Sir Lionel Sackville-West (1827 - 1908) - 16 May 1997

Several listeners have wondered about American feelings, thoughts, on the British General Election.

"You let it go by," one listener writes wistfully. Well, I did make a point of not breathing a syllable about it before it happened, while it was happening, for fear some mild remark of mine might be taken as an unforgivable intrusion of prejudice into something that was none of my business. Such things have happened to individuals far grander than a journalist. I doubt... I don't doubt, I'm quite sure that you, whoever and wherever you are, heard nothing at all about the election from the American ambassador to the United Kingdom. And even the present British ambassador to the United States was, how shall I put it, brilliantly silent.

Which reminds me of the way a French newspaper reported the first Cannes Film Festival, which was a dreadful flop. Showing a film to a half-empty hall and noticing the lack of top Hollywood stars who'd been expected, the gallant French paper wrote, "Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and Errol Flynn shone by their absence".

There's an old, and very good reason why British ambassadors, especially, not only don't say a mumbling word on the eve of an American election but, if possible, claim a pressing reason for taking a holiday. I don't know if it's still true, but one of the things a new British ambassador was always told before he left for Washington was the horrendous case of Sir Lionel Sackville-West.

The year was a presidential election year, 1888. The man in the White House was a Democrat, Grover Cleveland. Mr Cleveland was being opposed by the Republican, General Benjamin Harrison. There was one overriding issue in the campaign, tariffs. The federal government was running up an enormous surplus and President Cleveland wanted not to embrace Free Trade, which was a dirty phrase in those days but to reduce taxes for the benefit especially of farmers who suffered from the high costs that arise from excessive duties. The Republicans wanted the high tariff to go on forever.

As in all presidential, and dare I say parliamentary, campaigns there was a good deal of misrepresentation of the opponents' views. The Republicans hunted high and low to find some incidence, some pretext for pretending that President Cleveland was secretly an advocate of Free Trade. Undreamed of treasure trove fell into their laps from the pen, no less, of the British minister in Washington. Sir Lionel Sackville-West had been in the Foreign Service for over 40 years and represented Great Britain one way or another in eight countries. His public behaviour, so far as the books go, had been impeccable. In this Cleveland/Harrison election year, he was the British minister in Washington. I cringe to have to explain that in 1888, Great Britain did not consider the United States a superpower; it did not rate an ambassador, only a minister.

There came a day, in early October, when Sir Lionel received a letter from California, from a man claiming to be an Englishman who was naturalised, and facing his first presidential vote. "Please, Sir Lionel, what do you think? Which candidate do you suppose would be most friendly to England?"

Incredibly, this veteran diplomat promptly wrote back in his own hand, saying, "Mr. Cleveland is the man!"

Well, this conscientious, naturalised Briton was nothing of the sort. He was a devout Republican and had been put up to the trick by a local party agent. The Republicans crowed with delight and, two weeks before the election, printed the minister's letter and distributed it throughout the nation, converting it into hand bills circulated by the thousands throughout New York City. Where, it was rightly figured, it would inflame the Irish population.

The Republican gloss on the letter was that Cleveland was, thus, unmasked as a free trader, a president who would commit the United States to a policy of Free Trade to England's benefit. The administration responded quickly. The Secretary of State had Sir Lionel on the carpet. Sir Lionel maintained he was shocked, shocked that a private letter should be published. He'd been tricked, of course. He never meddled in domestic affairs.

These protestations, alas, were reported to the president as examples of what the secretary called "his general fatuity". President Cleveland asked to have Sir Lionel recalled, and gave him his papers. It was, however, too late to scotch the mischief already done. New York State was pivotal to the election, and General Harrison carried it, just – thanks to a decisive majority in New York City.

So you see from this enlightening bit of history how a correspondent here, with ties to Britain, is going to button his lip until the moment the door of Number 10 Downing Street, or in this case, Number 11, has closed on its new inmate. I honestly don't think there's anything very dramatic or startling about what was thought and written here about the election.

The wonderment of the size of the Labour majority was just as gaping as it was in Britain. All the reasons that your papers had rehearsed were repeated here. Too long in office; serious ideological split in the Conservative Party itself; the serious and repeated smell of scandal. In a very rare linguistic trick, Britons have taken an American adjective for shoddy material as "sleazy rayon", which we always assumed was manufactured in Silesia, and turned it into a noun. Sleaze. As, I gather, a synonym for sordid behaviour, usually sexual.

The most striking reaction, to me, anyway, was a general comment, you might say, of disillusion. American correspondents in Britain used to remark on the small, intent audiences and their tendency to heckle or put tough questions to the speakers. This was thought by American reporters to be an admirable difference. American rallies were always huge, mass gatherings of the faithful who bellowed with laughter at every thin joke, thundered applause at every platitude, and any time a dissenting voice or a placard rose up, the villain was promptly bustled out of the auditorium by the police.

Apparently, this has changed. The rallies now, as in America, seem to get bigger and bigger and to have become rousing sermons to the already converted. Also, much admired, was the institution of free television time for each party to present its case through a leading spokesman or woman.

I myself remember how serious and sensible both speakers were. Sometimes there was a forlorn, even more serious, Liberal. I gather all this has changed. The reporters found that the deliberate copying of American style razzle-dazzle and flapdoodle comes on apace. Sound bites, sight bites, grotesque caricatures of the opponents' promised policies, clever distortion of each other's slogans.

The last British election I covered was the 1955 one and I've just looked over my dispatches. They're almost touching in their antique flavour.

I wrote, "Here, no motorcades sirening into a city square with the candidate and his spreadeagled arms acknowledging the roars of 20,000 people, like Hitler entering Vienna. Rather, Mr Attlee, in a Mini car driven by his wife, through country lanes. Talking to a hundred, sometimes a dozen, citizens. Giving a scoutmaster's pep talk. It might be a parent/teachers meeting in the United States. No army of youth for Eden. No flights of a thousand balloons for Attlee. And the candidates saying, 'Thank you! One and all!' To a rustle of hand claps." I concluded that a British election campaign compared with an American election campaign is as a prayer meeting to a Roman circus.

Well, no doubt from the long coverage we had on several TV channels, Britain has developed its own form of circus. And much of this has been done by American advisers. As for what we used to call the issues, I have to throw in as background that in most American elections, rebels inside either party sometimes unite and form clubs for the other guy, like Republicans for Dukakis – there were precious few of them. Democrats for Reagan – they got him in.

So I said last November that Clinton won because he ran as a Republican for Clinton. Similarly, to use the same parlance, the American reporters might have written that Mr Blair ran as a Conservative for Blair. Enough said.

Or rather, not enough said! I ought to add that, in the little time since the election, long and admiring dispatches have been published here about what is being called the hyperactive and whirlwind pace of Mr Blair's already announced reforms. The banning of all hand guns. Parliaments for Scotland and Wales. Tough punishment for juvenile criminals. Reform of the health system.

An envious reflection is added by American politicians who note that, in a parliamentary system when the Prime Minister says "Do this!", it is performed. Whereas here the president can propose, and propose himself blue, but the Congress, most often the House, disposes.

What I regret most in the six-hour coverage of the election – one national channel simply switched to the BBC coverage – was any single line of wit from the winners, or humour from the losers. There were lots of "Time - not to look backwards but..." Guess what? "To look forwards". And one gem. One winner said, "It is the beginning of a new dawn". It made you wonder at once what the beginning of an old dawn would look like.

Still, even that unforgettable line is not as memorable as the most famous campaign sentence of Calvin Coolidge. A shrewd New Englander, President of the United States, 1923 to '29. He said, "When large numbers of people are out of work, unemployment results".

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