The last time a US president was almost assassinated, most of the rich world, while reviling the act, could hope it was peculiarly American. And so it is worth listing a few of the safety measures employed by British MPs in recent years. Mobile panic alarms. Stab-proof vests. Personal guards. An avoidance of planned events and inessential outings. A national police effort called Operation Bridger, now widened to protect elected representatives beyond parliament.
A country where political violence was rare, at least outside the war-like context of the Troubles, has lost two MPs to murderers since 2016. Candidates in the recent French elections came under assault, too. The German interior minister cites an “escalation of anti-democratic violence”.
Almost everyone deplores such attacks. The problem is, after that, the consensus flakes. The spectrum of behaviour that goes up to, but not over, the line of violence inspires less concern or even interest than it should. The harassment of candidates in Britain’s election has been met a sinister breeziness. To be clear, then: the anti-politician culture is wrong in and of itself. But more than that, it is self-reinforcing.
This is the doom loop of modern politics: it is an ever more unpleasant line of work, which means fewer good people choose it, which depletes the quality of public life – that is, governance itself and the comportment of those responsible for it – which in turn makes voters more hostile to politicians. And back around again.
There is no separating the question of, say, how a nation of more than 330 million people comes to field an 81-year-old against a 78-year-old in a presidential race, from the threats to public officials and general arduousness of “frontline politics”. (What a martial connotation that phrase now has.) Think there should be better people in politics? Well, after you, reader.
The point applies even more in that vacuum of deference we call the UK. The speed with which Rishi Sunak, who might have made a good prime minister with another decade’s seasoning, entered 11 and then 10 Downing Street, testifies to his drive, yes, but also to the awesome dreadfulness of the competition.
Actual violence is worse than intimidation, which is worse than verbal abuse, which is worse than invasive attention, which is worse than the reflexive, almost rote-learned cynicism that is now the routine lot of the politician in front of a public audience (“Why should I believe a word you say?” etc). But all have the same effect. All deter able individuals – whom we might define as those with good career options elsewhere – or even just well-adjusted, non-masochistic ones. The danger is that politics becomes a sort of clearing house for people who wouldn’t attain similar status in another field or who crave attention, however savage. It is tempting here to invert the over-quoted Groucho Marx line about clubs and members. Parliament shouldn’t accept anyone who would consider joining it.
This argument will always incur the complaint of romanticising the past. There is no objective measure of the “quality” of politicians, let alone one that conclusively shows that it has worsened. Nor is it an axiom that a person of high general competence will thrive in the peculiar realm of politics. Robert McNamara was a jewel of his American generation – Harvard Business School star, Ford Motor Company whizz – and a tragically fumbling Pentagon chief during the Vietnam War. John Major’s UK cabinet of the 1990s was stuffed with people who would have (and often had) flourished in academic, entrepreneurial or professional life. Voters hated it.
Over a long enough period, though, a nation is better – rather than worse – run if people with other career opportunities spurn them for politics. The obsessive will always volunteer. The apathetic never will. It is the marginal case, the waverer who has a life of prosperous anonymity open to them, who must be enticed.
It is natural to attribute the anti-politician mood to governmental failures: the botched wars, the misregulation of banks, the British state’s formidable achievement of rising taxes and deteriorating outcomes. There isn’t anything like the same curiosity about the source of those failures. What if the causal link runs the other way? What if an inept state is the ultimate fruit of anti-politics? Is Congress the least trusted institution in American surveys because it is so bad, or so bad because it is mistrusted, and therefore daunting to those who might otherwise enter and elevate it? Deride the political class. It’s a right. But the joke, in the end, is on us.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024