Tears and Tantrums at Number Ten
Tears and Tantrums at Number Ten
The spin doctors who are trying so hard to “humanise” political leaders are making a big mistake.The spin doctors who are trying so hard to “humanise” political leaders are making a big mistake.
In the past few weeks we’ve had tears from Messrs Brown and Cameron and the admission from Peter Robinson that he sometimes wants to turn out the lights and curl up in the foetal position.
The idea is that by emphasising the humanity of our leaders, the rest of us will empathise with them and therefore be more likely to support them when it comes to an election.
The trouble is that this is a two edged sword. Take Gordon Brown. Everyone will have felt enormous sympathy at his tears for the death of his baby daughter Jennifer. But by opening up his private life he makes it fair game for others to attack him for his tyrannical rages and to characterise him as a vicious bully.
There are other, much stronger reasons why they are so wrong in trying to turn British elections into American style personality contests.
We are currently fighting a war in Afghanistan in which British forces are suffering heavy casualties. We are still in the grip of the most severe recession since the 1930s. Closer to home our education system is in a mess, our economy is in decline and our government is dysfunctional.
This is not a time for tears and tantrums, it is a time for the development of effective governance and good policy in order to help the UK as a whole and Northern Ireland in particular out of the current mess and on a course which will lead to stability, prosperity and an end to conflict.
To achieve this we need our leaders to stop behaving as if they are X Factor contestants, and to start to enunciate policy.
Messrs Brown and Cameron can fill entire buckets with tears. Voters don’t care.
Their private lives are irrelevant. It may be good fun for the tabloids to make politics into soap opera but there is much, much more at stake for the rest of us.
Politics is at its heart a serious business which affects every one of us, shaping every aspect of our lives. We deserve much more than the spin doctors are currently serving up for us.
What we want to know is what their parties propose to do to ensure our economy recovers and that’s all about policy and not personality.
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