The Spectator’s Notes
It is surprising that the Cameron camp is so pleased that it was Ed, not David. Miliband ma does, indeed, have the more centrist politics of the two, but it was clear from Ed’s speech to his conference on Tuesday that he has a freedom which his big brother would have lacked. There is a great demand at present for a moral vision which attacks globalisation (he was artful to relate immigration to this), bankers, deregulation, the Iraq war. For Labour, these attacks are ways of getting out from under the weight of the later Blair/Brown years — hence Mr Miliband’s disparagement of ‘the company we kept’. I thought his approach was, at bottom, sentimental, and can be exposed as such. But, at a time of crisis both of money and ‘values’, it has some appeal. It also has a chance of making people doubt Mr Cameron’s own ‘We’re all in this together’ sincerity. If you compare the two men, Mr Cameron obviously seems the wiser, more substantial one. But Mr Miliband has made a good start as the one who cares more. He might make the Liberals wobble. There could be a real fight here.
Contemplating my own ‘squeezed middle’, I wonder whether Mr Miliband is, as he says, on my ‘side’. My immediate instinct is that he isn’t, not so much because of his politics as because of his age. For the first time in my life, all the party leaders are younger than I am. All were born after England’s victory in the World Cup in 1966 — David Cameron in October of that year, Nick Clegg the following January and Mr Miliband on Christmas Eve 1969. I would not argue that my own generation (I am 53) has made a uniquely distinguished contribution to our public life — our best offering was Tony Blair — but it does seem strange that, in a country whose population is unprecedentedly old, youth has become compulsory for our leaders. Why has this happened? The main reason is the famous ‘24-hour news cycle’. It demands that people look fresh on the telly all the time, and bounce up the steps to pointless meetings at a cracking pace. Older people are no good at this, so more than half the adult population is effectively excluded from the highest office. Young people famously complain that their parents’ generation does not understand them, but it is equally true, perhaps even truer, the other way round. Being ruled by young people is not necessarily unpleasant, but if you are older than they, it does add to the air of unreality which is anyway such a strong feature of modern politics. Richard West, the admired former contributor to this magazine, was once sacked from a newspaper for forging a letter from a youth club in Liverpool which said, ‘Why can’t we have a teenage Pope?’ But perhaps he was on to something. It is important to keep the young busy.
As well as confining their leaderships to a three-year age band, the parties have also picked people of — allowing for the cultural difference between each party — very similar backgrounds. All are white, heterosexual, comfortably off men. All three went to Oxford or Cambridge. One went to Eton, one to Westminster and Mr Miliband to Haverstock, the Eton of his Labour generation. All have spent most or — in Mr Miliband’s case — virtually all of their working lives paid for by politics, living in London or Brussels. Where is the diversity which they all bid us celebrate as a feature of modern Britain? True, Mr Clegg is partly Dutch, and Mr Miliband is sort of Belgian, but that hardly counts.
These similarities of background are symptoms of the narrow range of our politics. All three adhere to a fairly sensible orthodoxy of social democratic moderation. Mr Cameron has the best attitude of the three to the role of the modern state, but the philosophical differences are not huge. We lack ways of talking interestingly about so many things that matter — the nature of the United Kingdom, the military ethos, the role of high culture, the purpose of education, the future of Europe, the difference between London and the rest, the threats to world peace, the relationship between tax, poverty and aspiration, and a view of the environment which is not stiflingly priggish.
Mr Miliband complains that ‘parents can’t do the best for their kids, working 60 or 70 hours a week’. But he has been too busy to ‘get around’ to marrying the mother of his child and even to put his name as the child’s father on the birth certificate. Does this terrible lack of time qualify him to speak up for other hard-pressed parents, or is his negligence so extreme as to disqualify him from saying anything about family life at all?
Having a slight theory that ‘good’ television is generally worse than ‘bad’ television, I switched on Downton Abbey on ITV on Sunday night reluctantly. I assumed that, since Julian Fellowes prides himself on knowing about upper-class people, the accuracy of the detail would strangle the life from the story. I need not have worried. It was a delight. There was quite enough melodrama to suit the form (two of family down with the Titanic, for a start), a good supply of pretty women, golden turrets glowing in the sun etc. But what made this different was the sense that the series sees the world through the eyes of the participants instead of constantly saying to itself, ‘Look at these funny old Edwardians!’ The detail was indeed accurate (the fact, for example, that people waited only briefly in the drawing-room before dinner and never had a drink), but the greatest accuracy was in the spirit of the whole. The conflict between the entail which keeps the estate together and the interests of the daughters whom it deprives of money seemed absolutely real, as did the bleakness of life for the lame valet when the earl finally succumbs to below-stairs pressure and dismisses him. The story is not only about Edwardians (early Georgians to be precise, since this is 1912), it is Edwardian. It is also brave. I never thought I should live to see a television drama in which an earl is a hero and two homosexuals are the villains.
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