For once in his life, Frank Lampard's right: it is all about tough love
'Tough love' opines Wikipedia, 'is an expression used when someone treats another person harshly or sternly with the intent to help them in the long run'. It was also the phrase used by the Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard to describe Fabio Capello's new regime in the England Camp. While not exactly Boot Camp as yet, the Italian in charge of our national team has made it clear that scruffiness, bad table manners, WAGS and mobile phones in public are now history. Naively, our Frank gave an interview saying how amazed he'd been by the effect of Capello's style on team morale and self-respect. To those who've been advocating this as the start of a solution to Britain's woes as a whole, its success was hardly unexpected: and neither was the political elite's decision to ignore the lesson utterly.
By chance two weeks ago, I met an nby fan in a local pub (we were there for a quiz) and he paid me the compliment of saying that the appeal of the site was its hard-headed humanity. I in turn thanked him profusely for dishing up the phrase I've been hunting down for five years.
Tough love and hard-headed humanity are what often works to reform young offenders, but as almost everyone in power in the UK these days is both young and offensive, one can see why they're not keen to adopt it as a strategy. It's so much more fun, is it not, to follow the easy route of labelling and bullying and knowing you're right: just as the vandal knows the only way to make a mark on society is to scribble on its public surfaces, so the contemporary movers and shakers decide to make their mark by being shovers and makers - shoving us into archetypal one-size-fits-all holes while being on the make.
I don't know if you've ever interviewed alienated youngsters, but I have. What's terrifying is their certainty that nobody cares, they have no role model to look up to, things will never change - and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. As it happens, I've also interviewed a few of our elite in my time. For them, the certainty is that they all care, they are the role model to look up to, things will most certainly change if we elect them - and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. What both groups of misguided people have in common is a determination to believe: mine is the only way, and there is no alternative.
It's more than just ironic that those with most to gain from tough love have exactly the same mental block as those who would deny its validity. To give someone important discipline and affection is a gut-wrenching process - as any caring parent will tell you. To give an awkward person or group all the adoration and none of the responsibility is a recipe for disaster in families, love-affairs, society and politics. Our current generation of leaders do this - for women, for Islamics, for young offenders, for racial and orientational minorities - because first of all it's easy, and second of all they do not really trust those groups to look out for themselves. This is the ultimate act of patronising disdain, and those on the receiving end both disrespect it - and take advantage of it.
The way forward for our culture is to produce leaders we can look up to, but who don't look down on us.
Look up to leaders who connive and despise, get Blair, Brown, Mandelson, Harman, Straw, Osborne and Boris Johnson. Look up to leaders who lead and respect, get Churchill, Attlee, Bevan, Grimond, Ashdown, Field, Cable, Skinner and a host of other True Greats.
And yet....painfully few of those latter political names ever achieved useful power. On the increasingly sloping field of Parliamentary play, this vital combination of decency and strength is almost extinct. But it's what we need, and the voters recognise it: while 38,000 signatories to a 'ditch Brown' movement on the Government website want the Prime Minister out, just over 52,000 want Jeremy Clarkson in his job. Not because he understands the economy, but because he is searingly honest and thinks people are better left to sort things out for themselves.
As it happens, in 2009 Vince Cable topped a poll for 'who would make the best Chancellor?' The worrying thing is that he got just 19%, but this again is making a very clear point: the voters look up to him, but doubt whether anyone really knows what to do.
If ever there was evidence that politicians should both lead and respect the electorate, then that statistic is it.