Here’s a cast-iron rule of politics: authenticity matters. It is almost all that matters. If you have it, you’re made. If you don’t, no team of PR professionals can manufacture it for you.
In the past few weeks, one politician has driven this lesson home: Angela Rayner. On the face of it, she’s on the ropes. After claims she once dodged paying capital gains tax on the sale of a council house, she has suffered a hammering in the press and from the opposition. But if she weathers the storm, I reckon she’ll come out on top. Despite everything, her character has been burnished as a chorus of pundits and colleagues have rushed to her defence, framing her as feisty, self made, hardworking and straight talking. A sample, from Matthew Parris in the right-leaning Times: “Angela Rayner’s only crime is being an uppity lass.”
Then, at prime minister’s questions, a further gaffe from Rayner: she called Rishi Sunak a “pint-sized loser”. Well, coming from anyone else it would have been a gaffe. Instead, Rayner landed her blow: “So how DOES ‘pint-sized Rishi’ measure up to other world leaders?” ran a headline in the usually hostile Daily Mail.
And recall the reaction to Rayner’s last big blunder, when she called Tories “scum”. “Here is someone who says what she thinks and answers the questions, with some wit,” wrote Sean O’Grady in the Independent, who felt Rayner was “turning into a bit of cult figure”. And here’s news presenter Cathy Newman: Rayner was “aggressive, cheeky and [speaks] with a knowledge of the real world”.
How does Rayner do it? She’s authentic. It’s a rare enough quality in politics. John Prescott had it – after he punched a protester and his popularity among party members actually rose. Nigel Farage had it. Boris Johnson had it. Tony Blair had it. Margaret Thatcher had it. And Rayner has it. Her “gaffes” only serve to boost her reputation.
These men and women are exceptions because it is extremely hard to seem authentic in politics. A central task of the job – selling yourself to voters – burdens you with an obvious ulterior motive from the start. Even if your values coincide exactly with what you are saying, your audience may suspect otherwise. How can they trust you? How can they trust any doorstep salesman? You have an agenda, after all.
To make matters worse, you have a party line to stick to. It’s impossible to seem genuine when every single one of your colleagues is saying exactly the same thing. Then, too, collective discipline means you must sometimes defend indefensible colleagues, or seem enthusiastic about policies you hate. Worst of all, you are sometimes required to trot out a particular form of words when navigating a delicate subject. It is here, in the hands of a probing interviewer, that politicians are at their most insincere. All they can do is repeat themselves and dodge the question; even the best actors can struggle to seem spontaneous when saying their lines for the twentieth time.
How to be authentic when every aspect of your job is working against you? Here’s an extra catch: the harder you try to seem sincere, the more disingenuous you may appear, as voters guess, quite accurately, that it is all a marketing scheme. This is sometimes referred to as the “authenticity doom loop”, where every attempt to seem relatable makes you less so. For International Women’s Day last month, Sunak revealed details of how he split household chores with his wife. He enjoyed dishwasher stacking, he said, and making the bed. The reaction was disdainful. The prime minister was trying to seem normal, people said. He was attempting to fool them.
Occasionally, a politician does manage to square the circle. Last week, shadow minister Darren Jones won praise for seeming unusually honest. During an LBC panel debate with Iain Dale, he was asked for his take on ID cards, and replied he didn’t know, because he wasn’t sure what his party’s position was. Later in the programme he received the information by text. “I’ve got my lines!”, he announced, before reading them out.
But this is a complicated trick – acknowledging your job as inherently insincere, an act you are obliged to perform. This is the method that Johnson employed – winking at the audience as he went through the motions of “being a politician”. Jacob Rees-Mogg tries the same manoeuvre, if with less success. But Rayner belongs to a different set of authentic politicians; she is truly genuine. She, like Jeremy Corbyn, says what she thinks because she can’t help it – even to the extent of prioritising her own views over party messaging, or her own political interests.
Leaning in to a stereotype can also help. Johnson and Farage both seemed genuine partly because they made themselves caricatures; they conformed to a recognisable type. This is where women can struggle. In countries where female politicians are rarer, women are by definition acting against stereotype. In the US, which has yet to produce a female president, studies show women find it hard to appear authentic, whereas research from Norway, where politics is more gender balanced, suggests they are perceived as more authentic than male candidates.
What about Britain? A glance at female politicians on the right – Theresa May, Liz Truss – suggests the model for success is rather narrow: candidates must ape Thatcher. But Rayner’s nearest stereotype – the straight-talking northerner – is genderless. Perhaps the scope for female politicians is widening.
Is it a good thing, then, that we prize authenticity above nearly anything else? I’m not sure. There are few occupations in which “being your authentic self” is more important than “doing the job” and for good reason. Master sincerity, and you can get away with almost anything in politics. But should you?
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
