Stella or Hezza - Who's Paying More Attention?

Appearing on Question Time is a little like family life. You meet people you would never otherwise have encountered. This thought struck me after two events last week, one the much discussed Heseltine smear incident, which I suspect is not quite over yet; the other my curious encounter with Ms Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow. Both concern the fascinating way in which the ever-growing number of my foes imagine that I think things I don’t think. You expect this, and almost excuse it, in ill-informed Internet raiders and comment warriors. But in a former Deputy Premier and a future Labour cabinet Minister, it is more worrying and more interesting.

 

I met Ms Creasy for the first time when we were on Question time last year in Bristol. I knew of her because of her admirable campaign to protect people from horrible pay day loans, but I long ago dropped out of the Westminster lunch circuit, where politics and journalism meet,  and er , do not conspire, oh no, that would be a  ‘conspiracy theory’. They would do that. But they do have private, deniable conversations about shared objectives which result in the timed and co-ordinated appearance of newspaper stories which suit both of them. So I had no personal knowledge of her. I noticed during the programme, during the same-sex marriage discussion, that she seemed to have prepared a jibe against me on the assumption that I would follow the classic ‘right-wing’ line on the subject. Even when I made it plain that I thought the issue a trivial diversion, she stuck to her original plan, though it was largely lost in the hurly burly of the debate.  This was silly. I had prominently set out my actual views in my column and also in the ‘Spectator’ Magazine, where anyone remotely interested could have discovered them.

 

Now I freely state (why shouldn’t I? What sort of fool would I be if I didn’t do this?) that before joining in public debate with someone I do some basic research on them. It’s only polite, really. It’s silly to argue with them as if they hold views they don’t hold, or to assume they don’t have knowledge and experience which they do have. Once, this was only really possible for journalists who had access to those wonderful treasure-houses of inconvenient facts, newspaper libraries. Now, the Internet makes about 80% of such material available to anyone at all. I concede that it is a journalist’s response – I was trained from very early on to head straight to the cuttings library before writing about anything, advice which was and is absolutely right. Whenever, for any reason, I haven’t followed it, I have wished I had.

 

Apart from being useful, it’s often rather enjoyable. I love archives and there is a great joy in turning up a fact you never previously suspected, or seeing the past as news, as your father might have seen it.  But I should point out here that, unlike modern politicians, I have to do it myself if I want it done at all. I always smile when readers assume ( as many rather sweetly do) that I have batteries of assistants working full-time for me. Those days, if ever they existed, have long gone.

 

You’re waiting for the point. Here goes. During our QT encounter, Ms Creasy invited me to her Walthamstow constituency, an outer-London borough on the borders of Essex. I sarcastically thanked her, saying I was free to go there anyway. And I wasn’t really sure what she expected to demonstrate to me. She had, I think deliberately, become preoccupied with the least important part of something I’d  said.  I’d described the Labour elite as ‘fat Bourgeois Bohemians who despise the people whose votes they seek’ . We know this is true thanks partly to Gordon Brown’s encounter with Mrs Gillian Duffy during the 2010 election.  Mrs Duffy had legitimate worries about mass immigration. Mr Brown called her a ‘bigoted woman’, when he thought nobody was listening. Then of course there is the New Labour apparatchik Andrew Neather (look him up),who famously admitted that Labour’s immigration policies were intended to change the national culture.

 

 An ocean of apologies and a mountain of cunningly-written policy papers expressing ‘understanding’ for people such as Mrs Duffy won’t alter the fact that the true face of metropolitan Labour was exposed by these incidents. The Gillian Duffy episode also showed that, somehow or other, Labour’s traditional voters were still prepared to vote for a party that openly despised them (sound familiar? See my writings on the Tory Party).

The enduring unpopularity of the Tories, and the implosion of the Liberal Democrats, will probably ensure that Labour gets away with it again in 2015.

 

That was the fact. Ms Creasy seemed to think I was accusing her personally of being too fat, which I wasn’t (I repeat, she isn’t), or that I just needed to see multiculti Britain in action to swoon into the arms of the modern age. If you like multiculturalism, you’ll go on liking it. If you don’t, you won’t change your mind because you meet some nice multiculturalists. Even so, I got in touch with her afterwards, and fixed a date. I thought that  any opportunity to make my views known to a rising politician had to be worth taking.

 

The day came, I took the Tube up to Walthamstow and found myself in the midst of a sort of church fete. Ms Creasy had been posting teasing remarks on Twitter for some days, asking for volunteers to come and meet me and generally camping the occasion up. I had mainly hoped to speak to her, but could barely speak to anyone for most of the time because of the very loud music in the hall, which seems to be compulsory at all public events these days. Amusingly, I found myself sitting next to one of Walthamstow’s more established residents, a rather sharp gentleman who didn’t make much effort to conceal that he wasn’t wild about the changes to his borough. I only hope he wasn’t spotted talking to me. I know that my conversations were being closely monitored, because when I mildly wondered why there didn’t seem to be any Poles at the gathering, I was rapidly visited by people insisting that the Poles had all settled in very nicely, nothing to worry about etc etc.

 

I had a number of conversations with Ms Creasy, in one of which she insisted , with glowing sincerity , that she does not hunt for votes. Well, maybe not. Her seat is pretty safe and she could lose quite a few before it was in any way threatened. But a politician who says she doesn’t care about votes? I think comment is superfluous.

 

I tried to bring up a couple of topics with her, because of her own past and present. She attended a single-sex grammar school, of the kind that Labour has banned in most of the country. I suspect that if she hadn’t she wouldn’t be so high up the greasy pole of politics, and quite possibly would never have been heard of at all.   I sought to find out if this in any way opened her to the idea that such schools ought to be restored, the only political campaign I’ve ever waged which actually seems to me to be getting somewhere. She changed the subject, saying she favoured streaming( a separate point) and then plunging into a discussion on special education, which has nothing to do with grammar schools. There was some stuff about the 11-plus,which |I scotched by explaining I preferred the German system of selection by assessment and mutual consent. The legal ban on selection by ability in state schools (a law which, soberly examined, is more or less insane) is so central to Labour dogma that quite intelligent people simply shut their minds rather than discuss it. They are hardly going to say that they cling to revolutionary egalitarianism, that is, equality of *outcome* even if it leads to mass ignorance and national decline – even though they do. Because (and in this they are like the atheists who deny thy have made a choice) they very much wish to conceal their utopian objectives.

 

I raised the topic of marriage, too ( she made a joke about this on Twitter, pretending to think I had proposed to her). Did she think it should be encouraged and strengthened?  I got a bland answer, which didn’t sound to me like an strong endorsement of the married state as the best one for  children. I will only say here that Ms Creasy is not married, as far as I can tell from standard works of reference.  I know nothing of her personal arrangements, and wouldn’t dream of asking. But I do know that in certain parts of metropolitan Labour, marriage is looked on with active disfavour, or with indifference. I have always been very struck by the fact that the ultimate new Labour power couple, Alastair Campbell and Fiona Millar, remain unmarried despite many years of being together and raising children. I think we can safely assume that in the case of these two strong-minded people, this is a deliberate, conscious choice.

 

I think I’d have left it at that if she hadn’t soon afterwards tweeted to the effect that I didn’t believe in research. Something snapped at that point. I’d actually mentioned to her that I ‘d written a chapter about grammar schools in ‘the Cameron Delusion’ which she might benefit from reading. Well, I’m used to having these recommendations ignored. But is it possible to write books without research?  Not for me, it isn’t. I concluded that, all through our exchanges, Ms Creasy had had her communications equipment switched to ‘transmit’ , never to ‘receive’.

 

Like so many of my Internet critics, who express alarm when they agree with me, and never wonder whether this might upset their theories about me, she just isn’t interested. You’d have thought a ‘right-wing’ columnist who opposes wars, supports railway nationalisation, was willing to spend a chilly afternoon in Walthamstow with a Labour MP for no visible gain, and opposes the sale of council houses might at least ring a bell on an intelligent person’s anomaly detector. Hang on a moment. Perhaps the world isn’t quite as I imagined. Maybe I need to *think* about this. Nope. Just a casual, cast-off remark about how I (the author of five books) didn’t believe in research.

 

By comparison, Tarzan’s open hostility and blatant attempt to smear me on national TV is almost refreshing in its frankness. How amusing that – when most of my enemies actually think I *am* a Tory -  the Tories think I’m an enemy worth smearing. They may not fully understand why I dislike them so much, but they can see that it’s interesting and worth reacting to.  I’m grateful for the compliment, and will keep it in a safe place.