Jonathan Todd

“Theirs is to win if it kills them, but they’re just human with wives and children.”

Oddly enough, these lyrics from Race for the Prize, a brilliant song by the Flaming Lips, quite often occur to me when thinking of politicians. For example, when Andy Burnham recently described his selection as the Labour candidate in Leigh to Labour Uncut:

“I represent my home seat of Leigh. That often isn’t what people associate with a career politician. I went to Leigh when Laurence Cunliffe resigned. I lived back at home with my mum and dad, and basically worked on it for a year. It was pretty much a year where I campaigned solidly every weekend to win the nomination for Leigh.

“So nobody parachuted me in. Nobody gave me a ‘oh well, I’ll speak to this person, speak to that, all these doors will open’; none of that happened. I went up there, based myself there, knocked on every door of every member and won the Leigh nomination through grassroots campaigning. In many ways as a parallel to what I’m doing now in this leadership election. The establishment isn’t necessarily helping me; the media establishment, the union establishment. Even the Labour establishment. My connection is with the grassroots, ordinary members.”

Ok, Labour Uncut later filled in some details about his selection, as well as those of other Labour leadership contenders. But the sense of a quite lonely race for the prize for himself and for his community, from windy doorstep to windy doorstep, is evident in Burnham’s words; a sense that invariably seems absent from how politician’s are usually thought of. While this sense reflects the reality of many of the experiences of politicians, it is lost in the public perception amidst the dodgy expense claims, broken promises and general disillusionment with politicians and politics.   

Hopefully, Labour’s next leader can address this disillusionment. Someone who certainly has is Ed Rendell.  ”The most stunning turnaround in recent urban history” was how The New York Times characterised Rendell’s achievements as Mayor of Philadelphia. Yet, it wasn’t always like this for Rendell.

Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City, an insider account of Rendell’s first term as Mayor, discusses the position in which Rendell found himself after the disastrous failure of his first attempt to become Mayor in 1987, which had followed a 7 year spell as District Attorney of Philadelphia.

“Those who knew him and saw the law firm that he worked at, Mesirov Gelman Jaffe Cramer and Jamieson, or saw him socially after work, could feel the anxiousness that still welled inside him, the bolts of energy still running through him, but with no place to go. He held court. He gave opinions, but fewer and fewer people were inclined to listen. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, hard not to think of him as one of those baseball players who after that great rookie season just fade away because the timing of the swing has gone sour.” 

This baseball parallel brings to mind – in my mind, at least - Morrissey’s Little Man, What Now? ”A star at eighteen and then – suddenly gone.” While Rendell may not be physically small, he must have felt small after his 1987 failure. It required great reserves of courage and single-mindedness – more important preconditions for his success, it would seem to me, than any talents - to raise himself from the rock bottom he was in to achieve what he eventually achieved for Philadelphia.

The race for the prize is tough, but Rendell is just human and he has a wife and child.