I have been watching some episodes of The West Wing that I missed when they were aired.
There is one in which President Bartlett is agonising over the fate of a condemned man, a manifestly guilty multiple murderer. The locus of Bartlett's agony is the separation of powers. The President has the power to be merciful and grant a stay of execution despite the final rejection of an appeal by the Supreme Court, but should he? Bartlett decides not to intervene but living with his decision is excruciating. With the execution scheduled for one minute past midnight and the evening wearing on, he calls his his old priest to him, not to advise but to be alongside him in his anguish.
The priest arrives and greets him with a hug. He has known the President all his life, since childhood. Suddenly he says,' I don't know what to call you. Is it Jed - or Mr President?' After a pause, Bartlett replies. 'Frankly, I would prefer Mr President. Given the decisions I have to make in this room, it helps to remind me that, in here, I am not the man but the office.'
Good.
Let us have a British prime minister like that. Let him appoint dignified and conscientious cabinet ministers who inspire public respect, not for themselves but for their offices. Let us have ministers who treat their colleagues with the respect due to the offices they hold and to the constitutional arrangements under which they hold them.
Let us have the return of formal Cabinet government. Away with informal, un-minuted, ad hominem, sloppy, dangerously chaotic government-by-sofa. It is bad government which at its worst leads to war.
Enough of ministers referring to each other in public by their first names instead of their formal names or titles, in the mistaken hope that they will seem more electable next time they have to apply to us for their jobs.
The Minister would like you to think of him as your mate. To believe he's a pretty straight sort of guy, down the pub with the lads most nights. These are lies. They convince no-one. Faked first-name matiness does not inspire respect in the governed for those who govern. It diminishes it. Is the Prime Minister no more fit for his office, and does he take it no more seriously, than that big-mouthed daft bastard at the end of the bar? I mean, who wants his sort running the bloody country? If they're like him, sod 'em. Pint while yer up, bar steward.
The 'ordinary, just like your mates' illusion which too many politicians cultivate is both mendacious and dangerous. It encourages voters to overlook the enormous power to wreck lives and wreak legal violence upon the citizen which is inherent in government office. Its very falsity diminishes respect for both office and office-holder. It militates against both ministerial accountability and participation by the citizenry in the democratic process.
Beware the politician who tells you he's just like you, and who refers to other ministers by their first names as though they, too, are your personal friends - and his. He's lying -- and banking on your liking him enough not to demand answers to the hard questions he is dreading.
We neither want nor require a government of fakers who pretend to be each others' friends or even to like each other. Perchance it may be so but that is irrelevant to the business of government although incidentally it runs the risk of nepotism and so, better that they not be friends. Parliament is a serious place, not reality TV. Government not soap opera but deadly serious business with power of life or death in the hands of ministers.
The fictitious President Bartlett should be a lesson to Mr Cameron and the rest of his incoming government. I hope they have seen The West Wing.
I can only presume that you, like me, told everyone and the world that Anthony Blair was as arse of the first order, Campbell was and remains an hypocritical piece of ordure, Mandelson is, was and will be a mendacious little scheming shite and Brown likes it up 'im 'specially in America.
ReplyDeleteWhich brings me nicely round to Bartlett: the one thing that that programme proposed that was true was when his Secretary of State insisted that he be called 'Mr. President'.
He(the character)showed what is required by our reps is that if you do not understand what it means to be in charge of a country you belittle the country and by belittling the country you scorn the people and by doing that you portray yourself in your true colours. And that was in one of the first few episodes: the new president had to be shown what it meant to be in his position. In other words he did not understand what he had been elected to.
Latterly, of course, he out Einsteined Brunel, defined gravity and reduced quantum mechanics to a paperback of forty pages including notes.
So, to circularise, these people are so fundamentally shallow that to allow them to be our governors says, perhaps more about us than them. That they have Fabianised us into being this way is to their credit but to our everlasting shame.
And yes, the only way to stop this will involve bloodshed akin the French Revolution.
Is that too optimistic?
STB.