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Polls, politics and policy ~ Jocks and nerds in the political world
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Backing Britain from their Whip Inflation.
This week we look, in our politics section, at commentators’ newfound enthusiasm for the ‘nerd/ jock’ reading of British politics. Does this idea, borrowed from American films like Clueless and Mean Girls, really help us to predict who will be the next PM?
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the part of the newsletter that is always on Spring Break.
Jocks and nerds
Can British politics be understood through the prism of ‘nerds and jocks’? This meme has done the rounds in recent weeks, as a way of understanding where British politics will go next. The theory – if it can be called that – is that the British Prime Ministership has alternated, since 1945, between geeky boffins lacking charisma and swaggering Prom Kings who can’t master the detail. Thatcher (jock), Major (nerd), Blair (jock), Brown (nerd), Cameron (jock), May (nerd), Johnson (jock), etc.
The idea was Tweeted to some interest in 2019, when Labour was choosing the candidate who it hoped would replace Boris Johnson. And it was written up here into a recent long-form blog. During the immediate aftermath of Johnson’s resignation, it was even discussed on Radio 5 Live, as a potential way of predicting Boris’s successor.
This week saw conservative pundit Tom Harwood give the nerd/ jock dichotomy another airing on Twitter (see above) – leading to a lengthy discussion among many of the commentariat about whether his classifications rang true. Could Anthony Eden, a war hero who won the Military Cross, really be cast as a nerd? And in what sense was the bookish Harold Wilson a jock?
That the nerd/ jock trope has become so popular in recent months is largely thanks to the waning premiership of Boris Johnson – a Prime Minister who, more than most, embodies the meathead elements of the jock tendency. And the idea perhaps has a whiff of truth about it at points, insofar as a strident leader may cause voters to crave a diffident one, and vice versa.
But we humbly wonder, here at TCC Towers, if the present online enthusiasm for the model tells us more about the human mind than the Tory Leadership. People like a simple pattern or taxonomy for explaining things; there is indisputably something both neat and accessible about the nerd/ jock paradigm, with its nod to American high school movies. And, once you’ve signed up to the premise, it is tempting to stretch reality to fit the pattern.
Both of the present Tory Leadership contenders could be read either as the nerd or as the jock in the scenario, for example. Is Sunak the big spending Chancellor with the expensive wardrobe or the details man ruling out tax cuts? Is Truss the former Lib Dem goody-two-shoes or the Thatcher emulator throwing Brexity red meat to Tory diehards? Hence, regardless of who wins, the pattern can be said to have struck once again, and enthusiasts for the jock/ nerd conceit can continue to discuss it.
And finally this week Charlie’s Attic, the psycho-social wedgie at the end of your bulletin:
