From Man To Pig, And From Pig To Man

Peter Hitchens writes:

Most of you will, I hope, recognise the words above from the end of 'Animal Farm', where the poor beasts look through the farmhouse window and can no longer tell the difference between the visiting men ( whom they have supposedly overthrown) and their rulers the pigs ( who led the revolution against the men).

The quotation seems to me to fit the current merger of Cameron Tory and New Labour into a united political force, which is rapidly taking recognisable shape.

Some of you will recall a recent 'interview' with Mr Cameron (the paper involved never revealed where and how this interview had taken place) in which he praised several Blairite figures, including Alan Milburn. Now Mr Milburn is repaying the favour.He has declared in the public prints that Gordon Brown risks losing the next election for Labour. All politicians know that such remarks will be taken to mean rather more - in this case, it will be suggested that Mr Milburn thinks Gordon Brown deserves to and should lose.

Lord Levy, the former Labour fundraiser, was also reported as having met Michael Gove, the MP who is David Cameron's personal representative on Earth.

Readers of this weblog will not be surprised by these developments. It has long been predicted here that there will be significant defections by so-called 'Blairites' to the Cameron party before the next election. There were whispers of this at the Labour conference in Manchester nearly two years ago. But what is a 'Blairite' anyway?

The word, in its crudest sense, means 'power-worshipper'. Once the Blair faction was in firm control of the Labour machine, all ambitious MPs began to describe themselves as 'Blairites'. In the past, they may have been Trotskyists, friends of Neil Kinnock, Nuclear Disarmers, trade union militants, Communist fellow-travellers you name it. All this was forgotten in the famous Blair Revolution. The essence of this was 'electability is everything', so the deep convictions of Labour MPs were buried even deeper, never to be spoken of again, and they all talked a bland language of 'reform' and the 'third way' , while agreeing that 'Clause Four' which hadn't mattered for decades anyway, could be got rid of. The fact that they never spoke of their aims did not, however, mean that they had given them up.

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In 2001, given a perfectly good opportunity to sack New Labour - whose nature was by then clear to all but the dimmest - the voters refused to take it. Some actually declined to vote Tory because William Hague was bald. I remember a woman in the audience of 'Question Time' actually giving this as her reason for not supporting the Tories. Such is democracy. Hague, who is now universally lauded as a great intellect and author, fine speaker, potential premier, etc etc was then universally smeared as a hopeless, hairless idiot unable to run a bath let alone a government, and his party dismissed as a dead parrot by the same media who now talk up David Cameron.

The 2001 election, as I have pointed out here before, was viewed by Labour insiders as mainly about crushing what was left of conservatism inside the Tory Party (This was made clear by Mr Blair in remarks he made at the end of the campaign, and by the journalist Steve Richards a few months later).

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Mr Cameron was, in a way, the media classes' revenge for the Tories' refusal to pick the media's own favourite candidate, Michael Portillo. You might call Mr Cameron 'Michael Portillo for slow learners'.

Mr Cameron, untroubled by beliefs, had got the message of 2001. The Tories would only be allowed to operate again, without having huge vats of slime tipped over them all the time by the whole media, if they repudiated the Thatcher era and made it clear they wouldn't reverse what Labour had done. And lo, it has come to pass. The slime is now being directed at Gordon Brown, not in buckets but through a battery of high-pressure hoses on 24-hour standby.

Thanks to this amazing reversal of support, and melodramatically abrupt redirection of all that slime (one of the few products in which we still lead the world), what now seems possible - though by no means certain - is that the sweets of office, and the levers of power (provided they don't pull them too hard) will be in Tory hands in, say, 2010.

Now, what does a power-worshipper do in such circumstances? Why, like a big friendly dog he goes lolloping over the man most likely to give him a biscuit. So all those ex-whatever-they-weres will now become Tories. I expect the first defections to be in the House of Lords. But there'll be some in the Commons too. And perhaps some among the Think Tank political professionals who aren't in either house yet, but assume they will be eventually, because they have demonstrated that they have no principles and it is therefore safe to let them become MPs.

It will be really funny if, after defecting, they find themselves stranded by another, unpredictable turn of the political weather, and the Tories fail to win the next election. But then, I suppose they can always re-rat.

The point of all this is that we now have a permanent government in this country, run pretty much on the basis of the Labour manifesto of 1997, the 'political arm of the British people as a whole'. Those who wish to be allowed political office must accept those policies. But it is less and less important which party they belong to.

The rest of us, in the meantime, can do nothing to change this - except to refuse to give legitimacy to these people by voting for them. If a major horse-race or an important football or cricket match were fixed as blatantly as our Parliament now is, there'd be rioting in the streets.

But who needs to defect? Expect Andrew Adonis to be Cameron's Education Secretary while still receiving the Labour Whip in the House of Lords. Only John McDonnell would make any sort of fuss. And not even he would make much of one.