Training politicians makes them apparachiks not representatives of the people

The electorate will dump politicians if they believe they don’t serve the electorate’s interests. No amount of training in leadership training changes this truth.

Why do we have politicians? And, for that matter, what is a politician and have we blurred the lines between politics and public administration to the point where it is difficult to understand where one stops and the other begins. I’m asking this question because I want to understand what makes for a good politician. Now I have an ideological bias towards conservatism but there are plenty of conservative - and especially Conservative - politicians who are not good politicians. I can disagree with people like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton but also recognise that they were good politicians, and I can like the agenda of someone like Liz Truss while seeing that she failed as a political leader. But is the reason for the difference administrative competence or something else?

Geoff Mulgan who used to run Blair’s strategy unit and was then his director of policy, takes the view that good politics is about administrative competence:

“It is an oddity of democracies that this, perhaps most important, of roles is treated more casually than any other.   Other positions of leadership require skills: years of education are required for lawyers, doctors, scientists and even business Chief Executives. Yet for politicians there is little if any training and the primary methods of selection test for qualities that only loosely align with those needed once in post.”

Mulgan (perhaps not surprisingly from a regular lecture at the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘China Executive Leadership Academy’) is a big fan of training politicians, ideally before they become politicians.

“China invests heavily in training its leaders, who must attend party schools...write essays that are marked, and stay on top of the leading ideas in technology or law (while also confirming their familiarity with Marxism–Leninism). The seriousness of their attention to skills and capacities contrasts strikingly with the democracies.”

Politics in a one-party state is self-evidently very different from politics in a robust and competitive democracy. But the skills Mulgan describes are those appropriate to administrative competence rather than those that refer to politics. Under Mulgan’s model we are not training politicians but training administrators or else turning successful politicians into administrators. The Chinese model he advocates involves compulsion - ‘you will go on this course’ - but achieving political positions in democracies is not determined by education or training but by the ability to persuade people to vote for you and your ideas.

When I stood down as Conservative leader in Bradford, I went on the planning committee. By this time I’d been a councillor for 23 years, had been Executive Portfolio Holder for Regeneration for six of those years, had an MSc in Urban Regeneration, and in the course of those years attended dozens of planning meetings. Yet the system insisted I attend a training course on planning, one which involved the planning officer and lawyer conducting the session saying ‘you’ll know this Simon’ a lot of times. Despite this, along with my slightly dorky resistance to being trained, I think a course on the rules under which a planning committee operates is a good idea given the significance of the decisions members will make.

But Mulgan isn’t talking about training people in the rules of the system they’ve been elected to help run, but about training people in a nebulous thing called leadership. Everywhere I’ve been whether the private sector, the voluntary sector or government has been obsessed with leadership and training leaders. Yet nowhere have I seen good leaders created by a training programme. Indeed the best leaders I’ve worked with were essentially entrepreneurial and self-made rather than the products of elite higher education programmes. To clarify here, many of those good leaders had good, in some cases exceptional, academic qualifications but their leadership was self-driven rather than learned.

I recall doing a talk about business strategy (something I think probably more important than leadership) to some MBA students and describing how my very successful boss, Judith Donovan, operated. My observation was that, at any given point, the focus of her business’s strategy was the thing that Judith thought most important. Sometimes this seemed obsessive to the point of craziness - getting the flowers in reception changed three times so they were just right, we won the business so who am I to say the flowers weren’t the clincher?

The same went for another successful female boss of mine, Margaret, Baroness Eaton. I used to joke with my wife that, when you met with Margaret, you always talked about Margaret’s agenda even if you’d asked for the meeting to talk about something else. And Margaret’s agenda was always in that grey area between public administration and politics, usually seeking to make sure that political considerations are part of the decision-making. Politics is a very different discipline to public administration. Mulgan is right that we select for a critical political skill - getting elected - but overlook other important aspects of good politics such as having a clear objective-driven agenda and knowing how to exercise veto (on this last point, another former colleague, Anne Hawksworth, once observed that her main power as a portfolio holder was saying ‘no’ to offer proposals).

But I don’t think you can train people how to be politicians. Mulgan’s evidence is based on the experience of the Chinese Communist Party, elite Mayoral Programmes funded by Mike Bloomberg and the European Union. I do not think these managerialist and technocratic programmes get anywhere close to the process of politics or, indeed, to answering my first question - what are politicians for?

In China, politicians exist to ensure the ideological purity of the public administration. Plus, of course, China is not a democracy. I don’t think therefore that China’s approach to training politicians is relevant to politics and government in a Western democracy. One of the joys of Western systems is that one day experienced, technically-trained and respected men and women are leading the government, and the next day because those politicians upset the farmers, the public elect a party filled with people who have no experience of government. And the difference between these right-of-centre populists and left-wing populists like Podemos and Syriza (or Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter) is that the politicians arrive with a certainty about what is wrong rather than a naive belief they know what is right.

In a parliamentary democracy like Britain’s the first purpose of a politician is representation. For all that we speak of ministers and government, the main function for an MP is to go down to the big building in London to make decisions on behalf of the electors who put them there. It is true that proportional systems (like the Dutch one I reference above) tend to place more emphasis on party programmes but the UK, USA and Ireland all elect people to represent people. And representation matters because it is the essential principle of democracy. It doesn’t matter how much you developed and trained your candidate if the electorate decides to elect a farmer in a flat cap instead. In simple terms the politicians tell the electors what they will argue for down in London and those electors will choose which one they like most.

Once politicians arrive in parliament filled with representative purpose, a new politics starts. The one where, hopefully, the things those representatives campaigned to promote come to the fore but which in truth is dominated by a more personal agenda. Plus something - the agenda of public administrators - that politicians hadn’t considered. These public administrators - civil servants and their pals in the lobbying industry, council directors with big corporate empires - are an important part of the political infrastructure meaning that the elected politician has to deal with their agenda. And most of these administrators consider themselves experts and the politicians as either a nuisance or a means to an end.

My experience of the relationship between public administration and politics is that the administrators see their agenda as good and the politicians agenda as an obstacle to delivering what is good. Unless, that is, the politician arrives (and this is not at all unusual even at national level) without an agenda beyond having a big job whe nthe agenda is the officer agenda.

Political leadership should be about aligning your agenda and the civil servants’ agenda without compromising too much on what you want to achieve. This, I suspect, is the real reason for the struggles of UK governments since 2016 - success has only happened where these two agendas overlap and in critical areas (Europe, immigration, health) they are too far apart. Leadership in this situation is about recognising that turning the ship to point in the right direction takes time and care.

When we took leadership of Bradford Council in 2000, we were prepared in that we had a clear published agenda and, because of the manner in which pre-Blair local government operated, a relationship with officers. Even so the critical changes we wanted to see were held back while senior officers gave priority to their preferences and ideas. It would be wrong to simply dump all the projects and programmes in place and impose ones based on our agenda (not least because that ‘agenda’ consists of two paragraphs in a manifesto). Nevertheless, as we approached the 2004 election and took stock of that agenda, we realised perhaps 70% of it was delivered or in process of being delivered. And this was despite wider agendas (Blair’s regional development agencies especially) and events (the Bradford riots of 2001) drawing us away from the agenda on which we were elected in 2000. Plus that we’d never governed with a majority.

I don’t think that training would have achieved much to make our performance better. Worse, I fear that adopting the CCP approach that Geoff Mulgan supports, leads to the agenda of elected people becoming subservient to the agenda of the administration. Political leadership becomes politicians representing the government to electors rather than representing electors to the government. And this leads to a second problem with modern politics, the tendency to see politics as a career, as just another job within the wider polity. This view gives us the debate about how much we pay MPs, ministers, councillors and even the PM alongside the perennial frou-frou when MPs have outside employment. Being an MP we’re told is a full time job and the MP gets well paid for that job so doing something else alongside the role of elected representative (lawyer, writer, helping run a family firm, doing a TV show, etc.) gets characterised as somehow shirking from the politician's real job.

The situation is worse for local councillors who get an allowance these days and receive the same criticism about the ‘big money’ except that allowance isn’t a decent wage and doesn’t get close to compensating for the loss of opportunity to do an actual job. The system, even with the requirement on employers to allow time off for council business, is designed to work against people who have a full time professional job and pushes us towards all but the lowest tier of elected person being in what the system sees as a ‘job’.

We have a presumption about politics being a job and an assumption among the professional officer cadre that politicians exist to put their ideas through the democratic sausage machine with the minimum amount of fuss and bother. Training politicians in the manner Geoff Mulgan advocates doesn’t lead to better politicians (and we should maybe set aside his desire to create a 21st century version of Oxford’s PPE based on ‘engineering’ principles that speaks to a deeply undemocratic technocratic preference). Instead we will get compliant politicians whose task is to sell policy developed by academics and lobbyists and embedded in the administration via their civil service connections. The idea that a set of politicians can achieve power with a programme for government based on clear objectives and a well-presented vision is only accepted if those objectives and vision comply with the managerialism preferred by public administrators.

Despite this, the most effective politicians are those who have sold their vision to the civil service even when the experts that service relies on hate the policy. Michael Gove’s was effective as Education Secretary-of-State because he arrived with a clear programme, set up the rationale for that programme, and promoted it via external activism. The education ‘blob’ was resisted as free schools, academies and phonics for reading became the programme of the department (and largely remain so 13 years later). While I’m sure Gove was amenable to learning, this leadership did not come from training but from having a programme before arriving in government.

For all that, the opportunity to learn is valuable for politicians and training might provide some of this development. The danger, however, is that politics ends up being little more than a middle management role that presents promotion opportunities for a few within the overall administration. Politicians become part of the system (as we see in China) rather than as the people who the public chose to lead the public’s government. Mulgan’s agenda fills this latter role:

“Later in the year I will be publishing a much more systematic survey of the current state of training for governments, covering MPAs in many universities, the work of civil service colleges of all kinds, as well as the programmes mentioned here, with some clear messages about how many of these have lagged behind what governments actually need.”

In business the best leaders are a mixed bunch but the predominant characteristic isn’t having a higher qualification in business administration. The dominant characteristic of the best business leadership is being entrepreneurial, something that is easier to enable than it is to teach. Enterprising leaders give those around them space and permission to develop ideas and fit emerging ideas into their own vision and strategy. In my experience nobody with a ‘Masters in Business Administration’ who wasn’t already entrepreneurial before that course, is going to come out the end of it as a better leader or better strategist. Likewise I see little prospect of a technocratic ‘Masters in Public Administration’ producing political leadership.

Finally though, in a democracy the people make the decision. And it doesn’t matter how much training you give to politicians, how much they are embedded in the administration of government. In the end - you only need to take a look at Italy - the electorate will dump those politicians if they believe they don’t serve the electorate’s interests. No amount of training in leadership changes this truth.