How to lure people to politics

My beach reading, I suppose, is a bit odd. While my girlfriends read Fifty Shades, the Twilight sagas, the latest Dan Brown, and other books appropriate for the sun and sand, I punish myself with frown-inducing ego trips known as politician’s memoirs.

It is not that difficult to be a successful leader: surround yourself by people who dare to speak the truth to you

Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Bill and Hillary Clinton… they’re all blotched with dabs of sunblock and bits of dry seaweed for bookmarks. It makes for lonely reading – while the girlfriends fill me in on Christian Grey’s fetishes, no one is ever really interested in Blair’s conversation with Queen Elizabeth II in 2001.

So I was so very happy when lately we all got hooked on to the Danish television series Borgen. It’s the story of Brigitte Nyborg, a charismatic politician who unexpectedly becomes the first female Prime Minister of Denmark, and watching it is like being a fly on the wall of an MP. And finally everyone can understand my fascination with politics, politicians’ behaviour, attitudes, ego and their blurred life on and off camera.

The thing that intrigues me most is: How do we choose our leaders? What makes some people stand out more than others? Is it because they’re like us or because they are like how we want to be?

I thought about this quite a bit in 2008 when the Labour Party were choosing a new leader, and, of course, now that the Nationalist Party is in the same water, I started wondering about the whole thing again. What, in reality, makes a good political leader?

In an interview with UK Prime Minister David Cameron last week, journalist Eleanor Mills described his advisers as “pleasant enough but many are young and timid”. Someone told her: “Cameron won’t listen to advice. He surrounds himself with second-raters”.

You can see the red light flashing. Let’s compare him with Blair – who, whether you love him or hate him – was a man who had an excellent gauge of the people’s pulse. He met his polling adviser Philip Gould on a weekly basis, just to be told exactly why the public hated him and what he was doing wrong. His aides Anji Hunter and Alastair Campbell saw it as their duty to tether Blair to earth by telling him the blunt truth out there.

Blair won three elections; Cameron won one through the skin of his teeth – and won’t win the next one, for the simple reason that a leader is as good as the people around him.

On paper, it is therefore not that difficult to be a successful leader: surround yourself by people who dare to speak the truth to you. Easy.

“No, it isn’t,” said a friend as we were debating the issue. “When you’re in power, many people are in awe of you and are not able to be hostile to your face. Plus you have to be confident enough to be able to deal with a regular shower of criticism,” he said.

So where do you find advisers who can scrutinise, and who can see beyond the camera smiles and the shaking of the hands and notice the awkward cough/titter at the back of the room? Away from the grass roots: people who are not born and raised with the culture of a political party and who do not plan at age six, that they’re going to be MPs in 20 years’ time.

I’m always surprised by the youngsters in the University political groups Studenti Demokristjani Maltin and Pulse. Ask them a question and they’ll give you back a spieled speech that makes you want to slit your wrists. Instead of planning their gap years, these students spend their time watching recordings of mass meetings on a loop and then go in front of mirror and start mimicking their leader, so that by the end of it they all sound like mini-Manuel Delias.

How do you attract people who do not live and breathe politics? Conscientious recruitment. A(nother) friend of mine thinks the answer lies in setting up debate societies. First and foremost to bring to an end the shouting matches we like to call debates, and secondly to lure to politics people who are truly open minded.

“If I were a new party leader I’d set up debate competitions, with flight tickets for backpacking trips to Asia as prizes – and soon you’ll have a source of fresh people banding about ideas outside the box,” he said.

I think it’s a fantastic idea and I hope whoever is elected PN party leader takes this up. In actual fact, I hope it’s taken up by all political parties. It’s the only way out of tedious rhetoric, and rediscovering the philosophy behind the politics. It is our only hope for a decent, intelligent electoral campaign in five years’ time.

And maybe then, I can breathe and I’ll start packing chick-lit in my beach bag.

Twitter: @KrisChetcuti