VANITY, EGOTISM AND TREACHERY

Duty in public life is all but dead. In this excoriating critique, a historian says too many of today’s politicians are only in it for themselves. Their friends and – shamefully – the voters can go hang

BORIS JOHNSON should have known what was coming. Just over a year ago, a man who will go down in history as one of politics’ deadliest assassins wrote an article in the Mail about his favourite TV show.

‘For those of us fascinated by politics — and indeed by history,’ wrote Michael Gove, ‘Game Of Thrones replicates not just the unpredictability of events but also their multi-layered complexity.’

As Gove acknowledged, the swords-andsorcery epic might sound a surprising choice. But he declared himself a ‘hopeless addict’.

What he loved, he said, was not just the battles and the dragons, but the atmosphere of ‘cruelty and caprice . . . the glamour of black-hearted villainy, the lure of carefully strung-out suspense and — above all — the stomach-lurching power of the unexpected plot twist’.

These words were, in their way, a warning. A year ago, Gove had a reputation as one of the Coalition’s most cerebral ministers, a bookish man famed for his quiet courtesy.

Today, as he straddles the corpses of his friends, blood dripping from the dagger in his hand. His image could hardly be more different.

The depressing truth is, though, that many politicians probably admire him for it. For as the events of the last week have shown, many of our political representatives see themselves less as custodians of the national interest than as actors in a bloodthirsty drama, players in a real-life Game Of Thrones. Not all of them, mind you. ‘What the Government does isn’t a game,’ said Theresa May on Thursday. ‘It’s a serious business that has real consequences for people’s lives.’

If more MPs shared her grown- up attitude, then British politics would be a much better place.

But at a time when our national destiny has never seemed more uncertain, and when the opportunities and the dangers have never been greater, our two major parties preferred to spend the past week tearing themselves apart in adolescent posturing and pitiful faction-fighting.

To put it another way, when our country most needed unity, the people to whom we look for leadership, on both sides of the political aisle, have revealed themselves as no more than narcissistic pygmies.

Suffused with ambition, festering with jealousy, they have shown themselves interested more in their own careers than in the greater good of the British people.

And from the disgraceful shambles on the Labour benches to the contemptible squabbling of the Tory leadership candidates, never before, I think, have the British public been so ill-served by the people who claim to represent them.

TAKE, for example, Justice Minister Dominic Raab. He wrote an article for Thursday’s edition of the Sun, proclaiming his support for Boris Johnson to be the next Tory leader. It was headlined: ‘Why Boris has the Heineken effect — he reaches parts others can’t.’

Yet within hours, he had jumped ship to back Gove — blithely acknowledging that Gove’s abandonment of Johnson at the 11th hour seemed ‘ugly, horrific and Machiavellian’.

The disgraceful events of this week were, I think, merely symptomatic of a deeper trend.

Yes, politics has always been a dirty business, a world of treachery, narcissism and self-interest. And, yes, of course the bear-pit of Westminster has never been a place for shrinking violets. Yet something has changed. In the past few decades, too many MPs have stopped seeing themselves as representatives of their home areas, or even as representatives of larger social and political movements.

Instead, they see themselves merely as individuals, fighting for promotion and survival like characters in a box-set drama.

Parachuted into provincial constituencies, unmoored from the constituencies these men and women are meant to represent, they fancy themselves as real-life equivalents of Francis Urquhart, the Machiavellian operator in the BBC’s celebrated political thriller House Of Cards, which has now been remade in an even bloodier and more implausible American version.

It is perfectly true, I admit, that our history is littered with examples of staggering treachery and mendacity.

Indeed, if you want the perfect example, just look at the career of one of the most famous Conservative prime ministers: Benjamin Disraeli, who is often seen as the father of the reforming One Nation tradition, and who, in many ways, was the first truly modern politician, reaching out to a mass audience through the power of image.

Disraeli was, by any standards, a monstrous egotist.

As an aspiring politician in the 1830s he stood as a radical, before reinventing himself as a reactionary. He made his name with a devastating attack on his own leader, Sir Robert Peel.

Yet, as soon as Peel had fallen from power, Disraeli quietly accepted most of his former patron’s policies. As one Tory grandee put it, Disraeli had the ethics of a ‘political adventurer’.

Everything was for show, from his obviously dyed hair to his bizarrely lurid wardrobe: ‘Bluebottle frock coats, green pantaloons, purple waistcoats, white gloves with rings worn on the outside.’

How he would have loved the events of this week!

Disraeli would have thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of a vain leader whipping up a hard-Left mob against his own MPs — and he’d have relished Michael Gove’s dawn assassination of Boris Johnson, the dagger plunged in at the very last minute for maximum effect.

All good knockabout stuff, of course. As a writer, I can never get enough of it. But as a voter, and indeed a citizen, I can’t help finding it utterly shameful.

The problem is that where Disraeli led, others followed.

In effect, he established a template for political success; not for nothing was it Disraeli who coined the phrase ‘the greasy pole’, which so many people have tried to climb ever since.

Westminster has, in many ways, turned into a garish turbo-charged Disraeli tribute act, characterised by a tawdry obsession with style over substance; a belief in the importance of individual ambition; a childish thirst for melodramatic grandstanding; and a deep sense of narcissism, with the fate of the nation too often wrapped up in the advance of one man’s career.

Perhaps that sounds extreme. But I knew plenty of aspiring student politicians when I was at university.

I used to see them hanging around the bar of the Oxford

Union, soliciting votes for meaningless posts or sucking up to MPs when they visited to speak.

Some are now MPs themselves, the kind of people who parade their families on their websites and post selfies at local fetes before telling you how much they love public service and how proud they are to represent Market Snodsbury.

Every now and again I read articles in newspapers saying how selfless they are and urging us to give them another pay rise.

Yes, of course there are exceptions: people such as Jo Cox, the Labour MP tragically murdered in her constituency (her home town) last month, who seems to have been a genuinely modest, decent and publicspirited woman.

By and large, though, the student politicians I knew were monsters of vanity and vice, devoted not to other people, or even to an ideological cause, but to their own advancement and self-interest.

It doesn’t surprise me at all, therefore, that friendship seems to count for so little among today’s politicians.

Gove had been friends with Johnson for 30 years. His wife is godmother to the Camerons’ youngest daughter. Yet he still had no compunction about plunging the knife into his friends’ backs and ending their careers.

Even family seems to count for little.

Six years on, I still cannot quite comprehend how Ed Miliband could effectively knife his own older brother to get his hands on the Labour crown.

But perhaps that explains why Miliband is a politician (albeit a remarkably inept one) and I’m not.

‘So what?’ you may say. ‘ Hasn’t politics always been like this?’

WELL, it’s certainly true that politics has always had plenty of Grade A bastards, among them some of the most famous figures in our history. Take, for instance, the Liberal politician David Lloyd George, who stabbed his own prime minister, Herbert Asquith, in the back in 1916.

A genuinely disgusting figure, Lloyd George was a shameless womaniser who seduced or molested scores of society ladies, Liberal donors and colleagues’ wives — among them, almost unbelievably, his own daughter-in-law.

What drove this brilliant, treacherous, unscrupulous man was exactly the same thing that drives so many of today’s politicians: a monstrous sense of vanity and entitlement.

‘My supreme idea is to get on,’ Lloyd George once wrote to his wife. ‘ To this idea I shall sacrifice everything . . . even love itself, under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way.’

I can well imagine many of today’s MPs reading those words and nodding with approval. ‘ What a man!’ they probably think to themselves. What makes people like this? Why do they feel impelled to go into politics? What gives them their demonic ambition, their thirst for fame, their insatiable, pitiful, pathetic desire for attention?

As many biographers agree, the most common cause is the absence of paternal affection.

It is a cliche that most leading politicians started out as lonely, loveless children — but it is only a cliche because it is also true.

Lloyd George’s father died when his son was just one year old. Churchill’s parents treated their son with a complete lack of interest, sending him away to boarding school, from where he sent endless tear-stained letters begging them to visit him.

Even across the Atlantic a similar pattern emerges.

Bill Clinton, for instance, lost his father when he was young, while Barack Obama’s father walked out and returned to Kenya when the future president was only three years old.

Of course this is not true of every politician. Nor is it the case that every MP is similarly self-obsessed.

But instead of dampening their childish fantasies, today’s political culture actually feeds them.

They live in a world of sycophants and spin doctors, photo opportunities and a voracious social media.

LOOK at some MPs’ Twitter accounts and you will see they are tweeting almost constantly. There is always another 24-hour news channel to invite them to offer their most banal outpourings, another selfie to be shared with their followers, another social media feud to be unleashed.

Just look, after all, at how Obama and Cameron carried on at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, giddily snapping pictures of themselves like teenage Japanese tourists visiting the Tower of London.

Even 50 years ago, there were still some bulwarks against the rising tide of narcissism.

The MPs of yesteryear may not have been perfect, but their ambitions were usually held in check by the obligations of class and the power of institutions.

Whether Labour or Conservative, they were governed by an unwritten code of decency and duty.

Many had been born and brought up in their constituencies, instead of being parachuted in as soon as they left university.

Most were conscious that they represented something larger than themselves, from the paternalistic obligations of the old Tory elite to the working- class solidarity of the old Labour movement.

But as those bonds have loosened, so more MPs see themselves merely as individual actors in their own private melodramas.

The national interest is forgotten; what matters is their own destiny.

And of course that merely reflects a wider social trend.

Sad to say, we live in an age when the very ideas of duty, responsibility and collective loyalty are often seen as risibly old-fashioned.

Individualism is now the great god; all that matters is self-fulfilment, no matter what the cost.

Yet if they had cared to extricate themselves for a moment from their bubble of self- absorption, our politicians might have noticed a very different example of public service this week.

Yesterday marked the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a day in which 19,240 British troops lost their lives in the bloodiest battle in our history.

Politicians love to lecture the rest of us about courage and service. But the men who fell in the fields of France on July 1, 1916 showed more of those virtues and sacrificed more for their country than the squabbling pygmies in Westminster can even imagine.

Those young men believed they were fighting for democracy.

But if they saw the depths to which ours has sunk, they would surely weep with shame.