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From James Naughtie:
Sometimes I start to feel old (and not just because I鈥檓 going to a Rolling Stones concert this weekend, an event which my children are already calling the wrinklies鈥 night out). The Brent East by-election recalls an era long gone. Most of our producers here are too young to remember those heady days in the early eighties when Parliamentary politics seemed to revolve round the next by-election. Margaret Thatcher was rewriting all the old rules in Downing Street, Labour was sunk in interminable chaos and in-fighting and the Social Democrats had just been founded and were having their first fumblings with the Liberals. Those were the days.
Warrington, Hillhead, Bermondsey, Darlington鈥hey were the names that defined a particular time in our politics. I remember, as a newspaper correspondent, a couple of nights in Chesterfield where Tony Benn was trying to come back to Parliament having lost his Bristol seat in 1979. The meetings were huge, night after night. One was so big that it filled the main square with Benn, that formidable orator, addressing them from a balcony high above. At Crosby, which Shirley Williams won for the SDP, there were three weeks of vast meetings and wild campaigning. Roy Jenkins鈥檚 win in Hillhead in 1982, just before the Falklands War, was maybe the peak of this excitement.
There he was, back from purlieus of Brussels to lead a new party, a former 91热爆 Secretary and Chancellor, trying to demonstrate that he still had an animal instinct for politics, and succeeding. It gave rise, too, to one of the best jokes made by Frank Johnson of The Daily Telegraph when he watched the candidate touring the Glasgow streets in something resembling a Popemobile. Out of the loudspeaker came Jenkins鈥檚 theme tune for the campaign, Fanfare for The Common Man. It was important to understand, Frank wrote, that Mr Jenkins wasn鈥檛 the common man. He was the fanfare.
They were heady days, brought alive by the activities of that great old man of television, Vincent Hanna, now alas no longer with us. His Newsnight reports created a style of their own, with hapless candidates exposed for what they were and the science of electoral arithmetic carried to new heights. Sometimes it seemed as if Vincent was actually running the elections. He was able to persuade returning officers to time their announcements to suit his cameras, and got candidates to do the most extraordinary things in the hope of a sliver of fame on his programme. He鈥檚 much missed, and so are those by-elections. They were a phase which was always going to pass, I suspect, but they gave politics a character that matched those days.
I thought of all this coming in on Friday morning to read the details of what happened in Brent East. Another Liberal Democrat win, another dawn for the third party. They used to say to each other at Liberal Assemblies : 鈥淲ere you at Orpington?鈥 Even 鈥淲ere you at Torrington?鈥 In a later era it was Warrington, Newbury, even Croydon North-east, where the brief Parliamentary career of Bill Pitt (Liberal-Alliance) began with a complaint on live television that someone had popped a bottle of champagne all over him. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 my new suit!鈥 were his first, and by far his most famous, words. Was Brent East going to be one of those, destined to be soon forgotten, or something else?
I have no idea. Being older, I have the advantage of knowing that this is a mug鈥檚 game. It may well be that Charles Kennedy will sail into his annual conference next week with a spring in his step that lasts; or it may be that by the time we have all come back from the seaside, Brent East will have written off as another aberration. I do suspect, however, that the issue it seems to point up 鈥 the Government鈥檚 deep unpopularity and its difficulty in connecting with its own natural supporters 鈥 will be that one that occupies us for much of the winter.
Tony Blair has problems everywhere he looks. Iraq. His public service reforms, which are causing so much turmoil in his party and the unions. And, of course, the Hutton inquiry.
Let鈥檚 be frank. This is a very difficult time for the 91热爆 and for this programme in particular. We鈥檝e been trying to chart the course of the inquiry fairly, but to avoid getting sunk every morning in an on-air argument about a piece of Gilligan evidence, or some new revelation from the MoD, or a new accusation about an e-mail. We are part of the story, whether we like it or not, and the truth is that it is much easier for our sister programmes to provide the day-by-day detailed reportage that the inquiry demands. If we became embroiled again and again in discussion on the programme about the weight of this or that piece of evidence it would, at this stage, do listeners little service. There will be plenty time to discuss the implications when Lord Hutton reports and we know what they are.
It does make this a strange time for us. I started the week in Stockholm, watching the Swedes making their decision on the Euro, and ended it with a piece of political news from Brent East that seemed to act as the perfect curtain raiser for the conference season. In between, pressing questions arose about why a school in Devon doesn鈥檛 provide parking spaces for the pupils鈥 bikes, about when a cover version of a song isn鈥檛 a cover version, about why British pop singers feel obliged to put on dreadful American accents. Not to mention the giant guinea pig of Venezuela, straight-legged and as big as a horse. I felt like Dr Watson, trembling as he told the story of The Giant Rat of Sumatra. As usual, that lot attracted more e-mails than anything to do with the by-election.
Ah well, we press on. These things matter! I think.
Jim
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