Don't like politicians? Get a load of the kamikaze crew
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Version 0 of 1. "He had a picture of Macmillan on his wall: that's all you need to know." Thus did Dominic Cummings, former special adviser to Michael Gove, deliver to his prime minister what is, in certain Tory circles, the most crushing of insults. Poor old Harold Macmillan. The original detoxer of the brand, with his unswervingly middle-of-the-road instincts, may have been the one to tell Britons that they'd never had it so good, but his MPs didn't love him for it any more than they now love David Cameron. Say what you like about Cummings, but he does have a way with words. The prime minister is a "sphinx without a riddle", devoid of hidden depths; the Downing Street chief of staff Ed Llewellyn a "classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophant". But there's more to this than high-grade gossip, or yet another yelp of frustration about Downing Street donkeys leading self-styled lions. The most revealing thing in the whole outburst is Cummings' admission that the education secretary is on a mission to reform state schools as he sees fit, and that "if that means being carted off in a body bag at the end, so be it". This is the authentic voice of the Westminster kamikaze tendency, those so passionately convinced of their own rightness that they are willing to go down in flames for it, and if necessary to take others down with them. And it's not just the Conservative party that seems to be breeding fundamentalists. The Liberal Democrats have Lord Oakeshott, so consumed by a burning need to get rid of Nick Clegg that he was prepared to expose his party's deepest vulnerabilities – down to publishing details of which high-profile seats are most likely to fall, and how – in the process. Labour has Tony Blair and his undimmed conviction that, if Iraq is now exploding in our faces, that does not mean military intervention was a mistake, only that it hasn't gone far enough; that the current disaster is a consequence of failing to double down and intervene in Syria. Even Labour MPs sympathetic to his argument may wince for the lost votes every time they see "Blair" and "Iraq" in the same headline, but that seemingly doesn't deter him, since to him there's something far bigger than domestic Labour politics at stake. Just as there is for those Tory Eurosceptics who would rather be right about (and out of) Europe than in power, and whose attitude to the rise of Ukip is at best conflicted. Something of the same spirit, too, drives those in the 2010 intake of Tory MPs who have helped make this the most rebellious parliament since the war. For the kamikaze tendency, there's always something bigger at stake; always a burning reason to blow stuff up. Agree or disagree with them, they're only responding to the public mood. We say we don't like bland, managerial politicians, or the tendency for the three mainstream parties to blur into a fuzzy mass of interchangeable platitudes. We demand politicians with the courage of their – although, in truth, we usually mean our – convictions, not ones who'd sell their souls for a ministerial car. Well, this is perhaps what such nobility might look like in practice. Bright and bloody-minded people, without conventional ambition, who can't be easily bought off or brought into line because they don't aspire to office as an end in itself (or in Blair's case, not any more). People who take criticism as a compliment, proof that they're finally getting somewhere. People who don't need to see the evidence to know they're right. People who can't see why on earth you shouldn't just scrap GCSEs, bin the idea of a permanent (and thus neutral) civil service, generally kick a few tyres. They don't necessarily hold Thatcherite beliefs, but are closer to her view that consensus is just "the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes" than they are to Macmillan's definition of it as the "essence of Tory democracy". Their loyalty is to ideas first and people second, which is how someone as devoted to Gove as his former special adviser can end up dropping him in it with No 10. For Cummings' own personal kamikaze mission is exposing what he sees, often with good reason, as the crazy dysfunctionality of Whitehall decision-making. He seems equally prepared to be carted off in a body bag, if that helps. So long as politics is held in public contempt, Westminster may be increasingly likely to attract these latterday Joan of Arcs, happy to take whatever's thrown at them because the strength of their belief sustains them. For if politicians don't – contrary to popular belief – do it for the money, then the prime reason for entering a publicly reviled profession now has to be this sense of mission: a ferocious belief that there is something to be done, and you're the person to do it. No wonder, then, that his MPs so often lose it with Cameron, who has always had a mission for his party – to drag it back into the land of the electable – but not obviously one for his country. That's what drives even his friends mad. It's just that occasionally, when considering the alternatives, you wonder if a little woolly pragmatism isn't the main thing keeping politics sane. |