The Political Animal

An Anatomy

JEREMY PAXMAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Michael Joseph 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2003

This edition published 2007

1

Copyright © Jeremy Paxman, 2002

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford, for permission to quote from the letters of Clement Attlee, and to Secker & Warburg for extracts from Lucille Iremonger’s The Fiery Chariot.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Any error or omission will be made good in subsequent editions.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193750-2

Pour encourager les autres…

Contents

Preface

Imagine the scene. A school speech day. In the hall, row after row of school blazers, their occupants caught in a maelstrom of hope and hormones, acne and apprehension. Behind them, their parents, aunts, uncles and a few bored younger brothers and sisters. On the stage, the headmaster and the chairman of the governors listen approvingly as the visiting speaker, one of the biggest names in British politics, reaches the climax of his address.

‘Sad to think’, he says, ‘that in the days of Winston Churchill and Theodore [sic] Roosevelt,* people didn’t consider “service” was a dirty word. And loving your country was taken for granted.’ The man speaks with passion; he loves this sort of audience. He tears off his frameless glasses and peers down into the ranks of teenagers. ‘I hope’, he roars at them, ‘I see in this audience a future Prime Minister. I hope I see future cabinet ministers. I hope in this audience I see young people who will stand up and say “I want to serve my country” and not have others around them sniggering and laughing because they don’t understand service and they don’t love their country.’

It has the feel of a performance which has been given many times before, with overdramatic pauses and studied rhetorical flourishes: he is a rotten actor. This is ironic, since his whole life has been an act, based on a script he has written himself, which has given him a seat in the House of Commons, considerable wealth, deputy chairmanship of one of the biggest parties in British politics, a place in the House of Lords and the endorsement of his current party leader, who describes him as a figure of ’probity and integrity’. This audience, like most of those he addresses, long ago suspended any disbelief. He has another trope. ‘I get five or six calls a day asking me to go on television. You know what I do? I say no to all of them. Why should I go on television to be beaten up by some ill-mannered lout who’s never given any public service? Do you know what I say, ladies and gentlemen?’ – and here he stabs the air with his finger – ‘I say when that interviewer stands for office, when he gives some public service, then I’ll interview him.’

He pauses, waiting for the applause. It always comes. His stage irritation seems to reflect a real frustration that those in what he calls ‘public service’ (he means politicians, rather than nurses, teachers or people who raise money to relieve world poverty) are denied the respect they deserve, sneered at, laughed at, or – unkindest of all – ignored by the British people, who seem at best indifferent to the charms or importance of politics. The louts in the television studios have all the fun and none of the responsibility. Fewer and fewer people bother even to vote.

The speaker seems genuinely to care about the state of public life in Britain. I care too. In an ideal world, of course, we wouldn’t have any politicians at all. As Tom Paine remarked in the eighteenth century, ‘Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.’ Politicians exist because we disagree. All societies need to decide how to protect themselves, how to organize themselves, how to share out their resources and the alternative to force of argument is force of fists. The creation of politics is, therefore, a proof of civilization. So, although the existence of politics may be a mark of human frailty, politics itself matters. And it matters that politics is practised by good people. As in most walks of life, people go into the trade with a variety of motives, some noble, some vain. Most seem to be genuinely convinced they can make the world a better place. Some of them have done so. A small number genuinely deserve to be called great. I do not believe they are all scoundrels.

I set out in this book to answer a number of simple questions. Where do these politicians come from? Why do they do it? Why do we seem to be so disenchanted with them? And why does the experience of politics nearly always end in disillusion? This book is not really the story of the achievements of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries – they write their own memoirs, some of which I have drawn upon. Nor is it about local politics, which has become a sorry shadow of its former self. It is about the experience of politics on the biggest stage available to the ambitious young man or woman, in the Houses of Parliament. It is about how the actors in this theatre get where they want to be and about what the experience does to them. Perhaps, if we can answer these questions, we can begin to understand why the rest of us feel as we do about them.

By the time I had finished the manuscript of this book, the speech-day orator had embarked on the latest chapter of his career of public service. Jeffrey Archer was serving four years in prison for perjury.

Introduction

My first encounter with one of this curious tribe came at school. I must have been about seventeen when the local MP was invited to speak to the sixth form. More likely, he invited himself: politicians like to speak to local schools because they know that today’s sixth-formers are tomorrow’s voters.

I thought he was mad. Not in a foaming-at-the-mouth, baying-at-the-moon way, of course. Just very, very peculiar. He wore a loud suit in a Prince of Wales check, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a carnation in his buttonhole. He may even have had a bow tie as well. This was no more than you might expect to find draped around one of the flashier bookies at Epsom racecourse. But what stood out, what positively shrieked ‘look at me!’, was his moustache. This vast expanse of hair (he was bald on the top of his head) spread out from his upper lip and across his cheeks like two bushes from The Day of the Triffids on a race to his ears. Older readers may by now have identified Gerald Nabarro, the Conservative MP for South Worcestershire, a man who drove around in a fleet of cars marked NAB 1, NAB 2 and so on.

Nabarro, son of an unsuccessful cigar merchant, had left school in a London slum at the age of thirteen, run away to sea at fourteen and then, faking his age, joined the army, where an eight-year career saw him rise to the rank of sergeant. He then rapidly made a fortune in the timber trade and decided to become a politician. Nabarro used his twenty years in the House of Commons to become a celebrity. No successful radio discussion was complete without his fruity voice thundering out fruity opinions about the need to castrate sex offenders or to repatriate immigrants. Had he been less of a show-off, he might have risen within the Conservative party, for he had a tremendous grasp of detail in energy and tax matters (why, he asked in one of his 400 questions on purchase tax, was there a 30 per cent levy on false beards and moustaches?). To his credit, he could claim to have become the first man in the twentieth century to bring four of his own backbench bills on to the statute book, including clean-air legislation. One of his legacies was to bequeath to British politics a secretary, Christine Holman, who achieved greatness a quarter of a century later as the formidable wife of the disgraced Conservative politician Neil Hamilton and as author of the Bumper Book of Battleaxes. I recall little of what he said that day, beyond an exchange with one of the Jewish boys in which he claimed that they were almost certainly related, since both their ancestors had come from Spain or Portugal. There were some not particularly persuasive platitudes about the damage being done to the country by the Labour government, students, drugs, pornography and pop music. But, most of all, what Nabarro seemed to offer was a recitation–in a booming voice–of saloon-bar prejudices about immigration, Europe and why it had been right to prevent black majority rule in Rhodesia. These points of view were not particularly unusual, but there was an uneasy sense that we were listening to a litany of opinions which were held more by force of habit and repetition than anything else.

At university, I joined the Labour Club, but dropped out of any active involvement after one meeting. Student politics achieved the curious feat of being self-important and trivial at the same time. Outside the Labour, Conservative and Liberal clubs, there were huge battles to be fought about Vietnam, the military junta in Greece or why the college gates were locked at midnight. But the mainstream political organizations seemed to be dominated by people who had sketched out their life-plan at the age of fifteen and left no room in it for the main interests of most of the rest of us. Their idea of a good time seemed to be cobbling together draft resolutions for the annual party conference. I did vote against Gerald Nabarro in my first General Election, but then I knew no contemporary who would have done any different. My defiance made no difference. If you had put a Conservative rosette on a moustachioed hamster it would have been elected. The only thing which would stop Nabarro was Nabarro, and in the end he did it himself. In 1971 NAB 1 was caught careering the wrong way around a roundabout in Hampshire. Since he had made himself one of the best-known men in Britain, witnesses had no trouble positively identifying Nabarro as the driver. Yet the MP had the audacity to claim that it was not he at the wheel, but his long-suffering business secretary, a woman called Margaret Mason. The jury did not understand quite how a bald head and handlebar moustache could have been attributed to a female, and the judge fined Nabarro £250. Being the sort of person he was, the MP claimed that a terrible miscarriage of justice had occurred, appealed the verdict and, remarkably, won the case. Christine Holman appeared beside him on the steps of Winchester Court, weeping with relief that her boss had won the day. But, for all his booming proclamation that ‘calumny has been defeated’, the strain had broken him, and he died before the 1974 elections.

By then, I had started work as a journalist in Belfast. In Northern Ireland, I came across a form of politics which had nothing much to do with Nabarro-like flamboyance. But then, it had nothing much to do with the rest of the world either. The Unionists ranged from ascendancy toffs to sinister bigots, the nationalists from machine professionals whose power was built upon an intimate knowledge of the death notices in the Irish News to Jesuitical fanatics whose specialist subject was the naming of parts in an Armalite rifle. It was a form of politics which could never be accused of valuing style over substance. It was all substance and no style. One of the reasons that London-based British politicians so signally failed to make any progress in Northern Ireland for so many yean was that they simply could not comprehend the intensity with which sectarian political beliefs were held. It was the first time in my life that I met people my own age, or younger, who carried guns. The first time I ever saw a General Election result being declared was at Ian Paisley’s count in Ballymena. He had been sent back to parliament with a majority of over 27,000, which was more than the entire adult population of the town where the count was held. It made his seat one of the rock-solid safest in the United Kingdom (although in the neighbouring constituency the Unionist MP had an even bigger majority, at over 35,000, the biggest in the entire United Kingdom: if you weren’t a Unionist you might as well have turned your ballot paper into a paper dart). When the returning officer finished announcing Paisley’s result, the big man, encased in a vast grey leather overcoat, boomed out the doxology, ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’ The crowd closed their eyes and took it up enthusiastically. It was life, but not as we knew it.

Occasionally, I would meet the Secretary of State sent by the Labour government in London to try to bring some semblance of normal politics to the place. Merlyn Rees, a bespectacled man who looked and sounded like the best sort of headmaster, was thoughtful, compassionate and a real worrier. But too many generations had passed in the absence of real politics: between the partition of Ireland in 1922 and the outbreak of the Troubles in 1968 the British government had been content for the place to be run as a corrupt little Unionist fiefdom. Inventing genuine democratic politics was a tall order. For a brief while Rees managed to get politicians from either side of the fence working together, but it all fell apart when hard-line Unionists called a General Strike, backed by gangs of thugs on the streets, and brought the place to a standstill. Idealism drowned when the sewage farms were on the point of overflowing. Still he soldiered on trying to find a space where conventional politics could replace war, and for a while there was even a ceasefire between the IRA and the British army. But there was too much history to be accounted for and too much to be lived. When the truce collapsed and the bombings started again, the story went that Merlyn Rees had wept. It was all too believable. After a couple of years, this thoughtful man was replaced by a former miner, Roy Mason, who had, to put it mildly, a less complicated view of the world.

When I returned to England after three years in Northern Ireland, I shared a house with a friend who was hoping to become a Liberal MP. Every weekend he would be out pounding the pavements getting signatures for petitions about dog mess in the park. On Sundays, he was up to his armpits in old newspapers and discarded telephone directories, working at the Liberals’ recycling dump. It did not leave much time for a social life, although there was an intriguing period when a girl in motorbike leathers hung around the house. It turned out she worked in Conservative Central Office, but the late-night yelps from my flatmate’s bedroom indicated that they, at least, had worked out some sort of power-sharing arrangement. Eventually, he accumulated enough credit in the bank to be chosen as the Liberal parliamentary candidate in what he was told was one of the party’s ten most winnable seats. It turned out not to be. But by then he had moved to the constituency and his friend had set about trying to get a Tory nomination somewhere. Neither ever made it to Westminster.

A couple of years later, I was living in Notting Hill, which was part of the safe-ish Conservative seat of Kensington. The MP was a gangly, backbench baronet, Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams, a grandson of Lord Curzon’s mistress and son of a Liberal MP, an expert on the European Social Charter, who proclaimed his ambition to create ‘a full-scale tax credit system incorporating a structure of positive personal allowances as a feature of the community tax system’. At election time he would take himself down to the Portobello Road market with a megaphone where his impeccable Old Etonian vowels would be metallically mangled while the indifferent throng tried to go about their lawful business of buying fruit and veg. Occasionally, the crowd parted and you could see a balding fellow in a three-piece tweed suit speaking to no one in particular, but with a seraphic grin on his face. He was enjoying himself.

I saw a little more of Rhys-Williams’s successor. Dudley Fishburn had been a writer on the Economist, and never really looked any more at home among the greengrocers than Rhys-Williams had. Doubtless, like all would-be MPs at elections, he spent time sprinting up and down people’s front gardens, begging for their votes, but I saw him most often in the passenger seat of a car plastered with sandwich boards, jabbering into a microphone. ‘Vote for me,’ he bleated at people having lunch behind plateglass windows. ‘Your Conservative candidate, Deadly Fishbone.’

He left parliament around the time I moved house, and our paths did not cross again, although I did once get a letter from him, after I had written asking him to support some campaign or other. I was impressed to receive a handwritten reply, presumably scribbled one day when he was sitting in the House of Commons chamber waiting to make a speech about Endogenous Growth Theory. The only problem was that he had obviously had such difficulty balancing the paper on his knee that the thing was more or less unreadable. There have been other MPs since then, including one Conservative who solicited my vote only weeks after he had denounced me in the House of Commons as a ‘socialist’ and in private as a ‘thoroughgoing communist’. I sent him his letter back, stapled to a copy of the relevant page of Hansard, with the words ‘You must be joking’ scrawled across the bottom.

Until I started reporting on British politics – at the relatively late age of thirty-five – this was just about the sum total of my experience of our politicians. Scanty though it is, it is still probably a greater familiarity than most of us have. Since then, I have met literally hundreds of politicians. Some I have come to like, others to respect, and one or two I have learned must be handled as if they are radioactive. I know that the last feeling is reciprocated by some, but there is – or ought to be–a natural tension between reporters and politicians, and I am not close to any of them. It is easier that way. The Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Booth, once accosted me at a party and accused me of believing that ‘we’re all crooks’. She went on to claim that journalists were ‘only in it for the money’ and ‘not bothered about the truth’. The best I could manage in reply was to ask if she had confused us with lawyers. Quite apart from the odd use of the word ‘we’, the taunt was untrue. I most emphatically do not believe that they are all crooks. Or even that they are all, always, dishonest.

But they are different from us. This book is an attempt to find out why. For a long time, I was going to call it ‘Why Does It Always End in Tears?’ – because that, it seems to me, is the nature of the political experience. Very few politicians leave the stage happily. Prime Ministers outstay their welcome. Party leaders are sacrificed by their parties (then, as Margaret Thatcher showed, the tears can be real). Ministers rail at the difficulty of getting anything done, and then lose their jobs because Prime Ministers want to survive. MPs despair at the absence of advancement. Voters’ enthusiasm turns to disenchantment. Increasing numbers of us are finding the whole process so unappealing that we simply do not bother to vote. For most of us, elections are the one time when we have some direct contact with politicians. And what a strange bunch they seem on these brief encounters, men and women overwhelmed by a sense of their own importance, energetic, driven and wholly without a sense of proportion. Getting our endorsement – the approval of people they probably haven’t even met before – really does seem the most important thing in their lives.

In the most dramatic election of recent history, in 1997, there were 3,724 people attempting to get into parliament, more than at any time in British history.¹ One quarter of them were out-and-out no-hopers with no party machine behind them, ranging from the earnest – Independent No to Europe party (515 votes in Fareham) or the Anti-Abortion Euthanasia Embryo Experiments (318 votes in Oxford East) – through the over-ambitious local candidates, like the Sheffield Independent party (which got 125 votes in Sheffield), the Island Independent (848 votes on the Isle of Wight) or the People in Slough Shunning Useless Politicians candidate (277 votes), to the idiotic – the Fancy Dress party (287 votes in Dartford), the Teddy Bear Alliance (218 votes in Kensington and Chelsea), the Mongolian Barbecue Great Place to Party party (112 votes in Wimbledon) or the Black-Haired Medium-Build Caucasian Male party (71 votes in St Ives). A benign interpretation would be that these are people for whom the electoral process is a form of therapy.

By-elections, which usually take place in the middle of a parliament when the sitting MP has dropped dead, can attract vast numbers of them, like horseflies to fresh dung. Screaming Lord Sutch, who founded the Monster Raving Loony party, stood in nearly forty elections of one kind or another, advocating policies such as putting crocodiles in the River Thames, banning January and February to make winter shorter and breeding fish in the European Wine Lake, so that they emerged ready pickled. There was never the slightest danger of his being elected, although in one by-election he did poll more votes than David Owen’s immensely self-important Social Democrats, which prompted the party to give itself the last rites. Before he hanged himself with a multi-coloured skipping rope in a fit of depression, Sutch had made himself a feature of British political life, his top hat and leopardskin coat a spectacle on one declaration stage after another. When Martin Bell became the first true Independent² to win a seat in over fifty years – trouncing Neil Hamilton in the 1997 General Election – he spent much of the night of his victory working out how to avoid delivering his acceptance speech from between the flashing metal nipples of a seven-foot transvestite, who had used the election to campaign on behalf of a Birmingham nightclub.

It would have taken an outburst of contagious insanity for the people of Tatton to have elected Miss Moneypenny the Transformer as their MP (although he/she nonetheless picked up 128 votes). But, in truth, an absolute majority of candidates, not just the frivolous fringe, were losers from the start. Most of the Conservatives, most Liberal Democrats, most of the Scottish Nationalists, most Plaid Cymru, were wasting their time. Throughout the previous decade, most Labour candidates had known – or ought to have known – that they might as well have been beating their heads against a wall. In the first-past-the-post system, even if forty-nine out of every hundred people vote for you, if someone else has the votes of the other fifty-one, you get nothing. A Conservative standing in Bootle or Merthyr Tydfil or a Labour candidate in Huntingdon or Sutton Coldfield might as well spend the campaign playing tiddlywinks. However fiercely they whistle to keep their spirits up, they will not be elected to parliament. It follows that of the 3,724 men and women who stood for election, the great majority, well over 2,000, had the political life expectancy of snowflakes in summer. They had no more chance of becoming an MP than Miss Moneypenny.

The Liberal Democrats have been complaining for years that the British system at General Elections, by which only one candidate can be chosen for each constituency, is unfair. It can certainly produce some eccentric results. In 1951, it ejected Clement Attlee’s great, reforming Labour government and replaced it with Churchill’s Conservatives, even though more people had voted Labour than Conservative. In February 1974, more people voted Conservative than Labour, yet Labour formed the government. If Britain were to change its electoral system so that the number of MPs reflected the number of votes cast, it would certainly be fairer and perhaps parliament would rise in public esteem. But the change could also massively enhance the power of the party machines at the expense of independent-minded candidates and loosen the bonds between an individual MP and his constituency. It would certainly greatly increase the number of Liberal Democrat MPs (though they ask us to accept that they are making this pitch not out of self-interest but from principle). It is an issue for later. What matters for now is how any man or woman survives this lottery.

The first requirement for any ambitious candidate, obviously, is self-confidence. How many ordinary people can reduce every issue in the world to two competing questions? You must then be willing to stand up in public to declare that ‘There are two ways of looking at this issue: my way and my opponent’s way. My way is right. Her way is wrong.’ But the readiness to reduce everything to simple binary choices is not the point. Modern politicians from the major parties are given a list of right noises to make on any subject from the size of the nuclear arsenal to what ought to go into powdered milk. No, what is striking is the public certitude, the sheer brass neck, to pronounce that yours is the one and only sensible attitude for an adult to strike. Privately, many MPs have often confessed, to diaries or to intimate friends, that they find a particular cause hard to stomach, misguided or dangerous. But they cannot say so publicly. It would be suicide.

Allied to self-confidence, or the appearance of self-confidence, is a certain sort of manic persistence. Betty Boothroyd, who eventually discovered that the exuberant exhibitionism of a Tiller Girl was good training for the demands of being Speaker of the House of Commons, spent seventeen years fighting unsuccessful elections before she was at last selected for the winnable Black Country seat of West Bromwich. She supported herself by working as a House of Commons secretary for the best part of two decades. Caroline Spelman, the sugar-beet expert who was one of that small band of Conservatives who first became MPs at the 1997 election, went through twenty-seven selection interviews before she was finally chosen for a winnable seat. It has become received wisdom (at least among many female politicians) that people like Boothroyd and Spelman found the going tough because they were women. Boothroyd herself was fond of repeating the story of a woman who told her, ‘Well, I’m not going to vote for you because you’re unmarried, you don’t know anything about life, you don’t have any children and you don’t know how to run a house.’³

Despite the fact that these criticisms were allegedly levelled by a woman, and could just as readily have been directed at a man, the story has the advantage of seeming to endorse the conviction that there is a general prejudice against women in parliament. But plenty of men have had to show a similar Stakhanovite dedication to get themselves elected to parliament. Andrew Mackinlay – one of the minority of Labour MPs who seems to believe that the House of Commons should be more than a hired claque, there only to tell the Prime Minister how wonderful he is – trailed around the country trying to persuade local Labour parties to give him a chance. Some of the auditions for these unwinnable seats required travelling hundreds of miles to dusty meeting halls, in the knowledge that next morning he had to be back at work. At the end of the selection process, the chairwoman would emerge to announce that they had chosen someone else, with the implicit snub ‘because the rest of you aren’t good enough’. It takes a thick skin to cope with that level of repeated rejection. Even when finally chosen, Mackinlay had to fight and lose four elections, until, at the fifth attempt, he finally got to the House of Commons.

If the first two requirements, of self-confidence (or the appearance thereof) and dedication, are psychological, the third is physical. To be successful, you need enormous reserves of energy. Margaret Thatcher, famously, is reputed to have managed on only four or five hours’ sleep each night. (Both Hitler and Napoleon were said to have been able to get by with only three hours in bed; whether either is a recommendation for sleep deprivation is another matter.) Churchill’s authority over his colleagues was bolstered by the fact that he could eat and drink them under the table. If there was an ‘r’ in the month, he began shadow cabinet lunches with a dozen oysters, followed by roast beef and vegetables. This was succeeded by another helping of beef and vegetables, and then a big portion of apple pie and ice cream. All was washed down first with wine and then with brandy. ‘I get the drink. Stafford Cripps gets the blue nose. That’s life,’ he told one of his colleagues.⁴

Fourth, you must be an incurable optimist. Betty Boothroyd claims that she genuinely believed she could take every one of the unwinnable seats in which she served her parliamentary apprenticeship. Self-delusion on that scale is an obvious asset. You also need to believe that if your party gains power the world really will be changed for the better. Once you are elected, the optimism will help blind you to the fact that so much of your life is a luminous waste of time. MPs are sent to Westminster to represent their constituents and there is no career structure for a backbench MP. They must make the job up as they go along, and there may come a point when opening the seventy-eighth garden fete or speaking at the ninety-third dreary dinner begins to pall. Yet to advance in the party, to stand a chance of getting a post as the most junior of ministers, you need to keep quiet and do as you’re told.

Fifth, to debate successfully you must develop the ability to sift a mountain of waffle for the one nugget which will help your argument. You must be deaf to all other possible interpretations of that fact.

Sixth, to achieve anything as a minister you need unswerving loyalty, a readiness to engage in embarrassing publicity stunts, a limitless capacity for hard and often apparently pointless work and a sufficiently clear vision to keep steering towards your objective, despite the best efforts of your opponents (and your friends sometimes) and the bureaucracy to deflect you on to a convenient sandbank.

Last, you need a wife or husband who doesn’t object to long separations, to coming second, to trailing around party meetings like some well-groomed spaniel, to being admired and petted but never listened to. Your children must be prepared to put up with an absent parent whose possession of the initials ‘MP’ makes them a juicy target for the playground bully.

There is one other occupation where many of these characteristics – the late-night stamina, the optimism, the self-confidence, the brinkmanship – are essential. Gambling. ‘It’s the biggest game at the biggest table in town,’ was how David Ruffley, a bright and ambitious young Conservative MP, put it when I asked him why he was devoting the best years of his life to getting on in Westminster. The casino metaphor is the right one. Win an election and you gain those talismanic initials ‘MP’ after your name: it is curious that, however badly society as a whole may think of politicians, we tend to have much more positive attitudes towards individual members of parliament. Send a letter on the House of Commons portcullis letterhead, sign it with the initials ‘MP’ and you are guaranteed a reply. The local newspaper will carry your photograph every week. Every school, Rotary Club, Women’s Institute, old folks’ day centre and Scout Group will want you to speak to them. With a bit of luck and a fair wind, they believe, the eminence will grow. You may go on and end up a minister, with the opportunity to steer through parliament laws which can change the lives of all your fellow citizens.

And with a bit of bad luck, you lose everything. And you may lose it all through no fault of your own. There are so many possibilities. Your party falls out of favour. Your leader is seen as remote, out of touch or inept, or is just unlucky. Your constituency boundaries are redrawn, so your majority disappears at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. Your husband or wife, your child or your business partner does something very stupid or criminal. The list goes on. Every MP who has lost a seat has a hard-luck story in which he or she is the unwitting, undeserving victim.

The politician for whom it all goes wrong has nothing much to look forward to. For all the stories about people slumbering their lives away on the backbenches, since 1945 the average lifespan of a career in parliament has been just over fifteen years.⁵ In the great upheaval of the 1997 General Election, 260 new MPs were elected to parliament, which meant redundancy for a very large number of people. This showed, more dramatically than at most elections (it was the biggest shake-up of the House of Commons since 1945), how limited a politician’s job is. Those who found themselves looking for work soon discovered how few useful skills they had, how long they had been out of the job market, and how much they had lost touch with new styles and technologies. Some had simply no idea how to go about getting a new job. Others who blithely assumed that they would be able to walk into a boardroom somewhere discovered that the vote in Britain breaks down in such a way that there is a good chance that an MP looking for work will have represented a party whom half of the population cordially detest: why should any employer wish to hire someone who arrives trailing such a clattering load of offensive baggage? Small wonder that politicians who leave the world of politics voluntarily are such a rare breed.

There is, perhaps, a deeper reason, too. What do any of us want in life? Once the essential needs of food, drink and shelter have been met, the demands become less tangible, but only slightly less urgent. Everyone would like to be loved, for sure. We would all like to have some significance to others. Being elected an MP offers significance. How many would voluntarily surrender it? You begin to understand the older MPs who linger on in the House of Commons far beyond the time when they were any use to anyone. But they too are gamblers, if more like blue-haired old biddies lined up hour after hour at rows of one-armed bandits, than the younger MPs playing the roulette wheel or chemin-de-fer. No gambler places his stake believing he’s going to lose, and somewhere in the back of the mind of every politician is the conviction that one day his or her hour will come.

For most of us, political decision-making, even active political involvement, is something we delegate to others. We ask mechanics to mend our cars, send for computer experts when our software fails and wear clothes which can be cleaned only by taking them somewhere else to be dunked in chemicals we couldn’t name. The same happens with political decisions. What is curious is not that we are content to delegate to others the hard business of taking decisions, but that we choose to give authority over our lives to people who so many of the population seem to think are a bunch of charlatans.

In much of the popular mind, politicians are all the same. They’re a bunch of egotistical, lying narcissists who sold their souls long ago and would auction their children tomorrow if they thought it would advance their career. They are selfish, manipulative, scheming, venal. The only feelings they care about are their own. They set out to climb the greasy pole so long ago that they had lost contact with reality by the time they were in their twenties. You cannot trust a word any politician says and if you shake hands with them, you ought to count your fingers afterwards. They are not people you would want your son or daughter to marry.

Some politicians will even play a game in which they seem to accept the judgement at face value. It is their way of acknowledging that, as a breed, they have an image problem. And yet if you spend any time with politicians you will find examples to justify every one of those adjectives. And several not mentioned, like sleazy, stupid or sex-obsessed. The most damning critic of a politician is another politician. I have lost count of the number of people who have been described by their comrades – on a completely off-the-record basis, of course – as ‘corrupt’, ‘bonkers’ or ‘totally off his trolley’. Very occasionally, these remarks slip out in public, like John Major’s observation that when he saw his independent-minded Eurosceptic colleague Richard Body, ‘I hear the sound of white coats flapping.’ Rather wetly, Major later tried to explain that he was merely pointing up Body’s idiosyncrasy.

There is, simply, no way of reconciling the taxi-driver/saloon-bar wisdom with the way that so many politicians would like to see themselves. Their preferred adjectives would be idealistic, noble, selfless. They would like to be thought of as not so much in politics as in something called ‘public life’, in which they are ‘public servants’. From this perspective, they are not our rulers: the ‘masters’ are the people and the politicians are merely doing our bidding. The soldiers of this selfless army have been called to the colours by a passion to right wrongs, to fight injustice and to leave the world a better place than they found it. Personal advantage is the last thing on their mind and they could be earning much more money, doing a lot less work, somewhere else. Which they would certainly be doing were they not sacrificing themselves for an ungrateful nation. How can these two images be reconciled? Each is simultaneously true and untrue, unnecessarily cruel and absurdly generous. The House of Commons contains ascetics and dreamers as well as pompous incompetents and greedy opportunists. In fact, it probably contains a higher proportion of idealists and Roundheads than mere statistical sampling would predict.

No sensitive person can read the history of the Labour party and fail to be moved by the heroic determination of its founders to improve the lives of working people. The 1945 Labour government, the creator of the Welfare State, was packed with people who had a passion to build the new Jerusalem. The Thatcher governments were just as fierce about unpicking the post-war consensus to ‘set the individual free’. And every parliament contains the single-issue fanatics, who want to reform abortion laws, ban animal experiments, preserve rights of way or get public funds to make contact with extra-terrestrials, not because they have been told to do so, or because they think it will pay dividends at election time, but because, for whatever reason, they happen, passionately, to believe in their point of view.

Throughout the research for this book, I was struck repeatedly by the jrelevance of Enoch Powell’s observation about the great ‘nearly man’ of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century politics, Joseph Chamberlain. In his biography of Chamberlain he famously wrote that ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’⁶ There is a worldly wisdom to the words, and he was making a broader point than a comment upon the political life. But it seems to be spectacularly true of politics. He was right about Radical Joe, who was once seen as a successor to both Gladstone and Salisbury but never became Prime Minister, and whose stroke-damaged last years were an empty fulmination against the elements. But when you look at the careers of the nineteen men and one woman who did reach 10 Downing Street in the twentieth century it seems just as true of those who achieve their ambitions. With the very occasional exception, such as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, they fought all their lives to get the supreme job in British politics. Yet how many of them could be said to have left 10 Downing Street contented figures? Hardly more than one or two. For many, the culmination of a lifetime of effort was to be forced out of office, having their fingernails prised from the Prime Ministerial desk. For some, such as Ramsay MacDonald or Neville Chamberlain (Radical Joe’s son), the consequence of leading their party was to live out what remained of their lives in odium. There have been the consolations of receiving an earldom and a seat in the House of Lords, a life which Disraeli described as being ‘dead, but in the Elysian Fields’. It came, though, at the price of having to sit alongside people they had sent to the Lords as a way of getting rid of them. The harder they fought to avoid the waters closing over them, the sadder the figure they cut. Who was wiser, John Major who ambled off to watch cricket, or Margaret Thatcher who set up the Thatcher Foundation, to promote the values she believed had made her the country’s greatest leader since Churchill?

But Enoch Powell was equally right about himself. By the age of twenty this brilliant young man had won most of the prizes open to a classical scholar at Cambridge, by twenty-two he was a fellow of Trinity College. Three years later he was a professor of Greek at Sydney University. When the Second World War began, he joined the army as a private. He emerged a brigadier. He showed the same single-minded determination in pursuing his political ambitions, and was rejected nineteen times before being chosen to fight Wolver-hampton for the Conservatives. But, famously, Powell was too individualistic, too clever, too unworldly, too unstable, to flourish. He finished his career a wild-eyed irrelevance as the Unionist member for Down South on the Northern Irish border, whose main purpose was to denounce what happened down south.

‘Are you frightened of my husband?’ his wife asked me when I was sent, as a very young and inexperienced reporter, to interview him. Yes, I replied, aware, like all of my generation, that this was the man who had stabbed his party leader, Edward Heath, in the back in the 1974 elections, and, most notoriously, had prophesied race war in a speech talking of ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘everyone is. And he’s such a sweetie.’ And when we came to sit down and talk, indeed he was – courteous, charming and thoughtful. The fire had gone out of him, certainly. But perhaps he had always been that way. Politicians, after all, are just human beings, and few human beings are intrinsically unpleasant or dislikeable.

The sense of weariness infects the voters, too. Every politician who makes a promise raises a hope. Election campaigns are all about aspirations, to end unemployment, to build homes, to cut taxes, to care better for the sick or to raise national self-esteem. Sometimes the promises have even been honoured. Occasionally they have been honoured grandly. But, in the end, each government making the pledge, whether honoured or not, gets shown the door. Oppositions, it has been said, do not win elections. Governments lose them. It is not that they have necessarily done anything to rile the electorate, just that after a while we all get disillusioned and bored with them and want a change. Even great achievements are no insurance. Having led his country through the Second World War, Churchill found himself resoundingly rebuffed in the 1945 election. The Attlee government, responsible for the greatest social reforms of the twentieth century, including the creation of the National Health Service, was bounced out of office after only six years. Margaret Thatcher led the government which fought Britain’s last imperial war, a war which was won, against all the odds, at the other end of the earth, yet she was defenestrated by her own party because it sensed that the electorate was sick of her.

In the end, the experience of politics seems destined to cause disappointment all round. For party, for politician and for voter. Why?

1. Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings…

Where did they all come from, this extraordinary breed? Once upon a time, they must have been normal. Can they really have sprung from their mothers’ wombs full of doctrinaire certainties? Confronted by their mother with a plate of mashed banana at the age of two, did they exclaim, ‘I congratulate the honourable lady on her choice of acceptable food for an infant. She will doubtless be aware of the vital importance of the banana trade to many member states of the Commonwealth. And will she join with me in protesting at the American government’s attempt to force the World Trade Organization to capitulate to the interests of the American banana growers who provide such enormous donations to the Republican presidential campaign?’ From some political memoirs, you might think they did.

In a strict sense, politicians are not like the rest of us. Whether they have been driven into political careers by a simple desire to represent their community in parliament or, like Margaret Thatcher, from a conviction that they alone could save their country,* wielding power is essential. Mercifully, the proportion of people in any society who wish to tell everyone else what to do is limited. If it were not so, the country would be ungovernable. The arrangement works only because the people willing, however grudgingly, to do as they’re told vastly outnumber the people who wish to order them about. Once upon a time, our leaders must have seemed normal. As babies, they bawled and mewled, they messed their nappies, and later they learned to speak and write. It was only later that they decided to make history. Was there anything in their childhoods to warn that they would turn out as they did?

It is easy enough to get misled. In the late 1980s, political journalists became obsessed with Michael Heseltine, the man who ultimately brought down Margaret Thatcher. Heseltine, the great ‘nearly man’ of late-twentieth-century Conservatism, at that stage still seemed (particularly in his own eyes) to be the leader-in-waiting. Reporters wanted to know everything they could about him. An elderly aunt was tracked down and asked to reminisce about Heseltine’s childhood. It turned out that she remembered him chasing cats. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Perhaps the old lady sensed the dangerous implications of what she was confessing to the inquisitive reporters, for she quickly qualified the remark. The old girl explained that ‘He didn’t want to be cruel, he just wanted to impose his will on them.’¹ Aha!, the journalist who tracked her down must have thought, here we have all the evidence we need of the drive to power which propelled this darling of the party on his ultimately doomed chase to 10 Downing Street. You can imagine the aunt adding the clause about why he chased cats as a way of forestalling any suggestion of sadism. But it had the reverse effect. He wanted to impose his will on them! It was the sort of hobby the young Hitler or Stalin would have gone in for: once the cats were in order, the nation would follow and then the rest of Europe. Trains would run on time from Swansea to Sevastopol. The impression stuck, and the story of Heseltine’s urge to dominate the local cats is one of the few things we know of his early childhood.

There is only one flaw in the story. It is not that it is untrue. It is that it is too true. Has there been a six- or seven-year-old in history who has not tried to control the family pet, to get it to stand on its hind legs or to perform tricks? The plain fact is that most politicians have childhoods like the rest of us. The truth is that these recollections, usually garnered long after the event by biographers desperate for anything to enliven an adulthood spent in besuited backstabbing, tell us nothing much. Every family will have a similarly embarrassing tale about the childhoods of people who went on to become nurses, plumbers or Yellow Pages space-sellers.