An American In Confusion

So the Tories both won and lost then? Jo scratched her head in confusion. My wife has been loyally trying to share my excitement for the drama of the last few days; however, explaining to an American how the party with the most votes doesn’t automatically become the government is like reasoning with Izzy, our one-year-old, about why she can’t play with the remote control. To her it’s just unfair.

“But if the Tories can’t form a government without Nick Clegg, and Labour got fewer votes than the Tories, why didn’t the Queen just tell Gordon Brown to start packing?”

As I take a deep breath and prepare for a dissertation on the role of the monarchy I warm the teapot – another peculiar English custom with no apparent purpose.

This week we celebrated our fifth anniversary since Jo joined me on an Italian cookery course and never went home. Since then we’ve acquired two dogs, a house, a baby and a marriage. And every day she discovers something about British life to amaze and confuse her.

Roundabouts, Radio Four, rugby: there’s a never-ending list of extraordinary British traditions she’s come to accept. One of the things I most enjoy about living with her is that she questions all sorts of things I’ve always taken for granted. Like George, the postman.

Every morning he drives his van 20 miles from the sorting office to our house to deliver our bills. An hour later I drive to the village to put a pile of envelopes into a postbox which someone then takes out, puts into a van and takes back to George’s sorting office. “So why doesn’t George simply pick up our post when he comes round in the morning?” In fact, George does exactly this if we ask him - he's the best postman I've ever had in the UK - but it's only as a favour because I know it isn't common Royal Mail policy: if Britain adopted this system, which is standard throughout the United States, it would save the country a fortune and make all our lives easier. Over there every home has a mailbox outside with a little flag which you put up if you have any outgoing mail. Simples.

Jo would make a great prime minister. In just five minutes she would have sorted out not only the mail service (the word “post” would be redundant, as we’d no longer actually post anything), but also restored hygiene to our cities with weekly collections from bins large enough to hold all our rubbish, insisted that pubs offer more options than just roast dead animal for Sunday lunch (fine once a month, but every week?), and, top of her policy agenda, revolutionised the beauty salon.

Why can’t they do a manicure and a pedicure at the same time? Here it takes two hours and costs a fortune. In LA I can get both done in 20 minutes. And don’t get me onto shopping malls. How dare they charge you for parking when you’re only there to buy stuff from them?

Next week her parents fly in for a holiday. Jo asked me to make sure there are plenty of flowers in the garden. I tried patiently explaining how in Southern California you just ring up some Mexican gardeners and they come bearing instant blooms. Over here we have seasons and the herbaceous border has a mind of its own. What with this cold spell and the long winter, we’ll be lucky to have a bedful by October. She’s not impressed.

Northumberland be warned: there’ll be three Americans in the county next week, questioning our way of life. I’ve thought of hiring a local travel guide to help me with the more difficult comments. “Why do you call this little road A1 when there’s only one lane?” they’ll ask when we head up the coast towards Holy Island. “Why do your tea shops close at 4.30pm – isn’t that tea time?”

But the most important question my father-in-law will want answered, as we sit round the roaring fire in late May, will be: how on earth could a nice Democrat like Clegg ever believe he should share power with an arch Republican like Cameron? He’ll find that one completely incomprehensible.

When Did You Cry Last?

When did you cry last? It’s such a simple question, but it clearly disorientated Nick Clegg. Eddie Mair threw him this curved ball on Radio 4’s PM programme. The electorate had begun to take Clegg seriously, so Mair invited him to reveal a little of his true self. It was good timing: earlier that day, Gordon Brown had shown us his real character in the back of a car in Rochdale, speeding away from “just a bigoted woman”.

Gosh, when did I cry last? When did I cry last? You could hear the cogs churning in Clegg’s brain – this wasn’t on his list of carefully spun answers. Finally he offered: the last time he cried “was to some particularly moving music”.

Mair was having none of that. Which piece exactly? At which point Clegg clammed up: “Oh, I’m afraid a lot of music moves me so if I started giving you a list we’d be here all day”. And with that he sailed back into the safer waters of liberal policy.

Now if I were a politician (God help the country, I hear you say), I reckoned this was one question I could answer truthfully without hesitation. I’m such a romantic old softie, I could cry at a poster of Four Weddings And A Funeral. As the interview droned off into political predictability, my mind drifted to which tearstained event in my life might win the most votes.

There was the death of our dog Muka. Seventeen years ancient, I can still see her big bat ears opening with surprise as the vet injected the deadly blue liquid putting her to sleep forever. On the drive home without her, the image released such huge waves of sobbing, I had to stop the car in a layby to dry off the seats. That ought to win over the animal lobby, but perhaps it sounded too wimpy?

I couldn’t break a single tear at my father’s funeral because I was too overcome by the suddenness and scale of the event. I was 20, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I went back to North Shields cemetery. There, despite thousands of additions to the vast maze of near-identical plots, I was drawn straight to his gravestone. At the sight of his name, years of pent up grief unleashed themselves. Too intrusive, perhaps? Would Mair have dared to pose that same question to Cameron and Brown, knowing that they have such raw memories close to home?

So after all perhaps Clegg chose well: music is a safe enough bet for a politician. Despite my love of opera, I’ve never dared go to a performance of Turandot, partly because I don’t want to spoil the images the music has conjured in my head, but mostly because I know I would embarrass myself hopelessly if I heard Puccini’s themes anywhere but in the privacy of my own sitting room. Like I did at an open-air Art Garfunkel concert on Hampstead Heath amongst 10,000 people picnicking on white wine and sausage rolls. Joanna loves to tease me about how everyone around us broke into fits of giggles at the sight of my face flooded with tears at the first bars of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Ah, that fatal combination of music, nostalgia and white wine.

At the North East Business Awards last week I tried out Mair’s question on some true professionals. A leading public relations expert immediately replied, “I cried buckets at my 5 year old daughter’s school play”. And one of the region’s top political movers and shakers, well used to being doorstepped by the press, said “every time I think of Madeleine McCann”. And as if to prove it, she immediately welled up right in front of me.

Two perfect sound bites: they should offer their services to the Liberal Democrats.

Cleggstacy

Nick Clegg and my one-year-old daughter Izzy have something in common. Last week they both took their first grownup steps. The two events had equally devastating consequences. Jo and I have had to raise everything in the sitting room above child height: and, having found that their opponent is a baby no more, Labour and the Tories are belatedly rushing around trying to raise their game.

I missed Clegg’s first performance because the volcano had caused me to get stuck in France. Thanks to a surprisingly luxurious ferry (I know that sounds like a contradiction, but a huge cabin with a kingsize bed, private bathroom and breakfast-in-bed hands Brittany Ferries my vote for Most Stylish Cross-Channel Ferry), I arrived back in time to miss the wedding of my old friend, Christopher Graham.

Chris has one of the most powerful jobs in Britain: he’s our Information Commissioner. Appointed by the Crown, his job is to promote openness by public bodies and protect the privacy of our data. He’s the chap who decides what we should know about our elected representatives and what the government should know about us. In short, he’s our country’s Head of Fairness and Openness, the bloke you go to if you want to find out what our MPs and public corporations are doing or spending.

We met in the early 1970s when we were both BBC news trainees. Chris had been interested in politics all his life: he was a Liverpool city councillor at the age of 21 and he tried in vain to become an MP in the 1980s. It was Chris who first drew my attention to the plight of the Liberals.

He and I had volunteered to work on the results programme on the February 1974 election. Chris was very excited because the Libs, or Soggies as we unkindly called them, were on the verge of a breakthrough. If they achieved over 21% of the popular vote, they’d end up with maybe fifty MPs, compared to the six they currently had. At long last there would be a third force in British politics.

In fact, the Libs succeeded in doubling their vote to 6 million, more than half the support of either big party, but won only 14 seats. Statistically that meant (as Chris would recite endlessly to anyone who would listen) it took just 39,000 votes to elect a Labour MP, but 433,000 votes to elect a Liberal. That’s simply not fair, said Chris. And it still isn’t.

Even if Clegg gets 30% of the vote, he’ll only get around 100 seats – compared to the 200 he deserves. And that’s plain wrong: our cockeyed version of democracy means that if one party is supported by around 39%, that party can pretty well ignore the views of the 61% who voted against them.

After the 1974 election, Ted Heath desperately tried to keep power by seeking a coalition with the Liberals. But Jeremy Thorpe’s condition – electoral reform – was a dealbreaker. This time, the winner will be the party that offers voting reform first. Irrespective of which party gets the most votes on May 6th, unless Clegg falls flat on his face in this Thursday’s debate we’re likely to have coalition politics in Britain forever. That means Lib Dems in government for the foreseeable future.

And that, of course, is perfectly fair. If the Lib Dem vote sticks at around 30%, the British public isn’t going to tolerate Labour, with fewer votes, getting substantially more seats and possibly even forming a government.

Nick Clegg’s newfound popularity has exposed the obsolescence of the British voting system, which will have a serious crisis of legitimacy unless the established parties offer complete reform. The baby is walking – there’s no going back now.