What do “people in the real world” care about? It is a question as old as failing government itself. Yet, crucially, it is something that you – a person, in the real world – are not cleared to answer yourself. Instead, it needs a politician to inform you what you care about – and, much more frequently and much more dismissively, what you don’t care about. Once these permissible areas of giving-a-toss have been delineated, the politicians who told you what they were can get on with the long process of not fixing them, at the end of which they will tell you that those problems are fake/niche/latte-based because, out there in the world where you never go, people aren’t talking about them.
Let’s see this in action. At the height of Boris Johnson’s Partygate furore, one of his cabinet ministers ruled witheringly that none of this stuff was a concern “when you get out into the real world and you talk to real people”. Another high-profile Tory soon joined in the real-worlding, instructing people: “There are many things which matter much more in the real world.” People, so people were told, actually didn’t care about the thing they could be heard appearing to care about on phone-ins, vox pops and across their social media.
A few months on, we had Liz Truss’s catastrophic mini-budget, which imploded when it made landfall with the real world. But this financial horror show, too, was not in fact something that people in that real world cared about. “What the people I speak to –” Truss explained amid the smoking ruins of her economic policies, “and I’ve done a lot of travelling around the country over the past few months – what people care about is, in the town or city I live in: are there jobs opportunities, are the new businesses investing, does my high street look better than it used to look, are roads being built, can I get mobile phone signal? That’s what people care about!” What’s that? Their mortgages? Oh you rarefied old elitist, you. NO ONE cared about their mortgages. Real-world people were absolutely mystified and outraged by Truss’s subsequent ejection from Downing Street.
This is because whenever a politician does something bad, real people in the real world are completely relaxed and simply want them to be getting on with something different. The publication of the Sue Gray report offered the perfect occasion for Johnson to trumpet Brexit freedoms. “This is what I think people want us to focus on,” he judged. “I want to say to the people of this country: I know what the issue is. Yes. It is whether this government can be trusted to deliver.” Yes, that was the issue! Confusingly, while the publication of the Sue Gray report was an opportunity to talk about the approved real-world subject of Brexit, last weekend’s tailback crisis at the port of Dover was not. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, denied the hours-long queues were even remotely connected with Brexit, and instead blamed them partially on the weather. Real-world people want the government to piss down their back and tell them it’s raining.
Expect much more of this. A month out from the local elections, we have reached the point in the bankruptcy-of-ideas cycle in which party leaders make their pitch to the electorate by informing them what they do and don’t care about. This week is “crime week”, in which the Tories have launched a number of policies to crack down on crime because – can I shock you? – you should know that people care about crime.
Yesterday, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was revealing to people that people care about grooming gangs. It’s unclear quite how it has taken this long for the party that’s been in power for the past 13 years to realise that people do care about grooming gangs – but I expect to learn imminently that people won’t care about that delay, or the fact that child sexual abuse is far, far bigger than just grooming gangs. People will only care that no political correctness stops a crackdown on this bit of the problem now, even if any number of things presumably stopped politicians cracking down on the problem before.
For his part, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, was talking about women and trans issues by explaining across the airwaves that: “Almost nobody is talking about trans issues. I do sometimes just wonder why on earth we spend so much of our time discussing something which isn’t a feature of the dinner table or the kitchen table or the cafe table or the bar.” Naming a full three types of table there, Starmer seeks to convey an easy familiarity with ordinary people’s real-world equipment – the sort of authentic furniture around which food or even drink may be taken by real people. Where he comes from – the real world – tables have four legs and a sort of flat bit on top, and I think that’s what real people from Workington Man to Stevenage Woman want to talk about.
Impressively, even sewage was deemed a non-real-world issue for a long time, despite people being able to watch the stuff literally being sprayed into the water. Nearly 18 months ago, the government voted – on the eve of its own international eco summit! – to reject an attempt by the Lords to crack down on the discharge of sewage into rivers and waterways. As one Conservative MP put it: “It is necessary to be realistic.” We must live in a new reality, however, as today Thérèse Coffey is set to announce a plan to threaten water companies dumping sewage with unlimited fines.
As for the success of this favoured political tactic of the age, would you say that, overall, it is working? Far be it for me to speak for all “real people”, but as a single real person I have to say my overall impression is that the only people who don’t actually live in the real world are the politicians who deploy the device. Instead of listening with any kind of humility after the rolling binfire of the past several years, they seem to have adopted a tactic of telling people what they do and don’t want. Everywhere you look there is a politician coming off like some terrible amateur hypnotist, waving their hand slightly too close to your face and saying, “Aaaaaand … you don’t care about any of this.” People seem more sceptical than ever of their ability to fix anything much.
On the one hand, I guess these politicians are trying something really quite radical: an entirely new type of populism, which involves constantly citing what “the people” really want, at the same time as telling said people that they don’t want the things they want. On the other hand, it is – how to put this? – not immediately obvious how this approach is going to amount to giving the people what they want. But of course, as they never stop implying, they know best.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
