The politics we deserve

So Wes Streeting resigned his office with great honour and noble sacrifice because he felt he could no longer give the prime minister the sort of confidence he deserved. Let’s ignore the fact for a second that flagship health legislation had been unveiled the day before and a principled politician might want to hang around to see it through.

Streeting talked about the importance of a debate about ideas and not personality – which I would imagine could be a good strategy for someone who was worried about a rival with a personality. Let’s ignore the personal appeal and charisma of potential leaders and focus instead on the detail of their proposals.

And what’s his big idea? He’s all about rejoining Europe, or not necessarily about rejoining Europe but thinks we ought to have a chat about it, as if everyone has been ignoring the topic for the last 10 years. Is it coincidence that the knife edge seat Andy Burnham has found to stand in was a largely Brexit leaning constituency?

Burnham now has to run a by-election campaign being Eurosceptic, but leave himself enough room to talk up a closer relationship with the EU because that will be palatable to his party. That’s our debate about ideas and not personality.

It’s exactly the weaselly student politics sort of behaviour that Jeremy Corbyn and others have criticised recently – and I don’t find myself agreeing with Jeremy Corbyn very often. I was a students’ union president myself for a couple of years in the 2000s, coincidentally the same period that Wes Streeting was involved in NUS. It’s strange to think how many good people were around back then who aren’t involved in politics anymore. Largely because most of them are in jobs where they can do good things and help people.

Like so many areas of life, top line politics doesn’t consist of the best of what the country has to offer, it’s populated by the people who are still there. I’m not saying they’re bad people, or bad politicians, but simply that we don’t have meritorious systems that promote the best. It’s the tricks and sneakiness and many-facedness that gets you along the way.

Maybe we get the politics we deserve, but I dread to think what that says about us as a country.