Industry | 2009.01.10
David McKie: Ride the bus, Mr Brown
The prime minister in these troubled times is touring the regions - embarking, as the Downing Street website puts it, on a series of visits to UK towns and cities that will include a cabinet meeting and a public engagement in Liverpool. "We will keep you updated," 10 Downing Street pledges, "with all of the developments and announcements during the three-day trip." After they\'ve happened, of course. As the Guardian wisely opined yesterday, such tours (David Cameron\'s doing one, too), built around engagements with handpicked people in handpicked places reached in handpicked official cars, are utterly artificial. If you wanted to meet the people, you would never do it like this.
Politicians ought also to note that public opinion tends to cast a sardonic eye on their mode of travel, as US motor industry moguls learned when they turned up in private planes to testify before a congressional committee. The practical course, if Gordon Brown is keen to ascertain what voters are thinking, would be to tour the country by bus - and not the kind of sleek air-conditioned monsters that purr along major roads between regional capitals, but aboard the humble buses that pick up and set down in inconsequential villages as they trundle their way to town. Here you will hear conversations that reflect the way people are truly thinking, far more than you could in the self-conscious context of a focus group.
A prime minister truly eager to listen and learn would surely cancel his previous travel arrangements to make his way from Liverpool to the West Midlands today. Arriva bus 401 would spirit him from Merseyside down to Chester, and the 84 would carry him on to Nantwich, from where D&G Coach and Bus Ltd could convey him to Whitchurch, Shropshire. From Whitchurch (outside Tesco\'s), Arriva buses would sweep him to Shrewsbury, and thence via Telford to Wolverhampton. There he could catch Banga Bus, route 530 to Bilston (and when did Bilston last see a prime minister?). Travel West Midlands would whish him to Walsall and finally to Birmingham. True, it would take all day, but how much he would learn en route! Once passenger gossip had disposed of such issues as the ditching of Kevin Pietersen, the chances of Nigel Clough doing half as well as his dad did at Derby County, Celebrity Big Brother and so on, fellow travellers would no doubt update him with frightening frankness on the debris left by the credit crunch, the resurrection of John Maynard Keynes, and the state of their various high streets.
There\'s a further objection, quite apart from security risk, which his advisers might raise. Might he not be assailed by the kind of people one tends to flinch from on buses who believe themselves to be in possession of magic remedies to all the country\'s woes - advocates of bimetallism, men in aggressive hats who believe it is time to recall Margaret Thatcher, evangelists for selected vitamins, and the rest? But if that\'s the objection, let him ride the buses disguised as a private citizen, muffled in scarves. There\'s a precedent here designed to appeal to any prime minister who feels that the onset of national crisis means that his hour has come. He should model himself on King Henry on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, wandering in disguise among the simple soldiery. "The king\'s a bawcock and a heart of gold," Pistol tells Henry, "a lad of life, and imp of fame ... I kiss his dirty shoe, and from my heart-string I love the lovely bully." If this crisis has really redeemed Gordon\'s popular reputation, equally heartening things might be said to him were he and his dirty shoe to ride Banga bus number 530 to Bilston today.
• David McKie is the author of Great British Bus Journeys: Travels Through Unfamous Places
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/08/gordonbrown-labour
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