My first day in the press gallery of the House of Commons as a political reporter for The Independent was a lesson in leadership. It was Prime Minister’s Questions, then a twice-weekly event, 25 April 1995. Tony Blair, a shockingly youthful 41-year-old, had been leader of the opposition for a mere nine months. After a long struggle, he was confident of victory that week in a Labour Party vote to rewrite its constitution. The first question he asked John Major was about the anti-European rebel MPs.
Had the Prime Minister agreed to let them back into the Conservative Party without extracting any promises of future loyalty? The premier bristled and pointed out that Labour, too, was divided over Europe, and that there were many people in Blair’s party who wanted to keep the old Clause IV, which sought the ‘common ownership’ of the means of production.
“There is one very big difference,” Blair declared. “I lead my party. He follows his.” It was a terrific sound bite. Major conceded in his memoirs that it was “the best one-liner he ever used against me”. But what was most striking was the enthusiasm with which Labour MPs cheered a concept of leadership that was so much about repudiating their past. The noise from the Labour benches went on for some time, as the Conservatives sat in bruised silence. Hansard recorded the hullabaloo thus: “[Interruption.] Madam Speaker: ‘Order.’ Mr Blair rose – [Interruption.] Madam Speaker: ‘Order. This is using up very valuable time.’”
For a long time, leadership had not been a word with which the Labour Party had been comfortable. For Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, it consisted of managing factions and personalities and striking deals between them. For most party members, at least until 1983, the dictionary definition of leadership was “those that betray our principles”.
Much of my time as a chronicler of the rise and decline of Blair has been devoted, therefore, to puzzling about the nature of modern political leadership. Now the puzzle has begun a new phase, with the contest between David Cameron, who pays Blair the compliment of copying his early style with some attention to detail, and Gordon Brown, who offers a rather different kind of leadership.
On the face of it, the obvious assumptions about what makes a good leader favour Cameron. He is, as Blair is, a natural communicator. He has, as Blair had, forced his party to accept some dramatic changes. But there is more than one model of political leadership, and Brown offers a solidity that many find reassuring.
How to assess their leadership qualities against each other? The recent trends in management theory about what makes successful business leaders offer an insight.
A lot of new research identifies qualities in the best business leaders that are nothing to do with what Steve Brookes of Manchester Business School calls “the Great Man theory of leadership, which is all about charisma and over-the-top leaders”.
Dr Brookes, who is running ESRC seminars for public sector leaders in the UK under the title ‘Public Leadership Challenge’, points to an American study of 1,400 US companies by the management guru Jim Collins: “His unanticipated finding was that the best CEOs didn’t have egos. They were generally self-effacing people who had a real passion for the organisation. It was all about acknowledging that other people also had answers and what he calls ‘getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus’. It is about collaborative leadership – in the public sector that means getting the best out of people across a range of organisations.”
That cuts both ways for Cameron. The Conservatives chose him because he has charisma, which is a quality identified by Collins in his leadership manual, Good to Great, as an active hindrance to business success. But he does present himself as open-minded and keen to draw on outside talents.
