Today’s newsletter: some thoughts on Rishi Sunak’s election campaign, and the decisions, in the last six weeks, but also the last two years that made it so:
Indeed. It’s essentially a campaign with no self-awareness, run by people who would vote for the Tory candidate even had they murdered their own family.
Yeah - if I still had to do the hospital pass of 'write a column for people who will pick up the magazine on Thursday all the way through Tuesday' I would have basically done 'the biggest threat the Tory party faces is workplace ageism' for this reason.
Every day I get a cogent, clearly expressed email from Conservatives. Unfortunately these emails are from FT readers in their 50s and 60s who are still working, and could and should be getting selected and seconded ala Gillian Keegan, while the official Tory material I get is mental.
This is such, such a bad problem in quite a lot of British institutions now I think about it.
(Particularly vile when combined with any other form of bigotry. Notoriously awful for competent women in their sixties, for instance).
the Conservative Party would be unbelievably stronger if the lobbying industry had been harshly regulated for the last two decades - rather than hanging round knifing each other, the cream of Tory youth would have gone into banking and coming back as experienced and rich fortysomethings.
Honestly I think every political party would benefit from having less MPs whose main work experience is In Politics. They can become like large language models trained on text from other AIs.
I agree (though equally the lobbying stats aren't *as* bad as they look, in that, e.g. a lot of them count 'trade union official' or 'press officer in a charity' and this is one reason why Dan is right to say the Tory party in particularly is badly hit by it)
In terms of breadth of experience, what, e.g. Dan Carden (former Unite aide to McCluskey) did and what Melanie Ward (Scottish labour candidate this time, works for Medical Aid for Palestinians) are I think actually providing them with different experiences in a way the stuff mid-30s Cons do isn't.
The House of Commons was named as such, for a reason, and having politicians with no real world experience is generally a bad thing, Mhairi Black being a notable exception.
IMO, politics is a vocation like ministry. But people go for rabbinical training or ordination throughout their lives: the problem in politics isn’t some people who find their vocation late, it is how resistant it is to mid and late career switchers.
Yes, good point.
It's also a little like trying to go full-time as an artist -- it's not easy to switch career to "sculptor" or "musician" but I suspect the barriers are less than for "politician".
I appreciate it's not realistic but I think we would generally be a lot better off if our politicians had to live under the worse conditions they impose (housing, benefits, etc) for at least six months before taking power. Wouldn't always work (thinking of IDS and that show he did), but would help.
I'm getting really, really unrealistic here but I think this combined with them not being able to talk about it would make a huge difference.
Means they just have to try and understand it rather than showboating about their own suffering.
(Have you ever read the delightful Sue Townsend novel "The Queen and I"?
It does the "what if the royals had to live on a sink estate" thing but with a huge amount of humour and sympathy)
The key aspect of it being that Townsend had, herself, lived in some pretty gruelling poverty at times, been a benefits claimant and really really did not want other people to suffer the same, regardless of who they were.
The whole point of conservatism is you reject that kind of universalism though. You want better conditions for you and your “side”, and shit conditions for the rest.
well i don't think conservative values are worthwhile and instead we should be designing infrastructure around political power to make it unattractive to people whose motto is igmfy
I agree but then we need to accept politicians having outside earnings [with some conflict of interest safeguards] cos if we insist on every NHS consultant or small business owner or architect exiting their career due being elected for an uncertain possibly short time, we'll get no one of value.
