I am an absurdly unsuccessful politico. In almost two decades of political involvement, my highest elected office was two years as a council backbencher, a stint condemned to total irrelevance by my voting to depose the Labour council leader in my first meeting. I was immediately assigned to be the lowest ranking member of the street cleaning scrutiny committee, and it has been downhill from there.

My unmitigated personal electoral failure has had one advantage. Having eventually accepted my own total unsuitability for elected office (too much hard work, weekends spent in church halls, looking sympathetic, doing Vodka shots at Baja Beach club in Newcastle seen as career limiting), I observe real politicians with a sympathetic eye.

However bad they are, I would be far, far, worse.

So it is with some humility that I present a series of political rules designed to make life a little easier for aspirant politicians.

1. Don’t base your electoral strategy on asking voters ‘would you like a pony?’

We hear a lot of how the electorate favour tax cuts, more spending on the NHS, nationalised trains and lower fuel taxes. Indeed, the electorate would probably like each of these things. We would all like a pony, after all.

However, the electorate are not thick and know that if they want a pony, there will be a hay bill.

Asking voters if they would like a series of ponies, and then triumphantly declaring that this proves the electorate desire a whole field full of ponies will lead you into a political dead end.

Worse, when the electorate reject your ponies on cost grounds, you will be tempted to say: ‘but you like ponies, you said so! Have some more ponies!’ – which leads you to force an ever-expanding number of ponies on the electorate, who will respond: ‘Oh no, we’ll all die in ponygeddon’. Don’t do it.

2. Don’t do the left-right-left shuffle

What is the left-right left shuffle? It is where you have a nice leftwing policy, but you know the electorate appear to want a nasty rightwing thing, so you present your policy as being really right wing, when it isn’t really. You then end up explaining to your own people, who are horrified, that it’s leftwing, really. You go left-right-left in an undignified shuffle.

The left-right-left shuffle is popular amongst political thinkers and advisers smart enough to know that you need to sell things to sceptical voters, but who are reluctant to accept that this means the voters want them to do things that aren’t lovely.

Don’t fall for it. If you want to do something, do it on its own merits, whatever they are. If you don’t want to do what the voters want, don’t pretend you do with a little rhetorical shuffle. It won’t work and you’ll probably fall over.

3. Don’t make absolutely everything about values

Politics matters. It really does. It changes lives.

But the temptation to make relatively small things symbolic of something huge should be resisted, especially when this involves asserting superior moral values: Abjure the temptation to make the taper rate of tax credits a story of moral failure and utter callousness on one hand, and redeeming social justice on the other.

For one thing, no one will really believe it. Are you really so pure? For another thing, are you totally sure that you will never need to alter the taper rate, under any circumstances?

It’s perfectly possible to object to a policy without asserting moral superiority as the basis for your objection. Indeed, it can even be more convincing.

4. Don’t embiggen everything and don’t fear modesty

Politics is about change, right? If change is good, bigger change must be better. So whatever your policy, it must be presented as being hugely significant? Right?

Wrong. Helping small businesses get better help with hiring people is a worthy thing. It doesn’t need the burden of demonstrating why a ‘one nation long-term economic plan for alarm clock Britain’s hard workers who play by the rules’ is what we need.

Political modesty is not a cardinal sin. Look around you, at your fellow politicians. Pick any one. Hand on heart, would you really want them let loose, utterly unrestrained, putting all their most radical dreams into practice? No? Worry they’d make a total mess of it?

Then remember: that’s you, to everyone else. So it isn’t always the right thing to make everything you’d do sound revolutionary. Sometimes small is good. Sometimes, knowing your limits is a very good idea. I learned this after the seventh vodka shot in Baja Beach club.

5. If you’re tempted to tell a journalist you want to punch them in the throat, don’t.

Well, sometimes you have to state the obvious, right?

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Hopi Sen is a Labour blogger who writes here, is a contributing editor to Progress, and writes a fortnightly column for ProgressOnline here

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Photo: Eva the Weaver