When Sajid Javid resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer in last week’s cabinet reshuffle, Boris Johnson was described by some journalists as being a brutal bully, and by others as an insecure person needing to be surrounded by yes-men. Of course there are some who are unwilling to concede any virtue in Boris, but even so the authors of these comments display a lack of management commonsense which is both surprising and depressing.
Everyone who has ever been charged with the task of managing a group of people to run a useful enterprise knows that the only solution is to set up a team, a team in which all its members agree to follow certain established principles and to pull in the same direction. Being a member of a team does not stifle creativity or entail sycophancy.
What you absolutely do not want is for one member of the team to be a maverick wannabe superstar, continually posturing in the wings and stabbing you in the back. Or even worse, a loose federation of egotistical rivals continually sniping at each other. People of this sort have such monstrous egos that they’ll keep telling you that you’re getting it wrong, when in fact you’re getting it exactly right. They do so only in the hope of fomenting a revolution and coming out on top.
As it happens I have some personal experience of this kind of group dynamics. Many decades ago I was lucky enough to edit what was then one of Britain’s foremost car magazines, a weekly called Motor. We all though it a privilege to work for this institution and that testing cars and writing about the motor industry was the most wonderful job in the world.
But every now and then people would leave, for a range of reasons, and replacements had to be found. In making a choice, my colleagues and I always looked for someone who would be a good team player as well as a good journalist. We didn’t always get it right, but we never regretted the philosophy.
So what were these journalists thinking of then they called Boris Johnson a bully? Did they actually consider the recent conflicts between prime ministers and chancellors of the exchequer – Thatcher versus Lawson and Howe, Blair versus Brown – to be good precedents? Did they think that having a petulant prima donna in the house next door was a sound idea? Did they believe, further, that a cabinet composed of competitors is the right way to run a country? Clearly they got it wrong.
But there’s another thread to this idiocy: the idea that Sajid Javid’s dismissal would somehow compromise the ‘integrity’ of the Treasury. Integrity? What integrity? This is the government department that should be devoted to the long term greater good of the country by producing reports which are as honest, well-reasoned and realistic as possible. Instead, with an astonishing lazy arrogance, it produced a succession of Project Fear forecasts based on false hypotheses and biased assumptions. How can we ever rely on their forecasts again? The people responsible should be indicted for treason and the power of the remainder severely curtailed.
Of course, economic forecasts are mainly rubbish, but that’s another story.
Grumpy Greybeard 