Managing The Powerful.

Not as easy as it once was.

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It’s odd how certain trivial things stay with you for the rest of your life. When I was at school, I remember reading—whether freely or as directed I can’t remember—JH Plumb’s popular history of England in the Eighteenth Century, then quite recently available in Penguin Books. Even at that age, I had a developing interest in sarky one-liners, and I remember to this day his description of the ascension of King George II to power: “George II was like his father. Stupid but complicated.” The House of Hanover has not generally had a good press, although I gather recent historians have been less severe on it, but in any event that was my first introduction to what might be described as the problem of Managing the Powerful. That is the subject of this essay, and it’s something which I think is under-appreciated, and certainly under-studied, in writing about politics, government and history.

George II was a Head of State, not really removable by anything short of insurrection and civil war, and the English had had enough of that after the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. Moreover, James II’s attempt to emulate the absolutism of France had gone badly wrong, so the actual power of the English (later British) King was more constrained than in some other countries, Parliament was correspondingly stronger, and the problem was perhaps not quite so acute as in France, for example.

But the basic difficulty remained: the proper working of the political system, the taking of decisions and the formalities of laws, treaties etc, all depended on a King whose good sense and even rationality could not be taken for granted. History records a great many rulers in a great many civilisations with many different levels of skill and aptitude, but until early modern times they were all highly dependent for the actual running of the nation or the Empire on the traditional practice of finding and promoting favourites (including in some cases their family) who they hoped would be good and loyal administrators. After all, the most powerful King in the world can achieve nothing unless there are people there to turn his wishes into reality and make sure that plans are actually put into practice and continue to be so. Most rulers were insecure, many faced rebellions or civil wars, and their only protection was to surround themselves with people they could trust, and preferably people who had no independent power-base and so could be dismissed at will. The problem for those engaged, of course, was that keeping a position at Court, on which your fortune and even your life could depend, might mean always telling a sovereign what they wanted to hear, rather than the actual truth.

We often associate famous rulers with famous counsellors, some of whom fared better than others. In theory, these positions were very powerful: in practice they depended very largely on the continuity of royal favour. And needless to say, the temptation to use such positions for personal gain was rarely resisted. In the English tradition, the prototype of such figures is probably Thomas Cromwell, who from a humble background rose to occupy a whole series of offices, culminating in that of Chief Minister (amongst others) in the Court of Henry VIII. (His story is well told in the famous series of novels by Hilary Mantell.) He appears to have been enormously effective in this role, and played a major part on the Reformation and the establishment the Church of England, before falling victim to the anger of the King over his failed marriage to Anne of Cleves. Typically, Henry regretted his action when it was too late (Cromwell was certainly innocent of the treason charges brought against him.) Gifted figures like Colbert, Richelieu and Mazarin served French Kings in much the same way.

The problems posed by rule through powerful but transient figures who could act in the name of the sovereign had no real answer, and the increasing sophistication of western states made some sort of change inevitable. Moreover, the most powerful rulers, up to then, were surrounded by concentric circles of favourites and their own place-men, and getting something done might mean navigating several Secretaries and Secretaries of Secretaries, in the hope of getting an audience with someone able to take a decision. And of course there were informal ways of achieving things as well, frequently involving mothers, wives and mistresses. Much depended, in practice, on the personal capacity of the ruler if you could eventually fight your way through to him or her: the long-serving and hard-working Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, for example, has been more kindly treated by history than Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia whose undisciplined public utterances and behaviour and fondness for the military are generally credited both with helping to cause World War I, and with helping to establish an effective military dictatorship during the War itself. (There isn’t space to go into examples outside Europe here, sorry.)

It might be thought that the coming of democratic political systems and the effective primacy of Parliament would have put an end to these problems, but some of them are inherent and structural, and are just as much a feature of a democratic system. Put crudely, the qualities required to enter into politics and do well there are not necessarily those that are required for good high-level political judgement, or even sensible management.

Broadly, politicians fall into two types. There are those with some sense at least of public service, usually older when they start, and often happy to stop when they become a Mayor, or the local parliamentary representative. Such people tend to prize recognition in and by the local community, being noticed in the street and so forth. In the past we could have added those of strong political convictions—notably the European Communist Parties—who would often serve at local level for years, generally unpaid.

But most politicians today are not like that, and many have never been. They are on a political career path, leading onward and upward, and with a good chance at the end of leaving politics to head an international organisation or to make a great deal of money in the private sector. This requires ambition, a good sense of timing, the willingness to change allies and betray friends, and the capacity to change opinions and beliefs as others change socks, and to lie when necessary. Among other things. But it also requires a dedication to a style of life in which politics and personal ambition dominate to the exclusion of almost everything else, and this is something that is often less well appreciated. Our representative politician who has landed a job finally as Deputy Minister finishes “work” on a Friday only to go for a meeting at Parliament, followed by an excruciating but politically-valuable dinner, gets home at 11h00 and works on official papers for an hour before crawling into bed remembering to be up and about for an interview at 07h00 followed by a day-long visit to a politically-significant venue, shaking hands in the market-place and giving interviews, before returning for dinner with a colleague who is considering a leadership bid … I’ve often thought that, from my observation, by far the most important criterion for being a successful politician is to be able to manage on four of five hours’ sleep at night.

And of course today’s politician spends at least as much time thinking about and agitating for their own political career as they do on their notional job: briefing the media and dissing rivals unattributably, trying to work out who to suck up to and who to tread on. And as we’ll see in a moment, modern technology has worsened what was already a disastrous situation. Such a way of life has room for nothing except politics and ambition, which is why many politicians, even in positions of responsibility, seem to know so little about the real world and its problems. If this understanding of “politics” had any ideological substance to it, that might be different, but it is in fact purely technical, related to ambition, fear, hatred and all of the standard drivers of political rivalry and competition. You have to really want a job like that.

It goes without saying that a system that selects for such people does not necessarily generate political leaders with any of the skills of leadership and management that are needed, for example, to take responsibility for the Health Service or the National Police. The reality is that this type of politician—not entirely a modern development but significantly so—is unlikely to bring any particular intellectual or personal strengths to an important government job, except coincidentally. They self-select for other qualities, and these qualities tend in practice to be inimical to good government. For example, if you are a Minister obliged to take an important but controversial decision which will be strongly criticised, you will put it off as long as possible in the hope that the government will be reshuffled and someone else can inherit the responsibility.

Since the nineteenth century, it has been increasingly recognised that managing the powerful, whether they are elected, or whether they have taken power by custom or force, is a necessary skill of its own. You cannot run a country on the basis that the top person puts cronies in positions of responsibility, who in turn put cronies in positions of less responsibility and so on, the whole circus likely to be radically changed or overthrown at any moment. The ability to go beyond this, to create a professional, independent and highly qualified government service is what finally makes the difference between a properly-run state and a traditional grab-what-you can system. It’s the difference in practice between Singapore and Senegal. The system has to command confidence from the political leadership as well as legitimacy with the population: this takes time to develop, and as events have shown, can be lost a lot more quickly than it was gained.

The relationship between the political leadership and their professional advisers and those who implement their policies is seldom discussed in the political science literature, except for tiresome arguments about “control” and conflict. And as in recent years as the focus has shifted from “good government” to box-ticking and Powerpoint presentations, the idea has grown up that advice and expertise, if you even need it, is something you can just buy in, or indeed replace with AI in due course. What a country needs, apparently, is “service delivery,” and Chief Executives who behave as though they were in the private sector, and can hit quantitative targets, even if it means cheating. After all, Donald Trump knows what he’s doing … does’t he? He doesn’t need any advice … does he?

The trend ever since the 1980s has been of moving away from career professional administrators who understand politics and what can be done, towards the widespread recruitment of amateurs who happen to share their Principal’s views, or at least claim to do so in return for money. (This has been accompanied of course by the massively damaging transfer of entire functions to the private sector, which there isn’t space to discuss here.) Thus, as I argued in an essay last year, western governments are actually returning to the pre-modern era, of government by favourites and favourites of favourites. But, you may ask, why should a professional administrative system to support a government even be necessary? (Fifty years ago you’d be thought odd to even pose such a question, wheres these days you’ll get an op-ed in a Very Serious Publication.) In general, the question is asked by people who have no knowledge and experience of government themselves, so let’s set out in the simplest possible terms what such a system does at the highest level (of course armies of people are needed to implement policies but that’s a different subject.)

Actually running a country, and within that, running an organisation of anything from hundreds to tens of thousands of people requires skills that few people naturally possess. In the past, politicians with previous outside experience might arrive understanding at least some of what was required: these days it’s extremely unusual. And the problem is that most of these things that have to be done are difficult. Have you ever given a speech to five hundred people lasting half an hour and without sending them to sleep? ? Have you ever answered questions off-the-cuff before a Parliament or on live TV? Have you ever been doorstepped by the media demanding your comments on something you didn’t even know had happened? And these are some of the more mundane daily challenges. Yet even when you develop the technical capability to think on your feet (and some never do) you still need someone to tell you what it is safe to say.

Suppose that, after two weeks in the job you have to chair a meeting of people inside and outside government on a tricky subject with many different interests and points of view, attended by people who in general know more about the subject than you do. (This is entirely normal by the way.) Now if you have ever done it, you’ll know that chairing a meeting and getting a useful result is not the easiest thing to do under any circumstances You need a clear objective, a sense both of timing and how to divide the time available, an ability to avoid being carried away by the discussion or letting others dominate the argument, an idea of what may be realistically possible, and some sense of how the meeting and its outcome fit into the wider picture. At least, that will do as a start. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, in politics and government you can’t have a successful meeting just by shouting at people. So you need to be in command of the process at all stages, and familiar enough with the subject to keep the argument moving forwards. The way in which you do this, unless you are extraordinarily naturally talented, is by watching and learning from others. You probably learn more from watching bad examples than good ones: I recall several high-level international meetings which collapsed into chaos and disintegrated into little discussion groups because of weak chairmanship.

So the minimum you need is a decent grasp of the subject, and some advice on how to conduct the meeting, bearing in mind who will be there and what they want. This is where the skilled and experienced advisers come in, bringing a lifetime of experience and knowledge. And bear in mind this is the kind of thing you may find yourself doing several times a week, on a variety of subjects. Yes, in theory you could bulldoze your way through and lay down the law, but in practice you will only make enemies and fail to get the job you were out there to do, done. If the system works properly, you’ll get a written brief and then some oral briefing as well if you need it. And no matter how highly you think of yourself, and whatever your recently minted political advisor may say, if you don’t take all this very seriously, whilst reserving the right to make final decisions, then you are probably going to be toast sooner or later.

As I said, may of the things political leaders have to do are intrinsically difficult and stressful, and if you haven’t been interviewed on live TV, for example, the first time you do it it’s a bit of a strain. And sometimes what’s actually going on in the daily work of politics is a lot more complicated than it appears at first sight. A good example is international meetings, which are a feature of life in virtually all areas of government these days.

In your third month in the job, you attend a large international meeting where your country has important interests and objectives, and where the result of the meeting will be covered by your national media, either damaging or enhancing your political career. This is the first such meeting you’ve attended, and as you look around the table, you see other leaders of delegations, some of whom you now know, others of whom you’ll be meeting over coffee in a special little programme your advisers have put together. You may be alone at the table, depending on the size of the table and the room, or you may have the most important advisor—an Ambassador or a very senior official from home—sitting at your elbow. There’s a support team sitting behind you, exchanging with others, nipping out to make phone calls, writing and passing notes, being called out for impromptu meetings, liaising with your office, and all the stuff that goes on at such gatherings and is never shown on TV.

You probably have headphones because not everybody around the table will be speaking in the same language, and anyway the acoustics of the room may make that essential. You also need to realise that speaking for an interpreter is a separate skill from speaking to those who share your language, and you need to make a special effort to be clear. Whoever is chairing the meeting will already have come to see you, in part to sound to whether your overall approach is likely to be helpful or not, and lobby you for assistance on certain points. On the table in front of you will be your own brief, together with papers distributed for the meeting. Every now and then a new piece of paper will appear. If you are trying to agree a communiqué, which is often part of the business, then successive drafts of individual paragraphs, often in different languages, will appear on the table in front of you. You will probably be attending a Heads of Delegation lunch, on your own, to try to iron out the more stubborn disagreements.

One of the jobs of your advisers is to make sure you don’t get completely lost in the procedure (I’ve seen it happen more than once) and manage to keep a clear head and move towards, or at least not away from, your objective. This is a highly complex calculation, involving judgements about how far you can go, and how far others can go, who means what by what they say, who has the authority to compromise and who doesn’t, who can be pushed a bit further, when to give up and throw in your hand on a particular issue, what concession here can be traded for what concession there, when to play for time and hope to exhaust the others, when to play cards like, I’m Afraid I Can’t Agree to That Without Referring Back to the Prime Minister, and a dozen other tactics. Sometimes you have to take the headphones off to listen to one or more of your advisers, agree to send someone off for a restricted meeting somewhere else, read a note someone has handed your team, read a message just arrived from home, all while keeping an eye on what’s going on and making sure you miss nothing of importance.

No matter how personally brilliant you may be, it’s the backup and support that will largely decide how much of a success you make of the meeting. If this sounds very abstract, consider a real case that had very important real-world consequences. At the end of 1991, members of the then European Economic Community met in Maastricht in the Netherlands, to settle the final form of the Treaties on Political and Monetary Union. The leader of the British delegation was John Major, Prime Minister and in the job for only a year. Major was not a political heavyweight, and he knew it. Not an intellectual or someone with charisma (it was unfairly joked of him that he ran away from the Circus to become an accountant) he was the original, mid-level Man in Grey Suit, a reminder of the fact that in politics you can never tell who will finally float to the top. Moreover, the UK had begun the negotiations in early 1991 badly, (I heard the aspirations of other countries for the two Union projects dismissed as “Euro-froth”, soon no doubt to disappear) and had been obliged to make successive compromises ever since. Not altogether a promising scenario for Major

But he was well supported. For several months before the meetings, briefing material had been prepared, and Major went into the meetings with a massive binder. On the left-hand side, the latest draft clause of each Treaty, on the right-hand side the UK position, followed by what to say, followed if necessary by a counter-proposal. No other delegation had this level of support: many smaller ones turned up with just a list of points they felt strongly about. The result was that the UK did better out of the negotiations than it had any right to: I was told by somebody in the room that the only serious defeat was over a point where Major had fumbled that papers and couldn’t find the right place. That level of effectiveness, unthinkable today, represented the UK machine at or near its best, somewhat battered by a decade of Thatcherite vandalism, but still basically intact.

When people advocate “political control,” when they talk about institutional warfare between politicians and scheming bureaucrats, when they whine about Deep States, these are the kinds of issues they are actually talking about, generally without realising it. The effectiveness of a state apparatus ultimately requires both good leaders and good support: under some circumstances the latter can make up for the former, but the former can never make up for the latter. Yet the same people who complain about the persistence of Deep States affect to be puzzled by the catastrophic decline in the capability of western political systems to do anything much, and the clown-like antics of its national leaders, of whom Trump is simply the most egregious example. What is going on here?

We can start by acknowledging that political systems obviously differ among themselves. What is sometimes called the Westminster system, based on the British model and widely exported, had a professional career government service that supported politicians of any party in power, and, with obvious adjustments for issues of personal compatibility, served different Ministers as governments changed. This reflected the essentially bipolar structure of British politics, the large measure of agreement between parties and the fact that politicians and bureaucrats were culturally very close. Many European countries, especially those where coalition governments were the norm, had the French Cabinet system. Now Cabinet originally meant just “‘office,” and today it means the extended personal staff of Ministers, but also of senior officials at national and local level. It is also the structure of the EU, where a Commissioner will have their Cabinet and their “Services,” the latter being professional career staff. This system is recognised to have its inefficiencies, but it’s inevitable in a highly-personalised political environment, where politicians naturally gather around themselves people they can trust. The position of Directeur du Cabinet can be extremely powerful, and “Dircabs” have gone on to important careers in politics and elsewhere. In executive Presidential systems, as in France, the personal staff of the President is another complicating factor, and the German system, with a strong Chancellor, has many of the same features. Let’s not get into Washington at this stage

The essential point, though, is that any functioning system requires both a high degree of trust between political leaders and their advisers, and a high degree of competence on the part of the latter. This extends to the advisers saying “we don’t think it’s wise to do that,” and the Principal being ready to accept their judgement and advice. This did seem to work better in the past, especially in systems where career staff were secure in their jobs and where the quality of the political class was higher. (If half the stories I heard about Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour in certain crises were true, we should be glad that the men in white coats were never far away. Today, of course, the service has been closed down to save money.) The obvious problem is that the more personalised the system becomes, the more the supporting team depends for their livelihood on the favour of the Principal, and so the less likely they are to try to be a restraining influence. Now theoretically, this restraining influence should derive from the famous Separation of Powers, where the Legislature and the Judiciary are supposed to step in and restore order, aided by that strange beast known as “Civil Society” and even the media. Do you see any sign of that happening these days? Me neither.

The Separation of Powers doctrine, for all that it is beloved of political scientists, is just a mechanistic, zero-sum game, where different parts of the state oligarchy try to stop each other doing things. It has nothing to do with good government and indeed is probably inimical to it. It generally adds complexity without adding effectiveness, and misunderstands the nature of the problem, which is not the “strength” of the Executive, but the progressive hollowing-out of the forces that are supposed to ensure good order and discipline in the name of the country as a whole. Trump (since I cannot avoid mentioning him) is less a problem in himself than the outward manifestation of a government machine that no longer functions properly.

How did this start? Arguably, on television. In the late 1970s, the BBC ran a classic TV comedy series, Yes Minister, since sold all over the world. Even at the time it was anachronistic— it was based largely on the diaries of Richard Crossman, a Minister in the 1964-70 Labour Government, and was essentially an affectionate parody of the Civil Service that emerged after the Second World War. It originated the trope of the Machiavellian scheming officials manipulating gormless Ministers, which, even at the time was inaccurate, since the one thing officials do appreciate is a leadership that knows what it wants. But it epitomised a populist mood of the time against “unelected bureaucrats,” often educated at Oxbridge. Why not have some “practical people” from the private sector? (This at a time when British private sector management was the laughing-stock of the western world.) A previously-obscure Conservative MP, Margaret Thatcher, unsuccessful Education Minister and accidental leader of her party, was apparently persuaded it was a documentary. And there was a parallel, more highbrow argument: let’s strengthen the office of the Prime Minister with personal appointees, and replace these fuddy-duddy bureaucrats with practical people who know what they are doing. (God preserve us from “practical people.”) So the process began in Britain, and spread to other countries, of the de-skilling of public life, of a return to an earlier model of courtiers and sycophants. Under Mr Blair there was an uncontrollable flood of Special Advisers, Communications Directors and Chiefs of Staff, all interested for the most part in their own careers, and few, ironically, with any “practical” skills at all.

Between successive waves of “practical people” chewing their way through western governments like termites, and the wholesale importation of private-sector management gobbledygook, the machinery of most western government systems has now probably been damaged beyond repair. Even when the political system throws up capable leaders, perhaps by accident, they no longer have the backup to make and implement good decisions. The catastrophe of Ukraine represents the nadir of this decline (at least I hope it does) as well as providing yet more proof that building capable systems takes time and effort, while destroying them is quick and easy. Western politicians seem to wander around haphazardly these days, making pronouncements and taking decisions that defy all logic, seemingly without realistic advice of any kind. The current state of things in Britain under Mr Starmer is enough to make anyone whoever worked in the old system want to weep: Mr Macron in France seems to surround himself with inexperienced and sycophantic courtiers who feed his most bizarre impulses. Governments seem to be in the hands of children.

Technology, of course, is a big part of this. In the days when communication was mostly by paper, and appearances on radio and TV were important events carefully prepared for, what political leaderships said, and to an extent did, was carefully thought out in advance. Communications with Ministers and senior officials while they were abroad was not easy, and conversely, opportunities for Ministers to put their foot in their mouth abroad were not that frequent. This started to change in the early 1990s, and was at the time called the “CNN effect.” On one hand, live satellite coverage was possible from most parts of the world, but it was expensive, and “news reports” were often brief, sensationalist, with striking images but without much context. On the other, that didn’t prevent them becoming top stories on the 24-hour news, demanding instant responses from governments. (I can’t remember how many tedious interviews I watched that began with “If these unconfirmed reports are true ….”)

Then of course came the Internet, which affected the capability of government in ways that could not have been anticipated, and were mostly bad. One was that unofficial communications within the political system become much easier. Now, a political adviser here, and a political adviser there, together with a journalist and a parliamentarian could set ideas running that nobody else knew anything about. Instead of diplomatic telegrams, that everybody with an interest saw, Embassies and capitals began to communicate by email, such that half the time, people who needed to know things just weren’t told. And with the arrival of smartphones, political leaders could basically say anything to anyone at any time, under any circumstances, including communicating directly with the media or with people they knew in the private sector.

These days, of course, we have social media. Essentially, any political leader in the world can now empty their brain of the latest clever idea that occurred to them in the shower, or after a whisky too many, and address the entire world. Yet there still exists a kind of bizarre innocence about these things among the political class, as if sending a tweet advocating bombing Moscow was just an adolescent joke between friends. The idea that speech has consequences, and that the Internet is forever, doesn’t seem to have percolated. As I’ve pointed out a number of times, the political class—and the PMC that serves it—live in a hermetically sealed world of its own, talking only to the like-minded, where nothing it does really matters outside. What do you mean the Russians were annoyed when I sent that tweet saying we should nuke them? It was only a joke, really.

You can’t run a modern state like that, in my view. On the other hand, there are obviously those who won’t see it as a problem, who want the “Deep State” tamed and “democracy,” and … well, to be honest, I’m not sure what it is they want. You can have a powerful and effective professional government machine, or you can have out-of-control politicians making up policy and addressing the world on the hoof, where Mr Trump is an extreme example, but not the only one. Mr Trump’s antics are not the fundamental problem: he is a natural consequence of a state machine that no longer functions. And here, as in other cases, the US may simply be a bit further along the path to perdition than the rest of the world.