The red mist at Downing Street is par for the course in a society obsessed with short-term results, and where fear of failure still reigns supreme
Maybe it’s just something about Scotsmen. Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, notorious for his ‘hairdryer’ treatment of errant football players, once threw a boot at his star player David Beckham. Sir Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin (born Renfrewshire), until recently chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, had a reputation as a hard man with a short temper.
Charles Wilson, the Glaswegian former editor of The Times and later the Independent, would grab incompetent or lazy reporters by the lapels and shake them; he once threatened to eject me from the eighteenth floor of Canary Wharf (fortunately, the windows couldn’t be opened). Strangely, another Scotsman (who shall be nameless because he was usually the most even-tempered of men), while kicking my filing cabinet, used to me the precise words that Gordon Brown is reported to have used to his American adviser Bob Shrum: ‘How could you do this to me?’
So it isn’t just the prime minister who is guilty of the overbearing behaviour alleged by Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley. Nor, in fairness, is it just Scotsmen: those are merely the examples that come to mind. The cause of this chronic ill-temper among the executive classes (call it bullying, if you like, though, like ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’, the term is now used too loosely) lies, not in national characteristics, but in the changed nature of how organisations are expected to operate.
There is a view, widespread among executives for the past 30 years, that anger works and fear is the best way to get results. Don’t even try to be liked by your staff. Make unreasonable demands, and they will use effort and ingenuity to achieve more than even you expected. Let your emotions hang out there; it shows you care.
In the short term, this approach is probably effective. In the risk-taking neoliberal era, a company’s priority is to ensure that share prices rise with sufficient speed to stop shareholders selling, and the best way of doing that is to maximise profits and keep doing new things. This was Goodwin’s technique at RBS and he was regarded, for a time, as a champion. But he eventually failed because RBS’s expansion concealed underlying weaknesses that proved disastrous, and, though some employees knew of those weaknesses, they were too afraid of Goodwin to point them out.
The collapse of RBS and other banks surprised many outsiders, because they thought banks were pillars of establishment rectitude, concerned with long-term stability and a reputation for reliability. That is no longer so. Football clubs and newspapers, on the other hand, were always prone to short-termism. What matters is today’s result on the pitch or tomorrow’s scoop in the paper. Both, therefore, have long-standing rough management techniques, such as those favoured by Ferguson and Goodwin.
It is axiomatic, too, that politics is concerned with the short term. Politicians have long been accused of thinking only four or five years ahead to the next election, whereas good government requires long-term vision. And in recent years, as 24-hour media outlets mushroomed and traditional party loyalties weakened, politics has become more short-termist than ever. No government dare lose control of the agenda for a day. Hence the plethora of ministerial initiatives, each of which might be forgotten within a week; the growing imposition, across the public sector, of targets and benchmarks; and the anxiety that any negative story must be instantly rebutted.
Ministers increasingly behave like newspaper editors or football managers. If you’re looking for results on that time scale, you can’t afford delay and you can’t tolerate mistakes, so you don’t let your staff relax for a minute. If your goals are more long term, you take a calmer, more deliberative approach. Knowing that, if things go wrong, there’s time to put them right, you will tolerate occasional shortcomings, not least to keep your employees to see your projects through.
So it’s not the Scots’ fault after all. It’s the demands of our chronically short-termist society, which affect industry and government alike, as well as newspapers and football clubs. If Brown sees the world through a red mist, that’s probably because, in his position, it’s the best way of looking at it.
Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman
