Delusion and hubris – what’s not to love?

This Green and Strangely Pleasant Land considers the weird world politicians inhabit

Everybody knows that politicians can be devious and opportunistic but what about their immense capacity for naivety and excessive optimism?

This explains why they engage in recklessly stupid behaviour. The mitigating excuse for hubris is that they are trapped in an environment which encourages delusion. In Britain this consists of the Westminster Bubble, in the US they talk of living inside the Beltway. Both of these places are weird. Power and anxiety pulsate as they carry out their business under the bright lights of television cameras and bobbing microphones.

A good example of how this nurtures stupidity is the recent furore over Frank Hester, the biggest donor to Britain’s Conservative Party making racist and misogynist comments about Dianne Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, saying she should be killed.

In a normal world there would be little doubt over how to respond but normal behaviour appears to elude the Conservative Party leadership. So their first response can be summed up as ‘er, um’, followed by dismissing these remarks as merely being ‘inappropriate’. Some 24 hours later they discovered that what was said was clearly racist but, my oh my, that was no reason for either returning the racist’s cash or indeed for not taking more largesse from their star donor. Then we had Michael Gove, not sure which government department he’s running today, saying that this should all go away on grounds of ‘Christian forgiveness’ as he had, after all, said ‘sorry’.

Phew, it’s hard to keep up with this story, not least because in the gilded cage constraining the fast fading Prime Minister it takes a while to meander towards doing the obvious.

Like most politicians, the small rich fella’s initial instinct is to believe that no scandal is too big to disappear or, at least fade away after the initial excitement dwindles. When, inexplicably in their minds, this does not happen they inch towards Plan B which consists of admitting that there is something of a problem but really chaps, no need to get overexcited. Plan B, of course, fails, so they push off to Plan C, which consists of mumbling about how, on careful reflection, there might indeed be a problem and so stronger words are issued. That brings us to Plan D, although not inevitably. At this point it becomes clear that something must be done to tackle the issue head on. The problem with Plan D, as even recalcitrant school children appreciate, is that it is always too late.

Were it the case that Mr Hester was an aberration, generalisations about political misbehaviour  would fall into the category of hyperbole. However it’s hard to exaggerate when there is a well laid trail of politicians sniffing coke, being engaged in sex orgies, pouring over porn in the Common’s chamber in the mistaken belief that it was tractor literature, saying the vilest things and then complaining that they were taken out of context, opening themselves up to bribery and more or less anything you can imagine in the comfy zone of sleaze and corruption.  

The golden thread running through this catalogue of mindbogglingly unacceptable behaviour is that the perpetrators and their defenders always think they can get away with it.

This is where hubris kicks in. Maybe it’s because being part of an institution which is supposedly running the nation persuades politicians that their prestige wafts them up to an impregnable cloud where all problems are solved.

This is combined with a spirit of optimism explaining why the dead-man-walking Sunak government is littered with people who seriously believe that they have a shot at winning the next election.

I had personal experience of this delusional phenomena during the time I was employed as a rather minor functionary at Labour Party headquarters when ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and kept dithering over calling an election. When, at the last moment, he did the deed conditions were dire. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ left streets literally covered in rubbish and nothing seemed to be working. Labour’s defeat was clear to anyone with half a brain. However over at Labour HQ we deluded ourselves with the idea that the Tories had made a fundamental mistake in elevating the rather shrill Margaret Thatcher as their leader. Despite all the problems Sunny Jim was doing better than her in the polls, so we seriously believed that somehow this would be enough to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat. Oh, yes, no cliché was spared in those halcyon days.

It was, of course, nonsense but over there in the Westminster Bubble delusion is what keeps the bubble in place. It’s a little world of its own and even the inhabitants kind of know this as they keep banging on about what ‘real people’, as opposed to other bubble residents, think. This comes as close as it’s likely to get to self-awareness.