Ignore the pasties and the petrol stories: it was a good fortnight for the government

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/03/ignore-cries-of-coalition-in-crisis

Version 0 of 1.

Look at it this way. Britain has been quite well governed this past two weeks. George Osborne's budget was mildly reflationary and progressive, which is about right as the economy emerges from recession. Freezing the pensions tax threshold was not unreasonable, given how relatively well pensioners have done of late. Ending the 50p band undid a pointless Labour gesture whose revenue consequences were unclear.

A minimum price was set for alcohol, to curb binge-drinking. VAT on hot takeaways ended a tax anomaly. The invitation to panic-buy petrol shifted the stockpile from refineries into motorists' tanks, in advance of a threatened strike, allowing time to replenish garage forecourts. The cabinet has wobbled over cash-for-access and extending the police state, but has recovered its poise in retreating from the planning shambles. Talks on party funding may now resume in earnest. All in all, it has not been a disastrous bout of modern British government.

Readers may find this judgment astonishing. Where have I been? Have I not read the same newspapers as them, not watched the same television? Have I not seen the headlines about granny taxes, toffs' budgets, pastygates and four-star fuels? This was declared by all and sundry the worst week in the coalition's history. The gilt has fallen from the Cameron-Osborne duumvirate. Ministers have been squirming and "mis-speaking". Lord Tebbitt has thundered about "chum government".

This may be true, but I am not clear what it conveys about the conduct of government, as opposed to the spin put on it by the Westminster village. There the 50p tax cut was measured not against the rise in stamp duty or the clampdown on avoidance but against the freezing of the pensions threshold. Yet the latter was not a tax change at all, but the freezing of an allowance. The raising of the lowest earnings threshold was far more significant, but escaped comment because it was good news.

The VAT change on takeaway hot meat products ended a glaring discrimination against fish and chip shops, and was a modest blow against obesity. Yet it was greeted with hilarity and ridicule, while the most important introduction of a minimum alcohol price was dismissed for boosting supermarket profits. A panic-buying rise in fuel prices was also condemned as a gratuitous gift to racketeering middle men. Yet domestic stockpiling made sense against what then seemed a serious strike possibility. It put pressure on the tanker drivers' union and could yet help avert a strike, which would have cost far more than the "panic".

The pasty saga was even more bizarre, a classic of the London political classes pretending to a deep sympathy with what they suppose to be working-class eating habits. Television crews combed north-country streets, seeking out "ordinary people" to damn a price rise for what suddenly emerged as the staple diet of old England, the Cornish pasty. The public watched politicians munching their way through hunks of pastry, potato and fatty gristle, without ever being asked why Greggs should not be taxed at the same rate as Harry Ramsden's.

There are two media stereotypes at work here. The first is that any Tory government that raises a tax is conforming to type, that of an old-Etonian toff screwing down the poor. As Tebbitt said, there would be no complaints about Etonians in government if taxes were falling and incomes rising. As it was, pictures of Cameron and Osborne portrayed them in black tie while cartoons showed them in spats and pantaloons declaring, with Marie Antoinette, "let them eat cold pasty". This was invariably contrasted with the BBC's stock-in-trade of a single mother with crying baby, pasty-deprived and wailing "I really don't know how we are going to cope".

The second stereotype is not of politicians but of the media itself. Whatever journalists might think, newspapers are not reactive zombies, attaching objective significance to passing events. They are powerful, subjective mediators. Their staffs apply to politics a template of ingrained scepticism, preconception and cliche. They assume that what goes right is as it should be, and therefore boring. What is interesting is what goes wrong.

Critics of any policy are therefore more newsworthy than its supporters. Should it be thought basically sound, the media defaults to stereotype. It criticises some aspect of "handling" and "negative messaging". The 50p cut sent the wrong message, the pasty tax was badly handled. Any government supporter was treated as a patent idiot, while the petrol retailers' association and the chief executive of Greggs were treated as dispassionate observers. In the course of five days, "pastygate" and "fuelgate" had taken the budget's disapproval rating from -10% to -31%.

Old hands call this political weather. Politics is a rough old business, in which fairness has long rated far behind luck, fun and schadenfreude. As Alan Clark wrote, nothing so electrifies the Westminster lobbies as the scent of ministerial blood in the water. The sharks circle, thrashing in a frenzy of glee and ambition.

Weather is not commentary. Two years of coalition government have seen thrills and spills, risks and fumbles. But the volume of noise from Westminster's news factory drowns sentient analysis. Britain's three political leaders are by no means the worst ever. Yet last week YouGov registered their accumulated net disapproval rating as an unprecedented -121%. With ridicule oozing from every pore of the political community, the electorate could hardly make any other judgment.

I can easily share HL Mencken's view that all politicians are rapscallions at heart, and democracy should treat them harshly. But there is a cost. Where else should people turn for some rough approximation to the truth?