The delegates train leaving Euston on the Saturday morning of the Labour Party conference was buzzing. A potentially difficult conference had got off to the perfect start. The Tories were mired in sleaze, again. This time, the cleanest of them all had been caught at it John Major had had an affair with Edwina Currie, which he admitted. What amusement! What gossip! What unrivalled triviality to lift the spirits after all the pre-conference doubts and complexities surrounding PFI and Iraq.
At first sight, here was a story which we could all just sit back and enjoy. Back to basics really meant back to my place . Mary Archer commented that the only surprise was John Major s temporary lapse in taste. Currie replied that Mary was a fine one to talk, given that her s was permanent. But there is a real message behind the revelation.
As a Labour candidate in Sevenoaks in 1997, I knocked on hundreds of doors. Unsurprisingly, many of those who opened them were Tory voters. Why are you voting Tory, when the government is so utterly hopeless? I asked. I cannot recall a single person challenging this simplest of assertions. You can trust Mr Major, they said instead. He has dignity. You know where you are with him. He s not like that phoney, Tony.
This was not a comment on their trusting Mr Major s policies. Even Iain Duncan Smith now admits that was misplaced. It was a comment on how he appeared as an individual, on his personal bearing. Something about the way he spoke. You could trust him. The clear, unspoken implication from the hundreds of voters I met was that, if Tony was all slick presentation and gimmicks in public, you could never be sure what he was doing in private. With Major you knew. Or so they thought. There is no doubt at all in my mind that, for this reason alone, in scores of similar constituencies, Major was a good deal more popular than Blair in 1997 and, as a result of being perceived as trustworthy and decent, was at least ten points more popular than his party.
It is a fact that this basic perception of Major was worth literally hundreds of thousands of votes, possibly more than a million. And yet we now know that the perception was false. In the end, phoney Tony trounced real John and history really was changed.
The real lessons about the Major/ Currie affair have to do with the proper place of personal morality in British politics. Lesson one: let he who is without sin cast the first stone. This is a basic message which has been around for some time. The reason why Major s conduct is so much worse than, say, Bill Clinton s, is that he did try to cast that stone (whatever the revisionists now attempt to say). Lesson two: never try to judge a person s conduct unless they are the one looking back at you in the mirror. You don t know what your spouse is up to, never mind your best friend. So why, in Britain, do millions of intelligent people try to make judgements about the probity or otherwise of politicians private lives and then cast their votes accordingly? If you didn t know what John Major was up to, then you can t make a judgement about anyone. Ever again.
The only thing that matters about politicians is their public probity. Their private probity is totally irrelevant. All that matters is whether they implement, consistently, good and honest policies which do some good for the majority of the population. And yet it is amazing how many Conservative and Labour voters continue to obsess about private morality in the public sphere. These social conservatives are dangerous because they distract the electorate s attention from the big things which matter. Like PFI now that really is something to get all steamed up about.