On Leadership

Now hopefully this will be the only time that anyone who considers themselves remotely attached to fairness and reasonability will make this comparison, but the shoes of John Terry and those of the Prime Minister have not fit altogether too differently recently. John Terry deposed and vilified for his philandering; Gordon Brown attacked for his attacking, the bully exposed. Both matters call into question the role of the leader in their respective arena.

I won’t exhaust the Terry mess any more than has already been done, but to summarise, the issue revolves around the question of whether or not his extramaritals affect his ability to captain his country. Similarly it is being asked of Mr Brown whether or not his alleged “bullying” renders him suitable for leadership of the nation.

My sympathies could not be further divided.

The leadership of your country is an enormous honour. Individuals are given the opportunity to walk out ahead of the shining lights of what my shores had to offer the rest of the world, as their leader. Captains, especially national captains, are no longer just “one of the lads”; they must be that and more. They are exemplars. Leaders of nations are supposed to be the best of us, the archetypal citizen, the brother, sister, mother and father. They must simultaneously walk two paths, the one that took them to the captaincy and the one that goes from there. It’s not a case of cutting out the gristle and bark, but one of adding to the prime meat and glossy varnish, because undeniably, far more than with any other member of the team, the captain has both a private and public role.

So in Terry’s case there is a widespread argument that he should be able to do whatsoever he wants off the field as long as he still leads once he jogs out of the tunnel. Conversely Mr Brown is being asked to strip away the heat and brimstone that propels him to lead and become just the media shell in which he is encased on leaving the black door of No. 10.

I would suggest that I would prefer my eventual progeny to take from Mr Brown’s column in this instance, not from Terry’s. Cheating on your wife and best friend is fairly black and white, whereas one man’s bullying is another man’s anger or frustration or geeing up. Bullying? It hardly seems likely that a man who reportedly sleeps little more than three hours a night would have the time or inclination to single out particular staff members in order to subject them to regular torrents of abuse from on high.

None of this is to say that I think either of them should necessarily be in leadership in the first place and, yes, more than ever, general elections mean camps are divided and lines drawn. But surely this is one of those rare times we could all see fit to give the beleaguered man at Downing Street a fair break.