Robert Marshall-Andrews

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A joke monument to the ills of our age - Sunday Times

Article from the Sunday Times

There is one message for the spin doctors of Downing Street. Politics is not a joke. It takes an old, unfashionable socialist French playwright to put his finger on it. In Ring Around the Moon, Jean Anouilh's heroine confronts the merchant banker. "The world of the poor," she says, "crumbles when they see the rich turn life into a joke."

Not a bad line, worth mulling over. Within it are the distinction and relationship between the substance and presentation of government. The poor have remarkable generosity of spirit, a fact fatally overlooked by Marxist theory. By and large, unless fraudulently obtained, wealth is not resented by the poor, and the grand gesture, the great palace, is frankly admired.

It is the contemptuous joke that hurts. The trivial, ephemeral mockery born of commercial advantage, the strutting ego, the laughter of the peacocks.

As for the wealthy, so for politicians. In the right cause the voters are generous of failure. It is the joke they find hard to accept. The unhappy thought at the heart of government, in the streets and corridors of power, that there may be artifice abroad. Mocking Delphic oracles that spin the truth and deal in rumour in permanent defence of reputations rather than the political faith. And the serious cause of modern politics is not obscure. It is to rescue the domestic and global underclass and give them hope, dignity and opportunity within peaceful societies enjoying sustainable growth and an improving environment. Achieving these noble aims is the stuff of great politics and great politicians. Labour's twin targets of welfare to work and educational reform deserve and obtain widespread applause and can lay the foundations for continuing popularity.

They represent a profound endeavour to advance the public good. Even if they fail they will have produced, none the less, their own distinct reward, for they reclaim for politics the priceless value of rescuing its own good name.

Contrast, by way of analogy, the Millennium Dome, the most persistently unpopular of projects. Here all is the art of presentation. It is thrilling. It is big. It is the stuff of which dreams are made.

Yet the public are unmoved. Alibis are found. The lack of public esteem is attributed, in general, to the grotesque level of public expenditure and the identity of the minister in charge, Peter Mandelson. This ignores the central, important and barely perceived objection of the public - the entire project is a cosmic joke of vast proportions. At worst, it is a millennial metaphor for the 20th century. An age in which all things, like the dome itself, became disposable. A century when forests and cities, art and marriages, animal species, races, religions and even the Earth itself became ephemeral.

What more cynical monument could there be to this totalitarian, cocksure, fragile age than a vast, temporary plastic bowl erected from the aggregate contributions of the poor through the national lottery. Despite the spin it remains a massive pantheon to the human ego, the Ozymandias of its time.

As Mandelson said, in a speech that brooked no intervention, "if we fail we will never be forgiven, if we succeed we will never be forgotten". Absolutely. This is the bubble reputation, millennium-style.

This is the true political significance of the Millennium Dome. It represents in the most dramatic and visual form a facet of modern government that will, if left unchecked, erode the public confidence on which all politics relies, namely, the rise of media manipulation.

This is a hollow world, the Teflon carapace of politics, it has no substance, no content, no guts. It has only two related purposes - the inflation or destruction of reputations. This is the world of spin and the leak and the poisoned briefing. In this Lilliputian world, peopled by unelected "sources close to", political coinage sinks immediately to vulgar abuse. New colleagues of impeccable reputation are listed as "clinically insane", irritating voices are dismissed as unstable mavericks and even the central genius, the main architect of economic policy, the chancellor Gordon Brown, becomes, in an unseemly row across the fence, "psychologically flawed".

Briefings on the opposition are even worse. To spend time, money, energy and zeal on the Clouseau-like investigations of Mrs Ffion Hague's travel expenses may strike most people engaged in the commerce of life as being inappropriate for serious government. To get it wrong becomes a pathetically bad joke.

But this is a world where retaliation is all. Do not explain, counterattack at all costs with whatever comes to hand.

At one level, of course, it is simply depressingly infantile but it has a deeper significance for new Labour and for democracy itself. By feeding an appetite for personal grievance and personal attack the spin doctors of Downing Street ensure that Labour's own ministers are suitable and legitimate prey.

The peccadillos and predilections of the foreign secretary may offend some but they have, as Palmerston once observed, little relevance to the problems of the Upper Volta.

However, earnest protestations from Downing Street that Robin Cook is a politician of rare ability (true, actually), who has been scandalously treated by the press, come ill from a press office that two weeks ago was briefing against its own chancellor's mental condition.

Then there is the potentially devastating effect on genuine differences within the party. Socialist parties are, historically, plagued by division. The bonding of principle and conscience are, inevitably, more complex and fragile than the glue of self-interest, and the disciplines of adult debate are central to our success. This debate cannot be conducted on a foghorn basis from the centre of government. There can be no doubt that the media machine created to defeat our enemies is potentially a deadly weapon of self-destruction. It needs to be disarmed.

Finally, there is a wider significance beyond the interests of the government and new Labour concerning the nature of politics and the media itself. The last decade has been bad for politicians. The next person who tries to joke about brown envelopes in my presence is in as much danger as it is possible to experience form a middle-aged, overweight pacifist leftie. The system needs rehabilitation. Very badly. New Labour parliamentarians need to be seen for what we are: earnest, hard-working, well-intentioned, totally honest and perhaps, just perhaps, ever so slightly dull. We need our media circus like a hole in the dialectic.

Above all, they turn politics into a joke. And the world of the poor electorate crumbles when you do that.