Champagne Wars
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The British tabloids have been obsessed with one thing this week: catching high-ranking Tory politicians on camera as they swill champagne during their party conference. Aware of the danger, the Conservatives duly banned bubbly from their event. They didn’t want to give Labour’s smear machine an easy lead about privileged and posh Cons partying away in the midst of a recession. (Class conflict in Britain is still considered a potent political tool, as viscerally effective as culture-war pedaling in the U.S.)
But limey journos don’t give up. Spectator editor Fraser Nelson reports an amusing attempt by the Labour-loyalist Daily Mirror to plant a tray of “lager toffs” – lagers topped with champagne – on shadow chancellor George Osborne.
Osborne’s aides looked stunned: what to do? I was just passing the “waiter” myself at this point, and was tempted to swipe a glass – hair of the dog – but one of his press people had done just that. He was followed by cameramen, all asking “why have you just stolen that champagne?” But, no fear, the waiter had another glass. A second Osborne aide goes to nick the tray. Undaunted, the “waiter” picks up a glass and heads towards Osborne.
In fact, on Monday, Conservative leader David Cameron, attending a Spectator party, was snapped clasping a flute-full of Pol Roger. Sure enough, the next day the image adorned the front-page of London’s Evening Standard.
This passes for political intrigue in Britain. But even if the papers of the Left obtained a full video of Cameron and Osborne drowning peasants in a bathtub full of 1985 Dom Perignon, that still might not be enough to stop the Conservatives from winning next year’s election. (Well, maybe.)
Spare a moment, however, to feel sorry for Team Cameron: what’s the point in being a Tory pol if you can’t quaff the free fizz from time to time?
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Honestly, haven’t these people got better things to do than trick tories into sipping bubbly? You would have thought they could have come up with something more creative.
Personally I would have wound down the window of my rolls and asked: “Pardon me, would you have any Gray Poupon?”
But of course.
The problem over here in Britain is that there is simply no ideological difference between the New Labour brand and the New Tories led by Cameron. Or, to put it more graphically, the only choice in next year’s election is between another course of the shit-sandwich on a red plate, which you’ve tasted and found to taste like a shit-sandwich, or the only other item on the menu, a shit-sandwich on a blue plate.
No one – wants- to vote Tory, any more than they did in 2005, when Brown portrayed a vote for Labour as a vote for the guy who always had and always would hate Tony Blair more than anyone else in the country, and won Labour another term in office on those terms. But giving the country another term of Blairite policies, only without the talent for PR, Brown has handed the Tories an almost certain victory next year.
All the Tories have to do – and which they are doing – is keep their policies vague, the bulk of their shadow front-bench off TV, and wait for the protest votes to pile up in their favour. Then they’ll claim a mandate for the kind of extremist right-wing slash-and-burn policies Thatcher only dreamed of, rightly confident that Labour will tear itself apart for a couple of election cycles in a civil-war between the New Labour rump and genuine Labour challengers.
In the meantime, the nation gets another round of those tasty shit-sandwiches.