It’s striking how very swiftly we’ve accepted an event so mightily strange as the Makerfield by-election. After a couple of days of marvelling at the spectacle – a politician aiming to get back into Parliament for the express purpose of unseating his party leader – the media started treating the farrago like a totally normal event, and switched from boggling at the weirdness of it all to doing all the usual by-election stuff. Getting aerated about random polls, digging up the candidates’ salty old tweets, hanging about in pubs chatting to locals, etc. The novelty of the thing has evaporated.
Pulling a sad face and stating how beneficently ardent you are is, in fact, incredibly irritating in a politician
Indeed, Andy Burnham’s public campaign launch last week felt very much like business as usual. Sad-eyed Andy did his customary thing, getting totes emoshe about the north, while trying to get away from it. ‘I love this place, I love the people of this place,’ he said of this Wigan suburb, ‘but what I have inside is a burning sense of injustice that the proud communities of this place face a Westminster system that puts them at the bottom of the list’. Andy cares, you see, and like many politicians he likes to let you know how passionate he is inside, how very much he loves the special people of this very ordinary place. They’re more loveable than the very similar people in places like Essex and Kent because they’re slightly further away from London, and it’s a fact that you get more adorable and authentic with every mile of distance from Westminster.
It certainly takes quite a brain to look, as Andy does, at the country today – with benefits taken out exceeding the amount of tax paid in – and to say ‘well, the big problem here is obviously too much Thatcherism.’ Or to tot up the millions of extra people waved in to the nation for some inexplicable reason and pronounce that our trouble is that we’ve been far too right-wing for decades. But Andy is passionate, you see, he feels things so very much, which gives him insights the rest of us don’t see.
‘I know politicians always say things like this, but I am passionate about the NHS’ he once told the press. Whoop de dooh. Then there was his pronouncement that ‘The Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (me neither) is something that I’m really passionate about’. Or his declaration after his previous tilt at the Labour leadership that, ‘Going through the leadership process really changed the way I thought about myself as a politician. Actually, I came to the view that I only really want to do things now that I’m truly passionate about, that are kind of hard-wired inside, so that when I speak about them I’m doing it with a bit of oomph. And if I do that, even if I don’t win the argument, I hope people will say, “Well, at least he believes what he’s saying.”’
I’m not at all sure about that last strategy. Being heartfelt is something for other people to decide on about a person, like good looks, surely? Merely pulling a sad face and stating how beneficently ardent you are is, in fact, incredibly irritating in a politician. Theresa May was always doing it, even less convincingly – like Andy, banging on about ‘burning injustices’ that she just couldn’t ignore because her heart was brimming over.
Self-declared passion in a politician sets my alarm bells ringing. Nicola Sturgeon never stopped telling us about her passionate, burning heart. ‘I care a lot about the state of Scotland, the UK, the world, lots of issues I feel really passionate about, you know, the state of the climate, women’s rights, you know, the prospects and opportunities of young people’ or ‘Literature is the thing I’m most passionate about’. Then there was, ‘I’m particularly passionate about using the skills of our young people in Scotland to develop young climate leaders…’ On and on her passion surged, like flows of hot, caring lava. Now we discover that her home life was a sort of semi-detached cross between Castle Macbeth and an Argos showroom. She was, in fact, so molten in her passion about the climate or whatever that she simply didn’t notice the hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of luxury tat piling up around her.
When somebody tells you they are passionate, it’s a dead giveaway that they are a wrong ‘un. Like ‘I’m a people person’, or ‘I’m an empath’ or ‘be kind’, only rotters, cads or useless lumps say it. It is an enormous red flag and should be greeted automatically with the gravest suspicion.
When consulting food packets for cooking instructions, I find that I am increasingly met with claims such as ‘we are passionate about pies’ or ‘we believe passionately in premium spaghetti’. Well, thanks for letting me know. So what?
Similarly, I always want to reply to passionate politicians that I don’t care how much you care. Are you competent? Is your judgement sound? When my tap is leaking I don’t want someone who rocks up faffing operatically about how passionate they feel for plumbing, I want it fixed. I don’t desire or expect an emotional connection, I want you to do the job.
Don’t tell me about how much you care, tell me about the problem at hand and how you intend to solve it. In fact, I am passionate about loathing politicians who bore on about how passionate they are. I passionately wish they would stop it.
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