Party time
Normal people party in the summer, party people are preoccupied by plotting
Summertime by the sea with Mao Zedong, what’s not to enjoy?
Summertime conjures up images of beaches, maybe an ice cream on a sunny day and the bustle of excited kids released from school. In the murky world of politics summer presents a very different image where plotting and leadership intrigue are the season’s hallmark .
The media often describe it as being ‘the silly season’ because the summer break sends politicians away from their business in the capital but this does nothing to signal an outbreak of calm in political activity.
The British have institutionalized the summer as a moment for political intrigue because all the major parties hold their annual conferences at this time of year. They bring together a toxic combination of party grandees, wannabe grandees, political obsessives who make up the rank and file party membership and, inevitably, the press pack, delighted to have rare access to so many troublemakers in one place.
Britain is not alone in institutionalizing summer political intrigue. The world’s largest dictatorships also have summer retreats where the inner circle gather for what are billed as holidays but they have a history of being less than festive gatherings, fatal for some.
The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would retreat to his summer dacha in Sochi for long periods, summoning hapless underlings to keep him company as he pondered the fate of comrades, some of whom would never return. Mao Zedong established the world’s most dangerous summer camp at Beidaihe where the old tyrant would gather leading cadres, sometimes to be humiliated, sometimes to plot and at other times to have what passed for a good time in the company of their capricious party leader.
The American President is equipped with a number of estates outside Washington which are often pressed into service as holiday retreats. Under the current dispensation this practice has been ditched in favour of a vulgarian private enterprise retreat at Mar-a-Lago in Floridia owned by the Orange Blob. When he is in residence it is besieged by supplicants vying for patronage, they are joined by members of the Administration clinging onto their jobs and, a vast media pack. Although golf and entertainment are on offer, relaxing is not the word to describe it.
In some ways however the Mar-a-Lago version of a political summer is the most honest. There is little pretense of holiday making as there is no mistaking the naked ambition and avid deal making that goes on there.
Compare this to the frenzied behind-the-doors activity underway in Britain where the sun sometimes shines. In one corner are plotters vying to replace the fast sinking Conservative leader Kemi Badenock. The contenders are busy sharpening their knives as they pay only the most unconvincing lip service to their lack of ambition.
In the other corner is the increasingly unpopular Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party, who theoretically enjoys a more secure position as potential rivals issue fervent denials of leadership ambition in the knowledge of what happens to those who preemptively pop their heads over the parapet. But anyone who seriously believes that Labour’s corridors of power are not buzzing with intrigue presumably also believe that the party has scored impressive success in tackling the immigration problem.
At least in democracies summertime political maneuvering gets exposed in the media. But even in dictatorships speculation is rife. Take what’s happening in China at he moment where the highly active world of Pekingology or Panda Twitching, has been in a tizzy over rumours about the future of the portly dictator Xi Jinping.
They ask: are high level plotters getting busy? Why are so many high profile apparatchiks being purged? Why does Comrade Xi keep disappearing from view only to remerge without credible explanation? Panda Twitchers answer questions like this with great conviction even though they have little idea of what is really going behind the doors of this hermetically sealed political system.
Actually, a lack of real insight is shared among pundits in both democracies and dictatorship. In democracies the uncertainty arises because politics is a precarious business where firm predictions about the future of political leaders are prone to being thwarted by the unexpected. In dictatorships the uncertainty arises from the nature of a not even vaguely transparent political system obscured by an edifice of supreme confidence built on paranoid suspicion and reliance on force for acquiescence.
Understandably most people will not be spending the summer in a fervor of political speculation but some of us are, or, in my case were, paid to do precisely this because we had large news pages to fill. I can’t say I miss it that much but mischievous speculation does have a certain attraction.