Loyalty, in politics and beyond, has become the lost virtue

On the end of trust

I IMAGINE Professor M A Leschziner to be a man in his mid-forties with a small beard, an unreliable temper and a penchant for bow-ties. But whatever his looks, he is certainly angry.

Two weeks ago in my local freesheet, the Camden New Journal, the Professor wrote a furious letter denouncing the actions of the local Labour council as being "wholly incompatible with the concept and ethos of a caring, accountable and socially responsible/responsive authority". The incident had strained his political loyalty. "Let it be known," he continued, "that I am (soon was?) a member and strong supporter of the Labour Party in national as well as local government." Let it be known, indeed.

But what was the occasion for this blast of outrage? The abandonment of socialism? Gross corruption? Not at all. It was something far closer to home. Professor Leschziner's cause for complaint was "two ill-gotten parking tickets and an obscene charge for towing away my car, left parked legally with a clearly displayed resident's permit in a bay suspended at short notice". This, plus the subsequent unhelpfulness and discourtesy of the Labour council in returning the professor his money, had clearly strained his loyalty to the limit.

At which point one might ask, "What loyalty?" I don't know why the professor was attracted to Labour in the first place. But his motives may well have included such great abstracts as the pursuit of equity and social justice. Yet, here the professor has personally encountered a far-flung encampment - an outpost - of real politics, touching his own life and it has been enough to alter his perceptions.

This seems odd to me, but then it would. For several years, I was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, almost by inheritance. My parents were communists and so were many of their friends, who were also - as far as I could see - decent, brave people with an enhanced sense of personal morality and responsibility. Many of them had stuck with the party through the Cold War and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, so they were unlikely to be put off by, say, Mr Krushchev's attitude towards parking in suspended bays.

But loyalty - to party and to fellow members - sometimes made them purblind. Its invocation was an easy way for those at the top (or, indeed, just as often, those at the bottom) to avoid or stifle awkward debate. And it made sense, for if each individual scruple or difference were made the occasion of an open struggle, then the party could never survive. A choice had been made when taking out the party card.

That this form of loyalty is a feature of an age now past was illustrated by the writer Henry Louis Gates in last week's New Yorker. He contrasted the behaviour of Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who took the rap for erasing key Watergate tapes in the early Seventies - with that of former Clinton aides who, as the bimbos erupted recently, put clear water between themselves and their former boss.

But the Clinton saga offers other perspectives on the conditional status of loyalty today. The behaviour of former White House aide Linda Tripp, in recording the confidences of the young Monica Lewinsky (including the use of what is now known as the "Tripp wire"), constitutes as remarkable a display of personal disloyalty as I can remember. Any consideration of the ethics of Ms Tripp - who may well be telling the truth - makes one salute the actions of the young Victoria Aitken, who may have been prepared to perjure herself for her father. As ever, it is her dad that we should worry about.

Victoria apart, loyalty is now, in general terms, a much less attractive and fashionable commodity than once it was. Instead of existing for its own sake, it is increasingly subjected to a consumer-benefit test before it is tendered. Why should one accept anything or anyone "right or wrong"? What would be the advantage of declaring an allegiance and obstinately maintaining it?

Companies cannot complain about this. There is nothing more ironic than watching well-heeled executives turn round after years of downsizing and appeal to the loyalty of their remaining employees. Every sensible worker knows that if you have two good ideas, then you should give only one of them to your current boss, and keep the other for your next job interview. Two decades of globalisation and we all understand that we are on our own.

So do the consumers themselves. One of the most wonderfully inappropriate (though effective) PR concepts of recent times is the supermarket "loyalty" card. The deal on the loyalty card is this: if you spend more money with us, we'll make it cheaper for you. The "Mercenary Card" would be a more truthful name for this material transaction, which entirely lacks the human quality of sympathetic identification, of the abdication of self that the word loyalty implies. The loyalty card, then, is a lie.

Now, even one of the few areas to have escaped this cynicism, the passion for a particular football team, has found itself under assault. What can Newcastle United fans have made of the sneering comments made about them and their gullible support for the Magpies by the chairman and vice-chairman of the club they love? These same men, whose marketing equates loyalty with the purchase of club goods, then deride the supporters for wasting their money on over-priced goods. However frantically the two men apologise, the fans now know what their loyalty bought them: contempt.

It is hardly surprising then, that political loyalty should also have suffered the attrition of cynicism. In Westminster and on the political talk-shows, the byword for New Labour sycophancy is the MP for Peterborough, Helen Brinton. Hers seems a horrid loyalty, with its use of the approved phrase, the courtier's attention to her master's phraseology and the repeated demand for loyalty for its own sake. This appears to us like the dark loyalty of a Speer, or a Molotov.

But I'm full of despair at the alternative, too. Step forward Bob Marshall- Andrews, also a new MP for Labour. Old Bob is not a loyalist; Bob is a character, a new Austin Mitchell now that we are tired of the old one. Bob is lionised in TV studios around Britain, for he can be relied upon to put the humorous boot into Blair. Not for Bob the awkward task of defending the unpopular, merely because his own party is implementing it. Interviewed about the Dome, for example, Bob tells us that he hopes so very much that it will be a success, but that he's terribly afraid that it will be a complete fiasco.

So, I do not love either of them. I understand the rush away from unqualified support; any ex-communist should. Yet, if you have chosen to support an idea or a movement or a person (and I hope that you will), your desertion at the first disagreement or pratfall merely strengthens the view that joining anything, supporting anything, is a waste of time. It is thus a victory for cynicism, not scepticism.