Bernard Ingham: Policy, personality and presentation matter in politics

I got my own back when she espoused the poll tax. I said: “It may well have been immaculately conceived by Oxford dons but it is the very devil to sell.”

It might have been grudgingly accepted had Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, not lost control of inflation with some clever-clogs private enterprise in shadowing the D-Mark.

Then there was Tony Benn telling me that what count are “ishoos”, as he pronounced it, meaning policy, and not personality. That was also nonsense. In fact, policy, personality and presentation all matter a great deal in politics, as Theresa May is discovering.

She is not charismatic – certainly not in the Margaret Thatcher or Boris Johnson mould – and her presentation during the June election was abysmal. Yet, properly presented, there is something to be said for her “veering to the Left” on entering No 10 in seeking to make Britain work for the many instead of the privileged few. She was addressing the eternal problem of capitalist excess.

Incidentally, such unprincipled capitalists have much to answer for in Corbyn’s rise. Mrs May was not seeking to get rid of free enterprise – the world’s bread machine – especially when she knows, unlike Corbyn, the horrors of the alternative that Venezuelans are now discovering. But you cannot have a healthy, still less fair, society when it is regularly taken to the cleaners by vested interests, which include trade unions.

In her initial declaration of intent, Mrs May set out to tackle excess in the market place. But it did not come out like that. Some said it sounded like the unlamented ex-leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband.

She would simultaneously have carried greater conviction and tempered business and right-wing reaction had she said she proposed to encourage those crucial elements of capitalism – freedom, enterprise, risk-taking and reward – provided companies behaved responsibly.

Nor would she have given Corbyn his “dementia tax” electoral windfall if she had said she was quadrupling the amount the elderly in care could leave to their families and consulting, through a Green Paper, on the mechanics.

I do not get out much these days, but I am appalled by daily reports of rip-offs, hidden charges, opportunist price rises as during school holidays and what lurks in “the small print”.

I could mention energy prices (even if the Government’s nonsensical environmental policy is partly to blame), pension costs, car hire and repair, airport parking and dubious City practices.

Then there is the pestilence of the age: businesses, and especially banks – not to mention police stations – withdrawing services and making customers do their work for them, while spending fortunes on calls to penetrate the barbed wire of telephone options.

Only the other day I heard a friend, pursuing a complaint, ask if he was speaking to a real live person and not a Dalek. And my carer and I are celebrating my release from an outmoded business contract with 02 after five telephone calls over a couple of months, one lasting 45 minutes.

It can only be the sort of stupidity demonstrated by Remainers such as Sir Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, for right-wingers to complain that Mrs May is abandoning the Tories’ free market philosophy. No nation’s capitalism is allowed to operate without some regulation.

The issue is not freedom; it is morality. It is not unnecessary interference in business operations but the need for real politicians to look after the interests of consumers who, perhaps right-wingers need reminding, have votes. Presentation counts more than ever today. It can even make some think Corbyn is PM material.

No doubt Mrs May will learn from her recent traumatic experience, provided, of course, that her silly ministers and dense backbenchers allow her to get on with the job.

But I must warn her that, leaving aside her own media scepticism, she has an uphill task. In my 24 years in Whitehall, I failed to get presentation taken seriously, as distinct from Tony Blair and Co’s media obsessions. The subject was left, if left at all, to the fag end of meetings with next to no discussion of how the policy tale was to be told.

Mrs May needs to find a better way of telling the public about her admirable policy of tackling capitalist excess and helping the consumer. May God go with her.