The pathology of the politician

21 May 2011

Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the hours they work, that has made them take such stupid risks. This is the wrong question. We should ask a different one: what is it about these men and women that has attracted them to politics?

On the whole, by and large, and with any number of exceptions, individuals drawn to elective office are driven men and women: dreamers, attention-seekers and risk-takers with a dollop of narcissism in their natures.

Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve self-selected. Consider the odds. You hang around for years, forsaking other safely lucrative career ladders, in the hope (statistically unlikely to be fulfilled) that you will be chosen as a parliamentary candidate. Then you run for election in the hope (statistically uncertain) that you’ll be elected. Once elected you hang around again, now in a nervously exhausting but intellectually unchallenging job (the role of backbencher) in which you’re treated like a prince in your own patch and like scum by whips and ministers at Westminster — all in the hope (and yet again the odds are against you) that you’ll become a very junior minister; in which often wretched post you hang around for a few years more, still poorly paid, still little-regarded by colleagues, in the hope (the odds now even more heavily against you) that you’ll reach the Cabinet.

And through all this time you are obliged to submit yourself every four or five years to the caprice of your constituency electorate; all around you lie the bodies of promising politicians turfed out by the voters just as they were beginning to rise.

Even if you clear all of these fences you will never be well paid by the standards of those bosses in the world outside with whom you deal as equals; while most Cabinet ministers (as you very well know) never get much further, take their statutory knighthoods, become Right Hons, and slip away into the night, described by colleagues and commentators as having ultimately failed.

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Robert Upfold

May 20th, 2011 1:53pm Report this comment

My word, Matthew, you are making such heavy weather of an MP's lot. Is 'being obliged to submit every four or five years' for re-election such a burden? A lot of people face performance reviews every year and huge nummbers are made redundant with no pension and miserly severance pay.

Your account of the drawbacks of being a parliamentary representative hardly induces sorrow or sympathy because life outside is hard and getting harder.

The privilege of sitting in Westminster provides time and opportunities to do so many things; like clergymen of old members may pursue any interest: rescuing fallen women; writing sonnets; delivering sermons;finding facts in foreign fields; and so forth and so forth and so forth.

You didn't do so bad yourself.

D Short

May 26th, 2011 10:59am Report this comment

When allowances are taken into account (even now) plus the salary, and the excellent pension and the pay-off if you are not elected means that even an ordinary MP is not badly paid at all.

Don't forget that only 10 per cent of people in the UK earn more than £40,000.

And when you have a fairly safe constituency, not getting elected is not that uncertain.

And you are wrong to say that various other careers are safely lucrative. They are only so if you have ability and you work hard, not qualities MPs have.

But you are right to say they are seriously weird. As for the sexual peccadilloes, their choices tend not to be anything one would want to wake up to. Look at Prescott's mistress and Cecil Parkinson's. Not exactly love's young dream.

Nea

May 29th, 2011 8:07am Report this comment

Don’t forget another feature of these politicians:
They have always to lie to voters, media and superiors; they have to promise things that they know they cannot fulfill.

Dunroamin

May 29th, 2011 4:45pm Report this comment

Damn right they are weird. Ostensibly they are appointed to solve problems. In reality a politician who solves a problem is a turkey voting for an early Christmas. It just doesn't happen.

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