I think we all agree that: “I’m not interested in politics,” is the most dispiriting thing you can hear someone say. What do you mean you don’t like politics? What do you mean you don’t vote? Don’t you understand that good people fought bad people so you would have the right to vote?
Yet I wonder if politically engaged clever dicks like us, with our dinner-party wisdom, really have that much to boast about. After all, what do we really mean when we say we are “into politics”?
What actually captivates us about politics is the drama of it all, the Shakespearean tragedy, history, comedy and farce. It’s the soap opera we love. It’s the stranger-than-fiction scheming and plotting of the actors on this stage, as they crawl over and under and through each other to get to the top or the bottom or wherever they end up. Once you have got to grips with the plots and subplots, got a handle on the characters, read newspapers like this one, listened to Laura Kuenssberg, skulked around on the websites and subscribed to the odd conspiracy theory, there is no boxed set more binge-worthy.
But all this stuff has very little to do with making our country a better place. It is not about the discharge of power, but the acquisition of it.
There ought to be a second word for politics, because there’s politics as in the fun stuff, and there’s politics as in the really important stuff: the big ideas and the detailed, messy, hard grind of making and enacting the policies that can change things. How many of us can honestly say we switch on the radio, or check websites, to get the latest updates on key policies?
This came home to me just after the Brexit referendum, when I made the Panorama I keep banging on about, focusing on the (mainly leave) voters of the West Midlands. There was a great guy I’m still in touch with called Ryan Morris, then landlord of a delightfully named pub in Tividale called The Wonder. Ryan was passionate and knowledgable about politics. In the lead-up to the referendum, his pub had turned into an informal debating chamber, with him in the chair.
I spent time with him and his clientele in the early part of that week’s filming, and then went back to see him on a most tumultuous day in politics. It was the day Gove knifed Johnson (or was it the other way round?). The Panorama crew and I were mesmerised; I couldn’t wait to get Ryan’s take on it.
I walked into The Wonder, all of a bluster, shouting: “What do you think? Have you seen it all?” He just shrugged. He genuinely couldn’t have cared less. And then the penny dropped and I felt rather ashamed: his interest in the whole thing was nobler than mine. His concern with Brexit was pure in that it was only about policy. It was about how he felt things might change for the better. Westminster intrigue intrigued nobody at all in The Wonder in Tividale.
Obviously you can’t exercise power if you don’t acquire it in the first place. But how much more intellectual energy can be expended on that pursuit before there’s no energy left at all for anything else?
I don’t know if this is what the Gang of Seven were on about this week when they said politics was broken, but if they are, they’re on to something.
