Never give up

Yesterday, after attending the count in the Llandudno conference centre, I drove to the village of Rhos, near Wrexham, where I had been invited to speak to the children of my old primary school, Wern. After 164 years of serving the community, the school is to close, a victim of the “big is better” approach which is leading to the demise of so many schools around Wales.

It was good to be back. It is a church controlled school, and I owe much of whatever I have achieved in life to the ethos it promoted. I was happy, by visiting it, to do what I could to return a little of what it gave me all those decades ago.

 The children were very good value, attentive and polite. I was interviewed by a panel of three senior pupils. One of their questions was: “What single piece of advice would you give us?”

 The answer I gave would come naturally to almost any politician. It was: “Never give up. Whatever life throws at you, never give up.”

 Most politicians would give such an answer, because most of them are used to reverses in their profession. You won’t be long on the political ladder before you realise that it is not a smooth career progression. You will suffer losses and disappointments, many of them deep and wounding. But you will pick yourself up and carry on. If you are disposed to be a quitter, you should avoid a career in politics.

Consider, then, the advice that Labour MPs have today received from the peerless Matthew Parris in the Times. Parris’s considered view, having weighed the options available to those honourable Members in the wake of the local elections, is that they now have only one course of action open to them: they should give up. 

 Parris puts it quite bluntly:

 It’s over. There was nothing constructive in the voters’ message. These elections were not an invitation to change. They were a big two-fingered salute, a raspberry, a pressing of the de-trousered national buttocks to the window of the polling station. The voters are bored, tired, disillusioned and out of love. The affair, which in 1997 was (for the British people) uncharacteristically intense, is over, and the falling out is correspondingly bitter. Such flames are not rekindled – and certainly not by Mr Brown, whose personal stamp characterises this administration.

Regular readers will know that I yield to no one in my admiration for Matthew Parris. Of all political commentators, he is the one I turn to first on a Saturday morning. He it is who gives the coffee its aroma, the toast its crunch and the muesli its sweetness. He is simply the best. 

But, on this occasion, I fear that Mr Parris’s advice will, and should, go unheeded. No politician, Labour or otherwise, should just give up. While there is breath in his body or blood in his veins, he should fight, fight, fight. Politics has no room to accommodate the thrown-in towel.

And anyway, it won’t happen. No politician of any party is going to yield while there is still the ghost of a chance, however illusory, of succeeding.

I know, from my conversations with them, that many of my Labour colleagues were more than a tad depressed last week. They were expecting the worst on Thursday, and their fears were not unfounded. They will be bitterly unhappy with the local election results; for many of them, they point to the loss of their jobs at the next general election.

But they won’t give up. They will carry on fighting over the next two years. And when the election comes in 2010, they will give it their all.

Because that is what politicians do. They fight. It comes naturally to them, however hopeless the cause may seem. That is how most of them got to be MPs in the first place.

As Stephen Fry’s General Melchett so memorably put it in Blackadder Goes Forth:

That’s the spirit, George! If nothing else works, then a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through!