The Spectator’s Notes | 16 January 2010

At the turn of the year, William Hague, launching the new round of election campaigning, told an interviewer that David Cameron was the sanest party leader whom he had ever met. He has unintentionally put his finger on the only thing that is wrong with Mr Cameron. Most of us regard sanity as an unqualified benefit, and Mr Cameron certainly has that reassuring quality. His character seems rather like the snow in ‘Good King Wenceslas’ — deep and crisp and even. The problem, though, is that politics requires some sort of insanity, especially when there is a crisis, as there is now. The political leader’s belief that he or she (I’ll come to her) can save the nation is a form of madness, but a necessary form. Churchill, De Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher were not what is ordinarily meant by sane. Leaders at such times have to be able to defy the impossibility of events — financial collapse, war etc — and also to eschew sensible advice on the grounds that only they identify with the true yearnings of the voters. It was this evidence-defying belief which enabled Mrs Thatcher to hurl herself into the storm armed only with her handbag. Mr Cameron can see everything too coolly. I find that this common sense is making his potential voters a little uneasy.

There is a parallel between the embarrassments of Peter Robinson, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, and those of the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams. Both are ostensibly about sexual misconduct of relations — Mrs Robinson and her 19-year-old lover, Mr Adams’s paedophile brother. But both stories are really about power. In each case, the political leader involved sought to manage the situation by appealing to public sympathy, but in neither case was the public fooled. People want to know what Mr Robinson and Mr Adams knew when, and whether they abused their public positions to cover anything up.