Terry Prone: Political candidates must pay attention to the person who is in front of them
British The British Man' Known Of Former Politics 'grey Prime Minister Major Became As John
His parents were music hall artists. His mistress was the mouthiest woman in politics and spewed the details of their affair in the diaries she published years later.
After his father died, he discovered he had inherited two secret half-siblings.
He wrote a history of music hall called , which lovingly recorded acts which ran counter to what we believe to have been the constrained attitudes of a couple of centuries back, like the Barrison Sisters who played the Alhambra theatre in London in the middle of the 19th century “to great acclaim”.
“Provocatively billed as ‘The Wickedest Girls in the World’,” he wrote, “they dressed as children, played with dolls and sang songs with highly suggestive lyrics.”
They even achieved worldwide notoriety for their “kitten” routine. This, it should be said, included a 12-year-old sister in the line-up which teased majority male audiences with the question: “Do you want to see our pussies?”
The audience would tend to answer in the affirmative. The girls would repeat the query until a satisfactory level of uproarious demand was achieved, then “they would hitch up their skirts to reveal kittens cradled in purpose-built pouches located in their groins”. Classy.
It might surprise some readers to learn that the one who wrote that was “the grey man” of British politics, John Major, who to this day is regarded as a personality-free failure, despite achieving a lot more for the Conservative Party than did the more recent leader Boris Johnson.
Indeed, it might be argued that nobody other than Major could have succeeded Margaret Thatcher after the latter’s highly emotional exit, without seeming, in contrast, to be somewhat colourless.
But what irrevocably hung the “grey man” definition around John Major’s neck was TV programme .
Our own former finance minister Michael Noonan announced that he tried not to miss RTÉ Radio’s Scrap Saturday because he so enjoyed the mimicry of himself in that show.
Micheál Martin, on the penultimate delightedly imitated Mario Rosenstock’s earlier imitation of the Tánaiste on the same show.
Although seeing yourself caricatured can be fun, it cannot have been even mildly amusing for John Major, who could never have credibly claimed to enjoy watching himself portrayed by a grey puppet eating dinner with his wife in a silence broken only by him murmuring, “nice peas, dear”.
The quietly courteous manner which initially endeared him to public and media became a deadly disadvantage.
But that was the pattern of his career, even with his mistress. Edwina Currie started out by regarding him as a “sexy beast” and ended up throwing him to the wolves in her memoir.
Despite his music hall background, or perhaps because of it, Major would have shuddered away from advisers counselling that he must show emotion in public.
The kind of advice now being given to US presidential wannabe, Ron DeSantis, who’s being told to put his wife front and centre and get passionate about things when canvassing.
It doesn’t seem to matter to these advisers that some of the other Republican candidate line-up have done passion without payoff so far.
The myth never dies that showing your emotions is a sure-fire way to the heart of the voter.
Hence the constant call from journalists to Hillary Clinton to show her emotions. Which she did now and again, usually in self-pity.
Hillary and The Donald may not be siblings under the skin on much, but when it comes to blaming others for self-inflicted wounds, they march to the same drumbeat, or did when Hillary was still marching.
Showing your emotions draws on the belief that we all want to identify with the hard-done by. Uh, uh. We may sympathise with the hard done by. We may send a “Like” their way, because what harm?
But follow them into the gates of hell? Undergo the essential almost religious conversion process that will make us vote for them and continue to vote for them? That’s a different process.
Them breaking down in tears on our news feed may be a great distraction from the miseries of our own lives, one worth sharing and commenting on. But imprinting them on our mind and heart as worthy of our effort on polling day requires a whole lot more than tears.
Even more important in the rejectability of this show-your-emotions guff is that it is rooted in a contempt for voters.
Hang around any national or local election headquarters during a campaign and you will pick up the deadly disqualifying evidence of that contempt.
There will be a candidate or adviser who rolls their eyes and talks of the repellent “sense of entitlement” they encounter. This is usually directed against a person less moneyed, less educated than they themselves are.
In other words, the candidate/adviser is entitled to be entitled, the lower orders are not entitled to be entitled, and damn them, they think they are entitled — to good and respectful healthcare and to housing.
Then you have the candidate/adviser who explains to the room how the people they encounter don’t appreciate the complexity of a particular issue.
In other words, they think their uneducated desires are valid, the gobshites. Or the candidate/adviser who opines that this door-to-door stuff, this standing in supermarket car parks, is probably a waste of time.
What’s that you said about standing in supermarket car parks? Standing?
You mean you expect potential voters to come to you? How about you move your ass and go to them, looking as if you’d like to learn about them.
How about you ask open questions like: “How do you mean?” How about you learn to belt up and instead of lecturing them on the policies of your party or (if you’ve been in government) what you might unfortunately call the achievements of your party, just concentrate on them.
Even if they’re boring you rigid, find them interesting. Even if you realise you’ve forgotten what point they’re making — get them to make it again. You just go “whoa, tell me that again”.
Make notes. Thank them. Go back on the email address you got from them, mentioning some specific detail they shared, or giving an indication of what you’re going to do about it.
Once upon a time, the big parties did that. Now, Sinn Féin specialises in it.
No candidate should concentrate on learning to be colourful or emotionally performative.
Candidates can learn more from paying attention to the human being in front of them than from research spreadsheets.
If you let them, people will tell you the stuff that really matters to them. They mark your card for free. And like you better for listening to them. Because so few do.