Just hand in your homework and go, Prime Minister

[Rob W 0]

Opinion - Matthew Parris

 

The Times March 18, 2006

 

No more excuses. Just hand in your homework and go, Prime Minister

Matthew Parris

THE WORST OF IT is the waste. The waste of brains, of talent, idealism and nervous energy — the sheer waste of time — as Cabinet ministers tour the broadcasting studios at ungodly hours in yet another desperate exercise to get the Prime Minister out of a new hole he’s dug.

*

What a waste of hope. Were I on the Centre Left I would this weekend be reflecting bitterly on how much remains to be done, as a Labour administration is stalled in mid-journey by the delusions and duplicities of a lame-duck leader. So many new ideas still to discuss; so many plans only half-completed; so much to think about, to talk to the nation about, to talk to each other about; such a store of early optimism, early idealism, early trust . . .

 

And all rotting away.

 

Political journalists love it. Lobby corrrespondents don’t want to talk about Crossrail, nuclear-generated electricity, DNA fingerprinting, child poverty, Trident, congestion charging, a new North-South rail line. Lies and misdemeanours are our stock-in-trade. We rejoice when the worthy gives way to the unworthy and a boring but important centrepiece of the parliamentary session is elbowed to the margins by some slimy little half-truth or grubby impropriety. When it does, time and again, the same name crops up: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

 

 

My ancient doubts are less important than new doubts among new Labour’s friends, but let me put my own opinion delicately. I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention — himself — has been his only interesting role.

 

Books could be written on which of Mr Blair’s assertions were ever wholly sincere, which of his claimed philosophies are genuine, and how far he temporarily persuades himself that each passing passion is real. But deconstructing Mr Blair’s mind is hopeless.

 

Suffice it to say that I used to believe that, at the moment of saying anything, our Prime Minister probably thought that what he said was true — that there was no secret, internal wink. Today I have lost confidence even in that.

 

Small things as much as large have formed my view. What kind of a man would walk out of the Chamber as his former ally, Frank Field, rose to offer a patently heartfelt explanation of his reasons for standing down? Knowing what we do today about Mr Blair, would he still get the benefit of our doubt over the Bernie Ecclestone affair? What kind of a man would employ Alastair Campbell as his mouthpiece to history? What kind of a man would have given journalists on a plane to China the clear and false impression that he had had nothing to do with the outing of Dr David Kelly?

 

What kind of a man makes Silvio Berlusconi his friend and incurs a personal debt of gratitude to that bad, bad man? What kind of a Prime Minister neglects the courtesy and gratitude owed to his man in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, quitting early after heart trouble? What kind of a man leaves friends as different as the late Roy Jenkins, Paddy Ashdown, and his own Chancellor privately despairing that they can ever rely on the Prime Minister’s word again?

 

And what kind of a man dispatches his “personal envoy to the Middle East”, Lord Levy, to drill vast sums of money from little-known tycoons with hopes of taking life peerages, and hushes it up?

 

Another thing we know is that the Prime Minister recognised that if a gift were declared then the chain of events would be judged disgraceful. So the money was hidden: hidden even from his own party treasurer. And if Mr Blair believes now that the funding of parties needs reform, why not earlier — in his recent manifesto, for instance? You know why. He never meant to put matters right. He has been caught out.

 

The genius Mr Blair showed this week in extricating himself from this latest corner was breathtaking. If a burglar, caught red-handed, should by effrontery and oratory make from the dock so stirring a call for the fundamental reform of the Theft Acts that the whole court were distracted from the charge and persuaded to “move on” . . . then the tour de force would hardly be more impressive.

 

Our PM has the magician’s knack of drawing the eye away from the trick. Should a fraction of his talent for getting himself out of trouble be deployed in some wider national purpose, Britain would probably have conquered the universe by now. He reminds me of those schoolboys whose form masters report that if they devoted to their homework half the dedication they devote to getting out of doing it, they would be the envy of the school.

 

It is occasionally reported that some poor woman falls in love with a professional fraud and remains his wife for years without realising what she has married. The British electorate are such a woman. Mr Blair’s misdeeds are persistently overlooked, and his excuses credited. By the time we wake up he may have torn his party and its programme apart.

 

They must accept that he is no longer an asset to the new Labour cause and that, if they do not cut him loose soon, he may drag a whole brave political project down with him. There is not much time to lose.

[Tom_NUFC 0]

You know what, I don't always agree with Matthew Parris, him being a Tory and all, but he's right.

 

Blair isn't right in the head. He's a control freak.

[Rob W 0]

I've been getting uneasy about Blair for a while but I think Paris is right - he REALLY beleives whatever comes into his head at the time

[snakehips 0]

Rumour has it that some people actually believed he (Blair) is a socialist

[snakehips 0]

I see Geoff Hoon is going to be on Jonathan Dimbleby's show today. Is there a more slick, greasy, slimey politician out there than him? Doubt it. Waste of time having him on trying to ask him questions on Labour donations - no answers worth listening to whatsoever.

 

*makes a note to put Geoff Hoon on the 'poeple you most want to punch' list, behind Jamie Oliver and Davina McCall*

[Happy Face 29]

One week Blair, the next week Brown...

 

Regrettably, I have seen the future. It is dull, miserable and Brown

 

Matthew Parris

 

YOU CAN SEE one of the Right Hon gentleman’s jokes, said Chris Patten once of a Westminster sparring partner, “coming from the other end of Victoria Street”. You can see a Gordon Brown joke from farther off than that. At the Commons dispatch box this week the Chancellor of the Exchequer heaved the verbal furniture laboriously into place for the arrival in his Budget statement of a merry quip. Early drafts of the speech, awash with figures and percentage points, had probably left a small space blank except for the instruction: “(Insert joke)”.

 

Early on Wednesday afternoon, the joke appeared over the horizon and began lumbering up Victoria Street and towards the dispatch box. We braced ourselves.

 

*

“And I hold to our pledge,” he thundered, “not to extend VAT to a number of items . . .”

 

Not to? Something funny going on here . . .

 

“Food, books and newspapers, public transport fares and children’s clothes and children’s shoes . . .”

 

Oh Lord, not a shoe joke? Not that second-hand gibe at the Tories? “. . . including flip-flops.” Boom-boom.

 

A Brown joke. In fact there were two in all. You spoil us, Chancellor! If a certain lightness of touch was missing — well, as Samuel Johnson said after hearing a woman preach: “Like a dog walking on his hinder legs, it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

 

Merriment is not this Chancellor’s stock-in-trade. Nor, though, need it be. Not every fine speech is funny. But as I listened later to a recording of that interminable Budget speech (Ann Treneman says she lost the will to live) a gloomy realisation stole over me. We who follow politics are in for a very dull time. A desert stretches before us. This man is going to make an extremely boring prime minister.

 

They say the shelf life of a leader in power seldom exceeds seven years, by which time he begins to bore us. But Mr Brown has been jointly leading the country for eight years already. And he’s boring already.

 

Pin back your ears, fellow-citizens, and batten down the hatches. Pull your duvets over your heads. We are on the threshold of a period of dreadful tedium. Within a year or two a big, square, heavy-jawed, growly-voiced Scotsman will be at No 10, banging the table, shouting at us, hectoring us, boasting to us, scolding us, interrupting us and storming his way through interviews in which interlocutors barely get a word in edgeways.

 

And little of it will be memorable. Little will engage. Little will enlighten. Little will cohere. It will be all sound, fury, excuses and bragging, signifying nothing. So prepare yourselves for an age of speechifying and media-barnstorming which will leave no trace in the national brain except a faint ringing in the ears. Prepare yourself for lectures at whose conclusion the very few who have had the stamina to stay to the end will be asked what Mr Brown has just said and, reeling, be forced to reply: “You know, I really haven’t the faintest idea.” Prepare yourself for the futile game of pinning the ideological tail onto the donkey: is he Left, is he Right, is he anything?

 

Prepare yourselves for an epoch in which our Prime Minister stamps furiously around in a forest of words, flattening small trees and shrubs, but marking no clear intellectual path in any direction. And prepare yourself to be bored silly.

 

The easiest and perhaps cheapest criticism to direct at our next Prime Minister is that he is deficient in both eloquence and delivery. But I suppose it’s a fair defence of him to say that these are matters more of style than of substance, and though Mr Brown may have little feel for the English language and little apparent interest in hiring speechwriters who do, and though even the most elegantly phrased oration would turn to mud in the mouth of a Chancellor with so little sense of light and shade, so little pace, rhythm or timing . . . still, that is very far from saying he is incapable of communicating in ways that are interesting, or saying anything important. After all, there are people of depth and thoughtfulness who can give no good account of themselves from the rostrum; and there are shallow fools who can briefly impress.

 

I accept that. I would like to believe that though Mr Brown’s speeches and interviews fail as performances, they repay closer textual study.

 

The late Nicholas Ridley made speeches as dusty as his right-wing Conservatism was dry, but they deserved study. The late Angus Maude had a speaking style which was vinegary and cold, and so does his son Francis, but the speeches of both are always worth reading. And the history of the Left is stacked with dull orators whose argument leaps from the chapter of the history book, even though from the podium it seldom took wing.

 

If Gordon Brown were one of these, then I suppose we who write about politics should purse our lips and accept that we have in store many years, perhaps, of a national leader who does not tell his own story particularly well, but who has a story to tell.

 

We might conclude that the “narrative” of this man’s politics will be sought through intelligent study of what he says, rather than how he phrases or delivers it — or sought, even, not through his words at all, but his actions.

 

*

His supporters must hope so. For my own part I find in his speeches and interviews something more troubling than crypticism, inelegance or a tin ear. To me the appearance does say something about the reality. Beneath the apparent incoherence lurks the real incoherence: a political philosophy like an unmade bed. These are the speeches of a deeply unconfident man.

 

A confident politician welcomes the opposing case or apparently awkward fact and saunters towards either, ready to duel. Gordon Brown greets both with anger and tries to squash them. Almost never does he feel able to smile at himself. Almost never does he show the generosity that engages with the strengths of his opponent’s case: instead he sets about it with a club. He batters; he swats at things; he never parries. At the end of any argument the floor is littered with squashed facts, and Mr Brown has almost never lost; but very rarely won.

 

And close study of his argument suggests a strange evasiveness: behind the noisy, almost bullying, style, lies a mind ducking and diving and anything but bold. He shows no pleasure in debate, as though for him it were a kind of marathon filibuster until the bell rings — with, hopefully, nothing conceded. Almost nothing ever is. But what is gained? I wonder whether here is a man with a powerful brain and brilliant recall, well able to marshal facts and figures, but with fear in the pit of his stomach. Fear about where he really wants to go; fear about what he actually believes, what theoretical framework he can find on which to thread the beads of knowledge and ability of which he has such a rich store; fear of philosophical confusion.

 

The very best speakers lift hearts, spirits and imaginations: they can move and amuse. They inspire. Gordon Brown is not one of these.

 

All good speakers, though they may not inspire, can make a case, in a clear and appealing way: they can change minds. They persuade. Gordon Brown is not one of these.

 

Reasonable speakers, though they may not inspire or persuade, can set out facts, background and logic in a way which adds to knowledge and understanding. They can describe new ideas. They can explain. Gordon Brown is hardly even one of these.

 

Adequate speakers, though they may not inspire, persuade or explain, can hold an audience’s attention for half an hour without trying its patience. They do not cause suffering. A Brown speech actually hurts.

 

Prepare to suffer.

[Guest alex]

Would that be ex-Tory MP, Matthew Parris?

[Rob W 0]

Aye that's the man

 

But he's about as left as they come in the Tory Party

[Guest alex]

Aye that's the man

 

But he's about as bent as they come in the Tory Party

110987[/snapback]

Rob!

[Happy Face 29]

Aye that's the man

 

But he's about as left as they come in the Tory Party

110987[/snapback]

 

'Left' on Clapham common in a pool of his own blood and faeces.

 

 

 

 

Allegedly

[Guest alex]

He's openly gay tbh.

[Happy Face 29]

He's openly gay tbh.

111012[/snapback]

 

But does he openly prowl around Clapham Common, or just tell everyone about other ministers that do?

[Guest alex]

He's openly gay tbh.

111012[/snapback]

 

But does he openly prowl around Clapham Common, or just tell everyone about other ministers that do?

111016[/snapback]

That I don't know