‘The media shouldn’t wait until MPs die to delve into their backstories’

Reading through the tributes to Alistair Darling last week, it occurred to me that the only time you ever hear anything complimentary about politicians is when they die.

And while this might seem fair enough – after all, they already enjoy lots of power and influence, and so surely it’s more important to hold them accountable for their failings than to praise them, I think it warps the public’s perceptions of politics, and of politicians, in a way that does everyone involved an injustice.

Good politicians get little credit while in office, bad politicians get away with abysmal performance because we don’t expect anything better, and the public are deprived of a more human, more interesting and ultimately more accurate understanding of the people who govern, or seek to govern, our country.

Stereotypes about politicians are rarely true

To start with an obvious caveat – some politicians are terrible (and even though this is LabourList, I’m afraid this does include some Labour MPs too). Many more are simply inadequate to the jobs they hold.

But the most common stereotypes (some variation of ‘they’re in it for themselves/ the money’) are rarely true either. I’ve met many politicians, and I’ve sensed many different motives in them, but I’ve never met one I thought was in it for financial reasons. Few want to hear it, but most people with the ability to get elected to parliament could make more money doing something else.

It made me wonder what will be said about our current generation of politicians when their time comes, and whether it will be different to what is generally said about them now.

Of course, in death, no one dwells on the human failings and professional misjudgements that characterise even the most successful life, but the tenor of remembrance can vary – the phrase ‘a divisive figure’ tends to cover a multitude of sins in political obituaries.

It’s the least of their failings, but the Tory government of the past thirteen years has made the defence of my least fashionable opinion – actually, a lot of politicians are more decent and impressive than you’d expect – almost impossible. But here goes.

Being an MP is extremely difficult

Being an MP is an extremely difficult job, and many of them at least try to do it well. It requires understanding and being able to speak on a huge range of issues, managing a wide network of relationships, taking decisions on difficult political and moral questions, spending long working weeks away from home, and weekends canvassing and at constituency engagements, against a backdrop of intense scrutiny and sometimes abuse and threats to your personal safety.

None of them are saints, or pure altruists, and like most of us, their flaws are often inseparable from their best traits too. Strong moral convictions can also mean blindness to other perspectives.

The strategic calculation needed to get to the top can be indistinguishable from ruthlessness. High levels of charm, so useful in paving the way to high office, often don’t go hand-in-hand with rigid personal propriety. Good public speakers can fall somewhat in love with the sounds of their own voices. And so on. Some of them have few if any of these qualities, and shouldn’t be in politics at all.

But many of them do have real convictions, including, annoyingly, the ones you don’t agree with. Many champion different causes, or work through Parliamentary mechanisms to get laws changed in ways that don’t make the headlines, but which do change people’s lives.

Many use their platforms to make a difference in their constituencies on local issues. They often think deeply about how to vote on difficult issues, and take seriously what it means to vote on issues like military action.

Few people know much even about Starmer

The majority do not fiddle their expenses, harrass juniors or take money from lobbying firms. That some do should appall us because it’s not the norm, not because it’s all we can expect from politicians anyway.

The media is to blame for much of this, but I’m often surprised by public incuriosity too; even amongst politically-interested and left-leaning people, I’m struck by how little of them know anything about Keir Starmer.

I don’t claim to be able to see into his soul, but I don’t find him hard to understand.

The working-class background. The teenage socialism. The upward mobility through intellectual ability and an extreme work ethic. A person who defines himself by achievements and who is haunted by the prospect of failure.

A professional focus on international human rights law. A growing interest in public service reform. A desire to fix things within larger and larger systems. A reserved and analytical personality that is not an ideal match for politics but which he has worked on.

Anotable absence of anyone coming out of the woodwork with stories about his personal conduct – and can you imagine how much the right-wing press would pay for them?

All this paints a picture of a comprehensible character, and give a pretty clear indication of the kind of prime minister he’d be.

This stuff is not hidden – a scroll through Wikipedia and a couple of podcast interviews would tell you all of it. But you wouldn’t learn much of it from television or newspapers.

Journalists of course have a bias towards the gossipy and the characterful, and a professional interest in ‘catching politicians out’, as though they don’t trust the public to come to their own conclusions if they give politicians more than a minute to speak uninterrupted. Brief combative interviews just work to make our politicians seem like shallow caricatures; some are, but many are not.

We should hear more from real friends of politicians

When a party chooses a new leader, why doesn’t the BBC screen a documentary about them, covering their biography, their professional life to date, and some interviews with people who actually know them – both critics and friends (real friends that is, not fellow MPs hoping for jobs)?

Why doesn’t it show more coverage of the Parliamentary speeches and debates that take place every day on different issues? Why are there not more documentaries on how politics actually works in this country; intelligent primers for the politically interested?

The point of this kind of coverage would absolutely not be to present politicians in glowing terms – it would be to let their records and lives to date speak for themselves, so the public could come to more informed judgements about them.

And in demonstrating that most politicians aren’t actually completely venal, it would highlight the rare examples of those who truly are.

With Boris Johnson, it’s hard to imagine a single person not reliant on his patronage speaking highly of his character  – a younger person he had mentored, friends he had supported through hard times, constituents he had helped through unsung constituency work. That says more about him than his worst critics could.

But many politicians will have reams of such character references, and I think it would improve public discourse, and help us actually distinguish between the very different kinds of people who have sought to run our country, if we occasionally got to hear from them before politicians died.

Some MPs really can speak thoughtfully and at length about difficult policy questions, and it feels almost taboo to write it, but the public might learn something from listening to them too – many of them have thought deeply about issues from geopolitics to the economy, and are often party to insights that most of us don’t have.

And as for the rest? As Barack Obama’s grandmother apparently used to say, ‘Let a fool speak. For every time a fool speaks, they are just advertising their own ignorance’. There are still too many fools in politics, but it’s lazy to pretend all politicians are.