Treaty for Government

Introduction

Why did Labour lose the 2010 election? The reasons are seemingly obvious – the wrong leader, immigration, out of touch with key groups, lost its way, tired, and so on. But is there more to these causes than simply a wrong decision somewhere? Why on earth would a political party go into an election with a leader who could not win? How on earth could a government preside over the largest mass immigration in the country’s history without taking an explicit decision so to do? Why would a government pursue this policy that, alone, was sufficiently unpopular to lose the election, its detrimental effects were obvious, and sincerely believe its opponents were bigots? Why would a government of intelligent and motivated people, that started with such vision and impact, end up with initiativitis and not much else, finally losing to an Old Etonian? Why, by the end, were many Labour activists so angry with their party that election campaigning felt false?

Is all of this just the inevitable consequence of the political playing field? Should the new leader just wait for the slings and arrows to wound the coalition and around Labour’s turn will come? Or is there more to successful politics than politicking? Is it just possible that our government could be made to work better and be more than the mixture of people, policies, practice, chance, events, the media, and public perception interacting to a conclusion? What can organisational theory and practice tell us of how government could reform to improve its performance sufficiently? Here is the organisational life story of that government.

This piece explores the self-mutilation of New Labour and the wholly unnecessary loss of the 2010 election. Its perspective is organisational, not personal nor political. Its conclusions are for the Labour Party and for anyone who wants to govern well. It uses the causes of the loss to identify how government could be reformed for the benefit of us all. Little time is spent on New Labour’s many successes – I am concerned here about why it lost and the tone is often necessarily negative. The criticisms are deserved too, and some of the villains are unexpected.

Some have seen the causes of loss as a contest between New Labour and Old – thus New Labour is the source of failure, and a return to more traditional values is the solution; others have seen the applied brakes as the cause, and thicker and more widely spread New Labour policies being the solution. Neither is the case. This particular debate takes place up a creek, in a canoe, without a paddle. The New Labour project was necessary to winning the election in 1997 and to its successes in government. Such was the poor image of ‘Labour’, the irrelevance of most of its policies to most of the people, and the completion of its original mission, that in 1993 I advised John Smith to change the party’s name. This was a step too far for the party (but perhaps not for the country), and the term New Labour was born later under Tony Blair.

From its election, the New Labour project was a success. Indeed, its very success during the period when it seemed it could do no wrong, sowed the seeds of its demise. Once the controlling group of any organisation becomes convinced of its semi-omnipotence, then the true benchmark of success on the ground for the people is lost, and with this the critical accord between the internal view of the leadership and the external. Once this had diverged, the issue was not New or Old Labour, but Old New Labour as represented by Blair and Co., and new New Labour, unrepresented until the Conservatives spotted a hole.

Whether the future lies with new, old, only used once, nearly new, or middle-aged Labour is not the point. Understanding where the country is and what people want and need provides the basis for re-election, not tribalism based on backward-looking self-justification.

This piece attacks the way government is organised. This may feel like an attack on the individuals in those organisations. It is not. Exactly the same people in a different organisation, with different incentives, systems, and objectives could be world class. I have been on boards of companies and charities where collectively we have performed well, and I have been on a board with quality people where we have been collectively incompetent. The standard distribution of the capabilities of individual civil servants in the Civil Service, for example, is as good and bad as any other group.

When we are working in our many and various organisations, we usually believe that our behaviour and performance is our own. This is never the case. Organisations cause behaviour far more than most of us realise. The best organisations are better than the sum of their people and, to an extent, independent of whoever happens to be employed at a particular time. In the jargon, this is the result of an ‘aligned business model’. Liverpool Football Club in the 1980s, and Marks & Spencer for much of the last century, are excellent home-grown examples. At the other end, the worst organisations are worse than the sum of the individuals in them. My ambition is to move government in the right direction.

Why oh why Labour lost

Labour lost because of its weak governance and the inadequacies of the UK’s constitution. Labour’s weak governance meant that it went into the election with a leader who could not win and with a leadership that was tired and out of touch. The personal agendas of the leadership were to the fore and the country’s needs and desires a distant last.

The inadequacies of the country’s constitution meant that the government was not forced to observe and to learn from the outcomes of its actions. The feedback loops essential to a well-functioning organisation were (and still are) largely absent. The government became primarily motivated by the 24-hour news agenda, announceables, initiativitis, and the personal preferences of Cabinet ministers. It stopped listening to and seeking to understand the public. The countervailing force to the comfort blanket of photo shoots is to face the actual outcomes of new legislation, regulation, instruction to local authorities, adverts, changed benefits and altered taxes. But this is nowhere institutionalised in our constitution. We institutionalise organisations, but not their effects. Institutions are enshrined in law, but not the fundamentals for making institutions work. Governments are allowed to change more or less anything without any duty of assessment as to its benefit or otherwise. The mechanisms for accountability that could act as some sort of effective feedback are very limited.

The consequence is that over its thirteen years in power the government went from governing quite well in the first half to governing badly in the second. The electorate noticed and the party lost. Had the government been forced to examine its real record and stopped talking itself into believing it was still performing well, then sufficient dissatisfaction with the status quo would have arisen for significant change to start. Such feedback would also have provided the impetus to change the old guard and thus to allow grown-up governance (had it existed) to change the guard within the Parliamentary Labour Party (comprising all the party’s MPs).

Any organisation is limited by the capability of the people in it. The governance of the party and the constitution of the country meant that this capability was far lower than it need be. The procedures for selecting candidates to be MPs limit the pool of talent available. The rules of the Houses of Parliament limit the use MPs make of their capabilities. Lax accountability leads to lax standards of decision-making. The Civil Service is less of a closed shop than it was, but remains largely immune to the objective of getting the right people into the right jobs. Perhaps above all, the concept of learning being at the heart of organisational performance is nowhere to be heard.

Organisation Theory

An organisation is a social arrangement that pursues collective goals, controls its own performance, and has a boundary separating it from its environment. There are a variety of legal types of organisations, including: corporations, governments, non-governmental organisations, international organisations, armed forces, charities, not-for-profit corporations, partnerships, cooperatives, and universities. A hybrid organisation is a body that operates in both the public sector and the private sector, simultaneously fulfilling public duties and developing commercial market activities. As a result, the hybrid organisation becomes a mixture of a government and a corporate organisation.

Organisation theory and practice applies as much to an organisation called a political party or to one called a government, or to a charity, a local authority or a company.

I have spent my working life in this world, and I find it endlessly stimulating. Why does one organisation perform so well and another is in terminal decline? How is it that the modern miracle of a DVD player costing only £30, came to pass? What was it about the company inventing it that meant it won the race and others did not? How were the subsequent standards wars fought? How can such massive amounts of hard precision components be made and assembled so cheaply and to such consistent standards? Why, compared with thirty years ago, are DVD players so readily available and how can they be updated with such speed? And, amongst all of this triumph, why is the user interface so poor one wishes at times for the simplicity of the four controls of a VCR? What happens next? Will we all be stuffed by next-generation technology and its incompatibility with what’s on our shelves? And, what has this to do with running a country?

Our understanding of why organisations do what they do has moved on enormously since the 1970s. The Japanese usurping the primacy of western and particularly US industry stimulated an explosion in research in the 1980s, leading with motorcycles and cars. Markets were becoming global, and the US had sat on its dominant organisational model since the innovations of Ford in the 1920s. The Japanese came with concepts of Total Quality Management, Just in Time Stocking, Integrated Supply Chains, Self-directed Work Teams, and Customer Focus. Unlike some oftstated management jargon, these concepts were tested and applied and have endured.

Broadly, the reason you can get an astonishing cheap piece of technology like a DVD player is because of this revolution in organisation wrought by the Japanese. Today in mass-consumer products, unless your manufacture and distribution is world class you are not in business. Absolute conformity to design specifications in every part of manufacture is the basis for achieving world class. A notable characteristic of Japanese culture is conformity. Perhaps it is no surprise that the manufacturing revolution started here.

In my elastic mind a question pops out – is it an attainable objective to say that in politics unless your government is world class you will not be re-elected? Perhaps world class is too big a stretch, but our government could be so much better than it is. If you want much better government then its source is organisation theory. Much of this theory comes from companies operating in competitive markets precisely because to stay in business, thirty years of organisational leap-frogging has occurred and produced that explosion in understanding as to how the staff, IT systems, procedures, markets, regulations, culture, structure, strategy, and, yes, leadership work together to produce an Apple, or the former world leader in mobile phones, now ailing fast, Nokia.

Managers in public services and charities have taken some of this understanding on board. This is not to worship at the altar of the private sector, and to espouse that if only we ran the public sector that way, all would be well. Much would be well, with the selective, but rather less selective than at present, adoption of organisational practice which applies regardless of market or ownership structure. But, anyone phoning a call centre knows that the private sector has as far to go as the public in many spheres of activity. Indeed, all organisations still have the propensity to make for mediocre-to-unpleasant experiences for people as employees. Organisational theory still has much to find out, but our government does not have to be this poor, as this analysis will show. Why is Qantas the safest airline in the world? And what relevance is this to the Labour Party? Let’s find out.

The Organisational Life Story of New Labour in Government

This section explores government through an organisational lens. It observes where the government started with its formidable team, its control of Number 10, and its rigorously prepared policies. It bumps into the Civil Service and its supermarket trolley; celebrity status; insularity; and non-existent competition. The ‘major error’ count commences, the government evolves, delivery is a struggle, capacity constraints are ignored, junior ministers emulate quarks, and party ill discipline resurfaces in the least expected place. The consequences of unconstrained psychological flaws also come to the fore. Decisions are taken by fewer and fewer people. Leaders grow mouldy yet remain in place, the Parliamentary Labour Party does nothing, and the party behaves like
FIFA. The cult of the leader lives on, the reshuffle rate is upped, power continues to reside in the wrong places, and self-delusion reigns. The loyalty card is played. The government is tired, stuck, and long in the tooth. The party faithful flock to their armchairs. They think it’s all over. It is.

In many respects, it is a tale of two halves. As I have suggested, In the first half, much was achieved. The list is long and true: minimum wage, Sure Start, devolved governments for Scotland, Wales and London with AV+, thousands more (and properly paid) teachers, hospital waiting lists right down, effective crime-reduction measures, Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, more nursery places, interest-rate stability, Human Rights Act, teenage pregnancies targeted and down, doubled apprenticeships, and so on. In the second half, little was achieved’ indeed it is hard to recall anything of lasting value – the ban on smoking in public places in 2007 perhaps stands out, albeit with its excesses – although there must be others.

In organisational terms, what happened was this. Tony Blair becomes prime minister and enters Number 10. He and the New Labour leadership had assembled a formidable team of thinkers, organisers, strategists and communicators. Many others existed more widely, bursting to apply some unprejudiced thinking to the nation’s problems after the years of Thatcher’s guts as policies. He knew, too, that he had to control Number 10, not the Civil Service. This team had to work intensely to make everything happen and to get the first year’s programme into action.

New Labour was a great invention within the political marketplace. It came to government with many new policies, carefully and rigorously thought through in opposition, without the distraction of daily ministerial demands and nightly red boxes. Once in office, typically the minister with the brief who had led the policy development – fresh and often impatient from a career lifetime spent in opposition – launched into its implementation. Success was often swift. Simply not doing what the previous government had done felt refreshing. Some policies were ‘switch-throwers’ and therefore went into effect without diminution – proper funding of the NHS or devolution to London, for example. Some came with an executive team to put them into practice which by-passed or corralled the senior Civil Service, as in education. Luck played its part sometimes, in that the allocated civil servant could do the job, as with NHS Direct, implemented with an expert project manager.

But in other areas, little or nothing actually changed on the ground – transport being a notable example where in 1999, after two years of new government, the traveller’s experience had not improved (except for users of public transport in an easterly direction at the London end of the M4, where a bus lane had been installed). Travel by train continued unimpeded by government towards a caricature of Indian Railways – plenty of room on top.

My report card in 1999 went as follows. and came as a surprise to those for whom it was written at the centre of power:

 

Judging Government

The electorate keeps a score sheet. All organisations, from a supermarket to a children’s charity, are continually being judged, invariably on imperfect information but usually with remarkable accuracy. Perception is often behind reality, but catches on quite quickly. Think of Railtrack or Tesco or Amazon. Government is the same. My summary perceptual score is of several major ticks, several major crosses and several major waits. Today’s consumers (as well as being citizens we are customers of government) are harsh judges of their supplying organisations. Promises, starts, and work-in-progress count for very little relative to actual change. These judgements apply equally to business and to government. In this sense, government is not regarded as a preferred supplier deserving of kid-glove treatment. Travel broadens the electorate’s mind: the benchmark of performance is increasingly international rather than national, and this benchmark moves ever upward.

Meantime in the centre, the very freshness of personality and style created interest and demand. The rich and powerful wanted to meet this team as much as anyone. Advisers became minor celebrities, albeit in the policy world, sometimes listed in the ‘100 most influential’ charts. The team moved in a world to which few had access, behind a security cordon and in the grace-and-favour stately homes of Chequers and Chevening. The pass denoted high status indeed. In the face of such acclamation, keeping the feet on the ground was a challenge.

Thus is born a top-down style of government. It was the obvious way to go to achieve change for the country, as well as suiting the egos of those in power. ‘What Tony wants’ came to matter most. Thus, Number 10 became a royal court and a war room. This was also the point at which the top of New Labour started to lose its friends as it both focused on the task in hand and felt more and more self-important. These friends were people who had played significant roles in modernising, in getting New Labour elected, in creating fresh thinking and policies. They also lived in the world inhabited by most of the electorate, some even outside of North London, so could calibrate the government’s intentions with results.

But the central elite in 10 and 11 Downing Street, the Cabinet and key advisers, had now taken off, became more insular, transmitting rather than receiving (and certainly not engaging), and was driving down the long road sigposted ‘government has stopped listening to the public’. Why would you listen? The applause was ringing out. Improvement was happening. The statistics were mostly all pointing in the right direction. Near miracles had been performed in Northern Ireland. Labour had the best mind reader of the public in the shape of Philip Gould, who did listen and listen hard to focus groups and nuanced polling.

Only occasionally did the folly of insularity and of forgetting your friends and the wider network of experts from every walk of life rise up to bite you. The Formula 1 boss, Bernie Ecclestone, donated over £1 million, a cheque received at the party’s headquarters and handled with pride and care. Anyone who knew Formula 1 knew that Bernie ruled it with a rod of iron, had high control needs, and no history of altruism. Such a cheque, whilst arriving without ties, could only be intended to seek to influence decisions on cigarette advertising on F1 cars.

David Howell said of Rupert Murdoch, ‘No one who gets into bed with him gets out the same man.’ The same is true of Ecclestone. Anyone who knew Formula 1 and who might have been asked would have said do not get into bed with him. But no one was asked. A media storm blew up. The cheque was returned. The gloss on New Labour tarnished a little. An unnecessary failure born of insufficient humility.

Thus the ‘major error’ count started. Major errors are distinguishable from minor by their lasting impact. People accept mistakes, but some seem of a different order and stick in the mind. As they accumulate, so confidence in the government decreases and at some point becomes terminal. Sentiment, that squiggly measure, moves from positive to negative. Benefit of the doubt is no longer available. Any government can only afford so many major errors. Bernie Ecclestone’s donation, the Millennium Dome, opposing Ken Livingstone as mayoral candidate for London, the GPs’ contract, dropping the 10p tax rate, only embracing the response to global warming once it became part of the new conservative brand, running a deficit whilst the economy was growing, not abolishing the transfer of building societies act – these and others cumulatively left the government with limited credibility even when it got other big decisions right.

Meanwhile, the self-image was of universal excitement and achievement. Compared to the opposition, New Labour was brilliant. Unfortunately, the opposition was crap. The comparative difference from a baseline of ‘crap’ made the government only ‘good’. But this was to be a continuing depressant of its performance – almost non-existent competition.

The Conservative Party was doing an uncanny impersonation of the Labour Party in the 1980s. It had got stuck in a mental model of a world that no longer applied and was never going to be resurrected. For Labour’s fingerless gloves around burning braziers at the picket gate, read Conservative’s boys in shorts thanking their mothers for reading to them from the Daily Mail. One of the great crosses of the two-party state is that when one of the parties is effectively unelectable, we have a one-party state. It led Thatcher to excess and Blair to flogging dead horses. Orderly competition drives improvement in all things. Competition and democracy are close relatives. Proportional representation, which both produces multi-party competition for government and allows new parties to become established and old parties to die, is essential for good government.

Events occurred, too, of course. The deft handling by Blair of Princess Diana’s death, mourning, funeral and the reaction (or lack of it) by the queen, was extraordinary – this only three months after the election. The Northern Ireland settlement was a triumph of timing and negotiation.

The 2001 election arrived with the certainty that New Labour would be reelected, not least because of its triumphs, but also because the other lot were still living in the 1950s. But, disappointment was also around. With so much electoral and mood power, why had not the really radical changes been made? Where was the new democracy, proper proportional representation, the new legal system, the real public sector reform, the gripping of the Conservative’s major privatisation mistakes in rail, water and electricity, executive mayors by the score, and the sorting of the hundreds of day-to-day problems?

After the 2001 election, business as usual returned – real change was achieved and much was left as it was. A curious event happened at this time. In London, a Central line train derailed at Chancery Lane on 25 January 2003, injuring 32 passengers, after a traction motor became detached and fell onto the track. The entire line was closed whilst the cause of the failure was determined and appropriate modifications made to the trains. The line was then re-opened in stages, fully by the end of April, three months of mainly winter, later. (The official London Underground history website makes no mention of this commuter disaster, a pity since so much could be learnt. Instead it dwells on the automatic trains, upgraded signaling and other corporate speak, designed to reassure itself.)

The line carries over 500,000 passengers a day. A Labour baroness, on enquiring of my route home after dinner one night, and having scant awareness of the loss of the central line, responded that it was alright as there were alternative routes. My alternative that evening was overground to Chingford and, the buses having stopped for the night and all taxis being taken, a one-hour walk through a freezing snow-covered dark Epping Forest. Daily commuting of one and a half hours became three, in a bigger crush. The baroness had no understanding that for many of the half a million, this was their largest issue. New Labour was becoming more and more distant from, and irrelevant to, the daily lives of millions. Did it really need to take over two months to get some of the trains back?

Meantime, despite the Greater London Assembly coming into existence in 2000 and including Transport for London, the government prevented the transfer of London Underground to the GLA until 2003 after signing controversial, flawed and now failed Private Finance Initiatives for track maintenance. Why the government stopped London Underground being transferred is as much political and personal jealousy as anything to do with contracts – the new mayor, Ken Livingstone, had stood against the wishes of the New Labour hierarchy as an independent and won. Even worse, he was popular and competent. Once Livingstone got hold of the Underground it started to be managed more for its passengers than by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers for its drivers. Livingstone brought in hardened and experienced metro managers from overseas. The service improved as the executive mayor delivered what he had been elected to do. It still has along way to go. (A postscript is that the performance of the Underground has declined under the current mayor, Boris Johnson, and voters have noticed. This is may be the difference that could see the return of Livingstone – albeit that going back is rarely fulfilling in any organisation – and proof again of the value of executive mayors.)

If Ken Livingstone had been in charge from 2000, three years earlier, would the original Central Line incident have occurred and would the closure have been for so long? The national politicians were too far from the point of delivery and too disinterested for other reasons. The Civil Service in the Department for Transport, which then had much the same role as Transport for London and the Greater London Assembly now in relation to London Underground, had neither the experience nor knowledge as to how to run a large metro service, nor interest, nor organisational motivation. None of this was lost on those 500,000 daily passengers. New Labour lost more faith.

Every organisation evolves. None stay still, even if they want to. Where they do not adapt to changes outside of them, decline sets in. Typically, a new company goes through four stages of evolution: product launch, growth, maturity and decline. New products have to replace the mature in time to prevent corporate decline. The model for organising the company will remain successful so long as the external conditions remain the same.

Marks and Spencer was the UK’s longest-running corporate success for most of the twentieth century, regularly held up in the media as an example of excellence. Its organisational model was based around quality products, permanent partnerships with UK suppliers jointly to design and produce these products, lifelong staff with excellent conditions and training schooled in the M&S way, and home-grown management working in the stores.

Then the world outside changed. Intense retail competition invaded the M&S product space. UK manufacture became too costly. Too many senior managers believed their press, and complacency set in. They remained successful for a while but were living on the past. The market caught up with them, and with it came losses and declining market share. At this point, when major rethinking was required, growing your own staff and management became a disease not a blood supply. A new model was needed. M&S only recovered some of its former glory once new blood arrived that could start to break the internal culture.

Labour is an organisation like any other: it has leaders, managers and staff, resources, objectives, plans, systems, and values. It has all of the human resource issues facing a company, local authority or charity of a similar size. It operates in a competitive marketplace – that’s what democracy is – albeit one as rigged as newspapers. ‘First past the post’ limits the market to two or three providers, undoubtedly unlawful if the Competition Commission were ever able to investigate. We shall see later the significance of this for the demise of New Labour.

New Labour came to power with plenty of policies and little grasp of the often enormous difficulty of putting them into practice. Even with the most experienced and expert delivery staff and leaders, government is a tricky business. Being aware of this, in 1997 I proposed an implementation unit both to vet the implementability of each policy and to guide getting it done. It would have made some difference in some cases, but in the event it was never set up (although in the same vein, but with a different remit, the prime minister’s Delivery Unit did come into being in 2001).

But beyond that, Tony Blair realised as prime minister that the Civil Service is both poor at implementation and often obstructive. Within six months, the reality was dawning of the difficulty of getting anything to translate into change on the ground. The prime minister found that, in common with the supermarket trolley, the Civil Service has a mind of its own, and some parts work while some don’t. As one very senior civil servant of the time said, action only follows if the minister knows his mind and the Civil Service machine agrees with it. So much for democracy. The notion that the UK has an impartial Civil Service ready to do the minister’s bidding is false, bordering on a bad joke. Departments always have a view as to what should be done. If the senior Civil Service does not agree with a minister’s proposals, the chances of effective action are low. The senior Civil Service has a poor track record in achieving change in society and in running the many delivery arms of government. Policy is valued, and where promotion is earnt, delivery is not. Thus, even when the Civil Service agrees with what the government wants, the chances of effective action, although improved, remain low.

The pinnacle for effective implementation probably came after the 2001 election with the establishment of the Delivery Unit and before Tony Blair became a load more than a leader around 2004/5. This unit and the focus and pressure it created, certainly had effect. Once its founder and sponsor had gone, it lost impact. An exceptional unit like that can work with much muscle, for a period, but unless its behaviour and values become institutionalised within the wider organisation, it will wither in authority, which it did.

As Blair lost authority before and after the 2005 election, and New Labour lost sense of why it was there, ministers enjoyed their personal power. The wider party had little way of calling them to account. Media management became all, and initiativitis was rife, shorter and shorter-term thinking dominated, and most interest in real delivery was lost.

Capacity constraints were also ignored. The number of ministers is high (nearly a hundred) and exceeds the government’s capacity to use them, in the sense that government can only achieve so much. It is limited by some obvious constraints like the new legislation capacity of the Houses of Parliament, a public acceptability ceiling on expenditure and taxation, the capacity of existing public sector bodies to take on more work, for example in regulation or law enforcement. The capacity of the police to enforce all of the country’s laws was far exceeded long ago. Police forces choose and have to choose which laws matter, in their view. Fox hunting does not, for example, and nor does littering the pavement. If laws are to matter, then there has to be some kind of requirement of ‘one in, one out’ (we return to this later).

Some of the constraints are less obvious – the capacity to create a successful organisation is one that frequently stymies the intended change. The Child Support Agency is an example here. Setting up new organisations could be done with much greater consistency of quality than it has heretofore, but that takes greater care, more attention, and focus. Less will be better.

The centre of any government has only so much capacity for beneficial change, not least in terms of the number of hours in a day, and in the liaison between the many public sector agencies. There are only so many talented people around to lead and deliver, too. Complexity becomes another constraint too when the volume of change is beyond the scope of the centre to drive it continually. As the government became less effective, organisationally it started thrashing harder, as an overworked machine will do before it breaks apart.

In constructing its programme, government does not take account of any capacity constraints, and doing this is to ignore a key variable. In relation to ministers, an organisationally sound approach would be to identify first who has or is likely to have the ability to deliver a desired change, and second whether they have the relevant knowledge and interest. Then the programme would be, in part, built around them and what they can and want to do. This might sound somewhat random, but a cursory comparison with New Labour’s practice shows its advantages. The government built its programme largely on the interests of the prime minister and the Cabinet, who would set the highest priorities.

Junior ministers work on the basis of being in one office for one year. This is too short a time to get most change embedded. In the early 2000s, the then Department for Constitutional Affairs undertook highquality customer insight research into domestic violence, debt and relationship breakdown, which produced some powerful and actionable insights, such as the ‘creditor pays for recovery’ principle. This addressed the scenario whereby a credit card agency throws credit at people with little or no reference as to whether they can afford it, and zero responsibility for any of the personal outcomes, including suicide in extreme cases. Under the then and still existing arrangements, the defaulter is pursued through the courts, with the bailiffs at the end of the process. The minister took a considerable lead in the research and in its recommendations, but soon his year was up, politics moved on, and the Civil Service does not do knowledge management, so the research was lost, and with it and with him the impetus to bring about beneficial change.

A significant part of the formula for making New Labour electable was in party discipline. In the 1980s and before, the party resembled Coronation Street – feuding families, hot tempers, arcane debates, accusations, firmly held and cherished beliefs. The National Executive Committee was the opposition-in-waiting for Labour in government. With a functioning opposition in Parliament, plus the wall-to-wall Tory press, plus the home-grown opposition of the NEC, it is a wonder any Labour government lasted one term let alone more.

As part of growing up, Partnership in Power (a 1997 conference resolution) effectively neutered the annual conference as a place of policymaking spectacle along Roman lines, and quietened the NEC mainly by preventing MPs from standing in the constituency section thus avoiding the ‘leadership across the water’ syndrome. With changes in the party’s constitution came order and the opportunity for electability. The leadership could define, brand and manage New Labour to power. For as long as the leadership delivered electability and the social justice/economic efficiency combination, they were free to get on with it.

Partnership in Power neutered the grass roots at conference and the NEC, but the theme of party ill discipline resurfaced where least anticipated – right at the top. It was as if the party had to have a bust-up somewhere. It shifted from the Militant Tendency to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, as ill-disciplined as any party members you will ever see, and for precisely the same reason – they were unrestrained by the party’s governance. They believed in what they were fighting for, both their roles and their policies, but the Parliamentary Labour Party and the wider party had no mechanisms to hold them to account for their behaviour, nor for their policies and their effect. Top-down discipline and control was all, with no space for ‘upwards’ or peer discipline. With a monopoly on power whilst the Conservative Party was out of action, the long stop of electoral control had gone. They ran riot, so much so that by the third term much of their energy was devoted to their personal battles.

Competition between individuals in an organisation is powerful when directed at its purpose or output. It can provide much of the dynamic for improvement, always alongside the collaborative energy essential for success. Gladstone and Disraeli may never have achieved what they did without their intense personal rivalry; but the Blair/Brown feud went way beyond healthy competition and ended up as rank ill discipline. Their lack of self-control was every bit as culpable as any seen throughout the party’s history.

In 1998, a probably deliberate leak put the phrase ‘psychologically flawed’ into circulation. Its target was Gordon Brown. However, this is a core competence in the candidate specification for anyone at the top. Typically, people who get to the top of most large organisations (including governments and political parties) are the people who need the power most. In my own organisation a wise people specialist concluded that many of the partners could do the job of senior partner and chairman, but the person who spent most time working towards it, who put everything else secondary to his pursuit of it, who jumped every hurdle and shook every hand, was the one who most needed it. These are the people with high control needs, often very carefully disguised before achieving the desired office, but given full rein once there. Or as much rein as the governance allows.

High-control needs stem usually from being out of control in one’s family. The cause might be an alcoholic or other drug-dependent parent; it might be an absent parent – emotionally, physically, or dead. Many national leaders suffered an absent father and have been seeking their love ever since. Achievement is a way of proving to one’s father one’s worth and worthiness for love.

Whatever the source, this makes for the sort of driven people who will first get stuck into local politics, then often spend many years seeking a seat, who will experience convoluted selection procedures, and who will live their lives as MPs partly in their constituencies, partly in the House of Commons and partly in some sort of home in London. Where their partners and families reside varies.

Backbench time must be spent finding patronage to secure a shadow or junior ministerial job. Gerald Kaufman was renowned for always being elected to the shadow Cabinet through picking up second and third preferences because he was well known to every MP. His tactic was to know their birthday and those of their children. Out of his file each week came the prompt to write a card. Into his poll came lower preference votes for ‘Gerald the friendly bloke’.

This is but one example of personal politicking – building relationships, persuading people, case-making, telling people what they want to hear, developing a following, gaining the support of the kingmakers. To become leader much more is required. The more natural talent you have at the job at hand, so much the better.

Tony Blair was a consummate politician who had a strong empathy for the country and could judge the right response. A few months into being prime minister, at Princess Diana’s funeral, her brother Earl Spencer unreeled his attack first on the media and then on the royal family. As the applause trickled in from the public outside, it was taken up inside the abbey and into the nave and the sanctuary where the royal family was sat near the coffin. They were opposite a prime minister conscious of the television pictures and later interviews. His face took on that apparently non-committal demeanour whilst his eyes masked multiple calculations that saw him clapping too, but with his hands under the pew. Never forget that the primary psychological motivation of senior ministers is personal power. This has nothing to do with the needs of the country, the party, the right decision in particular circumstances, or anything external to themselves. Proportional representation is objectionable to people of this ilk as it dilutes the opportunity to exercise personal power. It is difficult enough climbing the slippery pole of one’s own party; why would one then want to share power with the Lib Dems? A one-party state would be a better place to be a minister where democracy and the views of the people are excluded from the ‘how do I get and exercise power’ equation. Power-driven politicians would be psychologically happier in the former East German government under communism. Decisions would not need to be tested with the media, be open to rebuttal by the public, be subject to parliamentary scrutiny however weak, nor in sum be tested at a plebiscite every four or five years. Only the single-party pole would have to be climbed and the politics at the top kept safe to maintain all those levers of control in your hands. Heaven!

The psychological needs of those at the top explain the rise of the social authoritarian tendency in the New Labour government. These are people who like nothing more than telling others not just what to do but how to behave and have the scale of ego to believe they are right in so doing. The notable transformation from assertion to aggression by some on the front bench tells a similar story.

H. L. Mencken wrote, ‘All government, of course, is against liberty.’ This quote took me by surprise when I first saw it. We elect progressive governments to extend liberty, not curtail it. In part, elections are fought and won on which party wants more freedom and which less. Surely, not all governments oppose liberty. But, those personal power and control needs are always present, no matter how left, right or centre the politician and the manifesto. Governments only extend democracy in their early years, as did New Labour with devolution. Thereafter, it is all the other way – corralling the internet, Big Brother watching you with CCTV and speed cameras, stalling on PR, local government enlisted into domestic service, social authoritarianism and vetting, vetting, vetting.

Public engagement has had much airtime in recent years, and failed to take hold as a ‘business as usual’ way of taking public decisions. Engaging publics with a stake in the decision, which could be anything from the future of nuclear power to a flood-defence scheme, leads on average to better-informed and more right decisions, and faster and more committed implementation. Governments with declining interest, as scaled by voter turnout and media coverage, have seen deliberative democracy as a means to restore public confidence in them.

But engagement is power sharing – bad for powerful ministers. It requires lots of relating to and dealing with vociferous publics; not a skill or a liking of the Civil Service. At a Health Service event in 2005, run by an expert crew from America Speaks, over 1,000 randomly selected people were taken to conference centre and seated twelve to a table, each with a professional facilitator, with the task of deliberating on what to do about the NHS. Instant electronic feedback from the table discussions was expertly digested and visually posted on the screens, so everyone was contributing. The method of engagement was genuine and expert (save for the head of the company conducting the event, who had no grasp that opinion polling is not deliberative democracy). The minister in weekend clothes mounted the stage, thanked all for giving of their time and views, encouraged openness and exchange, and then announced with a flourish that the outcome of the day, informed by the collective wisdom in the hall, would be a White Paper. This would be just how influential this public would be. Not a muscle moved in response to this democratic widening. Everyone knew that a White Paper has no value in itself. The chances of anything ever filtering down from a White Paper through the government process, institutional consultation, Parliament, the NHS administration, and local health bodies, into beneficial change on the ground and have positive impact on them, was about 5 per cent. On a good day. Contributing to a White Paper was as far as any public engagement went with ministers, who held on to the real power themselves.

Once a politician explains a decision by the need for strong government, you can be certain this is someone at the top end of power needs. As expected, we heard this in relation to the alternative-vote referendum by those opposed to power sharing – ‘we need the strong government that only first past the post can give’ (and, by inference, not the namby-pamby wimp-type government from coalitions and other inadequates). Sounds good, does it not? Flutters the spine? Makes one stand up straight? From time to time, we have experienced strong government, most potently with Mrs Thatcher. She drove some changes through which we would all agree with, in hindsight, like building the M25. She also drove change punitively and with destructive speed, like the coal-mine closures. She also drove hard some major errors, like the poll tax.

I never saw the point of strong government, when strong can and does lead to such high costs. I want right government, not strong government. Right government may from time to time be bold or courageous, and it may also be considered, cautious, careful, and experimental. Strong is just an excuse for the more psychologically flawed. Its endgame is Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Hitler.

Psychological flaws are not limited to the political class in government. The Civil Service is populated by people typically with high security needs, seeking the lifetime permanence of job and pension, as well as the power and status on offer that their own personalities would be inadequate to secure in any other walk of life. They are protected by procedure and written communication from decisions with personal risk, and that elsewhere would entail judgement and relationships.

The next phase in party dominance is when decisions are taken without reference to anyone outside of the ruling clique. The criteria for taking a decision is solely whether the prime minister, senior ministers or senior aides think it is right, often cross-checked with political editors at the Sun and The Times, who are somehow regarded as proxies for a majority of public opinion. The leadership can really get off on this too. It can make them feel very important to the point that the more unpopular the decision the more historic will feel the decision. This is fashionaccessory politics, and as useful.

The Parliamentary Labour Party as villain

After 2005, the distinction in organisational terms between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as prime ministers and leaders was zero. Both were the products of a very long period in a largely unaccountable organisation with weak opposition and ineffective competition. Both had disappeared into their central courts with almost zero disturbance from the outside world. Both were well into the phase of their survival being more important than competent government. Both felt the emotional pull of historic unpopularity. A purely political perspective sees Blair and Brown as very different people with their successes and failures being largely down to them as individuals. From an organisational perspective this is a mistake. Post 2005, both were products of weak governance and weak constitution. Both performed poorly. Both for the same reason.

In the 1960s and 70s, some in the football world would buy players at considerable cost, but Manchester City assembled the best squad of that era for limited fees from unfashionable clubs around, like Bury and Burnley, and had the best coach, an innovator well ahead of his time. Success followed. Great teams were built, not bought. The Man City coach was constrained both by the limited availability of money from the board and by a very wise manager. Strong governance allied to high talent produced fine quality. As soon as the coach got out from under the wise manager, who went, and was given the chequebook, success disappeared. We all need the right framework in which to be successful. Without it, some will be better than others, but none will flourish for long.

The Parliamentary Labour Party is the only group that could exercise discipline and accountability for the leadership, and make changes when needed. General elections exist for the country to judge the government. Parliament exists to judge government between elections. The political party has to judge its choice of leader. The PLP did nothing and is the real villain of the whole story. But, it knows no better, not even that its role should be to hold its leadership to account and to change them when needed. If it did and it had, Labour could still be in power.

On 5 May 2006, a year after the third election win and a day after very poor local election results, Tony Blair sought to exert his authority and to fend off his inevitable departure with a Cabinet reshuffle and some high-profile sackings. Short of ditching Gordon Brown, which would have proved to be the right move for the government and the country as well as for himself, he chose the least likely minister to be sacked, Jack Straw, to set an example in true public-school style. The message was clear. Here was a minister who had performed well in the role for five years, who had stuck by Blair in his unpopular war in Iraq, and who had strong PLP support: ‘If I can sack him I can sack anyone’ was the unstated message which rang loud and clear to all considering putting their heads above the parapet.

The construction of the Cabinet was no longer based on competence and political pull with the public – in other words the selection criteria had most to do with governing well – it was now based upon the survival of the prime minister: a wholly different objective which mainly pointed in the direction of not governing well. If any reader should doubt the overwhelming importance of good governance and a strong constitution to good government, then this one example of a lame prime minister using a weak constitution to remain in office with a lottery of ministerial competence, must convince those doubters.

The Conservative Party has its 1922 Committee, comprised only of backbenchers, to call a halt to its overdue leaders. In this forum, its MPs are able to speak truth unto power on those limited occasions needed for the party and for the country. The Labour Party has no such forum. It relies on deals and conspiring, calculating who will come out on top, courage of the few, message placement in the media, spin and anti-spin, hoping someone else will put their hand up, playing off both sides, the whips recalling past misdemeanours, patronage, etc. This can be very exciting at the time, but for all the integrity of this process, the potential candidates might as well offer straight financial bribes. The party behaves with all the transparency and integrity of FIFA selecting the next venue for the World Cup. For a party with a belief in its moral superiority over the opposition, how is it that power politicking on this scale, and involving such low cunning and guile, can be considered in any way superior to the straight and grown-up governance of the Conservative Party?

Beside the comparative ethics of the processes, the outcomes show that the Conservative Party removes its leaders fairly promptly in relation to their value to the party and the country, and the Labour Party does not. Is it a coincidence that since the establishment of the 1922 Committee, the prime minister has been Conservative for 62 per cent of the time and Labour for 38 per cent (excluding Ramsay McDonald’s four years as nondom prime minister alongside the majority Conservatives)? Many other factors pertain, but Blair should have gone before the 2005 election, Brown should have gone within a year of taking office, and Neil Kinnock should never had the opportunity to lose two elections rather than one. The Conservative Party would have made those changes.

In response to my question on the demise of the government, one former top adviser in Number 10 responded ‘it’s all about the leader’, that is, if the leader is good, successful government follows and vice versa. Leaders do matter, but outstanding leadership is rare. Successful organisations are built on successful organising and not on waiting for an outstanding leader. Tony Blair was a very successful leader, for a time. Churchill was an outstanding wartime leader and poor in peacetime. Blair eventually became a poor leader because the rest of the organisation of government was poor.

Harvey Schacter’s review of Debunking the myth of the allimportant leader: The Cult of the Leader by Professor Christopher Bones, emphasises the point:

It is impossible to be a perfect leader. All leaders are flawed. Saints are rare. Yet British academic Christopher Bones says we still have built a cult around leadership that is dangerous, not only for business but for society as a whole.

Professor Bones is not that well known on this side of the Atlantic, but he is an acerbic and thoughtful critic of modern business. He worked at companies such as Cadbury Schweppes, Shell and Diageo before turning to academia, where he served for many years as dean of the prestigious Henley Business School before becoming professor of creativity and leadership at Manchester Business School. In his new book, he attacks the top executives who have destroyed or badly injured prominent companies in recent years, aided in their pursuit of glory before their fall by image consultants, spin-doctors and media puff pieces.

The modern leader is egotistic, blind to their own faults, surrounded by people created in their own image and committed to actions driven more by the need to enhance their self-image than by anything else. We moved from ranking companies and their performance to personalising such comparative exercises by focusing on their CEOs, as though the CEO was the defining differentiator without which the organisation would have not achieved their success.

We have worshipped these leaders, and they have worshipped themselves. They have also grabbed considerable lucre. These business titans are part of what Professor Bones dubs the ‘L’Oréal Generation’, playing off the cosmetic company’s slogan, ‘Because I’m worth it.’ Indeed, the executives set the example for millions of others with their excessive lifestyle of grand restaurants, cosmetic enhancements, and instant gratifications. They had it all – sucking up huge fortunes in remuneration – but then they crashed, and took us with them. ‘The L’Oréal Generation has just found out that it will have to work longer, save harder, pay more to the state in taxation and suffer more natural disasters than any generation in history,’ he warns.

Professor Bones discusses how that happened, offering a searing indictment of the prevailing notion of ‘a talent war’, which bid up the salaries of top executives beyond reason and obscured us to the fact the talent that drives our companies comes from all workers, not just a few.

He asks us to reconsider the link between motivation and money, and for directors of companies to cleanse their minds of the impulse to keep hiking CEO salaries so that no chief executive officer could ever be below average for that rarefied group, since it would reflect badly on the company.

His recommendations include to: build a leadership expectation for boards of directors; reinforce collective accountability in companies; cap earnings potential for senior executives by introducing a relativity principle; and stop developing leaders and start developing organisational leadership. The best leadership programmes he has been involved in were those that focused on developing a consistent and commonly understood leadership approach across the organisation, not on helping a few people supposedly become outstanding leaders. The programmes were linked to a major strategic objective that was associated with a corporate goal, and introduced new ways of doing things and placed new demands on leadership throughout the organisation. ‘They built a collective not an individual expectation. They were about the organisation, not the individual,’ he stresses. ‘We have to dismantle the cult of the leader,’ he concludes. His book is about companies. With the exception of the salaries in office, much of it might have been about government.

Interestingly, one of the world’s consistently more content and successful countries (though of course not without faults and problems) is Switzerland. A federal council of seven with a rotating president runs their government. There is no dominant prime minister or president. We have fixed in our minds this cult of the leader. It does not stand up to examination, except in extreme times.

Reshuffle rate. Key here in the leadership cycle is the interplay between quality of government and survival as prime minister. Quality of government requires stability of ministers, giving them the time to understand the ministry and its role, and to provide consistent political leadership to make something happen. Non-performing ministers need to change, but this aside, government performance and ministerial longevity are positively related. However, to survive, a weakening prime minister will use all of his patronage power to keep his opponents off balance.

The reshuffles became more frequent and extensive. The pool of MPs from which to choose diminished as those who had already been sacked or have shown dissent or insufficient loyalty were excluded. Some MPs walked as they found better things to do than being pimped. As the pool shrank, unexpected people were appointed, and some of these were unexpectedly successful – unexpected in the sense that they had not acquired the patronage from senior ministers usually necessary, and unexpectedly in that their quiet competence had gone unnoticed. But on average ministerial standards fell (although by now that was not the game – prime ministerial survival was). The rate of ministerial change is a sure sign that the time for a new leader has arrived. This would make for a simple trigger for a leadership contest.

New Labour lost its way too because of the misallocation of power. For any society to work, power needs to be distributed and in the right place. Consider the patriarchal family with a dominating father/husband ruling with an iron rod. Not a very attractive proposition for the rest of the family, and certainly not one to receive a majority vote. Consider a dictatorship, with most power resting with the one ruler. Inevitably, harsh laws and punishments, nasty police, a large army, and reams of informants grow up to preserve that power. Wealth is used for influence and control. The institutions become self-serving. The absence of criticism, alternative views, and a news media free to highlight problems and failures, means mistakes go unremarked and unseen in government. Successful government needs to be open to change and to new views, and to confront its own failures. Democracy demonstrably works far better than dictatorship. But democracy comes in many forms and some work much better than others.

One of the biggest obstacles to organisational change is the ‘people like us’ problem, where power resides with certain classes or types. This is very common. It arises where those in leadership and managerial roles confuse performance with appearance. Thus, people with similar manners, behaviour, recreational habits or appearance are subconsciously assessed as good in their jobs, and those without as average or poor. Classically, many organisational climbers have taken up golf because the top executives play it. Or join the Reform Club. Or go to Oxford University. Or are irrepressively supportive of all management decisions. Chose your own distinguishing badge. (The Nolan rules encourage it.) We all do it, but no matter how much the appearance fills us with confidence, performance is not correlated. Performance always takes some independent and objective measure. Looking down from the top is no place to gauge that. Outside, across, peer, citizen, customer, pupil, user: this is where a reasonable measure of performance can be obtained and power allocated accordingly.

The 2005 election was the point for turning, but self-delusion had become established to such an extent that most in the centre could see only a New Labour government future. Some declared this the age of a social democratic hegemony, and others referred with a swaggering selfconfidence to the ‘impossible’ swing needed by the opposition to gain a majority, such was the in-built (and unfair) electoral bias of 5 per cent. They were and are right on the first count; It was just that few in the Cabinet remained social democrats, having by now become a government of all the speed cameras (and the Conservative leadership was looking more and more social democrat by the month). On the second count, they were wrong. In the 2010 election voters did what they had too, in terms of eliminating the bias, to produce the result they wanted. No swing will ever be ‘impossible’. But such was the degree of delusion, common in monopolies and any organisation detached from its environment, that the government behaved as if it could do what it liked. Often what it liked were the preferences and prejudices of the individual Cabinet ministers, and particularly the prime minister.

Leave aside that one million motorists (and voters) were three points away from being banned (and the impact that would have had on the economy), bring on more and hidden speed cameras. Leave aside that already immigration had far surpassed any previous scale, crack on with more: it’s good for you. Leave aside that significant parts of the public sector reform programme either had run out of road or simply had not worked: continue with the same formula. The permanent revolution in the NHS had echoes of Mao Tse-tung and his cultural revolution. Leave aside the affront to liberty of anti-terrorism legislation in practice, let’s extend the detention period from 28 to 42 days. And leave aside that the chances of this making any difference to preventing future bombings were around zero. The egos were getting off on their own hobby horses, their power to push anything through, almost the more unpopular the better. And all of this unfettered by any noticeable check and balance, other than by the news media (although their affect can be perverse, often with unintended consequences, and replete with their proprietors’ prejudices).

Playing the loyalty card. If you read only one book to understand the principles of organisation, it should be Dr Norman Dixon’s seminal 1976 account On The Psychology of Military Incompetence. Military incompetence refers to the failures of military organisations, whether through incompetent individuals or through a flawed institutional culture. Incompetence is the chronic inability to do a particular job or activity successfully. Incompetence can be found in any industry, field, or discipline, but incompetence in war is much more noticeable and has far greater significance – death and destruction.

Strict hierarchies of command provide the opportunity for a single decision to direct the work of thousands. An institutional culture devoted to following orders without debate can help ensure that a bad or miscommunicated decision is implemented without being challenged or corrected.

The most common cases of military incompetence can be attributable to a flawed organisational culture. Perhaps the most marked of these is a conservative and traditionalist attitude, where innovative ideas or new technology are discarded or left untested. A tendency to believe that a problem can be solved by applying an earlier – failed – solution ‘better’, be that with more men, more firepower, or simply more élan, is common. A strict hierarchical system often discourages the devolution of power to junior commanders, and can encourage micromanagement by senior officers.

Dixon ascribes historic military failures to the existence of certain personality qualities that, while conducive to rising within a hierarchy, are not conducive to thinking clearly in a crisis. He comments, ‘It is indeed ironic that one of the most conservative of professions should be called upon to engage in activities that require the very obverse of conservative mental traits.’

Dixon attributes historic instances of military incompetence to such traits as ‘the ignoring of intelligence reports which did not fit in with preconceived ideas’, ‘a delusional underestimation of the enemy (a “magical” attempt to minimise the external threat)’, ‘the fear of failure’, ‘an implacable resistance to the “uncertainties” of innovation’, and other authoritarian personality traits.

Dixon suggests Major General William Elphinstone’s disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 as a case of someone ‘attempting tasks so difficult that no one expects one to succeed; hence little disgrace attaches to failure’. And he attributes Lieutenant General Arthur Percival’s disastrous failure to defend Singapore against the Japanese in 1942 to his trying ‘to avoid the unpleasant consequences of failure by not really trying’.

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger includes these lines: ‘There is a broad division between those who laugh at the perception of incongruities in the world and within themselves, and those in whom laughter is released as a celebration of their own successes, a perception, not of incongruity but of total, triumphant correspondence.’ The former type makes more successful generals.

Dixon goes on to postulate that it is the military organisation that contains the potential to create incompetent leadership or to promote incompetent persons to positions of great power and responsibility. He lists several characteristics and values that the military holds in high esteem and strives to achieve, as well as their negative consequences.

Among these are:

– Uniformity, to the extent of oppressive conformity and the crushing of individual thoughts and the devaluation of initiative.

– Hierarchy and the importance of proper authority, to the extent of a fear to report bad news to superiors, the rejection of suggestions or corrections from the lower ranks, and hostility towards those of lower rank who initiate action without permission, however effective or necessary the action was.

– A love of regularity and regimentation and an inability to think outside of drill.

– The fact that ambitious and achievement-oriented officers are highly esteemed and respected in the military, so much so that self-serving and vainglorious officers are sometimes promoted to high leadership, with disastrous consequences.

Administrative incompetence refers to the inability of an organisation as a whole to adapt to change and innovation, as well as the inability of an organisation to learn from past mistakes. This bureaucratic inefficiency is not caused by any one person, but by organisational culture as a whole. Organisations, like physical masses, possess a kind of inertia that resists change, and it takes a great force to effect significant change. One solution to this is to put in place mechanisms whereby change can be implemented. This has to take place at many levels, from the ground up, as well as from the top down.

Trust is the last card played by the failing leader. The troops are fed the line that they ought to trust their leaders; it is their duty and responsibility. This has some pulling power, as few find feeling distrustful a positive emotion. The trust card is a powerful one, but comes right at the end when all other means to rally the troops has failed. The hand is empty.

But trust in leadership is earnt, never given. In the early days wholehearted support and optimism are prevalent. As experience unfolds, trust will either be earnt or be absent. Loyalty was the final card played by some in the Labour leadership. It had a similar motivation, resonance, and outcome.

Tired, stuck and long in the tooth. By the third term, tiredness was to the fore. Top jobs are very demanding. At any one time, a senior politician will be working long and unsocial hours, thinking and reflecting time is limited, ‘events dear boy’ can become exhausting, the price of continued office is eternal vigilance for attack from the opposition and news media, and driving implementation takes much energy. At this point, fresh legs are essential. But the government soldiered on. Its policies became repetitious. In justifying his need to continue as prime minister, Blair said he had to stay on to finish the job of public service reform, a comment that betrayed his stasis. In a world changing faster than at any time in history, all organisations have to adapt, and this includes the public sector. Change is permanent, not an occasional set-piece event.

After having been chair of Relate for six years, I contemplated whether to continue for two more or stand aside. Much had been achieved in transforming it from a largely voluntary monopoly provider of relationship counselling into a multi-service competitive professional agency; but much more remained to be done. Whilst my position was not terminal, my tool bag was only so big, and people get tired of your voice and style. I stood down, a new chair with a different style was elected, and the transformation continued. Whilst on a very much grander scale, the same applies to prime ministers – effective lifespan is limited, you can only do so much, and others can do a different but equally effective job.

The consequence also of outstaying your effectiveness is that you move from attacking the problem to owning it. Time and energy is spent defending policies rather than accepting that some worked and some did not. Tired, defensive, and ego-driven people only have the energy to continue with the same policies, when fresh legs would bring fresh thinking without owning the past.

Late in the third term, Brown was casting around for how to connect with the public and alighted upon opening up about himself and about his values. Values have been through much organisational examination. But, as one advertising specialist from the old shadow communications agency said, ‘I’m not interested in having values from the 50s pushed at me.’ It’s what you do in and with power that counts, not whether being the son of a preacher man somehow gives you worth or bestows some moral superiority or ethical guarantee.

All the while, party members and supporters experienced disappointment through to terminal disillusion. Many soldiered on, putting in the campaigning hours and dutifully defending the record, but by now a broken record living off the past. Many others, so demotivated by the government and its performance, could not bring themselves to put in the time and powers of persuasion to support an organisation brought low by self-indulgence and poor decision. These members and supporters were angry at the waste of power, at being ignored, at a central group which may have come to government with vision and some altruism but
which was leaving with little more than their personal agendas. The collective endeavour, termed New Labour, a project for all capturing our imaginations and support in 1997, had fizzled out into the individual ambitions of those at the top, a Boys’ Own club.

As stories of briefing battles surfaced, the behaviour at the top was first disbelieved. Surely, we thought, these leaders could not be so foolish as to leak electoral goodwill with mutual slander. Surely their ethics were better than this. Yes, politics is for the thick-skinned, but who benefits from the self-mutilation of the organisation? What possible short-term goal could justify the long-term damage?

In response to my question to a faithful party member after the 2010 election, came this email about recruiting new members and what they wanted to happen:

Getting the party back – a sense that the Labour Party had ‘lost its way’, become elitist, cosied up to big business, and had ignored them for the last few years (Iraq being the prime example), and that the next 12 months or so was an opportunity to shape and somehow ‘reclaim it’ from New Labour high command and corporate interests. Quite a few people I persuaded mentioned Obama approvingly and what he’d done in terms of building up a grassroots campaign, and wanted to see and support something similar here. People were particularly interested in getting the chance to vote for the leader and for the mayoral candidate, and all of them were keen for a genuine, even aggressive, debate about the future direction of the party, even if it does mean some blood-letting and possibly short-term PR damage.

By way of summation, in late 2007 I wrote this email in desperation (with apologies for the rant):

The government and New Labour is getting it wrong politically and technically in so many areas it is difficult to know where to begin. Some of this is down to Gordon, but, in the main, he is a lightning conductor for concern with New Labour as a project or political philosophy. New Labour has some considerable achievements to its name. And has gone as far as it can go. It is not the Holy Grail for how to govern. LikeThatcherism, and more so, it has had its place. But, it is a crashing mistake to believe that New Labour is somehow a fixture which will still be churning out the right policies and practice in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time. It’s over. What we need is new New Labour, not old New Labour. That’s what we hoped Gordon would bring and that he would ditch old New Labour with the wresting of control from Tony. Gordon’s failure is to persist with the same approach. I remember you talking self-assuredly, in response to questioning of NL, of the prolonged period of social democratic hegemony that we were now in. That may be so. David Cameron seems to agree with you. But that is very different from a prolonged period of one-party rule. Monopolies are bad for us.

Cameron and the New Conservatives are serious. David Cameron is still being dismissed as lightweight, having no policies, going to be found out, etc, etc. This is quite astonishing. The genesis for this email came listening to David Cameron on Today about performance measures
in hospitals. He was saying that the measures should be based on both throughput and success, e.g. did the patient get septicemia as a result of the operation? Does the hip work properly? He is absolutely right. There is no argument to be had. Every management theory, textbook, piece of research and practice supports this. And these measures should have beengot right 10 years ago. When a government has been attempting to reform something (in this case the NHS) for that long, it really is time to give up or to let someone else have a go.

This theme continues with Offences Brought To Justice, a key police performance measure. Why, Chloe asks, are the crack dealers left alone in her local alley? Ask a police sergeant in Manchester. The police get the same score for picking up a spotty teenager with a bit of cannabis (a single officer could pop out now and nab one quickly) as they do for a crack dealer (requiring plain-clothes surveillance, CCTV evidence, case preparation, etc.) Panorama came to the same conclusion. This problem has been well understood for 5 years plus. And the measure continues.

These are just a couple of examples of the semi-competent state. It is rumoured there is to be a Civil Service Act which will largely enshrine the status quo in legislation. This status quo is at the heart of the semicompetence. Why bother with such an Act? Surely just avoid it. I know Gordon came to power with promises of much constitutional change. And, in practice, this hardly amounts to a row of beans. But, it would not, would it? In the long term, governments become more and more part of the status quo. They cannot be the newcomers who have the time to really grasp what needs to change and have the will and energy to do it. We have very few expectations of this government doing anything of substance to the constitution. So, at least, don’t take us backwards.

Cameron knows all of this, has serious policies in response, and,politically, if all he offered was to stop remuddling the existing muddles in the public sector, would gather yet more votes from the public sector workers weary of being ‘reformed’ and from the rest of us weary of hearing of the next new dawn in public services.

Conservatives have better mind-readers than NL. But Cameron is much more than this. He has a political strategy remarkably similar to NL’s and TB’s in the early days. But he has leapt the political generation of Philip Gould. Philip, when he arrived fresh from the US election of Clinton in 1992, brought a sophistication to polling and reading of polling new to the UK. And he reigned for 10 years. Then along came Steve Hilton, who has overtaken Philip in his ability to read the public mind, not least because he is connecting with the emotional place of the public. ‘He doesn’t realise we have feelings,’ said a classic moderate Middle Englander near Carlisle of Gordon Brown. And neither does NL of course. NL just ploughs on regardless of how we are feeling. Hilton understands how we are feeling and Cameron acts accordingly. His tone is even and non-adversarial, almost gentle. He sees a world as we do: complex, with few easy answers, and many imponderables. Not a place where traditional adversarial politics (even if we were not bored stiff with these) would work in terms of coming up with and implementing the right answers (should they exist). GB, under advice from Geoff Hoon, continues to act like the big beast at Question Time. It falls flat. He doesn’t know it. And others on the front bench don’t look as though they do. Party politicsis, or should be by now, largely limited to changing the management, albeit we can only choose from two. It is not a way, any more, to get the right decisions and actions in so many areas of life. The bottom line is that Cameron and Co. are serious, always have been, have a far better grasp of what is needed and where people are, and would do a far better job in government than NL.

‘We are judged by our record.’ No we are not. The electorate has paid for what the NL government has achieved. Handsomely. Now, the electorate is making a judgement about what NL is going to achieve. And it is concluding (rightly) that NL is no longer going to get much done. For a long time, particularly while TB was hanging on (and cementing his legacy of making NL unfundable except by the trade unions) and then GB starting, NL continued to hold onto much sentiment as to its record and hope for the future. Once GB got a few things wrong and failed to change NL, then the sentiment moved more rapidly than any of us can remember.

Unable to think outside the NL box, at a private Demos seminar with a minister on immigration, I said that although clearly immigration is an issue, the bigger issue for me was population. Which is very obviously an issue all around us. Where are those 3 million new houses
going? The minister dismissed the point by referring to the leader of Newcastle city council who wants significant population growth there. The minister is not a lifelong politician and has significant experience outside (I understand) and is relatively young. But, he can’t think outside the New Labour box. Even in private. Another Cabinet minister put it well, with irony, in that ‘New Labour knows what is best for you.’ Well, actually, it doesn’t and, indeed, we are heartily fed up with that sort of stuck thinking and approach. For example, has the leader of Newcastle actually asked the citizens there what they think about a massive population rise? Or does NL know what is best for them? We are not stupid. We will all get to better decisions, and decisions which stick, if we engage people in a much more open process. We are fed up with things being done to us, particularly when they then don’t work. Once more, NL just doesn’t get it, alas.

Why bother? There are a number of decisions which the government does not need to take. It needs a quiet life and to avoid unnecessary political conflict. The 42/28 day debate is a classic of an issue to be avoided. I can see you all getting off on this, in that selfimportant, ‘these matters are too complex for the public intelligence, we know more’ sort of way. And it is totally crap politics. 10p tax abolition seems to fit into this category too. Denying the police backpay. Cannabis reclassification. This seemed to be an attempt to appease Middle England, or at least the Daily Mail. I am not sure anyone there is looking, but the main impact of the reclassification is to piss off a core Labour constituency. I wondered how on earth the polls had got Labour below the 30 per cent mark, which used always to be the absolute zero for Tories/Lab, as this is lifelong rock-solid immovable support. The way you do it is to piss off, sufficiently often, your core supporters who then see no alternative but to vote for the opposition.

Controlling the individual. At the margin, each of the decisions for new controls could be justified. And then, we woke up one day to find ourselves smothered in state controls. And we are thoroughly pissed off with them. Taken together, they are too much, too restricting, and at times cause much aggravation for the individual. Vetting, speed cameras, every possible road and car rule, stopping electrical DIY, costly registration for electricians, a rampant Health and Safety Executive, identity cards, smoking bans, etc. On top of this is the way these measures are implemented. Outside London Bridge station under the open and covered concourse, there are now aggressive notices threatening smokers with all sorts of dire consequences. It is windy here. There is no danger of passive smoking. The ban in restaurants on balance works for all. Why go draconian, and ban smoking in the open? Create aggression? Make some (all of them with votes) feel pariahs? And for some poorer people, smoking is one of their few or only pleasures. But NL knows what is best for you. And so did many others with high control needs.

Forgotten what politics is. I can’t remember when NL last did something populist or popular. NL in government has gone the way of most governments and been captured by professional interests. The weaker a government feels, the more it is reluctant to battle professional or institutional interests, the less it hears or responds to the public’s interests, and the more unpopular and weak it becomes. We have seen it before. The Family Courts are a classic example today of overwhelming need for reform, the first step has been on the table for years (anonymous reporting), but nothing happens because the judges feel they own the family law set-up. They don’t. The public does. But ministers won’t take even the first populist step. So the public have even less faith in the government.

Three points a vote. Whether you agree or disagree with speed cameras, every three points pushes another voter to Cameron. And in some cases with justification. They have played a role in reducing speeds. But now there is some unnecessary, ineffective and costly use of speed cameras. They are just there to produce an income, make a public servant feel he is doing a useful job, or whatever. The twelve-point rule for disqualification was introduced at a time when the means to detect speeding were limited by the number of traffic police officers. What will be the economic impact of having that many drivers banned? The political impact is there for you to observe.

Public sector reform. This is not just bad politics. It is also wrong in terms of what it is trying to achieve. The approach taken to public service reform has had some benefits, and it ran out of road quite some time ago. I don’t hear anyone talking with the freshness that effective public sector reform will need.

Take transport. It simply has not improved at all and has got worse in many areas. The last improvement in the trains was the reluctant transfer of Railtrack to Network Rail. Since then, the train service continues to be haphazard with nothing offered. No policies? Who are we talking about? The roads get more congested with no observable strategy. Transport is not keeping up with population growth. But then, that is not an issue, is it?

Post office closures. Dan has carefully worked out the demand at the three post offices near him in Hackney to be closed. They are all near to capacity. Why are post offices that are very much in demand being closed? And letter pricing has become so complicated. Why? The Post Office business has a death wish.

Unaccountable officialdom. I carefully followed the parking rules when visiting the acupuncturist and placed the scratch-card parking permit for the day in the car windscreen. And got a ticket. Which I will now have to contest, at a cost of approximately two hours of my life. There
is no comeback for public officials who make mistakes, or for their organisations. Hands are washed. That is how it is, bad luck. The onus is entirely on the individual to contest the decisions of the public sector. The balance of power is all wrong. New Labour places that balance firmly with the organisation. The rights of man are nowhere to be seen. Whose side are you on?

Taxation. A revealing debate in Progress magazine [produced by the New Labour think tank of the same name] concluded that the choice in taxation was between investment by Labour and cuts by the Conservatives. But, the public is not that simple in its assessment. They make broad assessments. They can see where their money goes. And they take a view as to whether putting more of it there is worthwhile. The public sector has improved. Particularly where the issue was one of underfunding (e.g. health, teachers’ pay). But, much of the public sector is, still, gratuitously inefficient. The so-called efficiency programmes have had little effect (e.g. the Environment Agency and its £25 million efficiency savings which mostly went up in smoke once more funding was secured from Defra). And the public looks at the public services and concludes it would be a real waste of money to give them any more. They will only piss most of it away. I am not sure how much of a proportion of GDP now goes in taxes compared with 1997, but it does seem like more. And it is not being used well. Sheltering behind the investment banner does nothing for public service. The public sector has to earn its wages like the rest of us.

Public service trade unions. One of the major causes of public sector inefficiency is the public sector trade unions. I would like to estimate how much I have been delayed on trains because of Bob Crow. The Fire Brigades union was rightly put in a box, but otherwise Labour has failed to tackle this endemic problem of unions.

Immigration. This perhaps sums it all up. Whether we like it or not, every new immigrant, regardless of NL category, is a vote for Cameron. NL has no strategy, no coherent policy (‘Cameron has no policies’?), has made some major blunders, not thought through the unintended consequences (English identity, screwing the socially excluded, congestion, paying for new infrastructure), nor struck a fair balance between the indigenous and the immigrant. Well done. Was it the need to feed the liberal conscience that led to all of this?

So what can be done?

There are two years to go. And the best hope is damage limitation, not winning the election. The first step is to grasp that the New Labour project is over, finished, done. Ditch anyone who can’t think beyond the NL box. Only employ people who think outside it. Next, take Cameron and all he says and does, seriously. He is the next prime minister. Get a new mind-reader and not xxx or similar. Start to grasp the emotional place of the electorate. Stop doing as much as possible. Avoid battles, the why bothers?,
legislation. And rest. Try and clear the brain and get some modern thinking going on a very few key issues or policies. Pick a few populist measures that are easy to implement. A 24 point rule? Review the cost-benefit of the HSE? US standards for clearing the roads after crashes? Actually cutting the bureaucratic impact on us all? End post office closures? Get hold of rogue traders? Easy information for the consumer about energy use? Etc. Etc. Etc. And, yes, get a new leader before the next election. But that is not the solution.

Reading this now, there’s not much I would change. My point then about ditching New Labour was about the brand and the mindset of its custodians. As a permanent break from Old Labour it is still where the party must be. New Labour as a fresh brand in 1996 alongside a fresh charismatic leader was just right. A tired brand with a weary leader peddling the same policies regardless of their effectiveness was plain wrong by 2007. Brown’s alternative of semi-Old Labour plus banking, was plain wrong too. The party needs the New Labour unencumbered minds of the mid-1990s, but not the numbed minds they became ten years later.

A caveat too about my comments on David Cameron. These were aimed at getting the New Labour establishment to drop the self-delusion and to take him seriously, rather than my being too generous as to his qualities. I also add that failure in government is not limited to New Labour. The coalition is being allowed to make unnecessary mistakes by our weak constitution.

There are always choices as to how to organise, usually unaddressed during periods of success, and only faced during decline. The Labour Party has to reorganise from top to bottom. The basis for this should be the ‘best possible chance’ principle advanced to John Smith to counter those opposing change and simply hoping for victory next time without too much personal discomfort. This principle says that the party should do everything it can to ensure electoral victory and better government. No stone of status quo should left unturned, no too-difficult problem unsurfaced, no centre of personal power left dominant, in order to avoid leaving success to luck and giving it the best possible chance.