Rafael Behr and the limits of politics
Reflections on the commentator's role
One thing we do have in the UK is extremely good political columnists. Stephen Bush, Andrew Rawnsley, Helen Lewis, Ian Dunt – our polity may not be in any kind of inspiring shape, but we do have wonderful writers to anatomize its decline.
Not the least of these, in fact perhaps the best, is Rafael Behr, former political editor of the New Statesman and a current weekly columnist for The Guardian. Behr is noted for the fineness of his style, with a particular feature of that style the use of sustained metaphors, such as comparing Brexit to the purchase of a ‘home ice-cream maker’1.
He’s also a man for the neologism, such as his recent description of Boris Johnson as ‘a lump of toxic narcissisium.’ So an old-school 18th-century aphorist, then, ironically well-suited to a social media age of precision and clipping. Behr himself is a good talker and has gone viral via a few clips on Politics Live.
If you had to whittle our political commentariat down to just one, then, you might well take Behr. His conclusions might not necessarily be wildly different from other writers but you’d have greater incidental pleasure of reading him. And now he has has written a book, which offers us the pleasure of enjoying his prose at more sustained length; it’s very good too, and has been reviewed warmly.
In it, Behr retells the story of his own major heart attack and how it coincided with the political shock to the system which the United Kingdom has itself experienced over the last decade. If that seems a little on the nose it’s worth stating that biology itself provided the metaphor, reminding us that nature usually expresses its symbolism in exceptionally crude terms.
The book’s strength is in its synthesis of the views of what it was like to live through these years as a certain kind of centre-left person. I count myself amongst such types, though Behr is a decade older than me, which I think gives my cohort an innately less despairing flavour. As is exceptionally rare for a British cohort, my generation of geriatric Millennials came of age during a protracted spell of centre-left dominance.
The book is written with gentle elegance – you suspect Behr puts things through a lot of drafts – and the personal material suggests an author with a Hinterland, after stints in Lithuania and Russia, sufficient to interest a reader not exclusively focused on a British political milieu.
And yet a question nagged me reading even such a good writer about British politics. What does it actually mean to be a good political writer?
What is that writer’s role?
It is an odd feature of the writing life that specialists get paid more than generalists. If you are a technical writer, a sportswriter or, as a friend of mine, an authority on research into insects, you are likely to get a steadier paid gig than someone who moves between genres. Political writers fit that pattern too – you become known for your analysis, and attempt to secure a berth to offer it. Such slots are rare and competitive but they do exist, and the kind of writer who gets one is often aiming for that berth from an early age.
Of course, even if you write about one specific subject you can find the whole world in it; sportswriters are always refracting heroism and courage and defeat through the games they observe. Even a technical writer never writes in isolation from the world – a farming specialist sees themselves dealing with how the Ukraine war impacts their sector; they ‘see the whole world in a grain of sand’ or, to maintain the agricultural example, ‘a grain of grain’.
Politics is slightly exceptional in that regard as politics is itself a dramatization of life. It is a ritualized staging of conflicts and issues that arise in society and a formalized presentation of their proposed solutions; therefore, a politics writer is writing about a metaphor of life as a metaphor for life. The writer who covers the practical business of politics stands somewhere between an observer of life and a stage critic, commenting on a mode of life which in some form heightened reality.
When we nominate someone as a political commentator we are nominating them as the interpreter of that drama; we are electing them to both tell us what is happening and also to phrase it in the way we can most readily understand. The political comedian Barry Crimmins used to say that he saw his job as offering a digest to a general public who did not have as much time to follow politics as closely as he did; in the same way, the political commentator is offering us a short precis of what’s been going on and, often aligned with our priors, what we should think about with regard to it.
Here Behr’s stylistic elegance becomes crucial; he is telling us what we need to know, but with the best words in the best order, perhaps supplying a sentence we can use as shorthand to identify our own political positioning in our weekly five or six minutes of politics chat. The irony of an aphoristic style is that it’s highly utilitarian.
I’m sure we’d agree that’s a prestigious role for a writer to have, an honoured position in the tribe. Yet there is a price that we exact for it from the writer themself; namely, we expect them to stick to the topic. A political columnist may not feel like writing about politics this week, and would instead to write about their five favourite places to get pancakes, but that would lead to alienating their readership and eventually a loss of their designated role. That is the contract between the specialist writer and their audience - you do this thing.