Quality | 2009.08.22
There it is, then. The Tories, too, will live down to our expectations | Marina Hyde
That all David Cameron can do is \'rebuke\' Alan Duncan and his fellow clods shows the scale of Tory dreams in an age of tweeting MPs
\'Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life." Thus ran Jeremy Thorpe \'s famously brilliant verdict on Harold Macmillan\'s Night of the Long Knives. It is but another testament to the depressing smallness of our current politics that one just can\'t conceive of such a zinger being unleashed today. There simply isn\'t the calibre of opponent to lend it that epic quality.
After all, this is the week that saw David Cameron opt to keep poor ration-booked, shit-treated Alan Duncan in his post, rather than declare that perhaps he wasn\'t the man to front the Tories\' now spectacularly compromised expenses clean-up. How could one possibly adapt the Thorpe quote to convey anything other than amused contempt? Greater love hath no man than he lay down his not-very-convincing reformer\'s pose for Little Alan Duncan\'s shadow cabinet life?
Big dreams, Dave. Big dreams.
For all his secretly taped braggadocio, Alan Duncan is oddly difficult to loathe, despite having worked tirelessly to engender profound distaste before entering parliament, notably for the hideous, disgraced oil trader Marc Rich. Either way, he is a mere plot device here, the mechanism via which Cameron has revealed his absolute adherence to the rotten old conventions of British politics.
The Tory leader has cleaved to the Blair-inspired dictum that losing a shadow minister (not even a minister), is more personally costly than looking as if you don\'t actually give a toss about trust in politics. Preserving the palpable lie of unity is far more important than policy.
That Duncan is not merely a multimillionaire but spearheading the Tories\' expenses reform is naturally priceless, yet somehow not as priceless as Cameron\'s decision to expose himself as entirely of a piece with the present shower of inadequates, against whom he has hitherto sought to define himself. In this he has done us a great favour. Instead of wasting time nurturing irrational hope that he might seize the opportunity to usher in some kind of constitutional reform, we can merely expect the next bunch to live down to our expectations.
"They still just don\'t get it!" ran the Mail\'s headline on Duncan\'s comments, which rather gauchely seemed to suggest the buzz-phrase of the expenses scandal was still current. It\'s not. We have now officially passed into the post-they-just-don\'t-get-it era. Adult-contempo catchphrasers are now spouting the retro "They\'re all as bad as each other", while the more avant-garde prefer "Do bugger off, you ghastly little fellow".
Against this unchanged backdrop, a new cast of characters is gaining mainstream traction as the Tories prepare to take possession of what is rather grandly referred to as "the political landscape", when it more closely resembles a pub car park at chucking-out time. There\'s idiosyncratic Mid Beds MP Nadine Dorries, who doesn\'t appear to be playing with a full set of patio furniture, and whose blogged vignettes on her struggles are fast becoming cult classics. This week Nadine was at it again, claiming she recently assisted at a road accident but was too frightened to identify herself as an MP in case they "lost trust" in her.
Last week it was one of Cameron\'s MEP horrors, Roger Helmer, explaining that homophobia doesn\'t exist, while alleged Tory "grandee" Patrick Cormack bleats about his MP\'s lot. "One is expected to give liberally to all manner of charities," he frets. "One is expected to attend all manner of events. One is expected constantly to be putting one\'s hand into one\'s pocket." It sounds unbearable. Perhaps one should just do one.
Then there\'s the gruesomely ambitious Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, whom naive folk thought quite the crusading modern hero when he stuck his European parliament rant against Gordon Brown on YouTube, but who has spent the past week on some madly self-regarding North American tour, and was so desperate to crawl up the colon of Fox News that he obligingly slated the NHS. "I wouldn\'t wish it on anybody," he gabbled, pathetically grateful for his close-up.
Like Mr Duncan, Mr Hannan has been "rebuked" by Mr Cameron, and presumably he\'ll be getting some underling to have another word with Nadine Dorries et al. But by now he must be feeling powerfully uneasy about the massively changed information environment in which he will take charge.
In the honeymoon period of New Labour, you see, Nadine Dorries would simply have been dragged into Alastair Campbell\'s dungeon lab, had her circuitry rewired, and been banned from going near a computer, a TV studio – maybe even a kettle – ever again. Those were the days when "on message" seemed a new and modern phrase, rather than standard vocab for even a Wernham Hogg temp. Campbell\'s hi-tech information armoury consisted of MPs\' pagers, which seems antediluvian in this world of MPs\' blogs and tweets and YouTube appearances. It\'s like fighting Skynet out there. And consider the agent of Mr Duncan\'s embarrassment this week. Who needs meticulously planned fake sheikh exposés when citizen journalists can do just as well?
It is much better for us plebs, of course. Far more desirable to know what our representatives really think – but one could almost feel slightly sorry for Cameron. He will never enjoy anything like the same full-spectrum control of his forces that Tony Blair did, which is perhaps why he wishes to keep familiar generals such as Alan Duncan around him.
marina.hyde@guardian.co.uk
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]duncan-expenses-cameron-tories
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