COVER -> DAY ONE
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It is a lucky man indeed whose straightforward, unwavering moral and political convictions can be accommodated by unflinching friends and unchanging institutions.
I do not think my mildly libertarian, mildly interventionist, mildly redistributive, fervently Euro-federalist political convictions have changed significantly in three decades but I have found myself in that time housed in three different political parties - Labour, Social Democrat and Liberal Democrat - and may yet go full circle and end up where I started with Labour.
For a very short time indeed I even had to flirt, in order to establish Britain's position in Europe, with the otherwise horrific idea of voting Conservative at a time when Labour was at best equivocal about the European Union (EU).
Today the two Parties have completely reversed with the Conservatives equivocal at best and Labour very much in favour of the EU. Just from that example it is clear that an individual can retain a steady conviction but be joined and deserted by various political forces.
At a more personal level still, those very New Labour supporters now so close to the European enterprise once shouted me down at a hustings meeting, just because I was pro Europe, with the repetitive endearment of "Fascist bastard!", simultaneously devaluing political debate and the suffering imposed by Hitler and Mussolini, not to mention wrecking their credentials as opponents of bourgeois institutions like marriage!
In real, as opposed to aspirational, politics initial convictions have to be balanced by the need to survive in order to carry them through, resulting in a sad paradox for purists: in order to get anything done you have to dilute your principles with the water of practicality, not to mention the bitter salt of circumstance and the sludge of receding tsunamis.
Nowhere is this more true than in the Middle East where the political starting-points of the protagonists could hardly be clearer: Israel wants to survive as a sovereign state with some control over some of Jerusalem; the Palestinians want to establish a sovereign state with total control over the whole of Jerusalem. Each side has had to alter its policy, regardless of principles, in order to bring its objective nearer.
Arafat has scrapped and wheedled; Israeli leaders have snarled and finessed. On occasion it has suited both sides to go to war and on others to seek peace but more often one side or the other has wanted war while the other has tried to play for time. We are now in a period where both sides want war simply because neither has gained anything from peace. If it comes to that Israel will, in military terms, win but it will be no better able to handle the bitter fruits of victory than the Palestinians will be able to handle defeat.
Further afield,
- the Arab League will fuel belligerence purely by proxy, paying for nothing and suffering nothing;
- the United States will talk of peace and continue to sell arms; and
- the United Nations will pose as the honest broker while passing disproportionately anti-Israeli Resolutions.
In a Region of shifting alliances and in a world of unpredictably shifting loyalties these phenomena are as stable as any can be but they might change any day.
No one should forget the surreal implosion of the Shah's Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, nor the flight of Imelda Marcos, nor the shooting of Ceausescu.
I forget where I saw the headline "What if the Archduke had ducked?". Not much, I think. The timing would have been different but, not much.
What if, however, Governor Bush rather than Vice President Gore is in charge of foreign policy? Should the Palestinians be piling on the protest or easing off; should Israel be pressing its military dominance during the interregnum or is this the last chance they will get for some time of working with a blatantly partisan White House?
As politics is endemically promiscuous, strange bedfellows do not remain strange for long; politicians have to procreate and sleep without fear of a knife between the shoulder blades.
Lest we think this is a phenomenon of the uncivilised and the unruly, consider the fate of politicians in G8 countries facing elections:
- never have so many had it so good;
- never has real unemployment been so low;
- rarely has the crime rate been falling so rapidly;
- never has the economy grown for such a sustained period --- and yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, there is gloom and insecurity, carping and sneering.
We have written off the economic miracle of the 1990s; we blame politicians for everything that goes wrong and never credit them with anything that goes well.
We seek to dismantle the whole, sorry, overblown edifice and then cower in the bushes, beseeching it to protect us from a myriad of real and imagined ills. Our vote depends on a joke, a smile, a complexion and then we complain that these people are not serious; we evade taxes and call them all crooks. We call on them to be honest but if they tell the truth we punish them by voting for their opponents.
Who would be a politician?
For the answer you could do much worse than read Fred Anderson's Crucible of War which describes the rise of George Washington through the Seven Years' War and his necessary though hardly predictable change from being pro-British to leadership of the American Independence movement.
So many politicians start with bright, altruistic ambitions but few make it to the finishing line before they are destroyed. Some, recalling Prime Minister Macmillan's phrase are destroyed by "Events, dear boy, events!" but most are destroyed not, as cheap fiction would have it, by their own insatiable lust for power and wealth but by ours. It is our impotence, not our virtue, which keeps us from behaving much more badly than they do.
