Spice girls back sceptics on Europe

Spectator, The, Dec 14-21, 1996 by Montefiore, Simon Sebag

Opposition to Labour on tax, rejection of single currency. Important interview by

INTERVIEW the Spice Girls, I thought. But the Spice Girls are interviewed all the time. My interview, however, would be different. I would ask only questions that I would ask Mr Major, Mr Blair, Mr Heseltine or any other politician.

Only one thing worried me about this plan. What if they weren't interested in politics? It was a needless worry. They were completely political. Politics was really their subject.

`We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology - Girl Power. But for now we're desperately worried about the slide to a single currency,' said Gerri, the 24year-old, husky-voiced, Titianhaired lead singer.

We were sitting in a smokefilled room with the inner Cabinet of the Girl Power Party. Gerri, known as `Ginger Spice', is the Spice Girls' expert on the small print of the Maastricht Treaty. As she argued the Eurosceptic case with passionate pride in the way English democracy has developed since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, sitting in her black platform glamrock boots, black stockings and hot pants, she resembled nothing less than a leggy, pouting, pneumatically Eurosceptic John Redwood at the high point of his recent intervention in the EU Budget scrutiny debate.

The politics of the Spice Girls may be somewhat surprising. You may, indeed, wonder who on earth the Spice Girls are and why we care. The answer is that this year this five-girl popular singing ensemble has dominated the culture of those aged between five and 25 in most countries of the world. Their album Spice has already sold three million copies; their song 'Wannabe' (an anthem to Thatcherite meritocratic aspiration) sold another three million, staying at number one in the hit parade for seven weeks. As I write this, they are number one in 27 countries. In Japan, they are the most successful popular Western group since the Beatles. But it is not their commercial success that makes them interesting -- after all, there have been plenty of teenage singing sensations before, from Tiny Tim to Little Stevie Wonder, from Donny Osmond to Take That. So why do politicians from Tony Blair to Brian Mawhinney care so much about Spice?

Just like the Thatcher Revolution, it has to do with ideas - the Spice Girls have views on everything. They boast a political movement called Girl Power which influences millions of young voters lost to the main political parties. One presumes that Girl Power must be a feminist version of the People Power that so effectively overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Like Bill Clinton - a saxophonist - they have their music, but they are primarily political animals leading a burgeoning political movement. Every week the feisty, sexy quintet make another outrageous political statement - how they lost their virginities, how they advocate female decision-making, whether they will ever experience Sapphism. The young believe they are the greatest philosophes since Descartes and Voltaire.

When Marshal Tito and his partisans arose in the remote Balkans to fight the Nazis, the Cabinet in London did not know if he was a communist, a nationalist, a myth or a hermaphrodite. When Fidel Castro raised the banner of Cuban rebellion in the Sierra Maestra, the West did not know if he was an aristocrat, a communist, a liberal, a myth or a bearded woman. But since both Tito and Castro were on the spot and armed, the West had to find out. It is the same with the Spice Girls - they control the vital territory of the young, apparently apolitical voters who do not even vote. So Labour and the Tories are desperate to find out their politics. Credulous fashionvictim journalists of magazines like Arena always call them `New Labour', but The Spectator is the first to ask them if this is really true.

Effectively, Girl Power is a single-interest movement like the Referendum Party. Like Goldsmith, the Spice Girls had careers before politics - he was the number one businessman in France, Britain and America, while they were number one everywhere.

The trouble until today was that singing ensembles had dogmatic political programmes that took stands only on traditional conservative issues like hotel-suite disfigurement, groupie fornication and narcotics-dealer shopping hours.

But the Spice Girls have changed all that forever. As at one of those American town hall meetings, the girls sat on five chairs arranged in a semi-circle around mine. They were advised by their two spindoctors, named Muff and Duff. To paraphrase JFK, not since Thomas Jefferson sat alone in the White House's Oval Office had such political and artistic talent been concentrated in one room. There was political excitement in the air; we were at their version of a political conference - the Smash Hits Awards Ceremony. They were glistening with sweat. They had just come off stage, where they had danced and strutted before screaming fans. Their fit, bare bellies were still quivering with sheer exhilaration.