ADDICTIVE habits are so hard to break. You keep telling yourself you’re going to give up: by the summer, by Christmas, as a New Year’s resolution. Even if you succeed, and most people don’t, the chances are that you’ll be tempted back before long. Your friends do it and if you keep hanging around with them, you get sucked back in.
Yes, politics is as hard to kick as smoking. Unfortunately, no one has yet invented a parliamentary patch that you can wear under your shirt to give you an artificial fix. It’s not enough to watch Newsnight and Question Time. You have to be there, to be in the flow and in the know.
This week, we have seen the recidivists come trickling back. Alastair Campbell has been out of politics for only a year, and already he is talking of standing for Parliament in his own right. Alan Milburn gave up his Cabinet job to spend more time with his family just 15 months ago, but the temptation to return is near-irresistible. The lure of power is too strong.
Not that “power” is a word that these junkies ever use. Oh no, it’s “an enormous privilege” that Campbell seeks. He says he wonders if he will “ever do anything meaningful and worthwhile again”, as if raising thousands of pounds for leukaemia research, or indeed writing for The Times, were neither meaningful nor worthwhile.
If Tony Blair’s former press secretary wanted to do something really meaningful and worthwhile, he could work in a care home for the elderly or sign up for the Samaritans. He could retrain as a classroom assistant in an inner-city school, as his former Downing Street colleague Peter Hyman has heroically done.
Campbell claims that he has to put himself under pressure again. It’s true that, after leaving a high-octane job, it is terribly easy to sink into a depressed lassitude, in which it becomes impossible to get almost anything done. But I can assure him that teaching a class of 30 stroppy 14-year-olds is pressured. He does not need to go back into politics for that.
These men do, however, feel an urge to go back. And it is a need that overpowers all other instincts. What they desperately miss is the feeling of being at the centre of things. Look at Alan Clark, who almost instantly regretted leaving Parliament in 1992, and eventually found his way back just in time for the subsequent election. He couldn’t bear missing out on the gossip, the inside information, the intrigue.
MPs sometimes talk about politics being in their blood. It does seem to course through their veins like a drug. Even being a backbench MP confers huge status in the constituency, if not at Westminster. You can put up with being a minion from Monday to Thursday if, when you return to Middleton-by-the-Marsh on Friday, you are king or queen of your own realm.
If that gives you an instant rush, elevation to ministerial office is like swapping soft drugs for hard ones. The high is even more exhilarating. Suddenly you have a whole Civil Service staff at your disposal, a car and driver, and those luscious red boxes. People want access to you, and will sometimes pay thousands of pounds merely to sit next to you at dinner.
Lobbyists want to bend your ear because you can change things. You make decisions that have power over other people’s lives. Backbenchers suck up to you because you can influence their careers. Worst of all, you get sucked into a vortex of ambition.
Politicians are usually far more interested in talking about their own and their colleagues’ prospects of advancement than they are in discussing the minutiae of policy. It’s like a great game, the Great Game in their eyes. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s nearly out? Gradually, nothing else seems important beyond the success of the team (ie, winning the next election) and the success of the individual. It is hugely to Alan Milburn’s — and Andrew Smith’s — credit to have recognised that there was more to life than politics and to have left voluntarily. Most politicians don’t. But once out of office, to wean yourself from the drug of ambition is extraordinarily hard.
The only thing that helps — the political equivalent of methadone — is for your party to lose power. Politicians who have lost their seats when in government and have returned in opposition have found the experience peculiarly dispiriting. Look at Michael Portillo, who never really recovered from it. Even Alan Clark found parliamentary life less fun second time around, when the Conservatives were no longer Masters of the Universe. Political comebacks are usually less than successful. Neither Norman Fowler nor Cecil Parkinson shone when they returned from exile. Portillo never quite recovered his spark as Shadow Chancellor. Estelle Morris’s performance as Arts Minister has been decidedly low key.
Alastair Campbell may find himself unable to resist the narcotic. But he will be doomed to disappointment. For, even if he reaches Cabinet, he will never find himself quite as powerful as he was at No 10. But then that’s the trouble with hard drugs. You spend your drug-taking career trying — and failing — to recapture the highs you experienced when you began.
Campbell wrote the other day that he managed to give up chain-smoking overnight after a session of hypnosis. He needs to go straight back to the hypnotherapist. It’s his only hope.
WAKE UP TO MAKE-UP
A MINTEL survey shows that most 7 to 10-year-old girls are using make-up. Cue reflex disapproval and cries of “Why can’t we let our children be children?” When my daughters were much younger, I would have joined the chorus. Not any more.
For a start, being a child (and particularly a girl) involves wanting to dress up. It means loving having your face painted. Begging to use your mother’s make-up is not a symptom of precocity or oversophistication. It is a show of childish delight in the possibility of transformation.
My two girls’ bedrooms are full of plastic eye-shadow or lip-gloss boxes that have come free with the trashy magazines pre-teens like to read. This does not bother me either. All the make-up aimed at girls this age is in pale, neutral shades, which barely show at all even after they have been slapped all over the face.
You don’t see 10-year-olds going out in bright red lipstick or black mascara. The make-up they use does not turn them into sultry 16-year-olds. So I can sincerely say, “Darling, you look lovely”, as the said darling looks almost exactly the same as she did before the make-up was applied to eyes, cheeks and lips. A dab of Vaseline would have had the same effect.
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
