The Swiss town of Davos has its charms: an alpine garden, a tobogganing slope, a squirrel trail. The police snipers who stand guard on its snow-topped roofs each January don’t rank among them, nor does the bland lounge where, in 2015, Enda Kenny charmed a tech behemoth.
“Ahh, the beautiful ladies of Facebook,” is how Kenny, then taoiseach, greeted executives Sheryl Sandberg and Sarah Wynn-Williams, according to the latter’s insider exposé of her ex-employer. “Coming from another man, this would be creepy,” Wynn-Williams writes in Careless People. “Somehow, from him, it’s almost charming.”
But Kenny, this almost-charming man, isn’t at the World Economic Forum purely to flatter, recite poetry or ply “gorgeous ladies” with private-equity wine. He placates, asks favours and tries to sell Sandberg the benefits of a new Irish tax incentive “with a twinkle in his eye”.
Wynn-Williams is taken with this firmest of allies, also describing him as “charming, a charismatic man” without qualification. Perhaps, though it goes unsaid, Kenny gets away with a shtick that other men wouldn’t because he gives the impression that it is not a shtick at all, that his “mischievous” behaviour is just his natural Irish charm.
Still, that other “almost charming” tag hints at the residual unease many of us feel when we have close personal encounters with charm. We know that charm can involve flirtation with fine lines that will sometimes blur. We know, though it might suit to forget, that compliments are not always synonymous with respect. We know that charm is the bow on the parcel, not the gift.
We might also recognise the transactional nature of what is unfolding – the charmer wants our admiration in return. We likely accept that we’re not necessarily immune to charm even when we identify it as such. Most of us will be stung by charm at some point in our lives, while desiring our own inexhaustible reserves of the stuff. No one wants to be accused of having had a charm bypass.
So what happens when the poisonous consequences of mass-scale charm deployment seep out of our screens from the lawns, podiums and garish offices of power?
Do elite-level charm tacticians – whose duplicity is either hidden from or actually admired by their spellbound audience – make us warier of the innocuous charmers we meet? Have we ever faced up to the corrosive impact of charming monsters?
Political charm is a contentious arena. Attributing the rise and fall of political figures to something as intangible as charm, or the absence of it, risks obscuring the structural forces that shape those trajectories.
Crucially, charm and charisma – charm’s low-effort, more innate cousin – are in the eye of the beholder. We’re as polarised in our perceptions of them as we are in everything else.
When toxic charmers flourish, the secondary damage they do – after the con itself – is to render us cynical, cold, distrusting and hyper-alert
Every time British political commentators trumpet the alleged charisma of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as if it is immutable fact, I wonder what it is they’re drinking. Conversely, I was once inside a giant tent where Gordon Brown, not long out of Downing Street, charmed a book festival audience in his native Scotland. The near-consensus on Brown was that charm was not his strong point.
Is Donald Trump charming? Even loathers of everything he says, does and represents might concede that there must be some superficial, crafty charm lurking in his arsenal. On the other (trapped) hand, can a man who turns handshakes into vice-like expressions of superiority as unsubtly as Trump ever be considered charming? It would be reasonable to yearn for a great deal more charm, if only to discourage his brutish copycats.
Indeed, the volume of unfettered nastiness, rage and self-absorption that erupts daily from Trumpville is now so dismally expected that it is instead the rare, brief moments of apparent sincerity that surprise.
“Your father was a great fighter, right?” Trump asked Micheál Martin in the Oval Office. The bar for his agreeableness was by then already so low, the question manifested to some watchers as genuine interest.
Days earlier, Trump had queasily declared in the company of UK prime minister Keir Starmer that he found his wife Victoria to be “a beautiful, great woman”, which might have been charming were Trump not a sexual abuser.
Since his re-election, the conversation has tellingly moved on to damage control, or how others might charm him. “Charm is the best defence and the best attack,” body language expert Judi James suggested before Martin’s visit. The advice on offer as the Taoiseach entered the den of the unruly disrupter-in-chief recalled one definition of charm as a verb: to try to control an animal.
The ways we invoke charm in language betray our suspicion of it. It’s an amber-alert of a word even when used to describe something ostensibly delightful. A “charming” cottage likely lacks space, light and modern insulation. If somewhere “has its charms”, it will invariably be pock-marked by the sort of dreary features no Instagram filter can disguise.
“Charming!” we say sarcastically, when someone has been absolutely charmless to us. People are said to “turn on the charm”, implying we’re aware they can turn it off again. Organised charm can be so aggressive a manoeuvre it becomes a “charm offensive”.
Sure, a “charmer” could be someone endearing, but a “real charmer” is definitely a cad with a much-frayed playbook. “I was raised to be charming, not sincere,” purrs Cinderella’s womanising prince in Stephen Sondheim’s 1986 musical Into the Woods.
Contemporary takes on the stock fairytale character tend to subvert the idea of handsome rescuers with castles but no catches – in the Shrek films, Prince Charming is a narcissistic villain.
The moniker now surfaces less frequently in straight-up romantic swoons than it does in cautionary tales as a harbinger of some fraud or shattered illusion. Not every charmer is a con-artist, but every con-artist is a charmer.
We can’t help liking people who dispatch compliments, and because we like them, we want to trust them. We want to trust that they mean it, so we revert to believing that charm and sincerity are not mutually exclusive
In domestic abuse cases, experts have for decades sought to highlight a sinister pattern. The Charm Syndrome is a 1991-published book, subtitled Why Charming Men Can Make Dangerous Lovers, by Sandra Horley, the now retired long-time chief executive of UK domestic violence charity Refuge. In it, she stresses the power of the mask that has yet to slip.
Abusers do not advertise their cruelty in advance. First, they’re charming. Then they start flitting between moods, flattering their victims one minute, putting them down the next. They destabilise and demoralise their targets before the escalation begins.
Portrayals of coercive control in culture often focus on the escape, by which point any remaining traces of charm are few. Still, we may glimpse some disconcerting changes in weather.
“Babe, that’s really sweet,” a straw-grasping Nicola tells jealous, resentful Adam in I Am Nicola, a 2019 Channel 4 one-off by Dominic Savage and star Vicky McClure. To apologise for an ugly rant that thwarted her bid to leave the house, he has proposed they “go see a show in London”, even though he “hates those things”. Soon, he’s angry again.
Meanwhile, in Mary Nighy’s quietly compelling 2022 film Alice, Darling, domineering Simon is all smiles as he shows up uninvited on the girls’ trip that pinched girlfriend Alice, played by Anna Kendrick, was too scared to tell him about. He cooks her friends a tersely consumed meal, then swerves between insults and intense physical affection before guilting her into cutting short her weekend.
Beyond both these intimate settings and the wavering diplomacy of world stages, charm is also routinely weaponised in business. In Careless People, Kenny isn’t the only person Wynn-Williams finds charming. She observes Sandberg, her boss, sparkling with charisma as she meets then New Zealand prime minister John Key, “like she’s the star of her own show, radiating confidence and charm”. Later, she discovers there’s a downside to working with people who are the stars of their own show.
Charm and wealth have a circular relationship. Charm is monetisable, but money can also pay for charm. One advantage of enjoying above-average fortune in life is the capacity to tap into banks of easy charm unhindered by the kind of everyday frictions that make the rest of us tired and cranky.
[ Mad Men made perfect sense during the swirling disorderOpens in new window ]
But this is only sometimes true. Other times, it’s the climbers and grafters who, by necessity, possess an abundance of charm, while over-confident rich kids glide by on a deficit of it.
This scenario plays out in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, the first episode of advertising agency drama Mad Men, in which tactless accounts man Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) unwittingly offends potential client Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), prompting her to fume to his boss, “You were right, Roger, this place really runs on charm.”
“Old money” New Yorker Pete can’t sell his own personality. The pity of this is that his forward-thinking ideas are ignored. By contrast, the man who rose from nothing to become Don Draper (Jon Hamm) can bristle at Rachel, then use his “magic” to patch things up with her over drinks. “You can tell your boss that you charmed me,” she says. No, this doesn’t end well.
The great joke of Mad Men’s first season is that these professional persuaders spend much of it vying to get charisma-void Richard Nixon into the White House, when we know that it’s 1960 and notorious charmer JFK will win.
Two accounts of another Democratic president’s youth convey with startling simplicity what it’s like to be on the receiving end of inherent charm: lovely.
In her 2003 memoir Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton sums up her first conversation with her future husband thus: “As we walked, he complimented my long flower-patterned skirt. When I told him that my mother had made it, he asked about my family and where I had grown up.”
True, Bill Clinton also “had a vitality that seemed to shoot out from his pores”. And yet the display of interest she recounts doesn’t exactly conjure up an image of wildly unmatchable personal magnetism. It sounds closer to the manners anyone can attain.
In Rodham (2020), novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s alternate history, a fictional Hillary has learned from Bill that compliments are “shockingly effective”. They “feel wonderful”, because “what in theory should sound saccharine or manipulative rarely does in practice, so long as you believe the other person really means it”.
[ Rodham: What if Hillary hadn’t married Bill?Opens in new window ]
There’s the rub. We can’t help liking people who dispatch compliments, and because we like them, we want to trust them. We want to trust that they mean it, so we revert to believing that charm and sincerity are not mutually exclusive.
Charm can be redistributed. But if charm stops working a charm entirely, we’ll be left in a dark place. When toxic charmers flourish, the secondary damage they do – after the con itself – is to render us cynical, cold, distrusting and hyper-alert. They’re the stingers that keep us out of the water. They’re the scammers who make us reject all unknown numbers.
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious,” insists Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.
It might be useful, though, if charm and goodness could be relied upon to align a little more than they seem to at present. Charm is ephemeral. It wears off, it fades. But that’s no comfort either. Who wants to live in a charmless world?
