As long as they're our scoundrels….

In recent weeks, I’ve been trying to tease out what kind of politicians that we want. So far, I’ve covered the posibility that we want them to behave in much the same way as jurors do, or that we want a paragon of virtue (in an expensive white suit).

With Esther Rantzen and The Jury Team in the headlines as alternatives to the menu of political parties, these are apposite questions.

But I’d suggest that there are other possibilities that deserve teasing out.

Do we, for instance, want politicians to be free-booting business people? The Republic of Ireland is widely seen as having a less proper political culture than we have in the UK.

When Ireland’s natural party of government, Fianna Fáil started to emerge from the long austere shadow of Éamon de Valera – initially, tentatively during Seán Lemass’ period as Taoiseach in early 1960s, but at a more accelerated pace in the 1980s under Charles Haughey (a politician who really does throw venal British MPs of today into sharp relief), the pact with between senior politicians and the voters appeared to be….

• I will wheel and deal on behalf of Ireland as a whole
• I’ll particularly look after the part of Ireland that has elected me
• As long as I do all of this well, who could mind if I retained a small slice of the wealth that my activity generates?

Now, I doubt if anyone would say that most New Labour politicians would be capable of offering such a pact in the first place. There appear to be very few with the kind of track-record that, say, David (later Lord) Young had (described nicely here), and the past few weeks have shown that, if anything, the government underestimated the degree to which the public expect a rigid adherence to the rules.

But if we were to ever model this question – to ask people what kind of representatives they want – surely we’d have to include the Charlie Haugheys, the Bertie Aherns of this world? We’d also have to include the no-nonsense rule-breakers of the mould offered by Lord Young as well, wouldn’t we?

Lord Young, as a politician, offered an expression of a particular political orthodoxy – in his case, Thatcherism. The major Irish figures of the last fifty years, on the other hand, appear to have had no noticeable political guiding star.

This appears to be a form of representation that we’ve abandoned without much discussion. Could there ever be a market for it again?