Jack Layton would have let them down in the end – long-lived messiahs usually do

Written by Henry Hill | 05 September 2011
Posted in Comment - Politics

Photography: John Hansen

Before I begin, I have a couple of confessions to make. I am one of those people who instinctively dislikes big displays of extrovert grieving for remote figures. I’m also British, and a Conservative to boot. The only reason I’ve not got an “I’m with Christie” t-shirt is because nobody this side of the Atlantic would know what it meant.

For those of you who don’t follow Canadian politics, New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton recently died of cancer, shortly after leading his party to its first ever second-place performance at a general election. A charismatic and popular politician who delivered his party’s successes almost entirely based on his personal appeal, his death as prompted an outbreak of Diana-style popular grieving amongst the Canadian citizenry and press. Criticising the man has become socially unacceptable.

What Christie Blatchford wrote about Layton – that for all his merits, he was still a political strategist and calculator (albeit an excellent one), that he wasn’t a saint and that a letter ‘crafted’ by an NDP insider group is not the same as a heartfelt personal message, even if a lot of heart went into it – will not seem so shocking in time. Criticising and even actively disliking Jack Layton was acceptable before he died and, once he has been dead for a sufficient amount of time, will be acceptable again.

Yet despite my remoteness from the Canadian national pulse, I think that a British perspective might be useful – not only to the “record number” of people who have apparently been sending Ms Blatchford hate mail, but to all who are writing Jack Layton’s eulogies – or are ever tempted to write such for others.

This isn’t an article claiming that Layton doesn’t deserve a eulogy – far from it. By all accounts he was an optimistic and charming man of great political skill, and I don’t think anybody is claiming this isn’t the case. Yet the level of post-mortem adulation heaped upon him, and the backlash against those who dare take a pin to the oh-so-fragile balloon of public opinion, suggest that commentators need to be reminded of an important, perhaps depressing fact of politics: politicians, especially those whose main draw is charisma, nearly always disappoint.

One doesn’t have to go very far to find examples of this trend. In the UK, both Tony Blair and Nick Clegg fit into the ‘fallen man of the people’ mould. Imagine if Tony Blair had died – of cancer, no less – a few months after his 1997 ultra-landslide election victory, or if Nick Clegg had passed away during the ‘Five Days in May’ in which his party had the appearance of holding all the cards in the first British coalition negotiation since the Second World War, and his personal popularity ratings were higher than those for Winston Churchill. For an example closer to Canada, imagine if Barack Obama had died shortly after his 2008 election victory.

Each of them would be remembered as saints. Each would have been a man of principle who ‘connected with the people’. Commentators would rhapsodise about their lost administrations and the better tomorrow they hailed. Yet, despite the fact that each of these men was for a time at least as personally popular as Jack Layton, none of them are so remembered. There is a simple reason for this, and it is important that even the most effusive of Mr Layton’s admirers keep it in mind if they are to have any sense of perspective: all of these men survived to be tarnished by the exercise of power.

There is a reason, as Barbara Kay reminds us, that state funerals in Canada are usually reserved for those who have “led a government… sat in cabinet [or] served as governor-general.” These are – with the possible exception of the last – positions of real political responsibility, and power is the real test of any political product, however well-presented it may be. The convention recognises a fact that pretty much encapsulates the fate of the British Liberal Democrats: that it is very easy to be virtuous and uncompromising from a distant third place.

That isn’t to say that Jack Layton wouldn’t have been a good prime minister or even a great one – the fact is that we can’t know. Before his death placed his politics temporarily beyond the reach of permissable criticism, the National Post was doing a good job of picking out the potential fault lines in the NDP, both the obvious – his party’s woefully ill-prepared caucus and repeated sallies into sovereigntist territory – and the less obvious. While some laud Layton as ‘a bridgebuilder’, a plea for cooperative politics is a common feature of third parties in Western democracies. See again the Liberal Democrats, who have based their politics on the promise of the principled exploitation of a hung parliament since they were founded, only to have it fall about their ears. As the latter discovered, actually cooperating with people you don’t agree with is very hard indeed.

When a National Post writer remembers how Layton once blanked him for an entire evening after reading something he didn’t like, is there any concrete evidence that he’d be any more able to cooperate with people he genuinely disagreed with than Obama or Clegg? Given that even in the few months he had after the election Layton showed many signs of replacing Duceppe as the Quebecois special-pleader-in-chief, can we be sure that the NDP under him would have killed off sovereigntism rather than simply absorbing it for a while?

Beyond personal failings, there are all of the other myriad things that lead to the depreciation of a government’s stock with the public. Ministerial scandals, unpopular taxes and policy blunders, not to mention Harold Macmillan’s famous “events”, all serve to undermine a sitting government, and Layton’s would have been no different. His premiership, had he got one, might have been great, but it wouldn’t have resembled the half-formed montage of cheering crowds, shiny new hospitals and world-class schools that probably slips through people’s heads when they think about it.

Reading through the reams and reams of very similar tribute pieces to Layton, and the various hyperbolic claims made about his contribution to the course of Canadian politics and history, I see the appearance of nothing so much as a nation trying, through repetition and sheer strength of yearning, to will into existence the rest of Layton’s career, and to give him the praise due for accomplishments that, for tragic reasons, he never had the opportunity to achieve. It’s as if someone had written an introduction to a book called “Jack Layton: His Life and Accomplishments” and upon discovering his subject was dead, attempted to turn that introduction into the whole book.

There are those who show a tendency, when somebody upon whom great expectations have been placed dies before the fulfilment of those expectations, to try to inflate what they did achieve in order to get it to fill the mental space in the mourners head set aside for what they should have achieved. Mr Layton’s admirers should do him the credit of avoiding this temptation, because whether you agree with him or not, he managed to lay only the foundations of what he might have accomplished. After all, he died shortly after the Canadian people had handed Stephen Harper and the Conservatives their first parliamentary majority. When you separate Layton the man from Jack the evanescent saviour, he was just a lovely man who came second.