Do you think our politicians are a sorry bunch? Here's the reason why

Future generations of aspiring public servants will, no doubt, study the infamous Michael Matheson case of 2024, when the then Health Secretary - whose sons ran up a £13,000 roaming charge on his work tablet while watching football on a family holiday - claimed the eye-watering sum back through parliamentary expenses, and then lied about it when he was caught.

But everything was okay because he apologised and, as his good friend the First Minister pointed out, he was a decent man who made a mistake.

The second of the three great political defences is to claim that your words were taken out of context. This excuse was used to questionable effect at the weekend by Ian Gribbin, the Reform UK party’s candidate for Bexhill and Battle, in relation to comments he made on social media, that Britain should have cosied up to Hitler in 1939, rather than going to war with Nazi Germany.

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One wonders what possible context it would have been appropriate to suggest that this country should have allied itself with a fascist, genocidal regime hellbent on global Aryan domination. But, as Lesson 2.0 at Politician School makes clear, after claiming your words were taken out of context, you should never get bogged down in the troublesome business of explaining why.

Gribbin also deployed the “apology,” in response to questions from pesky journalists about other comments he made on social media, in which he suggested women were “spongers” who should be denied free healthcare until their life expectancy fell in line with men’s.

He did not say whether those words had also been taken out of context, the proper context being that he is clearly deranged.

Which brings us to the third, and perhaps the most widely used of the divine triumvirate of apologia, the daddy of all political get-outs, that when the first two have failed and your back is to the wall, you blame it all on your advisers.

There will be few better examples of this cited in future Politician School textbooks than Rishi Sunak’s unfathomable decision to bail out of the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations early, to rejoin the general election campaign.

Not only did the Prime Minister insult the few remaining veterans, whose friends and comrades laid down their lives so that loathsome thickheads like Ian Gribbin would be free to make fatuous comments, belittling their efforts, almost a century later; he also managed to scandalise pretty much every right-thinking person in the country he hopes to lead after July 4.

Mr Sunak was eventually shamed into making the apology last Friday afternoon, after spending the morning scuttling away from journalists on the campaign trail and studiously avoiding their shouted requests for an explanation.

But, behind the scenes, deputy heads were already starting to roll. And the principal question being asked was not how a man who has achieved the highest office in the land came to make a decision that any dog in the street could have told him was wrong, but who was advising him.

The role of the adviser to pretty much everyone in public life has assumed a scale and importance in recent years that defies logic.

In the past, prime ministers had advisers to counsel them on technical and esoteric matters such as sophisticated macroeconomic policy or foreign relations with culturally sensitive overseas partners. Now it seems they need a consultant to tell them when to put their trousers on in the morning.

Repeatedly, we hear of leaders blaming their advisers for misdirecting them, not on issues of specialist expertise, but on fundamental questions of right and wrong.

Did Boris Johnson really need a team of flunkies to advise him that he should not be attending booze-fuelled parties in Downing Street during Covid lockdowns, in breach of the social distancing measures he himself had introduced?

Did Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, need to be told by underlings that the organisation she led should not be dragging hundreds of postmasters through the courts when there was clear evidence that its IT system was flawed.

Paula Vennells (Image: PA)

When it comes to corporate dysfunction, and other pejorative issues, the original and still the best examples usually begin and end with Donald Trump.

His recent trial in New York - in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide a $150,000 hush money payment to a pornographic film actress - illustrated how using an adviser to make the payment helped him to achieve plausible deniability.

The court heard how the cash was distributed by his lawyer, Michael Cohen, who ended up serving time in jail when the law finally caught up with him.

While the previous examples mentioned do not involve criminality, it seems that any leader in politics, business or other areas of public life, now sees his or her adviser as a buffer, to deflect incoming flak when things go wrong, rather than as a provider of impartial advice to help them make informed decisions.

Leaders are paid more than anyone else in an organisation to make the tough calls and to accept responsibility when they backfire.

If a prime minister cannot see the hurt and offence that will be caused by him failing to attend a ceremonial event, commemorating the single most important military event in this country’s recent history, then he should not delude himself that he has what it takes to be its leader.

Advisers exist to offer honest, informed, and impartial advice. Leaders are there to listen to advisers and then to lead, practically and ethically. The two should not be confused.

Such an opinion is unlikely ever to make it into a Politician School textbook and for that I offer no apology.

Carlos Alba ran the media campaign for Ken MacIntosh’s bid to become Scottish Labour leader against Kezia Dugdale