Handling frenemies in politics
‘There is only so much oxygen [in politics]’ begins a former special adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister, ‘there are 136 MPs all wanting to be around that cabinet table’. The intense competition to curry favour amongst political leadership and climb the greasy pole creates a unique culture within party politics. Your ‘team-mates’ can quite often view your success as a threat; they may smile at you at lunch before attempting to slow your progress that same afternoon. These people are your frenemies, he shares, they are friends to your face but enemies behind your back.
Ask a politician how many friendships they have within politics and they will likely say they have at least a few. But how many of these are true friends? How many will reach out to you when you suffer a setback, or lose an election? How many would visit you in hospital following a health scare? As is quite often the case in politics, many politicians look back on their careers and realise that their ‘friendships’ were instead acquaintances of convenience or utility.
To further understand the nature of the frenemy, and how they can affect the political experience the Silent MP had a chat with Randy Boissonault, former Canadian MP and special adviser to the PM on LGBTQ+ issues. Randy tells the Silent MP that understanding and coming to terms with the precarious nature of friendships within politics is crucial; ‘if you’re not prepared to be a student of the system, you’re gonna fail’ he enthuses, ‘the notion of being better than other people is not gonna wash’. In order to create meaningful relationships and drive real change during a political career, Randy believes in inclusivity.
The first step here, Randy says, is to work towards making your goals shared by everybody within your sphere, be that a working group, a parliamentary committee, your local constituency team, or even the whole party. ‘You better be prepared to share the credit and process’, Randy explains, ‘[and] go from me, to team’. You, as a politician, should merely be the vehicle for the goals you set; if the group knows that any achievements will be fairly shared and acknowledged, there will be less incentive for selfish politicking. For Randy, this works to mitigate the frenemy culture of modern politics; ‘you might think you don’t have a target on your back, but you do. Bringing people along with you is better.
Do it for the result, not the glory’.
Randy tells The Silent MP that we can make these changes through tiny actions. For example, rather than tweeting ‘I am honoured/thrilled/pleased to announce x, y, and z, focus instead on how the policy you are announcing benefits other people. ‘Taking the ‘I’ out of politics’, as Randy calls it, through small steps such as inclusive phrasing, allows us to foster a mindset of inclusivity driven by unselfish motivations.
For Randy, far too many politicans are focusing solely increasing their slice of the pie, when instead their efforts would be better concentrated on making the whole pie bigger. In politics, there will always be those waiting for your downfall, there will always be frenemies, but the first step towards a positive outlook and unselfish mindset is to focus on sharing your goals and motivations with those around you, and be true to these issues themselves rather than getting drawn into political game-playing and point-scoring. In this broad sense, Randy tells us to focus on putting our family first, and the politics will soon follow.
