So, all over the British news is the unstartling revelation that the Prime Minister is prone to the occasional big-wobbly-strop. This is not exactly news. Someone in the MoD told me years ago that it was pointless trying to tell the Prime Minister something he didn’t like. The big-wobbly-strop would immediately come flying out the pram, and it was best to don the hard-hat and the spittle protective glasses.
I was quite amused to hear Labour commentators on the radio yesterday saying ‘we’re all prone to this kind of strop’… are we? I’m not prone to this kind of strop. Not even in my own home. If it’s official government policy, though, I might give it a go. I’ll have the wobbly bit down to a tee…
Anyhow, why bring this to the KoW forum. Well, whilst upsetting the typing pool is regrettable (although in my experience in a former employment the use of that term was enough to get a particular senior administrator frothy…) it doesn’t really upset the strategic balance. However, the implied charge that the PM throws big-wobbly-strops when he hears something he doesn’t like and that deters officials from bringing things to him, or according to the former Labour GS they adopt strategies to avoid and manage him, then that is a serious matter when it comes to war fighting and countering terrorism.
Effective strategic leadership is about responding to difficult circumstances, seeing opportunity in adversity, and making decisions with as cool a head as possible. The big-wobbly-strop is something my kids deploy because they know no different. The big-wobbly-strop has no real place in a place of work (point one) because it’s unprofessional, and you might think you’re God, but no-one elected you (by the way) and two, the big-wobbly-strop is frankly dangerous if it leads to a military or security lapse because no-one wants to tell the Emperor that the policy has no clothes.
There’s something clearly about Downing Street… good people go in, and after not very long the disconnect from decent policy circles, and dare I say ‘the electorate’ (who they?) turns people into hubristic monsters. It happened to Maggie, it didn’t really happen to Major, but it definitely happened to Tony and it seems to have happened to Gordon in a big way. But if it’s all the same to those blahing on, on the radio, can we have our effective leadership back please? And can we leave the big-wobbly-strop to the two year old wondering where her mittens have gone?
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Do they really change? Or do people just poorly size them up in the beginning and learn about their frailties later?
We had a recent episode of public life not mirroring private life here in merry old America. A recent Presidential candidate named John Edwards was discovered to be a big phony. I found this humorous because I always found him to be transparently phony. He was like a shady, smooth-talking, southern lawyer out of a bad movie. It baffled me that people thought he was for real when he so clearly was not. But then when the scandal broke about him cheating on his cancer-stricken wife and fathering a child in the affair, people were shocked. There was, immediately, talk of “what went wrong” and “what changed” when, clearly, this guy has always been an egomaniac and hypocrite, but people chose not to notice.
Schmedlap, despite what we Americans think, character has very little to do with how a prime minister or president turns out. Some of the most effective executives have been right bastards with a whole string of mistresses in tow. So, yeah, John Edwards is a vacuous phoney, but that says very little about what sort of president he would have made.
After all, we all wanted to have a beer with Bush, but look at how that party turned out!