THE TRUTHFUL POLITICIAN

I am a politician. I am expected to toe the party line. Trouble is, I don’t believe in my calling any more. See that suit? £900, sleek and very, very smart. I have to stand up on the platform in it in five short minutes and make a speech pledging my support for my party and my leader. I’ve spent a score of years of going out on the stump and telling voters to vote for my party – assuring them that we are basically pro-Europe, pro-establishment, pro-democracy and pro-monarchy, and we are certainly for the working man. It’s all lies. I know that. I suspect I have always known that, but I have been in denial for years. As a matter of first principle, I know that I dissemble and that I practice the noble art of sophistry. I’ve delivered enough rhetoric to power a dirigible.

In five minutes, because of my burgeoning self-disgust and self-loathing, I am going to stand on that platform and I am going to denounce my party, my leader and my politics. I am prepared to tell my audience of party supporters and activists of the clandestine arrangements of the Home Secretary and his ‘contracts for favours’ motif. I intend to enlighten my audience about the Chief Whip blackmailing the Education Secretary into supporting the loathed Regional Assembly Bill by threatening to inform his wife as to the whereabouts of his mistress. I might even find time to mention the sale by the Defence Secretary of a new top-secret, remote-controlled weapons launcher to a Middle-East potentate in absolute defiance of the Government’s official policy. That ought to keep the record straight.

I’ll be ruined by this time tomorrow night. Under arrest, probably, for breaching the Official Secrets Act. They’ll trump something up if they can’t find a suitable charge that will stick. Something from my past, perhaps. There is plenty there to choose from. I feel for Mary and the children. Bang goes the BMW Z5 and the villa in Borehamwood. No salary, no expenses, no index-linked pension. She knows nothing of this. I’m scared, of course. Terrified. All I need do is keep my infernal mouth shut, turn a blind eye, let sleeping dogs lie. But I cannot do it. After years of cheap jibes, insults, subservience and toadying, I intend to stride onto that platform as if I were Sidney Carton on his way to the guillotine, head held high, shoulders back, chest out. I only hope my voice, normally so persuasive, assertive and strident, holds out, for I am in such a state of emotional flux, I cannot guarantee its timbre and strength. I would hate to go to my doom with my glorious words issuing forth in the mincing falsetto of Mr Humphries from "Are You Being Served".