The Politician’s Character

Last updated on: October 14, 2014 at 7:47 pm by David Mills

The Politician’s Character 2014-10-14T19:47:48-04:00 David Mills

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The mayor of London and Tory star Boris Johnson, said to aiming at becoming prime minister, believes voters don’t care about his adulteries — or “extra-marital affairs,” as the press antiseptically puts it — “What they want to know is what your agenda is, and whether you’re going to any good in the job.”

On the whole, I think that all that kind of thing is, or certainly should be, irrelevant to the job that you’re trying to do. And my impression in — I’ve fought two massive campaigns, in London, which got a huge amount of national scrutiny as well, and my feeling at the end of them is that the public don’t really . . . they don’t focus on that.

He may be right, though the judgment’s limited by the fact that the voters generally have two choices, only one of whom they broadly agree with, and if he’s a serial adulterer they’re still not going to vote for the other guy. Being elected doesn’t necessarily indicate that the public don’t care. It may indicate that they don’t have a choice.

It is true that no one wants an incompetent person in office and that character and competence are at most only slightly correlated. That doesn’t mean adulteries are “irrelevant.” Not all of politics is getting things done. Part of it is choosing what things to get done. That requires a moral sense and therefore a good character. Ideological conviction may to some extent substitute for character, because most men hold principles better than their character, but it can substitute for character most reliably on the broader questions, not on the finer questions that the politician must answer, and even then politicians of weak character will change their convictions or find ways to justify compromising them while still claiming to hold them.

And then there is the simple question of trust. We can ask whether a man who cannot keep his wedding vow can be trusted to keep any other, any lesser, vow or pledge. It may be that for some men the second is easier to keep than the first, but the voter has reason to doubt that the man who flouts the first will keep the second.

One of his partners, a journalist named Petronella Wyatt, became pregnant and aborted their child, the Telegraph reports. It is not reported what Johnson thought about that, but he is not reported to be a defender of the unborn.

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