Better a tricky dicky than a grey man in a grey suit By John Humphrys, the Sunday Times (abridged)

If you list, as I have been doing, all the many and various scandals that have dogged our politicians during the past decade it is true that you will have no trouble filling a couple of closely typed pages. There is a spot of expenses fiddling and influence peddling, the odd conflict of interest and abuse of power, a touch of corruption here and off-limits canoodling there, and a great deal of economy with the truth. The names involved total some­thing more than three dozen, some of them admitting their sins, others not. A shameful record? Possibly. Surprising? I doubt it.

There are 36 Honourable Members on that list of dishonour. Allowing for new arrivals and departures, that suggests that ap­proximately 2 per cent of them have occasionally strayed from the straight and narrow — some much further than others.

You may say that politicians should be different from the rest of us — and perhaps that is true. But take a look at those men and women who end up with their backsides on the green leather benches of the debating chamber. They are not, by and large, the sort of people who would otherwise have opted for a satisfying carrier as deputy bank manager or senior clerk with a gold watch at the end of it. Most of them are egoists, most are often ambi­tious to a fault, and many are chancers or, at the very least, risk takers. All the successful ones — without exception — are capa­ble of ruthlessness. What is more, we know damn well that is what they aire when we elect them. It is often the reason why we elect them.

We ask a lot of our politicians. We want them to be entirely honest-except when we ask them to lie on our behalf as they negotiate with Johnny Foreigner. We do not call it lying, of course; any more than we call it cheating when we berate them for obey­ing the rules, then demand to know why they can't play those twisters across the Channel at their own game. We want them to be humane, concerned, charitable human beings — except when they are ordering our pilots to bomb the bejesus out of Dresden or to fly at 15,000ft over Yugoslavia lest one of Our Boys be blown out of the skies ... and to hell with worrying about where their bombs may fall.

So the qualities we look for in a politician are not necessarily those we would seek in a prospective son-in-law. Winston Churchill may have done things that most of us would blanch at, but he won the war. Richard Nixon had earned his sobriquet "Tricky" many times over when he ran for president, but he was elected anyway. Even though he proved to be a foul-mouthed paranoiac who would stop at nothing to destroy his enemies and was forced to resign in disgrace, most Americans have a sneak­ing regard for him to this day. "Yes sir, he sure had the measure of those commie bastards".

Compare Nixon's place in American folklore with that of Jimmy Carter. You could not get more honest and moral and straight than good ol' Jimmy but, boy, did he let other folk walk over him. Or so they say. The lesson for any aspiring politician seems to be that we don't mind if you are a bastard, just so long as you are our bas­tard. The other thing it seems that we do insist on is that we can trust you and be certain that you are acting in our interests. Once that is settled we want you to have a mind of your own.

Now this is where there is a problem. The way modern poli­tics operates, it is increasingly difficult for us to divine the real character of a politician. Party discipline and the mania for con­trol at every move deny politicians the ability to show us that they have minds of their own. The growing dependence of poli­ticians on the image manipulators means that we are increasing­ly distrustful of the image that is created.

There are lessons in this for every one of us who worries about voter apathy. The more we perceive our politicians to be shaip operators concerned only with their own survival, the more inclined we shall be to stay at home on voting day — and no amount of jazzing up the voting system with booths in super­markets will tempt us out.

The more the image manipulators deny us the chance to see behind the glossy exterior, the more suspicious we shall become. We want to use our own judgment on our own behalf and if we are frustrated by not being able to see the real character then we shall be tempted by the extremes.

Note:

1. Jimmy Carter (1924)

the 39th President of the US from 1977 to 1981. He helped arrange the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel called the Camp David Agreement

Comprehension and discussion questions:

1. What kind of misdemeanors are politicians most frequentl) blamed for?

2. What makes politicians commit sinful acts according to the author?

3. Why do ordinary people elect dishonest politicians to repre­sent their interests?