Are Conservative politicians ‘weird’? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly in seats won by the Lib Dems – find elected Tories increasingly strange. It’s hard to disagree, but this isn’t the party’s only problem.
Who cares if a politician is weird?
As the Tories battle it out to elect their new leader, the reality is that hardly anybody out there recognises any of the candidates. The one that rings the most bells is Priti Patel. This is because, as anybody who has ever worked in marketing will tell you, she possesses an alliterative name. Tom Tugendhat also scores here, but loses because his surname is unfamiliar to most people outside Westminster and also impossible to spell. By such tiny things are careers made or destroyed.
But are Tugendhat and Patel – and indeed Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly – really weird? The accusation seems to have originated, like most of the things that bedevil us in Britain today, from America, coming hot on the heels of the Democrat campaign attempting to portray Donald Trump and JD Vance as ‘weird’. This is a bold tactic coming from an institution putting Kamala Harris up as their presidential candidate. It’s also odd, considering the ‘whole self’ movement, and obsession with ‘neurodiversity’, that is common among progressive types who are likely to support Democrats. Surely nobody is more ‘neurodiverse’ than Donald Trump. If Democrats welcome difference, why not embrace the Orange One? But no: it seems only their kind of weirdness is OK.
Perhaps then what Democrats over there – and Lib Dems over here – mean when they say a politician is ‘weird’ is something different. They are saying less about politicians and more about themselves: these ‘weird’ Tories, they want us to know, aren’t like us folk from a more elevated social milieu. Things have reached the prettiest of passes if the Lib Dems are seen as a yardstick of normality.
And here lies the real issue: all politicians are weird. There are only a tiny number of normal folk among their number, such as Alan Johnson or Liz Kendall and (maybe) Sajid Javid. Other politicians are weird in so many different ways, from the flamboyantly odd – Michael Fabricant, Michael Portillo, Ann Widdecombe – to the blank and robotic, such as Theresa May, Keir Starmer or Liz Truss.
The very strangeness of the job itself can even make apparently ordinary people look peculiar. Yvette Cooper wouldn’t make any impression on you at all if she wasn’t a politician. But send her out talking tough and looking increasingly fraught and she becomes strangely scary. This is because it’s frightening to see someone with such little judgment in a position of such power.
Why would anybody normal want the job of a politician? You have to zealously monitor yourself and everything you say and do, you get paid a paltry amount for the amount of work and responsibility, plus the public hate you, but you are at their mercy. You don’t, except for a very few ministers, even have much power.
A strange job will, of course, attract strange people. It’s a bit like accusing actors, comedians or pop stars of being weird. ‘Ooh, that Elton John, have you noticed, bit of a funny feller.’ ‘I didn’t want to say anything, but I think that Bowie chap might be wearing make-up.’
Frankly then, who cares if a politician is weird? Weird but competent would be fine, thanks. We wouldn’t mind how eccentric they are, so long as they did the job. I would welcome a prime minister who painted the right side of his body bright blue, insisted on playing the trumpet at press conferences, and whose hinterland was making life-size models of Concorde out of old Sprite cans, if he actually did the job effectively.
But many politicians don’t seem to realise this – and perhaps worrying about being seen as weird is knocking some of our leading lights off course. Kemi Badenoch’s launch speech saw her forsaking her Unique Selling Point: her usual wonderfully wry and quite stern appeal. Has she had coaching? She appeared all smiles posing in that TED Talk stance that is supposed to seem relaxed, but makes a person look as if they’re just starting to walk again after an accident.
Kemi should beware: such rebranding never works. Look at Gordon Brown, who attempted to change the way voters saw him when he was prime minister. Trying to change your presentation in such an unnatural way just makes you look weirder, and worse, as if you’re trying too hard. A smile on a face where it doesn’t belong gives a person goosebumps; it’s as disconcertingly wrongly located as a fish in a lavatory or a garden centre at the South Pole.
Weirdness – in all its forms – is neither good nor bad. It doesn’t matter very much, for example, that Ed Miliband is palpably odd. It matters that the energy secretary is hopelessly incompetent, ideologically barmy, and committed to an insane energy policy. I suspect his oddness will matter even less when the lights start going out. We’ll be begging for anyone to rescue us, no matter how weird that person might be.
Comments