It's a marvellous paradox of the times that while the number of people willing to entertain the dubious pleasures of the political life shrinks and shrinks to the point that, soon enough, the entire potential political class may be equivalent to the total volume of electorate officers and advisers, the overall cleverness of that class seems to grow and grow, almost at the same rate.
Never in our history has so much pure artfulness been applied to the humdrum business of political communication. Why, with Twitter, Facebook, artfully assembled photo ops and the Sunrise program, its possible nowadays to be prime minister without ever having to meet a single living human being. Still, cleverness of this style has an uncomfortable habit of over-reaching itself.
When Kevin Rudd strode out to meet an assembly of insulation business owners outside Parliament House earlier this year, with a ring-bound pocket notebook clasped in his hand, he must have thought this the perfect demonstration of his political savvy. Mix with a few real human beings in the flesh, pretend to take notes, voice some faux-spontaneous vernacular comments about how you get it, and soon enough you will have neutralised one of the most egregious public policy disasters of the past 30 years.
Another trouble with this kind of contrived cleverness is that people who spend their entire public lives dissembling to others are bound, soon enough, to start deceiving themselves. Witness the continuing excruciating confusion in Rudd's mind between his recorded approval ratings which are, after all, no more than voters' prudent calculations as to who would make the least disagreeable PM, and his own patent conviction that the public enjoys a warm and abiding affection for him.
No doubt we are all dupes to our self-image, and underestimate how keenly people see through us. But in Rudd's case the distance between public opinion and his lovingly nurtured self-image is vertigo-inspiring. Even so, the possibility must gradually be dawning upon him that the end-product of all this frantic artfulness might be that he achieves nothing of political consequence whatever, but achieves it in a very clever manner.
When British PM Gordon Brown suffered his now-notorious humiliation at the hands of retired Rochdale council worker Gillian Duffy last week, it was as if this entire contemporary apparatus of political cleverness came apart in a mere moment, like a two-dollar toy out of Crazy Bargains in the hand of an enthusiastic five-year-old. Brown and Rudd share a number of traits: a stratospheric temper, a wearisomely repetitive vocabulary of cuss words, a deep if unreasoning sense of intellectual superiority and a profound impatience with human frailty, at least as exhibited in others. And yet it is to Brown's undoubted disadvantage that, at some level, he is clearly conscious of his own profound human limitations and of his cramped incapacity for mixing sociably with his fellows. And so, when an unscripted encounter with a member of the public spins out of control he has no resources whatever to deal with it other than unconvincing displays of anxious bonhomie followed by a signature bout of ill-temper, which in this case accidentally became public.
One signal reason why political cleverness of this ilk persists and even flourishes is that it suits, not just the personal vanity of intellectually lazy politicians, but also the prejudices of the political class. And so when Duffy, purely in passing, as it happens, mentioned the question of eastern European immigration, both Brown and the media immediately and instinctively assumed the same thing: she must be an old-time Labour supporter of the very worst kind, a pantomime Alf Garnett in skirts, a quaint throwback to another era of aprons, brooms, polished front steps and head-scarfs, to be wooed and tolerated but never actually listened to.
And yet, if you view the exchange between Brown and Duffy carefully, it seems clear enough (as Duffy later angrily insisted) that her prime concern is not with immigration at all, but rather with the calamitous public debt burden which, having inflated over the years of Britain's fantastic financial bubble, is expanding even faster following the onset of the global economic crisis, and which she reasonably enough fears is going to be passed on to her grandchildren. Indeed, as Britain's Institute of Fiscal Studies pointed out in a report last week, there is no political party in Britain with a credible proposal to restore Britain's fiscal integrity even though everybody, on all sides, is agreed on the scale of the task involved.
Rather, each of the parties is asking the electorate to trust that a good one-third or so of the public debt can be restored by some species of magic, so that social services remain unscathed (in the case of Labour or the Liberal Democrats), or that unfunded tax cuts can be delivered on schedule (in the case of the Conservatives). No wonder so few voters know who to vote for, or who to believe.
"What are you going to do about this debt, Gordon?" is what Duffy actually called out, before an ingenious aide, sensing a photo-op, dragged her into that fateful conversation with Britain's PM. But when Duffy asked the same question of Brown to his face, he merely mumbled sophistries and then, in the manner of jesting Pilate, would not stay for an answer.
Yet, as we learned in this country in the 1980s and 90s, ordinary folk are not economic illiterates, merely by virtue of being ordinary. They simply demand to have the unromantic reality of their country's economic situation explained to them in an unvarnished manner. The bulk of the Australian electorate is instinctively unhappy about the demise of local manufacturing; but it is even more unwilling to return to the days of tariff walls and economic provincialism. This is as it ought to be.
If Britain possessed an electoral system worthy of its electors, Labour would be a spent force and a century's worth of effort by numberless party activists would lie in ruin. As things stand today, the likelihood is that barely more than one in four electors will vote Labour, while the only group out of which Labour will maintain the largest share of votes will be the low-skilled and the poor, and since nowadays they rely upon benefits for their survival, you could describe them almost as Labour's feudal dependents.
It's especially notable that skilled blue-collar workers, the group from which the modern Labour Party grew, and which has always been its electoral backbone, have become Labours' most skittish and least-convinced supporters, if the crop of polls since February is to be believed. Perhaps this is because having wearied of being patronised by their social betters, they are willing to experiment with any party that at least pretends to speak frankly, to explain where the spending cuts will come from and who will be hurt the worst.
Instead, Britain will be burdened with a coalition government of some variety, cobbled together without coherence or legitimacy, which will limp through the growing fiscal crisis without ever confiding in the electorate, for fear the voters are not ready to hear about it. And how clever is that?
