The political soap opera – tasty, but not nutritious

Two things that happened today have given me pause for thought.

I’m working in a Central Government department in Whitehall for a few weeks, answering letters from disgruntled members of the public. At lunch today, I found myself walking alongside David Miliband down the road to the Foreign Office entrance. With his purposeful stride against my lazy saunter, he quickly passed me, as did his harassed adviser in tow. As they passed, he turned to his adviser and offered a demonstration of his fabled fierce intelligence and political cunning: “Looks like it’s going to rain again.”

The prospects of both Milibands – Ed and David – have been talked up this week, with Ed’s Climate Change White Paper and David’s Afghanistan campaign dominating the headlines. Ed seems to have come out on top. David, I have heard it said, lacks the ‘killer instinct’ after failing to make his move for the leadership before the reshuffle last month. In fact, I think David is simply too clever to make his move now – who would want to lead a doomed Labour Party? Six or seven years down the line, when the media and the public have become slightly less enamoured with the New Tories: that’s when we’ll see the re-emergence of David Miliband as a frontrunner for the leadership.

In my opinion, Miliband is the most likely candidate for next Labour Prime Minister, in perhaps thirteen or fourteen years’ time, barring a Cameron-like rise (MP in 2001; party leader in 2005; PM in 2010) from a new Labour MP elected next year. Although the party’s most likely route back into power might be having a fresh-faced youngster at the helm, representing a complete break from this shambolic Government, I wouldn’t bet against Miliband somehow rebranding himself as a phoenix from the flames of the current Labour party rather than a central figure in it. After all, if there’s one thing that David Miliband is good at, it’s being a “politician”, with all that word connotes: the ability to refashion oneself according to what is politically useful.

A world away from these political machinations, a letter lands on my desk from Mrs —. Mrs — is a disabled 44-year-old with mental health problems, living on her own in a council estate which happens to be down the road from my flat. She composes 10-page narratives on her life, writing to Gordon Brown as if he was a personal friend. These end up with me, as she has a range of health problems and one of the few legible words in her latest letter is ‘surgery’. My job is to send her a stock reply.

Mrs — clearly needs more help than she is getting. Why is sending her a stock letter about surgery options the best that Government can do for her? What can be done to help her manage her life? To what extent can we make her life easier and more bearable in the context of limited resources? These are just a few of the many difficult questions, on all sorts of social issues, which need some kind of answer. So far, we are not getting it from politicians.

Everyone enjoys the political soap opera, but it has a major and detrimental effect on the work that Government and opposition parties can do on the real issues. The reasons why the media and politicians themselves are interested in the political soap opera rather than in complex social problems are obvious. The soap opera offers simple problems to which the solution is inevitably a change of leader. The harvest of this view for the media is a series of sensationalist headlines; while for the politicians involved it is the illusion of change – “now we are equipped to tackle the real issues” runs the cry. But, as everyone knows, they never really do get round to tackling them: because solving social problems requires an expensive, long-term commitment to measures which – gasp – may not even be headline-grabbing.