The Daily Novel

Whenever two or three Liberals are gathered together they are asking each other whether they made a serious mistake when they chopped Charles Kennedy, after two or three ‘tired and emotional’ television performances. I think they did. Better to have a boozing leader than a boring leader. Particularly in the television age parties need a leader who can inspire, who can articulate policies in words that all viewers understand. Above all they need a leader who can speak from his or her heart to the hearts of the viewer.

The latest revelations by Greg Hurst, in his book Kennedy: A tragic flaw, do nothing to shake my conviction. Indeed rather the opposite. I would rather have a drinking American President than a reformed alcoholic like George W. Bush, who is much too self-righteous for my taste. I am not arguing that being in control of a country while drunk is any less dangerous than being drunk in charge of a motor car. That other famously drunken leader, Winston Churchill, did manage to impose a few bad decisions on the nation while drunk (which he frequently was when he called meetings of the War Cabinet at 8 PM at night by which time the early-rising generals were ready to go to bed). But mostly his colleagues managed to restrain him. It was a cabinet that included some pretty powerful figures including those of the opposite political persuasion like Clem Attlee. (That is what democracy is about, ensuring that no one man or woman ever gets too much power. Not ensuring that the world is safe for consumer capitalism which not everyone wants.)

And I don’t think we would have done nearly so well in the war if the entirely sober pipe-smoking Clem had been the leader. Churchill’s fatal flaws were all part and parcel of his personality. He was highly emotional and subject to all kinds of excesses. But he also had the eloquence to inspire millions and to empathise with their feelings.

A few years ago I bought a tape recording of parts of Churchill’s wartime speeches. I was disappointed when I listened to them, because though the eloquence still came over it had nothing like the impact it had on me, and others, when we first listened to them.

I would have been around 7 at the time. I would be sitting with my father and mother and my brother and sister, probably doing jig-saw puzzles, my mother knitting my father mending his watches and clocks on the card table. We were all in one room with a coal fire burning. The room was stuffy because not only were all the windows closed but the three piece suite was piled up against the French windows to protect us from flak.

When Churchill came on (or when the BBC News came on) we would all stop what we were doing. The clicking needles in my mother hands would be stilled. My father would take the eye glass from his eye and turn towards the radio in the corner of the room. That’s why the tapes are so disappointing. Churchill was talking in the language of the times and speaking to the hearts and minds of the people of those times.

Leap ahead to 1959 when I was in New York at the celebratory party for the election of Jack Kennedy (no relation to Charlie). It was crowded with young people delighted to be rid of the tired Eisenhower administration and its big business cronies with whom Eisenhower played golf. Kennedy (better call him JFK to avoid confusion) had brought in all these young people (to the campaign not to the hotel because JFK was in Washington on that night) through his eloquence. Like Churchill he had one or two fatal flaws. He was emotional and sometimes over-impulsive, as when he crashed his motor torpedo boat into the pier.

I have not got any tapes of JFK’s speeches but parts of them still ring in my head; ‘Do not ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’

Those words, and others which JFK uttered, still have relevance today. Churchill’s do not because Britain is not facing the same kind of threat. America is facing a similar threat to the one JFK saw so clearly. JFK was by means anti-capitalist but he thought that the power of big business needed to be restrained by Governments and that the ideology of unbridled consumer capitalism was blinding it to the plight of America’s poor people and to the weak and vulnerable everywhere.

Today America has an administration which is far more right-wing than that of Eisenhower and a Christian fundamentalist idealogy which fails to understand other religions, let alone the quite large numbers who think any religion is bad for thinking folk. The essential message of the Christian fundamentalist lot is that if you believe in God he will make you a millionaire. Notsomuch throwing the money changers out of the temple but telling the meek, that if they only they believe and come and pray in the temple, they will become as rich as the money changers.

Jesus Christ must be turning in his grave, except, of course, he can’t do that because he is immortal.

So carry on drinking Charlie. And all you liberals remember that you ain’t going to get anywhere unless you have a leader who can inspire and who makes it clear that he cares for the people who will suffer if Blairism continues or if the quite eloquent Cameron is elected. Eloquence is not all. You have to have the right message. Perhaps I should have said the left message. But no, I am more of a JFK Democrat than either a little liberal, a little conservative, or a little labourite.