The grand Budapest hotel

Paywall postscript; Re-planning right-wing government

This article was originally published in The Critic in mid-December

Two years ago in his ‘Anger in the Age of Entitlement’ column for Physchology Today, Steven Stosny posited an idea that love and politics were beginning to sound the same.

After attending a panel discussion of political hopefuls who disagreed disagreeable, he noticed that the participants sounded remarkably like resentful couples he was treating in private practice; ‘Lovers sound like politicians and politicians sound like embittered spouses’, he wrote.

The links between relationships and politics are multiple, varied and a rich furrow for social phycologists to plough. One notable similarity is the restlessness of dissatisfaction that both the electorate and romantic partners feel after a long period of stability; known in romance, popularly, as the ‘seven-year itch’.

This period of waning romantic interest is remarkably similar to the political cycle; couples in the so-called honeymoon phase (defined as lasting two and a half years after getting hitched) report very high levels of satisfaction in their marriages. But research suggests there are two subsequent periods of decline after this; the first is around the four year mark, after which the marriages then tended to stabilize - before another decline set in around year eight.

This is so similar to the cycle of democratic politics that political scientists in America refer to it as the ‘Six year itch’. After six years in office, the public's growing dissatisfaction with the president, their political party and their agenda coincides with a midterm election, during which the president's party typically experiences significant losses in congressional seats.

How, political strategist might ask, can this be avoided?

There are two approaches. The first is that taken by Conservatives, who simply avoided the problem by regularly chopping leaders; of the five Prime Ministers they provided over the last 14 years, only David Cameron reached 6 years in office.

But as the last election proved even deploying five Prime Ministers, with different values, styles, focuses and solutions, still saw the party worn down by it’s time in government. As the afternoon turned into evening, any sense of an ideological mission seemed to slip further and further away; the government focussed less on setting long-term priorities and more on lurching from crisis to crisis , and embodied not so much a driver of political leadership as a Westminster gossip reaction engine.

There is no wonder that government grinds the ideas out of politics. Dominic Cummings, in his nichely infamous blog post on the dysfunction of Whitehall The Hollow Men, used his time in the Department for Education to portray how the sheer amount of noise generated by a Department – and the closeness of political leadership to the actual running of the Department - meant ‘it took a huge effort to think seriously about priorities’, and that ‘priorities slip unless you remain dementedly focused and demented focus is an alien concept in Westminster.’

The party recognised its problem as much as anyone; ahead of the General Election there were regular briefings from anonymous MPs and Ministers that they believed some time out of power would do the party good. Many thought it would allow the party room to breathe, to come up with new ideas to solve new problems that had arisen during it’s tenure, for a personnel reset and an ideological refresh. Indeed, the promise to do just this was a key part of Kemi Badenoch’s leadership bid.

As for the other approach, there is a useful comparison.

In 2010 – the same year the Conservatives took power - Viktor Orbán was elected Prime Minister of Hungary. Although he lost over 100 seats in the National Assembly in the 2014 election, since then his party, Fidesz, has consistently returned nearly 50% in the National Assembly. At the last election, Fidesz received the highest vote share by any party since the Fall of Communism in 1989.

So much for itches. But how has Fidesz managed to prevent themselves being worn out by the realities of government?

Their success lies in creating an architecture of space. Cummings describes a chaotic environment in which Ministers are swamped – deliberately or otherwise – with so many issues that there is simply no capacity, no space, for Ministers to do anything but react. In the case of the Department for Education, this was only a question of mental capacity; in the case of 10 Downing Street, the lack of space is as much physical as mental.

Contrast the elimination of strategic thinking – ground down by overwork – Cummings describes; ‘For at least the period January 2011 – July 2012, it took a huge effort to think seriously about priorities other than after 10pm or at weekends’ with the fact that - even as Prime Minister - Orbán remains a voracious & proud reader, and is known for taking Friday afternoons to read.

The idea of a Prime Minister taking time to read seems almost ludicrous to anyone used to the daily Low Namierist rigmarole of British politics. This is allowed by a far more powerful executive office; the Prime Minister's Office in Britain has a headcount numbering around 300 people in a highly complex structure of multiple ‘units’ that has been built, ad-hoc, by multiple Prime Ministers, with unclear lines of responsibility as a result. The Prime Minister's Office of Hungary, meanwhile, has a headcount in the thousands. This at once removes the Prime Minister’s operations to a purely strategic level, and prevents them from descending too far into the particulars of the day-to-day running of government

But it is just a question of allowing Ministers room to focus. The Hungarian government also employs people, directly, whose sole job is to think about long-term strategy; the geopolitical think tank the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, for instance, has recently been folded into the Prime Minister’s Office. No such organisation exists in British politics; rather, think tankers are bought in as Special Advisers to assist the day-to-day running of government and, like Ministers, too often find their ideas ground out of them.

Kemi Badenoch has announced a vast swathe of policy reviews in opposition. But overarching this must be a systems inquiry that asks why, for 14 years, the supposedly Rolls-Royce Civil Service handled more like a Lada and what Tories must do to once more incentivise, and allow, the space for good governance.

POSTSCRIPT – Out of Oxford

They looked at my postcode
They asked me to speak
It was then I decided my prospects were bleak
Well it may be through goose rule
It may be through God
But one day there’s going to be blood on the quad
Me in the belltower and blood on the quad

I came away from Hungary thinking that their model of governance had plenty of lessons for the UK – particularly in creating room at the top for leaders to engage in and think about long-term strategy – although it must be acknowledged that the fact Hungary is a nation of ten million, not 70, plays some not insignificant part in this.