‘Politics is show business for ugly people,’ said Paul Begala, famously. Westminster today, however, is more akin to a finishing school for aspiring media personalities. We live now in a new age of ‘presenticians’ – in which more and more political figures present their own news shows.
Turn on your TV and you could well be confronted by one of a dozen current or former MPs who are now anchors or regular pundits.
On GB News, there’s the husband-and-wife duo of Esther McVey and Philip Davies, and Lee Anderson MP just replaced his fellow Tory Dehenna Davison as the network’s resident ‘Red Waller’. Jacob Rees-Mogg has also joined the self-styled ‘People’s Channel’. At same time, across London on Talk TV, fellow Johnsonite Nadine Dorries will soon be grilling her onetime boss Boris Johnson. You can also catch Bim Afolami and Tan Dhesi as talking heads on Talk’s flagship late night show.
Skeptics will question whether such a blurring of the line between politics and the media is really healthy
If radio is your preferred medium, you can enjoy the weekly musings of Ed Vaizey on Times Radio or Labour’s David Lammy on LBC. LBC now presents itself as The People’s Town Hall, featuring as it does regular ‘Call Keir’ and ‘Speak to Sadiq’ segments.
Media, it turns out, is where ousted or retired politicians go to keep addressing the public. ITV’s morning schedule regularly hosts the likes of Ed Balls and Gyles Brandreth; GB News provides current MPs with sympathetic hosts in the form of Michael Portillo and Gloria De Piero. George Osborne is a regular on the Andrew Neil Show.
The more craven recovering politician seeks out reality or gameshow TV: Strictly and I’m A Celebrity offer the likes of Matt Hancock an easy segue into the world of light entertainment.
It’s nothing new, of course. In the 1950s, the likes of Bob Boothby and Michael Foot became national figures via In the News and Free Speech in the 1950s. John Freeman and Woodrow Wyatt both switched from being Labour MPs to Panorama presenters: their colleague Christopher Mayhew volunteered to take mescaline for the same programme. Later stars include the likes of Brian Walden, Matthew Parris and Robert Kilroy-Silk, all of whom fronted TV programmes throughout the 1980s.
In those days, politicians would only pursue a career in broadcasting after leaving the Commons – or resign from the House in order to do so. Those who chose to remain in parliament, such as Boothby and Foot, tended to be panellists, not presenters. Nowadays, no such demarcation exists.
The rise of the presenticians is in part a product of the explosion of outlets in recent years. ‘There are so many more media companies with a rapacious need for content’, says one insider. Debate, analysis and monologues offer cheap content, compared to first-hand reporting or big production teams.
The regulator Ofcom has been fairly relaxed about such obviously political figures shaping what we are allowed to see under British broadcasting law. LBC and its parent company Global started the trend by luring in big names with their own eponymous phone-in shows. The decision of the then-deputy prime minister to front a weekly ‘Call Clegg’ programme in January 2013 was soon followed by the channel’s ‘Phone Farage’ counter-weight. Moscow’s propaganda channel Russia Today then went a step further by offering first George Galloway and then Alex Salmond their own shows.
For attention-hunting politicians and for their media employers, the mutual benefits are obvious. The channel gets an experienced broadcaster, at ease with wide-ranging political debate. A famous face can serve as a legitimising factor too and bring powerful connections to the role: witness McVey and Davies interviewing Boris Johnson last April in a sort of televised version of a 1922 Committee meeting.
The politicians, for their part, can gain more notoriety and make good money – McVey and Davies have made more than £115,000 together from GB News alone. Television offers MPs a chance to pitch themselves beyond the Westminster Village too – over the heads of party managers. The number of people who voted for Matt Hancock in the I’m a Celebrity final for instance is likely to be substantially higher than the number of people who voted in this summer’s Tory leadership election.
The broader story too is the declining power of party and parliament in politics, and the rising potency of individuals with their own mediagenic ‘brand’. Politicians used to have earn acclaim through speeches to the House, in debates tightly controlled by the party whips – now political fame can obtained on the television sofa, a more convivial setting. Even speaking to the House has, since the advent of cameras in the chamber, become far more of a performance for public consumption.
Nobody surfed the media-political waves better than Boris Johnson, once the king of Have I Got News For You. He made his popular appeal undeniable through his many appearances on chat shows. But we have today moved into a different reality – one in which political people do media less than media people do politics.
This is a nightmare for the party in governments, which has to compete – increasingly on social media – with rebellious figures such as Rees-Mogg or Dorries. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it gives other journalists plenty to talk and write about. But the presenticians, in order to be successful, risk the charge of caring more about fame than, say, than the public good.
Donald Trump was much criticised for his reality TV presidency. He cared more about ‘ratings’ than policies or even polls. But, looking at all politicians vying for our attention on the airwaves, it’s tempting to wonder if he wasn’t ahead of the curve.
Sceptics will also question whether such a blurring of the line between politics and the media is really healthy. And given the ongoing focus on MPs’ earnings, can such shows truly be said to benefit their constituents?
It is not implausible to imagine some kind of equivalent of a Tucker Carlson or Volodymyr Zelensky-like figure emerging from Britain’s burgeoning media sphere to influence legions of followers or even run for office themselves. With the Tories likely to lose heavily on current trends, outspoken media voices could command greater sway in an opposition rump party of demoralised activists. Whether that’s healthy for democracy we’ll just have to wait and see.
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