12
Jamie Pow
I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.
Benjamin Disraeli, on becoming Prime Minister in 1868 (cited in
Dale, 2013: 132)
Introduction
Politics has long been perceived as a game between competing insiders,
as illustrated by the above quote from Disraeli. What appears to be different today is the occupational backgrounds of politicians, particularly
frontbenchers. Disraeli had prior experience as an author, but there is a
perception that an increasing number of Members of Parliament (MPs)
have pre-parliamentary experience in professional politics itself. The notion of a ‘career politician’ in Britain was articulated in the early 1980s
by Andrew King, who observed that “increasingly… politicians without
a great deal of first-hand experience of the world outside politics are
running the country” (King 1981: 278). This was echoed by Riddell who
argued that MPs are decreasingly associated with having experience of
‘proper jobs’. Instead, he pointed to “a marked rise in the number of MPs
working in jobs directly linked to politics” (Riddell 1993: 118).
This article tests the theory of the continued rise of the career politician,
defined as someone with a pre-parliamentary occupational background
in professional politics, such as research for a political party or as a parliamentary aide, against secondary and original quantitative data. By
looking at the changing number of career politicians in the House of
Commons since 1997, the success rates of career politicians as candidates since 1997, and the contemporary occupational composition of the
Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, it will be argued that career politicians are
increasingly dominant in British political life, particularly in the Labour
Party. This empirical finding highlights normative issues for representative democracy to which parties themselves should respond.