BROWN, LABOUR GET 'BELL RUNG'

10/02/2010

A fortnight ago renowned liberal historian Mark Mazower curiously remarked:

 

“Say what you will about Hitler…”

 

So too did witnesses follow-up Lord Bell’s Labour shadow boxing / PR master-class Tuesday night with a defence of the once-moustachioed (Bell not the Reich Führer) communicator’s straight-talk delivery and stick-to-your-guns principles.

 

“Say what you will about his politics…” one witness murmured.

 

Bell’s talk, given at the invite of the Media Society and Foreign Press Association, was a perfect example of how to win friends and influence foes.

  

When goaded by interlocutor Peter York to say something nice about himself, the modest Bell chimed,

 

“David Lewis of the Daily Mail once wrote: he’s so charming, dogs cross the street to be stroked by him.”

 

In predictable fashion, Bell, with his fiery brand of wit, had, by the end of the evening, everyone eating from his hands. 

 

It matters little that Bell, a seeming graduate from the Carl Schmitt school of black and white dichotomies, spent most of the night, red-faced and ranting over a country that clearly has no room for old men.

 

“Politics, over the last 20 years, have moved to some dreadful place called the centre ground. People think that the centre ground is midway between the left and right.  It is not, it’s in the middle between right and wrong.”

 

Or that he thought his own party had come to resemble the “appalling mob of middle-ground claptrap.”

 

“I know them all and I talk to them.  But the only thing I’m allowed to say is ‘Gosh, you’re doing well.’  If you say anything else they walk away.”

 

“Young men don’t ask old men what to do.  The (Cameroons) are not a unique group of young people that don’t like old people.” 

 

It matters little either that his post-Thatcher client list – which has included ‘Last Dictator’ Lukashenko, surmised by the Spectator to be “Europe’s answer to Kim Jong Il”; ‘robber capitalist’ Boris Berezovsky; and NHS-baiting private health companies – is every bit as mercenary and ideologically capricious as his enemies.

 

Or his bit rich, millionaire populism: “It isn’t because of the bankers it is because the Government borrowed 178 billion pounds of our money and pledged it against the collapse of very banks who have behaved improperly or irresponsibly.  They say, let’s run a society where there is no pain.”

 

On Labour, and its similarities to the PR world, he was even more unequivocal.

 

“What Blair did was say we’re now all middle class.  He made the division in society appear not to be there and through their politically correct laws and complete abuse of our freedoms, they have silenced anybody from saying anything that disagrees with them.”

 

Asked if forced to give Brown advice, Bell was unrelenting: “I couldn’t.  I’d have to apologise to my maker, my wife, my children, the rest of the county, if by any remote chance I accidently gave him good advice.   He is probably the worst prime minister this country has ever had.”

None of this matters, it seems.  What truly matters to most is the how-you-say-it art of persuasion that Bell still clearly masters.

Ryan Mahan