Could you please just answer the question?

In TV crime dramas, the baddies always respond to difficult police questions with “no comment”.

Who wouldn't rather watch Vera than a political interview?

I’m beginning to wish that politicians would do the same, instead of endlessly churning out the pre-prepared PR boilerplate in which they have been drilled in order to skirt around every difficult issue.

Though my sympathy with TV and radio presenters wearily repeating “Could you please just answer the question?” is reduced by the knowledge that they will instantly condemn and lampoon any politician who actually says what he or she thinks for making a terrible “gaffe”.

Personally, I think we need more and bigger gaffes to enliven this wretched campaign, and open up a bit of clear blue water between the parties.

Boris: a real brick when it comes to gaffes

Nigel: hardly a day goes by ...

Natalie: see above

Because if nothing changes between now and May 7th we seem likely to end up with a dead heat between Labour and the Conservatives. Leaving the politicians themselves to make the unappealing choice between an extremely shaky re-run of the last Conservative-led coalition; or a Labour minority government propped up by the party that looks set to destroy Labour in Scotland and whose very raison d’etre is to do precisely the same thing to the country as a whole.

On either scenario, and whatever the Fixed Term Parliaments Act may say, the chances of us having to re-live the whole election campaign before too long look high. Which would be frankly unbearable.

Since the potential outcome is so finely balanced, the major parties are taking their natural supporters for granted and “reaching out” to potential swing voters from the other side.

So Labour has implausibly become the party of strict financial discipline, while the Tories have discovered a surprising taste for populist giveaways.

If the fringe parties adopted the same approach Natalie Bennett would now be touring the UK in a Maserati while Nigel Farage would be on a chartered boat in the Mediterranean, rescuing would-be immigrants and ferrying them to Dover for a slap-up lunch.

Luckily no such strictures apply to those never likely to have to form a government, so the SNP can cheerily propose “an end to austerity” that would create financial mayhem and undoubtedly lead to yet more austerity for everyone in the long run.

I wrote five years ago that the 2010 election was one to lose, as whoever emerged as the victor was likely to make themselves deeply unpopular by taking the necessary action to put the public finances in order.

In the circumstances, I am pleasantly surprised to find that the Conservative Party is apparently still in with an outside chance of retaining office. Though whether this has more to do with their reasonably solid track record of economic management or the free gift they were handed when Labour chose the wrong Miliband as its leader is hard to say.

I’ve done one of those “who should you vote for?” analyses, correlating party policies with individual desires, and find that I am 38% Conservative, 36% UKIP, 15% Labour, 3% Lib Dem and minus 85% Green.

I imagine that most of us will be similarly conflicted, given the mainstream focus on policies not designed to appeal to their core supporters.

It may seem a bit rich for a PR man to say that what we need for the rest of the campaign is less PR, but anyone who has observed me in what passes for action will know that mine has never been a conventional approach.

So I would greatly welcome the clarity of some anti-PR campaigning by the sort of politicians who rant about “that bigoted woman” live on camera, or say something utterly outrageous with a humorous twinkle, or punch members of the electorate who lob eggs at them.

Allied with a willingness to provide straight answers to straight and sensible questions. (And if it’s an obvious trick question designed to plunge the politician concerned into a pit full of sharpened stakes, then say so, rather than waffling on evasively.)

Otherwise the big winners on May 8th may turn out to be the same as in 2010; the “no comment” party of those who took the trouble to get themselves onto the electoral register but could not find any reason at all to vote.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Please, sir: can I have some vision and passion?

Few things gave me greater pleasure in 2014 than the resignation of Alex Salmond after his referendum defeat.

I was not so naïve as to suppose I had heard the last of him, but at least I hoped for a decent interlude of remission from the dread disease.

Instead he is back in the headlines and all over Conservative billboards as the great bogeyman of the forthcoming General Election: the one-issue obsessive who may well determine which of the leading contenders enters Downing Street.

And, of course, he will do so at a high price. This will mean either another independence referendum that he will surely be odds-on to win, if the SNP has indeed eliminated Labour as a political force in Scotland; or a “devo max” settlement that it will be hard to discern from independence by the naked eye.

As political stratagems go, there can surely be few that have failed more spectacularly than Labour’s brilliant idea of creating a devolved Scottish parliament with a voting system rigged to prevent the SNP ever attaining a majority, thus granting themselves a cosy fiefdom they could rule forever.

But then the fundamental problem seems to be that contemporary politics is all about stratagems. Trying to outmanoeuvre the other side with the promise of a tactical tax cut here, a raid on someone else’s savings there, or yet another scare story about the NHS.

And always seeking to crow that someone who has wandered off-message by saying what they genuinely think about any issue has committed an unforgiveable “gaffe”.

From "two Jags" Prescott to "two kitchens" Miliband, apparently the key election issue of 2015

It’s a contemptible game. Small wonder, then, that the British public has come to treat politicians with such contempt. Condemning them to a Western Front-style stand-off in which both sides pound away with small hope of gaining more than a yard or two of ground, let alone clinching an outright victory.

I no more understand the Scots’ sense of grievance that propels the independence movement than I can comprehend what drives the militants of Islamic State. Both seem to me to be based on a misreading of history.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the piscine double act of Sturgeon and Salmond can tap into a genuine passion for a cause, however wrong-headed it may be. So do other smaller parties like UKIP and the Greens, even though on closer examination many of their policies prove to range from the ill-thought-through to the howling mad.

Beer, fags, lentils ... and fruitcakes?

Where is the passion and vision in the campaigns of the two major parties? How are they going to save Britain from break-up, and ensure that we are properly defended, whether that be from Islamist terror or President Putin?

Can we please move on from foot-shuffling and pointing at the other child across the classroom (“Please, sir, it was him, sir!”) whenever the issue of cuts to defence spending is aired?

Yes, I know that campaigns trying to stir our patriotic impulses have not always proved a roaring success, notably William Hague’s “save the pound” crusade of 2001.

But these are dangerous times, and it surely behoves our would-be leaders to rise to the occasion with some real vision instead of playing party games, of which the bickering about televised debates is but the most egregious example.

To be fair, David Cameron and Gordon Brown both managed to express some powerfully pro-Union sentiments when the referendum campaign appeared to be running away from them. How much better it would have been if they had relied on that passion, rather than trying to buy off the other side with massive concessions. A ploy that never creates gratitude, and always feeds the appetite for more.

I don’t actually expect the tone and content of the election campaign to be elevated as I wish, but I do have one small consolation. According to Monday’s Times a “celebrity chef” called Valentine Warner (no, I’d never heard of him, either) is setting up a distillery in the Simonside Hills to produce Northumbrian whisky form genuinely local ingredients.

If he succeeds, he will replace at a stroke the one Scotch export on which I am reliant, and allow me to wave a bittersweet farewell to that land of midges, wind turbines, identity cards, grievance and bitterness.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

What if we were capable of running our own country?

The “what if?” game is a favourite among those of us who have spent some time studying history.

The end product of six years studying history, and a reminder of how I looked before old age and dissolute living took their toll

What if someone had said in late June 1914: “You know, Franz Ferdinand, I think it might be better if you didn’t visit Sarajevo today”?

Or what if Britain had decided to let France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary get on with it in August 1914, and sat aside whistling nonchalantly?

The rationale for intervention has always been that Britain cannot allow the Continent to be dominated by a single power that might act against our vital interests.

In which case our finest minds have done an absolutely cracking job, through 50 years of international politics and diplomacy, in creating a power bloc on our doorstep that seems to be almost uniformly hostile to our notion of who should run the European Union, and how it should develop.

This should not be altogether surprising. The Continental countries’ experience of revolutions, dictatorships and military occupations during the last century is vastly different from our own.

If they wish to forge an ever-closer union with a common currency and uniform laws largely handed down from Brussels, bully for them. But I sense that a natural majority of the British people shares my reluctance to join them.

Hence at some point we need to stop lying to each other, admit that we want different things, disengage and move on.

There are many respected economists willing to vouch that the net economic cost to Britain of withdrawing from the EU would be marginal at worst, and that the oft-bleated refrain of “three million jobs at risk” is a number simply plucked from the air.

Only one thing gives me pause about embarking on an unreservedly enthusiastic campaign for our early withdrawal from the EU, and it is not the potential impact on business. It is doubts about the calibre of those who would have to shoulder the burden of running a properly independent country.

Surely those with the privilege of voting in the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum must similarly consider the leadership of the SNP and think: “Really? All on their own?”

Wheezes pour forth from all sides in the year-long campaign for the 2015 general election. The Conservatives offer us HS3 to cap the monstrous folly of HS2, plus the alluring promise of elected mayors, even though the idea keeps being rejected whenever people are offered a say on the issue. The evident moral here must be: don’t ask the people.

Any sane person’s heart must surely sink when George Osborne proposes to merge the tax and National Insurance systems, given that the three words even more likely to induce despair than “England football team” are “Government IT project”: a guaranteed recipe for waste and chaos on a truly Brobdingnagian scale.

Meanwhile Labour’s own policy chief Jon Cruddas denounces the “dead hand” at the party’s centre that prevents it from proposing anything similarly radical, and Nick Clegg …

Well, there’s probably no point wasting ink on anything the LibDems have to say, given their electoral prospects next year.

Are any of our prospective national leaders really up to the job of leading a nation of 64 million people alone on the international stage?

Our Queen certainly is, but she is 88 and on a job share as head of state of 15 other countries at the same time.

Ed Miliband? Don’t make me laugh.

Nigel Farage? I refer you to my previous answer.

David Cameron is undoubtedly a bit of a lightweight. A former PR man, for heaven’s sake, and I can tell you from decades of direct experience just how useless they are.

But our “friends” in Europe have surely done him a massive favour in appointing as their supremo a man who apparently likes a drop and whose crowning achievement to date has been leading a country with a population around two thirds that of Tyneside.

Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, congratulations. You are officially the man who makes even David Cameron look like a proper statesman.

Now, what if Dave actually calls that EU referendum I am sure he would really rather avoid, and cannot wriggle around to recommending that we all vote to stay?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Pigs and politicians cannot win

My cousin’s roof was blown off by a tornado last month.

That is surely not a sentence many people get to write, unless they have a very large extended family in Kansas. But my cousin lives in the sleepy village of Great Livermere in Suffolk, which experienced this freak weather event on August 23.

The wind also flattened the outbuildings in which, until that very morning, had lived three contented pigs. They escaped being crushed because my cousin’s husband had roused them at five o’clock and driven them to the abattoir to meet their destiny as sausages.

I mused for some time as to whether this constituted good or bad luck. I also considered whether the tornado might be seen as retribution by a vegetarian deity, but dismissed the possibility since my cousin’s husband is a priest. I finally concluded that it was simply one of the very few classic lose-lose situations not currently involving a politician.

Last week, despite myself, I bought a copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography. It came with two dust jackets, and I exposed the second one with some trepidation, half expecting it to reveal the image of the shape-shifting giant lizard which, former sports commentator David Icke assures us, is the reality behind our royal family and political leaders.

The more I read of Blair, Mandelson and Brown, the more credible that theory becomes. However, the only difference between the two covers was that the inner one lacked the “Half Marked Price” sticker slapped on the first. This presumably slashes the take of the Royal British Legion, to which Mr Blair has announced that he is donating his profits.

Another classic lose-lose situation because it produced gales of abuse for his hypocrisy that were surely just as great as the howls that would have gone up if he had simply pocketed the money.

On the other hand, it is possible to have only limited sympathy for someone who, when asked if he has any regrets, skirts around those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that he is sorry he tried to abolish foxhunting. Oh, and maybe we should have a crack at Iran next.

Incidentally, I have not read a word of the book yet but the cover picture is haunting me as I type this and making me think that the Tories’ much derided “demon eyes” poster campaign of 1997 actually hit the nail squarely on the head.

I felt rather more sympathy for William Hague in his lose-lose dilemma with his young adviser. Share an expensive hotel room and face accusations of impropriety, or book two and be rubbished for wasting money? After the expenses scandal, what would you do?

The resulting personal statement was the second time Mr Hague has made me cringe, the first being his understandably jejune performance on Radio 4’s Any Questions immediately after his debut as a 16-year-old at the Conservative Party conference. The fact that this is not constantly replayed to embarrass him can only suggest that the BBC has wiped the tape.

My principal client regularly holds managers’ conferences at which all participants are expected to share hotel rooms with colleagues of the same sex. The implications for their reputations are apparently now mind-boggling. Except, of course, that totally different rules apply to politicians.

Back in the 1980s Spitting Image portrayed the press as pigs – trilby-wearing porkers spreading porkies. Today politicians have become the lowest form of human life. How we all hate them – and that’s before they have even started on the real spending cuts.

Dave Cameron will no doubt look back on his paternity leave with young Dandelion, or whatever she is called, as a brief lull before the tornado struck. I hope it does not take his roof off, but if I were him I would not bank upon it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.