Speaking of leaders

Lloyd Evans

Thursday, 20th November 2008

Lloyd Evans compares the parliamentary styles of Brown, Cameron and Clegg

As the New Labour project draws to a close, one myth has been embarrassingly exploded. The economy was never the pliant house-trained pet the Labour leadership pretended. In fact, ever since 1997, we’ve all been bit-players in a two-act comedy scripted by Tony Boom and Gordon Bust. The closing scenes had already begun when Blair, with characteristically faultless timing, ducked behind the curtain for good. Ever since his departure the government has felt like a venture capital business whose boss has been headhunted. The sparkle has gone but the photocopier still works. Initiatives and directives continue to splurge from Whitehall. More policies here, new guidance notes there, all of them fashioned around the mirage of ‘fairness’.

No one exemplifies this deathbed tinkering better than the Prime Minister. With his ashen hair, sad eyes and slackening doughball jowls he has the look of Nixon during his exit throes. At PMQs he hunches at the despatch box, leaning heavily on one elbow like an uncertain sailor gazing queasily at the deepening swells. Years in Parliament have taught him a narrow range of tricks. Flexibility, originality and quick-footedness aren’t among them. Like a mediaeval siege engine he blunders into battle flinging out heavy-duty ballistics at all opponents. If he misses he has no alternative but to chuck more. His great gift, his head for figures, is so extraordinary that it must put him close to abnormal on the spectrum.

Like the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man, there’s something compulsive and almost involuntary about his stat-o-mania. Questioned over knife crime earlier this year, he quoted the precise number of teenagers frisked in a recent stop-and-search initiative in London. In June, answering a point about Mugabe’s rigged elections, he reminded the house that Zimbabwe has 9,400 polling stations. Percentages and proportions, increases in funding, billion-pound price tags attached to new schools and hospitals, he has armies of digits at his fingertips and he sends them forth in great buzzing swarms to intimidate his opponents and reinforce his air of invincible authority. When challenged he replies with a lordly brush-off, ‘I don’t accept your figures.’

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Kram Ekosum

November 20th, 2008 4:50pm Report this comment

Erudite and interestingly painted images of the three leaders. It is a huge shame that the majority of the "intelligentsia" do not share your perspicacity

Jim

November 20th, 2008 5:27pm Report this comment

You seem to be distracted by the show.

What links them all together us that they don't yet realise the gravity of the problems facing the country. Therefore they don't have any solutions.

They can't bring back justice because of the European Union. They are all thinking taxes will have to rise after the election to pay off our debts, but the tax base is collapsing.

New companies can't start up because of regulatory burdens and already high tax. So something has to give to enable change.

None of them offer me any reason to sell my gold and start a new business. I don't really see the attitude and legislative changes necessary to make me think about doing that.

You should remember that the public has to force change in how we are governed before any new business has a chance of being successful. We won't be at that stage for many years I fear.

In the meantime you may be good at describing them, but there is nothing inside their heads, and that is what is important.