An anti-hypocrisy agenda will get Labour nowhere
Angela Rayner’s recent Twitter posts read like a Jeremiad against hypocrisy in politics. “This is not a government it is a racket,” she wrote in response to ITV News’ reporting on allegations that the government had “fast-tracked” contracts for Covid testing to selected organisations. The Tories had used “the pandemic as the cover to enrich the friends of Tory Ministers,” she said. Rayner has fashioned a position in the Labour leadership distinctive for its focus on Tory hypocrisy and its close cousin, Tory sleaze.
The Conservatives claim to be trying their best to grapple with the pandemic emergency; but at root, she says, all they really want is to enrich their mates in business. Rayner’s attack line on Tory hypocrisy long predates the Matt Hancock affair. Last September, Rayner accused the Conservative Party of talking a “good game” on the levelling-up agenda while in reality “turning their backs on the North”.
Labour leader Keir Starmer understandably went heavy on the theme of hypocrisy at PMQs this week. He cited the case of Ollie Bibby, 27, a leukaemia patient who was unable to see his family before he died. He died on 5 May, the day before the video of Matt Hancock kissing his aide was recorded: “Every time, it’s the same old story,” said Starmer: “Where the British people are doing everything asked of them, it’s one rule for them, another rule for everybody else.”
There is good reason why Labour should treat the Matt Hancock affair as a special case. But the opposition would be unwise to persist in dramatising the Labour-Conservative divide as a continual battle between the forces of hypocrisy and truthful conduct – it makes them sound sanctimonious and it won’t work.
Hancock’s hypocrisy was genuinely gargantuan. He didn’t just break the rules he helped construct. His lesser hypocrisy was to chasten the British public for misbehaviour and present himself as a paragon of good behaviour while doing precisely the opposite. His most serious crime went to the core of his political persona: for the last year, the Health Secretary presented himself as someone who cared about the public. No cheesy gesture to show that he really, really cared was out of bounds for Hancock – the NHS badge was worn at all times, and he even appeared to pretend to cry on TV at footage of the first Covid vaccine being administered in the UK.
There is a hypocrisy in “calling out” the hypocrisy of the rule-maker while only gesturing to the appalling character of the rules themselves. It was not Hancock’s hypocrisy that led to Ollie dying without seeing his family – the responsibility for that lies with the crude rules themselves, the rules Labour repeatedly voted for. “He begged to see his family,” Starmer said. Sir Keir never elaborates on what he would have done differently.
Over the centuries, hypocrisy has attracted complex responses from political theorists and philosophers of all stripes. For the Ancient Greeks, hypokrisis meant simply the act of performing in a drama, the practice of being one person while pretending to be another. But In his treatise Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes thought of “pious frauds” in authority as a danger to the State’s legitimacy. But he also believed that sovereigns could legitimately lie to the populace in order to maintain civil peace: “Reputation of power is power,” he wrote. Or to put it another way: “If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.”
We might well believe, like the philosopher Hannah Arendt, that, when confronted with really blatant examples of personal hypocrisy, “only the crime and the criminal… confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core”. But we also accept that hypocrisy – thought of in its original sense as assuming a role – is an essential political skill. On a more fundamental level, our constant wrestling with the problem of hypocrisy – mostly provoked by revelations in the press that public servants lie, dissemble and cheat – is the price we pay to live in a free society. In China, do newspapers point out the lies of leading ministers? Or dwell at length on the subtle hypocrisies of its ruling elite? No.
Labour shouldn’t rely on allegations of hypocrisy to beat the Tories – after all, look at how that turned out for the continuity Remain campaign. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, the liberal-left was taken over by a series of crusades against hypocritical campaigning in politics. The claim was that while Vote Leave affected to be addressing themselves to the post-industrial North; in reality, the Brexit project was about building a “Singapore-on-Thames” and selling off the NHS to the Americans. Did Brexiteers make promises they couldn’t keep? Of course. But it is also possible to argue that the Remain campaign itself played with the truth. Were they hypocrites, or just lying? Isn’t it just as hypocritical to believe that only your opponents have a unique claim to hypocrisy?
The Labour leadership is currently in transition, trying to move away from a defensive pandemic politics in which it supported the government at every turn because it felt it had to. But its attack lines are the standard accusations of Tory hypocrisy and sleaze. That “same old Tories” line eventually runs into the Boris problem: for Boris Johnson’s enduring appeal does not simply derive from his ability to “put on an act”. It derives from his ability to make his opponents look po-faced. They point out furiously that Boris’s persona is just an act. Voters interpret this argumentative ploy as too-clever-by-half. Unless the hypocrisy is colossal, voters often conclude – sensibly – that, while all politicians lie, some of them are just better at it than others. It is, as the pundits say, “priced in”. Harping on about hypocrisy isn’t going to change many minds.