h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mandelson's rant of a speech was amazing, wasn't it? I thought he was going to start singing "My Way"! I seriously wondered whether he'd been at the !

Not heard about this! Good old Mandy mouthing off was he?

Yeah - raging on and on about how people had tried to write him off but he'd survived because of his "inner steel"!

[Michigan Yankee who knows nothing of UK politics]

Is it normal for the losing candidate to quit the party like Hague did? In the U.S., the losing presidential candidate often sinks from view, and likely won't raise enough support or money to run for the Democratic or Republican party again. But they don't usually quit positions they've gained. (While Lieberman was on the ticket for Democratic VP, his name was still on for being a Congressman, so he accidentally got elected. But that was sort of a fluke.)

Maybe this is just my lack of familiarity with UK politics, but it seemed weird to hear that Hague quit as head of the party when he lost the election.

Sometimes the party leaders do quit when they lose, sometimes they don't. If they don't quit they can be pushed, should someone successfully challenge them for the leadership at a party conference. I think the last time this happened was when Margater Thatcher ousted Edward Heath as Conservative leader in th Seventies.

In this instance, I think Hague's position was untenable after the election not because he lost but because he lost by such a wide margin. If he'd been able to halve or even substantially reduce the size of Labour's huge majority in the House of Commons, he could have claimed that his party was on the right track and perhaps kept his job. The fatal factor for him was that his party are no better off now than they were after Labour's landslide win in 1997.

That makes sense. But when I first heard it, I thought it might be the action of a sore loser, or a signal that he was exhausted with politics. Guess it's more normal than I thought.

Come to think of it, the losers of presidential candidates in the U.S. rarely have any other positions to fall back on. They have to spend a year or more campaigning, which usually precludes campaigning for any other position. Of course, you could just ignore your current job as an elected official of say the state of Texas in order to spend all year campaigning. Then you would have something to fall back on.

But as a rule, they usually seem to fade away. Or do Viagra commercials.

Looking ahead, do you think Al Gore will get the Democratic nomination for President again in 2004? On the one hand, he didn't fire the public's imagination enough last year, and he lost, albeit narrowly and in highly dubious circumstances. On the other hand, he is now widely perceived to have been cheated out of the Presidency. I wondered if the Democrats might calculate that if Gore stood against Bush again, he'd get a big sympathy vote, and people might support him out of a desire to correct an injustice.

So who did a Viagra commercial then?

Incidentally, I heard a senior Tory yesterday commenting that changing their leader now might be like changing the captain of the Titanic while its already sinking.
It does seem like that at the moment, the LibDems do seem fairly happy that they might end up as the second party rather than them but I guess it must have seemed like that for labour back in the mid-eighties.

I think the Tories' problem is very much like the one Labour had in the mid-Eighties. It is that they just seem too extreme to appeal to many people beyond their own hardcore supporters. They can surely only recover by winning back some of the middle ground from Labour, but in order to do that they'd have to suddenly abandon the hardcore anti-European, anti-asylum seeker rhetoric with which they fought the election. It would be pretty difficult for them to do that now. Maybe that was partly why Hague stepped down so quickly? Could he have calculated that this way, he'd be more likely to be followed by a new leader with similar views?

Ah well, that's the Tories' problem!

Anne Widdecombe has thrown her hat into the ring for the Tory Party leadership - Looks like Labour is going to reign for a while yet.

Comrade GreyDesk

The Tories prediciment continues to keep me amused as well

However it would be nice to have a Labour government in the mean time.


Comrade Baldbloke

Seems like there was a history teacher or professor who implanted the rule in my brain: no candidate of the major U.S. parties who loses once will be nominated again. And it makes some sense, similar to Hague quitting. If you put a lot of money on a candidate and he puts all his effort for a year into campaigning but he loses (especially to painfully stupid Bush), then why should the party back that candidate a second time?

The only thing that could get Gore nominated to run next time is if people continue to buy the joke bumperstickers that have been so common since President-sElect Bush was selected: "RE-elect Gore in 2004."

Maybe you're right. He could get a sympathy vote. But I suspect the Democratic party will be more realistic and pick a more viable candidate. Like Hillary.

(I'll vote Nader again, if he runs again.)

Bob Dole did a tv commercial for American Express shortly after he lost in 1996. A few years after that, he did a serious commercial for Viagra.

I can see it now: "You know, I once warned you all that things could soon be getting hard. Well, with new Viagra, that's guaranteed..."

There is no rule or law prohibiting US candidates from having another go. Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960.

Yeah, and look what a mess he ended up in. He should have given it up as bad job when he got beat in 1960

Hague is still MP for Richmond and what he resigned was the party leadership; I think some of the Americans may have been confused upon that point.

Good point, Bagpuss. I believe that Hague also had a healthy increase in his majority in his constituency, so he'll remain an MP - unless he wants to take up one of the many suggestions for alternative careers that British voters have offered him!