The yawning after the night before

Don't expect this posting to be as long as my previous late night marathon earlier this week. I'm rather tired and fancy an afternoon nap! I'm not ready for my dotage just yet, but following the British General Election this last 30 hours or so has been an exhausting business- and that's just as a mere viewer, never mind candidate or counter!

However, it seems that even the tellers who continue to tally up the votes in our wonderfully old-fashioned British system of a cross on a ballot paper without a chad in sight have their limits. The umpteenth re-count for one southern constituency has now been held off til tomorrow as the counting staff were tired and needed a break. This brought no sympathy from BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce though, nor the sixtyish elder of the two Dimbleby brothers who fronted the corporation's ever-superior Election Night coverage. "Where's their Stamina?" Ms Bruce offered somewhat condescendingly late this morning, though she probably has a point.

The whole BBC team had been on air from 9.55 p.m last night. Judging from the results of their joint ICM/MORI exit poll with the commercial broadcaster ITV, mind, they could just have easily have packed their bags and gone home there and then: amazingly, the prediction is for once remarkably close to the actual final result which seems to leave birthday boy Blair (52 today and probably feeling it!) with a 66 seat majority- exactly what the poll predicted.

Still, where's the fun in relying on opinion polls? Had the broadcasters left it at that, not only would the broadcasters have been perilously close to giving in to the hated US way of doing things, but we would have lost all the drama, the shocks and surprises of the greatest reality show around, such a mammoth undertaking that we only get to see it every four or five years. And boy, there were certainly plenty of surprises for both unwitting viewer and politico last night and this morning.

I do miss the action and the building tension and the involvement in the whole process I used to get when I worked for the BBC. My one and so far only visit to a count was to the Hastings and Rye constituency in John Major's surprise election victory of 92, when I served as technical assistant to one of the Beeb's more technophobe freelance journos. Great fun! Elections are best shared with someone else, I always feel, but unfortunately my brother was pretty tired last night and bowed to having to get up for work in the morning. Where's HIS stamina: that never stopped me back on that incredible May morning of 1997 when New Labour first ousted the Tories after an eighteen-year spell in power.

I remember then going off to pray in the park- well, the Pavilion Gardens, Brighton, to be precise- after spending an exciting night in the BBC's old Brighton base sharing the event with my mate Andrew who works for the BBC's regional TV news department. Staggered was not the word when we discovered that even true blue Hove (Brighton's classier neighbour since united with it as a city) had succumbed to the New Labour charm- though I was amazed to find that they still managed victory there last night even after a change of candidate. Somehow, at that time it really did seem like a new dawn for Britain, and maybe we somehow all believed as the victory song of Blair's Buddies had it :"Things can only get better". But have they?

Well, who knows? It all depends whose figures you believe, what criteria you take and how you judge the betterment of the country. Certainly, if measured purely in terms of material wealth and how it is spread across society, I would say that Britain is a better place after eight years of Labour government (though where have those years gone so quickly!?). My own present situation excepted, which is partly due to my own actions in giving up a stressful, unsatisfying job last June, unemployment has never been so low for decades. More people own their own homes than ever before, mortgage rates though past their nadir are still as low as many folk can remember.

People are, it would seem, better educated- if at a price. More folk have access to university education than ever before, rather reminiscent of the Open University days and the "white heat of technology" of Harold Wilson under which Blair spent his teenage years and surely left their legacy. But hang on: right in the middle of the campaign, Britain's last remaining volume car maker, Rover, becomes "Over" as they go bust, and now even the great name of Marconi and the US giant IBM are having to lay workers off as the merciless march of market forces once again bite into the benevolent intentions of progressively minded politicians.

Everything in the garden is not lovely, Mr Blair, and people know it. This is why, surely, the party has lost a large part of its previous majority over all other parties and as the commentators put it this morning, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair has had his wings clipped. Not that it may worry him too much, apart from party solidarity; he has already indicated he will not be fighting the next election which surely now falls to Gordon Brown, the prudent chancellor who has taken much of the credit for Labour's economic successes.

Who his main contender will be though, for that far off date in 2009 or even the end of the decade, who knows! This lunchtime in Putney brought the shock news from Michael Howard, the conservative leader, that he too would not be around for the next meeting of red, gold and blue and numerous other colours of the political spectrum in a few years time. Howard blames age, he being 63 now, though this seems a somewhat untenable argument given that the 20th century's greatest politician, Sir Winston Churchill whose memory will be much to the fore this VE60 weekend, was still serving in the highest office in the land around the age of eighty. And look what he managed to achieve, even after the ignominy of defeat in the so called "Khaki election" of that year.

Which leaves just the third force in this wonderfully entertaining manifestation of democracy we call the British political system. The boy Charlie done good! Well, I've got to say that of Mr Kennedy and the Liberal Democrats haven't I, as he is the same age as me and has just become a new daddy- so there's hope for me yet! However, few people are saying that the Lib Dem success story yesterday- gaining another dozen seats or so- was a one off reaction of protest to Britain's involvement in Gulf War II, which many would have seen as Mr Blair's nemesis. We may not yet have proportional representation, but we do have a third force in British politics at last in the shape of the Lib Dems.

Thank the Lord for that; another memory of my GCE exams and particularly the original Liberal party's contribution to the foundations of the welfare state we Brits so treasure. Remember it was Liberals who first gave us retirement pensions, unemployment insurance and numerous other benefits we now take for granted and would protect to the last. Could it be that their time has now come again? Well, who knows: it's very unpredictability is one of the most fascinating manifestations of politics, but if a week is a long time, what price four/five more years. Never mind, the spirit of Churchill lives on. Let us never forget how much was owed to so few- the one time Liberal chancellor who later became Britain's great Tory wartime leader, and Lloyd George who, actually, did not know my father.

GOD GETS THE VOTE
When all is said and done, politicians are after all only human. They have feet of clay, and as the late, great Robin Day once so memorably said can be "here today, gone tomorrow". Wasn't it to John Nott, one time Tory cabinet member, who promptly walked off from the interview in disgust? Fragile things, pragmatic and idealistic- the people as well as their politics, which has to be about more than expediency but as Blair was humble enough to admit this morning, listening to people. The trouble is you see, politicians don't have all the answers, but our modern secular society tends to lionise them and expect them to do so.
The reality is, it seems to me, nothing will ever change for permanent good in our society until our basic spiritual state is changed. There was a well-crafted if occasionally rather long-winded piece by historian Simon Schama in the Guardian earlier this week (register at www.guardian.co.uk to read it), who was back in England observing and participatiing in our election after many years exposure to the very different US model. He made the point how the "G" word- otherwise the name of the almighty- rarely gets a mention in British campaigning, which is so very different to the US model.

This may be political pragmatism in our so called diverse and multi-cultural society, but I think it is also a great shame that our politicans do not make more reference back to the bedrock of values on which our society was founded- and most of those are the Judaeo-Christian (and indeed Muslim) ideals captured in stone literally in the Ten Commandments. Should not this underlie everything we as a society do- but who even cares or knows much about them these days? I was gratified to see a clergyman asking a question of a panel of the great and the good via the mouthpiece of Jeremy Paxman this morning, but where have been our religious leaders through much of the rest of the campaign? Christian action has been there, certainly, but it has been far too low key.

What will really change Britain- not just for four years, nor for a decade but for the duration- is when people are motivated as John Wesley was motivated, back in the eighteenth century when most of the constituencies were rotten boroughs and the only people with the vote were the landed and the sycophantic supporters of the privileged classes. I think it would be true to say that Britain c2005 is a much more classless society, though not quite, but it is definitely a much less respectful society and we need to learn to show proper regard for people such as teachers and the police again.

Tony Blair in some way seemed to acknowledge this this morning in his "victory" speech, which was followed by a wholesome family group gathering outside Number Ten after a courtesy visit to Her Majesty. In fact, the British constitution, unwritten though it is.
did not require Mr Blair to have audience with HM at all, as an incumbent Prime Minister. Nevertheless, he did so out of respect. That in itself can be a loaded word: the vitriol of ex-labour Iraq rebel George Galloway's speech and subsequent media interviews on winning the Bethnal Green and Bow seat showed anything but the qualities his party's name suggested.

John Wesley, the founder of what became the Methodist Church, is often said to have prevented a revolution in the late seventeen hundreds in Britain, something which was rife in the spirits of France and America among other territories at that time. Wesley founded schools, the forerunners of trade unions and all manner of other activities which taught the "poor" to respect themselvs and yet actually offered a way out of their misery, hope for the future and a new life. He effectively overturned the old order of privilege and condescension which had been the rule of government in England up til that time.

But what motivated Wesley? Not the promise of another four of five years in government, nor least of all the hope of a nice comfortable life in the upper house upon his retirement. Wesley knew that what mattered was not who was holding the reins in Westminster or what king was doleing out patronage from Windsor castle, but how close men's souls were to the king of kings. Much has been said during the general election campaign about the lack of a great theme for this battle of the ballots, and I'd agree. At least Wesley knew what was needed and put it in a four-pronged attack which everyone could remember- the four "Alls" of Methodism:

All people can be saved
All people need to be saved
All people can know they are saved
All people can be saved to the uttermost

Sounds like a better prescription for good government than "If you value it, vote for it" any day. Wesley, whose conversion day is celebrated later this month- had a proper sense of perspective. I'm praying for all our newly-elected, or returning, politicians today; I pray that they- whatever their beliefs- may make their watchwords in this responsible office more of John and his younger brother Charles' treasured epithets:

"Do all the good you can,

By all the means you can,

In all the ways you can,

In all the places you can,

At all the times you can

To all the people you can"

If a politician can allow this to overtake selfish ambition or pointless momentary pragmatism, then maybe he or she at the end of their earthly service can know too, like John Wesley that "things can only get better", or to put it another way as he did on his deathbed "the best is yet to be"