Why lampooning politicians keeps them honest

Our political classes are as deserving of mockery, satire and suspicion as they ever were

SOME attribute the low standing of politicians today to what is called "the satire industry" and the consequent disappearance of deference; they find this deplorable and think it damages parliamentary democracy. Others believe that we still accord too much respect to the clowns in Westminster and Holyrood. Any thinking person is likely, depending on circumstance, mood and the day of the week, to veer from one of these opinions to the other, holding both of them, though not simultaneously.

All the same I incline mostly to the latter view. When I was young and more trusting and idealistic than I am now, I generally thought well of our political leaders, and even had heroes among them: R A Butler, Iain Macleod, Nye Bevan and Jo Grimond, an eclectic group, to which I might add, despite the vicissitudes of his private life, Aberdeenshire's Radical Tory, Bob Boothby. I even believed that Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was went too far in their mockery and denigration of politicians. These days I judge them more harshly, and find them for the most part a sorry lot.

Consider for instance the parade of nonentities, phoneys and chancers aspiring to be the next president of the US and what is, laughably, called the Leader of the Free World.

What would America's greatest iconoclastic journalist, H L Mencken, have made of this lot? Mencken, who found President Coolidge's career "as appalling and as fascinating as a two-headed boy" and who dismissed even F D Roosevelt (whom he came to detest for his duplicity) as "The Great Croon of Croons". One would like to be able to hear him on Hillary and Mitt Romney and the ridiculous Rudi Giuliani.

There is much admittedly to dislike and condemn in Mencken. He was unashamedly racist (before the term had been coined) and generalised stupidly about the inherent qualities of different races. He was in favour of capital punishment, and believed that the low level of crime in late Victorian Britain could be accounted for by the fact that "the English had hanged out their criminal classes". (Actually we had dispatched them to Australia.) He was disagreeably contemptuous of the uneducated and ignorant.

Nevertheless on the subject of politicians and government he is admirable, and still very much to the point.

"A politician," he wrote, "has no actual principles. He is in favour of whatever seems to him to be popular at the moment." That was not only perceptive, but prophetic, anticipating the influence of opinion polls and focus groups.

And how about this? Mencken remarked that in the first decade of the 20th century, there was "a sudden change" in the operation of government in the US. "Holes began to be punched in the Bill of Rights, and new laws of strange and often fantastic shape began to slip through them. The hysteria of the late war (i.e. 1914-18] completed the process. The espionage act enlarged the holes to great fissures. Citizens began to be pursued into their houses, arrested without warrants, and jailed without any form of trial. The ancient writ of habeas corpus was suspended; the Bill of Rights was boldly thrown overboard."

Give or take a few details, doesn't this describe what has been happening in the US and New Labour Britain in the first decade of this 21st century? The hysteria occasioned by 9/11 and the so-called "War on Terror" has resulted in the suspension or abrogation of ancient liberties.

Even here, in Scotland, we have seen a young man imprisoned for what was essentially "a thought crime", retrieving information from the internet, which he might possibly have intended to put to malevolent use. In effect he was jailed to prevent him from committing a crime which he may, or may not, have been contemplating.

Mencken admitted that "as private citizens" politicians "are often highly intelligent and realistic men, and admirable in every way". True; out of office, or with no hope of office, they often speak excellent sense. But in power it's a different matter; then, as he put it, "the best seem to be almost as bad as the worst". This is because of the nature of government, which, Mencken thought, "in its essence, is organised exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man… Government invades his liberty and collars his money in order to protect him, but, in actuality, always makes a stiff profit on the exchange".

"Nine-tenths of professional politicians are professional rogues", Mencken observed, living off the rest of us. Look at the expenses claimed by our self-styled representatives in Westminster and Holyrood, and deny that if you dare.

Of course, Mencken had no remedy. It was impossible that, as a Tory reactionary – he called himself "a Presbyterian Tory" – he should have had one.

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is a waste of time." Truer than ever, the first part of that statement, at a time when government impudently invades every area of private life. But, alas, the second part of the sentence is equally true.

So we must shrug our shoulders and thole it. Still, laughter and mockery of the clowns in office, and those aspiring to office, have not yet been outlawed – amazingly, you may say. So the sensible man laughs and turns, like Candide, to the cultivation of his garden where, again astonishingly, we are not yet told what we may and may not plant – unless, that is, you choose to grow cannabis to provide you with some relief and a means of escape from the contemplation of our masters. Do that, and you'll be banged up.