Of all the subplots of British politics during the American Revolutionary War, the most enjoyable is Lord North’s obsession with resigning. After a series of desperate attempts were rebuffed, in March 1778 North finally snapped, dropping all courtly decorum and instead giving it to George III straight: if the ‘load of important duties is entrusted to me, national disgrace and ruin will be the consequence.’ The King disagreed. Lord North would remain yoked to office for another four years before finally tasting sweet release.
Today, if you had to describe the average British politician in one word, you’d struggle to do better than ‘reluctant’. Almost every long-form interview the Prime Minister has given this year has included some kind of apology. One line captures the general tone: ‘there are many bits of politics that are just alien to the way I do my work… I find it hard, you know.’
In most jobs, a key part of doing them well is looking like you enjoy it. Last year comedian Conan O’Brien appeared on Hot Ones, a web series in which guests are asked questions whilst eating ever more sadistically-dosed hot wings. Asked what the worst thing a guest could do on a late-night show was, he answered instantly: tell the audience they’re not enjoying themselves. ‘I’d look out at the audience,’ he said, ‘maybe 200 people sitting there, and I’d see 200 souls leave 200 bodies and float up through the ceiling.’ The first rule of entertainment, at least, is never to say you’re bombing.
Enjoyment has many virtues, but the most underrated is the power it bestows. Doing something well is one thing; doing it in a way that makes clear you enjoy it is another. Whether it’s a motor journalist drifting a car whilst speaking to camera, a tennis player finishing out a match, or a maître d’ in a great restaurant feeling confident enough to sit beside you and recount the miracle of staying open after an all-night celebration, the effect is the same. Enjoyment is a form of authority.
The older, legal definition of enjoyment is ‘possession’. This sense of quiet command is captured in Boswell’s line that Johnson’s ‘supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason’. O’Brien thinks the same way. Break the illusion, and watch your grip disappear. The souls leave the bodies.
That modern policymakers choose to ignore this near iron law of public life might seem bizarre. Fiction, however, suggests the instinct is sound. From Gerald Fedden to Kenneth Widmerpool to Nino Sarratore, there’s no quicker route to litero-political ruin than enjoying it too much. Only a rare few survive the spotlight: the protagonists of Coningsby and Endymion, or, I suppose, Hugh Grant in Love Actually. Even he still pays the necessary tribute whilst roaming Wandsworth in pursuit of his secretary. ‘Are you the Prime Minister? Yes, I'm afraid I am. And I'm sorry for all the cock-ups, my Cabinet are absolute crap.’
The sharpest cautionary tales, though, come from one pen in particular: Anthony Trollope’s. There’s Augustus Melmotte, the crooked financier whose appetite for fraud (and flair for dinner parties) carries him perilously close to the top. Or Ferdinand Lopez, the wily lounge lizard whose rise destabilises an entire administration. Or the loathsome George Vavasor, torching his cousin’s fortune on a doomed campaign for the Chelsea riversides. In Trollope’s world, ambition is forgiven. Enjoyment, or so it seems, is fatal.
Contrast these rogues with Trollope’s beloved Prime Minister, Plantagenet Palliser: diligent, obsessive, and quietly endearing. He’s a lover of early morning bed-chats about the British constitution, a proud owner of horses named Dandy and Flirt, and the kind of man who, while on a grand tour of Europe with his wife and her companion, fantasises about delivering a six-hour financial statement from the despatch box. For Palliser, as for many of today’s leaders, the role is one of subjugation: strapping into harness as a ‘serviceable slave’ of England, and attacking the job with the ‘grinding energy of a young penniless barrister labouring for a penniless wife.’
By the time he reaches the top in The Prime Minister, the fifth novel in the series, any question of enjoyment falls away. Palliser spends the book trying, and failing, to hold his rickety coalition together, sacrificing both public favour and private happiness for little in return. When the end comes, it’s not just the reader who feels relief, but Palliser himself: ‘But for m’self I shall never desire to stand at the head of a government again… I don’t think that a Prime Minister of a free country should suffer from that infirmity.’
Trollope clearly liked Palliser. A lot. In his autobiography, he calls him my Prime Minister, and lists him first among the three characters he’s proudest of. That affection has shaped the standard reading: Trollope as the quiet champion of dutiful self-abnegation in the service of technocratic politics, the patron saint, as Adam Gopnik put it in his superb 2015 essay, of those who ‘surrender freedom of action to the dull daily work of good government.’ Fittingly, the vice president of the Trollope Society is the most boring British Prime Minister of the past fifty years: the achingly interregnal John Major.
As I boarded the flight from San Francisco to London last week, all of these thoughts, from Plantagenet Palliser to John Major, were far from my mind. I was after simpler fare: Heads of State, the latest Amazon Prime action thriller, in which Idris Elba plays the British Prime Minister, Sam Clarke.
Things are going well in Sam Clarke’s Britain: the Britain, essentially, of an Iranian or Russian propagandist. We really do run the world. Joint MI6 and CIA teams police it, all under the all-seeing eye of Echelon, a shared GCHQ and NSA surveillance tool. In his first press conference, Clarke announces the development of a bleeding-edge nuclear technology made in Britain and soon to be exported around the world.
This was all excellent stuff. As I watched it at 35,000 feet, en route to America, I began to sit up a little straighter. It was as if Suez had never happened. I, like the other Brits draped in blankets on this BA flight to San Francisco, felt like a Greek en route to visit the Romans.
Clarke did not share my enthusiasm. We first meet him asleep on the sofa in the Downing Street flat, whiskey and papers at his side. With six years as Prime Minister under his belt (the most unrealistic thing about the entire film), he is Palliser reborn, most happy when debating changes to the ‘tax code’ in committees, the six hour financial statement to the Commons redux. Each morning he goes for a run through London, Range Rover trailing behind him, little audio summary of his day playing, Arsenal beanie sweat sodden. Cold. Wet. Dutiful.
It has made him a relatively unhappy warrior, a disillusioned technocrat to whom hope is nothing more than ‘delayed disappointment,’ The summary he gives of his job, though pithier than both North’s and Palliser’s, hardly differs in sentiment: ‘this job, my job, is about suffering.’
US President Will Derringer, played by John Cena, sees things differently. A former action hero turned politician, Derringer not only enjoys the job, he treats that enjoyment as essential. For him, governing isn’t just about results, but also about, as Thatcher once said of Reagan, embracing the ‘great cause of cheering us all up.’
Derringer wants Clarke’s approval, and is wounded when Clarke shares fish and chips with his rival during the presidential campaign, a gesture he sees as a coded endorsement. Clarke, in turn, sees Derringer’s ‘popcorn presidency’ as a farce. After a joint press conference goes wrong, both are forced by their aides to share a flight to a NATO summit in Trieste. Air Force One is shot down. Hijinks ensue.
Having been Trollope-pilled over the course of a lifetime, I settled in expecting Clarke to teach this grinning mountebank something about the gravity of office, and what it takes to become a world leader. Yet it's Clarke who runs into a problem. The body count. A team of spies are massacred. Then the entire crew of Air Force One.
By the time a CIA agent, played with cheerful lunacy by Jack Quaid (‘that boy’s a nutter.’ ‘Maybe, but he’s America’s nutter’), nobly gives his life to save them both, the Prime Minister’s tortured miserabilism begins to grate, not just on us, but Derringer as well. ‘If life is such a Möbius strip of failure and futility,’ he asks, ‘why do you want to lead an entire nation?’ Clarke has no answer. No wonder, as Derringer keeps reminding him, his polling numbers are firmly in the red.
Here we find the film’s sly message: Clarke might have just as much to learn from Derringer as Derringer does from Clarke. Conan O’Brien’s law of showbusiness holds true beyond the studio, as the slight clenching in my jaw made clear while watching the Prime Minister pout lyrical after surviving yet another fight scene. There is nothing especially mystical about political authority. It too depends on looking like you enjoy it.
This presents a challenge: not just to our current political crop, but to Trollope as well. Did Hollywood really have one up on him? If he’d boarded BA 285 that rainy day in London, and had the misfortune to sit next to me and the eighteen month old I was stewarding, would he have been appalled?
I doubt it. The most common mistake about Trollope is to assume that loving Palliser means endorsing his way of governing. Affection is not the same as reward. Every author has their favourites, and it is often those very favourites (think of Jane Austen’s Emma) on whom the most flaws are heaped.
Trollope is no different, which is why his affection does little to help Palliser succeed. Like Trollope himself, whose own brief and disastrous run at Beverley in 1868 scarred him for life, Palliser’s time at the top is short. His administration is creaky from the outset, and the personal cost, especially to his marriage, is steep.
You can jump on plenty of reasons for the failure. A lack of clear policy, as Sir Orlando Drought charges early on in The Prime Minister. The ever more ham-fisted attempts by Palliser’s wife, Lady Glencora, to sex up the administration. Or simply, that the vicissitudes of parliamentary arithmetic fated it to die.
Watch Heads of State, then turn back to Trollope’s own verdict, and the problem sounds all too familiar. Palliser is too thin-skinned, too diffident, too rigid; a man who can handle facts and systems, but to whom people have never opened themselves. The young idealist who once dreamed of becoming Chancellor is gone. In his place stands someone always scanning for the exit, knowing full well he’ll never be able to take it.
Without a Derringer, a plane crash, or an army of the most Russian Russians to fight his way through (the final scene involves a Viktor Bout-inspired character opening fire on the entire NATO leadership), there’s no reckoning, nor epiphany. What undoes Palliser is simpler, and more brutal: he hates the job, and it shows.
It’s thus no surprise that it’s the slightly-less-than-dutiful politician, the one who can take a step back and look at the surroundings every now and then, who, in Trollope, usually meets with most success. Mr Gresham, the house's ‘favourite orator’, for whom members will miss almost anything to hear him speak. Phineas Finn, the politician of whom John Major perceptively once wrote (he genuinely could have been a critic in another life), ‘was Trollope as he wished to be.’ Or even Mr Daubeny, a man who (like his inspiration, Disraeli), it’s both easy to roll one’s eyes at, but also find yourself quietly impressed by: ‘He manipulated his words with such grace, was so profound, so broad, and so exalted, so brilliant in mingling a deep philosophy with the ordinary politics of the day, that the bucolic mind could only admire.’
This makes particular sense when you remember how much Trollope himself enjoyed politics: the ‘noblest and manliest’ (he really would have liked Heads of State) of all England’s assorted callings. Here he is, taking us to Parliament for the first time:
'It is the only gate before which I have ever stood filled with envy... my lips have watered after no other fruit but that which grows so high, within the sweep of that great policeman's truncheon.'
It’s this too that I think leads to the confusion: the visceral hatred he has for the truly content-free showmen of politics. ‘The intriguers, the clever conjurers, to whom politics is such a game as is billiards or rackets, only played with greater results’ — the Melmottes, Vavasours and Lopezes of the world. Only someone who thought politics so worthwhile could be so obsessed with gunning down those who don’t.
That’s the irony. Trollope didn’t hate political enjoyment. He hated those who faked it. The problem today is the same: the lumping together of figures like Gresham and Daubeny with the Melmottes and Vavasours. In a world where enjoying politics is seen by leaders as, at best, moronic boosterism, and at worst, a portent of malice, it’s safer to wince your way through high office and call it virtue.
They misread the room. A lot of the mystical power of so-called populist leaders around the globe is much simpler than you think: they're the last few who actually look like they're enjoying the job. Enjoyment in politics isn't a luxury; it is part of the governing infrastructure. And there's enough nihilism in the air already. As Trollope puts it, one last time, on the curse of unhappy Prime Ministers: 'they affect to disdain and put aside the thing they can no longer enjoy.' The nation has enough to carry. We shouldn't have to carry our leaders too.
Perhaps it’s time to recall Trollope’s most counterintuitive lesson. A little less dutifulness in our politicians might not be such a bad thing. Every Clarke needs a little Derringer. Every Palliser, a little Daubeny.
Otherwise, the Melmottes, Vavasours, and Lopezes will be only too happy to do both.
great post!
It is a very true point that the enjoyment of other people especially leaders gets amplified in the hearts of onlookers. But I'm interested in what you think the history of obligatory po-faced seriousness is for political leaders. I would say that someone like Thatcher was still 'allowed' to be funny and undutiful, even despite sexism. Maybe Blair professionalised things, altho that narrative feels a bit too easy. Of course you have Johnson who projected a serious level of enjoyment of his post. Is it a left/right thing? Seriousness is often equated with empathy, the chief virtue for some political movements.
One other thing: Maybe I've misread but I would quibble that I don't think Melmotte is a good example of a politician falling to ruin because he enioys himself too much. Rather, he has to project enjoyment and lavish fun as a means to his political ends, which are laundering his reputation and achieving influence. This feels very different to me from someone like Palliser or -- another example -- Mr Brooke in Middlemarch who find the whole concept of politics and ritual extremely amenable.