Ahead of the publication of his book about leadership – definitely not aimed at
Keir Starmer – the former prime minister talks about relinquishing power, why
he’s not fazed about a second Trump term and being an AI evangelist
Were you to board an aeroplane piloted by a man who has never previously sat in
a cockpit, you’d be alarmed. Were you to face surgery by a woman with no medical
qualifications, you’d be frightened. Politics is the one profession that can put
someone in a position of great power and responsibility without any prior
experience or demonstration of ability. “It’s bizarre,” Tony Blair says. “In any
other walk of life, that doesn’t happen.” When he became prime minister in 1997
he was in his early forties and an absolute neophyte at governing. He was much
better at it, he believes, towards the end of his decade at No 10 than at the
outset. So he’s written a book about the dos and the don’ts of leadership
“because government is a science as well as an art”.
In the first flush of taking power, leaders “listen eagerly” because they grasp
that they know little or nothing about governing. In the second stage, they know
enough to think they know everything and become impatient with listening. Hubris
becomes a danger, inviting nemesis. “You’ve got some experience, but your
experience makes you believe that you know more than you actually do. And that’s
the risk. That’s why I say stage two is the most difficult and many people never
get to stage three.” Maturity comes with the realisation that what they know is
not the sum total of political knowledge. Once again, “with more humility”, they
listen and learn.
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Tag - Keir Starmer
The prime minister’s beauty sleep is interrupted by an unwelcome visitor with
designs on the government’s spending plans
• You can order your own copy of this cartoon
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Bruce Daisley calls for ‘beefed-up’ online safety laws and compares tech
billionaires to unaccountable oligarchs
* As an ex-Twitter boss, I have a way to grab Elon Musk’s attention. If he
keeps stirring unrest, get an arrest warrant
Elon Musk should face “personal sanctions” and even the threat of an “arrest
warrant” if found to be stirring up public disorder on his social media
platform, a former Twitter executive has said.
It cannot be right that the billionaire owner of X, and other tech executives,
be allowed to sow discord without personal risks, Bruce Daisley, formerly
Twitter’s vice-president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, writes in the
Guardian.
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It cannot be right that Musk can sow discord without personal risk. He’s a
jetsetter: perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mind
The way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a
fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own.
We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after
his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The
aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to
mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest.
This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the
social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using.
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