Tony Blair in a Macedonian refugee camp in 1999. Image: Anja Niedringhaus/EPA/Shutterstock
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How do we want our politicians? And what do we want of them? These two questions frame our democracy. The answers are always the same and always changing, mostly because as soon as we get the thing we want, we want something else. Much like shirts. Or football club managers. Let’s talk policy, we roar, no more of this personality business! What are the policies? Show us your confounded policies! Delight us!
Then the change comes. They have delighted us long enough.
Take Keir Starmer. During the early part of this year, with a Conservative government lurching from crisis to psychodrama to a complete absence of policy and decency, a cry went up for solid and stable. Starmer, with his even-handed dependability, nothing showy, a slab of beige to quieten the kaleidoscopic mania, was the grown-up the room needed.
When elected, he began his Eeyore-like pronouncements, his warnings of tough days ahead, of pain. So quickly we decided we wanted some sense of hope, maybe not Johnson’s bloated boosterism, but a small spoonful of sugar. All-out policy was all too much.
This had been a brief, English seaside honeymoon, rather than weeks of walks on balmy Italian beaches.
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The key here doesn’t feel like it’s about personality – lack of or desire for – rather communication and relatability.
Tony Blair has been doing a round of interviews to promote a new book on leadership. He hasn’t been prime minister for almost 20 years. Regardless of his successes as PM, he is a bête noir, and worse a war criminal, for many over his actions in Iraq. Yet his interviews are followed with huge interest, and his pronouncements are given weight and real importance. He has a global political cachet and gravity.
Like Oasis, he’s a soaraway ’90s success that has never quite been eclipsed. It’s not necessarily because his ideas are sharper or more impactful than anybody else’s. But because he has a way of getting them across that connects. Despite his forced glottal stops and his shirtsleeve chumminess, it has all, more often than not, felt real. People bought what he was selling because they thought he meant it.
Maybe that is the simple guiding principle. Be yourself. Or at least a version of it that is not so far from reality that voters can see through the mask.
In this week’s edition we carry an interview with Nadhim Zahawi, formerly a minister under four different prime ministers, and for a brief time chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful person in Britain. Zahawi is, therefore, cleaved to the worst of the governments he served, to the hostile environments, to the cuts and the sense of a ruling class aloof from hardship and reality. He himself was fined by HRMC for non-payment of millions of pounds in taxes.
Yet, we see a refugee who arrived as a child in England, unable to speak the language, fleeing for his life from Saddam Hussein’s regime. A man who speaks with honesty about flirting with football hooliganism, of understanding the fragility of things as his best friend died after falling into homelessness and heroin addiction.
He speaks of the “mistake” of the hostile environment, of the need for assimilation, of shared values. All very l’esprit d’escalier, Nadhim, we collectively say. But where was this when you had the levers of power in your hands? And can’t you see how frustrating it is for the public to learn this is your belief now, rather than when you toed a party line that was clearly at odds with you?
Maybe it’s the parliamentary system that requires those we send to Westminster to switch off their own compass and sublimate themselves to something beyond them, either because they’re told that’s the way to get things done, or because of personal ambition that will be rewarded by playing along.
If we want it to change, then we need to make our minds up about what we want.
Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on Twitter.
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