The leadership void at the top of the UK

Only in the pantomime realm of politics would Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson ever have been able to don the epithet ‘leader’ and get away with it.

He certainly wouldn’t have cut it in the world of business – as his excruciatingly incoherent ‘Peppa Pig’ speech to the CBI last November proved quite conclusively. With the ghost of his infamous “f business” comment still lingering in the memory of the audience, his ill-prepared and incompetent ramblings shone a very harsh spotlight on his inadequacies. Johnson would have been hard pressed to be hired by anyone in that room in any meaningful role, let alone in a position of leadership.

The voters of North Shropshire obviously recognised this fact last year and according to the recent SkyNews / YouGov poll, the Tory membership is coming to the same conclusion. 38% believe he is doing badly, 34% think he should stand down and 39% of Conservative Party members say he cannot be trusted. And that was before the latest indefensible revelation of yet another Downing St lockdown party. The majority of the UK now believe he should resign.

Even members of his own Cabinet seem to have come to the same conclusion – Boris Johnson is a woeful leader.

It is something that the business leaders who attend my leadership workshops and seminars have been telling me for a while now. Whenever I ask delegates ‘What does a poor leader look like?’, the cry from all corners of the room used to be ‘Donald Trump’. ?The response I have received since November 2020 is a little closer to home.

In these workshops, we also discuss and debate the traits of great leaders. Inevitably, the resulting list looks something like the box above.

As we reached this part of the workshop with a gathering of 30 business leaders a few weeks ago, one of the delegates remarked, “Boris Johnson fails every one of those.”

And it is true: the current UK Prime Minister does not score well, if at all, on any of the above list of leadership traits.

Let’s take a stroll through each one.

1. He doesn’t seem to care enough about anything apart from himself and the next ballot. If he cared, he would give Parliament the respect it deserves and actually answer the questions put to him rather than dodging them with waffle. If he cared, he would have delivered the controlled immigration the country needs to fill the chasm of vacancies that exist across the NHS, hospitality and so many other sectors. He would have a vision and a plan for fixing aged care. He would have provided ventilation for schools eighteen months ago. He would not have reduced international aid. He would not have held or condoned parties during lockdowns while fining others for doing the same and preventing people from being with their loved ones or attending funerals.

Johnson is ‘Mr Entitled’ and ‘Mr Superficial’ rolled into one. The rules don’t seem to apply to him, even when he is making them. He is renowned for an inattention to detail and an inability to plan. And when it comes to leadership, jolly soundbites, witticisms and dressing up for photo opportunities are no substitute for integrity, an achievable vision and a plan to deliver.

2. He is no longer trusted by an increasing proportion of the population. There have been too many lies, too much disregard of Parliament, too many dodgy contracts, too many Peerages for party donors, too many Barnyard Castles and Downing St Parties, too much prevarication and late or no decision-making, too little admission of wrongdoing. I could have just stopped after ‘lies’.

And he shows no sign of reforming. On January 5, during the first PMQs of 2022, he got his facts wrong about the ‘Warm Home Discount’ twisted UK GDP statistics and told four bare-faced lies about inequality, labour policy, immigration and his own previous comments about inflation. In Parliament. Let’s see what he does today as he tries to dodge the indefensible.

3. He displays no genuine empathy. Johnson claims to empathise with ‘red wall’ voters whilst thinking it is completely normal for a Tory donor to fund his flat refurbishments and standing by as food banks multiply at a shameful rate. He is happy to use National Insurance to raise tax revenue even though it hits the same ‘red wall’ voters disproportionately. He talks of ‘levelling up’ but without a coherent strategy to achieve it. He feigns empathy, but the smirking unwillingness to answer direct questions, empty rhetoric and cringeworthy references to muppets and cartoon characters give him away.

4. He hates making decisions. On the 20th of December he held a nationally-broadcast press conference after a two-hour cabinet meeting to announce that he was making no decision on Covid restrictions. The next day, he was forced to announce that he wouldn’t be making a decision until after Christmas. On the 2nd January, the decision was postponed yet again. On January 5, he boasted to the House of Commons of his approach. Perhaps his repeated non-decision-making will turn out to be one of the best decisions he has ever made, but that’s not the point. Good leaders project a feeling of confidence. This one projects an air of dithering and reluctance to make decisions. Granted, the role of a Prime Minister is incredibly tough. It requires clear decision-making with insufficient data. It requires someone capable of making decisions.

5. Does he change his mind when facts change? Yes, sometimes, but to twist a phrase from Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, only after exhausting all the alternatives. U-turns on free school meals, protection for Owen Patterson, international quarantine, masks, restrictions, … all were either late decisions after lengthy prevarication or corrections for decisions that should never have been made in the first place.

6. Create more leaders? He doesn’t even like to hire them. He seems to have surrounded himself with too many yes-men and yes-women. Like most ego-driven leaders, it appears to be all about him. Strong leaders hire people who are better than they are. Weak leaders do the opposite. They place loyalty above competence, creating weak leadership teams in the process.

7. He enables very few people to shine. You can see this every time Tory MPs are whipped into voting against their consciences or the best interests of their electorates – e.g. voting against free school meals in the middle of a pandemic or against making emptying sewerage into our waterways illegal. You can see it every time a hapless cabinet minister is sent out to parrot meaningless scripted comments approved by Number 10 in an attempt to justify the latest Johnson-induced crisis – proroguing parliament, changing the rules to protect Owen Patterson, the position that ‘there was no party and, if there was, all rules were followed – including the one banning parties’ or ‘of course it is normal for the PM not to know who paid for his wallpaper or to tell us whether he attended a party in his own garden during lockdown’.

8. Stewardship? This is the second most important trait of any leader as it encompasses so many of the others on this list. Johnson’s legacy seems to be plunging rapidly into the twin troughs of embarrassment and disaster. He will leave a divided nation that is significantly poorer than it would have been without him. Business investment was on an upward trajectory until 2016. So was GDP. Both have since headed south with the gradual exodus of jobs, capital, talent and businesses from the UK – mostly to Europe. Even Jacob-Rees Mogg’s investment firm opened an office in Dublin. Trade with Europe is down 15% and food exports to the EU are down 24% according to the Government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility. These numbers will sink even lower now that the mountain of import customs paperwork and border checks have kicked in since New Year’s Day. The cost of Brexit now significantly outweighs the cost of EU membership – and this gap is growing every month. The UK economy is already 1.5% lower that it would have been and will be reduced permanently by “about 4%” according to the OBR. These figures are enormous. Wales, Cornwall, fisherman and farmers have all discovered that the money and the ‘easiest of EU trade deals’ they were promised will not be forthcoming. The best performing part of the UK lately has been Northern Ireland – because when it comes to trade, it is effectively still in the EU. ?

Meanwhile, Johnson’s record during the pandemic has been shambolic - and fatal for so many. The first year of Covid saw the UK recording the highest deaths per capita and the worst economic performance of the G7. Even the much-touted vaccination programme has not been ‘world beating’, as he repeatedly claims. On Dec 21st he declared that the UK “has vaccinated more people as a percentage of our population than virtually anywhere else” whereas the truth is that we lagged significantly behind more than a dozen nations, including several in Western Europe. Even Australia has vaccinated more of its population. But it’s just another ‘'patriotic’ truth-twisting fable from this Prime Minister. Like Trump, we are becoming desensitised to his lies. That is part of the problem.

Stewardship is the act of leaving your organisation, department or team – or in this case, your nation - in a better state than when you found it. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will leave a nation that is poorer, lonelier, more dysfunctional, less credible and less relevant than it was before him.

9. ‘Humility’ is a word that does not seem to exist in the Johnson lexicon.

10. Share the credit and take the blame? Quite the opposite. A poor leader sends juniors out to explain the inexplicable. A poor leader sets up scapegoats to take the fall. A poor leader blames others for poor outcomes.

11. Is he genuine? Yes, the real Johnson has always been clear for all to see. According to his Eton report cards and his previous employer at The Telegraph, he has always been an entitled, shambolic, truth-twisting, opportunistic showman. Quite genuinely.

12. Leadership today is a team game, not a solo pursuit. Woeful leaders build woeful leadership teams. If the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg’s sources and tweets are to be trusted, Ministers have not been inclined to speak up in Cabinet meetings, preferring instead to text one another about how bad things are.

13. Finally, and worst of all – he doesn’t deliver results. Brexit has not been ‘done’. The ‘oven ready’ deal that he negotiated with the EU and was elected on seems to be no longer fit for purpose. It never was. It never could be. ￡350m a week has not been diverted from the EU to the NHS. It never will be. Cornwall has not been reimbursed for the loss of its EU subsidies. Neither has Wales. The money will not materialise because it no longer exists. The fishing industry has been used. Agriculture has been let down. The UK’s greatest export and largest generator of taxes, the financial services industry, has been ignored. The other trade deals that have been agreed have been inconsequential. If FTAs are ever concluded with US, China and India, they will come at a significant price.

Even The Telegraph is now bemoaning the fact that, because of Brexit, Britain has “missed out on a global trade boom” as we languish behind key rival nations. In the same article, “Time is running out to prove Brexit is not a historic failure” (4 Jan 2022), Chief City Commentator Ben Marlow lamented that Johnson’s claim of “taking back control of our borders” simply hasn’t happened. No plan is in place to fill the gaping and growing vacancies caused by a combination of Brexit, Covid and the well-meaning Furlough Scheme. The NHS is in desperate need of skilled people. As is dentistry, the haulage industry, hospitality, fruit farms, … the list is long. No Aged Care strategy is visible – merely a plan to raise National Insurance and tip the proceeds of that tax into the NHS. Even the much-vaunted HS2 has been curtailed. COP26 ended in disappointment.

Instead of the diffuclt task of governing, Johnson seems to have chosen from day one to simply continue to market to us. He is in constant campaigning mode. Almost every piece of information from Number 10 is over-hyped - so many facts twisted; too many initiatives overpromise and under-deliver; too many smirks, so many lies.

One of the key reasons this PM doesn’t deliver is because he doesn’t plan. It’s all reactive, ‘back of the fag packet’ bluster and superficial soundbites. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. But what Ben neglected to say is that to have a plan, you first have to care.

If Johnson was in business, he would have been sacked by now. Actually, no, that’s not true. He would never have been given the job in the first place.?