We — by which I mean the press as much as the public at large — have a strange attitude towards our political leaders. We demand humanity and spontaneity from them. Yet we mercilessly pillory them for the “gaffe” that strays from acceptable opinion.
We demand that they listen to us, but accuse them of U-turns and popularity-seeking if they duly change their opinions. We want straight answers to straight questions but, when we get them, we deem them insensitive and insulting.
Very few politicians rise above all this. Mo Mowlam was one. The warmth and spontaneity were genuine. At a party in 1994 she marched up to a national newspaper editor she had never met, grabbed the lighted cigarette from his mouth, took him by the elbow and propelled him bodily across the room to meet Tony Blair, the new Labour leader.
When a peace deal was being negotiated in Northern Ireland a few years later, Blair said that he felt the hand of history on his shoulder. Irish politicians felt the hand of Mowlam, then Northern Ireland secretary, all over them. The Ulster Unionists, members of a naturally reticent race, couldn’t abide her “touchy-feeliness” and thought she was on the Republican side in any case.
As No 10 saw it, Blair and his aides rescued a peace process that she had steered towards the rocks. But for a time Mowlam was more popular than the prime minister — she got longer ovations than he did at Labour conferences — and she was even talked of a possible successor.
Why did the public seem to love her? It helped that she had “fought” and recovered from a brain tumour. In the television age, her face also helped: wide, fleshy, quite pretty, often smiling. But what mattered most was that people felt that if they knew her personally she could play a role in their lives.
She was the person you might ring for coffee or lunch if you needed a bit of cheerful counselling, perhaps after the end of a love affair. Or you would invite her to a party because she’d be the life and soul of it.
This is the secret of political popularity in the modern era. Trust, although much discussed by opinion pollsters, doesn’t matter; if it did, Harold Wilson would hardly have won a vote, never mind four elections.
Cleverness can be a positive handicap. Oratory in the Churchillian style now comes over as pompous and old-fashioned; that was why Michael Foot was so hopeless as Labour leader. Modern democratic politics, sharing the tabloid headlines and the television schedules with Big Brother and EastEnders, is soap opera, not grand opera. The voters want recognisable characters from ordinary life.
Yet few modern politicians have distinct personalities. Nobody would invent Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Iain Duncan Smith or Alistair Darling for a soap opera. Some politicians, I suspect, go into politics to give themselves a personality: they have so little sense of self that they are comfortable only when they have some official status. Others start with a personality but allow it to be stunted by the demands of spin, compromise and party discipline.
Blair, at least until the Iraq war, was popular because people knew who he was: the man next door (probably on a Barratt Homes estate), always pressing you to come to PTA meetings or help out with the Scouts. Gordon Brown is the man you get to be church treasurer. George W Bush is the chap you invite to your barbecue.
You’d invite Bill Clinton to dinner if you had a recently divorced woman as a “spare” among the guests. You’d ask Ronald Reagan to be godfather to your children. Margaret Thatcher (a surprisingly good party hostess, incidentally) was the bring-and-buy organiser, ruthlessly marking up the prices and bossing everybody around. Kenneth Clarke, the most electable of the possible candidates for Tory leader, is the convivial man in the pub who slaps you on the back and stands his round but is a bit too full of himself.
Other politicians have personalities that people just don’t like. It’s no use their saying popular things. Lots of people (alas) agreed with Enoch Powell on immigration, but he was too weird to achieve personal popularity. You wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to him at dinner (I speak from experience). Tony Benn also seemed weird and people didn’t agree with him anyway, but once he ceased to be of political consequence his underlying amiability gave him an Indian summer of popularity.
Michael Howard is courteous and charming but the voters, like his political colleagues, sense an inner coldness. The public couldn’t work out William Hague. A deeply serious speech to a Tory conference in his teens marked him as a nerd. Then he wore a baseball cap and boasted about pub crawls, marking him as an oik. In the end everybody decided he was just a twit.
Isn’t all this a sad comment on the superficiality of our times? Shouldn’t we want politicians of wisdom and foresight, steadfast visions and great ideas? Shouldn’t we, as Benn sternly insists, stick to the “ishoos” and keep off “pershonalities”? Perhaps. But that is to forget two things. First, most voters do not have the time or inclination to study the details of a politician’s policies or performance.
Second, many of the issues — global warming, GM foods, pensions, tax credits, for example — are highly technical. The dedicated right or the dedicated left have no difficulty, arguing respectively that global warming is a myth designed to overthrow capitalism or that it is a reality caused by overconsumption and profit-making.
Now that class loyalties have dissolved and ideologies have gone out of fashion, most people don’t see it that way. A politician’s personality — partly manufactured and perceived only through the media — is all they have to go on.
Third, a gut instinct about whether you can imagine yourself working or partying with a particular politician isn’t a bad one. It isn’t infallible, as the junior Bush shows — but ask yourself if (from what you know) you could go on holiday with Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney and the point is proved again. Lenin and Robespierre were men of great ideals, but would you have wanted them around the house?
Might the Germans have done better if they had asked themselves, as they heard Hitler promising national regeneration, if they would care to have a beer with him?
It is easy to get depressed about the quality of modern political leaders, about how much spin and artifice go into their public images, about how readily we are taken in by plausible promises delivered in a plausible manner. But Mowlam really was fun and she really was warm and sincere. A nation that took her to its heart doesn’t have bad political judgment.
