The fascination of the modern world is that the realm of aesthetics does not end at the doors of the Tate Gallery. Art and advertising, commerce and culture have become one. Some might add politics to that list. Industrial design is our folk art. In this game there is no standing on the sideline, no such thing as a value-free decision not to be involved. And cars, being invested with more 'design' than any other commodity, are cruelly revealing of our tastes. 'I don't care about cars, I just drive an old Montego' is a testament of faith. It means you care about cars rather a lot really.
I'd had Tony Blair down for a SAAB, a car that's intelligent, responsible, non-aggressive, but also just a teeny bit raffish. No slam dunk of testosterone here: these cars are gender-free. Provincial solicitors might drive steady Volvos, but urban barristers prefer slinkier SAABs, cars with a high IQ. The parallels between the GAP-clad, Majestic-quaffing Blair - or perhaps I mean the image of Blair - and the eco-sensitive SAAB are surprising. Like Blair, the SAAB 900 looks good, and appears to be the quintessence of social democracy, but underneath it has a dark Secret. It's nothing more than a very ordinary old-regime Vauxhall Cavalier dressed in impressive new(ish) clothes.
So the Prime Minister's arrival at church on one of his very first public outings in a Ford Galaxy was something of a surprise. It's certain that Blair's courtiers had taken the iconography of this one very seriously indeed. The Galaxy is the most successful of the new category of MPV (Multi Purpose Vehicles). It's not just a new car: it is a new type of car - and here, of course, is its significance.
Given the Prime Minister's domestic obligations and arrangements, he could have chosen an estate car, but that would have excited too many associations with cosy suburbia. A Range Rover would have done the job, but that would have been too much Mr and Mrs Deposed-Tory of Cirencester and with lots of ineffable rural associations, upsetting to the anti-hunt and tree-hugging lobby. A luxury car, on the other hand - a Jaguar perhaps - was too undemocratic: but a people-mover seemed just right, the sort of car politicians can hold talks in, move people, that sort of thing. The symmetry was marvellous.
Never mind that to many people the styling of the Galaxy gives an unusual impression that the car might, at any one time, be coming or going. Never mind that it can't decide whether it's a minibus or a sports car. Never mind either that the capacity to accommodate so many fellow-travellers seems at odds with the principles of freedom and independence which are the source of the motoring bug. The Galaxy's other attributes provide a perfect iconographic system for New Labour. It's sophisticated, mature (lout not old-fart), outgoing and as flexible in its accommodation as New Labour is in its policy. And of course, it's European. This Ford is not made in Dagenham or Halewood, but in a joint venture with Volkswagen at a new site in Portugal. If the Galaxy were a person it would be a forty-ish graduate, given to wearing deck shoes (probably with socks) at weekends, buying wine at Majestic, chinos from Gap and possessing committed views on child-rearing, forests and Third-World debt.
The Galaxy is New Labour on wheels... or, at least, in theory. If the sight of a brand-new, delivery-mileage-only Prime Minister driving himself to church in a Postmodern monospace seven-seat V6 people-mover was a surprise, the sight of the Blairs actually arriving at Downing Street (when a formal photo opportunity had not been announced) in a forlorn Montego Estate was - depending on the colour of your prejudices - as cruelly disillusioning or as neatly confirming some prejudices as Prescott wearing a gorilla costume and swinging a football rattle at his first cabinet meeting. For this melancholy device is the Blairs' private car, and it is irresistibly tempting to make the telling comparison of Chardonnay/brown ale, New Labour/old Labour and Galaxy/Montego. And very depressing it is.
Television news showed the Montego missing a plastic hubcap - telltale slovenliness - on a course of automatic physical disintegration to complement the necessary intellectual deconstruction demanded by the Blairs' consumer choice. The Montego is a survivor of the pre-anaesthetic days of the British car industry when the British car industry was still British. It is a vehicle entirely without personal charm or capability and with so little technical merit that only the most sensitive instruments could detect it. It was manufactured to a price rather than to a standard. Great designs are an expression of belief. Great designs have a moral quality. The Montego was not a great design.
The production technology employed to manufacture it was so backward and full of redundant processes and wanton complexity that mediocre quality and unreliability were standard fittings, along with interior design using Iron Curtain plastics and the aesthetics of a Romanian psychiatric hospital. They couldn't work out how to impregnate the bumpers with body colour so they had to paint them. Engines were crude and interior design reminiscent of the Polish avant-garde of the 1970s: lots of daring angles and glossy plastic and depressing tilts at modernism. As a driver's car, a Montego is no more stimulating than an afternoon in a day-care centre, its handling like a hospital gurney missing a wheel. It is the utter negation of joy, optimism, positivism and a sense of progress. It is depression made visible: dispiriting, cynical, ugly, backward and despairing. It is the Blairs' personal choice. Someone capable of tolerating such awfulness is not to be trusted. But, of course, this was the off-camera reality, as opposed to the photo-opportunity.
Will we see Ministers all in Galaxys one day, opportunistically fiddling with swivelling conference chairs so as to change direction with the ebb and flow of public opinion? Among all its many merits, the Galaxy is one of the few cars you can buy which allows passengers to sit with their backs to the direction of progress. Since it cannot easily be classified, it's a fine car for politicians. But even if Ford's popular people-mover does not officially replace the ageing fleet of government Rovers, one thing is certain: the choice of private car should be on the declaration of members' interests.
-Stephen Bayley
