Brains, not beauty, are what it's about

THE phrase 'beauty contest' has become the agreed code of those in the Labour Party and the media who dislike the prospect of Tony Blair becoming Labour Party leader.

According to this analysis, victory in the leadership election will depend not on policies but on perceived likeability, camera- friendly physiognomy and ability to speak on television and radio in what are known, in another favourite hate phrase of those who hold this line, as 'soundbites'. Hence, they deduce, victory will be Mr Blair's.

This conspiracy against real politics - as enemies of the alleged beauty contest present it - results from the tendency of the media and the electorate to favour surface personality over political ability. And this assumption about the workings of modern politics is not limited to enemies of Mr Blair. Even some of his supporters are backing him on this grudging horses-for-courses calculation: a telegenius for the telegenic age.

This common interpretation is, however,

perverse. Naomi Wolf, an American writer, has published a book called The Beauty Myth, about feminine stereotypes. But we may borrow her title to expose the beauty myth that afflicts current political discourse and, in particular, the Labour leadership race.

It is an oddity of politics that a philosophical generalisation can happily exist alongside its daily contradiction. During the 1988 US election, the media would every few days bemoan the descent of elections into contests between slick, handsome and witty men. The phrase beauty contest may even have been used. It seemed to worry no one that, at the high point of this despairing wisdom, the American parties had nominated perhaps the two most boring candidates ever to contest the presidency: George Bush and Michael Dukakis. Barely averagely presidential, they were scarcely on speaking terms with words. Ronald Reagan had proved an exception. Yet the myth of the funny dummy was what voters and pundits wanted to believe.

This view has been just as popular in Britain since the Eighties and is equally false. In 1990, Conservative MPs were faced, after Margaret Thatcher's departure, with a choice between the finest political actor and orator of his generation and a shy, stunned, shuffling nonentity. They chose the latter - John Major over Michael Heseltine - because policy, a promised continuity of dogma, mattered more to them than personality.

In 1992, Labour chose, after Neil Kinnock's resignation, between John Smith - bald, fat and with a tendency in interview more towards the sermon than the soundbite - and Bryan Gould, who was svelte, had a careful tonsure-concealing haircut and, a former television reporter, was a laureate of the one-liner. They favoured the former over the latter on grounds of policy. Only the Liberal Democrats, who like to claim greater political seriousness than their rivals, can be accused of having conducted a beauty contest, if an unfairly matched one, in selecting Paddy Ashdown over Alan Beith in 1987.

In general, though, the elections of the past 15 years - party and national, British and American - have been a series of beauty defeats. Those politicians of the Eighties who spent most time in front of a mirror - David Owen, John Moore, Cecil Parkinson - all passed on to the Lords far short of fulfilling

their ambitions, and to present the succession to John Smith as a kind of catwalk cavalcade is quite wrong.

The candidacy of John Prescott is surely hampered less by his rough appearance and pugnacious manner than by his perceived ideology: old-fashioned, punitive, class- driven. Robin Cook is, admittedly, the most problematic example for those who reject the beauty contest argument. He has been subjected to comment in liberal newspapers about his body that, if made about a woman, would have jammed the letters page; and to remarks about his hair colour that, if made about the pigmentation of his skin, would have resulted in prosecution. Yet his roots on the left of the party are probably more ruinous to his wider public support than opinion about his stature or coiffure. Margaret Beckett, too, suffers more from her doctrinal history than from beauty reviews.

It so happens that the parliamentary Labour Party at the moment contains an MP who is witty, liked by almost all who meet him and a natural broadcaster. His public manner is warmer and more natural than Tony Blair's. Unlike Mr Blair, he has past leadership and legislative experience. He is Ken Livingstone. Yet, for all his advantages, the former leader of the Greater London Council has no chance of the Labour leadership because he is seen as an ideological extremist. Here I am prepared to concede one point to those who insist that personality ranks before policies. British politics, if not a beauty contest, may be something of an elocution contest. There would doubtless be electoral resistance to Ken Livingstone's Lambeth accent and nasal intonation. Equally, Tony Blair's southern middle-class delivery - though he was born in Scotland and represents a northern English constituency - will attract as much support nationally as it promotes suspicion in sections of the Labour Party.

Even so, if Mr Blair is, as polls and anecdote suggest, the most likely new leader and potential PM among the Labour candidates, this is not because the public is a sucker for a pretty face and a nice voice. It is because he is regarded as a moderate who is unlikely to take much more of their money off them, whose enthusiasms for union reform and erosion of Labour's links with the unions are widely shared among voters, and whose rhetoric on crime prevention suits the general

mood. His accent would cease to be attractive to southern England if it started to speak the traditional language of socialism. In Tony Blair, manner and manifesto are thought to match, as, to different effect, is the case with John Prescott.

Whether or not we agree with it - and I am personally a bit of a Livingstone man - British politics is a moderation contest, and if voters find anything beautiful, it is centrism. So to talk of a beauty contest and to attribute the position of the current front-runner to some kind of mass hormonal hysteria is patronising to the public and insulting to Mr Blair. The story of modern politics has been, for all the fashionable paranoia about media manipulation, that policy has mattered more than eyes and smiles. If for many, Mr Blair's face fits, the appeal is more than skin deep. Those who grumble might consider the possibility that it is their ideas that people find ugly.