Clegg should stay on ‘the ciggies’
Jonathan Lindsell, 12 February 2013
That sounds like rather bad advice. After all, cigarettes kill. Moreover, as Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg has a duty to act as a role model to the country, or at least not to act the total hypocrite as his government upholds the indoor smoking ban and pushes forward an attack on packaging.
In Sunday’s BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Disks, Clegg admitted to a weakness for tobacco and selected a ‘stash of cigarettes’ as his luxury item. This didn’t seem too much a cynical attempt to show himself as a ‘man of the people’ – indeed Clegg slipped it in so apologetically (“I hope my children don’t hear [this]”) that any whiff of nonconformism or rebellion was softened by a healthy dose of family values.
However, he’s currently “off the ciggies”, and that’s worrying.
Why?
Because kicking the habit – or worse, doing what Clegg is apparently doing, which is suspending the habit in the knowledge he may later succumb – saps willpower.
Willpower is the subject of a recent book by experimental psychologist Roy Baumeister, made palatable by his New York Times partner John Tierney. Baumeister argues that ‘willpower’ is a quantifiable, finite mental resource. They show that people can only effectively exercise self-control so many times each day, and that discipline applies to a variety of circumstances. To paraphrase, Nick will be using the same ‘store’ of willpower to choose a healthy lunch, resist smoking, manage his party and run the country. If he runs out, he will suffer ‘decision fatigue’.
Baumeister suggests that when our willpower store is depleted, we become much worse at decision-making, often choosing the path of least resistance, the policy which requires the least spending, the African intervention most likely to meet press approval. Examples in the book include men who, after spending the day attempting not to ogle attractive women at work, are demonstrably weaker than their control-group when they later work out at the gym. More scarily, this this Daniel Kahneman study supports Baumeister’s suggestion that glucose is the main willpower-booster, and shows a horrific 65% fluctuation in Israeli judges’ legal thoroughness depending on how long ago they ate. If even theoretically-objective professional parole judges’ performances vary so greatly on the basis of their willpower stores, imagine how unreliable Nick Clegg must be.
What I’m driving at here is that it is both irresponsible and selfish for Clegg to try and quit smoking now. The first paragraph’s hypocrisy argument is flawed – Clegg has turned his back on numerous Liberal Democrat and personal pledges already, not least tuition fees. While the university fiasco provided us with this hilarious video, it also shot his credibility to tatters far more than the odd cigarette ever could. Even then, since he has now admitted to smoking in office (with the exalted company of President Obama), the cat is already out of the bag in PR terms.
The Liberal Democrats ostensibly agreed to form the Coalition both so that the country might have a stable government, and so the threat of their withdrawal might keep the most disagreeable Conservatives and their policies in check. This cause requires serious gumption, as the Liberal Democrats are attacked from all sides – from the Tories for obstructionism, and from Labour and the media for insincerity and power-hunger. In this case, it behoves Clegg, as their leader, to be fighting-fit at all times. His nicotine habit was presumably a vice long before he got into power, and for the good of the nation and his own credibility, he should hold off quitting until he’s out of power. I never thought utilitarianism would justify a daily exposure to cancer and heart disease, but in this case it clearly does so – Clegg will better serve the electorate if he indulges in the occasional puff, and saves his resolve for confronting Cameron.