50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

Why politicians are like alcoholics

Iremember a few years back sitting in a radio studio as part of a panel of five people discussing various topics, the nature of which has long vanished from my memory. The man sitting beside me was a well-known politician, a liberal-minded fellow, generally regarded as one of the brighter sort.

Yet he had this kind of twisted energy that so many of them seem to have, the kind you can sense when they come at you on the campaign trail and they grip your hand too tight — or, indeed, when you sit beside them in a radio studio, waiting for them to stop talking.

Because you have to wait... and wait... until you realise that if you don’t actually stop them, they will simply keep going. They have the floor, and they are not going to give it up for anyone.

There is this supreme selfishness in them; this deep love of the sound of their own voice; this ego that demands your attention — would this remind you of any other kind of person?

Think about it now, bearing in mind the nature of this column — yes I know that’s not much of a hint there, but still

— would any other kind of person at all have such traits?

OK, I’ll help you out here — I think that anyone with an addictive streak in them, who ever comes into close personal contact with a successful member of the political classes, can feel this affinity straightaway. It is virtually a physical awareness, a sense that this character is being driven by something that is not normal, that is not right — and they’re the good ones.

At least sometimes the gibberish is well-meaning, if ultimately, indeed, gibberish. But well-meaning or illmeaning, they will convey this impression that they are pumped up by something, which, when taken away, leaves them utterly deflated.

Yes we know how that looks, how a politician who is out of the game can suddenly look about 20 years older, all the vital juices gone — that powerful stuff was really all that they had, and without it, they have no idea how to live.

So when people talk of this general antipathy they have for ‘the politicians’, I feel they are not just referring to differences of opinion they might have, it’s a deeper thing, more visceral.

We have this subconscious wariness of them, not unlike the caution which we exercise in the presence of a known drug abuser. We can feel that they are marching to the beat of a different drum.

I mean, no normal, healthy person could live the way some of these people live, not just because they choose it, but eventually because they know no other way. In extreme cases, you have men such as Jeremy Corbyn, for whom the meaning of life was apparently to be found at political meetings with like-minded individuals, until one day, by some accident, he actually became the leader of the Labour Party.

At which point he was required to reassess some of the things he’d been saying at meetings since about 1971, but was, of course, incapable of doing this.

He’d been on that stuff for too long; it had formed him as a person; it had defined his identity in much the same way as the chap sitting on the same barstool for 30 years, saying the same things every night, is defined by that position.

So the addiction to politics is not even necessarily the urge to be king of the world, it is also a way of getting through life without having to get too deeply into the truth of things; without changing your mind about anything.

Sustained by a lifetime of delusions, even when you’ve been massively defeated, you can turn to your friends and say that at least you won the argument. Ah yes, at least you won the argument. Again, it reminds me of something... can’t quite place it...

“There is this supreme selfishness in them, this deep love of the sound of their own voice”