Ed Miliband, Nigel Farage and the age of cynical politics

Would you rather this country was led by a man who is out of touch, arrogant and smug or someone who is out of his depth, weak and out of touch? That, according to the voters themselves, is the choice they’ll have to make at the next election. It is an illustration of just how cynical and despairing people are about politics and politicians.

Margaret Thatcher may have been, as the bien-pensants put it, divisive. But she had her partisans as well as her detractors. It often seems like modern politicians only have the latter. Indeed, when the electorate of 2013 were asked what phrases they associated with Thatcher they replied ‘determined’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘stands up for Britain’.

Today, the politicians who prosper are the ones who go out of their way not to be like politicians. One political fixer who has sat through endless focus groups in the last two years calls this the Boris Johnson effect. He notes that ‘being caught on a zip-wire should be disastrous. But at the moment anything that marks you out as not another politician is helpful.’ Nigel Farage is clearly channelling this advice. He canvasses in outfits that would give a Tory spin doctor a heart attack, tweeds and cords or City pinstripes, and takes every opportunity to imbibe in public; he’s filmed with a half-empty pint in UKIP’s latest party political broadcast. You can turn the sound off and the message is still clear: I’m not like the others. This approach appears to be working; a poll this week has him as Britain’s least unpopular party leader.

In some respects, the obloquy heaped upon David Cameron and Ed Miliband is odd. Both of them are in politics for the ‘right reasons’, Cameron out of a sense of public service and Miliband because of ideological conviction.