Last Friday evening, I was discussing the Suella Braverman debacle on BBC News. I described her as “a glorified internet troll”, and said her behaviour was part of a wider problem of “clowns” being promoted above their ability. This includes Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as prime minister, Kwasi Kwarteng in the Treasury and Braverman in the Home Office to name just a few. The host, rightly ensuring balance, responded by saying I’m sure they would say they are “serious politicians”.
They certainly should be, because ministers make decisions that shape our lives, and mistakes can even cost our lives or those of others abroad. The problem is they are evidently not.
Rishi Sunak appointed Braverman as home secretary only six days after she had been sacked by Liz Truss for breaching the ministerial code. Let that sink in for a moment: Sunak gave one of the great offices of state to someone who fell short of the standards required to serve under Liz Truss. The Prime Minister is rightly being castigated for that failure of judgement, for that prioritisation of political expediency – pandering to the factional interests of his Tory right-wing backbencher – over the duty of public service.
The First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, said of her departure: “Never has someone been so unfit for public office as Suella Braverman. At a time when we need those in government to bring communities together, she revelled in fanning the flames of division.”
Many of us will share that sentiment. It is a comforting truth, but only a partial truth. We also have to reckon with ourselves: ultimately the fault lies with us as voters in a democracy. How much time do we each spend scrutinising the people standing for election in our constituencies before casting our ballots? If the answer is less or about the same as we do when casting our vote for Strictly, then we only have ourselves to blame.
If we don’t take politics seriously and engage with the people we are electing, they can end up as prime minister, as chancellor in charge of the nation’s finances, as home secretary in charge of the police, or health secretary in charge of the NHS during a pandemic.
In the last three elections, Braverman has been elected as the MP for Fareham with more than 30,000 votes. Does a clear majority of Fareham’s population really believe that Suella Braverman is the most talented person that they could send to represent them in our Parliament?
The denizens of that Hampshire town are mostly casting their vote for a party, not a representative. Fareham has only ever returned a Conservative MP since the seat was created in 1885. Many similar seats exist across the country that for decades, if not forever, have only returned an MP from the same political party.
Just this morning, Rishi Sunak has taken a look through the 350 or so MPs he has on his benches and couldn’t find a single one that he thought was up to the job of being foreign secretary. Instead he has appointed David Cameron, the disgraced lobbyist and former prime minister whose main foreign policy intervention was the 2011 bombing of Libya.
In 2016, the Conservative-dominated Foreign Affairs Select Committee published a damning report into Cameron’s foreign policy in Libya. It found the action was “not informed by accurate intelligence”, “not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya” and concluded: “The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of Isil in North Africa.”
Resurrecting failed politicians is not a solution for our democratic failings. Labour has called for a general election and that would be welcome – this Conservative government deserves to be put out of its misery (as do we).
The solution isn’t necessarily either in electoral reform, especially if that grants political parties greater control through centrally imposed party lists. What we need is greater voter engagement – to pay attention to who you’re voting for.
Look at the number of scandal-induced by-elections in this Parliament – from Hartlepool to Tamworth, from Somerton and Frome to Rutherglen and Hamilton West. We live in a democracy. We sent those people to Parliament to represent us. We have failed and we, the voters, have to take some responsibility too.
A quarter of a century ago, the US politician Ralph Nader, warned: “If you’re not turned on to politics, politics will turn on you.” Politics has turned on us: dividing us, failing us and even killing us. Our economy is in crisis, there’s a growing housing crisis, the NHS is in crisis. We’ve suffered the longest and deepest fall in our living standards on record.
In an Ipsos poll a year ago, just 12 per cent of us said we trusted politicians to tell the truth – more people trusted advertising executives (14 per cent), estate agents (28 per cent) and journalists (29 per cent).
What a damning indictment that is of us too, because we elect them. I’m sorry to sound like a school teacher (trusted by 81 per cent of us), but we really must try harder.
Andrew Fisher is the former executive director of policy at the Labour Party
