Friends at the top

Nick Clegg and David Cameron appear to get on well. But is friendship really a good basis for fair government?

Another day, another image of the nation’s two new best friends: David Cameron and Nick Clegg. And doesn’t it feel odd? It’s not just about getting used to the “new politics”, or the fact that during the election campaign they were at each other’s throats. It’s seeing a friendship at the helm that’s disconcerting.

Of course, Gordon and Tony were friends too, sometimes. But they shared an ideology. Dave and Nick didn’t and, it seems, could not have assembled a coalition without the personal chemistry. (Gordon couldn’t do it because he didn’t have enough warmth for Nick, as he implied in his farewell speech.) So should we be bothered, or should we welcome amity at the top, as part of our constitutional growing up?

Well, we might be bothered. The crux of the issue is that friendship embodies a very different set of values to democracy. Friendship is nothing if not particular and personal. Your friends are special individuals to you, and you treat them differently from others. To say one person is your friend is to imply others are not, and perhaps further that another again is your shared enemy. To be a friend is to be a favourite, and is to be treated favourably. It’s why we get so nervous when friendship is visible in the workplace, deploying those ugly words “nepotism” and “cronyism” to describe it. A boss can be taken to court if they are seen to give friends preferential treatment. Friendship is profoundly unfair.

Immanuel Kant thought so. He believed that friendship was unethical. We don’t act according to moral laws when we act with our friends. We go on how we feel, our whims, or a sense of loyalty. To put it philosophically, friendship is not amenable to universalisable imperatives, precisely because it is partial. If the golden rule is to do to all others as you would have them do to you, friendship contravenes it. Your friend will do far more for you than they’d do for others. Kant went so far as to say that there would be no friendship in heaven, it being a place of moral perfection.

This notion of equality is crucial in modern democracy. We have one person, one vote. Everyone is equal before the law. Human rights are universal or they are nothing. Friendship mocks such values with its partiality. The kind of politics that is based upon friendship – who you know – is the kind of politics that human rights organisations campaign against.

It’s a sense of injustice that runs deep in western culture, going back to its Christian roots. For Christianity too is profoundly ambivalent about friendship. On the one hand, it seemed only sensible, to theologians like Augustine, to acknowledge that friendship is a great blessing in life. They agreed with Aristotle that a life could not be called happy without it. But on the other hand, they knew that God’s love is unconditional, equal and for all. Like the law today, which is the secular version of the same theology, God does not have favourites. It’s why the commandment is to love your neighbour, not your friend. Your neighbour is everyone and anyone. Only on such a principle can community be formed.

That represents a striking change from ancient Athenian democracy. Then it was assumed that the flourishing city-state is one that nurtures citizens as a company of friends – individuals who share a sense of goodwill, and realise that their good is linked to the good of others. For Plato and Aristotle, and later Cicero and Seneca, the role of friendship in politics was crucial: they knew it was troublesome, but they believed it was fundamental. No civic friendship, no good life. We think differently, tending to the opposite notion that a flourishing nation is a successfully managed company of strangers – individuals who aren’t inhibited by others in pursuing the good in their separate lives. Hence, for us, when friendships gain prominence on the public stage, we are wary of them.

So, we’ll never quite trust the friendship of Dave and Nick. They will have to keep repeating that they’ve established a common philosophy between them, and that their coalition is based upon policy. The media, meanwhile – on our behalf – will keep looking for evidence of rows and fallouts, sensing not just that the friendship must be fragile, but that it carries this whiff of unfairness, that it offends the values modern democracy should uphold.

Mark Vernon is the author of The Meaning of Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan)