The rules

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/24/the-rules-etiquette-guide-to-integrity

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Integrity is a bit like modesty – if you find yourself publicly declaring you have it, you probably don't. Politicians always claim to have behaved with the "utmost integrity" when vowing to clear their name, shortly before resigning.

The essence of integrity is sticking to what you believe in. That part is actually quite easy. The tricky bit is believing in something in the first place.

David Cameron once said he believed passionately in saving the environment, which is a good thing to believe in unless you also happen to believe that you are destined to be prime minister, leading a party full of people who think climate change is a pretext for European bureaucrats and Liberal Democrats to cover Britain's areas of outstanding natural beauty in wind turbines. Then one day newspapers report that you've dismissed all of your old environmental policies as "green crap" and you're in an integrity crisis. The traditional way to change your beliefs and hang on to your integrity is to undergo a Damascene conversion. This involves realising how wrong you were before and wiping the slate clean and ready to be inscribed with new beliefs.

Unfortunately for David Cameron, his claim to be a committed eco-warrior was itself meant to be a revelation experienced on behalf of the Conservative party, so technically his abandonment of that belief is a reconversion on the road back from Damascus, which doesn't count.

<strong>Degrees of integrity</strong>

Ed Miliband has said that the Labour party has behaved with "complete integrity" in its dealings with the Co-op bank and its disgraced former chairman, Paul Flowers. That is a tautology. Partial or incomplete integrity would mean integrity that isn't fully integrated and so not integrity at all.

Along with consistency, the essential component of integrity is discretion. Being proud of your integrity makes you pious, which is an invitation to other people to scour your past for inconsistency and call you a hypocrite.

Hypocrisy is the repellent little bit of leftover breakfast stuck in the beard of piety when it is trying to impress people with its integrity.

Further up the scale from piety is evangelism, which is when someone thinks they have so much integrity they can sell a portion of it to strangers.

Evangelism is the distracting bit of saliva that forms in the corner of piety's mouth when it thinks that it is speaking with integrity. After evangelism comes zealotry, which is piety turning aggressive when drunk on its own integrity.

Politicians stand a better chance of being recognised for their integrity if they have a hinterland. That means having interesting things in their lives outside politics. (Note: interesting in this context doesn't mean indulging obscure sex fetishes.)

Political integrity needs a hinterland to give it perspective, otherwise it looks weird.

<strong>Quotable integrity</strong>

Every politician who thinks their integrity is undervalued quotes Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The more common pattern is that they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they go back to ignoring you, then you lose.

Another popular integrity quote is John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Awkwardly, it isn't at all clear that Keynes ever actually said this. This introduces a paradox: if the facts about the famous quote about facts changing change, does everyone have to change their mind about what a good quote it is to use when they change their mind?

<br /><strong>Integrity words and phrases</strong>

<strong>U-turn</strong> When the facts about public opinion force politicians to change their minds, graded on a media scale from "embarrassing" to "humiliating".

<strong>Honesty</strong> What people who don't work in politics think of as the best policy.

<strong>Gaffe</strong> The noise that honesty makes when it crosses a party line.

<strong>Conviction</strong> The moral impetus that launches political careers and the legal outcome that prematurely ends them.

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