Shared Opinion | 17 October 2009

How long will it be before the word ‘voting’ is no longer associated with ‘governing’?

How long will it be, do you reckon, before the connotations of the word ‘voting’ are all about reality television, and hardly about government at all? Not long, I’d say. With President Blair, with goats and General Dannatt, I worry that voting and government are drifting apart. You’d think more of us would mind.

I don’t think you can blame reality television. Back when it was new — a decade ago, or thereabouts — there was a vogue among satirists for pointing out how hilarious British politics would be if it followed the same rules. ‘Iain Duncan Smith!’ people would chortle. ‘You have been evicted!!’ It sounds pretty trite now, but at the time this was cutting-edge stuff. Some of us built our careers on it. But strangely, or at least to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever did the reverse.

If The X-Factor worked like British politics, you’d vote at the beginning, not at the end. Across the country, divided up locally for no reason you could discern, you’d cast your vote for somebody of whom you’d never heard. Most likely they’d each have marketed themselves, on leaflets, by means of some recognisable reality TV archetype. Teenage Single Mother. Fat Scot Who Might Be Bonkers. Mixed-Race Secret Gay in Hat.

So you’d mark your paper, and one type would win, and that would be the end of your involvement. Then the victors, the Fat Scots Who Might Be Bonkers, say, would get together and pick their own leader from their own ranks, without considering it any business of yours at all. Thereafter, the triumphant Fat Scot, the one that all the others had chosen without you having anything to say about it — let’s call him, I dunno, Gordon? — would look back among his group, and decide who all the runners-up should be, all by himself.