Years ago when I was a teacher, the deputy head was sent on a management course to learn how things should be done. He returned with a briefcase bulging with stuff about 'mission statements', and 'appraisals' and 'mentoring' and other, at the time, newish ideas about how we could be dragged screaming into the twentieth century. If only things were so simple now This was in the time before risk assessments and suchlike and to many of us all this stuff seemed incredibly exotic and outlandish.
I don't intend to go into the minutiae of organisations today, not least because to be honest I know bugger all about management of any sort and anything I might write would merely be a rehash of something off Wikipedia. If you are interested may I point you thither.
I am however quite interested, at least for today, in the concept of leadership. Almost without exception all those who have refused either to serve or to stay in the shadow cabinet have cited Jeremy Corbyn's lack of leadership as their main reason. 'We cannot work with him,' they say, 'because of his total lack of leadership.'
They do not seem to see his change of direction as a problem, at least publicly, even to the extent of putting forward a challenger who has claimed many of Corbyn's policies as his own. This is of course duplicitous of them, to say the least. Many came to prominence in the party under Blair and Brown, and that is the sort of party they still want. However to admit this and to reject Corbyn's more socially aware and caring policies would not paint them in a very sympathetic light and so they attack his leadership style indeed.
They claim he is not a leader. Well certainly until September last year he was not and never had been a leader. He had been a member of a loose coalition of left leaning like minded Labour MPs which had no formal structure and no leader. Indeed if you read accounts of how he got to stand in the leadership election in the first place it seems that he was the only one left and agreed to do it in the absence of an obvious alternative. The party, and I am sure Corbyn himself, thought that the left needed a voice in the election and I don't suppose he expected to win any more than any of the other candidates thought he would.
But once he started campaigning it became clear that in and around the Labour party there was a huge appetite for socialism. The slow dismantling of the state begun by Thatcher and continued by Blair was not everybody's taste. Up to that point then only possible outlet for such feelings was via the Green Party, who were the only truly socialist party in the running, but they were tagged as being tree huggers and loonies in sandals and easily dismissed by the media and had little chance under our voting system of making any sort of breakthrough.
Here now was a chance to take a party with a long and interesting history, with experience of government, with all the infrastructure in place to fight a decent campaign, here was a chance to return this party back to its rightful place on the left. Not the hard left, as some would have it, just the left. I cannot have been the only person who saw what was happening in Britain, with creeping privatisation and the dominance of 'The Market' and felt a sickening sense of powerlessness every time there was a General Election. Who to vote for? Generally the lesser of two weevils.
Once he had won, ironically swept to power by a system designed to do just the opposite, he had to decide how he was going to run things. He had no permanent team, many were 'on loan' so to speak from other jobs. He laid his stall out pretty early on. He would listen to the concerns of actual people and use his time at PMQs to ask their questions. This he has continued to do despite a barrage of ill mannered heckling from those who should know better, and from the Tory benches as well. Tories of course know that constituents are there to do as they are told, to be seen and not heard.
The other defining characteristic of Jeremy Corbyn, which sets him aside form most other leading politicians is that he has time for people and treats them as adults. He doesn't try to pull the wool over their eyes, and behaves courteously towards them. This I suspect, though I have no evidence, is also at the heart of his leadership style, if that is what it is. He appoints someone to a job, trusts them and expects them to get on with it. There is a weekly shadow cabinet meeting where views can presumably be aired. One of Owen Smith's gripes was/is that he only had one meeting with the leader during his stint in the shadow cabinet. Corbyn points out that they met every week in shadow cabinet. On the other hand when it comes to the fact that they defeated the government on their welfare policy, Owen Smith claims all the credit. Okay Owen. Well done you. You were given a job and you went away and did it. It's what you are paid to do. Did you hang around outside the offices of whoever was running Pfizer when you worked for them? No? I thought not. You got on with your job. Why is this different?
I've just watched PMQs and I was very impressed by Corbyn's performance on grammar schools. Mrs May tried to shoehorn a couple of jokes in about his record as leader, but they were just that, shoehorned in, and didn't raise much of a laugh. Methinks the lady doth try too hard. She is not naturally funny and sadly it shows.
Now we also know why Dave has disappeared like shit off a shovel, with the publication today of a report condemning his part in attacking Libya and the fact that it contributed to the rise of Daesh. It seems he was putting as much distance between himself and Westminster as possible.
To end on a lighter note, one of the things our deputy head brought back with him was a useful list of the different types of boss one might encounter in one's career. It was a long time ago and I cannot remember the others but we decided that our boss was a 'seagull'. This was defined as the sort of boss you didn't see for ages and who would then suddenly appear and shit all over you. Because if this I made a seagull trophy to be awarded to the best player in the annual parents versus staff cricket match. Every year it was awarded to him, and he kept it prominently displayed in his study.
Cameron's style however could almost be described as reverse-seagull. He hangs around generally shitting on anything he can find then buggers off and you never see him again. For that I at least I suppose we should be grateful.
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