The chattering classes tend to get much more excited by the personality clashes at party conferences than by the politics
The party conference season should be a place where great ideological differences are aired. Ideas that matter are debated at length and the public gets a glimpse of vastly divergent world views.
But while there will be a bit of this, the whole circus these days is much more about presenting the personalities of the different leaders to the public. Have we really got to know them yet? Do we trust them or are they too slippery? Do we think they are the right (usually) man for the job – strong enough in a crisis but not totally inflexible? Do we actually like them?
And the media gossip around all these conferences will be as much about who is plotting against whom as it will be about the policy differences behind the splits.
Attention has once again been diverted from policy to personalities with the release of Alistair Darling’s book, Back from the brink. In seeking to explain what he did or did not do as Labour chancellor, Darling inevitably strayed into the relationships he had with the then prime minister Gordon Brown. And that in the main is what got the juices of the political chattering classes going.
As one who was part of the Number 10 team during Brown’s premiership and also worked closely with widely differing politicians over the years, I can confirm that personalities vary a great deal. I can also reveal the shocking truth that clashes are not uncommon in politics. Unless my experience is unique, the same is true in families, at work, in football teams, bands and even not-for-profit charities.
In politics though, does this mean that ideas, ideologies, paradigms are now for the birds – the political analysts and philosophers – but have little to do with politics and decision-making? I think not.
Take the Darling-Brown situation. Of course, there were tensions of style, of approach, of tactics and even of substance in some cases. But what was common was a belief that government had to play an active role in finding a solution to the economic problems of the day, that the deficit would have to rise to counter the recession, that eventually it would have to be brought down, but not at a pace that snuffed out any nascent recovery.
That broadly is a progressive Keynesian response to what threatened to be a global repeat of the Great Depression. And despite the personalities, and at times intense debates over the details, ministers, officials and special advisers knew in which direction we were headed and worked hard to try to achieve it.
Overall, where there is tension and debate, that is a good thing because it means the ideas are discussed. Perhaps it is too much to claim that this is politicians following the ‘Socratic method’, but the media paint these tensions too often as exclusively about personalities when that is not what is at the heart of the matter.
Strangely, sometimes the differences are much greater where the personal tensions are less. As an observer now, it seems to me that there is a massive ideological divide between Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s approach to crime and to prison and that of so much of the rest of his party. It is a chasm not about detail but about a fundamental difference in understanding of what the aim of a justice system is. It’s not about whether Ken does or does not get on with Dave and IDS or is too much of a jazz-loving Europhile for the back benchers – it’s about so much more.
In this situation, those surrounding the relevant secretaries of state and the prime minister really are in a quandary over what to do. Whose world view is the paradigm within which you are working? Who is going to win out? And how do the pieces move in response to real world events like riots?
Of course, personalities do matter and we should never claim otherwise. We see it time and again: the head teacher who leaves and the school collapses; the head of department who cannot manage and falls out with their staff; the colleagues who cannot bear to be in the same room as each other; the inspirational leaders who make everyone feel good; and the political leader whose messianic aims take us off into unwise foreign ventures. But that influence can be exaggerated.
One does not need to be a Marxist to believe that there is something deeper than just personality and who gets on with whom. Even if it is the gossip and intrigue that makes the best copy for the press.
