Why it is lonely in the political centre

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I saw Anthony Joshua win the IBF heavyweight championship of the world in the O2 Arena once. This month, two men with a combined age of 118 sold out the same venue for a night of political repartee. Explanations vary for the lavish success of The Rest Is Politics, the podcast that pairs former Labour adviser Alastair Campbell with one-time Tory MP Rory Stewart. But most cite its centrism: its commitment to the middle ground in polarised times.

I’m not having this. Campbell is emphatically of the left, in tribal feeling if not always in doctrine. Stewart is a rural romantic, a paternalist, who must be bemused that modern-minded liberals have come to view him as one of theirs. (If you think it is hard to get things built in Britain now, be glad Stewart was never planning minister). True, their listeners saw Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as more or less equal villains. But the electorate disagreed when given the choice. Corbyn was marmalised. Under what warrant, then, is it “centrist” to equate the two? The C-word now seems to mean something like “left-liberal” for people with no idea where the national median is.

Why am I being so precious about the centre ground? Why do I sound as though I want to register it as an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée? Well, it gets lonely here. The number of authentic centrists is minuscule. To be one is to find almost everybody ghastly. If you haven’t put in the hard yards that centrism entails, hands off the label. 

It is the bravest position to take on the political gamut. In the middle, you are everyone’s infidel

It took a while in and around politics to absorb something. The reason centrists win, or won, is not that a plurality of voters hold those views as their first preference. Even in the Clintonian heyday around the millennium, it’s not clear they did. Rather, the centre is what a plurality can live with. As far as fighting elections goes, this amounts to the same thing: victory. But it means that actually being a centrist is isolating. Your agenda, or something like it, ends up being enacted, to the delight of almost no one. The point is best captured in the person of Emmanuel Macron, who is simultaneously hated and twice-elected. 

People have it exactly wrong, then, when they talk of the centre as something weak-willed and etiolated. It is the bravest position to take on the political gamut. To the left and right, there are large social movements you can subsume yourself into. (In an atomised age, this matters far more to some people than winning.) In the middle, you are everyone’s infidel. If I am correct that The Rest Is Politics is really a soft-left congregation, what is the dead-centre equivalent? There isn’t one. The numbers aren’t there.

Who counts as a centrist, then? It would be absurd to demand that you take the middle view on each issue. (I’d be too pro-immigration. Nor would I want a government that split the difference on supporting Ukraine.) But a starting point might be this: have you voted for both of your country’s main parties for national government? An amazing number of ostensibly reasonable people haven’t, and wouldn’t. This is an imperfect test in the US, where someone under 30 has not had a non-populist Republican party to back. And in some democracies, the neat bi-party model doesn’t apply. But in much of the west, the test finds people out. A lot of avowed centrists in Britain decided that Thatcher and Major and Cameron were unsupportable, which is quite the coincidence.

Napoleon said the key to understanding a man is to know what the world was like when he was 20. For me, that was 2002, the peak year of the centre, before the Iraq fiasco. I really do believe in some Blair-ish, Economist editorial approach to the running of most high-income societies most of the time. (Poorer countries might suit industrial protection and other liberal heresies.) The fate of Britain since deviating from Uncle Tony’s agenda circa 2016 does nothing to dissuade me. But I could just be the mental prisoner of my generation. Either way, there is an ever stronger pull to the centre of the centre, like the singularity of a black hole, and about as enchanting to most people.

Email Janan at [email protected]

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