You know what the British voter is like. Let him learn that you have won the Derby or saved a golden-haired child from a burning building, and yours is the name he puts a cross against on his ballot paper, but tell him that somebody has knocked your topper off with a Brazil nut and his confidence in you is shaken. He purses his lips and asks himself if you are the right man to represent him in the mother of Parliaments.
PG Wodehouse, Cocktail Time
Forgive me if my habitually placid cheeks appear a morsel flustered.
For the first time since we bartered off our glorious empire in what I like to call a fit of bankrupt absence, something happened in Great Britain this week that, fingers crossed, might yet prove noteworthy on the international stage.
One doesnt delight in over-blowing these things, but it is awfully tricky not to get jittery when your snout whiffs a political whirlwind on the horizon. Particularly when that horizon lies off the Southampton coast and the wind smells of herring.
British politics, for those of you inexcusably un-boned in its labyrinthine chicaneries, tends to sort-of-work like this: rhetorically, the two major political parties argue like husband and wife over the proper use of state power the Tories contend an eagerness to privatise everything and render their own governments impotent; the Socialists declare a yen to grind the levers of the nanny state until we are all crushed under a lava of red tape.
In practice, of course, things work a little differently: the Tories wield the full weight of state machinery to drive home their anti-statist agenda; the Socialists wield the full weight of state machinery to drive through a toothless parliament as much half-baked legislation as they can squeeze into the electoral cycle.
But this week, something shifted and Im not talking about that bottled Irish ghost selling on eBay. The respective leaders of the Tory and Labour parties Messrs Michael Howard and Tony Blair traded blows over what, I dare to suggest, could be the first tick of a timebomb in the political evolution of the human race.
Addressing a hall full of miserable-faced, blue-rinsed female pensioners, Mr Howard suggested that people (people, that is, like you and I) are sick to the back teeth (if we have any there was a notable absence of them in his audience) of politicians spouting so much visionary gibberish, banging on about great tectonic shifts in the social landscape and shaken global kaleidoscopes, always promising utopia, forever blinding us with dates with destiny. Most people dont want a date with destiny, Mr Howard noted. They just want a date with the dentist.
Mr Blair took this as a barbed attack on his own well-documented messiah complex (and notoriously shoddy set of molars). What rot! he said, though not quite in those words. Ive been on several dates with destiny.
Shes a real tramp that destiny.
Its hardly surprising that people dont trust politicians today, Mr Howard said, adopting a façade reminiscent of Uriah Heep. In the real world, if you say youre going to do something, you do it. And if you screw up, you can lose your job But politicians seem to live in a different world.
They sure do. Mr Blair opted to address a room full of eternally hopeful social democratic wonks. (It is important that neither audience were exactly composed of the people as such.) Licked by a golden tan thatd make a Bond girl green with envy, Prime Minister Blair delivered a trademark sermon.
There is a sense in these days that its better for politicians to reject grand visions and great causes and go for what the Tories have done, for what I might call minimalist politics an offer so bare that its very paucity is meant to give it credibility.
As a great believer in making offers so bare that their very paucity is meant to give them credibility, I couldnt help feeling the prime minister was losing me. But then he went for the jugular.
The minimalist approach rests on not challenging the assumption that politics is boring, politicians all the same, and all of us break our promises.
I hardly need alert the sophisticated reader to the tiz I was left in on hearing that remark my knees lost a kilo or two of cartilage, I reversed the whole way home.
But given that very few of my readers graze within a million acres of sophisticated, I shall make pains to elaborate.
See, this Blair-Howard ding-dong, as pleasing as it may be on the eye, signifies a profound shift in the way we laugh at our politicians.
Surely, if ever there was a point to politics and you never know, there might be then it is this: the chance to observe the truly splendorous spectacle of professional grown men scrapping over whether they are boring, pointless and a pack of lying hounds who are all the same and unable to actually achieve anything without having made it up then fiddled the statistics.
Now thats my kind of sport!
The absence this time around of any real comedy from the nominees or even a bare effort at lightheartedness has made a grim and furious campaign season even more so, wrote Jack Hitt in the New York Times this week about the race for the White House.
The solution has presented itself: to liven up the most anticipated presidential election in fifty years all the US has to do is hire Tony Blair as chief gag writer.
Politics has been given a lifeline: self-mockery. One candidate can claim that voters are rightly sick of the sight of his mendacious face and weary of hearing his fallacious pledges and faux solutions; the other can claim, with a straight-face, that he really aint boring and truly means this flimflam about domino theories and dates with destiny and equivalent dog-do.
But this is a democracy! we can cry. Whatever you dog-do, Im voting your sorry ass out next time round just to see the look on your face.
Priceless.
