There is excitement about who will be the new leader of the Tory party, and hence the new Prime Minister. Someone who can accomplish Brexit. Someone who can do the honourable thing by public opinion, the referendum result, and about the manner and terms upon which we leave. As fatigue with the whole show sets in, a resolve to see this through remains and is, if anything, fortified by the continuing uncertainty.
When Brexit is accomplished, we will need strong leadership to deal with the consequences and turn our new situation to advantage; to deliver on the promised land of the Brexit campaign. I have said all along, to anyone who would listen, that the people who lead us into the referendum result and into Brexit should lead us out of the European Union. That makes perfect sense and has done all along. It would have been so much better if we could have recognised that and implemented that truth back in 2016 and appointed a leader then who would have fitted that bill. My own strongly held view at that time was that it should be Boris Johnson and/or Michael Gove and/or any of the other leading Brexiteers who should have been immediately put in charge of the negotiations towards getting us out. How could we ever have allowed ourselves to think or act differently? It has simply produced a waste of time and energy and lead as into the situation we have now.
But having belatedly put that right, or seeming now to be on the cusp of doing so, we should not be under the illusion that having righted that wrong and given ourselves a new dawn the change which is now about to occur will on its own deliver, in the days that lies ahead, on all the other things which need fixing. The malaise in politics and the loss of public confidence in how it is done will endure nevertheless. The drama of Brexit under a new leader and the challenges of making the most of the opportunities arising will require strong leadership but should not blind us to the fact that leadership, as we have experienced it in the past, is just no longer available to us.
This leadership has been in the form of a strong individual leader. Such leaders no longer exist. Leadership now has to be a collaborative effort and what I have hitherto been a advocating as a means of providing a satisfactory Brexit, or a way forward from the vote which has led parliament into such an impasse, needs also to be at the foundation of how we now go forward into the promised land. If this promised land is simply to be a re run, or a reinvigoration, of the forces of the old which now need to be transformed into the practices of the new then we shall simply be pouring new wine into old bottles.
What was offered as a way to break the Brexit impasse in parliament, and recognise the underlying forces responsible for it coming into being in the first place, will need to apply to politics more generally going forward, if we are not simply to keep an old corpse going by artificially propping it up and animating it from without. The zombie is a popular theme in entertainment right now. We should be aware of it becoming a fact in politics, however sophisticatedly done to blind us to the reality. If we have not truly found a way to hear all the evidence, gather all the points of view, weigh and sift them all in a collaborative effort where strongly minded individuals work together to allow movement and find inspiration between them, then let us at least try to do this as something more like business as usual is restored to our future course, even though it will be anything other than normal with all the Brexit implications to resolve.
Don’t take my word for it. Look around to see where leadership actually is a rising now and it is within individuals but only when the act together. If this is unappealing, look around and ask yourself where the evidence lies for perpetuating the old style of leadership. It produces unsatisfactory outcomes which cannot find the endorsement they need to truly be taken up enthusiastically and with resolve. This has happened with Brexit; don’t let it happen with everything else.
The Emporer's New Clothes 