Leadership Secrets of Alastair Campbell

I have some trepidation about the cult of leadership, because the effectiveness of any outfit really does depend on the systemics and context as much as a single leader's gifts and commitment. However, continuing the discussion begun here yesterday, my eye was taken last week by some principles about leadership from an unlikely source — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s great Spin Doctor in the Sky, whose diaries are now appearing in print.

These may well become the prime source for political historians of the Blair years in the way Alan Clark’s did for Thatcher. Some will like Mr Campbell more than others, indeed his partner says he’s been much nicer to live with since he finished work as a spin doctor, but he’s a perceptive information hound who observed world and goverment leaders closely for ten years. He pulls no punches. In a Times interview he concludes these are the qualities that make an effective leader in this day and age:

Clarity of objective and strategy. Only then go tactical.



The best team leaders are the best team players



Boldness



Adaptability



Staying calm in a crisis. Listen but lead, not listen and lead



Patience. Take your time if you have to.



Set the media agenda. Don’t let them set it for you.



Get your head above the parapet when the s***t’s flying



Encourage enterprise and ideas at all levels of your organisation in a non-blame culture.

Discuss?

Edyukayshun: How not to be topp

Here’s how John Abbott of the 21st Century Learning Initiative sees the story of English Education —
An uncertain and fast-changing world calls for new heights of creativity, lateral thinking, hard work and ability to reinvent ourselves.
Fortunately, adolescents are bursting with these things — programmed by evolution itself to want to make their mark, explore, acquire fresh insight and work hard in common causes.

Unfortunately, Abbot says, the English have spent the past twenty years turning their adolescents into superior battery chickens. Every school is now a crammer’s. Personally I can say that a fifteen year old complained to me recently about his geography teacher. What was wrong with her? I asked.The reply, quick as a flash, “she wastes our time by trying to teach us things that won't come up in the exam.” This is a fifteen year old, with a growing brain and a world before him, transformed by what we call education into a checkbox automaton. Abbott points out that our adolescents check the boxes they have been trained to check, but God, are they bored! He sees this as a disgusting betrayal of our young and, indeed, our own future. Jesus valued the child above all. The system treats ours as mascots and commodities.

Tony Blair sailed into Downing Street with priorities of “Education, Education, Education.” What have we to show for it? John Abbott’s Over-schooled but Undereducated is a scathing indictment of contemporary English educational dogma — not students and teachers, or even schools, who often work heroically to buck the system, but the centralized, top-down, target driven farrago of lost opportunity upon which billions of pounds has been showered since 1997.

In 2007 UNICEF published Report Card 7, examining the health and wellbeing of children in leading Industrialized nations. It studied 40 indicators and the UK result, in the fifth richest country in the world, was stunningly poor. British children came bottom for family relationships, sexual and substance abuse, happiness and mental health. They came top for bullying, depression and suicide. They scored high for ignorance, too, in comparison with their peers abroad. After 4 years of the Every Child Matters initiative, reading attainment slumped from seventh to seventeenth place, mathematics from twelfth to twenty-fourth.

Abbott examines the whole sorry tale since John Milton wrote:

I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man [this was 1644!] to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.

Judged by this standard Abbott tells the story of a skilful, ingenious and progressive people, with points of real excellence, but one tragic flaw — an obsession with class. Attempts to provide the kind of through schooling to age 16 that other European nations developed in the 1870’s came to grief in England because of a desire by the governing classes to ensure that the lower orders would be trained to know, above all, their place. Thus the great divide between grammar schools and the rest since 1879, reinforced in 1902.

The 1944 Education Act added to this error the now entirely discredited scientism of Cyril Burt who suggested intelligence was somehow objective and fixed by the age of 11. Everything we now know of brain science indicates that this notion is pernicious rubbish. Selective education parked the majority of English children in schools with pockets of genuine idealism, but a general culture based on containment rather than growth, where they were bored and switched off as often as inspired and equipped.

This was not entirely disastrous, especially for males, as long as they went on to appreticeships, where higher socialisation and education for life could still happen. The abandonment since the seventies of apprenticeships has been accompanied by bureaucratization, centralization, and the fatuous notion of performability — that you can somehow leverage human flourishing by standard targets, pulling the cabbages up towards the stars on elastic, rather than growing them organically by humanity, passion and compassion.

Many primary schools strive nobly, in spite of, incredible to report, lower per capita expenditure than secondaries, teaching the child not the subject. They also have to backfill a kindergarten experience that is impoverished by Northern European standards, against an increasngly ravenous desire by politicians since the eighties to dig up the cabbages every week to check that they are still growing. This activity, of course, inhibits their growth.

Add to these operational follies vacuous liberal utilitarianism which reduces the human being to an isolated production / consumption unit, and the assault of successive British governments since the seventies on the family and institutions of value, and it’s hardly surprising the whole system is lost at sea.

Abbott writes a fluent philippic. His longer term perspective is vital for those who act as though
“English education began in Nineteen Eighty-eight, with the innovation of Baker days and Section 28.” It didn’t, and the long-term results of the muddled and sometimes conflicting heritage of the past two hundred years in our schools are compounded by the larger forces of social disintegration in our own day, to indicate a need for real re-thinking all round. I’m not sure about all of Dr Abbott’s remedies, but it feels as though he has diagnosed a big disease with painful and unerring accuracy.

Gordon Brown: Der Untergang

Fully Democratic voting systems deliver 36% of the power for 36% of the votes. This is boring for career politicans, but it’s also predictable. Most European politicians have to exercise skills to work together in the national interest more than once every 36 years plus remembrance day. As the only way to more power is to win more votes, they have to work harder with the public, and are generally more respected for it.

As it is in the UK, ninety years of cruising around in the belief that 36% of the vote entitles our political masters to 100% of the power has scarce prepared them for an hour such as this. Although they are being uncharacteristically soppy-stern and polite, they don’t seem to know how to talk with each other, rather than at each other. One optimistic hope is that they will learn, and this will be good for us all. The problem has been acknowledged since the 1860’s, and the kind of solution we need an open secret since the Royal Commission of 1908-10. They can hardly say they weren‘t warned.

And as the great Poker Game in the Sky grinds on around Westminster, first man down is Gordon Brown. How will historians see him?

Two interesting counterfactuals could be run:

• What if John Smith had lived another ten years?
  
  
• What if Brown had cut and run in 2007 to establish his legitimacy?

To Brown’s credit, probably, is his performance as a very British iron chancellor. His staunchest opponents will have to grudgingly admit he held his nose and did what probably had to be done about the credit crunch, and competently. His tax credits scheme was a way of redistributing income without raising income tax. He generated shedloads of cash to throw at education and health after thirty years of cuts. Yes, there’s a comparatively high peacetime public debt, but everyone’s got one of those coming out of recession, whilst economic historians will point out that as a proportion of GDP it’s actually lower than for most of the tweniteth century.

Brown was a Roundhead at Tony Blair’s Cavalier party. When Blair and Brown met at the Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant, or wherever, they carved up the next 13 years of the governance of Brtain between them. The process was probably much swifter and easier than what has been going on since last Thursday, and considerably more lasting.

However, as Blair swigged the champagne, Brown gagged on his Irn Bru. Therein lies tragedy.

Once Brown had gotten over the joy of playing with the real levers of power at Number 11, he probably hated the party, but hung on in there for the joy that lay ahead. How sad that it was so joyless when he got it. Nobody knows at what point Blair and/or Brown bricked up the corridor from Number 11 to Number 10, but his estrangement from his ertswhile dinner companion was disastrous. Brown, as a man of genuine rectitude, probably found it hard to believe what some of his less puritanical colleagues were up to.

But Brown was a genuine conviction politician. I remember his appearance at the Lambeth Conference. He obviously knew and owned the Millennium Development Goals without cue cards. He actually belived in that stuff.

Colleagues from all over the world, who believe the English to be clever but devious, were impressed by his obvious sincerity and passion. Not quite English. Scots, in fact.

Too passionate, not emotionally intelligent enough? How about what they are already calling Bigot-Gate? Other politicians suggest they would never call a voter anything as rude as “that woman.” When the great bin of emails is emptied out on the day of doom, and the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, I believe it will show other politicians have, in fact, called voters, and their colleagues, considerably ruder things and got away with it. But not with the microphone on.

And after all those complaints about Tony Blair’s addiction to spin, it’s ironic and sad, in some ways, that Brown’s “Lion in Winter” style was such a rat sandwich to Fleet Street, if not all the British public.

Blair danced for us and we tried to dance, with all the finesse Btits bring to that activity. Brown wept for us and we would not wail. He’s almost certainly done the decent thing politically. I think history will be kinder to him than the Sun. Let’s see who’s next.

In the Loop: Fake Hawk Down

Imagine, if you can, a world of soundbite politics where the machinery of power is operated by vacillating professional politicians, out of their depth, jumping to the whims of ruthless, feral spin doctors. Everyone is trying to use everyone else, but they don’t quite know what for, making it up as they go along, riding the tiger of inter-departmental politics, sending the whole world to smash in vain attempts to save their faces.

Armando Iannucci’s comedy presents history as pure cockup rather than conspiracy. Imagine Burn after Reading writ large & lurid across UK/US corridors of power, a blow-up version of AI’s The Thick of It. It easily translates to world stage and big screen.

The Big Plot of the film may not actually quite convince, perhaps because the Blair/Bush figures are a bit too far behind the curtain, but the tactical delivery system is absolutely first rate. Brace yourself for some of the foulest-mouthed comments ever committed to celluloid, remembering they are only just a little bit North of the way some among our burgeoning class of political special advisers seem to express themselves.

Peter Capaldi’s Alistair Campbell character is a riot of egotism, obscenity and ambition. Not-so-steadycam shots and quick pans add pace and a well-judged smidgin of documentary atmosphere to the whole absurd business, in a non-annoying way. Laugh at the ludicrous, but remember that penning a tale about sexing up information to order with entire disregard for truth, morality, or the human beings involved, did not call for much invention from Mr Iannucci.


It’s good to see a movie driven by a sharp script, not CGI. Lines are delivered pretty much perfectly, although some may wonder how someone as gormless as Tom Hollander’s Minister of Overseas Development made it anywhere beyond kindergarten. There are visual gags too, including a memorable moment when Mimi Kennedy (no relation) accidentally transforms herself in the Ladies’ rest room from jaded State Department senior into a Frankenstein monster. James Gandolfini richly deserves a chestful of medals for his portrayal of a big chunky but dove-ish five star general — “When you’ve been to war once you don’t want to go there again — like France...”

Perhaps we’re just a sarcastic bunch in High Wycombe, but the belly laughs rolled around the auditorium in a way I haven’t seen them do in a long while. It’s strange to live in a place where such a portrayal of our politicians and their advisers inspires knowing looks rather than depair, but if Mr Campbell & his chums really didn’t want to go down in history this way, as they are doing, their obvious remedy at the time would have been to stop behaving in ways that inspired it. Sleep tight tonight.

Banking meltdown: The Plain Truth

City banks have been struggling recently. As Presidential hopefuls lay aside their differences to try and avert disaster, archbishops probe the morality of meltdown. Theories abound about how such a crisis could ever have happened. Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse expose a poingnat but awful truth at the heart of our present Banking Crisis:

Post-Christmas Blair Which? project

Erstwhile Buckinghamshire weekender Tony Blair has joined his wife’s church. Why not? Two years’ sixth form journo harum-scarum on this topic was all bilge, and would have been even if TB were still PM. If Lloyd George, a Baptist, had decided to join the Methodist Church, it would not have mattered a spearmint puff. How much less this man, this century. Christians join other denominations every day. Advertising for a new archdeacon this year, a significant proportion of applicants were originally ordained in the RC Church. So what? Only denominations that take themselves way too seriously, or just don’t understand post-Christendom would be bovvered. So Tony Blair deserves better than crackpot right wing RC’s sounding off like the Judaean People’s Front about how unworthy he is to join them. They should read more Graham Greenes.

But what about Tony Blair the leader? In the season for annual reviews, what’s the historical score? How would a consumer mag rate our recent history? Here’s one Oxonian nerd hot tip — Historians’ verdicts on leaders are usually more positive than those of their detractors / persecutors immediately after they left office. It looked like decline and fall for this erstwhile Blair voter to count no fewer than six “Bliar” Tee shirts in one tube carriage last summer. Does this fate await all England managers and prime minsters? Build ’em up, knock ’em down — they were never as good or bad as the papers said. Paying tribute to Tony Blair’s idealism and charisma sounds almost Blairily insincere.

Historically speaking? Gladstone came from a conservative background but was willing (sometimes too willing?) to play a high radical hand. Gladstone was high minded and immensely hard working, with a knack for catching the moment rhetorically. Enemies accused Gladstone of ruthless demagoguery, of which he was himself utterly unaware. They called Gladstone insincere, when he was in fact only too sincere.

Incredibly, when you consider what both were up against, the Gladstone project in Ireland, like the Blair project there, almost made it home. Gladstone’s government ground into the dust, like Blair’s, amidst recriminations about an overseas fiasco involving Muslims — Sudan for Gladstone, Iraq for Blair.

Blair’s governments blew impressive economic bubbles, delivered a minimum wage, tackled the foothills of child poverty, inspired style iconry and mildly rebalanced a few UK priorities. None of these were quite all they were cracked up to be, but they were hard-earned and amount to considerably more than nothing. Did Blair renew the UK constitutional setup, or did he destroy it? We’ll see. Ditto Education.

Healthcare was a more precarious endeavour. Blair sincerely piled shedloads of cash in, but somehow the returns diminished and the more that went in, the less people appreciated it. Perhaps, and the only way to discover this was to try it, the UK simply maxed out the benefit any market model healthcare system could deliver without as much money leaking out the bottom as was going in the top. Contemplating Debt Mountain and aging assets, historians may wonder at the scale of PFI — a UK public works funding scheme rather like putting your mortgage on your credit card. Tony Blair’s most serious tactical political disaster, although it seemed like a good idea at the time, was announcing his departure in 2005. The UK media being the UK media, he never quite got out of the garage for his third term.

Tony Blair’s Mary Tudor “Calais” would have to be Iraq. This is a real shame, because his leadership over Kosovo and Sierra Leone was courageous, creative and effective. Surely Blair was right to cherish the US/UK relationship. It was just Blair’s bad luck that the US fell into the hands of a foreign policy ingenu and Neocon experimentalist, who mired his country recklessly in a Suez-style adventure that screwed up its prestige in the Middle East. Compare and contrast Annapolis with Camp David, and weep. Afghanistan was dumb. Iraq was dumber. In the story of the American Empire, the Iraq war will probably play a similar part to the Boer War in the tale of its British counterpart, militarily and otherwise.

Possibly Blair did all he could to temper the loonery, but in fact almost a million innocent civilians died, Iraq collapsed into major chaos and became a world terrorist centre, whilst Iran’s star began to rise. UK public trust crumbled after the dodgy dossier. The CIA used to say, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Or can you? It remains to be seen what’s next for Tony Blair. He’s certainly made a far more selfless, courageous and principled start to his next career than his predecessors did to theirs. It could even be redemptive. It’s all too easy to judge others who bear burdens we will never have to shoulder. Perhaps it’s time t0 cut him a bit of slack for now, and offer our sincere prayers and good wishes for the future.