How important do we think it is for our political leaders to have integrity? It’s a more complicated question than it seems. We’re quite conflicted about it, I reckon.
On the one hand, the scrutinising media are obsessed with pointing out supposed lapses in politicians’ integrity – times when they’ve gone back on their word, changed their view for pragmatic reasons or directly lied. Even in the age of Trump, the press still behaves as if pointing out any such inconsistencies will make a politician immediately apologise for existing and check into the nearest monastery.
On the other hand, the overwhelming suspicion, cynicism and depression that the public feels about politics at the moment comes from the widespread conclusion that integrity is a quality that not one of our politicians possesses – that they’re all the same and all out for themselves.
If we’ve decided that they’re universally dishonest and self-serving, why the press obsession with pointing out every single occasion they display those flaws? Having observed that all the cows shit in the field, there’s really no need to tell the farmer every time a cow shits.
For some people, integrity is an absolute – you either have it or you don’t, you’re honest or you’re not. And, in order to be honest, you have to be completely honest. By that measure, I agree that none of them have integrity. And neither do I. And neither do most people. Jeremy Corbyn’s fanbase might claim this sort of integrity for him – and certainly the projection of it has always been his priority. He’s never been one to let political success get in the way of virtue-signalling.
A more flexible view of integrity would be that it’s a sort of sliding scale. Almost everyone in the public eye is balancing their ambition, greed and vanity against the requirements of their consciences. No two people’s ethical balancing acts are ever going to be quite the same. The exception here is Boris Johnson, who shocked the nation by having no conscience at all. This is interesting because I don’t think, even at his most popular, he seemed like he’d have much integrity. He always came across as a bit naughty and selfish, but also clever and fun. For a while, people found his twinkly egomania endearing. But when it transpired that he had absolutely no integrity at all, that turned out to be a bit too appalling.
I’m talking about this because I’m so bored with the election campaign. It’s a shame because I was enjoying it to start with: the sodden Downing Street announcement, Gove retiring, Ed Davey on the waterslide. Now it feels repetitive and bleak with only the occasional sickening snapshot of Nigel Farage’s delighted face to break the monotony.
But the situation doesn’t change: people are exasperated with the Tories and so they’ll probably be voted out unless the public’s apathy and disgust become so overwhelming that turnout collapses. In the very but not unimaginably unlikely event of that happening and the current government clinging to power, it really would feel like the best move would be to give up and close Britain: hop into some of the boats that migrants have left behind and see where the current takes us.
What grinds me down is all the fruitless effort to get the politicians to admit that they’re awful, to proclaim how ambition has compromised their integrity, how they’ve said things in the past out of expediency that conflict with the expedient things they’re saying now – as if this is something new and not a quality absolutely vital to the job.
Let’s take Rishi Sunak’s leaving the D-day commemorations early. What do we actually think that proves? That he would be prepared to opt out of a respectful historical commemoration in order to obtain electoral success? We know he would do that. Any of them would do that. Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee, Wilson, Thatcher and Blair would all do that. He’d been to most of it, he’d shown his face and he’s fighting for political survival. He might not murder in order to remain prime minister, but he’d definitely skip a ceremony. We can’t seriously expect to find a leader who wouldn’t.
The only question worth asking is why he believed leaving that particular event early to do some random TV interview would help his cause. In retrospect, we know it was a disaster for his campaign but it really feels like he didn’t need a crystal ball to see that coming. It was a huge error of judgment but the extent to which it shows a want of integrity is entirely unworthy of remark.
The “gaffe” that Keir Starmer is currently trying to handle is the mere fact of his having been on Labour’s frontbench at the last election when the party was led by Corbyn, a man Starmer has spent much of the intervening time effortfully disowning. No one asking him questions about this doesn’t know the real answer: he’s a politician and a member of the Labour party and therefore sought to prosper under the previous Labour regime even though he thought its chances of winning the election were slim. But of course he couldn’t say that at the time and so has proved himself capable of dishonesty and rudimentary guile, like every single other politician of equivalent prominence.
The hope with this kind of vacuous scrutiny is that the politician being “skewered” will say something that makes the situation worse for themselves. The prevailing media view is that that would be some kind of achievement. But assuming the politician just squirms and weasels their way out of the questioning without really saying anything at all, we can all return to the standard “They’re all the same”/“They never answer the question” contemptuous narrative that allows Farage’s toxicity to masquerade as refreshment.
No one who wins political power in a grubby but hopefully just about functional democracy like ours is ever going to be any kind of saint. We will always be led by people who possess enormous quantities of ambition, cunning and self-esteem. We don’t learn anything important about the future from our relentless attempts to make them admit it.
