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TRUST
Increasingly ‘trust’ is the prism through which politics is viewed. We look through that prism and decide, or assume, that the politicians we see are not worthy of trust. Voters trust celebrities, artists, rock stars, footballers and other non-elected public figures, in some cases to the point of deification. They speak in admiring terms of a footballer earning £250,000 a week. They fume about MPs earning £70,000 a year. Elected leaders are tormented by questions about trust and integrity.
At least they tend to be, after their early honeymoon period, when levels of ‘trust’ can be dangerously high, making the chances of disillusionment even greater, as leaders struggle to deliver promises made in election campaigns and to please voters, who are quick to blame them and to assume they are being ignored by those they elected.
There are some exceptions. In 2016 The Economist magazine reflected that a distinctive culture in Italy had enabled Silvio Berlusconi to thrive as prime minister:
At the height of Silvio Berlusconi’s power, as the billionaire-politician brushed scandals and lawsuits aside with the ease of a crocodile gliding through duckweed, a professor at an Italian university described... how the terms furbo and fesso helped explain the then-prime minister’s survival. In those bits of Italian society from which Mr Berlusconi drew his strongest support, it is a high compliment to be deemed a furbo, or a sly, worldly wiseguy. The furbo knows how to jump queues, dodge taxes and play systems of nepotism and patronage like a Stradivarius. In contrast the fesso is the chump who waits his turn and fails to grasp how badly the system is rigged, or how much of his taxes will be stolen. The fesso might cheer a new clean-air law in his city, naively taking an announcement by the elites at face value. The furbo wonders who in the environment department may have a brother-in-law with a fat contract to supply chimney scrubbers. Mr Berlusconi’s fans saw him as the furbo to end all furbi. He showed that he heard them, offering them crude appeals to wise-guy cynicism, as when he asserted that any Italians who backed his centre-left opponents were not just mistaken, but were coglioni or, to translate loosely, ‘dickheads’, who would be voting ‘against their own interests’.1
Berlusconi might have defied the trend in a freakish way, retaining or increasing support as criminal investigations over his conduct piled up, but Italian politics has been shaped and reshaped by a wider mistrust of party politics. In some recent elections more than one hundred parties or movements fielded candidates. Berlusconi’s own career reflected the loose party ties. His party was first called Forza Italia and later became People of Liberty (PDL) when it merged with the National Alliance (AN). It was founded largely on the same rhetoric as so many other parties in Italy: aloof from the corrupt political landscape, in this case in the form of a fresh face from the business world. Berlusconi soon seemed very different. With numerous scandals attached to his name, he struggled to win support by offering himself as a ‘clean’ candidate. That made room for a new proliferation of parties on the right, which included Civic Choice of Mario Monti, a new Christian Democrat party, and others.
The rise of the Five Star movement in Italy is based partly on a rejection of all orthodox political parties and their methods of doing politics. Some voters in Italy do not trust any orthodox politicians and their parties any more. They trust those who were outside politics and who claim to be a movement rather than a party.
In the era of mistrust, some voters choose to trust the outsiders, both in Italy and across much of the Western world. Grateful voters assume that at last they have leaders who speak for them, and therefore they cast aside the prism of trust. They cannot trust all that Trump has said and done, because he already reneges on some campaign pledges. Far from locking up Hillary Clinton, he invited her to his inauguration dinner and praised her in his speech to the diners. His presidency suffered the early resignation of his National Security Adviser in February 2017, after leaks suggested that he tried to cover up talks with Russia and misled the vice-president, Mike Pence. More trivially, Trump has exaggerated the scale of his victory in the presidential election and the size of the crowds who attended his inauguration ceremony in Washington. If more mainstream leaders had behaved in a similar fashion, they would be in deep trouble – not just in the media, but amongst the voters who had placed their faith in them. Instead, when Trump held a rally for supporters in Florida in February 2017 he was hailed as a hero: the president as the performer of a one-man show. At one point Trump brought a member of the audience onto the stage. The fan declared, with the celebrity president next to him: ‘Mr President – we the people, our movement is the reason why our president of the United States is standing here in front of us today. When President Trump during the election promised all these things that he was gonna do for us, I knew he was gonna do this for us.’
The crowd chanted in response, ‘USA, USA…’ Their patriotic ecstasy is a reminder that in politics ‘trust’ is deeply subjective. They had chosen to trust their hero and, in the early days of the presidency, they were not going to let the evidence get in the way. Similarly, mistrust forms and intensifies – sometimes without evidence – if voters decide they have been let down. Trusting a leader who is evidently untrustworthy is fairly dangerous. Choosing to mistrust elected leaders, mistaking the complexities of engaging in democratic politics for mendacity and criminality, is even more so.
For understandable reasons, parties within a coalition can contaminate each other. But democratic politics can now contaminate individuals who become politicians, whether they are in a coalition, outside one, or just getting on with their ill-defined jobs. No doubt there are many reasons why people become politicians, including vanity and the thrill of political theatre. But few do so to behave criminally or to act mendaciously for the hell of it. Why would they want to do so? There are easier ways to get rich or famous.
The explanation is partly about us (not the elected politicians), and the way we choose to view politics. We make choices, too. Look at the reactions to mainstream political leaders when, for whatever reason, they leave politics. Almost immediately they are viewed differently.
When Hillary Clinton made her speech in the aftermath of defeat in the presidential election in November 2016, commentators praised her without their usual forbidding qualifications. One wrote revealingly that Clinton ‘was never able to show she was something more than the hyper-prepared, super-smart best student in the class. And then she managed to show more of herself in her concession speech, the latest example of politicians doing their best when they’ve lost something they wanted so badly.’2
In fact, her concession speech was exactly the same, in tone and substance, as the main campaign speeches Hillary Clinton had been making for the preceding two years. The difference was not in Clinton herself, but in the way listeners and viewers chose to perceive her. When she was seeking to be president she was polluted by politics and mistrust, viewed as a striving, ambitious, cold and calculating woman. In some quarters she was regarded also as a corrupt, secretive, criminal candidate. But when she had lost and was no longer stifled by politics, she was perceived as a human being. On Twitter, as she made her concession speech, commentators and voters from around the world were proclaiming, ‘If only Hillary Clinton had spoken like this during the campaign, she might have won.’
She had spoken like this during the campaign. But in the aftermath of her defeat she was seen as a different person, a public figure with authenticity, wit and grace. She was viewed in such a light because she was stepping outside the political arena.
In the UK there are similar examples, as vivid as, and in some cases wilder than, those in the United States. In a competitive field the most bizarre was the experience of the former Labour politician Ed Balls, who had been a senior adviser in the Treasury to the long-serving chancellor, Gordon Brown, and went on to become a Cabinet minister. As a politician, he was so unpopular that he lost his seat in the 2015 general election, even though he was one of the more prominent national political figures. He had been shadow chancellor in the Labour shadow Cabinet for much of the 2010–15 parliament. As a politician, Balls was viewed – wrongly – as a political thug. When his name was mentioned, voters responded to this caricature: ‘Oh, Balls, he’s a bully’, ‘Oh, Balls, he beats up other politicians.’ He could never escape that caricature while he remained in politics, which meant that, like Hillary Clinton, when he spoke on his brief with great expertise, voters either did not listen or chose not to believe him. He was mired in the era of mistrust.
In reality, Balls was an economist who became a politician, a rare and much-needed combination. He had a hinterland, a zest for life and he was loyal to those he respected, even when that loyalty did not help his own career, and often hindered it. None of this was seen while Balls was in politics, although he tried hard towards the end of his political career to make voters and the media recognize a different side to him.
Yet when Balls decided to become a contestant on the hugely popular BBC TV series Strictly Come Dancing, he was a near-instant much-loved celebrity. Some, including the former Labour leader Ed Miliband, who had no time for Balls, described him as a ‘national treasure’. Balls – overweight and not a natural dancer – competed with natural dancers and the country started to love him. People who had turned against him as a politician were phoning up the BBC to declare their vote in favour of him, in order to keep him in the dancing competition – a vote that meant he remained in the series until the final rounds. After he was voted out of the contest, he was hugely in demand: presenting awards to film stars, taking part as a star guest on TV programmes. As a politician, some voters turned off when he spoke. After his TV appearances as a dancer, they paid to see him live, when the Strictly competitors toured the major stadiums. Balls was the big draw at the O2 Arena.
After Balls had lost his seat in the 2015 election, some voters came up to him and declared they were pleased he had been defeated. Being a human being, Balls suffered following that brutal rejection. But when he became a hit on the dance floor, he was greeted like a rock star when he appeared in public places. There was talk of him returning to politics and becoming the next leader of his party.
This is a dangerously perverse sequence. Voters could agree or disagree with Balls, as a politician (or indeed with Hillary Clinton), but he was impressively involved in some of the epic decisions of recent decades. He was a central figure in the UK government’s ultimate decision not to join the single currency – the euro – one of the historic decisions made by a British government in recent decades.
In his twenties Balls was chiefly responsible for putting together a left-of-centre economic framework similar to that of the Democrats in the United States, who were working closely with Larry Summers, as an economist and academic. Both he and Summers are too easily blamed for the financial crash. In the UK the framework, partly defined by Balls, gave the Labour government the space to increase public spending after its election in 1997. Normally a Labour government had no such space, moving from crisis to crisis until it loses the next election. Again, voters can agree or disagree with what Balls did or failed to do, but this was epic policy-making that affected the lives of every single voter in the United Kingdom.
Balls was also involved in the careful planning that led to a unique tax rise in order to pay for increases in spending in the National Health Service, announced by the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, during his budget in 2002. The funding led to improvements in healthcare. The additional cash may have led to terrible inefficiencies as well. But unquestionably lives were enhanced by the sweaty, nerve-racking, energy-sapping manoeuvres en route to that announcement. Balls was at the heart of the strategy behind the scenes, where he was a dominant figure in the UK Treasury. During that period he was viewed with either indifference or loathing. When he went onto the dance floor, he was adored.
Politics contaminates. Once liberated from politics, although these public figures are then unable to implement their noble hopes and visions, politicians can become adored.
The same sequence applied to the former Conservative leader William Hague, another illuminating example from the UK. When Hague was leader of the Conservative Party between 1997 and 2001, he was viewed with disdain bordering on contempt. Newspapers – some of which now support the Conservative Party – portrayed him brutally on their front pages as a dead parrot, an image from the famous John Cleese sketch about a dead parrot in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. When Hague made speeches or gave interviews they attracted very little attention. As far as there was media coverage, it was derisory. Hague was slaughtered in the 2001 election and resigned as leader of his party.
Almost immediately he became hugely popular. People who would have turned away from his speeches as a party leader now queued up to pay huge sums of money to hear him as an after-dinner speaker. Hague was hired for many thousands of pounds to tell a few jokes. He told good jokes for nothing when he was party leader.
Hague also took lessons to become a pianist, and people wanted to hear him play the piano – a pursuit that humanized Ed Balls too, but only after he left politics. Hague began to chair celebrity quizzes, including the famous BBC news quiz, Have I Got News for You. At one point in the years that followed his terrible humiliation at the ballot box, Hague took part in a phone-in on the BBC during which one caller phoned in to say, ‘You would make a brilliant leader of the Conservative Party.’ To which Hague replied, after a polite pause, ‘I have already been a leader of the Conservative Party and I don’t think it went very well.’ He became a former leader tipped to be a future leader, and it was only during the period after he had been a leader that he became popular, no longer infected by politics at the top.
When the mainstream leaders reach a peak in France, they are often viewed with similar derision. President Hollande attracted such low personal ratings in the opinion polls that he chose not to contest a second election – a humiliating calculation. This was largely a reflection on his mediocre and weak leadership, but he had entered the dangerous arena and become loathed more quickly than he deserved to be. Once French presidents leave politics, they get streets named after them. In the fray, they are not trusted.
The default position of intense mistrust is revealed in another dark context. After the terrorist attacks in Paris in the autumn of 2015, Hollande had no choice but to become an apolitical leader. The presidential response to such a tragedy does not demand political acts from the left or right. In the immediate aftermath of tragedy, a president cannot trigger a great political row. There is inevitably a unifying focus. Soon there might be debates about security and competence, and all the other contentious issues that accompany the threat from international terrorism, but at first there is an apolitical unity. In that context – a non-political one – Hollande’s popularity briefly rose. The popularity was measured in terms of trust, as it always is in the anti-politics era. Trust in Hollande rose from 15 per cent before the attacks to 35 per cent the following month, in December 2015. It was a short-lived bounce, after which his ratings fell to freakishly low percentages again.
Voters no longer trusted him once he emerged from the setting of a national tragedy. Hollande was fleetingly seen as a leader who could be trusted, not because he himself had changed, but because voters had chosen to see him in a different light.
In Germany, Angela Merkel too is judged in terms of trust, but in a way that shows the evasive ambiguity of the word ‘trust’. Merkel’s enduring appeal is based on a claim to trustworthiness in its simplest form. In effect, her message to the German electorate has at times been summarized in two words: ‘Trust me’. By this, she means that she can be relied upon to rule competently.
A leader who proposes such a relationship risks a negative response when they are seen to be incompetent. When she says, ‘Trust me’, what she means is, ‘I will deliver what I say, I am a reliable leader.’ Probably what she does not mean is: ‘I will not be corrupt or a liar.’ On the whole, voters work on the assumption that Merkel is not corrupt and mendacious, and therefore she does not need to make that point. In other countries, leaders often fight a battle over trust, when they are seen as corrupt, liars and war criminals. This is especially the case in the UK.
But even in Merkel’s case, the issue of trust has stretched to what one German newspaper described as ‘breaking point’. Inevitably this followed her compassionate, and economically astute, refugee policy. Merkel herself acknowledged her changed relationship with parts of the electorate and spoke in terms of ‘trust’ when she lost a key regional vote, in her home region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Voters in her region abandoned the established parties, including the Christian Democrats, and moved towards the German anti-immigration right-wing alternative, just as Austrian voters had done in the 2016 presidential contest. Merkel responded, again using the term ‘trust’: ‘We must all think hard about how we can win back trust again. And of course, in the first place that means me. I am the party chairman, I am the chancellor.’3
She did not talk about winning back ‘respect’ or ‘support’. Like all democratically elected insiders, she was looking at how to regain trust. In early 2015, before her refugee policy, Merkel had a popularity rating of 75 per cent. That was down to 44 per cent, her lowest rating in five years, in the summer and autumn of 2016. She framed her response through the nightmarishly distorting prism of modern politics: the prism of trust.
Perhaps she meant that she would need to prove her competence again. Like other highly emotive terms, such as ‘asylum’, ‘immigration’ and ‘taking back control’, such phrases have an evasive ambiguity and tend to be conflated. But ‘trust’ at its most fundamental – and ‘mistrust’, in its more common application when applied to modern democratic politics – must also have a connection with ‘integrity’. If voters are to trust leaders, they must feel there is a fundamental integrity; and if they mistrust them, they must regard them in some way as mendacious, or worse. This is obviously very dangerous, not just for Merkel, but for the future of democracy.
The focus on ‘trust’ is unique to politics, although it extends to other public institutions. A newly appointed chief executive, or an aspiring one, does not make a pitch in terms of ‘trust’; he or she speaks of ambition and innovation. A head teacher does not begin his or her reign at a school by insisting they are worthy of trust. A newspaper editor does not proclaim that he or she can be trusted with the overwhelming pitch. But in politics it has become necessary to do so.
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There has always been a degree of disdain for elected politicians. There is nothing new in voters viewing warily those they have chosen as their rulers. The wariness is reflected in satire, going back centuries, and in protests that reflect a resolute anger over a particular policy or issue. The distancing between electorate and leader is reflected in the almost inevitable disillusionment after a government’s early honeymoon euphoria is replaced by terrible ratings in the opinion polls. The whole idea of a ‘swingometer’ – whereby there is an almost inevitable swing from governing party to the main opposition party, as disillusionment sets in – is further evidence that rulers are doomed to be unloved. The sequence from honeymoon to disillusionment has been common in democratic politics for as long as democracy has existed, in some form or another.
But more recently an intolerant intensity has accompanied the familiar disillusionment – a loathing of politics and politicians that is dangerous and undermines democratic politics.
In the UK a series of recent prime ministers arrived in office determined, above all, to prove their integrity, but left with questions about trust overwhelming all others. Securing trust was almost their main political mission. In their bid to be trusted, the mistrust deepened.
John Major, the Conservative prime minister who succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990, made great play of his ordinariness – his upbringing in a working-class part of south London. Much of it was authentic. Major went into politics with a fascination for what could be achieved by power, and a degree of ideological conviction as a relatively moderate Tory. He did not have the qualities to be a titanic leader, but he was not a crook. Yet his government was overwhelmed by allegations of ‘sleaze’. Opinion polls suggested that ‘sleaze’ came close to topping the list of voters’ concerns about Major’s government. Some of his ministers and MPs were culpable in various ways; and one, Jonathan Aitken, served a prison sentence. But perceptions of ‘sleaze’ under Major went beyond a series of freakish and unrelated cases.
The term served to condemn virtually the entire government. When, as a minister, William Waldegrave tried to explain why ministers might not be able to tell the truth in relation to, say, the strength or weakness of the currency, he was widely condemned as a liar, advocating mendacity as a matter of policy. In fact he was speaking the truth in explaining how a chancellor might fear devaluation privately but, if he were to express his worry in public, would make devaluation more likely. In his vivid memoir, published in 2015, Waldegrave spoke of how tormented he felt as the media, ranging from the Financial Times to the Evening Standard, wilfully misreported his words.4
Amidst new levels of hysteria, John Major launched, in his desperation, a poorly thought-through ‘Back to Basics’ crusade. He was referring to domestic policies and was not intending it to be an attack on the so-called ‘permissive society’, but subsequently any Tory MP having an affair (or thought to be having an affair) was accused of immoral hypocrisy. Major never meant his silly slogan to be applied in this way, but that was what happened, after an inept briefing from one of his staff. MPs who were not conventionally married were now in trouble and ‘sleazy’ in their hypocrisy.
The British media sensed weakness and tormented Major, as one allegation after another surfaced about various ministers and Conservative MPs. None were directly aimed at Major or were about him, but in the end he was the victim, as his then opponent, Tony Blair, suggested that he led a government ‘mired in sleaze’ – an allegation that Blair was later to regret making, as he too became overwhelmed by allegations relating to ‘trust’.
Blair was so determined to prove his own and his government’s integrity that he said early on in his premiership that he and his ministers had to show they were ‘whiter than white’. Preposterously, he declared that even perceptions of impurity were unacceptable – a sign of how irrational ‘mistrust’ had become. That was another comment he was to regret, because no minister can control perception. A minister can be pure, but perceived as impure. Obviously it would be unfair under those circumstances to sack that minister or for him or her to resign on those grounds. Indeed, Blair himself was soon perceived as impure. If he had acted on his pledge, his resignation would have had to come within months. There were allegations that he changed policy to help a Labour donor, Bernie Ecclestone, in the autumn of 1997. Blair denied them, but the perception of wrongdoing was in place.
Blair was investigated by the police towards the end of his leadership in a way that shone much light on the distorting impact of mistrust. The cause of the Scotland Yard investigation comprised questions raised by an SNP MP over whether Blair had acted illegally, in honouring some of the political donors to the Labour Party. Many other leaders had honoured donors in a similar way, but Blair, post-Iraq, seemed easy prey, and a wholly inexcusable police operation was mounted on flimsy evidence and a vacuous legal basis. Blair was interviewed by the police and several of his close allies were arrested, sometimes early in the morning, although none were charged. The investigation collapsed when the Crown Prosecution Service ruled that the evidence accumulated by the police was not worth taking as far as a trial.
The very attempt to do so was part of a culture that assumed criminality too readily in relation to public figures. The reporting of that particular investigation was depressingly predictable. BBC outlets in particular ran reports citing ‘police sources’, quoting them piously as if they were beyond reproach. The ‘sources’ complained on one occasion about how Number Ten was obstructing their noble investigation. The accusation triggered a long report on Newsnight about how Blair and others were ‘spinning’ the investigation, choosing to be questioned by police when other big news stories were in play, even though the report had been prompted by police sources ‘spinning’ nonsense to the BBC. The dynamic was a symptom of the anti-politics era and contributed to it. The brave police officers were portrayed as taking on the mighty elite. In reality, the investigation was closer to a police fantasy. The officers who embarked on the investigation were probably not overtly ‘anti-Labour’ or ‘anti-Blair’. They were part of the anti-politics culture, too, enjoying the heroism granted to those who take on the elected insiders.
Arguably the leap towards mountainous disdain began with the impeachment of President Clinton, a similar story to the pathetic police investigation of Blair, but on a much more epic scale. This was overtly political, whereas no Conservative was directly involved in the attempt to investigate Blair; indeed, many Conservatives spoke out against the senior officer who was playing the star role.
In contrast, it was almost as if some Republicans in Washington could not accept Clinton’s election. Here was a Democrat imposter disturbing the natural order in which Republicans won presidential elections. They had been brought up politically on a series of Republican victories, and instead of seeking to oppose Clinton purely in terms of policy – although of course they did that as well and prevented Clinton from implementing many of his proposals – they took to other devices to undermine a Democratic outcome.
The impeachment of Clinton in 1998–9 remains one of the most extraordinary events in the United States’ history. Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, but a Republican supporter – strongly encouraged by the support of other senior Republicans in Washington – pursued Clinton obsessively. Starr began by investigating one alleged scandal, the so-called ‘Whitewater Affair’, concerning real-estate investments. Although that was investigated assiduously and continued to haunt Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign, there was nothing Starr could find to bring down either of them. Instead of giving up, he pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, during which he contrived a set of circumstances whereby Clinton was impeached.
Many years later Starr expressed a degree of regret about what had happened and described Clinton as the most gifted politician of the baby-boomer generation: ‘Clinton’s genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear. It’s powerful, it’s palpable, and the people of Arkansas really understood that about him. That he genuinely cared. The “I feel your pain” is absolutely genuine.’5
There is an illuminating book on the whole affair, called The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by a law professor, Ken Gormley. It is a long book and details insightfully what happened. Although Gormley does not in some respects condemn Starr, he concludes that this was the beginning of the sharp division between Republicans and Democrats. The division was formed over the issue of trust and integrity – the killer of democratic politics.
Bill Clinton’s experience came to haunt and torment the separate candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2016 in ways that were bizarre. She did not have an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and she was not impeached. She was not found guilty during the ‘Whitewater’ investigation. Yet in the televised presidential debates, when Trump wanted to deflect attention from his own infidelities (or allegations of infidelities) and self-described ‘locker-room banter’ about women, he would demand of Hillary: ‘What about Bill Clinton and his treatment of women?’ It was as if she had become bound up with the same degree of culpability as Trump and, arguably, Bill Clinton himself.
In terms of her policy proposals, Hillary was not heard in the campaign, partly because she had to spend a lot of her time deflecting imprecise allegations of corruption. There was no evidence of corruption in her use of private emails – the latest saga to convey sinister, behind-the-scenes Clinton scheming. Her use of private emails was almost certainly a consequence of all the earlier allegations. There became a paranoid secrecy in the Clinton court, partly because they had cause to become secretive; they themselves did not know whom they could trust, and so they became more controlling, less open and that in itself fuelled suspicion. It is the impossible catch-22 in the era of mistrust.
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Another epic event that quickly became an issue about ‘trust’, rather than about a leader’s judgement or policies, was the war in Iraq. The war was a calamity. What happened raised many major questions, and the political leaders had much to answer for. Yet very quickly the multi-layered causes were reduced to issues and questions about whether Bush and Blair lied in order to take their countries to war.
In the UK the media became obsessed with the idea that the so-called New Labour government focused almost exclusively on ‘spin’ – presentation in the media – rather than on actual policy development. While New Labour’s nervy leaders were far too preoccupied about how they were faring in the media, some of them were also absorbed in policy-making. But that policy-making, and even the internal differences over policy, was underplayed in the UK media. We ended up in a surreal position, before the war in Iraq, when quite a lot of the focus was on the way the government presented a policy rather than on the policy itself. By implication the media, including the BBC, was suggesting that voters should not trust the government because it was spinning mendaciously.
The focus was dangerously disproportionate. Every prime minister employs press officers to present the government in the best possible light. If advisers working for a prime minister sought to present him or her in the worst possible light, they would be acting oddly.
Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, in particular became an obsession with the media. Even though it is true Campbell sought to present Blair positively, so did the first Labour press secretary to understand the modern media, Joe Haines, who worked for Harold Wilson in the 1970s. By the time Blair came to power, the BBC employed far more managers, producers and reporters at its Westminster base in Millbank than Blair employed spin doctors. But BBC editors, unable to join in with newspapers cheering or jeering partisan policy areas, could obsess about spin and trust without seeming biased. They leaned neither to the left nor to the right in targeting issues of trust and spin. As a result, long before the war in Iraq, the BBC obsession meant that virtually any ministerial announcement was reported partly on the basis of how it was presented. The substance of the policy was underplayed.
The question of whether Blair lied to justify war in Iraq, with the help of Campbell, was therefore one that was guaranteed to make tumultuous waves. On 29 May 2003 a BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, generated headlines with a series of reports that began with two so-called ‘two-way’ interviews on the BBC’s Today radio programme with the presenter John Humphrys. It was not just the two-way interviews that caused the storm. The BBC headlines throughout the day implied that senior intelligence officials were disowning the government’s dossier on the alleged weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that Blair had published in advance of the war in Iraq. Such was the controversy that The Mail on Sunday, brilliantly quick at adding petrol to the flames, commissioned Gilligan to write an article in which he wrote that Alastair Campbell was to blame for ‘sexing up’ the intelligence.
The entire sequence has become part of a highly charged mythology, to the point where any attempt at a brief look at the evidence is almost pointless. It has done more to undermine trust in the ‘elected insiders’ in the UK than any other factor. Yet while Blair has many questions to answer about his judgement, depth and genuine political courage in relation to the war, his integrity became the only issue. Blair was rarely questioned about whether he understood the tensions in Iraq and the wider region, in advance of the war or after it. He showed little sign of doing so. Instead he was constantly asked whether he was a liar – the default question for parts of the UK media when elected politicians are in trouble.
It is necessary to examine what happened when Gilligan detonated his explosive grenade, because the saga shows how mistrust can be fuelled in British politics – and politics across the democratic world – with deadly imprecision.
Here is a transcript of part of Gilligan’s two-way interview at 7.30 that morning, a highly listened-to slot on the BBC throughout the UK. It was his second ‘two-way’ in the programme. What comes across most strikingly is not sensational revelation, but a lack of clarity between presenter and reporter as to precisely what the revelatory story is all about:
JOHN HUMPHRYS: Our defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan has found evidence that the government’s dossier on Iraq that was produced last September was cobbled together at the last minute with some unconfirmed material that had not been approved by the security services. Now, you told us about this earlier on the programme, Andy, and we’ve had a statement from Ten Downing Street that says it’s not true. ‘Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,’ says Number Ten. Sorry to submit you to this sort of English, but there we are. I think we know what they mean. Are you suggesting – let’s be very clear about this – that it was not the work of the intelligence agencies?
ANDREW GILLIGAN: The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the information agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there. They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong. They thought he had misunderstood what was happening. Let’s go through this. This is the dossier that was published in September last year. Probably the most substantial statement of the UK government’s case against Iraq. You’ll remember that the Commons was recalled to debate it. Tony Blair made the opening speech. It’s not the same as the famous ‘dodgy dossier’, the one that was copied off the internet. That came later. It was quite a serious document that dominated the news agenda that day. And you open up the dossier and the first thing you see is a preface by Tony Blair that includes the following words – ‘Saddam’s military plan allows for some WMDs to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to deploy them.’
Now, that claim has come back to haunt Mr Blair because, if the weapons had been that readily to hand, they probably would have been found by now. But you know, it could have been an honest mistake. But what I have been told is that the government knew that claim was questionable even before the war, even before they wrote it in their dossier.
I’ve spoken to a British official who was involved in the preparation of the dossier and he told me that in the week before it was published, the draft dossier produced by the intelligence services added little to what was already publicly known. He said: ‘It was transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier. The classic example was the claim that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes, because it wasn’t reliable. Most of the things in the dossier were double-sourced, but that was single sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong.’
Now this official told me the dossier was transformed at the behest of Downing Street, and he added: ‘Most people in intelligence were unhappy with the dossier because it didn’t reflect the considered view they were putting forward.’
Now I want to stress that this official, and others I’ve spoken to, do still believe Iraq did have some sort of weapons of mass destruction programmes.
‘I believe it is about 30 per cent likely there was a chemical weapons programme in the six months before the war, and considerably more likely there was a biological weapons programme. We think Blix [Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] downplayed a couple of potentially interesting pieces of evidence. But the weapons programmes were quite small. Sanctions did limit the programme.’
The official also added quite an interesting note about the result, since the war, of the capture of some of the Iraqi WMD scientists. ‘We don’t have a great deal more information yet than we had before. We have not got a great deal out of the detainees yet.’
Now the 45-minute issue is not just a detail. It did go to the heart of the government’s case that Saddam was an imminent threat, and it was repeated a further three times in the body of the dossier. And I understand that the parliamentary intelligence and security committee is going to conduct an inquiry into the claims made by the British government about Iraq and it is obviously exactly this kind of issue that will be at the heart of their investigation.6
This exchange is worth dissecting carefully as it shows how mistrust in leaders is fuelled by journalistic muddle. Let us begin with John Humphrys’ confused opening question. Humphrys suggests that the dossier was ‘cobbled together’ at the last minute. Was all of it cobbled together? How does he know? It was compiled speedily, but with a lot of senior figures working on it carefully. The stakes were high. It was not put together casually, as Humphrys implied.
Then he asks Gilligan: ‘Are you suggesting that it was not the work of the intelligence agencies?’ What does he mean by ‘it’? The entire dossier? One single piece of cited intelligence?
The question is woolly and makes no sense. The Joint Intelligence Committee signed off the dossier, therefore it was evidently the work of the intelligence agencies at the most senior level. No one had ever claimed that it had been the work of every employee of the vaguely defined ‘intelligence agencies’.
Gilligan does not answer Humphrys’ vague question. It is left to hang in the air, conveying a sense of scandal without specifying quite what the scandal is. Instead Gilligan focuses solely on the claim that Saddam possessed WMD that could be ready to strike within forty-five minutes. Gilligan’s reply that the intelligence agencies were unhappy with the information is nowhere near as explosive as Humphrys’ opening question implied. Intelligence can be wrong. Not surprisingly, ‘intelligence agencies’ were worried that this particular assertion was unreliable and did not want it in the dossier. Gilligan adds that ‘what I have been told is that the government knew that claim was questionable’ before it was included.
Given that all intelligence is ‘questionable’, this is not revelatory. We knew at the time that Blair was choosing to believe the intelligence, when he did not have to do so. His opponents were arguing in public that they believed the intelligence was ‘questionable’. Robin Cook was one of those making such a case to Blair in private, and then subsequently in public after he resigned. Blair never claimed as scientific fact that the intelligence was 100 per cent correct. He was in no position to do so. He said he believed that Saddam had WMD, and here was the intelligence to back up his view. Blair was wholly wrong, but he was advancing a case, not claiming scientific proof that he was correct.
The next part of the BBC exchange is, retrospectively, sensational for the opposite reason than is normally claimed. Gilligan’s source backs the dossier in all other respects except the forty-five minute claim. So the big story is that a British official was relaxed about most of the dossier, because the intelligence was double-sourced. This is the only reference to a source – a British official ‘who was involved in the preparation for the dossier’. But those who had been directly involved in the preparation had signed it off. Again there is vagueness. How involved was the source?
Then it all gets even more confused, when Gilligan asserts sweepingly that the still vaguely defined ‘agencies’ were unhappy with the whole dossier, even though they believed that Saddam did possess some WMD.
So ‘most people in intelligence’ were unhappy. That is a lot of people, but Gilligan had earlier referred to just one source. And yet the source – ‘this official’ – did believe Iraq had WMD. Gilligan then returns to the specific concerns about the forty-five minute claim and suggests that this gets to ‘the heart of the matter’. Does it? In his desperation over his dependence on intelligence, Blair used every scrap he could find to make his case that Saddam posed a threat. In his foreword to the dossier he highlighted this particular threat. It was up to us how much weight we gave it. The context could not have been clearer at the time. This was Blair’s case for war against Iraq. But in the months leading up to the war there was little focus on the forty-five minute claim. It was never at the ‘heart of the matter’.
For such a highly charged issue, this was a slapdash ‘two-way’, and the one quoted here was less contentious and confused than the earlier interview that had opened the programme. Was Gilligan, or perhaps Humphrys, suggesting that the dossier had nothing to do with the ‘intelligence agencies’? Was Gilligan focusing solely on the claim about WMD that could be used within forty-five minutes? Was he reflecting the view of a single source? How involved was that source?
Later that day Robin Cook, who resigned from the Cabinet because of his opposition to the war, told friends that he despaired of the Gilligan report. Cook knew the pivotal question was why Blair had become so pathetically over-reliant on intelligence that was known to be unreliable. Suddenly the BBC had made the leap to making claims that the dossier was a work of fiction, sexed up in Number Ten against the wishes of the ‘intelligence agencies’. Cook could see a red herring diverting attention from the real saga.
The diversion was so immense that, more than a decade later, it shaped the way Blair was perceived by the media and by many voters. He became the prime minister (and then former prime minister) who had lied his way towards a calamitous war.
All hell broke loose after Gilligan’s broadcasts. Blair was on a visit to Iraq when the imprecise allegations were made. He and Alastair Campbell were both bewildered. Had Sir John Scarlett, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), briefed Gilligan, in an act of strange betrayal? What precisely were they being accused of? Then, the following Sunday, Gilligan hyped up his allegations in The Mail on Sunday. The first two columns of the first page of the article carried a photograph of Alastair Campbell, with a smaller photograph of Gilligan below and these words in the headline: ‘I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam’s WMD. His response? One word… CAMPBELL.’7
Here was a senior BBC correspondent asserting, as an assumed truth, that ‘Blair misled us all over Saddam’s WMD’ and offering an explanation from his ‘source’ – Campbell. Again there was confusion in the article. Because the seniority of the source is unclear, no one could make a fair judgement. But the BBC had lent its weight – the weight of supposed impartiality – in deciding that Blair had ‘misled us all’ in making the case for war: a sensational allegation.
But the assumption that Blair lied in advance takes some explaining. Did Blair say to his closest fellow crusaders that he would lie about WMD, even though the lie would be exposed when the weapons were not found?
Of course he did not. The sequence was more complex. Blair was desperate to put, and win, a case. He deployed the evidence to win it. He was not conducting a BBC seminar on whether or not to invade Iraq. He needed the backing of voters, the media and most of his party in order to stand timidly shoulder-to-shoulder with President Bush. He could not lead in a different way.
So, like a lawyer in a tight corner, Blair put his case on the basis that the intelligence suggested that Saddam possessed WMD. As he was engaged in an act of persuasion, he did not spend time pointing to the many qualifications in the intelligence. He could not afford to put the case for the opponents of war; the opponents were doing that already. Contrary to the Gilligan reports, he placed such disproportionate focus on the intelligence, with the cooperation of senior intelligence officials on the JIC. There are many important questions that arise. Why did Sir John Scarlett cooperate so willingly? Why was the intelligence so wrong?
These questions were not asked. Instead, a row erupted between Number Ten and the BBC over whether Blair lied in order to justify war.
The Conservative Party did not benefit from the growing perception that Blair lied to justify war. It was in no fit state to be a beneficiary at the time. Instead the seeds were being sown for the rise of outsiders – the nationalists in Scotland and UKIP. And the disillusionment with the once-deified Blair, the prime minister who had pledged to restore trust in politics, fed a wider disdain. Prime ministers ceased to be believed. A few years later, in the Brexit referendum, David Cameron made many warnings about the dangers of leaving the EU. More voters preferred to trust Nigel Farage. If trust becomes a defining issue, then elected prime ministers are doomed to be viewed as untrustworthy at some point in their tenures. The space opens up for outsiders.
Inevitably the Bush administration too got trapped in questions around trust and Iraq, and the missing weapons of mass destruction. And yet the reasons why Bush and Blair came to focus on WMD were far more complex than just a lie to persuade voters to back the war. Although, certainly in Blair’s case, he was obsessed with persuading enough MPs on his own side, and voters, to support him, the democracy-poisoning issue of trust is too simple to explain it.
There is no question that, after 11 September 2001 and the terrorist attacks in the United States, Bush and his administration began to focus almost immediately, and without reason, on Saddam and removing him. There was talk, almost within days, from some of Bush’s senior figures in that divided, incoherent administration saying that Iraq must come next, even though they had not at that point dealt with Afghanistan – and of course never did fully do so. Without the intervention of Blair, they would probably at some point have acted unilaterally, or with others, and invaded Iraq without consulting the United Nations.
Blair was, in many ways, an insecure prime minister who felt that, as a Labour leader, he had to be in alliance with the United States when military conflicts arose. He had no great specialist knowledge of the Middle East, but he had a deep awareness of why Labour lost elections in the 1980s. One of them was the sense that Labour could not be trusted on matters of defence and the alliance with the United States. The other guiding philosophy Blair had was a shallow one: the Third Way, navigating between left and right and between different problems, to come up with a solution that as many voters as possible would regard as acceptable. In this case, Blair decided that he had to support the United States, but also that he wanted to carry as many people with him as possible, not least in his own party. The way to navigate this particular Third Way was to persuade the United Nations to back a possible war in Iraq. The only way Blair could do that, and persuade Bush to back him, was to focus on Saddam’s apparent non-compliance of various UN resolutions in relation to his weapons of mass destruction. The focus on WMD became inevitable when Bush agreed to Blair’s proposition that he set out on a UN route to deal with Saddam.
Whether or not there were WMD, and whether or not Bush and Blair were convinced there were WMD, is largely irrelevant. There was evidence from the intelligence that there were WMD, and that is what Blair clung to as he made his lawyerly case. It was the only case available to him in order to bring in the United Nations. Once Bush had agreed to this, on the basis that Blair would back him anyway – ‘I’ll be with you come what may,’ Blair wrote in a famous memo – Bush too had to focus on WMD in a way that he probably was not planning to do beforehand. That is the sequence that led to the publication of dossiers and the presentations to the UN on Saddam’s WMD – weapons that were subsequently discovered not to exist.
The thorny road to a disastrous war was not about leaders lying, but about leaders trying to make a case for war. When Churchill was prime minister, as the Second World War started to become incredibly hazardous, he made his famous public broadcast about the need to ‘fight them on the beaches’. Churchill was not being truthful. There were real dangers at the time, but he knew he had to sound wholly confident about victory, when he could not have been. Was that a lie? Was it an act of persuasion to keep up people’s spirits?
The terminology of ‘lying’, ‘trust’ and ‘mendacity’ is inadequate to explain what happened in relation to Iraq, and in many other policy areas that challenge elected leaders. In a way, what happened was much more serious. The intelligence was wrong. Weak politicians made the wrong calls for different reasons – ones that were explained by their characters and their political backgrounds. But what happened was more multi-layered and nuanced than a couple of national figures simply becoming reckless liars to the point of criminality.
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Trust and mistrust have become so central to the perception of virtually every mainstream political leader that it is increasingly difficult sometimes to disentangle actual corruption – criminal acts that, understandably, lead voters to turn away from democratic politics and to loathe those they have elected. Genuine corruption, worthy of contemptuous mistrust, continues – as it has always done in politics. There is no reason why elected politicians, who are after all human beings, should be any purer than the rest of the human race. At the same time, there is no reason why they should be more impure, not least given the intense level of scrutiny to which they are subjected.
Across quite large swathes of the European Union, various parties and politicians are mired in allegations of corruption that are worthy of scathing mistrust. Corruption is another explanation for the decline of the mainstream – its failure to be robust as outsiders made their moves.
In Spain, the government of Mariano Rajoy became immersed in political corruption scandals, darkening his prospects of hanging onto power. Rajoy’s People’s Party, a recently commanding party of the centre right, was buffeted by arrests, revelations and resignations linked to corruption. In Valencia – for decades a bastion of People’s Party power – the party became the target of a judicial probe into allegations of bid-rigging and illegal commissions. The judge leading the investigation named nine out of ten PP councillors in the city as formal suspects in the case. The party was also in trouble in Madrid, where the local party headquarters was raided by police over suspicions that the branch received illegal payments from businesses. The case claimed a prominent scalp. Esperanza Aguirre, a local PP leader and a highly influential figure inside the ruling party, announced her resignation, saying that she had accepted ‘political responsibility’ for the scandal. She added, in a revealing and sweeping sentence, ‘Corruption is killing us.’
For Rajoy, the latest eruption of cases could scarcely have come at a worse time – not that there is a good time for a party to be defined by corruption. His party had emerged as the biggest bloc in parliament, after an inconclusive close general-election result in December 2015, but he relied on the support of other parties to be re-elected as prime minister. With his party mired in authority-sapping corruption scandals, that task was impossibly daunting.
In much of the democratic world, political parties are accused of being too centralized, failing to empower local parties and party members. According to this romantic critique, local parties must be given more power, and in some cases autonomy, in order to avoid out-of-touch leaders ruling in a bubble, cocooned from the views and ideas of party members.
A lot of the outsiders have made a pitch to their own parties by pledging that they will listen more to local members. They will let local parties decide who represents them in the national parliament and what the policies of the party should be. Such a transfer of power was a fundamental objective of Jeremy Corbyn, following his hero Tony Benn. In Europe, many parties are based on the principle of localism. And at Westminster, the House of Commons has been transformed over the past two decades, as many MPs now place representing their constituencies above being loyal to their leadership. Yet the experience of the PP in Spain is one example of many which suggests that, when the centre lacks control of local parties, there is a danger of malfunction, including corruption.
At which point the centre becomes the victim of what happens locally. It is not only the centre of a national party that suffers, but potentially an entire country. If incompetent or corrupt local figures are elected to national parliaments, they become part of the raw material for a government. It is not uncommon for a prime minister to look at his or her parliamentary party and struggle to appoint from it a formidable administration.
The solution to national-versus-local control over a political party is complicated, but must include a degree of central control and scrutiny over local parties. But such an exertion of control from the centre goes completely against fashionable orthodoxy, which insists that parties have become too centralized, too much obsessed by ‘control freakery’, as it is sometimes laughingly called. As some so-called control freaks at the centre of government have had cause to reflect: ‘I don’t feel in control of anything.’
A lack of control applied, to some extent, in another scandal that fuelled levels of mistrust to boiling point in the United Kingdom. The expenses scandal, involving Members of Parliament, led to some MPs serving prison sentences for fraudulently claiming expenses. Others had to explain why they were putting down claims for a duck house, or dog biscuits, as an expense. They struggled to do so.
The errant MPs had a case, of sorts. In a more reasonable age they would still have been rightly condemned, but perhaps might have been listened to. In an age of unreason, no one listened. MPs were making their fatal claims as part of an insular, parochial system that was partly put in place at Westminster because it was politically impossible for governments to agree significant pay rises for Members of Parliament. So they got stealthy rises, in the form of expenses or allowances. Officials encouraged MPs to put in claims, and only when the official Freedom of Information Act was put in place did these expenses ultimately become public knowledge. They were not expenses but allowances, for which there was a limit. MPs were encouraged to reach the limit. This is not a justification for what happened, but it is an explanation. The UK had not elected a parliament of crooks by some wild act.
MPs were foolish enough, or stupid enough, to take risks. Arguably, if they were foolish enough to fiddle their expenses for financial gain, they should never have been selected as candidates in the first place. But party leaderships have lost control in many parts of the democratic world to local party memberships and, as a result, the level of scrutiny of individual MPs and their local parties is sometimes non-existent. Although voters were shocked by the expenses scandal, nobody drew the conclusion that local parties and MPs in the UK need more controlling from the centre. In some contexts ‘control’ is seen as sinister – as in the ‘control freaks’ at the top of a party. Yet ‘taking back control’ is the most fashionable slogan of the anti-politics era.
The MPs’ expenses scandal ensured that a third British prime minister in a row become buried in issues to do with trust and mistrust. Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair, making trust his fundamental crusade, given the raging mistrust of Blair. This became the main reason why he felt he could succeed as prime minister. Blair felt exactly the same when he was on the edge of power, until he fell into a sea of mistrust.
A whole series of events led to Brown suffering precisely the same fate. To his torment, mistrust soared under his premiership – partly because the MPs’ expenses saga happened under his watch. Brown, too, was attacked and teased for claiming for services like Sky TV, although his leadership suffered even more when some Labour MPs were charged with various forms of fraud. Some of his Cabinet ministers also faced separate allegations of misconduct. For Brown, the collapse of trust in his leadership was as tormenting as any other issue, including the financial crisis and his indecision over an early election. He had planned to personify trustworthiness. Very quickly he was seen as untrustworthy. He knew he was doomed when he read his plummeting poll ratings in relation to trust.
MPs’ expenses and Iraq were ingredients in the Brexit referendum campaign, even though they had absolutely nothing to do with the issue of the European Union. They were ingredients because they had fuelled such mistrust of the ‘elite’ that when former prime ministers put the case for staying in the EU, they helped the other side. Leading Brexit campaigners were delighted when Brown or Blair made a speech, for they were not trusted.
There are other ways in which corruption manifests itself. France is extraordinary, in that each president seems to leave office amidst some scandal or other. Nicolas Sarkozy was charged in 2014 with corruption, linked to allegations that he received up to €50 million in illegal campaign financing from the Libyan dictator, Gaddafi. Sarkozy denied it, but the impact of the allegations against him continued to intensify to the point where, when he stood to be the right’s mainstream candidate in the 2017 French election, he was, surprisingly, defeated at the first hurdle.
Before him, the French president Jacques Chirac was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence after being found guilty of embezzling public funds to illegally finance the party he led. The court said it found Chirac guilty in two related cases involving fake jobs. This was during his 1977–95 tenure as Paris’ mayor.
François Hollande became president appearing to be, and claiming to be, a new, purer kind of leader. He, too, suffered from accusations that could form part of the plot of a political thriller. The allegations centred on his campaign manager, and mysterious offshore accounts held by his budget minister. Hollande faced journalists’ questions and, as they were asked, voters noted that here was another part of the elected elite under fair, or unfair, suspicion.
In the French presidential election in 2017 a full judicial inquiry was launched after allegations that the leading centre-right candidate, François Fillon, had abused public funds. In the autumn of 2016 Fillon’s Thatcherite economic views were being debated and analysed. By the start of 2017 his embryonic campaign was focused entirely on questions over whether his wife did the work that she was paid for.
Always, it seems, these elected insiders are under suspicion. In such a contest, the outsiders seem innocent of wrongdoing.
In Italy, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi started a year of community service at a care home near Milan, following a tax-fraud conviction, and that was not by any means the only court case in which he was embroiled. He was at one point banned from holding public office for five years. Up pops an innocent comedian – Beppe Grillo – to form a new political party, and that innocence is in many ways the essence of his appeal.
These serious allegations of criminality and corruption fuel mistrust about democratic politics. Voters elect various figures to power, and they leave office with allegations whirling around them. But even in these cases there is a degree to which the reaction is not fully justified. The elected politicians are not immune from the justice system in their various countries. There were consequences for the elected insiders. If they were accused, they had to answer those accusations. That is not to underplay the degree to which voters are legitimately angered by such revelations, but it does show that on the whole there is no place to hide, for democratically elected politicians.
This perception that leaders cannot be trusted has led to a paralysis of the mainstream. Step back and reflect on what intense mistrust means to a mainstream leader, and it is easy to see why they are fearful of acting in ways that are radical and meet the challenges of the times. If you are not trusted, it is not easy to announce and implement decisions that might benefit a country in the longer term while making short-term demands on the electorate. In such circumstances, leaders and voters must dance together. Investment in public spending and capital spending, the policy focus of outsiders on the left and the right, is much harder for mainstream leaders to implement if they are regarded as criminals. This is true even when the mainstream leaders are convinced of their innocence, and justifiably so. They read the focus groups, the opinion polls and the newspaper columnists; they know how they are perceived, and it saps their confidence. Yet in most cases the loathing of an electorate that once paid homage makes them determined to stay in power, in a pathetic, doomed attempt to persuade voters to like them again.
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There are so many ironies and complexities in relation to this issue. The mainstream left parties, which rarely feel they are natural parties of government, go out of their way to win the trust of voters, media and the wider establishment. The main objective of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats was to secure the trust of Middle America – the Washington establishment. In spite of his neurotic desire to please and to be seen as trustworthy and worthy of presidential power, or perhaps because of that desire, Clinton ended up being impeached. Blair went out of his way to be trusted by Middle England, the media that Middle England reads, watches and listens to, and he ended up as the subject of a police investigation and later almost in exile from his own country, because many voters believed he lied in order to take the country into what they regarded as an illegal war. Brown, who came to power determined to restore trust, is in similar exile, rarely seen or heard in the UK. Major was relieved to give up power; a test match at Lord’s was an immediately more attractive alternative to politics. Yet for all their flaws, none of them were criminals and, as public figures, all were well intentioned.
Meanwhile, outsiders who have not been contaminated by power may be the subject of endless investigations and face a range of allegations, but they do not suffer the same electoral repercussions. The US presidential election in 2016 was emblematic of this: Hillary Clinton, stifled by allegations and perceptions of criminality that were without definitive proof, versus Donald Trump: the subject of several investigations – indeed, so many investigations about his financial affairs that some newspaper columnists predicted, or perhaps hoped, that he would face impeachment.
But Trump was the one who was on the offensive during much of the campaign, certainly in terms of allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. He was on the defensive about his attitudes towards women, but it was Hillary Clinton who, in matters to do with trust, was much more on the defensive. The reason is not a bias to the right or against the left, but a bias in favour of those who are outside politics. And Trump was trusted by some voters, when he was talking nonsense at times, in ways that he implicitly acknowledged after his victory by dumping quite a few of the absurd pledges made during the campaign. Hillary Clinton, more cautious and incremental in some of her policies, was not believed. That was because she had been immersed in democratic politics for decades and Trump had not.
The insiders – those we elect – are not believed. They become liars or are liars; they are spinners and they are criminals. The non-elected outsiders are those who speak for the people. As long as this prism is in place, democratic politics is in danger. It is, after all, we, the voters, who elect the politicians; and once they are elected we, the voters, quickly conclude that not only do we disagree with them or are disappointed by them, but we begin to regard some of them as criminals.
Here is a difficult issue. Inevitably politicians are scrutinized around the clock and are, rightly, held to account around the clock. They are the ones elected, even if they are nowhere near as powerful as they are perceived to be. We, the voters, are allowed to criticize these politicians with indiscriminate venom at any time of the day or night, but they are not allowed to respond in kind.
There was a classic example of this in the 2010 UK election when a voter attacked the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, over the issue of immigration. Gillian Duffy subsequently became a heroic figure in that campaign, as a representative of ordinary voters. After the encounter, Brown got into his car and didn’t realize that a microphone was still recording what he was saying to an adviser as they drove off. He described the woman as ‘a bigot’. It was one of the most devastating moments in Brown’s long career, because he had been caught committing the ultimate offence: a politician criticizing a voter. That is not allowed. The other way round, it is more than allowed. Voters wallow in their desire and appetite to attack politicians, as does the media; but the media does not accept it when politicians turn on them, and neither do the voters. Brown had been caught and was forced to apologize in the most humiliating way. He went to visit Gillian Duffy and was caught, looking shattered, in a radio studio shortly afterwards.
But sometimes there is a need to acknowledge that voters can be at fault, even if politicians are not allowed to do so. The disdain of some voters for politics is partly unjustified. Anger at politicians is, of course, legitimate and welcome, a sign that voters are engaged with politics. They make connections with politics, at least when it seems to fail them. But total disdain is a lazy response to politics and to elected politicians. It is not enough to say, ‘They’re all the same – they’re all a load of bloody crooks, in it for themselves’, because none of that is true. Politicians are not in it for themselves. A lot of them could earn much more money doing other jobs. Power is no doubt addictive, but very limited and complicated, and nightmarishly draining. Instead of exploring the dilemmas the so-called insiders face – an exploration that voters might find interesting and compelling, and that might lead them at least to have some sympathy with the complexities of power – voters are either contemptuously indifferent or disdainful, and sometimes both.
There is a depressing contrast to the informed passion with which so many voters engage smartly with the twists and turns of sport. That engagement is understandable: like politics, sport is another great human drama. But some people follow all the vagaries of team selection – who’s up, who’s down – and the implications for the fate of individual teams; but when it comes to politics, it is simple mistrust that distorts their reaction. This is a problem for society, but it can only be addressed if it is accepted that voters are partly culpable.
However, they are only partly so. No one watches, or could watch, politics around the clock, in the raw: watching speeches and press conferences live, awaiting the outcome of meetings in which senior figures have been making key decisions, watching debates in various elected chambers around the democratic world. Anyone who did so would go bonkers; and no one has the time to do so anyway.
Inevitably this means that the media frames voters’ ideas and views. It is the media that, by definition, mediates. It is our guide to the world of democratic politics. In order to understand why trust has become such a corrosive issue, paralysing mainstream leaders, we do not have to look just at politicians (some of whom are untrustworthy), or conclude that it is solely the fault of voters failing to engage properly, although that is an issue. We must look at that powerful force – the media – which mediates politics in a way that can sometimes make elected leaders feel powerless.