The longing to be liked

This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman’s study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. ‘This fellow says he wants to make the world a better place, but let us find out what he’s really in it for’ is the gist. The quest is lively, the evidence often persuasive and the anecdotes excellent, but the reader ought to keep firmly in the back of his mind the undeclared major premise of Paxman’s whole enterprise:

Given that people are not telling the truth when they claim to be in politics to make the world a better place, why in heaven’s name do they put themselves through it?

The ‘why in heaven’s name’ comprises most of the argument, and what they do put themselves through is hilariously catalogued. The book is an intelligent romp: never less than pacily and punchily written, yet good-humoured and sympathetic, for the author often seems to like the beast he anatomises. In the course of sniffing out ulterior motives, he lights upon explanatory needs and drives – a greed for applause rather than money – which I find intuitively persuasive: I share Paxman’s view that British politics is not particularly corrupt, and my hunch is that he is right in his guess that psycho-political explanations of a man’s craving to be something in public life may matter more than we suppose. But are they the whole story? Paxman rather sidles round this vast question.

The author’s debt to Lucille Iremonger, author of The Fiery Chariot (1970), is generously acknowledged. She it was who in the 1960s studied the lives of 16 British leaders and, in noting the coincidence of bereavement, wretchedness and emotional disjunction in the childhoods of so many, anticipated Paxman’s own conclusion: that those drawn to the political platform are exceptionally likely to crave attention and applause: ‘They clap,’ as this former sketchwriter once wrote about Jeffrey Archer, ‘therefore I am.’