The public don’t hate ‘professional politicians’ – they hate bad professional politicians

The summer saw the British public glued to their televisions during August. Not to watch the ‘who is more socialist’ contest of the Labour leadership race, nor to monitor the latest polls showing Labour falling down the charts on an almost daily basis in inverse relationship to Team GB’s success. No. Instead, watching the comradery, dedication and commitment of the British team in Rio was a sight to behold. They did us proud. And the small bit of the iceberg that we, the viewers, saw in Rio was the culmination of not months, but years, of training. Perfecting tactics, developing skill and pursuing a strategy for domination. From all of this our politics can learn.

Politics is the only elite that prides itself on being untrained. In fact, those who have worked in or near the Palace of Westminster or a government department are actively sneered at in our national media. Never would an athlete go to a fundraiser to say, ‘I am totally new to this, not even been for a jog, but give me money so I can win the marathon’. Politics actively revels in it.

Things are so bad that a member of parliament receiving media training or mentoring about how to run a small business risks becoming some sort of revelation. Towards the end of the last government cabinet ministers actively cancelled training for their special advisers because ‘if it got out’ that their staff were undergoing professional development it would rebound badly on them and suggest weakness or inability. Only at the end of his five years as leader and ahead of the leaders’ television debates was Ed Miliband given top-level and concerted training for making his case to the nation. It is fair to say that it did not have much impact because it was the content of his well-rehearsed arguments that the voters did not like, not how they were presented. But had a culture of being winners been nurtured, and persuading more voters been embraced, things might have turned out very differently, including getting the content right in the first place.

The truth is that it is not ‘professional politicians’ that the public does not like – it is bad professional politicians. How many Scottish voters are bothered that Nicola Sturgeon has spent her entire life in politics? That it is so much her life that she is even married to the chief executive of the Scottish National party? Not one.

How many Britons shrank from backing Margaret Thatcher because she had been determined to enter parliament as soon as she left university? Even in her mid-20s when she was supposedly inventing Mr Whippy as a food scientist (not true, folks), she was avidly pursuing selection and election in Dartford.

And Boris Johnson has never done journalism that is not political and thus falls into the same category, vying with Sturgeon and Theresa May in the popularity rankings.

What the public despise is those they see on television who seem to have only done politics their whole career and yet are not very good at it. People who clamber to the top and then appear to have no idea why they made the effort. Men and women who twist and turn as the winds of politics shift. Miliband was the patron saint of this feeling. Sadly, too, were the three ‘anyone but Corbyn’ candidates put to the party members last year.

Of course, politics must be peopled – and heavily so – with those who have not worked in Westminster, who draw on experience from across the board. What is important is to get your thinking in order, work out how you want to express it and then find ways to get what you want done. The much-missed Jo Cox shifted government policy in barely a year in parliament – compare her record with some in the House of Commons for decades – because she was clear what she thought about big matters like Syria and crafted an approach to work across party lines. Fellow 2015er Jess Phillips worked in a women’s refuge before entering national politics. Those who dismiss her as simply talkative miss the thoughtful reasoning that stands behind her arguments and the way in which her words are both carefully chosen and strikingly expressive.

And then there is the new prime minister, who, like Thatcher, was long keen on entering parliament (and whose previous life working in banking and financial services seems to have escaped the notice of the seemingly nonexistent Labour attack team). A satirical headline recently read: ‘May succeeds by not being a shambles’. To Tories, May’s whole approach presumably made for a welcome contrast with her predecessor, ‘essay-crisis’ David Cameron. He himself was always open to the accusation of having done nothing but politics and only just got away with it because his opponents were so bad (until he didn’t, taking the rest of us down with him as he flunked his last and biggest test).

Just as with this summer’s Olympics, the British public appreciates a job properly done. Those who treat politics like a game are bound to lose at some point; such is the nature of games. Those who treat politics like a craft have the chance to build something that lasts.

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Photo: House of Commons