Why doesn’t the PM simply fire his defence secretary? It’s about being human and about being in control
The details of Liam Fox’s resignation as defence secretary in 2011 are too arcane to reprise. But the incident was classic as an example of a prime minister hovering over whether to sack someone involved in a messy controversy in which the facts were disputed. In the end a degree of clarity was achieved sufficient that Mr Fox had to be replaced. But this article was written before that, at the stage of contested allegations and calls for him to go. It looks at the unwritten rules that apply in these situations, situations that PMs encounter repeatedly.
So what were we supposed to do? The 1997 election campaign had begun when The Sun let us know it had a sensational story for the next day’s paper. A married Conservative MP and ministerial aide, Piers Merchant, had been photographed in a park, apparently kissing a 17-year-old hostess who worked in the Casa Rosa nightclub in Soho.
We were manning the press office at Conservative Central Office and naturally our first step was to phone Mr Merchant, who I’d always rather liked, and ask him about it. He denied it. Totally. He wasn’t having an affair. She had suggested a walk in the park and then she had kissed him, unexpectedly and without invitation. He alleged a tabloid sting. Trust me, he said.
We phoned back the journalists. Come off it, they said. Listen, we followed him. We know. Trust us. It was an affair. He’s lying.
So what were we supposed to do? In the end, what we actually did was, well, nothing. And all these years later, I still don’t know the truth about that kiss. It all still seems a bit murky. Although it does have to be acknowledged that a few months later the MP was embroiled in a second story involving the same woman and had to resign his seat.
The lesson of this story is that in these scandals you are expected to move decisively, taking a clear position. Anything else is weakness, dithering, tolerating sleaze. But often you can’t honourably do so. You don’t know the whole truth. You may never know it. And you can’t really act without knowing it, because that’s not fair on the accused.
The result? You end up breaking what is possibly the most important rule of politics. The rule that says that you must always seem to be in control of circumstances.
The Liam Fox story provides a perfect example. That Dr Fox has shown poor judgment is not in any doubt. But the fact that he is still in office and that the Prime Minister has not turned against him is not as complicated as it seems. It’s less about calculations and party balance, and more about something very human.
David Cameron doesn’t know any better than anyone else the nature and consequences of the Defence Secretary’s relationship with Adam Werritty. But he does have a different responsibility. If he sacked Dr Fox based on concern about where the stories might go in future, he would be ending a man’s career. And all to make it easier for him, David Cameron, to get through the next 48 hours.
The Prime Minister would be inflicting a terrible blow on someone he has worked with closely (Dr Fox is rather liked by the Downing Street team, even though they think he is, ahem, ‘a card’). He is reluctant to do this just to make the story go away.
This stance, however, is risky. If, as is obviously possible, more emerges that makes it impossible for Dr Fox to continue, Mr Cameron might look as though he wasn’t firm, strong, on top of things. And once you’ve lost a reputation for being in control of the situation, it is very hard to win it back.
It’s very odd, this political imperative that you must look in control. In dealing with a strike, for instance – or, as Presidents Obama and Clinton discovered in different ways, a budget fight or a party split – being seen to be in control usually ends up being of greater importance than the innate popularity of the stance that you took.
The Government is discovering this with its deficit position. Even though people are wary of its policy, they like that the Government is clear, has a direction, seems to be in control of what it is doing. Politically speaking, if inflation runs out of control or the deficit target is not being met, that may prove a much bigger threat to the Government’s position than the grinding hardship of the austerity programme. So there’s no doubting the power of this feeling that control is so important.
But I have often wondered: where does it come from? Why do people feel like that? After all, with a little thought, we accept that in reality a prime minister can’t be in control of circumstances, because circumstances are circumstantial.
I think the cultural critic Neal Gabler provides an insight in his dazzling book Life: the Movie. The book argues that in the last century entertainment has driven all before it. The demand to be entertained has been by far the most important political and cultural force, supported by the development of entertainment technology.
There is no field, in Gabler’s view, that has escaped the impact of entertainment; everything has succumbed to its overwhelming power. Reality has simply given in. The media, shopping, crime, even our personal identities, all have become branches of the entertainment industry. We all see ourselves as leading actors in a movie named after us, and work at our image and relationships to fit with the plots and characterisation that we have in mind for ourselves.
Some take this idea a very long way. Walt Disney spent his life trying (and succeeding) to create an entertainment empire that was a world of his own, one that he could control. I think Steve Jobs was rather the same, an entertainment entrepreneur, trying to control his own life and ours. But most of us don’t go that far. Beyond the fairly limited sphere of our own immediate existence we are content to be spectators, watching the show.
And our attitude to politics reflects this. We see political narratives rather like films: we expect them to proceed at pace, to go somewhere, to have a conclusion. That’s what we’ve become used to – life as entertainment. And we expect, however unrealistically, that the protagonist should drive the narrative on, staying on top of it, remaining ultimately in control and triumphing over adversity.
The fact that real life cannot provide us with this neatness, with the clear resolution of a movie, leads to disillusion, to confusion and disdain. And, knowing this, politicians will do a great deal to keep up the illusion, making small bets about what will happen next so that they can anticipate it and seem in control.
While David Cameron is grappling with the truth about Liam Fox’s actual life, voters are watching him in Fox: the Movie.