Probity and sincerity are admirable qualities, but they don't make for a good politician

MATTHEW PAR RIS

Does it matter whether a politician is sincere?

In the corner of my mind the question whispered itself with gentle insistence as, sitting round a kitchen table, some friends and I threw ourselves with relish and for the umpteenth time into that old favourite among parlour-debates: 'Tony Blair is a confidence trickster: discuss'.

For what it's worth, I do not think he is. With this prime minister, what you see is closer to what you get than has been the case with most of his predecessors. Calm, steady, unvindictive and put-upon, John Major was in reality a more troubled and interesting character: manipulative, jumpy and volatile, and not beyond score-settling and spite. Brave and undeviating Margaret Thatcher may have seemed; she was also muddled, cautious, circumspect, manipulable and ready to trim. Uncle Jim Callaghan was more serpentine than avuncular; Ted Heath became a yachting man on spin doctors' advice; Harold Wilson never smoked a pipe except for the cameras; and relaxed, patrician Harold Macmillan was so much the nervy and insecure actor that any attempt to uncover the 'real' Macmillan only peels off another layer of the onion's skin.

But, as my friend Julian Glover, now editing the Guardian's politics website, wrote last year in the New Statesman, 'perched atop a muckheap of media merchants, pagers and pledge-cards' the man himself — Tony Blair — is remarkably unspun. He is what he seems to be: 'a Christian lawyer who lives in Islington, probably ironed his jeans at university and really didn't smoke pot. He has never had a makeover and never would.' He tells tall stories about his boyhood (who doesn't?), and has developed to an advanced degree those skills to charm and disarm that the ambitious and slightly insecure tend to lean upon. He tells little lies (who doesn't?), but he is not in himself, in his own person, a big lie. 'Sitting in his fourth parliament and sixth year as party leader, Tony Blair has yet to offer anything other than a single version of his character.'

I agreed then and, with Mr Blair now in his fifth parliament and seventh year as Labour leader, I still do. I could write you another 500 words on this, and (forgive the immodesty) I think they would read well enough. But then I love these discussions, don't you? They're so easy, we can all have an opinion, and no expert knowledge is called for. Anecdote rather than argument, hunches rather than fact, are what is required, for this is essentially the game of character analysis, and it can be played over the garden fence, at the golf-club bar, across the airwaves of BBC Radio 4, or in the commentary columns of serious newspapers.

The discussion we can have about the sincerity or otherwise of Tony Blair, lain Duncan Smith or Charles Kennedy is, in its essentials, little different from the discussion we might have on the former marriage of Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere, whether Michael Winner really is as rude to waiters as people say, or whether Gerald Corbett ought to have apologised more and sounded as though he meant it about that train crash . . . except that those three discussions would be in the Arts & Entertainment section, the Food section, and the City pages, respectively, whereas ours comes under Current Affairs.

In truth, they should all be filed under Gossip — and be none the worse for that. But because (especially in the world of political commentary) we like to dignify what we do, we have tended to encourage each other and the electorate in the view that this kind of gossip is our civic duty; that the most important question we need to answer about a politician, and the question on which we should satisfy ourselves before we turn to any other, is whether he or she is sincere. Whatever that means.

Is he honest? Is she straight? Does he mean it when he claims that his life's purpose is to change his country for the better? Does she truly, madly, deeply care?

For those who hope to report the scene at the Pearly Gates, these are undoubtedly the key questions for St Peter, As a voter here on this earthly plane, however, I know little about Tony Blair's eternal soul and I doubt how much I ought to want to know. What I do need to know is this: is he any good at his job? Is he capable of accomplishing the tasks he has set himself? Are they the right tasks?

Never mind about his heart, where is his head? How do the figures pan out?

Now none would disagree that such considerations are of the last importance; but the probity-merchants would argue that if a politician lacks purity and passion in his personal motives, this will infect all he does. 'Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom' (Jefferson); 'This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day. . . ', and so on. It sounds most plausible. But is it right?

Instead of asking whether it stands to reason (as so much nonsense does), glance at personalities from history whose foresight, strength and judgment have made them great, and ask in each case whether probity is what distinguished them — or even attended them in any marked degree.

Was Henry VII, who really began modern England, passionately principled? Was Elizabeth I's great attribute her sincerity? Was Napoleon, was Lincoln, was Ataturk, was Disraeli, was Alexander the Great, was Henry Ford, a pretty straight kind of a guy? Was Churchill? Before Churchill, perhaps our greatest 20th-century prime minister was Lloyd George, a serial adulterer who cuckolded his family doctor, told his wife to lie in court, and ran the honours system like a privately owned grocery store.

Is what we would fault in Adolf Hitler that he was not sincere? Is that our complaint about Osama bin Laden? Was it the Eurosceptics' complaint about John Major or the Labour Left's complaint about Margaret Thatcher? Ian Paisley is honest, isn't he? John F. Kennedy was hardly an unusually sincere human being, was he?

I could move next to the questions that I do think matter about people and their plans. Can a modern health service be financed on taxes alone? Who ought to own and control the fixed assets of a railway network? What is the right level of defence spending for a middle-ranking power like ours? Can the technology be found to charge motorists for the roads they use? How much of our countryside ought to be turned over to agriculture? In what sort of a state is Whitehall's IT-network? Ought local education authorities to retain their responsibilities for education? What would be the feasibility, and what the cost, of. . .

. . . But I sense that I am losing you.

Matthew Pam's is a political columnist of the Times.