Society
Hague just can't get his head round England: it's way too big
Published 09 October 2000
This Christmas, William Hague, Ffion at his side, will be sitting in his Range Rover, enjoying a bottle of wine and some turkey sandwiches as he feasts his eyes upon the Yorkshire Dales. Weather permitting, the two may take up their sticks and go for a walk.
The "rest of the nation", William told us in Just William (and Ffion), the recent Channel 4 documentary about the leader of the opposition, were welcome to go on "enjoying family arguments" but, for him and his bride, it was to be a quiet sandwich in the car. No family, no friends, not even church-going - it seemed a pretty peculiar way to spend Christmas Day. Yet the irony of this oddball viewing the rest of us as dysfunctional squabblers who will spend the holiday stuffing ham down one another's trousers and pelting each other with buns was lost on William.
But not on anyone who watched the programme. Its star wore a regular guy's Banana Republic T-shirt and boasted of his down-to-earth attitude at every step, but he was so tense with his interviewer, awkward with his jolly sisters, and unconvincing when fondling Ffion, that we knew there was very little that was normal about him.
It wasn't just Willie's weirdness that came out loud and clear in the documentary. His provincialism, too, became obvious. The man's roots, he kept reminding us, are in a few square miles of north Yorkshire - and his allegiances are to the men and women who live there. For these simple and amiable folk, London is that "place down there", an alien den packed with foreigners, blacks and men in gay pride T-shirts. William was at ease when he was downing rum and black and hoovering big slabs of artery- blocking meat pies. He relaxed with Mother Goose, a woman the size of a barn who owned a boarding house and fed him a proper Yorkshire tea; and he hailed as bosom buddies a series of country bumpkins who looked like walk-on extras from Emmerdale. Little England is way too big for this man to get his head round; he feels at home only when he is within whistling distance of his neighbour's field.
Having a homespun leader may play well to some of the Tories down on the farm, and he can pick up a vote or two as the solid alternative to supercilious Islington Person. But what do the snobbish ladies in the shires make of him? You can hear them at their coffee mornings, tut-tutting over the way he held his fish knife or bunched up his napkin at the end of the meal. For these Conservative battleaxes who swell the party ranks, organise its fundraisers and staff its selection committees, the Yorkshire lad is a bit of an embarrassment, like a whiff of cow dung suddenly wafting through the French windows.
It is not just the Tory matrons who will be worried if he gets to No 10. Imagine what Gerhard Schroder or Lionel Jospin will make of the homeboy who prefers stout to champagne and thinks the world stops at York. William may remind us that Harold Wilson was from the same parts, but this is the age of globalisation: when all the world's your stage, you'd better have a taste for focaccia and be at ease with Lexus Man as much as Mondeo Man.
Willie's strong sense of roots will usher in a new era of tribalism: to the provincial, the world divided into Them and Us. The outsider is suspect, change worrying, and feuds are bitter and three generations long. It's an attitude that sets the stage for a factionalised party that would make today's Brown v Blair camps look like one big happy family. William's inner circle - Coe, Finkelstein and the teenyboppers who hang on to their coat-tails - will be tight, its horizons restricted to a cosy world where anything unfamiliar will be censured. Anyone who would raise eyebrows in a high street back home will find himself unwelcome; any policy that smacks of the metropolitan liberal elite will be resisted. This is a narrow platform - and it can draw only the most narrow of support. How many voters in Yorkshire?
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