The other day I came across an article making the familiar argument that politicians these days increasingly have no background in anything other than politics. Unlike their forbears, it is claimed, who had wide experience running other organisations, our leaders these days are woefully ill-experienced. The author of this article - George Walden, who ten years ago I regarded as the intelligent face of the Conservative party, but I’m afraid I now tend to see more as just a miserable old man - particularly compared them with Churchill.

This is now a familiar claim. But - aided by an interesting discussion at that excellent institution Liberal Drinks (which I feel strongly we should encourage to happen as widely as possible around the party, incidentally) - it strikes me that although it conforms to our general sense of the decline and convergence of politics, is not actually supported by the evidence.

I offer two main pieces of evidence against this claim.

Firstly, let’s take a look at perhaps the two greatest Prime Ministers that Britain has had (I’m not trying to start a discussion here about who Britain’s two greatest PMs were, but they seem to me a reasonable pair to pick!).

Churchill was obsessed by politics from childhood, aiming to follow his father into government. He first entered Parliament at the age of 25 and was in the Cabinet by the time he was 34. At various points in his life he made some money through writing, and in his early life had a couple of thoroughly Boys Own escapades in the battle of Omdurman and escaping from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer War. They were certainly no routine experiences. But playing soldiers in various parts of the world did not give him much sense of the varied conditions of life in his own country at the time - and it is quite clear that throughout his life his main focus was always politics and government.

Gladstone, similarly, went straight from university into Parliament at the age of 22 (6 years younger than the current youngest member of the House of Commons) after only a Grand Tour that was extremely limited by comparison to today’s gap years, and first became a Minister by the time he was 24. Although he famously had interests in theology and Homer, he never did any job not related to governing the country (or in his case, half the globe too)

I don’t propose to run through every Prime Minister or senior politician of the last two hundred years - some like the Duke of Wellington really had had huge outside experience, others not - but generally it seems to me that certainly through the twentieth century most senior politicians, by their late twenties at the latest, had essentially given their life over to politics.

So the idea that the great politicians of former years had come into Parliament only after vast experience and success in some other field of life just doesn’t seem to me to be supported by the facts.

Indeed, by comparison with many of them - much though it goes against the grain to defend him - David Cameron spending seven years at Director level in business, in the television industry, is quite broad and senior experience.

Secondly, the whole notion that experience in politics represents only a narrow view of the world, seems to me entirely wrong. If you are, say, a teacher, or in business, or a soldier, then you can get through much of your career working mostly on quite similar issues from year to year, and in many ways working with people who are mostly quite like yourself.

Politics is quite unlike that - and compared to the politicians of say a hundred years ago, most politicians today have far far more contact with the whole very wide range of people that they represent. If you had written to, say, Churchill asking for help with, say, a piece of casework about, I don’t know, the immigration status of a member of your family, or asked Stanley Baldwin to help you access more benefits from the Government, I don’t think you would have got much help. Compare that to the huge amount of casework which most MPs do for their constituents today, from the articulate complainers to the most genuinely needy, and it’s clear that politicians today have far far wider experience of the issues and problems in the constituency than their predecessors. Certainly no MP today could conceive of getting away with only visiting their constituency only once every few years as its MP (as Churchill did) - and imagine how a candidate would be crucified by their opponents for standing for election in two constituencies in the same General Election (as Gladstone and many others in his day did). Compared to them, someone today who has come straight out of university to spend say ten years as a leading local councillor, has far wider experience of issues, from helping the poorest to dealing with the business world.

Quite simply, the extension of the franchise, reinforced strongly by the campaigning techniques first introduced by the Liberal Community Politics movement of the 1970s and now predominant in all parties, has transformed the relationship between politicians and their electorate, and vastly broadened the experience and understanding of MPs, leading councillors and other elected figures.

So the evidence simply doesn’t support the claim that politicians now have much narrower experience than their forbears. Cicero famously bemoaned the decline of civilisation and how “young people today” don’t live up to their illustrious predecessors with the phrase “O tempora! O mores!” and this complaint against our MPs is simply one of one of today’s incarnations of the same claim, that every generation since him has made.

I’d add finally something I have said before - that in a democracy, if we aren’t getting the politicians that we want, then we have only ourselves to blame. In Stalin’s Russia, say, it was reasonable to complain about the government - you didn’t have any control over it. But in a democracy (albeit an imperfect one) then if you don’t like our current politicians - vote for someone else: we may not get the politicians that we deserve, but we do get the politicians that we vote for. But the fact is that although people may say that they don’t like politicians, when it actually comes down to it, and we actually get the choice, that’s who we vote for. (You may say that all parties offer the same kind of politician - but again that reflects what we want: various fringe parties offering “a different kind of politician” now exist, and any new ones could come into existence, but they don’t succeed, because simply people don’t vote for them).

The most prominent current example of this is Boris Johnson. People say they like his chaotic buffoonery, but when it actually came down to it in the six months leading up to May this year, his electability was measured exactly by how much he could put a lid on that, and conform to the standard behaviour of a politician. If even a politician as known and as popular for his buffoonery as Boris can only succeed by conforming, then I think the position is clear.

None of this is to say, of course, that today’s politicians are perfect. And of course anything that they can do to broaden their experience is to be welcomed. But the idea that today’s politicians are - in terms of either experience or of literal age - just children beside their predecessors, is simply nonsense. Sometimes we just need to curb the inner Daily Mail in us all which insists that things are just not as good as they used to be!