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Your Royal Highness, Your Grace, My Lord Bishop, Your Excellencies, Honoured President, Academicians, Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen, artists, art lovers, friends, trustees, donors, distinguished guests and assorted media scum. I rise to my feet on this occasion with a due sense of the honour that has been accorded me and not a little fear and an – I hope – becoming sense of unworthiness. For I am not an artist. Those of you that are artists are the most important people in this room. I do not say that out of sycophancy, it is in this academy a constitutional fact. There are many societies and institutions in Britain where you as artists would come lower down the social order than estate agents, debt collectors or even television actors and bankers, but not here. In the press, in much of television, in bars, clubs and workplaces all over the country artists only usually feature in conversation when they have been committed some perceived outrage against public sensibility, gullibility or decency. Otherwise they are grudgingly tolerated, faintly patronised, clumsily misunderstood or cheerfully ignored. I cannot speak for artists in knowing whether this is a good thing or a bad, some of you may prefer it that way. And of course no one of you can speak for all artists, for if ever there were a diverse collection of recalcitrant, cussed and bloody-minded individualists it is artists: one artist alone is a political party, two artists together are a rebellion, three artists in the same room are a civil war…. But my point is that whatever the position of the artist in the wider world, your position here is paramount. The administrators, financiers, public figures, the great, the good, the donors, the supporters, the mighty, the famous and the fabulous here are all in this place your submissive underlings.

To have been appointed a Trustee of this glorious institution I count as one of the great honours of my life, a life spent looking at pictures and art works with the deepest pleasure but also often with the deepest embarrassment. I will return to the question of embarrassment in a moment. First I want to summon to the feast a figure who is never far away when we talk of art, but is especially close on this exact occasion. I expect you are all familiar with the 1881 painting “A Private View at the Royal Academy� by William Frith. It depicts this very evening, the opening of the Summer Exhibition, 130 years ago. If you don’t know it, you can see it here in the John Madejski Fine Rooms, where it hangs. Frith depicts the fashionable, the artistic, the grand, the curious and the august all gathered in this very place in that High Victorian summer: they are looking at pictures, but mostly of course they are looking at each other, and many of them only have eyes for the one figure who dominates the canvas. He is a tall, elegant and charismatic young man, with a lily in his buttonhole, a catalogue in his hand and a look of unembarrassed and unselfconscious assurance in his eyes. He is of course Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.

Who was Oscar Wilde at that moment? His collected poems might have been moderately well received that year, but he was only two and half years down from Oxford, had written no plays, no books and no essays worth noting. Despite this and by virtue of personality and influence alone he was already famous enough to have inspired Gilbert and Sullivan to write Patience, an operetta that poked fun at him and his circle. And he was well known enough to dominate Frith’s enormous canvas. He occupies so important a position in the painting because he was one of the first figures and certainly the most articulate, to raise art from a hobby, a taste, an enthusiasm or an extra in life, to the status of a moral philosophy: he privileged art as the primary and central mode of human expression, the shortest path to the truth and to happiness, the highest and most important pursuit, calling or achievement to which humanity could aspire. But of course the more important art is to us, the more self-conscious we are when confronting it.

I mentioned embarrassment earlier. I think it is surprising how rarely the issue of the embarrassment inherent in engaging with art is addressed, especially in Britain where embarrassment might be said to be our national emotion. And it is peculiarly an issue with the visual arts. When we go to a concert all we have to do is close our eyes, or watch the conductor or orchestra, keep quiet and try not to make asses of ourselves by clapping at the end of a movement. We can let the music come to us, enter our ears and brains and allow it either to send us to sleep or to make a shape, a narrative, an emotional structure in our minds that delights, solaces, charms, frightens, seduces, enlivens or in any of a thousand other ways acts upon us and our thoughts and feelings. Although it seems today that if there is one thing going to a concert or play truly provokes in people it is a coughing fit. But that is a whole other kettle of wax. The point is that things are different when we look at works of art. When we go to a gallery there are other people moving and talking all around us and our time is, all things being equal, our own and not under the control of a conductor or director, we can choose to linger or pass by any individual work – choose: there is a frightening word.

There are so many unspoken dilemmas facing a gallery visitor. We arrive at an exhibition space that is displaying pieces by artists of whom we may or may not have heard. Often we are attending a show which exhibits works by names so illustrious and so, we are told, important, that they have already for hundreds of years been called Old Masters. Or they are Modern Masters, geniuses, icons, cultural heroes… they are great, or scandalous, or notorious or revered.They are intimidating.

Are we supposed to know facts about the artists and their works? Are we supposed to talk? Shall we be entirely silent and slowly stand and stare at works without comment and without revealing what we feel or shall we occasionally dare to say that we like this expression, or that shape, or those colours? Do we whisper to our companions, or do we imitate that awful show-off over there who is talking so knowledgeably and loudly about morbidezza, sfumato and golden sections? And isn’t it actually snobbish of us to disapprove of him, he is obviously enjoying himself and what is wrong with him imparting his enthusiasm and knowledge to his companion? Why should we assume he is showing off, doesn’t that assumption reveal nothing but our own self-conscious insecurity? Oh dear. It’s all so complicated. Aren’t we just striking a pose too, the pose of one who refuses to listen to any nonsense about art history, or pay any attention to the tradition or biographical background of the works before us. In fact we are going to ignore the so-called masterpiece in front of us and stylishly prefer the lesser known work next to it, just to show how original we are and how unswayed by reputations.

Even if we avoid all those contortions we still have to stand before art works that might have us entranced, or confused or perplexed, or shocked or bored or thrilled or hungry for more while at the same time knowing that there are others clamouring to see them as well, so we mustn’t hog the space directly in front, yet we are conscious too that we don’t know how far away to stand – should we step right back and risk other people getting in the way? On the other hand if we go too close are we pretentiously implying a connoisseur’s expertise in brushwork and technique? Oh dear, all I want to do is engage with the piece sincerely, with no pre-conceptions or prejudices but my own manners, fears and anxieties and my awareness of myself and of others, all obtrude. There’s always someone blocking my clear view of an artwork and that someone turns out to be myself.

All this self-consciousness. It sometimes seems that the only safe way to go round an exhibition is entirely on one’s own, otherwise we’re in terrible fear of looking like a show-off, or an ignoramus, or affected or blasé or pretentious or philistine or something equally shaming and dreadful. We yearn to be open, to learn, to be provoked, to engage honestly, simply and truthfully with a work, but to do so we must leave our self-aware, social, verbal and public selves behind. But how hard that is when we are in such a public sphere. The very fact of our being in a populous gathering automatically activates all those tribal status, power and perception regions of our brain that are death to plain, honest, naked encounters with art.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe no else here has even a ghost of such a problem. Perhaps you are thinking that I’m deluded and ill; perhaps you are all far too grown up and mature for such silly issues ever to come between you and the ability to meet a painting or work of art squarely. The artists here certainly won’t share this problem because the power to rise above self-consciousness is almost a defining quality of artists. Artists are superb at switching off awareness of self. As you can tell if you watch one eat.

Others of you however, fellow non-artists, might understand what I am talking about. And talking is the problem. While I could not be more delighted that we live in a verbal world, I do understand the pleasure in occasionally laying language aside and letting some other non-verbal part of our brains take over. For you cannot explain a work of art in words. A painter makes a painting out of paint – paint is its language. If you can define it, nail it, comprehend it in words then something is rather wrong. A work of art is precisely that which remains when you have run out of words to describe it. The works that move us most are those that have the most life and power in them when the talking stops. If an artist could have said it in words, well then they would have done. Instead they have said it in paint, or stone, or bronze, or glass or whatever medium they may have chosen. “All art is at once surface and symbol,â€� Oscar Wilde wrote. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.â€�

I think it is a relief to know that paintings and sculptures are not crossword puzzles to be solved or allegories to be read or tests to be passed, but it still does not make it easier to walk around a public gallery without being aware of the others there and without being aware of oneself and the figure one cuts. I think that is why so many people look cross in art galleries. They are either scowling at those loud, disrespectful parties of continental schoolchildren, or they are pursing their lips at a fellow Briton they deem to be showing off or they are frowning at someone who, like a bad golfer, is ahead of them and playing through too slowly. Or perhaps they are looking cross because it is art and art is supposed, isn’t it, to be serious and important and therefore demands a serious and important face?

Maybe the technology will save us. With earphones on and lost in an audio commentary we are perhaps more likely to close out the outside world and be left alone with the art work, which is what we want. And you don’t even need the audio commentary, with only the earphones you can zone out of the embarrassing present and into the artwork.

I mustn’t go too far. I raise the matter in the hope of clearing the air and letting those who also feel it enjoy the relief of fellowship. I am not completely crippled by this embarrassment problem, nor I think does it stop me from enjoying art more and more as each year passes. Nor clearly does it stop most of us. More people are going to galleries than ever before in our history. They go with excited anticipation and they go prepared to shed any preconceptions, prejudices or problems with Art with a capital A. The queues that form every single day in the courtyard here, and outside the Tate, the National and other galleries, museums and exhibition spaces show that the public enthusiasm and curiosity for art is enormous and growing.

In an increasingly infantilised world where so much seems to be split into good or bad, correct or incorrect, acceptable or unacceptable, where complex ideas are chopped up for public consumption like food chopped up for a child, where so much is hygienic, attainable, safe, sugared, assimilable, digestible, pasteurised, homogenised and sanitised, in such a world our appetite has never been greater for the complex, the ambiguous, the challenging, the untamed, the sharp, the peculiar, the surprising, the dangerous, the dirty, the difficult, the untameable, the elusive, the unsafe and the unknowable. In other words, for art. And to confront it, all we need do is to forget ourselves and our embarrassments and find a way to engage face to face. When we are in the galleries, we can all be Oscar, we can all raise our eyes to a canvas and encounter it fearlessly, with humour and grace and zest and not a trace of embarrassment. It is the adventure of a lifetime and there are few better places in the world in which to embark on such an adventure than here, where art and artists rule.

And so it is a great pleasure for me to invite my fellow guests to rise and join me in a toast to the Royal Academy of Arts….

x Stephen Fry

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Wherever and however you are reading this, welcome. It might be that you are, like me, the kind of early adopting sillyhead who has already got their hands on an iPad and, having naturally rushed to download FryPaper the App, is now reading this on your new slidey-smooth device. Perhaps you have an Android or iPhone and are making use of WordPress’s rather superior on-the-fly mobile formatting. It may be that you are quite happily reading these words the traditional way on the stephenfry.com website. You may be one of a large-ish chorus who wishes I would stop being so lazy and prevaricating and return to the habit of recording blessays and blogs in the form of a podgram as I used to do in the good old days.

© Tony Husband 2010 for Stephenfry.com

Let us suppose for a minute that you have an iPad on your lap, perched oddly on your splayed out knee, laid flat on the table, fashioned into a lectern by the Apple suedette case, cradled in your arms above your head in bed or in any of the other peculiar contortions that you will find your body adopting in order best to read and interact with your new friend. You may, rightly, think that this FryPaper app is rather simple and unexciting. Indeed it is. There are the device, the content and you and we are not very interested in clouding the interaction between the three. We might add this bell or that whistle from time to time and as occasion and opportunity might suggest, but for the moment we are happy to offer this as no more than a little something. If the mood strikes me to blog, microblog or blessay the app can suck that content from the site and let you know that it has done so and you can read it in an iPaddy sort of way. That is all there is to it.

But there is a much stronger chance that you do not own an iPad and that you are waiting to see what the fuss is about or waiting for iPad 2.0 or even 3.0. There is a chance too that you are an Apple sceptic or even Apple hater who thinks those of us who have one are dumb lemmings, mindless style slaves, pretentious boobies, suckers, poseurs and losers. Over the last few years and with a growing intensity more or less mappable onto a graph of Apple’s seemingly relentless march into greater profitability and share value, a new kind of depth of feeling has entered the tech world and I thought that on the day the iPad comes out I might as well look at this whole problem of Apple, trolling, flaming and the nastier side of Web 2.0.

The tribalism, fanaticism, fury, joy and intensity of hatred, veneration, anger, love and contempt with which Apple and its products are regarded by some must, for those who are on neither side of the sectarian divide themselves, pass all understanding. I have rarely wavered in my excitement and delight but naturally I believe my responses to be reasoned, reasonable and this side of sane. Well, I would wouldn’t I? Nobody in any realm introduces themselves as an extremist. It is only their opponents who are extremists. Some Apple devices are better than others, but I confess I am nearly always childlike in my thrilled and squeaking pleasure when the latest object of desire chugs off the Cupertino conveyor belt. What Willie Wonka was to Charlie, Steve Jobs is to me. I am pretty excited to see the latest HTC and Blackberry devices too. You would have to be very peculiar if you claimed that there was an absolutely equality in design and finish to all the gismos that come from all the manufacturers, it is of course perfectly okay not to be nuts about Apple and to choose another path to digital felicity. I would be the first to say that biodiversity is better than monoculture in the unnatural smartphone and computer world just as it is in the natural animal and plant world.

I ought at this juncture explain what my professional relationship with Apple is. I have often been told that I am a “spokesman� for the company and it is assumed by a few that I am on a retainer of some kind. I own no Apple shares and have never accepted (or indeed been offered) a penny by the company or their representatives. I have attended the odd launch at their invitation, but they have never paid my travel expenses, nor would I want them to. On the other hand they have given me gear. My friend Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer, likes me to have the newest products to play with and through him I am lucky enough to get early versions of all kinds of devices. On the other other hand, the nice people at HTC have also given me prototypes and hot-off-the-press versions of almost all their WindowsMobile and Android smartphones too. I have sat and chatted to their Chief Marketing Director John Wang, a man I greatly like and admire and he has made sure that I have a full range of his superbly put together devices to use and evaluate. The wonderfully kind BlackBerry chaps from RIM have also done the same for me — giving me a new Bold, a new Storm and much else besides. I am a very lucky fellow indeed to get all these devices but I don’t tell you all this in order to elicit envy, admiration or wrath. I tell you simply so that you get a picture. Being a tech blogger, a figure who is known to be excited by smartphones and digital devices of all kinds I am sent lots of toys to play with for review and personal use. A small minority of it is in fact Apple, but nonetheless those who like to believe in agendas, conspiracies, graft and corruption will continue to imagine that I have a vested interest in Apple. The anti-Apple lobby sees that kind of thing everywhere. The BBC, god bless them in their paranoia, fear and writhing self-conscious insecurity, are hard put sometimes ever even to mention the company, knowing all too well that there will be those accusing them of being unpaid PR operatives for Cupertino, disgraceful lackeys and running dogs spending MY LICENCE FEE on the furtherance of Steve Jobs’s evil plans. And on and on it goes.

The causes that lead some to hate everything Apple are complicated and various, but they are certainly not rational. Hate never is. Nor indeed is love. We are dealing with emotions here, not thoughts. Apple divides people in tribal, primal and almost frightening ways. Not all people, of course, indeed only a tiny, tiny minority of people, but they (we) are the ones who take up most of the bandwidth in the tech blogosphere and make the most noise and fill up Twitter and Facebook and other forums with our polemical deliberations and bellicose disquisitions. Although it is a minority who are so riven, it is a significant and loud one. I do not think you find such divisions and disputation in many other areas of human life, except religion, politics and sport of course. Some people prefer Ford cars to Honda say, or Parker to Waterman pens, or Sony TVs to Samsungs or Colonel Sanders to Ronald McDonald or Beethoven to Mozart but you don’t find online ideological wars or virulent tradings of insults on the subject. Apple haters cannot wait to tell you how underwhelmed, how (exaggerated yawning gesture) bored they are by the hype, what suckers, what sheep what idiots we are for even discussing the iPad. They know perfectly well how much better the HP Slate is, or the JooJoo or the Notion Ink Adam or any number of Android or Windows 7 netbooks, smartbooks and tablets. Only a susceptible ignoramus would rave about a ‘slick’ (what an insult) over-designed (d’uh?) iCon (hoho) like the Apple iPad.

I exaggerate. Of course I do. A little. Only a little. Most people, as I have already said, are on neither side of a Swiftian civil war between LittleEndian Applistas and BigEndian Anti-Applistas. There are plenty of people who are more measured and reasonable in their scepticism about Apple, it is not my mission to characterise everyone on each side as a fundamentalist. But you know there really is fury out there. Absolute fury. Otherwise funny and sane people like Charlie Brooker have taken up anti-Apple stances as a matter of style. ‘People who like Apple are pretentious and style conscious, so I will never ever have one,’ the argument goes, if I can call it an argument, and obviously I can’t, because it isn’t an argument it’s just a dumb and slightly mad assertion. After all, how style conscious do you have to be to refuse to be seen dead in anything so fashionable. Huh? I mean huh?

The fact that I will have turned off my website’s comments facility or moderated it into effective silence is even now driving some of my readers (a tiny minority I’m happy to think) insane. They are dreaming up insults about me and the iPad and dripping with cunning clever remarks to show what a fool, what a pretentious idiot, what a preening, posturing pseud of a lame waste of skin I am to champion Apple and their controlling commercial ways, their over-proprietary software, firmware and hardware and their whole corporate style. How dare I not let them flame me off the planet with their bile and spleen and choler and other medieval bodily fluids? It is their right and their need not just to disagree with me but to grab me by the scruff of the neck and push me face down in their prose until I squeal for mercy and admit that the iPad is a failure and a disgrace, that I am a fool and a nothing for falling for it and they are supreme and knowing and right, dammit, and why won’t anyone listen??? The desire to wag a finger, to take me down a peg and above all to show a superior understanding of Steve Jobs’s motives, Apple’s deficiencies and my shortcomings, hypocrisy and smug stupidity must be overwhelming, but you will have to forgive me for suggesting that you do all that on your own site, not on mine.

I don’t know about you, but my eyes are already trained only to read the top half of a web page these days. Rather as a Victorian would not look below the waist, I do not let my eyes have even a second’s contact with the revolting Have Your Say or Comments section of a BBC site, a YouTube page or any blog or tech forum. The lower half of web pages is very like the lower half of the body — full of all kinds of noxious evil smelling poison. I suppose it has to be expelled somewhere, but you will forgive me for not wanting to be close by when it happens. It is a pity, a real pity, that the furious few pollute the atmosphere and obstruct the pipelines that might otherwise allow the reciprocal possibilities of the world of User Generated Content that Web 2.0 promised all those years ago. Lord knows I don’t want the comment sections on my site to be filled with nothing but sycophantic agreement and loving worship. The truth is I would like them to be open, honest and free. There are thousands of people with valid and interesting points of disagreement with me on any number of subjects, with objections to Apple, their corporate style, their approach to hardware, firmware and software and their whole philosophy, but they are drowned out by the fundies and the freaks. One hurtful, mean-spirited, vicious or intemperate comment ruins everything. Absolutely everything. One turd spoils the whole bath. You cannot say to someone about to lower themselves in, ‘Don’t be a wimp, it’s only a small turd, the rest of the water is crystal clear.’ So I would rather have no comment at all. Call me weak, call me pusillanimous, call me craven, call me anything, only don’t do it here.

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It’s none of your business. How you will vote is none of my business. This country cannot proceed along any lines that make sense or promise hope unless we can all get along no matter how we vote and unless we respect the primacy of the secret ballot. Having said which, open and free discussion of the people, parties and policies up for consideration is all part of democracy too.

© Tony Husband 2010 for Stephenfry.com

What Right Have I to Blog?

Should I even be writing this blog? In a free country under the new dispensation of social networking is my ‘influence’ so disproportionate that for me to be revealing my voting intentions (which I am not quite going to do, by the way) in some sense inimical to the democratic spirit? I have about a million and a half Twitter followers, most of them I should think of voting age. If I changed the mind of even 1% of them would I somehow be cheating?

There are arguments for and against my involvement at such a level. One argument is that columnists in newspapers who have absolutely no more legitimacy in terms of influence, education, knowledge, understanding or right to persuade and interfere than I have are attempting to do so every day and with far more vitriol, conviction and absolutism than I would ever dare to exhibit. Which will not stop them from having a go at me were I to presume to pop my head above the parapet and suggest a voting preference. The screams of “Labour Lovie!� or “Lib Dem Lovie!� would be heard from here to hell. ‘It’s all very well for a pampered celebrity to parade his so-called caring credentials …’ blah-di-blah-di-bleugh. In ideological wars of this nature the first casualties are consideration, mutual respect, sense, proportion and dignity. Fair enough, one must be tough I suppose, although I’d much rather not be.

Another argument to propel me to write may be that the very weight of Twitter followers and website traffic behind me ought to bring with it some sense of civic duty. Maybe, there is a chance at least, this election matters. I don’t question whether or not it matters to the candidates, of course it does, but whether it matters more than most historically, socially and individually to us, as Britons. If this election does matter then surely my ignoring it would put me in the position of one of those rather silly people who is content to jeer from the sidelines, ‘they’re all the same anyway’ and ‘it makes no difference’ – which believe me I understand, for we are all tempted to be one of those. ‘Lord, what fools these voters be,’ we say to ourselves, if we are the kind of pompous Shakespeare quoting arse that I am at any rate, ‘you won’t catch me committing myself or risking a vote, much better for me to rely on the acuity of my vision which sees through the lot of them.’ Believe me, I do understand how tempting that position is. But I think we all know, in the innermost chambers of our heart, that such a position is unworthy of us.

The nailing of my colours to the mast might just encourage some of you to vote. I really do not mind how you vote, but I think you should. The ‘I can’t make a difference’ assertion is neither true, nor impressive, nor amusing, nor worthy, nor dignified. It is lazy, cowardly and inane. In Australia and some other countries voting is compulsory. Maybe it should be here too. At the very least the poverty and inadequacy of my arguments or assertions may at least propel you to the voting booth to vote against everything I believe. That at least would be something.

To sum up. What business do I have to ventilate my psephological dispositions for the Great Choosing that will take place on Thursday?  Do I think that my electoral intentions are relevant, important, worth more than anyone else’s, of national interest? None of the above. On the other hand, I have been approached by all three major parties who have sensed that I might be more of a floater (in every sense of that unfortunate epithet, I suspect) than I ever was in previous general elections. And on the other other hand some of my Twitter followers seem to think that my coyness in refusing to reveal my intentions amounts to a kind of cowardice or failure of citizenship. So I have decided to write this piece of bloggage in the hope that it will at least acquit me of apathy or irresponsibility. But I will preface it now with this insistent motto: do not let anything I say influence you. Vote with your heart, vote with your head, vote with your gut: your heart, your head, your gut – no one’s else. I just hope you have courage, style and charm enough not to hate me for what I am about to say, for I assure you I will not hate you if you say the exact opposite. Trollers, resentful maniacs, weirdos and abusive beasts can stop reading now, I have no interest in horrible and offensive meanness of spirit. You must believe me when I say that I have never hated any fellow countryman or woman because of how they vote or how they express their voting intention.

Let’s agree to disagree

For a Labour voter to hate a Tory voter or vice versa is for us all to stumble into the revolting and nonsensical little-endian big-endian madness that Swift pilloried in Gulliver’s Travels. Let me say here and now and beg you to believe that some of the people in the world I most love, reverence, adore, admire and respect will be voting Conservative on Thursday. I grew up a Tory, I spent my childhood summers at Conservative fêtes and whist drives and dinner dances. I thought anyone who voted Liberal, let alone Labour, was creepy weird and horrifying. At some point the wind changed. The wind’s name was Margaret Thatcher, but we won’t go into ancient history. All the vices I once attributed to Labour — vulgarity, meanness of spirit, lack of warmth, sympathy or lightness of touch — I now attributed to the Conservatives. I went so far as to join the Labour Party, to write speeches, or parts of speeches, for Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, all of whom I met and liked. Mind you, I met and liked John Major and plenty of Tories too. I’m a whore when it comes to meeting and liking people. It is most annoying to have one’s prejudices overturned by real life. However one thing has remained constant in my political affiliations, and that is a deep contempt and fear of tribalism.

© Tony Husband 2010 for Stephenfry.com

When I meet a Labour voter who can only hiss, stamp and fume at any Tory, or a Conservative voter who can only jeer and condemn a Labour voter then I bridle, bristle and simply writhe with indignation. Let this be known and celebrated: we all have the right to vote the way we want. We all have our reasons and motivations and they do not justify anyone insulting or reviling us. Actually, the fact is that ‘reasons’ is probably the wrong word, for we are all (or almost all) energised in politics above all by feelings, by loyalties and deep turbulent emotions that bubble down in our depths. These have far more influence upon our political ‘views’ than rational and logical considerations. There may be those who are capable of carefully and objectively weighing the qualities of each party’s policies and coming to a voting decision on that basis, but I have yet to meet such people. We all know we should be like that, but we all know that we should only put into our mouths what reason tells us is nutritious, calorifically justified and environmentally sustainable. We eat by appetite, emotion and desire and we vote according to criteria of loyalty and connection that are much closer to the support of football teams than to rational assessment and analysis. And, of course, we respond to the personalities that are put up in front of us. I have yet to find anyone who is not influenced by personality. Only, being humans, we are all hypocrites, and we accuse those who dislike our hero or admire our villain of being the ones who succumb to the cheap allure of personality politics, we of course, are immune. Of course, so deep run our alliances that we impute good qualities to personalities we would otherwise not warm to and see ghastly characteristics in those whom we would probably like in real life, if only they were not from the Other Side. What we cannot bear is when someone from across the political divide from us is obviously believable, likeable and reasonable. That is when we accuse their supporters of being victims of personality politics and the individual in question of being ‘a media creature’.

If such innate tribal fixity was wholly the case then Gilbert and Sullivan would be right and that Nature really does contrive that ‘every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative.’ We all know that, aside from those so ingrained in loyalty that they simply could never vote outside their born or acquired adherences, there are such creatures as floating voters and that they are the ones who determine electoral outcomes. I find, for the first time in thirty years, that I am one such.

The choices

Forgetting the forgettable, there are three parties we can choose from. They represent, so far as I can see, the Same, Another Same and something New and Untried. There are powerful, in my opinion, reasons for believing either that the last thing we need now is discontinuity or for believing that we need fundamental change. In other words, I can see why we might want to plough on through the debt crisis that faces us with a reliable, if unexciting administration and I can also see why we might want absolutely to alter direction and experiment with new ways of hammering out consensus, compromise and pragmatic reform. What is harder to envisage is a new driver in the same car, a change that satisfies tribal loyalties but actually achieves nothing.

Britain is in dire straits financially. We are, not to put too fine a point on it, shafted six ways from Sunday. As always, those who will suffer most will be the already disadvantaged. No matter who wins or commands a majority on Thursday there will be appalling cuts in public services, terrible depredations made that will hit first and hardest those who can least afford it. Twas ever thus, you might think. But the ripples in crime, discontent, infrastructure decay and quality of life degradation will affect all, even those who least care about the destiny of the destitute.

Vote One

If there is a way out of it, it will require dullness, concentration, probity, focus, geeky financial fanaticism and an almost horrible obsession with economic detail and technique. Sound like anyone we know?  The last thing that is wanted, this vote might suggest, is an untried chancer who makes promises that we know, with the best will in the world, he cannot keep.

Hands up anyone, anyone who believes that the Osborne/Cameron nexus will honestly punish or regulate the City as they need to be punished and regulated? Whatever noises they make about it, you know, you know as surely as you know that turkeys would never vote for Christmas, that somehow, by perfectly reasonable and unforeseeable routes, any manifesto promises to be tough on financial impropriety will somehow get lost and the smarting chastisement that the short-selling creeps who got us into this mess deserve will never be forthcoming. (In fact you can pretty much guarantee that even a Labour vote will not guarantee the regulation that wise financial insiders know is necessary ) ‘Oh it will just cause a mass exodus from the City.’ ‘Oh, alienating the wealth creators is the surest route to bankruptcy.’ ‘Germany hasn’t done it, nor has the SEC in New York.’ ‘We have to compete. Cut our banking houses off at the knees and you hobble the British economy, perhaps fatally.’ Gosh, how convincing that all sounds. As a result insane bonuses and horrific financial instruments will rise again, a debt dependent economy will boil once more into life and dozens of journalists and commentators will rise to their feet to applaud.

I don’t mean to be sneery or negative about this, it is what the Tories stand for and there are arguments one can subscribe to which convincingly defend their nature and their instincts and their outlook. Goodness knows there’s a huge part of me that is libertarian and contra-dirigiste enough in outlook to look with longing at the certainties of the Reasonable Right. But you would have to be naive or dishonest to deny the certainty of the outcome of a Conservative government in terms of its friendship with bankers, financiers, fund managers and those who manipulate and massage capital for a living. I do not for a minute concur with some visceral Labour views of Tories as being automatically and genetically uncaring or socially illiberal. True, there are dozens and dozens of Conservative candidates whose repellent stupidity and vulgarity would make even a Daily Mail reader blush and stammer, just as there are dozens and dozens of Labour candidates whose bigoted, dull-witted asininity would embarrass a Guardian reader into dribbling delirium. And there are plenty of Tories whose hopes for the poor and the dispossessed and the outcast are as sincere as that of any socialist or liberal.  Vote One, if I were to cast it, is all about a belief that – despite the rather obvious and predictable PR choruses to the contrary –  continuity, solidity, sound management, a lack of interest in anything but the economy and a bone-headed refusal to pay much attention to image makers and spin doctors is what is required now. Far from All Change, let’s go for No Change and weather the storm that is coming with a dull, intelligent, responsible, proven and determined pilot at the helm. One who won’t ask for relief when the waves batter  but will plough on, head down, until we find calmer waters and sunnier skies. That is Vote One. In case you’re very very dim, that would be a vote for Gordon Brown and Labour. It isn’t very exciting, you might think, but it might just see us through.

An argument against Labour might be that Iraq and the revolting Digital Economy Bill and a catalogue of fudge, fumbling and failure that three successive periods of power has (necessarily) witnessed may well be reason enough to turn away. Those who feel most betrayed by Labour’s shortcomings and reversals of policy are those least likely to be drawn to the Tories however, so one imagines that the disenchanted left will either stay home or vote Lib Dem. The worst of the Labour calamities, the war in Iraq, would have taken place under a Conservative administration too and it is one which Brown is less personally involved in than was Blair. For all those betrayals and deceptions it is hard not to believe that the most pressing question must be the economy.

You may of course argue that there has been nothing sound about Labour’s management of the economy either, but actually I cannot believe that the financial tsunami that struck Britain and the rest of the world in 2008 would have been any better dealt with by anyone else. I do feel that the very determination and uncool dourness and resolution of Brown might well be a good bet. When the house is a ruin, go for solid and unglamorous damp-coursing and roof relining – you can worry about the wallpaper, furniture and carpeting later. You might also think that dour and unglamorous as Brown may be presented, when he is allowed to let go and reveal his true self he is surprisingly more impressive than either of the other two candidates. Take ten minutes out of your life to watch this. You really do have to twist reality to claim that this is a spin-doctored act and not the real passion of a conviction politician. That is the man and what he stands for. It may not move you however. You may not find it interesting or appealing. Conviction politics may not be what you think the country requires or you may regard such idealism as false or irrelevant.

Sidebar One

It’s not about quality of parliamentary intake. God knows most of you reading this should be aware that the kind of people standing for election are simply the same kinds of idiot that we were at school with, that we are ourselves. Human, frail, unreliable, greedy and stupid – only with the rather dubious (you might think) difference that they actually want to be in Parliament, which you or I do not. But my heart always sinks when I get a tediously clichaic tweet saying ‘Bloody hell Stephen, don’t you know they’re all the same?’ or  ’Hung parliament? Yes, they should be! Hahahahahahahah!!!!!’ Well now steady on, how can we inhabit a democracy and simultaneously dismiss and loftily choose never to vote for, those who actually get off their arses and allow that democracy to come into being? No matter how crap, sterile of imagination, predictable, verbally trite, sententious or weird every single one of the candidates presenting themselves for election may be, at least they have actually offered themselves up for the cruel, impertinent and unspeakably humiliating inspection that candidacy entails. And for what? For power? Come now, do you really think that? Maybe there is a touch of vanity in their ambitions, but is it any more than the vanity that anyone after a good job should have? And if you say, ‘well it isn’t a good job, snigger snigger,’ then please offer up for all of us an alternative to democracy, one in which your higher standards and your superior understanding will prevail. In the meantime, as Neil Kinnock used to say, ‘don’t moan about it, change it. Stand yourself! Be a candidate!’ And if you simply relay that you’re a nobody, and that it’s not what you know but who you know, then you still haven’t got the point. You could be a candidate, yes, you could be a candidate, but you would have to go to meetings, walk pavements, shake hands, consult, seek views, consider options, do all the things that those who involve themselves in democracy do. Honestly now. I mean really honestly, haven’t you, as I have – I’d be the first to admit it – sounded off about the crapness of politicians without ever really considering the full nature of democracy and what it implies, or should imply? One of the very reasons I would run a thousand miles from public office is the sanctimonious, sententious, unforgiving, inquisitive and merciless scrutiny to which my every move and every word would be subjected. I couldn’t take the responsibility of not being able to make a light joke and I couldn’t bear the insufferable indignity of having to speak so blandly for fear of giving offence that I would sound like every other politician ever sounded. It is really no good us moaning about the quality of our politicians when the intensity of our inspection of everything they are and do is so great they are not allowed those very qualities of eccentricity, originality, colour, life and surprise that we claim to want in them.

Vote Two

Conservative. Dave seems alright. He’s got a ‘team’, he’s young (ish) and energetic. He wants power, he’s motivated enough to feel that he deserves it and that when he gets it he will operate its levers with efficiency, drive and purpose. He will have to do almost everything that Brown would have to do in terms of cuts, cuts, more cuts, taxation and more cuts, because our economy is so burdened with debt that there is no other way out. Those who are predisposed to conservatism might hope that he will roll back the frontiers of the state and destroy the culture of Health and Safety, Political Correctness and liberal relativism that has, they think, mired our society in nanny-state dependency, but it has to be said there are no such claims made in his manifesto. He claims to believe in multiculturalism, gay rights, the national health service and the welfare state even though many of his supporters in the press and in the real world manifestly do not. I do not actually believe that he will dismantle any of the major elements of that welfare state any more than Labour did, but I expect those who fear he will make huge cuts in the arts and other ‘sacred cows’ of the ‘liberal elite’ are right and that the climate under Cameron will be less friendly to much that they hold dear. He may bring back hunting with dogs, he may (especially if he has a small majority) be forced to give full rein to some of the Christian oddities and other shudder-worthy nuts in his party, but then Blair and Brown have had to placate the weirdos in the Labour back benches too. Under a Cameron administration will crime go down, will the ‘war on drugs’ be won, will the troops come home from Afghanistan, will pensions be safe and standards of education rise? I don’t know. I more than faintly doubt it, but I doubt whoever gets in power will solve those problems. Cameron is not as ideologically motivated as Thatcher was which might allay the fears of some floating voters as much as it irritates some red-meat Conservatives. It is a vote for the same car, as I have suggested, but in the hands of a different driver. Up to you to decide how well you think he will steer it.

Sidebar Two

There is one thing that cultural commentators in our press cannot convincingly mimic, much as they may try, and that is the rhetoric of the Right across the Atlantic. The Sarah Palin world of ‘hockey moms’ and ‘Christian virtues’ and ‘family values’ simply does not play in Britain. We writhe in discomfort at any hint of religion, hence the embarrassment of Tory supporters at that peculiar Philippa Stroud woman, a candidate for Cheam who may or may not have officiated or assisted at ‘gay demon exorcisms’ at some time in the past as part of some ludicrous evangelical sect of which she is or was a member. The British resent strongly the idea that a politician has any business telling us how to love or behave in private or which ‘values’ to cleave to. The thought of Christians or any other religious group having influence over policy is something party leaders know they have to hide rather than parade. In America, the Right routinely calls Obama a member of the ‘liberal elite’ – it is hard to know quite how this rhetorical distortion first got into the political vocabulary. America has a self-made myth of plain-speaking wiseacre folk which deprecates complexity, ambiguity, difficulty and nuance. There is a long-held distrust in the United States of verbal fluency, wide reading, historical knowledge, interest in the arts or intellectual curiosity. All those things seem more often than is comfortable to dispose people towards agnosticism and liberalism, therefore they are characterised as urban, un-American, European and ‘elitist’. It is hard not to wonder if the ideal American citizen is no more than a god-fearing, family consumer who never questions that while bankers and financiers may be sophisticated and clever and educated and wise, anyone else with those qualities should be religiously tarred and righteously feathered.

When I was growing up ‘elitism’ was a word sneered from the lips of the Left, now it is sneered from the lips of the Right. The sneering was ugly then and it is ugly now. Knowledge, science, understanding, literacy and curiosity are absolute goods and to hell with anyone who tries to follow that American habit here and attempts to construct a discourse in which only a despised liberal elite are interested in science, the arts, history and ideas. Such wickedness reminds one of those who opposed Education For All at the end of the nineteenth century. All knowledge should be free and available and all people should be encouraged to acquire it. It will not necessarily lead to liberalism, but it will lead to understanding and a desire for openness and decent, non-tribalist exchanges of the kind that can only enrich our democracy.

Vote Three

This is, of course, the possibility of voting Liberal Democrat in the almost certain knowledge that the vote will in reality be cast for a hung parliament and the creation of some sort of coalition, almost certainly with the Conservatives taking the lion’s share of the Great Offices of State. Many people in Britain might think that Nick Clegg and Vince Cable are more impressive than most of the candidates and senior members of any party and that our country can only be enriched, in its moment of economic crisis, by their presence in government at some level. The arguments, if arguments they be, that hung parliaments mean hobbled, lame parliaments are surely nonsense. The Scandinavian and German examples show that where there is political will and determination anything is possible, including stability, continuity and relatively swift economic recovery. For every example of a bad coalition system there is an example of a good one. We cannot assume the worst, however British a trait that may be. Our society is open enough, with its media and social networking, to force the politicians to come to a workable arrangement. If the terms of a Lib Dem win are Proportional Representation for all future General Elections and a determined effort to move to a genuinely open and well constructed parliamentary democracy then I for one am excited. It might all go wrong, but then it is so wrong already that this is a risk I would not be too unhappy to run. I do not think it means that Peter Firth, Rupert Penry-Jones and the cast of Spooks would be forced to take over in a bloodless coup d’état, nor do I think it would cause rioting in the streets and mutiny in the ranks. It may turn out to be a rather British damp squib, or it may be (which I think more likely) result in a jerky, jolting, juddering evolutionary move towards something a little better. I do know that my Labour friends would all be rather horrified by my entertaining such a vote, for they are convinced that a vote for the Lib Dems is tantamount to a vote for Cameron. That is something you will have to decide.

On one front alone I would absolutely urge you to vote LibDem and that is if you live in the Oxford West and Abingdon constituency. Your incumbent member, now under threat because of boundary changes, is Evan Harris MP, far and away the most persuasive and impressive parliamentarian in the cause of good and open science and enquiry that we have had in the past decade. He has been central to mould-breaking and inspirational multiparty cooperation in issues of scientific concern since 1997. It seems to me (almost!) that he should be elected unopposed like the Speaker. If you have any interest in the promotion of science and evidence based policy-making and a voice to oppose superstition, religious vested interest and new age nonsense, then do check him out and get those Oxonian Abingdonians working for his re-election.

My intentions and yours

Well, I’m sorry that I have ignored the other parties, but this blog is long enough and I am trying to be realistic about the tri-partisan options most of us will consider. I will be honest inasmuch as I can confess, and it will probably not come as much of a surprise, that Vote Two is not one I envisage making. I find it unappealing for a number of reasons and I will confess that sheer gut instinct is one of them – a dislike of the party and its loudest advocates, not of any individual members and certainly not of Tory voters and supporters as individuals: as I have already said and cannot repeat enough, some of the people I love most dearly in the world are natural and proud Conservatives and I love them none the less for it, just as they (I hope!) love me none the less for my politics. I also find (and I know how much some of you will groan at this) that I worry how much crucial strides in my lifetime towards gay rights would be threatened under the Tories. This article interested and alarmed me greatly.  Plenty of you will think that is just bloody typical of faggoty Fry and that I should put my sexual nature behind me when voting. I would happily do so if I didn’t believe that too many Tories are not prepared to offer me the same courtesy but will toil sedulously to make life more difficult for gay people. Work I’ve done for Stonewall and others has shown me that the bullying, suicide and homophobia that still exists in the world today is not something to be taken lightly. Picture your son or daughter, brother or sister being victimised, taunted and threatened in the playground and street and tell me that it’s all just ‘political correctness’.

More important than my own political views or my own voting intentions are my hopes that nothing I say will stop you from choosing Conservative if you consider it the right way to cast your vote. It may be you will be voting Tory through dyed-in-the-wool instinct and loyalty or it may be that you are someone who once voted Labour or Lib Dem but who has decided that Cameron and the Conservatives will be best for Britain. It’s none of my business, but do vote just as you want and be proud to do so.

© Tony Husband 2010 for Stephenfry.com

As for me, I am still hovering between One and Three and I suspect I will not be sure until I am actually facing the voting form, Sharpie in hand. (Will it be Sharpies? I do hope so. I virtually addicted to their fumes)

I know that the above may please no one. Some will despise me for failing to condemn Conservatives more outrightly and fervently, others will think that I’m a stupid lovie pinko who should shut the hell up. We can all agree I hope that my views are worth no more (and no less) than yours in any sense, but especially in the sense that counts — in the polling booth.