SATURDAY MAY 19 2001

While eggs are flying, democracy is safe

BEN MACINTYRE

Britain still likes its politics in the raw — but it could never happen in the US

How refreshing this rough, swift British democracy feels after the smooth hugeness of the American version. To cover a British election after an American one is like going from some opulent formal ball under chandeliers to a wild barndance in a tractor shed where everyone is faintly intoxicated. The American process was minutely choreographed and scripted, a long, complex minuet in whalebone corsets; the British equivalent is all fights and bruised feet and bad jokes.

After watching John Prescott give new meaning to punched ballots by knocking a chad out of a voter, it struck me that in the time I have covered American politics, I have never seen a politician properly heckled, let alone covered in egg and wrestled to the ground. By the time anyone got close enough to take a swing at the Vice-President they would be dead.

I don’t think I ever saw Al Gore or George W. Bush speak to a voter who wasn’t a previously vetted, bona fide supporter. When we did walkabouts, it was through streets swept clean of anything that might impinge on the utter predictability of the occasion. Senator John McCain caused a sensation by travelling on a bus, a radical departure from tradition that made journalists swoon and brought the Secret Service agents out in hives.

After two years of saying exactly the same thing at every stop, the presidential candidates were word-perfect: their speeches would be topped and tailed for geographical relevance, a line could be inserted to indicate that the speaker knew he was addressing children, firemen, or members of Congress, but otherwise, unless this was a Major Policy Moment and therefore distributed to The New York Times the night before, the speeches were identical. Here, a candidate would risk ridicule by saying exactly the same thing twice. John Prescott can’t even say the same thing once.

At American rallies, the occasional protester might infiltrate an otherwise uniformly supportive crowd with a rebel placard, but the campaigns kept permanently on hand some high school basketball players for precisely this eventuality, who would simply stand in front of the protester with larger, higher placards and block him off until he could be discreetly carted away.

Staged political events in the US are so vast and dazzling, so packed with pompoms and platitudes, so expensively controlled and calculated, that they really have no relevance whatever to how anyone might vote. There is little point in canvassing living voters in America, since a slice of fake television can do the job much more effectively. The sweaty business of politics is so caked in make-up that barely an inch of real flesh shows through.

British electioneering still has an immediacy and informality that is remarkable and, if you happen to have spent the past few years on the American campaign trail, distinctly strange. Events unfold in a British election in a way that they would never be allowed to do in the US: a senior party member says something out of turn, vanishes, and then reappears saying he didn’t say what he was said to have said; the Home Secretary is jeered and slow-clapped by members of the police force; the Shadow Chancellor wanders around the East End pouring sweat on a roasting day, posing with fish and eating spicy food.

The incident in which Tony Blair was berated by a woman over the state of the health service was particularly astonishing to my Americanised eyes. In the unlikely event that such a thing happened in the US, it might be reported, downpage, by some of the less pompous newspapers, but it would probably not be broadcast. American politics has an overdeveloped sense of its own dignity that does not allow of such raw scenes; one woman’s rant would not be considered proper news.

Only one American paper considered it seemly to report the Prescott Punch.

But of such moments are real politics made, for whether or not the British public is interested in this election, they are at least allowed a glimpse of who their candidates are: the flicker of embarrassed uncertainty on Blair’s face as Sharron Storer pushed past him; the pugnacious set of the Prescott jaw; Michael Portillo’s almost physical desire to show off for the cameras. In one week of British electioneering, we have learnt more about our politicians than could be gleaned in a year of American politics.

Most British politicians would, in truth, prefer to have an American-style ersatz election campaign of strategic photo-ops and docile audiences, and the spin-doctors of every party are gradually pushing politics in that direction. The 1997 campaign marked a radical shift away from the John Major soap box of 1992, and the trend has continued in this election: curtailed access to politicians, little spontaneity, set-piece events kept secret as long as possible to minimise protests, and hand-picked crowds.

But there is a strict limit to how much of this control the British public will take, and the spinners know it. American voters expect their politicians to behave like actors, and find evidence of human behaviour on the part of candidates rather disconcerting.

In Britain, by contrast, we cleave to a nostalgic image of elections in which eggs, fists and insults fly, and we do not really believe the process is under way until they do. We still recoil from the bogus and scripted, as witness the reaction to Blair’s visit to Saint Saviour’s and Saint Olave’s.

Here is the mark of a robust democracy that has not yet succumbed to the American Way: we insist that the Prime Minister eat a bag of chips from the Happy Haddock, but we also notice and mock when he fails to take his cufflinks off.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001