look who's the rabbit now

The 'new dawn' is broken, is it not? Broken on the wheel of credulity. Snapped as dead twigs. The New Labour Project has run aground; its rotting hull no longer having the clearance for the shallow waters by this corpse-strewn beach.
The British tory party, the so-called 'natural' party of government, is now headless, causeless, motiveless, pointless. Given the hysteria about immigration; given the challenge from the Liberal left; given the Blair Pinnochio factor. The Shadow Cabinet kept their seats, but soon they'll have to pawn everything else just to pay off Saatchi.
The polls closed at ten. It was a predictable night in many ways. But predictability is not synonymous with boring, as any football fan will tell you. This was in fact one of those few British elections in modern times that generally reflected the moods of the British people. Thatcher and Major had been propped up by the vociferous middle class minority holding their precious cheque-books. Blair, for the last eight years, had a vociferous middle class minority of tame bureaucrats, the New Labour ilk, spouting about means and ends and 'responsible' government. But the yoke, they'll say, was broken in 2005. For the first time perhaps since Mr. Atlee, a government for the people looks possible. Of course a few things need clearing up first.
The exit poll gave Labour a majority of 66; the tories were awarded Michael Foot's fateful 209. Like myself (see earlier postings) they got the result right but the details off a touch. The first result came in at 10.45 pm. Labour's Chris Mullin, ardent civil rights campaigner turned Blair apparatchik in charge of withholding funds from Africa. He lost the coziness of his majority; but, just like Blair for the moment, he kept his job. The television pundits speculated. Blue-screen wonderments fizzed and popped like epileptic break-dancers. The older Dimbleby on the BBC lent old world charm as his clipped impersonation of his own father mixed digital grunts and groans. Local presenters, like rabbits in headlights, grappled with the electrickery of outside broadcasting as he handed out marks for diction and grammar. Jeremy Paxman poised in mantis mode, pondering which head to bite off first.
By 11.30 pm, the rest of Sunderland came out for Labour, with a similar pruned majority. A Blackpool rock election: says the same the whole way through. Then our next prime minister, barring internecine popularity contests, wafted into his constituency at Kirkaldy, shepherding his good wife, almost spontaneous. OB camera number 53 catches his customary pose as his chin bites down on his neck; and he smiles, not just for the cameras; he's seriously enjoying this. And we cut past Paxman, preening, and on to OB camera number 241, somewhere in Madge's kingdom, where the minister in charge of Mage's armed forces emerges, mole in Spring, and for the first time since Abu Grahib prison was revealed to the world we see Geoff Hoon MP, the thinking woman's dalek. He doesn't look at cameras. He is carried through the throng by his own inexplicable pomposity: this guy is so stupid he seriously thinks he's better than you. Not a word emerges from his green lips. Nothing about the British soldiers being charged for prisoner abuses. Nothing about the dead.
At midnight just about everybody has their tanks in a line. The tories are keeping stiff upper lips in the usual way: they'll all be pissed as figs in an hour; hip-flasks secreted like spliffs; enough hospitality gin flowing to pump an almost human pallor into Malcolm Rifkind. By way of a positive message at this late stage they point to the black tory, their very first one bless them, who will take his seat as MP for Windsor before the night is out. Why do I somehow think this would not have been possible at all were it not for the death of the Queen's mother just recently. OB camera number 112 whisks us to the King's Head in Islington's Upper Street. A decent pub for Upper Street: the old flavour of Bohemia, before the Blairs moved in. All the young dudes are voting Liberal, it would seem. Those who bothered. Or Green. In the studio Paxman is being polite by his standards to Shirley Williams. She who was as responsible as anyone else for the defeats of Kinnock and Foot, first as part of the Callaghan disaster, and then in her 'gang of four'. Ian Hislop eggs on Boris Johnson. They teach you how to egg people on at public school.
"Phph-well, er, er, oooeeeer !" Intones Johnson, "herrumpph, ch'ooer, er, well, eer, of course it will be a victory. Er, a victory? Did I say that? H'er, herumph, hurr-umph-umph, h'er well, er...of course I don't mean a victory, h'er I mean a....umm..."
Meantime, somewhere in Yorkshire, the rhinocratic county, we get a glimpse of Nick Griffin, BNP fuhrer, who has arrived, we are told, in an armoured car. Maybe he has snorted enough coke to be planning a victorious march on Downing Street, but he avoids the impelling compulsion to goose-step; while the storm-troopers are elsewhere, wolfing down sausage-rolls. If you wonder why Nick Griffin is their leader, you only have to glance at the other BNP candidates as results start coming in. He is the only one with any hair. He is the only one who hasn't got 'hate' tattooed on his knuckles. He is the only one not doing a Bob Hoskins impersonation. And besides, he's the one with the armoured car. We get told the Liberals have taken Cardiff Central as well as Cambridge. The statisticians ponder this, but pretty quickly they give up. Then OB camera number 69 gives us a victory speech from Blunkett, who seems to have returned to public life having completed his experiments in genetic research.
"I promise to represent this constituency," Blunkett tells us, "like the right-wing fucker I am, because I know you like it really. And when people ask me why i'm not more tolerant, I say I don't know what tolerance looks like."
And OB camera number 666 gives us a victory speech from John Prescott, the beast himself.
"And I promise," munch munch munch, "to eat this chicken bucket," munch munch slurp, "in the time it takes you," slurp, burp "to say 'regional government'".
By 1.00 am the Labour Party had won 40 seats to the tories 1. By 1.25 am, Labour had 100 seats to the tories 9. In the middle we got a speech from Gordon Brown: humbleness of Dickensian proportions. Seconds later Alan Milburn, Blair's favourite fag-boy not weeks ago, tells us he's retiring again to spend more time with humanity. Peter Snow bounds about, shows us old clips from 'Tomorrow's World', renders the wall scene from 'The Matrix' in terms of Charles Clarke's ears and announces, breathless boffin, that Labour's majority will be 68. Enough to keep the tories out. Enough to finish Tony Blair.
I leave the cartoon fun and almost start in my chiar to see Thatcher peering back at me from the gloom of ITV OB number 102. They will bury the rest of the party with her. She whispers that once stentorian suburban drone and tells us Blair isn't really a Thatcherite, and, as often with ITV news coverage, I wonder who's fooling who.
Barbara Roche loses Wood Green to the Liberals, with a swing of fifteen per cent. The tories are making ground in London, getting back a few old cups for the prize cabinet: Putney, Ilford, Bexleyheath. They did at least corner the racist vote as well, nationally, where the other right-wing parties were losing their deposits: Nick Griffin scored a paltry 4,000 votes; Kilroy-Silk did even worse. The UKIP, which did so well locally not long ago, and may appear again during the Europe referenda, were invisible, pretty much everywhere. Sad little white blokes crawling back to their sad little cars: defending the empire against gypsies and turbaned ruffians will have to wait a year or two.
The New Labour project met a fairly timely death at five minutes past two in the morning. Timely, because its only earthly use, to destroy the tory party, was being affirmed as it was taking those last breaths. Poetically, it died in Wales: Blaenau Gwent. That old seat Michael Foot used to hold with 30,000-plus majorities, and his old mucka Aneurin Bevan before him. The imposition of an all-woman shortlist, the imposition rather than the woman bit, had forced a rebellion against Labour measuring ninety-five per cent and returned the rebel, Peter Law, with his accustomed majority. This is a fundamental message. Constituency parties, especially at election times, consist of people, not manageable units. The Labour movement, such as we were ever allowed one, built itself on a single precept: solidarity. Solidarity among people is not fixed, immutable; it is based on a common consent which is philosophically rooted, but never cast in stone. If a political party strays, as Blair has done since the day he arrived, from the essential principles of mass consent, then the solidarity will stay, but its direction and decisions will desert the party in favour of a fresh common consent. Blaenau Gwent shows how the party's own machinery, which in the end is only so many people, can be used to send the party a direct message: do not take the working class for granted when you play your electoral games. This is a mature and self-aware electorate, co-ordinated by the wonders of digital communication. The Labour movement has never been a bunch of bleating sheep, however it may have appeared over time. Blair's mandate was to win victory, and he did that eight years ago. On this night Labour discovered how easy victory can be without any need for a Blair. Indeed, Blaenau Gwent shows you don't even need a Labour Party if it is set on doing nothing for the working class. You just need the solidarity, and a hired hall, and a few mobile 'phones, and lots of steaming tea.
Cardiff Central officially fell to the Liberals a few minutes later. Then we were taken to Sedgefield, for the evening's main feature: Mohammed Ali versus one grieving father with a camera-shy moustache. It has been a very long time since the Prime Minister's own constituency was the centre of any real attention on election night. Usually you just get the count and a few weary platitudes. But Reginald Keys, whose son died in Iraq, polled 4,000 votes to come essentially joint second to his Tonyness; truly did the cat stare at the King. The Prime Minister looked ashen grey as MacMillan. He looked as helpless and paranoid as Anthony Eden. Or like John Major, desperate to be somewhere else. Indeed, just has his 'historic' (they won't give off calling it 'historic') third term was unfolding for the nation, Tony Blair looked like a whipped St. Bernard forced to watch while a poodle ran off with his bone. Mr. Keys slagged him off righteously him for not visiting the wounded. The hall fell silent but for his singular denunciation. Reign's have fallen on less.
By 4 am Labour's hollow victory for assured. Michael Howard, looking more than relieved at not having to do this shit any more, conceded defeat at twenty past. The overall majority was announced at 4.25. This was a sting to this tale, though. Bethnal Green and Bow: home to the original Cockney and several thousand Bangladeshi Brits, whose proclivity to vote for the aerial bombardment and illegal occupation of Moslem nations had been wearing thinner and thinner of late. Oona King, propped up on a Valium grin, was awaiting the worst in a surrendering white suit. George Galloway did his best to look statesmanlike but it was clear his anti-war ticket had paid out plentifully. The Respect Party came second in two neighbouring constituencies, and Galloway took the seat in a fifty-six per cent anti-Labour swing. Gleefully he took to the mike, thanked Oona King, and then in an essentially punk da capo vocal aria, he called on the Labour Party to sack Tony Blair. A few minutes later, still flushed with adrenaline, he submitted to an interview with Paxman. Paxman, who hadn't had a decent meal all night, immediately tore into the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow, in vintage uber-snotty fashion. It was probably a deliberate stab for some good television. But Galloway wasn't taking the bait and trotted off to a more suitable reception from Dimbleby Minor on ITV.
The show was over. I went to bed. I dreamt that Doctor Who had become prime minister and had abolished prejudice and poverty; and he'd made me Minister for Recreational Sex. I awoke at midday to hear Michael Howard resign. It was quite enjoyable, waking up next to Michael Howard: i'd never heard him resign before. The whimpers of hopelessness from the tory ranks was audible. John Redwood was turning in his grave.
Labour finished with a majority of sixty-six. Ergo: precisely thirty-four Labour rebels should be enough to curtail the neo-capitalist excesses of Blair's final hours. There's a chilling postscript. Straw is still Foreign Secretary. Charles Clarke is still Home Secretary. And Blunkett has been recalled to put the ranks of the physically and mentally disabled onto forced-labour schemes: boot camps for cripples is one to be proud of, I guess. But Brown's path is now very clear, and there's not a lot in the way of it. And Blair's Cabinet is limited in its strength: not just by the back-benchers; not just by the clear feeling from the party at large; but most especially by their own long-term ambitions. Why push an unpopular Blair policy when you are cutting your own throat?
Even on a fairly poor showing, when it came down to it, the Liberals had the best result since 1923, and now have sixty-two MPs. But more importantly, they have shifted measurably to the left, and have more clout in the inner cities. They can build, for a while at least. But they are considered a high-tax, high-spend, socially conscious party, and Gordon Brown looks set to have one of those of his own before long. The fact is a large part of Labour's vote went to the Liberals; but whereas ten per cent of the Labour electorate comprises sixty seats, the same ten per cent voting Liberal equates to only eleven seats. Such is 'first past the post'. On the bright side, the Liberals combined with the Labour rebels now constitute a political force at least equal to the parliamentary tory party, and certainly rivalling the support for Tony Blair.
The tories are nowhere, and they will probably lurch further into nowhere with a new leader no-one's ever heard of after another damaging leadership campaign. They finished up with 198 MPs. Less than Michael Foot's tragic 209 in 1983. In 1987, Kinnock lost with 229 seats. In 1992 he lost with 271. The tories have now had their three worst election disasters in history, all in a little row. To borrow the cricketing lingo: there really isn't much difference between getting all bowled out for 198, or all bowled out for 167. When the opposition scored 300-plus, you may as well retire hurt and help yourself to some cream buns. As prime wit Andy Hamilton put it: it's hard to find a more unpopular man than Tony Blair, but the tories found one. In years to come, the tory party will retreat into the sort of barely acceptable niche currently occupied by fans of 'S and M'. Seedy websites adorned with Thatcher paraphernalia will advertise a live chat with Nicholas Soames. Shops with blacked out windows will hide rows of back copies: titles like 'Conservative Housewives' and 'Monetarist Climax'. An intimate interview with Willie Whitelaw, dressed in...er, well at least he's dressed.
New Labour just ran out of track, and all the driver can do is keep everyone's hopes up while his compadres start to panic. In all likelihood, the political landscape has further to change. The environment was barely an issue at all. Future elections will be fought on global warming and green taxes. For now, they are just managing to make a suntan as fashionable as possible as they dart back to the limousine to the airport: how millennial they will all look in a couple of years. Another sobering thought: allowing for changes in voting intentions, which I hope would vary radically, a proportional representational system would have given us: 235 seats Labour, 210 seats tories, 150 seats Liberal, along with 20 each for the Greens and the BNP. In short, a hung parliament for the next twenty years. If the tories start supporting electoral reform, you'd be right to smell trouble. The political classes have one over-riding motive to which all others defer: self-preservation. That 'mother' of parliaments (she's some sort of 'mother') could not withstand its halls being crossed by those who hadn't been barristers or lecturers or local bureaucrats. Should the day come when ordinary people, dumb to the political machinations but skilled in shit-spotting and oratory, actually take the reins and run our patched-together state. What if nurses ran hospitals, teachers ran schools and doctors ran surgeries and the courts settled crime, only behoven to government for funding and support, not slaves to whichever anti-state ideology grips the latest Secretary of State. What if soldiers got to vote on going to war, or every kid got broadband internet through a state-funded telecoms project and because the telecoms admitted it was a social necessity. The old nationalised companies used to buy in bulk: sixty million is bulk enough for most orders. Where they fell down was in profligacy. Not because they weren't 'commercially competitive'. I've seen 'commercially competitive': it sneaks into market with a briefcase full of homemade perfume with a fake Chanel label and sneaks off with a pocket full of twenties; collar turned up; sort of Del-Boy Trotter, but Del-Boy Trotter has wit and charm and endearing qualities, and doesn't have a brother who does housebreakings. No, the nationalised industries' fell down because, after World War Two wore off, so did the feeling of community and togetherness and working for the good of the nation. In the end, the state was just another shit-bag awful boss-man: you clocked on, sparked up and kept schtum 'til the pay-cheque rolled in. You can introduce a bit of motivation, as recent evidence shows, with league table sticks and financial carrots, just like the rest of the world of work functions, but most of all you need the explicit funding and sheer altruism required of good public servants, to make schools and hospitals fulfil their functions with as little bureaucracy and moralising cant as will allow. We still leave much to the state: health, education, economic policy, policing, environmental policy, social security. At the moment they are entrusted to Gordon Brown and a few iconoclastic MPs to the left of their respective parties. The right wing in Britain has always been about, as they put it, rolling back the state to somewhere before the Atlee reforms, even before the capitulations of Lloyd George. The fact remains that it is Brown and those Mps who have been given the mandate, with a majority that suits their purposes very well indeed. The sparks will start to fly before you know it. Even the Queen's speech could see an uncomfortable ride: at least for Blair. For the rest of us: we only enjoy seeing our politicians when they are uncomfortable; if they don't squirm, what else are they good for? Blair can get used to squirming, or he can collect his Order of the Garter and stick it in his sock drawer with his upper chamber silks. Viscount Blair of Baloney. Or Lord Blair of Porky-Pie. Or just Blair: 'the accused'?

bread and butter basics

Most general election campaigns take on their structural characteristics in much the way mould grows on an untended loaf of bread. At first all seems normal, but for a few tell-tale spots, the marginal constituencies. Then whole slices of society give themselves over to the campaign, and start to sprout colourful local issues and pastel shades of local prejudice. And then, before you know it, the entire loaf is covered in burgeoning communities of different political colour, green, yellow, purple; plenty of hues to choose from, but all imbued with the same rancid smell. Every political instinct you have tells you to throw out the whole loaf, it reeks so; but you get pressed by one of those curious British traditions into actually supporting one parasitical fungus or other; so the loaf becomes a permanent occupant, stinking the place out that bit more each passing year. The parties offer fresh-cut sandwiches. Gordon Brown even promises some cake. The older generation, the comparatively statesmen-like, try to recapture the grand old days of crumpets and 'doorstep toppers' dripping honey. The Liberal Democrats promise a brand new recipe for cheese on toast, while the Europhiles suggest croissants at every turn The BNP insist on thick sliced white. The Greens offer wholemeal with specially healthy chewy bits. But all, even the Greens, are deluded. Whatever the constituents of the loaf this time, it will soon grow stale like all the others. And then it will start to smell very badly indeed.
Either Blair already knows his plug-holed personality has cost Labour the lion's share of its majority, and is fixedly grinning to the end, or; he seriously believes in his own triumphant third-term pitch, and is in for the fright of his life. The stolid front, the apparent unity, of Blair, Brown, Cook, Milburn, Straw and Charles Clarke, conceals a government already so ideologically fractured that I wouldn't be surprised to see all five of the above, excepting the broken Blair, standing against each other in a Labour leadership election within the next six months: thus might we get our next PM.
If Labour has a good night on May 5th, it could come out with an overall majority of sixty or better. The story then would not be about Blair and the succession, whichever wheels are already rolling, but about the future of a tory party which barely rates as the official opposition. It would indeed be fitting for Michael Howard of all people to lead those tories into political oblivion. The party of Neville Chamberlain and his worthless piece of paper, of Anthony Eden and his speed-freak disasters, of John 'you won't know i'm here' Major; again the comparisons with Michael Foot's Labour Party look mighty favourable for Michael Foot.
Tory leadership tousles have never shown the party at its best. Presented with the task of being democratic, this essentially despotic bunch are fish out of water indeed. Before the setting up of the 1922 Committee, the leader merely assumed the role, generally with the blessing of the monarch. More modern practices require the parliamentary party to choose from their ranks. In this case it will be Howard's surviving rump, which, depending on individual misfortunes, could be a highly conflicted rabble. In recent years the actual leadership election has been less about selecting a Prime Minister in waiting; and more about stopping some ambitious sod or other becoming a Prime Minister in waiting. In 1990, the cry was to stop Michael Heseltine. In later years the strategy has been to stop Redwood; or stop Kenneth Clarke; or to stop Portillo. Every tory leader since Thatcher has been a spoiler as a result. This time round they'll have no such luxury: the remaining party will have no potential leaders to choose from at all. John Redwood, a singularly despotic ex-history lecturer whose skill in front of the camera reminds us of Prince Philip in his heyday, might break ranks to lead. But I doubt it. Oliver Letwin, the prissy shadow chancellor could score some barrister points at the despatch box. But I doubt it. Portillo, sneaking back in at a by-election; though I don't know where the tories would expect to win a by-election; and I doubt it. They will presumably try to make a virtue of a 'clean slate'; which would be code for 'I know no-one's ever heard of him but he's the only bloke we've got left' and then they'll elect some chap called Andrew something whose peccadilloes are unknown to us. At least that way they can promise any policies they like. It's either that or back to William Hague and his base-ball hat.
Whatever happens on May 5th, it will constitute the best result for the Liberals since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George. Even if they don't quite become the official opposition, their momentum might even earn them a seat or two in Blair's final Cabinet. New Labour are treating the Liberal surge very badly. So drilled are the likes of Prescott in their cheap dismissive shots they've alienated even more of their own electoral base; demonstrating all the sportsmanship of power-dressed pillocks on the squash court. Kennedy has that quality, once possessed of Blair, that makes shit hard to stick somehow. He knows that in a fluid political situation, he can do much worse than simply standing still. And following one scenario at least, he'll find the balance of power landing in his lap; and from such a seed we may even in time developed a more effective democratic system of the sort Blair is so scared.
With a reduced majority, perhaps even an unworkable majority, New Labour will be forced to jump ideologically in one direction or another. They can either bolster the majority with Liberals, which, in these curious far-right times will force a shift to the centre-left. Or they can broach that unholy of unholies and rely on the tories on unpopular votes, riding the splits in their own party, and creating the most unpopular far-right government since the last one. This would probably lead to widespread civil unrest, for a start.
The other choices, with a reduced majority, involve continuing to govern by carrying your entire party with you on every vote. If Blair attempts this he will fail. Too many of his own will not wear identity cards and emergency powers and Bushist foreign policy. Ideologically, this preacher of the 'third way' is so painted into a corner that any attempt by him to move to the centre will tear away those last shreds of credibility. The only other option open to him is to resign and call another election later this year, which would just about crown his unique unpopularity once and for all. The Labour scholars know the two elections in 1974 achieved barely any improvement to Labour's majority; and were pretty much an interminable nightmare for the electorate.
It would appear from here that Gordon Brown would not need any deals with the Liberals. Clare Short worships his odd socks. Diane Abbot would forgo that last Jaffa Cake in his aid. But we have no way of knowing how gentlemanly Blair and his cut-throats are likely to be about a smooth succession. The history is none too clean. Even Blair himself in 1994, once the 'deal' with Brown was done, still had to fight contenders in those, thesedays slavish Blairites, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett. More frequently potential Labour leaders must take on six or seven rivals, of all political hues. Those keen to promote a Blairite dynasty could back Milburn or Blunkett as a direct stop-Brown candidate. And who knows which of these uber-bureaucrats fancies a crack at the top job out of sheer vanity, or sheer mortality. Jack Straw, John Reid, Charles Clarke, Robin Cook, Beckett again; who knows what power does to you when you've glimpsed the ermine.
The simple fact is Gordon Brown is an untried commodity were there to be any sort of rigorous campaign. In many senses his political image has similarities with the likes of Foot and tory Ken Clarke. He has that iconoclastic whiff. In boardroom spew: 'not a team player'. Don't get me wrong. Gordon Brown is the last, best of the worst hope for any kind of rational social policy when there's no such thing as society left. I can just see him getting outflanked by a neater haircut, just like the last time. There is the occasional true intellectual in the political classes. But it is the managers, the bureaucrats who rise to leader. In the final analysis of crosses on paper, the intellectual is often hated or even feared. At different poles you could cite Enoch Powell or Michael Foot. One never got to be leader and there are many who are glad he didn't. The other got to be leader and there are many who wished he hadn't. As for the self-styled intellectuals, there was never anything electorally attractive about Roy Jenkins or Lord Hailsham or Norman St. John 'Stingey' Stevas or Alan Clark. Edward Heath was highbrow, patricianish, but in the low-down he was a rude bully who got his own way by losing his temper whenever necessary: he was a former, highly effective Chief Whip; give the servants a good thrashing; works wonders. Both Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher were deliberately lowbrow. In remarkably similar ways. His was the pipe and the mackintosh. Hers was the handbag and the polka-dots. Both attempted high airs and graces in a typically middle-class manner, and each time they emphasised their 'h's they came across as that bit more lowbrow as a result. He was the pitysome Harold Steptoe. She was the detestable Mrs Bouquet. Callaghan and Major continue our tour of the fake lower class. One had been a union man for as long as there had been unions, and really should have made a better Prime Minister. The other was a curious orphan from Brixton, actually related to Thatcher (it was later revealed) and of stock from the bottom end of the entertainment industry. No-one ever had any hopes of him, and so he didn't disappoint.
Perhaps we have to accept that the intellectual in our society, and consequently in our electoral process, is most probably marginalised and scorned. People are suspicious of the clever, in case of unfathomable plots or inscrutable plans. In the all-embracing drivel that is Hollywood, the bad guy is invariably more intellectual than the action hero. One has a fiendish plot and untold money and resources. The hero more typically an unfeasibly large gun and a short temper. Maybe a few years of Gordon Brown might change that. I doubt it very much. More likely, some astute Brownite will design an 'image' for him, working round the hair and the wonky tie. A family man. A football fan. A passionate, er, sums adder-upper. He is an imposing public speaker. Much better on radio, of course. It would be a fine opportunity for the Labour machine to lead the way in anti-celebrity, to peel off some of the gloss and polish the Downing Street cameras have stunk with for so long. But I doubt that too.
The real issue, as bloody ever, is not the personalities at all, of course, but the policies. Maybe we're all getting kidded. It wouldn't be the first time. Maybe Gordon Brown will lead us into identity cards and emergency powers and immigrant concentration camps and tags and ASBOs coming out of our ears and a privatised welfare state. Maybe they all would. This in all good faith is not even the issue at this election. The issue, with days to go, is all about Tony Blair and Iraq and his own vain shoddy image. If Labour actually go and lose, or more likely lose much of their majority, the leadership can just say it was all about Iraq and carry on, under a new leader, with this same raft of grotesquely right-wing policies. Electorally speaking, the only people who can stop that happening are the Liberals and the parliamentary Labour Party. And the Liberals might gain millions of votes but only a few seats. While the parliamentary Labour Party only very rarely does the right thing. And even then not necessarily for the right reasons. Much may depend on a few marginals turning Liberal, and a few of the Blairites losing their seats.
In some quarters the knives are already out for Blair. As one crippling conspiracy theory transmutes into another, you start to wonder whether Blair's own strategy is to play it for self-sacrifice; that he wants to go out like Julius Caesar. The odd seasoned back-bencher is calling for him to go already. And then there's Brian Sedgemore. For more than twenty years Sedgemore held Hackney South, and now, assured of his members' pension, he has crossed the floor after the event, and threatens one hundred and fifty more Labourites will do the same. If this was remotely likely we may need the services of John Redwood after all. Not for his right-wing idolatry. But for his reputed extensive knowledge of the English Revolution.
Turn-out will probably be poor, and will continue to be so until the existing political class is dispensed with in favour of a real democracy. In the meantime a minor right-wing squabble infests the airwaves, the broadcasting equivalent of cockroaches in the pipes. They stink. They scuttle about. They make you want to scratch.
A massive vote for Charles Kennedy might change things; but I don't see a massive vote for anyone. The election is the side issue. The Labour succession is the key. There are enough self-serving deceptively capitalist goons who'll get elected for somewhere so that there'll be more blood on the tracks in the name of New Labour. The question that begs is simple: will the real Gordon Brown please stand up, please stand up?

hms titanic: steady as she goes

Saturday 23rd April

Rather than sit through a rerun of Paxman versus Michael Howard disguised as 'Newsnight', I opted for the Friday night brain-stopper on the sister channel, in the background, with a book. I was diverted from Alan Watkins' almost detailed assessment of the fall of Thatcher (taking the likes of Kenneth Baker and Alan Clark as reliable diarists) by the frolics on the television screen. Granny's cheeky favourite Jonathan Ross was cheekily expounding wank jokes (by which I mean jokes of which the subject is wanking, and not Ross' stock-in-trade of particularly bad jokes) with his guest, the ex-pinup Pamela Anderson. I suddenly discovered what a 'bimbo' was, or rather, how the bimbo came to be. You see, if you happen to be a woman whose sexual allure is viscerally apparent, by dint of the pout in your mouth or the size of your mammaries, then normal social company essentially forces bimboness upon you. Why? Because the men around you are swapping innuendos, ad nauseum, and your only choice is to risk coarsely rising to the bait: or, ignoring the jibes by pretending to be completely thick as pig-shit. Thus, Miss Anderson attempted to deflect Ross' carefully vernacular lines about erections and paper tissues with a moronic inscrutability that left one feeling she might just make an actress of herself after all.
I only bring this up because in the course of his only mildly censored little chat-show, Mr Ross, who is given the vocabularial freedom Andrew Marr can only gawk at, came out with the first, perhaps the only politically apposite remark the BBC has broadcast since the Hutton Report. Jonathan Ross summed up the campaign by saying: "if Blair gets any more of a suntan then Michael Howard will want to have him deported".
Xenophobia has been used as a political weapon since Athenian statesmen warned of the Spartans. Xenophobia was also the primary political weapon of Hitler, Mussolini, Oswald Moseley, and the National Front. In Marxist terms, the fostering of religious or racial conflict constitutes a primary concern for capitalism, since the proletariat is divided and thus ruled. This is why, far from calling the tories a bunch of racists and electorally obliterating them, the government prefers to support the basic paradigm that we risk getting 'swamped', to quote Thatcher, with immigrants.
I received some New Labour blurb through the post. No-one knocked to garner my vote. Perhaps Millbank already has me on file as an awkward git. Perhaps they can no longer look the voters in the eye. i've only just read it. Better economy. More public investment. And a line from Blair himself about "protecting our borders". Not a word about bringing 'democracy' to Iraq. And I thought they were so proud of it. Not a word about my local council off-loading its housing stock on to grab-all Thatcherist landlords. Not a word about hospital infections, nor their virulence since cleaning was privatised. Not a word about our perfectly decent hospital that's been closed and is to be pulled down. Not a word about the generally unavailable local police force, or the lack of mental health beds, or even the scandal over school dinners. Not a word about the 50% hike in fares on public transport, or the 30% hike in household gas.
Under the headline "Security For All", we get a full A4 portrait of my local Labour candidate. He's a standard metropolitan hotch-potch. The executive tie mixed with Militant-looking stubble. The bank-clerk side-parting and the union man cheap overcoat. Centrist identikit. You can have any sort of Labour government you want, comrade, er, I mean, sir. The headline of course is a simple terror tactic. There used to be these blokes, I daresay they're still abroad, who went door to door selling "Security For All". They worked for a locksmiths. The standard tactic involved
touring your home and pricing you up for dead-bolts and window-locks and alarm systems, with all the civilised reassurance of Lucky Luciano. "Someone could get in there, easy, look," they'd say as they sized up your tatty old back door. "You keep something by the bed, do ya; you know you really should". When their prey was particularly old or relatively wealthy, I dare say they made a pecuniary killing on their implied protection racket.
Actually, the security my candidate seems to be offering me is economic. He trumpets the financial figures of a privatised neo-capitalist economy. It's as if the Meteorological Office want a pat on the head because it isn't raining. On the inside pages are hidden the usual Labour publicity photos of various chaps of ethnic variety, all glowing with the existential fact that the streets are now so dangerous they're installing cameras absolutely everywhere. I am promised a brand new local leisure centre, when we've got three already, and 'refurbished' schools
(obviously the first furbish wasn't a success) when we haven't got a book-shop. With a certain Atleesque charm we are promised 'Decent Homes', though they neglect to tell us who'll be living in them: certainly not the poor souls who do at present. As soon as these flats are worth £200,000 or so, myself and my fellow immigrants, addicts and malingerers will be straight out on some bureaucratic pretext or forced out by ever-steeper rents.
As for adding to the security of our streets with a cohort of fake coppers in bullet-proof vests? The whole point about 'Robocop' is it's a satire. Across town, of course, in the shadow of Bow's bells, the cops have no time for burglaries or rape as they're too busy protecting the rival candidates. George Galloway faces threats from his own side, as the more radical Moslem voters try to mount an electoral boycott. Of course against a backdrop of headless corpses floating down the Tigris and twenty shot dead in a football stadium in Hadith (both reported Wednesday),
the notion of a bloody election campaign in the old sense seems hopelessly nostalgic.
Headline of the week goes to the Communist 'le Manifesto' newspaper published in Rome. At the news of Cardinal Ratzinger's election as Pope, they called him: "German Shepherd". It follows that if a member of the Hitler Youth can become God's exclusive press agent on Earth, we can look forward Bishop Lee Bowyer leading a flock and Paul Gascoigne as Foreign Secretary. i'm not fussed. So long as Pope Benedict preaches about love and forgiveness, and not 'damnation' and 'heresy'.
As for the national political situation, I defer to Jonathan Ross. Paxman makes them squirm, but pinning down a live eel is a knack they thwack out of you at public school. Labour's own critics have all been lobotomised for the duration. Robin Cook employs his arch-diplomatic duplicity while taking pointless stabs at the tories for the sheer cut of their jib. Camera-hogging Diane Abbott is suddenly camera -shy. Even Ken Livingstone takes time away from his various heli-pads to actually walk a few London streets. He'll suddenly rediscover the drawbacks of
bespoke leather soles. He hasn't stood anywhere without a carpet since 1992.
Politicians are fond of cricketing analogies. This is because standing there facing Curtly Ambrose takes considerably more courage than ordering in a few thousand troops. When Blair first came in to bat, he had the team and the fans behind him; but since then he has disappointed, and his deeply flawed stroke-play simply acts to make the bowling look good. He plays cuts when he should be playing cover shots. He stands far too far to the right in his crease. Somehow he's survived all sorts of shouts for caught behind. And he keeps getting his own guys
out at the other end: Byars, Dobson, Mowlam all run out; Cook and Short retired hurt.
The bowling, however, is Combined Universities atrocious. From one end we have the old-stager Howard, trundling his military medium. From the other we have Kennedy, avuncular off-spinner, to a completely defensive field. Howard keeps a couple of slips out of sheer self-importance. Kennedy's picking his moment to sneak off for bad light, has half an eye on the clock, and the other half on a tray of cream puffs he had to leave behind at tea-time, worse luck.
Meantime, back in the pavilion, ructions a plenty. In the Labour dressing-room, opinion is fairly firm that Blair should get himself out, so that Gordon Brown can go in to bat next and smack it all over the park. The Opposition, meanwhile, have pretty much run out of bowlers, and no-one's put their hand up; they'll end up letting William Hague another go; at least he bowls straight.

duck and rabbit

 The mail slopped onto my tiny hallway floor in the Spring grey. Mid-April and there's barely a leaf on the tree, and I have an October cold. What is more fitting therefore that among the collection of adverts for things I used to own (telecoms, gas, water, rent collection) there was also a 'message' from Michael Howard.

"People have had eight years to work out what's wrong with this Labour government". Just reading his words with his voice in my head puts me off any thought of rice crispies. Yes, Michael ! We've worked out it's just your lot, pretending to be a Labour government: they are tory fuckwits, Michael, and it's all your fault. They'd bring back the poll tax if the Daily Mail told them to, and all because they've swallowed all that toryness we were fighting all that time. They are the epitomy of a cure that is worse than the disease. And you, Michael, are the disease.

Mr. Howard then promises me a specific 'timetable' with 'no wriggle room at all'. Wriggle room. Is that the likes of Saatchi and his minions, 'reaching out to the ordinary voter', with a cliche not good enough to be called a cliche, in a vague attempt to be post-vernacular. It isn't a good phrase, Michael. You had the best education anyone's money could buy, and you talk about 'wriggle room' in your only stab at the top job? Those 'ordinary voters' will just picture Anne Widdecombe at a tory disco, getting on down with Nicholas Soames to some positively vetted repetitive beats. Wriggle room. Maybe it's something they have, down at central office: a wriggle room. Like a smoking room crossed with a sauna. Prospective tory Mps sneak in and then they wriggle, uncontrollably, getting out of their system all the wriggling they've kept pent up all day, slopping about in their own slime, dodging all those questions.

Anyhow, Howard promises: "more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes, school discipline, controlled immigration and accountability". So that's fear of crime, fear of MRSA and AIDS, fear of poverty, fear of teenage louts, that old warhorse fear of black people, and, finally, fear of a new tory government simply helping themselves to all the cash and fucking off to the Bahamas...as if that thought hasn't occurred to anyone else.

He wants better discipline in schools. That peculiar menacing voice of his perfectly suits the phrase. Better discipline. More people in prison. Tough on immigration. He's sending his own grandmother back, i'm told, along with Lenny Henry, Tariq Ali, and the combined contents of the Arsenal and Chelsea football teams. All delivered like the Mekon, or the baddie in Dick Barton, or Professor Moriarty, or Peter Lorre, only Peter Lorre would have charm. This voice cannot lead the tory party. It needs to be put to better use on tv ads for drink-driving, or warnings about unprotected sex: "have you remembered to use
a con-dom"- grin, grin. Put you off for life. He'd work well as the tourist voice-over in the London Dungeon: "on your left you'll see the red-hot pokers used to extract confessions; we called it a short sharp shock".

He wants to "give parents vouchers to send their children to schools of their choice". Well, that's fine. Mine will do Eton, Thetis, and then Durham or Cambridge, depending on whether or not by then Cambridge has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Microsoft Corporation. i'm told the Dutch have good schools. Maybe our vouchers are good for Amsterdam Grammar. He wants to cut "red tape" for businesses and the police. And of course he wants to cut taxes, for as many of his friends as is feasibly possible.

"Are you thinking what we're thinking?" Well, Michael, if you're thinking you are heading for the worst election disaster since the word 'tory' first came in vogue, then we are on a similar track. The satirists are clearing their desks. The tories in general and Michael Howard in particular are heading for below the radar oblivion; all the more so if we are ever to get any fairness in our democracy any time soon.

My estimation is a tory presence in the Commons of barely one hundred seats, putting them on a par by my best guess with the Liberal Democrats. I wouldn't be surprised if Kennedy's happy-go-lucky uberbeaurocrats actually poll more votes in the country than Howard's fag-end of '80s toryism. But that won't make Kennedy the opposition leader. Back in the '80s, when David Owen led that major splinter group the SDP, amputating the right limb of the Labour Party and destroying opposition to Thatcher, he stood with his best gang (basically every old Labour right-winger bar Hattersley) at a general election and they barely managed six seats. They deprived Labour of 100 seats in the process: such is first past the post.

In the interests of historical balance it might be worth considering for a moment the merest possibility of a tory victory. What would life be like? Well, it would at least be an honest police state. Armed police everywhere. ID card check-points down the Co-op. Tazer-carrying guards patrolling school playgrounds. Millions in prison. More millions unemployed and destitute. Pay as you go health-care. Asylum concentration camps. Of course we'd get all these under Blair given his way in his own sly time. But the tories would make a virtue of a security state, a xenophobic state and the destruction of the welfare state.

But Michael Howard's political career has about three weeks to run. For him no Ted Heath backlash. No John Major default shocker. He'll probably live for another 400 years of course, so don't write off a sequel in the Lords. In time, not that much time, he'll preside over Thatcher's funeral, and Tebbitt's funeral, and Heseltine's funeral, and he'll be burying the gentlemans' club that ran an empire for a century. Right is the new left, worse luck. And patriotism is better catered for by those further to the right, as in truth the Thatcher of 'Nimrod' and misread Blake always was.

Adding to the tories woes will be significant gains (by which I mean maybe actually a seat or two) for the UKIP, the BNP, and Kilroy-Silk (who we must remember got himself elected once upon a time as a Labour candidate). As with the old SDP, serious numbers of votes will cause barely a ripple in the Common's make-up, but they can still decimate the numbers of tories overall.

This will mean a comfortable Blair victory of course. Except that Labour's core support has collapsed too. This is mainly Blair's own fault. But it is simplistic to see his leadership as the primary right-wing factor preventing some sort of 'Real Labour'. The combined efforts of Kinnock, Mandelson, Beckett and Gordon Brown have burnt all the socialist bridges and exchanged them for a privatised pontoon. Harold Wilson was the first Labour leader who wasn't pledged to nationalising Britain's top 25 companies. Kinnock crushed the 'loony left' and the pacifists both. The tale of the loony left was some sort of landmark in the history of this formerly socialist party, so a brief prece seems in order. Wilson lost his grip due to illness. Callaghan was the safe centrist alternative but his lack of support among more militant unions coupled with an all-purveying sense the leadership was selling out the party's dreams, led a disenchanted (even by our standards) British electorate to decide in 1979 to let a woman have a go: even if that woman was Margaret Hilda Thatcher. The iron-knickered lady brought with her the likes of Saatchi and Bernard Ingham (fresh from the Tony Benn camp of all places) and a whole new system of modern marketing, slick, professional. Thatcher was hence able to hoodwink the electorate for a full eleven years. Even now, those dark times I was forced to live in, of mass unemployment, satanic free markets, vicious riot police, those bigoted ideologues like Tebbitt and those villains Archer, Parkinson, Lawson (the tax-cutter in chief), Hurd (the arms-dealer in chief), John sodding Selwyn Gummer (the simpering arse-licker in chief; "watch me while I give my daughter Bovine spongeiform encepalopothy"), even now they get sold as some golden age when the economy was set to rights (10% inflation, 15% interest rates),
when public spending was got under control (in fact it's been around 40% of GDP since the 1960s, it's just nowadays half of it goes to private profiteers instead of anywhere near any poor people; no time to harp on compulsory tendering and the abolition of rent controls now though), when the trades unions were tamed (they castrated amid a certain capitalist triumphalism, indeed), and when Britain regained its place as the pig-headed bully of Europe and foremost heavy petter of the United States.

Labour's response at the time looks hopelessly anachronistic now: it looked reassuringly anachronistic back then. Michael Foot was the most dynamic centre-left force and the most impelling orator in a generation; unfortunately it was Gaitskell's generation. Back in 1960, with Aneurin Bevan increasingly marginalised and mortally ill, Michael Foot would have been fancied as leader of a radicalised Labour Party, ahead of any of the old guard, certainly ahead of the then Lord Stansgate (aka Tony Benn), far ahead of Jim Callaghan or even Harold Wilson, who was seen back then as a conniving little oik. But by the 1980s, all the gentle old fool could do was preside like a grandparent over a rumbumptious children's party: and that's where the Militant Tendency come in.

Michael Foot lost in 1983. It is considered by present Labourites, those trenchant self-deceivers who are still convinced Blair was a good idea, as a disastrous defeat. Tony Benn lost his seat. In truth, the Labour Party in 1983 won 209 seats, against the right-wing splinter-group the SDP (before they merged with the Liberals), and on the back of Thatcher's status as a decorated war hero. Many will remember the sight of her on 'Panorama', scrambling up to Port Stanley, bayonet between her teeth, carrying Denis with one hand and Denis' crate of Famous Grouse in the other; or was that the other Denis, Dennis Waterman carrying ITV? Anyhow, if you offered 209 seats to Howard's tories they'd bite your arm off, and then sell it back to you on some part-lease part-purchase scheme.

The defections, though, from Labour in the early 1980s really did for the party for ten years. Not that David Owen, Shirley Williams, or the moderately intellectual Roy Jenkins were particularly missed. But it was enough to split the vote and to split the support for both Foot and later Kinnock. The middle class, so hard won by generations of centre-right policies and centre-left rhetoric, seriously doubted a Labour Party bereft of its ideological checks and balances. The left behaved like a bunch whose wives were away, and the centre could only look on as pragmatism gave way to inarticulate class hatred.

The Militant Tendency were an odd bunch. In truth they constituted those left-wingers dumb enough to play with party politics, and those local bureaucrats whose efforts at self-aggrandisement coincided with a desire to smash all the toys in the playpen. In truth they were all that was left over once the unions were smashed, at best a few partisan self-proclaimed 'Trotskyites' (although their Red Army were issued copies of Tribune rather than any artillery), in an unholy alliance with a smattering of local government officials, each convinced they could fight the 'class war' on flexitime, and then go home in a taxi with a Chinese. Tribune had been Aneurin Bevan's newspaper. Imagine a few tory backbenchers waving the Hunting Post. When Neil Kinnock brought in sweeping censures that effectively killed the Militant Tendency at the end of the 1980s, he didn't just throw out a few camera-hungry idiots, he effectively counterbalanced, at long last, the earlier split from the SDP; healing one wound by blood-letting another. It was painful to watch, but Kinnock reasserted the centre of the party as a party with no wings at all.

And yet the groundswell, the core support essentially stuck with Labour for all those years in opposition. Indeed, Kinnock's party became the fulcrum to all the opposition to Thatcher. It wasn't just him venting his over-voluble spleen at the dispatch box, where her performances, in truth, consisted of parroting for years and years: "once upon a time, boys and girls, there was a Winter of Discontent". But Kinnock, just as every other Labour leader prior to Blair, was ridiculed in a right-dominated media and a right-dominated press.

In 1997, Blair landed 418 seats. The tories crumbled to 167. They have further to crumble. But for Labour, I would call it, risking a pun, a conservative estimate that they will lose a hundred Mps on the 5th. That's a hundred totally furious ex-backbenchers. Two hundred cozy jobs threatened by collapsing majorities, as their majority stays at home. Plenty will vote Liberal Democrat. Plenty more will not vote at all. I have friends who tell me they'll vote Liberal. My ex-partner will probably vote Liberal. Billy Bragg, i'm told, will vote Liberal. Even Tariq Ali, the BBC's pet Marxist, has indicated he will vote Liberal as the anti-Labour vote. There is a view that a massive Liberal vote will let the tories in. Tory pollsters do deserve some credit, if only since the tories are the only ones left who can afford decent spectacles. But I think the primary emotion in both the main camps on May 6th will be rank dismay.

Here's my latest odds and I don't see them changing. Labour will win 320-360 seats. Tories will win 120-140 seats. Charles Kennedy's bouncing babes: 80-120 seats. The UKIP might win a couple. Maybe George Galloway, less of a maybe Kilroy-Silk. The vote on both left and right severely pruned by Respect, the Greens and the racists, with possibly no Mps at all as a result. Throw in Gerry Adams and his gang; along with Ian Paisley and Son, awkward gits to the Crown, est. 1916. Blair might have an overall majority of forty. He may have no overall majority at all.

But this will be the end for Blair. If he gets his forty, he has to talk turkey with Robin Cook, Clare Short, presumably Mo Mowlam, Frank Dobson, Frank Field, Jeremy Corbin, and fifty more who've just had the electoral fright of their lives. He probably won't bother, preferring to give way to Gordon Brown within six months. The smaller the majority, the sooner i'm guessing he will go. Blair likes to eat ducks and rabbits: and never humble pie. As I write he might just be deluded enough to think he'll romp home; he might just be setting Blunkett, Byars, and Milburn back in the Cabinet. But then again he may have a political nose, and he may just be putting that photo of himself somewhere safe before going next door to butter up Gordon about being Labour Leader in the Lords for a couple of years.                                                

never mind the monarchs

Oh if there is a god of any colour, give us some of your old party tricks, and incinerate this political 'class', though it is class they all so lack, with some timely thunderbolt or two! Do we really deserve, we the meek, another four weeks of this rhetorical slime, this charlatan schm-.. schm-.. their behaviour is so cheap there's not even a Yiddish word for it. So me, the idiot scribe gets served Tessa Jowell, whose socialist conscience leads her to parrot leadership quips about choice in the health service. Will the patients be able to choose which 'super-bug' to die from? Will the nurses be allowed to choose to be paid like consultants? And Tessa tells us how important her beloved leaders' 'managed migration' (a phrase which conveniently allows each Labour campaigner to be as racist as is required). And who grills Tessa, on our erstwhile behalf, as we choose the successor to Asquith and Churchill? Well, there's ex-tory hack-torturer, Amanda Platell, still fresh-faced from crashing the zeppelin that was William Hague's campaign, still pushing all the buttons of racism, greed and moral intolerance, 'coz in her prim upper-Aussie soul she knows we're all like that deep down. And the equally deluded Piers Morgan, on the penitent trail after crashing the Daily Mirror, direct from fawning over the day's royal wedding....

Nick Witchell: "...and the awful man is joined in front of the renta-bishop by his bride to be, radiant in her Laura Ashley curtains and some pearls she pinched from the Queen Mother in a game of Altzheimer's cribbage....and the orchestra play Handel, since no-one in the entire royal family has commissioned a piece of music since 1754....

Archbishop: "Do you, Charles Philip Arthur George von Battenburg, trainee usurper....

Piers Morgan: "Oh, it's delightful, quite delightful; I have an erection fit for a union jack...

Archbishop: "...and do you, Camilla, divorced Catholic, royal adulterer, agree just this once to stay married at least for appearances, and promise not to be a queen in any shape or form?"

Camilla: .... (This is, of course, her catch-phrase).

 And the crowd wave flags and the luxury coaches hove out, and a church-full of people all uncross their fingers, such are the vows of state....And Piers Morgan chokes down a tray of license-fee smoked salmon nibbles, washes it down with license-fee Chardonnay. And it's back to the smoke to quiz Tessa Jowell on her socialist credentials. Socialist racism. Socialist war in Iraq. Socialist privatisation. Socialist identity cards.

 Ramsay MacDonald's best stab at Labour government foundered in an economic crash: his luckless cabinet were forced to resign rather than cut unemployment benefit. This 'Labour' crew of Bliar's have made a virtue out of benefit cuts. This crew have made a virtue out of those very things the socialists fought: 'free' markets which leave us all in chains; 'free' enterprise, otherwise known as licensed knavery; and their new buzzword, "choice".

 What they have in mind is a purely capitalist choice. In the cess-pool that constitutes the British economy, the cancer of advanced capitalism sucks life-bloods according to the rules of 'choice'. You can choose to pay nothing and you'll get nothing. You can choose to pay a little and get some rank apology for a service. Or, you are 'free' to choose to fork out hand over fist and you'll get something approximating service your parents got for nothing. And what controls your capacity for choice? Why, money, don't you know. We all have the 'choice' to make millions out of some thieving scam or another. And if we prefer not to exercise that choice, if we 'choose' to remain poor, well; what are we complaining about?

 It was a New Labour ruse to take two steps to the right. It wiped out the competition. But now they believe their own strategic delusions. They think the electorate have taken two steps to the right. They have convinced themselves of the electoral power of a Thatcherite taxi-driver mentality. They have convinced themselves left-wing politics is a flush that was busted by poor old Michael Foot. To extend a rather tasteless metaphor, therein lies their Achilles' heel. They have lost their mandate. They no longer represent any but the most reactionary and xenophobic of the British people. They will suffer considerably on election night for, in the new market lingo, badly treating their 'existing customers'.
Labour has no shred left of its own class base. They may finish on May 6th with a decent majority; maybe even an overall majority. But they have squandered a century of goodwill.

 Thousands took to the streets today, in another so-called democracy. The square in Baghdad, home to the gripping finale of Dubya's war movie, you know: toppling Saddam like he was some mixture of Lenin and King Kong. Well, this time it was a real demonstration, sans rostrum camera, Iraqis demanding Yank go home. Was footage of it immediately co-opted and turned into CIA t-shirts? No. Did Rumsfeld jump up and down farting platitudes about the will of the people? No. Amid Charlie's slightly soiled bunting and a flipping horse race, it got barely one mention on Radio Five, at 2.10 am. To the question of the war as an election issue, they seem to have decided it won't be, already, behind closed doors.

Custer tactics

 So, Mandelson has had his cabalist charts out and they're going for the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year: it's the number of the beast after Mandy's fifteen per cent is taken off; handling fee. Michael Howard took his last ceremonial swipe in PMQs in a sorry attempt to echo old Heseltine pantomime. He'll be equally retired by June. The main question at this stage: do the two main parties realise the hammering they're both going to get; or do Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet swan around in cliquey ignorance, oblivious to the real reale politique?

 Turn-out can make things even worse for both of them. Deserting tories will take succour in the U.K. Independence mob; while the BNP's Nick Griffin launched his campaign in the best way possible, by getting nicked for inciting racial hatred. Given the racist vote is split at least three ways, not even counting Kilroy-Silk, the wave of taxi-drivers who used to prop up Thatcher will have less voice this time round than ever. Deserting Labour voters, many on account of the war of course, will stay home rather than tie daisy-chains with Charles Kennedy; although the more middle-class, the habitual voter, could certainly back the Liberals, leading to some casualties in Labour heartlands like London and the North-West.

 At least two million voters who would once have backed Bliar have lost faith with him over the war alone. Labour's sly response is to let candidates on the doorstep profess anti-war views. Fresh-faced local councillor after fresh-faced local councillor says: "i'm standing for Labour but I opposed the war". If Alan Milburn seriously thinks this passes as campaign strategy then he's had lessons in tactics from George Custer. Of course, Labour have historically knackered up election campaigns. That's how we got Major for so long, Thatcher in the first place, and Ted Heath, who they said at the time was a fluke. Were it not for the massive starting majority they wouldn't have a hope.

 The truth is none of them have a hope. Bliar, reputation in tatters, will smarm it out like a Michael Jackson defence attorney; it is curious that these two Mickey Mice have mirrored each other's careers- popstar fashion disasters in the '70s; clambering over unwary competitors in the '80s; the megalomania set in in the '90s; by now they both physically resemble their own waxworks (bit of Taussaud's Dorian Grey going on there), and spiritually resemble Norman Bates' final scene in 'Psycho', while their remaining acolytes practice duck-and-cover. Still pretending to be the Lenin of Lincoln's Inn is the order of the Cheshire Cat's day. He power-struts into Asda, nostrils and necktie flaring; up for a bit of undepth political philosophy with a couple of shelf-stackers, caught in the camera-crossfire like giggling squirrels. The man who killed political debate tries to start one, next to a mountain of nappies, showing his best side, gut sucked in, for approximately four-and-a-half earth seconds. Then it's back into the chauffeur-driven public service delivery vehicle just in time to catch 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman'. Alastair Campbell left him great long lists of what to do and when. Stress the government's (and certainly not Gordon's) economic competence. Eight years and we've had no devaluation crisis; no hyperinflation; no general strike. Jim Callaghan would have said it couldn't be done. Ramsay MacDonald would have said it couldn't be done. It was very simple, though. Bliar convinced the captains of industry that he was tory through and through, so just this once they didn't drive Labour to the brink of catastrophe. Gordon convinced the unions that he is the only man left in Britain who knows the fourteen times table. And beside his plain, functional Scots pine bed sits a battered, thumbed copy of John Maynard Keynes' immortal tome: 'Macroeconomics For Dummies'. No. 11 always sleeps better than No. 10. While Big Jim fretted in his moth-eaten cardigan about the International Monetary Fund, Denis Healy's sleepy brows knitted themselves together, providing a sherry-fuelled snoring accompaniment to Michael Horden's somnambulant portrayal of Paddington Bear. When John-blink and you missed me-Major had bitten off his fingernails in a vain attempt to punish himself sufficiently over the Exchange Rate Mechanism, school oik Norman Lamont had already sloped off to slumberland with a bottle of single malt and a copy of Country Life.

 If anyone in this nation thinks Michael Howard would be a good Prime Minister, besides Mrs Howard and the obligatory little Howards, then we have a problem of serious amnesia at large. If the Poll Tax was a venereal disease, then he was the large unsightly but disconcertingly painless pustule that heralded its arrival fifteen years ago. It was his pathetic good fortune that he never featured as a leadership contender after that; not until Major, Heseltine, Hague, Portillo, Kenneth Clark, Duncan-Smith, Dibble and Grubb had all had a go. He is a self-defeating figure: the more he spouts his 'trust me, i'm just this friendly Jewish guy' thing, the more he resembles the snake in 'Jungle Book'. And when he says "I want criminals to fear the police" you believe him; trouble is we'd all fear the police with him in charge of them. Emergency powers are bad enough with fake-tories wielding them. What would real tories do? Round up all the Husseins in the phone book and quiz them on 'British' lagers and Erikson's away form?

 And giving Charles Kennedy the balance of power does suspiciously resemble letting smurfs run Sellafield. If only he were more honest about being a non-personality. You can get away with being a deliberate non-personality: Attlee, Major, both a charismatic as a hung pheasant; both as memorable as a karaoke night.

woods, trees and other occular discrepancies

Easter Sunday

  The campaign glows white-hot as the hustings reverberate with slogans and promises, the people whipped up to a fever of political excitement......well, no. Of course no. Tony Blair's right-of-centrist Thatcher worship has succesfully alienated the very people you need for a democracy, undermined the very legitimacy of the British two-party system, made parliamentary 'opposition' vanish with deliberate manoeuvring, castrated the election before it's even been called. In consequence, what may at the moment appear to his Tonyness as merely the latest rubber stamp, will by force of reaction explode so many myths that we'll look back on 2005 as a significant watershed in the politics of this country.

 Why? Because whatever campaign disasters befall any of the parties between now and polling day, two things are already clear. This election will signal the death of the Conservative party as a meaningful force. And the death of New Labour as a project.

 The death of the Tories should never be mourned. Their latest debacle, Howard Flight and his bag of shite, is just a casual twitch of the corpse. Their eventual demise in a month's time will be a Popish death, a Tito death; and started the night they lost the courage of their convictions and decided Thatcher just wasn't greedy enough.

 New Labour's project of course had nothing to do with centrist government and plenty to do with kicking the Tories into the middle of the next century. Here's a lawn. Here's some tanks. But its imminent collapse has nothing to do with losing its raison d'etre, the tory foe. It is the grotesque ill-will and distrust now felt towards Bliar, the group's frontman, and the way he took us all for granted.

 Of course, we've had one death already. Jim Callaghan, the thinking woman's suet pudding of politics (a place where puddings abound). 'Glowing' tributes from 'all quarters'. 'Glowing' usually means: possessed of the critical acuity of economy bog-roll. 'All quarters' meant all quarters of the now quite robotic Labour Party. Denis Healy called him a 'great man', which reminds us with a nostalgic glint of all the rank bollocks Denis Healy used to talk, back in the old days. James Callaghan indeed. The man who forced us through sheer incompetence into devaluation, back when he was Wilson's Chancellor. The man who sent troops into Northern Ireland when he was Wilson's Home Secretary, precipitating the worst phase of that particular war. The man who so lost the plot as Prime Minister that he alienated his own union base and made Thatcher seem like the reasonable alternative. In short, the man whose actions and more typically his inactions, left us in this right-wing cul-de-sac in the first place.Jim Callaghan indeed. Ten-foot high with black stinking bin-bags. Grave diggers on strike. Yes, that Jim Callaghan. 

 Callaghan was always all about that big lie of the left. The 'people', they always say, dimly aware that whoever it is they aim to represent is actually present at any of their Hampstead wine parties; the 'people' wouldn't understand an actual honest left-wing political agenda. The poor little mites aren't quite up to even Clement Atlee's piecemeal reforms. So we, the political class of the left, must pretend to the people that we're on a solid, right-wing populist ticket; and we can keep our left-wing dreams until we've won them over. Callaghan was always on that right-wing ticket. His was never socialism, but ultra-bureaucratic capitalism, in which the 'people' are shat upon by both capital and the state at the same time.

 The left in this country have always sat outside the Westminster soap opera. You need to own several suits before you're allowed in. Michael Foot's brief opposition was the nearest I ever saw in my lifetime. All it really demonstrated was capitalism's historic hold on the levers of democracy. When it got down to it, the rent divisions between socialist intellectualism, trades unionism, activist protest, and 'militant' local bureaucrats could not be pasted over with a few red flags. Kinnock succeeded in restoring a perceived professionalism into the entire political class: under Mandelson, a new machine was put into operation, in which 'politician' became a desirable career choice for bright young socially tory lawyers who didn't really care which team they supported. Under Bliar, the New Labour project had a simple attitude to the left: they've never won us an election so sod the lot of them. Let's corner the right instead. We'll announce the death of political debate. We'll cede the policies to right-wing individualism, and say its all about who's best capable at 'managing' the country.

 So they ditched the clause about workers owning the means of production, distribution and exchange (a bit like the Christians ditching Luke) in favour of something Diane Abbott scribbled on the back of a restaurant bill. And Bob's your uncle, Labour actually gets back in power. Shiny slimy lawyers' grins all round. Bliar sings 'Morning Has Broken' in front of the Cenotaph. Major collects his cheque and stops biting his nails.

 New Labour started by giving the pensioners a 75 pence pay rise. New Labour will be over now they've admitted spending 37 pence on school dinners. But, you cry, this election will be another victory for New Labour. Er, I think not. The 2005 election will result in the painful slashing of the New Labour majority, and, dare I say it, major gains for the Liberals. I think that's the first time i've ever commented on Liberal politics in my life. The protest vote may well extend to one or two of the smaller parties. The tories will be obliterated, keeping barely a hundred seats.

 So that's my pundit's instinct. i'll go further. Labour's reduced majority will be the end for Bliar. He'll have lost his reputation as a winner. And he'll be unable to govern a parliamentary party shorn of many of his yes-men, forced to deal with Clare Short and Robin Cook and Frank Dobson and Frank Field and Jeremy Corbin and all those other corpses he climbed over. And there's the rub: there's where the punditry gets easy again. The point about the 2005 election is: whoever wins, in whatever fashion, the Prime Minister by the end of the year will not be Bliar or Howard or Kennedy; it will be Gordon Brown. Probably as soon as Conference.

 I'll make one more prediction, a month out. Electoral fraud will become an issue in a British election. You see, scuttling around under the genteel front of Westminster is a whole second front of would-be politicians: power-dressed weasels, stoats and ferrets who will 'close the deal' at what ever cost. Bureaucratic fraud comes easy to these guys: they practice all year massaging government statistics. There will be several postal vote scandals and record numbers of contested counts. The tories will use this to hide their decimation. Bliar will use the fog as he knows best: intimidation and arm-twisting behind closed doors.

 So, the winners: Clare Short, Charles Kennedy, dare I say George Galloway. The losers: Bliar personally, Michael Howard (who will be missed like the haemorrhoids) and those members of his shadow cabinet who actually lose their seats. If they've any sense of political purpose, the Liberals will use their wedge to push electoral reform. Bliar may well panic: for all his vicaresque smugness he knows you only live once. He knows he had eight years: and he blew it.