Swansong an echo of the way it was

By Joe Bennett

Looking like an elderly Prince Charles, Bill Birch has been a rock in the wild seas of politics. And now he is going.

Bill has been as his times have been. His middle name is Pragmatism. When thinking was big, Bill thought big. When thinking shrank, Bill's shrank with it. When Bolger dithered, so did Bill. When Jenny strode into the classroom, Bill offered to clean the blackboard.

Always the right-hand man, the lieutenant, the Horatio to a flashier Hamlet. And though Hamlet after Hamlet fell on his sword, Horatio Birch shambled on.

He maintained almost single-handedly the tradition of the dowdy political male. While the new breed of politician drank into the night and hopped from party to party in their sunglasses and underpants, Bill shuffled on in the same suit. Now he is saying goodbye. He is taking his stoop and his mournful eyes and his paper-thin voice to his orderly garden to grow roses and labradors.

Just as politicians have changed, so have Budgets. Time was when a Budget was when the head bean-counter totted up the number of sheep the country had sold, took from it the sum of money needed to keep Wellington in biscuits for another bureaucratic year and arrived at a negative figure. Money would have to be found.

And every year the bean-counter would scratch at his balding bean-counter's head with its pitiful wrap-over strands well greased against the winds of Wellington, and would decide once again to tap the puritanical roots from which this country sprouted. He would tax pleasure. Pleasure was evil and had to be paid for. A penny on cigarettes, twopence on beer, and threepence on both wine and petrol because in those days the two were indistinguishable.

Oh, the sweet simplicity of yesterday. Who would have thought we would ever bemoan the passing of days when politicians were men, accountancy was simple and spin doctors were but babes in arms?

Back then the Budget was a mere statement of accounts, an annual reckoning. Now it is a presentation document, a show case, a piece of propaganda neatly parcelled into sound-bites. Behind its apparent authority lurk the demons of our age, the weasels and twisters, the unelected army of PR people for whom integrity is a brand name and policy an advertising campaign.

The new style sits ill with Bill. He is happier with numbers than with rhetoric. Though he mouthed the words of tomorrow, he exuded the spirit of yesterday. Though his words embraced the future this was a speech of valediction.

Quiet, decent, unimaginative Bill, a man who would have made a splendid country constable, has had enough. Bye bye Bill. I hope the labs lollop and the roses bloom.