On Leadership and its absence

While we laugh at the debacle of the election of Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker in the USA, closer to home we face our own catastrophic failure of political leadership.

Britain’s public sector is in revolt, our national health service is on its knees and millions are facing poverty and destitution; and our political leaders response is compulsory maths and a clampdown on graffiti. This week Rishi Sunak, who looks like a sock-puppet and speaks as if he is addressing a kindergarten made a ludicrous speech in which he laid out five policy pledges promising to reset the economy and fix everything that had been broken by thirteen years of Tory rule. Seeming to inhabit a completely alternative reality Sunak tried to soothe the anguish and stress of the nation by promising the strangest concoction of policies. “Can’t get an ambulance? Never mind we will send refugees to Rwanda?” “Facing impossible fuel bills? Don’t worry we will make maths compulsory till your child is eighteen.”

It wasn’t so much an abdication of leadership as a departure to show great leadership for a completely fictional world that nobody lives in. If Sunak’s fresh-faced new agenda is bizarre, so too is Keir Starmer’s. The Labour leader has now wrapped himself in the language of Brexit claiming Labour would launch a “take back control” bill aimed at devolving sweeping powers to local communities in its first term. Starmer’s gibberish makes no sense at all. You cannot on the one hand deny a referendum for Scotland while on the other hand claiming that you “will devolve power across the UK, giving people control over their own future…”

Starmer and Sunak are determined to show some difference but are quite alike: they share much of the same political bandwidth and struggle manfully to put across that they are a safe pair of hands, the Labour leader losing no opportunity to repeat that a Starmer government would have to “make very difficult choices”. They are mere functionaries of a political class unable and unwilling to initiate change or help people understand the reality of the challenges we face. But if the abject failure of political leadership is routine and expected, as leaders find themselves controlled and limited by public opinion and an aggressive news cycle, where else can we look for leadership in a troubled world?

“Are you in business?”

It’s ironic that some of the most effective moral leadership comes from a twenty-year old autistic girl, someone who shows leadership through her own actions. Others have opportunities for leadership thrust upon them. Take Prince Harry.

The media has this week been, once again, flooded with the Harry and Meghan Story. If the previous monarch’s approach to PR had been characterised by a dignified silence and a certain air of stoicism, the current crop of royals are characterised by the noise of an endless whining, a sort of narcissistic self-pity. For the Sussex’s and the Wessex’s (I forget which is which) this endless spiel is mingled with a hefty dose of psycho-babble and therapy-speak, none of which translates-through to any actual self-awareness. Imagine being so tone-deaf as to think that announcing that you had killed twenty-five people would, somehow help in your effort to gain public sympathy? As the journalist John Pilger noted:

“For all the public whining from Prince Harry and his wife, his admission that he slaughtered 25 people in Afghanistan, a country offering no threat to his own and left impoverished, offers us a glimpse of the ruthless system propped up by his family.”

No, ‘leadership’ is not really to be found from the gilded lives of the Windsor’s and their extensive hangers-on and wider brood.

If the sort of moral leadership expressed by Greta Thunberg, or previously by such as Gandhi or Mandela or Guevara – a leadership based on deeds not words – is extremely rare today, so too is the sort of leadership expressed through charisma. This might be no bad thing. The use of fine rhetoric and silky oratory has masked a thousand villainous deeds. History is littered with charismatic leaders: think of the Americans from JFK, to Martin Luther King, or from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. But if the gift of the gab might be an essential tool for gaining power but it’s not much use at exercising it.

His speaking-style was extremely strange but Tony Blair was probably the last British politician that anyone thought had an ounce of charisma. Now we are more likely to be ruled by people with a charisma-bypass, assuredly dull creatures.  Alternatively we will be governed by people who just dropped into power by dint of their position in society, people like Boris Johnson or multi-millionaire Rishi Sunak or David Cameron who thought so little of being Prime Minister he just hummed his own departure as he left the lectern at Number Ten, immediately imagining how he’d make millions doing something else.

In light of the failure of political leadership – across many continents and all parties – it is re-emerging in strange and new places. ‘Leaders’ are as likely to be found now on Instagram or Tik-Tok, as poets, writers, pop-syrens and artists, community leaders or activists strapped to a motorway or leading a union. If Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Mick Lynch or Vandana Shiva or other dissident voices and whistle-blowers are the new leaders we need they too often operate alone, as individuals. The actual forum of politics has become a place where people who are drawn to leadership must avoid at all costs. ‘Politics’, or party politics is a place where leaders go to die. It’s a suffocating space which guarantees the status quo and protects vested power.

Across terminal problems of housing, the drugs death epidemic, climate breakdown, disfiguring inequality and poverty wages, Britain is characterised by leadership in its absence.

New forms of leadership must overcome this, and yes leadership models and structures has a (big) gender element. Back in the heady days of 2014 Laura Eaton-Lewis wrote (‘We need to talk about leadership‘): “If we’re really interested in creating a socially democratic model of leadership, we have a great opportunity to do so in Scotland right now. With all this energy and engagement coming from the usually ‘invisible’ women and minority group leaders, it’s a timely moment to rewrite the governance models that underpin the systemic prejudice outlined above.”

“It’s entirely achievable to create a high functioning culture if we begin as we mean to go on.  We can reap the benefits of diverse knowledge by representing ALL of our talent in leadership roles, putting the best of our minds together.  But to do this properly, we have to tackle this problem now, and to do that we have to see that the problem has at least four dimensions:

• It’s systemic – the way we do things needs to change
• Cultural – the way things have always been done has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that favours the same people over and over again.   To re-programme this we need to actively select leaders on a positive bias from amongst those who are currently invisible
• Behavioural – we need to set a new social contract about how we expect to conduct ourselves.  We can’t leave politeness only to the ladeeezzzz.
• Modelled on a pre-existing template of what ‘success’ looks like.  So we need to create new narratives and promote other models of success.”

In a world dominated by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Andrew Tate and Nigel Farage this optimism may seem outdated, but the opportunities to change the patterns and structures of leadership remain the same, and given the meta-crisis and the failure of our politicians to step-up, there’s a position, indeed many positions to be filled. Note: previous applicants need not apply.