More than words

Politicians should not behave like newspaper columnists.

Everybody knows that there is much wrong with our politics. Voters have irrational or ill-informed preferences; politicians are selected for particular mindsets; the media systematically mislead not only voters but also politicians; and of course the power of capital constrains many intelligent policies.

As if all this were not enough, I’d like to add a further problem. (No, I’ve never worried about overdetermination). It’s that we have a mistaken paradigm of what a politician should be.

Societies have for centuries had various such paradigms. Often, it has been a “strong man”, such as a military leader, who can get things done. In 19th century England it was the gentleman amateur, who could leisurely administer an Empire with his degree in greats. In the mid-20th century it was an engineer, pulling levers to control the economy or society as if it were a hydraulic system. Or it was a technocratic manager supposedly free of ideology, the skills of business management being thought transferable from companies to unversities, churches or government.

In recent years, though, a new character has joined this dramatis personae - that of politician as newspaper columnist. We expect our rulers to communicate well and to win debates, an image reinforced by the myth that Churchill won the war by virtue of his inspiring speeches, and by the influence of the Oxford Union.

Of course, few people explicitly say that politicians should be like newspaper columnists. But culture is what we don’t notice, what we take for granted. It’s unspoken assumptions that are often the significant - and dangerous - ones.

The embodiment of this paradigm was of course Johnson, a columnist who blundered into government. But we still see it almost every day when various government ministers do the round of morning TV and radio shows where they are expected to speak on issues outside of their departmental remit, such as when Home Office or Health ministers are asked to speak about foreign affairs - as if they should be general-purpose opinion-mongers rather than people who must drive policy changes through government departments. It is to Wes Streeting’s great credit that he told Sophy Ridge “I’m not here to be a commentator”; he showed signs of appreciating that politicians ahould not be columnists.

Truss, however, was not so acute. “We must cut taxes” is a suitable newspaper column. But governing requires more. It requires you to answer the question: how can you cut taxes when bond markets are worrying about inflation and when there’s not much obvious public spending to be cut?

In dodging the difficult question Truss was acting like a Brexiteer. “Leave the EU” is a column. But what type of Brexit should we have? Can we get it through parliament? What is the economic cost of doing so? Is the cost worth paying, and if so why? These are questions for proper politics.

Which draws our attention to why the columnist is a bad, or at least incomplete, model for proper politics. The columnist can avoid the tricky questions and give glib answers. The serious politician, however, cannot. He or she has to say: “there are no easy answers, and whatever you want will come at a cost”. That they so rarely say this is, of course, a sign of how they have internalized the politician-as-columnist paradigm.

Not least of these questions is how to actually implement policy. Doing so requires grunt work of grinding through the detail, getting stakeholders onside and ensuring that bureaucrats know what to do. Columnists can rant glibly about bureaucrats, but adult politicians must work with and through them, just as CEOs must work through middle managers. If a politician is moaning about the “blob” or the “deep state” it is because he or she has failed in the basic sense of not even understanding what one’s job is.

The columnist paradigm misleads us in other ways. His or her only tool is words. And just as the man who only has a hammer thinks everything is a nail, so the columnist overvalues words.

One way in which this misleads us is that we expect words to convey some truth. But sometimes they cannot, because politicians cannot conduct negotiations in public.

Years ago, when asked about one of his players committing a foul, Arsene Wenger often replied “I did not see the incident”. Of course, he lied. What he meant was: “I’m not going to criticise my player in public.” Journalists pretended not to see this. Perhaps people are making a similar error in criticizing Starmer’s meek reaction to Trump’s attack on Venzuela. His refusal to condemn this might (and certainly should) be the equivalent of Wenger’s not seeing the incident - a reluctance to get into a public conflict which would risk even higher tariffs and damage to the economy.

Over-valuing words has another distorting effect. It fails to see that politicians don’t necessarily achieve their big aims by sweet reason. They have other ways of doing so - by mobilizing or creating some interests and bypassing or facing down others.

Insofar as Thatcher was a success, it was not because of her powers of rhetorical persuasion; if this were so, her epigones would not now be supporting trade barriers and the repression of free speech. Instead, her skill was to defeat trades unions, not least by carefully selecting when to fight them; to mobilize a constituency of “garagistes”, small businessmen who supported her against traditional Tory “wets”; and even to create a new client group, of people who had recently bought their own homes.

In the same spirit, perhaps the most lasting achievement of the Blair government was that in expanding universities it enlarged the number of liberal metropolitans, whilst one of its great failures was to alienate an erstwhile client group: public sector unions who became cheesed off with its top-down managerialism.

From this point of view, the Starmer government is an abject failure. It has demobilized potential allies - liberal cosmopolitans angered by its attitudes to immigration and pro-Gaza protests; or workers in HE and other creative industries - whilst not mobilizing or creating any new client groups.

Politics is about interests, not just words.

Insofar as words do matter, though, columnists mislead politicians in another way. For them, words mainly go only outwards: yes, some like John Harris occasionally talk to people, but when they do you can see the selection bias from outer space. But a big problem in politics now is communication in the other direction: how do politicians know what people are feeling? And (a different and maybe more important thing) what is ground truth?

Politicians could never rely upon their constituents to tell them this; the sort who write to MPs are a self-selecting selecting bunch of cranks. Nor can they rely now upon newspapers, which are increasingly propaganda rags telling a dwindling and ageing readership what it wants to hear. And of course, X doesn’t tell them, as knowledgable and civilized minds have mostly left the platform. Which leaves the questions: how is government to know ground truth? What accurate and unbiased sources of information could it have? These are issues which government-as-columnist neglects.

There’s one final way in which the columnist distorts politics. He or she often blurs the line between the personal and the political. For a good politician, though, the correct answer to many problems is simply: “that’s not government business”. As an individual you might be interested in what some people have in their trousers or in who plays at Glastonbury. But it’s no business of government. Failing to see that the personal is not always the political leads to tyranny.

The presumption that there should be similarities between politicians and columnists is therefore misleading in several ways, giving us a mistaken impression of what politics is and what politicians should do. Ths isn’t the only reason why we have been so atrociously governed in recent years, but it is one - and an overlooked one.