Politics Without Honour: Expediency at Democracy’s Expense

A call to restore honour in politics, rejecting tribalism, spin, and winning at democracy’s expense.

In an age increasingly defined by the politics of self-justification and tribal fervor, a story from 2018 now reads like something out of a moral fable. A British minister, Lord Michael Bates, showed up a few minutes late to a session of Parliament. He missed a question. He rose, apologized—not with spin, not with excuses, but with a full-throated sense of shame. And then he did something that left his colleagues stunned: he offered his resignation.

The idea that a public figure would feel so deeply the weight of a small discourtesy—tardiness!—and offer to step down for it feels quaint, almost absurd, in our current moment. But what Lord Bates embodied was not absurdity. It was honour. And it reminded those watching that honour once served as the quiet architecture of public life: a moral scaffolding we barely noticed until it began to disappear.

His resignation was ultimately declined, but the act itself left a mark. It offered a fleeting glimpse of a political world governed not by performance, but by principle. It was the kind of moment that suggested there is still such a thing as moral responsibility, and that public office is not merely a platform for strategy, but a trust to be earned—and re-earned—daily.

The Triumph of Expediency

Contrast that with today’s prevailing political atmosphere, in which the noble impulse to do the right thing—regardless of political calculus—is treated as a weakness. Winning, we are told, is what matters. Winning the seat, the news cycle, the Twitter war. And if you have to distort the truth a little, break a few norms, dodge a little accountability—well, that’s just the game.

Apologies are no longer expressions of contrition; they’re strategic communications. Resignations, when they come at all, are dragged out, poll-tested, lawyered up. In this environment, Lord Bates’s reaction to being late seems almost laughably out of step. Why resign over something so small? But that question reflects a deeper erosion of our standards. It’s not just that we no longer expect public figures to be honourable. It’s that we’ve stopped believing honour matters at all.

The Shift North of the 49th Parallel

Canada has not been immune to this cultural shift. Over the past decade, our political tone—particularly on the populist right—has grown louder, harsher, and more transactional. In place of reasoned argument, we now get performative outrage. In place of reflection, we get reflexive denial. A politics once marked by civility and good-faith disagreement is increasingly shaped by the imperatives of American-style media combat.

There are echoes of Donald Trump’s political ethos here, but the deeper concern is structural. The game has changed. Politicians are no longer rewarded for taking responsibility; they are rewarded for sticking to the script. Deny the mistake. Attack the accuser. Reframe the facts. And if you do it convincingly enough, many voters will cheer—not in spite of the dishonesty, but because of it. Because in tribal politics, integrity is not a virtue. Loyalty is.

The Psychology of Tribalism

We should not be surprised. As the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, human beings are not primarily reasoning creatures. We are moral animals, yes—but our morality is often intuitive, shaped more by identity than logic. We defend our “team” with visceral loyalty and rationalize its behaviour after the fact.

That’s how we end up in a world where the same person who was once outraged by a political scandal will dismiss a nearly identical one—so long as it comes from their side. The principle doesn’t change; the jersey colour does. And in this climate, honour becomes an inconvenience—something that might cost your side the game.

When the Party Becomes the Country

One of the most disturbing developments in recent politics—Canadian and otherwise—is the fusion of partisanship with patriotism. Increasingly, people don’t just support a party; they equate their party with the country itself. To criticize the party is to betray the nation. To lose an election is to suffer a national tragedy.

This is not just misguided. It is dangerous. Because it replaces public spiritedness with factionalism. It treats dissent as treason and compromise as weakness. And it trains citizens to see politics not as a common project but as a zero-sum war of all against all.

One of the most dangerous things in politics is when loyalty to party replaces loyalty to principle. When that happens, the democratic process becomes a hollow ritual. That’s where we find ourselves now: with parties behaving more like teams in a blood sport than vehicles for shared ideals. The rituals of democracy persist—elections, debates, press conferences—but the spirit animating them is increasingly performative.

Partisanship isn’t new, of course. But when it becomes a kind of moral absolutism—where one’s side is always right and the other irredeemably wrong—it hollows out our politics. It corrodes our capacity for compromise and turns opponents into enemies. And when scoring partisan points matters more than solving real problems, Canadians are left with theatre instead of progress.

Politics as a Means, Not an End

We have forgotten something elemental: that parties are not ends in themselves. They are vehicles. They are tools for organizing people around shared visions of the common good. They are not moral identities to be defended at all costs. And when we treat them as such, we corrupt our civic life.

Politics at its best is a shared search for the good life. It is a conversation among fallible human beings trying to build a just society. That conversation depends on mutual respect, on truthfulness, on a sense of proportion—and yes, on honour. When those virtues vanish, politics becomes little more than performance art for the already-convinced. It becomes a contest of slogans, not solutions.

The Quiet Power of Responsibility

So where do we go from here? We start by reclaiming what Lord Bates instinctively understood: that public service is a moral undertaking. That character matters more than spin. That admitting fault is not a sign of weakness but a marker of strength. And that the health of our democracy depends not just on good policies, but on good people—people willing to say, “I was wrong,” or even, “I should step aside.”

This kind of cultural shift will not come quickly. It will require citizens who demand more from their leaders and leaders who are willing to demand more from themselves. It will require a new generation of public figures who are less interested in winning the moment and more interested in doing what is right—even when it costs them.

The story of Lord Bates is, in one sense, a footnote. But in another, it is a reminder of what is possible. It shows that honour is not dead—it’s just waiting to be rediscovered. And perhaps, if we can still recognize such gestures for what they are, there is hope yet for our politics.

Because if democracy is ultimately a moral enterprise, then its future depends not just on who governs, but on how. And whether, in the end, we are willing to value integrity more than victory.