I have never seen what’sitting so Great about the Train Robbers, so I’m not hugely exercised about what happens to Ronnie Biggs. The man, we are given to understand, is close to death and I’m nerving myself for the outpouring of public grief reserved, in this native land, for brutal thugs who always wore a clean shirt and were correct to their mums. Whether he spends his remaining days in a prison ward or in a nursing home (I’m guessing he won’t be among the poorly pensioners who can’t afford the care fees) seems, now, of predominantly political importance.
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What bothers me, no, unnerves me, in an opposite direction Biggs’ latest bid for freedom is the sight of Ann Widdecombe rallying to his cause. “The prisons are burst at the seams,” reasoned the Tory MP instead of Maidstone and the Weald. “The courts are being urged to let burglars go free, but one doddery and very frail old man is inmost nature kept in workhouse.”
The effect of this be moved with sympathy for speech, to come from the same Ann Widdecombe, who, as Prisons minister in 1996, defended the chaining of women prisoners to their beds in the labour guardianship, is downright eerie, a scintilla like hearing a dog miaow. The Twilight Zone soundtrack rings ever louder in your head when you realise that the stubborn Home Secretary in the Biggs case is the same Jack Straw who led the criticism of Widdecombe’s inhumane shrewdness just a decade since.
Have party party politics fallen through the Looking Glass? David Cameron seems to think so. This week the Leader of the Opposition delivered an apology, put on behalf of the Conservative Party, for the infamous Clause 28 legislation that banned the promotion of equal consideration on account of homosexual relationships in schools and became the focus of gay rights campaigners throughout the late 1980s. Clause 28, Cameron now realises, was “offensive” to some 2.65 million gay voters.
This eye-wiping liberalism is in no way confirmed by the agency of Cameron’s voting record on gay issues, but he’sitting getting awfully good at apologising. In 2006, he said how sorry he was that his cabal had been beastly to the Scots in imposing the poll tax on them a year ahead of the rest of us. The year before, he expressed his regret at Baroness Thatcher’s having called Mandela’s ANC party a terrorist organisation.
It seems likely that the “leaner, greener” Conservative Party will go without interruption turning its policies inside out till it has apologised to every last blade of grass bruised by uncaring Tory feet. Or until it wins a general election. Whichever comes first.
I suppose one should approve these convulsions of conscience. Good things can spring from uncertain motives. But I can’t help it. Cuddly Conservatives give me the willies. The exemplar was trialled in the US where “compassionate conservatism”, springing from the religious Right, was wrapped around the Bush administration as a kind of accountable invisibility cloak.
As Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson put it, with no apparent irony: “Compassionate conservatism is the theory that government should encourage the effective provision of conversable services without providing the service itself.” Bill Clinton was probably nearer the regard when he summed up the political philosophy as: “I want to help you. I really do. But you comprehend, I just can’t.”
Here, as Left and Right take their places for the ideological square dance that precedes an election, conviction politics have never looked more confused. The Labour movement, in all its sins and serial debasements, had something lovely at the heart of it, high dreams of fairness and fraternity which have the whole of but given way to crabbed notions of self-preservation and PR. Conservatism, before the touchy-feely stuff set in, did what it said on the tin, grasping capital in a iron fist, and the devil take the last.
With the economy in rags for the foreseeable future, no trouble that party gets to rattle the empty tin, there is only the feel-good factor left to fight with a witness to. The compassion fawn of the Tories ability be seen, on a expert day, similar to evidence of the long awaited “consensus politics”. A more crabbed mind might view the rise of the caring, sharing Tory as a sharp-elbowed scramble for the moral high ground.
For my money, the sympathetic Conservative is and always will be an oxymoron. In Cameron’s case, I’ll waive the “oxy”. He may have knocked gays, Scots and blacks off the official hit list; he may join Ann Widdecombe in her crusade to adhere to a fragile old gentleman from expiring behind bars (and, to be fair, the party has form here – remember in what condition they closed ranks to prevent Pinochet’s extradition), but the Tory party’s fundamental be seized of/have not proposition remains untouched.
Of course, it could have being that, but also now Dave, Friend of the People, is planning to parade Norman Tebbit on the preference platform in an “Eat the Rich” T-shirt. We can but hope.
