Joyce McMillan: Trivia fills the political vacuum

Published on Friday 3 September 2010 14:50

FORGIVE ME for sounding a little on the sober side, but so far as I can see, this has not been a slow week for major political news. The Middle East peace process has restarted, after years of silence.

The economic recovery in the United States has stalled, raising fears of a global double-dip recession. One of the world's most populous and politically fragile countries is still substantially under water, following a historic flooding disaster.

And here in Britain, we are facing the deepest public spending cuts for a generation or more, amid a dangerous absence of real debate about the government's deficit reduction strategy.

There's no shortage, in other words, of serious subjects crying out for discussion; yet somehow, at this moment of global concern and crisis, our view of politics seems to have been entirely eclipsed by the image of Westminster government as a kind of running soap opera, driven not by ideas and policy, but by a sensational series of personal scandals and fallouts.

The week began as it was to go on, with a Sunday-morning BBC discussion on the Labour leadership question that focused entirely, not on the alleged political differences between the two Millibands, but on the burning question of how upset their mother might be by the growing bitterness of the contest.

A couple of days later, Tony Blair's book was published, bringing with it an avalanche of trivia about his likes, his dislikes, his non-existent drink problem, and his knock-down, drag-out marital rows with the political love of his life, Gordon Brown.

And finally, to cap it all, there came the case of William Hague and the shared hotel rooms.

Now perhaps I should make it clear that I do not care whether William Hague made love to his boy assistant from lights out to breakfast-time, during the election campaign, so long as he does not lie about it, and continues to carry out his duties as Foreign Secretary with his usual intelligence, wit, and fearlessness.

Marital fidelity, or the lack of it, is essentially a private matter; and while I accept William Hague's assurances that the allegations made are false, and feel nothing but sympathy for the Hagues in their struggle with the agony of multiple miscarriage, which they felt obliged to reveal this week, I really wish that I lived in a world where such details were not the stuff of public discussion.

Yet for a couple of days last week, these essentially personal matters were allowed completely to monopolise the political news.On Thursday evening, Eddie Mair's PM programme began talking about the Hague affair as soon as the 5pm news was over, and was still talking about it half an hour later, like one of those comic parodies of rolling news at its most absurd.

"Just remind us again what a miscarriage is," chirped the hapless Eddie to an expert interviewee, at one point. And in the general melee, what was supposed to be a joint press conference between Hague and the German foreign minister was entirely eclipsed by the embarrassing sound of the Westminster media pack obsessing over Hague's sexuality, to the exclusion of all other topics.

Now of course, this week's events have only offered an extreme example of a tendency that has been growing more marked for the last decade; yet still, it's worth trying to analyse this progressive reduction of politics to a kind of personal drama, in which perceived character matters hugely, and policy hardly at all.

It has something to do with the genuine political vacuity of a situation in which all three main party leaderships - particularly if Tony Blair and David Milliband get their way - continue to embrace the same neoliberal ideology; the silencing of alternatives always makes for a dull and dumbed-down debate.

Most crucially, though, the trivialisation of politics has to do with the attitudes of a political and media elite who are well placed to protect themselves from the consequences of bad government decisions; and therefore do not, when the chips are down, care very much about the consequences of policy.

Out here in the real world, ordinary people are increasingly fearful, and desperate to know just what the coming cuts are going to mean, in terms of lost jobs and lost services.

But in there, in the Westminster village, it's all still just a game, a merry-go-round of who's in and who's out, and whose think-tank can be most wittily dismissive of the things ordinary British people hold dear.

This is the world our leaders increasingly inhabit, emerging only occasionally to meet ordinary voters. This is the world so narrow, and increasingly so closed to outsiders, that it spawns the absurdity of a Labour leadership contest between two identikit brothers, divided only by the narcissism of tiny differences.

And this is the world which treats politics as a soap opera, because it has long since forgotten why politics really matters. Ordinary people know, from their own experience, that without strong, compassionate, and well-organised government, life is nothing but brutish and short.

For those wealthy enough to want their politicians weak, though - too weak to protect people from the scourge of poverty and unemployment, too weak to challenge unaccountable power in any form - then there is no smarter move than to mount a constant, distracting, and unrelenting attack on their personal integrity.So it's time, now, for us to start asking ourselves some sophisticated questions about who gains, from this relentless trivialisation and personalisation of politics; and why no other group of power-holders on the planet, for all their colossal wealth and extravagant lifestyles, are ever exposed to the kind of public roasting that William Hague has endured this week, over a matter which is, or should be, of no public consequence at all.