Opinion: Tony Blair’s Book “On Leadership” misses the critical point

Tony Blair’s Book “On Leadership” misses the point.

Finito World

“The centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. So WB Yeats wrote towards the end of his life. It doesn’t feel entirely irrelevant as a description of Starmer’s Britain.

The early months of Labour’s time in government has seen some good ideas, the first signs of governmental infighting, some naivety and some poor decisions too.

None of this ought to come as any surprise – and it would hardly be news at all if there wasn’t a mounting sense that the country needs leadership on a different scale to what we had under the Conservatives. Lord Darzi’s NHS report alone was enough to make people realise the scale of the inheritance Labour has – but that’s not to say there aren’t other problems. From education to housing, to transport and defence, to productivity and growth, the UK’s difficulties appear to be legion.

But if the leadership we need isn’t yet evident in the Starmer government – and yet to materialise from an opposition still bruised by the recent general election’s thumping defeat – where is it to be found?

Despite the fact that he left office nearly 15 years ago, there will be many who are still not ready to listen to the pronouncements of Sir Tony Blair. This is understandable when one considers the legacy of his Middle Eastern Wars, his awkwardly gilded post-premiership, not to mention the quangocracy which was certainly not curtailed by 14 years of Conservative-led government.

And yet in a recent interview with The Observer‘s Andrew Rawnsley, designed to promote On Leadership, he did what Blair has always been good at: making an argument.

Observing that the civil service is essentially unfixable, and that bureaucracy will have an innate tendency towards being bureaucratic, Blair offered the alternative: leadership from the centre.

This is a very different thing to having a centralised system which we have come what may. Blair explained: “…unless you’re driving from the top, it [change] won’t happen. It won’t happen for several reasons. It won’t happen because the system won’t have a clear enough direction if it doesn’t get it from the very top. It won’t happen because too many issues require many departments to work together. And you need the centre to do that.”

This is true, and seems all the more so from watching over a decade of prime ministers who couldn’t control the centre: May was a Remainer asked to enact Brexit; Johnson lacked discipline; Truss was never prime minister material; and Sunak could do the day-to-day, but lacked vision. Starmer is, so far, a sort of blend of May and Sunak.

But if we accept this argument for strong leadership, it needn’t just apply to Westminster where it seems least likely to be successful. It can form a part of all our working life.

It is a remarkable fact how little education there is in our society surrounding leadership. There is very little leadership education during our formative years: indeed, it might be argued that a samey curriculum tends to homogenise students – and this process is the opposite of generating the individuality which we associate with leadership.

Of course, if we accept the need for leadership in our society then we might wonder how best to foster it. As Sir Terry Waite argued in a previous issue of Finito World, the study of history is important, especially if we can look at what made, say, Abraham Lincoln an effective leader and ask students to apply his essential pragmatism and patience to their own lives.

Furthermore, this magazine applauds the work conducted by the Institution for Engineering and Technology in highlighting the importance of engineering on the curriculum; one attractive aspect of such an approach is that it engenders precisely the kind of problem-solving which makes for inventive leadership.

In these pages too, Emma Roche has argued that an understanding of the original practical nature of ancient philosophy is of importance too when it comes to creating a generation which knows how to lead.

But really it’s in mentorship that we are most likely to learn the skills needed: at Finito we believe that mentoring has a unique ability to create the knowledge base for effective leadership.

The country in fact is in such a state that we are not in a position of being able to simply submit to the powers of some great man or woman – were that person to come along, which seems unlikely. In fact, in the shape of Starmer it might be that we have another underperforming PM.

Instead, Blair’s book seems to spark off a series of thoughts which its author may not have anticipated. The new centre can’t be located in 10 Downing Street; it needs to be in each one of us.