Dialogue: Let's drink to the rift that ruins every revolution

By JOE BENNETT

Ladies and gentlemen, charge your glasses and please be upstanding. I give you the Alliance. Rarely have so many got such fun from so few.

I take little interest in politics because little of politics is interesting. It is uninteresting because we live in a democracy and it is the duty of a democracy to make politics uninteresting.

My apathy is a luxury, a luxury not afforded to the citizens of Zimbabwe, or, indeed, to most of the people in the world.

If you are a poor and powerless citizen in most of the world, you are like the host of a party, a party where you've paid for the booze but aren't allowed to drink any.

All you can do is sit and watch your masters turning into drunks. And, whenever they like, the drunks can bash you up.

When they bash you up, you ring the police. The police arrive and they look remarkably like the drunks. In fact, they are the drunks. They carry on bashing you up. You take the police and the drunks to court and find that the judge is a drunk and your lawyer is a drunk and the jury comprises a dozen good drunks and true.

When the sentence is handed down, you protest that you haven't had a fair trial.

Everyone laughs.

The judge explains it is your own fault for causing a fuss. You shouldn't have tried to rise from your allotted place in the pecking order.

You protest that your place in the pecking order was one where there wasn't a whole lot of pecking to do, and they say that's right.

You say that that isn't fair and they say that's right. You ask if it's your job as a citizen simply to buy booze for the drunks and watch them drink it.

They say yes. You say that isn't fair. That's right, they say, it isn't fair.

You say this is like a Kafka novel and they beat you up again.

They've never read a novel. Novels are filth. They tell you to repeat that novels are filth. You refuse. They smash your teeth. They break your nose and hit your kidneys with a stick. You howl to the heavens. You howl that it isn't fair.

Overhead you hear the popping of a cork. Then a huge bass voice from the clouds. No, says the voice cheerfully, it isn't fair.

All of which is good raw stuff, the way human affairs have always been, and fun to observe from afar in the manner of an anthropologist, but rather less fun to be caught in the middle of.

We are not caught in the middle of it because we live in a democracy. In this democracy, the booze-drinkers are answerable to the booze-buyers, so life is artificially fair, or at least as fair as anyone's managed to make it so far. .

As a result, we rarely get the raw stuff, the big stuff, the true stuff of human nature. And that is why the present spat within the Alliance is such a delight.

It's like one of those Our World animal porn movies where the cheetahs stalk a herd of hippos. It makes splendidly nasty viewing.

Instinct drives the cheetah and the hippos, just as instinct drives the actors in the Alliance pantomime. And underneath the froth of detail runs a storyline as old as people.

The Alliance are the protesters at the party who reckon the drunks have got all the booze. They don't want the booze themselves. They just don't want the drunks to have it. The Alliance are the have-nots. Their position is predicated on not having.

But dear old Mr Anderton isn't really a have-not. He's a drunk in teetotal clothing. He always has been. He wants power. Some people do and some people don't. It's not a crime.

He leads a have-not party that suddenly has. He likes it. The party doesn't.

The party feels it is supping with the devil. How can they condemn the drunks while they themselves are drinking? Hence the rift.

It is a rift as old as the game of power. It's the rift that has ruined every revolution.

Most revolutionary parties split. One side sells out to pragmatism. The other stays loyal to what it sees as ideals.

Lenin goes one way, Trotsky the other. The IRA one way, the Real IRA the other. Anderton one way, McCarten the other.

The Alliance story is keeping to a time-hallowed script. I like it. I find it fun, anthropological fun, to see the same old tale being played out in the human animal.

But it's only fun because, like the Our World cameraman, I won't get hurt. He has his hippo-proof Land Rover, I my parliamentary democracy. Cheers.