Election 2001 - A L Kennedy, James Fenton, David Hare: these and other writers fill the media with their elite disdain for politicians. John Lloyd denounces them

Like many in this election campaign, I have had something like a Bryan Gould experience. It is, wrote the former Labour shadow cabinet member and contender for the party leadership, the mystery of a large poll lead, concomitant with being able to find "virtually no one who likes the government".

My experience was milder. I have been able to find, without seeking, people who like the government; but I did have a conversation with an acquaintance who had voted Labour before, and now "can't, just can't". A criminal lawyer, he said that "Jack Straw was just too much". I asked in what way. "The abolition of trial by jury." I said this was only for minor cases. He said it was a sign of worse to come. I asked why that was bad for his clients. "It'll be much tougher to get them off!" This he said in a way intended to make clear that these would mainly be the guilty.

Gould wrote his observation in the Guardian on 4 May, and got it on TV by means of a short Channel 4 documentary screened at peak time on 6 May. His doing so illustrates a curious dichotomy in our present intellectual life. The broadcasters and the publishers are now more full of voices and images denouncing the government than ever before.

I did not draw the same conclusions from my "can't vote Labour" conversation as did Gould. I was struck not by the profundity of my acquaintance's dislike, but by its shallowness. He did not move to denounce Straw or Labour with passion, or even with much knowledge.

His was the gambit of a liberally inclined man who wanted a simple agreement: "Isn't this government awful!" This is the way in which the government is now framed. It is being so framed by the media, whose more intellectually inclined practitioners know, from an acquaintance with modern communications theory, that events are constantly "framed" or "privileged" or "foregrounded" by the dominant powers. Thus, in the past century, the dominant Europeans framed Africans as savage, women as inferior, Jews as grasping. More recently, organised labour has been framed as destructive, feminists as shrill, immigrants as threatening.

The media have spent time and money on trying to de-frame such groups. In the course of this, another frame has been created: the one for the politicians. It is a thicker and more rigid frame than previous ones - because it is almost universally applauded by most sections of the media. It has thus become "common sense".

The style of educated discourse about politicians is now one of high scorn - a huge victory for the left elite's views over the past three decades. The journalistic squibs of the most ambitious young leftists of the 1970s - in particular, their deep contempt for mainstream politicians - have seeped into the mainstream of the profession. In the current campaign, this has been accentuated by the employment in the media of creative writers to comment on the election.

The less they know about politics, the higher is their scorn. The Scots novelist A L Kennedy, who writes an occasional column in the Guardian, admits (16 May) she knows little about politics, but believes, nevertheless, that politicians are less than human. Listing people she has met (or created) as drug-dealers, murderers, chequebook journalists, she continues: "And then there are the politicians . . . they have rabidly embraced sociopathic levels of irresponsibility and deception while creating world visions which are dangerously unhinged from any recognisable reality."

Kennedy is the quintessence of this kind of writing because it depends, avowedly, not on a knowledge of politics, but on a higher sensibility: a moral intuition that politicians are rotten people pursuing phantasmagoric goals. The novelist Robert Harris does know about politics, however - he was political editor of the Observer and then a widely admired columnist for the Sunday Times. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of new Labour; but in his renewed column for the Sunday Times, he reveals himself as a man brutally disillusioned. Every time he turns on the TV or picks up a paper to read the political news, he feels "a great surge of revulsion" (13 May). When he learnt that the date of the general election had been leaked to the Sun, or saw Tony Blair pose for the girls at St Saviour's school to launch the election campaign, he wonders: "How deep was the cynicism? . . . How gross the duplicity?" New Labour has been reduced "solely to a desire for power". As one who had helped it into being, he feels tarnished.

The political ingenue and the political insider come together in their use of language. People whose fortunes have been built on the careful use of words are astoundingly profligate in their use. "Rabid", "sociopathic", "cowed" or "quelled", "revulsion", "cynicism", "duplicity", "nightmare", "drop-dead fiasco of such epic proportions" are employed to describe the leak of an election date, a press launch in a girls' school, or an unspecified whiff of political corruption.

Harris was keen on new Labour when Peter Mandelson, a close friend, was a minister. Mandelson, whom many saw as a conductor for all the sins that Harris now attributes to the government, was fired, and Harris thus has an interest in savaging the Tony Blair and his team.

As does the comedian Rory Bremner. Bremner asked for a press ticket for Blair's campaign bus - and was refused. In an article on this incident (Sunday Telegraph, 13 May), he writes: "I was quite looking forward to being disabused of my impression of the government as a nervy, paranoid clique which talks of openness but in reality exercises ruthless control . . . the reality is even worse."

In the same article, Bremner recalls the incident, in the 1997 election campaign, when the novelist Will Self was thrown off John Major's campaign jet for taking drugs in the toilet. Self, who was writing for the Observer, was dismissed by the newspaper (though he was kept on by this paper). It is an index of the radicalism of the media now that Self has been employed by BBC Radio 4's Today programme as a kind of writer-in-residence for its election commentaries. These have not, in fact, employed Self's magnificent linguistic skills: in perhaps unconscious comradeship to his doleful sense of weariness with the campaign, he uses cliche and bathos rather than hyperbole.

The quieter tone is also used by the playwright David Hare and the poet and critic James Fenton, in their columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian respectively. Hare, who had been the British stage's leading radical, is now prepared (25 May) to see in Peter Mandelson a man "liberated by his recent experiences" and credits him (overgenerously) with, for the first time, bringing "Northern Ireland's wildly disparate representatives together". Even Hague is accused (24 May) of nothing worse than a management consultant's approach to politics.

Fenton, in the Guardian, is not so admiring and is less focused: in a piece on the Liberal Democrats on 25 May, he digresses at knowledgeable length on trees and plants, with the rather flimsy excuse that the environment is a topic of the day. In his observations, however, he is shrewder than Hare, able to see the Liberal Democrats' penny on income tax, which attracts them a great deal of bien-pensant support, as not a policy so much as "a symbol for the kind of policy they would have if they really needed one".

What links Fenton and Hare with their fellow writers is a default mechanism of detached disdain for the process they are observing. They do not consider - though it would seem to flow from some of their observations - the truly radical thought that politicians assist rather than destroy the maintenance of civil society; that they are precious rather than disgusting individuals in a time of media dominance; that they defend rather than pollute the public sphere. It is the prose of de haut en bas: a confirmation that the cultural has, in the minds of the literati, and especially of the media, sealed its moral suzerainty over the political.

In the 1970s, Fenton was one member, with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, of a New Statesman staff that was hugely influential in the creation of the new left journalism, which has now become general - if in a grossly debased form. None of these writers practises it. Fenton became a foreign correspondent, developed as a poet and now writes fine essays of art criticism. Amis became a grand novelist; recently, he has sought to revise his political stance, to the point where his most engrossing thoughts on politics revolve round the hideousness of communism and the paucity of the western intellectual response to its crimes. Hitchens remains a radical journalist: in some ways, the radical journalist, working as he does the rich and high-octane seam of US politics. He is a great denouncer. Fairness is no part of his brief; but in pursuit of his partiality, he works much harder than those who oppose or seek to follow him. The reader is given some basis to hate with him.

The present creatives do not do that. None rises to anything like the engagement that Norman Mailer brought to the 1960 US presidential election campaign - writing that drew a generation of would-be authors towards journalism rather than fiction.

Instead, they prefer the tropes given to them by the commentators of the right - that Labour is a hopelessly compromised and shallow bauble.

The sound of the frames being nailed into place has been louder in this campaign than ever before.

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