An article in the Spectator linked below gives "Ten Rules for the Next Tory Leader to Live By", and as it doesn't really fit into the "Who'll replace Boris" thread I thought I'd avoid the smiting of the ban hammer and stick it here.
www.spectator.co.uk
Two of the "rules" particularly caught my imagination:
It’s a bottom-up world. Civil servants think in top-down ways, as if the world was a chess game and they are moving the pieces. But it’s not like that. From the English language to the internet, the world is full of things that are, in the words of the 18th century philosopher Adam Ferguson, ‘the result of human action but not the execution of human design’. Even an aeroplane is adapted from previous designs, not designed from scratch: in that sense it is a product of evolution as much as intelligent design. Ten million people eat lunch in London on most days, choosing what to have at the last minute and never going hungry, yet there is no London lunch commissioner and it would be a disaster if there were. Politicians cannot create prosperity; they can only create the circumstances in which ideas have sex.
The pessimists are usually wrong. When I was young, the adults said the future was bleak, just as they do today: the population explosion was unstoppable, famine was inevitable and pollution was going to shorten average lifespan. No adult said anything optimistic in my hearing. ‘The outlook for man is painful, desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future seems to be very slim indeed,’ wrote Robert Heilbroner in a 1970 best-seller. Yet over the next half-century average human lifespan grew by five hours a day, extreme poverty collapsed from 50 per cent of the world to 8 per cent and child mortality fell by three quarters. Pessimism is the handmaid of statism. ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,’ said H.L. Mencken, presaging the pandemic.
I would add my own advice, hardly original, but it seems often forgotten or ignored by the lodgers in No10:
Any thoughts?
How to be PM: ten rules for the next Tory leader to live by | The Spectator
You’ve just become prime minister. The public finances are in a mess, the Bank of England has stoked inflation, cutting taxes may make it worse, energy prices are through the roof, people are hurting so you can’t cut social spending, the Health Service is lengthening its waiting lists despite...
www.spectator.co.uk
Two of the "rules" particularly caught my imagination:
It’s a bottom-up world. Civil servants think in top-down ways, as if the world was a chess game and they are moving the pieces. But it’s not like that. From the English language to the internet, the world is full of things that are, in the words of the 18th century philosopher Adam Ferguson, ‘the result of human action but not the execution of human design’. Even an aeroplane is adapted from previous designs, not designed from scratch: in that sense it is a product of evolution as much as intelligent design. Ten million people eat lunch in London on most days, choosing what to have at the last minute and never going hungry, yet there is no London lunch commissioner and it would be a disaster if there were. Politicians cannot create prosperity; they can only create the circumstances in which ideas have sex.
The pessimists are usually wrong. When I was young, the adults said the future was bleak, just as they do today: the population explosion was unstoppable, famine was inevitable and pollution was going to shorten average lifespan. No adult said anything optimistic in my hearing. ‘The outlook for man is painful, desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future seems to be very slim indeed,’ wrote Robert Heilbroner in a 1970 best-seller. Yet over the next half-century average human lifespan grew by five hours a day, extreme poverty collapsed from 50 per cent of the world to 8 per cent and child mortality fell by three quarters. Pessimism is the handmaid of statism. ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,’ said H.L. Mencken, presaging the pandemic.
I would add my own advice, hardly original, but it seems often forgotten or ignored by the lodgers in No10:
- Remember that you are in the post at the pleasure of the people, so do your best to keep promises when events allow you to (and if they don't, tell the electorate).
- If something isn't working, stop doing it, and try something else (IF you can).
- Always try to do what you believe is the right thing, but if that's not possible do the thing which is least wrong for the Nation. Not the Government or the Party, the Nation.
- Defence is incredibly expensive and wasteful, until you need it. So pay as much as you can afford.
Any thoughts?
