Martin Vander Weyer
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But I never had that feeling again: in 1997 and 2001 we knew it was hopeless, and in 2005, on a new-built estate near the army camp at Strensall, I had a moment which made me wonder whether the Tories would ever return to power. I rang the bell of a house with a tidy garden and an Audi and a Volkswagen in the drive. A well-dressed man of about 40 glanced in horror at my blue rosette — and fiercely, wordlessly, slammed the door in my face.
The link between Conservative ideas and what was best for him, his family and his neighbours had somehow been obliterated — by the comfort blanket of Blairism, by the failure of successive Tory leaders, by easy money and rising house prices, by the sheer passage of time. It is this profound disconnection, just as much as the adverse electoral arithmetic, that presents David Cameron with such a mountain to climb.
Beware Red Vince
Here’s a little election campaign quiz for you, to stave off the boredom. Who said: ‘I find it utterly nauseating, all these chairmen of FTSE companies being paid 100 times the pay of their employees, lecturing us on how we should run the country. I find it barefaced cheek.’ Was it Bob Crow of the militant RMT, or a message through the ouija board from Mick McGahey, long-dead communist leader of the Scottish miners? No, it was that nice ballroom-dancing Vince Cable of the Lib Dems, responding last week to the letter from 80 corporate chiefs, including the bosses of most of Britain’s biggest private-sector employers, opposing Labour’s increase in National Insurance contributions.
It makes you wonder how Cable might have responded, in his previous job as chief economist of the oil giant Shell, to a request from the top-floor executive suite for a draft speech on the appropriate policies to promote growth and prosperity: ‘I find it utterly nauseating, chairman, that you think anyone wants to hear your views on this, given the grotesque size of your pay packet.’ Doesn’t sound likely, does it? But perhaps Cable — who was a Labour councillor in Glasgow in his younger days as a university lecturer there — is marching quietly leftwards again while maintaining his avuncular façade as one of the few politicians the public feels it can trust.
A YouGov/Channel 4 poll at the end of March found that substantially more voters would prefer Cable for Chancellor ahead of either Alistair Darling or George Osborne, who came a poor third — and that even among Tory voters, Cable scored only one percentage point less than Osborne. But if Cable is nauseated by business leaders telling the truth about their companies’ and employees’ prospects under Labour, and does not even accept that they are entitled to air their opinions, then he and Osborne are hardly going to find common ground or scope for job-sharing in a Tory-Lib Dem hung-parliament pact. A Lib Dem-Labour deal would look much more comfortable — which makes a vote for Red Vince little better than a vote for Gordon Brown.
Dazzling delusion
I did not rush to see Enron when it first opened in London because I feared it might be another tiresome anti-capitalist rant in the mode of Serious Money, Caryl Churchill’s verse play that castigated the boom-time bankers and traders (who perversely adopted it as cult entertainment) at the Royal Court back in 1987. But I finally caught up with Lucy Prebble’s dramatisation of the rise and fall of the Texan energy firm at the Noël Coward Theatre last week, and found myself admiring it enormously, both for the dazzling theatricality of the staging and for the way that Prebble tells her complex story in human rather than ideological terms. It’s all about what went on inside the minds of Enron chairman Ken Lay, his chief executive Jeff Skilling and their finance wizard Andy Fastow, as they turned an old-style oil-and-gas business into a monstrous fabrication of virtual markets, hidden liabilities, fake profits and high-flown corporate rhetoric that fooled everyone, themselves included, until the moment of its collapse in 2001.
‘I decided there’s no point in writing a drama where you condemn everybody and say, “Isn’t making money bad”,’ Prebble told an interviewer. Curiously, as I left the theatre, I overheard a young banker type complaining to his girlfriend that the play was just another indiscriminate attack on everybody in the financial world. But City boys are over-sensitive these days, and he was quite wrong. As Lucy Prebble has also said, Enron is about ‘the delusion that goes on in all of us’. Booking until mid-August, and not to be missed.
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