By what means – personality, policy, argument or deceit? Alone or in alliance, and alliance with whom? For peace or war? Leading party or public? Long-term or interim? For stability or adventure? More or less honestly or more or less not?No sensible person ignores such distinctions. But the febrile media treat nuance as academic frivolity and, in the manner of baby’s first feed, “Wants to Know!”
At this, the modern leader, lacking pride, offers a pre-emptive show of bonhomie and ingratiation, which will be praised, in the short term, as leadership. That, though, is what happens in a sophisticated economy equipped with “democracy”, more accurately, elected assembly and public representation.
Alexander the Great has fewer problems than Anthony Eden. Alexander invades all his neighbours, kills them in satisfying numbers and weeps that there are no new worlds to conquer. Eden, lacking a dominant ally’s fiat to snatch back the Suez Canal, must invent a rigmarole of bogus conflict between Israel and Egypt, and pretend to be “separating the combatants”. He lies and, worse than that, lies incredibly, because he is not a Macedonian warlord, free as air. He heads an economy capable of ruin in three days of bad trading. Every secret move faces swift revelation and, worst of all, he has broken the immortal Irish advice about not starting from here.The case is altered whichever way you look.
Consider specifics. Some of Adolf Hitler’s worst enemies would acknowledge his superb qualities of leadership, but he had the opportunities. When he was being rejected for architectural school early in the 20th century, all sorts of people, not just retired field marshals, but intellectual innovators, Gabrielle D’ Annuzio, Filippo Marinetti and Padraig Pearse, were writing admired manifestoes calling for the cleansing power of war, sacramental blood-letting, also yearning for a “Strong Man”. It was a fashionable tune and very catchy.Given the humiliating German defeat at the brink of victory in 1918, bank failure, huge unemployment, champagne inflation, all baffling civil government, a short-listing for Strong Man naturally followed.
Compare and contrast that Germany of the late 1920s and France in the 1880s. Defeated by Bismarck, old authority removed by “dirty democratic politicians” – a scandal – the Panama Canal Company, talk of Jewish finance – and aspirant Leaders rolled up in France. Happily, the favoured candidate was General Georges Boulanger, man on a black horse, brave soldier in a colonial spat, half-Welsh, not all that right-wing and vaguely aware of the enormity of the undertaking. Boulanger was to have marched on the National Assembly ahead of a raging crowd which the proto-fascist Libre Parole was working up. Leadership here meant seizing power, emptying parliament and proclaiming rivanchiste war against Germany and rotten bourgeois democracy. Boulanger cried off and shot himself on the grave of his sweetheart – “Dying”, said Georges Clemenceau, “like a subaltern”.
In like fashion, given the circumstances, Lenin, in Russia in 1917, did the violent necessary. Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, in France in 1848, did not. Cometh the hour and all that. To leading a successful revolution, circumstances occur, but only ruthless nerve accomplishes.Forgetting such harsh will and horrible ends, what sort of leadership is required in a civil, parliamentary context? Well, no one sort. Take Winston Churchill after 1945. By normal standards, he was hopeless. Sixty-nine, tired, knocked back by inconceivable defeat, he spent a remarkable amount of time, pace our own dear former leader, as the guest of rich friends, painted (rather well) in France and Morocco, edited the drafts of his books, written by Bill Deakin and Maurice Ashley, and made occasional intemperate assaults on Clement Attlee’s Government, plus the odd historic perception like the “Iron Curtain” Fulton, Missouri speech.Yet Churchill was displaying excellent leadership. It was slow and very good. Having lost national command, he protected his party position by simply leaving aspiring successors – Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, Harold Macmillan – waiting on his inscrutability. Butler, ablest and most practical, he set to work in Old Queen Street, employing unknown, very bright young men, such as Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell, to research credible policies and an intelligent response to Labour’s accomplished business.
The Tories emerged from Butler’s charters very careful, but credible, ready to dismantle wartime controls and rationing, but ignoring people such as Harry Crookshank, keen to erase welfare and discipline the lower classes. This was Liberal Toryism. It didn’t solve low growth or achieve dynamism, but, facing a nearly 200-seat deficit, put Tories into tempered power until 1964. The Conservative Party grumbled and followed and won – that’s what I would call leadership.
However, what about a bold, original leadership which delights history and loses elections? Robert Peel, arguably our greatest Prime Minister, was intellectually persuaded that the Anti-Corn Law League of Richard Cobden and John Bright (formidable leaders themselves), in seeking to sweep away all tariffs, was entirely right. Peel led country gentlemen of narrow understanding and large holdings likely to depreciate in value when untaxed, cheaper grain came in. In 1846, Peel split his party, abolished the Corn Laws and fell from power. He was a magnificent leader in every respect, beyond his party’s health.
Likewise, William Ewart Gladstone. In 1885-86, he reflected on Irish griefs – the Land Leaguers, cattle-maiming, boycotting, general breakdown and embitterment. He came up with Home Rule, limited autonomy with Irishmen having some say in their own government. Arnold Bennett, 19 at the time, described his reaction to such leadership on the first page of his great novel, Clayhanger (1910): “A parliament in Dublin! The Irish taxing themselves… A separate nation! Surely Gladstone could not mean it… the wondrous legend of the orator’s divine power – the long-stretching, majestic, misty sentences gave him faith. Henceforward he was a Home Ruler.”
Gladstone did not actually go as far as Edwin Clayhanger thought. His Home Rule Bill was a cautious and tentative business. Nevertheless, it was denounced by his own Attorney General as “red ruin” and Tories, under the “cynical pessimist”, Lord Salisbury, called him “lunatic” or “traitor”. The legislation was defeated in the House of Commons and the Liberals split for a decade, but it was leadership alright. Like Peel, Gladstone recognised what should be done. Unlike Peel, he couldn’t make it happen. But after 37 years, the Easter Rising, executions and civil war, Ireland emerged independent into 60 years of estrangement.
There lies the reckoning between two sorts of leadership and two sorts of success. Peel and Gladstone fathomed the right answer and, in pursuit, ignored the party’s correct line. The distinction between actually carrying the cause hardly affects judgement of the two men. What they provided was a clear, historically sustained view of what should be done. They used their leadership talents – Peel’s cool rationality, Gladstone’s ardent invocation – to pursue it.
Contrast Tony Blair: technically excellent, quiet, non-ranting, fatally nice to Conservatives, professionally young, readily sincere – splendid leadership, but where? We no longer set issues against men. The argument has been moved down. Valuing technique above purpose, we use devices free of principle or debate. We look to a cult of personality, free – unlike Gladstone or Peel – of any cause, devoted to holding office and cab-for-hire access to the dripping rewards after office.
We also observe, in the United States in 1988, one Lee Attwater smearing Democratic presidential contender Michael Dukakis with the black criminal, Willie Horton, whom the Massachusetts Governor would surely release in thousands to murder us in our beds – and think it brilliant. New Labour believed devoutly that winning power, by whatever shabby means for purposes which could be thought up later, created glory for a governing echelon to enjoy.
If there is a middle way between leading out of conviction in an unsuccessful good cause and shallow successful careerism, you might find it in Charles de Gaulle. Devious out of sight, a general behaving like a soprano, he nevertheless spoke in a way which resonated and he was wonderfully, but constructively, untrustworthy. Ask the French of Algiers. “Je vous ais compris” conveyed: “You have persuaded me”, while actually stating: “I’ve got your measure”.
Leadership needs believed-in ends, kept clearly in mind; needs, too, a cunning of silences and half-suggestions, allies ditched, blood relations usurped – no nonsense about primogeniture. It needs time, needs silences and escape from publicity between well-chosen excursions. It should lead in a style pleasing the public before party members – and still needs the party members. But such a leader now lives in the world of half witted media comment treating him like chat show fodder. Some respond with Australianisation: everyone’s mate, favourite pop bands, a display of unfitness to lead anything except a karaoke night.
The best modern leader will know this and will, with cold eyes, concede as much as he must. But he will remember too, that in Scotland, an overweight former banker who took his party sensibly leftward, also toned down rhetoric and easy-playing resentments, kept dignity and distance, was reliably civil, courteous and bourgeois and has done rather well.
