If you believe politicians are useless, you'll end up with useless politicians

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to dinner with one of the most hated men in Britain.

No, it wasn’t a serial killer, one of the targets of Operation Yewtree or a disgraced tabloid editor. It was Nick Clegg. Prior to the meal, it was quite interesting telling people I was going to dine with the Deputy Prime Minister. For a second, they’d be quite impressed, then they’d remember who the DPM was. Their features would swiftly rearrange themselves into a mask of withering disdain and they’d make some witty crack about preferring to eat with Pol Pot or Katie Hopkins.

The effect of this was twofold. Firstly it told me that I always get my boasting wrong. When I boast, I’m like a cartoon character with a bazooka who, after he’s pulled the trigger, realises he’s pointing it backwards. Secondly, and more seriously, it made me reflect on how vertiginous and total Clegg’s fall from grace has been. Back in 2010, in the heady days around the TV debates, he looked like a serious contender. It’s hard to believe now, but back then you often heard people saying, “He’s the one who looks like the next PM.”

Plus ça change. After the tuition fees débâcle and four years of apparently acting as Tory enablers with little or no real influence, his party’s polls are dismal and he is routinely dismissed as worse than useless. In fact, he’s not far off experiencing the ultimate political debasement, where you go from being an object of public contempt to one of popular pity.

This was my first thought, too. Poor Nick. But actually, it’s the wrong reaction. My second, rather better, thought was, “Why do we love hating, belittling and denigrating our politicians so much?” Fifty years ago there was way to much deference to our ruling class. Now, it’s unalloyed contempt all the way down. It’s a national sport. We’re all Mini-Me Jeremy Paxmans, but without the intellect or interrogative justification. We want our politicians to look stupid, incompetent, corrupt and adulterous. How do we like our leaders – principled or pragmatic? Neither, we like them disgraced.

Often we’ll do this by trawling through their personal lives – while all the time, asking why we can’t have great politicians like Churchill (alcoholic), Kennedy (drug addict) or Lloyd George (sex addict). If we can’t do it via the traditional means, we do what we’ve done with poor Ed Milliband: we just keep piling on the opprobrium until they become what we want. It’s a bit like bullying in the playground. Call someone a loser long enough and they’ll probably cry. Like a loser. Then we can call them a loser some more.

Anyone’s fair game. You saw this with Blair. We called him a warmongering jerk until he ran away to America to play with the Neo-Cons. Then we called him an unprincipled, money-grubbing, warmongering jerk. More recently, Ken Clarke, a genius who is loved across party lines and who has done some amazing work on social policy and prisons, was effectively run out of town by that great bastion of British values, The Sun. And you don’t have to think Steve Hilton was right or even sensible to recognise that he didn’t deserve to be hounded into American academia.

I have to admit to indulging in the political witch-hunt a little myself, although I was relatively restrained, merely calling our leaders weird. Well, who wouldn’t be weird, if they were confronted by baying mobs at every turn – and often over policies that have broad public support?

Before I launch into my main point (and get all nice about Nick Clegg) I should remind you that, yes, I’m a Liberal. A lapsed Liberal and a rugged, Gladstonian Liberal who likes free markets and the odd gunboat, but a Liberal nonetheless. Don’t worry though: this isn’t a pro-Liberal piece. I could just as easily be writing it about the leading lights of the Labour Party or the Conservatives. It’s a pro decent people piece.

Anyway, sitting between Simon Hughes and Nick Clegg I was reminded for the first time in ages just how inspiring good politicians can be. They force us to think outside the box of our own petty concerns and project ourselves onto a national and even global stage. They remind us that we can change the world for the better. They actually made me feel like a teenager again – raging against Thatcher while still admiring her steeliness and her ability to bend the country to her will. Dare I say it, they even ignited a spark of nostalgia for a time before my birth, when we felt we could stand up to dictators, end war and make the next generation fairer and healthier.

It was a great feeling. My brain snapped out of its usual slough of grubby, realpolitiking despond. I stopped wondering how many thousandths of a foreign CEO’s opinion my own vote was worth and felt a rush of new ideas and fresh thinking. It was a bit like the hit you get from a couple of lines of coke, without the nasty selfishness, the inane bullshit and the desire to smoke a thousand cigarettes. I wanted to roll up my sleeves and start solving the country’s problems. And I experienced all this within a few minutes of sitting next to someone who is often reviled as a useful idiot.

That’s the point, though. He isn’t. Clegg is a capable, intelligent and deeply decent man. Simon Hughes, who was on the other side of me, is, if anything, even more decent. Now the Justice Minister, he’s the Lib-Dems' longest serving MP. He’s passionately pro-London, passionately fair and renowned for helping the people of his Southwark constituency, regardless of their political stripe. We discussed the capital and some of what I’d written on its problems. Sitting next to him, I was struck by how much this man (who was clearly so much wiser and more accomplished than me) was willing to listen. Even if he was just humouring me, he did it for so long and so well, he’s still a far better person than I am.

Clegg spoke about the £2bn the government will spend on getting the very poor into education early and seemed genuinely excited, not to have won an argument, but to have done something good. And this was the tone of the whole evening. It wasn’t about scoring party political points. It was about making life better for British people. I went in cynical and bored with the coalition and angry about what it had done to my party and left loving politics and wanting to make Britain great again.

You don’t just see this unexpected decency at the top either. Last week, I was with newly elected Camden Council, notably Theo Blackwell. I know that Labour London councils provoke an almost Pavlovian reaction with many Telegraph readers. But this is a cynicism based on a 25-year old stereotype. As a local businessman, I was struck by how pro-business the council was and how disinterested they all seemed in cheap political machinations. In fact, I’ve often thought that, away from the endless scrutiny of the national media, local politicians are actually better at putting together coalitions to get things done than their national counterparts are.

Of course, there are politicians who are crazy. Nutters with axes to grind or agendas to advance. There are politicians who need to see more of the outside world. But generally I think they’re far better people than we imagine. This shouldn’t come a such a surprise really: for £60-£100k, they work 100 hour weeks and do a job that, in many cases, is utterly thankless.

And please don’t tell me they do it for the power. The vast majority of backbench MPs have all the grief of being in the public eye and very little real power - their chances of getting a cabinet seat are about one in 20. Most of them could halve their workloads, halve their stress and quadruple their salaries by getting jobs on corporate boards.

So, in an age where it’s fashionable to be utterly cynical about politicians, I think that perhaps we should start giving them the benefit of the doubt again. Recognise that they’re only human and stop holding them to impossible standards. Remember that we react to circumstances, change our minds and often find it impossible to follow though on our promises. Clegg screwed up over tuition fees (and he knows it) but that doesn’t mean we should all hate his guts. Blair may not believe he screwed up over Iraq, but, that aside, he was our most talented leader since Thatcher and did a great deal of good.

Even if we’re not going to do it for them, we should do it for ourselves. If we always believe our politicians are corrupt, venal and useless, we wind up with a kind of political nihilism. There are plenty of countries where you see the results of this, but one of the worst in the developed world is Italy. When the majority really believes that nothing good can come out of the system, that’s when nothing does. You end up with a political class that’s riddled with corruption, sex scandals and criminality and, ultimately you get leaders like Berlusconi. Politicians who really are only good for slagging off. Is that what we really want?