A Conspiracy?

The following is an extract from an article by Ferdinand Mount in this morning's Daily Telegraph linked from here:

"While I was staring at Mr Blair's eerie tan, the Prime Minister may have been launching a vigorous defence of his decision to invade Iraq. Or Michael Howard, while I was dreaming of the first cappuccino of the day, may have been explaining to us exactly how he would renegotiate the European fisheries policy.

But I do not think so. On the contrary, so far foreign affairs have been kept off both parties' menus with Stalinist rigidity. It is as though their leaders had signed some secret concordat not to mention the war, or indeed the outside world in any shape or form

I heard Mr Howard start off yesterday morning with a thumping denunciation of Blair's lies: the lies about Tory spending plans, the lies about Labour's pensions policy, the lies about the patient's passport. Terrific stuff, but was there not one other little area of, shall we say, prime-ministerial prevarication that earnt some notoriety not all that long ago?

With few exceptions, the media seem happy enough with this weird vacuum. They will remorselessly quiz the politicians on almost anything else you can think of: where the Blair tan came from, what Rupert Murdoch thinks of immigration, the treatment of prostate cancer. But as for the world and Britain's place in it, for the moment these seem to be no-go areas.

Which is peculiar in the extreme. Because outside the political hothouse, as far as I can see, people talk of little else. Perhaps for the first time since 1945, it is two foreign issues - Iraq and the European Union - that are foremost in the minds of the most agitated voters at this election.

Every Leftish person I bump into is obsessed with Blair's lies in the run-up to war. Every Rightish person is exercised by the latest excesses of Brussels and in despair at our apparent impotence to undo them, let alone to find a stable and enduring relationship with the EU, in or out of it. Every tobacconist and taxi driver is liable to let rip on either front.

There are not one but two elephants in our sitting room. And the politicians are doing their best to pretend that neither of them is there. In the American elections, the candidates chewed over every aspect of the Iraq war. In France, each clause of the EU constitution is being hotly contested. In the British election campaign to date, zero public debate on either."