Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher in London in 1987 ©Getty Images
The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Ageby Archie Brown (Bodley Head, £25)
Archie Brown does not say so, but I cannot resist guessing the exact moment at which he was provoked into writing this book. It was, I fancy, when he got to page two of the introduction to Tony Blair’s memoirs, the bit where our hero reminds us that “I won three elections.” “No, you didn’t,” I imagine Professor Brown shouting as he hurled the book across the room. The near-universal belief that the leader’s personality is decisive in elections is simply wrong. It’s parties that win and lose the day. Heath was far less popular than Wilson in 1970, Thatcher than Callaghan in 1979. Leaders are much less important than they think they are.
It is an even greater misconception that strong leaders are the most successful and admirable. On the contrary, when a leader always gets his or her own way, dominates colleagues, and concentrates decision-making in his or her own hands, disaster tends to follow. Collective leadership is always better, the proper processes of government need to be respected, and your political party is there to be consulted and wooed, not manipulated or ignored.
That is Archie Brown’s argument, and a very respectable one it is, too. As emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University and author of numerous books on the Soviet Union, he is well-qualified to make this case. But behind his general argument there lies, not very well hidden, a personal assault. For the prime example of the misbegotten strongman that is adduced, time and again, is Blair. He is the only 21st-century leader to receive sustained attention. Putin, Merkel, Berlusconi don’t get a look in. It is always Blair we come back to: his braggadocio, his cavalier treatment of his party, his contempt for the normal processes of government, his reckless adventurism abroad, above all in the Middle East. If Iraq is not written on Tony Blair’s heart, it is on Archie Brown’s.
To transform the particular polemic into a general theory of leadership, Brown trawls widely, if not particularly deeply. We are taken on a gruelling sightseeing tour from Ataturk to Yeltsin. In the course of this journey, we get rather too many glimpses of the obvious: “the more power is concentrated in the office, the greater the potential significance of the change of leader occupying it”; “the impact of the leader on the outcome of presidential elections was found to be substantial in the United States”; “the Cuban revolution is a clear case where leadership mattered a great deal.” Yes, a nobody who sneaks in on a leaky old boat with 80-odd followers and goes on to lead his country for half a century is likely to be a rather exceptional person.
But we also encounter a running problem, which tends to undermine Brown’s general thesis, if not his personal vendetta. For every instance which supports his argument, there is another one, or more than one, which doesn’t. Successful political leaders, like human beings whom they sometimes resemble, come in all shapes and sizes. They may be five-foot-nothing like Deng Xiaoping, or sixfoot- five like Charles de Gaulle. They may be grand and sonorous like Churchill, or folksy and unpretentious like Harry Truman; irresistible like Bill Clinton, or rather off-putting like Margaret Thatcher. Many are showoff egomaniacs, but a few are deliberately inconspicuous like Clement Attlee (obviously Brown’s favourite of them all). Yet even St Clem entertained a sly self-regard, shown by the epitaph he composed for himself:
There were few who thought him a starter, Many who thought themselves smarter. But he ended PM, CH and OM, An Earl and a Knight of the Garter.
Nations vary too widely in their constitutions and traditions to lay down general rules for leading them. As Brown himself notes, in Russia, there is a genuine popular willingness to accord a leader uninhibited power; in the United States, the separation of powers and the federal structure may leave the president semi-impotent in domestic affairs for months if not years, especially in his second term and when he controls only one house of Congress or neither.
Nor is it true that high-handed, arbitrary and even corrupt leadership is a recipe for failure. From Robert Walpole to Silvio Berlusconi, deeply flawed leaders have managed to stay in power for long periods without arousing serious popular dissatisfaction and often managing to do a bit of good. More depressing still, deceit is not always punished either by fate or by the electorate. De Gaulle’s abandonment of the Algérie française supporters who carried him to power could not have been more highhanded, deceitful or successful.
Brown believes that it is, above all, in interventions overseas that overweening prime ministers lead their nations to disaster, but his examples extend only to Munich, Suez and Iraq. The rather larger, impeccably collective decisions to intervene in 1914 and 1939 are not touched on. Nor are the cases where decisive intervention has more or less worked: the Falklands, the first Iraq war, Kosovo, Sierra Leone. The ultimate success of intervention in Bosnia suggests that earlier action there might have prevented a good deal of bloodshed. Nor has posterity been charitable towards non-intervention in Spain and Abyssinia in the 1930s. Non-intervention in Syria is not looking too good at the moment. It is hard to deduce any reliable general lesson from the tragic jumble of history, still less to comfort ourselves that if only our leaders observe due process, it will all turn out right.
Brown is particularly stern about leaders who fail to follow the expert advice available to them. But recent history is littered with the failure of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to foresee calamities—Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands and the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. Nor do bureaucrats always speak with one voice. Vansittart and Eric Phipps had one view of Hitler, Horace Wilson and Nevile Henderson another.
Margaret Thatcher is criticised here for shouting down the sceptical majorities in her cabinet. This is contrasted with Attlee’s meticulous and civil style of operation. But the two cases are scarcely comparable. Attlee had not only a huge majority but a party behind him that wholeheartedly agreed on its far-reaching socialist programme. Thatcher found herself leading a bunch of timid and demoralised Conservative MPs, who had lived with the Attlee settlement so long that they despaired of rolling back any of it. Adherence to Brown’s stylebook in such circumstances would surely have meant that nothing much happened and Britain went sliding on into the twilight.
I am dubious, too, about Brown’s underlying assumption that we are all calling out for strong leadership the whole time. Au contraire, as soon as we have got it, we start complaining about one-man bands and the way He or She never listens. It is true that when the government appears to be an omnishambles, we do look for someone who is able to restore order, direction and confidence. Is this so unreasonable? The “myth of the strong leader” is that we always want one.
During the Cold War, Brown was Britain’s most famous sovietologist, often consulted by presidents and prime ministers, as he tells us in his preface. It is only natural that he should devote a fair bit of space to political leadership in Russia, and in particular to Mikhail Gorbachev, who became his special subject. And what a strange tale it is.
We are told, first, that in March 1985, when Gorbachev came to power “Gorbachev was the only reformer in the Politburo.” We are also told that “the Soviet Union was not in crisis in 1985. It was radical reform which produced crisis, rather than crisis that dictated reform.” Even more amazing, Gorbachev’s silver tongue seems to have so bewitched his colleagues that “they had no inkling that he would pursue the policies he did.” More amazing still, Gorbachev himself does not seem to have had much inkling either: “It was of decisive importance that Gorbachev’s political goals... changed while he held the most powerful office within the highly authoritarian Soviet system.” We are talking, remember, of a period of no more than three or four years between Gorbachev’s accession and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and of the USSR and communism itself.
So it was all Gorbachev’s own work. None of it would have happened, or need have happened, without him. At each stage, he had little idea where he or the Soviet Union would go next, still less how it would all end up. If that isn’t high-handed, not to say hot-headed, I don’t know what is.
In the west, of course, we applaud the results. The liberation of Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War—these were huge, undreamed-of gains, and we were right to fall on our knees in astonishment and gratitude. But for the Russian people, the next 10 years were terrible: unemployment and poverty rose to appalling levels, the life expectancy for Russian men went down from 64.2 to 59.8 within the decade, many of those surplus deaths attributable to alcoholism and despair, their numbers dwarfing even the terrible toll in Iraq. Gorbachev admitted that “in the heat of political battles we lost sight of the economy.” If you were an ordinary Russian, would you not have preferred the political caution, even the repression, insisted on by Deng Xiaoping in China to preserve stability during his daring economic experiment?
There is a further oddity in Brown’s treatment of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. We are admonished not to call these by the name of “revolutions.” Apparently, “the myth of the East European ‘revolution’ of 1989 is very pervasive,” but it doesn’t count, because a real revolution must “involve violence or the threat of violence.” Why must it? Since the 15th century, the word “revolution” has meant “an instance of a great change in affairs or in some particular thing.” Since 1600, it has meant, more precisely, “a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it” (both definitions from the OED). Violence has never been a necessary ingredient. Thus we refer as naturally to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 as to the Bloodless Revolution of 1688.
Brown wants us to refer to the momentous events of 1989 rather as “peaceful transitions.” This bland term does not begin to encompass the impact and scale of what happened: the suddenness of the collapse of the old regime, the sense of liberation, the overnight disappearance of the ruling ideology, the shock waves of economic and social chaos that followed (less so in the satellite nations that had some earlier experience of democracy such as Czechoslovakia). Why should Brown seek to minimise the grandeur of these upheavals (and those who led them)? It is surely absurd to describe what happened in Romania as a revolution because people got killed and to deny the title to countries where they didn’t.
I cannot help thinking that there is another hidden agenda here. Before 1989, Brown was foremost among those analysts who saw great hope in the reform programmes announced by successive rulers of the USSR. Overall, he saw the Soviet regime since the death of Stalin in 1953 as gradually evolving away from totalitarianism towards something approaching democracy. Gorbachev’s reforms and their consequences could be read as the final stages in this reform process.
But this is not what happened. For all the patching up, the system turned out to be bust, hollow, kaput. If the USSR had not been one vast rust bucket, it would not have begun to collapse as soon as Gorbachev laid a finger on it. Almost nobody expected this to happen, not the Cold Warriors of the right, not Brown and certainly not Gorbachev himself. We must be charitable about this total lack of foresight, because we all shared in it, but it will not do to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and pretend that it was all part of the master plan.
Gorbachev himself described what happened as “revolutionary change by evolutionary and reformist means.” If this was an evolutionary process, it was one managed by the Blind Watchmaker, one more example of what Darwin himself called “the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature.”
Brown’s treatment of Gorbachev seems to me as indulgent as his treatment of Blair is unforgiving. At the end of the book he returns to Blair with an animosity that borders on the obsessive. We have been told dismissively that “the only lasting impact of the Labour government led for a decade by Tony Blair (continuing fallout from the Iraq war apart) is likely to be the constitutional change which was enacted”—most of which Blair himself did not care to boast of.
Is this really true? For a start, 10 years of domestic peace and prosperity are not be sneezed at. Then, whatever you think of it, it was surely an achievement to wean the Labour Party away from its hostility to the free market and to persuade it to accept most of the Thatcher settlement. It was mostly Blair’s remodelling of his party before he became prime minister rather than his campaigning charm which supports his egocentric claim that “I won three elections.” At the same time, expenditure on the National Health Service and on education was hugely increased, leaving identifiable improvements in standards of general practice and primary schools. It would even be possible to argue that Blair bequeathed a more amiable tone to British politics. At all events, this certainly was not the worst government in my lifetime.
Of course, Blair and Gordon Brown overspent wildly, and it all went belly-up in the bank crash. They deserved to fall from grace in the end. But then they all fall from grace in the end, strong men and consensualists alike, and they usually deserve to.
Archie Brown’s greatest achievement is unexpected and unsought. What he makes you think is that the only rule of political leadership is that there are no rules—and even that probably isn’t a rule either.
