To the drooping disappointment of the sign-holders, the Blair bus pulled away with no Blair in it. Maybe the Blair bus would pick Blair up at Downing Street. We piled into the car and headed off in that direction, but at Downing Street there was no Blair bus. Back at Millbank there were no press buses either: they had left without us, we knew not whither. Luckily, Harris had a contact on the second press bus who owed him one after a hairy moment in Beirut. Ducking beneath the surveillance of the on-board Millbank commissar, the contact whispered into his mobile that the bus convoy was proceeding through Notting Hill Gate, perhaps on the way to the West Midlands via Shepherd’s Bush roundabout.
We caught up with the second press bus on the M40 and sat behind it while Harris communed again with his contact. Newport had been mentioned as one of the day’s locations. It couldn’t be Newport Pagnell, and probably wasn’t Newport, Rhode Island: but there might be a Newport in or near Staffordshire. Harris signed off on the moby and studied the map, on which Staffordshire occupied about a thousand square miles. So there was no point trying to run up there ahead of them and lie in wait. Meanwhile I was calculating the total revenue per bus from forty or fifty media personnel all coughing up the full whack: somewhere north of 25,000 quid. ‘Almost enough to pay for the petrol,’ said Harris. It would have been a good line for Hague, who had run out of good lines the previous night while being trampled by Paxman.
The great Australian philosopher Rod Laver once said, ‘When you’ve got your man down, rub him out.’ Strategically, the idea makes sense, but not when extended to the spectators. By now Millbank had dealt with Hague: he had been rubbed out with such thoroughness that the only way you could tell where he had lain was by a man-shaped area cleaner than the surrounding pavement. But Millbank still had many enemies, and two of them turned out to be me and Harris. Whispered word came through from the bus that we had been spotted.
Somewhere in the command centre of the bus, Millbank operatives were processing the information that a mystery car had been observed trailing close behind the tinted back window. The face in the car’s front passenger seat checked out against the hostile media list. James, Clive, 61, Australian origin. Used to be on television, now active on the Internet. Thinks he’s funny. Back-seat passenger could be Harris, Brian, freelance photographer. Paying for divorce, ready for anything. Once got a shot of Blair in pyjamas with Mandelson picking his nose: not his own nose, Blair’s nose. High possibility of upcoming satirical attack at arrival point.
The easy course of action for Millbank would have been to buzz Special Branch and suggest that we be removed from the bus’s tail. It would have worked, too: Harris has so many points on his driver’s licence that he isn’t even allowed to be a passenger. But someone higher up the chain of command must have been given pause by two further considerations. The first consideration was that people are still legally free to travel on the open road, unlike on the railways, where they can travel only under tight restrictions. The second consideration was that the Bremner Battlebus Ban (instigated when it was assumed, perhaps correctly, that to give Rory Bremner a ride on the bus might result in his imitating everyone on board including the driver) had gained negative publicity. The current potential satirical attack was headed up by comparatively minor players but there could be a nasty media backlash if Special Branch took them out. Better use the charm weapon and suck them in.
Although we were getting our information from on board the bus, we had to deduce that last part. Until the bus arrived in Stafford we were still expecting to be stopped any time by a fast car full of heavy bluebottles saying ‘Breathe into this bag.’ But suddenly, strangely, the both of us were persona grata as the two press buses disgorged their cargo at a complex called THE STAFFORDSHIRE AMBULANCE SERVICE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE TRUST HEADQUARTERS. The Blair bus, which Blair had joined en route after a quick flight, was circling the district in a holding pattern while the media took up position to cover the forthcoming spontaneity. The smudgers toted their trademark aluminium stepladders for seeing over the heads of the public, although these locations are so secret that it usually means seeing over the heads of nobody except reporters. I grabbed a spot on the ropes where I could clock the scene.
It looked like a military base. I counted at least thirty ambulance personnel in green overalls, most of them marked PARAMEDIC on the right breast, while the left breast bore the name: ALAN, PETER, GEORGE. (In the empire of New Labour, the valley of the lost apostrophe leads to the plateau of the missing surname.) The ambulances were all inside the hangar, where the main action would take place. A bomb-squad copper was towed past by his sniffer dog. The dog had that particularly hang-dog look that dogs get when their biggest thrill of the week is snorting a practice wodge of Semtex, but every other life-form on the concourse was polished and alert.
Abruptly I found myself being loomed over by an upright man in green overalls called Roger. He turned out to be the guy in charge of the whole outfit: Roger Thayne OBE, an ex-lieutenant colonel whose background in medical service includes the Falklands and Lockerbie. We had a point in common. Roger’s son-in-law commands the 4th Royal Australian Rifles, currently active in East Timor, where they had been in a skirmish only yesterday. After telling him how I approved of the Australian government’s action with regard to East Timor, I discovered that Roger didn’t necessarily approve of the British government’s action with regard to the Health Service. ‘What you’ve got in the Department of Health are people who have never seen a patient, and they are advising people who do see a patient.’ I asked him if more money would fix things and the answer was: not without a re-think. ‘It’s a question of morale. Doctors, nurses, want to look after patients, not paperwork.’
I was busily writing that down when the Blair bus pulled in and gave forth the power couple – Blair and Cherie, both in full smile mode, a grand total of sixty-four scintillating teeth exposed to scrutiny from a satellite. Blair had his jacket off already: ever since Peter Mandelson noted with horror that one of the smudgers had nabbed an under-arm sweat shot, Blair has been pre-cooled for all occasions. Bad news for jacket manufacturers, but it makes media sense. So do Cherie’s long-top pants suits with the long-toed shoes. During many a chat-stop on the way to the hangar, she proved her grace. She has a way of standing with one foot in front of the other, like a figure on an Egyptian frieze, although she does so with her legs crossed, as if Nefertiti were dancing the tango.
Soon they were inside being shown how the ambulance unit could electronically monitor patients at home, with the aim of cutting down the number of death-defying sprints to the hospital. A handsome South African doctor name-tagged ANTON VAN DELLEN (doctors still have surnames) proudly informed me that this was a cutting-edge set-up, but I wondered if, inside, anyone was telling Blair (a) that the secret of its success lay in the determination of its commander to fight his own war with no bullshit from upstairs, and (b) that the doctor was an import.
Dr Van Dellen strode handsomely away on his mission of mercy, to be replaced in my view by the celebrated Blairite apparatchik Anji Hunter. Access-starved journos tell me that Anji is a hard case, but she didn’t seem that way today. At my age I am immune to sexual desire, but there is a lingering aesthetic sense that appreciates a tall, slim female form draped in a black linen pants suit underpinned with strappy high-heeled sandals for the shapely feet, the toenails painted with the blood of slain lovers. This was one chic apparatchik. Getting as tough as I ever can when drowning in a woman’s eyes, I asked her why the Labour poster campaign was still screaming at the punters to get out there and vote in case Hague got in. She said, ‘Why don’t you have a word with Alastair?’ She meant Alastair Campbell, so she might as well have recommended having a word with Napoleon Bonaparte: nice idea, but it would depend on the availability.
Anji drifted elegantly back into the Blair bus and Alastair Campbell came hulking out of it. He was very nice. You could fill the Millennium Dome with media people eager to testify that he is n
ot nice at all, but he was nice today. I don’t think he was turning it on, although clearly it can be murder when he turns it off. He wasn’t guarded in the least. When I suggested that New Labour no longer had any challenge from the left, he guilelessly let slip that Charles Kennedy might fill the bill. I noted that one down: the whole potential realignment of British politics compressed into a moment. His answer to the question I had asked Anji was simple: a foregone conclusion meant that the voters might stay home. When I said that the Tories might vanish altogether, he said ‘Good.’ He said it with a smile, but he meant it. ‘What about democracy?’ I wailed. This time his smile said he didn’t mean it. ‘Ah, come on. Don’t give me that stuff.’ I could have quoted him cold and launched a thousand cartoons, but it wouldn’t have been fair. His laughter said that what he was saying was preposterous. There is nothing preposterous, however, about the possibility.
Even with some of the polls adjusting the Labour lead downwards because of new rules for asking questions, we are looking at a one-party state for at least one parliament into the future. As Campbell went back into the bus to plug himself back into his information system that deals with millions of people all at once instead of one sweating hack at a time, I was pondering the implications. Tony and Cherie emerged from the hangar and proceeded down the concourse. Craning sideways, I could see Cherie dropping to a crouch, either to kiss babies or else to converse with children and very small adults. We were informed that at the next stop Blair would reassure Shropshire and the waiting world about New Labour’s commitment to a Strong Society. Medical staff would be safe from attack by schoolteachers driven crazy by late trains.
But I could catch the speech on the fringe channels late at night. Harris had got his stuff. The great thing about photographers is that they bring the same expertise to baby-kissing as they do to a Palestinian kid bouncing rocks off an Israeli tank: they do what they must, and when it’s done it’s done. But for a scribbler, the story rarely fits the frame unless he lies. Integrity means you can’t stop taking things in, and on the road back to London I took in the thing that mattered. It was buried on page 17 of a stapled clump of bumf handed to me by the indefatigable Roger. At the request of the NHS board, his ambulance unit was being studied by Sheffield University ‘to identify the transferability of the Staffordshire performance throughout the National Health Service’.
Eureka! If Roger’s irascible voice was going to be heard at government level, the implications were enormous. It meant that Labour would not just be bringing the private sector into the Health Service, it would be dumping its cherished top-down, target-setting management system. This was the very thing that Portillo was saying the Tories would do. The Tories wouldn’t be doing anything for the next hundred years, but if Labour moves in that direction it will be clear confession that from the health angle the whole of the last parliament was a waste. Tony’s campaign slogans for the public services boil down to ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ If he really means ‘I got it wrong last time but this time I’ll get it right’ he is open to an objection that uses the words ‘piss-up’ and ‘brewery’ in the same sentence. But New Labour certainly can organize a bus-trip.
5. Lunging for the Tape
On Monday afternoon William Hague was in the Wirral, where he said, ‘It’s a campaign that’s going very well.’ No doubt King Harold said the same thing at Hastings, while his troops kindly pretended not to notice the arrow sticking out of his eye. Scholars have yet to agree about which of the two Roman consuls, Aemillius Paullus or Terentius Varro, said the same thing at the battle of Cannae. To escape being massacred by 7,000 of Hannibal’s Libyan heavy troops, the depleted legions turned around just in time to be charged by 10,000 of Hasdrubal’s cavalry. At this point either Aemillius or Terentius said, ‘It’s a campaign that’s going very well.’ It probably sounded better in Latin.
There was comparatively little media coverage in ancient times: a concept difficult to explain to some of our young people today. Even for us adults it is sometimes hard to believe that there were no Big Brother cameras in the Garden of Eden to get the pictures of Adam and Eve being ejected naked. Nobody was watching. If Survivor had been there nobody would have been watching either, but Big Brother could have done a lot for Eve’s subsequent career as a lap-dancer. We are so accustomed by now to seeing people in toe-curling circumstances right there on television that we think it normal. But in the pre-electronic world, Hague would have been able to say ‘It’s a campaign that’s going very well’ and nobody would have caught the moment except the flabbergasted inhabitants of the Wirral. Today we can all watch and wonder. We can even wonder if he might be right.
For Hague to snatch a victory, the Queensland gambit would have to work. On the weekend, the press told us a lot about the Queensland gambit, a stratagem which can be outlined in a single sentence if you don’t mind doing without the graphs and pie-charts. The side sure to lose warns against the dictatorial ambitions of the side sure to win, whereupon everyone votes for the side sure to lose, which then wins. It worked in Queensland, but you have to remember that Australia’s most fun-filled state is also the place where the responsible authorities took a long look at the first cane toad and decided it was environmentally friendly. By the time they found out that it could poison a moving car and couldn’t be killed with a flame-thrower, it had spawned a million children and learned to vote.
For the Queensland gambit to work this week, Hague would have to distract our attention from a blatant contradiction in logic. If he means anything by saying that his campaign has gone very well, he must mean that the Tory faithful at which it was aimed have come back to the fold. If he simultaneously paints the picture of a triumphalist Labour government taking its overwhelming majority as a mandate to extinguish liberty, he must mean that there are no longer enough Tory faithful to vote their beloved party in. The second part of the anomaly concedes that the natural constituency of the Tories has shrunk to a rump, and thus concedes that he was wrong to aim his campaign at its traditional hopes and fears. Therefore the campaign was ill conceived and could never have gone well.
The Tories had made the capital strategic mistake of falling back to reinforce their base camp when it was already overrun, instead of staying out in the field, living off the land, and maintaining contact with the enemy. By late last week the Smith Square general staff had realized this, but they still hadn’t persuaded their field marshal, whose ebullience aroused memories of Montgomery during the Arnhem operation. Montgomery was still claiming a masterstroke after it turned out that he had dropped his paratroopers on top of a Panzer division. On Friday night Hague started lacing his speeches with some stuff about the public services, but was still banging on about asylum and the euro. By Sunday night, using God knows what combination of drugs and threats, his frantic lieutenants had persuaded him.
It must have been his toughest weekend: he has the guts to fight a losing battle forever, but to admit to your friends that you’ve been wrong takes character. Anyway, he did it, and on Monday he switched his themes to the central ground on which some of us had been expecting him to fight from the beginning. The new Tory PEB backed him on both strands: there was new stuff about the public services, emphasizing the undoubted fact that Labour’s claims to having made a good start were open to question. There was also some old stuff about undeserving interlopers and the threat to the pound, thus to reassure the diehards that their saviour was not repudiating his earlier stand. So the PEB was trying to attract the central vote without abandoning the faithful. Unfortunately the Queensland gambit tacitly admitted that not even both groups put together would be enough to swing it unless some of the central voters switched. It went without saying that if they did switch, they would switch to the Conservatives.
This was a big thing to go without saying, because there was always the chance that they would switch to the Lib Dems. Over in Labour’s Fortress Millbank, the anti-apathy scare campaign had the same drawback. If the sleeping v
oters piled out of their cots to stop the Tories by voting Labour, that would be OK. But what if they decided to stop the Tories by voting Lib Dem? Both main parties were thus running the risk of reinforcing the Lib Dems in the marginal seats. All Monday afternoon on Sky News you could watch the three leaders preaching to the nation through stump speeches in the marginals. Sky News has had a good election. As a lean operation it likes nothing better than free talent, and here were the three top performers each doing their full cabaret act live to camera for no fee. It was like getting the Three Tenors to sing at your daughter’s wedding under the delusion that it was a charity appearance.
Hague, as we have seen, was in the Wirral, warning the country against the dreadful consequences of the Labour landslide that wouldn’t happen because his campaign was going very well. Blair was at Enfield Southgate in London, the seat Portillo lost in 1997. Blair was talking to schoolchildren again: as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. ‘We’ve still got a massive amount to do, but we’ve made a start.’ It was the same vulnerable message, but the man delivering it was at his best yet. He talked to the kids without talking down. ‘When I was young, anyone who owned a house voted Conservative.’ It would have been too complicated to explain to them that Margaret Thatcher had inadvertently created the new house-owning constituency that was now voting Labour, but there was not much he shirked.