Have you heard the latest about Michael Gove? Get this: Ben Wallace, the MP who ran Boris Johnson’s Tory leadership campaign until Gove knifed Johnson in the front, said Gove can’t be trusted because he has “an emotional need to gossip”, especially after a drink or two. I know. Outrageous.
“We don’t have an ‘emotional need to gossip’, we have an emotional need for connection, and gossip is a jolly good way of finding [it],” says the psychotherapist Philippa Perry
Phillip Hodson, also a psychotherapist, says that some of us need that connection because we’re scared of being boring; gossip is the currency that reveals our social value. “It’s part of social discourse to want to be interesting, but so is the enjoyment that comes with talking behind people’s backs”.
Where does this instinct come from, and is it always destructive? “No,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Manchester Business School. “Gossip is about sharing perceptions of people or situations. Done positively in a workplace, it’s a really important part of communication and building camaraderie.”
But, he adds: “In any social group, someone has the primary role of the gossip. Play it badly and you risk losing credibility because nobody will talk to you.”
Gove has taken on that risky role in a village that lines up professional gossips (politicians and journalists: it’s notable that Gove has been both) along a very busy garden fence. But the tittle-tattle instincts so evident in Westminster are what make us human.
“What lifted us from ape communities to modern communities was our ability to collaborate against some kind of outside threat by creating a sense of commitment and bonding – a social contract,” says Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. “Gossip oils the wheels of that contract.” He says the word itself only took on a pejorative sense in the 18th century (it comes from the old English “godsibb” meaning godparent, or a person close to you with whom you share information).
“The problem is that this contract is susceptible because to benefit from it you have to be prepared to give up more selfish interests,” Dunbar adds.
In attempting to balance the competing instincts to serve the needs of the community and the self (which is all politics is, after all), Gove may have crossed the point at which gossip becomes scandal. To be fair to him, it’s a fine line. As Oscar Wilde wrote, scandal is just “gossip made tedious by morality”.
