Odd People, Dad's Army and can UKIP rob the Tories of Victory? - Daily Mail (blog)

Mr Slippery has been annoying UKIP again, calling them 'Odd People'. Well, I can't complain, having called them 'Dad's Army' for some time myself, and jeered at one of their MEPs for saying women should clean behind the fridge. But then, I'm not trying to get UKIP votes, whereas Mr Cameron, at least theoretically, does want those votes.

 

Does UKIP want them? It seems to me that the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, doesn't love his own members all that much. In an amusing and surprisingly sympathetic interview with Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian on Monday 7th January http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jan/07/nigel-farage-party-eccentrics-ukip, , Mr Farage comes pretty close to endorsing my view of his outfit.

 

Talking about the 1990s, she asked him : 'But those were thankless, wilderness years – surely he must have wondered if the whole enterprise was mad? "Um, I didn't think the concept was mad. I thought the people, in many cases," and he starts to laugh, "were not to my taste".

 

"UKIP in the 1990s, the people in it and who voted for it were in the main 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'. I mean, you look down the membership list in 1994, anyone below a half colonel was a nobody," he hoots. "I used to say you could always tell it was a UKIP meeting by the number of Bomber Command ties in the room. It was that generation." Was it his milieu? "No! I was the odd one out. Which I loved, of course. I've always liked to be the odd one out, wherever I am."'

 

I wonder, myself, whether those members have all gone.

 

Interestingly, Mr Farage does a bit of back-pedalling on drugs, but it is so unprincipled that it doesn't in any way soften my criticisms of him and his party. Here's the passage. Ms Aitkenhead writes: 'But his party's enthusiastic libertarianism goes out of the window when it comes to a pleasure its core members aren't so keen on – illegal drugs. Farage's own instinct would be for wholesale decriminalisation – which would almost certainly broaden UKIP's appeal among younger urban voters – but the policy isn't even up for debate. "It would be completely impossible for me to win that debate within the party. And a general doesn't try to fight every battle."'

 

But back to Mr Slippery and his 'odd people'. From the point of view of a very rich, privately-educated stockbroker's son, who is married to a wealthy sprig of the nobility and who has never suffered from inarticulacy or a feeling of inferiority in his entire life, any political activist is going to seem odd. People such as Mr Cameron have believed all their lives that those who have strong views about things are in some way eccentric and a bit barmy. His Eton schooling and above all his immersion in the Oxford School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics will have told him that it is only the little people, the excluded and the disappointed, who dare to care about politics, and engage their passions in it.  He has been taught that such feelings are beneath him, and that real commitment to any cause is mistaken and silly.

 

Party activists, from his Olympian position, can seem rather pathetic, odd and strange. Not for them the calm, opulent detachment of the elite. These are people for whom a new policy can spell bankruptcy, or penury , or wounded grief . Why, they feel their country's woes as a personal pain.

 

 

In a world where normality means that the thrifty and hard-working end their lives in solitude and straitened circumstances, being ordered about by cruel care-workers, while the tricky, the violent and spendthrift are indulged by a complacent state, a bit of oddity is welcome.

 

To the disappointed inhabitants of New Britain , Mr Slippery and Michael Heseltine may seem unloveable, whereas more normal human beings, who have lived real lives of striving and disappointment such as Norman Tebbit, seem much more appealing (note how Lord Tebbit is still loathed and scorned by the liberal bigots).

 

 

By the way, I've noticed a growing tendency to suggest that in some way a vote for UKIP will aid a Labour victory at the next election. There is a very simple reason why people thinking of deserting the Tories for UKIP should not be influenced by it.   *The Tories will not win anyway*. This was the case at the last election, where even the wild, inflated campaign of nonsensical rage against Gordon Brown (who was in fact joint Saviour of the Poond Sterling, along with Ed Balls) could not get the Tories a majority.

 

Now that people have seen what the Tories are really like ( and spotted that , as Mr Farage says, the Liberal Democrats are not the reason for their failure, but a useful alibi for what they planned to do anyway) , they are bound to do even worse than they did in 2010.

 

Labour will form the next government, probably as a minority, perhaps with Liberal Democrat or even SNP support, though there is a faint possibility that they will get a majority and a chance that they will form a coalition with a purged Liberal Democrat party led  into the general election by Vince Cable.  

 

The old and usually reliable rule, under which a party  that can't score 50% in polls in mid-term will not get a majority at the general election, seems to suggest that Labour will fall short of outright victory. But the Tories will do far, far worse. It simply won't be possible to get people to loathe Ed Miliband the way they loathed Mr Brown. The idea of Mr Miliband as a hate figure is as unworkable as the phrase 'feral guinea pig' .

 

Last Sunday's Mail on Sunday poll showed that, even without the UKIP surge, Labour would get a wafer-thin overall majority, if actual votes were based on current voting intentions. The idea that UKIP would therefore rob the Tories of a majority is not workable. The Tories have no majority of which they can be robbed, nor will they ever again achieve such a majority in the United Kingdom under anything approaching existing boundaries.

 

But  is the idea that we can get from the current mess to a revived British politics in the course of one election is equally unworkable. It's a ten or 15-year project, which, alas,  has yet to begin. The real tragedy is that so many Tory tribalists insisted on voting for that awful, treacherous party in 2010, so postponing the necessary death of the Conservatives and their replacement. Let's hope they are not similarly fooled again in 2015.