Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (15 page)

A spokeswoman said: “We are of the opinion that classes like these are a way of empowering women … if an intelligent, independent woman wishes to learn a particular form of dance in respectable surroundings –” I’d be very surprised? No: “… we see nothing degrading in that.” And I suppose if some stupid or impressionable women want to join in, that’s fine as well.

So far, so undergraduate. They’ve correctly identified that received wisdoms, such as the view that pole dancing is degrading, shouldn’t be taken as read. But they’ve confused being contrarian with forming a reasoned opinion. Having stumbled upon the word “empowering”, which can be deployed under so many circumstances – I use it about charging my phone – they’ve let it trick them into thinking that they’ve framed an argument.

I expect they’re feeling a bit smug that it made the papers. When I was a student, I made up a story about a cat crapping on the script of a play I was trying to publicise. This duly appeared in the gossip column of the student newspaper and was subsequently picked up by the
Times
Diary. I thought this basically made me Matthew Freud. More people would be aware of the show, I reasoned. True. And they’d associate it with cat shit. If it made anyone buy a ticket, I don’t want to meet them. But I’m sure that Juan de Francisco, the union entertainments officer who’s organising the classes, thinks he’s done himself and the society good by getting this mischievous idea some coverage.

He hasn’t but that’s all right. Being dickishly flippant is one of the joys of student life. The Union Society, in particular, is an institution where persuasively advocating things you disagree with or don’t care about is all part of the game. It may be idiotic, but no more so than stealing road signs, guzzling so many Creme
Eggs that you throw up or crawling around the floor dribbling and eating from the dog’s bowl. It’s all part of growing up. Or, in my case, a Friday night out.

And it’s understandable that if you’re, say, a 20-year-old woman at Cambridge and a committee member of the Union Society, you may not think that the world is quite as sexist as people claim. It probably doesn’t feel like it. So why not use your looks, surely as eternal as your intellect, to further “empower” yourself by making men ogle you as well as admire your keen grasp of tort law? That’s not a policy with a shelf life, is it?

Pole dancing is grim and I don’t see anything empowering about learning it. Even if you say that it’s just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs? And if, as de Francisco claims, it’s “not intended to be sexual”, why is it only for women? Shouldn’t men get the chance to be empowered too? I told you it was sexist!

People talk about sexism against men quite a lot. Everything from being officially excluded from MP selection shortlists to getting turned away from nightclubs is cited as if it demonstrated the utter hypocrisy of all feminist aims. The reactionary view is that it’s all gone so ridiculously far – political correctness has gone so distressingly, dangerously and self-harmingly insane – that occasionally, would you believe it, things are now unfair on men! This doesn’t seem to take into account that if situations weren’t sometimes unfair on men too, it wouldn’t be fair.

But, as this election campaign is demonstrating, when it comes to sexism, “PC gone mad” is a long way from power – it’s still a minority party compared to “chauvinism gone senile”. Just look at the horrible way that the leaders’ wives are treated. To go with our medieval monarchy, we have politicians and news media whose attitudes to marriage are stuck in the 1950s. Those poor women should have nothing to do with this election beyond
voting – they’re not employees of the state or political parties and they should be getting on with their own lives.

I refuse to accept the argument that we need to know about the personal circumstances of potential leaders in order to trust them. There is no evidence that being “a good family man” is a necessary precursor to competent government or precludes incompetence and tyranny. Yet we insist they present a bland and dated image of family life, and complain when it looks affected.

Beyond that, we treat these women, who are paid nothing for their time, with an insolence we wouldn’t adopt with a drunk tramp pissing in a bus shelter. There have been whole articles devoted to the apparently unacceptable condition of Sarah Brown’s bare feet, which were revealed when she took her shoes off in a Hindu temple. In what way is a critique of the Labour leader’s wife’s toes in the public interest? It’s just being incredibly, vindictively rude to someone who can’t avoid the public gaze, and is unable to answer back.

Just as stupid and sad was the spectacle of the new female parliamentary candidates from the main parties all posing for a magazine shoot. I don’t blame them for agreeing to it, but their male equivalents would never be asked – or only as the sort of ironic and tokenistic objectification of men currently in vogue as a gesture towards redressing sexism.

These normal-looking women, wearing their best clothes and smiling politely, never wanted to be in magazines. They’re standing for parliament – they want to be empowered. I doubt they started with pole dancing.

I wrote the following article roughly two weeks before the 2010 general election. The politics nerds among you may note that my predictions weren’t 100% accurate.

David Cameron’s career is cursed by fate. With his privileged background, excellent education and meteoric rise, he may find it hard to believe but he’ll be sensing something unpleasant by now. He may misattribute it and waste months taking allergy tests or eating bacterial yoghurts to reinvigorate his gut. There’s no point changing your diet, David. What you’re feeling is the hand of history – yanking your scrotum.

Such agony is familiar to the millions throughout the millennia who’ve found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time: rural weavers on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, devout polytheists on the accession of the Emperor Constantine, Incas in the early 16th century, homeopaths in about six months’ time (if there’s any justice), most Russians at pretty much any point (there isn’t).

This is the only explanation for Cameron’s startling lack of success in the current election campaign. That may seem an odd remark to make about a man whose party is ahead in most opinion polls but, given how British politics has worked for most of the last 100 years, that’s much worse than he should be doing.

The current government has undergone a horrendous series of crises: sudden and massive financial meltdown just as the man who was associated with the country’s finances became prime minister; an expenses scandal discrediting the whole House of Commons at a time when most of its members were Labour; the war in Afghanistan becoming ever bloodier and more intractable; and finally the mass grounding of aircraft caused by an act of God that must have finally convinced Gordon Brown that there isn’t one.

This last was an emergency which no governing party could have negotiated unscathed: either there are no plane crashes, so the ash was harmless and you’ve overreacted, or there are more than no plane crashes, which, to the non-statistically minded as well as those on board, always seems too many. These, then,
were choppy waters indeed (like the stream beside the abattoir after the wrong sluice was opened) and Brown hasn’t been much better at metaphorical canoeing than I imagine he would be at actual canoeing.

But I grudgingly admit that Cameron’s failure to capitalise on this situation cannot be attributed to his deficiencies as a party leader. He may have refused to make more than the bare minimum of policy commitments; his rhetoric of change, optimism and social responsibility may have been as empty as Ann Widdecombe’s little black book; and the fact that his core team is just a bunch of university mates with a towering sense of entitlement may have been ludicrously ill concealed; but, historically, none of these shortcomings would have stood in the way of his confidently assuming power under circumstances such as these.

“You’re sick of the government, aren’t you? So vote for me!” is how British opposition leaders have always addressed the electorate. It’s usually enough. “Why commit to policies in advance when I can win just by not being Gordon Brown?” Cameron must have thought. It doesn’t exactly make him a statesman, but it doesn’t mean he’s an idiot either. He analysed his strategic objective and, in time-honoured fashion, organised a perfectly competent cavalry charge. It had always worked in the past. And then history opened up on him with a machine gun.

It feels like something may be changing, and this could be real change rather than the mere alternative that Cameron offers. The apathy and disillusionment of the electorate may be turning into something more constructive than moaning about politicians being the same, not bothering to vote or telling ourselves that Ukip isn’t racist. Instead, people are beginning seriously to question the two-party system. That’s why Cameron’s strategy, to everyone’s surprise, isn’t working.

The public’s reasoning may have gone like this: “The Tories represent change, in that electing them would result in a change
of government. But somehow I’m not sure they’d be a better government, just a different one. And, in fact, there’s something eerily familiar about them. Big business seems to back them. Does that mean they’re nice? Hmm.

“Oh, it doesn’t make any difference who you vote for, does it? They all use the same platitudes. I wish they could all lose. I suppose that means I want a hung parliament? People seem to think that could happen. And everyone says Nick Clegg won the first leadership debate. I only saw a bit of it myself, but I’m quite glad – he was the underdog. Maybe I’ll vote for him? That might give the Lib Dems a bit more influence if there’s a hung parliament. Also, it might keep the Labour/Tory [delete as applicable] candidate out in my constituency.

“Actually, wait a minute! I feel quite good about Nick Clegg now! Nick Clegg and a hung parliament! And the Lib Dems want proportional representation, which would mean there’d always be a hung parliament. Would that matter? It seems interesting.”

I hope people have been thinking along those lines because I believe that that’s the sort of typically British, ponderous and cynical reasoning that could bring about proper reform. Historically, we don’t change things out of ideological zeal, we change them when enough is enough. We’re sick of a system where all a party leader needs to do to win power is convince us that he’s not as bad as his rival. In a proportionally representative hung parliament, politicians may have to win arguments and talk about all their policies, not just scaremonger about the taxes or cuts that they claim their opponents are planning.

I’m speaking too soon but all this makes me optimistic. The savage and irresponsible response from the Tories and the rightwing press to Clegg’s popularity boost reinforces my belief that something might be happening. Otherwise the Tory papers wouldn’t be using words like “Nazi” and even more damaging ones like “donations”. And senior Conservatives wouldn’t imply
that a hung parliament would usher in a sort of governmental apocalypse.

The truth is, for them it might. No party has done better under the old system than the Conservatives – they’ve enjoyed decades in office. But a hung parliament resulting in electoral reform could mean they never form a majority government again. They’re feeling the hand of history where it hurts.

Like I said, it didn’t really work out that way.

Nick Clegg gets a lot of stick these days. I’ve certainly slagged him off several times, and I feel guilty. It says a lot more about me than it does about him – I’m just cross with myself for voting for his party. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t mind him at all. But when you vote Lib Dem, the last thing you expect is to end up complicit in what a government is doing. You expect to be merrily carping on the sidelines at the thoughtlessness of those corrupted by power. It’s an almost monastic act, a renunciation of worldly power in the name of self-righteousness.

When you’re trying to wash your hands of politics, it’s disconcerting to discover you’ve just rinsed them in the blood of your countrymen, to have to explain yourself to Labour-voting friends: “I’m sorry, I got overexcited about electoral reform”; “I became intimidated by the size of Gordon Brown’s head”; “It was annoying not to be able to feel smug about Iraq.” You can’t say: “Well, I never expected them to get into office – that was the key to their appeal.” At worst, they were supposed to mitigate New Labour, not connive with the Tories.

If it’s been a nasty shock for me, how much worse must it have been for Clegg? A member of the Lib Dems said to me in early
2010 that a hung parliament would be a disastrous election result for them. I didn’t really understand. To me, it seemed like their best realistic outcome. I now realise we were both right. Clegg must have had a horrible time under a barrage of abuse and, as the anniversary of the election approached, it started to show. He began to look jowly and sad. One thought of him sitting through cabinet meetings, shaking his head and glumly eating crisps.

Well, there’s only so much criticism a man can take before he’s forced to react, and it seems Clegg has finally snapped. But instead of resigning and returning to his manifesto pledges, he’s just got himself a rowing machine. Obviously he didn’t mind people calling him a hypocrite nearly as much as them saying he had a paunch. To be fair, he’s only going along with our whole society’s priorities there.

Apparently the machine allows Clegg to work out between, and sometimes even during, meetings. Presumably this way he can intimidate advisers with his physicality: panting and dripping with perspiration, he can draw them into his circle of trust, closer to the heart of power, like the noblemen privileged to witness Louis XIV’s levee. Or indeed like Winston Churchill, who often conducted business from his bed or the bath, a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigar in the other. I can’t really imagine Churchill heaving away at an exercise machine, though – getting out of breath while Halifax burbled on about appeasement. The blood, toil, tears and sweat he offered members of his government were largely metaphorical.