Sometimes I wonder why I ever wanted to go into politics. Even as a parliamentary candidate, as part of the poor bloody infantry, everything you do is scrutinised through the cynical prism of a sceptical media. Every time you attend a community meeting or visit a school the cynics are waiting to pounce. ‘He’s only after votes’, they mutter - as if that were somehow a crime on a par with aggravated burglary.
You can see in their eyes that they believe all politicians are scum, and it will be almost impossible to change their minds. If it’s a problem for candidates, it’s even more difficult for party leaders, who don’t just have local hacks to contend with, they have to break through the feral cynicism of national political journalists. Some, like Neil Kinnock and William Hague, never manage it. In the end, no matter what those two did, they were always on a loser with the media.
David Cameron, by contrast, had an elongated eighteen month honeymoon which now seems to have ended rather abruptly. But even during the honeymoon, the cynics were out in force. Whenever Cameron tried to break out of the Westminster bubble he came under attack. He travelled to the North Pole to examine the effects of global warming on the polar ice caps. He spent a couple of days in Birmingham with a muslim family. He spent two days as a teaching assistant at a school in Hull. He spent two days on the beat with South Wales police. And what was the reaction to all of these visits? A giant raspberry from the all-knowing, ever-cynical Westminster lobby pack.
On Monday David Cameron will travel to Rwanda to spend two days with more than forty Conservative MPs, candidates and activists who, at their own expense, are spending two weeks on VSO supported aid projects in Rwanda. The reaction to the visit in the press has been almost universally cynical. “Sham Cam – Tory leader’s African day trip in hug-an-orphan stunt” screamed the headline from last Sunday’s News of the World. The paper’s Deputy Political Editor (which must surely rank as one of the most challenging jobs in Westminster) informed his readers: “You’ve got to Rwanda it to him. When it comes to grabbing photo opportunities David Cameron really takes some beating.”
If I were Cameron I’d take that as a compliment, for a single picture can often say more than a thousand words. Put David Cameron into any situation and he thrives. He relates to people in a way that few other politicians can. He doesn’t have that awkwardness which Gordon Brown suffers from. Like Margaret Thatcher, he has a way of flirting with the camera. But this visit to Rwanda amounts to far more than that. It’s from trips like this that political leaders form a world view.
In 1975 Margaret Thatcher was a foreign policy illiterate. She had barely been abroad, a fact illustrated by Jonathan Aitken’s unkind barb about her probably believing Sinai was the plural of sinus. Fifteen years later she ended her premiership by celebrating the end of the Cold War. How did she pick up the expertise she needed to help Ronald Reagan win the Cold War? By using her four years in opposition to travel the world, to meet world leaders and to understand the problems encountered by their people.
Cameron’s trip to Rwanda is not a one off. He visits places like Rwanda and Darfur because he wants to understand their issues first hand. It’s the same with his domestic visits. Whether you’re a councillor, candidate, MP, minister or Party leader it’s not possible to learn everything you need to just by reading a brief written by a civil servant or an adviser. Show me a politician who is strapped to his Commons desk and I’ll show you a politician who is not only out of touch with the people he is supposed to represent, but a politician who is incapable of entertaining new ideas, new thoughts or new perspectives.
After the 1992 general election Paddy Ashdown, who had just fought his first election as LibDem leader, took three months off to tour Britain to try to reconnect with normal people. What he found inspired him and set him up for the next five years of leading a political party. He believes those three months were crucial to the success the LibDems achieved at the 1997 election, when they gained their highest number of seats for seventy years.
As a politician it is easy to fall into a trap of believing what people write about you in newspapers. Sometimes you feel as if you are being suffocated by people who pretend to understand your every thought, but in reality know nothing about you and care even less. Margaret Thatcher never suffered from this because she famously never read the papers. John Major was the opposite and seemed to spend every waking hour obsessed with what people were saying about him. David Cameron would do well to leave his new Director of Communications Andy Coulson to worry about the papers. He should trust his instincts and ignore the cynics.
