Well, at least Joey Essex has given bored pundits something to talk about today. He pitched up at a press conference with Nick Clegg, and took a selfie with the Deputy Prime Minister, which will certainly add to Clegg’s collection of useful props he hopes might win him a few more votes.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones says this is an ‘image of the crisis in our political system’. Perhaps it does make Clegg appear rather desperate. But much of the tone has been sneering at a figure so apparently stupid as Essex wandering about in Westminster at all.
I should declare an interest as I’m one of the journalists who Essex has been talking to about his programme, which sees him trying to work out why he should vote and how Westminster works. Essex hasn’t voted before. I’d certainly never watched The Only Way Is Essex before, and I’ve never been to Marbella (where he apparently hangs out) either. But given so much political media seems to be politically engaged people talking to one another about a subject they all know pretty thoroughly, a programme aimed at people who – shock horror – don’t know what an exit poll is, or even who the Liberal Democrats really are – seemed like a rather good idea.
Sneering at people who haven’t caught the politics bug seems less of a good idea. Given 35 per cent of the UK electorate couldn’t find a reason even to vote in 2010, let alone obsess about the ins and outs of an election campaign, that’s rather a lot of people to dismiss.
I wasn’t particularly interested in politics as a teenager, or even as a student. I read the papers while Radio 4 buzzed in my family kitchen and was fortunate to have a good education, so I wasn’t entirely in the dark. I’ve voted in every election since becoming eligible to do so, including police and crime commissioners, which makes me a rare specimen indeed.
But until a public affairs tutor at journalism college, a man called Dave Kett who has taught a huge number of political journalists including the BBC’s fantastic John Pienaar, exploded with enthusiasm when explaining select committees to us, I never saw much reason to become obsessed with politics either.
One of the reasons, I must confess, was that most of the people I met in my youth who were mad keen on politics were terribly sneery towards anyone who seemed less confident of their opinions than they: arrogant bearded boys at sixth form college who opined knowingly about ‘Blair and oil’, while boring you senseless about the things they’d seen while smoking dope. Or snooty university types who had written their maiden speeches for the House of Commons and, again, looked down on those who didn’t really know who to vote for. They joined the university political societies. In my fresher’s term I joined the student newspaper, the poetry society and something called High Heels and Handbags: a very well-subscribed club that went on shopping trips. That’s what 18 year olds do. What incentive was there to feel enthusiastic about politics? It already felt like a closed shop for know-it-alls.
When people who aren’t in that closed shop dare stick their heads around the door, whether it be Joey Essex talking about ‘Nick Leg’ and the ‘Liberal Democats’ or the beautician who thought Barraco Barner was our president, they are laughed out of the shop again. You’re not welcome here, you don’t know enough about the game.
These sneering and laughing people aren’t even in the Westminster Bubble, as political insurgents would like to call it. Even within the Bubble too there is a culture of sneering at people who are not political geeks. I have, now, become one of those geeks – to me, it’s not boring identikit politicians. It’s about the arguments that drives our national policies, protecting or harming the most vulnerable people. To me, it all matters. But I’m in a small minority.
My friends from school and university still complain to me that they cannot work out who to vote for, and that when they try to read a lot of political coverage they find that it refers in such detail to rows they didn’t even know were happening rather than explaining what the parties stand for. One of my friends, with a good degree from a good university doing a very worthy public sector job told me the other day about a ‘very left wing politician’. It quickly transpired she was talking about a member of the Tory awkward squad, and didn’t know what ‘left’ and ‘right’ meant. I suspect she’s one of many.
Westminster is closing in on itself more and more. Research conducted last year found that of the 712 candidates who had been selected by November 2014 to stand in the election, 30 per cent were already involved in politics in one form or another. They already know how to talk to each other, but perhaps they’re less adept at talking to those outside. Perhaps it is an insecurity that leads them to sneer.
Tory MP Nadine Dorries told me in 2013 that she was utterly baffled by life in Parliament when she first arrived:
‘When I first got into Parliament, I was in the members’ tea room with [fellow Tory] John Hayes,’ she says. ‘He said to me, “Nadine, have you ever read Alice in Wonderland? You have just come through a hole and you have landed in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and you don’t understand a word anyone is saying, do you?… You are like someone from the real world and I can see you’re lost.”’
When Labour MP Gloria de Piero embarked on a project to find out why voters hated politicians, she found people who were incredibly engaged with issues, but not with politics. They wanted to change the things that made them angry, but when she asked why those people didn’t stand for office, their response was ‘No-one asked me’ or ‘where is the job advert?’ No-one asks outsiders to join the Westminster closed shop, and because the goings on in that shop make little sense to those outsiders, they see little incentive to grow more interested.
I hope that by the end of the Joey Essex programme, those of us who are involved manage to convince him to vote, and that in doing so those watching, who would never tune in to Newsnight or read a ‘wide-ranging’ interview with David Cameron in a newspaper might see the point of politics, and why voting does make a modicum of sense. This is what Nick Clegg was trying to do in meeting up with Joey Essex today – and yes, critics may sneer at him for doing so. But if politics is about making and winning arguments, it’s also about persuading people to listen to those arguments, rather than sneering at them because you’ve made it difficult to follow.
Comments