In era of social media politicians don’t think enough before they act

WHETHER it’s a brilliant idea that morphs into a failed stroke, or a cock-up that started with the best of intentions, there’s a time to raise the hands and say you got it wrong.

That rarely happens. The deafening collective volume of criticism any controversy generates in a multiple of media outlets tends to deafen the people at the centre of the problem and militate against them coolly considering their options.

Nobody should ever underestimate the real effect of criticism. Everybody believes they welcome and learn from criticism. Almost nobody ever really does. For the most part, even dressed up as “constructive”, criticism is experienced as a personal assault without justification or evidence which, left unopposed, will further reflect on the one being criticised and make them appear cowardly. Leaving an accusation unanswered on a major radio or TV programme seems impossible. The view is taken that to be absent would be to empower the enemy.

Then loyalty kicks in. Loyalty is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to humanity, turning a manageable problem into a killer crisis. Once loyalty comes into play, innocent by-standers feel the need to don the green jersey (or a jersey of whatever colour indicates fealty) and stand by their man or woman, even if they become road-kill in the process. The urge to defend the pass is visceral, even when the pass is clearly not worth defending and is self-evidently irrecoverable. Three days later, loyalty can look like idiocy and honest supportive effort can look like even worse idiocy.

It’s akin to the experience of the mounted soldiers of the Light Brigade who were ordered to ride into the Valley of Death, with, according to Lord Tennyson, no illusions about the rationale or the outcome.

“Someone had blundered:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.”

In their situation, it wasn’t mainstream and social media that filled up their brains with noise. Instead, “cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them, volleyed and thundered...” Not that different, then, to the situation facing those in a political PR disaster, when it’s all noise, threat, terror and someone in authority demanding action of some pointless kind. Except, of course, that the Light Brigade guys – most of them – ended up dead, whereas politicians in a parallel situation end up politically dead or severely wounded. In neither case did or does anybody learn anything. In modern politics, the all-pervasive presence and mutual competition of media tends to obviate learning from experience: the politician is bounced from a poll to a by-election to a problem to a scandal to another poll and then into an election.

Absent the constant demands of media and the ridiculous two-phone permanent availability to their constituents, politicians in the past had more time to reflect and develop. The criticisms reaching them, too, often came in more useful forms than a flurry of abusive tweets or a cacophany of tut-tutting from newspaper columnists.

Oxford Professor of Politics Archie Brown instances an account where a politician not known for openness clearly learned from an initially unwelcome criticism. The politician was British prime minister Winston Churchill and the critic was Clement Attlee, his deputy prime minister in a brief post-war coalition government. Attlee saw himself as having a role in shaping the behaviour of his prime minister, not by criticisms in the newspapers of the day, attributed or anonymous, but by using more direct and discreet means.

“At the beginning of 1945, he typed with two fingers a two-thousand-word letter of protest to Churchill, doing so himself in order that his criticism would remain strictly between the two men themselves,” writes Brown. “This was an unusually long letter from Attlee, of whom it was aptly said that he would never use one word when none would do. He observed that it was ‘very exceptional’ for Churchill to have read cabinet committee conclusions when these papers went to the cabinet. Consequently, half an hour more would be wasted ‘explaining what could have been grasped by two or three minutes reading of the document’. Moreover: ‘Not infrequently a phrase catches your eye which gives rise to a disquisition on an interesting point only slightly connected with the subject matter.’ But, said Attlee, there was ‘something worse’. Churchill paid far too much attention to two ministers who where not members of the war cabinet, Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. (These were Churchill’s personal cronies. However, far from spelling that out, Attlee did not even refer to them by name – only by their official titles, the lord privy seal and the minister of information.) Attlee strongly asserted the supremacy cabinet, writing: ‘There is a serious constitutional issue here. In the eyes of the country and under our constitution the eight members of the war cabinet take responsibility for decisions.”

If Attlee imagined that Churchill would read the letter and then sit down on his own, reflect upon it and make a firm purpose of amendment based on its stringent advice, he was mistaken. Churchill hit the ceiling and immediately went on a search for people who would find the letter as outrageous as he did. Lord Beaverbrook, one of the first people with whom he shared it, described it as ‘a very good letter’. Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, described it as ‘both true and wholesome’. Churchill’s private secretary made an equally positive note in his diary: ‘Greatly as I love and admire the PM, I am afraid there is much in what Attlee says, and I rather admire his courage in saying it.’

Unable to find comfort in any of the predictable directions, Churchill went into a mad cycle of drafting and re-drafting sarcastic replies, none of which was posted to his second in command. Of course, Churchill could rage in a benign vacuum, experiencing no pressure from media because Attlee had gone to such lengths to prevent the possibility of a leak. All of which, in sharp contrast to today’s constant demands on politicians, particularly when in government positions, to reply to everything immediately, allowed the prime minister to sleep on the issue.

Next morning, he had begun to see the issue in a different light, influenced, not just by Attlee’s arguments but by the responses of his wife and Lord Beaverbrook. Before much more time elapsed, he replied. His letter was not long and it was short on enthusiasm, but it was properly respectful and included the promise: ‘You may be sure I shall always endeavour to profit by your counsels.’

The availability of mass and social media to politicians has radically improved the speed and breadth of information reaching them. But it has also radically reduced the amount of time they have in which to hear, accommodate and learn from advice from colleagues who themselves are frequently too busy to offer such advice.

Then loyalty kicks in. Loyalty is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to humanity