US v UK elections

Twenty-odd years ago, my editor asked me to go over to England to cover a British General Election and make such comparisons with an American presidential campaign as occurred to me along the way.

On the way in from London Airport, I scanned the hoardings for election posters, for the billboards that would show cosmetic pictures of the two leaders over some such slogans as Labour is Your Neighbour, or Eden is Leadin'. I saw none. No hint anywhere on the hustings that there was to be, or had ever been, a General Election. Come to think of it, there was one which puzzled me deeply. It said, 'Truman. Courage'. I asked a native in the airport bus what it could possibly mean. He gave me a lacklustre look of the sort reserved for an American tourist who asks 'What is the Cup Final?' and he said, stonily, 'It's a beer.' 

Next day, I took off for the country and in all my travels from Reading to the West Country, and up through the Midlands, and on to Scotland, and back to the wind-up in Manchester, I saw no buttons or bows, no surging crowds in football stadiums, no airplanes skywriting 'Madly with Adlai' or the British equivalent at $1,000 an hour. There were no motorcades with six cars, three press buses and eight police outriders sirening into a city square with the candidate and his spread-eagled arms, acknowledging the roars of 20,000 people, like Hitler entering Vienna. 

Much more typical was a day spent with Mr Attlee and his wife. They drove alone in a Mini car through the country lanes, and they came to a church or a schoolhouse and he stood up before a hundred or a dozen citizens and he made a sort of scoutmaster's pep talk and then drove off again to a rustle of hand claps. 

Certainly there were rallies, so-called, such as you might muster in the United States for a particularly heated parent-teachers meeting, but they were held in halls, not coliseums, where there was no army of youth for Eden wearing blue boaters, no flights of Attlee balloons, no vast flock of waving banners to give the impression that you're present at an indoor battle of Agincourt. There would be several hundred people listening to what the man had to say. There would be, to an American, the novelty of people standing up in turn to challenge the speaker on this point or that. Hecklers went so far as to shout, 'Yah, but 'ow about pensions?' Or 'Not bloody likely, mate!' These intruders were politely hushed and the man said, 'Thank you one and all!' And that was it. 

In the United States, 20,000 people pack into Madison Square Garden or Soldiers Field in Boston and they are all of one party, one mind. They are rallies of the faithful and any interloper from the other party who got up and heckled would be hustled out by a couple of shocked cops. 

I came to the conclusion that a British election campaign compared with an American election campaign was as a prayer meeting to a Roman circus. 

Well, from the television clips we've seen of the recent British election campaign, I gather there've been some changes made. 'American-style', was what the British commentators called it and I'm afraid they're right, though Mrs Thatcher's borrowings seem to have been from early Coolidge to middle Nixon. Calvin Coolidge wore Indian headdresses and patted melancholy cows for the edification of three or four news agency photographers. Mrs Thatcher nursed a calf for a swarm of television cameras. What bothered me most was what I've called the 'Nixon borrowings', only because he most thoroughly adopted a public relations technique whereby most of his speeches were vetted for content and tone by the roving watchdogs of an advertising agency. 

Mr Nixon was, I believe, the first American to be convinced that Richard Nixon as God created him was not quite right for exposure to the multitude. No later than his first run for the Senate almost 30 years ago, he delivered himself as promising raw material to a couple of advertising geniuses and they moulded and barbered not a man but the image of a man whom their private surveys told them would be most appealing to most voters. Well, it turned out for him to be a Faustian bargain, for in the end he came to prefer what was cagey to what was true. 

Plainly the new British campaign technique has a long way to go towards that torturous end. The role of the advertising men appeared to have been restricted to what, figuratively speaking, you might call that of a movie director. A little more of the working man's downrightness here! A more true blue county note there! Occasionally you could almost hear the hired television therapists whispering, 'Just a touch slower!' and 'A chuckle there perhaps!' Still, I'd like to have seen anybody suggesting to Winston Churchill which convictions he ought to stress or telling Ernest Bevin when to breathe or what to think! The British adoption of advertising wizards as political advisers would do well, I humbly suggest, to stop where it started. 

Americans, who don't like to see Britain going American in anything if only because of the uncanny British gift for picking up the worst of America instead of the best, were greatly relieved to hear that nobody has yet thought of introducing the system whereby a million voters will pull a lever, walk into a curtained cubicle in turn, tap little levers of their choice, then pull the big lever to let them out. But that also rattles up the cumulative votes so that, a couple of hours later, the city count is in. The whole city. And the Irish Democrats on Third Avenue are already steeped in sorrow or reeling in ecstasy. 

It was good to hear – and was in keeping with our fondness for Old England – that men and women of matchless honesty and patience would, on the contrary, be separating out bits of paper by hand, some white, some off-white and making little piles of votes for councillors and votes for MPs and then dividing them into other piles and counting them till their lips grew tired in the dawn. 

But, happily for all of us, not least for the sanity of the British nation, one thing in British elections has not changed. The campaign lasts three or four weeks at most. It's a painful reminder that an American presidential campaign begins no later than the first month or two of any president's third year. He imagines he was elected for four years but once past the halfway mark he sees the presidential hopefuls of the opposing party, and frequently one or two of his own, trotting in to the paddock. 

Mr Carter already faces at least four Republicans who are officially entered for the 1980 race. There must be half a dozen others who look in the shaving mirror every morning and see a future president. And from his own stable, he sees a young pretender in Governor Brown of California and half the party has its stopwatch out on Senator Edward Kennedy. The president is not alone. Senators and congressmen up for re-election in November 1980 are already reacquainting themselves with the geography and folk ways of their beloved native states and making up to fat cats for the wherewithal to finance all those stadium rallies and television commercials and banners and posters, and buttons and bows. 

Elections are now big business and the media and the advertising agencies can't wait for the suspense of the thing itself. They draft it with all the tender care of the next television crime series. They manufacture the suspense and stretch it throughout two years. But however soon or late the grizzly process starts, the effect on the politicians, whether in America or Britain, is much the same. In the United States where, once the two presidential candidates are chosen, the actual campaign runs for four or five months and, in Britain, where this time it ran for four weeks. The debate starts with an elaborate, even a reasonable, parade of the issues. Then the polls show them running too close for the comfort of either side. The PR men step in and tell them that one issue is boring the people while another is inflaming them. So they concentrate on the combustible material and, whether in the last month of an American campaign or the last week of a British campaign, the debate begins to deteriorate. Self-righteousness, the cardinal sin, takes over. Less and less is the indignation truly felt. It's pumped up. 

Nothing in American public life is more obnoxious than the swollen veins and the hurt tremolo of a presidential candidate in his last speech on election eve as he works himself up into a paroxysm of outrage over the sins of the opposition party and the dreadful prospect they offer of the ruin of the Republic. 

And, in the end, it seemed to me the British campaign resolved itself into a hoarse exchange between two barking dogs, so that in the final days, Labourites were warning us of a return to capitalist greed and a free-for-all and the Conservatives were frightening us with the threat of a Labour government hell-bent for Moscow. 

But then, at last, there's a winner. And the new president or prime minister who, through the fever of the campaign has declared the great aim to be nothing less than to usher in a new deal or a square deal or the great society or a new Britain, must get down to the business of governing, which is to say, to decide whether to put a penny on the price of bread, to give window cleaners a four-day week, to call out the troops in a garbage strike, to introduce computers into the Post Office, to ration petrol, to make social security cover unemployed hairdressers. 

An election is then seen to be only a crisis in the process of government and not the process itself, like a war, an earthquake, an epidemic, birth, death, marriage, a revolution even. And since in all the Western democracies there is no thumping majority for a single ideology since, indeed, their governments govern with hair's-breadth majorities or none at all, they must, in the meantime, devote themselves to the long pull of mending and making-do, dealing with the humdrum, the day-to-day grumbles and chores of life. 

In a democracy, anyway, most government and most of life, I shouldn't wonder, is conducted 'in the meantime'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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