So You Want to Be a Politician

Part I

So you want to be a politician

1

In defence of politics

Shane Greer

It’s always been easy to bash politics and politicians. But, at the moment, it’s fashionable. It’s the new black. It’s vogue. One need only flick on the television or open a newspaper to experience the vitriol being directed at our elected representatives and our democratic system as a whole. ‘They’re all in it for what they can get’, we’re told. ‘They’re completely removed from reality’, we hear. ‘They’re all as bad as each other’, we’re led to believe. And believe it we do, in tremendous numbers. An ICM poll for the BBC News Channel back in 2005 found that eight out of ten voters didn’t trust politicians to tell the truth, 87 per cent felt that politicians did not keep the promises they made in advance of general elections, and an incredible 92 per cent said that politicians never gave a straight answer. Fast forward to 2009 and the situation hadn’t got any better; in fact it had got worse. According to an Ipsos MORI poll for the Observer newspaper only 13 per cent of people trusted politicians to tell the truth. What’s more, politicians were seen as the least trustworthy of all professions (including lawyers, who so often are the butt of jokes pertaining to dishonesty).

To say that politics is in crisis is an understatement on a par with saying that Muhammad Ali was a pretty decent boxer. Public confidence in the British political system could barely be lower, and trust of politicians has been all but destroyed. Indeed, if politics were a business and voters were its customers, it’s almost certain that, by now, it would either be bankrupt or propped up with a government bailout.

That we find ourselves in this calamitous situation is hardly surprising, though. We live in the age of 24-hour media. An age in which negative stories sell and positive stories get cast aside. Why talk about the politicians diligently working on behalf of their constituents when there’s another politician who’s abused their position for personal gain or enjoyed the company of some rent boys?

But to blame the media would be wrong. To do so would be to ignore the fact that the media ultimately succeeds or fails (even the BBC) on its ability to satisfy its audience. And if the audience is excited more by negative stories than positive ones, what media outlet in its right mind wouldn’t give them what they want?

But let’s be clear about something. While it might be tempting to blame the audience, to bemoan their obsession with negativity, the simple fact is that we politicos are no different. Can any of us honestly say that we didn’t enjoy the last story about a member of another party running into difficulty? Can we honestly say we haven’t navigated to the BBC News website and found ourselves drawn immediately to the story about natural disaster in a far off land? After all, who doesn’t like a juicy story they can get their teeth into? And let’s not forget one of the most fundamental rules of democratic politics; you, the aspirant candidate, don’t get to decide what the voters are interested in. They hold the power.

However much we might like voters to look up to their elected representatives, to hold them in high regard, and to view them as generally honest and decent people, it simply isn’t going to happen. If you want to become a politician you have to accept that.

But never forget, for all its detractors, politics remains a noble endeavour. Perhaps ironically, given the effect his decision to go into Iraq had on the public’s trust in politicians, it is Tony Blair who best reminded us of the inherent value and virtue of our parliamentary democracy when concluding his final Prime Minister’s Questions:

Some may belittle politics. But we know, who are engaged in it, that it is where people stand tall. And, although I know it has its many harsh contentions, it is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. And if it is, on occasions, the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes.

Those who rail against our political system forget that without politics, and specifically democratic politics, decisions would be taken by force. The Melian principle would come to characterise our way of life; with the strong doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must.

All too readily history teaches us the lessons of dictatorship; peoples enslaved, rights curtailed where they are not obliterated, the rule of law replaced by the rule of force, the persecution of minorities, the invasion and subjugation of sovereign nations, the extermination of entire social, religious, ethnic and national groups, the imprisonment of political opponents, the presumption of guilt rather than innocence, and the sacrifice of liberty at the altar of conformity.

As citizens of a liberal democracy it’s all too easy for us to forget how rare and hard won the freedoms we enjoy really are. Stories of genocide and totalitarianism exist in the abstract. Far from being tales of individual tragedy, they become little more than matters of statistics; involving numbers so high as to remove utterly any hope that their real meaning will penetrate our relatively privileged existence. But it is ultimately the individual human stories behind the statistics that serve as a stark reminder of how privileged we really are. One such example found expression in an article by Professor Mahmoud Bassiouni, who chaired the Commission of Experts to Investigate the War Crimes and Other Violations of International Humanitarian Law in the Former Yugoslavia:

A man on crutches whose legs seemed to have been broken came over to see us yesterday … When the war broke out, his neighbourhood became Serb controlled … One day, a group of about half a dozen young thugs … came over and hauled the man away from his café to the police station. They tied him up on the floor … they then proceeded to take their rifle butts and break both his legs … While he was lying there on the floor with two broken legs, the thugs went and got his wife and two daughters. They told the wife in the presence of her husband and her two daughters that unless she did everything they wanted, they would rape the two girls. The mother, in order to protect her daughters, complied and submitted to degrading and humiliating sexual acts. Then when they were finished with her, they slit her throat. While she was withering on the floor dying, they raped the two girls in the presence of their stepfather. Then … they slit the throats of the two girls. Next, in perhaps the worst possible cruelty, they took the man and dumped him out in the streets … This morning I discovered that he had committed suicide during the night, leaving only the message: ‘I lived long enough to tell my story to someone in the hope that it will be told in the future.’

That we as citizens of a Western liberal democracy find such brutality incomprehensible speaks volumes of the virtue of the political system we have come to take for granted.

Is our system perfect? Of course not. Are all our politicians paragons of virtue? Hardly. But for all our system’s flaws and our politicians’ shortcomings, we still wake up in the morning and find that the battle to get to No. 10 is fought with words rather than weapons. That alone is something we should be proud and fiercely protective of.

And let’s not forget that it was our ever evolving system of democracy which over the years abolished the slave trade, made suffrage universal, stood firm against dictatorship when it threatened the freedom of Europe, granted rights to workers, delivered a universal healthcare system based on an individual’s need rather than their ability to pay, made education free and compulsory for all children, ensured habeas corpus, recognised homosexual relationships through civil partnerships, embraced religious freedom and protected freedom of speech. The list goes on.

Ours is a political system which should be celebrated, both for its achievements in the past and its acknowledgement that it must constantly improve if it is to make greater achievements in the future. For sure, there will always be an abundance of individuals ready to throw mud at politics and politicians, but let’s not forget that they have yet to propose an alternative system of government which promises to be better.

Winston Churchill said it best: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’

Shane Greer is the executive editor of Total Politics

2

What it’s like to be a politician

Andrew MacKinlay

Many years ago while an aspiring candidate in a pretty hopeless seat, someone advised me that there was no point going into public life and also being a shrinking violet. This was sound advice.

Consequently, both in making speeches and at dinners, coffee mornings and other social occasions, much energy and mental preparation has to be expended in order to fulfil the expectations of your supporters.

It is essential to overcome (or, perhaps more accurately, disguise) the insecurity and lack of self confidence that so many of us suffer from. This can of course lead to embarrassing over-compensation. We have all met the very loud, over the top, gladhanding personality. The skill is to try and improve one’s game on each new occasion.

If you are shy or lacking in self confidence, your task is to overcome this, and with the help of your supporters build an ‘image’ of what their chosen candidate or MP should portray.

One will draw strength from what, in my opinion, is normally an overwhelming amount of goodwill and in some cases considerable deference. However, there will always be one who shakes his head or doesn’t laugh and who asks a spiteful loaded question or makes a remark about MPs’ expenses. They are like an Exocet missile racing into your side, destroying and crumpling the fragile hull of your newly acquired confidence.

The thing to do is to focus on the fact that overwhelmingly your audience appreciates what you have to say and that they have had a ‘chat’ with you and had an opportunity to have their say. The politician’s nightmare is remembering people’s names and also those to whom you have written in response to a query. The volume of those you meet and those who write is enormous and is never ever understood by journalists or those who are charged with assessing the ‘worth’ of MPs when it comes to expenses.

A bishop gave me a tip one day. When you don’t know who is speaking to you – say ‘Please remind me of your name?’ If the reply comes back ‘Margaret’ you then, clasping the lady by the hand, swiftly rejoin by saying: ‘I know you’re Margaret! It was your last name I just couldn’t remember!’

Clement Freud, who was the Liberal MP for Ely, recalled the formula for those who come up to you and about whose identity you haven’t the foggiest idea. You simply say: ‘I got your letter’, obviously reassuring them that you immediately recall and identify the subject matter, and that you will be keen and able to converse and enlarge on what was in their letter. Maybe it was a wrong that needed to be righted; maybe you were tipped off to send condolences following a bereavement or a disappointing failure; or maybe it was to congratulate the person on some great success. You have no idea!!

The microseconds flash past. You hope that you will be rescued by another who wants and is competing for your attention or that the first person will give you a clue about the subject matter to which they are referring.

Your face muscles will work overtime as you ‘work the tables’ at a social. You will laugh at the joke, the critical punch line lost as the teller doubles up with laughter at his own story. Your face will lift and your eyes light up when a proud lady tells you about her grandson who is going to university, only for the mask to change as if a switch was flicked on hearing from a widower of the recent loss of his wife of sixty years.

You desperately hope too that when picking the raffle tickets as the principal guest at a function, you avoid picking out one of the many tickets you paid for… and most certainly that if you have already won the big box of chocolates, you don’t win again. If you do, and the ‘choice’ is between the bottle of Famous Grouse and bath salts… well there really is no choice. You’ll enjoy your bath!

In the final weeks of my time as an MP I got one of those letters from a very pompous man (who was not a constituent) in which he boasted how hard he worked, unlike so many others, and how he was paying for others while he maintained himself and his family by private schooling and private health insurance.

He then posed a series of ‘questions’ in which he challenged me to proffer my views and/or defend my party’s position. He continued in his letter to ask: ‘Is there anybody in Parliament today that fairly represents British people like me?’

Hopefully not!

I replied that if he thought he could do a better job as a Member of Parliament, and do it more cheaply, then not only could he stand at the next election but arguably he had a duty to do so!

I think this is an important point. Those most vociferous critics of either your individual style and stewardship of public office, or of the government, must be asked why they have not the courage to stand for election.

The Friday surgery can never be shown on TV. At the end of a long, hard week it can be emotionally draining but also most rewarding.

There are the ‘regulars’, including those being spied on by the CIA, and those who get messages from space through their TV sets. However, by far the greater numbers are those whose problems are numerous: victims of a heartless bureaucracy, or those who are starving because of the appalling and gross incompetence of the UK Border Agency to determine their status, or to find their papers lost in a Home Office tower block in Croydon – not for months but years. Then there are the parents who have bought their council home but cannot understand that there is a shortage of municipal properties for their daughter and son-in-law and infant grandchild. These are good people but one wonders if on occasion they expect the good Lord to come down from heaven each night and replenish the housing stock in green pastures. You try! You try to explain the shortage and the demand and every time you send a letter to the housing office you try to muster and craft new arguments which always end up as variants on the same point. Nevertheless you explain why this young family is ‘a special case’.

A weekend will be filled with many pleasing duties, when invariably one is welcomed to a variety of different functions. Friday may include a veterans’ dinner and Saturday might be the presentation at the under-12 soccer tournament. Saturday afternoon could be a non-league football match – to be welcomed by the quip ‘Eh!… haven’t seen you lately… must be an election in the offing’ – and in the evening it could be the scout gang show, choral society or the male voice choir.

Sunday might include a civic service, an ordination or induction of a new rector, or the Apostolic Church of God from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. – always exciting, with sermons delivered with great fire and passion interspersed with some of the great sounds and anthems from west Africa.

Sunday evening – where has the weekend gone?

I went to the gang show every year for ten years. I enjoyed it every time and it allowed me to reinforce my regard and commitment for the Scouts, an organisation of which I was such a beneficiary in my childhood and adolescence. However, after ten years one really does know every gag, every line and every dance step.

One year I could not attend the show and was somewhat taken aback when I faced a mild rebuke from an old scout who said: ‘We never see you these days.’

When you’re out campaigning, in the run-up to an election for example, that’s often the kind of response you get on the doorstep. When you ask for someone’s support you need to do so confidently and boldly. They will often say ‘Well, they [the council] never come and cut our grass’ or ‘It’s a secret ballot, isn’t it? Well, then, it’s between me and the ballot box’. Your response must always be scrupulously polite but you can gently point out where and how you are available in between elections.

Of course, it must be stressed that there are also those who are supportive and you obviously devote time and spend a few minutes talking to those who encourage you, telling you they’ve ‘never voted anything else’.

So now you’ve arrived! Your first day is daunting there are no two ways about it. You’re like the new kid arriving at secondary school. Certainly when I arrived back in 1992 there wasn’t any guidance. It is very much down to you how you organise your day, your time and your staff. You will have to orientate yourself around the maze of rooms within the Palace. This is an exciting time and these early days might be the only opportunity you have to explore the building and learn about its great history.

Foremost among your many tasks is to get yourself an office, either in the main building within the Palace itself or in one of the many surrounding buildings on the parliamentary estate. It is important to consider where you want to place yourself strategically. If you want to be ‘in the thick of it’ you will have to make do with a small stuffy, possibly windowless office. But there are advantages to this, such as being close by when the Division bell starts to ring.

There is no overarching way to behave as a politician other than the obvious things: honesty, integrity, humility. Part of the problem has been that there is very little guidance but hopefully when you get to the other end – as I am now – you will look back at your time as a politician with some pride and with fantastic memories of all the people you have been able to help: the achievements, the opportunities to travel and visit many countries and also to make contact with some incredible people which will often lead to lasting friendships.

For me it has been a long and fascinating journey and one which I would not have missed for all the world.

Andrew MacKinlay is the Labour MP for Thurrock

3

What it takes to be a politician

What it takes to be a councillor

Nick Cuff

I didn’t really plan to be a councillor, it just happened. Before I got selected, my knowledge of local politics was hazy. If you had asked me what a councillor did, I would probably have muttered something about social work.

I remember things moved quickly. I had recently relocated to Wandsworth and signed up with the local party association. However, I hadn’t been to a single local event and I didn’t know any political activists.

One day while at work I received an association wide e-mail. A candidate had dropped out and they were asking for people to come forward. I thought it was worth a shot and filled in an application while sipping my coffee.

That night I told my girlfriend what I had done. She looked on in horror. ‘Do you realise how much additional work being a local councillor actually involves?’ I remember her asking.

I promised her with usual bravado that as a virtual stranger there was no chance I was going to get selected. It wasn’t the first time I had been wrong and it certainly won’t be the last.

I don’t remember too much about the night of the interview. I remember being very nervous but thinking things had gone quite smoothly. I joined a few friends in the pub afterwards and happily forgot the experience.

The next day around 8 a.m. I received a call. I have come to learn that agents don’t do small talk on the phone and this was no exception.

My girlfriend was in the kitchen and I remember her hovering within earshot. After one or two pleasantries the agent told me I was being put into a safe seat, and I would be a councillor in three months. She must have heard because within seconds there were floods of tears and accusations of broken promises.

The agent also must have heard. He stopped in his tracks and asked who was crying. I replied it was my girlfriend and was about to explain when he cut me off: ‘Crying with delight! It’s great to have someone supportive behind you.’ A second later, I had my instructions and he was gone leaving me to manage expectations on the home front.

I’ve been a councillor for nearly four years now and have been selected to stand again. My life hasn’t been radically altered by the experience but I find I sleep less and organise myself more.

One of the great things about being a councillor is that you can combine a day job with being a local politician – something unfortunately increasingly frowned upon at a national level. This keeps you in touch with the real world.

I find there is a cross over between the skills you learn in business and the skills you learn as a local politician. I talk from experience here. I have had two different careers since I became a councillor – first in public affairs before retraining and joining a City surveying practice. My experience and knowledge as a councillor has benefited both and vice versa.

There are certain character traits common in all aspiring local council candidates and councillors: the skin of a rhino and a steely determination to keep you going. Both traits don’t necessarily need to be inherent; the longer you’re in this game, the more you find they naturally come about.

The most effective councillors also pick their battles. There is a mountain of paper and the tentacles of a local council seem to stretch out for ever. Rather than trying to master everything, it’s far better to specialise in one or two areas.

And one final thing: being a councillor doesn’t destroy relationships. I’ve even managed to convince my girlfriend to come out and deliver leaflets.

Nick Cuff is a Conservative councillor in the London Borough of Wandsworth

What it takes to be an MLA

Simon Hamilton

When considering the question ‘What does it take to be an MLA?’ it is tempting to say if anyone else has an idea could they please let me know.

Being a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly – like holding any public office – doesn’t exactly come with a job description.

There are characteristics and qualities that an MLA should have that are common to any elected position.

It almost goes without saying that you should have a desire to make a difference however you might define it. Astute political antennae, an ability to argue one’s point and the patience to sit for hours scrutinising the detail of legislation or a policy proposal are essential.

When I entered the Assembly in spring 2007, I believed I possessed at least something of each of these traits. Or at least I thought I did.

Take for example, the absolutely key requirement of speaking in public. While some MLAs seem to have become trappist monks, taking vows of silence, if you want to get noticed and get votes, speaking in public – whether that be on radio or on TV or in the Assembly chamber – is imperative.

Having your homework mentally marked by the big beasts of the NI political jungle like Paisley and Adams doesn’t make for an easy environment to come across as cool, calm and collected. It was a big step up for me from having been a local councillor. After a year on Ards Borough Council I was prognosticating and pontificating on all sorts of subjects. It doesn’t matter where you get your grounding – Council, the courtroom or in a community group. The common refrain we hear on radio phone in programmes, ‘that even I can do better than that shower in Stormont’, may be true in the odd case but generally you need time to settle in, to start to understand the system and simply to find your feet.

Perhaps the one big difference to being an MLA in NI as opposed to being a legislator elsewhere is that NI politics is much more ‘retail’, much more constituent focused than I have experienced elsewhere. If you think you can just sit in Stormont burying your head in policy work and talking endlessly in debates, then you shouldn’t be surprised when the votes are counted and your pile isn’t as big as others. Voters expect you to open a full time advice centre and operate surgeries and they demand to see you personally and aren’t afraid to stop you in the street and ask you about their problems.

Maybe the one thing that is forgotten when weighing up embarking upon a career as an MLA is the impact it will undoubtedly have on your life. An understanding family is critical as any semblance of a normal working life disappears on day one. As much, though, as you will have to devote your time to helping perfect strangers, you must never lose sight of the needs of your own family and indeed yourself. I have observed too many politicians miss seeing their own children grow up and watched as their own health has deteriorated as they pursue every possible vote to know that balance is what you should aim for even if you don’t always achieve it.

But above all, this is something you must want to do. It isn’t good enough to think you’ll just give it a go. It has to spark something in your core. I do this job because I absolutely love what I’m doing. This was something I always knew that I wanted to do at some stage in my life so there was always a passion for politics burning deep inside me that made it an easy choice for me to abandon a fledgling career in accountancy. I have worked in jobs where I haven’t wanted to get out of bed in the morning and face what a day in the office or the shop