In between the sweat and the stumble, there was one especially revealing moment during Thursday’s special edition of Question Time. It came from a man exasperated with what he saw as yet another refusal by a candidate to give a straight answer to a straight question. “Do you comprehend how much respect you’d get from the audience if you were truly honest?”
In the applause that followed were years, if not decades, of accumulated frustration. The man was voicing what has now hardened into received wisdom. It was the belief famously voiced by Jeremy Paxman when he said his starting assumption for all political interviews was: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” It is the notion we nod to when we say of a colleague or friend who appears to be slippery: “Oh, that’s a politician’s answer.” It is the premise of those countless trust surveys that show politicians at the very bottom of the scale, less trusted to tell the truth than bankers, estate agents and even journalists.
When we speak of politicians as dishonest, we’re not quite referring to full-blown mendacity. I suspect most people know that while a few politicians are criminally dishonest – those who went to jail for expenses fraud, for example – most are engaged in a very particular, narrowly defined kind of untruthfulness. It rests more on euphemism and omission than the outright lie. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’d admit it’s not only politicians who are guilty of it. When an unwanted guest asks, “Will there be a stag do?” and you reply, “I don’t think that’s been decided yet,” you’re being a politician too.
Still, the question of honesty has loomed large at this election. A low-level hum of distrust has been the background noise for the entire contest. It helps explain, for example, why the polls have remained static despite some of the big promises that have been announced. When the Tories pledged an extra £8bn a year for the NHS, some Conservative MPs hoped they’d see a bounce. They didn’t get one, just as Labour saw no movement following its promise of an extra £2.5bn. Voters just shrugged off the blizzard of numbers, sceptical of all of them.
Partly in response, the politicians have sought new ways to firm up their promises, to clad them in iron. They put the important ones on the front page of their manifestos, in a reverse of the familiar logic of the small print. If it’s there in big letters on the front, they imply, then we definitely can’t wriggle out of it. For Nick Clegg, the manifesto front page has almost constitutionally sacred status. Sure, he might have broken his word on tuition fees, but that was never on the front page of the Lib Dem programme, he argued this week.
Or they talk of a “lock” that will force them to stay honest, even if they wanted to stray. Labour installed a “budget responsibility lock”, guaranteeing that every policy will be fully funded and entail no extra borrowing, on – you guessed it – the first page of their manifesto. Not to be outdone, David Cameron this week proposed a new “tax lock”, a law that will stop him raising income tax, VAT or national insurance.
Lock, then, is the new word of choice for a promise that really, really won’t be broken. “Vow” might have been preferable, but it had a relatively short life, after it was deployed by the three main Westminster leaders in the closing days of the Scottish referendum campaign – only to be seemingly broken hours after the votes were cast, when the prime minister announced that the just-promised expansion in powers for Holyrood would be delayed while he sorted out the more pressing matter of England.
Of course, all these vows and locks only serve to confirm voters’ worst impressions of politicians and their honesty problem: they’re like drinkers hiding all the bottles, tacitly conceding that they need to be saved from themselves.
None of this is especially new, but it has got worse. The corrosion of trust caused by the expenses affair of 2009 never went away, while the coinage of a politician’s promise was debased emphatically a year later – with the birth of the coalition. As Clegg learned again on Thursday night, the broken promise of tuition fees will define him forever.
And this is the big shift the politicians have not yet adapted to. Pledges have a different meaning in the age of hung parliaments and coalition. You might want to do X or Y, but the facts and the numbers may not let you. Clegg was the first victim of that brute logic, but Cameron and Ed Miliband act as if he will be the last. They make ever more macho promises, painting red lines and the like, but those promises ring false. Voters know that the ugly, rough business of assembling a majority in the Commons is likely to see those pledges broken.
When Miliband insisted on Thursday that he’d rather not be prime minister than do a deal with the Scottish National party, he was surely hoping to reassure English voters scared by Tory talk of a Labour-SNP government and to win back some Labour Scots who would otherwise back Nicola Sturgeon.
He no doubt had a legal, technical definition of “deal” in his mind that meant he would not later have to sit down to munch a steaming plateful of his own words.
But it was foolish. Because if he does eventually come to some unspoken, vote-by-vote arrangement with the SNP, the spirit – if not the letter – of his pledge on Thursday will seem broken. He may think he has left available some legalistic wiggle-room. But voters will spy a broken promise – and the cynicism will deepen. Cameron may have created a similar, though less sharp, problem for himself with his insistence that he will only lead a government committed to a referendum on leaving the EU.
Politicians need a new vocabulary for these new times, one that does not commit them to action they may not be able to take in circumstances they cannot predict. A starting point would be simply to set out their goals, free of bravado – and to insist they need as many votes as possible if they are to turn those hopes into reality.
In all the debate about electoral reform that is surely coming after 8 May, this may be one overlooked advantage. Under a more proportional voting system, coalition horse-trading would become an established, inevitable fact of life. Politicians would have to come clean about it, rather than living a lie. And if that audience member was right, then voters will respect them for it in the morning.
• Jonathan Freedland is hosting Guardian Live: Election results special on Friday 8 May at 6pm in Kings Place. For full details and to book tickets, see here
