Everything bad happens in the rain

The end of last week’s blog fades up to the rafters. The audience peers into the darkness. There’s an anxious shuffling amongst the dark and a spotlight flips on. To start with it shines just away from the slithering presence on the boards; only a grey suited elbow is clipped by the silver ray. With some kerfuffle, where initially the beam sprays across the room, it settles on the slight, surprisingly short man with a grey badger streak to his hair that matches his suit. The only flash of colour is the deeply dark red tie. He looks slightly hunched as his eyes squint under the bright light. He takes a final half step towards to the microphone, one of those old large circle ones from the nineteen thirties that partially obscure the speaker’s face.

He clears his throat, a rough grating harumph that catches in the mic and radiates around the room. He half-glances down to his hands folded together at his midriff and then, with the tiniest, almost imperceptible smile, he opens his mouth to speak.

But we don’t stop to listen to poor Ed Miliband because we know what he’s going to say. His mouth will be opening and closing, but the words won’t be his. They’ll be those decided by committee, reviewed by focus groups to see how supporters and haters will react and dragged into the crowded centre ground. It’ll be nothing new, anyway. An understanding that there must be cuts; an acknowledgement that the future will be tough, but that by working together we can make a new economy. Poor Ed. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ed. I think he’s great. In the Labour leadership campaign I thought he ran a better, more left-leaning, more grass roots of the party focused campaign. I’d vote for Ed, I’d probably vote for brother David too, mind, because, at the very least, I think, compared to the current floppy-haired, over lacquered occupant of the big chair, they at least give a shit.

Regardless I still feel sorry for Ed. Nobody’s listening to him. Nobody’s listening to him, because it’s not just me who can predict what he’s going to say. It’s everyone. You get the impression he’s kept on a leash by his party handlers, too fearful of letting him saying anything truly original or vaguely controversial in case he’s lampooned and instead he ends up being mocked for his very dullness.

It wasn’t always like that. It might seem fanciful in an age of twenty-four hour news coverage, but once upon a time our politicians were larger than life and had that mystical otherness which suggested that they might change the world for the better. The real world. The one people lived in. The rhetoric of the great reforming Liberals of the early twentieth century was not only capable of stirring the masses to exaltation, but was followed up with real action that eventually dragged Britain out of the workhouse and laid the ground work for the major reforms of the late forties to take place. The NHS. Pensions. The welfare state. Mortar which held together the society that gave a shit. The politicians who survived Queen Victoria would never be elected now. They’d be seen as too rogue, too maverick for national office. Lloyd George and Asquith both led lives filled with women and dubious money and fateful misadventure and bitter slighted enemies who would ensure their foibles were routinely plastered over the papers in the twenty-first century. Attlee would have been too boringly unphotogenic. Bevan too wildly Welsh. Even Churchill, the man held up as a pinnacle of British spirit and wouldn’t-it-be-marvellous-if-all-our-children-turned-out-like-Winston, in 2011 would have had his exceptional drink habit exposed.

In those days it was easier for a politician to bend reality to his will, to control the story so that he was always a hero. Lloyd George, in 1918, emerged from the First World War as the man who’d won it, who’d finally ended the slaughter and with victory no less. He was the man the people loved for his reforming budget despite the dead bodies growing mountainous over in Flanders. They loved him so much that a congratulatory biography of his life was filmed, which Lloyd George’s office quickly quashed simply because it wasn’t theirs.

In contrast, Tony Blair must wonder if he’s ever going to get his appearance back. He’s continually ridiculed and accused of ever more fanciful crimes. From the, when broadcast, near-future The Trial of Tony Blair, where he awaited his fate for war crimes, to the contemporary The Hunt for Tony Blair where he is chased across a noir-parody, sleeps with Margaret Thatcher and murders anyone who crosses his path, including tossing Robin Cook down a Scottish scree slope. Criticism of our leaders has become virtually post-modern, a pastiche of itself as we begin to muddle Blair with an unending mess of actors who’ve tried their hand at his peculiar mannerisms and faux charm.

Perhaps this reflects our deep lying disappointment with him? And them all.

As regular readers know, years ago I planned to write a short story about my disappointment with the Labour government and with Blair in particular. The 1997 dawn at the pinnacle of my teenage years heralded so much none of which really came to pass. Sure, there’s the minimum wage, vastly improved NHS, public services that worked for a while, the climate change act, child poverty and crime rates reduced, reformed city centres, but there’s also wasted opportunity of a majority, university fees, catastrophic bust and war after war after body after lie. I never could find the words to express quite how frustrated I was with how it had gone wrong. Tony the smiling, “pretty decent guy” who’d promised to usher in a new, cleaner age of politics was gone. Admittedly he had swept aside the Tory sleaze of toe sucking, cash for questions, arms dealing, oil smuggling, prison and health service disinterest and education incompetence that had riddled their way through a whole cabinet like the dark dreams of the underworld, but in their place were the backhanding, cash for honours, document sexing-up, invading, gun-toting, Bush-and-Clinton arse licking, Cliff Richard holidaying, verbal tick caricaturing, demon-eyed, dead man walking that was all centred around Blair himself. How do you write that?

You can’t and that’s why, rather than a single big denouncement, a Profumo moment, the satirists and writers and comedians had to pick away, until there was nothing left but a fiction. We took arguably the last man capable of being a political hero and we reinvented him as a work of fiction to make his failures and his lies less harmless.

We’d done it before with our hate. We made Thatcher vulnerable with our words, in fictions like Grant Morrison and Paul Grist’s masterful St Swithin’s day. That was a tale of teenage broken heart so yearnfully realised through the partnerless dance-swaying amongst the midnight railway carriages, to the La’s There She Goes which played in his head long after the batteries of his walkman had died. No-one believed his hurt and so he did what any sensible love-lorn teenager would do, blame his ills on society. After all, it was a society butchered into no such thing by the woman elected to the office of power, Mrs T. There’s a gun (or was there?) in a plastic bag (or maybe it’s just a notebook). It doesn’t matter. All he had to do was get close enough, amongst the crowds in the St Swithin downpour, the rains which signalled yet another washed out summer, get close enough to catch her cold blue eye and to whisper, ever so quietly:

‘Bang.’

Because they’re all fallible in the end. They all fall in the end. Even big bad Silvio Berlusconi. God, we think we have some ill-deserving fuck-wits running Britain, how did a first world country manage to keep electing a man whose sole interests in governing appear to have been ejaculating across and into as many women as possible, preferably in a sun-drenched private villa at the public expense? Simple, he controls all the media. The picture we see of a power-crazed, plastic face tightened, hair transplanted, megalomaniac sex fiend prepared to drag an entire continent into the ocean just to get laid one more time, isn’t shown in the same light in Italy. Contrary to the snarky British view that the Italians probably don’t care, that they think he’s some kind of idealisation of the Mediterranean psyche, rather it is they don’t know.

So, maybe it is impossible to build up any single individual to believe they might change the world through politics in this country ever again, but at least we’re not going to have a prime minster more interested in bunga-bunga parties than impending financial disaster. Playing polo and serving the interest of Daddy’s friends in business, yes, but then we knew that last year and we still, sort of, elected them. More fool us.

I wish it were otherwise, but I don’t think it’s Ed’s who’ll save us. I don’t think any modern politician is, could or even should be the answer. There’s too much of a necessity to be practical, or political if you will, and too much subsequent awareness of such actions for them to be iconic; for them to be untainted; for them to appear more idealistic than human; for them to be heroes.

So, we’ve discarded high and low culture, science, sport and state. There’s not much left. If we pick apart society’s layers there might be one last cowering group, huddled underneath a damp mushroom head in the corner. Church.

Yeah, I know. It’s called a God reflex.