The Labour Party and the Ulster Unionists appear to have both reached the conclusion that presentation isn't everything. Each, faced with the choice between a leadership candidate who was media slick and one who spoke in halting and glitched sentences, chose the stumbler. Ed Miliband and Tom Elliot have the same difficulty in conceiving the full trajectory of a sentence from the starting point and invariably pause to grub around for the word they need, much like a child caught halfway across a river without an obvious stepping stone in front.
In the old days of about a couple of months ago, it was understood that a politician who could not make his or her way mellifluously from a capital letter to a full stop without tripping was, however impressive his or her other strengths, unlikely to survive media pressure. Tony Blair had a similar problem but he had the perfect mask for it. Stranded in the middle of a thought he would effect to blush, making out that what he was about to say was difficult because it was so embarrassingly noble that a humble man could barely utter words so creditable to himself.
And it may be that because we ultimately saw through Blair we now prefer leaders who have none of the polish. We now trust a speaker more who shows the signs that we once took for evidence of acting and insincerity: hesitation, uneasiness, inarticulousy. In the witness box, the person who can't find the right word is understood to be fearful that there is no right word.
The gifts of rhetoric and panache evolved precisely to disguise the evidences of deceit. We are more mature now; we understand that ordinary decent people stammer. We recognise that the politician who turns the defect of a pause into the effect of feigned consideration, masking doubt and ignorance with inflection, is just an old fashioned liar who should be selling cheap jewellery out of a suitcase.
So Tom and Ed are likeable for having no obvious sides to them, for being ordinary decent blokes making an honest effort against the odds. Votes for them can be read as protest votes against hypocrisy and dissembling. The question is whether they can win elections with their bumbling, whether they can acquire a little bite on the job and cut up rough when the need arises.
For Ed there will be Prime Minister's Question Time, in which he will either shine or crumble, in which his party will see whether he is a fighter or a flop. For Tom, it is hard to see that the job presents much opportunity to acquire the dexterity he needs. He has an added problem, in that he will come under an onus to befriend the party he must claw seats from, the DUP.
Tom is a victim of the political structure that determines that real political enemies have to be treated as friends. He should talk to the SDLP about it. There is a party which to survive, must gut Sinn Féin, but somehow do it without seeming to give an advantage to Unionism or otherwise demean the Nationalist project. Our politics is constructed in such a way that parties direct their contempt at those who pose virtually no challenge to them – since few people change sides in the old sectarian balance – and must hold back their wrath when dealing with the parties which have the real potential to weaken them, inside their communal camps. With an Assembly election coming, Tom must decide whether to snuggle a little closer to the DUP to avoid getting the blame for weakening Unionism and letting Sinn Féin appoint the next First Minister.
Or? Well, he can frame his project as an attack on the DUP, an assertion of a distinctive identity for the Ulster Unionist Party, but come the vote, Unionists may prefer to keep Sinn Féin in check than to embrace what limited Unionist diversity Tom offers. Currently Tom is keeping the DUP at a distance. He has to do that. Just as in the divide between Sinn Féin and the SDLP, there are some committed supporters of one party or the other who will never defect. The Ulster Unionist Party may be historically depleted, a rump, but there are still people for whom it is their natural political home. They will never leave it, and the legacy of animosity towards the DUP makes a merger unthinkable. When they hear Peter Robinson aspire to a single Unionist Party, they read that only as a takeover bid.
Tom's job is to keep those people happy. But that is a separate task from enlarging the base of the party and taking more power in the Executive and it may not ultimately be compatible with reform and expansion. An irony is that Tom may be working to establish the distinct identity of the Ulster Unionist Party while moving it spiritually closer to the DUP. Party liberals have been unable to pull Ulster Unionism out of the grasp of the rural conservatives and reshape it as a more culturally and religiously neutral movement that might attract Catholics. They have seen Tom assuage the bumpkins with his sniffiness about the GAA and Gay Pride and they doubt that this pettiness can be anything but a drag on growth.
Still, down in Fermanagh they like that sort of thing. Just as in the unions they like a Labour leader who talks about equality and disowns the Iraq invasion. Ed and Tom have more in common than their hesitancy of speech; they are touchstone politicans for the old guard in both parties. Well chosen for opposition. Leaders who will keep the seat warm until the chauvinists wise up or die.
December 23, 2010
