A word of advice

From Ben Macintyre at the Times, rather than from me. It concerns the recent trend (imported from the USA) of celebritising not merely elected politicians, but also their partners and spouses. Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and now Sarah Brown, whose ‘heartfelt’ introduction of the Prime Minister oozed more cheese and schmaltz than the whole West End put together. For the second Labour conference running. The recent episode with Andrew Marr and the anti-depressants that the Prime Minister may or may not be taking brought up the whole issue of privacy in politics, and MPs (unsurprisingly) have been falling over each other in demanding that they, too, be granted a sphere of privacy into which no-one should be allowed to pry.

But on the other hand, if politicians then choose to display themselves, their families and their private lives to the media and public with the same sense of decorum as Hello! magazine, then this starts blurring the line of privacy, and only encourages those outside the Westminster Village to pose increasingly close-to-the-mark questions of those inside it. Moreover, politicians’ demands for privacy ring ever more hollow with the slow expansion of centralised state involvement in citizens’ lives – ever stronger legal powers for the security services that gradually eat away at habeas corpus, the still-looming spectre of ID cards, and the highest number of CCTV cameras in the developed world. In other words, politicians are going to have to make their minds up – either they, like the rest of us, are permitted a private sphere which is each citizen’s castle, or they, like us, have to accept that modern society demands greater insight into their lives than they feel comfortable with.

~ by Marius Ostrowski on October 2, 2009.