A post about political responses – is it time to try honesty?
Our charismatic Prime Minister, whether intentionally, or as a chancer due to his habitual ill-discipline of taking the ‘short cut’, appears to have disregarded the advice of colleagues, fudged rules and political convention (proroguing Parliament), and bent standards of public life (party gate and Pincher). The upshot – he was rumbled, doggedly pursued and finally deposed.
But has that expurgation resolved a problem with our politicians? Is political life really purged and refreshed?
The ‘elephant in the room’ remains precisely where it has always been. Mark Twain joked in 1897, “truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economise it”. Boris Johnson was not the initiator of economy of truth, he was simply a serial perpetrator. And it seems he leaves behind – on all sides of political life – a whole heap of others that continue to seek to mislead us.
It was a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’ that triggered this post. When first broadcast in October 1948, the programme’s panelists sought to debate with integrity of argument, challenging where necessary and conceding where appropriate. In this week’s episode, when questioned, SNP Work and Pensions spokesperson Kirsty Blackman MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Murray MP and Minister in the Scotland Office Iain Stewart MP managed to turn almost every topic into a political football. Only ‘The Herald’ columnist Iain Macwhirter accommodated the proposition that government is a fine art, not a science, and that those who govern deserve credit for their successes as well as criticism for their failures.
It is the intellectual dishonesty of failing to give credit – that is missing from current debate, leaving in its wake the obsessive fault-finding that deceptively portrays every argument through the prism of calamity. Whilst as a species we are rarely comfortable with compromise, we are certainly damaged by such dishonest polemic. Shouldn’t our political leaders now be striving to work together, supportively and openly, accounting with refreshing candour their opponent’s successes as well as their failures and errors? If they did, wouldn’t we be better respected and informed?
By way of postscript on our Prime Minister, I would not for a moment write him off. Whilst every candidate to replace him contended that they would not have him in their cabinet, do bear in mind that political memory is short and forgiving. It is not beyond reason that, were he to seek to return, he will be embraced again by a party that is otherwise bereft of both personality and vision.
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Ageing Effortlessly 