The Rise of the Outsiders by Steve Richards

Author:Steve Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

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Most leaders of elected governments are nowhere near as powerful as they appear to be. Quite a lot of them struggle to stay in power for very long or to maintain a level of popularity that enables them to follow their convictions as far as they wish. Instead, they are forced to twist and turn pathetically. Democratic rule was never easy. Ruling has become even harder as globalization takes hold.

The gap between the way elected insiders are perceived and the reality of their neurotic, tentative hold on power is darkly comic. Tony Blair’s former press secretary, Alastair Campbell, noted that when he attended the G20 summits of international leaders, the media portrayed them as grand gatherings of the intimidatingly powerful. Here were leaders with a swaggering muscularity, deciding what to do next with their global might. Campbell observed at first hand that such gatherings were very different from that perception: a weekend away for anxious leaders worried about forthcoming elections, the state of the economy in their countries and in the wider world, security issues, the media. The ‘insiders’ had good cause for their neuroses. However strong some of them might appear to be, they governed most of the time in a weak political context.

Few of them dared to explain the reasons for their fragility – a trap that made them even more vulnerable. Most felt obliged to appear mighty and omnipotent, to feed the impression of strength. They could not admit to vulnerability, fearing that such an admission would be taken as a sign of hopeless weakness or would become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which public exploration of the constraints upon them would sap their authority and make them even more powerless. They were trapped. If they sought to explain their vulnerabilities, they would become even more vulnerable. Instead, the elected leaders gave interviews in which they insisted on how well they were doing, and how optimistic they were that their policies were transforming people’s lives for the better. In doing so, they seemed detached from the hard realities or, even worse, indifferent to them.

There was a classic example of the dilemma in the UK at the end of the summer of 2008, as the global economy moved towards its apocalyptic crisis. The then newish prime minister, Gordon Brown, was already under immense political pressure and wanted to hit the ground running after the summer holidays, a rare moment in the year to make a fresh start. He had given upbeat briefings on the state of the UK economy to British journalists accompanying him on a visit to the Olympics in China. He ached for some sense of optimism, after a turbulent few months.

Unknown to him, his chancellor, Alistair Darling, had given an interview to The Guardian in which he warned that the global economic conditions were the worst for sixty years. He was being open, and in some ways was stating the obvious. But when they were published, his words became self-fulfilling. The pound fell like a stone on the Monday afterwards.

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