The Ideal Content-Free Politician Leaves…

It seems incongruous to cite Langewiesche and Michael White in the same post, so I broke this out separately and it grew. White worries that public anger at MPs’ pay and expenses and even actual thieving will rob us of inspiring examples of public service, such as Denis MacShane.

What gets me here is that MacShane is as good as it gets for White – a second-division pol who ferociously supported the Iraq War and also the Euro, combining two absolutely catastrophic policy disasters into a greater whole through a kind of alchemy of dross. This is what we should look up to.

In his second act, he picked on “trafficked women” as a cause but couldn’t actually find any, having utterly failed to listen to anyone who knew anything at all about the issue, and turned to the man who accompanied him throughout his political career – Signor Ben Trovato. I can think of few pols who have been caught making up their facts as often as MacShane – only the wretched Iain Duncan Smith comes to mind.

But the real problem with MacShane wasn’t what he did, it was how he did it. His whole approach to politics had a mean streak a mile wide. Few Iraq War boosters were as keen to smear, insult, and mock those of us who were right. We were Islamofascists. We were crypto-racists. We were in bed with the enemy. We were, invariably, anti-Semites.

Then, he turned around and viciously abused White’s colleague Nick Davies for disagreeing with his crusade to rescue fallen women. The sorry story is here. Davies was suddenly “taking the side of the managers of the sex industry”. The rhetoric barely changed at all – he just swapped a couple of nouns and he was ready to go, a variable geometry political thug offering multi-role capability against a wide range of targets. And then he invented a fake thinktank in order to pad his expenses!

My dear colleague, Daniel Davies, argues that there is something tragic or at least tragicomic about MacShane, and that his crime was motivated by the effort to live up to the European public intellectual role he felt the UK lacked. I would amend this.

The problem with MacShane was that he was like Quentin Crisp’s pig farmer who was born to be a ballet dancer – a man whose talents and aspirations lay in radically different directions. He imagined he was Danny Cohn-Bendit, but was more like David Batty. Can anyone remember any ideas he might have had about the European Union? The senior pols who promoted him didn’t want him for his thoughts on Europe, but for his thug’s sense of gut tactics and his willingness to cart it up, come what may. And like Crisp’s pig farmer, after thirty years, pigs were his style.

It was a cynic’s career, by a cynic, for cynics. And that was what Westminster politics valued and got. Cynicism and ruthlessness have their place in politics – it’s an adversarial activity, after all – but nobody thinks they are actually admirable in themselves. Except, apparently, for Michael White.

The problem here is a standard one for people who live at the centre of politics. They come to believe both that Westminster is of all-dominating, cosmic importance, and also that it is of no intrinsic interest. They are not interested in politics so much as in politicianing, a sort of professional sport. MacShane was a specialist in one of its component disciplines, and importantly, one that is entirely neutral with regard to content.

Hence it doesn’t matter to White that MacShane achieved essentially nothing of substance except for widening the vocabulary of political insult a bit. Before him, it wasn’t routine to call people anti-Semitic because they disagreed with you. Now it is.

White expects us to take politicianing seriously, as if it were actual politics, while he and MacShane continue to treat it with utter cynicism – in other words, to piss on us and tell us it’s raining. We may not be able to turn off the flow, but we can at least disbelieve the assertion and wear a hat.

And of course the tone matters, too, as it did with MacShane. White is apparently trying to achieve greater public involvement in politics, especially among the youth, by patronising the shit out of the public, and especially, the youth. Good luck with that. Or perhaps it’s not so daft. If White hadn’t chosen to patronise me and some people I know, I certainly wouldn’t have bothered to write 778 words on MacShane. And if MacShane hadn’t chosen to insult various people I know, I wouldn’t have bothered to write about him ever.

6 Comments on "The Ideal Content-Free Politician Leaves…"


  1. I used to think MacShane was one of the good guys, a long time ago – he took a sustained interest in Eastern Europe, from a democratic socialist standpoint, at a time when it wasn’t profitable (or, always, safe) to do so. It was only later I started to see him as a liberal Cold Warrior – which made a slightly different kind of sense of the Eastern Europe stuff (and makes me wonder now if his hackery for Solidarnosc was as unprofitable, or as independent, as it looked).

    The tone of White’s piece – and, I’m afraid, Chris Mullin’s – is really infuriating. They both describe somebody who picks up causes and drops them unpredictably, with the only constant being a tendency to fight dirty right from the off. In other words, somebody totally unreliable and dangerous to be around – which you’d have thought would be even more of a liability in politics than in everyday life. But both White & Mullin take the view that, hey, that’s politics!

    As for White’s defences of MacShane, I’ve got a kind of technical respect for the ingenuity of the line about Labour MPs being more likely to get caught out – the Tories have got centuries of subtle ruling-class evil to fall back on, those poor decent horny-handed sons of the valleys only know how to fiddle the books badly. Yeah but no. The more substantial point is about the disparities in treatment of different MPs who were caught out, and naturally White focuses on how much money was taken and how much was repaid. Rather than, perhaps, on whether a given MP lied through his teeth, obstructed a police investigation, and when found out continued to maintain he had done nothing wrong (which to a pedantic legalistic mind carries the strong implication that he’d do it all again). Even MacShane’s Guilty plea is supposedly an indictment of public mistrust for the political class – as if, by rights, he should have been able to brazen it out and charm the jury into an acquittal, just as by rights he should have been able to get somebody to pay for those plane tickets.

    As you say, veneration for the trappings of politics combined with contempt for the substance of politics (or indifference; in some cases I wonder if it’s ever crossed their minds that there is any substance to politics). That, plus a massive, massive sense of entitlement.

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    1. Also, I don’t remember White saying anything about – for example – Osborne’s house flip being literally the only one of the Torygraph’s expenses stories they didn’t run on the front page at the time, when it mattered.

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  2. If I remember correctly, there was a discussion about MacShane a long time ago somewhere (probably Aaronovitch Watch) in which I said something similar to this post: namely that, absurdly, there were journos and politicos who thought that MacShane was an expert on foreign affairs. How this came about I cannot imagine.

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  3. Echoing Guano, something I’ve said elsewhere about MacShane worth repeating is that his background in journalism is all-important. politicians who are former journos always get an easier ride because they tend to have friends in the industry and know how it works – see also Gove and Bo-Jo. The Mullins piece even effectively says that he got special treatment because of his prominence in the NUJ and that other journalists probably would have had their careers killed by his level of unprofessionalism.

    White says:

    >>Tiggerish in his enthusiasms, sometimes daft but not apathetic or a cynic if respected colleague and justice campaigner Chris Mullin can still write an admiring piece about him.

    This is staggeringly poor-quality argument here. He was one of the most cynical politicians out there as his ‘debating technique’ demonstrates – also coming to mind is the instance when he refused to respond to the question of an Arab student at Cambridge, who he knew nothing about, until he’d ‘apologised for Hamas’ – yer actual racism right there. Or when he verbally abused a young woman who was trying to explain the new expenses system because he, well, ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to listen.

    I’m most amused by his personal friends like Nick Cohen, so usually keen to sling the term ‘fraudster’ around, claiming that he only made ‘one mistake’ – when his expenses were a catalogue of greed and embezzlement in addition to this illegal business.

    But hey, former journos are still journos.

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  4. MacShane also made a statement to the Chilcot Inquiry. This is a link to a critique of it.

    http://www.iraqinquirydigest.org/?p=11456

    As the second commenter there said:- “I feel sure MacShane is very well aware of the dishonesty in stringing together the concepts ‘had WMD’ with ‘probably had WMD’ and ‘would have liked to acquire WMD’ and ‘was a threat’. These are all very different circumstances, that merit very different reactions. By stringing them together, just as Blair is so fond of doing, a sophist seeks to confuse the reader into thinking that having WMD is much the same as not having WMD. That somehow a war that might be justified if the target had WMD is still justified even if they don’t, provided you think (even if wrongly) that they might one day be a threat.”

    I don’t think that MacShane (and White) have come to terms with the fact that there are substantial numbers of people who can see through this sophistry, who can communicate with each other through blogs and other internet-media, and have long memories. They appear to think that no-one is going to critique what they say. And if MacShane hadn’t insulted the intelligence of bloggers, they might not have noticed that he was claiming expenses for a rent-free garage.

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