I was reading Michael Gove in the Daily Mail the other morning. He had discovered what he called an “ironclad law of history”.
I became suspicious at “ironclad”.
History rarely comes ironclad.
Gove was writing about the British government’s latest sanctions against Israel. This is a complicated contemporary question involving Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Hamas, British foreign policy, antisemitism, international law and several other things on which reasonable people might disagree.
Fortunately, Gove had found a simpler way through.
He went to the wardrobe.
Out came Munich. Czechoslovakia. Hitler. Totalitarianism. Afghanistan. Russia. China. Lenin. The defence of Western civilisation.
By the end, Gove was asking whether Britain still had the “steel to resist”.
It was an impressive costume.
My son Adam said something to me the other day:
“All politics is cosplay.”
I laughed when he said it.
Cosplay, if you’ve managed to avoid the term, is the business of dressing up as a familiar character; Batman, Darth Vader, whoever, complete with the costume, mannerisms and, ideally, the right lines.
Reading Gove, I wasn’t so sure Adam was joking.
Because if politics is cosplay, British politics has a particularly magnificent wardrobe.
Churchill is obviously in there. Several Churchills, probably. There is Defiant Churchill, Wartime Churchill and Never Surrender Churchill. The less convenient Churchills have presumably been moved to storage.
There is Thatcher, available whenever someone needs to take difficult decisions.
Attlee can be found when the country needs rebuilding.
Somewhere there is a Working Man, although he seems to have gone missing.
There is also the Ordinary Bloke in the Pub, a remarkably popular costume generally worn by people who have spent most of their adult lives in politics.
Best of all, the costumes come with lines.
Put on Churchill and you get resolve, defiance and never surrender.
Put on Thatcher and you get markets, unions, fiscal discipline and difficult choices.
Put on Attlee and you get reconstruction, public ownership and collective provision.
The Chamberlain costume is there too, although it hangs rather forlornly at the back of the wardrobe with a label:
FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
The great advantage of an old costume is that it comes with old lines. You know who you are, what you believe and what you are supposed to say.
This is unbeatable when the problem is old.
Except when the problem is new.
Then something unfamiliar arrives and Westminster goes to the wardrobe anyway.
Donald Trump, for example.
There is considerable rummaging.
Churchill?
Naturally. Churchill is always tried first.
Chamberlain?
There is an awkward silence.
Someone reaches towards the costume marked FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
Someone else eventually discovers William Pitt the Younger, who had to work out what to do when George III went mad.
Now we’re getting desperate.
Nothing quite fits.
But eventually everyone emerges wearing something, and the costume supplies the lines. Trump must be confronted. Or accommodated. Or flattered. Or contained.
The argument becomes partly about which historical character we have decided to dress up as.
Then artificial intelligence arrives.
Back to the wardrobe.
Adam Smith?
Ned Ludd?
Alan Turing!
Everyone likes Alan Turing.
Then someone emerges from the back dressed as Mary Shelley.
Oh dear.
Again, the costumes come with lines.
Wear Adam Smith and AI becomes an extraordinary new productive force which markets will eventually absorb.
Wear Ned Ludd and the machines are coming for our jobs.
Wear Turing and we ask whether machines can really think.
The trouble is that choosing the costume has already begun to choose the answer.
History is enormously useful. It is an extraordinary collection of human experiments, successes, disasters and unintended consequences. We would be foolish not to examine it.
But the wardrobe is excellent at answering one question:
What does this remind us of?
It is useless at answering another:
What if this is new?
Cosplay has an unavoidable limitation.
The character must already exist.
You cannot cosplay something nobody has seen before.
And neither can the old lines tell you what to say about something that wasn’t there when they were written.
Churchill said a great deal about socialism.
Unfortunately, he never got around to social media.
That matters because genuinely new political ideas suffer from the same problem as genuinely new political problems.
There is no costume.
A familiar idea arrives fully equipped. It has language, heroes, villains, policies and speeches. Everyone knows where to stand. The newspapers know what to call it. Politicians know their lines.
A genuinely new idea arrives rather badly dressed.
Nobody knows which tradition it belongs to. Nobody knows which voters are supposed to like it. There is no famous speech to quote and no historical character available to lend it authority.
It may even look unserious precisely because it is unfamiliar.
Perhaps that is the real danger of political cosplay.
Not that politicians look ridiculous in old costumes. Politics has always involved theatre.
It is that the wardrobe can quietly limit what we are capable of imagining.
There is nothing wrong with looking inside it. Sometimes there may be exactly the costume we need.
But when nothing fits, perhaps the answer isn’t to keep rummaging.
The great advantage of an old costume is that it comes with old lines.
The great danger is that you keep saying them after the play has changed.
The past is a source of evidence, not an available destination.
The future, inconveniently, has no costume.