of the same change in the national conversation about public spending. For years the orthodoxy has been that more public spending must be better. People against more public spending were by definition heartless, just as privatisation and profit were heartless. A Labour politician had only to cry “Tory cuts” to win any argument.
But after Labour boosted budgets by tens of billions in its second term the Conservatives produced their meticulous James review of what the taxpayer had got in return. Public-spending cuts are beginning to mean cutting waste, not cutting services.
It was the Tories’ commissioning of the James review that bumped the Labour government into commissioning its own Gershon review of the same subject — waste. New Labour now talks of cuts. But behind both reports is the impetus of many years of solid, unfashionable research by think tanks, and the popular versions of it put out by the media. The Institute of Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Centre for Policy Studies, Politea and Reform — and others — have for years been doggedly trying to point out the errors of the centre left orthodoxy: the dangers of state monopolies, of overregulation, over-taxation and welfare dependency.
Reform opened its presentation last week of its new Manifesto for Reform by stating that a third of the population in the UK received more than half of its income from the state. People are beginning to believe it. Politicians are beginning to feel they can say it without being seen as heartless, capitalist little Englanders.
This may not be a new dawn, but it is the beginning of the end of a long Conservative night, whatever the polls say.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 27, 2005 | Comments (0)
Where the boys show the girls how to do business
There is more than enough reality on television, without reality TV as well. Besides, there is something very odd about the idea of reality TV, as if the humiliation games played by gaggles of ditzy self-publicists were somehow as real, or perhaps even more real, than documentary footage of starving babies and bombed-out villages.
That is an extremely odd idea of reality and I think it contributes to the increasing public mood of unreality. Besides, humiliation is not my idea of a spectator sport.
At least, that is what I always used to feel — until last week.
Last Wednesday I suddenly became a reality TV addict; I am completely hooked on a TV series on BBC2 called The Apprentice; it is Anneka Rice meets John Harvey-Jones meets Anne Robinson, only far more sophisticated, and it is one of the best things that I have seen on television for a long time.
It centres on the astonishingly telegenic figure of Alan Sugar of Amstrad (the electronics group) fame and also of a huge self-made fortune. If he hadn’t made the big time in business, he could certainly have been extremely big in television.
The McGuffin — to use Hitchcock’s word for the central excuse for a drama — is that Sir Alan, as he is always deferentially called by all around him, is prepared to take on a young apprentice, ideally someone much like himself, at a six-figure salary.
We don’t really know what the apprentice will be supposed to do, or whether Sir Alan really needs one, but that doesn’t matter. The point of the show is to find one.
From thousands of hopeful young entrepreneurs across the country, the competitors have been reduced by the programme’s producers to 14 of the most outstanding, seven men and seven women. Rather oddly, they are always known as the boys and the girls, although most of them appear to be in their thirties; the world of the entrepreneur clearly has little time for the locutions of political correctness.
Sir Alan is putting them all up in a luxurious big house overlooking the Thames, plying them with champagne and rich treats to give them a taste of the fruits of entrepreneurial success, as well as impressing us viewers with the glamour of Sir Alan’s way of life.
In each programme he gives the competitors a real entrepreneurial task to do; in the first two they were divided into a girls’ team and a boys’ team. Last week each team had to buy £500 worth of flowers and sell them, somehow, at a profit by the day’s end. In the second week (of which I have seen a preview) they were given two days to research, design, make and present a new child’s toy (with professional help).
After each task they file into a plush boardroom where Sir Alan gives judgment of a breathtaking, gravelly bluntness that I was beginning to think had disappeared in this country; in the end the losing team leader has to choose two other team members to share responsibility for failure; after a painful interview, Sir Alan theatrically pronounces “You’re fired” at one of the three, who then has to wheel a sad suitcase home.
What a joy it is, I am ashamed to say, to watch all these desperately competitive young things fighting like ferrets in a sack. You would have to have a heart of stone not to find it funny, if often rather moving, too.
But beyond that, the whole thing is so unusually interesting. It’s about how business and competition actually work, so much so that it’s positively educational and worth showing in schools. And it throws up all kinds of ideas and possibilities and touches on many profound anxieties.
The first very problematic thing it throws up, or at least the first that struck me, is how hopeless most of the women were (at least when working with other women) compared with the men. They tried to be co-operative and conciliatory (in the way that women are usually supposed to do) but in fact they were constantly quarrelling, sulking, undermining each other and behaving like prima donnas.
They spent quite a lot of time on management speak, about how they see their roles and what they mean by leadership, but they were in fact divided, indecisive and resentful.
The only time when a woman was really decisive, it was in complete defiance of the best judgment of her entire team, although she didn’t really seem able to appreciate that; she even took a vote and then ignored it.
The boys, by contrast, talked a great deal less, co-operated far more, were far more decisive and seemed better able to make the most of each other’s abilities — contrary to all the clichés about gender difference. And they had much more fun.
The mystery of all this was that although the boys’ egos were clearly just as inflated as the girls’ (and probably more so), they were far better at controlling them in the interests of joint success. They seemed instinctively to know how to negotiate between co-operation and competition.
The girls’ dutiful efforts to persuade themselves that loyalty and co-operation were best were at times risible — most evident in the most hopeless cause, with misplaced loyalty. And the girls’ attempts to be manipulative — supposedly a female skill — were obvious and unsuccessful; the boys were much better at it.
Before anyone starts calling me a misogynist, I should say that I have been lucky enough to know or to meet many highly intelligent and successful women. I have also worked very happily indeed with lots of women, both colleagues and bosses, who were as good as, or better than, any man although sometimes in a different style.
I have lived in the Far East, where women have successfully run large and small enterprises, time out of mind. So this is not a rant against women in general. But it is a question. Why do these thirtyish would-be entrepreneurial women put up such a poor performance — so far at least — compared with the men? Is it just more difficult to find entrepreneurial women for some reason, just as it’s difficult to find women physicists and women chess players? (This is the sort of question, incidentally, which is likely to get the president of Harvard University in the United States hounded out of office.) I suspect that it might be a generational thing. Older women are more realistic and more pragmatic. Younger women are confused by conflicting ideas — on the one hand the demands of freebooting entrepreneurialism, and on the other the demands of politically correct, management handbook, personal development corporation-speak.
The boys seem largely indifferent to contemporary management culture and indeed say the most politically incorrect things.
As Sir Alan said about the sales technique of one of them, it may not be pretty but it works.
Entrepreneurialism is not pretty, but it works. And the reality of entrepreneurialism is something that most people in this country know very little about and feel very ambivalent about, important though we all know it is.
That is what, among many other things, makes this programme so addictive.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 20, 2005 | Comments (0)
Charles and Camilla aren’t heartless, they’re just posh
Many years ago, when I was first married and newly introduced to the rackety world of my parents-in-law, I used to see quite a bit of the late Derek Parker Bowles, the former father-in-law of our future Mrs King.
It was an odd world or so it seemed to me — glamorous, louche and heartless. Everyone was mad about racing, which meant horseracing, and most of them were owners and breeders (of horses, I mean). I often used to think I was rather a disappointment to my dear late father-in-law, because I was not a filly, which would have been much more interesting for him.
Most of the people in that world were upper-class or gentlefolk and many of them used to do a lot of fratting with the royal family on and off the racecourse including, notably, Derek Parker Bowles. He was hospitable to various of them and was a particular admirer of the Queen Mother.
In that world drink flowed astonishingly freely, the language was often blue and the conversation earthy. My late mother-in-law, at least, ought to have had Expletive Undeleted as her middle names.
It was considered good form to be amusing if possible, although many fell at the first as far as wit went. But Derek Parker Bowles was one of the funniest and most charming men I have met. On the few occasions when I was placed next to him at dinner, he made me laugh until I howled.
Even more entertaining, however, was the analysis of these occasions pronounced by my alarming mother-in-law without the slightest hint of sentiment or discretion. "Don’t be so bloody ridiculous," she would say. "Of course they’re not full brothers. Everyone knows that little Lord Jamie is by that ghastly man who went bust in the Caribbean."
She used to love telling stories about how somebody’s gardener had removed his employer’s dead body from the arms of his mistress in the spare bedroom, after an ill-timed heart attack, and out into the potting shed to save embarrassment all round.
I believe quite a few of my mother-in-law’s stories were true. At any rate I gradually came to understand the Edwardian nature of that world.
Forsaking all others did not appear to be part of the deal in marriage in those circles. Marriages could quite tolerably muddle on without being disturbed by extramarital adventures. Indeed, my mother-in-law openly had a lover for many years, a delightful man from her own circle. Nobody seemed to mind much.
Naturally it was considered sporting to have at least one child by the lawfully wedded husband and ideally two — Diana, Princess of Wales’s derided "heir and a spare" — but after that money and nannies could smooth away any awkwardnesses. Nanny Parker Bowles and Nanny Pilkington were friends of my husband’s nanny and all were called by their employers’ names. It was a different culture.
I mention all this because it is the culture in which both Camilla and Diana grew up. It is the culture in which the Prince of Wales could entirely understandably ask the enraged Diana why on earth he should be the first Prince of Wales not to have a mistress. It is the culture in which Camilla could famously challenge Charles about her great-grandmother being his great-great-grandfather’s mistress.
It was a culture in which Charles felt that he had to be provided with a "suitable" wife, whatever that might mean — as debatable as what being in love might mean to a prince under orders to marry. There was a kind of Edwardian understanding in those circles — old-fashioned to others but certainly still prevalent among courtiers and the rich upper classes until recently (and perhaps to this day), which everyone assumed that Diana would understand.
I believe she did. Diana was brought up in it, after all. Her family had been rich courtiers for generations. She was born on a royal estate. Her own sister had almost managed to marry Charles. The idea that she was an unsophisticated, blushing, romantic virgin has always seemed to me quite absurd.
Her cynical talk of keeping herself "tidy" for marriage — an extraordinarily old-fashioned idea for someone of her generation and one that suggests both a deep understanding of her own marriage prospects (following her sister’s failure) and her high ambition — shows that she was clearly a part of that Edwardian culture, too.
Those who see her as a lovestruck girl shocked and betrayed by a cynical older husband seem to me to have disregarded the culture in which all the protagonists were born and bred. Diana knew perfectly well what she was taking on in Charles. It is bad luck on all concerned — tragic, finally — that knowing it, and doing it anyway, she couldn’t or wouldn’t accept it.
Outside the charmed circle, the general public knew little of this Edwardian culture, imagining the Windsors to be models of romantic bourgeois propriety, and when it was exposed during the Wars of the Waleses they assumed, I think, that Diana was as shocked and misled as they were — hence the mass public sympathy for her.
That is why Camilla and Charles are seen as the villains. That is why sympathy for them today, or rather the "sympathetic indifference" towards them that pollsters detect, is so ambivalent. That is why they don’t get the enthusiastic congratulations that otherwise might be offered to a man and a woman who have loved each other devotedly for 30 years, indifferent to youth or beauty. That is why they worry about opinion polls and dream up feeble subterfuges such as the titles of Duchess of Cornwall or Princess Consort.
Under their own cultural rules they are innocent, but in terms of contemporary culture they are guilty and must find some sort of penitential posture.
I suspect that both Charles and Camilla behaved in an unfeeling, insulting way to Diana. I rather believe the stories that suggest they broke the Edwardian rules (as Diana did in a different way) by patronising and humiliating her, by ignoring her and making free with Highgrove when she was its proper mistress.
If it is true that they laid out flower beds together and spoke of "our roses" and gave dinner parties there during the marriage, then I think that was taking unsentimentality a great deal too far, especially since it was clear that Diana was unhappy. Whatever the truth, though, they ride under different rules from most people’s. Their tragedy was that they assumed rather coldly that Diana did, too. After all she had plenty of lovers as well.
The most high-minded among us, such as Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, regard all this royal engagement stuff as tosh and trivia and wholly unimportant. I am not so high-minded. I find it fascinating. But I am not sure what its importance is. One has the impression with the royal family that it is somehow, inexorably, fulfilling its destiny.
It will survive for as long as it meets some sort of publicly recognised need, or perhaps just a little longer. And I suspect this quiet wedding will make little public difference at all, except as the expression of the end of a particular era — an era that died, in reality, with Derek Parker Bowles’s generation.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 13, 2005 | Comments (2)
A few good (brawny) men could pacify our schools
The apathy of the British public is mysterious. Last week’s headlines about education should have driven people into a fury: “1.5m children denied decent education”; “More than one in 10 schools failing, says Ofsted”; “Schools crisis as discipline standards fall in classrooms”; “Curbs on truancy fail to cure school absentee problems”; “£885m blitz fails to get truants back into lessons ”.
The detail behind the headlines is worse and still more depressing. If anything ought to arouse public passion it is the shameful failure of education and the blighted hopes of millions of children, not to mention the damage to society as a whole.
There is an undeniable mass of evidence that British state schools aren’t working. Of course there are some that are good, or good enough. But the failures are extraordinary. In last week’s Ofsted report, David Bell, the chief inspector of schools in England, revealed that 40% of secondary school pupils, nearly 1.5m children, are not getting a decent education, and are “capable of much, much more”.
The proportion of schools where teaching was “only satisfactory” or unsatisfactory had risen slightly to just over 25%. Of 10,000 schools visited since 2001 a tenth had made unsatisfactory, poor or very poor progress.
The proportion of officially failed schools placed in the special measures category rose by nearly a fifth in a year. As for disruptive behaviour in the classroom, only one in three secondary schools was judged to have acceptable standards of behaviour — a worsening of the situation of five years ago.
There was a sharp rise in the percentage of schools where discipline was unsatisfactory or worse, and levels of good behaviour were at their lowest since Labour came to power. These findings are astonishing, especially considering the high priority new Labour promised to give to education, and the huge sums it has thrown at it.
It is an achievement of dome-like proportions to spend £885m since 1997 on measures to improve school attendance without making the slightest dent on the rate of truancy. The rate of absences from school — including absence with permission — has fallen by one percentage point. That is £885m of your money, torn up and scattered to the winds.
The true results of this disaster are plain to see. Last summer Tony Blair was forced to admit that it was indeed a “scandal” that one in four children left primary school without being able to read or count properly. Last December the National Audit Office reported that most school-leavers lacked the literacy and numeracy skills they needed to participate fully in the modern economy. An international survey found that the UK had a higher proportion of adults with poor literacy and numeracy than 13 other developed countries.
The Confederation of British Industry made much the same point, calling it a “national scandal” that leaves employers to “pick up the pieces and the bill” and pointing out that 60% of teenagers leave school without even a grade C in GCSE maths and English. Meanwhile, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has repeatedly approved lowering the pass mark for the national standard in English for 11-year-olds “to maintain standards”. Last year it was cut to 41; in 2002 it was 49. Almost half of universities and (according to the CBI) one in three companies feel obliged to give school-leavers remedial classes in reading and writing.
Need I go on? Government claims about rising standards in schools are ludicrous. How can we possibly have arrived at such a sorry point? More importantly, what, if anything, can be done? There are so many factors, most of them intractable — too few teachers, poorly qualified teachers, mixed ability teaching, excessive “inclusion” of children with severe problems, multiple language problems, disruptive children, bad homes, inadequate parents, absent parents, morale brought low by a bossy but incompetent government and its tangles of red tape, inadequate police support and a culture of low expectation in many schools.
Bad behaviour is one of the most universal problems; teachers cannot teach in a 21st century Bedlam cum Tower of Babel, in fear for their own safety.
Ruth Kelly, the new education secretary, has suddenly come out with a cunning plan of zero tolerance. Yet it seems only days since her predecessor, Charles Clarke, boldly announced his cunning plan to make all schools take their “fair share” of classroom thugs and wreckers, if only to ensure that not just some but all lessons everywhere are undermined. That’s equality, at least. Which, in its usual cynical vacillation, does Labour mean? If either? Zero tolerance makes common sense and would involve removing the school wreckers altogether, to the best of all possible sin bins. But neither could possibly succeed without important changes in the law and in the culture of paranoid anxiety that surrounds children.
I don’t believe in corporal punishment. But the reaction against it has gone to such extremes that you cannot, literally, lay a finger on a child. You will be suspected of sexual motives or of unacceptable aggression. Either way you will be in serious legal trouble. Children are well aware of this and exploit it skilfully.
Yet it is quite impossible to deal with aggressive, semi-feral children without some physical contact, whatever the risk of abuse. There are times when it is right for an adult to restrain a child, perhaps slightly roughly in extremes, or even to hug a child; both are necessary sometimes for authority and discipline and to provide the limits and the encouragement that troubled children need.
Some time ago I heard of a successful project in a sink school in Washington, where SAS-style soldiers were brought in both to be role models for unhappy, fatherless boys and to provide basic discipline, if only by the force of their physical presence; I remember thinking it could never happen here, because of the law.
In the communal garden where I live, one bad boy terrorised all the younger children for months while their parents stood around powerless to stop him for fear of the law. It wasn’t until a brave dad clipped the boy round the ear, to general astonishment, that the problem was solved — illegally. If community responsibility means anything that ought to have been legal.
On the same principle it ought to be possible for two or three teenage thugs to be marched forcibly out of a classroom without the threat of legal action. There ought to be more big brawny men around in schools, perhaps as classroom assistants in the absence of many male teachers, to be bigger than the playground bullies and able to take them on. Teachers need threats and sanctions, not least teachers in sin bins.
It’s true that when discipline in schools was strict it was sometimes excessive. It’s true there were abuses. But I often wonder whether the abuses of today — by schoolchildren against other schoolchildren and even against teachers — aren’t just as bad and more generally disastrous. This will not change unless the law is changed.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 06, 2005 | Comments (0)
