Philip Rubenstein
What Makes Political Leaders Successful?

Philip Rubenstein What Makes Political Leaders Successful?

- Welcome, everyone. If you are here in the UK, good evening. And if you’re elsewhere, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. The question we’re exploring today in this session is: What is it that makes successful political leaders a success? And the reason I picked this topic is because we all know we live in a world that’s beset by all kinds of problems, and it’s only natural to wonder what kind of future our children and our grandchildren are going to have. And this leads inevitably to the question of political leadership. When we look for political leaders who have… I mean, let’s call it the right stuff, to navigate us through these incredibly challenging times, what qualities should we be looking for? So there’s different ways of doing this. And rather than just setting out a wishlist, I thought it might be more useful to do this in reverse, which means identifying a group of really successful political leaders. And by successful, I mean successful on their own terms. So I’m not going to be judging their politics or their outcomes. And just exploring: What are the qualities that these individuals have, if any, in common? So please forgive me and just listen to this caveat for a moment ‘cause this is a work in progress. I find this subject absolutely fascinating, but I have to say, I really do struggle with it. And it’s felt just like trying to pick up quicksilver. And just when you’ve kind of grasped it and you think you’ve got it in your hand, it just, it slips away. So let me just say there’s no monopoly on wisdom here, and I’d love to hear what people think.

And if you agree or disagree, please say. If you have different insights into this subject, please put it into the chat and we’ll have a look afterwards. 'Cause I’d really, really like to see what people or what people think about this subject. So let me just start off just by sharing with you just some of the sources that I looked at just in preparing this presentation. Here are five books, and let me just go through each one of them quickly and individually. On the top left is Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris Kearns Goodwin, for those of you who aren’t familiar with her, she’s kind of the master of biographies of US presidents. She’s absolutely fantastic, riveting, insightful, and she spent most of her adult life writing about US presidents. And this was her book where she tries to put it all together and look at leadership across the board. And then in the middle, we have Anthony Selden. And Anthony Selden is… He’s, himself, a leader in education. He was a head teacher for 20 years. And over the last few years, he’s turned to biographies of British Prime Ministers. And this is his “History of the British Prime Minister,” the Office of the Prime Minister over the last few hundred years. And next at the top, we have really interesting book by professor of psychiatry, Arnold Ludwig. This was written turn of the century, just after 2000, “King of the Mountain.” He spent, would you believe, 18 years researching this book. He read over 400 biographies of political leaders in the 20th century.

And so the book has his insights. And at the bottom, two slightly different books. The first one is by one of the most influential writers on business leadership over the last 50 years. That’s Jim Collins. And Jim Collins wrote two seminal books. The first one is called “Built to Last,” and the second one is this one, “Good to Great,” and lots and lots of insights about leadership. And again, like the others, he’s applied the same technique. He’s looked at successful leaders and he’s asked: What have they got in common? And the final one is General Stanley McChrystal, his book entitled “Leaders.” Stanley McChrystal is, himself, no slouch. He was a five-star US General. And in his last role, which he relinquished in 2010, he was the Commander of all the US Armed Forces in Afghanistan. So those are some of the sources. And when we talk about the subject, I have to say, I don’t find it very helpful to talk about great men and great women. I think it’s much more helpful to think about men and women who had a great impact on their societies when they were in need, and so I’ve chosen to focus on these five individuals. And as you can see, three of them were US presidents, there’s Abraham Lincoln; FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and one of his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt, who’s in the bottom right corner there.

And then supplemented by arguably the two British prime ministers who, between them, had the most transformative effect on Britain in the 20th century. And there, Margaret Thatcher, at the bottom. And the gentleman with a pipe, if you are not too familiar with your British political history, is Clement Attlee. And between them, these two espoused ideas which continue to, I mean, pretty much define the fault lines of political debate in Britain, even today. You’ll notice at once that Winston Churchill isn’t on this list. Now, Churchill had an astonishing capacity for leadership, and I’ll talk about him a little later, but I’ve left him out of this list because for all of his huge talent and genius, the electorates after World War II didn’t believe that he would deliver the profound change they were all looking for. And so instead, they voted for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party by a landslide. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Attlee, I mean, one of the things that makes him so interesting, he’s really the polar opposite of everything that Churchill was. He was mild-mannered, he was stiff, incredibly poor communicator, and modest to a fault. In fact, is so modest that Churchill famously insulted him by saying that he was a modest man with much to be modest about. And yet, the list of achievements of the Attlee government in only six years, between 1945 and 1951, is breathtaking. They built, in Britain, the modern welfare state. They introduced major education reforms. They created a national health service from scratch. They constructed half a million homes. They rebuilt the economy on the back of the Marshall Plan. They brought almost every major industry into public ownership. They co-sponsored the creation of NATO, they built the British atom bomb, and they began the dismantling of Empire, starting with the withdrawal from India and, of course, Palestine.

So let’s look at some of the qualities that these individuals seem to share. And the first theme that I wanted to talk about was radicalization. And that’s because they all seem to undergo profound life experiences, which somehow combined to galvanise them for the top job. I hesitated about choosing this word radicalization. And it’s a potent word and it might seem a strange word to use because it’s normally a word that we associate with extremists, rather than with mainstream politicians. But I’m using it here to describe a process, as I say, that seems to take place when these characters, viscerally, are affected by their experiences. And it somehow have used them with a kind of a moral energy. So, whoops. Let’s just go back a bit. This is the young Teddy Roosevelt, very good-looking, as you can see in his youth. And Teddy Roosevelt first goes into public office at the tender age of 23. But it was never done with the public good in mind. He did it because he thought politics was going to be a great adventure. And then, pretty soon on, he starts to investigate the tenements in New York as a state assemblyman. And he sees what the slums are really like and he sees the harsh reality of child labour. And soon after, he becomes governor, and he sees at firsthand the absolute and extraordinary corruption between the political bosses on the one hand and the business community on the other. Between them, they seem to stitch everything up and leave nothing left on the table to democracy. He leaves politics to fight in the Spanish-American War.

And there, he spends time with ordinary enlisted men, and he hears about their lives, and their families, and their hardships. So by the time he becomes president in 1901, he’s been on this long winding path where all of his various experiences combined into this huge desire that he has to improve people’s lives. The other Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, was similarly… He was similarly radicalised a few years earlier, although in a slightly different way. I mean, FDR was born into a life of complete privilege living in upstate New York. And his new wife, Eleanor, was a settlement worker on the Lower East Side, and she wanted to raise his awareness of poverty on the Lower East Side. So she told him to meet her for a date right by the settlement house where she worked, and she took him round, she took him around the house, she took him around the area, and he was completely and utterly shocked by the fact that people could live in such poverty. And he said that it changed him that night forever. Some leaders are radicalised by failure. And this is young Clement Attlee. And it certainly seems the case that both he and Margaret Thatcher, who, by the way, Margaret Thatcher, I mean even though she was on the completely other side of politics from Attlee, she always said that of all the politicians of the 20th century, she admired his seriousness more than any other… more than any other person. But they both experienced the bitter pill of failure when they served under a Patrician leader for whom eventually they came to lose all respect.

Attlee, who was already fired up before he went into government by the extreme poverty he witnessed every single day… Oh, sorry. When he was a social worker in London’s East End in the 1920s. And he first enters government in the middle of the Great Depression. And he’s hopeful that a labour government is going to alleviate poverty and is going to deal with the causes of poverty as well. But he’s devastated when his hero, Ramsay MacDonald, who’s the Labour prime minister, decides, because of the numbers, to form a coalition with the other parties and waters down, almost dumps the entire reform programme. And like many of his colleagues, Attlee calls MacDonald a traitor and he says his decision is a total betrayal of the Labour movement, and he’s bitterly, bitterly disappointed by what he experiences. And similarly, Margaret Thatcher, and she was a minister in the 1970s in Edward Heath’s government, and she was the so-called token woman who was around the cabinet table at the time. And she watched a government flail around as it unsuccessfully tried to manage the oil crisis, stagflation, high unemployment, and perpetual deadlock with the trade unions. And Thatcher writes about the fact that she experienced a growing realisation that Heath was wrong, that conventional thinking wasn’t working, and that she was part of the problem.

So like the others, she comes into office galvanised, radicalised, and ready to do big new things. This leads us nicely onto the second theme, which is purpose, because the truly successful leaders all seem to have a defining purpose, which serves as their guiding star throughout their time in office and impels them into action. It’s their answer to the why question. Why did I fight so hard to get here? And why am I here? And what am I going to do with my short time in the role? Purpose, of course, can mean quite different things to different people. For Attlee, the purpose of his time in office was to harness the resources of the state to create a more equal society. Whereas for Thatcher, it was exactly the opposite. It was to remove the shackles of the state in order to create a freer society. So different purposes, but they both had purpose in equal measure, and it was their raison d'etre for everything they did. Abraham Lincoln’s purpose evolved while he was in office. He came to office with the overriding purpose of saving the union. And at the time, he had no real wish to… He certainly had no wish to abolish slavery across the whole of the US. But as the Civil War trudged on, Lincoln became far more sensitised to the idea that slavery was fundamentally immoral and wrong, and his purpose evolved to include the total abolition of slavery across the whole of the United States. The point about purpose is that it provides a focus for the leader.

If you are a leader with purpose, you’ll keep failing before you succeed, but purpose keeps you going in the right direction and it keeps you focused on what it is that you are actually trying to achieve. And it makes sure that even though incoming is at you every day, that events and circumstances try and derail you, that you’ll keep your eye on what it is that you’re actually trying to achieve. This is a… I love this image. You can see so much in this. This is Lyndon Johnson, of course, and he’s a really interesting case study in purpose. And I mean, Lyndon Johnson has really been rehabilitated over these last 20 years. His reputation as a domestic reformer, of course, was completely overshadowed by the spectre of his epic failure of leadership over the Vietnam War for many, many years. Johnson spends much of his earlier career really in the business of accumulating power. And if you read the wonderful biography by Robert Caro, which, if anyone’s got a year spare, it’s four big fat volumes. I can totally recommend it. But it’s very clear that he’s interested in power, power, power and in acquiring power and in using power. But then he has a massive heart attack, and he recuperates and he asks himself, “If I died tomorrow, what would I actually have achieved?” And he realises it doesn’t amount to very much. And this is when he starts on the long journey to finding his purpose. When Kennedy is assassinated, Johnson assumes the presidency and he launches what becomes known as the Great Society. And just look at what he achieves in under two years: Medicare, Medicaid, PBS, and NPR, the public broadcasting networks, voting rights, civil rights, fair housing, immigration reform, much, much more.

I mean, it’s just an extraordinary set of accomplishments in a very short space of time. And what’s really interesting about LBJ is that he defies the norms of what you’re meant to do and be as a good leader. He yells at his staff, he humiliates them in public. I mean, he’s a terrible bully. And yet, his staff stay with him and they stay loyal to him, and they’re willing to suffer all of his short words not because they love him, but because they’re imbued with a common mission. And it’s a mission that means that they all feel they’re doing something that’s much larger than any one of them as an individual. So purpose is really essential to a successful term in office because it gives force and coherence to a government. Purpose also provides a narrative, a story about why change is needed. And every successful government needs to build a narrative and communicate it. I mean, curiously, not every successful political leader is a great communicator. LBJ was far better in private than he ever was in public. And Clement Attlee was a really poor performer when it came to communicating in public. But many of the successful leaders were great communicators. Lincoln did it with stories; Teddy Roosevelt, he did it with his pithy sound bites; FDR did it with fireside chats; and, of course, Churchill did it with his soaring archer. We come up now to the third quality, which is discipline.

If purpose is a foundation, a foundational quality, purpose alone, purpose on its own, will never be enough to get the job done. Teddy Roosevelt reckoned that there are two kinds of success in the world. One is when you are born with a great talent, which is impossible for anyone else to emulate. So for example, Shakespeare is genius for writing plays, but most success, he says, most success is achieved by people who develop qualities they already have. But to an extraordinary degree, through hard and sustained work. And the leaders that we’re looking at all had an intense work ethic and abnormally high energy levels. Attlee was known by colleagues as a tiger for work. And as prime minister, he worked a 14-hour day. And Thatcher likewise famously survived on only four hours of sleep a night. Discipline, though, is more than just hard work and long hours. Discipline is also about self-restraint and it’s the ability to reign in your own emotions in service of your purpose. In the heat of Civil War, Abraham Lincoln would get furious with some of his battlefield generals who he felt were making poor decisions. But he knew that if he vented this fury on them, it would either paralyse them into inaction or it would cause them to be rash. So he wrote what he called his hot letters, and he’d channel all of his distress into a long, long letter, and he’d get it out of his system, and then he’d put the letter in a drawer, and he’d forget about it. And Roosevelt had a very similar process when he was doing his fireside chats.

When he was really angry with someone, he’d go through five or six draughts of the fireside chat and he’d read each one aloud to the speechwriters. So in the first draught, he might accuse an isolatious congressman of terrible things, of betraying his nation. But by the final draught, it was out of his system and it was all gone. And it was never mentioned in the final speech. I think one of the great, to me, one of the great exemplars of self-discipline and self-restraint in the cause of purpose was Nelson Mandela. Mandela, as we all know, was incarcerated on Robben Island where the prison conditions were incredibly harsh, and he had to face daily humiliations from the prison guards. And here’s how he describes leaving prison after 27 years on the island. “As I walked out of the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in a prison.” To leave those 27 years of hatred took enormous self-discipline, but he did it. And this is what ultimately gave him the strength to negotiate with the white minority government to manage a peaceful transition to democracy and to work tirelessly during the rest of his life for Black and white people to want to work together. Allied with discipline, and again, a quality that all of these individuals seem to have in spades, is resilience. Perhaps the secret of their resilience is that they’re all very comfortable as individuals in their own skin.

They all seem to be people who don’t try to be anyone else. So by resiliency, it’s not so much that they’ve got a tough outer shell, it’s more that they’ve got a inner sense of self-knowledge and self-confidence. “This is who I am, this is what I stand for, and this is what I have to do.” This is one of my favourite quotes about power. It comes from Robert Caro, who I mentioned earlier, great biographer. And he says, contrary to the popular expression, “Power doesn’t corrupt. Power reveals.” When people are in power, and they’re under real pressure, and it’s crunch time, that’s when you find out who they really are and what they’re really made of. So where does this resilience come from? Well, in most cases, with the leaders that we’re looking at, it seems to have been very hard one, through overcoming adversities in earlier life. Margaret Thatcher was given no free breaks on her way up. She had a tougher road than any man. She was constantly being patronised, constantly being told to know her place, constantly told not to get above herself. The idea that a woman could be prime minister when she was younger was completely fanciful, and it just made her work twice as hard as anyone else. Teddy Roosevelt, as a child, suffered from severe asthma, and he was plagued by weak eyesight all of his life. But he determined to overcome all of these physical deficiencies, and he developed a lifelong love of the outdoors and physical exertion. And then in his 20s, his wife dies in childbirth. And on the very same day, his mother, who was only 49, she dies.

While she’s making her way towards his world, she dies of typhoid fever. And this sends him into a deep, deep depression. And the only way, he finds, he can abate it is by shipping himself out West. And he becomes a cowboy for two years. And later on, he said the only way he could outride depression was to spend 15 hours a day galloping on a horse to exhaust himself, so that he could get to sleep at night. Probably the most well-known modern example of overcoming physical adversity is FDR, who, as I said before, born into privilege. All the trappings of wealth tampered by his mother as a young man, something of a kind of a alloaristocrat. And then his life-changing trauma was when he got polio. And he was told at first by doctors that nothing would come back from the waist down. But if he could strengthen his arms, and his chest, and his back, then maybe, maybe he might be able to manipulate a wheelchair. And so for the next couple of work, next couple of years, he’d spend every day, he’d get onto the floor in his library and he’d crawl around for hours and hours learning to strengthen his back. And he later said that if you’ve ever tried to move your big tone for two years and you finally do, then boy do you learn humility. Number five, choosing and keeping the right people. Jim Collins, who I mentioned earlier, Jim Collins, the business writer, says that one of the keys to achieving great things as a leader is to have what he says is the right people on the bus. And it’s a very simple image, but I find it a great image. I really like the picture of having the right people on the bus. Stanley McChrystal, General Stanley McChrystal, opens his book on leadership by discussing this painting. It’s Washington crossing the Delaware, and a copy of the painting hangs in the White House. It’s Washington as a general.

And McChrystal’s point is that when we think of leadership, often this is the picture that we have in mind. It’s someone who’s standing alone at the front, 10 feet tall. But in practise, it’s actually not individual leaders who solve the problems. It’s a team of people. And, “Real leadership,” says McChrystal, “Real leadership is found in the interaction between the leaders and the followers.” This is a quote that I really like from Arthur Conan Doyle, who’s the author of the “Sherlock Holmes” books. “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius.” And the reason I put this up is because most of the highly successful political leaders are not, in themselves, original thinkers. And they seem to know this about themselves because they make themselves highly mentorable. I mean, it’s very interesting. You read biographies of a lot of these people, and they’ve found mentors along the way. They’re very open to ideas. And crucially, what they do is they seek out big thinkers and they listen to their ideas, but they never allow themselves to be shackled by other people’s ideas. Great leaders don’t fear talent. They’re quite the opposite. They seek and they embrace talent. Clement Attlee did this brilliantly in 1945, and he assembled one of the most exceptional teams ever to be put together in British political history. For those of you who know your British political history, you’ll know names like Morrison, and Dalton, and Cripps, Ernest Bevin, Nye Bevin, and Hugh Dalton, and each one of them, kind of a giant in their own right and immensely capable. Most of them had enormous egos and half of them hated the other half.

And it’s why Attlee was uniquely qualified to lead them. He knew all their strengths and weaknesses because he’d served with all of them in the Wartime Coalition Government. And he couldn’t manage their egos because having no ego of his own, he didn’t feel the need to compete with anyone, and none of them felt he was competing with them. Attlee’s view was, if you want to be the public face and take all the credit, well, good, that’s fine. It’ll keep you motivated and it’ll keep you accountable. It was this combination of outstanding talent and an egoless leader that enabled Attlee’s government to achieve so much in such a short period of time. Abraham Lincoln was the same. On the night he won the election, he said, “I have to surround myself with people who are stronger than me.” So who does he appoint into his cabinet? He appoints his three chief rivals: Seward, Chase, and Bates. And each one of them was better educated than Lincoln, more celebrated than him. And each of them thought that he should have been president instead of Lincoln. And he was asked by one of his friends, “Why are you doing this? You’re going to look like a figurehead, not like a leader.” And Lincoln replies, “The country is in peril, and these are the strongest and most able men in the country, and I need them by my side.” Of course, he also had one eye on the politics because the three of them represented all of the factions in the party, the moderate, the conservative, and the radical. And to have them in his circle would be essential both in the Civil War and then later when he came to work on the Emancipation Proclamation.

We should also, when we talk about the right people, we should never underestimate the power of partnerships. And this is, of course, because the job of leader is an incredibly lonely one. And a true partner, if you find one, can be helpful in many ways. And partners can end up playing many, many roles for the leaders. Attlee was hugely reliant on Ernest Bevin for advice, for comfort, and for support to get colleagues back in line. Bevin died in 1951 of a massive heart attack. And it’s no accident that the Attlee government pretty much ran out of steam that same year. Roosevelt arguably had two partners in government. The first was Harry Hopkins, who was his kind of go-to guy and his closest confidant in politics. And so much so that Hopkins actually lived in the White House for the three years, from 1940 to 1943. But, of course, he also had Eleanor. And Eleanor was the person who, for him, told truth to power. He describes her as a welcome thorn in his side. I suspect she probably wasn’t always welcome, but that was the description, a welcome thorn in his side. Always willing to argue with him, always willing to question his assumptions. And for such a powerful person, he needed someone like that. For Thatcher, her partner was William Whitelaw. Willie Whitelaw, he’d been a rival candidate for party leader in the 1970s.

But once she won, he became totally loyal to her, he’d give her support, he’d give her advice. And he was the only one, apart from her husband Dennis, who was able to tell her in private when she was wrong and she’d take it from him. Willie Whitelaw had a stroke in 1987, and it meant he had to resign from government. And many commentators feel that that was really what marked the beginning of the end of the Thatcher premiership, because she no longer had someone to give a sensible advice, to moderate her stance on issues, or to maintain a consensus of support among her colleagues. This need to have someone whispering sense in your ear goes back to Ancient Rome when generals were returning glory from a campaign and they’d be given a triumph. And standing by your side as your chariot passed through the city was a slave whose only job was to whisper in your ear, “Memento mori. Remember, someday, you will die.” The sixth and final quality that, to me, these leaders seem to exude is what I’ve called adaptiveness. It’s not a very elegant word, but adaptiveness, it’s a kind of a state of mind. It’s about maintaining a level of flexibility, of agility, of keeping things loose so that you can always respond to what’s going on around you. Adaptive leaders stay very close to reality and they never fall into the trap of becoming the primary reality that everyone else has to worry about. And if this is one of the reasons why, often, it’s the less charismatic leaders, like Clement Attlee, who can often produce the best long-term results better than their more charismatic counterparts, because they seem to be… They don’t let their ego get in the way of reality.

I talked about Churchill before very briefly, and we haven’t really discussed it, so we do need to remedy that because Churchill… Churchill understood that charisma could be a liability, and he feared that his own towering charismatic personality might deter bad news from reaching him in its starkest form. So what does he do? He builds adaptiveness into the system in a way that only Churchill can. Early in the war, he created a separate department outside the normal chain of command, which was called the Statistical Office. And its main function was to feed him the brutal facts about the war every day and completely unfiltered. And he relies heavily on this throughout the war. And the unit isn’t dissolved until the war’s end. So as the Nazi panzers sweep through Europe, Churchill said he was able to go to bed and sleep soundly. “I had no need for cheering dreams,” he said. “Facts are better than dreams.” For me, the most extraordinary example of adaptiveness is demonstrated by Roosevelt, by FDR, when he launches the New Deal in 1933. By the end of '32, America is pretty much on its knees. Unemployment has hit 25%, ¼ of working Americans out of work. FDR is elected, and the first hundred days of his presidency sees an avalanche of legislation tackling a dizzying array of problems. FDR unleashes a set of massive programmes for jobs and public relief.

These are programmes which either dispense cash or, where possible, they create jobs on public works. So this is things like the construction of highways, and bridges, and dams. And just one example is the creation of the Civil Works Administration, which starts up in November 1933. And in just four weeks, just think about it, in just four weeks, it puts 4 million people to work. Just incredible. So I mean, the scale of these programmes is stunning, but of course when you do so much and you do it so quickly, you are going to make mistakes. You’re not going to get it right the first time. And the interesting thing about FDR is that his commitment was never to ideology. It was to what he called bold, persistent experimentation. So throughout the '30s, programmes were set up. Those that worked were continued and often scaled up and those that didn’t were quickly replaced by other programmes. And to me, that’s real adaptiveness in action. So there you have it, six characteristics. It seems to me that many of the most successful political leaders, successful on their own terms, seem to share. They’ve all, by the time they’ve got to office, they’ve all been radicalised to the extent that they’re galvanised and they’re ready to do big new things. They’ve got real purpose in government. And when events try to distract them, when people try to deviate them, they keep their eye on the prize and they stay focused on their purpose. They’ve got tremendous discipline in terms of their ability to have a strong work ethic and to be self-restrained when they need to. They’re hugely resilient.

When they get knocked down, they just get straight up again and they choose the right people on the bus to make sure they can deliver what they need to deliver. And they never lose touch with reality. They stay loose and they’re able to adapt, adapt, adapt to whatever circumstances come their way. So just before we go to questions, I mean, let me just say again, I mean this is a work in progress and I’m just really interested in seeing what people have to say, what people think about this subject 'cause it’s something that we all care about. But I just wanted to end on a more contemplative note because for all this moral purpose, and self-control, and the never-ending cycle of work, and the getting knocked down and picking yourself up again, for all of that, there’s usually a price to pay. You’ll recognise this once, I’m sure. This is the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and it’s the most incredible statues, the most magnificent piece of work. When you stand there in person and you look long enough, what you realise is that you are looking at a Lincoln not in his prime, but you’re looking at him after the ravages of four years of Civil War. And somehow, the artist has captured a Lincoln who is totally exhausted by it all. You see it in the eyes, you see it on the face, and you see him not so much sitting in the chair, but he’s slumped in it. And that’s the thing about these leaders, all this purpose, and discipline, and resilience, it all takes a toll. And history seems to suggest, and this is why we cherish democracy, and we cherish terms of office, and we cherish elections.

History seems to suggest that even for the best of them and the most successful of them, there’s a sweet spot of between six and eight years when they’re at their very best. And after eight years, most of them just seem either to lose touch or simply run out of steam. I think the Framers of the US Constitution were very smart, and it’s no accident that US presidents can only serve for two terms of four years each, eight years in total. Eight years is sufficient time for a leader to truly make their mark, but it’s not enough time for them to grow stale or tired or more importantly, to stop listening. Towards the end, Margaret Thatcher stopped listening and became impermeable to advice. Towards the end, Teddy Roosevelt, who’d always described himself and seen himself as what he called a steward of the people, starts to confuse that idea with an autocrat who doesn’t need to take advice because he alone knows what’s best for the people. And even Franklin Roosevelt, towards the end, became fractious and impatient and was dreaming up plans to stuff the Supreme Court full of his placement. Leadership is hard and it’s exhausting. And as one minister close to Margaret Thatcher put it, “Every revolution has its expiry date.” Thank you.

Okay, so let’s have a look at comments and let’s see what people have to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Sandy Lessner. Hello, Sandy. Thank you. “Churchill called Attlee a sheep in sheep’s clothing, I think.” Yes, he did. I mean, Churchill. Churchill was funny about Attlee because Attlee was always very loyal to Churchill. I mean, remember, he’d served as his deputy prime minister. And Churchill never returned the favour and Churchill always underestimated Attlee. But yes, he did call him a sheep in sheep’s clothing.

Q: Arlene Goldberg says, “Why did you leave out George Washington?”

A: Well, it’s a very fair question. Washington was another great… And I only apologise. Had I but had the time, is all I can say.

Louise Sweet says, “Reinvitation for comments, some thoughts need for conspicuous public display and recognition, few alternative leaders or policies, relevant followers, access to vote, media resources, capacity to be both clear and to obfuscate, support for and feeble opposition to leaders’ policies in their implementation, staff confidence and tenacity.” So you have to have a real diversity of skill to do this job and to do this job well.

And Catherine Peters says, “There’s a great PBS documentary series by Ken Burns on Teddy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Well, I mean, quite frankly, anything that Ken Burns touches tends to be utterly brilliant. So I’ve not seen it, I’d love to look it up, but I’m sure it is absolutely fantastic.

Q: David Sefton says, “Can you please compare Kennedy and LBJ?”

A: Kennedy was charismatic but an unsuccessful president, whereas LBJ was unloved but successful, especially civil rights legislation. Ah, I mean, this is a very difficult question, and it’s been tackled by people who know a lot more about the subject than I do.

Q: What would’ve happened if Kennedy lived?

A: I mean, it’s one of the great what-if questions of recent political history. Certainly, Kennedy could inspire.

Q: Kennedy was a visionary, but could Kennedy have got the passage of legislation of all that legislation through in the way that LBJ did?

A: Given that he didn’t use LBJ, he didn’t value LBJ, and LBJ’s superpower was understanding how Congress worked and how to get things done in Congress. I don’t know is the answer. It’s one of the unanswered questions, but thank you for raising that.

Julian Dutermann refers to the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Team of Rivals” about Lincoln. Absolutely fantastic book. Anyone interested in enabling who, I think I have to confess, is probably my personal favourite of any leader everywhere. But it’s a fantastic book and thoroughly recommended.

Q: “Might it not be conceivable that these qualities also operate in the character development of the worst leaders in history. Hitler, Stalin, et cetera,” says, Bobby.

A: Well, I mean, it’s a great question. And I didn’t include the word empathy among my six because what’s interesting is that not all of these leaders are empathetic. I mean, Margaret Thatcher does display some empathy, but empathy’s not a word that jumps out at you. And certainly, LBJ had empathy, but again, it wasn’t a defining characteristic of him. Neither was it in the case of Attlee. Certainly, I think that some of the qualities, certainly, can be applied to some of the most evil dictators who crossed the 20th century and previous centuries. But I think one of the things that kind of saves it for the others is adaptiveness, funny enough, because Hitler, and Stalin, and the rest were not very adaptive. And for them, the only reality was their reality. And that’s what they didn’t have. And again, the fact that we value democracy because we know that even the strongest and most successful of leaders, after a certain time, is going to get out of touch, is obviously another great big difference in terms of the systems in which we operated.

Rita Canorac, thank you. It says, “As a side note, Lincoln suffered clinical depression.” Absolutely, he did. And when he had his first term of office, he supported a whole raft of infrastructure projects, which all got canned after an economic recession. And he went into a dire, dire depression because he felt he’d let everyone down, all of his constituents. And that was one of the things that allowed him to develop resilience in the future.

Q: Rose says, “Excellent talk, but it was Ernest Bevin who was the cause of problems in Palestine. Big anti-Semite, or am I incorrect?”

A: You are not incorrect, Rose. Bevin was not a great supporter of the Zionist cause, and that’s something of an understatement, and I certainly wouldn’t defend him in that area. But, as I say, in this one area, he was invaluable to his master, Clement Attlee.

Q: Yolanda says, “If you had to rank them, what would be at the top?”

A: I think that question is above my pay grade, so I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know how to answer that.

And Rita, again, shares the same birthday as Lincoln. So that’s good to know. And I think we’re probably running out of time, so let me just take one or two more of the comments.

“When you run a contracting…” Sorry, this is from Saul, from Saul Galgo. “When you’re in a contracting or manufacturing business, you have the same problems as running a country, and you have to solve surprise problems that come up when you least expect it.” Good luck, Saul. You should do one of these lectures, and you should tell us all about the trials and tribulations.

And Neil Scott has pointed out, has corrected me. “It’s actually the Twenty-Second Amendment that prohibits more than two terms. It’s not in the Constitution.” So my apologies for saying that credit was due to the Framers.

So thank you, everyone, thank you for joining. I hope that gave everyone a little bit of food for thought. And if anyone has any other thoughts on the matter, I hope over time, we all get to meet and we all get to share them together. So, thank you everyone. Thank you very much.