My mother once said "You've become very cynical since you started working for the National Audit Office". That must have been nearly twenty years ago. I must have have been very idealistic before then, because I've spent almost two decades in the most cynical profession and yet I'm still an optimist! It makes me a rubbish auditor and also a rubbish politician and political commentator.
Everywhere you turn, you just can't avoid talk about the Expenses Crisis and the separate but connected Cabinet Meltdown Calamity. The general consensus is that it's a bad thing for Politics, that the Great British Public's disillusionment with the political process is complete.
Not me, not at all. I ought to be intellectually rigorous and consider the evidence of public disengagement. The sound-bites where Random Public person says "They're all in it for themselves" or "They're all as bad as each other".
Long ago I held ambitions to become a Parliamentarian; no ambition is real unless it includes Rising to the Very Top. Yeah, from the age of eleven my sole ambition was to be Prime Minister. Everything else was a stepping stone en route.
My time as councillor firmly removed that ambition. There was a recognition that there is more to life than working long hours, which is what is required to get to the top in just about any field. I was daunted by the enormous challenge of trying to perform the role properly yet fitting it round a part-time job.
What put me off the most was the realisation of what was required to become a Parliamentary candidate. There are basically two routes to take, either that of a party loyalist, or as a maverick. As a maverick you stand most chance if you get the support of something like the Campaign Group, which is the grouping within the Labour Party most representative of my views. But that carries the same burden as being a Blairite lickspittle - you end up not being allowed to think for yourself and air your own views.
Perhaps keeping quiet and saying the 'right' things might be a small price to pay to getting into a position where people will listen to you say the 'wrong' things. But there is a fear that one would end up making calculations - just until I get to be junior minister, just until I get into the Cabinet, I will resign from Government and become a Select Committee Chair with teeth.
But what I despise was and is the people who play 'politics'. Manoeuvring and campaigning for personal advantage, in the process marginalising people like me who did speak out, did try to look at the bigger picture. I resented being side-lined by intellectual pygmies with no strategic over-view, no sense of Leadership or understanding of complex matters (such as Corporate Governance or Joined Up Government, which are dread and simplistic buzzwords for really important concepts). I have seen people become MPs with no discernible ability other than the ability to bullshit and to position themselves in the right place at the right time.
I have actually been through a strange and silly thought process in the past few days of actually considering applying to be a Parliamentary candidate. Perhaps for some of the same reasons that motivated me in the early 90s to become a councillor - a perception that I couldn't fuck it up as badly as the previous lot, however well meaning they were.
All week I have been surrounded by political conversations, and it's really quite exciting. I have remarked to several - carefully selected - people that all the shenanigans this week will quite overshadow the launch of the next series of Big Brother.
(I don't actually believe that, because the print media are offered considerable bribes to ensure such TV programmes are given blanket coverage. I see such programmes as being entirely pointless and a complete waste of time.
They don't entertain me. If I wanted to eavesdrop on the empty conversations of uninformed uninteresting chavs, I would catch a bus to Streatham. They don't educate me, or give me any insight into life, the human condition, or the world around me.
Why waste my time on such TV when you don't have to search very far to find well-researched documentaries or well-crafted dramas that open my mind and extend my horizon.)
I remember the world's most boring man, Trevor the Planning Officer now retired to Barbados, telling me that even bad architecture serves a purpose by bringing the community together. He was proved right because my own little local area has a thriving and active Residents' Association as a direct result of the infamous Streatham Place development which kicked off over seven years ago.
It has been heartening to see so much passion - and humour - across the internet and in real life in the great urge to get people to vote almost anything but BNP. I blogged this a few weeks ago and while I wasn't being original I did think I would be a small voice crying in the wilderness.
Obviously, we won't know until Sunday, in reality Monday morning, and I might be horribly wrong. I hope though, that we have all remembered that although many politicians in the mainstream have been shown to be greedy, cynical and corrupt, a great many are not. Most are hard-working, and all share a general belief in the democratic process, and most people in Britain don't want a divisive, hate-filled and violent polity.
Some of the media say that the recent Expenses furore will lead to people being turned off politics. I don't suppose I am typical of anybody - once a political geek always a political geek - but I think most people who become involved in politics at any level, from grassroots to Cabinet are motivated by a desire to do it better than the incumbent/previous lot. This is certainly not an announcement that I shall be standing for Parliament in 2014/2015, but it is an announcement of a bit of a wake-up call. How I respond to that wake-up call remains to be pondered on.
