Election Fever ... Or Flu?
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday April 18, 1997
* Not campaigning, slagging * Rose is a misFitz * Dame Angela and the emu * The things people do * Poms and the Oz experience * Heligan, a blooming best-seller
Oh to be in England
Now the election's here ...
A conference on the performing arts drew me this week to London for three days. Pleasant spring weather, stimulating debate ... pity about the election, which must be the most tedious in living memory. British-style campaigning makes Aussie electioneering seem like a model of sophistication. To date, none of the parties - Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats or Sir James Goldsmith's new Referendum Party - seems to be doing much more than slag off opponents. They do this both in the media and on the stump. The two major parties have natty campaign buses, the Tories' models are painted blue, the Labour party vehicles red. In them, candidates whirl round the country, sometimes accompanied by selected hacks and television crews greedy for a sound bite that transcends blandness. At each stop, candidates leap out, deliver speeches by rote, and then disappear back into their buses to head for the next stop. Few issues seem to have been raised, no policies enunciated and both parties tippy- toe around the delicate question of Europe. It's a curious situation when the Liberal Democrats are seen as the radical choice.
THE thing one does appreciate however, is the great writing on matters electoral in all of the quality newspapers, a fine example of the art of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Pity the standard of political debate doesn't match the elegance of the journalism.
The Labour Party has as its symbol a red rose that would look more comfortable on a can of air freshener. Which, perhaps, is why this week it launched a supplementary image, a traditional British bulldog of the sort favoured by Churchill, meant, so the spin doctors say, to symbolise the country's resolute spirit. The animal has one of those grand pedigree names, but for convenience's sake had been nicknamed Fitz. One of the Tory newspapers gleefully pointed out that the bulldog was a dodgy breed, prone to breathing difficulties, troubled by excess flab, with poor eyesight and one whose young have to be delivered by Caesarean section because of the size of the head. Sounds rather like modern Britain.
NO DOUBT this new mascot will appeal to the animal-loving Brits. But it has competition. Nicking BBC television news headlines from the election last Tuesday was a story about a school cleaner charged with maltreating a duck. And on Wednesday one read about a peacock attacking a four-year-old boy at a garden centre, pecking him firmly on the forehead and shoulders. The bird was put down.
ANOTHER exotic bird is in the news, the emu. The Financial Times this week carried a front-page headline that ran "Dame Angela Rumbold opposes Emu". Leaping upon this rare mention of something Australian in the British press, one had visions of a clash between the formidable Tory vice-chairman and Australia's national bird, but the emu in question turned out to be an acronym for European Monetary Union. God help the feathered variety that tried to face off Dame Angela. She looks like a particularly ferocious old bird.
THERE has been no recent sighting, however, of the Tory supporter who's been capering around London dressed as a chook, cackling that Tony Blair is too chicken to square up to John Major in a television debate. I have searched in vain for this interesting person. Lots of pigeons but no chook.
LOTS of fish, too. It seems that those staples of the British diet, haddock and cod, are facing extinction. Fishing, or more precisely overfishing has, along with the EMU, become a modest election issue. We have had John Major visiting a canning factory and holding up a large turbot which is a more expensive variety than haddock and cod, but no less threatened by those dastardly Euro fisherfolk. And although it has nothing to do with electioneering, Prince Charles has visited a meatprocessing plant in Aberdeenshire and looked particularly fetching in white fedora, white coat and white wellies with just an inch or two of his kilt showing between the bottom of one and the top of another. I think the visit was meant to inspire confidence in British beef, which would seem a public relations task akin to absolving Bill Clinton from any links with Whitewater.
AS USUAL on these trips, I scan the press for any mention of Oz. I have found two, one on the front page and another on the back page of Tuesday's Times. We are mentioned in connection with the forthcoming cricket Tests and only in connection with Mike Atherton's announced captaincy.
NO DOUBT the ABC will soon screen a new documentary called Ten Pound Poms. It deals with the experience of postwar migrants who quit Britain for Australia. It seemed to me that the producers were keen to paint a rather bleak picture of both the voyage out and the conditions under which the new Australians lived immediately after arrival. However, what emerges is that the life most of the subjects enjoy now is far more satisfying than the one they left behind and most of those interviewed wouldn't ship back to the Old Dart for quids.
TOP of the list of best-selling hard cover books right now is one called The Lost Garden of Heligan. Published to coincide with a documentary series on Channel Four, it describes the rehabilitation of a fantastic garden in Cornwall. Abandoned after World War I, Heligan and its vast gardens fell into ruin, roused from their melancholy 75-year slumber by Tom Stair, a Dutchman living in England who decided to restore it. It's a fantastic story of enthusiasm triumphing over all manner of adversity, of a Quixotic project that has been described as the garden restoration of the century. Heligan is now the most visited garden in Britain. In a rare spare moment here I hurried into the nearest bookstore and bought a copy. I have not been able to put it down.
NEWS this week of a proposal to close Trafalgar Square and two other major London public spaces to traffic. Ah, for such enlightenment. We just pump more cars through ours.
NOT YOUR EVERAGE FAGIN
THIRTY years ago, a visitor to Lionel Bart's musical Oliver might have caught a youthful Barry Humphries playing Fagin, his first major West End role. Entrepreneur Cameron Mackintosh has persuaded Humphries to assume the role again. He'll go back into the current revival shortly for a three-month stint. "Cameron is very persuasive," he told me, "and the money will pay my sons' school fees for a term or two."
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
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