Janet Daley:
On both sides of the Atlantic we are seeing perverse behaviour that shows politicians are living in their own little world
Politics has become surreal. I personally cannot remember a time when the behaviour and pronouncements of the personalities striding across the public stage seemed so utterly bizarre. Not just odd, or unexpected, or infuriating, or perverse but actually outside the parameters of rational expectation. The performances of both Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn over this past week, in their quite different, idiosyncratic ways, have exceeded almost all conceivable predictions for gratuitous unreason.
In Washington, the pantomime did not stop at the sacking of James Comey the head of the FBI who was responsible for investigating the possible links between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin. It continued (and, as I write, still continues) in a defiant display of bravado. Okay, you could say: the president was inconsistent about a contentious event. It’s not unprecedented: an inexperienced administration screws up its public briefing. Nothing all that shocking here – even if the scramble by his press team to cope dissolved into selfparody. But that is not the real scandal here.
Meanwhile back home, the leader of the Labour party lost control of the release of his own manifesto, then did a vanishing act which led the press on a Keystone Cops mission to chase him, before he finally emerged with mock serenity from a meeting which he claimed had reached triumphal unity on Labour’s message. With what may prove to be prophetic symbolism, one of the architects of that message, Len McCluskey, who was recently reelected leader of the Unite union with a turnout of 12.5 per cent of the membership, did a pratfall down the stairs as he left the meeting.
The clear first impression of both the Trump and Corbyn debacles is of utter shambles. The sheer half-baked amateurishness of it all has to be an insult to the public intelligence. But the prospect of people who literally do not know what they are doing being in charge (or potentially in charge) of major countries is not the most interesting thing about these parallel phenomena.
What was exceptional – quite mind-blowing, in fact – was not the confusion and self-contradictions of the Trump farrago but the shamelessness of it: the total lack of any apparent discomfiture with which it was carried out. Trump gets rid of the man who is engaged in an investigation of his possible ties with Russia. He then proceeds to turn his story of why the sacking was necessary on its head. And he does all this with a bravura arrogance and disdain for public seemliness that suggests that his power is incontestable.
This would be absurd in almost any modern democracy; but in the United States, where constitutional propriety is regarded as sacred, it is grotesque. There is now an American president who apparently does not give a damn about how his behaviour looks or whether his account of himself and his own reasoning is even plausible.
In Britain, the Labour party endorses a programme that is designed by and for, not its traditional voter base, but its hard-core activists and the assorted special interest hangers-on who have gathered behind the banner of a Marxist faction. It is an incoherent, disconnected mix of policies which range from Left-wing orthodoxy – public ownership of the means of production – to much more recently fashionable concerns, like gender politics. It seems as if every complaint in the spectrum of grievance had been added to the wish list. This is a document which tacitly assumes there is a substantial mass of Labour voters who still see their lives revolving around an old-fashioned class struggle, where personal aspiration and mobility are unthinkable, but who also, oddly, are ready to endorse every manner of social diversity that is favoured in metropolitan circles.
How did we get here? The most powerful country on the face of the earth – which takes such pride in the integrity of its institutions – is led by a man who clearly does not understand the basic principles, or even the vocabulary, of its political culture. And the main opposition party in Britain seems utterly uninterested in what most working people want or consider important. The electorate, it has been repeatedly noted both here and there, was ready to welcome “outsiders”: it was tired of professional politicians who told smooth lies. Well, in the US they got a man who is about as “outside” as it is possible to be. But this isn’t the honest innocence of Mr Smith
Goes to Washington: it’s a thuggish know-nothing with a vicious temper. And here is the really alarming point: his core following does not seem to care. His general approval ratings may be disastrously low but there is a solid base of voting support which does not mind what he says or does, however childish his outbursts and recriminations.
There is obviously a section of American society which is so illeducated in its own democratic tradition and so aggressively contemptuous of public opinion at large, that it cannot see anything wrong with the way this presidency is being conducted. Which brings us to back to our own less consequential but equally weird situation at home. The official Opposition is now under the control of a very small group of people who clearly do not care what most people in the country think. They appear to have no interest in the possibility of winning this general election (or the one after that) or in the democratic process itself. They are living in a private world in which their obsessive ideological concerns are all that matter. It is the power struggle within the party hierarchy that dictates their concerns. This has always been the case on the hard Left – take it from one who spent her youth there – but now it is the prevailing mentality of what should be the second most important force in national politics.
If you were wondering last week how it was that the Labour leadership could, apparently without qualms, be proposing a programme which could not, by any sane standard, constitute an alternative plan for government, this is the explanation: they do not
care. It isn’t you or me or eight-tenths of the population that they are trying to persuade. They have no serious intention of convincing most voters that this is actually a perfectly sensible plan for the future of the country. They are talking only to themselves and aiming to consolidate the allegiance of just that small number of followers who will determine their personal futures. That infamous draft manifesto was a testament of faith – a theological tract – not a serious election proposal. It was a call to those who knew what to listen for, to rally round the Old Faith and place themselves at the service of those who guarded the shrine.
So by an odd historical accident (or is it?) we have peculiarly similar developments in two of the most advanced democratic countries in the world. There is a party with a leader in power, and a party with a leader who could theoretically gain power, breaking every major rule of political discourse. They are not engaging in argument: they are shutting it down. They are not putting forward realistic policies which might be engaged by constructive debate: they are presenting fantasies which only the naïve and credulous could possibly entertain.
It is difficult not to see this as a kind of nihilism in which the whole social contract on which modern democracy has been based is being blown up. Or an extreme form of public narcissism which assumes that it no longer matters what the great mass of the population thinks of your antics or your statements because this show is not about them: it is a private contest with your own demons, or your own idea of yourself. Whatever it is, it is not going to end happily.
READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion