Politics: ugly business for show people

Politics, it used to be said, is showbusiness for ugly people. You get to hold forth at length in Parliament, on TV and in the local and national press about whatever it is buzzes around your bonnet. With Lembit Opik, famously, it was asteroid strikes. Until he ended up dating a Cheeky Girl (ask your parents, kids) and losing his seat and whatever shreds of dignity remained to him. He tried stand-up, music and most recently, professional wrestling. It didn't go well.

What didn't often happen was a transfer between politics and showbusiness. There was a sense that politics was largely a serious business undertaken out of duty to improve the lot of your fellows. It was often the culmination of a lifetime's work: as a union activist, as an entrepreneur, diplomat or teacher. it wasn't a stepping stone to greater things.

Until the advent of Tony Blair. Entering politics as a young man and unencumbered with any serious ideology, he parlayed the ability to persuade people of his sincerity into a long stretch as PM and now a life of plutocratic luxury doing something mysterious which persuades merchant banks and foreign governments into giving him millions of pounds. His example spread stardust around the houses of parliament like dandruff from a celebrity's collar. Ann Widdecombe, previously famous for insisting that prisoners giving birth should be chained to the bed, turned up on an amateur dancing programme. Still an MP, she combines being dragged round a dancefloor with announcing that gay people can just think themselves straight, amongst other nonsensical opinions. The Speaker's wife appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. Louise Mensch dabbled in politics just long enough to snag a column in the Murdoch press and leave for New York, away from all those constituents whinging about their terrible lives. Worst of all, Lord Drayton resigned from his job as Minister for Defence Acquisitions to pursue a career as… a racing driver. Meanwhile, the MoD spent £30bn it didn't have on 'defence acquisitions' that don't work. This is politics as a hobby - no sense of public service at all.

And now we've reached a new low. Serial self-publicist and reactionary Nadine Dorries has announced that she's joining I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here - not after her political career is over, but during it. Despite being paid £65,000 to represent her constituents, she's off to Australia for a game show. Presumably the Tory whips' office have agreed to this because she's such an embarrassment, but that just deepens the sense that politics is a springboard to a media career or fame and fortune. These people are cynics and dilettantes… which goes some way to explaining why our public sphere is rotten to the core. The only people who'll stick around are the lunatic fringe and the lobbyists.

Would you like to tuck a fiver down my y-fronts?

Horrific image, isn't it?

But Richard Drayton, an eminent Cambridge professor claims - with some cause - that this highly-educated government's philistine attack on education will turn educators into whores.

"A nomadic global pirate class buys 'onshore' services from prostitutes and politicians, journalists, mercenaries and academics...(who) can become a kind of intellectual lap dancer, gyrating to excite the attention of the rich and to provoke small tips."

He's right. If you read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, you'll recognise what's happening. In the aftermath of any disaster, the hard-right free-marketeers take the opportunity to cut and public services, demonising government as 'socialist' or 'incompetent. The hollow irony this time is that the disaster is one caused by free-market economics. They've smashed up the world economy and their solution is… more of the same!

Academics think of themselves as professionals because we get paid monthly and choose our own clothes, but we're deluding ourselves. I've never had a permanent job: I'm on a series of temporary ones. That means no security and no prospect of doing ordinary things like get a mortgage, saving for the future or not worrying about the possibility of long-term illness. More importantly: the more we're kept in a state of fear (they call it 'flexible employment'), the less likely we are to disagree with management or protest when they arse things up.

Right now, I'm acting as union representative for a colleague in an employment dispute. How am I meant to negotiate robustly, knowing that the people on the other side of the table will be examining my contract in the summer? How can I choose interesting, perhaps provocative texts for study when I'm aware that the institution is terrified of radical ideas and edgy texts?

The proletarianisation of education won't just beggar me and my colleagues: it is leading towards bland, safe curricula and self-satisfied students. How can I tell someone their work isn't good enough, knowing that their responses to satisfaction questionnaires will contribute to discussions about my job and - much more importantly - potential course closures?

What we'll end up with is boring courses taught by cowed academics churning out high marks to high-paying customers. Society is the loser: undereducated conformists do not generate cultural, scientific or economic innovation.

Drayton's not impressed by his colleagues' responses to this situation:

 "most British scholars have made only token opposition to these changes".

"The British Academy has offered cowardly hand-wringing, (while) vice-chancellors and many administrators have been active quislings, merely asking how they can best adapt to the new order," he said.

Yet more books

This really has to stop. Today's haul consists of Volume III of Drayton's Complete Works, Gottlieb and Linehan's The Culture of Fascism, and Selbourne's Beauty.

It's the Drayton that depresses me most. I bought Poly-Olbion because I thought I should read it again and have it around for professional purposes, which means it'll never be read other than to rip chunks out for study purposes. Volume III is worse: I just know I never will open it, but couldn't face having an incomplete set. It just wouldn't be right. Moronic, isn't it?

What's your favourite Drayton poem?

Episode 923, in which I buy the most boring books in the world

A good haul of paper with marks on them today. A couple of Paul McAuley SF novels (400 Billion Stars and Red Dust), Gwyneth Jones's Life because I thought I had everything she's written until I found this, Roots of Desire, Marion Roach's cultural history of red hair (for my Anne of Green Gables work) and the big prize of the day: the first two volumes of Michael Drayton's Complete Works. Drayton's the author of Poly-Olbion, a topographical and mythological tour of England and Wales in Alexandrine verse. It's the most interesting boring (and massive) poem ever written. Or do I mean the most boring interesting poem? I don't know.

Anyway, there's another even geekier book on its way: Cheney's Handbook of Dates for Students of History. Not the exciting dates, just a list of special days (such as Lammas) and charts so you can work out the right dates taking into account changes in how we reckon such things. Never again will I be stuck on the Roman/Gregorian problem, or unable to explain the significance of Michaelmas!