Its policies are mere consumer responsiveness says a university professor

Its policies are “mere consumer responsiveness”, says a university professor. The latest issue of the Spectator parades a grand array of the articulate and anxious. New Labour “is all pure pragmatism”, says George Orwell’s biographer. These spending commitments are completely uncosted …” Such stern sentiments make many left-wing people shiver.

Almost five years the government-in-waiting, with all the impotent responsibility that implies, Labour, it is argued, has long since stripped itself of every vulnerable stem of belief. Their number and consistency, indeed, are marks of the Liberal Democrats’ lesser political status. In the minor-party hothouse, away from the cold blasts of any ruler’s compromises, rare and exotic principles can grow.Not so for the Labour party. Two weeks ago, his party scored 9 per cent in a poll; by last week it had 15, even 17 Yet the Liberal Democrats’ principles have an abstract air. There has been no Tory praise of low taxes as the economic panacea, no defence of welfare cuts as removers of dependency, no saluting of privatisation as a spur to efficiency. The public appetite for modern right-wing certainties has disappeared.
The milder convictions of the Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, have swelled in appeal. The problem with that new conviction, it soon appeared, was that it did not have the approval of every Tory MP, not even the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.

A chaotically contested policy does not make a terribly convincing principle. And Europe is the only subject on which the Conservatives have attempted principle. At no stage in the campaign has the most ideological party in recent British history laid out its ideas. Last week, the Conservatives sought exemption from this charge of empty pragmatism.

For the past month, this sceptics’ consensus has dampened down political talk like a persistent drizzle. And what about gardening? What else is it but a benign form of environmental activism? After all, gardens have personalities. Mine is a woman in her forties, ripe and abundant, blooming and drooping like the poppies I planted this year.. Conviction, we are frequently reminded, has been the most elusive commodity of this election campaign. Party machines, so finely tuned for tactical shifts, cannot handle it. Floating voters, so minutely aware of their own interests, do not value it.

Journalists, so self-consciously suspicious of all politicians, do not believe in it. An interest in exotic cuisines could reasonably be viewed as an antidote to the culture-crunching fascism of the fast- food chains. In the midst of all the talk of voter apathy, a number of signals suggest many people, young and old, are engaging more rather than less with the world around them. So what is so wrong with letting that show? Surely a vulnerable human being is more appealing than an enamel-grinned superman. But when I applaud Tony Blair for being human enough to let himself look tired, I’m suddenly Labour’s loose cannon.