Someone once asked me, “What qualities do you think one needs to be a successful politician?” Why they would ask me is anyone’s guess as (a) I’m not qualified to give a reasoned and proportionate response to such a question and (b) I don’t really care. On further investigation, it turned out that they had been at a particularly stormy meeting where members of the public had turned up to grill MSPs and councillors about our beloved trams project. The chap in question had been mightily impressed by the way in which the various members of the panel had been able to deal (without a pre-briefing) with searching and intelligent questioning from a pretty irate audience.

It’s true that there’s nothing like a public meeting to get the bowels of politicians working overtime – BBC’s Question Time is a prime example – once the public sniff blood they can reduce even the most commensurate politician to a quaking, mumbling wreck. So what skills do you need to fend off a pulsating pack of pissed off voters?

Alasdair Campbell sucked politicians into his poisonous vortex...

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Mendacious madman
Well, a couple of things that most commentators agree on are charm and charisma. If you’re charming and charismatic, you can probably get most of the public to turn out in the pissing rain to wave flags as you send the troops off to an illegal war in which you know that thousands of innocent civilians will be murdered – Tony Blair did it in Iraq without flinching and despite the fact that a million people in the UK took to the streets in protest. George W. Bush could never quite manage the charm offensive. Whilst I acknowledge his simpleton tendencies, he always looked as if he was quite enjoying the fact that he was responsible for butchering innocents, something which invariably turns the public off – unless you’re from that particularly sensitive demographic in the Bible Belt of the USA.

However, whenever Blair was questioned on the case for war, he would incline his head to one side, look down at the ground in a ‘look at me I’m humble’ fashion, hold his arms out in an all-embracing gesture and say, “Look, what you have to understand is…” He would then go on to quote endlessly from what we now know was Alistair Campbell’s irrefutably sexed-up dossier on Iraq’s capability to blow us all to smithereens in 45 minutes. Which brings us to the next quality required – spin.

Campbell always claimed that there was no such thing as spin – or was he just spinning that particular line to throw us all off the scent? In reality, he was a master of making a case for something when popular opinion and, on many occasions the facts, showed that an alternative course of action was more preferable. With regard to his making the case for the invasion of Iraq, MI6 regarded him as (pun probably intended) ‘an unguided missile with a propensity to have rushes of blood to the head’.

No doubt just what you need when you’re about to unleash shock and awe on a bewildered and terrified population. But if Campbell was a loose cannon in private meetings with the security services behind closed doors, he was nothing less than indignant whenever he was in a television studio or in front of an audience. How dare we question his judgement when it was as plain as the nose on your face that Iraq was about to flatten most of the Middle East and quite probably the UK with weapons of mass destruction?

All sane folk knew that these were the ramblings of a mendacious madman but his consummate ease and unflinching belief in his own deception showed that far from spinning out of control, Campbell was pirouetting quite happily in the knowledge that he was sucking deluded, weak and shamelessly ambitious politicians into his poisonous vortex.

Politically expedient
So why am I rambling on about political skills, particularly those that are required to deceive, delude and disassemble the truth? Well I recently toddled along to the cinema to watch The Ides of March, George Clooney’s latest establishment rattler, which, (in my opinion) provides a perfectly accurate depiction of political machines in action.

Sure, it’s supposed to be entertaining but it gets to the heart of what modern politics is all about – it’s not about what you say, it’s how you say it and to whom; it’s not about whether you believe that a war is just, all you have to ask is, is it politically expedient?; it’s not about who you know, it’s about why you have to know them; and it’s not about trust, it’s about self-serving ambition to the detriment of decency and the greater good.

Sure it’s been done before, in the unapologetically lachrymose Mr Smith Goes to Washington which was made in 1939, but so it goes on. And whether it’s an illegal war in the Middle East or a disastrous tram project which is in the process of ruining one of the most beautiful cities in the world, it would appear that spin, charm and charisma are the only currency you can deal in if you really want to succeed in modern day politics.

Which begs the question, how in God’s name is David Cameron Prime Minister?

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Illustration: Bernie Reid