UK Election: 2

It's a measure of how little we care about what Christopher Hitchens has to say that it took us a week to get around to reading his endorsement of Tony Blair in Slate. But it's no less revealing of Hitch's pathology for being a week old. First, there's the following element of his past rationales for not voting Labour:

though in the 1979 election the Callaghan regime had become so corrupt and incompetent and reactionary that I didn't vote at all.

This is a language and logic that would embarrass even the scruffiest second year college radical; poor "Sunny" Jim Callaghan was indeed a reactionary -- if one defines the term as meaning someone who, like, reacts to events. Such as by not doing much of anything in the face of out-of-control trade union militancy. Since Jim died recently, we can go to the London Times obituary for the accurate summary sentence:

It was his fate to have to stand impotently on the sidelines as the organised muscle of British trade unionism put on a display of such brow-beating and bullying that the public resolved to keep the political wing of the labour-industrial movement out of office for the next four general elections.

Some "regime." And in this topsy-turvy world, we find that the best line about Callaghan with contemporary relevance came from William Rees-Mogg, also in the Times:

One measure of an unsuccessful Prime Minister is the length of time it takes for his party to get back into a majority after he has left office. In Jim Callaghan’s case, after 1979, that was 18 years, the longest period of any Prime Minister of the 20th century, unless one includes Lloyd George [Liberal], whose tally is 82 years and still counting.

A verdict well deserved for the man who expertly moved Ireland along from one crisis to the next: World War I conscription, then a War of Independence, and Partition -- bequeathing a mess that Callaghan found himself trying to clean up 50 years later.

We learn one other thing about Hitch's political fervour. In that election in which he saw himself as above participating, Callaghan's opponent and victor was Maggie Thatcher. So even long before Hitch's more obvious descent into the reactionary mire in 1990s America, here is someone who couldn't lift his arse to vote against the conservative revolution in Britain, and yet could spend the next 15 years getting all worked up about the malign influence of Mother Teresa and Diana Spencer. 20 years later, it's Bill Clinton and Al Gore who earn the contempt while another conservative revolution unfolds under the old leftie's nose. It must be about time for a screed against Martha Stewart.

[Previous entry in this series.]