EVERYTHING IN MODERATION
Daniel Finkelstein

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Daniel Finkelstein 2020

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Daniel Finkelstein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008356606

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008356620

Version: 2020-08-10

Dedication

For Nicky

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Part One: The Sound of the Suburbs

The suburbs are what make Britain great

Not every age needs a Churchill or a de Gaulle

Once in a while just go for it, hell for leather

Peace and freedom: the blessings of capitalism

Six reasons why I’m an uber-moderniser

MPs? Well, I can’t trust anyone. Not even you

I’d never voted Tory. But changing was easy

It’s human to dread change and fear loss

Labour hasn’t got a monopoly on compassion

No, I won’t be asking for a foreign passport

Part Two: The Rules of Politics

Now here’s a spiffing idea …

Why a mobile phone on a beach sends out a stark message to Gordon Brown

Happy birthday! We like you

Top Tory tips: climb the ladder, check out the ceiling and see the cheese

Let me flog you a used car

Guess the weight of the ox: then you will see what’s wrong with our politics

Enough substance, Mr Cameron. Stick to style … because you’re worth it

Ooh matron! I’m sick of fizzy populism

Curse of the Premier of the Month

Some sage advice: ignore the results

Everyone agrees he’s got to go. So why hasn’t he?

Keep plugging away. The brand is a winner

This isn’t Fox: The Movie. It’s messy, real life

This politico has a lesson for ‘the real world’

There’s only one solution to the PM’s dilemma

What happens in Syria will not stay in Syria

71 days to go and Ed has no campaign in sight

Bad news for Labour: you’re stuck with him

Part Three: The Arrow of History

The 2016 Isaiah Berlin Lecture

1968 violence: blame the bulge

Understand Chelsea versus Sheffield, and you will see the Iraq game plan

Mr Blair’s final magic trick will begin shortly

Would you pass or fail the Kinnock Test?

Berlusconi’s antics are everybody’s business

The political class is losing, not gaining, power

Labour leadership hopefuls stuck in the past

Rees-Mogg’s Brexit history lesson is bunkum

Part Four: People

Walt Disney … Defend Disney from his Mickey Mouse critics

Hillary Clinton … Hillary’s flaws have defined the US election

Clement Attlee … A review of Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee by John Bew

Chuck Berry … A political revolutionary

Ted Sorensen and JFK … Obama must learn from the real Jack Kennedy

Ayn Rand and Karl Marx … Beware zealots who lack the human touch

Gordon Brown … The problem all along, Mr Brown, was you

Millicent Fawcett … The Fawcett statue will be a true landmark

Robert McNamara … From the fog of war come three hard truths

Gary Becker … The man who won a Nobel Prize for parking

Winston Churchill … The wartime leader was a great man, but a racist nonetheless

Muhammad Ali … The boxer could sting like an extremist

John Major … They didn’t listen to him then. They are now

Nelson Mandela … Rising above victimhood

Margaret Thatcher … It wasn’t her that divided us

Margaret Thatcher … The last prime minister of the Second World War

Brian Epstein … and the triumph of capitalism

David Bowie … Rock’s great rebel owed it all to capitalism

William Hague … His two faces are the two faces of Toryism

Luciana Berger … Her exit was a distressing sight

Donald Trump … and the pastor who propelled him to the top

Theresa May … and how history will see her

Jeremy Thorpe … The extraordinary story of a fantasist

George Martin … From the Goons to the Beatles

Part Five: Pastimes

Hours not to reason why (or how I’m pushed for Times)

Football’s ridiculous. And unfair. But it’s such fun

Hamilton musical makes a Founding Father a hero of our time

Whose finger on the off switch?

Fidget in the office to beat the fat

Oscar night: can real men get red-carpet ready?

Thank you for your highly original idea …

Our sepia-tinted PMs were arrogant and remote

Part Six: Crime and the Law

Serial killers and serial errors

All that clairvoyant stuff, I don’t see it myself

J’accuse: this man must not languish in jail

These bundles of charges pose a real danger

We should all be free to choose how we die

Prosecutors don’t know how biased they are

Part Seven: My Times

It’s simple, all the new leader has to do is to win over some new voters

Tonies and Phonies

The truth behind Cameron’s victory: the triumph of the Smith Square set

No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. It’s Brown that’s New Labour, not Blair

The best-dressed corpse in the morgue

Tying the knot? For you, we promise £5,000

Our high inheritance taxes must go, pass it on

Israel acts because the world won’t defend it

If you don’t like voters, they won’t like you

Gay marriage – such a conservative idea

Soon it will be mainstream to say ‘leave the EU’

If we don’t cut the deficit now, when will we?

If Scots file for divorce, we’ll need a good lawyer

Labour’s hypocrisy has brought us to this crisis

Shy Tories are not really shy … or Tory

As Greece shows, threats will get you nowhere

Let’s face it, the EU rescued us from failure

Killer flaw at the heart of the Brexit campaign

If Labour split, what sort of new party would be formed?

We must stand up to the populist blackmail

This election will sweep away the old politics

True socialism always ends with the Stasi

Jeremy Corbyn’s worldview is made for anti-Semites

Boris Johnson’s tax-cut promise is sheer folly

Corbyn’s grand plan is to replace Parliament

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

I suppose you could say that I really started working on this book when I was eight years old.

It was then that I began getting up early so that I could be the first one to read the newspaper. Rather to the bemusement of my parents, who had absolutely no interest in sport, I’d become a football fan, and I wanted to read the match reports and the scores before my dad came downstairs to make breakfast. After that, the paper was his.

So as soon as it arrived I would skip to the front door, lay The Times out on the hall rug, and, starting with the back pages, read whatever football news there was. Which wasn’t much, to be honest.

After I’d been doing this each day for a couple of years, it occurred to me that the paper seemed to contain a lot of other stuff and maybe it was interesting. So when I had completed my survey of the football coverage, I turned the paper over and began again at the front.

It was at about this time that the burglars were caught in the Watergate complex. I was soon hooked on the stories of the President and his men. And on the other political battles that made the mid-1970s such a fascinating political time.

It made me rather an odd child, though. I obtained the autographs of Norman St John-Stevas and Ray Buckton (google them). I collected Times Guides to the House of Commons and memorised the size of majorities of MPs. When Giscard d’Estaing became President of France, my French teacher told the class about it and announced that he had until then been defence minister. I responded that in fact Giscard had been finance minister. I was, at that point, eleven.

And so I first became attached to three of the great passions of my life: football, politics and The Times. And much as I imagined I might grow out of one or the other of them, I never have.

My parents couldn’t talk to me much about football, although they did try. My father, a bookish professor, even took me to Hendon games. Sitting in the freezing cold at half time in a recent Hendon home match I heard over the tannoy: ‘Elsewhere in the league it’s Billericay nil, Bognor Regis nil’, and I thought, my goodness, my dad must have loved me very much.

But politics was a different matter. I wouldn’t say either of them was excessively political and they were both less-than-usually argumentative people. But they did think public affairs mattered a great deal and they were thrilled that I did too.

So, over breakfast each day we would talk about what was in the news. Other things came up. Philosophy a little, mathematics a fair bit and religion too (more out of intellectual interest than devotion). But mostly it was politics.

Around the time I first became interested, 1970 or so, my parents were both Labour voters. Dad, especially, really liked Harold Wilson. As an engineer (a measurement theorist to be precise), my father felt that modern systems and planning were the way to organise a society. The talk of forging a new Britain in the white heat of technology was very attractive to him.

As I write later in this book, he was also an immigrant who had lived on welfare benefits, made his way through night school and worked in the coal mines. He found the Conservative Party of Macmillan an alien thing and suspected the feeling was mutual.

He did have one problem with Labour, however. As a child he had been deported to Siberia along with his mother, and his father had been arrested and sentenced to hard labour as a capitalist and democratic civic leader. As a result of this, my father did not trust the MPs to Wilson’s left, but this rather increased his support for Wilson himself.

My mother – a maths teacher and as much a believer in scientific progress as Dad – shared this concern about extremists, but for a reason that was both different and not so different. She was a survivor of Belsen concentration camp. She was always pretty wary politically of anybody – how shall I put this – overexcitable.

By the end of the 1970s, my dad had come to the conclusion that planning the economy didn’t work, and both of them became concerned about the Left. Thus began the shift that saw them vote SDP in the 1980s and Conservative after that, though very much of the Major/Cameron kind.

So this was the environment I grew up in. A generally progressive household, but a Times-reading one rather than a Guardian-reading one. Rationalist and pro-science, firmly on the American side of the Cold War, socially liberal on race and women’s equality, for the welfare state and public services, for free speech and the rule of law and, above all other things, for moderation, a sense of proportion and generosity to other people.

Whether it is nature or nurture – a bit of both I think – this isn’t a bad description of my own politics all these years later. My mum often used to use the phrase ‘Everything in Moderation’. She mostly applied it to portion size and her willingness to try anything once, but it could pretty much be our family political slogan.

All of these hobbies and instincts I brought with me when I joined The Times properly in 2001. Plus one other thing: a lot of political experience.

By the age of twenty-four, I had already run for Parliament. I was the SDP’s candidate against Ken Livingstone in Brent East in 1987. I was far too young. I hadn’t had a proper job yet, I lived at home and I couldn’t drive. I’ve a letter from the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau somewhere that reads: ‘Dear Mr Finkelstein, it was so nice to meet you, and your mother.’

But I’d become close to the party leader David Owen and he’d become a mentor. Actually he still is. I did a lot of growing up when I worked with David. During the 1987 election we had breakfast every day before his press conference. He said he found it helpful and I believe him, because he doesn’t dissemble, even to your face. But I suspect it was me that found it more useful.

I learned a lot from David about national politics, fighting by his side on the party’s national committee. I also learned a great deal about how to maintain your integrity and independence, how to think things through for yourself and ensure you never let being moderate make you go soft altogether.

Ultimately, of course, we were unsuccessful: the party collapsed, and I rather surprised myself by what I did next. I joined the Conservative Party.

My politics had certainly shifted a bit since my teens. I’d become quite a lot more convinced of the benefits of a capitalist market economy, quite a bit more fiscally conservative and a little more sceptical about government intervention. But what changed most was my view of political alliances.

Experience had made me appreciate that you can’t build a broad enough political movement if you only worked with people who shared your views and your background completely. The world isn’t full of Jewish sons of refugees or people from Hendon Central with Master’s degrees in computing.

The miners’ strike, the argument over CND and the obvious fact that many of Mrs Thatcher’s reforms had been necessary also made me realise that I was trying to be right wing on the left. So the Tories it was.

Within about three years of joining the party I found myself round the Cabinet table briefing the Prime Minister as his head of research. It was the tail end of an eighteen-year government and politically it was very tough. But it was hard not to respect John Major or be proud of serving him. I wasn’t too surprised, however, when we suffered a huge defeat.

What followed was sometimes hilariously difficult. I became a close adviser to William Hague and convinced I was supporting someone who deserved to be prime minister. He was incisive, calm, witty and kind. His qualifications seemed to me obvious. But it was difficult to get anyone to agree. These days there are lots of takers for that proposition, but at the time nothing we did made any difference. Maybe that is because some of it wasn’t very good, but then again, even when it was brilliant – Prime Minister’s Questions for instance – it made no difference.

It was partly as a result of this I began to grasp something very important. Something I’m embarrassed I didn’t get earlier. People aren’t following politics. To what is really an astonishingly great degree. What moves politics are much deeper things – demographics, how the economy is changing, instinctive and hard-to-move reactions to the party leaders. Grasping this was my first step to real understanding. I don’t think there is one column in this book that isn’t touched by this awakening.

It was also during this period I appreciated properly how serious the Conservative Party’s problems had become. I am quite an optimistic person and sometimes I’d persuade myself that things weren’t as bad as they looked. Andrew Cooper was there to put me right. I’d met him in college and he had become a hugely successful pollster as well as one of my best friends. He didn’t share my Pollyannaish tendency, being instead a pitiless empiricist. And he was almost invariably correct.

I started to meet up with others over pizza to discuss how the party could become more moderate, modern and liberal. There’d be four or five of us each time. One of them was George Osborne (also a close friend) and another was David Cameron. We shared frustration, but in David’s mind the idea of what to do next began to take shape.

So anyway, all that is a long way of saying that in 2001, when I joined The Times after being defeated in Harrow West in the election, I brought with me years of working on the inside. But also the complication that I had publicly known political views, an agenda and friends and allies active in politics.

The stakes became higher when one of those friends became the prime minister and another the chancellor of the exchequer.

I took the view that I couldn’t escape this, and I shouldn’t deny it. So the best thing to do was to give readers the benefit of the understanding I gained, the insight I had, while being honest about who I was. I was an opinion writer and not a news reporter. I hope (and think) readers felt I struck the right balance.

I’ve read The Times every day since those first encounters with it on the rug, rarely missing an edition. It has always suited my temperament and mostly suited my politics too.

And that may be what accounted for the feeling I had sitting in reception at the paper, waiting for a meeting with Peter Stothard, the editor. I had a number of different job offers and they all seemed very interesting and to offer good prospects. But in the reception of The Times I felt a sense of excitement and also one of belonging.

I proposed to Peter a sort of online think tank: basically a blog in the days before such things existed. He was mildly interested in that, but more interested in me joining as a leader writer.

It wasn’t long before I started writing columns for the paper. And three things were, I think, particularly important in the columns I ended up writing.

The first is a piece of advice I received when I first started writing a regular column for the main comment pages (or op-eds as they are known, as this sort of article initially appeared opposite the editorials).

The first columns I wrote appeared in the features pages, where I was asked to stand in for the historian and journalist Anthony Howard while he wrote a book. The appropriate style for such a column was informal, relaxed and personal. I would bring in anecdotes and talk of my own experiences.

Then Michael Gove, one of the paper’s most prominent and popular writers, was selected as a parliamentary candidate and it was decided to move his column to features and that I would take over his op-ed slot.

Just before I made the move the features editor Sandra Parsons told me I should take care not to change too much. Keep it informal, keep it personal. Don’t feel the op-ed pages require you to be stiff or pompous. It was wise counsel. Where stiffness and pomposity remained, it was at least my own personal stiffness and pomposity rather than being put on for the occasion.

Also important was inspiration from my brother. I have always lived surrounded by books. My grandfather (my mother’s father) had been the archivist of the German anti-Nazi movement and established a library, one of the largest collections of material about fascism in the world.

Quite apart from the library, he bought so many books of his own that he was driven out of his flat above the ice-skating rink in Queensway into a house in Golders Green, in order to have enough shelf space. He devoted three entire rooms of this house to books, although he was frustrated when a structural engineer put a limit on the number of volumes he could store. Apparently the engineer was concerned that the floors would collapse under the weight.

My father then also bought many thousands of books of his own, some hundreds having been given to him by his father-in-law as an engagement present. The overwhelming majority of these were on Judaism, which was my father’s intellectual hobby. And I, like Dad, started by being quite focused in my reading. Politics and history, history and politics.

My brother, by contrast, though distinguished in his field (software engineering) has always been amazingly eclectic in his reading. If you introduced someone to him and said they were an expert in the history of Chinese piracy, Anthony would invariably remark: ‘How interesting, I’ve just been reading a book on that.’

It rubbed off on me eventually. I began to experiment more. Social science, social history, books about murders and about baseball, random books that just looked a bit interesting and might take me off on an interesting tangent. And I’d often share what I learned with readers.

Sometimes people ask me how I have managed to read so much and I’ve never been sure of the answer. I’m not particularly speedy. But I am pretty dedicated. Whenever I am not doing anything else, which turns out to be a lot of the time, I’m reading.

From this inspiration I had an insight. There was a huge amount of social and political science that could cast light on the news and it wasn’t necessarily appearing in other people’s columns. Game theory, for instance, and social psychology. And at one point in my first couple of years at The Times I stumbled into statistics.

During the World Cup in 2002 I began to write a column on football, using statistical analysis to illuminate the game. These columns don’t appear in this book, but their influence does. I began to think about issues in a different way, understanding how concepts like reversion to the mean might aid my understanding of politics and social affairs.

Armed with all this, I settled in to write a weekly column that has appeared, and still appears, on Wednesday every week since 2005. And there hasn’t been a single week in that entire period when I didn’t wake up nervous on a Tuesday morning, wondering if this week’s column was really going to work when you started writing it for real.

But it’s got to work. It’s appearing in The Times, after all.

Actually, Tuesday’s nerves are only part of it. The most difficult part of producing a column isn’t writing it. It’s having the idea. From the moment a column appears, I start to worry about what on earth I am going to put in the next one. And the fear grows until an idea comes.

I might have been reading the paper and articles and books all week and be completely blank. And then, emptying the dishwasher, a column will appear to me while I’m putting away the teaspoons. Sometimes it is just the very basic argument, other times it’s the whole thing.

Once it does, though, I may (in fact almost always do) need to do quite a bit of reading. I might want to use an academic study or tell a historical story or write about someone who has just died. I am fanatical about getting this stuff right and ensuring that even the most expert reader would accept that I know what I’m talking about. Because one thing I can be sure of, working on The Times, is that even the most obscure points will come to the attention of the expert on the subject.

Once I have the idea I have to agree it with the Comment Page Editor. Often I will give them more than one potential column and they will pick. Sometimes they – or very occasionally the editor through them – will tell me that the paper has already run too many columns on this idea and I should come back to it another time. But it’s a matter of pride not to propose such ideas if I can help it.

I have often been asked whether I am told what position to take and I can honestly say that this has never happened. Well, OK, once I wanted to write a column telling Sir John Chilcot to take as long as he wanted to complete his report on the Iraq war. I unwittingly timed this for the day on which the paper was launching a series of news reports which suggested he needed to get on with it. I was politely but firmly asked if I might pick another topic and I gladly agreed. But apart from that, never.

Once I’ve been given the go-ahead I’ll settle in and start writing. I try not to schedule any distractions for Tuesdays so that the column in my head is the one I get down on paper. How long does a column take? Well it’s 1150 words and it takes usually between two and three hours to write down. But in reality it has taken me somewhere between three hours and the entirety of my life since I was eight years old.

Finally, a word about this book.

I’ve written something like 700 columns for The Times and had room in this volume for about 110 of them. The earliest column in this volume was written in 2003, the latest on the day Theresa May announced she was leaving office in March 2019 (which seemed a reasonable place to stop).

When I read them all again, obviously I was looking for the best ones, but just as important was that they should still seem relevant and interesting now. For instance, I wrote a column on gay rights which I was pleased with, but a lot of it dealt with the religious opinions of Ruth Kelly, a Blair-era cabinet minister. I thought this material would mystify readers who had forgotten the details of this political row.

Equally there were some columns which predicted exactly what was going to happen next. I am rather proud of them, but once the predicted events had happened, I concluded that the article might be more interesting to me than to readers of this book.

In some places context is necessary to enjoy the column properly, and I’ve added a short couple of sentences of explanation before the column begins. But in many cases they should be immediately understandable without notes.

I decided early on to group the articles together by theme rather than chronology. Where useful – in my articles on the big political battles of my time as a columnist for instance – the sections do follow a chronological order. Elsewhere – the section on great contemporary figures – it does not.

I grouped together some political columns on the issues of the day that I think elucidate basic rules of politics. And I have also included a lecture, very much inspired by the columns in The Times, that has not yet been published.

There are some issues I care about that are missing and one or two columns are excluded because, while they were quite good, I’ve repented of the views in them (such as a horrible column suggesting that I didn’t really care about Scottish independence, which I passionately do).

I haven’t altered the ones that are included, even when a phrase or idea or prediction makes me wince. The only changes I have made are a few tiny excisions when I have repeated a word or when the sentence reads particularly poorly or I have made an observation more than once in the book. I have also, in one or two places, removed a reference to an event that might have meant something to the reader in the week it was written but is now just distracting. When making such a change I have been particularly careful to avoid altering the sense of anything I’ve said.

I’ve also kept the headlines from the original articles in most cases.

So here they are. My wife always observes that op-ed columns are either obvious or rubbish. I hope you will find more of the former than the latter. And perhaps one or two that aren’t either.

PART ONE
The Sound of the Suburbs

When I became Comment Editor of The Times, I used to tell our columnists that it wasn’t enough for readers to learn what the writer thought. They also had to be convinced that it mattered.

This was partly about the evidence they produced to support their argument of course. But it was also about giving readers a sense of who the writers are, where they come from, what their values are.

So I suppose I should start this collection in the same way, with columns that give you a sense of my outlook. Not everything, of course, but some important things.

The suburbs are what make Britain great

Bourgeois life is too easy a target for satire. There’s nothing better than the dual carriageway and a job in extra-wet tissues

12 August 2015

Some years ago my father came home from an academic conference with a picture book he’d been given by his visitors, Oulu, the Fifth Biggest Town in Finland.

It was crammed with photographs of the highlights of this jewel of Northern Ostrobothnia. The town hall, the sawmill museum, a bicycle stand, a deserted shopping street covered in snow. There was also plenty of useful information. Since 1996 Oulu has hosted the Air Guitar World Championship. And at the end of the book was a picture of a dual carriageway accompanied by the suggestion that we might like to visit Oulu. ‘Or better still, go round it.’

At first I thought this meant that the whole book had been a joke. Slowly, however, I realised that they were simply proud of the Oulu ring road and were advising us not to miss the chance of travelling on it once we’d had our fill of sawmills.

You might think of this column as: In Defence of Oulu.

It is prompted by the death of that great genius David Nobbs, the author of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the man who appreciated the comedy in describing a train arriving eleven minutes late at Waterloo station owing to staff difficulties at Hampton Wick.

Nobbs chronicles the monotony of daily suburban life brilliantly. Walking down Coleridge Close and turning right into Tennyson Avenue, filling in the crossword on the journey into work at Sunshine Desserts, the three pictures on his boss’s wall: ‘A Francis Bacon, a John Bratby and a photograph of CJ holding the lemon mousse which had won second prize in the convenience foods category at the 1963 Paris Concours Des Desserts.’

Nobbs said that one of his inspirations was the thought that people have such strange jobs: ‘You can’t grow up wanting to become an executive for extra-wet strength tissues.’ A life trying to think of ways to market products like Kumquat Surprise (‘What about something like, off the top of my head, I like to stroke my nipple with a strawberry and lychee ripple’) drives Reggie to a breakdown.

Though Nobbs was an uncommon talent, his was not an uncommon target. The futility of suburban or small-town life, the banality of commerce and management, the hypocrisy of respectable lives behind net curtains, the despair as youth trickles away into middle age.

And every time I watch Richard Briers quit for a life of self-sufficiency in Surbiton, or Kevin Spacey’s character Lester Burnham melt down in American Beauty, or Reggie Perrin fake his suicide, I am struck by the same thought inspired by the guide to Oulu.

Sunshine Desserts is the height of civilisation. Lester Burnham was better off when he went to work in an office and looked after his family. Oulu is right to boast of its ring road, which is quite an achievement.

When we look at history we regard as heroes those who fought and those who conquered, those who were martyrs for their point of view, those who set out on great adventures, those who built great cathedrals and pyramids.

Yet I think it is a fine ambition to have been an executive for extra-wet strength tissues. In the history of mankind how many better jobs have there been? How many have been better paid? More comfortable? Less dangerous? More inoffensively useful to their fellow man?

The HR department of a children’s shoe brand has never launched a war. Nobody dies in the creation of advertisements for Kumquat Surprise. Surely the reason our ancestors struggled so hard and even fought wars is so that we, their children, could live happily on the commuter line to King’s Cross, heading into work on the 8.17.

I always sigh when I hear people attack consumerism. All that hunger, and war and pestilence, all that dictatorship and torture and tragedy and they want to attack shopping?

I was brought up in Hendon Central and when I was thirteen years old they opened Brent Cross Shopping Centre. I could walk there without crossing the road. My father was a cultured man, a highly sophisticated intellectual, but he regarded the shopping centre as among the great beneficial developments of mankind.

He had almost starved as a young boy in a Soviet-imposed exile. When my father was thirteen years old he couldn’t walk to the shopping centre because there wasn’t one in Siberia. He couldn’t drive there either, because Stalin had the car.

For him, the ability to buy a prepared sandwich in Marks & Spencer or meet my mother for a crusty roll and butter in the Tesco coffee shop represented a great advance in the condition of man. And isn’t it wonderful to live in a country in which we worry seriously about becoming too fat?

People talk about the death of big ideas. The great thing about Britain is our small ideas and our pragmatism, our suburbs and our bourgeois stability. This thing – this apparent banality – that we so easily satirise is what people at the Channel Tunnel are desperate to have. They are fighting their way to be able to work in the Alpine Dry Cleaners in Hatch End. The right to purchase Good Housekeeping in the WHSmith on Bridge Street is as attractive a right as all those contained in the Declaration of Independence.

The Metropolitan Line from Pinner, change across the platform to the Jubilee Line at Finchley Road, is not quiet despair, it is salvation. Oh for delays caused by leaves on the line! Come bring me your apologies for inconvenience!

The heroes of history are those who do not fight wars; those who instead create a world fit for people to market non-stick frying pans and sell to each other oven-ready chips. Yvette Cooper. Jeremy Hunt. Not Julius Caesar. Or Fidel Castro.

Give me any day a politician who has been special adviser to the agriculture minister over a man on a white charger come to purify the nation and sweep away its corruption. For I well know who will be doing the sweeping and who will be the swept.

Give me special advisers and special offers. When people are trying things on in the changing rooms of Top Shop they are too busy to start transporting the Jews to the East.

We have toiled hard over centuries to create places like Oulu and Pinner, where we can live in peace and work in offices with desk chairs that swivel. Let the sun shine on Sunshine Desserts.

Not every age needs a Churchill or a de Gaulle

My mother’s life taught me the value of political moderation and to be distrustful of radical change and big ideas

8 February 2017

A couple of weeks ago I received in the mail a copy of a book called Survivor. It contained stunning portraits of Holocaust survivors taken by the photographer Harry Borden. And one of them was a wonderful picture of my mother, standing by the open door of the dining room at her house in Hendon.

Accompanying each portrait were a few words from the subject in their own handwriting. Next to hers, Mum had written: ‘I think of myself as a person, a wife and mother first and a survivor last.’

Last week, after a long illness, she died. And I have found myself standing by the same open dining-room door and thinking about what she had said. Here’s my attempt to make sense of it.

Whenever my mother told of her arrest and being taken to a concentration camp by cattle truck, she would always add that my father had spent much longer in such a truck when exiled to the Siberian borders by Stalin.

Partly this reflected her natural modesty. She found competitive stories of suffering utterly ludicrous, and was keen to undercut her own. But partly it was to emphasise the way in which the enemies of liberty, however different they look, produce the same misery and death.

Even as a child it wasn’t hard to absorb the simple political lesson. It was to be resolute in defence of democracy, free speech and the rule of law. When I was a student I was often offered dope, but refused it because Mum and Dad taught me never, ever to break the law. If you don’t respect the rules laid down by a freely elected parliament, where next? My friends remind me that I refused to tape records for them because it breached copyright.

As an adult, however, I began to understand better the subtlety of my parents’ politics. Actually, more than their politics, their way of looking at the world.

My mum’s favourite joke was ‘Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the theatre?’ Indeed, when my father died, I returned in a hurry from watching Chelsea play Norwich City and my mother looked at me and said: ‘What was the score?’ (It was 3-1 by the way.)

The reason she found the Lincoln joke funny was that she thought nothing so absurd as a lack of a sense of proportion. It would have been a perfectly reasonable response to Belsen and exile for my parents to have had a hair trigger, to see the next Holocaust in every event, the next Stalin in every bumptious leadership figure. Instead, they went the other way.

My mother’s view was that if she lived her life as a ‘survivor’, she would be granting Hitler the ultimate triumph. She would live as a person, a wife and a mother. She would note not how similar events were to a fresh disaster, but how dissimilar they were.

My parents never involved themselves in a hedge (or any other) dispute with a neighbour, it was out of the question to disapprove of their children’s partners, they never took sides in rows on the synagogue council. It isn’t quite true that we children were never admonished, but they were remarkably tolerant. Even when I failed to realise that Copydex glue for carpets was intended for the underside.

The only time I remember being properly told off was for claiming, just before dinner, to be starving. Justly, my parents found my failure to appreciate what starving really was, offensive.

Inevitably, this all had an impact on their politics and on mine. It isn’t just that we find unbelievably stupid, people who put the Nazi emblem on the European Union flag or call it the EUSSR. It’s broader than that.

The great figures of history are often seen as those who are unreasonable in circumstances where reason no longer applies. Take Charles de Gaulle, for instance. He was stubbornly, almost insanely, unreasonable about small things as well as big ones. And his pettiness was his greatness. Through it he preserved the rights of France and secured its independence.

No one would argue that Winston Churchill was always reasonable or acted proportionately. Nor that, in different circumstances, Margaret Thatcher was either. There are moments in history for people willing and able to be incredibly bloody-minded and to appreciate that great acts of change or resistance are necessary.

But not every moment is like that and not every circumstance requires it. There is greatness too in the ability to compromise, to moderate, to accept with generosity the eccentricities and obsessions of others. It can be an achievement when nothing much happens.

America’s first president had his wars and his monument. America’s fifth president, James Monroe, cannot boast a great cathartic moment, or a spectacular military victory. Only a period in office known as ‘the era of good feeling’. But I know which president I would rather have lived under. There would be no Monroe without Washington, but what would be the point of a Washington if we were never able to enjoy the era of Monroe?

And not every political event requires courage and resistance. Sometimes acceptance and understanding are the right response. I notice the imprint of my parents’ politics on my view of leaving the European Union. I wanted to remain, but you know what? We’ll live. Even if the worst predictions of the economic consequences are correct, which they probably aren’t, we will live.

My parents thought political moderation was a virtue in itself. They regarded grand conspiracy theories as bizarre, and sweeping big ideas as unconvincing. My dad liked Harold Wilson precisely for the reason some of Wilson’s colleagues despised him, because he was a pragmatist who adapted to circumstances. I think politically Mum was happiest when she supported the SDP, though she admired John Major.

My mum didn’t want to live all her life as a survivor. She wanted a country that was free but also safe and stable. She didn’t want a turbulent politics that sucked in every citizen. She wanted reason and moderation and a sense of proportion so that she could do more than survive.

So that she could live, and love, and nurture and prosper. And, in the end, so that she could die in peace and tranquillity in her adopted home.

Once in a while just go for it, hell for leather

Moderation is fine for every day, but for one-off moments adopt an uncompromising, Steve Jobs approach

Oscar Wilde once said: ‘Everything in moderation. Including moderation.’ Although probably someone else said it first. This column appeared during the London Olympics, of which I’d always been a supporter.

8 August 2012

Enthusiasm for the Olympics has its critics. Someone wrote to me last week describing the whole thing as a disappointment, while complaining that there were so many empty seats. This reminded me of Woody Allen’s joke about the two Jewish women and the restaurant. ‘The food here is terrible,’ says one. ‘Yes,’ says the other, ‘and such small portions.’

One argument, however, I feel I have to take seriously. It goes, roughly, like this. It’s fun and all that, but we’ve spent billions of pounds and as many hours so that some people can run around in circles for a fortnight.

I’ve thought a little about how to respond to this and I feel the best way is by telling you about my one sporting triumph. I beat Sebastian Coe in an egg-and-spoon race. Not at school. As adults. He already had his gold medals. And there was none of this stuff he did against Steve Ovett, none of this coming back in his less good race later and being vindicated. He was just beaten and I won, end of.

The thing is, you see, that Seb turned out to run quite fast, faster than me (on the day). But he dropped the egg and I didn’t.

The egg-and-spoon race rewards moderation. If you run too slowly you lose anyway. Run too quickly and there’s a good chance that you will lose the egg. Egg-and-spoon suits both my athletic ability (although in the ten years since my famous victory, I’ve lost a yard or two of pace) and my attitude to life.

I am, in general, conservative with a small c. I am suspicious of big schemes, of people with a glint in their eye and a simple solution, of those with dogmatic obsessions who can’t resist hammering it home. I am all for the spirit of compromise, taking one thing with another, seeing if we can’t fold everyone into the solution. Naturally I suffer from the inevitable human failing of believing myself more reasonable than others think me, but you get the idea.

And the Olympics, the history of it, the conduct of the competitors and, indeed, the very fact of London 2012, is a contradiction of that idea.

At the end of last year, Walter Isaacson published his excellent biography of Steve Jobs. And it turns out that in many ways Jobs was dreadful. He was manipulative, egotistical, ready to trample over people to an extraordinary extent and his head was full of highly eccentric notions, particularly about his health and diet.

He was also simply brilliant. And there was a connection between his impossible personality and the impossible results he achieved. He insisted that his singular vision, his concept, however extreme and impractical it might seem, was delivered exactly as he had conceived it.

He was quite unwilling to compromise with anybody or even with reality. He ignored cost, or even whether the parts he wished to include in his new product existed. He thought anyone who couldn’t see things as he saw them was a fool and should be treated as such. He lied and cheated to get his way. And he succeeded.

This can’t be a rule for everyone’s behaviour. It can’t be countenanced. And even for one person, it can end in disaster, as with Jobs it often did. But the extremism, the insistence on seeing through his idea without challenge, that’s what made it so good. You can’t always be like that, but sometimes you have to be.

To follow the history of the Olympics is to be struck by the unbelievable dogmatism of Avery Brundage, for decades the leading light in the International Olympic Committee. He held to his ideas – that the Olympics should be for amateurs, and that politics should be kept out of it – to the point of madness. In the late 1950s he was still complaining publicly about the ‘well financed’ campaign in the 1930s against the Nazi Olympics of 1936.

Yet at the same time it is hard to avoid the conclusion that without this singular, blinkered, intense commitment – one that it would often have been hard for a reasonable, moderate person to justify – the Olympics would have collapsed long before London 2012.

Brundage’s behaviour was hard to tolerate, but perhaps sportsmen tolerated it because, at some level, they understood his extremism. Bill Furniss, the swimming coach, describes intense sessions with the great champion Rebecca Adlington as ‘sick-bucket sessions’ because they push her to the absolute limit. One of Adlington’s great advantages as a swimmer, her admirers explain, is her willingness to endure pain.

Who does that? And why? It is to achieve a moment, even if only a fleeting one, of uncompromised brilliance. She endures pain because she has a singular vision that brooks no opposition or interference. Not everyone can do it, and she can’t go on doing it for ever, but what it produces is something worth having. And something that can’t be obtained in any other way.

That’s what we’ve done with these Olympics. We achieved something great, something wonderful, because we went all in, because we brooked no compromise, because we stopped at nothing.

We spent millions and millions of pounds on an opening ceremony and then allowed one man’s vision to determine its content. It was, at points, more than slightly bonkers, but for the same reason it was worth watching. It never seemed like it was made by committee.

And then we spent billions on staging the Games themselves. We created Olympic lanes, and told office workers to stay at home, and covered Horse Guards Parade in sand so that women in bikinis could play volleyball on the parade ground. We took a ludicrous amount of trouble. We never said we couldn’t. We never said we wouldn’t. We just did it, whatever it took – to deliver it just right, without a corner being cut and without even common prudence calling a halt.

And what we have got has been worth it, even if it has been a bit mad. The fact that once in a lifetime we got it out of proportion has been the point. We couldn’t have had it any other way.

It isn’t a way to govern, of course. You’d run too fast and drop the egg, you see. I think my moderation is the right way most of the time. But I wonder if we couldn’t do it just occasionally. A new airport perhaps. Some people look at the Olympics and think: ‘Whatever next?’ And I think that’s rather a good question.

Peace and freedom: the blessings of capitalism

The great ideologies dispossessed my father. It was democracy that let him live and die in safety and contentment

7 September 2011

A little more than a week ago my father lifted his arms and did something that he had done countless times before, blessed his children as he ushered in the Sabbath. But he was doing it for the last time. When he had finished, his hands fell to his side. He died the next day, with the blessing as his final act.

He had known for several weeks that his illness was terminal, and each day he grew more tired. But through it all his mind remained as sharp as ever, which is to say very sharp. And so each night in those precious days before his death, I sat by his bedside and we talked, sometimes about his extraordinary life, sometimes about a task that still needed doing (updating, for instance, some references in the book he had been writing about Polish Jewry) and sometimes about the future of capitalism.

I didn’t find these odd topics, even though he was so ill. My father cited ‘conversation’ as his chief hobby, along with ‘not gardening’, and took both seriously. Yet with him, the small talk was never small.

Throughout my life we would discuss philosophy and argue about politics over breakfast. At dinner we might talk about problems of physics and maths, with a long discussion about how many cans of drink might be fitted into a fridge of a given volume. Both my parents, I recall from one Friday night meal, felt very strongly that it is insufficiently appreciated that a centimetre is not a proper SI measurement.

The day after a debate on some ethical question I would often get a call, my father having sought clarification from a scriptural source or from one of his many reference books.

And all of this seemed so natural that it is only in writing it down now that it occurs to me it might seem a little eccentric to others. Oh, well.

Anyway, all this is to say that considering the future of capitalism counted as light chit-chat. Our latest discussions began because I had been reading some articles by journalists and commentators whom I respected, which argued that the Left had been correct about capitalism all along. Capitalism, they said, had proved to be a conspiracy of the elite against the masses. Karl Marx’s prediction that it was inherently unstable had been right.

I wanted to know what my dad thought because, as far as I could see, this argument contradicted the experience of his life.

In response he began, as he often did, by telling me a story. It was one that I knew – the one about the cocoa and the bones – but one that I wanted to hear again, just one more time. In 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, my grandfather had been released from a labour camp, where he had been serving a sentence of eight years’ hard labour for having been, the communists judged, a ‘socially dangerous element’.

Leaving prison, my grandfather had joined the Polish Army Corps, had traced his family to the remote Siberian outpost where they had been exiled, and had managed to send them a little money.

After almost two years of starvation, my father and his mother rejoiced that they had some cash, and, their deportation order having been lifted, the right to spend it. My grandmother decided to go to the finest restaurant in the whole of Semipalatinsk.

In they went, a waiter took my grandmother’s coat and they sat down, each with a large and fancy-looking menu card. Yet as they requested items, they were told that unfortunately, today, this or that was off the menu. Eventually my grandmother was forced to ask: ‘Well, what do you have?’ Just bones and cocoa, came the reply.

My father never had much time for complaints that ‘consumerism’ was undermining the moral fabric of society. He thought it odd that people would regard it as a bad thing to produce items to buy and sell and to make a profit from them. He also thought that a gloomy view of Britain and Britons totally lacked perspective. The idea that ordinary people did not benefit from capitalism seemed to him too obviously absurd to require refutation.

However, the main benefit of capitalism was not, as far as he was concerned, money. Beyond the ability to purchase books and the occasional Indian takeaway, he was not motivated by accumulating wealth. He left an inexpensive Casio watch which, as a measurement scientist, he liked because it told the time accurately. What he really appreciated about liberal capitalist democracy is that it left him in peace. In peace and freedom.

A fellow detainee in my grandfather’s prison had tried to persuade him not to leave when he was released. They could stay safely in the camp, he said, and drink the meths in the hospital. On behalf of his family, my grandfather chose freedom instead. And though it brought many trials and years without land to call home, my father never doubted its virtue.

The great sweeping ideologies had been a failure. They had driven him from his home and from his life, killed his relatives, dispossessed his family. My dad took a rather dim view of those extolling Marx’s powers of analysis, which he found, to say the least, wanting. He supported capitalism for the small things that it brought – the suburbs, the rule of law, Brent Cross Shopping Centre. He was safe here. His family was safe here. The vast majority of British people are safe here.

In those last days, we discussed, too, how his life showed that it was, in any case, silly to think of Britain as some sort of free-market anarchy. My father had been on National Assistance when he first came here, had spent years in the coal mines working for a nationalised industry and had then spent the bulk of his career as a university professor.

Unlike those of us born here, my father became British on purpose, as a conscious act, one that he had thought about deeply. He never thought Britain’s leaders corrupt, or that the country was going to the dogs, or that our society was collapsing, undermined by its moral decay. He lived here proud of a nation that let him live, let him learn, let him teach, and let him practise his religion. He knew what it meant to be British.

Six reasons why I’m an uber-moderniser

David Cameron must not retreat from his progressive agenda

Just before the 2003 Conservative conference George Osborne, then still shadow chancellor, gave an interview in the Spectator in which he said that he ‘didn’t take the kind of uber-modernising view that some have had, that you can’t talk about crime or immigration or lower taxes. It is just that you can’t do so to the exclusion of the NHS, the environment and economic stability.’ I didn’t really disagree with this, but it was interpreted as George (who absolutely is an uber-moderniser) distancing himself from modernisers. So I thought it an opportunity to state some of my own basic views about Conservative politics.

3 October 2007

I am about to do something dangerous, something I might regret. I am about to allow myself to be labelled. The history of this is not encouraging. A few days ago Roy Hattersley wrote about how much he wishes he had not accepted the label ‘old Labour’.

And put it this way, the Tory ‘wets’ are no longer paying a grateful retainer to their branding consultancy.

But the boy can’t help it. I am an uber-moderniser. The moment the phrase was coined by George Osborne to describe the keepers of the Tory modernising faith I realised the term fitted me perfectly.

There are plenty of people who think that what David Cameron should do now is gently retreat from all that modernising rhetoric. It is all too ‘Blair’, they argue, and there isn’t enough in it for Middle Britain. I completely disagree. A sharp break from the strategy that lost three elections is essential. When Mr Cameron stands up later today, he needs to show that he still carries the modernising torch.

Here, then, is the uber-modernisers’ manifesto.

That optimism triumphs over pessimism

Tory modernisers argue that the Conservatives must talk about more than the economy. Quite right. But we uber-modernisers worry. We think that all this talk of the quality of life can easily lead the Tories to sound gloomy, angry, at odds with today’s society, banging on about anarchy on the streets.

And voters will come to associate the Tories with that pessimism, just as visitors to a car show associate the vehicle with the sexy woman sitting on the bonnet. Mr Cameron must talk of his confidence in modern Britain. A sunshine strategy, that’s what uber-modernisers want to see.

When you talk about them, voters learn about you

The Tory party members would cheer a vicious attack on Gordon Brown, but it would still be a mistake. Voters will not rely on Tories to tell them what to think about the Prime Minister. Instead they listen to Tory politicians and make their mind up about Tories. Are they reasonable? Are they pleasant? Are they in touch?

Last week there was a ludicrous call for [Labour minister] James Purnell to resign because somebody, without his permission, had photoshopped his picture to suggest he had been in a group photo. In fact he had been slightly late and photographed separately. Uber-modernisers regard calling for his resignation, as some did, as an indication that Conservatives still don’t get the point about being seen as reasonable and intelligent. And it’s an important one, since commenting about Labour is one of the main things that TV viewers see Conservatives do.

That to win, Tories must appeal to their core vote

This may seem a bit odd. Isn’t the whole point of modernising to move away from a core-vote strategy? Ah, but that depends on what you think the Tory core vote is.

Uber-modernisers argue that the real core vote for the Conservatives, the people who have elected Tory governments for a century, are the middle class, and particularly women. The experiences, views and aspirations of this core have changed massively in the past twenty years and the Tory party failed to change with it. Instead the party chased after new voters who shared traditional Tory prejudices. This group is too small, lives in the wrong places and is disinclined to vote Conservative.

A proper core-vote strategy requires a more liberal, tolerant Tory party in tune with working women and the modern middle class.

That brand decontamination comes before everything

The very start of the modernising journey was the realisation that a proposition that could win popular support became unpopular the moment it was advanced by the Conservatives.

So before you can make a successful public appeal on crime, immigration or, say, voucher schemes for schools, you first have to persuade the voters to trust the party.

You have to remove from the party’s brand the idea that, for instance, it doesn’t care about public services and that it dislikes foreigners. You have to show that what matters to voters matters to you and matters more than your obsessions – say on Europe – and more than Westminster gossip.

While Mr Cameron has made some progress, personally, on this task, the party as a whole has a long way to go. Uber-modernisers are concerned that the party overestimates how far voters think it has come.

That the danger is having too much policy, not too little

When David Cameron became leader he was told by almost every commentator that he needed lots of policy. Not us Uber-modernisers.

Policies don’t win elections. Victory comes from voters feeling that a party is fit for government and preferably that voting for them is something to be proud of. And policies don’t tell people how you are going to govern either. The micropolicy produced in opposition by a research team too small to do it well forms only the smallest part of the real programme of a government.

So uber-modernisers were always concerned about having large numbers of policy commissions under light central control. And we were right. The confusing mess of unfiltered policy ideas has been very damaging.

In his speech Mr Cameron needs to make a proper argument, accompanied by big statements of direction on important issues, but not make lots of small, poorly thought-out policy promises.

That you must show as well as tell

It is not enough to say that you have changed. You must demonstrate it. It’s what you are that matters, not just what you say.

Since party reform is one of the few things an opposition can actually do, how you handle the party is vital. That means, for instance, that the leadership simply has to succeed in getting large numbers of women candidates.

And it also means the leader has to show he is strong. Party reform is not complete and Mr Cameron must not ignore it.

There is a long way to go before there is modernisation. Too much modernisation is certainly not the Tory problem.

MPs? Well, I can’t trust anyone. Not even you

The British public is feasting on hatred. One minute it’s estate agents, then bankers or foreigners. Who will be next?

This was written at the height of the MPs’ expenses scandal.

27 May 2009

I can’t. Believe me I’ve tried. And I know it would make my life easier. Occasionally in the last three weeks I have managed to work myself up into a state of righteous indignation for an entire hour at a time. I feel briefly as though I may be able to join in. But then it goes. Nothing I can do about it, I am afraid. The national anger, the frenzy, the fury about MPs and their allowances just passes me by. Actually, it is worse than that. I am afraid it makes me shudder.

When Princess Diana died I walked through St James’s Park and saw people, tears in their eyes, laying funeral wreaths for someone they had only seen on television. I remember then feeling outside the national mood, finding the intensity of the mourning slightly strange.

Yet I did, at least, find something uplifting in the emotion, even if I didn’t feel it myself. Sadness at the death of a young woman with two young children is, after all, compassionate, a worthy sentiment. I felt rather proud of my compatriots, if a little bewildered at their fervour.

The national mood of anger at MPs strikes me rather differently. It doesn’t bewilder me as the Diana wreaths did. I can see that some MPs have behaved badly. I even think some should (and might) end up in prison. So I ‘get it’. I see why people feel as they do. I understand it. I am, to use that dreadful political cliché, ‘in touch’ with the national mood. I just can’t share it. I find it ugly, unpleasant, lacking all sense of proportion.

Robert Mugabe starves his population to death. Nothing. The Janjawid commit genocide in Darfur. Nothing. Gordon Brown bankrupts the country. Nothing. Then someone buys an unnecessary trouser press. Pandemonium.

When people are being murdered in their millions, dying in their boring, banal way, the BBC puts Question Time on at 1.30 in the morning and sticks a comedian on the panel to give proceedings a bit of a lift. Now that Cheryl Gillan has accidentally claimed for £4.47 of dog food, they move the show to prime time, bumping the Two Ronnies or whatever, so that everyone can boo Ming Campbell.

I would find it all fantastically silly if I didn’t find it so worrying. It is, you see, a flashing alert signal for me when ‘I was following the rules laid down by Parliament’ ceases to be regarded as any sort of defence. I get worried when I see people declared guilty until proven innocent in Harriet Harman’s famous ‘court of public opinion’ because there has been an article written about them in a newspaper. It makes me shiver when a whole category of people – politicians – are regarded as guilty, because ‘they’re all the same’, and when it becomes routine to dehumanise them by comparing them to farm animals.

And it isn’t just the MPs, you see. It would matter less if it was, I suppose. It is that all of us think everyone else is on the take, or is useless, or tasteless.

We’ve only just finished (for the time being) a great national furore against bankers. Bankers, they’re all greedy. With their big, fat bonuses. Ripping us off, lining their pockets, making off with our savings. That Sir Fred Goodwin, he’s one. Take away his pension. Strip him of his knighthood. Kick him out the golf club, him and his banker friends.

And before the bankers, there were social workers. Totally useless. They let Baby P die because they were busy ticking boxes. It’s left-wing political correctness gone mad (and you don’t want to go mad, or you’ll have to see a psychiatrist, and there’s a group of people you want to steer clear of). Sack them. Take away their pay-offs. It’s time that whole profession had a clear-out.

When the opinion pollster (not that you can trust opinion pollsters) Populus asked voters their view of MPs’ pay, they were virtually unanimous in wanting an independent group put in charge. ‘How about a major accountancy firm?’ Populus asked their focus groups. Oh, no, came the reply. We can’t have accountants, they’re the worst. ‘Lawyers, perhaps?’ Lawyers? Are you kidding? They’re worse than accountants.

Although perhaps not as bad as estate agents, I suppose. Does anyone know what they do for all that money they get paid? No, neither do I. You can’t trust a single one of them. Any more than you can trust a journalist. And don’t get me started about journalists. Here they are, going on about MPs’ expenses when they’re all on the fiddle themselves. I know they are, because I read it in the newspaper.

Journalists, they’re as bad as second-hand car salesmen. Or those people who sell insurance, come to think of it. Or those so-called advisers who hook you on their pensions and leave you without a penny. And there you are destitute, while Premier League football players, who are stupid and always up until 2.30 in the morning in a nightclub with one of the millions of young women who are now out binge drinking, swan around ‘earning’ a million pounds a week for kicking a ball around and shouting at referees (who aren’t deaf, even though they are all blind).

Mind you, at least they work for a living. Not like toffs who think they own the world (and probably do). Their sense of entitlement is dreadful, particularly the ones who went to Eton. It’s a toss-up whether their arrogance is to be preferred to the smugness of middle-class people who live in dull suburbs and sound like Richard Briers and cut the grass too often.

Vicars? Wet and ineffectual. Property developers? Rapacious, reactionary. Teachers? Left-wing, long holidays. The police? Never come when you need them. Firemen? All off doing their second jobs when they should be working for us. Public-service workers? Pen-pushers in plush offices. Farmers? Always got their hand in the public purse, when they are not spreading diseases. Benefit claimants? On the fiddle, obviously. The bin man? Leaves rubbish all over your drive unless you pay him off.

The Scots, the French, TV documentary makers, hospital consultants, MEPs, traffic wardens, diplomats, council workers, people who wear sweatshirts with a hood. Let’s face it, I can’t trust anyone, except me and you. And I’m really not sure about you.

The other day I stumbled across an American opinion poll. It showed that a quarter of Americans, when asked, said that they blamed the Jews for the financial crisis either moderately or a great deal. Even more – nearly 40 per cent – attached some blame to us. Great.

When I witness this national mood of anger and blame, when I see people heckle politicians, and call them crooks, and lump them all together, and pass by all the good they do, I hope you will forgive me if I can’t join in. I don’t like it when people start mobbing up. It frightens me.

I’d never voted Tory. But changing was easy

The tribalism of British politics has always been a mystery to me. I hope it doesn’t cost David Cameron his chance to govern

This article was my final column of the 2010 election campaign. The day after it appeared, voters went to the polls and the result was the beginning of Cameron’s coalition government.

5 May 2010

Perhaps it’s because I am Jewish. Or the son of immigrants. Or perhaps not. I don’t know. But I have always found British tribal political loyalty hard to relate to.

When I was a child growing up in Hendon, there was a baker we used to use on a Friday. Good bread, biscuits not bad, but service? Hilariously, unfailingly, rude. They wouldn’t just take an order, they would tell you what you should have ordered. ‘Bagels? You don’t want them. And anyway you had them last week. Rye bread’s nicer. You’re having the rye bread.’ It would have been cabaret if they’d meant it to be funny.

I developed a theory. Yes, even though I was nine, I developed a theory. That’s just how I am, leave me alone. My theory was that we Jews are outside the British class system. In most shops, I’d noticed, there was a little deference to the customer, a little bit of ‘and what would sir like today?’, even if sir was only just old enough to see over the counter. In most shops, the idea of poking the customer in the stomach and asking them if they’d put on weight wouldn’t occur to the salesman. But with one Jew selling to another, a little bit of stomach poking was acceptable, is acceptable, as a matter of fact. Deference just doesn’t come into it. Nor class resentment.

Now I am sure that not all Jews feel like this, but on me all that prodding left a mark. I find class hard to understand, and class tension baffling. And being a member of one tribe (British Jews), I have never felt the need to add a second.

Which creates a difficulty when it comes to analysing this election. Because I think the key to Thursday’s outcome – the difference between the Tories falling short of an overall majority and winning comfortably – lies with people struggling with a deep, tribal, inherited, often class-based loyalty.

You may remember those posters: ‘I’ve never voted Tory before, but …’ The Conservatives put those up because they realised that, among undecided voters, an extraordinary number said that while they were thoroughly disillusioned with Labour, they had never voted Conservative before. Now, they said, they were on the brink of backing David Cameron. And then, again and again, they added this: ‘My grandad would roll in his grave.’

Many pollsters assume – and adjust their polls accordingly – that a disproportionate number of these undecided voters will return to their past voting behaviour rather than following the trend. This has helped to make polls more accurate in the past. The result largely depends on whether that assumption holds good this time.

So, annoyingly, this election will be determined by people fighting a tribal urge that I’ve never felt and can’t completely relate to. The best I can offer is this: once I considered myself on the centre left, and I don’t any more. And once I, too, had ‘never voted Tory’, but in the end I didn’t find it very difficult at all.

Being on the centre left was very comfortable. I found Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric jarring, I thought the Tory triumphalism of the 1980s distasteful (sometimes wrongly – I used to think that all those flags and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ were sinister, but when I finally attended a Tory conference it was more like Seaside Special), it made life a great deal easier at dinner parties. The centre left, too, seemed the right place for a social liberal. Naturally on guard for the merest hint of racism, I also believed that gay rights were among the most important issues for my generation.

Beyond this, I found the certainty of the Tories off-putting. I have always recoiled from people whose eyes shine with ideological fervour. My parents’ experience, imprisoned by fascists and communists, made me an instinctive moderate, suspicious of grand schemes and those who think they have found the key to the happiness of mankind. It’s true that such certainty could be found on the left too, and I didn’t like that either. But it seemed to suffuse the Conservative Party at that time.

But there was a problem. One I found more and more difficult to ignore. It just seemed that again and again, the Right was more, well, right. The economic policies coming out of the left ranged from the disastrous to the silly. The unions, basically a destructive force, were accorded too much respect and given too much power. The Left seemed incapable of understanding the need for a strong defence policy. So in 1992 I became a Conservative.

Some of this Tony Blair could see and put right. I liked his social liberalism, I thought him often moderate and reasonable, I shared his Atlanticism, and (I duck for cover here) I found him rather charismatic, and still do. But I am not at all surprised that his New Labour project is ending in failure. Because while he changed much about Labour, there are things he couldn’t change.

Like every Labour government, this one has spent too much. On every single occasion – honestly, every time – the party has been in office for more than nine months, there has been a huge economic crisis, made worse by its public spending. Underpinning this mistake are two wrong-headed ideas that are deeply (indeed, almost unconsciously) held on the left.

The first (understandable but incorrect) is that it is cruel to say no to requests for spending and to interest groups. The second is that for every problem there must be a government response. I am a pragmatic person. I don’t have some abstract, ideological aversion to ever spending taxpayers’ money. But surely Labour has now tested this approach to destruction.

Yet, if we abandon this spendthrift policy, we must reform public services so that they are sustainable on budgets that grow less quickly. And Labour has failed on this too. Its coalition of old and new – a gallery to which Gordon Brown was playing for more than a decade – slowed reform until Mr Blair ran out of time and the rest of us ran out of money and patience.

When Mr Cameron called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, I think this is what he meant. That the Conservative Party needed to change to face the modern world, to make itself a welcoming home for social liberals and moderates, and people who felt Tory rhetoric had been too harsh. And when it did so, it would be ready to put right what Mr Blair and Mr Brown got wrong. I hope he now gets the chance to see it through.

It’s human to dread change and fear loss

Good conservatives understand the value of tradition, but know when to welcome gay marriage or malls

6 February 2013

Years ago, before they knocked down the factory and built Brent Cross Shopping Centre, before the Brent Bridge Hotel came down and they put up suburban homes, before Mr and Mrs Underwood moved from next door to a block of flats at the end of the road, I bought my first record – ‘C Moon’ by Paul McCartney and Wings – in Hounsom’s on Watford Way, just up the road from Hendon Central Station.

It was a little shop full of records, and behind the counter were two elderly (or at least to my ten-year-old self they looked elderly) ladies. In the back the brother of one of them wore a white coat and mended television sets, occasionally popping out, waving a screwdriver, to see what was going on. The ladies helped me to choose albums, adding to my collection of Beatles records, recommending Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, selling me Nilsson Schmilsson by Harry Nilsson.

To get there you went past Woollon’s, the pharmacist, who also developed film and sold cameras, and then Peter’s, the tobacconist, where you could buy sweets to consume at the pictures next door at cheaper prices than in the cinema kiosk.

Cross over Queen’s Road and there was the Express Dairy which delivered our milk in glass bottles and sold chocolate yoghurt with a funny sort of disc-shaped hard topping. After that, Batty’s, which sold stationery. I bought fountain pens there for school. (A fountain pen was compulsory, even if for me it was torture, reducing my work to incomprehensible smudges.) Then past the undertakers, with their newspaper clippings in the window from the day they buried Nelson, and you were at Hounsom’s.

They’ve all gone now, the record shop, the sweet shop, the cinema, the lot. All except the undertakers, but I suppose we’ll always need them. What sort of conservative would I be if I didn’t miss them, if their disappearance didn’t make me just a tiny bit melancholy? Indeed what sort of human being would I be? We all have this sadness, this dread of loss, within us. One of conservatism’s greatest strengths is its appreciation of this.

The great liberal philosopher John Rawls developed his famous theory of justice by imagining the arrangements that human beings would regard as fair if we were behind a veil of ignorance. What would we agree to if we had no past and didn’t know what our future held?

I am a conservative, rather than a pure liberal, partly because I don’t believe you can arrive at a theory of fairness in this way. Rawls is asking what we would regard as fair as human beings if we weren’t one. For what makes us human is at least partly our past, our experiences, the records we bought in Hounsom’s.

And it is for this reason – even though gay rights has been one of the most important causes to me all my life – that I understand Conservative opposition to gay marriage, and can sympathise with it even while thinking it wrongheaded. Conservatives draw strength from tradition. They do not abandon it lightly. They are right not to abandon it lightly.

It was while I was thinking about the Tory split on gay marriage that I heard Desert Island Discs with Tesco’s former boss Sir Terry Leahy (or should that be Dessert Island Discs? Sorry). And Sir Terry was asked about the way his supermarket’s growth had led many small shops to go out of business. Did it make him sad?

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But it is part of progress. People aren’t made to shop in supermarkets. They choose to shop there.’ It was all there in Sir Terry’s answer, the core of the modernising Conservative case.

Batty’s and the Express Dairy may have been part of the fabric of my youth. But just as important to the tradition of this country is a restless entrepreneurial spirit and a belief in liberty. There is a tension between these things that cannot be eliminated. A society cannot be successful if it lightly discards tradition, but it cannot be successful either if it stifles liberty in the hope of halting progress.

The modernising case is that the latter is the greater danger. The practical political point for Conservatives is obvious. Look at the picture of the local Tory association chairmen who came to deliver the letter to David Cameron protesting against gay marriage. Consider their average age. There is, quite literally, not much political future in that.

But beyond the politics there is a social and economic argument to be made. Things do not stay the same, and it is poor history and poor conservatism to argue that they do. There wasn’t a Hounsom’s before the gramophone record was invented and televisions needed to be mended. And at some point before I was born, the local blacksmith must have closed down, complaining that shoppers were given parking tickets when they tethered their horse outside and that everyone was now buying saddles at Horses ‘R’ Us.

It would be impossible to prevent this change without extinguishing liberty. And absurd to try. You can’t preserve Britain by stopping us doing what Britons do.

The job of Conservatives, and I think the most important task of modernisers, is to know when to accommodate to the modern world, when to resist and when to adapt, when something is a fundamental value and when it is just a passing here-today-and-gone-tomorrow camera shop. When people say that Tony Blair was a conservative I think he was, in the one sense that he had a superb modernising instinct. He knew when change was fundamental and permanent and needed to be absorbed.

Many of the great moments of Conservatism – introducing full votes for women, for instance, or Disraeli’s expansion of the franchise or Butler’s Education Act – have come when the party has completed a reform that agitators once called for and Conservatives once barely understood. It is the Conservatives’ job to build the new community when the shopping moves out from the High Street, even while appreciating what has been lost.

In this tradition lies David Cameron’s legislation on gay marriage. It has split the Conservative Party, as of course it would. But I cannot agree with the argument that it has done so for little reason. And this is not just because I think respect for gay people is so important. It is because the core of modernising Conservatism is to reconcile the changes brought through liberty with the traditions of the nation. This measure is not peripheral. It is the core of what David Cameron means.

Labour hasn’t got a monopoly on compassion

Martin Freeman is the latest celebrity to claim wrongly that the Left has cornered the market in human decency

During the 2015 campaign, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party ran an election broadcast featuring an effective speech about his values by the actor Martin Freeman. This is my response.

8 April 2015

Dear Martin Freeman,

Do you have a moment, by any chance? I’d quite like to have a word about the party broadcast you did for Labour last week. I won’t keep you long, I promise.

Let me start with this. It was really good. It is ironic that everyone complains that politicians are just playing a role, but when an actor appears in a broadcast, everyone is delighted with its authenticity. But I think that is down to a particular quality of yours. It’s why I’ve always been a fan. One can imagine knowing Tim from The Office and wanting him as a friend.

I also want to say thank you for doing it. I thought it was really brave of you. You are successful and widely liked and it is impressive to be willing to put that at risk – to make yourself controversial and open to scrutiny – to advance a cause you believe in. So many people just moan about politicians. I admire you for being willing to do more than that.

It won’t surprise you to know, however, that I do rather take issue with what you had to say.

I am not proposing to argue with you about voting Labour. It’s not what I am intending to do myself, but there are some robust arguments for voting Labour. What I want to take issue with is something different. I’d like to persuade you to think again about the argument you made.

You begin your broadcast with the assertion that this complicated election is ‘in the end simple … It’s a choice between two completely different sets of values.’ You continue with this: ‘Now, I don’t know about you, but my values are about community, compassion, decency. That’s how I was brought up.’ So you contend that, whatever the details of the argument, in the end they’re only part of the story.

Instead, ‘There is a choice of two paths. The bottom line is what values are we choosing … Labour. They start from the right place. Community. Compassion. Fairness. I think all the best things about this country.’

Now, I don’t doubt that Labour does start from this right place. But the thing is – and I’m not quite sure how to put this correctly, so I’ll just say it – the thing is, so do I. Community, compassion, fairness, decency, I like those things too. I try to live by them, too.

I wonder if at any point while making the broadcast it occurred to you to wonder if it could really be true that Tories sit down and think: ‘Mmm, compassion, no I don’t think we’ll start there. Let’s wait until someone comes up with something unfair and then we can get motoring!’ Before letting out a sinister laugh and heading off to have tea with Voldemort.

I am pretty sure you didn’t mean this – because you appear like a self-effacing, nice, considerate person – but actually what you said was both arrogant and offensive. And I suspect these are the last things you’d wish to be.

It was arrogant because it suggested that you have succeeded in living by the values you have been brought up with. That you are fundamentally a good person. I guess deep down we all think that, whatever our failings, but you actually said it out loud. On television. As a way of distinguishing yourself from me.

It was offensive because it suggests – there is really no other way of interpreting your comments – that your superior voting choice is dictated by the fact that your parents brought you up to be decent. Whereas mine?

You are either suggesting I am not a good son, or that my parents were not good parents. Either that they tried to bring me up to be kind, like you, but failed. Or that, unlike your parents, mine didn’t much bother with moral instruction, sending me out into the world to laugh at disabled people and steal from orphans.

As I don’t think you meant this, I think what you made was a simple intellectual error. You assumed that decency and compassion lead only to one political view and that if it isn’t yours, someone reaching a different conclusion isn’t compassionate or decent.

Let me give you a few examples that show that this isn’t quite right. Take welfare. I want, desperately, to support poor people in their moment of need, but how much is the right amount? What are the right conditions?

Obviously compassion inclines one to generosity. Yet pay too much and it starts to make it more financially advantageous to be on benefits than to work. Some people won’t exploit this but others will. And how fair – that word you use – is this to those who do work, have low earnings and have to pay for it?

I apologise if this is an obvious point, but I fear it really did seem as though, watching your broadcast, I had to make it.

What about war? We are kind, decent people the two of us, so how does that leave deciding what to do about Syria? It’s not much of a guide, is it?

Or taxes? We all agree we should take money from those who can afford it, to help pay for communal services people wouldn’t be able to buy on their own. Yet if we tax too much or in the wrong way, we might slow the growth of the economy, damaging the income of the least well off.

Has it been compassionate to end up spending so much that we need to borrow a fortune? Has it been fair? Or decent? You talked about young people and how important they are, but won’t they have to pick up the bill for all the borrowing?

We all make different judgments about what works and what we think is sensible. I don’t doubt there are coalition programmes you feel have been poorly thought through or whose impact has harmed people they shouldn’t have harmed. Where the balance between keeping welfare bills low and protecting recipients has been poorly struck.

I don’t object to you arguing these points with vigour. But I do object to the idea that they arise because you are a better person than me.

The idea that the Left is kind and the Right unkind is a pervasive one but one that history doesn’t support. Some of the most grotesque mass murdering dictatorships in the world have come from the left. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot. Leftism isn’t a certificate of goodness.

Peace, love, looking after sick children, trees, the climate, poor people, family, hospitals, pensioners, I do like them all as much as you do, you know.

Daniel

No, I won’t be asking for a foreign passport

Britons are rushing to apply for dual nationality with EU countries but for me, citizenship has a more profound meaning

27 November 2018

Before the mid-1960s the front page of The Times carried classified advertisements rather than news. So it was that on 6 May 1946 appeared notice of the funeral of Maud, Duchess of Wellington, an appeal to find a travelling trunk that would fit a 1939 Vauxhall saloon, an offer to purchase typewriters ‘in any quantity’ and a small advertisement from a Dr Alfred Wiener.

The last read as follows: ‘Notice is hereby given that DR ALFRED WIENER of 45 Queens Court, Queens Way, London, W.2. is APPLYING to the Home Secretary for NATURALIZATION, and that any person who knows any reason why naturalization should not be granted should send a written and signed statement of the facts to the Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, S.W.1.’

I assume no one did give a reason, or that their reason wasn’t a good one, because shortly after this advertisement appeared my grandfather became a British citizen.

That day’s edition of The Times forms a pair with the German Reich and Prussian State Gazette of August 1939 which lists my grandfather, his wife, my mother and her sisters among those who had been stripped of their citizenship for activities deemed to have harmed the Reich (my grandfather was one of the leaders of Germany’s anti-Nazi movement).

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has produced a flood of applications for dual nationality from those who feel they might be eligible for a passport from a member nation. My wife, for instance, is the daughter of a German Jew and a Jewish Sudetenland Czech whose families fled the Nazis. Last week she, with the support of her father, submitted the forms necessary to become partly German.

She, like many others, doesn’t feel this a particularly momentous thing to do. It is merely transactional. A matter of pragmatism. With a passport from an EU member she, and should they later wish, the children, may be able to work abroad and also move more swiftly through passport control. She is entitled to it, so why not?

For others, more complicated feelings are involved. Their application is a sort of protest against Brexit and an insurance policy in case Brexit presages a less tolerant Britain or a calamitously poor one. And there are also some Jews who worry about a Corbyn government.

I can’t share these feelings. I understand and respect (and obviously, in one case, love) those who have applied for dual citizenship, but I won’t be doing so myself.

As it happens, I actually probably can’t become German. My wife can because it was her father who had been a citizen. In my case, it was my mother and that doesn’t count. Hilariously, now that I think about it, I was very put out to discover this. The Nazis took away my family’s status and now I can’t get it back. Given that I don’t want German citizenship, I am aware this fury is a little ridiculous.

But I think I could become a Pole. My father was born a Polish citizen in Lwów and then exiled by the Soviets during the war. After 1945, Lwów became part of Ukraine and Dad could never go home again but he always insisted that he had not renounced his citizenship. And right at the end of his life the Polish authorities agreed.

So, although the process and the citizenship status sounds complicated, I could try becoming a Polish citizen. But I don’t intend to attempt it.

This is not because of my feelings about Germany (I think modern Germany is extraordinarily admirable, and its creation a miracle of liberal democracy) or Poland (my father on his deathbed left few instructions but one was to encourage me to stand by the Polish people). It’s about two things.

The minor one is that I am not a pessimist about Britain. I think things will be basically all right. I worry a little about being a Jew if Corbyn gets into power, but not enough to consider fleeing. I’ve got better things to do than start filling out long forms in Polish or assembling German documents. Life’s busy enough. It took us a year to replace the kitchen bin when the spring lid stopped working.

But the more important reason is that I don’t think obtaining citizenship is just another transaction. Acquiring a foreign passport is not like acquiring a department store credit card. I believe that being a citizen is to accept a profound bond with your fellow citizens. My grandfather felt that too, actually. Losing his German citizenship was one of the great, heartbreaking tragedies of Alfred Wiener’s life because his nationality was so important to him.

In some ways I think it would be an insult to the Poles to apply to be a citizen if I didn’t really mean it.

There are some who believe that patriotic attachment is dangerous because it challenges our universal rights as human beings. I disagree. I think that attaching yourself to a community with roots and practices, traditions and institutions is an essential part of defending rights. I think that it is empty to love mankind in general if you don’t love anyone in particular. I feel this most strongly about Britain. When my mother arrived in Ellis Island, listed in the manifest as ‘stateless’, it was this country that ultimately took her in.

When my father’s exile ended, it did so in a small house on the Hendon Way. Their freedom and their Britishness were not attached to each other by some intellectual argument, but by practical necessity. I have often repeated my grandmother’s words – ‘while the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central’ – as if they were a sort of general statement of her politics, but I think she just meant it as a statement of simple truth.

My loyalty to this country cannot be divided and it isn’t for sale. It isn’t in conflict with my belief in universal liberal rights, it is its guarantor.

When I was young I suffered from asthma, and an attack would often keep me awake at night. My mother would take me to her bed and read to me. Sometimes it would be Winnie-the-Pooh but more often I would choose a book of the kings and queens of England.

Only as an adult have I reflected that when the Tudor monarchs reigned, or even the Georgians, my family wasn’t here. We lived under distant emperors. But then we chose these great Britons and they chose us. Their countrymen gave us a home and our liberty and peace. And I’m never going to be part of something else.

PART TWO
The Rules of Politics

Bill Clinton used to say that he’d like to find the unified field theory of politics. There isn’t one of course. But I have always felt that analysis of current events can benefit from an understanding of how politics works.

In this section I have grouped together columns which dealt with an immediate issue but established a more general rule that could be more broadly applied.

Now here’s a spiffing idea …

The Man in Westminster doesn’t know best; that’s why it’s daft of politicians to attack focus groups

During the 2005 election for a Tory leader (which David Cameron eventually won) much of the discussion was about why the party lost in the general election that had just happened, and how to win again. As a way of emphasising their own authenticity, some candidates and commentators attacked the use of focus groups.

7 September 2005

I’ve come up with a really great idea, one that is bound to help revive the fortunes of the Conservative Party. Hear me out. I bet you’ll think it’s really spiffing.

The Tories should cancel all the professional assistance they have been receiving that helps them to discover what voters think. Instead they should simply guess.

Of course, I don’t expect them to do this entirely unaided. They will be allowed to make full use of some randomly selected comments made to me on the doorstep during the 2001 election campaign, if I can remember them correctly. And I’ll try and dig out some old correspondence, too, if anyone thinks it may come in handy.

Naturally, this will be a little hit and miss. Not to worry. It doesn’t matter what voters think anyway. The party should just trust its instincts, rather than mess around trying to divine the views of the electorate.

What do you think? That ought to do the trick, I reckon.

My idea may strike you as, ahem, a little eccentric. Yet amazingly enough it has become a widespread view in the Tory party. So widespread, indeed, that I feel it necessary to point out that I was being satirical.

Attacking focus-group polling, the assembling of small groups of voters who are interviewed in detail about their opinions, has become a standard piece of rhetoric in the debate on the future of the Tory party. David Davis talks of ‘hocus-pocus focus groups’ and tried to cancel them when he was party chairman. ‘I bring to politics a rejection of focus groups and opinion polls,’ says Ken Clarke. Norman Lamont agrees. Lord Saatchi regrets not being firm in his opposition to focus-group polling. Simon Heffer congratulates them all. Matthew Parris thinks the critics are on the right track. The attack wins applause at constituency suppers and nods of approval at the 1922 Committee.

With so much agreement, it’s a shame it’s a load of nonsense, isn’t it? I’m sorry to sound intemperate. Ever since I worked for some years as a Tory party official, I’ve sat through so many attacks on focus groups. And I’ve been so polite, haven’t said a word, let it all wash over me. Then last week, I just snapped.

Funnily enough, the remark that did it for me didn’t come from a Tory at all. It came from Jon Cruddas, who until pretty recently was a senior adviser to Tony Blair. He urged the Prime Minister to free himself from the ‘dead hand of Middle England’ (top piece of electoral advice, that) and blamed Mr Blair’s shortcomings on his consultation of focus groups.

So here is this man Cruddas, who only enjoyed a position of power because his boss had the perspicacity to understand the need to move the Labour Party towards the centre and the intelligence to use professional polling to help to do it, and even he is attacking focus groups. Time, I decided, to stop letting it wash over me.

Now, it has to be admitted that focus groups can often be comically ill-informed. Attempts to investigate reactions to Michael Howard being Jewish ran aground when a group in Nottingham was asked to name any Jews in public life. A long silence ensued, only broken when one man offered ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ as an answer.

After Gordon Brown announced huge increases in spending on the NHS, I was keen to know the public reaction to the days of headlines that his new policy had attracted. Our pollsters reported back to me that not a single person in eight groups had heard of there being any announcement on anything.

Even when the groups do have views it can be dangerous to follow them. The Government’s policy on soft drugs, for instance, is uncannily similar to the view that a focus group will give – the policing of soft-drug use should be relaxed so that the sale of hard drugs can be combated more successfully. The initial announcement of the new policy was therefore guaranteed a fairly good reception.

Yet there is a difficulty. What if the policy doesn’t work? What if the focus groups are simply wrong, and soft-drug liberalisation leads to greater hard-drug use? The public won’t put its hand up and say: ‘It’s a fair cop, guv. We gave you bad advice.’ They will blame the politicians, and rightly so.

In fact, where focus groups that I helped to commission strayed into discussing detailed policy, the result was almost always incoherent. A polling report we were given on healthcare was headlined – THE NHS: IN A FOG.

Yet, anybody who mistakes a focus group for a meeting of Mensa or the AGM of a think tank is obviously an idiot anyway. That is not their point. What good professional polling does is to help politicians to understand what voters think, what different language means to them, what they care about and what they do and do not understand.

The Conservative Party’s problem has not been listening to too many focus groups, but not listening to them enough.

A good example is tax policy. The party has spent tens of thousands of pounds on focus groups that tell it that voters do not believe tax-cut promises. This is not an ideological point. It does not say whether voters want tax cuts, that is a different question. Nor whether tax cuts are right, that is yet another question. But it does indicate that the central message of successive Tory election campaigns has cut no ice with voters.

You’d think that one would want to know that. But apparently not. And that’s why the grumbling about focus groups matters so much. It’s why this is not a small argument about how to spend £100,000 of campaign funds.

The opponents of focus groups believe that they know what voters want without having to ask. They also believe that voters need to come to the Conservative Party rather than the Conservative Party moving towards the voters. They believe, they seriously believe, that the Tory party has been too responsive to the electorate.

I don’t think they are quite correct about that, do you?

Why a mobile phone on a beach sends out a stark message to Gordon Brown

Brown says: let’s make agricultural subsidies history. Where can we get the wristband?

This article appeared in Labour conference week after the speeches of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Mr Blair had fought his last election as leader. There was much speculation about when the latter would replace the former, which he did two years later.

28 September 2005

In the mid-1990s the American mobile phone business realised that it had a problem. It could get men to buy phones, but women just wouldn’t. Women thought mobiles were just boys’ toys.

Then AT&T began screening a commercial that sent sales through the roof. A mother gets ready to leave for work. The house is in chaos, the babysitter has plonked the kids in front of the television. The children start pestering their mother to take them to the beach. ‘I’ve got a meeting with a client,’ says the mother. Her youngest child replies with the line that made the ad famous. ‘When can I be a client?’

The commercial finishes with the mother sitting on the beach, the children running around her, playing happily. She is using her mobile to talk to the client. And throughout the entire commercial, the word ‘phone’ is never mentioned.

Ten years ago this advert was being used to sell phones. These days it is being used to sell a message about political communications. Dave Winston, former adviser to Newt Gingrich and now pollster for the Republican House and Senate campaigns, shows it to his candidates when explaining how he wants them to talk to voters.

He explains to them that they need to touch voters and not just talk at them. They need to make them feel an emotional affinity, a real need, for what the candidate has to offer. They need to appeal as AT&T did.

The traditional method of selling a phone was to talk about battery life, access charges, the reach of the network. It was all about mechanics, never touching on reasons, never touching on people’s (and particularly women’s) daily lives. The traditional pitch for a mobile phone was like … well, it was like a Gordon Brown speech.

On Monday the Chancellor battered his audience with a long list of statistics about finance facilities and percentages of GDP. At one point he offered us the catchy slogan: ‘Let us make agricultural export subsidies history.’ Where do we go to get the wristband?

Mr Brown’s conference address and his Sunday Times interview have been interpreted as closing the gap between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. They did nothing of the kind. They simply demonstrated the size of the gulf that separates them.

This gulf is not essentially one of policy (although, of course, there are substantial differences). And it cannot be bridged by adopting the Blairite agenda, even if that is Mr Brown’s intention. However hard he looks, the Chancellor will not find the secret of Mr Blair’s appeal hidden in the conclusions of an NHS White Paper. And he will not become a Blairite by promising to implement a pilot scheme for an internal market in the provision of school textbooks.

The key to the Prime Minister’s success is to be found elsewhere – in his personality, in the way he mounts an argument and in his ability to communicate with Middle England. These the Chancellor simply cannot match.

Take Mr Brown’s decision, announced at the weekend, to commission a report on the Middle East so that he could drive the peace process. And whom did he appoint to write the document? That great expert on the Arab question, Ed Balls. Isn’t there anyone else he trusts other than Balls of Arabia? If Tony Blair had done the commissioning, he would have picked someone from far outside his personal circle – the Tory businessman Archie Norman, say. Brown lacks the trust and the confidence.

Then there is his ability to communicate. When designing the Republican House and Senate campaigns for particular pieces of legislation, Dave Winston uses something called ‘communications laddering’. A politician might start with the technical attributes of a policy (say cutting tax by 5 per cent) and then move to its technical benefits (you will have more money in your pocket). Winston wants them to go up the ladder identifying personal benefits that might appeal to the emotions (so, for instance, you might be able to buy music lessons for your children). Support the tax cut and be a better parent.

The classic example of the successful use of communications laddering is provided by the Republican campaign to win support for an increase in the defence budget. Winston was after the support of the group he termed ‘security moms’. Traditionally women have not backed higher military spending, so instead of talking about percentages of spend and the size of the armed forces, the Republicans concentrated on making families safer from attack.

Try applying Winston’s model to a typical Brown speech. The Chancellor spends most of the time right at the bottom of the ladder, talking about the technical attributes of his policy (‘£55 billion of debts written off for ever, the delivery of debt cancellation of 100 per cent’). Occasionally he travels up one rung and sets out a possible benefit of his programme (greater share ownership, to use an example from Monday’s speech) but he very rarely moves successfully from these rational components of a political message to the emotional ones. If ever he does, it is to touch the emotions of Labour activists rather than those of Middle England.

Mr Blair, by contrast, finds ascending the communications ladder simple. He brings his arguments back time after time to real people and their concerns – to the patient anxious for the results of a diagnostic test, the young family struggling to afford their first home, the disabled person needing help to get back into the workforce.

He makes real arguments too. For all that he has a formidable intellect, Mr Brown’s speech was simply relentless. That of Mr Blair was compelling.

The Brownites believe they can adopt the best bits of Mr Blair’s agenda and move on smoothly. They will find it isn’t as easy as that, nowhere near as easy. Mr Brown and his circle have never properly appreciated the political brilliance of Tony Blair. When he is gone they will. And they will miss it. Oh, how they will miss it.

Happy birthday! We like you

How a car salesman and an anti-war demonstration illustrate a strategy for modernising the Tories

At the 2005 Conservative conference David Cameron made a highly successful pitch for the leadership on a platform of modernisation. The favourite David Davis’s speech fell flat. This piece appeared after the conference but before the first leadership ballot of MPs.

12 October 2005

Joe Girard sold a lot of cars. A lot. For twelve years in a row he featured in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s greatest salesman. Let me tell you how he did it.

On birthdays and public holidays potential customers would receive a card from Mr Girard. They might get as many as twelve a year. ‘Happy Birthday’ the card would read, or ‘Happy Easter’, or whatever. And then followed the words: ‘I like you. From Joe Girard, Chrysler Montana.’ As Girard put it: ‘There’s nothing else on the card. Nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like ’em.’ And it works. People like to be liked.

Since I was first alerted to Mr Girard’s activities by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini, I have talked of them often to Conservative audiences. You see, I think the Tory party has spent a great deal of the past two decades sending out cards reading, ‘Happy birthday, we don’t like you.’ And, naturally, it doesn’t work.

I was thinking of Mr Girard again when I read the recent comments of the right-wing columnist Simon Heffer. He ridiculed the Tory modernisers for believing that the party lost elections because it was ‘insufficiently nice to homosexuals’. Well, yes Simon, you gorgeous meaty boy, the Tory party has lost votes by being insufficiently nice to homosexuals. But there’s worse news to come. You might be asked to be nice to some other people, too.

The reason? Because of a moderniser’s strategy for reviving the Conservative Party that they are calling ‘show, don’t tell’.

For the last week the leadership contender David Cameron has been urged by innumerable columnists to start putting ‘meat on the policy bones’. He is disinclined to oblige. He argues that the advice misses the point. And he is right.

The starting point for the alternative ‘show, don’t tell’ strategy is the poll-finding that featured prominently in the conference speech of party chairman Francis Maude – that those who agree with a particular policy are far less likely to assent to the proposition if they know that it is a Tory policy. The Conservative Party is damaging its own cause.

This means that the central job of a new Tory leader is to put the Conservative argument in a different way; to win trust and wider support for the policies of the Centre Right, not just to outline new schemes; to embody a new attitude, talk a new language, show that he is in touch with voter concerns; to be the change, not just to talk about it.

Just as the Thatcher revolution applied some basic economics to public policy, so modernisation involves accepting some basic social psychology.

The things for which Tory modernisers are most mocked – going around without a tie, drinking cappuccinos in Notting Hill, organising focus groups, recognising how Tony Blair has changed politics and being sufficiently nice to homosexuals – are not risible at all. Dressing like the rest of Britain, sounding like the rest of Britain, setting as policy priorities the things that voters care about most and relating better to upper-middle-class people in metropolitan areas are important.

Take dress. Few things have brought more ridicule down upon Tory modernisers than dressing differently. What a trivial thing to worry about. Yes? No. Dress matters.

As Cialdini states in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: ‘We are more likely to help those who dress like us.’ He cites, for instance, an experiment conducted in the early 1970s when experimenters, dressed either as ‘straights’ or as ‘hippies’, approached students and asked them for some change for the telephone. The students were far more likely to help if the experimenter was dressed as they were. Similarly marchers in an anti-war demonstration were much more likely to sign a petition proffered by a person dressed like them. Indeed many of them signed without bothering to read it first.

Most of this isn’t rocket science. And I think that this is what bothers the critics. Sounding moderate, shaping your political programme around the priorities of the electorate, avoiding pointless attacks on harmless groups (why, for instance, do Tories go on about people studying golf-course management? What did greenkeepers do wrong?), eschewing silly partisan name-calling. It all seems too simple. The critics yearn for some huge ideological betrayal that they can then denounce. They are almost begging Mr Cameron to disappoint them with some policy sell-out that they can disagree with.

Yet a policy sell-out wouldn’t help. Of course it will be necessary to change Tory policy priorities and, in time, there will certainly need to be policy development in new areas. This is a critical part of demonstrating that the Conservative Party’s culture has changed. But the central insight of ‘show, don’t tell’ is that until the Conservative Party is once again listened to, liked and trusted, its policies, changed or not, will make no impact at all.

The Tory peer Lord Ashcroft had the pollster Populus track public recognition of Tory policies during the last campaign. Recognition that the Tories had been campaigning for a tax cut reached a peak of 3 per cent. Fewer still believed that they meant it.

This is the reason that David Davis’s conference failure was so devastating. He didn’t trip over the platform and bang his head on the lectern. He didn’t talk gibberish: he’s an intelligent man. It’s just that suddenly everyone could see that he can tell but he can’t show, that he can talk of change but he can never be the change.

There has been so much new policy during this leadership campaign. This candidate wants to restore advanced dividend tax credits, that candidate wants to lengthen the contract period for charitable provision of public services, a third candidate wants a new charities tax regime. But can you recall which candidate wanted which policy?

Exactly. Putting policy meat on the bones just isn’t the point. David Cameron should go on ignoring those who tell him that it is.

Top Tory tips: climb the ladder, check out the ceiling and see the cheese

How optimism trumps over pessimism in life and in politics

30 November 2005

This is what happened when John Lennon first met Yoko Ono. It was at an avant-garde art exhibition at the fashionable Indica Gallery in London. In the middle of the room, Yoko had placed a ladder, on the top of which lay a magnifying glass. This could be used to read some tiny letters written on the ceiling. So the Beatle duly ascended, picked up the magnifying glass and read the scribbled word. And all it said was this – ‘yes’.

It was that word that made Lennon stay. As he told countless interviewers in the coming years, if the scribbled word had said ‘no’, he wouldn’t have hung around.

Now, as a Beatles devotee, I’m perfectly well aware that in addition to being a genius, John Lennon was an idiot. And anything to do with the absurd Yoko Ono has me on my guard. Yet I watched a TV programme last week that made me wonder if Lennon wasn’t onto something after all.

David Davis and David Cameron were on Sky News, taking part in another debate (surely it must be over soon, somebody, please, please, do something) when an argument began over the new licensing legislation. This does not sound very promising, I agree, but, as it happens, the exchange turned out to be one of the most significant of the entire leadership election.

‘We have a situation where the centre of many cities and towns in this country are no-go areas for decent people,’ said Mr Davis, giving 8 o’clock as the curfew for decent people and arguing that the Government was making things worse. I have listened to Conservatives making Mr Davis’s point in roughly similar language countless times and thought nothing of it, so David Cameron’s reply took me by surprise. ‘We must not make everyone who wants to go out and have a drink on a Friday and Saturday night sound like a criminal,’ he said.

The moment I heard this I recognised the debate the two were having. An unresolved, half-buried Tory argument was rising to the surface. Should the Conservative Party paint the skies blue or should they paint them black?

Ponder for a moment which of the contenders was correct and it is obvious that they both are. Eight o’clock may be on the early side, but Mr Davis is right that many people avoid town centres at night because of the drunken, rowdy behaviour of others. And Mr Cameron is right that it is madness for the Conservative Party to regard every young person in town in the evening as indecent. Lots of people are just out to have a good time, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

It is precisely because both men are right that the strategic choice they each made is so fascinating. The same set of political facts can be expressed in two entirely different ways with a completely different emphasis.

In the very early days of opposition, after the devastating result of 1997, the Conservatives debated these alternatives openly, even giving the different options labels as a shorthand. The party could be pessimistic about all the great threats overhead (painting the sky black) or it could be optimistic about the possibilities for Britain (painting the sky blue).

But the debate never came to a conclusion. The ‘realities’ of opposition kicked in, taking over from the academic discussions. Without fully realising the choice it was making, the Tory party began to paint the skies black, became the pessimistic party.

This country is being strangled by regulation and taxation, criminals are taking over our streets, family life is collapsing, immigration control is a joke, alcoholism and drug abuse are rife, the constitution is crumbling and we are being subsumed in a European super-state. Oh yes, and no one decent can go out after 8 o’clock.

Eight years later it seems clear that this choice was the wrong one. And Mr Cameron’s intervention in the Sky debate suggests that he realises it too.

A Blue Skies party might say this – that this country is already prosperous but untold opportunities lie ahead for all if we build a flexible low-tax economy; that one of the greatest advances in social policy of the last thirty years is that we now know that crime can be beaten with the right policies and that in other countries this is happening; that immigration can be an immensely positive thing and that assimilated communities have been enormously successful and will continue to be so provided we get the system under control; that many cities outside London are booming and that there is now so much to do after 8 o’clock. I could go on, but you get the idea.

In the mid-1990s President Clinton’s chief strategist Dick Morris came to a similar conclusion. The Democrats, he said, reminded him of a group of tenants who would greet the collapse of their roof with chuckles because it meant trouble for the landlord. Changing that attitude, which he found very difficult, was one of the keys to Bill Clinton’s extraordinary political recovery from a landslide mid-term defeat in 1994 to re-election in 1996.

The reason that optimism is a superior political position to pessimism is really quite simple – association. Why do you think car companies advertise their products with attractive women? It makes their cars seem sexy. Why do fundraisers serve you a meal before they pitch to you? It makes them seem warm and generous. Why did the Persians slay the messenger who brought news of defeat? It’s all because of association, the linking of message, messenger and environment. John Lennon is not alone in wanting to see the word ‘yes’ at the top of the ladder.

A Black Skies party is itself viewed as dark, threatening, likely to bring about precisely the problems it warns against. The public slays the messenger that brings it bad tidings.

It doesn’t have to be like this. My mother likes to describe pessimists as those who can only see the holes in the Emmenthal. It’s time for the Tory party to wake up and see the cheese.

Let me flog you a used car

Combine a subtle sales technique with some tests on mouthwash and you get an election strategy

Mr Cameron became Conservative leader in early December 2005. This appeared after he faced his first Budget as opposition leader.

29 March 2006

It is one of the most famous campaign posters ever produced – a scowling caricature of Richard Nixon, accompanied by the slogan: ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ And the reason why this political attack, of all the many thousands, has resounded over the decades is simple – the ability to sell a used car is a pretty good test of both a candidate and his political strategy.

I’ll tell you what set me thinking about flogging second-hand automobiles – last week’s Budget.

Gordon Brown is a great believer in dividing lines. He wants the voters to be able to see clearly the choice in front of them, with Labour, naturally, on the popular side of the divide. So his speech aimed to frame the debate over the rest of this Parliament.

Whatever else David Cameron may do, Mr Brown hopes that the choice at the next election will still boil down to this – the party that invests in public spending versus the party that cuts it.

On the face of it, this would seem to present the Conservatives with a nasty dilemma. Do they go for a tax-cutting agenda, hoping to overcome the scepticism of voters over such promises and their fears about the impact on services? Or do they abandon lower taxes, and with it a crucial part of what might make a Conservative economic and social policy work if the Tories were to win?

And here is where the used cars come in. The Tories should skip around Mr Brown’s trap. They don’t have to choose between remaining a low-tax party and abandoning tax cuts (no choice at all for a Tory). Instead they have to choose between these two strategies – lowball and highball.

As part of his lifelong work charting the way in which human beings are influenced, the social psychologist Robert Cialdini spent time undercover as a second-hand car salesman. It was during this period that he was introduced to one of the most successful selling techniques – lowball.

The customer is offered a car at a low, low price. Enthusiastically, he agrees. Then, deftly, the cost advantage is withdrawn. A calculation error is claimed, or the salesman’s offer is ‘overruled’ by the showroom manager. A particularly popular version is to offer the buyer an inflated trade-in price for his old car. Then when the deal has been agreed in principle, an ‘independent’ valuer arrives and reduces the offer. Knowing how much his old car was really worth, the customer accepts the new valuation as fair. The sale goes ahead.

Lowball is a very effective and common method of persuasion. It takes advantage of our great desire to remain consistent once committed. In yesterday’s papers the al-Qaeda supergrass trial provided a frightening example of lowball’s potential power. It was alleged that the defendants were aiming to recruit young people to fight in Afghanistan, and then later tell them that this had become logistically impossible and they would need to target Britons.

What has this got to do with politics? Lowball is frequently on display in elections. The Blair-Brown strategy before the 1997 general election was a classic lowball strategy. Voters were told that income tax rates would not be increased, yet, once Labour was elected, tax began steadily to rise.

Now take a look at their methods. At first the tax increases were stealthy, almost hidden (changes to advanced dividend corporation tax for instance), later the rises were more blatant (national insurance) and justified more openly. This is instructive. You see, lowball need not be dishonest (the direction of travel can be made clear even if the distance of travel isn’t), but if it is dishonest, voters will not complain. That is lowball’s power.

By the time Labour got round to raising taxes openly, voters were convinced that this was what they voted for. Just like the customer with the undervalued trade-in motor, when Mr Brown told taxpayers they would need to pay more, after all, to fund the NHS, voters reacted by shrugging. Hadn’t they always known, deep down, that the initial valuation was unfair? That they would have to stump up more? A Tory lowball strategy, an honest one, would involve being clear about wanting lower taxes and public service reform but it would be gentle and cautious about the speed and extent. In power, slowly, it would be able to go farther and with public consent.

There is an alternative, of course, and some people urge it on the Tories. Highball. The party distinguishes itself from Labour with a radical, exciting, enticing programme. It tackles public prejudices by making the big arguments right now, upfront.

There’s just one problem with highball. No party has ever gone from opposition to power on a highball strategy. Margaret Thatcher in 1979? Definitely lowball. Tax was mentioned but no big promises, and reassurance was provided at all stages. Radical Thatcherism came later, when it could take the committed voters with it.

Of course, it could be objected that the analogy breaks down because a tax-cutting Tory party wouldn’t be threatening costs, it would be tempting people with a benefit. This is a misunderstanding. A radical manifesto involves this cost – risk. And social psychology, something called prospect theory, tells how voters will react to this, too.

If you offer someone a choice between receiving £15,000 and a gamble in which they could be given £10,000 or £20,000, then mathematically the two alternatives are the same. Psychologically they are not. A complicated experiment involving testing people’s reaction to adverts for antibacterial mouthwash (don’t ask) proved that we would prefer the £15,000 gain to the gamble. But fascinatingly, if we were told that we would certainly lose £15,000 or we could gamble and might lose either only £10,000 or as much as £20,000, we prefer to gamble. We are more cautious about expected benefits and are prepared to take more risks when a possible loss looms.

Our caution, our commitment, our consistency – lowball is the only possible choice for the Tories. Anything else, and the voters will say: we’re not going to buy a used car from those people.

Guess the weight of the ox: then you will see what’s wrong with our politics

Social science suggests we need to change the way we reach political conclusions

5 April 2006

This weekend I had my handwriting analysed at a birthday party. I basically regard graphology as nonsense, but my friends had taken infinite trouble with the rest of the proceedings. Cliff Richard, for instance, sang ‘Congratulations’ as Denise Van Outen jumped out of the cake, neither of which happened at my last birthday to the best of my recollection. Having my handwriting analysed seemed the least I could do.

Anyway, the lady looked at the way I signed my name and said that I liked to connect up ideas from apparently unrelated areas. Fiendishly clever insight, that.

And so this column will set out to prove her right. In just under 1,000 words I intend to link the suspension of an academic at the University of Leeds, the weight of an ox, the outcome of the 2002 football World Cup, the recent dissenting speeches of Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn and the state funding of political parties. And, of course, cakes, graphology and Denise Van Outen.

Let’s get going. On Sunday, a group of academics wrote to a newspaper complaining about the disciplinary proceedings instituted by the university against one of its lecturers, Frank Ellis. Dr Ellis has been suspended for arguing that racial groups have different average IQ levels, and that those of blacks are inferior to whites. His defenders protested that some evidence suggested he was correct.

Yet the academics who suspended Dr Ellis and those who defended him are making an error. In fact, the identical error. They are confusing the correctness of Dr Ellis’s views with whether he should be allowed to continue his academic career. These are not the same thing at all.

In the autumn of 1906, as recorded by James Surowiecki in his excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, the scientist Francis Galton visited the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. While there he found his eyes drawn to a guess-the-weight-of-an-ox competition. Butchers and farmers were taking part, but so were ordinary visitors without any expert knowledge. Galton was interested in how bad their guesses would prove to be.

Galton was to be surprised. The average of the 800 guesses during the day was almost exactly right and, crucially, much more accurate than any individual expert assessment. What he had discovered was something counter-intuitive – that even the wildest incorrect guess plays its role in helping to produce an accurate average guess.

Dr Ellis is a lecturer in Russian and Slavic Studies. He probably has as firm a grip on the study of IQ and ethnicity as he does on the study of ox-weighing. But his view is useful in both, regardless of its correctness. Allowing mistaken views to have a voice in the academy is a vital part of determining the truth.

Galton’s observation suggests something else that is important too – independence. Let me use an example from an area about which I know a good deal more than I do about fat stock – football predictions. A Swedish study conducted during the last World Cup showed that groups of experts were far worse at predicting match outcomes than complete amateurs (in this case, US students with almost no football knowledge).

There were a number of reasons for this – experts try to be clever-clever, for instance, and factor in things that do not affect the outcome – but one of the most important was the experts’ lack of independence.

When experts make judgments, they do not make them alone. Their forecasts are based on the collective wisdom, wrong or right, of other experts. They reinforce each other’s errors. This makes their collective guess, the average of their guesses, far less accurate than if they had each guessed independently.

All of which brings me, as surely you knew that it would, to the state funding of political parties.

Divining the truth requires the greatest breadth of opinion to be taken into account, not excluding even the wildest and silliest ideas. And it requires the greatest achievable independence of opinions, so that all are adding in their own view rather than recycling someone else’s mistake.

Now consider modern British politics. Here all the prizes go to uniformity, the acceptance of collective responsibility, the exclusion of fringe opinions and the squashing of dissent. The ability to read and remember the ‘line to take’ from party headquarters is valued far more highly than creative contributions to the public debate. Recent speeches by Labour’s Mr Byers and Mr Milburn urging their party to develop a fresh agenda were remarked upon only because they departed from ‘party discipline’. Their content, such as it was, was ignored.

The whole of British politics is, in other words, a giant conspiracy to reinforce error. The exercise of independent judgment is rare, the tendency to recycle the conventional wisdom of experts is great. And once an error is made, the unspoken rules say that it must be persisted with, and everyone is required daily to offer their fresh support for yesterday’s mistake.

It is this, and not the massively overstated problem of sleaze, that is really corroding British political life.

And the state funding of political parties will make it still worse, certainly in the form that is being considered. The State will bestow its financial favours on central party organisations. Private fundraising will be severely restricted. Discipline will be rewarded, the maverick punished and independence of view militated against.

If there has to be state funding, if it cannot any longer be resisted, then surely it should be to the individual Member of Parliament rather than to the party. If MPs want to contribute to the centre then they can. And yes, I know, there are some pretty eccentric MPs out there. But that, you see, is the whole point.

Enough substance, Mr Cameron. Stick to style … because you’re worth it

Politics is more like Budweiser than like Crest toothpaste

In the year after his election as leader, there was constant criticism that David Cameron wasn’t moving quickly enough to elaborate on his agenda. An important theme of my columns was to argue against this. What follows appeared on the morning that Mr Cameron was due to give his first speech to party conference as leader.

4 October 2006

I am worried about David Cameron. I fear he will have too much policy. I am concerned that there will be too much substance and not enough style.

In 1975 Volkswagen introduced the Rabbit on the American market. And it was good. It was economical, it didn’t break down and its hatchback design was an improvement on its rivals. ‘The best car in the world for under $3,500,’ bragged the company in full-page advertisements. It probably was. But sales were disappointing.

In his book How Brands Become Icons, Douglas Holt explains why. The traditional view of branding was that it was necessary to identify a unique selling proposition – Crest toothpaste has distinctive cavity-fighting ingredients, Dove soap is gentle on the skin because it contains one quarter cleansing cream – and then tirelessly communicate this benefit to consumers. Holt calls this ‘mind-share branding’, trying to imprint a view of the brand’s unique benefits on the minds of consumers. Yet, Holt says, for many brands this approach is not enough. He dubs these ‘identity brands’.

An identity brand – Nike, Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s – is valued not so much for what it does as for how it makes consumers feel about themselves. One of the earliest identity brand adverts was L’Oréal’s slogan, ‘Because I’m worth it.’ The brand is bought largely to help the purchaser to define their identity. Volkswagen recovered when it stopped selling itself on its maintenance record and started selling itself as the provider of the sort of car that a creative individual would drive.

To promote an identity brand you tell a story, one that resonates with people, one that they want to be part of. Corona turned itself into the party beer with adverts that told stories of people drinking it on the beach at spring break. Mind-share branding works differently: it works by pounding on about the benefits of the product. But Holt believes that this is suitable only for ‘low-involvement’ goods or business-to-business services.

Political parties, in fact political causes, are classic identity brands. Voters make choices in order to make statements about themselves, to establish their own identity, as much as they do because of anything the parties offer them. When people announce their voting behaviour, they often say ‘I’m a Tory’ or ‘I’m Labour, me’. What was the slogan of the anti-war movement a couple of years back? Not ‘this war is wrong’, or ‘this war is expensive’, or ‘there are no weapons of mass destruction’. It was this: ‘Not in my name.’ The ultimate identity slogan.

Most pundits, however, think of parties as mind-share brands. So here we all are in Bournemouth asking the Tories where the USP is, where the policies are, as if it were policies, benefits, the technical qualities of the brand and its products that determine elections. They don’t.

Naturally (this is the media we are talking about, after all, and high mindedness is our USP), there is a more high-minded case for policymaking. To start off with, policymaking tells us what parties are going to do in government, doesn’t it? It informs voters what to expect, doesn’t it? Well, actually, no, not really.

Let’s take the most often-cited case – tax cuts. If a party that might govern for a decade or more lets you know what is going to be in its first budget, how well informed are you? If they set some targets for the NHS and a planned reorganisation of regional health authorities, how much do you really know about the way they will run the health service?

Between 2001 and 2005 Tony Blair committed this country to two major wars. Were they in his manifesto? Of course not: how could they have been?

Policymaking, then, is a bit of a con. Manifestos pretend to be an entire programme for government when in reality even the most detailed of them only cover a few items. Voters don’t make judgments based on these programmes and they shouldn’t either.

What matters is not such bogus ‘substance’, it is the governing style of the prospective rulers. Are they strong or weak? Interferers or liberals? Atlanticists or Europhiles? Moderates or extremists? Localisers or centralisers? Tax cutters or big spenders? Tied to vested interests or independent of them? Free traders or protectionists? In touch or out of touch? These are the sort of questions voters should ask.

Big emblematic policies – favouring the continuation of the NHS, supporting school vouchers, opposing the Euro and so on – can help, to a certain extent, to provide answers to such questions. Much more than that they can’t do.

But even if a manifesto doesn’t tell you what sort of government you are going to get, at least it is useful for the party taking office. Erm, no again.

I used to be director of the Conservative Party policy unit. There were four of us. The Government probably has as many people assigned to the development of policy on the export of carpets. We did not remotely have the ability to determine sensible policy on the myriad of detailed issues we would be facing in government. We couldn’t costs things properly or make the right trade-offs. But that didn’t stop us trying.

Labour has spent much of the past five years undoing stupid things it committed itself to in opposition and then did in its first five years. The problem with politicians, you see, is not that they don’t do what they say they will, but the opposite – they try to do what they said they would do, even after realising it wasn’t a good plan.

So if policies don’t win elections, inform voters or help with governing, why do the media keep asking for them, and why do politicians keep offering them? Simple. To keep us all entertained.

Let’s review yesterday’s papers, shall we? Full pages on a stray remark about autism at a fringe meeting, reports of a tax revolt that wasn’t happening, a Tory donor questioned by police and a huge story in the Daily Mail informing us that a new family tax policy was about to be announced. The Mail provided us with costings and everything, which was clever of them considering that the policy doesn’t, as far as I can discover, exist.

Why did these stories appear? Partly to fill the space normally occupied by policy announcements – crackdowns on internet porn, a five-point plan on dental hygiene, you know the sort of stuff – that are carefully handed out to newspapers to make sure everybody is usefully occupied. Without it the space gets filled one way or another. And some media outlets decide that they will make up their own policies if none are given to them.

The Conservative Party conference has been rich in useful information about the sort of prime minister Mr Cameron will be. He declared from the platform, for instance, that he belongs to the centre, an extraordinary, unprecedented remark for a modern Conservative leader to make.

But soon all those policy groups will report and we’ll be done for. We’ll stop learning all this useful style stuff and ‘substance’ will rule the day. Let’s hope David Cameron puts it off as long as possible.

Ooh matron! I’m sick of fizzy populism

Labour could regret having a snap election

When Labour gathered for Gordon Brown’s first conference speech as Prime Minister in 2007, it was at the end of a summer in which he could do no wrong politically. Everyone seemed to be talking about him as a political genius and saying he would call an election and sweep back to power. I listened to his address and then, at the height of this fever and before it broke, I sat down to write this column questioning the whole thing.

26 September 2007

So rubbish is the new brilliant, is it? Here’s the theory. Yes, Gordon Brown was really boring on Monday. Yes, he had nothing to say, but took sixty-five minutes to say it. Yes, his statements of belief were astonishingly incoherent. Yes, his stunning strategic move was to pinch the clothes of the Tory party, failing to recall that they were the garments the Tories wore when they lost three elections.

There was remarkable agreement in Bournemouth that the Prime Minister’s speech was poor. Even his most enthusiastic supporters weren’t claiming it was Demosthenes.

But what you have got to understand is that it was all done on purpose. He meant to be dull, you see. The cheesy rhetoric showed that he was too busy running the country to be bothered with crafting good phrases. His shopping list of cheap populist promises was not a worrying revelation that there is nothing there, it was a clever move to dish David Cameron. His lack of a single funny joke was designed to emphasise his seriousness. It was rubbish, but, hey, wasn’t it fantastic?

It’s remarkable how such an eccentric theory has taken hold in the media, but it has. I just keep reminding myself that moods pass. Noel Gallagher’s visit to Downing Street was hailed as a masterstroke, Cool Britannia was regarded as a vote winner and it was believed to be miraculous that Mr Cameron could ride a bicycle.

So I dedicate this column to two assertions. That rubbish is rubbish is rubbish. And that Gordon Brown can call a snap election if he likes, but he might not win it.

As Mr Brown spoke, I realised I was listening to something vaguely familiar. And then suddenly it came to me. He was repeating the standard Tory platform speech from the 2005 election, right down to the pledge to clean hospital wards.

The pitch was exactly the same. In place of the tricksy Tony Blair, let’s put in a hard man who can get the job done, someone who acts rather than emotes. And with the hard man comes a series of hard pledges all about foreigners and guns and drugs and things. These promises come straight out of focus groups. You make liberal use of the two phrases that get applauded at both party conferences – ‘matron’ and ‘cancelling contracts’. The very words of Middle Britain. How can you lose?

Here’s how.

Once upon a time Coca-Cola believed it was onto a winner. In focus-group tests, consumers said they preferred Pepsi. So you make Coke taste more like Pepsi. New Coke was born. And it was a fiasco. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains why – consumers preferred Pepsi when they were asked to compare a sip of that drink with a sip of Coke. But when they drank a whole glass? Coke came out on top. Individual policies on immigration and hospital wards pass the sip test, but voters may not want a whole glass of fizzy populism.

Look at it another way. Politicians often wonder why people don’t vote. This is the wrong question. The real puzzler is why on earth anybody bothers voting at all. If you multiply the chance of influencing the outcome by the difference that a change of government might make to your life, you might calculate that the benefit to you is so small that it is not enough to risk, say, the probability that on the way to vote a caravan full of violins falls on your head, having been pushed off a third-floor council house balcony by a drunk dentist.

If a rational view of personal interest cannot explain people’s voting behaviour, what can? That they vote to make a statement about themselves. As the identification of party with class has declined, for instance, so has voting. By supporting a party, voters are declaring what sort of person they are. They want to be able to say that this is something they did for the country and they want their party label to declare that they are a good person, who does the right thing for the country.

A string of policy pronouncements may chime with individual preoccupations without satisfying even those who agree with them. Mr Brown could easily find in an election campaign that his message doesn’t work as well as the focus groups seemed to promise.

It might reasonably be objected that Mr Brown may not have crafted the perfect message but that doesn’t matter because he’s fighting the Tories and they are in a mess. Quite right. Except that it is not only the Tories he is fighting – it’s also the Government’s record.

The public have not made up their mind about Mr Brown. They are reasonably impressed with his handling of the various problems in the summer and reassured that he appears to be moderate and a human being. But they are very sceptical of New Labour politicians bearing gifts.

He says he is going to jail for five years those who illegally carry a gun. Where? He says contract cleaners will be sacked if they don’t meet cleanliness standards. Aren’t they now? He says he’s going to toughen up border controls. Yeah, right.

Mr Brown has excited expectations of change, but he cannot meet them merely by talking. He has to demonstrate change. And if he goes to the country now, he won’t have done. That’s why his poll lead is not stable. How long since he was last on even terms with the Tories? Er, a couple of weeks back, wasn’t it?

Of course, the Tories present a tempting target. It’s very hard to see them winning a majority in the autumn. But is it so hard to see them depriving Labour of its majority? There are serious contradictions in the Tory strategy. Perhaps even insoluble ones. A quick dash to the polls might allow Mr Cameron to go to the country without even trying to resolve them. Anyone who can’t conceive of Mr Cameron appealing to undecided voters in a burst of television exposure is demonstrating a failure of imagination.

An autumn election? It is not hard to see Gordon Brown calling it in haste and repenting at leisure.

Curse of the Premier of the Month

After Gordon Brown’s supposedly glorious summer the reality dawns that he was never much good even then

19 December 2007

Congratulations, James Gordon Brown. For you were the Barclays Manager of the Month for September. I’m just sorry, as you opened the champagne, that no one reminded you of something every football fan knows. The Barclays Manager of the Month trophy comes with a curse.

I want to introduce you to some statistical work on the fortunes of Premier League gaffers. You see, I think it can help us answer a puzzling political question.

Back in the summer the media portrayed Mr Brown as a political demigod. Now he is written about as someone who would be lucky to win third prize in the East of England tiddlywinks competition. The standard narrative is that he changed. He started brilliantly, but when he called off the election, he lost his way. But is that really right? Perhaps the standard narrative is just a way for the media to get itself off the hook. Perhaps the truth is simply that the summer’s reporting was hyperbolic nonsense.

And this matters. It matters because of the light it sheds on the coverage of politics and the light it sheds on what is really going wrong for Gordon Brown.

But first – the football. Every month, one Premier League manager is honoured for his team’s performance. And most fans do not regard this as a blessing. They note that no sooner has the boss of their team been photographed with the trophy and a sheepish grin, than their side begins to lose. The curse of Barclays Manager of the Month strikes.

Now I am not a big one for curses normally, but this one? There’s something in it. Here’s how it works. The boss who wins the award does so because his team did better than anyone expected that month. This might indeed have been because his team had genuinely improved. However, that’s not usually the reason for the run of good results. The reason is that victories and defeats come in clusters.

A team that have the ability to win 50 per cent of their games will not ordinarily do so by winning and losing alternate fixtures. They will win a few, lose a few, perhaps have a draw in the middle somewhere. And guess what happens to you if a cluster of victories happens to coincide with a calendar month? Come on down, manager of the month. The problem is that a cluster of defeats is quite likely to be on the way to even things out.

The whole idea of a manager of the month, in other words, is ridiculous. A few weeks is far too short a time to judge whether real improvement has taken place. And handing out a trophy for a cluster of victories shows a touching faith in the ability of people to change.

Forgive me switching sports for a moment. Over in America the baseball manager Billy Beane has built a successful team upon a recognition that players don’t change. In Moneyball, his bestselling book on Beane, the journalist Michael Lewis records how most baseball managers ignore the flaws of promising youths because they think these flaws can be eliminated. Beane picks them knowing that he will have to live with their flaws. Players don’t change.

The coverage of Mr Brown this summer made both these errors. It assumed, as the Barclays Manager of the Month does, that a cluster of victories is the same as a real improvement. And it demonstrated a touching, but misplaced, faith that politicians can simply change who they are and eliminate their flaws.

The result was a ridiculous overestimate of some fairly prosaic acts by the incoming Prime Minister. Did he deal with the terrorist attacks brilliantly? Not really. He didn’t have all that much to do. Was his handling of the floods a triumph? Hardly. The Audit Commission has been damning about the inconsistent, badly targeted government assistance. Foot-and-mouth? I think it has to be a ‘no’ on that one too. And coming back from holiday early was a good stunt but maybe even that wasn’t smart. The man has looked exhausted ever since.

And now, in an attempt to make the narrative work, the summer’s political genius has become winter’s dunce. Nothing can go right for this comic character. Vince Cable captured this point and made people laugh when he said that the Prime Minister had within a few weeks turned from Stalin into Mr Bean. Witty. But honestly, how likely is it?

Gordon Brown has been a consistent character – his virtues and his defects. His brooding intelligence, his inability to make a decision, his relentless drive, his attachment to a closed clique. These things weren’t going to change. He wasn’t a new man in the summer and he isn’t a dolt now.

Isn’t this all just history? Not quite. The standard narrative rather underestimates the troubles facing Mr Brown. It describes his difficulties as a few extraordinary incidents hitting him in quick succession. That’s something he can turn round once he catches his breath. But understand his difficulty as an underlying problem that existed in the summer and you see the hole that he is in.

People have turned against the Government not because of a few bad media stories, but because people wanted change, felt Mr Brown might bring change and now feel that he won’t. It is the long-standing disaffection with New Labour he is really suffering from.

What does this analysis tell us about the coverage of politics? That we are too inclined to ignore long-term trends because we are busy covering immediate incidents. That we are carried away with the idea that people change, merely because change makes a good story. That we often record the noise rather than the signal.

We are too inclined to believe that a week is a long time in politics. It isn’t – any more than a month is a long time in football management.

Some sage advice: ignore the results

It’s opinion polls, not local elections, that count. And where’s the fun in knowing that?

30 April 2008

Forty per cent of British women who go on a holiday to Spain have sex with a stranger within the first five hours of their arrival. Believe this? Then you are ready to follow this week’s local election results.

Nearly one quarter of young drug users have smoked cannabis together with their parents. Convinced? Then you are missing your vocation. A job awaits you as a political reporter.

The cod survey is ubiquitous. Britain’s favourite flavour of yoghurt as determined by 132 respondents on the Yoghurt Council website; the ten top musical acts of the last millennium (winner Robbie Williams, runner-up Mozart) as nominated by listeners to LBC; the news that 38 per cent of people prefer their vacuum cleaner to their spouse (according to a survey of vacuum cleaner retailers).

Most of these start their life on the PC of a hopeful PR executive and end it in the news-in-brief column of a free-circulation newspaper. But imagine if a cod survey were to dominate political debate for a week, become the lead item on the news, create a massive storm that swirls around the feet of the Prime Minister. Well, imagine no longer because that is precisely what is about to happen.

At the end of this week, millions of voters will go to the polls and elect thousands of local government representatives. And the results will matter to those who live in the areas involved. But they will also be reported as providing a useful guide to the state of national opinion, a verdict on the Prime Minister and a glimpse of the result of the next general election. Such reporting is a preposterous error.

Ask a politician to respond to an opinion poll finding and chances are you will get back this cliché: ‘I don’t believe in polls, I believe in real votes in real ballot boxes.’ Michael Heseltine even gave this answer once when he was asked about the views of Polish people. Journalists pretend to be cynical when they hear this cliché. But really it represents our view too. Surely real voters going out to cast their ballot in proper elections are giving us a clearer view of the political picture than opinion polls?

No, they aren’t.

Let me start with the question. Any pollster will tell you that tiny changes in wording can make a big difference to the outcome of a survey. If, for instance, you remind people that the Liberal Democrats exist before asking about voting intention, the number who say they are Liberal Democrats increases.

But here we are not talking about tiny differences. We’re talking about trying to find out who you want to be prime minister by asking who you want, say, to be mayor of london. It is hardly surprising if this does not prove very enlightening.

Next, there is the nature of the sample. This week’s local elections do not take place in every part of the country, so one can only guess at what might have happened in the places that are not going to the polls. But there is an even more serious problem with the sample – it is a self-selecting group of enthusiasts.

The surveys that I mentioned at the beginning of this article – the holiday sex poll and the cannabis poll – were real examples. They came from magazines that asked their readers to write in with their drug and holiday experiences. Naturally, respondents were people happy to share details of their love life and drug use and sufficiently motivated to put pen to paper. Not exactly representative.

Those who vote in local elections are a similar bunch. Not sex addicts and drug users, but unusually enthusiastic about their own peculiar vice – picking their local councillor. Angry protesters and political junkies form a much bigger proportion of the local vote than they do in a general election. The sample in local elections seems so much better than that provided by pollsters, because it is so much larger. But unfortunately it isn’t properly balanced.

And finally – a minor point this, but worth noting – there is the fact that not every seat is contested by every party. Quite often voters will go to the polls to find that there is no Labour candidate, say.

None of these is merely a theoretical point. The proportions of votes cast in local elections and those cast in general elections are wildly different. But there are analysts who will play with the figures and claim they can tell you what it all means. They will dominate the coverage next weekend and the Prime Minister’s future may depend on what they had to say.

For them I have two questions. The first is – how? How can you really adjust properly for the different questions voters were asked and for the unrepresentative enthusiasm of the sample?

The other question is – why? Why would you bother? Who would construct a poll by, to start with, asking millions of people in only some parts of the country to go down to their local school if they want to and opine on an entirely different matter; and then, reverse-engineer the results?

Surely you would just ask 1,000 or so voters in a representative sample what their general election voting intention is? You would use a poll, with all its imperfections.

But that would mean admitting that anything we will find out on Thursday, we already know more accurately now. And where’s the fun in that?

Everyone agrees he’s got to go. So why hasn’t he?

Bobby Kennedy and the Brazilian football team explain why toppling Gordon Brown is only a possibility, not a certainty

By 2009 the frenzy over Gordon Brown fighting an election as a genius had turned into a frenzy about him being deposed. A challenger was expected at any moment, but I was dubious. This article appeared the day before Labour did disastrously in the European elections, a fiasco that was widely anticipated.

3 June 2009

John F. Kennedy, always the cooler, more considered of the Kennedys, watched his brother Robert dive off a sailboat into frigid waters off the coast of Maine, laughed and shook his head. He remarked to his close aide Ted Sorensen: ‘Well, that either showed a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending how you look at it.’

Sorensen recalled these words when he found himself riding in Robert Kennedy’s campaign plane, supporting a presidential bid that most of the old JFK team, including him, believed was doomed. Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, taking on a sitting president in his own party, either showed guts or no sense at all. It depended how you looked at it.

Robert Kennedy hated President Johnson. ‘He’s mean, bitter, a vicious animal in many ways,’ Kennedy complained. His young advisers thought LBJ was sure to lose in the end in 1968 whatever Bobby did. And if LBJ lost, and Kennedy stayed out of the race, then Kennedy would go down with him. It would be ‘eclipse – irretrievable’, his trusted aide Adam Walinsky warned him. Yet still, Kennedy had hesitated before running.

There were good political reasons for this hesitation. In his compelling book on Kennedy’s 1968 effort, The Last Campaign, Thurston Clarke explains how the more seasoned ‘honorary Kennedys’, JFK’s extended family of advisers, joined forces with the Democratic establishment to urge RFK to stay out. He couldn’t win the nomination, they said. He’d just spoil it for Johnson. And in the background there was always the possibility, the nagging thought, that it could all end in tragedy. As it did. Friday marks the doleful anniversary of Bobby’s assassination.

So why did Kennedy do it? Why did he take the plunge? What turned his confident public statements that he would not run into a decision to go for it? In one word – Vietnam.

Kennedy could not support Johnson through the campaign as a war that he hated continued to escalate. Political considerations could be balanced. This couldn’t. He could not stay silent; he had to make the case. And when he had finally decided to take the plunge he told friends: ‘I don’t know what is going to happen, but at least I’m at peace with myself.’ Clarke believes that, in the end, Kennedy felt morally compelled to stand.

The decision Kennedy agonised over – to challenge for the crown, or not to – must surely be in the minds of some of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet today. Those that are left, that is.

Surely they can see what the rest of us can see. That Labour led by Mr Brown is doomed to terrible, catastrophic defeat. That no one, no one, could lead Labour to a worse defeat than he. That waiting it out for another year does not bring dignified defeat for a united government.

What could possibly be stopping them, then? Why is the departure of Gordon Brown as Labour leader still only a possibility and not a certainty?

The first reason is what one might call the Bobby Kennedy reason. Mr Brown’s critics do not have a Vietnam War to compel them to act. They only have the hedged-about political considerations that led RFK to hesitate. If cabinet ministers were to call for Mr Brown to go, what would they cite as the reason? Merely that Mr Brown would lead Labour to defeat? That may be of interest to the Labour Party, but hardly to the rest of us. It certainly doesn’t constitute a moral case for action.

When Michael Heseltine stood against Margaret Thatcher, he offered a clear change of direction. So did John Redwood when he challenged John Major. Both felt that they could no longer stand aside, that they needed to make their case. They believed that their moment had come. Is there anyone in the Cabinet of whom that is true now? Upon what grounds?

If Mr Brown survives, there is something else he can thank – the fact that there is a market failure in the market for political coups.

It is tempting to use social psychology to analyse the behaviour of the Labour Cabinet. One could suggest that they are adhering to a social norm, going along with the group. Just as hundreds of followers of the Reverend Jim Jones drank poison just to fit in, so cabinet ministers are keeping quiet as they all commit suicide together.

But this description doesn’t quite fit. Because, unlike Jones’s followers, most individual cabinet ministers are only too aware of what is going on. And they don’t want to die.

So economics provides a better way of understanding why they still might not act. A market failure can exist where it is impossible for people to gain the full benefit of the costs that they incur by acting. And this may yet save Mr Brown.

The benefit of Brown’s demise – increased support for Labour – is shared among most members of the Labour Party. The cost – the risk of sticking your head above the parapet and then finding no one else has joined you – is concentrated on the person doing the head-sticking. It could be in everyone’s interest for Mr Brown to go, but still in no one person’s interest to start the movement against him. Naturally someone could decide to move, heedless of this calculation. But market failure explains why such an obviously sensible thing for Labour to do might yet remain undone.

There is a final reason. Let’s call it the World Cup reason. Brazil were the best team in the last football World Cup. In any game they played, they were favourites. Yet it still remained unlikely they would win the whole tournament. And they didn’t. The reason is simple statistics. A string of things, each of which are probable, taken together become improbable. It was very likely that Brazil would win any one individual match, but unlikely they would win them all.

It is very probable that Labour will achieve such a bad result tomorrow that the party will be jolted. It is very probable that in the next week one or more Labour MPs may announce that it is time for Mr Brown to go. It is very probable that Mr Brown could be forced out if there were a revolt. But for all three things to happen? That’s a great deal less probable.

It is hard to believe, isn’t it, that Gordon Brown can carry on like this. It’s extraordinary to think he might. But, really, he can. He shouldn’t do, he might not, but he can.

Keep plugging away. The brand is a winner

Tories think that the job of changing their party’s image is complete. It isn’t – and complacency could be fatal

This appeared as the 2010 election campaign was under way and responded to a feeling that the Tory campaign was underpowered and inconsistent. It picks up again on the issue of brand and deepens my analysis.

10 March 2010

In 1915 the Coca-Cola company decided that it needed to do something about its bottles. The firm’s bottlers were complaining. They felt that the straight-sided containers they were using weren’t distinctive enough. So Coca-Cola set a challenge to glass manufacturers. Could someone out there come up with a better bottle?

Yes, was the answer. The Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, proposed the swirling, curved ‘contour’ bottle. It became, and remains, one of the most recognisable and best-loved brand icons. And Martin Lindstrom, the brand guru and author of the book Buyology, thinks he knows why. The Coca-Cola bottle is, he says, ‘smashable’.

If you drop the famous Coke bottle on the ground, and it smashes into a hundred pieces, you would be able to pick up just one of them and still recognise what it is. Lindstrom lists some other brands of which the same is true. A bit of a Harley-Davidson, a scrap of an iPod, a drop of Guinness, Lego. These brands are all smashable.

But the Conservatives? I suspect there’s only one sense in which anyone thinks they are smashable, and it’s not Lindstrom’s.

A smashable brand is consistent, the same through and through. Its values guide every part of the design, its identifying features suffuse everything, there isn’t a detail that is left out, that isn’t true to the whole. And all appeal to the emotions. One study, using brain scans, shows that smashable brands light up the same part of the brain as religious imagery.

These brands share something else. Their owners understand that there is much more to their appeal than one simple function, however good that function might be. In fact consumers purchase the product as much for what it says about them, and how it makes them feel, as for what it does. The product is much more than functional, it is part of their identity.

You can divide the last five years, or even fifteen years, in politics into two sorts of period. You can divide it into the periods when the Conservatives have remembered and cared about their brand and the periods when they haven’t. Periods when they have understood the need to build a consistent and coherent picture in voters’ minds of who they are, and periods when they have doubted the necessity, or have believed the job done, or have chased other goals.

And I believe that you can divide the periods in one other way. The periods when they have cared about their brand and been successful, and periods when they haven’t cared and have not been successful.

Now the election campaign is upon David Cameron’s Conservatives, and the polls are closing, and the leadership team has a choice. What sort of period are the next two months going to be?

To anyone who doubts this account, I recommend a superb new history of the last decade in Tory politics, published this week. Peter Snowdon’s meticulous narrative, Back from the Brink, records the highs and lows of the party both before and after David Cameron captured the leadership.

As Snowdon records, one of the events that propelled Mr Cameron into the leader’s chair was the presentation to the 2005 Tory conference of opinion research on the Conservative brand. Tory immigration policy garnered significantly less support the moment voters were informed which party supported it. Informing voters that the immigration policy they had just been asked about belonged to Labour made no difference to their support. The brand problem was confined to the Conservatives.

The party faithful realised what this meant and chose a leader who might alter perceptions. And in a hectic, but hugely successful, period after David Cameron became leader, his team concentrated on just that task. Everything – policy initiatives with Bob Geldof, photocalls with huskies, being seen out biking, dropping health policies that seemed to favour opting out of the system, shifting Tory attitudes on issues like gay rights – was geared to make the party, and particularly its leader, seem different.

These Tories, the message was intended to say, are modern, energetic, determined, tolerant, they listen, they are at ease with today’s Britain. They understand that people are fed up with knockabout politics as usual. They support public services, particularly the NHS, they will protect the low-paid and they understand that, as Mr Cameron put it early on, ‘we’re all in this together’.

The Tories are still living on the capital from this spell. But every so often, they forget. They start thinking they have changed the brand already, that the work has been done. They have self-indulgent little rows, as they did over grammar schools. They coast. They start wondering if they need a retail offer to the public, some big (probably expensive and therefore impossible) initiative. They lose sight of the fact that their best moments (Mr Cameron’s speech without notes and his response on expenses, George Osborne’s big calls on taxes and debt and spending) have been when they have been reinforcing their new brand.

Politicians and pundits alike overestimate the impact that individual policy initiatives have on voters. Focus-group research suggests that most voters don’t know what ‘Whitehall’ is or what ‘hung Parliament’ means. The BBC has done research which shows that the term backbencher is lost on those watching its news bulletins. All that get through are very broad messages about the character of a party, about who it is, about its brand. And this is transmitted in many ways big and small, but particularly through pictures and spontaneous public appearances.

The old negatives that dogged the Tories – that they will cut the NHS, get rid of tax credits, favour the rich over the poor, the South over the North – dog them still. They, and particularly David Cameron, have made some progress in persuading people that the party has changed. But not enough. And certainly not enough to stop plugging away at the message. Every day. All the time.

Eighty two per cent of people think it is time for a change. Less than half say they will vote Conservative. The voters are out there to give the Tories a landslide, but the party needs to help them over the finish line. They just need to show a bit of (Coca-Cola) bottle.