Britain needs a government, not this fag end farce

Where were you on the evening of 1 May 1997? I was a young reporter watching at the municipal count at Meadowbank in Edinburgh where several senior Scottish Tories were being defenestrated in the municipal sports centre. The then Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, arrived lit up by a hail of flashbulbs. This was pre-internet and newspapers all had many photographers and lots of us reporters, so at a moment of crisis the target, the victim, would after sunset be flooded in light and jostled by a large crowd of hacks and assorted hangers on, sometimes shouting, sometimes just looking.

Rifkind lost his seat that night and with some dignity left the building to ponder the ruination of his political career. I remember the man from the Guardian shouting after him: what will you do now? I will go home, Rifkind said, sounding relieved.

So violent was the swing against the Tories that day that the Scottish Conservative MPs were all wiped out. The reformer Michael Forsyth, then Secretary of State for Scotland and now Lord Forsyth, lost in Stirling.

New Labour ended the night with 56 out of 72 seats in Scotland. The SNP won only six seats. Its leader Alex Salmond was a canny media operator but against the might of Tony Blair and the Labour machine his party at the time looked small, silly,  parochial. New Labour was going to deliver devolution, a Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, and that would make the SNP irrelevant, wouldn’t it? Er, no.

Across the UK, Labour had won a majority of 179. The Tories, dogged by  sleaze, were humiliated. Even though the Major government undertook numerous important reforms from 1990 to 1997, from autumn 1992 and the ERM crisis the administration had a fag end feel. New Labour punished the tired Tories. 

But the scale of Blair’s landslide turned out to be a disaster in several respects, not least when it came to the long-term prospects of the Labour party.

Not only did the crushing victory create unrealistic expectations about what the new government could achieve, it encouraged in Blair himself a tendency to believe he was on a messianic mission. Later, this created the conditions for hubris and  overreach. New Labour was nothing less than the political wing of the British People, he suggested, a quite a mad notion. Diana was the “People’s Princess”, he said. But who are “the People” (cap P)? There is no such single mass with a unified view. Marxists and populists use the term – the People – because they want to define criticism as being opposition to “the People” and thus isolate those who dare to disagree. In a healthy democracy there’s no such thing as “The People”. Parties cycle in and out of office, with losers’ consent. Most people agree, broadly, on no more than a few national institutions and assumptions. There is no overwhelming mass, no “the People” any political leader such as Blair passing through can claim to speak for.

Anyway, it seemed to me Blair was always best understood as a figure shaped by his religious convictions. As a veteran hack reminded me this week at Westminster, pre-1997 Blair was popular but in the first phase of his leadership he was really rather earnest and naff. Look at the pictures of him taken back then playing his guitar in an awkward manner. That was part of a spindoctor drive to make him look with it during Britpop. When the landslide happened a couple of years later it unleashed something: he became a much bigger leader, a man of vision and destiny, and a trainee international statesman who behaved more and more as though it was his responsibility to save the world.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Blair’s got his response half right. In his speech to Labour party conference in 2001, a few weeks after the attacks, he stood by the US and produced his best rhetoric, before spiralling off into a hubristic explanation of how, with the kaleidoscope having been shaken, the entire world could be cleansed and remade. There were no limits. Hey, let’s try to fix Africa, he said, sounding more like an idealistic young vicar delivering a sermon than a Prime Minister.

On the Union and Scotland, the 1997 wipeout was a disaster because it left the way open to the SNP and the potential unravelling of the UK.

The New Labour assumption had been that devolution when it came would revive the Scottish Tories and shut out the SNP in perpetuity. There would then be a permanent Unionist bloc in the Scottish Parliament – Labour as largest party, plus the Tories and the Lib Dems – that allowed no way through for the SNP into government at Holyrood. With the Scottish Tories all but destroyed, the SNP could focus all of its attentions on attacking Labour and painting it (unfairly considering how many Scots were leading figures) as London-dominated and remote.

After the Iraq War, unpopular in Scotland, Salmond had his opportunity. The London Labour establishment, he said, had taken Scotland against its will into a dubious war.

The end result was that the SNP got into power in 2007, the year Blair was replaced by Gordon Brown, another man on a mission shaped by his religious roots, in his case as a “son of the manse”. The Nationalists have been there in power ever since, facing a depleted, divided Unionist opposition that cannot cut through, even though the SNP is doing such a spectacularly poor job of running Scotland one wonders what the party has against the place.

A stunned Blair seems himself to have understood on election night 1997, on hearing the results, that wiping out the Scottish Tories might not be a desirable outcome for the health of the Union.

Twenty five years later, another Tory administration embroiled in sleaze allegations is facing the wrath of the electorate and waiting to find out how bad it will be, next week and in the general election in 2023 or 2024. On Thursday, in the local elections, the Tories are braced for a hammering.

There is always semi-comical expectation management ahead of tricky local elections. If a party leadership warns it will be Armageddon and it ends slightly short of that, then the governing party usually gets away with it. The feedback, from Tory MPs I’ve spoken to this week after they’ve been out campaigning, suggests voter anger on the cost of living and Boris Johnson hardening into contempt. “We’re in Tory voters saying I’m not voting for you territory,” said one. We’ll see.

A government with a clear, coherent programme can survive a lot of mid-term shenanigans and unpopularity.

But this is not that. For the terrible truth widely recognised across Whitehall and Westminster is that aside from on the war, and the permanent machinery of the MoD, intelligence, security and the Foreign Office, there is not a government. It is simply not functioning. The tales are legion. One hears of cabinet ministers barely there, of senior civil servants in despair at the drift and delusion. Paper is not processed. Decisions are not made properly. The country has no economic policy (really, it doesn’t) and an energy policy that is insufficient. The Treasury, judging the Prime Minister to be an intellectually incontinent toddler who wants to spend more on everything, simply blocks in the hope that somehow a new PM will be along soon. The much vaunted levelling up programme is stalled, with the Treasury refusing to facilitate it.

This all stems from the top. British governments take their cue from the character and behaviour of the Prime Minister. Under Margaret Thatcher, fixated on processing paper and advancing decisions, the pulse of officials quickened if the PM got involved. Under Blair and Brown the big beasts had clout and there was a direction, albeit sometimes it turned out to be the wrong direction.

This administration has all the hallmarks of a fag end government. Only on the Ukraine and related policy is it different.

Oh, and in one other area there is some dynamism and inventiveness. That relates to the core aim of those around Boris Johnson. That aim – the main purpose – is to somehow save the PM and get him into an election-winning position. Those in charge of the Prime Minister in Number 10 have moved into general election campaign mode already, creating dividing lines and testing the attacks that will be deployed against Starmer and Labour. That’s why the legislative programme is slimmed down, not to create focus, as is claimed, but to avoid unpopular, hard choices and make everything about the coming election. To that end, the Prime Minister’s wife is less visible publicly and court politics is less of a feature, in public at least. Johnson’s own appearances are more sparing, or more sober. His team is looking for a way to get him a hearing again from the public, hoping for a lucky break on the economy and for Starmer to carry on being leaden and potentially unelectable.

That is all very well from the perspective of the Prime Minister and I can understand why he goes along with what is his best – only – hope of survival and revival.

For the rest of us, of all political parties and none, though? It’s hopeless when so much needs tackling and improving.

In every domestic area – the economy, the need for growth, housing, public sector reform (remember that?), energy, the Union – the  country needs proper government and is not getting anything like it. At some point the voters will notice. They may have done so already.

It’s Groom up North

The latest episode of my Authors in Conversation series is with Brian Groom, on his new book Northerners: A History, from the Ice Age to the present day. You can watch it on YouTube, where you’ll also find all the previous episodes. Every week I interview a leading author on a book that has grabbed my attention.

Brian Groom is ex-FT. In 1997 he was editor of Scotland on Sunday, the paper I was about to join as Political Editor. During the election I was working my notice elsewhere and about to join.

The weekend before the 1997 election, Brian’s then paper published one of those “bombshell” constituency opinion polls suggesting the swing against the Tories was going to be even bigger than anticipated. The Scottish Tories, including three members of Major’s cabinet, would lose their seats, it projected. At the time there was some scepticism. A few days later it turned out the poll was dead right. The voters had had enough and on 1 May 1997 the Tories were flattened.

What I’m reading

I’ve just finished Gideon Rachman’s punchy new book, The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy around the World. He calmly takes Trumpism apart. The psychological pen portrait of Putin is particularly persuasive, especially as the book was written before the invasion of Ukraine. I disagree with the highly negative assessment of Brexit, but then I would say that wouldn’t I? Also, I’m not convinced the Merkel, Macron alliance turns out to have been the right approach. Gideon Rachman is on Authors in Conversation in the next few weeks and I look forward to us discussing all this and more.

Have a good weekend.

Iain Martin
Editor and Publisher,
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