The 1997 Christmas special of The Mrs Merton Show probably doesn’t feature in many people’s formative political memories, but it remains with me more than a quarter-century later. Caroline Aherne, as the bitchy old biddy who made celebrities squirm, turned her smiling-assassin interview style on Edwina Currie, there to flog a book. After introducing her guest as ‘the female Margaret Thatcher’ and asking to check the back of her head for a 666 tattoo, Aherne invited Horace Mendelsohn, a Stockport pensioner and Mrs Merton regular, down onto the sofa. The old boy proceeded to harangue the ex-minister on her party’s record in office before the two sparred over the new Labour government’s pledge to cut NHS waiting lists. Currie predicted that Mendelsohn would come to feel as disillusioned by Labour as he did by the Tories, but he wasn’t having it.
‘As bad as they are, this lot is definitely more capable and better than the government we’ve had for the last 18 years,’ he told her. ‘Give them 18 years and you won’t be saying that,’ Currie warned. Without missing a beat, he shot back: ‘I won’t be here in 18 years.’ (Mendelsohn died in 2009.) At the time, I couldn’t understand why this exchange struck a chord with me – in my defence, I was 11 – but I knew instinctively that Currie was right. Which wasn’t an easy thought to handle. Our family was Labour and, 666 tattoo or not, Currie was one of Satan’s foot-soldiers. In time, I came to learn that what she was articulating was cynicism and though I have resisted its logic over the years, it is where my own political thinking is now firmly planted.
So the early signs that Labour will be as politically inert and ethically dubious as the Tories aren’t surprising to me. Sir Keir Starmer is stuffing the civil service with political apparatchiks and handing donors all-access passes to Downing Street? I am shocked – shocked – to find that politics is going on in here. But some really are shocked. James Ball, political editor of the New European, finds it ‘baffling’ that Number 10 isn’t ‘in full “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach” mode’ since ‘the public is absolutely sick of stuff with even a whiff of seediness or impropriety after Boris Johnson’s premiership and Partygate’. He says that while it’s ‘not true’ that Labour is as bad as the Tories, ‘it’s downright embarrassing they’ve opened the door to that incredibly predictable attack’. How, he wonders, could this happen when the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was previously ‘a senior ethics official’ in the civil service.
There is something endearing about this mindset, right down to the invoking of Sue Gray. ‘How many goodly creatures are there here!’ Managerial centrists think of themselves as pragmatists but you will struggle to find anyone more idealistic. Their idealism is not for a set of ideas but for a set of people, the people who should always run the country because they alone possess the necessary ability, intelligence and ethical fibre. They are metropolitan graduates with a progressive (but not too progressive) worldview. They are for experts, immigration and the EU and against populism, Trump and the menace of disinformation. None would be out of place in an Aaron Sorkin drama. They are the grown ups and we are very fortunate to have them back in charge.
It’s not just about ethical judgement; we are beginning to hear doubts about the government’s direction, or lack thereof. Labour economist David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, is seldom unburdened by an opinion and already has several on Sir Keir Starmer’s government. For her social spending cuts, he has dubbed the Chancellor ‘Slasher Reeves’, which makes her sound like the hockey-masked antagonist of an Eighties horror movie. Professor Blanchflower, a long-time intellectual pin-up among progressives, accuses Labour of having ‘no clear economic ideas at all’ and ‘no vision’.
This is a little awkward since he signed an open letter to the Guardian in June stating that ‘Labour provides a credible economic alternative… and that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves offer a combination of stability and an ambitious set of reforms to help grow the economy’. Blanchflower’s confidence in Labour lasted only slightly longer than Liz Truss’s premiership and that lettuce. (The professor says he signed the letter because ‘the alternative was much worse’ and that ‘fourteen years of the heartless, evil, incompetent Tories was enough’. He assumed Labour ‘had fine secret planning, but seems I was wrong’.)
My intention isn’t to sneer at Ball or Blanchflower; I share the latter’s analysis of Labour’s grim fiscal conservatism. In voicing their misgivings early on, they are doing the honourable thing. Contrast their candour with the partisan hackery of the Starmerbros, those pundits who seem to regard the Prime Minister as a member of the witness protection programme and themselves as the marshals assigned to guard him. But Ball and Blanchflower’s political instincts display all the hallmarks of progressive doctrine and its flawed understanding of human nature. They see politics as a contest between Good People with Good (i.e. progressive) Intentions and Bad People with Bad (i.e. conservative) Intentions. This is a function of idealism and its credo that politics is about values, but politics is not about values, it’s about the acquisition and exercise of power to the benefit of favoured interests and the detriment of disfavoured ones. Politics is not the pursuit of virtue but of outcomes. It leaves consideration of saints and sinners to the Almighty.
Edwina Currie was right: every political party lets its voters down in the end. Once you accept that, and understand that politics is about the allocation of resources rather than the distribution of virtue, you don’t have to worry about disillusionment. Extract what you can in exchange for your vote and expect nothing more.
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