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Reid: ‘I didn’t say that.’
Clarke: ‘Yes you did. You said you knew.’
Reid: ‘All I said was I knew I’d had so many jobs in this government.’
Clarke: ‘Let’s go.’
Reid: ‘All right, let’s go.’
(Neither moves)
Eventually, in Margaret Beckett’s play as in Samuel’s, a boy unexpectedly arrives. It is of course Tony Blair.
Clarke: ‘Do you have a message from Mr Gordo?’
Boy: ‘Yes, sir.’
Reid: ‘Does it mention me?’
Boy: ‘Yes, sir.’
Reid: ‘What does it say about me?’
Boy: ‘Can’t tell you, sir. I was brought up not to swear.’
Clarke: ‘Never mind about all that. What is his message?’
Boy: ‘Mr Gordo won’t come this evening, but surely tomorrow.’
(The next day)
Boy (reappearing): ‘I have a message, sir.’
Reid: ‘Mr Gordo won’t come this evening.’
Boy: ‘No, sir.’
Clarke: ‘Why’s that?’
Boy: ‘Because I’m staying Prime Minister, sir.’
Clarke: ‘Does Mr Gordo know that?’
Boy: ‘No, sir.’
Reid: ‘So we stay too, then?’
Clarke: ‘Yes, we stay.’
(They go)
Famously, Mrs Beckett has always refused to be drawn as to the play’s ‘meaning’. Is Gordo in any sense God? Possibly. Indeed, probably. Or perhaps.
It will depend on whether, when he comes, he will keep her in the Cabinet. Or not.
One could sense Ken Livingstone, on his recent visit to China, wanting to revive a grand Old Left tradition. That of Western leftists visiting a communist country and pronouncing that there a new economic system was coming into being that was better for the common people than the one it replaced, and vastly superior to the injustices at home.
Mr Livingstone’s difficulty was that, although the communists rule China, the economic system is now capitalist, and the replaced economic system was communist. Mr Livingstone overcame the difficulty by getting himself quoted in the Observer as saying that, though he deplored the excess of the Cultural Revolution and ‘the Great Leap Forward’, the Chinese were much better off under Mao than under the ‘feudalism’ that he replaced; for example, in the matter of literacy. Mr Livingstone was silent about condemning today’s Chinese capitalism. He only condemns Britain’s and America’s. Perhaps this was because he hoped to attract Chinese capital to London.
How does Mr Livingstone know that the Chinese became better off under Mao? He has never given the impression of being a student of Chinese history any more than most of us Britons are. He has, however, long given the impression of being one of those Westerners who have discovered, with scant evidence, higher literacy, better health and education and so on, in the latest country in fashion on the Left. As each one was revealed as tyrannical and murderous, another took its place. First, it was revolutionary France, which modish Whigs such as Charles James Fox much admired. Then, slightly before Mr Livingstone’s time, it was Stalin’s Soviet Union. Then it became pre-Cultural Revolution China. In between came Cuba, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Allende’s Chile, Sandinista Nicaragua. At the moment, there are hopes for Señor Chavez’s Venezuela.
Sympathetic Western visitors always made the ‘literacy’ point. Sceptics, however, pointed out that this improved literacy often consisted of various villagers being herded into recognising written party slogans. The ‘feudalism’ point is also familiar. It was made about pre-Stalinist Russia, even though in 1914 Tsarist Russia was about to overtake France as the world’s fourth biggest economy, and the main reason for the Kaiser’s war was to smash Russia before her industry made her too hard militarily to defeat.
A glance around the China shelves in the London Library would show the sceptical browser that Mao’s raising of the peasants’ living standards consisted of party toughs, instructed by intellectuals, descending on villages, coercing the inhabitants, and murdering those who proved difficult. Still, Mr Livingstone, like his fellows running China, is an Old Leftist who to keep his job must rule a polity — in his case, London — whose standard of living depends on the local capitalists. For Londoners and Chinese it could be worse. He and they could be in charge of the economy too.
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