On Wednesday, EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas summed up what many were thinking when she quipped privately that the state of the world makes it a “good moment” to start drinking. She might not have intended it as a serious assessment, but it offered a telling insight: Europe’s representative on the global stage thinks things are looking pretty dire.
Some asides distill political truths that stand the test of time. Juncker’s declaration that European leaders “all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it” came to be known as the “Juncker curse,” shorthand for the electoral challenges faced by reformist governments.
“Advisers and communications people often try to stage-manage everything a politician says. But leaders are human and sometimes they just say what they’re thinking — either in jest or as the pressure of the job gets to them,” said Louis Rynsard, a former political adviser in the U.K. House of Commons and co-founder of Milton Advisers. “The instinctive reaction is ‘oh, dear God, what just happened,’ but nine times out of 10 political leaders being human works better than all the beautiful crafted PR lines ever could. For the one out of 10, you just have to hope no one was listening.”
For those living in a world of secrets, what they laugh about can reveal their attitudes to things they can’t openly discuss.
“There’s only so much politicians can carry around with them and you get this sort of leakage of ideas, things that have been half thought-through,” said Ashley Weinberg, senior lecturer at the University of Salford and author of The Psychology of Politicians.
Britain’s royal family is famously measured in its communications. Yet King Charles was uncharacteristically frank when he welcomed his first prime minister, Liz Truss, to a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace in 2022, just as her proposed budget threw the markets into turmoil. “Back again? Dear, oh dear,” he smiled. Truss resigned 12 days later.