You have, I am sure, heard the plaintive cries: politicians nowadays - a bunch of pygmies! Useless, drab, uninspiring, hopeless! How we can get better MPs?
The problem seems to be this: there are plenty of MP-adjacent people (spads, for example, and various public policy sorts) who are bright and able, and generally interested in the job, but the job itself looks so off-putting that they don't go for it. How can we change that?
This old chestnut came up recently on an online platform (not Twitter, but let's say Twitter). There was some talk about pay, but a couple of intelligent people pointed out that the bigger issues are matters such as losing your job overnight or being less employable after doing it.
Now, we need to be clear that, in a functioning democracy, there must always be the possibility of going overnight from running the country to being essentially a nobody. That's a feature, not a bug. But it's a fair point that being removed from power should not mean personal disaster, and it's also true that if the job requires people to accept the risk of personal disaster then it will (a) attract some pretty odd people and (b) incentivise them to do some pretty odd things once they get power (for fear of that very disaster).
Were MPs better in the past? I don't know. But it seems to me that there were a variety of features of political life in place a generation or so ago (now, I'm afraid, routinely roundly despised) that mitigated these worries about personal disaster. If MPs were better, perhaps these are some of the reasons why. Let me take you through them (below the break).
