Reflecting on the life of Gandhi, George Orwell opened a celebrated essay with the words: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.” In recent years, and partly because earlier generations awarded them a more saintly status, the British public has adapted this excellent maxim by substituting the word “MPs” at the beginning of it.
You may have noticed by now that I have made it the business of this column to occasionally defend politicians (while mostly slating them) on the grounds that, like proper journalists, they are a boon to democracy. To that end, I think you should know about something called the UK Life Sciences Strategy.
Published early in the last parliament, and co-authored by Rohan Silva, my fellow columnist in these pages, it invested huge energy and resources behind the biological knowledge that generates a trade surplus of more than £5 billion and employs nearly 200,000 people in more than 5,000 companies.
To take just one example of what this has achieved, we have now built 13 Genomic Medicine Centres around the country. These use information from our genomes to improve clinical care. It has life-saving consequences in fields as diverse as oncology and pharmacology. Together with the revolution in patient data, where you can access health records and advice from the smartphone in your pocket, it will change healthcare everywhere. Britain is leading the way, as part of a Life Sciences Strategy which, when reviewed two years ago, had already made “notable progress” in eight of 13 key areas.
Have you heard about any of this? If not, can I suggest why? Two words: George Freeman.
The Tory MP for Mid-Norfolk is precisely the kind of politician you never hear about because he is at least as interested in doing things as being things. He spent more than a decade working in the life science industry and, more than perhaps anyone else in Whitehall, now owns the strategy in government. For that privilege he has taken a whopping pay-cut and put an unbearable strain on his family life.
Do we really think extracting this price and inflicting this toll makes better public servants of our MPs? Who knows what scandal will afflict him in years to come but Freeman has been improving the nation’s prospects for a while. He knows, as few know, that at its best politics oscillates between the tedious, the menial and the vital. Not for him the fanfare of breakfast talk radio or attendant cameras on every factory visit. Modern politics, a noble profession staffed by ignoble amateurs, is more mundane than that.
Once upon a time we thought of MPs as saints. Then we were shocked when they turned out not to be spared the peccadilloes common to man. This shock, and the ensuing disgust, has spawned a rancid political culture that makes zeros out of heroes, casting the likes of obscure George Freeman as geeky, boring even — though our lives depend on him.
Our culture is too crude and rude to give MPs their due, and when the history of our time is written by those who missed it, few will attach glory to the plodding Englishman without retinue and renown. Yet unbeknown to a sedated electorate more interested in trivialities, it is just such men and women who spare us the burden of having to care.
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