THIS WEEK'S LETTER..... A for Ambition

Who wants to be Prime Minister anyway?

DID Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak ever plan to be Prime Minister? Certainly both are desperate for the job now, but have they always held that ambition? Or did they only suddenly decide to run the country about six weeks ago – and if so, should that worry us?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, some people are born leaders, some achieve leadership and others have it thrust upon them. In business, if you were going to internally promote someone to managing director you’d choose an employee who had consistently proved a desire, drive and imagination to get things done and take a team with them. You probably wouldn’t choose someone who suddenly said: “Well, it had never occurred to me but you know what? Now we’re here, I’ll give it a shot.”

Just as few employees arrive on the bottom rung determined to take over the company, few MPs enter parliament with the immediate goal of becoming Prime Minister. Who knows if Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss did, but even if that’s true, everyone in most employment situations knows vocalising a desire to depose the boss so you can do the job better will end your career pretty swiftly.

‘You can’t openly say you want the boss’s job’

This may be why In November 2020, Rishi Sunak scoffed at an interviewer who asked him if he wanted the top job with a brief “God, no”. And Liz Truss, posed a similar question in 2018, limited her public service ambition to “I’d love to be Chancellor one day”. (And of course both may also have been channelling Jim Hacker, famously briefed by Sir Humphrey Appleby to respond to similar questions by saying “while he does not seek the office, he is pleased to offer himself in the service of his country, and that should his colleagues persuade him that is the best way he can serve, he might reluctantly have to accept the responsibility, whatever his personal wishes might be…”)

We should, though, probably hope Sunak and Truss have harboured long-held ambition to be Prime Minister.

For one thing, you don’t want a PM who doesn’t want to be there. For another, history tells us that most politicians with a clear ambition for No10 end up being the most effective Prime Ministers – or at least, the most impactive. For instance, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair all craved the top job so they could change society, and every one of those three (for good or ill, depending on your view) achieved that. Much less effective were those politicians who ended up as Prime Minister by default, accident and maybe even to their own surprise. Perhaps that’s why, say, John Major, Theresa May, Gordon Brown and Jim Callaghan never ruled with the same authority and were clearly less impactive as a result.

‘Ambition on its own simply isn’t enough’

We must remember of course that ambition doesn’t by itself make for effective leadership. If you’re only seeking power for power’s sake, rather than for what you believe is the greater good of the team/company/country, your leadership will likely be a disaster. Recent evidence both here and in the US proves that.

Leaders, bosses or politicians whose personalities bulldoze everyone in order simply to serve themselves cannot hope to unite or lead an effective team, and everything unravels pretty quickly, especially if they’re dishonest about it.

(In our house we nicknamed our outgoing PM “Chasing Cars”: “(On a podium:) If I lie here? (In parliament:) If I just lie here? (To the cabinet:) Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”) Ambition for the greater good is a fine quality. Ambition ostensibly for the greater good while actually serving only yourself, not so much.

Hopefully of course, whoever replaces Boris Johnson in the next few days will show more integrity and honesty. They could begin by proving themselves open, trustworthy individuals. How? Well, maybe they could start by not being fined for breaking the laws they set. (Bad luck Rishi.) Or by not having had an extra-marital affair. (Bad luck Liz.)

No-one is ever ready to be Prime Minister

Whatever, it’s likely neither Truss nor Sunak is actually prepared for the top job. That’s because few Prime Ministers are, and that’s because almost none is voted in and out by the public. In fact (and a corker of a fact it is too) every Prime Minister of the last half-century – Johnson, May, Cameron, Brown, Blair, Major, Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson – has either arrived at or left Downing Street only because someone quit. The last PM to both enter and depart No10 through a public mandate at a General Election was Edward Heath (1970 and 1974). Which considering we live in a democracy, is quite startling.

Whoever wins the race for No10 has to decide what their leadership style will be. Blair once described the “journey” of a politician as going from “wanting to please all the people all the time, to realising his responsibility is to decide – and when he decides, he divides”. Major, by contrast, admitted his leadership style wasn’t polarising enough, saying “the biggest mistake I made was this wretched ability to see both sides of an argument”. Truss, the clear favourite to win the present contest, has already – and with a hilarious unwitting etymological nod – seemingly nailed her colours to the mast: “I’m quite bolshy, I like to get my own way.”

But perhaps initially more importantly than deciding how they’ll lead is deciding that they really want to lead at all.

As I say, I don’t know if Truss or Sunak have long harboured ambitions to be Prime Minister. But if they always have – and if they really are working for us, not themselves – they might even be quite good at it.