How a political leader's word shapes trust in public affairs. Straits Times 2022-07-12

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How a political leader's word shapes trust in public affairs

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/how-a-political-leaders-word-shapes-trust-in-public-affairs

Straits Times

2022-07-12

For Subscribers

The race to lead Britain

*How a political leader's word shapes trust in public affairs*

Promotional videos and newspaper articles are gushing from the 11 candidates who have so far applied to become Britain's next prime minister. As the Conservative Party immerses itself in a torrent of verbiage, it also needs to grapple with the record of the man fast heading for the exit - and especially with his remarkable gift with words.

Words were the making of Boris Johnson. His political career was built on his time in 1989-94 as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Brussels, where he single-handedly invented a Eurosceptic brand of journalism full of bureaucrats mandating straight bananas, banning prawn-cocktail crisps and building themselves two-mile-high office blocks. The Italian rubber industry, he wrote, was in trouble with the Eurocrats for making undersized condoms. None of it was true - but none of it was completely false, either.

In her anecdote-stuffed biography of Boris Johnson, Sonia Purnell recounts how Michael Portillo, having lost his own bid to become leader, tells Mr Johnson, then still in his first term as an MP, that he must choose between politics and comedy. "Boris," she writes, "could not see why."

Sure enough, in politics time and again he found a ringing phrase to help him wriggle out of trouble. He was able to signal his ambition, usually a cardinal sin in British public life, even as he denied it: "My chances of being PM," he joked, "are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or of my being reincarnated as an olive." Accused of being first a car-lover and later a green, he said: "If the climate can change, I don't see why my mind can't". He dismissed allegations of an affair as "an inverted pyramid of piffle". When it transpired that he had been lying and he was sacked as a minister, he said: "My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."

To British voters Mr Johnson's anti-politics was refreshingly transgressive - just as voters elsewhere flocked to populists like Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini and Jair Bolsonaro. They thought that the joke was on the prim, humourless dullards in Westminster and that they were in on it. One candidate campaigning against Mr Johnson to become mayor of London in 2007 heard on the doorstep that: "I'm voting for Boris because he is a laugh."

However, 15 years later the laughter rings hollow and would-be Tory prime ministers need to understand why. One reason is rooted in Mr Johnson's own career.

His facility with language was fatally combined with a willingness to lie. He treated the truth as casually as the reputations of the credulous colleagues sent out to defend him. Rather than risk his popularity with tough decisions, or master the brief, or fulfil his promises, Mr Johnson would wing it. He succeeded until voters concluded that the joke was actually on them.

The other reason words failed Mr Johnson is that politics is not in fact a branch of entertainment. It is too often treated by everyone involved, including the press, as the script for a national soap opera. However, political rhetoric is not an end itself. Speeches are a device to win governments power, and to keep them in office, so that they can follow their political programmes.

Spin and messaging are supposed to help a government stay on course by clearing the path ahead of obstacles and distractions. With Mr Johnson as prime minister, there was no course. The spin concealed no programme except a desire for office.

The Tories may now choose to replace the Cavalier Mr Johnson with a Roundhead who is serious, taciturn and capable. For the past four decades the pendulum in British politics has swung between charisma and competence.

John Major, who took over after the drama of the Thatcher years, had left the home of his trapeze-artist father to become an accountant. The messianic Tony Blair, who followed him, passed on 10 Downing Street to the low-church Gordon Brown. David Cameron was sunny, Theresa May was an overcast Thursday afternoon.

Roundheads can make good politicians. Consider Mario Draghi, the Prime Minister of Italy and the former head of the European Central Bank. Perhaps Italy's most successful recent leader, he could hardly be accused of flippancy. Yet it says much that Mr Draghi is a technocrat appointed by the parties. The longer he is in power, the more Italy's elected politicians are infantalised.

Ideally, politicians would have it all. Margaret Thatcher is the most recent British prime minister who best combined a world-altering ability to set out a fresh vision with the gumption to see it through. However, leaders like that do not come along often.

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Conservatives pondering the future of Britain would therefore do well to heed the advice of Bernard Crick, a British political theorist who died in 2008.

Politics, he wrote, is a marketplace where irreconcilable interests come to resolve their differences through compromise in order that people can devote their passions to the really important things in life.

No longer should spinning words be a substitute for a government programme. No longer should a ringing phrase paper over a glaring contradiction. Words are essential in politics, but they are worth nothing unless they are anchored in reality.

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