8

            What Kind of Leadership is Desirable?

Of all the books that have been written on leadership, a very high proportion have emanated from the United States. In the political literature, this usually means a focus on the American presidency, with other countries receiving only passing mention. Moreover, as Hugh Heclo has complained, many presidential studies implicitly lean towards a ‘great man’ conception of history and politics. Success ‘means prevailing over opponents and ostensibly shaping the course of public policy’; success or failure ‘is a matter of whether or not the president gets his way’. Thus, presidential studies often become advocacy of presidential power.1 This point, as I have argued, has applied for some time now to assessments of political leaders more generally. Too often those who seek ascendancy over their colleagues in government and try to dominate them are regarded as strong and, by that very token, successful, and those who work within a more collective leadership are deemed to be weak and less successful.

It is, though, unsurprising that special attention should be devoted to leaderships, individual or as a group, which play a decisive role in effecting great change. I have distinguished the rare transformational leaders who have been crucially important in producing systemic change from redefining governments, still far from common, which alter the terms of the debate and stretch understandings of what is politically possible. Sometimes, to take the British example, that redefining was done by what was very much a collective leadership, in which the prime minister’s main task was coordination of the work of others. That was the case with the Labour government headed by Clement Attlee from 1945 to 1951. There are other instances where the prime minister has been the driving force, as may fairly be said of the Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher between 1979 and 1990.

In the United States there is a widespread tendency to expect the president to do too much, more than is possible for any chief executive within a system with as many checks and balances.2 In recent decades there has been a similar tendency for commentators to demand that premiers in parliamentary democracies should do still more than they are already doing. They are urged to wield power with greater vigour, including power over their colleagues and political party. Many a premier and party leader has attempted to oblige, having been goaded by the mass media (and by political opponents with their own agenda) into a demonstration of political virility, eager to prove ‘he is his own man’. In the UK some observers and former insiders believe that British prime ministers do not have enough powers. From time to time they advocate the creation of a prime minister’s department, being dissatisfied with the extent to which recent incumbents of 10 Downing Street have already colonized the Cabinet Office.³ In the United States, the gradual increase in size of the executive office of the presidency, created by Franklin D. Roosevelt, has led, as we have seen, to plaintive cries from other parts of government of ‘too many people trying to bite me with the president’s teeth’. In fact, because of the way power is dispersed within the United States, with an especially powerful legislature, there was and remains far more justification for the presidential back-up in Washington than there would be for a prime minister’s department in London. That would mean acolytes guessing (even more than at present) what the prime minister wanted, which would often be conveniently close to their own opinions, as they attempted to bite members of parliament and even ministers with the prime minister’s teeth.

When an increasing number of issues are referred to a prime minister for adjudication, this is unlikely to lead to their successful resolution. Problems can become more intractable as responsibility for making decisions is transferred to the head of government, thus delaying matters until that person can give the issue a necessary minimum (but often inadequate) amount of attention.4 Heclo sees wisdom in the words of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu who said that ‘a leader is best when men barely know he is there, not so good when men obey and acclaim him’.⁵ That, he admits, is an unrealistic counsel of perfection for a modern chief executive, but he is right when he urges that presidents (and this goes for premiers, too) who ensure that other people get together and themselves work out answers to the problems may be exercising ‘a more subtle and productive form of leadership’ than the ‘hyped-up kind of “follow me” drama’ familiar in popular culture.⁶

When the United States is put into comparative perspective, it is clear that it is virtually impossible for a modern president to be ‘transformational’ in the sense in which that term has been used in Chapter 4 of this book. To change the system is scarcely feasible. Even to redefine the limits of the possible is not easy. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson are the clearest twentieth-century examples of such redefining leadership, and what they achieved was generally positive.⁷ (The huge and most tragic exception was Johnson’s embroilment in war in Vietnam.) Both presidents made ample and effective use of their ‘power to persuade’, in Roosevelt’s case with particular appeal to a broad public, while Johnson fully exploited his links to individual senators and intimate knowledge of Congress as a whole.⁸

Some presidents have been at their most effective when they let others take the lead in important policies. The role of Secretary of State George Marshall, and the Marshall Plan, in Harry Truman’s presidency was, as noted in the Introduction, an example of this style of leadership. Truman, though, stood full-square behind Marshall in his support for the European recovery programme. The civil rights breakthrough, limited and bitterly contested as it was, which occurred on Eisenhower’s watch – ending racial segregation of state schools – owed much more to the attorney-general Herbert Brownell than to the president (and, as was seen in Chapter 2, Eisenhower was generally the more hesitant of the two). Ronald Reagan acquired a reputation as a hardliner, but it was when he behaved more collaboratively that he had some legislative success in changing social security and the federal tax code.⁹ The same could be said of Reagan’s foreign policy. He was content for George Shultz and the State Department to take the lead in responding to the radical change underway in Moscow, and Reagan himself entered into a constructive relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Nevertheless, in the light of the constraints which the American political system imposes on the president, there is more of a case for an occupant of the White House making the most of the powers he has than for prime ministers in parliamentary democracies to be similarly assertive, given that there is normally a majority in parliament (whether of the same party or a coalition of parties) ready to sustain the government. Thus, Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz are among those who argue that President Obama should, on coming to office in 2009, have worked closely with the Democratic majority in the Senate ‘to eliminate, or greatly reduce’ that institution’s blocking power through filibuster. As the Senate has the right to make its own rules at the beginning of a new Congress, a simple majority vote would have eliminated the filibuster during 2009–2010.10 Given that the United States political system has been described as a ‘vetocracy’, and has more veto power embedded in it than most, Obama was perhaps unduly cautious about using the legitimacy of his freshly conferred democratic mandate to seek ‘the elimination of the extreme majority-constraining filibuster rules’. One result of this would almost certainly have been the passing of his health reforms in less diluted (and less complicated) form, giving him a more convincing message to take to the mid-term 2010 election. In reality, the messy process of passing the complex and compromised health legislation contributed to the defeat of the Democrats.¹¹ The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was eventually approved could be counted as a ‘legislative success’, in light of the fierce opposition and misrepresentation it encountered in the United States, but such a ‘success’ in the British context would have been deemed a failure liable to undermine the authority of the prime minister.¹²

There has not been a transformational American president since Abraham Lincoln. Readmission to the Union of the eleven Confederate states that had seceded and granting citizenship to black Americans constituted a transformation of the federal republic. Lincoln has been mentioned only in passing earlier in this book, for its focus is on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is, however, an outstanding example of how collaborative and collegial leadership could be combined with attachment to principle and the achievement of path-breaking change. In an important sense, the republic was refounded on a new basis. It is likely, as the leading authority on the Lincoln presidency James McPherson has written, that ‘without Lincoln’s determined leadership the United States would have ceased to be’.13 Lincoln’s leadership and Union victory in the Civil War, the same author observes, resolved two fundamental problems that had been left unsettled by the American Revolution and the Constitution alike. The first was the survival of the republic as one nation and the second was the ‘monstrous injustice’ (in Lincoln’s words) of a country ‘founded on a charter that declared all people deserving of the inalienable right of liberty’ which had become ‘the largest slaveholding nation in the world’.¹⁴ On the latter issue, Lincoln came under strong pressure to drop abandonment of slavery as a condition of peace, but he refused to do so. After noting that more than a hundred thousand black soldiers were fighting for the Union as he spoke, he said: ‘If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive – even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.’¹⁵ Lincoln went on to employ a combination of high principle and low politics to get the votes needed to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, through Congress.¹⁶

As Doris Kearns Goodwin has demonstrated particularly well, Lincoln’s ‘political genius’ lay not only in the brilliance and profundity of his speeches and in his resolve. It rested also on his feel for timing, an ability to be ahead of public opinion but not so far ahead of it in the policies he pursued as to undermine the chances of success.¹⁷ And, as much as anything, it rested on Lincoln’s willingness to work collegially with the most capable politicians of the day, including those who had been his most formidable rivals. A less assured or less magnanimous leader than Lincoln would have been disinclined to surround himself by a group of men, each of whom thought, at the outset of his presidency, that he had a stronger entitlement to the White House. A lesser leader would have been more inclined to appoint to cabinet positions ‘personal supporters who would never question his authority’.¹⁸ Instead, Lincoln gave the most senior posts to his principal rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, Senator William H. Seward of New York, Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and the Missouri elder statesman Edward Bates. Seward came to regard Lincoln as ‘the best and wisest man’ he had ever known and observed that his ‘magnanimity is almost superhuman’.19 Chase, who never quite got over what Lincoln called his ‘White House fever’, on four occasions sent the president letters of resignation, and the fourth time Lincoln surprised him by accepting it. Even so, Lincoln later appointed Chase, who had frequently intrigued against him, to the office of Chief Justice. Subsequently Lincoln told Senator Zachariah Chandler that he ‘would rather have swallowed his buckhorn chair than to have nominated Chase’, but that the decision was right for the country.²⁰

Lincoln often said that ‘he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them’, observed Gideon Welles, a member of that Cabinet. A notable case involved Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvanian political boss who has been credited with the definition of an honest politician as ‘one who, when he is bought, stays bought’.²¹ Lincoln found it necessary to remove Cameron as Secretary for War after extensive corruption in the War Department had been exposed. However, the president then wrote a long letter to Congress explaining that the unfortunate contracts had been ‘spawned by the emergency situation facing the government’ and that he and his entire Cabinet ‘were at least equally responsible with [Cameron] for whatever error, wrong, or fault was committed’.²² Cameron was for ever after devoted to Lincoln and, as Goodwin notes, ‘appreciated the courage it took for Lincoln to share the blame at a time when everyone had deserted him’.²³

In a system which invests executive power in a president, that leader generally has the power to make a bigger difference than has a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy. Yet the USA, if we leave aside foreign policy, scarcely fits into that generalization. The modern American political system is one in which power is so divided – among the White House staff, the other government departments and agencies, Congress, the judiciary and the fifty states that make up the federation – that the president has far less power domestically than most prime ministers possess, provided (and it is an important proviso) they can carry with them their Cabinet colleagues. This applies especially to countries with majoritarian electoral systems, rather than proportional representation. The party of which the prime minister is the leader normally has an overall majority in the legislature.

Yet, there are occasions, especially in the field of foreign policy, when the election of an American president has much more far-reaching consequences than the choice of government within parliamentary democracies. The US presidential election of 2000 was a clear illustration of the point. It showed that even when individuals as unexceptional in talent as George W. Bush become leaders of a country, when it is one as powerful as the United States, they can make a significant difference, whether for better or for worse. Yet that election also illuminated the part which chance and sheer luck can play in one, rather than another contender, reaching the highest office. It would not have taken many more Democrat-inclined voters in one or two crucial states to have voted for Al Gore rather than for the more radical (but no-hope) candidate, Ralph Nader, to have put Gore in the White House. Or Palm Beach County in Florida might have used a more reliable voting mechanism than its butterfly ballots (the ‘hanging chads’, whose existence it thrust into the consciousness of an unsuspecting world).24 Or Gore might have won Arkansas ‘if he had been willing to let Bill Clinton’s popularity work for him’.²⁵ In fact, it was Bush’s good fortune to scrape victory in the electoral college as a result of factors such as these, even though he lost the popular vote nationally. And this was surely one of the cases where the choice of leader in a democracy had a huge impact on the lives, and deaths, of others in countries far from the United States. As Nannerl Keohane puts it: ‘Gore might well have pursued a course in Afghanistan not too different from that of George W. Bush. But he would almost certainly not have invaded Iraq, and on this score alone the world today would be a different place.’²⁶

            ‘NAPOLEONIC’ RULE IN BRITAIN?

Setting the top leader far above and apart from the ruling group within an authoritarian regime, or above and apart from his or her Cabinet in a democracy, serves the purpose of strengthening the leader’s power at the expense of party colleagues. It has, therefore, a real utility for the leader and for the leader’s entourage, if the purpose is maximization of personal power rather than good government. In an autocracy, obedience to a dictator’s command and the absence of overt opposition feeds his vanity. There is often also more than a touch of vanity involved in the attempts of democratic leaders to maximize their personal power. Daily and hourly, Max Weber wrote, a politician has to overcome ‘a quite vulgar vanity, the deadly enemy of all matter-of-fact devotion to a cause and . . . of distance towards one’s self’.27 Weber sees lack of objectivity and irresponsibility as ‘deadly sins’ in politics, and vanity, ‘the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible’, something which tempts the politician to commit those offences and to be ‘constantly in danger of becoming an actor’, concerned, above all, with the impression that he is making.²⁸

Margaret Thatcher, although described as an ‘egotist’ even by her sympathetic major biographer,²⁹ was more concerned with power as a means to uphold values she held dear than with seeking the limelight out of personal vanity. As was argued in Chapter 3 of this book, she helped to redefine the terms of political debate in British politics in a way in which Tony Blair did not. Blair accepted the new centre ground of British politics which Thatcher and like-minded colleagues had helped to create. Kenneth Clarke, who served in the Conservative cabinets headed both by Margaret Thatcher and then by John Major, remarked that Major’s government ‘was destroyed from within by people who considered themselves to be the most loyal to Margaret’ and it ‘was left to Tony Blair to take over Thatcherism with a human face’.³⁰ Domestically, this included a bias in favour of the private over the public sector in the economy and increasing the private sector component and application of market criteria in health, social and educational provision. In foreign policy Blair went beyond Thatcher in his acceptance of the views of the right wing of the US Republican party, reaching a position which on the Middle East was difficult to distinguish from that of American neocons. Blair influenced only the form, but not the substance, of the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq, whereas Thatcher did not hesitate to take Ronald Reagan to task on certain issues, although they enjoyed good relations and an ideological affinity. In particular, and after listening both to advisers within government and to outside specialists, she played an important part in reinforcing Reagan’s desire to engage with a new Soviet leadership, helping to convince him that it made sense to do so in the person of Gorbachev.³¹ Over time, however, Mrs Thatcher listened much less and would not hesitate to explain to Hungarians what was happening in Hungary.* She did concede, however, when she visited a Moscow housing estate in 1987, that the people living there ‘knew the system even better than I did’.³²

Although far more polite to, and emollient with, Cabinet colleagues than was Mrs Thatcher, Tony Blair attempted to emulate or even outdo Thatcher in the centralization of power in 10 Downing Street. Thatcher had as her right-hand man and Private Secretary Charles Powell. Blair appointed his brother Jonathan Powell who asked for, and was given, the grander title of chief of staff.³³ (Both of them highly capable officials, they came to these posts from the Foreign Office.) Interviewed in 1996, six years after Thatcher left office, Charles Powell said: ‘I’ve always thought there was something Leninist about Mrs Thatcher which came through in the style of government – the absolute determination, the belief that there’s a vanguard which is right and if you keep that small, tightly knit team together, they will drive things through . . . They could go out and really confront people, lay down the law, bully a bit.’³⁴ Jonathan Powell, before Blair had yet entered 10 Downing Street, in a remark at an off-the-record seminar which was leaked to the press, said that ‘we wanted to move from a feudal to a Napoleonic system’. Explaining what he had in mind in a book written much later (its hero is Machiavelli rather than Napoleon), Powell wrote: ‘The British system of government is traditionally a feudal system of barons (Cabinet ministers) who have armies and funds (civil servants and budgets), who pay fealty to their liege but really get on with whatever they want to do. There is very little that the prime minister can do to make the government consistent or coherent. The only weapon he has in his armoury, a very blunt one, is hiring and firing people . . . We needed to have greater coordination at the centre on both policy development and implementation.’35

Whether either Lenin or Napoleon were appropriate models for a political leader in a democracy, or whether a leader who had never held even the most junior ministerial office (Blair’s case, although not Thatcher’s) need have other ministers regard him as their ‘liege’ (master), are questions that should have only one answer. Nothing remotely Napoleonic occurred, but at the beginning of the Labour government’s second term, a new institutional mechanism for monitoring the implementation of policy was introduced. Its initiator was Michael Barber who argued that if a government had an objective or target, there should be a plan for achieving it and means created for ensuring delivery.³⁶ Blair appointed Barber head of this new Delivery Unit, which reported to the prime minister. The targets it set for reducing hospital waiting times, reducing crime and improving school performances were highly controversial, and had some unintended as well as intended consequences. Nevertheless, in a book in which he reflects on his experience in government, Barber argues strongly that the pluses outnumbered the minuses (although the ‘targets culture’ remains contentious).

Whatever Napoleonic ambitions Blair may have harboured, and in spite of his sense of entitlement to take decisions on behalf of the government, he could never achieve his imperial goal, for if he was the Napoleon of 10 Downing Street, exercising significant control over foreign policy and influencing the social agenda, there was another Napoleon next door where Gordon Brown dominated economic policy-making and hence a large swath of domestic policy. Writing in the last days of the Blair premiership, Barber was just one among many insiders who noted that ministers had to decide ‘whether they are predominantly in the Brown camp or the Blair camp or whether they will seek to be in both’. The unusually powerful chancellor was a constant constraint upon Blair’s power and, as that power ‘ebbed away’ during the prime minister’s third term, this constraint became still greater.³⁷

When Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013, much admiration for her achievements was expressed. Not the least of these was her becoming the first woman prime minister in Britain, and doing so, moreover, as leader of the Conservative Party, which had consistently lagged well behind Labour in bringing women into parliament and government (although it, too, fell far short of the degree of gender equality attained in Scandinavia). There was also much emphasis on Thatcher’s ‘strong leadership’ and praise for her being a ‘conviction politician’. There is, indeed, much to be said for a politician having a thought-through political philosophy and firm values. Such a person will not be excessively driven by opinion polls or focus groups, though she or he may take them into account in deciding how to present policy. Convictions, however, and a determination to act on them, are not necessarily an unalloyed blessing. Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, to take a few obvious examples, were ‘strong’ and domineering leaders, and they all (even Stalin) had exceedingly firm convictions. A majority of the Conservative Cabinet (and a large section of the parliamentary party) finally decided that they would put up no longer with one of Mrs Thatcher’s convictions in particular – the belief that she was always right. Almost a quarter of a century later, the cabinet ministers who told the prime minister she would have to go were still being scorned by those nostalgic for the lost leader. The latter included the historian Andrew Roberts who, in language strangely reminiscent of that used by Stalin’s minions about the victims of the show trials of the 1930s, described the Cabinet ministers who saw off Margaret Thatcher in 1990 as ‘an over-ambitious cabal of cowards, fools and traitors’.38

Geoffrey Howe, whose resignation speech triggered the forced resignation of Margaret Thatcher from the premiership in 1990, wrote of how the prime minister had come to dominate the reactions of her colleagues to the extent that meetings in Whitehall and Westminster were ‘subconsciously attended, unseen and unspoken’ by her. He notes: ‘The discussion would always come around somehow to: how will this play with the prime minister? That gradually grew, to the point where she was so accustomed to getting her own way that she became over-confident; less and less dependent on consultation with colleagues, more and more dependent on a narrow circle. It tends to happen. It happened to Ted Heath. It happened to Tony Blair.’³⁹ Kenneth Clarke recalled that on one occasion the prime minister said in Cabinet: ‘Why do I have to do everything in this government?’ Clarke says: ‘To which I think I wasn’t the only person sitting round the table thinking: “The trouble is, Margaret, that you believe that you do have to. And you shouldn’t. And you can’t.”’40*

Thatcher may have tried to bludgeon her Cabinet, and it was ultimately her undoing, but she bypassed it rather less than did Blair. Alistair Darling, who was not only a Cabinet member continuously from 1997 to 2010 but also a politician well disposed towards the ‘New Labour’ emphasis on ‘Middle Britain’, is among those who have been critical of the lack of collective discussion, and thus of genuine collective responsibility, for policy during those years. He notes that a reader of Blair’s memoirs might be forgiven for thinking that ‘for Tony it meant, “New Labour, c’est moi”’. Embracing in his generalization Brown’s premiership as well as Blair’s, Darling says that on too many occasions ‘we didn’t discuss issues, in principle, well before the die was cast’. As examples of bypassing of the Cabinet, Darling notes: ‘Tuition fees [for universities], a policy which has worked, was never discussed properly, so the result was no collective ownership. On Lebanon there was little discussion. And because he thought it was the right thing to do, [Blair] was prepared to ignore public opinion and any reservations there may have been in the Cabinet.’⁴¹

            LEADERS AND PARTIES

It is easier to define effective leadership than to get anything remotely approaching consensus on what is good or (the rarer) great leadership. An evaluation of a leader as good will depend either on a subjective judgement about that person’s likeability or on whether one approves or disapproves of the policies the leader has promoted. Different situations, however, call for different styles and qualities of leadership. Thus, ‘the most effective leader in a given context is the group member who is best equipped to assist the group in achieving its objectives’.42 In Joseph Nye’s concise definition a leader is someone ‘who helps a group create and achieve shared goals’.⁴³ In an organization other than a political party a leader may also ‘determine or clarify goals’,⁴⁴ but determination of goals is not an appropriate function of a party leader in a democracy. The broad objectives – for ‘goals’ have become less grandiose than they were for some political parties in the first half of the twentieth century – should be the prerogative of the membership of the party in a dialogue with the party leadership, for why otherwise should they give up their time to work for it? In a democracy, effective political leadership will involve helping a political party to win power and, after attaining governmental office, helping to implement the policies the party has espoused.

The relationship between the leadership group as a whole and the party’s members in the legislature (as well as the leadership’s relationship with the party membership in the country) is normally, and should be, a two-way process. The leadership team have the advantage of being able to determine priorities, but if their actual policies are more influenced by media tycoons or by financial lobbies, this is neither effective nor democratic leadership, but a different form of followership. It is much easier for a party leader – certainly in Britain – to get a good press by distancing himself from his own party than by standing up to media proprietors. Stanley Baldwin was much more robust in his attitude to newspaper owners than have been his late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century successors (with the partial exception of the current Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband). In a speech in 1929, Baldwin said: ‘The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal likes and dislikes of two men.’ Continuing his attack on the press barons, he famously went on: ‘What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages . . .’⁴⁵

Tony Blair, in contrast, was much more solicitous towards wealthy newspaper proprietors and business interests than to members of his party, the only people, apart from his Sedgefield constituents in the north-east of England, who had voted directly for him. As noted in Chapter 2, he dismissed them – and not in an off hand remark, but in his memoirs – as ‘exiled for years in the Siberia of party drudgery far from the centre of government’ and re-emerging in the run-up to a general election ‘in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance’.⁴⁶ In what was an off-the-cuff remark, an unnamed close ally of prime minister David Cameron was widely quoted in May 2013 describing Conservative Party activists in the constituencies as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons’.⁴⁷ Such a disconnection between party members and their leaders, and disdain for the rank-and-file by their leaderships, is not only unbecoming. It is also dangerous for democracy.

Leaders should view their parties not just as a vehicle for their ambitions but as a shared undertaking to advance the most widely shared objectives and values of that party. This obviously requires the serious pursuit of electoral success. Parties which put purity of principle ahead of all compromise are likely to remain in the political wilderness. This need not mean disregarding the views or disparaging the beliefs of the generality of party members. Those are not likely to be identical to the opinions (or apathy) of the broader electorate, but any member of a legislature as well as a party leader has some necessary room for manoeuvre in negotiating between the active and inactive, between the committed and the sceptical.

There are, though, two conclusions on which students of democracies and of countries in transition from authoritarian rule are widely agreed. One is that a viable party system is an indispensable pillar of a democracy and that when parties are manipulated from above, rather than allowed to develop an independent and influential existence, a country in transition from autocratic or oligarchic rule has got little or no chance of becoming a consolidated democracy. A majority of the successor states to the Soviet Union, including post-Soviet Russia, are cases in point. The other finding is that political parties throughout most of the world have seen substantial declines in their membership in the period since the mid-twentieth century and that survey research shows them to be held in low esteem. As the authors of a major comparative study of political parties noted, ‘Large majorities of citizens in most countries acknowledge that “Without parties there can be no democracy”, but those same individuals often criticize parties for their “divisive” behaviour’.48 Another of the dilemmas parties in many countries face is pithily summed up by Juan Linz as ‘Parties Cost Money: But Not Mine, Not from my Taxes, and Not from Interest Groups’.⁴⁹ Interestingly, one country in which democracy has thrived more than most in recent decades is reunited Germany (and, indeed, West Germany before that) where parties do receive state funding and where their membership has increased, although that owes a good deal to the incorporation of the former German Democratic Republic in the united German state.

Given that it is reasonable to expect leaders of political parties in a free and pluralistic political system to have a prior commitment to democracy as such, and granted their need to connect with the wider electorate, it is dangerous if they regard the rank-and-file membership of their party as little more than a necessary evil. The authors of a study of party organizational change in the twentieth century noted that, in order to assert their supremacy, one ‘answer is for the leadership to marginalize the party on the ground, and even to let it wither away’. Whether consciously planned or not, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this appeared to reflect ‘the recent experiences of the mainstream parties in Denmark and the Netherlands’.⁵⁰ In Britain, in contrast, there was a major membership drive by the Labour Party in the early years of Tony Blair’s leadership. Successful though it was at the time, many of those members, as well as other long-standing ones, subsequently left the party in disillusionment, the Iraq war being the last straw for a significant number. Too great a concentration of power in the hands of a party leader debilitates the internal life of the party, while its members are caught between a reluctance to criticize the party leadership in a way that would give succour to political opponents and an equal reluctance to delegate excessive power to the leader.⁵¹

Criticism of the leader from within the parliamentary party or from the rank-and-file membership will, of course, lead to complaints that the leader has ‘lost control’ of the party, but we need to question how much ‘control’ it is appropriate for a leader to have over the people who put him where he is. Equally, a party leadership has a responsibility not to allow intolerant extremists to take over the party. Thus, the UK Labour Party, under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, expelled from their ranks the Militant Tendency organization which had been taking over a number of local party branches, intimidating, berating or boring other members into submission or exit. A similarly ‘hostile takeover’, as Moisés Naim puts it, of the US Republican Party by the Tea Party has endangered that political organization.52 The prestige of political parties has declined cross-nationally for a number of reasons. One, as Naim observes, is an unintended consequence of a healthier development, freer media and more independent scrutiny, which has exposed corruption that was previously hidden or silently tolerated.⁵³ But the ‘public tarnishing’, he argues, is also connected with political parties having become less able to distinguish themselves from their opponents ideologically.* As a result, they have ‘relied less on the popular appeal of their ideals and ideas and more on marketing techniques, the media prowess of candidates, and, of course, the money they could raise’.⁵⁴

None of the criticism of overmighty or presumptuous leaders should be taken to suggest that leadership does not have a distinctive and important role to play. Members of the top leadership team, and not just the top individual leader, have a responsibility to explain and justify why a particular action is being taken, even if it is one unanticipated by party members or one which does not fare well in opinion polls. The polls themselves have a significant part to play in a democracy – countries on the way to authoritarian rule can be relied upon to stifle independent survey research – but they do not relieve leaderships of the duty to give a lead. They need, however, to engage with their parties, giving them a leadership role in public discourse, rather than fob them off with sham consultation, for if political parties become moribund, so will democracy.

It is easy for a leader to have his (or her) own beliefs reinforced by his immediate entourage. It is not too difficult, other than in the time it consumes, for a leader to speak individually to a majority of cabinet members and get their agreement on a particular issue. Most of them will not have given much thought to the matter because they have their own departmental responsibilities and, in a one-to-one conversation with the head of the government, they will be disposed to acquiesce. If, however, this is an important matter of policy principle for the government and the governing party, it is more conducive to good governance and more in keeping with democratic values for the issue to be presented to a Cabinet committee or, if need be, the Cabinet as a whole. There may be one or two people present who have thought seriously about the issue, have come to a quite different conclusion from the premier, and who may have the more cogent arguments. Whether that minority then becomes a majority depends on other members of the top leadership team. They will need not only to have been convinced of the merits of that opposing argument and the desirability of a different policy decision, but also to possess enough backbone to reject the view of the prime minister.

To the extent that political parties decline, their place will be taken by those both within the society and from without who have the most wealth to deploy in the exercise of economic and political leverage. Notwithstanding the great political and social change that has occurred since the eighteenth century, the words of Adam Smith and John Millar quoted in Chapter 1 have not lost their relevance. ‘The authority of fortune’, observed Smith, is ‘very great even in an opulent and civilized society.’ His pupil Millar similarly noted that the influence derived from wealth ‘is not only greater than that which arises from mere personal accomplishments, but also more stable and permanent’.⁵⁵ It is political parties, with a mass membership and strong organization – as well as, importantly, trade unions – which have exercised a democratic countervailing power to that wielded by wealthy individuals, rich families, big business and financial institutions.* If leaders pay more attention to the latter than the former, they pave the way for two dangerous outcomes. One is that their countries will more and more become plutocracies rather than democracies. The other is that the place of political parties will increasingly be taken by direct action groups. They are often not particularly interested in democratic norms and procedures and are liable to fall into the same mistaken trap as revolutionaries a century earlier of believing that only ends matter, and that whatever means are deployed to achieve those ends are justified. Even when moved by righteous anger against evident injustice, as in the ‘leaderless revolutions’ of recent years in the Middle East, they may – given the absence of organization, policy coherence and commitment to political pluralism which a democratic party can provide – pave the way for a new authoritarianism.

            LEADERSHIP UNDER AUTHORITARIANISM AND DEMOCRACY

A myth may contain an element of truth, and yet be greatly misleading. Some of the people who have been thought of as strong leaders – Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung or Saddam Hussein – did indeed wield enormous power. In that sense they were strong leaders. The myth here consists of the idea, sedulously promoted by these leaders and their propagandists, that each of them was singularly wise, gifted and far-seeing. Vast resources are devoted in many totalitarian and authoritarian states to spreading the message of the people’s good fortune to have such a great leader. In the absence of alternative sources of information and criticism, the regime’s narrative can be, and often has been, widely believed for a time. The fabrication lies also in the idea that concentrating enormous power in the hands of an individual leader brought great benefit to their countries. In reality, their tyrannical rule had disastrous consequences.

There is a qualitative difference between the possibilities open to even the most high-handed and overweening leader within a democracy and such a leader in an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. However hard a leader in a democracy tries to dominate the political process, that person and, more pertinently, his or her party are ultimately accountable to the electorate. There are, however, lessons to be learned, and warnings to be heeded, from looking at leadership in authoritarian as well as democratic systems.* The idea that one leader knows best, and is entitled to have a quite disproportionate share of executive power within his or her hands, is not confined to dictatorial regimes. And even authoritarian systems, as has been suggested in earlier chapters, tend to be less dangerously adventurous abroad and less murderous at home when they are led by an oligarchy rather than an autocrat.

The cult of the leader, which emerged in fascist and in many (not all) Communist states, was pernicious. But there have been unconscious echoes of what in Nazi Germany was the Führerprinzip (the leader principle) and what in Stalin’s Soviet Union, from the early 1930s onwards, was known as edinonachalie (one-person command) also in democracies. We encounter it in the attitudes of politicians and political commentators who want to place more powers in the hands of the top leader nationally and who also prefer one-person rule at the local level to more collective leadership. Both in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, this big boss principle applied, above all, to the Führer or, in the Russian case, the vozhd at the apex of the system, but it went all the way down the hierarchy, so that little Hitlers and little Stalins at the regional and local level could justify their arbitrary decision-making on the basis of one-man leadership (and they were men, not women). After Stalin’s death the need to balance edinonachalie with kollegialnost (collegiality) began to be stressed.56

A leader in a highly authoritarian political system who wishes to introduce radical reform has a justification for bypassing the party organization not open to a party leader in a democracy. Since the party itself has generally seized the reins of government by force, proceeded to monopolize power, and then retain that power with a mixture of rewards for conformism and punishments for deviation (all the way up to the death penalty or, at best, long imprisonment for opposition), it cannot convincingly claim either a moral or a democratic right to rule. Thus, neither Gorbachev attempting to liberalize and, ultimately, democratize the political system of the Soviet Union nor Deng Xiaoping aiming to liberalize and marketize the Chinese economic system was under an obligation to abide by the norms of the system each man was trying to supplant. In fact, as a matter of political prudence, they worked within the existing system for as long as it took to make the changes and, in Deng’s case, beyond.

In the Politburo chaired by Gorbachev, there was, as even members of it who became his enemies admitted, freer and lengthier discussion, with every opportunity for critical voices to be raised, than had existed under his predecessors. Not knowing what policies he would pursue, the Politburo had selected Gorbachev as party leader. At the time, this meant his automatically becoming the country’s leader. Until there was qualitative change in the political system, that same group had the power to remove him from the first of these posts and, as a necessary consequence, from the other. Thus, it made sense for Gorbachev to use his ‘power to persuade’ within the Politburo, carrying more conservative colleagues with him and, when he could not do so, making tactical retreats. From the point at which an executive presidency was created in the Soviet Union – in March 1990 – Gorbachev increasingly bypassed the Politburo to the fury of its members. By then the Politburo was no longer the functional equivalent of the Cabinet in a system such as that of Britain. It was merely the highest policy-making committee within the Communist Party, which was rapidly losing support in the country and was no longer the centre of power in the Soviet state.57

*

Finally, several important misconceptions underlying the myth of the strong leader are worth reiterating. Within parliamentary democracies there is a tendency to believe that the top leader counts for more than he or she actually does. Policy outcomes which have been brought about mainly by others are frequently attributed to the premier. No less often electoral victories are misleadingly hailed as the party leader’s achievement, whereas only very rarely has the leader made the difference between victory or defeat. The more fundamental error is to view the top individual leader who asserts his or her political pre-eminence, bypassing senior colleagues and the machinery of government, relying more on a coterie of personal attendants than on his or her political party, as the kind of leader we should wish to see. Usurpation of powers that more properly belong to individual ministers, and which, in matters of intra-governmental or intra-party contention, are more appropriately settled in the course of collective consideration by Cabinet members, are not, and should not be regarded as, the mark of a successful democratic head of government. Leaders who believe they have a personal right to dominate decision-making in many different areas of policy, and who attempt to exercise such a prerogative, do a disservice both to good governance and to democracy. They deserve not followers, but critics.

* Whereas in the earlier years of her premiership, Mrs Thatcher was capable both of asking good questions and of listening to the answers, especially if they came from people with specialist knowledge, this had changed by her last years in office. Ivan Berend, an important Hungarian reformer and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the time of his meeting with Thatcher in August 1990, recalls that immediately after he was introduced to her, she grabbed his arm, took him to a corner and asked him about the exciting events in Hungary. However, ‘she did not wait until I began speaking, and immediately started answering her own questions and explained to me what was really happening in Hungary’. Berend contrasted this with a meeting he had in the same year with the Spanish prime minister Felipe González ‘who expressed a deep interest and excellent understanding of what was happening in Hungary, and asked brilliant questions’. See Ivan T. Berend, History in my Life: A Memoir of Three Eras (Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2009), p. 225.

* That in a democracy senior politicians should feel the need to subordinate their convictions to the will of one person is lamentably reminiscent of life under autocracy in which, when the leader is absent or has not given explicit instructions, trying to divine the will of the dictator becomes the guide to action. In Hitler’s Germany this was called ‘working towards the Führer’. As Ian Kershaw has written: ‘In the Darwinist jungle of the Third Reich, the way to power and advancement was through anticipating the “Führer will”, and, without waiting for directives, taking initiatives to promote what were presumed to be Hitler’s aims and wishes.’ (Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Penguin, London, 2009, p. 321.) Cabinet ministers in a democracy, behaving in a similarly supine manner for the sake of promotion (or avoidance of demotion), could usefully be reminded that many of those who have come to occupy the highest political office within their countries were at one time critics, and even rebels, within their parties.

* The United States has partly bucked that trend, gravitating in certain respects towards the opposite danger. It is moderate Republicanism which has been under threat, as has the necessary modicum of consensus on what constitutes civilized democratic discourse. Rather than see implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which had gone through due process in Congress and had been upheld by the Supreme Court, the Tea Party conservatives showed themselves willing in October 2013 to shut down the federal government, lay off hundreds of thousands of workers, halt medical research, and seriously undermine not only the dollar but their country’s international standing. While their extremism, and their misrepresentation of a modest and long overdue social reform, could no longer come as a surprise, what was more remarkable was their success in intimidating more mainstream Republican leaders into going along with an action which, if prolonged, was liable to do profound damage not only to American society but also to the global economy.

* Smith’s and Millar’s emphasis on family wealth and connections as a ‘source of authority’ appears all too relevant two and a half centuries later. The point applies in contemporary authoritarian regimes, not least China, while in parliamentary democracies political parties need to be on their guard against having the best-connected candidates foisted on them, rather than seeking breadth of experience, ability and commitment to the party’s values. The danger is readily discernible in Britain. Even in the United States, which still cherishes the ‘log cabin to White House’ parable (which has occasionally, as in Lincoln’s case, been a reality), ‘keeping it in the family’ has become a pronounced trend in recent decades. It beggars belief – and statistical probability – that within a population of over three hundred million people, the best presidential candidates should turn up in the immediate family of President George H.W. Bush. Family fortunes have counted for much, as in the case of Joseph Kennedy’s sons. Still more significant, however, are family members of a president inheriting the latter’s wealthy friends, fund-raisers and backers in a system in which more money is required to win an election than in any other democratic country. The United States, moreover, remains the most unequal of the world’s democracies. It was at its least unequal, as noted in Chapter 3, when Johnson’s Great Society reforms were having an impact. Even then, however, the US was more unequal than other democracies for which comparable data are available.

* That is all the more so because in the contemporary world there are many regimes which have been described as ‘electoral democracies’, inasmuch as they have elections of a sort, but in which the opposition is given no access to the major mass media, and opposition parties and independent political movements are restricted and harassed. These hybrid regimes – which, in most cases, fit the description of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ (or ‘competitive authoritarianism’) better than ‘electoral democracy’ – occupy a middle ground (although a far from golden mean) between genuine democracies and indisputably authoritarian regimes.