Conscious of a dreamlike image. I am viewing a film of Trafalgar Square with tourists walking across the new pedestrian space in front of the National Gallery. Horatio Nelson stands confidently on the top of his monument. A strange effect begins to happen, like a haze in front of the film. Gradually, as though a cloud were passing in front of the sun, the pillar becomes obscured, until it is no more than a faded outline. Nelson still stands firmly against the sky. Finally, the pillar disappears completely; now Nelson stands alone, like some great illusionist who can walk on air.
Perhaps Nelson could. Perhaps he did, providing an illusion of pure leadership which inspired his officers and men to heroic victories. I know how he beat the French, but I’ve never been sure how he could have beaten the red tape and intrigues of the late 18th-century Admiralty. They must often have seemed the real enemy. What Nelson could do, ordinary mortals cannot. Yet it is ordinary mortals who now have to perform feats of magic, as though they were trying to stand proud on pillars of salt in a thunderstorm.
Last week the media thunderstorm was helping to dissolve three British institutions, with three very different leaders. The most immediately threatened is Iain Duncan Smith, an obviously decent man who has made a useful contribution to Conservative Party policies. The second is the Prince of Wales, an obviously decent man who has made a useful contribution to the breadth and effectiveness of the work of the monarchy. The third is Archbishop Rowan Williams, an obviously decent man who has deepened the thinking of the Anglican Church throughout the world. All three men share this quality of decency, of basic goodwill. They are people who try to behave well, who try to do the right thing, who try to do their duty. Perhaps in this they all look a little bit old-fashioned, though a serious conscience is less of an anachronism in an archbishop than in a prince or a politician.
Both the Prince and the Archbishop are also men of serious spiritual concerns; Iain Duncan Smith is a Roman Catholic who very reasonably, keeps his religious views as a private matter.
All three men are thoughtful, patriotic and serious. None of them has a natural gift for handling the modern media. On television, Iain Duncan Smith’s baldness, Prince Charles’s voice and the Archbishop’s beard all have a negative impact. A full head of hair, an operatic baritone and a razor might have made a difference to their leadership qualities on television. In other respects, and in their views, they are very different; the Archbishop is a man of the Left, the politician a man of the Right, and the Prince is an idealist of the Centre.
The impossible situation in which they find themselves, standing awkwardly in mid-air, has little to do with their personal qualities and everything to do with the dissolving character of their institutions. Indeed, none of the three is a Julius Caesar, a Churchill, a Napoleon or a Nelson. Yet in modern British life, no one else is either, nor can be. Genius comes along from time to time in human affairs; there is no timetable which guarantees when the next one will arrive. Tony Blair himself is a more skilful politician in certain respects than any of these three; that is not to say that he is necessarily more thoughtful or wiser.
In the machinery of human government, it has to be possible for able men of goodwill and serious judgment to take the decisions. This is particularly true in democracies, which are based on the assumption that the ordinary man, not the genius leader, is best qualified to make the choice. We do not have a Napoleon to hand, but if such a person were available, we should not want him as Prime Minister, monarch or archbishop. Far from being the answer to the question of leadership, a Napoleon would be a lethal defeat for the principle of democracy.
My conclusion would be that it is not the leaders that are to blame, either in the case of these three or in other cases, but the sickness of our institutions. These three institutions are all ancient, gifted with the capacity to survive, and central to the culture and history of Britain. The English Church is the oldest, going back to St Augustine in AD595. The monarchy goes back to the West Saxon kingdom of the next century. The Tory party emerged from the King’s Party in the English Civil War of the 1640s.
The British are, predominantly, monarchist, conservative and Anglican. How is it that, at the same week in such a long history, the monarchy, the Church of England and the Conservative Party should all be in such crisis, to all appearances threatened with the prospect of dissolution?
One might look for scapegoats. Certainly there is a lack of personal loyalty in these institutions. When such different leaders as Margaret Thatcher, John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith have all been undermined in succession by their own colleagues, one can judge how viciously disloyal the Conservative Party must have become. Whatever view one may take of his motives, Paul Burrell has been the butler from hell when it comes to breaches of confidence. Sometimes the disloyalty has been far more gratuitous than Burrell’s. What can have made Mark Bolland, Charles’s former deputy private secretary, give the interview last week in which he said: “He doesn’t have a lot of inner strength”? Private secretaries used to be private; they plainly have a lifelong duty of loyalty and confidentiality, like a lawyer or a priest. Not in modern royal staff, apparently, nor in the modern Conservative Party.
Yet I do not suppose that so extensive a breakdown in such important traditional institutions can be blamed on rogue individuals, however unattractive the conduct of hidden plotters may have been. One can blame Paul Burrell for the immediate issue, but he had nothing to do with the annus horribilis, let alone the divorce, in which, to my own knowledge, he acted as a robust support to Diana, Princess of Wales. In bad times, good men can do bad things.
History shows that people who start with the best of intentions can be trapped in a social situation which has itself become disordered. Perhaps that has been true of the staff of Conservative Central Office as well as of Palace staff.
In all these cases of institutional breakdown, there has also been an issue of sexual politics. The immediate crisis in the Church of England concerns the appointment of a gay bishop in an American diocese That has threatened to cause a complete split in many Anglican provinces, including Australia and Canada, as well as the United States. The split also threatens the unity of the Anglican Church in England.
This has revealed an ethnic as well as a sexual division, with the Anglican Church in Africa and the Caribbean taking a conservative line. Yet it all goes beyond sexual or racial politics. I was impressed by the addendum to the judgment of the primate of the West Indies, Archbishop Drexel Gomez. He says his Church is only in “technical” communion with that of Canon Robinson, the elected gay bishop, in New Hampshire. But he adds that the situation “ has risen not because we have differences about sexuality but rather because what was once a consensual view of Christianity . . . is no longer the case”.
Modern history has been eroding the Christian consensus, but it has also been eroding the British cultural consensus. We think that we share certain assumptions, but we do not. These divisions do not necessarily follow sexual or ethnic lines, nor do they seem to me to follow political lines. It is almost an accident that it is at present the Conservative Party, the monarchy and the Anglican Church which are the institutions immediately under threat. It could just as well be the Labour Party, the Army, and the Roman Catholic Church — which would possibly be even more dangerous. Après Tony, le déluge.
Nor is this merely a question of age. In my experience, it is among the young — those under 35 — that one finds the strongest reaction, the sharpest resentment of this breakdown of loyalties. They, after all, would have to rebuild what their elders are allowing to fall apart.
Any society which loses its coherence must also lose its self-confidence. Only the consensus and selfconfidence of society make any kind of social leadership possible. We should not blame our leaders if we have made ourselves unleadable.
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