Losing a child young is a terrible thing, and I am sorry that Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both had to go through that. But do we really want to choose our government on the basis of which party leader we feel more sorry for?
On the X Factor, before each contestant sings, there is a package telling us about how the singer felt that week. Often these are tear-jerking affairs, revolving around how hard the contestant is finding everything, how much she misses her fatherless children/dying mother/disabled brother, how desperately important it is for her family that she should do well in the competition, and so on. The notion that we should listen to all sing and then vote for whoever was best, even if that person happens to be a multi-millionaire from a solid family background with healthy relatives, the notion that talent should be more important than moral desert is obviously ridiculously naive.
But the X Factor is an entertainment show. Though one might question the morality of corrupting one's audience with such invasive mawkishness, no-one is in any real doubt that that's what they are selling - and I enjoy it, too.
On the other hand, strange as it may seem to suggest so, politics is not an entertainment show. The Prime Minister has influence over the deployment of nuclear weapons. He allocates hundreds of billions of pounds in spending. He drives initiates concerning the laws and other restrictions we must live under.
Furthermore, he does not do this alone. Perhaps if we elected an overlord with supreme power, we might feel we wanted to know every aspect of his character, everything he believed, all his history before we surrendered ourselves to him. But a Prime Minister is merely a leader of and spokesman for a team. There is no guarantee or requirement that he believe personally everything he advocates. He's just a cog - albeit a large and important one. And he's a cog operating within a System and subject to an Establishment that grants or withholds freedom of action. Surely, surely what counts is what his team is going to do, not how much we enjoy listening to him chat about himself on TV?
The Conservatives have been every bit as guilty as Labour concerning the descent of our politics into "character" and lip-quivering sentimentality: think of John Major's emphasizing of his humble background against Tony Blair's priviledged one; David Davis' noble single mother; and so many others that we would be drawn into mawkishness just by listing them. These days in politics we must know about the Prime Minister's wife's contraceptives, whether David Cameron's teenage auto-eroticism involved Mrs Thatcher, how many women Nick Clegg can remember sleeping with, and whether Gordon Brown joined the mile high club.
And now this weekend we have the final descent, the reductio of the whole farrago: our Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition compete as to who was more grief-stricken concerning the death of his child. Political journalism could not be more inappropriate or invasive if they set up spy cameras in the House of Commons lavatory.
This...is...not...dignified. I'm sure that sounds stuffy and old-fashioned and not very with-it and post-modern and lots of other unsound and politically naive things. But we have to have some mechanism to stop matters descending to here. There has to be some way we can punish the decision to open oneself up in the way our politicans have done. And of course it is too hard, too harsh and heartless to criticise someone directly for expressing his grief. Furthermore, once one side does it, without a punishment mechanism it is very difficult for the other side not to be drawn in. So punishment there must be. Hence we invent a somewhat artificial concept, dignity, as a euphemistic device. We do not say "We criticise you for talking about your dead baby." What we say is "Don't do that - it isn't dignified."
Or...or...we say: "But what we want is politics as entertainment!" I want my politicians to tell me about their sex lives, their diets (biscuit or banana?), whether they wear socks two days running, their preferred subjects of auto-eroticism, their contraceptives, their grief. In which case, fine. But don't then complain if the System, the Establishment, does not cooperate with people chosen in this way concerning anything important.
