Tony Leon on what he’s learnt

The former leader of the DA launches the three-city book tour of his latest title this week: a collection of political war stories called Being There: Backstories from the political front.

Interview by Dominique Herman

“I HAD a brief career as a lawyer, I had a brief career as an academic, I had a brief career as a diplomat – all about three or four years in each case – and a long career as a politician. From the age of about six, I told my mother I wanted to be prime minister of South Africa. Not quite realised, but I became the head of the opposition.

We grew up in an intensely political family. My mother and father were very involved in liberal politics and the founding of the Progressive Party in Durban when I was four years old, and I got exposed to it at an early age: both to the party politics and to all the racism that was then rampant in Durban and in South Africa.

So I got conscientised at a young age. All my friends, the last thing on their minds was politics; it was beach and rugby and cricket. So I was a bit of an outlier. When I was about 12, I joined the youth movement of the Progressives and got involved in the first election campaign in 1970, and never sort of stopped for a long time until I did stop.

My parents were hugely supportive of me – unto death in both cases – but my mother said, ‘Oh, Tone, you should do something other than politics. Don’t subject yourself to all the stresses.’ Every attack on me, which were many, was taken very personally by her. My mother was an intellectual but Jewish mother at the end of the day.

Politics gives you a lot but unless you’re corrupt, it’s not a world of riches. And I’m not complaining; I’m perfectly comfortable. You’ve got to have a sense of vocation otherwise you can’t do it. When I got into politics and when I went to parliament: it’s a perverse thing to say and I don’t mean this to be misunderstood, but Apartheid, both its cause and opposition to it, was a calling. To stand up for Apartheid or stand against it – as my small party did – was something you did out of a sense of deep conviction.

You didn’t go into politics or parliament because you know, ek soek werk: I want a job. And even in 1994 when the DP was reduced to me and just six other MPs, every one of those seven of us had done something before going into politics, so we’d all had a hinterland. Whereas nowadays – and this is not confined to South Africa – politics and political office is a profession in and of itself. So you get people who’ve got no background, or very little background other than politics or trade unionism, and they don’t have a wider perspective.

It wasn’t just being an attorney which helped. Having lectured in constitutional law and the interpretation of statutes, when I actually got into parliament and we were legislating, I could read a bill with a legal background and with some knowledge of how this worked, how regulations applied. I mean, you can pick this up but it does help to come with that kind of background.

What being an attorney taught me at a highly competitive firm like ENS wasn’t so much the legal part, although that was helpful. It was actually the rigours of professional discipline which is almost entirely absent from huge swathes of government. You had to respond to every item of correspondence; you had to meet very stringent deadlines. And I just found that professional training and discipline invaluable, right through to today. It teaches you to be administratively competent, I think.

There’s quite a lot of sacrifice involved in political life if you take your responsibilities seriously, and it’s absorbed practically everything else. I loved what I did. I felt that I was doing something purposeful and when I stopped loving it, I stopped.

On the one hand, I was exhausted by it – it was really kind of hand-to-hand combat. And once the party had achieved what I had set out to do, which was to create a bigger opposition, and, after all the ructions in the party, win back the city of Cape Town, I then thought, look, I can’t take this any further now.

I also saw at that stage that a lot of my big one-time admirers were starting to get a bit sort of restless. You know, someone else should take over. And I was then 50 years-old and I wanted to do other things with my life. It was a bit of a wrench letting go but I wanted to go on my own terms in my own way and in circumstances that were broadly of my own choosing.

Occupation of office – any office, not just politics – is a pointless exercise unless there is some new purpose attached to it.

A lot of people don’t move on because they’re terrified of letting go, which I fully understand. I didn’t have a plan B; I made a plan B as I went along. But I suppose I had enough self-confidence to back myself. That was the critical thing. The first few months I left politics was a bit scary because it’s like going out of this hot bath that you’ve made for yourself and you were very comfortable, but I think that’s very necessary. Take yourself out of your comfort zone. Sometimes when you do it, it’s hard, but then it becomes easier as you do it more.

There’s nothing I want to do that I haven’t done but I’d like to deepen some of the things I’ve done. So I’ve got some really good friends around the world and spending time with them is great. I travel quite a lot so I see a lot of places. And I’m never blasé about new places; I always have a deep feeling of anticipation.

We have a grandchild and she’s a constant source of delight. She’s three going on four and behaves like a 20 year-old, so watching her evolution from the beginning – pre-conception, literally – is great.

I’d like to know more about music. I go to the concerts but when I listen to a symphony, I feel a bit like that famous US Supreme Court Justice who was asked to define pornography and said, ‘I can’t define it; I know it when I see it’. I love music and I know it when I hear it that I love it. I’d like to have a better understanding than I do.

My mother was a great classical music fan and she left me a lot of books and I should actually sit down when I’ve got some time. But then I went to a Methodist boarding school and I have this Methodist thing: you shouldn’t sit around, you need to work. So I kind of need to get it out of my head that appreciating a good piece of music is not idleness, it’s enrichment. I have a thing you’ve got to be busy, but busy with work. It’s all nonsense, of course.

I was so preoccupied with my political career; it does go into your DNA. It was the whole of my life for a lot of my life and I’m not a person who does things in half measures, so I put that first. But when I met Michal, I just kind of knew this was the one. I’d had a lot of false starts and a couple of failed relationships but I just knew with her that she was the real deal. We started going out in 1996.

I have a lot of respect for her and she has for me. We irritate each other from time to time as happens when you live 24/7 with someone, but we give each other space and that’s very important. Michal thinks that I was brilliantly qualified to be the leader of the opposition because I’m contrarian. She thinks I’m very difficult. I see myself as amazingly easy but self-perception is not always reality. To use that cliche, it’s compromise. When you live with someone, it’s not one-way traffic.

I don’t have a feeling of regret. I’ve been very lucky and I’m very blessed that I could pursue things that really resonated. I knew that I wanted to go into politics from a young age and I pursued that. I mean, I didn’t do it in a monomaniacal way; I did a lot of other things. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I knew that’s what I wanted to happen.”