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Politicians and privacy: protesting too much?

An outsider listening to British politicians protest against media intrusion into their family life would think that they have a point. But the truth is that it is a lot of sanctimonious humbug. And here’s why.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair seldom lost a photo opportunity to show off his children. Remember him famously posing outside No. 10 holding his newly-born baby Leo? And all those Downing Street leaks about how the then French President Jacques Chir ac simply loved little Leo even as he hated his father’s politics?

Yet Cherie Blair took out a legal injunction against their nanny writing anything about the Blair children in a book about her days in Downing Street.

Likewise, Tory leader David Cameron is always talking about his disabled child to emphasise his “commitment” to the need for a better public health service and for more schools for children with special needs. But when it doesn’t suit him politically his family life suddenly turns into a “no-go” zone.

And, in a toe-curling confession, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg told a men’s magazine that he slept with “no more than 30 women” before settling down with his wife. Yet, when the media wants to know if he ever took illegal drugs he is quick to invoke the “privacy” clause protesting “what I got up to as a teenager is not relevant to my job now.” How is boasting about his sexual conquests “relevant” to the job? Or is it? I’m just a bit puzzled.

Last week Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who wears his fetish about privacy on his sleeves, did what no other previous Labour leader had ever done: in what the BBC described as a “break with tradition” he wheeled out his wife Sarah at the party’s annual conference in Manchester to promote his image of a solid “family man” who understood the problems of Britain’s hardworking families.

Delegates were surprised when, instead of the party’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, the normally low-profile Mrs. Brown appeared on the stage to introduce her husband before his “make-or-break” keynote address. Like a good housewife, she spoke about her husband’s “achievements” and his “motivation” to help people.

“I’m so proud that every day I see him motivated to work for the best interests of people all around the country,” she told the conference as amid cheers Mr. Brown stepped up to deliver his speech in which, ironically, he took a potshot at those who used their children as “props.”

Mrs. Brown insisted that the intervention was her idea and that she told her husband about it only at breakfast that morning, though elsewhere Mr. Brown said that they had, in fact, discussed it in the summer. But who thought of it first is immaterial. What matters is that Mr. Brown agreed and deemed it fit to use his wife as a prop despite his professed aversion to have his family exposed to public gaze. Indeed, he appeared to bask in the glory of what one commentator hailed as his wife’s “scene-stealing performance” which put the delegates in a better mood to listen to him.

Critics described it as a classic case of a down-at-heel leader “clutching at straws” — in this case his wife.

“September 23, 2008 will go down in the modern history of Downing Street as the day when a Prime Minister, abandoned by his MPs and struggling for survival, leaned on his wife to save him,” one critic said.

The point is that having stepped across the line that separates his public life from his family one Mr. Brown has opened the door for potential media intrusion into his privacy. Will anyone take his protestations seriously in future? Or indeed should they? And that goes for Mrs. Brown too.

As The Observer columnist Catherine Bennett noted: “Desperation, presumably, has prompted her mercy dash from obscurity [but] she must know that the price of this intervention will be her privacy.” She warned that henceforth Mrs. Brown should be “prepared for the invasion of her private life that will follow her unsolicited intrusion into the public one…”

Meanwhile, feminists have criticised Mrs. Brown for “allowing” herself to be “used” for political goals of her husband. They say that for an independent woman like her (she was a high-profile PR consultant before she married Mr. Brown) to be seen playing “second fiddle” to her husband was a “step backwards for women.”

“Sarah’s behaviour reinforces the notion that the best place for women in politics is standing one step behind their husband,” wrote Janet Street-Porter, a self-confessed admirer of Mrs. Brown and editor-at-large of The Independent on Sunday newspaper.

How different all this is from the sub-continental political culture where though dynastic politics is notoriously commonplace it is less common for politicians to flaunt their families in public. But we’re now living in a global age and with ideas travelling so fast (the British practice itself is seen as an American import) who knows how things might turn out at the next Congress party or BJP conference?

Nehru Centre, Indian government’s cultural wing in London, will soon have a Pakistani rival. The Pakistan High Commission, which has existed in a bit of a cultural vacuum all these years, has decided finally to launch a Nehru Centre-style cultural centre and the buzz is it would be as “classy as the Nehru Centre.”

Nehru Centre? And classy?

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