Dublin Opinion

I’m not a religious person but I have to admit that when I picked up Alastair Campbell’s Diaries in a bookshop recently and read how he felt depressed after his resignation (shortly after the death of the Government scientist David Kelly) but ‘not depressed enough to do what Kelly did’ I found myself uttering a short prayer.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God’, I thought, ‘he can’t be serious.’

Campbell’s diary has caused mountains of words to be bashed into enough hapless word processors already, most of which has simply added to his increasing fortune. However, I imagined that John Lanchester’s review in the London Review of Books was going to be a hoot.

And sure enough it is. For example, here’s a detail about the faintly homoerotic aspect of their governmental milieu, which, according Lanchester, was:

“full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all coming to blows (Mandelson v. Campbell in the course of an argument about whether Blair should wear a tie), bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each others’ backs, and ruthlessly doing each other down while secretly knowing that they are mutually dependent. Anyone being sent to a girls’ boarding school would do well to prepare by reading The Blair Years. The cover photo is part of this, Blair looking up at Campbell with an expression of submissive yearning that verges on the pornographic.”

But it’s his description of the structural flaw at the centre of representative democracy in British politics that interested me the most. In theory, it looks fine:

“We have a representative democracy: we the electors vote for members of Parliament, whose job is to represent us, and who, collectively, are the sovereign power. In practice, though, it doesn’t quite work like that. We the electors vote for MPs, who regard their primary role as being representatives of their political party, and who pay just enough attention to their electorate in order to get re-elected.”

In reality, power is devolved to the centre, particularly around the leader. If that leader has a substantial enough majority, they can do almost whatever they want.

“So a leader can, after winning a general election, in effect take the phone to the electorate off the hook for the next four and a half years. This is not an accident, it is the way the system is supposed to work: a fundamental democratic deficit, designed to deliver functioning majorities of power with a minority share of the vote, and a permanently empowered class of politicians and civil servants.”

The reason it’s supposed to work like this, it’s argued, is to prevent mob rule, to allow our leaders to govern with a cool head and not simply to satisfy the baser needs of the lowly proles. This democratic deficit, argues Lanchester, “has caused the role of the press to mutate into that of the de facto opposition. The system is insensitive to popular opinion – it is designed that way – but at the same time there is more and more opportunity for the expression, and manufacture, of popular opinion.”

While the situation in Ireland is slightly different - no Taoiseach has enjoyed a ‘fat’ majority for a long time, there is clearly a willingness to allow power to remain devolved to the centre. The partners in government, in their eagerness to show that they are serious about being in government, are more concerned with showing their loyalty to cabinet than dealing with the issues that are important to those they represent. (There is a caveat here though. John Gormley’s plan to try and reform local government is a step in the right direction).

However, it is the ineffectual nature of the opposition in Irish politics that rings true with what Lanchester is saying. And connected to this is the point that the press has mutated into a de facto opposition, which is busy expressing, or is often the case, manufacturing popular opinion.

In the midst of the Manchester payments scandal last September, it was the Irish Times who lead the charge while the opposition parties kept their distance to avoid a backlash.

The latest edition of The Pheonix has a Pillar of Society article about the recent appointment of Eoghan Harris to the Seanad. It talks again about the secret meeting with Tony O’Reilly, Bertie and ‘Biffo’ Cowen in O’Reilly’s city centre townhouse, which was organised after months of sustained criticism of Fianna Fail from journalists in Independent Newspapers in the run up to the election.

The article makes the point that Eoghan Harris’ shifting allegiances can appear a mystery to the uninitiated (or John Waters, for that matter) but can be fully explained by the fact that Harris is simply drawn to power.

In the months prior to his own conversion to the FF cause in April, he repeatedly attacked Fianna Fail on Stamp Duty and other issues. The article points out that the one party he hadn’t flirted with was Fianna Fail, but this could be explained that the fact that he once tried to do PR work for Charlie Haughey, but was rebuffed. Charlie didn’t trust him.

However, the article tries to show that through a series of headlines and articles the Sunday Independent were providing plenty of negative comment about FF in the run up to the election and how, after the O’Reilly meeting, this suddenly shifted in a favourable direction.

Stephen Collins, writing about Harris’ nomination, was quick to argue that it was a sign that Bertie was untouchable. He was a man so secure politically that he could appoint Harris knowing full well it would rub the liberal types in the Dublin 4 media pack up the wrong way. Having said that he won’t be contesting the next election and having anointed Biffo as the next leader it showed that he couldn’t care less what anyone else thought.

But The Pheonix article argues differently. Referring to those close to Fianna Fail it says that Bertie is actually frightened of the Sunday Independent and despite his appearance at the Mahon tribunal being postponed until September so eager to prevent the Sindo from savaging him. So if Bertie is able to buy off the defacto opposition, where does that leave our representative democracy?

The question is though, is Eoghan Harris that influential? The Sindo is the most popular Sunday paper, and probably the most widely read in the country, so getting Tony O’Reilly to call off his hounds is probably in his best interests but its not at all clear that what is best for Eoghan is best for Tony. That bit remains a bit strange.

At the end of the piece on Alastair Campbell Lanchester mentions how the abrasiveness of Campbell acted as a lightening rod for Blair and makes the point:

From Blair’s point of view, it was actively useful to have a press secretary who behaved like a total prick.

Amen.