Sound Bites and Self-Regard

In an ongoing effort to be, if not down with the kids, then at least on the same chapter as them, I watched a couple of episodes of The Traitors last week. That I was able to confine myself to just two hours tells you what I thought of it. It was not so much the format which turned me off (although it was, perhaps, slightly icky), but the participants. They all took what is ultimately a game VERY SERIOUSLY, as if it were an event akin to the Normandy landings. But they also took themselves VERY SERIOUSLY, each introductory video a hymn to self-love with quotes such as “I’m a leader”, “I’m good in groups”, “I can see right through people”. Allied to that curious lack of boundaries which characterise the reality TV contestant (How can you know you’ve got a “really good team” when you’ve only met your teammates a couple of hours earlier?), I decided that the outcomes of banishment or metaphorical murder which the show offers all but the winner were no more than they deserved.

People who go on these programmes are by definition odd, having a greater than average desire for attention, and a lower than average propensity to embarrassment. In this, they are similar to politicians, and it was a pleasing synchronicity that, in the same week the televisual barrel was scraped once more, those who would be our political masters ended the Christmas truce to inflict themselves on the public again.

First out of the traps were Reform, keepers of the Thatcherite flame or gammony throwbacks according to taste, and a party with which I have, in the interests of disclosure, a certain amount of political sympathy. Accusations that all they offer is a return to the past would not be stilled by a presentation which looked like it had been knocked up by an intern in 2003, nor by harrumphing about “socialism” in the manner of a 1970’s colonel pondering a coup. That there is little between the leaderships of the major parties is not a new point but Gorgeous George Galloway’s “two cheeks of the same arse” makes the point rather more pithily than “consocialism”. As for “Starmergeddon”, how many seconds did it take to come up with that one?

The tragedy of the party which sees a spectre haunting Britain is that it is haunted by a spectre of its own – its once and future leader, or Godot as it may turn out. Farage may be many things, but he has star power. Without him, Reform looks like a teenager telling himself he is witty, popular and cool like his best friend, while said friend is at a party to which he has not been invited. It may not be right or fair but life isn’t. As teenagers who do get invited to parties will tell you, you need “rizz” and Reform, at the moment don’t have it. A lack of self-awareness is a prerequisite for a politician, but taken too far, it looks slightly ridiculous and the further it goes, the more ridiculous it looks.

If Reform’s presentation was curiously apt for the brand they have, but not the brand they want, the Lib Dems also lived down to their reputation. For the Dad Joke of political parties launched a poster featuring a Dad Joke. “Rishi’s Removal Services” no doubt still has the good burghers of Guildford chortling to themselves a good week later. Still, the lord loves a trier, even if Ed Davey’s activities over the Post Office scandal may turn out to suggest that being tried is exactly what he deserves. A shrewd electoral choice of launch site Guildford may have been, but dragging the nation’s media out into the Home Counties to launch a poster (how very 1950’s) is indicative of a party with delusions of importance (not entirely unlike many of its voters then…).

Reform and the Lib Dems were but an amuse bouche though, the undercard to the next day’s heavyweight clash (although if Fury/Usyk is anything like Starmer/Sunak, lord help us all).

Sir Keir had his Obama moments (“Project Hope”), he had his scrappy moments – politics should not be “a sermon from on high, a self-regarding lecture, vanity dressed up as virtue”. We must “moderate [our] political wishes out of respect for the different wishes of others” (those who have read Jung will remember that the sins for which we attack others are those we are conscious of committing ourselves…). But most of all, he had his towering self-regard. All that was needed for everything bad in Britain to magically become good was the election of the Labour Party with him at its head. He knows what people want and he knows how to give it to them (good and hard?). For he will serve the British public. Service, you see, runs through him like a stick of rock.

Literature is, of course, replete with stories of scheming servants who use their masters’ inattention to pursue their own projects. One might, therefore, raise an eyebrow at the promise of a politics which “treads a little lighter on all our lives”. Our current system “needs your full attention…And that’s exhausting, isn’t it?” Perhaps he was channelling Holly Willoughby at her most patronising, perhaps a driveway-layer promising to look after everything just as soon as the cash hits the account.

Whichever, he certainly wasn’t offering any details. The £28bn Green Investment Fund. Maybe it’ll start on day one. Maybe in the second half of the Parliament. Perhaps it will be a different number. Perhaps it will never happen. He wants to cut taxes, but he can’t say which. His Shadow Chancellor is also keen to cut taxes on working people which should perhaps cause those relying on private pensions or dividend income to prick up an ear. Still, why bother with the small print when national renewal is on offer? Just sign on the dotted line and hand over the cash. What could go wrong? Anything else would be a betrayal of Britain.

If Rishi Sunak was notably short on the hopey/changey thing (even if, of all the political leaders with the possible exception of Humza Yousaf, he must be the one most hoping that things will change), he did actually commit news rather than unleash a wave of waffle, suggesting that the election will be in the second half of the year. This would be obvious to anyone who could read a poll and had a basic grasp of human psychology but the media, in its wisdom or need to have something to say to fill the airwaves, had decided that May was a real option.

It may make sense as something may turn up, but having recently completed a periodic re-reading of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (get me), his quote about the gladiators “mauled all over and covered in blood by the wild beasts, [who] still plead to be kept alive to the next day, where in the same state they will meet again those same claws and teeth” seemed strangely fitting. (It is one of those great books which, no matter how often you have read it, always seems to have something fitting to say to your present circumstances).

If Sunak was unusual in having something concrete to say, he was depressingly familiar in other ways. There was a slogan, “Stick to the Plan” (the advisability of doing so rather depends, of course, on the quality of the plan. Those at Gallipoli would probably have favoured changing theirs). There was a touch of self-regard, not entirely anchored in reality, with claims to have halved inflation (the Bank of England would like a word) and reduced taxes (well, ish). There was a general sense that Rishi, and Rishi alone, could deliver the sunlit uplands of peace, prosperity and a chess set in every school.

In a year where America may re-elect the compere of a reality show, Britain then seems stuck with reality show contestants. Like those on The Traitors, there is no lightness in our political class, no self-awareness, only a desperate belief in their own importance and the importance of the game they play, a belief that the hopes of the nation hang on their every word and action, that there will be mass lamentation and rending of garments if they fail to make it to the next round. But, as Arthur Balfour might have put it, “very few politicians matter, and no politician matters very much”.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.

This piece first appeared in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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