You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
It's possible to make the case - although it's not a popular argument - that all literature is political. "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude", wrote George Orwell in Why I Write. Certainly, to be apolitical doesn't mean that the world stops turning - it just means you're not watching how it turns. Just as the sporting world seeks to embalm politics in its own protective casing - cracked open for special occasions like footballers' race-rows and homophobic sports tournaments - there is an entrenched and (ironically) ideological idea that art and politics should occupy separate terrain. Politics is imagined to be an hors d’oeuvre to the main course of human experience, a career choice for sexually repressed student union types and a fad for trust fund babies; certainly not the business of a serious artist. It’s less contentious to analyse politicians in fiction - as distinct from political fiction - in order to understand how literature can channel or challenge our contempt for the Westminster blob.
If today's politicians feel unfairly vilified, they should console themselves that they’ve nearly always been held in contempt. Charles Dickens, in his early career as a parliamentary reporter, was said to regard politicians as pompous rhetoricians whose words lacked substance. In Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People, the waters of a small spa town become contaminated and the mayor refuses to do anything about it. Politicians have been portrayed as anachronisms of a stale moral order - think of the unimpressive Prime Minister who turns up at Clarissa’s party in Mrs Dalloway - or as the unseen architects of an authoritarian nightmare in the case of Kafka’s The Trial or Orwell’s 1984.
Today’s politicians are a different breed, in life as in art. Politicians are required to be cagey, telegenic, identikit cliche-babbling machines, obsessed with opinion polls and controlling the press agenda. Cordelia in King Lear could have been speaking about a Question Time panel when she warned against “that glib and oily art, to speak and purpose not”. The great irony of a modern politician’s existence is that they’re mostly unable to give their actual opinion. When the microphone malfunctions and the wrong words come out, they’re labelled “gaffe-machines” or worse. The term conviction politician seems to have entered British political discourse for the simple fact that such a thing doesn’t exist; it’s an ideal, a fantasy, that our elected leaders might say what they actually think rather than act in thrall to a vast media apparatus designed to set traps at every turn. The precarious nature of this existence creates drama and tension; irritating as a democratic spectacle but fantastic for storytellers.
If there was ever an expectation that politicians were moral standard bearers, this is manifestly no longer the case. To be disgraced is almost a prerequisite to being a British politician; many have become accustomed to standing in front of a camera and expressing “what was once called shame and is now called embarrassment”, as a journalist once put it. When I explain that Charm Offensive is about a disgraced politician and his recovery, the usual reply is something like, "there's no shortage of candidates there”. For the compromised idealist, Joe Street, the road to recovery means to ignore orthodox political structures and build his own Jerusalem on his own terms. For a storyteller, it’s perhaps true that liberal-left politicians make better objects of study - see Robert Harris’s The Ghost - as there is greater scope for moral compromise and therefore betrayal, conflict and drama. Conservative politicians are supposed to be disappointing; not so liberal ones.
What is the responsibility of authors to examine politics or politicians? It’s certainly not to be a propagandist or to write a prescription, but art has a long tradition of shining a light on areas of human activity that would otherwise go unlit.
Charm Offensive by William Thacker is out now, published by Legend Press.