Politicos are people too

By Tim Nicholls / @tim_nicholls

We are a curious bunch of people in this country. We bemoan, quite rightly, the detachment of the political class from real life, but we deride those politicians that display their human sides. Gordon Brown’s interview with Piers Morgan is just the latest in a series of these events and I think it’s time we reconciled ourselves to the fact that politicians are human too.

The papers, blogs and news are full of comment on this, including Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, who suggests that politicians should empathise without expressing their own feelings. But I wonder if this is right? Yes, we want politicians to empathise with us and the challenges we face, but don’t we also want to know what drives them, what shapes their beliefs and why they think what they think? We need this to know if they empathise with us. How else do we decide which of them to entrust with our vote?

So often in life, our beliefs are shaped by precisely those things that we find emotional, either happy or sad, and there is no reason to believe that politicians are any different.

In my mind, British politics is geared towards shunning passion. Recent decades have brought politicians closer to us on one level, through increased media exposure, but they still seem different, somehow ‘other’, from us regular mortals. Politics is depersonalised (too cool, too calculated) and rhetoric has long since lost the true passion that comes from personal experience. And of course, in a way, we love this because it makes politicians so much easier to hate.

Moments of emotion are ‘electioneering stunts’, tears are all ‘crocodile’ and the motives are always somehow ‘ulterior’. What a sorry state of cynicism.

People do not relate to Gordon Brown, they do not feel that they know him: this is what we are told with monotonous regularity. If he wants voters to trust him, he has to open up. The loss of his daughter would have brought the most stonehearted of us to tears if we had been recounting it, and it is an indelible part of the person he is. The same is true of David Cameron and his tragic loss, and of many other politicians. We cannot criticise politicians for closing themselves off and, in the same breath, for telling us about themselves. It is not vote-grabbing, it’s their end of the deal for asking us to trust them.

And this is not all personality politics, about feelings rather than thought. No, if we want to know what politicians think and believe, we have to know the reasons why they think that way. Our lives shape our beliefs; our beliefs shape our thoughts.

We no longer believe a monarchy anointed by God should rule us, because we want to govern ourselves and be led by other people like us, but we retain that separation between the ‘political classes’ and ourselves. Our squeamishness over politicians showing emotion and, dare I say it, humanity, is incongruous with the modern, media-intensive world. Politicos are people too, and sometimes people cry.

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