The Lost Art of Politics

It’s happened in other countries before, it’ll happen again… but in the past year UK politics was shaken to its very foundations. Not by the public enquiry in to the war in Iraq. Not by the government’s fiscal stimulus plan. Not the outbreak of a ‘flu pandemic. No, it was shaken it its foundations by a duck house and a dirty moat.

I’m not going to dwell on what was a gargantuan mountain-out-of-molehill situation, it’s been done to death in the media – but I will briefly run through the “MPs Expenses Scandal” for the benefit of any non-UK readers.

Suffice to say that, on a background of global recession and rising unemployment, Members of Parliament (MPs) tried to resist calls to have their expense account details placed in the public domain. When the Daily Telegraph then obtained all of the details from an un-named source, they began a series of exposé articles, naming and shaming individual MPs who appeared to have been, at best, stretching the rules to the limit and, at worst, submitting fraudulent claims. The result was a national crisis, a number of resignations or de-selections and public confidence in politicians and politics itself at a new low.

Whilst I did think it unacceptable for a wealthy MP from a privileged upbringing to claim money from the public purse to have the moat around his stately home cleaned, the claims themselves weren’t what I had a real problem with. What enraged me about the whole affair was that their collective responses were a prime example of how politicians exist on a different plane of reality to the rest of us.

Politicians follow a certain code. Their profession developed a linguistic art of sitting through endless interviews and responding to countless questions without ever actually saying anything. ‘Politic’ is a language that appears to have originated from diplomacy and then mutated into something closer to Pig Latin. Those who use it do so with a smugness derived from their belief that only those in on it can understand them, whilst the reality is everyone can understand them and it’s only their fellow speakers who don’t think they sound ridiculous.

During the years of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, political satire was at a peak. Satirists and comedians revelled in the plotting and intrigue of government and the skilful word-craft of those more successful in it. Shakespearean actor Ian Richardson became famous for his role as Conservative ladder-climber Francis Urquhart in the TV adaptation of House of Cards, a trilogy of novels by Michael Dobbs and for his catchphrase “You may very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Urquhart was described as ‘the epitome of elegant evil’ but you could respect and enjoy the art with which rivals could fall to such a sharp tongue. Perhaps the standard of MPs has decreased, perhaps the internet age has made the average Joe Public more savvy or perhaps those inducted into the political world have just become lazy. Whatever the reason, the result is the public tearing clumps of hair out in frustration as they listen to politicians of all colours doing all they can to say everything but what they actually mean.

MPs who were grilled over alleged irregularities in their expenses squirmed embrassingly to find a way to apologise and limit the damage without ever actually admitting they did anything wrong. There were many phrases such as “an unfortunate administrative error by my office” and “whilst my claims were completely within the rules, it is clear that the rules themselves need to be changed in order to restore public trust”. Even the most blatant cases haven’t unearthed a single admission of real guilt. So we are to understand that none of these people requested, received and spent money they should not have had on purpose. It was all down to shoddy record keeping and misunderstandings. It is simply a gross insult to the intelligence of the electorate.

Particularly in a time of such difficulty as we have had over the past year, what I – as a voter – want to see is somebody… anybody… having the political balls to scrape away the Vaseline on the lens between parliament and the public and talk to people like a normal human being. The one who does so will, in my opinion, reap significant reward.

There are some fundamental rules that politicians live by that need to be scrapped first:

1. Bad news must be dressed up, bitter pills sweetened at all times. If you tell them the truth, they will blame you and you will lose your seat
2. Never – at any time – admit that you’ve listened to another point of view and changed your mind. Even if you realise you were wrong, it’s better to be wrong and stalwartly refuse to budge than to ‘U-turn’
3. When something is going badly, pointing out that it was even worse under the last administration will make people think you’ve done relatively well
4. Once you have left office, whatever mess you made is now the fault of the new administration and nobody will remember your mistakes. You are now free to re-invent yourself with a clear conscience.

 There are many more, I’m sure you will have your own to add to this list, but I think if those four were changed we would have a fundamentally better relationship between our elected politicians and the people they are supposed to represent. Most of all, politicians need to start talking to the public – and each other – like they talk to their friends or family: Not like robots to the media and Punch & Judy shows to each other, but like humans.