Of all the treasures unearthed by June’s General Election perhaps the most encouraging is the public’s endorsement of a compassionate and gentle-natured politician. “Weak! Weak! Weak!” cried the political classes. You can’t succeed in politics without being ruthless. Criticism can’t be countered with mere reason. You need withering put-downs, personal slurs, something acerbic for your supporters to bray-to in the House.
Well, fingers crossed, the public seems to be losing faith in this rule. Rather than ask why, perhaps it makes more sense to ask, ‘why not sooner?’ Why is our politics, supposedly rational democratic politics, dominated by aggressive players? Why does spitefulness win the cheers in Parliament, rather than compassion?
Odd as it might sound, I suspect it is rooted in the martial origins of our democracy. It’s easy to forget (or indeed die without realising) that our current aristocracy are the descendants of warriors, the marshal caste. Certainly, the appearance and behaviour of our own Queen Elizabeth (House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) does little to betray her ancestral origins – middle-class grandmotherlyness is more the pitch. But such modern exceptions prove the rule. As the political power of the nobility transferred to the commons the brutality of our aristocracy lost its use and evaporated. Rather than organising rape and genocide expeditions across the Middle-East, the modern Knight is more likely to be found sharing vacuuming duties in a National Trust property, before sharing a ploughman’s with the head gardener (“such glorious sunshine, Tom”).
By contrast, the lords and ladies who held political power prior to our elected MPs did so by force of violence. There was nothing gentle about those gentlemen. They killed their way to the top, and maintained their lead by the same means. This was nothing uniquely British or even uniquely European of course. In their own lands, the Hindu Kshatriya and Japanese Samurai filled a strikingly similar upper-class role to our own Knights and Barons, Kings and Queens. All too often, it seems, human societies have been forced (or inclined) to relinquish political sovereignty to brutes.
Of course there was more to kingship than terrorising the peasantry. There was also the guise of protector. The wise prince presented himself (and his barons and soldiers) as indispensable to the safety and security of his land and subjects. This provided cover for less noble pursuits – personal enrichment for example. Theft, piracy, and the enslavement of other peoples could all be practiced in the name of security, and sanctified by the grace of some old god or other. Indeed, when no external threat could be found, the benevolent king could send his troops into foreign lands to protect and liberate foreign subjects from the tyranny of their own leaders.
Sound familiar? It seems our democracy inherited some of the values and strategies of its aristocratic predecessors. As the sword of state (sword, you note) passed from aristocracy to commons, along with it went the intention to wield it – rather than smelt it. The aggression that characterises current political discourse is just the outer layer of a political culture obsessed with violence, the political necessity of violence. We need Trident missiles. How else would we stay safe on our walk to the food bank? We need to bomb foreign lands to prevent the ‘radicalisation’ of citizens in our midst. We need to sell weaponry to terrorist states to keep our economy afloat. Anything else would be irresponsible, idealistic, cowardly.
And who best to captain manoeuvres? A warrior-king of course. A political heavyweight who can stand twelve rounds against Pugilistic Paxman and Hectoring Humphrys. A modern Odysseus who can skip the verbal tripwires of the Kuenssberg and deflect the incredulous sneers of the Maitliss.
Such journalists are of course integral to the problem – which is why they were so baffled by the election result. They’d laboured hard to strip all political content from their scripts – and this was the thanks they got. They’d successfully condensed several millennia of political thought into a single leadership trait: are you tough enough? Are you a tough enough negotiator? How would you ‘deal with’ Assad and Putin and Kim Jong-un? Would you press the button? Would you vaporise other nations to protect your nation? Would you shoot to kill? Would you strike first?
Toughness. What more is there to ask of a king? And yet here was a large section of the public taking a perverse interest in manifesto content; distracted by such esoteric issues as health, housing and quality of life; attracted by talk of arms reduction, repelled by the prospect of endless campaigns of bombing and invasion.
If the warrior’s spell is finally breaking it can’t happen soon enough. The noble politics of greed and brutality has pushed us to the brink. The world urgently needs thoughtful, compassionate, feminised politics. Here’s hoping.
