Conference season

In the meantime, domestic politics here in the UK has suddenly started to heat up again, and for once it's quite interesting. The Tories, approximately 16-20 points ahead in the polls, feel as though they are marching to certain victory, especially since the Sun decided to endorse the party this week. Reportedly after David Cameron (a la Blair in 1997) visited Rupert Murdoch and supped aboard his private yacht. George Pascoe-Watson, interviewed on Newsnight, said that The Sun had finally run out of patience with the Government and had given plenty of warnings over the last five years (over Afghanistan, Europe, immigration, etc...) that they had failed to heed. Now, he said, it was time to switch allegiance to the Tories, who, he claimed, could deliver better for the country.

Of course, what's really going on is that Murdoch smells the writing on the wall for Labour and he wants to be seen to back winners. Of course it helps that Cameron and Osbourne have assiduously courted him and Jeremy Hunt has implicitly supported James Murdoch's criticisms of the way the BBC is run. But really Rupert just wants to catch the mood of the country and sell more news. Neither party would ever seriously consider policies which infringed on his business interests, and both would welcome his patronage with open arms, so the choice for Rupert is not really significant. Apart from anything he lives in America, where he's content to visit the Fox studio and tell his viewers that Obama could be dangerous for the country - read 'bad for business'.

Anyway, there was a lot of pantomime shredding of the Sun at the Labour conference, none of which means anything. The Sun's backing might end up being worth one or possibly two percentage points, but newspaper endorsements rarely have a significant impact on voting patterns or intentions. The fact is that Labour is stuck because they've been in for three terms and people want change. They don't really care about the shape of change, they just want to give the other bunch a go. David Cameron is more charismatic than Gordon Brown, but people aren't that stupid or that fickle. It's Brown's unopposed election - the source of his power - that has made him so unpopular, not the fact that he's partially-sighted or a dull speaker.

What he also lacks, perhaps most crucially, is a sense of the importance of political gesture, and the inability to coin popular policies and frame the debate in terms of these initiatives, rather than allowing the momentum to be taken by the opposition. Blair could never fail to come up with something headline-grabbing when he needed it. Brown can hardly manage it in a major policy address. Somehow, the Prime Minister and the cabinet have managed to let the focus shift from their role in staving off a depression and the rescue of the banks to the inflation of public spending and the need to slash public sector jobs/Departmental Expenditure Limits.

Yes, public spending is unhealthily large, but that is principally because of one thing - the banking crisis and the decision to nationalise (effectively) some of Britain's biggest commercial lenders. It isn't the public sector that's to blame for our current woes at all, it is the very apogee, the apex, of private industry. They're the ones who fucked up our finances and made us push our debt through the roof. If you want to blame someone, blame Lehmans and RBS and HBOS and HSBC. Oh yeah, and the FSA and the Bank of England and the Treasury who were all asleep at the watch, but don't blame investment in the NHS, schools, and the other spending departments. In case you're interested in these things, Public Debt as a percentage of GDP was 49.8% in 1997, and fell to 44.2% in 2007. By the end of 2008 Debt had risen to 52% of GDP. I wonder why? Oh yes, because in December we spent all that money on the banks.

So while the execrable Taxpayers Alliance and other right-wing pressure groups call for a slash-and-burn approach to government spending (notice they didn't protest handing over billions of public money to private investors), and tell us how bloated and inefficient the public sector is, they forget to mention that public spending was under control (though it still needed to be trimmed long-term) until a bunch of hyper-greedy bosses and shareholders done us up like a kipper and then came crying to HMG. It's called socialism for the rich, and they can get away with it because we cannot afford to let the banks fail and because there is an enduring myth that the private sector in all areas and at all times provides greater efficiency and better value than the public sector. And I just don't even know where to begin with that one.

It's all a bit depressing.

On the plus side, though, watching Lord Mandelson's emergence as the real power behind the throne and the supreme showman on the political stage has been very enjoyable. I can't really admire him, but you have to enjoy his supremely oleaginous performances in interviews and at the Conference. His speech: 'If I can come back, we can come back...' was pure theatre, in fact it was almost Vaudevillean. He so clearly loves every minute he spends in the limelight, basks in it. And that enjoyment is strangely infectious. But he's not just slimy. He's actually a very very powerful communicator and he has a very strong grasp of strategy.

Of course what lets him down and has let him down in the past is his judgement on certain questions of public perception, a kind of disdain for the public's wish to see that their politicians are bit like them and that they are above reproach in everything they do. There has to be the pretence of humility, the appearance of a relatively normal lifestyle, to aspire to the very top. And perhaps he'll never have that, but then he'd be much more boring, and actually much less honest, if he did.

It does feel now though as if he's absorbed all the lessons of his earlier career and somehow he's won out over all his doubters. He's still there, after all, after Blair and Campbell and the others are long gone. It's the delicious sense of self-satisfaction that emanates from him, the sneyd superiority he does better than anyone else, that makes him such a joy to watch. And apparently he actually has been a very competent minister. He certainly saved Gordon's bacon pretty much single-handed and now he really is the one, you suspect, who runs the show. Amazing when you consider the hostility he faced among Labour activists and MPs through much of the 90s.

Well, it may not last very long, but Mandy's moment in the media spotlight is certainly providing some very, very good television. And who knows, he might still be able to narrow the gap enough to snatch victory away from the Tories. I'm not sure I really care, either way - except for very narrow selfish reasons (I imagine the Tories will probably abolish as many quangos - read NDPBs as they can in the first hundred days), but the whole thing will be a lot more colourless without Peter Mandelson.



Poetry recommendations (not that you care): 'The Autumn Born in Autumn', selected poems by Matthew Mead, Anvil. 'Selected Poems', Aldo Vianello, Anvil. 'How To Build a City', Tom Chivers, Salt

Oh, and if you didn't happen to catch Brian Blessed's performance on 'Have I Got News For You' a few weeks ago, you missed one of the funniest things that has ever happened on TV. Fortunately some kind soul has put it on Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1gwVIhJ8II The man is a total genius. He puts on one of the most amazing displays of comic energy, timing, theatrical performance and showmanship I've ever seen. I don't usually like this kind of acting, but he does it so brilliantly, with such bravado and incredible use of slapstick humour you just can't help falling for it. Hislop and Merton just fall about laughing, not to mention Alan Duncan, who can hardly stop giggling. Utterly utterly brilliant. He should be on every week.