Too much information when some politicians tell their story

By Derek Lord

Published:

I WONDER what the founders of the Labour Party would make of John Prescott and Cherie Blair cashing in on their time at the top of the New Labour movement by selling their memoirs for more money than the average worker makes in a lifetime? Both authors attempt to win the reader’s sympathy by revealing the most intimate details of their private lives while at the same time putting the boot into Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell and anyone else who got up their respective noses while Tony Blair ruled the roost in Downing Street.

John Prescott confesses to an eating disorder and Cherie Blair attempts to win us over by revealing what a struggle it was for her to find the mortgage payments on the Blair’s £3.5million mansion. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to either of them that we may simply interpret these revelations as signs that they are both, in their own way, greedy pigs.

My first thought on hearing that the former deputy PM has been engaged in a long “battle” with bulimia was that he had obviously won it. Perhaps that’s a bit uncharitable of me. After all, we’re all supposed to be empathetic and supportive of people with eating disorders, and just because Prescott is a wee bit on the chubby side does that mean he should be mocked when he comes out and bravely confesses his failings?

Well, maybe mockery is too harsh, but a bit of well-aimed indifference probably wouldn’t go amiss on this occasion. I’m just a bit sick of public figures parading their problems across the front pages and expecting to Hoover up sympathy on the back of it. These people have the power to affect millions of people’s lives, but the moment they have to take any criticism for the decisions they’ve made, it’s all “oh, leave me alone, I’ve got bulimia” or “I’m depressed” or “my mummy didn’t love me”.

We definitely live in a too-much-information culture, when people feel compelled to reveal their inner selves to you whether you’ve invited their confidences or not. All I want is politicians who make the trains run on time and ensure that the economy ticks over nicely. I don’t want to be their special friend, or much less their psychiatrist. The bus driver doesn’t tell me his problems and I don’t tell him mine. Why do celebrities and politicians constantly inflict theirs on the world?

Some people have detected the dead hand of celebrity culture in the John Prescott story. It’s definitely no coincidence that his trumpeting of bulimia has appeared at a time when he has an autobiography to sell. And, if he hadn’t written it, it’s unlikely he would have ever felt the need to share his condition with us. Who’s going to shell out £20 for a hardback about a man who rose to the largely symbolic post of deputy PM, and whose main claim to fame is that he once banjoed a farmer during an election campaign? The secret diary of a 69-year-old binge eater has much more appeal in this celebrity-obsessed society.

And what a surprise it was to learn that Mr Prescott, who up to now had been regarded as a regular working-class chap, despite his penchant for croquet and bidets, was at heart just like the rest of the metrosexual Blairites who could barely get through a sentence without the bottom lip starting to quiver with emotion.

Now, he has succumbed to the tide of sentimentalism. He wants us to feel his pain, when some of us had a sneaking respect for the fact that he seemed to be a man who believed, rightly, that the world would be a more agreeable place if people kept their pain to themselves, thank you very much.

Besides, I’m not totally convinced that he even has bulimia. What he describes is a greedy man with little self-control who gorged himself on Chinese food and trifles – “stuffed my face”, in his own words – and threw up afterwards as a way of expelling the gargantuan quantities he’d eaten. That definitely suggests a dysfunctional relationship with food, but it doesn’t sound like bulimia.

But stuffing your face with food because you don’t have any self-control doesn’t sound very exciting, so they attach a “sexier” label to it. Bulimia will do. Princess Diana had it, after all, and it doesn’t come much more glamorous than that. But attaching the label of bulimia to him is trivialising a very serious condition.

Interestingly, doctors have said that Prescott’s confession might persuade more men to come forward with similar problems. I’d say that was well nigh inevitable. Everyone these days seems to want to attach a modish label to their particular problems. In a way, it’s understandable. There’s comfort in a crowd. It makes people feel they’re not alone in their woes.

What’s more disturbing is how we all now collectively consume other people’s problems as entertainment. The bookshops are bulging with books that wallow in the grimmest imaginable material: rape, sexual abuse and childhood neglect. For some, such tales help them through their own traumas, but most readers are just getting a cheap thrill out of peeking in on other people’s darkest corners. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Mr Prescott and Mrs Blair have jumped on this particular bandwagon.

Hopefully, it’s a phase that will pass and politicians will go back to writing dull, worthy, 1,000-page autobiographies detailing every session of the negotiations leading up to some piece of legislation nobody remembers anyway. Those were the days when politicians kept their private lives to themselves, and we were grateful to them for doing so.

Finally, in the aftermath of Glasgow Rangers’ tragic defeat in Manchester, it is at least comforting to know that not all of Scotland’s citizens are down in the dumps. Indeed, Herself tells me that she was passing a public house on Wednesday night as the final whistle blew when a cheer rent the air before dozens of green-and-white-clad topers burst into the street, laughing and jumping up and down with joy. One of them espied a chap on the other side of the street who I presume was one of the local housebreakers, because he shouted over: “You’ll be all right, tonight, Tommy. You can turn over all the gaffs with union flags in the windies. Their owners won’t be back for hours.”