The three most beautiful words in the English language
Just admit that you don't know what you're talking about
The three most beautiful three words in the English language are not 'I love you'. They are 'I don't know'.
Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones had the bravery and good sense to utter them on LBC this week during a phone-in. He was asked by host Iain Dale if Labour would repeal the Tories' voter ID rules if they attained power. "I don't know actually," he said. What in the name of God, you think. The words do not compute. I'm honestly not sure if I've ever heard another politician utter them. "That's a good question. I only see economic policy so I don't know what our position is on it."
"Well it's refreshing for you to say that actually," Dale said.
"I like to say I don't know when I don't know," Jones replied. "I get told off sometimes for doing it. Come back to me when we publish our manifesto and I'll let you know."
It's worth watching the clip. It's very charming. It’s unfortunately followed by him receiving Labour’s lines-to-take, which manage to sound robust without actually expressing any concrete position at all. But look, we can’t have everything. Ten consistent seconds of impressive political performance is about as much as we can credibly ask for.
It shouldn't be hard to do what Jones did, and yet it is. There is a considerable social pressure on current affairs debate programmes to pretend you have an expert insight into everything, despite the fact that most participants are amateur generalists at best. Jones pulled it off very well there, but generally speaking any admission that you don't know will be met by frowns. You're there to know. If you don't know, why are you there?
One of my worst TV performances (there have been many) came when Vera Lynn died. I was about to go on for Sky's evening paper review: over an hour of live television. Then the news came in that she'd passed away. The producers were very clear that this was the main story. We had to discuss it at length. The trouble was that I knew nothing about Vera Lynn. I knew she did that We'll Meet Again song. I knew my nan used to like her. That is the sum total of my knowledge about Vera Lynn. Needless to say, it is not enough to use up an hour. By the end I was deploying vacuities and truisms that would have shamed a Hallmarks card, just churning out the most monstrous drivel to stay alive out there. The second time I heard myself say that ‘of course it’s a tragedy when anyone dies, but she lived a long life’ I knew the game was up. Fucking mortifying.
I've spoken things on these programmes which are based on little more than having read the news and using a sprinkle of political judgement. I'm not proud of it. It is a nonsense. Walking off those sets, I've sometimes felt a gnawing sense of fraudulence. I know the topics I understand. I know those I don't. And what's worse, I can sometimes hear myself adopting a certain manner when it's one of those I don't - a public school certainty I'm really quite ashamed of, to cover the blushes of my knowledge gap.
This entire genre of news broadcasting is based on a kind of fiction, really. In a normal paper review you'll cover perhaps ten or 12 topics. If you go on Question Time or Any Questions or Cross Questions - the LBC show Jones was on - you're rarely told the questions in advance, meaning you have to be on top of everything. They are therefore completely different to being asked to go on TV to talk about one subject, where you can make a judgement as to whether you have anything useful to contribute.
It takes a long time to understand any one of the topics you're talking about - rail nationalisation, asylum policy, the international law concerning Israel's behaviour in Gaza. Everything is complicated. Everything has hidden depths when you start really reading into it. It is perilously rare, bordering on the unheard of, for anyone to properly understand all the issues they're asked to talk about. So the format pushes us towards generalism, sophistry and am-dram ideological clarity, rather than in-depth knowledge or understanding.
It's for this reason that you get a certain personality type on these things: Someone whose confidence is inversely proportionate to their knowledge. These great tankers of certainty - columnists, politicians, think tankers. They're marked out not by their views but by the ability to state them proudly regardless of their comprehension. They're talking heads, and that is precisely what they become: a head that talks. It's the certainty of fools.
Politicians occupy a designated subsection of this species. The effects are compounded in their line of work because of their workload, the need to project strength, and the demand that they stick to a party line, which is often itself extremely contorted.
Even a lowly MP has too much work to do any one part of their job thoroughly. If they were to do their constituency work properly there'd be no time for scrutinising legislation, and if they scrutinised legislation properly there'd be no time for constituency work. Ministers and shadow ministers have an additional workload on top of that, often consumed by relentless meetings and the constant tyranny of box work, which sees them make countless decisions a day, many of which should rationally be made on the lower rungs of the civil service. It's simply not feasible or remotely realistic that they'd be on top of all the issues they're discussing. Honestly, if they were really on top of their brief, they wouldn't have the time to be on top of any other issue at all.
True knowledge is not certain. It is humble. It takes place in a context of doubt. It knows enough about a subject to recognise how complex it is and how much uncertainty lies within it. It acknowledges its boundaries. It recognises that we are always wobbling on the edge of falsehood. In the words of Jacob Bronowski:
"We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible."
We value people saying they don't know precisely because it suggests that they are aware of what they do know, of where they can claim some expertise and where that claim ends.
The crossbench peers in the House of Lords are one of the few oases of specialist knowledge in Westminster. These are people who had impressive careers beforehand in science, law, businesses, volunteering or whatever, and then were given a life peerage. Sometimes people will suggest that we get rid of the party political peers and just keep the crossbenchers. After all, it's their expertise which makes the Lords an effective revision Chamber. But this would force the crossbenchers to vote on all sorts of things, including things they don't know anything about. Having party political peers makes sure the day-to-day business of the Lords carries on, with the crossbenchers dropping in to scrutinise the things they really do have experience of. It preserves precisely this element: the gaps in our knowledge, the limitations of our awareness. The sense of real specialist knowledge, which is necessarily curtailed.
That's why conspiracy theorists and bullshit artists will often rely heavily on people who have doctorates in unrelated fields. You'll see a religious studies scholar pontificating about ballistics over the JFK assassination, or, a historian outlining their lockdown scepticism during covid. In each case, you’re witnessing a great smearing of expertise - the assumption that credentials in one area grant it another. But of course, that's not how it works.
Could we all be a bit more like Darren Jones? It's harder than it looks. Sure, he can do it once. But if he really started saying 'I don't know' for all non-economic questions he'd quickly fall foul of the producers and Labour party bosses. There's something fundamental to the format of current affairs debates which mitigates against an honest assessment of the limitation of our knowledge.
But realistically, there's something in us too. We like certainty, particularly moral certainty. We're susceptible to a confident manner, to a no-nonsense sentence, to strongly-worded conviction, to a clear party line. We're liable to think of this as leadership rather than insecurity, and to trundle off over the edge behind the person who articulates it. Politicians and columnists don't behave this way just for fun. They behave that way because it gets results.
We have a cultural bias against modesty and humility in politics. We are, as ever, the victims of our own bullshit. So good on him for saying it, those three beautiful words. It’s harder than it looks.
Odds and sods
Season Two of the Traitors Australia, available on BBC iPlayer, is a modern parable. Something happened on that show, some insane mixture of personalities, which produced a morality tale for the ages. The entirety of the human experience is contained in its episodes: pride, ignorance, cowardice, conformity, terror and the extraordinary but under-discussed role of charisma in public life. The final episode is one of the most thrilling and emotionally compelling moments of television I've seen since… well, since the final episode of the first season of the UK Traitors. It's a goddamn tapestry of the human condition.
"the assumption that credentials in one area grant it another"
This is a really important point and is a view that academics often use to promote their views in the media. Kathleen Stock, for example, has no academic background in gender, yet was held up as a national expert in the field because she had credentials as a philosopher (specialism - aesthetics). Jordan Peterson similarly preaches from authority about topics of which his understanding is skin deep. It's more of a problem at the crankier end of discourse, where there's space for grifters and activists to misuse their credentials because real experts avoid getting into charged one-sided positions about nuanced topics.
Fortunately it can act as a filter if you know what you're looking for. Stock, Peterson and their ilk have no academic credibility in serious circles any more, they've pissed it up the wall for clicks.
My favourite example of this from my field is when all sorts of random astronomers got booked on live TV to cover the launch of Tim Peake, the British astronaut, to the International Space Station. Astronomy is not rocket science, and while many were happy to talk about space travel in general, they were caught out when there was an unexpected delay on arrival. I still have nightmares about the look on the face of one of the world’s experts on the Sun being asked, I think on Sky, what might have gone wrong and whether there was any danger, as he realised he didn’t have a clue. (We later found out it was just time for the crew to recover from space sickness so they could smile when the hatch was opened, but still)