When the dust has settled, the counting agents have gone home, and David Dimbleby has been put back in his box for another night, then spare a thought for the poor old candidates. Most of them will lose – that is arithmetically obvious. They will have to pick up their lives again after weeks, but sometimes years, of peculiarly focused effort, while their whole life has been put on hold, and find something worthwhile to do.
Not only that, but also they will have to start their slow recovery from a condition I have come to christen – at least to myself – as Mad Candidate’s Disease.
There is a cure, so we needn’t despair, but it’s a tough one: tough on them, tough on their families.
Here are the three most obvious symptoms:
1. A glassy stare, and a failure to listen, rather like a transmitter that only transmits and never receives – a fault once known to the military as “permanent send”.
2. A dehumanising habit of interpreting absolutely everything – their partner’s cancer, their children’s achievements – first and foremost in terms of their own electability.
3. A strange fantasy that, no matter how hopeless their constituency, how low their previous vote, how little work they have actually done there, how few leaflets they have delivered, they could actually win.
This last one is the least logical. Maybe they talked to a couple of voters who smiled at them. Maybe they suddenly imagined that their party was sweeping the nation. Well, it isn’t impossible – they could win. Couldn’t they?
This is one of the reasons that political parties find targeting so difficult, even though it is absolutely necessary in a first-past-the-post system. It is why the Greens and Ukip will get only a couple of seats on Thursday, despite widespread support.
It isn’t just failure to organise themselves. It is that candidates in even the most hopeless seats cling on to their fantasy, attracting workers away from places the party really could win, because Mad Candidate’s Disease has them in its grip.
I’ve been there. I’ve been a parliamentary candidate myself (Regent’s Park and Kensington North, 2001), though only for a few weeks, and I had such serious facial eczema at the time that I also felt myself to be unelectable as the Creature from the Black Lagoon – so my symptoms ought to have gone the other way. But even so, I succumbed.
I’ve also written books, so I know there are parallels with Mad Author’s Disease, which is the fantasy that – no matter how obscure your book, how few bookshops it is available in, how turgid the text – well, it could be a runaway bestseller.
Partly these are the symptoms of putting yourself out there, making yourself vulnerable to rejection, having to see the messages written about you on the ballot paper (one of my prospective voters had written: USUALLY VOTE LIB DEM BUT WOULD NEVER VOTE FOR BOYLE). I assumed at the time that I had never actually met them, but maybe I had.
This openness to insult means you have to shift your psychology to accommodate it. It isn’t surprising that it makes you see reality a little differently.
There are also parliamentary candidates who, through sheer strength of character, managed to avoid it and stay open and genuine and overwhelmingly themselves during the campaign.
But there are consequences to all this. Mad Candidate’s Disease insulates the political class from the voting class. It means they don’t see each other clearly, as human beings should. It means they can’t predict each other’s reactions.
Which brings me to the point. Huge sums are spent before, during and after every general election to predict how people will vote, or to research people’s probable reactions to policy formulations reduced to a sentence or so. Huge numbers of bourbon biscuits are employed in focus groups.
Yet actually politicians are staggeringly ignorant about how best to behave, how best to explain and how best to campaign.
They have no idea why voters lean one way or the other, though the most sophisticated are pretty sure it has nothing much to do with individual policies. Voters don’t make up their minds along the lines of supermarket special offers. But how do they? Well, nobody knows.
In particular, nobody knows how voters react to election leaflets. Most seem, anecdotally, to prefer leaflets which are positive, sunny and interesting. Most politicians don’t realise how unpleasant most of their election literature is.
In fact, many leaflets are so scurrilous in tone, so cross, so reeking of a sense of offended dignity, that – if they were from anyone but a political party – you might consider calling the police.
But politicians are insulated from this by the symptoms of their trade. It’s sad, but must be fixable – and deserves a bit more research.
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