The Wiki Man | 8 May 2010

I haven’t watched Triumph of the Will all the way through, but I am fairly confident that at no point in the film does Hess suddenly turn to the crowd and say: ‘Yes, sir, your question. Row 689, the blond gentleman in black with the skull insignia? No, not you, sir — the slightly more Aryan-looking gentleman to the right — just behind the eagle.’ (Maiden with coiled plaits wearing dirndlkleid strides over with a boom microphone.)

Man: ‘Does the Führer have any idea how difficult it is to bring up two children on an Unterscharführer’s salary, what with hyperinflation and that?’

Fuhrer: ‘Well, Horst — it is Horst, isn’t it? It’s funny you should ask that because I was riding through Munich just the other day when I met someone from a typical hard-working family who…’

No, I’m right. It’s not there. And there’s a reason why not. For, as party strategists should have spotted, this particular format, as used in the recent leadership debates, is wholly inimical to oratory. It is also rather ill-suited to right-wing politics. When random members of the public can share minor problems with politicians in front of a crowd, convention and politeness require candidates to acquiesce in the left-of-centre notion that all human problems have political solutions.

The whole thing effectively becomes an empathy competition — in one instance making participants sympathise with the wife of an accountant who couldn’t afford a larger house (sad, yes, but it’s not exactly Jarrow, is it?). There is no place for brutal honesty — for the answer that ‘maybe it’s not our problem’. The effect is to perpetuate the false promise that politicians have the answer to everything.

Yet, if you look at recent history, it’s perfectly obvious that most improvements in our daily lives have not resulted from government’s juggling with handouts.