What Is It About Politicians?

G:/WORK/Blackwell Journals/PolQ/PolQ84-4/05_POQU_12048.3d ^ 26/11/13 ^18:43 ^ bp/amj

What Is It About Politicians?

TONY WRIGHT

Politicians are like monkeys. The higher theyclimb the more revolting are the parts theyexpose. (Gwilym Lloyd George)

One Labour MP elected at the last generalelection has reportedly spent the last yeartrying to find out why people dislike her somuch. Not her personally of course (in fact,people tend to view their ‘own’ politiciansrather less unfavourably than the generality),but the occupational group of which she hasbecome a member. It is unlikely that herresearch will produce any new findings, butthat does not make it a pointless exercise. It isworth asking what it is about politicians thatpeople so dislike and what, if anything, mightbe done about it.The fact of dislike is well established and

confirmed by survey upon survey. One recentsurvey in the United States broke new groundin the dislike stakes, though. As reported byThe Times,

cockroaches and head lice are nowmore popularamong American voters than members of Con-gress . . . the politicians were also beaten in thepopularity stakes by root canals, colonoscopies,traffic jams, Donald Trump, France, used-carsalesmen, Brussels sprouts and Genghis Khan.1

Only playground bullies, telemarketers,gonorrhoea, communism, North Korea andthe ebola virus were more unpopular. InBritain we are more familiar with those reg-ular surveys that ask people to rank variousoccupational groups in terms of trust andwhich consistently show politicians jostlingbankers, estate agents and tabloid journalistsfor the bottom spot.The problem with surveys like these, inter-

esting though they are, is that they tell us littleor nothing about what it is about politiciansthat people so dislike (and therefore whatmight make them less disliked). A surveylast year, undertaken by YouGov for theFabian Society, sought to explore this andcame up with some helpful findings.2 Pre-sented with some of the criticisms commonly

made of politicians and asked which of thesethey agreed with most strongly, the clearwinner was ‘politicians seldom give straightanswers to straight questions on radio andTV’ (57 per cent). This was followed by‘politicians are more interested in scoringpolitical points than doing the right thing’(36 per cent); ‘most MPs have too little experi-ence of the real world before they go intopolitics’ (34 per cent); and ‘politics is a gameplayed by an out of touch elite who live onanother planet’ (31 per cent). Similarly, whenasked what might make politicians seemmore relevant to their life, the winner by amile was ‘[if] they stopped arguing for aminute and tried to work together to solvethe big issues of the day’ (44 per cent).There are two main sources of dissatisfac-

tion that seem to emerge from findings likethese. The first is that politicians are perceivedas being engaged in a kind of game, the rulesof which enable questions not to be answered,truths not to be told, facts to be distorted,complexities ignored and opponents tra-duced, all in pursuit of political advantage.The second is that politicians are perceived asliving in a closed political world, withoutexperience or knowledge of real life, whichmakes them unrepresentative and out oftouch. If the former dissatisfaction is aboutconduct, the latter is about character. Yet theyare also connected, because it is easier toregard politics as a game if it has becomedisconnected from everything else.Are these perceptions accurate and the

dissatisfactions well grounded? If so, can any-thing be done about it? My answer will bethat, at least in part, they are well founded;and that, again in part, some things couldusefully be done about it. Before getting tothat, though, something needs to be saidabout the parts that are not well founded.This involves rejecting any assumption thatthere was once a golden age when politicianswere loved and trusted. There is no evidencefor this, although matters do seem to have got

# The Author 2013. The Political Quarterly # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2013Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA448

The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 4, October–December 2013 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-923X.2013.00000.x


worse. ‘Today, more than ever, the politicianappears to be held in contempt’: that was thejournalist Henry Fairlie in 1960,3 but it couldhave been written at almost any time in thepast hundred years (or longer). There is noth-ing surprising about this. What would besurprising, because so counter-cultural,would be if people gave positive answerswhen asked if they thought politicians under-stood the problems faced by ordinary peopleand did their best to solve them, or if theyalways put the country’s interest first. That isjust not what you say (unless you live inNorth Korea). Similarly, although people saythey want politicians to work together, theyare equally likely to say (if asked) that theywould like a strong leader with a clear senseof direction.This suggests that a dose of realism is

required in any search for ways to improvematters. The fact that negative perceptions areso entrenched is an indication that there issomething intrinsic to the activity of politicsthat fosters them. Perhaps this is the perennialgap between the promise and the perform-ance. Perhaps it is the fact that in politics,unlike in the consumer world, you often donot get what you want. Perhaps it is the sensethat many problems are beyond the capacityof politicians to deal with them. Perhaps it issimply that the function of politicians is to beblamed for life’s adversities and discontents.There is no shortage of reasons why, beyondparticular events like the fiddling of expenses,people might take a dim view of politicians.This is not offered as false comfort, since bothperceptions and participation have recentlyworsened further, but merely as a reminderthat there are larger and longer factors atwork here and that a certain modesty is there-fore needed in any discussion of what mightbe done.The focus here is on the twin charge against

politicians that they are engaged in a gameand that they are out of touch. It is not difficultto find supporting evidence for both charges.Much of politics is a game, which is whypeople regard it rather like they regard ad-vertising (although without the codes of prac-tice). It is a game which absorbs theparticipants, but puts off most other people.The nature of the game is best illustrated byone or two examples. Some months ago areport found that the government’s Work

Programme had been so unsuccessful in find-ing jobs for people that it would have beenjust as effective (and saved a lot of money) tohave done nothing. A Labour spokesmandeclared: ‘I am really angry about this’.What he really meant of course was that hewas absolutely delighted, since bad news for agovernment is always good news for anopposition. But the game required that heshould pretend to be angry. In similar vein aformer Conservative chief whip, when theparty had been in opposition, once confessed(in private session) to a committee I waschairing that he had ‘never been able todecide whether it was my job to try to makelegislation better or worse’. This is why muchof the way in which the House of Commonsoperates feels like an elaborate game, whichmay not matter for much of the time but doesmatter if it produces legislation that is defec-tive because the parliamentary game has sub-stituted for effective scrutiny.The effect of the game is not just that people

get fed up with the endless point-scoring, butthey also cease to believe what politicians say,because they think that what they are sayingis merely part of a game. This point wasrecently made nicely by the comedian DavidMitchell in his Observer column.4 His examplewas a speech by transport secretary PatrickMcLoughlin at a Campaign to Protect RuralEngland conference, in which he made anattack on ugly road signs. Reading a reportof the speech, wrote Mitchell, ‘all I could hearwas the subtext: ‘‘I wish to shore up a sectionof the Tory vote by crowd-pleasingly joiningin with your grumbles’’ ’. He admitted thismight be unfair, but insisted it was the fault ofpoliticians, because ‘I can’t even hear whatthey’re actually saying. However clearly theirmessage is being conveyed, however eye-orear-catching their rhetoric, all I’m aware of isthe eagerness to please, the meretriciousreaching out to a useful demographic’. Thisis the corrosive consequence of the game ofpolitics. Everything that a politician says, ordoes, is treated with suspicion because ofnegative assumptions about why it is beingsaid or done. Nothing can be taken at facevalue, or on its merits.It involves a linguistic game too. Narratives

have to be constructed, phrases honed andwords deployed in service of a political pur-pose. The repetition of ‘lines to take’ produces

What Is It About Politicians? 449

# The Author 2013. The Political Quarterly # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2013 The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 4


leaden language (captured in Orwell’s obser-vation about political language as stalephrases ‘tacked together like the sections ofa prefabricated hen-house’) that inhibits realdiscussion and makes many listeners reachfor the mental switch-off button. Politiciansbelieve, perhaps correctly, that only the con-stant repetition of ‘key messages’ will makeany kind of impression on voters, but thiscomes at a high linguistic price. Hence theubiquitous rhetoric about ‘hard-workingfamilies’ (how hard do you have to work toqualify?) and the like which empties words ofmeaning.The nature of the linguistic game that is

being played is nicely captured in an examplefrom theUnited States. In 1996NewtGingrich,who two years earlier had published his Con-tract with America, used his political actioncommittee to circulate privately to Republicancandidates a document which included in-struction in ‘Language, a Key Mechanism ofControl’. It had two lists of words, tested infocus groups: the first containing the ‘Op-timistic Positive Governing Words’ that thecandidates should use, and the second the‘contrasting’ words to be used about theiropponents. In the first list was ‘candid, care,challenge, change, children, courage, debate,dream, environment, family, hard work,legacy, liberty, opportunity, peace, proud,reform, share, tough, we/us/our. . .’; in thesecond were words such as ‘bureaucracy, fail-ure, incompetent, collapse, corrupt, waste . . .’5

Versions of such lists are to be found in thelanguage of politicians everywhere, whetheron left or right, because they are engaged inthe same linguistic game. Strip out suchwords and not much would be left in mostpolitical speeches. They frame the contempor-ary political argument in Britain, as the Coali-tion parties deploy the language of failure,waste and collapse to pin the blame forfinancial meltdown on the last Labour gov-ernment, while promoting their own tough-ness and courage in tackling the deficit.Labour has found more difficulty in findinga contrasting vocabulary of its own, but it will.Even linguistic usage that seems trivial isalmost certainly not. When David Cameronalways refers to ‘our’ country and ‘our’ NHS,a usage never found in everyday speech, it isfor a deliberate political purpose. It isdesigned to affirm his identification and soli-

darity with the country and its most valuedinstitution. As such it is straight from theGingrich playlist.Does any of this matter? I think it does if we

want to understand why so many peoplewrite off politics as no more than a game. Itconnects directly with the sense that politi-cians will say anything, whether true or not,and whether believed to be true or not, if it isnecessary to advance their position in thepolitical game. This is not the place to explorethe whole issue of political hypocrisy6 andwhether it is legitimate for politicians toinhabit a separate moral universe in this re-spect, but something can be said about theability of politicians to develop a capacity forsaying things not because they are true butbecause they are useful. In the hands of itsmost accomplished practitioners, this can be atruly remarkable facility.Take the case of Lyndon B. Johnson, the

magisterial biography of whom by RobertCaro has come to be seen by many politicians(including Gordon Brown) as a handbook ofeffective political practice. LBJ was a ruthlessbully, but he got things done. He also engagedin a process of ‘working up’ which enabledhim to believe in whatever it was he wantedto argue for at any particular time. As Carodescribes it, ‘Lyndon Johnson could makehimself believe in an argument even if hehad never believed in it before, even if hehad believed in an opposite argument—andeven if the argument did not accord with thefacts’.7 Not all politicians can master thisfacility of flexible belief in quite the way thatJohnson managed, but some mastery of itseems to be essential if they want to practicetheir craft with the necessary conviction. Thegame seems to require it.But does it? If the game-playing aspect of

politics is one of the main things that makepeople dislike politicians, perhaps it is worthexploring whether politics could be donedifferently. This would involve politiciansbeing more straightforward, answering ques-tions honestly, avoiding the routine point-scoring, not always traducing opponents,working together where they can, ditchingthe spin, acknowledging the complexitiesand limitations of policy making, telling thetruth about problems, admitting they getthings wrong—and generally behaving morelike normal human beings. Pie in the sky?

450 Tony Wright

The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 4 # The Author 2013. The Political Quarterly # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2013


Perhaps so; except that people have rumbledthat much of what politicians do is just a gameand do not like politicians very much as aresult. Perhaps it is might just be worth tryinga different approach.This is what Peter Kellner, pollster and

political commentator, recently recom-mended in calling for ‘a campaign for politicalcivility’. He offered this analogy:

To see why such a campaign is needed, imaginethat all we ever heard from rival supermarketchains was how awful the others were—howdishonest, how immoral, how they lied abouttheir goods and short-changed their customers.Would we be surprised if the public concludedthat none of them could be trusted?’.8

Yet this is precisely how the political game isconducted, with entirely predictable conse-quences in terms of the erosion of politicaltrust. Those who think that it is impossible, orundesirable, for the game to be conducted inany other way should not also lament theinevitable consequences of doing politics likethis. Nor should it be thought that what isbeing proposed here is some sort of cosyconsensus. Politics needs and thrives on dis-agreement and competition. But the disagree-ment should be real, about things that matter,not the kind of predictable and ritualiseddisagreement on everything that just turnspolitics into a game.Now to the second main area of expressed

dislike of politicians: that they are out oftouch, unrepresentative and disconnectedfrom the real world. In other words, thatthey inhabit a political bubble of their ownmaking. Here, too, a little caution is needed.The constituency system ensures that politi-cians have to encounter the people they repre-sent on a regular basis (unlike in thosesystems where regional party lists enablepoliticians to float above their electorates).There is also an obsessional concern nowwith knowing what the electorate is thinkingand feeling about everything at all times.Furthermore, it is difficult to see the parlia-ments of the past (not least because they werealmost entirely composed of men) as some-how more representative than parliaments oftoday.When all this is properly said, though, there

is a charge that does carry more weight. It has

been nicely expressed by Lord Turnbull, aformer cabinet secretary:

There is a growing trend for people to come intopolitics more or less straight from university.They lick envelopes in Central Office, become aSpecial Adviser, and on and on it goes, and bythe time they are in their mid-thirties they areCabinet ministers, barely touching the sides ofreal life.9

The fact that all three main party leaderscurrently fit this sort of stereotype gives it aparticular force. In fact the picture is rathermore complicated (and requires moredetailed evidence than we currently have),but there is enough truth in it to feed adeveloping public sense that politiciansincreasingly inhabit a closed political worldof their own and lack experience and under-standing of other worlds and lives. As I heardsomeone express this recently: ‘if they havenever had to worry about paying the gas billhow can they represent people like me?’.This can easily become the perception that

it is only the game of politics itself that theyare interested in, and the rewards that go withit, rather than any wider purpose. This viewwas recently expressed by Max Hastings:

I knew quite a few of the generation of Britishpoliticians who started their careers in 1945—thelikes of Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, EdwardHeath, Enoch Powell and Iain Macleod. Thecommon denominator, whatever their party,was that they entered politics passionately be-lieving they could change things. They wereserious people. It does not matter whether theywere wrong or right—almost all of them hadreal beliefs. Today most aspirant politicians ofevery party have not a personal convictionbetween them.10

This is unfair (and unhistorical), but the factthat it can be so confidently asserted mattersmore. Some politicians have understood thatauthenticity is now the most useful asset theycan possess, which has produced the bogusauthenticity of a Boris Johnson and thesaloon-bar simplicities of a Nigel Farage.They trade in the fact that they are not seenas ‘normal’ politicians.It is now a generation ago that Anthony

King produced his pioneering analysis of therise of the ‘career politician’ in Britain, with itstreatment of politicians as an occupationalcategory. He charted the way in which, by




the 1980s, the non-career politician had vir-tually disappeared from the top of Britishpolitics, a trend which has consolidated itselfsince. This might be inevitable, but one of itsconsequences was that we were increasinglybeing governed by people with a diminishedexperience of the world beyond politics. Kingalso warned of another consequence: ‘It ishard to escape the conclusion that the demiseof the non-career politician has led to a certainloss of experience, moderation, detachment,balance, ballast even, in the British politicalsystem’.11 If this kind of analysis of politiciansas an occupational category was an interest-ing academic exercise a generation ago, it hasnow become a matter of pressing politicalinterest. We increasingly want to know whopoliticians are and where they have comefrom (and how we can exercise some controlover what they do).It may have been Aristotle who first identi-

fied the need for politicians to know ‘wherethe shoe pinches’, but the general absence ofthis kind of shoe-pinching knowledge amongtoday’s politicians is now widely noticed.They are certainly clever—perhaps more cle-ver than ever, furnished with their degrees inPPE and the like—but this does not makethem wise. Nor does it compensate for adeficiency of experience of other walks andconditions of life that might inform their polit-ical judgements. When people say that theythink politicians are ‘out of touch’, these arethe sort of considerations they have in mind.This in turn leads to the quest for that elusivequality of authenticity in politicians, and forways in which the talent pool of politics canbe widened and deepened.This becomes more urgent as the political

party, which is the recruitment agency forpoliticians, loses its popular base. The col-lapse of membership and attachment notonly concentrates power at the top of theparty, but also narrows still further thealready small group of people involved inthe selection (and re-selection) of politicians.The number of participants is now so small inmany cases (the exact numbers are not dis-closed by the parties for obvious reasons) thatwe are approaching a crisis of representativelegitimacy. This is why there is growing inter-est in finding ways to expand this selectorate,notably through local primary elections inwhich everyone can take part. Limited experi-

ments so far (notably in Totnes, which pro-duced a local GP as the Conservativecandidate in 2010, who then became arobustly independent MP) have not encour-aged the party leaderships to extend theexperiment. Yet they will have to, if they areserious about opening up politics to morekinds of people.If we confine politics to those who are

required to demonstrate devotion to a polit-ical party, then to be chosen by an ever tiniergroup of the party faithful, then not only doesthis exclude almost the entire population; italso makes such people increasingly unrepre-sentative of everybody else. If we really dowant lots more people, from a whole range ofbackgrounds and with a wide variety of lifeexperiences, to be involved in politics, thenwe have to find ways to bring this about. Theconsequence of not doing so will be to furtherincrease the perception of politicians as aseparate political class out of touch with therest of society.This perception is reflected in a recent

British Social Attitudes survey, whichexplored whether the sort of constitutionalreform proposals most usually advancedwere seen by people as doing anything toremedy the discontent with politics and poli-ticians. This was found not to be the case.Only measures which promised to give citi-zens more opportunity to control the politicalclass produced a positive response: ‘The onetype of reform that is consistently both abso-lutely and relatively popular among the scep-tical is that which gives citizens a direct say indecisions’.12 For example, no less than 88 percent of people felt that any MP who had‘broken the rules’ should have to resign andfight a by-election. Yet this recall measure,like primaries, promised in the wake of theparliamentary expenses scandal has con-spicuously failed to appear. Thus the consti-tutional reform proposal disliked by mostpoliticians is the one most favoured by citi-zens.Yet the argument here is that structural

reform is not the primary requirement if wewant to tackle the expressed public discontentwith politicians. Some reforms of this kindmight be useful, but most are seen as irrelev-ant. The real discontent with politicians turnson how they behave, and the sort of peoplethey increasingly are. It is how politics is now

452 Tony Wright

The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 4 # The Author 2013. The Political Quarterly # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2013


done, and by whom, that seems to be core tothe dissatisfactionwith politicians. If this is so,then it is not surprising that a responseframed merely in terms of assorted constitu-tional reforms will fail to deliver its expectedbenefits. This has been the experience of thepost-1997 constitutional revolution which hasnot produced an improvement in politicaltrust, but instead a further decline. This sug-gests that its causes—and remedies—lie else-where.If this is right, then the focus should be on

political behaviour. In a whole range ofrespects, the ways in which politicians routi-nely behave (and believe they need to behave)just turn people off. What seems clever andnecessary to them, as part of the politicalgame, only serves to diminish them in theeyes of everybody else. There is a hugechallenge here for the whole political class.The further focus should be on the nature andcomposition of the contemporary politicalclass itself. There is widespread public anti-pathy to the idea of rule by a class of careerpoliticians who have done nothing but poli-tics. People want politicians who have a lifestory to tell and not just a political career toadvance. A sharp division seems to be open-ing up between the career and non-careerpolitician (the recent parliamentary vote thatprevented a military strike against Syriamight be seen as a victory for the latter), butthe balance between them is something thatdemands attention.So that Labour MP who is trying to find out

why she (and those in her occupation) areregarded so negatively by the public hasmuch to chew on. However, she and hercolleagues also have many of the remediesin their own hands, just by doing politicsdifferently. Politics is a noble craft, despite

its murky side, and those who engage in it areundertaking an indispensable and difficultactivity. Yet it is hard to get this understoodin a culture which prefers to regard politicianswith contempt and mockery. Not all theremedies for this lie with politicians them-selves, but some certainly do. They could dopolitics in a more grown-up way, and theycould resist the tendency to become a separatepolitical class. This would be good for them—and for us.

Notes

1 The Times, 10 January 2013.2 The survey results are reported in Fabian Review,vol. 124, no. 3, 2012.

3 H. Fairlie, The Life of Politics, London, Methuen,1968, p. 15.

4 D. Mitchell, ‘Watch out for devious politiciansand suspicious giraffes’, Observer, 18 November2012.

5 This example is cited in G. Esler, Lessons from theTop, London, Profile Books, 2012, pp. 32–5.

6 On which, see the discussion in D. Runciman,Political Hypocrisy, Princeton University Press,Princeton and Oxford, 2008.

7 R. A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master ofthe Senate, New York, Vintage, 2003, p. 886.

8 Peter Kellner, ‘Why positive campaigning canwin elections’, The Times, 8 August 2013.

9 Quoted in Public Administration Select Com-mittee, Goats and Tsars, HC 330, 2010, p. 11.

10 M. Hastings, ‘Boris: brilliant, warm, funny—and totally unfit to be PM’, Guardian, 11 October2012.

11 A. King, ‘The rise of the career politician inBritain—and its consequences’, British Journalof Political Science, vol. 11, no. 3, 1981, pp. 249–85.

12 J. Curtice and B. Seyd, ‘Constitutional reform: arecipe for restoring faith in our democracy?’,British Social Attitudes 29, NatCen SocialResearch, 2012, pp. 45–63.



Documents

What Is It About Politicians?