MPs returned to Westminster this week during a spell of hot, sultry weather more characteristic of late July than mid-October. They sweated up in the corridors, mopped their brows in the chamber, sat in shirtsleeves on the Commons terrace (apart from the Liberal Democrats, who at first did not return at all; the recall of Parliament at the end of a 10-week break was a therapeutic ‘away day’ for party spokesmen. To be fair to Charles Kennedy, his absence was barely discernible).
Tony Blair added to this troubling sense of unreality. President Talebani of Iraq has been in town. The Iraqi President and the British Prime Minister called journalists to Downing Street to provide reassurance that British troops will stay ‘as long as it takes’ and Iraq was en route to a secure and prosperous future. The Talebani visit was a reminder of how readily two parallel worlds can co-exist: the official narrative set out by politicians in documents and public utterances, and the lives people actually live.
This dualism has come to define Tony Blair’s premiership. The Prime Minister has long been engaged in an unavailing struggle to reconcile instructions with outcomes. In his first term he ordered public service reform, then was baffled when nothing happened. In his second term he invaded another country, and has been just as taken aback by the devastating consequences. Life has played a grim joke on the Prime Minister: nothing fits in with the tidy reality as observed from the Downing Street sofa and constructed by speechwriters.
This week Tony Blair has embarked on what is perhaps his final attempt to impose his own trajectory on events, and thus define his destiny. There will be an education White Paper next week, while last Monday the PM outlined counter-terrorism policy. Needless to say, it was instantly in a mess. Tony Blair told journalists in Downing Street there was a ‘good and compelling case’ for holding terror suspects for three months without charge, while Charles Clarke reiterated the Home Office line that there was ‘no fixation’ with the 90 days’ upper limit.
This little clash with Charles Clarke indicates the new difficulty Tony Blair will face as he embarks on his final term in office. He no longer intimidates Cabinet colleagues. I am reliably told that quite a number of the most senior members of the Cabinet now routinely brief against the Prime Minister. They tend to be disenchanted by Tony Blair’s increasingly random interventions and ever shorter attention span. The preposterous ‘12-point plan’ against terrorism, launched by the Prime Minister without sensible consultation with officials, is the kind of thing that makes ministers incautious with their contemptuous utterances. The Prime Minister has one last chance to bully colleagues: a Cabinet reshuffle. I hear that the notoriously itinerant John Reid, who does well if he lasts 12 months in a given post, may be moved to the Home Office to replace the errant Clarke.
But the story of the week remains the Conservative leadership. The withdrawal of Malcolm Rifkind means that there are likely to be just four contenders. These will become three after MPs vote for the first time this Tuesday, and the final ballot will be held on Thursday afternoon. We should know the identity of the two MPs who will go to the ‘country’ by the time The Spectator lands on readers’ doormats next weekend.
To understand the dynamics of the next few days it is necessary first to look back. The events of 4 and 5 October in Blackpool were the most astonishing in my lifetime as a political reporter. There is a very instructive analysis to be written about the 24 hours or so that elapsed between the moment David Cameron strode into the Winter Gardens ballroom on Tuesday morning, and the eclipse of David Davis the following day. It could tell us something about the Conservative party, and everything about the new rules of political engagement in the 21st century.
The skills of the traditional political reporter are not merely inadequate, but actually present an obstacle to understanding what happened. In conventional terms David Davis made no worse than a moderate speech, and David Cameron was no better than good. The best effort of all, by far, came from Ken Clarke, and little help it did him. To explain the life-changing effect of Cameron’s little 15-minute oration one needs to look further afield: towards semiotics, philosophy and, most relevant of all, literary criticism.
Novelists have always made satirical play with the elision of reality and perception. The murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons in Huckleberry Finn had its origins in a benign remark wrongly interpreted as an insult. P.G. Wodehouse’s novels make frequent comic use of a collective ruling, invariably instigated by an aunt, that Bertie Wooster has become engaged to be married. Paul Pennyfeather was not the perpetrator of the obscene act on which Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall hinges. Poor David Davis is like Pennyfeather — sent to jail for a crime that he never committed.
In his essay ‘How to Recognise a Poem When You See One’ the literary theorist Stanley Fish turned his attention to cases like these. Fish has helpfully produced the useful concept of the ‘interpretative communities’, capable of reaching powerful judgments which are nevertheless dramatically at variance with the real meaning of the text. The interpretative community which confounded David Davis during those definitive 24 hours was the media. On the evening of David Cameron’s alleged triumph one journalist was heard saying to another, ‘Tomorrow’s story: Davis bombs.’ The following morning, as Davis strolled to the podium, a Guardian reporter turned to a friend and remarked, ‘He’s like a condemned man going to the gallows.’
The prophecy became self-fulfilling. As the long, sustained applause died down after Davis’s speech the broadcasters went straight to work. Nick Robinson of the BBC and Adam Boulton of Sky both assessed him as no worse than a bit disappointing. The lively figure was Tom Bradby, the new political editor of ITV News, who instantly went on air and declared, ‘Davis has bombed, and bombed badly.’ I have discussed this report with Bradby, who leads a double life as a bestselling thriller writer, and he insists that his judgment was based on rigorous interviews with Tory representatives on the floor. There have been few more dramatic entrances to political journalism at the top level than Bradby’s. At the Labour conference his cool and assured judgment turned Walter Wolfgang into a national sensation after the BBC ignored Wolfgang’s eviction from the floor. Likewise, at Blackpool he was way ahead of the game. The interesting question is this: did Bradby not just explain but also intervene in the events he reported?
David Cameron, the new favourite to become Tory leader, is to all intents and purposes a fiction. He is the author of a brilliant speech which never really happened, a man of dazzling talents that he does not possess. The real Cameron, of course, staggers on under the burden of artifice and interpretation. How well he lives with this weird new identity will determine the result next week and, who knows, maybe the election in four years’ time.
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