Life's a Gamble! - 1 June 2001

I'm one of those people who was never given much to gambling.

I put it in this careful way because nobody who can take gambling or leave it should claim any great gift of character. Gambling can be like alcohol or cocaine, an addiction.

And it's heartening news this week that a drug has appeared experimentally which promises, one day, to cure even compulsive gamblers.

But from time to time I have been overcome by a hunch, which in view of the record is perhaps as scientific an urge as any in the arcane mystery of gambling.

Once in the early 1970s I was on the transatlantic phone to a very old English friend - in turn fighter pilot, businessman, now retired to grow roses and to gamble - on the horses and on elections. He was, however, that rare, happy type - a shrewd, controlled gambler.

Well the British general election was to take place the next day and all the oracles showed a coming Labour victory for Harold Wilson.

"Overwhelming," my man assured me.

"Still John," I said, "I have this hunch for Heath."

"Preposterous," was his comeback.

"Nevertheless," I said, "you have your bookie and I have none. Put me something ..." which for me would be grotesque "... say, £50 on Heath."

With a tolerant sigh for an innocent old friend - and it was true I knew nothing about English politics - "It shall be done," he said.

In those days the BBC had handsome, large premises in the classic shrine of 1930s architecture, before the Bauhaus gang required every American tycoon to tear down his Frank Lloyd Wright building, his stately Richardson, his elegant Stanford White and put up street-long files of grey, stone, monoliths in the style - I guess - of the late King Lear.

The Rockefeller Centre was, and is, a splendid series of set-back, towering slabs of beautiful Vermont marble, framing a garden ice rink.

Overlooking it were the elegant headquarters of the BBC. And every British general election they hold a party, starting usually about 4pm (9pm London time).

By then trends were beginning to flow and so were the liquid stimulants - enough anyway for me to feel increasingly confident about my Heath hunch.

I'd been told that two city constituencies were the key - solid Labour seats. Birmingham, I believe, was one.

Well the first big shock proclaimed by the BBC's New York director was:

"My God, Birmingham's gone for Heath."

The second key constituency rudely did the same.

I left before I got above myself and when I was home, sure enough, Edward Richard George Heath was the first choirboy to become prime minister - second bachelor after Lord Balfour, who couldn't sing anyway and was therefore never a choirboy. He was also an atheist.

Alright, I went to bed with a quite new feeling, dangerous I'm told since it can mark the first symptom of an addiction.

Next morning I put in a brisk call to good old John Metcalf, ex-poet, fighter pilot, businessman, shrewd gambler and fine friend.

"Well, smart Alec," I said, "how about those odds?"

Eight to one. How about those £400?

"Alas," he said, "I have a dreadful tale to tell. I called my man and then found I simply couldn't let you lose, so I'm devastated to say I never placed the bet.

"I grieve, I weep, I bare my breast."

"Save the poetry for Harold Wilson," I said, "just a formal citation for contempt from Edward Heath will suffice."

Naturally I thought of this woeful 1970 experience when I opened my New York Times the other morning and came on this lead sentence of a dispatch from London: "The imminent landslide victory for conservatism in the British election should come as no surprise to anyone."

This, from an Oxford professor, said neatly and wittily what many political observers, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been saying vaguely and clumsily for a year or more.

"I did not say," the piece went on, "a victory of the Conservatives, they will do abysmally but may console themselves that conservatism in the form of the Labour Party has won at the British polls once again."

This is something I think many Conservatives in Britain, young ones especially, don't realise as much as they should - that Mr Hague is not confronting a Labour government but a democratic liberal government, or call it a centrist right government.

Through all the shifts and accommodations that Mr Blair and the young centrists have made with the old Labour Party, what has come through completely but not maybe with the force of a thunderbolt, is that the middle-aged Labour men have concluded, reluctantly, that the free market does better in life in practice than central planning and state ownership.

During the last year or so a series of bed books that I've tapped for midnight entertainment have contained weekly reports in the 1930s called Essence of Parliament.

One thing stood and shocked me: Labour's regular downfall through the grim 1930s, the first decade of the Great Depression, was its steady devotion to a dogma in the face of that dogma's continual failure.

In every election I read about, in the 30s and 40s and maybe beyond, Labour carried the slogan "Full employment in peacetime, higher wages, no inflation". They never made it.

It took 30-40 years for the younger Labour men to see that this is a prescription for Utopia and not possible on this planet. They always went out of power with high unemployment and high inflation.

Well the political picture in the United States is not all that different. In spite of many differences of name and procedure between the parliamentary and federal systems the Democrats, ever since Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, have been the champions of the welfare state and the Republicans the party of resistance.

There was a time, I recall, when Roosevelt gave a jokey description of his administration to a Labour leader.

"Sydney," he said, "we tax and spend, tax and spend."

It was a joke that never should have been made. The Republicans seized on it and still use it as a short, sharp definition of what is wrong with the Democrats.

Much of the debating that goes on in both houses of Congress chants this old pro-New Deal or anti-New Deal language. And the fiction is maintained that the United States has two parties with greatly opposed philosophies.

But, as in England, most of what came out of Clinton's second term were Republican ideas.

In his first term his one personal achievement was to kidnap the old Republican concern for the government's deficit and he turned an alarming deficit into a surprising surplus.

The delighted Democrats then began to think up ways of distributing it from the top, for many excellent causes: Increasing, for instance, the list of so-called entitlements - that's to say doles and subsidies and credits for the poor, the unemployed, the old, the disabled.

The effect on the Republicans was predictable. They responded to Clinton's proud surplus by saying - hold on there, let's have no more big bureaux created to decide who shall get what, that surplus belongs to the people and what this country needs is a big tax cut and let people decide how to spend their own money.

A huge tax cut was candidate Bush's loudest campaign song. The Democrats took polls and found that the people weren't very interested.

Anyway the Democrats comforted themselves when Bush succeeded by saying - well it takes months and months of debate for any tax bill to go through, and after all you only face a tax bill once every 10 years.

To everybody's astonishment, including, I suspect, President Bush's, nine or 10 Democrats in the House moved over and gave the Republicans enough votes to pass a big tax bill and cut, after only a short debate, and President Bush signed it last week.

One forlorn Democratic leader described it as: "A good short-term bill, in the long run a disaster."

Looking back over what they're calling the Clinton legacy, the real political complexion of it is something both parties prefer not to recognise. Which is that Mr Clinton moved more and more away from New Deal thinking toward the centre.

In fact the best things that came out of his second term were two bills - having to do with maternity and paternity leave - that were jointly sponsored by the most left wing of Senate Democrats and the most right wing of Republican senators.

And I think the biggest single achievement of the Clinton reign was a successful shift of over a million Americans off welfare on to work. This was not only the idea but the performance of a Republican governor in the state of Wisconsin. He's now in President Bush's cabinet.

Still if Professor Ferguson had been looking over the ideological condition of American government as well as British he might well have written - before the advent of President Bush - that in America too conservatism was triumphant. Even more so now when President Bush positively and proudly declares that he has come to revive and revivify the conservatism of Ronald Reagan.

The Democrats, without a leader and without a policy of their own, are suddenly blessing the obscure senator from Vermont who left the Republican Party and became an independent and so broke the 50/50 deadlock in the Senate and gave the Democrats the chairmanship of the Senate committees.

They can now deny the president the laws he'd like to have passed by asserting the power of Senate committee chairmen to keep bills they don't like from coming to a vote on the floor of the Senate.

It's not exactly a heroic political stance but it will have to do until the Democrats find a leader and a policy.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING 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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