THE SOFT-HANDED classes have always had a yen to prove themselves in grittier lives, either out of curiosity or to demonstrate solidarity with a romanticised worker-hero. Orwell endured hotel kitchens; modern journalists win awards for pretending to be cleaners on the minimum wage or enrolling surreptitiously in the armed forces. Michael Portillo became a single mum for the telly; Matthew Parris as an MP tried life on the dole. Those of us who did lowly jobs in our youth talk them up in later, comfier life. I was a temp, a barmaid, a waitress; others boast on their dustjackets of time as street-cleaners or roustabouts. On closer questioning we tend to admit that it was never for long; but like Marie Antoinette with her silver milking-pail, all chattering classes love to claim rounded humanity by gingerly rolling up our sleeves and making sure the world notices.
Thus Hazel Blears has invited Cabinet colleagues to make short video diaries of themselves doing “ordinary” jobs, to be shown at the Labour conference. David Miliband will work at a recycling plant and might, we are breathlessly promised, even collect rubbish. Tessa Jowell has been helping deprived children with art projects. Peter Hain promises to work in a steering-wheel factory.
The inspiration, we are told, is the Channel 4 series Faking It, in which people learn in four weeks sufficient skills to fool a panel of experts. Unlikely people have become a nightclub bouncer, a DJ, a dog-dance trainer, drag queen and conceptual artist. Sometimes the struggle is gripping; sometimes it is embarrassingly revealed that being a scratch-vinyl-DJ is actually something that can be mastered in a week by a classical cellist without breaking sweat, or that dancing with dogs is not rocket science. The TV company chooses picaresque jobs for obvious reasons, but Ms Blears has equally obviously gone for the mundane worthy end of the market. A pity: one would love to see John Prescott playing the cabaret circuit in fishnet tights and Ms Blears as bangin’ MC Mutha Hazel.
I know a bit about these exercises, since the early years of my marriage coincided with my husband Paul making In at the Deep End for the BBC and training for months as a carriage driver, shepherd, chef, comedian and hairdresser. Those were serious and expensive exercises, involving many unfilmed hours in Michel Roux’s kitchen and an inordinately long period of living with an opinionated sheepdog. The concept of “ faking it” in four weeks had not yet arrived, still less the idea that a few days’ posing in a steering-wheel factory can give the nation’s most arrogant MP an insight into a factory hand’s life. Even so, the main lesson was that real jobs, to which people give whole lives, are harder and subtler than they look.
Ms Blears’s aim — to convey a sense that ministers are in touch with “real” life — will fail. It will look as patronising as every other bit of litter-picking, graffiti-scrubbing and photo-friendly stuntmanship down the decades. “Real” people know quite well that this generation of ministers, more than any before them, have made a point of staying as far as possible from common experience. Few MPs have had ordinary jobs. Many were lawyers for a short while; some were journalists. Those who got their hands dirty are a dying breed. An inordinate number of political careers started as precisely that: research assistants, speechwriters, local government functionaries, union officials. We no longer have wartime soldiers in Cabinet (which explains their careless attitude to deploying the military). A few were in business, which is encouraging; there is a smattering of teachers and, to be fair, Charles Clarke was a maths lecturer.
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But generation by generation, more and more MPs have merely moved words and thoughts around in the crypto-academic political arena, never making any object or generating profit, never tangling with a cruel marketplace. They also lead featherbedded lives beyond the wildest dreams of most “ordinary” workers: decent salaries, long recesses, safe pensions (while normal workers suffer fund deficits, MPs’ deficit has just been seamlessly mended with an extra £1.2 million a year from us; ten years in Parliament wins a pension that would take a parallel earner 27 years to reach).
Fine. But what this level of privilege and responsibility demands is not some video charade of “real” work . It demands the humbler exercise of listening to those who do it every day. It is not enough to hire sycophantic consultants and self-selected “spokesmen”; you have to listen to the voices from the ground, understand their concerns and what makes their ethos and working methods distinctive.
A glimmer of recognition of this truth emerged from the other party yesterday, when David Cameron’s public service improvement policy group acknowledged that previous Tory governments had “a vastly overstated focus on what the public sector can learn from the private sector . . . the political culture has often required the Conservatives to belittle the efforts of people whose objectives we share”. Even better, they admit that “a private corporation which publicly shamed its employees in the way that government has done in recent years would not long survive”. They condemn over-bossiness in education and the NHS, and speak of “local solutions”. David Willetts even says that teachers have wisdom and “we want to learn from it instead of living in a fantasy world where they can be ignored and we start all over again”.
There’s no detail or costing. But it is a start. It suggests that somewhere in politics lies real unease about the crisp-sounding — yet basically vapid — managerialist ethic of the past twenty years. It was not just Tory: new Labour proved just as disrespectful of workers as the Thatcherites. It suggests that some politicians grasp that it is not enough to nag and berate, and certainly not enough to dress up for a day as a dinner lady or hospital porter. You have to listen, with respect.