Politics & Power Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson

A line like this works because it sounds like a sociological law while openly behaving like a joke. Parkinson, best known for turning bureaucracy into comedy with the authority of an “expert,” takes local politics - usually framed as civic virtue in miniature - and rebrands it as domestic escapism. The bite is in “solely”: no ideals, no community spirit, no ambition, just the slow, respectable flight from a bad marriage into committee meetings and procedural skirmishes. It’s a demolition of self-mythology.

The subtext is class and gender, delivered with a dry Edwardian hangover. “Men” is unexamined default, and “local politics” is the safe arena where a certain kind of man can acquire status without risking real exposure: you trade intimacy for minutes, motions, and the warm anesthesia of being needed. Parkinson isn’t just mocking politicians; he’s mocking the social architecture that makes politics a socially acceptable excuse to be elsewhere. The unhappy marriage becomes a hidden engine of public life, and that’s the nastier implication: private failure can masquerade as public service.

Context matters. Parkinson wrote in mid-20th-century Britain, a culture thick with clubs, councils, and voluntary committees - and with marriages more durable than happy. His historian’s eye supplies the faux-formal phrasing; his satirist’s instinct supplies the insinuation. The line flatters readers by letting them feel they’ve spotted the real motive behind civic piety, then implicates them by suggesting the whole local democratic machine may run, in part, on emotional avoidance.