Political good name depends on work, not writs

ON one of RTE's news bulletins last Tuesday the first three items were as follows: Albert Reynolds's libel ease against the Sunday Times, Proinsias De Rossa's libel ease against the Sunday Independent, and Padraig Flynn's threat of a libel action against the Daily Mail. In recent months, another member of the present Government, Michael Lowry, settled a libel action against RTE.

Each of these senior politicians has a perfect right to seek to vindicate his good name through the courts. But, equally, the rash of libel cases is a symptom of some kind of illness in the body politic. There has to be something wrong with a political culture in which reputations are won and lost not in government or parliament, but in the ritual arena of the law courts, where public figures go "seeking the bubble reputation/even in the canon's mouth".

Politicians have been touched, over the last decade, by two contradictory developments. On the one hand, they have become increasingly obsessed with public image in the narrowest sense. Many of the most effective politicians in history have been loved and hated in equal measure; now, most politicians are terrified of arousing hatred, ridicule or contempt, even among their avowed enemies.

And, on the other hand, politicians have been deprived of the only thing that makes a personal image genuinely political - the sense in which it is a metaphor for a deeply felt ideology, in which the political leader embodies a set of passions and ideas that have real meaning for a lot of people.

On the one hand, politicians worry more than ever about what the public as a whole thinks of them. On the other, the narrowing of political debate and the rush towards the bland centre ground gives them less and less opportunity to build their reputations on a firm foundation of ideas and passions.

ALLIED to this development is the increasing irrelevance of parliament. The rise of the political libel case has a lot to do with the decline of parliaments as an arena for the making of reputations.

These days, most parliamentary speeches might as well be delivered before the politician's bathroom mirror. In the last century, it was not unknown for a newspaper like the London Times to carry over 60,000 words of parliamentary debate verbatim, considerably more than half the length of an average book. These days, 3,000 words of a parliamentary report is a great deal. The rest of what is said is spoken, for all practical purposes, in semi privacy.

The consequences of this are becoming obvious in the growing exodus of career politicians from the Dail. The brutal life of the political messenger boy is no longer sweetened by the compensations of fighting the good fight for a passionately held ideology. Nobody cares often, indeed, nobody knows - what a backbench politician says in the Dail.

Instead of being able to forge a reputation by the mastery of parliamentary rhetoric, the ambitious politician is deprived of a reputation simply by membership of an increasingly despised profession.

The response, in all western political systems, has been to pump up the politics of personality. Politicians have begun to imagine "reputation" as something to be protected rather than something to be created. They have begun to imagine it as a function of the kind of person you are, not of the kind of things you do. And they have been trying to persuade the public to take the same view.

The American writer, Richard Sennett, has noted that the modern political leader operates by "focusing his followers on his motivations", and so "deflects them from measuring him in terms of his acts". This, of course, is the reason for the poverty of the US presidential contest. Both Clinton and Dole asked voters to judge them by their personal histories, not by their public record.

Faced with this kind of political leader, we are, as citizens, burdened with the impossible task of making sense of him as a person before we can make judgments about how he uses power. "It is," as Sennett says, "uncivilised for a society to make its citizens feel a leader is believable because he can dramatise his own motivations. Leadership on these terms is a form of seduction.

And, of course, the ultimate way to dramatise your motivations is by engaging in the ritual combat of the libel case. The problem with politicians constructing or defending their reputations through the courts, though, is that it undermines the whole basis of political life. It blurs a distinction that is at the heart of a civilised political culture: the distinction between the private realm and the public realm.

Crucial public issues - the fall of the Reynolds government, the painful growth of Official Sinn Fein from conspiratorial militarism to democratic socialism - are argued in court in purely private terms. Judgments about important events in the recent history of Ireland are to be expressed as judgments about the motives and morality of individuals. Large parts of our common, public past are being, in effect, privatised.

THE holders of public office seek vindication not as bearers of public responsibility, but as private citizens. As Proinsias De Rossa's counsel told the High Court on Tuesday, his client is taking his action "as a private individual, with no greater advantage than any other citizen. The fact that he is a TD and a Minister does not increase or lessen his right to his good name."

The same point was made repeatedly by Albert Reynolds's press secretary when, during his reign as Taoiseach, he instituted libel proceedings. But, while it is unarguably true, it is also highly problematic.

For one thing, both cases turn on allegations about the political, rather than the private, behaviour of the plaintiffs. And, for another, the distinction between public office and private motivation is precisely the one that has been most thoroughly obscured in modern political culture. High profile political libel cases inevitably add an extra layer of obscurity by confusing still further the private person and the office holder.

The irony of all of this is that there are signs that the voters in western democracies are beginning to redefine political reputation as a public, not a private, matter. This week the American electorate gave a landslide victory to a man whose private character they tend to despise. Polls have consistently shown that Americans do not believe that Bill Clinton, as a private citizen, is a man of honour.

Yet they were, on the whole, able to leave that judgment aside and make a decision about Clinton on the basis of his public values, of what he has done in office, and seems likely to do over the next four years. They decided, in other words, that a political leader's reputation is a matter not of personal motivation nor private morality, but of the public values he displays in office.

There should be a lesson there for our own politicians - that it is action and ideas, not writs and silks, that might yet give politics a good name.