Real People
Ed Miliband becoming leader of the Labour party has crystallized some thoughts rolling around in my head lately on popular cynicism about young “career politicians”, which has been a feature of political whinging for a decade or more now. Or rather, this comment in the Metafilter thread about Miliband’s victory has crystallized them:
The guy has been an MP for a whole 5 f—ing years. Doesn’t this fill anyone with dread? I f—ing hate professional politicians. The leader of each of the main UK parties is nothing more than a political wonk.
I responded:
You f—ing hate politicians who have been MPs for only 22% of their adult lives? You want him to have been there longer—to be more of a professional politician? Or less of a professional politician—to have only just entered parliament?
From a Times profile a couple of years ago: “His decision to follow his brother into the House of Commons was hard. Wary of always being in David’s shadow, he was uncertain whether to seek a similar frontline role.” Yep, ruthless ambition to enter Number 10 since he could talk, by the sound of it.
This “they’re just political wonks” complaint is so boring. The leader of CERN is just a physics wonk. The leader of Microsoft is just a computer wonk. The fact is that it takes a certain number of years to get to the top in most professional fields, a certain amount of experience in that field. You don’t get to be leader of a political party by being hailed as the world’s greatest plumber and everyday bloke and spirited into the post.
It used to be that you could accrue that experience gradually, alongside another career, or gain it after a mid-life career change, and become a party leader later in life, with all the worldliness that years as a plumber supposedly brings. But voters have indicated lately that they don’t like old leaders when they’re up against younger models: Ming Campbell, Michael Howard, John Major, Gordon Brown, Bob Dole, John McCain, George Bush senior. So there’s pressure within parties to find the younger models, pushing their age down to the minimum possible while still possessing the necessary political experience and capital.
That minimum age seems to be about 40. Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are all about 40. They’ve had time to build enough experience in related fields and just enough political and parliamentary experience to qualify. But they haven’t had enough time to also become captains of industry or professional footballers or hairdressers running their own salons or whatever else it is that people might want of them.
I heard someone on Radio 4 the other day comparing politicians with “real people”, and the poisonous nature of the phrase suddenly struck me. Politicians are real people, with experience of eating and sleeping and loving and hating and working and dreaming and all of the hopes and disappointments of being human. They’re unusually busy people, and in many ways their lives aren’t ordinary, but if we’re going to condemn people for the effect their work has on their lives then we should snark at every office worker who moans about the long hours they have to put in and every labourer who complains about their aching back.
But that aside: tell us who you would want as leader instead. Not just of the Labour party, but of any of the major parties. Nominate any currently living UK citizen, if you like, right down to your best mate. Then map out the steps they would need to get there. Then estimate how long it would take them to achieve them. Then estimate how old they’ll be when they get there. And then estimate what their chances will be of getting elected prime minister against a fresh-faced young leader in their early 40s who represents Fresh Hope for Britain.
I’m about the same age as Cameron, Clegg and the Miliband brothers, and at this point can confidently claim that I’d be unlikely to become leader of a major party, let alone prime minister, even if I had the political will to start down that road and the political appeal to get there. Because this push to the minimum age isn’t going to disappear overnight. One day voters might swing back to older leaders, but that shift could take decades. That doesn’t mean it would be impossible for someone starting out at my age or older to become an MP or minister, though, and you can certainly achieve a lot in politics without being party leader.
My problem with the insistence that leaders should be “real” and not career politicians is that it makes impossible demands of leadership contenders who are about 40, which is what the electorate is increasingly demanding. Subtracting the several years of active politicking needed to become party leader from the 40-year mark leaves candidates in their early thirties; if they went to university they might have had a decade of everyday working life by then. They will have hunted for rental properties, maybe got a mortgage, maybe found a partner, maybe had children. Why do we assume that people who become leaders of political parties at 40 have none of the “real-life” experience any of us have?
Perhaps all this hits home because an old friend and almost exact contemporary of mine became leader of a political party, and with it a government, two years ago. He’d only been an MP for four years at that point, and a minister for two, so I imagine he gets some of this tiresome stuff too, even though he had a career in quite a different field before entering politics. From the account he gave when I met him in the pub six months before he became leader, there was nothing careerist about his initial decision to run for office: it was a case of having the right kind of experience, a bit of luck in making the right contacts, the opportunity to run, and the willingness to go for it. The same as when any of us apply for and get any new job.
He’s a real person, too.
26 September 2010
A couple more comments of mine from that thread, preserved here for the ages.
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I don’t have a list handy of all the Labour MPs. But if we could rank them by age and narrow in on those aged 40-45, and then eliminate the ones who only entered parliament in May, we would have a relatively short list, I’d bet. And the number with any public name-recognition (important for a new leader to have at least some) would be even smaller. These are the constraints parties work under. They can’t magic up attractive potential leaders from thin air; they have to work with what they’ve got. In Labour’s case, they had these guys.
And remember Labour’s other constraint: they wanted a new leader who wasn’t too much in the thick of the Blair/Brown years, at least in the eyes of the public. Another reason to go for the young, “fresh” faces, and I’m sure the key reason David lost to Ed.
Yes, MPs will tend to come from certain backgrounds, and will rely on advisory groups to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, and will be subject to lobbying. Lobbying is a crucial part of any democracy, because whatever range of skills MPs possess they’ll never be able to cover every aspect of life in the entire country. As for the public, if we don’t like the lobbyists we’ve got, then we have to become the lobbyists we want. And if we don’t have the time or inclination to do that, we should accept that we, too, have to work with what we’ve got.
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Does “political wonk” mean a party creature or just anyone whose work has some connection to politics? Anyone who’s had anything to do with bureaucracy, journalism, the law, or any kind of policy role could rate as a “political wonk” under that sort of definition. The term is so nebulous that it means that people from many walks of life, with many different skills and insights, are dismissed as soon as they run for office as being career politicians, “political wonks”—and as everybody knows, all politicians are bastards.
I have no doubt that being unusually interested and involved in politics is a feature of most people who end up as leaders of major political parties. Complaining about leaders being political types is futile. But being unusually political in your interests doesn’t mean that you’re destined to become an MP or leader of a party, or that your life before or after entering parliament is somehow less real. What if Ed Miliband, instead of running for MP five years ago, had taken a promotion in the Treasury instead, or joined the BBC or the Guardian as an economic journalist, or gone into academia? He could have done any of those things in his mid-30s. Would his previous life still be interpreted as that of a “professional politician”, said with a sneer?
Added by Rory on 29 September 2010.