There were times, in the days following the Labour victory, when I felt like the man in the Charles Adams cartoon: the man grinning in a cinema showing a deeply sad film, while all the people around him are in tears. Except that in my case, it was the reverse: all my bien pensant, Labour-voting, or at least anti-Tory friends were jumping with joy, while I felt faintly down. This was not because I was sorry to see the Tories go, or because I believe that a Labour government means disaster is at hand. I was as happy as the next man to see the back of Neil Hamilton or Michael Portillo. It was a shame they were not joined by Michael Howard, too, but you cannot be greedy. And so far "Tony's" team hasn't put a foot wrong. The reason for my lowered spirits was not so much to do with the election result itself, as with the gloating air of virtuous self-congratulation, and the assumption that every decent human being in Britain should share in it. "Everyone was beaming Labour," wrote Polly Toynbee in the Independent about the people of London. Well, surely not everyone. "This was our velvet revolution," wrote Matthew Engel in the Guardian, "and yesterday the population went wild," as though the British people had just fought themselves free from a dictatorship. Peter Popham, in the Independent, compared the event to the fall of the Berlin wall. Either these people were blissfully ignorant of what things are like under a dictatorship, or they had lost their marbles. It takes some stretching of the imagination to think of John Major as Honecker, or Michael Howard as Beria.
In fact, I fear these journalists are neither ignorant nor insane. What underlies their hyperbole is the smug idea that Tories are bad people, lacking the superior virtues of Labour supporters. This was the message from the writers and artists who were strewing opinions about like festival streamers. Nick Hornby, for example, offered the view that serious writers voted Labour because they "empathise." Tories, then, don't empathise. They are selfish, greedy, immoral people. As Peter Popham put it, in the angry style of a man weighed down by a social chip: "We saw them [the Tories] for what they are: the chinless wonders, the very nice pinstripe suits, the year-round tans; their hereditary assumption of privilege, their camp obsession with gentility..." And so on. Reading this, the phrase "effete snobs" comes to mind, but that was used in a different context of course, by Nixon's right-wing hatchet man, Spiro Agnew, about the leftwing, East Coast intelligentsia.
Superior virtue is indeed one of the main assets on offer from New Labour-"trust us, trust us." The photograph running down the entire front page of the Independent on Friday 2nd May was oddly appropriate to the general mood: "Tony," with the glassy eyes of holy reverence, folding his hands in prayer. Here was a virtuous man, who empathises, who doesn't mince about in very nice suits, who will heal the sick, and deliver the meek: Vote for Jesus! Virtue was a particularly important selling point, since so much else on the Labour programme had been filched from the detested Tories. I heard it said during the victory celebra-tions that the result was a "massive indictment of Thatcherism." Whatever else it was, it was not that. Anywhere else in Europe, New Labour would be considered a right of centre party. Blair has made it quite clear that he has no intention of undoing Margaret Thatcher's dirty work. Labour's new departures are constitutional, not economic. Hugo Young, whose call to rejoice also hit the high notes, pointed out in one of his columns that this was a very peculiar election. Normally, a massive swing in voters' sentiment means that people want radically different policies. Yet in this case, the velvet revolution, the fall of the Major wall, the new dawn, brought to power a party which promised to do nothing significantly different from the one it had replaced. So why the ecstasy? Why the bathos? Why would a perfectly intelligent newspaper reporter (and now MP) write: "As I sit and try to write, on the morning after the election, I keep jumping out of my seat and hopping round the room. I keep grinning."? (Yvette Cooper, the Independent) I think I know why. And what is more, I think the joy is justified, despite all the irritating sanctimoniousness. Like Gaullist France, Liberal Democrat Japan, Christian Democrat Italy, Tory Britain was in danger of becoming a one-party state. All one-party states-I am speaking of democracies here, not dictatorships-share the same symptoms of a corrosive disease. Networks of mutually backscratching politicians, civil servants and businessmen get established over time and begin to seem immovable. Financial and other favours become institutionalised. Politicians rise to the top, not because of superior governing ability, let alone superior ideas, but superior talent at operating the networks; the art of keeping your own nose clean, and those of others browned. Here virtue is indeed a factor. The opposition is like a virgin: its virtue is yet to be tested by temptations that only come with power. But however virtuous, a permanent opposition is also a sick creature. For without the experience, or even the prospect of governing, an opposition party tends to become irresponsible, resentful and frivolous, as do intellectuals who are dissatisfied with the status quo, but impotent to change it. One-party democracies breed extreme, often violent forms of radical opposition: Japan's Red Army, Italy's Red Brigade. If parliamentary democracy ceases to be a viable instrument of change, people will seek other ways. Britain never was a one-party democracy. And its big parties have always acted as giant sponges for all kinds of extremists. But Tory Britain was beginning to show all the symptoms of the disease: the sleaze, the old boy networks, and the frivolousness of a demoralised opposition, exemplified by the Militant Tendency period. Tony Blair's great achievement (with some barely acknowledged help from Neil Kinnock and John Smith) was to have stopped the rot in his party. He gave the Labour party the confidence to govern. He ditched most socialist shibboleths in the process, but he would have been mad not to. He has not got many new ideas to put in their place, but then neither does anybody else, least of all the Tories. Tony Blair offered British voters the chance to vote the rascals out. Now it is his turn, together with all the doting writers, academics, businessmen and assorted hangers on, to have their virtue tested by temptation. And when the day comes that they, too, have outstayed their welcome, after too many years of back-scratching, deal-making and back-sliding, they will be the rascals to be kicked out. The fact that the British people are able to do so is a great blessing. In London, no walls need to come down, and no revolutions need be staged. That is the thing worth celebrating.
