Blair’s ruthlessness was key to his success

Some reflections on leadership

Photo by Tom Stoddart/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

For the most obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking about leadership. The Channel 4 documentary about Tony Blair reminds us that it wasn’t, in the end, his winning smile or easy loquacity that got him through. It was an inner tempered-steel ruthlessness, revealed in brief flashes during these interviews. As with almost any successful democratic leader, that is what kept him going.

In Palermo – again, for the most obvious reasons – I was reading Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, about the prince of Salina facing the Garibaldi uprising of 1860. The novel gave modern politics that overused aphorism, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” But there is so much more to the book. It is mouthwatering on food, and excellent on politics. Here, for instance, is the prince on a wily bourgeois rival: “Free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency and plain good manners, he moved through the forest of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.” It gives a picture of the heedlessness to criticism and the sense of direction needed at the top. In this sense, I believe Wes Streeting to be an elephant. I’m pretty sure Angela Rayner is one, too. A question for spring is whether the Prime Minister proves a pachyderm or not.

A complete ignoral

Speaking of princes, what an absurd distraction is this business of stripping Andrew of his place in the succession to the throne? There isn’t the slightest chance of him getting there. It is just to get the media talking about something other than Peter Mandelson, uncancelled local elections or the Chagos Islands. Suppose there was a bizarre motorway pile-up near Windsor, and another simultaneous moment of carnage in California, and Andrew bobbed to the top. Even the British would at that point reject monarchy entirely.

I don’t see a republican revolution ahead. The Windsors shouldn’t fear pitchforks – the days of a march on Winter Palace or Versailles are long gone. Their much likelier fate is a prolonged, weary fading of significance – what George Brown would have called “a complete ignoral”. When we no longer care or notice, they are no longer really monarchs.

A change in the weather

Here is a modest proposal. We are suffering – and that’s the right word – from the wettest start to the year since records began. Meteorologists warn of no let-up from the cascade in the weeks ahead. Yet there must, in due course, also be a high chance of another blistering, record-breaking summer of swelter and sweat. We talk about this new “drown-then-fry” cycle. But somehow the right has made “climate change” and “net zero” phrases to shrug at. It’s a bizarre disconnection.

The answer, surely, is that climate science is, for most voters with immediate financial and other worries, too theoretical, too abstract and its consequences are too expensive in the short term. So, a crucial argument is being lost. We need, first, a national plan for dealing with new weather extremes – a commitment from the Prime Minister to examine what they mean for farming and food security; for flood defences and new housing; and, in the summer, for the transfer of water from the wetter west to the drier east; for housing that stays cool, and for shaded urban respite areas for older people. Such things are down to earth and urgent. This is where the politics of climate should begin, with the economics of the anti-warming strategy following behind, as the argument about weather and climate is won. If Labour put things this way round, they’d do better.

Where the light gets in

Bumbling around, as I am now professionally required to do, I’m sometimes stopped and asked whether there is any hope. Is absolutely everything going to pot? The truth is, we are still all surrounded by brilliant people doing great things with skill and dedication.

London has long had a serious knife problem – county-lines gangs attacking one another over drug territories. Guns were starting to appear. But things are getting better. This is partly because the police, working with local authorities, are learning to engage more effectively on the streets. But it’s also because of a charity for young people called Mary’s, which I am proud to be a patron of.

Mary’s was begun and is run by a charismatic, very hard-working and dedicated man called Jason Allen, who is turning lives around with tactics now being copied across London and, soon, I hope, all around the UK. At a time when social media feeds us division, hate and despair, Allen employs empathy, patience and understanding. He is an example to anyone tempted to give up and turn away.

[Further reading: The crumbling Crown]