Marbury

better leaders needed

I am generally quite sympathetic to our politicians, or at least I try to be. First, because it's too easy to blame one group of people for all the world's problems, or to assume that you would behave much differently if you were in their predicament. Second, because the pol-hating game is self-destructive. The more we tar and ridicule our elected leaders, the fewer talented people will want to enter politics, the worse we'll be governed, the more we'll hate our politicians...

Politics is hard. But there are some days when I think, no, there's excuse for this. We deserve - or at least, we need - better leaders than this. 

Yesterday, two incidents, both relatively trivial, brought out the bottle-thrower in me.

The first was David Cameron's appointment of an old chum and St Paul's boy to Number 10. Now, there's nothing wrong with a politician wanting a few old friends and colleagues around him; most Prime Ministers and presidents do the same (those who don't, like Margaret Thatcher or Harold Wilson, never really had close friends to begin with). But Cameron takes it to a new level. When I picture Cameron's Number 10, I see a cramped, fetid male locker room full of chaps boasting about bowling figures and attacking each other with wet towels. Unfair, I'm sure: I'm not doubting that Christopher Lockwood and Jo Johnson are committed and talented. But you might have thought there are some people of similar calibre who didn't go to St Paul's or Eton, and who aren't men. You might have thought the PM would actively seek out people who are different from him. But no. Cameron's defence of his decision is abysmal:

"I judge people by what they can do, what they can bring – by the quality of their brains and the passion in their hearts, not which school they went to."

In other words, the only people of merit went to a small number of public schools. Perhaps he should start considering where people went to school, instead of reverting to innate laziness and unexamined prejudice. A hundred historical examples and social science experiments have demonstrated that even a group of brilliant individuals will make stupid decisions when they suffer from a lack of diversity. How can Cameron not grasp this point, or the secondary one that he is sending entirely the wrong signals to an electorate that already thinks of him and his cabinet as a group of comfortably secluded toffs?

So, to the alternative Prime Minister. Yesterday Ed Miliband gave an interview to Martha Kearney on the World At One that was widely and rightly regarded as disastrous. Partly this was a question of tone. Here's Peter Kellner writing in The Times (£):

The Labour leader sounded shrill when he should have been statesmanlike, tetchy when he needed to be calm, lightweight not mature. As a result his carefully thought-out arguments will have made little or no impact.

I would agree with all that. Sometimes, you can really tell that Miliband was raised in an academic household, in which complex intellectual issues were thrashed out over Corn Flakes. At one point, he asked Kearney a question as if testing her (Kearney waited for a second before replying, coolly, like a teacher to an over-excited sixth form student, "You tell me"). At another he cried, "You don't understand, Martha". And pass the milk.

If Cameron is surrounded by an overly homogeneous clique, so is Miliband. In the latter's case, I suspect the problem isn't that they went to the same school so much as his advisers all come from a similar intellectualising milieu, in which an ability to wield airy abstractions is over-valued and the consensus is that if an interviewer or a voter isn't agreeing with you it's because they just don't understand. Perhaps we will all catch up. Perhaps not.

Then again, how clever do you have to be to see that since you are going to be asked the same question again and again, you'd better have an answer ready? Kearney asked Miliband thirteen times if he intended to borrow more, and every time he evaded the question, mumbling something about "the medium term". Kellner is actually being too kind when he refers to "carefully thought-out arguments".

Miliband and his team must know that until they have a way of dealing with this question, then everything else they have to say will be ignored. I realise it isn't easy. "We're going to borrow more in the short term so that we're borrowing less in the longer term" is a mouthful. But it, or something like it, is the least bad alternative. Until he and the other Ed agree a line, then Miliband is walking out to every crease with his bat broken. 

Now this, I really don't understand. How, after three years to think about it, can you not have an answer ready?

Politics is hard. But Cameron and Miliband are making it look impossible.

health and safety

Excellent:

candyman

Christian and NIck Candy.

The FT's "Lunch with..." column is one of the finest feature series in British journalism. The format is simple: take someone interesting or noteworthy to lunch, get them talking in an informal way about their work and life - food is a great disarmer - and report on the conversation, weaving in the details of the meal. Much can be revealed about a person by the manner in which they address a waiter or a plate of pasta. You will have your own favourite examples; mine include Robert Caro and Esther Duflo.

The FT's latest lunch is with Nick Candy, of the absurdly successful Candy brothers, two lads from Surrey who have become rich and (in certain circles) famous by developing property for millionaires and billionaires.

This particular 'Lunch' has been feted on Twitter as a subtle takedown of its subject. In fact, it's anything but subtle (if it really was subtle, there wouldn't be so many people proclaiming it as such). A hatchet rather than a stilletto is used to make Candy look like a pushy, shallow, boastful spiv.

But if you subtract the interviewer's evident animosity and scrape away the spin he puts on everything, it's hard to see why we should judge Candy as harshly as he clearly wants us to. The Candys didn't come from a rich or well-connected family. They made their fortune by the application of effort, energy, ingenuity and chutzpah, and as far as we know they haven't harmed anyone or bent any laws along the way. They have built a solid business: when the crash came, they came through.

Nick Candy has married someone who is by all accounts a strong-minded woman, and he is, as even this interviewer feels compelled to note, smitten by her. Though clearly a hyper-busy guy, his interactions with the waiter seem polite enough (real arseholes don't say, "Just excuse me one second..." when a call comes in). He acknowledges that a large part of his success is down to luck, rather than his own brilliance. Put it this way: Candy is no Donald Trump. (And if you want to hear about some really shitty interpersonal skills, read the Steve Jobs biography.)

Yes, Candy is flash - the interviewer uses the phrase "wide boy". He has the temerity to be wearing an expensive suit. He offers a long list of the cars he owns, namedrops like crazy, and (perhaps) overplays his relationship with the FT's editor. He's unforgivably vulgar too, ordering a glass of white wine for his lunch companion even though the interviewer ordered steak (although if the interviewer didn't want white wine, presumably he might have said so). None of this, of course, is evidence that he's unpleasant or morally degenerate.

What this really comes down to is that Candy doesn't possess, and hasn't felt it necessary to acquire, the manners and sensibility of the educated middle class. That makes it easy to despise his success, a temptation that we in Britain are always prone to - even journalists at the FT. In the week of Mrs Thatcher's death, this interview, and the reaction to it, are a useful reminder that in this country class still trumps money.

NOTE: It's not that I don't like takedowns, it's just that they have to be genuinely subtle to work, so subtle that you can imagine the subject reading it and nodding in approval, like this lunch with the conservative sociologist Charles Murray. Or take this, with Sean Parker. Do you come away from it thinking Parker is a prat? Maybe. But you may also think he's rather likeable, or a mix of the two. Either way, you don't feel the interviewer straining to impose his judgement on you. What both of these pieces do very successfully is convey a vivid impression of their subject's presence, which ought to be the highest aspiration of any interviewer. The reader should feel he has been sitting across the table from the interviewee. Pulling that off takes a high degree of almost novelistic writing skill. Hatchet jobs are easier.

mrs thatcher and the importance of detail

I've avoided much of the Thatcher coverage, not because I have particularly strong feelings either way (in short, I agree with Hugo Young that the changes she wrought were, on balance, more good than bad). But one of the best pieces I have read was a personal recollection from Ferdinand Mount, a former aide to Thatcher who went on to become a journalist and author. It's unashamedly affectionate but Mount is a perceptive observer and a good writer, and he gives us a vivid sense of the Thatcher presence.

He also makes you think about how important was Thatcher's attention to the minutae of her job. Politics is often presented as if it's all about the exciting stuff: big ideas and strategic maneuvers. But much if not most of it is about attention to the dull detail, as this government has repeatedly discovered to its cost.

One of the things I admire about Thatcher is that she grasped the importance of the mundane. She's often presented as a "visionary" leader and she certainly had one or two big guiding philosophical principles (she was a classic hedgehog in that respect). But she wasn't really interested in political philosophy. She was interested - tenaciously, ferociously interested - in the details of everyday life: from the hem of a dress (her mother was a dressmaker), to the price of milk, to how people paid their rent.

This translated to a vice-like grip of the kind of policy details that other politicians would find boring or beneath them and leave to civil servants (which would leave them terribly exposed if they were picked on in cabinet or ever found themselves sitting next to her in the Commons dining room). Actually she was less of a visionary than a geek (chemistry at Cambridge [UPDATE - talking of detail, it was Oxford, as Erin points out]) - a geek with attitude.

In an increasingly complex world, we need more geeks in power; more politicians who enjoy sweating the details. For all that I remain an admirer of Tony Blair, I kind of wish it had been Thatcher chivvying the Americans, during the build-up to the Iraq war, for details of their post-invasion plans.

Anyway, here's Mount, who manages to make you think a little differently about not one, but two of the great world leaders of the last century in one unprepossessing paragraph:

When I came to work for her again 20 years on, as head of her policy unit, I am afraid I took an unholy delight in watching her chew up a junior minister who had not done his prep and could not explain the difference between the powers and the duties of a drainage authority. Curiously, the only time I ever met Ronald Reagan, he talked in mind-numbing detail about an equally down-to-earth subject: garbage disposal in California. The alliance between this odd couple, one a humourless workaholic, the other a notoriously relaxed charmer, was not only based on ideology but on attention to the realities of life.

how to make room for anger

Photo: Mark Thomas/Rex Features

Philip Collins, in The Times (£), has written one of those columns that ought to be handed to the relevant party leader with the words, "Just go and do what it says here". The leader in this case being Ed Miliband (actually, if Mr Miliband wants to win the next election he could do a lot worse than treating PC's collected columns as an instruction manual). I can't liberate the whole thing from behind the paywall but the key paragraph is this one:

The first thing Labour has to do is to counter Mr Osborne’s argument that these welfare cuts are “inevitable”. This is the line of a man who has thrown you out of a balloon and told you it is inevitable you will hit the ground. But Labour has no plan and so nobody listens. If Mr Miliband had even a rudimentary account of the cuts he was prepared to make then there might be an audience for his protests at the cuts that he thinks are unjust.

Labour needs a plan on public spending that goes beyond "Don't let those heartless Tory bastards cut everything," which is basically where they are. Right now, the voters are in the mood for a government run by heartless bastards, as long as those heartless bastards are considered more competent (or less incompetent) than the other lot. The next election won't be won on who is nicest.

Collins goes on to suggest a couple of policy postions that Labour might adopt to prove it's taking the responsibilities of governing in austere times seriously. One is to limit child benefit to the first two or three children. The other is to lift the exemption that NHS has from the cuts. The drastic cuts to other departments are only made necessary because of the commitment Cameron made, to get elected, not to cut the NHS budget, which represents 40% of public spending.The exemption is a crazy policy, in policy terms. Politically, it was smart.

Labour has a different political problem than Cameron did, of course. As Collins puts it, Labour could "create more room for its anger" by taking tough positions like this. Of course, lifting the NHS exemption would enable the Tories to point at Labour and say, "They want to cut your beloved health service." But this kind of attack would only redound to Labour's benefit. It is the perfect example of a policy that works for one party but not for another.

Policies are never just about policy. They are signals - and the meaning of a signal depends on who is sending it. The signal that this kind of policy sends about Labour would be a very powerful one. It would kill the Tory claim that Labour hasn't got a plan to deal with the debt. It would vaporise the perception that Labour only wants to spend and borrow.

Even better, it's good policy.

m.l.k.

A Life magazine photographer took this photo of the contents of Martin Luther King's briefcase shortly after he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at 6.01pm on April 4, 1968. King was pronounced dead at 7.05pm that evening.

how to offer gravy

Along with The Economist and The Telegraph, the best obituaries can regularly be found at the New York Times, particularly those written by the brilliant Margalit Fox (read everything by her). This week she tells us about the life and work of John Gumperz, a professor of linguistics. This is how the piece opens:

The conflict hinged on a single word: “gravy.”

The place was Heathrow Airport, the time the mid-1970s. The airport had recently hired a group of Indian and Pakistani women to work in its employee cafeteria, and trouble had arisen between them and the British baggage handlers they served.

The baggage handlers complained that the servers were rude, and the servers complained that the baggage handlers were discriminating against them. Neither group knew why the other felt the way it did.

Fox goes on to tell us that Gumperz was one of the first linguists to get interested in how people used language in their every day lives; at how we routinely encode layers of subtle social and cultural meanings into our conversation while barely realising we are doing so. This is how she closes out the piece:

Summoned to Heathrow that mid-’70s day, tape recorder in hand, Professor Gumperz discovered the following: when diners ordered meat, they were asked if they wanted gravy. The English women who had previously worked behind the counter had posed the question with a single word — “Gravy?” — uttered, per cultural convention, with rising intonation.

When the Indian and Pakistani women joined the staff, they too asked the question with a single word. But in keeping with their cultural conventions, they uttered it with falling intonation: “Gravy.”

Professor Gumperz played the recorded exchanges for diners and staff members. His explanation of the subtle yet powerful difference in intonation, and the cultural meaning it carried, helped the groups achieve a mutual understanding.

“He pointed out that the rising intonation versus falling intonation made it a very different statement, even though the word was the same,” Professor Tannen said. “So rising intonation sounded like, ‘Would you like gravy?’ And falling intonation sounded like: ‘This is gravy. Take it or leave it.’ ”