Why our leaders can't be heroes any more

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/13/beware-the-superman-syndrome-politicians

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There is a general lament about the Lilliputian nature of our current leaders. Where are the towering figures of the past? Why do we have such uninspiring leaders who can’t even eat a bacon sandwich, or resist chillaxing on the job, or, in the case of the Greens, even remember their policies?

There is, of course, nothing new about this. If you look back at the newspaper columns of the 1960s you will find commentators demanding to know where were the current-day Churchills and Bevans, and in the 1930s they wanted to know where leaders of the stature of Gladstone and Disraeli had gone. It is the familiar syndrome – from which I suffer – that as you get older, policemen look younger and younger.

Nonetheless it is indisputably true that at the moment there is an unusual lack of strong, charismatic leaders, not just in the UK but in Europe too.

It has come to something when Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is the dominant figure in Europe. I admire her quiet and subtle style of leadership, and she towers over her colleagues, but she is scarcely a colossus in the mould of a De Gaulle or even a Kohl. I vividly remember the first time Tony Blair met her, in the new British embassy in Berlin in 2004. Then the leader of the opposition in Germany, the soon-to-be chancellor plonked herself down in front of him and said disarmingly, “I have 10 problems” – and then began to list them, starting with a lack of charisma.

The dearth of strong leaders is more than just the usual feast and famine – or it wouldn’t extend across the west

In part this vacuum is the result of a familiar pattern that normally a strong leader is immediately followed by a weak one. Margaret Thatcher was followed by John Major, Blair by Gordon Brown, Ronald Reagan by George Bush Sr, and so on. It is very hard for a new strong leader to grow up in the shadow of an existing strong leader. Their successors are nearly always lower-key figures.

But the dearth of strong leaders is more than just this usual pattern of feast and famine – or it wouldn’t extend across the whole field of western democracies.

Something more fundamental has happened to the way we see our politicians. Since the beginning of time we have expected our leaders to be supermen, unlike mere mortals. We want them to be much greater than us so that we can look up to them. In the 15th century Niccolò Machiavelli advised that a prince should ensure his “reputation was greater than his strength”. He should strive “to bear himself so the greatness, courage, wisdom and strength may appear in all his actions”. But leaders are in fact ordinary human beings with failings, just like you and me.

The myth of greatness is maintained by an artifice similar to that employed in the film The Wizard of Oz, where the insignificant figure of the wizard is made to appear larger than life and “terrible” to his people by a series of ropes and bellows and curtains. In the same way modern political operatives strive to present their bosses as heroes. They aren’t even allowed to suffer from normal ailments.

As Labour’s director of communications, my colleague Alastair Campbell applied a firm rule that Blair could never appear to be ill. If he had a sore throat he had to have it anaesthetised so he could deliver his speech as if nothing was wrong. And in 2005 he had to run in the general election not just with Brown making his life a misery by trying to unseat him but with an inflamed disc causing him agony, without letting any of the symptoms show. The trouble is that, as in the Wizard of Oz, sometimes Toto can inadvertently pull the curtain aside and reveal that the wizard is an ordinary mortal.

In the past the curtain was kept in place by an unspoken pact between the politicians and the media. The human foibles of leaders were hidden. John F Kennedy would have had trouble being a hero in the prim politics of the 1960s if his sexual peccadillos had been public. Franklin D Roosevelt would not have been seen as a strong war leader if the media had shown him confined to a wheelchair. Churchill’s image as indomitable would have been severely undermined if his depression and alcoholism had been known to all.

That has all changed. Nowadays even a French president can’t take a scooter ride across Paris to visit his mistress without all being revealed. And as a result, our leaders are no longer heroes for long. We build up our hopes and aspirations in them, only to be disappointed. The same is true of celebrities in the modern world. They used to be accorded decades of reverence before they finally departed. Now they are created, enjoyed and spat out in a matter of months. The whole process of putting someone on a pedestal and then pulling them down has been dramatically speeded up.

Nor is just a matter of the rules changing and the pace of modern life. It is also true that modern leaders are indeed less powerful than their predecessors. In a globalised world prime ministers can’t pull the same economic levers as they could in the 1960s, and they are buffeted by global economic trends rather than being able to steer them. As members of the European Union they can’t stop immigration, however often they promise to do so. Without a substantial army they cannot take a leading role in world affairs. And as part of Nato and the European Union, their scope for independent foreign policy initiatives is severely limited. Leaders therefore are diminished in real terms as well as in terms of perception.

The only parts of the world where we still seem to have leaders as supermen are in the eastern autocracies. President Vladimir Putin certainly doesn’t admit to having a sniffle or to feeling the cold when he takes off his shirt. No one in Russia would complain that they suffer from weak leaders at the moment. In China, with “Papa Xi”, the cult of personality has returned virtually to the levels under Mao.

In his first two years in office President Xi Jinping has appeared in the pages of the People’s Daily approximately twice as often as his predecessor, Hu Jintao. In North Korea the cult is so extreme that the people are taught that their leaders are so different that they do not even need to defecate and urinate like ordinary human beings. Strong leadership therefore lives on, but not in the idealised form we imagine.

So maybe we should be careful what we wish for. Maybe strong leaders are not quite as alluring as we think, and we should celebrate the fact that our leaders are just like us. Just because one candidate can’t remember his whole speech and the other likes to put his feet up on the job doesn’t mean they can’t govern. It could be that in the more constrained environment of developed democracies and a globalised economy, we actually want and need leaders in shades of grey rather than the towering figures of the past.