August is the month when those of us who spend most of the year fixated on Westminster let politics drift into our peripheral vision, which is how most people see it the rest of the time. It is the benefit I have come to appreciate most from a summer holiday – the shift in perspective that accompanies a more abstemious news diet. Constant grazing on the minutiae of ministerial statements is not normal.
That’s a slippery word, “normal”, and I use it here drenched in caveat. I’m not talking about median voters on economic charts or a midpoint between ideological extremes. Normal isn’t a demographic segment. It doesn’t mean mainstream. It isn’t the centre ground. It isn’t ardent or apathetic, although it could be both simultaneously, depending on the issue. Normal is politics as it appears to people who are busy doing something else.
The winner in British elections tends to be the side that most appeals to that vast, amorphous constituency whose preferences are, by definition, ill-defined. There is an art in coming across as less intrusively political than the other side. The unspoken pitch is not to use up all the mental bandwidth that voters would rather spare for things other than politics.
This was the devious genius of the campaign slogan that won Boris Johnson his huge majority in 2019. “Get Brexit done” worked on two levels. It offered satisfaction to people who desperately wanted to leave the EU, but it also contained the lesser consolation of being left alone to the larger number, including remainers who hadn’t felt all that strongly about Europe in 2016 and wished the whole damned business would just go away.
Johnson himself was much less popular than is implied by the result of that election, which is narrated by the former prime minister’s fans as proof of his preternatural charisma. Theresa May’s net approval rating was higher going into the 2017 election – in which she was humiliated – than Johnson’s was on the eve of his triumph. The differentiating factor was the increase in determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street.
That impulse was not exclusively, or even substantially, motivated by policy. Individual items in Corbyn’s manifesto were popular. But the Labour leader represented the opposite of “get Brexit done”, and not just on the thorny matter of relitigating the referendum. He was seen as a fanatic, the ringleader of lapel-grabbing, finger-jabbing cranks who think politics should be more in- your- face.
That stance, culturally rebarbative to many British voters, has now been adopted by the Conservative party. It stands out more grotesquely when you let politics drift past in the background. It is the face that leers from the crowd, eyes bulging, veins throbbing, fizzing with idiosyncratic fury: the Lee Anderson look. The deputy Tory party chairman is convinced that election victory is reached through deep culture-war trenches; by railing against all that is “woke” and telling asylum seekers to “fuck off back to France”.
There are many people who share Anderson’s opinions and some who relish the intemperate way he expresses them. Rishi Sunak gave him a job for that reason, calculating also that it is better to have a self-styled hard man of the right spitting bile out of the tent than spewing into it. But it badly misreads the room to think the absent quality that people are really craving from their politics today is aggression, or that a knack for stirring social media into a frenzy is a measure of what, in the analogue era, used to be called the common touch.
The internet has obviously had a radicalising effect on politics around the world. The mechanism is well documented: people dwell in information silos, have their prejudices amplified and insulate themselves from discomfiting truths. But the extent to which that may have changed the fundamental parameters of debate in Britain is hard to know when it is tangled up with the additional polarising mechanism of a referendum.
Not just any plebiscite. Brexit stirred complex questions about the nation’s economic and strategic future together with even harder questions about identity, belonging and the past. It then squirted the roiling stew down two narrow channels – leave and remain.
Those identities threatened to wash away traditional party allegiance. They saturated two general-election campaigns in ways that made the results hard to interpret in terms of conventional left/right preference.
Brexit is not now done in the way that Johnson promised, but it is subordinate to other issues. Even people who wish it could be reversed (and they are many) dream of that mission being accomplished by creeping consensus, because no one wants a reenactment of battles that bitterly divided the nation.
No one, that is, except those Conservatives who know no other way to conduct politics. For a certain breed of Brexit belligerent, the period that much of the country would gladly forget is a monument to campaign success and a model for future glory.
Sunak indulges that delusion but without the evangelical conviction that would at least confer a sheen of authenticity. This is a weakness that shows up most if you don’t follow the prime minister closely but catch sight of him, as most people do, only in passing. There is a pleading sterility about his manner, as if he is handling his own policy with surgical gloves for fear of contamination.
It probably doesn’t help that the one thing many people know about the prime minister is that he is stupendously, abnormally rich. Wealth needn’t be an obstacle to connection with voters, even in a cost of living crisis, but it raises the bar when Sunak tries (and fails) blokeish affability.
Not that Keir Starmer effortlessly clears that hurdle. Even friends of the Labour leader lament his peculiar knack for hiding relative normality and humble decency from the camera. But the opposition frontbench, under Starmer’s guidance, has successfully cornered the market in unthreatening banality. That might not sound like much of an achievement, but it counts for a lot when the Tory tone is hysterical menace.
There is a lot more Labour needs to do to earn voters’ willing endorsement. Plenty can still go wrong for Starmer. His lead in opinion polls is founded on a calculated vagueness, and yet that doesn’t necessarily mean it is evanescent. People who don’t follow politics closely might not be able to put their finger on why Labour should be given a go at government, but the idea that Britain needs another term under the Tories feels palpably weirder.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
