Looking for leverage

Greg Power

Greg Power was special adviser to Robin Cook and Peter Hain. For the last couple of decades he has been working in places from Baghdad to Belgrade, and Cape Town to Cairo, helping politicians strengthen their systems of government. His new organisation, Mētis, launches this week, devoted to developing the craft of political leadership, alongside a new substack.

The key to being an effective politician lies in quickly working out how little power you have, and finding ways to get stuff done anyway.

One of the exchanges most redolent of Keir Starmer’s time in office came in December last year, when he appeared before parliament’s Liaison Committee, the gathering of the Commons’ Select Committee chairs.

Asked what he had found most difficult in the first eighteen months, his plaintive response was that he “kept pulling levers” only to find that very little happened. Too much regulation and obstruction was getting in the way, he suggested.

The reaction of many seasoned parliament-watchers at the time was, “But Keir, it’s literally your job to make sure the levers do something …”. Which is a fair point. But it misses something more fundamental about the way that politics works.

If you’re only concerned with process, you’re likely to achieve very little. Getting anything done in government is as much about being able to navigate people, politics and behaviour, as it is about the system. And that single insight goes to the very heart of being an effective politician.

Starmer would have done well to absorb the lessons from his own national security adviser’s book on the Blair years. Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli: how to wield power in the modern world, recounts his time as chief of staff between 1997 and 2007, and in the first chapter notes that the dominant sensation for a PM first entering Number 10 will be how difficult it is to make anything happen.

Foreshadowing his future boss he states specifically, “A new prime minister pulls on the levers of power, and nothing happens.” The principal problem about the centre of government, he says, is not that it has too much power, but rather too little.

This is not a revelation. Most holders of the office have said similar things. But as Powell goes on to elaborate in the book, ensuring that the levers of government do something depends on persuasion, and carrying people with you. All political power is highly contingent, based on the ability to cajole, influence and build broad-based coalitions of support, and then hold them together. As he points out, this means that if you want to deliver on your promises to the electorate, you need to be a leader of remarkable skill.

It also reflects a deeper truism about politics, and what it takes to be an effective politician.

Having spent the last twenty years working with hundreds of politicians in more than sixty countries, newly-elected MPs and ministers everywhere seem constantly surprised by how little formal power they hold once they reach office. In contrast to the poetic flourishes of their campaign, the prosaic nature of legislative politics hits them hard.

The smart ones work this out quickly and set about finding ways to get around this by tapping into other sources of influence and leverage. Although they might lack formal power they have significant informal power, especially in their ability to convene. MPs sit at the centre of numerous and disparate networks at both national and local level. Rather than bleating about what they lack, they find ways around the formal process by connecting the concerns of different stakeholders, aligning the incentives at work, and constantly brokering, negotiating and compromising between those interests to hold their base together.

These ‘remarkable skills’ require tenacity, inventiveness, and entrepreneurialism, as well as a feel for politics and people. And they are as important for a prime minister as they are for a backbencher.

This is the essence of politics, or what political scientist James C Scott called ‘mētis’. Such skills are difficult to teach, and learnt by engaging with people and problems. They are honed through practice, experience, and by constantly having to adjust to uncertainty and opposition. As Scott puts it, they come from adapting quickly to unpredictable events and making the best of limited resources.

These are not, however, traits that have characterised Keir Starmer’s leadership. One of the most common complaints from ministers and MPs over the last two years is that Starmer does not do politics. He has instead tended to delegate the dealmaking to others, preferring to focus on what he seems to regard as the real business of being Prime Minister.

To be fair, he had limited time to learn these skills – suffering from the fact that he had only been an MP for five years before becoming leader, and only nine years before he became PM. Most of his predecessors had far longer apprenticeships before reaching high office. But also, for reasons I’ll explain in my next Substack, the years since 2015 were by far the worst time for any MP to learn the craft of being a politician.

The bigger problem is that he has not shown any interest in developing such skills and appears to regard the realities of politics as all a little distasteful. Yet, as Jonathan Powell explains, it is the very limits of formal power that require the Prime Minister to become an exceptional politician if they are to get anything done.

At a political level, government needs to be organised around the implicit recognition that power is limited and contingent. It feeds into everything including managing the parliamentary Labour Party and anticipating internal opposition, being clear about the implications of policies before they are announced, and ensuring that ministers and advisers know exactly what the government line is before they speak to any journalists.

But they are also basic management skills. Management in every profession is less about issuing instructions than leading a team and shaping its culture – it is the art of getting people to do what you want them to, but without having to ask. That depends on setting out a vision and values, as well as an array of interpersonal skills, understanding what motivates others and appealing to the personal, professional and political interests at work. Managerialism without managerial skills is unlikely to achieve much.

In this context, the appeal of Andy Burnham is obvious to most Labour backbenchers. He is evidently a more instinctive politician, comfortable with both people and politics. His note last week to members of the PLP was clearly designed to mark the difference between his style of leadership and that of Keir Starmer, emphasising his desire to change the culture, modernise parliament, listen to MPs’ views, and draw on their talents.

But, unlike Starmer, he also spent a long time honing the craft of politics. At several points in his book, Head North, written with Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram, he is at pains to point out how little power he had as MP, minister and Mayor. Yet the book is characterised by stories describing how the pair of them got around this, building the skills that enabled them to compensate for that lack of executive control.

Viewed in that light, two of the major criticisms that he faces – ‘away from Westminster for too long’ and ‘being a Mayor is not the same as being PM’ – start to look like advantages.

In the first place, British parliamentary politics has possibly never been as dysfunctional as it has since 2016. The rapidity of elections, Prime Ministers and turnover of MPs, alongside significant societal and technological shifts, has made the culture of the place far more fractured, fractious and polarised than it was when he was in government. Any attempt to change Westminster’s culture so that it is more constructive is probably more likely to be led by someone who can bring an outside perspective, and see more clearly the insidious creep of new norms over the last decade than those who have slowly absorbed them on the inside.

And second, the criticism that being a Mayor is not the same as being Prime Minister is self-evident. The obvious rejoinder is that no job prepares you adequately for being PM, as all of his recent predecessors have proved.

However, Burnham’s biggest achievement in Manchester is arguably in making the mayoralty matter. This was by no means guaranteed when he started. He came into a role characterised by few formal responsibilities and facing opposition from his own Labour council leaders who believed his only job was to reregulate the buses. As he put it, he wanted to put the Manchester role on a par with the more established Mayor in London.

Although there are genuine arguments about what he alone can claim to have achieved since he was elected as Mayor, the fact that he was able to turn it into a role so significant that he was able to use it as a springboard to Number 10 should not be underestimated.

He will need to bring all of those abilities to the job of Prime Minister. The economist J.K. Galbraith when working as an adviser to President Kennedy noted that “politics is not the art of the possible, it consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” The most successful Prime Ministers achieved things not because of the power conferred by the office, but rather because of the skills that that they deployed in getting around the job’s inherent limitations and challenges. Ultimately, the most skilful politicians are those who show the ability to make the most of what they have at their disposal.