Party conferences these days aren’t really conferences at all. They are spectacles: displays of mass solidarity on the way to triumph—or disaster. And, of course, orchestrated charisma-fests. See how David Cameron juts out a leadership-jaw, cajoling, bossing, joking with the audience and (more importantly) the cameras. A shadow cabinet member told me that watching his boss at conference was like “watching someone having sex with the delegates.” Figuratively, I take it.
No one has accused Gordon Brown of flirting with his audiences. The PM suffers from a weird anti-charisma. The qualities cited as his strengths by those who know him well—breadth of vision, passion and force of personality—all too often disappear into a black hole of long, repetitive sentences and rigor mortis body language. But Brown too accepts the diktat of charisma. Spin doctors have come and gone trying to convince us that Mr B is more interesting than we think. And Nick Clegg, for all his intellect and charm, also tries hard to compensate for his deficit of presence. Yet he remains “the man who isn’t there,” says a Lib Dem frontbencher, collecting triple points on his disloyalty card.
Packing my bags for the annual mating display of the parties in conference season set me thinking about how much we take the charisma battle for granted in British politics. As Samuel L Jackson observes in the film Pulp Fiction: “personality goes a long way.” We implicitly measure our leaders against the other great personalities of the era: Obama and Sarkozy. But having also spent time recently watching Angela Merkel’s election campaign, I was equally struck that one of the most powerful women in the world is a largely charisma-free zone who has made anti-personality politics work for her.
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