My family was a BBC family: but for some reason, once a week, we were allowed to “turn over” to the “other side” and watch Opportunity Knocks.
You remember the format? An amateur singer, an amateur conjurer, and a man who did farmyard impressions would each perform a short turn, introduced by a friend or a family member. Viewers were invited to send in postcards with the name of their favourite performer, and the person who got the most votes got to open the show the following week. A sealed envelope was an acceptable substitute for a postcard, and if you couldn’t remember the act’s name and wrote “Irish Singer” they would know exactly who you meant. There was also a clap-o-meter but that was for fun only.
“And I mean that most sincerely, folks” stands with “Beam me up, Scottie” and “Play it again, Sam” as a well known quote that no-one ever actually said.
So: there was a particular singer who had written a perfectly harmless romantic ballad, and we the nation voted that he should come back next week and sing it again. The crop of talent in Week Two was so dreadful that he was invited back for a third week, and a fourth, at which point "the man with the quite good song" became "the man who had won Opportunity Knocks more times than anyone else". It was clear to me even at that tender age that everyone was voting for him because everyone else was voting for him; that he was winning because everyone expected him to win; and that either they would have to introduce some kind of Twenty Second Amendment, or else admit that the format was broken.
I know perfectly well that the singer was Bernie Flint and the song was I Don’t Wanna Put No Hold On You, but it suits my carefully cultivated online persona to pretend I can’t quite remember. I believe he resigned voluntarily after thirteen weeks.
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We all hate Sir Kier Starmer, but we can’t quite remember why. The Right regard him as a radical left wing lunatic. The Left see him as somewhere to the right of the Conservatives, with policies on immigration that threaten to out-Reform Reform. If the Left think you are a Fascist and the Right think you are a Communist, there is a good chance that you are actually somewhere in the middle, and "somewhere in the middle" is the exact place you would expect to find a Centrist.
After the trauma of Jeremy Corbyn, and the farce of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, it looked like a good idea to put a boringly moderate man in charge for a bit. “Not being Jeremy Corbyn” and “Not being a Conservative” was a pretty good pitch for Leader of the Opposition, but not a viable unique selling point for the actual Prime Minister. Having elected a Centrist the electorate quickly got very bored with Centrism.
We all love Andy Burnham. I have no idea why. I am not even quite sure I know which one he is. I vaguely remember him trying to become Labour Leader in 2015; he would probably have won if not for the unexpected late Corbyn surge. Perhaps the idea is that if he wins this time we can rewind and pretend the intervening eleven years never happened? There is a general sense that he has done a good job as Mayor of "some town". We have even coined the word "Some-Town-ism" to represent that idea. Recently, he didn’t lose a safe Labour seat to a Reform candidate in a by-election, which is a fairly low bar to have cleared.
I gather that he thinks that Brexit may have been a bit of a false step; and that possibly we oughtn’t to have privatised transport and water and air in the 1980s. The US President is cross with him because he doesn’t think we should dig any more oil out of the sea, and the Daily Mail is very cross with him because he believes in Net Zero. I too am in favour of going back into Europe, nationalising monopolies and not having another summer as hot as this one. He dresses casually and likes the Pogues. He has a degree in English Literature. I find it hard to convince myself that anyone who likes Tony Harrison can be entirely evil. Donald Trump says that he is “extremely liberal extremely”.
"Extreme Liberal" has a contradictory ring to British ears, as if you had said that someone was a "Catholic atheist" or a "nice PE teacher". We use "liberal" to mean "not too far to the Left and not too far to the Right": as a synonym, in fact, for Centrist. Americans tend to use it to mean "much too far to the Left".
It may that Andy Burnham is extremely much too far to the Left extremely. It may be that he is extremely in the middle. It depends a good deal on where you are standing.
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You might think that Centrist and Liberal (in the British sense) mean roughly the same thing. But Mr Tony Blair has invested the word Centre with his own, esoteric, meaning. For him, Centrism is the belief that policy comes before politics. It is the belief that you should first establish what the “correct” answer is, and only then try to persuade voters to support that answer. So a Centrist is not always Moderate. “When the correct answer requires radical change, the centre should be the radical change maker.” On Blair’s terms, Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn were all equally Centrists. They unquestionably did what they thought was right even when it was unpopular, and tried to persuade the public that their ideas were the right ones.
Blair says directly that Starmer won the 2024 election because people thought he was a Centrist, although in fact he is not. I suppose the accusation is that Starmer shapes his policies around what he thinks he can convince the electorate to vote for; that he looks for vote-winning policies and then pretends that he believes in them. This is, of course, precisely the accusation that was frequently levelled at Blair himself, not least by me.
I am also intrigued by Blair's use of the word "correct". It seems to assume that everyone wants the same thing: that we are all trying to get to the same place, and that there is theoretically one "right" answer to the question of how we get there. Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are aiming for the same destination, but unable to disagree about the best route. The possibility that different people might honestly want different things is relegated to the waste bucket marked “ideology”.
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I recall from my History "O" Level that one of the things the Chartists wanted was annual elections. They also wanted secret ballots, universal suffrage, the payment of MPs and roughly equally sized constituencies. We have long taken those things for granted: but if I proposed that from now on we should have an election every twelve months, you’d think I was very silly. If I proposed a system where an incoming Prime Minister could be kicked out of office if he had not achieved his stated objectives in the first eighteen months of a five year parliament, you would think I was very silly indeed. And if I proposed a system where, after that eighteen month trial period, a new Prime Minister could be selected, without an election, by the same MPs who three weeks previously were professing utter loyalty to the deposed one, and that this new Prime Minister would be expected (but not constitutionally compelled) to follow the policies laid out in the rejected one's manifesto, you would think I had gone doo-lally.
And yet this is where we find ourselves.
Starmer forced to resign twenty three months after winning a landslide majority. Seven prime ministers in ten years. Liz Truss and the Lettuce.
Can we all agree that the format is irretrievably broken?
When it suits us, we still think of the Prime Minister simply as the prime “minister”, the MP who happens to have been chosen by the other MPs to be in charge for the time being. I still think that’s not a bad system: the people elect local representatives and the local representatives choose a leader.
But when it doesn’t suit us, we act as if the Prime Minister is the President; the single person who the People jolly well elected to “run the country” and who all the MPs should jolly well defer to as if he were King. In 2016, the Labour Party went out of its way to frame the leadership election as an American style primary. By the end of her term in office, Mrs Thatcher was referring to herself with the royal “we”.
If the Prime Minister is just the fella who happens to be managing the club this week, then bringing on a substitute from time to time if you don’t like the job he is doing makes perfect sense. But if everyone who put the tick in the “Labour” box thought they were voting for Kier to be President, swapping him for a different President, with a different style and possibly different policies, without checking if the People are okay with the idea, seems markedly undemocratic.
I don’t think it would be a good idea to add yet another jigsaw piece to our already hopelessly diffuse constitution. Tomorrow someone could introduce an Automatic General Election Following a Prime Ministerial Resignation Bill. You could, in fact, introduce a bill to do whatever the hell you like, provided it doesn’t contravene the Human Rights Act, and there are quite a lot of people who would like to drop the “provided” part. That’s the beauty of parliament being sovereign and us not having a written constitution, and I suppose, Brexit. But by the same token, the day after tomorrow, a different politician could introduce an act to overturn said measure. When it was convenient, we invented the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which meant that the Prime Minister could no longer call a general election on a whim. But when a Prime Minister wanted to call a general election on a whim, they repealed it again.
If my constituency voted for Joe Bloggs of the Red Party to represent it by an overwhelming majority two years ago, I am not entirely sure that it makes sense that he should have to stand for election all over again because the Blue Party has decided to defenestrate its leader. Or at any rate, it makes no sense if you still see MPs as local representatives. If you see them as delegates to an electoral college whose only purpose is to cast their vote for the Red Party or the Blue Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate, perhaps it does.
What is needed, obviously, is a complete overhaul of the whole system and a written-down-in-one-place constitution. Do we still want MPs to choose a “prime” minister, or do we want separate Presidential elections? Do we really want to keep the House of Lords, and if not, what do we want to replace it with? And is it sensible that someone can have “a landslide majority” when two out of three people voted for the other guy, or do we want some more sane method of counting the votes?
But we’ve been through that movie before. The people hate voting and will never support a system where they have to put three crosses on a piece of paper instead of one. No-one, not even a Prime Minister who studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Cambridge understands how instant run-offs work. And a proportional system could generate results where no single party had a majority in the House of Commons; where the Commons and whatever-replaces-the-Lords were controlled by different parties; where the directly elected President was Red and the proportionally elected Commons was Blue. Politicians of different parties would have to start talking to each other and working together and making compromises, and then where would we be?
Someone might say that the fact that our present system produces decisive results from indecisive electorates is a feature, not a bug: that we actually want a Prime Minister who can do broadly what ever he likes, and a system where 30% of the votes equates to 60% of the seats has a certain elegance. I might be prepared to make out a case for a system where the people select a King, and for four years, agree to treat him like a King. But that’s rather undermined if the other house mates can vote him out whenever they feel like it.
Any major constitutional rethink would take years to thrash out. So I think we have to resign ourselves to a lachrymose speech on the lectern outside Downing Street every eighteen months or so. The format, as I say, is broken.
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There is no point in re-litigating the strengths and weaknesses of Jeremy Corbyn. He was, on Blair’s terms, a Centrist: he put policy before politics; and tried to persuade voters that the things he believed were the things they ought to believe as well. The right wing press thought he was a communist, but the right wing press thinks that everybody is a communist. There is a strong body of opinion that rejects the legitimacy of any non-Tory Prime Minister on general principles. They crucified Jeremy Corbyn and they went on to crucify Kier Starmer and Andy Burnham hasn’t been installed in office yet and they are already sharpening the nails for him.
It used to be thought that the hoi polloi voted the way their newspaper told them to vote and that any leader had to court the good graces of the Sun and the Daily Mail to be in with a chance. But while supermarkets still sell newspapers, or at any rate have them on display near the hobnobs and digestives, the idea that “Daily Mirror readers” represent an identifiable club now seems faintly quaint. Trump and Obama both understood that he who controls Social Media controls the world. Perhaps we should not fear “Red Andy” headlines in the Mail as much as we used to. We probably oughtn’t to pay too much attention to Elon Musks tweets, although we probably should pay an awful lot of attention to his money.
Before the 2024 election, I said that since socialism was a busted flush, we had a binary choice between a Prime Minister who was a Tory and a Prime Minister who was not a Tory, and since Kier Starmer was the only Not-a-Tory candidate who had the remotest chance of winning, all non-evil people should support Kier Starmer, even if he was a little too far one way on Israel and not quite far enough the other way on gender. (I rejected the option of tactically voting Lib-Dem because the last time I tactically voted Lib-Dem they acted as Tory enablers. One of my friends correctly said in 2010 that if I had wanted a party that would never make an alliance with the Conservatives under any circumstances, I should have voted Labour.)
I qualified this by saying that I would withdraw my support from Starmer if he crossed anyone of four, red, or possibly blue, lines. I said I would not vote for him if he reneged on his commitment to human rights, and especially, his opposition to the death penalty. I said I would not vote for him if he cut or threatened to cut Labour’s historic links with the Trades Unions. I said I would not vote for him if he started to treat Donald Trump as a friend — in the way that Tony Blair cosied up to George Bush Jnr. I accept, of course that a Prime Minister has to have diplomatic relations with all sorts of unsavoury people. And I said I would not vote for him if I ever caught him using the word “woke” as a pejorative. To my knowledge, he never crossed any of those lines, although he put his toe alarmingly close to some of them.
When I wrote that essay, I had not predicted just how toxic Labour’s language about immigration would become; how authoritarian the anti-anti-semitism campaign would become; and how ready he would be to throw my trans friends under the bus when the equalities commission decided that nursery school taboos about boys and girls toilets were going to be enshrined in law. But he never reached a point where I felt inclined to say “We would be no worse off if Kemi Badenoch were Prime Minister” or indeed “Labour is now functionally as bad as Reform.” I was rather alarmed that in his resignation speech, he said that one of his key achievements was that he had persuaded the Labour Party to start brandishing the Union Jack all over the place. And when his Home Secretary said that white liberals should "fuck right off", I did feel inclined to say “To which party should we fuck off, oh Lord?”
All of the above still applies. I don’t know who Andy Burnham is or what he believes in, but I am pretty sure that he is Not-A-Tory. I don’t think we should split the Not-A-Tory vote because Lord Binface has some sensible suggestions about the price of kebabs.
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Assuming that he is able to dislodge excalibur from the anvil on July 16th, Andy Burnham will not be short of people offering him advice, but if he is reading this, I would offer him the following counsel:
Do not assume that, because you beat the Faragist fairly and squarely in the by-election, that the bubble has burst and we can resume business as usual. Do not think in terms of winning a second term: think about mitigating the disaster when you lose. Ask the question: if I were the last Prime Minister before the new Dark Age, what would you do? Because you probably are.
The single best thing you could do: and the single best thing that any Prime Minister could have done since Kinnock threw the 1992 election would be to introduce Proportional Representation. The ideal system would probably be fairly complicated, and it would be easy for believers in the Divine Right of Pluralities to block or talk out any complicated proposal, in the way they talked out the perfectly sensible and reasonable proposals about physician assisted suicide. So simply go for a first-second-third choice / alternative voting / instant run-off system. It’s imperfect, but it massively reduces the chance of the Faragists gaining power on the basis of a large number of tiny majorities.
Form close alliances with the Green, Lib-Dem and other Not-Farage parties. Agree not to run candidates against each other; decide now that after the next election you will form a coalition government of national unity. More there are with us than them, but that doesn’t signify if we keep on voting against ourselves.
I understand that you would like to replace the House of Lords with a High Council of Realms and Shires. But if this is not feasible within the time frame, then use your Prime Ministerial fiat to flood the existing chamber with women, with people with dark coloured skin, with people who use different words than “God” to refer to God, with people who believe that climate change is real and that vaccines work, with people who think that women should control their own bodies, people who don’t much care which public loo anyone goes in provided there is sufficient paper, with scientists and economists and experts, and in general, with as many people who are not likely to be Faragists as possible. Do this on the understanding that they will lose this role as soon as the Great Council is introduced. The House of Lords cannot prevent a future Prime Minister from doing something obviously crazy but it can hold him up a bit.
Some of us are old enough to remember how, when local governments started doing things that Mrs Thatcher didn’t agree with, she enacted laws to reduce the powers of local government to do those kinds of things. She abolished the Greater London Council altogether, because the people of London would keep electing Ken Livingstone as leader. She passed deeply illiberal laws to prevent local councils allowing schools to say nice things about gay people. When there was a campaign of non-payment to protest about a deeply regressive tax she’d introduced, she tried to make a law that any local politician who supported the campaign wouldn’t be allowed to vote at council meetings. You may be able to think of other examples.
We have seen some rather half-arsed attempts in Reform controlled councils to dictate what books can be displayed in council schools and libraries, and what flags can be hung on council buildings. If I were the last Prime Minister before the Dark Age, I would enact laws and regulations to make it as hard as possible for my successor to impose his ideology on the country. I would fill libraries and schools with the best anti-hate books on the market. I would enact laws, or repeal existing ones, so that local and national government have no power to censor the curricula schools or colleges or adult education courses, or to make dictates about what insignia can and can’t be displayed. I’d look at making specific laws about secularism: safeguarding the rights of Muslims, Christians, Malaysian Frog Worshippers and atheists to pray and dance and sacrifice newts and evolve before council meetings, but absolutely prohibiting the imposition of official religious acts. I'd introduce much, much stronger rules about online hate speech, with violators barred from public office for, say, five years. I'd introduce a new criminal offence of using language likely to incite rioting -- I find it hard to believe that such a law doesn’t already exist. I'd look at how to strengthen the Human Rights Act. I believe that at present Parliament is not allowed to debate the restoration of the death penalty. We are looking at a situation when in incoming Monster Raving Loony Prime Minister might introduce a law that says that redundant churches can never be repurposed as places of worship for other faiths; or that canteens in government buildings will be required to serve pork twice a week with no veggie alternative; or to introduce French style beach patrols that would order ladies who were dressed too modestly to uncover themselves. We want to get to the position where Sir Humphrey could say “I am afraid you can’t do that Sir: it is unconstitutional.”
There is no precise British equivalent of a Presidential Executive Order: but is there a danger that a future MUKGA leader would find ways to misuse the Royal Prerogative? If so, that loophole needs to be closed, forthwith. But conversely, is there any way that our status as a Constitutional Monarchy could be a bulwark against extremis? Could we envisage a situation where, even if the Commons and the High Council voted in favour of bringing back witch-burning or sending orphans up chimneys, King Charles would be permitted — nay, constitutionally required — to withhold Royal Assent?
I am brain storming here.
I can very well see why you would object to these kinds of measure.
Perhaps you hold fast to the Good Chaps theory of government: we may not necessarily agree with everything Mr Farage says, but at the end of the day he is a Hinglishman as opposed to a Proosian or a French or Dutch or Roosian, and he won't do anything as terrible as all that, because a Good Chap never would.
Or perhaps you believe in Playing The Game. The really important thing is that, should the wrong guy win the election, we respect the Will of the People, the Fine Traditions of This House, and have an Orderly Transfer of Power, and let them do their thing until 2033. Just because they would play dirty if the situation was reversed is no reason to come down to their level.
Or perhaps you believe that if you do a Jolly Good Job like you did in Some Town, and that when the people start to see a real differences in the price of potholes in their pockets, everyone will love you and vote for you in sheer gratitude.
I wish you luck.
You have about eighteen months.
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