We want our politicians to be good persons and act morally on our behalf. Yet they continually fail to live up to our expectations. We think of a great many of our politicians as corrupt, self-serving and, at best, amoral. They lie, obfuscate, and avoid answering important questions and rarely, if ever, accept responsibility for their errors or the bad things they do. Conversely, politicians are quick to claim credit for successes for which they were only tangentially responsible or if they happen to be the lucky recipient of a fortuitous series of events.  It is no wonder then that our faith in political institutions and the men and women who serve in them is very low. In the 2018 Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, only 19% of a representative sample of a 1001 British adults trusts politicians to tell the truth. (The one group who scored lower were advertising executives with 16% while nurses, in contrast scored, 96%.)

What is puzzling is that politicians, especially those in democratic societies who need to win elections to gain and retain power and who are subject to continual scrutiny by a free press, repeatedly act in ways that they know will erode their likeability, question their moral probity, and diminish our trust in them. For a great many people, the sentiments of Alvy Singer (the protagonist in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall) expresses a common view about the morality of politicians.