Next Thursday, voters in the UK’s 12 European constituencies, 27 shire counties and seven unitary authorities will go to the polls in the most extraordinary circumstances. There is, as Martin Vander Weyer argues on page 25, no shortage of local issues to exercise us in the county council elections, just as the unratified Lisbon Treaty ought, in theory, to loom large in the European elections on 4 June. In practice, of course, this so-called ‘Super Thursday’ will be something altogether different: the first true snapshot of public fury at the MPs’ expenses scandal, and a measure of how deep that crisis really is.
Labour is bracing itself for a punishment beating that will make last year’s drubbing — in which it suffered its worst local election results in 40 years, was forced into third place and lost London to Boris Johnson — look like a light swipe with a feather duster. Even those close to Gordon Brown fear an electoral meltdown that will, quite simply, make his continued occupation of Number 10 untenable.
The Prime Minister is notoriously stubborn and prone to believe that bad opinion polls and local election results are merely evidence of popular ‘false consciousness’: the public, Brown insists, will come round eventually to his supposedly masterly command of the ‘issues’. But a sufficiently bad result for Labour on Thursday will render such convictions irrelevant.
Although a formal challenge to the incumbent party leader would require an alternative candidate to secure the backing of 20 per cent of Labour MPs (that is, 70 signatures), the dual pressure of round-robin letters and private representations to the PM by senior Cabinet colleagues could quickly force Mr Brown’s hand. It seems, faute de mieux, that Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, has emerged as the Pearly Dauphin and there is a growing consensus in Labour’s ranks that his cheery countenance and plain-speaking manner might spell the difference in the next general election between mere humiliation and outright catastrophe.
But if Mr Johnson is the answer, then the question is wrong. The principal issue facing the polity in the early summer of 2009 is not the parochial matter of the Labour party’s electoral fate, but how best to restore confidence in the broken-backed political system. That confidence has been in steady decline for years, and has suffered a series of ferocious body blows since the Telegraph began its disclosures. Those who whinge about ‘McCarthyism’ and ‘witch-hunts’ only make themselves look pathetic, and debase these already overused terms. The point about Senator McCarthy’s hearings and the hysterical pursuit of witches in the 16th century is that the innocent paid a terrible price. The point about the expenses scandal is that the MPs in question are bang to rights: they have done wrong and they are, quite justly, being called to account. The real scandal is not the Telegraph investigation and the internal party inquiries it has triggered, but the collective cover-up of the expenses racket that preceded the new transparency.
That said, there is now an urgent need to put parliament back on a sound footing where, for starters, it is not a laughing stock and, in due course, it can win back its moral authority. On Tuesday, David Cameron delivered a well-argued speech on the need for broad reform of the nation’s political structure and the distribution of power within it. When we at the Spectator hear the words ‘new politics’, we start counting the spoons. One can detect this sort of rhetoric in Macmillan’s book The Middle Way, Heath’s first speeches as Tory leader, Wilson’s promise of a ‘New Britain’, John Major’s ‘civic conservatism’ and Citizen’s Charter, Tony Blair’s solemn pledges to ‘hand back power’ to the voters, and Gordon Brown’s intermittent enthusiasm for institutional reform and the ‘personalisation’ of public services.
The difference between Mr Cameron and his forebears is twofold. First, 21st-century technology has made it possible to speak of the ‘post-bureaucratic era’ with honesty: thanks to the digital revolution, the true devolution of power away from the apparat and the elite to the citizen and to the consumer of public services is now feasible. Transparency is easily achieved: witness the posting of MPs’ expenses online. It is not hard, likewise, to imagine parents and businesses collaborating on the web to take advantage of the Conservatives’ plans for independently established schools. If there is a Cameron revolution, it will probably be defined by a new historical phenomenon: a ‘progressivism’ which is e-led rather than elite-led.
Second, as James Forsyth points out on page 8, Mr Cameron does not have the luxury of his predecessors — namely, to kick all this into the long grass once he is in Number 10. The consumerisation of personal behaviour, coupled with the growing contempt for the political class, means that the next Prime Minister dare not renege on his promise to transfer power from the centre to individuals and communities. Such treachery really would be a recipe for pitchforks and tumbrils in Whitehall.
As the local and European election results roll in, we shall see how close we already are to a rising of the suburban sans-culottes, a taking to the barricades by Mondeo Man. Even now, it is perfectly clear that the status quo is not an option, that the voters’ fury is intense and of a quite different order to routine grumbling.
Parliament, usually regarded by the public as a dusty institution, is now seen universally as a fortress of spivs and thieves. It is impossible to conceive how the occupants of that fortress can continue to legislate until May 2010. Its authority has drained like water from a bath, and is no more retrievable. In this context, Mr Brown’s fate is a secondary matter. Mr Cameron’s reform plans — however sound — are not the highest priority. Whatever happens on 4 June, the public will continue to seethe with righteous anger until they are given the chance to vote for a new parliament in a general election. All else is a distraction.
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