Just as Thatcher and Blair set the tone for Irish politics, so will the next-but-one general election in the UK
THE BEST present I ever bought myself was a long- wave radio, on which I can get BBC Radio 4, probably the best radio station in the world.
It’s not just that, rather than listening to someone moaning about overpaid politicians to an overpaid telephone operator masquerading as a celebrity, you can listen to a lovingly-produced documentary about the secret life of crows. There is also the sense of being a surreptitious observer of a drama for which you haven’t bought a ticket – or perhaps a voyeur at the window of a former landlord who is not quite as socially significant as he used to be. The long-wave experience, of course, accentuates this understanding of things – the unreliability of the reception creating the sense of a curtain of sound swaying in between.
Nowadays it is possible to access Radio 4 via satellite or the internet, but this, for me, gives an incorrect impression of the relationship between "us" and "them". We are, though profoundly interlinked and in some ways similar, two different civilisations. It therefore seems appropriate that we should have to twiddle knobs to eavesdrop on "them", or find a cricket commentary substituting for the Todayprogramme at 7am. This is the way we discovered rock'n'roll, so it seems an appropriate way of discovering the future of Irish politics.
I think both British and Irish people often forget how much we know about the former, having watched them and absorbed their popular culture all our lives. Top of the Pops, Buntymagazine, Shakespeare, Enid Blyton, John Peel, Man U, Agatha Christie, The Hotspur, Whispering Bob Harris, EastEnders– all these are as much parts of "us" as "them". Out of politeness, we invariably acquiesce in the British attitude of superiority, but in truth we know everything about them, whereas they know almost nothing about us, apart from U2 and the IRA.
For understandable historical reasons, we tend to overlook the profound impact our neighbours’ politics has on ours. Unconsciously, we follow trends set “across the water”, not so much in the realm of ideas and isms as in the demeanour of the political animal. We had no equivalent of Thatcher, but nevertheless, from the mid-1980s, Irish politics took on something of her certitude as, of all people, Charles Haughey adopted something of her thinking in addressing the mess that he had contributed to making of the Irish economy. We misnamed it, as I remember, “monetarism”.
The leadership style of the Tiger years, similarly, seems to have gathered its inspiration from Tony Blair: the matey affability of Bertie and Enda seeming to arise from an unconscious desire to emulate Blair’s successful reworking of the JFK brand.
This, of course, is a general election year over there, so the next four months there may have more far-reaching consequences for Irish politics than anything happening on this island in the same space of time. If, as almost everyone seems to expect, David Cameron ushers in a new phase in UK politics, Irish politics will unconsciously go into imitation mode again.
But my feeling is that this is a loose-ends election, and will be a closely run contest between two nonentities, more than likely to be followed hard by a real election between two figures competing to be the Voice of the Next Generation/the Next Big Thing. Cameron, of course, is ersatz Blair, the Tories’ attempt to recreate the brand that revolutionised British politics from a “leftward” direction, as Thatcher had earlier revolutionised it from the “right”. For some time I have been running into individuals who tell me they are advisers to Cameron and outline in detail the content of the coming revolution. Politeness has thus far precluded me from suggesting to these good people that their man is less a blank canvas than a holed bucket. Cameron, having little or no understanding of what he is seeking to emulate, seems to me a false prophet, at best a precursor.
As Wednesday’s abortive putsch bears witness, the British Labour party has finally understood that Brown and Blair might have been two men but were one leader, and that, in the absence of one member of the partnership, the brand is kaput. (In Ireland we never grasped this, which is why the affability of the recent period was less effective than the “monetarism” we copied from Thatcher.)
Blairism was born of the most intimate relationship in 20th-century politics, and had a long period of gestation, starting after the 1983 election when Brown and Blair first shared a broom cupboard in Westminster. Much of the commentary has focused on the conflicts and rivalries between them, but they most resembled an old married couple, unable to live with or without one another. Blair could not have made it without Brown, and GB is lost without TB.
This, then, is the drama of the 2010 UK election: a pseudo-battle between a leader who cannot admit that he has lost an arm, a leg and more than half a mind, and a would-be leader who takes everything literally. This beats EastEndersany day of the week.