Why do politicians resign? As we remember it – rightly or wrongly – it was once all about issues of principle or, at least, some matter of personal honour. These days, however, it seems that the usual cause is one of personal misbehaviour.
Certainly, we’ve never held our politicians in such personal low esteem. If you were to ask the general public to describe the personality of the average politician you might expect to hear words like ‘arrogant’, ‘shameless’, ‘dishonest’, ‘manipulative’, ‘reckless’ and ‘uncaring’.
In an article for the Atlantic, James Silver – a criminal defence attorney – points out that these are the classic characteristics of the psychopath:
But can he really be suggesting that our politicians are a bunch of knife-wielding maniacs? No, because it turns out that psychopathy is a much wider category than commonly imagined:
Furthermore, there are reasons why people with psychopathic tendencies might be attracted to politics:
Even worse, psychopaths might actually be well-adapted to a modern political environment:
In their anger with politicians some people claim that MPs have an easy life. This is demonstrably wrong, but, when confronted with the evidence, the retort is ‘well, no one made them do the job’. And that, of course, is precisely the point. To subject yourself to all the rubbish that a MP has to go through, you either have to be unusually brave or unusually mad or both.
But here’s a really mad idea: Politics might just benefit from the involvement of intelligent, imaginative, engaged individuals who nevertheless wish to enjoy a normal family life, a sensible working week and a reasonable degree of privacy.