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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Often, in the weeks after an election, I am a little disorientated and groggy, having spent the night covering the results with very little sleep. But unlike UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, I don’t have to run a nuclear state while recovering.
That may explain why he claimed immediately after the results of the recent English local elections were in that they showed that Britain was on course for a hung parliament (they didn’t) and then a few days later that he had said no such thing (he had). Perhaps he was simply in the same confused state as the MP who, shortly after the 2016 Brexit referendum, cheerily ended a phone call to me with the words “thanks mum!”
But it is more likely that Sunak was trying and failing to find a way to balance two competing demands of his job. As prime minister, he can’t vanish from public view whenever he suffers a political setback. He has to talk about the pressing issues facing the country and his own legislative agenda (such as it is). Inevitably, when he does, he will face questions about the political situation. But the conventions of being a party leader compel him to say that the election is up for grabs, and to present crushing defeat as a form of victory.
The interesting — for “interesting” read “stupid” — part is that absolutely no one in his party believes him. There is not a cohort of Conservative MPs who would have demurred had Sunak come out and said that the local elections show that people are very angry indeed with the Tory party — nor that he and his fellow Conservatives have a huge job on their hands even to achieve a respectable defeat at the next election.
Indeed, the single biggest reason why Sunak’s position as Tory leader is secure is that would-be applicants look at the scale of the task and think that their interests are better served by leaving the prime minister to it.
There is no other walk of life where it is considered normal to say things you don’t believe, to an audience who knows that you are talking nonsense. The heads of troubled businesses regularly have any number of overly optimistic plans for recovery — but what they don’t do is declare publicly that lossmaking is really a form of profit and that commercial rebuffs are an endorsement of their strategy. At least, not if they want to stay in post.
There is a large gap between the candour we receive from business leaders and other organisations and that which we get from politicians. This is one reason why, in so many instances, the first question I am asked about Sunak (or Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, for that matter) is whether the problem is that he is daft enough to believe what he is saying, or if he thinks that we are.
But there has always been a candour deficit between the corporate world and the political realm. In part, this is because most businesses have an enforced moment of truth every quarter, while most politicians only get theirs once every four or five years.
The bigger problem for anyone seeking to repair public trust in politics is the increased level of candour we expect and exhibit in our own lives these days.
Think about, say, baby photos. Unless you are very precocious indeed, you will have a handful of them, all taken before the advent of the digital camera and very few depicting your parents as the shell-shocked and shattered people that the parents of a newborn often are. But if you are on Instagram and have any friends with small children, you will see both photos and text updates talking frankly about the joys and challenges of being a new parent.
When people see greater honesty in their personal lives, they expect to see it mirrored elsewhere. The age when you were expected to suffer silently through a bad marriage, the loss of a pregnancy or depression is over. So too is the era when a politician such as Hugh Gaitskell could have a prolonged affair with Anne Fleming, the wife of the James Bond author, for almost the entirety of his stint as leader of the opposition and keep it from the public.
People who talk about their own personal lives in unvarnished detail, and are used to seeing others do it, are only going to be turned off by politicians who still feel the need to cleave to an old style of communicating and talking about what they do.
Although the similarities between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are often wildly exaggerated — Trump’s reaction to losing office was to refuse to accept it, whereas Johnson’s has been to write an indifferent newspaper column — they are nevertheless prototypes of a new kind of politician better fitted to a more candid age. Their eccentric appearances, off-the-cuff oratory and unusual hair styles suggest an authenticity that more polished politicians don’t have. Trump’s success in part came from defying traditional expectations of how a politician should speak. But in some ways, Joe Biden has learnt from that — his reply that there were “at least three” genders subverted the expectation that politicians should have strong feelings and clear positions on every issue.
In reality, neither politician is as authentic as they seem — but nor, for instance, was John F Kennedy really the energetic and vigorous young statesman he played on TV. In truth he was a badly behaved man battling many illnesses, yet he became the model on which many successful political careers were built. Indeed, subsequent generations of politicians, on the left and the right, still ape JFK, albeit imperfectly and with rapidly diminishing returns.
Bad hair might not be an essential prerequisite for electoral success today, but giving the appearance of authenticity and candour increasingly will be.
stephen.bush@ft.com
