Career Politicians & Direct Participation

I heard a debate on R4 about career politicians and direct participation, and I'm currently undecided. Which is annoying, because I prefer my opinions to arrive fully formed, like a well made cabinet door, rather than wobbling around in public like a newborn foal.

The anti-career-politician side made a decent point. Politics can become a sealed ecosystem where people spend so long climbing the internal ladder they forget the rest of us don’t live inside Westminster. They start talking in acronyms, moving from think tank to SPAD to ministerial office, and before you know it they’re announcing “bold reforms” that look suspiciously like a PowerPoint slide with a human haircut.

But the pro-career-politician side also has a point, and it’s the bit everyone skips because it’s less satisfying than a rant. Parliament is a trade. Most MPs arrive knowing how to campaign, how to do media, and how to survive the constant noise. They do not arrive knowing how the state actually functions. They don’t understand the rhythms of legislation, the dead weight of procedure, the silent power of the Treasury, the legal limits, the international constraints, or the fact that every “simple solution” has three unintended consequences and a bill attached.

That knowledge doesn’t drop into your lap on day one. It comes from the grind.

And the grind is not glamorous. It’s endless reading, briefings, Select Committees, constituency casework, and learning the hard way that government is mostly about saying “no” to things you’d love to say “yes” to. It’s dealing with civil servants who know more than you do, stakeholders who want something for nothing, and a media environment that treats complexity as a personal failing. It’s learning to spot the difference between a policy that sounds good and a policy that survives contact with law, budgets, and physics.

This is also where the PPE thing matters. A few MPs have done PPE, which at least suggests they’ve had formal exposure to politics, economics, and the basic idea of trade-offs. Plenty of new entrants haven’t even got that. They’re not stupid, but they’re arriving with enthusiasm and opinions, then being handed a department, a red box, and a problem that hasn’t been solved since 1978.

Which brings me to the comparison nobody likes because it’s too obvious. You wouldn’t trust a brain surgeon who didn’t have experience. And you’d trust him even less if he didn’t have a medical degree. Yet in politics we do this odd thing where we sneer at experience, sneer at training, and then act amazed when the results look like an amateur dramatics society trying to run an airport.

And if you want a case study in why the grind matters, look at Boris Johnson.

Johnson didn’t just have a talent for chaos. He had a talent for promoting people too early, for the wrong reasons. Loyalty and message discipline were treated as qualifications. Competence and experience were optional extras, like heated seats. People were moved up the ladder fast because they were useful to him, not because they were ready to run anything.

That has consequences. Departments aren’t debating societies. If you put someone in charge who doesn’t understand the brief, doesn’t know how to interrogate advice, and is terrified of contradicting the leader, you don’t get “fresh thinking”. You get paralysis, blunders, and policy made by headline.

It also poisons the culture. If everyone can see that the route to promotion is flattery rather than ability, you select for the wrong personality types. You get courtiers, not administrators. You get people who never say “this won’t work” because they’re trying to stay in favour. And you lose the one thing government needs most: internal honesty before the public humiliation arrives.

Somebody on the direct participation side said the answer is “expertise on tap, ordinary citizens on top”. It sounds marvellous. Like ordering a new kitchen. You pick the colour, and a team of professionals quietly makes it all happen behind the scenes.

The problem is that “expertise on tap” only works if the person doing the tapping knows what questions to ask, can judge competing advice, and can accept trade-offs. Otherwise expertise becomes a buffet. You pick the expert who tells you what you wanted to hear, and you call the others “the establishment”.

And there’s another awkward truth: ordinary citizens on top doesn’t get rid of elites. It just changes which elites win. You end up with organised activists, lobbyists, donors, and media operators doing the steering, while the citizens provide the decorative seal of approval. It’s democracy as a showroom model.

On the other hand, I do get the anger. It’s hard to watch people regulate an industry one minute and then pop up the next in a well-paid “strategic advisory” role in the same sector. Even if nothing illegal happened, it looks like the job was an extended audition. And if you were on a fairly normal salary before politics, the temptation is obvious. Parliament pays decently, but it doesn’t pay “private sector redemption arc” money. After years of being shouted at in the street and having your life turned into a headline, a cushy job offer starts to look like compensation.

So yes, I’m undecided. Not because I can’t see the flaws in career politicians, but because I’m not convinced direct participation fixes them. It might just swap one set of problems for another, with fewer safeguards and more shouting.

At the moment I’m leaning towards a dull conclusion, which is usually a sign it’s true: we need representative democracy, but with tighter rules on lobbying, longer cooling-off periods, proper enforcement, and a bit more direct citizen involvement where it actually works, like citizens’ assemblies and local decisions with real information and time.

In other words, keep the engine, improve the brakes, and stop pretending the steering wheel can be handed to the loudest bloke in the comments.