Our political leaders used to love reading and going to the theatre. Now they fear being seen as elitist
Reviewers of the recently published prime ministerial diaries of Harold Macmillan have commented on the remarkable number of novels the politician manages to consume even while running the country: entries regularly confirm the truth of Mac's celebrated claim that he liked nothing better than going to bed early with a Trollope.
This portrait of the reader-leader led the Sunday Times critic to observe that this bookwormery was symptomatic of the dilettante and complacent nature of politics of the period. However, the novelist Stephen Vizinczey riposted in the correspondence columns that Macmillan's "reading helped him to understand far more how life works than position papers".
This disagreement resurrects the recurrent question of whether politicians can spend too much time on politics. Certainly, journals of the past often give the impression that it was once common for Britain to be governed by culture vultures who dabbled in legislation. The index of the second volume of Richard Crossman's diaries, for example ? covering a period when he was a cabinet minister ? is studded with entries such as "attends Much Ado About Nothing", "goes to Das Rheingold", and "sees Space Odyssey 2001". And Sir Peter Hall, in his Diaries, records the then chancellor Denis Healey attending a four-hour performance of Hamlet during a financial crisis.
Such sightings are very rare today. In the present generation of politicians, even culture secretaries speak of hoping eventually to catch the hit movies when they're released on DVD.
The main problem is that modern leadership is frequently a 24-hour business, with a grudging four or five hours conceded for sleep. But the excuse of busyness is complicated. In fact, the firm diagnosis of contemporary spin doctors is that voters don't want their leaders to be working all the time. When the Sun newspaper recently published what American journalism splendidly calls a "tick-tock" of a typical day for the prime minister ("9am: Cobra meeting, 10am: preparation for PMQs", and so on), it was clear that there would be little time for reading or theatre outings, but mainly because of the periods dedicated to joining the children for tea or bathing and bedtime routines.
Apart from encouraging us to fantasise about a Macmillan tick-tock ("9am-11am: grouse-shooting, 2pm-4pm: post-luncheon re-reading Barchester Towers"), the breakdown of a Cameron day is revealing of a shift in attitudes. Spending quality time with the kids has replaced cultural consumption as evidence of a proper work-life balance in a politician. These days, image-conscious leaders will gain far more credit from revealing that they have taken time to read a book to their children, which advertises that they share the values of normality, than of having settled down with some fiction themselves, which would be widely viewed as indicating laziness or complacency.
In widely malevolent times, security is another issue: getting a prime minister safely to the theatre would cost the taxpayer. And the speed of voter reaction through social media complicates the question of repertoire. London Road, the National's brilliant drama with music about the Suffolk prostitute killings, is one of the hot tickets that Cameron, Clegg and Miliband should see ? but objectors would soon be "slamming" them in the tabloids if they did.
But the biggest change since Macmillan's day is the perception that consuming high culture is self-indulgent, suggesting too much time or money, or elitist. Going to the opera as often as Richard Crossman did would be considered by a No 10 chief of staff today as being as image-damaging as a crack-cocaine habit. Better, it's perceived, to pretend to the electorate that you're just like them by knowing what's going on in The X Factor or Britain's Got Talent (Gordon Brown once boasted of having phoned Simon Cowell), or sport.
So, with the Camerons away in Ibiza, Nick Clegg got a seat in the royal box on Saturday to watch Manchester United losing the Champions League final to Barcelona, although it's not clear how the Liberal Democrat leader's present image problems will be helped by being seen watching a once proud and confident outfit reduced to humiliating second strings by an arrogantly superior force. Perhaps an early night with The Barchester Chronicles would have done him more good.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/29/mps-night-in-trollope
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