R D Kernohan
Alex and I
Tuesday 27 April
I fill in my ballot which the returning officer urges me to send back by post as soon as possible, even though I haven’t heard from all the candidates. He may reckon that the Royal Mail is one of the public services now distinctly worse than Labour found them.
So too are some NHS services. I’ve just waited a week to see my own doctor, for whom I’ve great respect, and confessed that I seemed to be recovering without him. And if I take ill outside office hours, at weekends, during extended public holidays, or on staff-training days I may or may not get good service (I did last time I tried) but not from someone in the practice that knows me.
Yet there’s not much about the NHS in the campaign – partly because devolution has blurred it as a Scottish issue, partly because Cameron’s determined we won’t seem as vulnerable as in 1997. He’s able to speak sincerely about good things in the NHS and ready to limit and even distort economic options by guaranteeing spending. All politicians profess to love the NHS. In fact they’re afraid of it, overawed by the enormous costs and expectations now involved.
An SNP billet-doux has arrived. It’s in modest format but they’re saving up to pay lawyers in the broadcasting case. The candidate doesn’t seem to believe in independence – or, if he does, forgets to mention it.
But now I’m growling and eager to take offence – at my own lot. Our candidate in North Ayrshire and Arran has been suspended from the party for views about homosexuality which are clearly personal but quite widely shared. They aren’t that far from my own and, more important, they seem neither offensively expressed nor beyond the range of opinion which any party must expect to include on such issues. Why is that when parties insist they want to be a ‘Broad Church’ they become so eager to ex-communicate? I see Labour ditched a chap in Cambridgeshire, but for email erotics. I wouldn’t have chosen Mr Lardner’s words, and I wouldn’t put as much weight on Camus and Burke as he does in appealing to public opinion in Ardrossan, but parties ought to cherish articulate candidates with minds, styles, and voices of their own.
I’m less displeased with polls tonight, most displeased with the way my sometime employers run the Scottish branch of the firm nowadays.
Wednesday April 28
I’ve something in common with Alex Salmond after all, and not just that we both knew his court action over TV hadn’t a hope. We’re both friends of ‘The Archers’, that most middle-English of radio serials. But will he champion my campaign for a better class of Scottish character? We have a most uncouth one now and, back a bit, there was a more refined type doing dreadful things to Elizabeth before she married into the squirearchy. But I really reached for the polling-week Radio Times to see if David Cameron’s tastes were sound. He’s ticked most of my boxes and given me a bonus by approving of my good and sadly missed friend from Herald days, George Macdonald Fraser. I’m sorry George isn’t around to comment on some aspects of Cameron’s New Conservatism and the state both of the nation and the Herald.
The calm of my lunch is disturbed by broadcasting frenzy over Brown’s unkind comments on a Rochdale lady of determined views. Many others, including Reagan and Major, fell into the open-microphone trap but not at an election’s climax. And in elections it’s when things aren’t going well that they often go worse. I remember Rab Butler chatting to a journalist on a train about how things might be ‘slipping away from us’. Very soon they were. There’s hyperbole on the air about this being possibly a decisive moment. Brown may salvage something and finish bravely but there’s damage where he was known to be weak. He’s a bit arrogant, petulant, patronising, and overbearing – though I prefer these vices to Blair’s. The affair is trivial compared to the main election issues but I enjoyed Mandelson wriggling on TV. He said five times that it was all caused by the PM saying ‘something he didn’t believe’.
Ironically, I was meditating before Brown’s self-inflicted wound about the way the leaders’ mental and physical stamina was lasting out, especially in the intensity of TV debates. Hardly a fluffed line or argument. I wonder if Ming Campbell could have stood it, had the Liberals and media not knifed him. He would handle a hung parliament better than the precocious Clegg.
Let’s pause on the polls tonight. Fieldwork was almost entirely before Brown was caught out. But maybe we should be more worried about Greece than ill-used grannies.
Thursday 29 April
You would think from this morning’s papers he had actually pushed his granny off a bus. I’ve also just heard it all dubbed on French TV. It’s the worst campaigning disaster I remember, but the serious questions it raises were already there. We knew the PM can show a nasty streak. And we have known from Enoch Powell’s day that anyone who speaks frankly about immigration risks being called a bigot. The issue lost its sting when for two decades Tory and Labour jointly assured us large-scale immigration was at an end and we could concentrate on assimilation. But it didn’t work out that way.
I risk ex-communication from the choir by missing practice again, but this debate counts. You can’t win on it alone but you can lose. Nobody lost and Brown did well, given his situation. Clegg waved his arms about too much, showed some signs of yielding to the law of diminishing returns, and ended with a modest echo of his first triumph. Cameron got some real steam up and contrived some hits that didn’t always relate to the questions asked. He’s not Blair, thank goodness, but he got across need for a change after 13 years and a tiring but still dogmatic government. Some of his notions are too liberal for me but I think most come from conviction, not just opportunism. He’s in that Tory tradition that sees government as our duty, and sometimes is in danger of treating it as our right.
But it often sounded like prize-giving day at a college of populist demagoguery. Too many of the answers for too much of the time were interchangeable. Thank goodness for the different accents which reminded you who was who.
So I wrote before seeing polls on who ‘won’. I don’t think they’ll alter the trend of ‘intention’ polls, where Brown’s stamina (and desperation) may cancel out any effect of the Rochdale disaster. But things have moved a bit to the Tories after the shock of the first debate.
Of the first four polls, three give it to Cameron over Clegg (as I would) and one is tied, but as in earlier debates I rate Brown a bit better than people polled. A Scots thing? Presbyterian solidarity? Even a generation thing, though I’m a lot older still? I’m not sure.
But enough of polls. The task of winning this election is nothing to what comes after it, regardless of the uncertain arithmetic of next Friday morning.
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04.05.10
Issue no 246
Stitched up
Since ‘Bigotgate’, the
electronic media’s arrogant control of the election has
been complete
[click here]
How did he get
away with it?
Catherine Czerkawska
argues from personal experience that the scandal facing the Roman Catholic church is common to
other institutions
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Ash
Gerard Rochford
Our poem for May
reflects more deeply
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significance of
a current event
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Also today:
Bob and Rose
The last in the series
of election diaries
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for R D Kernohan
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for Rose Galt
Tedious and Brief
The election in 100
words a day
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Alan Fisher’s
World
Saving the euro
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Next edition: Wednesday