Dan Hitchens on Something
How nice are politicians?
Who cares if politicians are pretty nice, decent people? Dan Hitchens details his response to Patrick Kingsley’s blog on Charles Kennedy.
Dear David: nobody cares.
One of my favourite pieces on the Varsity Blog so far was Patrick Kingsley’s reminiscence of his spell as Charles Kennedy’s tea-lady. The part when the sixteen-year-old Patrick Kingsley breaks down in a phone box as Kennedy’s resignation speech is relayed to him is a moment of great pathos. Kingsley’s tears, we should feel, are the same tears wept by the French footsoldier at Waterloo, by the Spartan at Thermopylae fighting for the body of Leonidas, by the member of David Cameron’s election staff next May.
It is odd, reading the piece, to think how little that resignation speech meant to most of us. Such is the effect of political power (or, in the case of Charles Kennedy, something similar to political power), that it can turn a minor event in modern British political history into a scene of such despondency. But it is precisely in the matter of admiring politicians that I do take issue with Patrick Kingsley, because tacked onto the end of his post was a piece of conventional foolishness masquerading as unconventional wisdom. “When we look at politicians,” Kingsley wrote, roughly equating “we” to “you lot”, “we have a tendency to confuse criticism of their policies with condemnation of their characters. Public mismanagement, however, shouldn’t lead to personal vilification.” That is to say, if a politician makes a terrible mistake, we should not respond to it as though he intended its terrible consequences. We should remember that politicians are “often decent people”, “in politics out of duty and service”.
This is unconvincing because it is an attempt to translate the virtues of social life into the virtues of political action. But a social virtue – kindness, generosity, interest in other people, cheerfulness – is not necessarily the same kind of thing when one has responsibility for tens of millions of other people. Politeness may make me listen to a boring person; but politeness should not make me force the population of Cambridgeshire to listen to a boring person. If a drunken Frenchman throws a punch at me, I may charitably turn away; but if a drunken French President bombs Folkestone, Gordon Brown cannot charitably turn away, because he has a responsibility to the people of that unfortunately-positioned town.
And these examples are not so far from modern politics. It is virtuous in social life to stand up to a bully in the room. But that is not the same as spending billions of pounds of other people’s money and hundreds of thousands of other people’s lives to stand up to a bully in Iraq. It is virtuous in social life to take precautions for other people’s safety. But “security measures” such as the ID card mean taking precautions by bargaining other people’s liberty. Hospitality in your own home is a virtue; but permitting mass immigration, whatever might be said for it, is not hospitality, because there are other people living in Britain apart from the politicians who permit it. Standing aside to let others take a decision can be a social virtue; but standing aside to let the European Commission make seventy per cent of UK law needs a quite different justification.
“We have a tendency to confuse criticism of their policies with condemnation of their characters”, argues Kingsley. But the single important fact about a politician’s character, since he is in our lives, is what he believes and how he puts it into practice. It is only because politics looks so attractively unreal that it is possible to pretend it is an arena for the social virtues. There are in everyday life all kinds of people whom we condemn for their policies irrespective of how pleasant and dutiful they are. If the man who built your house turns out to have no qualifications and within a week the roof has fallen in, do you say, “He was a decent man trying to do his best. I cannot blame him”? He may have been a decent man who thought that was the right way to build a house, or he may have been a cynical fraudster; it does not matter. What matters is that he has a responsibility to you and to your roof and he has failed in his responsibility. Our politicians are finding new ways to fail in their responsibility all the time. I am not interested in knowing whether Tony Blair (who is after all the most successful British politician of the last twenty years) has a nice family and can tell a joke. I am not even interested in knowing whether, if he were to tell a lie, he would do it out of a sense of duty or out of pure malice. I am interested in the lies he told to an electorate now thoroughly used to being lied to by decent dutiful pretty straight kinds of guys.
Topics: Charles Kennedy, Labour, Lib Dems, Politics, Tea
Hello Dan!
I think you’re setting up a false dichotomy here. As I wrote, I agree that we should hold politicians responsible for their actions, and I agree that we should criticise them. I just don’t think this criticism should stray into personal abuse.
If your builder cocks up, sue him. If a politician cocks up, vote him out of office. But don’t call either of them “a one-eyed Scottish idiot.”
Dan,
Besides your unwarranted scorn for Patrick’s personal reaction to the resignation of his boss, and your presumption that he looks down at “you lot” who don’t believe what he believes, or who don’t subscribe to his own moral views, I think you’ve somewhat missed the point.
The “social virtues” that you compare to politics are quite different to what Patrick was writing about. He was talking about the public/media reactions to politicians, which degenerate into personal attacks, not the disagreements that we as the electorate might have with policies, even if they are framed in moral terms (as Tony Blair was so often wont to do).
Your builder has certainly failed in his duty, but when you take him to court you give your evidence about the quality of his work, you presumably don’t hurl abuse at him, pillory him on comedy shows, or attribute his negligence to his appearance.
We do not elect machines to represent us, we elect people. No man is perfect, and the collective electorate certainly is not. Why, then, should we expect a politician–themselves imperfect–to represent not the sum of our own failings, but some kind of higher moral standard which presumes they must be infallible? We might argue that politicians set themselves up for a fall: they know the nature of the political arena, and must be prepared for the consequences if they cock up. Their responsibilities mean that they have to be more careful than most. But that does not mean that if they fail to meet impossible standards we should harangue them as if those standards should be met.