Politics and the Amateur Ideal

I once heard someone say it’s a shame that Fred Perry didn’t win more Grand Slams in tennis.  Pretty inarguable, I thought.  Then I looked up what Perry got up to after his final major, the 1936 US Open (or the US Championships, as it was called then).  It turned out he didn’t drop off the face of the earth.  He simply turned pro.  Although if you listen to some people, he may as well have vanished.

            The nature and chronology of the drives towards professionalisation vary from sport to sport, and it doesn’t do to enumerate them all here, because as much as I’d love to give you the lowdown on Fred Perry’s career using my newly-acquired knowledge, tennis isn’t really what I want to talk about.  But to be brief: football in Britain became professional at its highest level as early as the late nineteenth century; professionals were finally allowed to play in the tennis majors in 1968, merging the championship lineage of the new ‘Opens’ with that of the old amateur-only tournaments and thus consigning much of Fred Perry’s career, and that of Pancho Gonzales, the top professional player of the 60s, to the status of historical curio rather than canonical glory.  Rugby union held out until 1995.  Slowly but surely, the amateur ideal is receding into the past.

            In his wonderful book, What Sport Tells Us About Life, the former Kent cricket captain and sometime Test batsman Ed Smith identifies a reversal in the valences ascribed to the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’.  Traditionally, it was considered grubby to earn, expect or demand money for playing sport, whereas amateur status conferred nobility and honour; you played not because you wanted to be rewarded, but because you loved the game.  Nowadays, if a team is poorly organised, lazy and/or unskilled they are said to be ‘amateurish’.  Conversely, ‘professional’ signifies praise.  You got your heads down, worked hard, played your designated role and came away with the win you wanted.  The only sport in which amateurs still enjoy more glory and respect than professionals is wrestling, and one could argue that amateur and professional wrestling are so different as to render any comparison redundant.

            Increasingly, politics is becoming an arena in which ‘professional’ is a dirty word.  In one sense this is nothing new.  It used to be that MPs comprised a phalanx of wealthy lords and landowners, who entered politics not because they desired to gain further riches but because of a fervour for public service.  Admittedly noble, but with the effect of excluding less well-off would-be politicians from this service.  Thankfully this changed in 1911, and politics became a profession with commensurate remuneration.  But I’ve noticed the amateur ideal re-emerging in recent years.  To give one example, in the general election earlier this year I received a leaflet from my local Conservative candidate (God bless him for thinking I would ever vote for the swine).  It listed his career achievements, his policies for the local area and, of course, a big ol’ picture of his mug.  And, with a depressing inevitability, it was adorned with the phrase ‘I’m not a professional politician’.  You see this more and more these days.  There is a segment of the electorate with whom this sort of claim plays well.  But, as Samuel Beckett might have said, not I.  When I saw the words ‘I’m not a professional politician’, all I thought to myself was, ‘Oh, ok.  I…kind of wish you were’.  My local MP is Labour’s Ben Bradshaw, who has held the seat since 1997.  You could call him a professional politician, for sure.  But, just as you might praise Chelsea (though increasingly infrequently these days) for being ‘professional’ in grinding out a 1-0 win on the proverbial wet Wednesday night in Stoke, Ben Bradshaw is great at his profession.  A model professional, if you will.  He was Culture Secretary between 2009 and 2010, as the Gordon Brown government spluttered to a rattling halt like a dodgy Zafira.  He was a candidate for Deputy Leader of the party (coming last in the ballot, admittedly).  He’s turned what used to be a safe Tory seat into a little red stronghold in the predominantly blue South West.  Ben Bradshaw is a professional politician.  But that doesn’t make me dislike him.  Rather, it gives him a track record that makes me far more likely to vote for him than some Conservative tyro who thinks that the amateur ideal can hold sway in contemporary politics.  Yet sadly, Tory-boy may be right in the long run.

            It’s profoundly ridiculous when you think about it.  Politics must be the only profession in the world where applicants proudly trumpet their lack of experience in order to try and get a job.  This would never happen elsewhere.  No prospective corporate executive would open an interview by saying ‘You don’t know me from Adam and I don’t know the first shitting thing about loss adjustment, but god damn it, I’m really enthusiastic and I reckon I’d do well’.  Wanting something isn’t a qualification.  To return briefly to sport, I play in goal for a 6-a-side football team.  I’m not great, but I try hard and I do a more skilful job than most people would.  Now imagine that I call Roy Hodgson, tell him that Joe Hart’s been a bit rubbish recently and that I would do better as England keeper.  Roy, being the intelligent and fair-minded gent that he is, would lend me a receptive ear and tell me to state my case.  I’m hardly going to tell him, ‘Well, I’m not a professional footballer’.  If I wanted to get over my exile from international football by setting up a company with a large loan, I’m not going to tell the nice lady at HSBC that I’m a rank amateur in the business world.  And if I injure myself in an attempt to prove that bastard Hodgson wrong, and the Tories have achieved their wet dream of privatising the NHS using the same amateur-ideal logic they’ve used with regard to education, which holds that any old fucker can set up a school, if the man in the white coat tells me, ‘I’m not a professional surgeon’, I’m out of there as fast as my knackered legs can carry me.

            Staying with business and surgery, let’s turn back to politics, and to America, because it’s across the pond that the worrying imbrication of politics and the amateur ideal is emerging most vividly.  The clown car of candidates that is the Republican Party presidential primaries comprises a cavalcade of professional politicians.  State governors, congressmen, senators.  And who are the two most popular runners, and by a long way to boot?  Donald Trump and Ben Carson.  An entrepreneur and a neurosurgeon.

            I’ll start with the Donald.  I hesitate to call his candidacy ‘anti-political’ as some pundits have done, because he was an intensely political figure long before he officially announced his intention to run for the Oval Office.  ‘Anti-establishment’ is perhaps more accurate.  His supporters point to his record of success in business, charitably ignoring his multiple bankruptcies, as proof that he’s got what it takes to lead the country.  He shoots from the hip, they say when he calls Mexicans rapists or patronises women, because they’re largely the sort of people who perceive shooting as glorious rather than a terrible last resort.  He brings new ideas, and sees politics with the eyes of an outsider.  He’s an amateur.  He’s never held elected office.  But that doesn’t seem to have harmed his standing in the polls.  In fact, it’s proved a distinct advantage.  Republican voters have become so virulently opposed not just to the right-wing mainstream but to the very idea of government, that they view public service as a black mark against Jeb Bush, or Ted Cruz, or Rand Paul.  If you want to be President, the less experience you have the better.

            Which brings me to Ben Carson, Trump’s closest rival at present.  Whatever you think of Trump, at least he possesses a business acumen (of a sort) which may help him negotiate the corridors of power, and his wealth limits the extent to which he will be beholden to corporate interests in the unlikely event of his taking office.  Carson doesn’t even have that.  Now, before I gleefully rip him to shreds I’m going to speak up for Ben Carson, which I am not generally wont to do.  He’s retired now, but when he was a neurosurgeon he was by all accounts superb at his job.  He saved countless lives, many of them children.  Well done to him, sincerely.  Does this qualify him to be President of the United States?  Not a fucking bit.

            Here’s how Ben Carson got into politics, in case you’re unaware.  Every year there’s an event in America called the National Prayer Breakfast, in which numerous faith leaders get together with the President, say a few words to, and about, the god of their choice, and enjoy pancakes in a contemplative setting.  In 2013 Carson appeared at this shindig, speaking on behalf of the Seventh Day Adventist community.  Breaking from the convention that the Prayer Breakfast was to be apolitical, he launched an attack on Barack Obama, with specific reference to his socialised healthcare policy.  This brought him to national fame, and led a group of conservative Christians, delighted that someone was finally brave enough to speak up for the interests of this marginalised, oppressed group, began a ‘Draft Carson’ campaign to encourage him to run for President.  He did, and here we are.

            Ben Carson’s even more of a political amateur than Donald Trump.  If Trump’s the journeyman non-league footballer who used to be on the books at Aston Villa, Carson’s the fat bloke who plays centre back for your local pub team.  He’s never run a political campaign, he’s never served in the Senate, Congress, or as relatively minor a legislative body as a State Senate.  He’s never even been mayor of the tiniest tinpot small town.  His principal qualification for office is that he’s a conservative Christian in the public eye, a prominence engendered by his rather ill-mannered willingness to politicise what was meant to be a reflective spiritual gathering.  That’s all.  So he was a world-leading neurosurgeon.  Irrelevant.  So he has an inspiring (if gradually unravelling) personal story about how faith in God saved him from a life of crime and violence.  Irrelevant.  His popularity is doubly puzzling when you consider that there are numerous candidates in the race who believe much the same retrograde Christian wank about abortion, homosexuality and Islam.  Ah, but of course.  They’re professional politicians.

            I’m not saying that you should always go for the continuity candidate.  Some governments and MPs become complacent over time.  They may need turfing out.  And the political system as it stands is fundamentally broken.  New people and new ideas can shake it up.  All I’m asking is that you refrain from blind faith that political outsiders are inevitably going to do a better job than professional politicians.  Quite often that simply isn’t the case.  Blanket condemnation of currently serving politicians, as we saw during the expenses scandal, is misguided and frankly dangerous, because it creates a space in which extremist neophytes with little political acumen can thrive.  Look at UKIP in Britain, the Front National in France, Golden Dawn in Greece.  Look at Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who are currently benefiting from Republicans’ disenchantment with their party machine.  We cannot follow these Republicans in becoming a nation of people who somehow see experience as an automatic negative trait in our politicians.  And at the same time, we must have the courage to accept new blood when it is able to demonstrate, in detail, its competence to govern.  Take each candidate as you find them, not with respect to their life story or their relative imbrication with political apparatuses but because of their policies and ideas, because of the job you think they’ll do.  Leave the amateur ideal in the nineteenth century.  Where it belongs.