I suppose it is largely our fault that most politicians are mentally ill. We eviscerate them daily and one assumes that some of the poison eventually seeps through and begins to affect their central nervous systems. Being held up to ridicule for their incompetences, being dependent for their livelihoods upon the whims of idiots, and being forced to speak in a language from which all real meaning has been excised obviously takes its toll. I have been reading the diaries of that strange former minister Edwina Currie — a woman with whom I share virtually no political conviction but who I have nonetheless always rather liked as a person. She is definitely mad. I don’t mean this in an unkindly manner; it’s just that to read her diaries is a little like being led into a place where orderlies in tunics remove your bootlaces and you have to ask for a nurse to light your cigarette.
She is not as fantastically barking as the people gathered around Tony Blair when he was prime minister, of course. Alastair Campbell’s vast tranche of diaries will fill you in on the detail of that narrenschiff, that bedlam, that nest of maniacs; all of them perpetually constipated, or manically depressed, or leaning over the khazi with their fingers down their throats — or just screaming at one another, day after day, wracked by paranoia and jealousy. Edwina’s madness is the more common one, that of self-delusion, the bizarre (to us) notion that she is right about everything and absolutely brilliant, like the elderly chap wired up to a drip in the boobyhatch who thinks he is the Duke of Wellington. At one point in Edwina’s book, wrapped up in some rage, she howls about how Margaret Thatcher kicked her out of the cabinet after the controversy over the alleged salmonella infection of eggs — something else Edwina got wrong. And does she howl! And then concludes by saying: ‘Ah well, I’ve made a success of my life since, which is more than can be said of Mrs T herself, and so many other people.’
To write that, I would argue, you have to be quite mad. But in a less obvious manner she was deluded too about her own political beliefs. She believed, for example, that the British public was terrifically gung-ho for the European Union and were being let down by weak, xenophobic politicians at home. It is true that the British public did not, if the polls are to be believed, wish to leave the EU completely, back in the mid-1990s. But contrary to what Edwina thought, as she continued to demand we join a single currency, they wished for no further integration and thought the whole thing was a fantastic mess. This reality never seems to have impinged, any more than it did at the time on the BBC, which always categorised the Eurosceptics as insane and racist to boot. Well, being politicians, they probably were insane. But they were right on that issue, as we now all agree.
I wonder how much of this sort of thing is self-delusion and how much is either wishful thinking or self-censorship. Yet again, the British Attitudes Survey, published this week, suggests that the world, as seen by the electorate, is very different to the world as envisaged by the pitiful gibbering hordes in Westminster. Take the issue of immigration: as is ever the case, 75 per cent of the British public want it reduced, now, this minute. Not quotas, not better staffing procedures at Croydon — they want it reduced. More than half want immigration reduced by ‘a lot’. There is no equivocation about this; like the euro, which was opposed by roughly the same amount of people, the public is virtually united in opposition to a policy which has been pursued — and is still being pursued — by the major parties.
But even more than that is the astonishing fact — or astonishing if you are a Westminster politician or an employee of the BBC — that only one third of British people think that immigration has been of cultural benefit to the country. Some 48 per cent think that immigration has had a negative impact on the culture of the country. And yet not one of our four major national parties (counting the hapless Greens) would do anything other than argue against this sentiment, strenuously, and with copiously acquired feeling. Indeed, if you are a mainstream politician, you must take the view of the minority and insist that immigration has been of immense cultural value to the UK and, when pressed, begin to eulogise chicken tikka masala and rap music and perhaps the chewing of khat leaves for their invigorating or soporific effect, I’m not sure which it is. To argue what the overwhelming majority of the British public seems to believe — that immigration has had either a negative effect on British culture or has made not much difference either way — would be political death. There would be an immediate screaming, a howl-round; you would be disowned by your party leader and almost certainly deselected. And yet very nearly half of the public believe that immigration has made the country worse (economically and culturally, incidentally, according to the survey).
Perhaps this is why they go mad so easily, that they are forced to spout stuff all the time which they know full well to be rubbish — and is not believed by the vast majority of the electorate. We very nearly joined the euro, of course; it was Blair’s big project for the second term. Only the sense, or incandescent spite, of Gordon Brown stopped it happening. And just as with immigration, the debate would have been queered by political correctness, by a delusion.
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