The death of Ivan Cameron, bankers’ bonuses, Brown in America: now raw emotion is the driving force of our politics

How do we make our judgements on politics and political leaders? Is it their policies, their values and their record as public figures? I hope such factors play a part in determining our views. They are the ones that affect our lives, directly or indirectly, when public figures acquire power. Yet I sense that another factor overwhelms all others. In modern Britain, raw and primitive emotion has become the driving force that shapes perceptions.

This force takes the form of hysterical anger, sadness, indiscriminate tribal loyalty towards some individuals and hatred of others.

Three recent front-page stories highlight the casual way in which uninformed emotion sweeps away reason. The stories are the death of six-year-old Ivan Cameron, Gordon Brown’s trip to the United States, and the row about Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension. In each case, the media are partly responsible for the emotional pitch. To some extent, the hysteria also reflects the mood of voters, who show little inclination to work out the connections between policies and their daily lives, but respond instinctively to politics as a game show, a version of Strictly Come Dancing or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with its highs and lows, villains and heroes.

Politicians have decided to play the game. On Sunday 1 March, it was not just Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, who went on TV to insist that Sir Fred would not get his pension; the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, gave an interview a few hours later in which he leapt on the bandwagon. Neither of them was able to explain how the pension would be clawed back, though, revealingly, Harman suggested that the “court of public opinion” would prevail. Raw emotion is being elevated to a judicial body.

The reporting of Ivan Cameron’s death is the most complex of the three stories. The awful news was reported sensitively on broadcasting outlets and in the newspapers. Politicians responded with a dignified restraint as they always do on such occasions. Yet I was troubled by one element of the reporting. I must have heard and read a hundred times that “the short life of Ivan changed David Cameron as a human being and as a politician”.

How did all these amateur therapists know that Ivan changed David the politician? Where is the evidence? Perhaps he did, but the leap was made without a moment’s hesitation by the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, and many writers in the following day’s newspapers. In modern Britain, the personal becomes political without anyone pausing for breath.

I am not sure how anyone, even those political journalists who are close to Cameron, can make these assertions about the impact on the public figure with such confidence. I do not make this point to be disparaging of the Conservative leader. On the few occasions I have spent much time with him, he has struck me as likeable and remarkably calm under fire. But one of his admiring tutors at Oxford, Vernon Bogdanor, has said that Cameron was displaying such characteristics as a student. Maybe it is possible to combine the narrow arrogance epitomised by membership of the Bullingdon Club with a more exuberant decency. Perhaps the character traits that partly shape Cameron’s public personality pre-date the birth of Ivan.

More illuminating are the assumptions behind the claim that the personal became the political. They accept unquestioningly that Cameron has become a progressive Tory, a moderniser who changed partly out of his stressful experiences with Ivan. I have no doubt the experiences were life-changing and traumatic. I concede that Cam­eron is committed to public services, as is every politician. Who is opposed to public services?

Yet I do not see that Ivan’s life and David’s policies are necessarily connected. As far as they can be discerned, the party’s array of policies suggests that Cameron shapes his commitment from a core Conservative perspective.

Cameron wrote the Conservatives’ 2005 manifesto – a populist, right-wing document that

included a proposal to subsidise private health treatment – after his son’s birth. Although Cameron was close to Michael Howard, he never questioned the policy. In the 2001-2005 parliament, Cameron voted against many of Labour’s socially liberal reforms and supported the war in Iraq. He opposed the spending increases on the National Health Service that brought Britain closer to the EU average for investment in hospitals. That is all wholly understandable: he was a loyal Conservative MP. But I see no evidence that Ivan was turning him into a “moderniser” or a “progressive” before he became leader.

I suspect that the electorate played a bigger part in Cameron’s pragmatism (a more accurate description of his style of leadership than the term “moderniser”, a word that means virtually nothing). After the inevitable defeat in 2005, Cameron knew the Conservatives had to be re-branded and that policies would have to be dropped. His decision to change was a political one. Since then, his “modernising” project has been erratic, particularly since the deepening of the financial crisis.

A genuine progressive would not have

opposed a fiscal stimulus as a matter of principle and would not have advocated cuts in proposed public spending. But, perhaps uniquely in the western world, Cameron did both. And yet, according to the media narrative, a tragic event in his life, one that will humanly change him and his family for ever, has somehow or other made him a moderniser committed to public services, even if his economic policies would arguably damage public services.

There has been some spectacularly good reporting of the economic crisis, but the nature

of the party divide has been subjected to little scrutiny. This is an important gap, and the vacuum is generally filled by a more emotive narrative that can be summarised along these lines: “The economic crisis was caused by Brown’s fatal decision to set up the Financial Services Authority, a disastrous regulator, and then by his decision to borrow money when the economy was booming. We need an apology. Coincidentally, the rest of the world is also in recession.” These assumptions distort debate, or prevent a proper debate.

Such is our culture of hysteria, that I read most days of the week that the government is falling apart, to such an extent that Brown was wasting his time going to Washington to meet Obama and address Congress (though the newspapers and parts of the BBC would have eviscerated him if he had not been the first European leader to have been invited to Washington).

It is true that, on one level, the government is falling apart. Governments often are. Brown’s chaotic management of his government merits much reporting, more than has taken place so far, in my view. His management and projection of the government are as bad as they were last summer. But in relation to the biggest story of all, the financial crisis, Brown has a distinctive plan, combining an attempt at a globally co-ordinated response (he might fail, but it is worth a try), a substantial fiscal stimulus in Britain, and various devices to get the banks lending again. Much of this is opposed by the Conservatives and we need to know more about what they would do instead. Hatred of Brown and admiration for Cameron might be good therapy for a range of columnists, editors and bloggers, but in the end they do not get us very far.

In particular, those so-called left-of-centre columnists who now hail Cameron as the great progressive must explain how his economic policies will give him the scope to be an agent of social justice. For example, the normally forensic Guardian columnist Jenni Russell wrote recently that the Conservatives’ policies for schools were more progressive and redistributive than those of the government. But, as the Conservatives’ favourite Labour minister, Lord Adonis, has pointed out, without a simultaneous big increase in funding, the consequence of the Tory policy will be to transfer resources from the inner cities to the leafy suburbs as middle-class parents set up new schools within the existing overall budgetary constraints.

Part of what is happening is the familiar partisan knockabout that makes our media more lively than most. It is more emotionally tribal than usual, partly because Cameron has close allies in senior positions at several newspapers and Blairite columnists have shifted effortlessly, and with genuine conviction, to become Cameron admirers. Cameron’s genius as Tory leader was to recognise that Tony Blair represented an opportunity for the Conservative Party and not a threat. The homage paid to Cameron by some Blairite journalists is a tribute to this insight.

But the cause of the loud emotional pitch goes beyond a noisy, indiscriminate bias towards the Conservatives. The row over Fred Goodwin’s pension shows how easy it is for virtually the entire country to lapse into hysteria. Yes, the pension is immoral, but immoral pensions and pay-offs for failure are agreed most days of the week without much fuss being generated. They are a feature of our mad, risk-taking age. A manager is appointed on a ridiculously lucrative salary on the understanding that he or she will deliver huge returns. If he or she fails to do so, they are removed with a substantial pay-off. There are multimillionaires enjoying a lavish premature retirement who made fortunes out of virtually destroying the railways after privatisation. There are football managers with pay-offs so vast, they are much wealthier for failing. However, only the banker is abused, as if the return of his pension would solve the economic crisis.

Rewards for failure could be addressed by sweeping government takeovers or by retrospective legislation. There is a case for both, but I doubt if the Sun newspaper or George Osborne would advocate such moves. Instead, they rail against the inevitable consequences of a market- based system that they strongly support. It is a semi-revolutionary moment, but the qualification is important. Most of those fuming are not remotely revolutionary. They are responding to and fuelling the understandably fearful anger, without being able to do anything about an individual’s pension, arranged by what is still a privately run operation.

Perhaps it has always been like this, and yet the level of hysteria seems higher than ever to me. The economic crisis, a sense that power might be changing hands, media orthodoxy and the game-show culture of dumbed-down Britain are fusing to make a politics fuelled by emotion rather than reason. History suggests that raw emotion and politics is a dangerous combination. l

Steve Richards is chief political commentator of the Independent and a contributing editor of the New Statesman

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