From one hibernator to another, Rip, wasn’t the real surprise not how much had happened, but how little? Mr Van Winkel was absent for longer than my sub-antarctic winter, but both of us dropped out for quite some time. With fresh eyes I can look, as he did, at the events I missed. Events? How slight the news that made the headlines seems, to one who missed it the first time round!
Talking about politics is what I do. I’d like to think it mattered, that it pressed. As a noisy passing show it often seems to. But reviewing the political news now, not as a merry carousel but as a heap of press cuttings dated March to August 2000, is like reading inconsequential stories from another country. Wherever could I have found the 40,000-odd words I would have had to submit by way of running commentary?
At the risk of talking myself out of my job, I am driven to ask what early 21st-century British politics really amounts to. How much of what we are pleased to regard as “serious political commentary” is seriously necessary? We are lucky enough to be living in jolly uninteresting times, so why does the churning out of political journalism, political broadcasting, breathless political reporting, sage political analysis, and the writing (and reading) of endless political memoirs and diaries, continue without respite? Too much news-commentary chases too little news: ours is an epoch of rampant editorial inflation.
Or so it seemed to me on returning from isolation. I had braced myself for a whirlwind briefing on developments in Britain since March. Mentally I had set aside the better part of a week to get myself up to speed with current affairs. I touched down at Gatwick. What, I asked friends in politics, happened while I was away?
There was a pause. Ten minutes of somewhat desultory observation followed, from which I gained the impression that the euro and the Tories rose a bit before falling; Ken Livingstone won London, the Liberal Democrats won Romsey and neither has been heard of since; everybody got excited about the Blair baby and the Blair family holiday and whether there should be pictures; Euan was nabbed drunk and most people felt sorry for his Dad; the economy’s chugging along nicely and the Government intends to spend more money; Tony Blair is closer to his sell-by date, his party no closer to making up its mind about the single currency, and the Tories further than ever from looking like winners.
And that’s about it. The meteorological equivalent would be: “Sunshine with scattered showers; continuing mild.” Yet consider the scene along the media frontier between the world of politics and the world of political reporting. You could be looking at a war zone. As we speak, the whole vast organisation of the BBC is gearing up for massive coverage of the TUC and party conferences. Over the next month, in an operation presenting tremendous logistical challenges and costing millions, thousands of reporters, commentators and technical support staff will be dispatched to Bournemouth, Brighton and Glasgow, from where hundreds of hours of undiluted politics will be broadcast to tens of millions of listeners and viewers. And nothing will happen.
Meanwhile, back in the metropolis, the serious publishing houses and their army of publicists are preparing for a bumper autumn political season. An “unauthorised” biography of Mo Mowlam simmers away in a locked warehouse at a secret address. Paddy Ashdown is publishing his diaries. John Major is supposed to be putting the finishing touches to the paperback edition of his surprisingly popular autobiography. Geoffrey Robinson has a literary surprise for the world. Michael Heseltine’s recollections are finally (with Anthony Howard’s help) ready; Andrew Rawnsley is said to be writing about new Labour in power; and the Baroness Thatcher is apparently writing yet another book.
Nor do I mock. I will read them all, some out of duty, some for enlightenment and some for fun. Some will be good, some disappointing, and some will create a sensation. Maybe I shall review one or two for the newspapers. Beyond the astonishingly large number of genuine readers such books will attract, many will generate not only reviews but genuine headlines, sustained commentary on the inside pages, letters, leading articles and endless impertinences in the diary columns.
It is not unlike what goes on inside the many stomachs of a cow. After being well-chewed, ordinary grass is then processed and reprocessed with added juices, a little acid, and timely squirts of bile. Likewise in political reporting, cud from the news pages and the publishers’ press releases is re-chewed at the seaside, even worked back up into “real” news stories as serving politicians hit back at erstwhile colleagues who have written about them disobligingly, and the political authors respond to the responses, and we commentators all comment.
At a certain point in the political publishing season, after the primary material has been chewed to death then digested in the media cow’s first, second and third stomachs, the residue is passed along for redigestion by the satirists, parodists and ironists. The likes of me - merchants of the wry sideways glance - are offered our not-unremunerated hour to mock and giggle at it all, and invite your laughter.
The season at last over and all that is digestible digested, we are left with . . . well, what finally emerges from your average cow. Laid down by the passage of time, this will rot nicely into material for the historians, archivists and academics: fertiliser for many a wise account and informed insight into the age.
Maybe my time among the albatrosses has turned me strange, but, returning to it now, I am moved to ask why.
Why bother? Should we? For we live in a time of peace and plenty, an age whose presiding ideologies are hardly in contention and whose arguments, though the source of much irritable noise, are really very minor. Ours is a free-market democracy to which no serious threat is imminent, governed by a set of politicians whose predominance faces little challenge at the next election, and, when the time for challenge does come, could yield only to another set of politicians with remarkably similar aims led by a man with less hair. Three or four rival teams ask for our purse, our applause, and the chance to score; but they are all playing the same game.
And surely that’s the analogy? Sport bores me silly; politics bores many sports fans silly; but are we, participants or commentators, so very different? As participants we are tribal, secretly doubting that any team is permanently superior or eternally right, but suspending disbelief for the sake of the thrill of the contest. As commentators we stand back and compare form, admiring (or decrying) skills, tactics and mistakes.
This sporting analogy of politics is hardly original; it’s obvious. I remind you of it because, revealing as the analogy has always been, in the Britain of late summer 2000 it has never been more true. That being so, it is perhaps time that we who interest ourselves in the world of politics - we who write or broadcast politics, and you who read, follow and watch the games - stopped believing ourselves to be more serious people than sports fans, bird-watchers, horseracing enthusiasts and tiddlywinks fanatics. In an age almost beyond ideology, why should speculating on the ups and downs of personalities at Westminster be any more grown-up a pastime than following the lives of celebrities in showbusiness?
It is time to question the worthiness of politics as a modern hobby. Upon that primary assumption - rarely articulated, never challenged and hardly defended - are based so many subsidiary assumptions about the role and cost of “public service” broadcasting, the balance of contents in “serious” newspapers, and division of manpower and resources within news organisations.
On my return from Kerguelen the changes that did strike me as important were not political. I was struck by the advance of e-mail and the Web even in five short months - most advertising now assumes public familiarity. I noticed how technological change filters fast and deep. I noticed, too, how transport in a modern country like ours seems to be approaching some kind of crisis, where big decisions about the motor car are needed soon. I heard that the Human Genome Project has taken a huge step forward, a step I cannot honestly claim to understand. And I have begun to believe that the world’s climate really may be changing.
Why then are science writers and those who explain and discuss technology not considered quite “mainstream” in a modern newspaper? Why is politics assumed to be at the core of newsgathering? How do we justify directing so much money and journalistic talent at a part of the news that seems almost peripheral?
In the weeks ahead, many viewers, listeners and readers may feel themselves faced with a choice of fare: between shot-putting in an Olympic stadium and javelin-throwing in a seaside political auditorium.
Bully for both brands of entertainment, I say, and long may the latter amuse and pay me. But let us understand them for what they are: sideshows. And let us be more generous in our attention to the real news and those who write about it.