“But he’s so … BORING …”
Yes. and thats no bad thing.
Just before the pandemic, I went up to Newcastle on a late January Wednesday afternoon to do an audition for the daytime quiz show, Tipping Point. Not really a spoiler, but I didn’t get on. I think that was for two reasons: first, I didn’t play the strategy game of deliberately getting some of questions wrong¹. Too many right answers doesn’t make for exciting gameplay. But second, and most important, I think that the camera didn’t like me. I’m not hugely photogenic, and I very much suspect that would transfer to television too. I’m not that unusual there, I don’t think. Most of us look a bit weird on video, even if you look at yourself on things filmed on your friends’ phones, (or, if you’re older, on video cameras): you never look your best.
Television is notorious for making people look bad. As a result, few people ever come out of the experience positively. Those who do are not normal²; there is a very specific set of characteristics that make one look good on a television screen, and they are both difficult to really accurately pin down, and are not widely shared in the population. The people who appear on TV most are there, generally speaking, because the camera likes them, whatever other talents they may have.
If you’re a politician this can be a problem. The job of a politician is to do politics. It means sitting in rooms with people you don’t always like, trying to convince them, negotiating decisions and agreements that no one necessarily thinks are ideal, but are what everyone involved is able to accept. It’s a job about compromise. What it isn’t is a branch of the entertainment industry. Or rather, it shouldn’t be. Some politicians were less than keen about jumping into the new media back as far as the beginnings of television, and even radio before that³. You can explain that as being about the fear of change from the older members of the political establishment, but in retrospect you can say there was some prescient concern about what an increasing presence of a visually-centred medium would have on the political process. Politics shouldn’t just be “show-business for ugly people”⁴
And this is a reason I haven’t been watching any of the TV debates going on. They aren’t helpful. However, ever since David Cameron’s wheeze to goad Gordon Brown into them in 2010, they seem to have become an unwelcome fixture in the electoral calendar (from a purely personal point of view). Why did he do that? Cameron came from the PR industry, and he was vaguely passable in front of the camera⁵. He knew Brown wasn’t. Brown had many virtues (and faults, he’s only human, after all), but looking at ease in front of a TV camera is not one them. Blair had that. He was probably a bit too good, to be honest. So Cameron exploited the weakness, and the novelty of the format in the UK at least magnified the audience to witness the comparative awkwardness of Brown’s performance in comparison to both Cameron, and Nick Clegg.
And this is part of the problem, because before Blair had been John Major. By many accounts, in person, John Major is a warm, quite charismatic, and actually a physically striking person. These were all assets to command a room in the day-to-day work you do where you are looking into people’s eyes in person. But in front of a TV screen none of that shone out. So it was with Brown. Quite a lot of Thatcher’s image was constructed over time. If you look at her earlier years as Conservative leader, especially in Opposition, she looks very stilted. Perhaps this increase in focus on the Prime Minister, and the personality of the leader is a very noticeable echo of the effects of the Reagan era in the US finding its way into our culture, once again via the grammar of television. The political programmes don’t help, and the formats employed seem almost designed to prevent any serious discussion. The first “debate”, with its demands for 45 second policy soundbites (so I read), was exactly why this kind of process is so unhelpful.
All of this means that if you’re a political party, and you need leaders, you’re stuck in a bit of a quandary. You can choose skilled political operators, and hope the camera will be kind to them, or you can choose the people to whom the camera is kinder and hope you can get away with the other stuff in the background. This may at least partly explain why, in the current era, the US got Trump⁶, and we’ve been stuck with the likes of Farage, Johnson, and Truss⁷. Johnson in particular is interesting, because the media image he carved out for himself is not the one you’d expect a politician to do. In the end, perhaps that was part of the undoing: after years of trying to sneak under the radar with the chummy, bumbling persona, when he needed to try to look serious, and statesmanlike he couldn’t, partly because he wasn’t actually capable, but partly because he’d already fixed the other image in the public imagination. It was too late to try and break it.
In the run-up to the election, Sunak has been assailed on many sides for things like his preference for wearing high-vis whenever he shows up to site visits⁸, the improbable budgie mourning cut of his trousers, the fact that his suits are just a little bit too skinny-fit, or his embarrassing choice of white samba with a town suit. Perhaps none of these things would have been huge issues had Sunak been at all competent, or empathetic about some of the damage left behind by government policy, some of which he has been personally responsible for either as a Chancellor or PM. But maybe all that does is throw the superficial judgements into starker relief.
In the end, I don’t care if Keir Starmer looks a bit stolid on the TV, or if he doesn’t immediately sound like he’s about to launch into a funny story on the sofa on Graham Norton. What I care about is whether he’ll actually be serious about doing the job, and whether he’d be any good at it. I don’t want to be “entertained”: we had three years of that after 2019, and look how well that went. I want a competent government, and someone who can lead it. Is that really too much to ask?
¹ Oh, foolish pride! The general knowledge questions were quite easy as it happened, and I finished them pretty quickly. I may even have been first. In retrospect that probably wasn’t wise. But then you had to stand in front of a camera and talk about yourself.
² I mean mostly in the strictly statistical sense here. But not entirely.
³ As far back as the 1951 election, Churchill was apparently reticent about the advent of television, partly because of (as ever) fears of BBC bias, but also for wider reasons.
⁴ This quote is widely attributed, sometimes to Jay Leno, but quite often (and probably more likely give the subject matter) to the America political commentator, Paul Begala.
⁵ Even with that weird, shiny dish-faced countenance, looking like a smug toddler overfed with fois gras.
⁶ Douglas Adams nailed that one. Trump and Jonson are both in the Beeblebrox mould, gurning for the camera, while the truly pernicious stuff goes on in the background while they wave their hands around and make noise.
⁷ She spent an awful lot of time carving out photo ops for herself, it’s just that she ruined it by opening her mouth. “Pork markets!”
⁸ Sadly, they do tend to make him look a bit … Playmobil, and not Prime Ministerial. You wonder where that advice is coming from in an age where surface presentation is so very important.
