Michael Gove wanted to be Prime Minister of the Greatest Britain in the World – but the press discovered he’d taken cocaine and his dream was turned upside down. There’s a moral lesson in this. Kids, stay away from politics. It gets in the way of having a good time.
In all seriousness, drugs are bad and ruin lives – but they’re also apparently ubiquitous. No sooner had Mr Gove been outed than several other candidates in the Conservative leadership contest also admitted to some sort of drug use. Boris Johnson deflected questions with a joke: I sniffed some, he said, but I sneezed (in England you can operate outside of the law so long as you are funny about it). Given that so many fessed up, that no one will go to prison and no laws will change, one is left wondering what the exposure of Mr Gove meant, except to illustrate the eternal game of cat-and-mouse game between reporters and politicians.
As a hack myself, I’m never going to knock investigative journalism. We’ve got to keep the elite on their toes and if we found out that, say, a politician had multiple bankruptcies and boasted about sexually assaulting women – well, I assume this would outrage the voters and cost that reprobate an election. Likewise, if I’d been the one who discovered that Mr Gove had broken the law, it would be my ethical duty to write about it. Mr Gove, an ex-journalist himself, has actually praised the reporter who broke the story. Hacks who go into politics are some of the most fatalistic people you’ll ever meet because they know what they’ve done wrong and they know what a smashing headline it would make. Their past is like a time bomb, waiting to go off.
So, yes, reporters are going to report, although everyone needs to keep some perspective. This dogged pursuit of the truth – admirable though it is – is increasingly perceived as bias, as if journalism had become a party of its own, not so much holding the powerful to account as trying to score points. For example, much of the media in Britain absolutely detests Boris Johnson, even though he’s yet another ex-reporter (and current columnist). Actually, that’s probably a mark against him. He might look like a shambles, as if his hair had fallen off a wall and landed on his head, but Boris has more writing talent in his little finger than most of the press corps put together – and we know it and we resent it. We resent that so many people love him; we’re furious that he doesn’t seem to work for it. Journalists were up in arms when he declined to appear on a Tory debate hosted by Channel 4 News, although, admittedly, the show is about as objective as Mao’s Little Red Book. Mr Gove was interrogated about his cocaine shame, just as all the candidates were asked to name their greatest weakness. Had I been on the panel, I would’ve said: “Redheads.”
This is the same Channel 4 News that tracked down two women who’d been the victim of a savage homophobic attack, told them Boris had made “misogynistic and homophobic” comments in the past and asked them if such a man should be Prime Minister. The answer was no. That kind of journalism sounds an awful lot like the pursuit of a vendetta and the audience learns very little from it, certainly not that Boris is a sopping wet liberal who endorsed the introduction of gay marriage.
The problem with a hostile, even disingenuous media is that it breeds mistrust and shuts down communication – which ultimately is bad for the spread of information. If so much political rhetoric seems simplistic or evasive, this might be why. Politicians, who otherwise would kill to get on TV, will run away from scrutiny that they think is unfair.
The time has come for a new relationship based on honesty. We don’t need to know everything: the public has no need to know that I tried cannabis at university and ended an otherwise pleasant evening being violently sick in a bathtub.
But if politicians can at least own up to the universal truth that we are all broken and need fixing, and if the public can tolerate failure, perhaps we could shrink politics back down to size – to acknowledge that it can’t solve everything and, in fact, it isn’t supposed to. Humility stems from admitting you’re human.
We all want to be our own god, to see ourselves as perfect, but the reality is that we are just as flawed (and a bit frightened) as each other. The world is imperfect because we are imperfect. This is the basis for a strong democracy, a community of sinners trying through deliberation to do a little good.
Tim Stanley is a journalist, historian and Catholic Herald contributing editor
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