In the gloomiest days of Labour’s 18-year flirtation with oblivion, a grim orthodoxy imposed itself upon the faithful: politics must be earnest. The Labour benches at Westminster sagged under the weight of doom-prophesying behemoths who took their literary inspiration from Eeyore. Tony joined CND and fretted about apocalypse. Cherie wore dungarees.
The ascent of one candidate brought a symbolic end to this doleful era. Glenda Jackson’s victory in Hampstead and Highgate in 1992 brought glamour to the ranks. Granted, Ms Jackson was no frivolous Kylie. A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she had played angry, contemptuous heroines in films such as Sunday, Bloody Sunday. But she had also had some fun playing opposite Walter Matthau.
Even under that most Calvinist of leaders, John Smith, Jackson bathed Labour in a lustrous glow of sophistication. Amusing as well as articulate, her barbed gibes at the sleaze-racked Tories raised smiles on both sides of the House. Here was a woman for Blairite times and Jackson was proud to play that role. She even accepted nomination as a “Blair Babe,” sweetly repulsing every invitation to condemn that description.
Now? Glenda Jackson’s recent assault on Labour’s leaders has resembled a spiteful and demented woodpecker drilling for nutrition in a chair leg. She has demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister, his communications director and now Tom Kelly. She is “deeply ashamed” of the Defence Secretary and doubts that Jack Straw can survive. Even her language has coarsened. On Tuesday’s Today programme she described the PM’s personal staff as “unspeakable” (though she was frantic to speak about them), “beneath contempt” and possessed of a “capacity to disgust” that was “positively boundless.”
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Jackson has now been typecast by Radio Four as “Avenging Harridan”. Her snarling lips cannot resist the lure of a microphone through which to condemn the Government in which she once served. She has not evolved into that noblest of creatures, the independent-minded backbencher. She is not a jovial Julian Critchley, nor even a conscience-racked Tam Dalyell or George Galloway. She is more akin to Geoffrey Howe or John Major’s “bastards”. Willing to wound, she offers just bile.
Her thespian skills have not entirely deserted her. Jackson is still capable of suspending disbelief. Regrettably it is her own. In a recent column she appeared to describe herself as more than merely human, declaring that she is “a product of that historic Government of 1945”. To the NHS and the foundation of Nato we are invited to add the Honourable Member for Hampstead and Highgate. History will demur.
Every government needs a conscience, but Ms Jackson’s open-mouthed anticipation of the next call from Today is not proof that she possesses one. It is evidence that Labour’s rank and file have once again lost contact with reality. Ms Jackson is playing to the gallery that always cherished the purity of opposition over the potential of power.
New Labour was created to defeat the whining minority who insist that their party must serve the producers of public services, never their consumers. Jackson was once part of that solution, now just a spiteful rent-a-quote devoid of humour and perspective. She brought the same interpretation to her depiction of Elizabeth I. That did not matter. Her opposition to Labour’s last chance to fulfil the promises on which she was elected does. Perhaps it really is over when the most impressive of recruits is content to recreate the worst days of Labour’s past by performing as a malicious court jester.
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The author is a former Editor of The Scotsman and was an adviser to the Shadow Cabinet 1985-88.