Over the last few weeks I have been seriously contemplating cancelling my subscription to the Times as it continues to push Tory propaganda without challenging the lies and deceit. Anything that challenges Johnson’s integrity gets pushed to inside the front cover and virtually hidden. Anything that provides the slightest criticism of Corbyn gets splashed over the front page and several more inside. I may revise my decision having read this piece by Clare Foges in today’s edition. It is the most sensible thing I have read in the paper for months. It is quite lengthy but worth every minute of your time reading it.
Anyone looking to be cheered by a magisterial prime ministerial performance should google “Thatcher jump”. In a TV interview from 1995, the former PM was asked by her Swedish host to play along with the show’s signature gimmick, “stand up and do a jump in the air”. Cue a look from the Lady that would have frozen the molten seas of hell. “I shouldn’t dream of doing that. Why should I? . . . I made great leaps forward, not little jumps in studios.” Thatcher gave interviews in order to be asked tough questions and to rise to them. At her last prime minister’s questions, amid the hail of parliamentary arrows, she roared: “I’m enjoying this!” Scrutiny was welcome because she had a record she was proud to defend, ideals she was passionate about expounding, a vision she relished setting out.
Cut to 2019 and our current prime minister continues to
dodge an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil. Johnson’s schedule did, however, have room for a chat on
This Morning in which he was asked about his description of burka-wearing women as “letterboxes”. This is hardly dangerous territory. Johnson’s old writings have been exhumed too many times for them to move the needle of public opinion now. Those who loathe him for calling gay people “bum-boys” or Africans “piccaninnies” will always do so; those who think such comments are evidence of his colourful, admirably non-PC character will continue to do so.
In contrast, the Neil interview promised a proper dig beneath the platitudes. No politician anticipates these encounters with a song in their heart. As Corbyn, Sturgeon, Swinson and Farage have found, the veteran knows his detail. He will not be fobbed off with answers that begin “Let me be clear” and which proceed to be anything but. Johnson is, in Thatcher speak, “frit”. But as Neil said to viewers, “the prime minister of our nation will, at times, have to stand up to
President Trump, President Putin, President Xi of China. So it was surely not expecting too much that he spend half an hour standing up to me.”
A lot of things we huff and puff about in politics don’t really matter in the end. But this does matter, because it betrays something deeply troubling: the Conservative Party’s disdain for the voters. “Disdain” might sound strong but let us view it through the lens of its opposite: respect. When you respect people you treat them at least as equals. You credit them with intelligence. You seek to be open with them, to earn their respect in turn. During this campaign the Conservatives have displayed no such respect for
the electorate. Instead they are scornful of scrutiny, complacent about what they need to prove in order to govern. They think that repeating the same phrases endlessly is all the detail we deserve. They are prepared to lay out the bare minimum of policy and no more. In short, they patronise us as idiots, polling booth fodder, Pavlov’s dogs who will leap to vote Tory at the
sniff of a tax cut.
Johnson’s refusal to grace Neil’s studio is just one example of this disdain playing out. See also: the formulaic campaign; the lack of any meaningful new ideas in
the manifesto; the desperate reliance on bogeyman Corbyn as a reason to vote Tory. This is a party coasting back into government on autopilot, treating the voters as dim, gullible, easily biddable.
The emptiness of the manifesto is disdainful. Volumes are spoken by the thinness of this one. A manifesto is meant to be the blueprint for national transformation, yet one of its more eye-catching policies is to increase the budget for mending potholes. Yes, it is full of big spending commitments — 50,000 more nurses, 40 new hospitals — but beyond pledges to shovel billions more into the ever-hungry maw of public services, where is the thinking about how to re-organise the state to address the overwhelming issues of our age: automation and its challenge to work; our ageing population and the pressures on social care? Where is the imaginative effort? Where is the coherent plan for the next ten or 20 years? It seems the party is so confident that voters will have nowhere else to go that it doesn’t need to bother.
The disdain is there, too, in the performances of those sent out to make the government’s case. They have been given scripts which they read dutifully, no matter the intervention of facts or common sense. One of the most painful I witnessed was outgoing MP Nicky Morgan, sent on breakfast TV to sell the policy of 50,000 more nurses. As the presenters pointed out, the inclusion of 18,500 existing nurses made the 50,000 figure disingenuous. No, Morgan maintained, these would be 50,000 more nurses, an assertion that bent both maths and English. Likewise, the announcement of 40 new hospitals is so heavily caveated (only six are being built now; the rest is seed funding to plan for upgrades down the line) that it takes people for fools. We expect Labour to give us fantasy numbers on hospitals and nurses, not the Conservatives. Surely they can see that such guff patronises the voters, treats us with disdain?
The Conservatives have calculated that this dull, safety-first, ideas-free campaign will do because come polling day millions of voters feel there is no other conceivable box to tick and because “getting Brexit done” is all that matters to the majority of them. They’re probably right but it’s a dispiriting approach.
I don’t want Corbyn anywhere near No 10: his economic ideas are irresponsible, his views on foreign policy dangerous. I don’t want Farage near power; whether he means to or not, he summons ugly spirits in our country. I don’t want Sturgeon in the ascendant; I dearly want the United Kingdom to hold. But at least their politics are animated by genuine beliefs which shape their ideas and policies. These very different politicians have their unshakeable positions which they try to persuade people to get behind. That is very different from focus-grouping a load of slogans and repeating them ad nauseam.
Some Tories will greet all this with a shrug. The goal is to keep Corbyn out of power and get Britain out of the EU and they may believe that in reaching that end all means are justified, whether dodging real scrutiny or offering up the blandest of manifestos. I’m sure they are correct and that none of these things will matter much on polling day. But there may be some who, after the Neil no-show, find they have other things to do this Thursday. After all, if Johnson can’t be bothered to turn up for them, why should they bother to turn out for him?
