I’m beginning to understand how those Labour supporters felt in 1992, when the electors refused to vote out an economically incompetent government which had clearly been in power too long, and whose leader had proved himself a deadbeat pygmy compared to his predecessor.
On the night of the 1992 general election, I was working for the BBC at a town hall in London, where several results were being counted: we were essentially there to mark the demise of the SDLP. I was with a bumptious little squit of a reporter from current affairs - a classic middle class lefty. He started the evening in high spirits, jeering at me in advance for the crushing defeat “my” party was about to suffer.
Well, as we know, it didn’t quite turn out that way.
The reporter spent the rest of the evening in an absolute snit, throwing endless hissy fits and laying into me, the camera crew, and even the elderly chief returning officer, calling the amiable old buffer something I can’t repeat just because he’d been a bit slow getting to one of the declarations. The old boy relayed the insult to the packed hall via his microphone. I apologised oleaginously, but the damage had been done: the Daily Mail featured the incident the following day, and I and the wretched little tit I was working with were both hauled over the coals back at base. (Naturally, the reporter’s career continued to flourish unabated, and does so to this day. I wonder what would have happened if he’d been a Conservative supporter?)
I remember arriving back home at about six o’clock in the morning, and realizing for the first time since the initial Basildon result that I was still living in a Tory Britain. It seemed unreal. And continued to do so for the next five painful, embarrassing years as John Major and his unlovable chums lurched from PR disaster to PR disaster. I spent several of those years working at Westminster, and it was like being in a an endless car-crash, waiting for the sickening crunch of a foreseeable collision that seemed to take eons to happen. When it did – and Tony Blair won the 1997 election – it was a massive relief.
Now, of course, we realize that while John Major may have cut a pathetic figure as leader, his government was actually doing a pretty good job, and managed to hand over an economy in good shape – indeed, in such good nick that even a useless bungler like Gordon Brown needed nine years to bring it to its knees and – to quote Daniel Hannan – “run out of our money”.
So will 2010 prove the mirror of 1992 or 1997?
If the former, then God help us all. In any sphere in which this government has involved itself, it has made things worse: education, law and order, the economy, the health service – just everything! At least the Tories in 1992 could honestly claim that the country was in better shape than when they’d taken over from Labour in 1979. But it’s now in infinitely worse shape than when Tony Blair won in 1997. God alone knows what further damage a bungling left-wing basket-case of an emotional cripple like Brown could cause over the next five years: unlike Major, there are no competent ministers sitting alongside Gordy to offset his destructive urges.
If this is actually 1997, that’s better. Slightly.
Because the one hope is that David Cameron casts off the cloak of mealy-mouthed Butskellite wetness and reveals himself to have been a true right-winger all along.
Fat chance, I know.
What a tragedy for the Tories, and for the country as a whole, that William Hague was elected leader in 1997 – otherwise, a popular and accomplished right-wing politician would be about to take the reins of power (indeed, might already have done so back in 2005), and we’d be waking up on a morning in May to the realization that our Socialist nightmare, the inevitable erosion of everything that makes one so proud of this country, has finally ended.
As it is, if the Tories really have got those crucial marginals sown up (and I doubt it) we’ll wake up to a leader who hasn’t got any sensible plans to cut the deficit, won’t give us a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, is determined to spend yet more of our money – pointlessly - on the NHS, is flaffing around the key issues of immigration, law and order, and defence, and who actually seems to believe in all this climate change horseshit.
In other words, a sort of non-autistic version of Ted Heath.
Roll on 2015.
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