I SPENT four days in the UK last week to observe - from the viewpoint of the voter - the election campaign. What I saw was negative campaigning by all parties. Every billboard screamed an accusation. Every poster yelled an allegation. And every headline shrieked sleaze!
The Tories are desperately trying to cast off the mud. But since John Major has no power to deselect Neil Hamilton - the MP, at the centre of the "cash for questions" controversy - the sleaze factor remains a central element in the election.
The Tories might prefer to focus on the real issues and more especially on the style and leadership of Tony Blair and the paucity of his policies.
Hamilton, in fairness, is doing his best to turn adversity to his advantage. It was widely interpreted as a turn up for the books when he came out rather well in a street encounter with BBC journalist Martin Bell, the anti corruption campaigner.
In fact, it was both predictable and significant. Martin Bell may come from within media, but Neil Hamilton's wife, looking at media from the outside, has a better understanding of what its needs are. She apprehends the increasing theatricality of politics, in which events are staged for amass media, and created her own street theatre on Knutsford Common, waiting until the microphones were within range and the cameras in sharp focus before launching a single accusatory soundbite. Did Bell agree that people were innocent until proven guilty, she asked.
Suddenly, Bell was in the wrong. A fast assent was what was needed. But Bell, figuring correctly that a speedy "yes" would line him up for the next salvo, hesitated, thereby leaving himself open to pursuit. Mrs Hamilton promptly pursued him, poking him with quotable quotes, none of them too lengthy or challenging for a tabloid or that night's TV news. It all deflected "attention from the awkward business of cash for questions.
Instead, those column inches were going to Hamilton's "formidable" wife, as the Mail put it, talking of "their agony and their love". As entertainment, this is great.
As a demonstration that human interest stories will always have more interest than stories on the ethics, it is instructive.
Since Walter Mondale's unsuccessful presidential run, politicians have known that feeding the media monster is a crucial prerequisite of a political career. The British campaign may well be the one which takes that a step further. It may be the campaign which establishes that policies, parliamentary performance and an ideological framework are irrelevant, and what matters is the creation of an unthreatening populism which is media friendly.
If Labour wins this election, that would be a legitimate conclusion to be reached, since it is Labour, in the presentation of itself as a party and of Tony Blair as its leader, which has abandoned the primacy of policies.
The rationale behind the length of the Tory campaign was the hope it would flush Blair out, forcing him to explain his policies. That has proved very difficult. Labour's stance has been "never mind the policies, feel the smile". Blair has been all teeth and shirtsleeves in an essentially American campaign majoring on picture and atmosphere while pushing policies and stances to one side.
Labour's objectives seemed to be to ensure that no boat was rocked and that John Prescott's working class fingerprints were kept off the Filofax. Up to this week, it seemed to be working. Now it's unravelling, for two reasons. First of all, Labour contradicted itself publicly, most notably over Scottish devolution. Secondly the cardboard figure of Blair has begun to look one dimensional.
By contrast, Major is a hardened campaigner who should not be underestimated. He exemplifies Johnson's observation that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully.
My personal knowledge of John Major goes back to when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and I was attending EU Ecofin meetings. I found him down to earth as few other British ministers were, and also kind and considerate to his civil servants.
Later, I knew him as Prime Minister. I have said before that we owe the peace process to the courage of one man, Albert Reynolds, and the openness of another, John Major. He is open and moves from monochrome to Technicolor under extreme pressure. When all the chips are down, out comes his soap box and up he, gets on it to stiffen his own troops and reinforce potential voters.
This week the deputy head of a large Catholic second level school in the UK told me she cordially hates the Tories for the damage done to the education system, under their aegis, but may still vote Conservative - because she sees Major as more trustworthy than Blair.
There has been the usual genteel tut tutting about negative campaigning, as if this was an unwelcome new arrival which would not possibly work. This is a peculiarly durable myth, this one of negative campaigning as a fruitless and distasteful New Thing. Distasteful it may be, but it is neither fruitless nor new.
ONE of the first truly negative campaigns was waged in 1934 by one Clem Whitaker, a public relations man in California, on behalf of a Republican running against a Democrat, muckraking journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair.
Whitaker cast the campaign as a holy war against "Sinclairism" which was represented as more or less the same as communism. A highlight of the campaign was a series of phoney newsreels, showing mobs of vagrants (actually actors) supposedly on their way to California to get in on Sinclair's welfare schemes.
Sinclair lost, and Whitaker made a fortune peddling negative campaigning to other candidates, constantly stressing that voters may change their minds on particular issues, but their fundamental needs remain constant. Two of the most fundamental of those needs are the need to be entertained and the need for conflict. People like to take sides and they don't want to be bored.
In Britain, negative campaigning is particularly effective because of the tendency of newspapers to throw in their lot with a particular party in advance of an election.
This leads to a hunger for angles, insults and embarrassing pictures rather than to a hunger for discussion, in print, of issues and of policies.
In this area Irish newspapers, which have tended over the last few years to be rather less corporately aligned with any individual political party, better serve the needs of democracy.