Ming: The unacceptable face of British politics? (pic: Click for Flickr attribution).
The Guardian’s Catherine Bennett is right to be worried about the impact that a climate of hypercommentary on personal tics will have on politics:
“With the internet demanding ever-improving performance skills from its principal actors, Westminster can only become less hospitable to people who look more like Menzies Campbell than Ant and Dec. Unless, that is, they can produce an official ugliness pardon from Simon Cowell and his authentic, travelling freakshow.”
But, if this is the case, what kind of elected representitives are we going to be prepared to tolerate in the future?
Over on the Personal Democracy Forum (which proudly declares that ‘technology is changing politics’), we see Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill explaining how Twitter helps her to keep it real:
“That’s really why I do it. I think it keeps me in the discipline of not being afraid to say things that may not be perfect, that may actually offend, that may actually truly reflect what I’m thinking and why.”
Senator McCaskill’s example strikes me as being very close to being a priestly ambition – someone who is constantly begging the civil variation on the question ‘What would Jesus do?’
On another tack, here’s something Neighbourhood blogger Kevin Harris has sent me about how a magistrate has lost his job because he has embraced the level of openness that Senator McCaskill appears to be urging upon us all.
It seems to me that we – the public – have become increasingly unclear about what kind of people that we want to represent us.
Do we want someone with the kind of contrived celebrity grooming that Catherine Bennett saw in Tony Blair? Are we prepared to make occassional exceptions for people who don’t present the full manicured package but who do offer an outstanding talent?
Perhaps the political equivalent this year is Vince Cable? After all, he combines a great facility with lots of clever (but slightly boring) stuff, but he’s no oil painting. Michael Foot was another case in point: Few parliamentarians were as admired – even by their opponents – as Foot was, but his personal appearance and manner really capped a disastrous political performance for Labour in 1983.
Perhaps we want someone who has the qualities we would look for in a good magistrate? Or perhaps a juror? Or do we want someone whose concience is constantly on parade?
We clearly want politicians to be more accountable to us for their actions, their thoughts, their decision-making processes, their daily interactions, their income and expenditure, and even their body language and personal grooming. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Gordon Brown’s unpopularity is, at least in part, down to a failure to compete in a beauty contest.
I’d like to look at each of these components over the next few weeks and break each one of them down to see what the implications are for politics, democracy and the quality of governance that we can expect in a more interactive age.
