Over the least few weeks we have seen two examples. Influential people wreck their reputations through inappropriate speaking, despite having easy access to PR advisers, speech writers, agents and lawyers: Gregg Wallace, TV host; Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury. Then, back in the past, Prince Andrew, Paula Vennells, Rebekah Vardy, Kevin Spacey – and if your memory goes back that far, Roseanne Barr and Gerald Ratner. Why do they get it so wrong?
I enjoyed seeing Conclave, the film version of Robert Harris’s novel about the election of a Pope. One sequence stands out for me. Ralph Fiennes, playing the film’s reticent hero, Cardinal Lawrence, is being readied for his role in leading the process. His vestments are too elaborate to be put on without help. Even the sumptuous silk lanyard that holds his pectoral cross has to be fitted by someone else because it is adjusted from the back. His human form is blurred. He will only be capable of moving slowly. He becomes a collection of symbols, a bulky red triangle with the scarlet pimple of the zucchetto on top. The Cardinals address each other as ‘Eminence’. The sole human-to-human conversation in the film is the one where Lawrence and an ally have shed their robes. They whisper, dark-shirted, using each other’s first names, in a shadowy room.
During the voting process, the Cardinals are literally sequestered, surrendering their phones and laptops. The film is a metaphor, showing how cut off the Church has become. There is just one mention of its true mission and it comes from the unwelcome outsider, very late in the film. The real preoccupation of this group of Eminences is their struggles for power. They have lost sight of what their actual purpose is supposed to be.
Clothing is such a useful way of emphasising your prestige. I had a coaching client who held a senior rank in a uniformed service. He was driven to his sessions, wearing his splendid uniform by a junior officer who waited, undisturbed, on double yellow lines outside my office. This man was embarrassed by his weight but in uniform, especially with the addition of the highly decorated cap, it added impressive bulk to his height. What was his reason for coaching? It was that when wearing his uniform he felt confident. When dressed in ‘civvies’ he shrank, describing himself as ‘the original wallflower, unable to speak’. In all uniformed services, the more elevated your rank the more tassels, striped epaulettes, glittering bands, gaudy medals and shiny metal you are likely to wear. As one such client said to me, ‘The moment I put on my uniform I’m doing my job’.
A few years ago I facilitated a meeting of NHS leaders, a newly formed committee of policy advisers. Throughout the day they insisted on addressing each other by their role titles with no first or second names: Professor, Minister, Chairman, Doctor. Not once during that day was the word ‘patient’ spoken.
So this is how it happens. You separate yourself from your constituency through language and symbolic clothing. You live in a Palace, Castle or Residence if you are a royal, a president or a bishop, or a 12-bedroomed gated house if you are some other kind of celebrity. In effect you are just as sequestered as those cardinals. You pay people to perform the daily chores that keep you going. You no longer shop, clean or cook. You are taken everywhere by a chauffeur who is paid to be discreet. Protocol begins to matter. Everyone defers to you, sometimes by literally bowing or curtsying. Archbishop Welby spoke, in one of his dreadful jokes, about pitying his ‘diary secretary’, by implication just one of a host of such secretaries.
In Craig Brown’s clever and touching new book, A Voyage around the Queen, he has a lot of fun with the way the late Queen skilfully managed people’s helplessness and blushing when meeting her. Her stand-by comment was ‘How interesting’ before she tinkled a little bell to signify that the meeting was over.
Hilary Matel explored the same territory in her Wolf Hall books where the magnificent third and final season is currently on BBC TV and the iPlayer. Henry VIII runs his Court on suspicion, threat and by pitting one courtier against another. That way he feels safe.
This is what makes it so hard for people in these roles to apologise when they blunder. At first they genuinely don’t see why it was wrong. They are congratulating themselves on their cleverness, hence Prince Andrew immediately after his disastrous 2019 TV interview with Emily Maitlis, ‘That went well didn’t it?’ I can imagine Gregg Wallace feeling triumphant at his crude dismissal of the people who had complained about his behaviour as being ‘a handful of middle class women of a certain age.’ If any one of their many staff or advisers counselled against it, they were ignored.
You can end up believing your own PR. You think you’re invulnerable. Then your blurted-out words show your shallowness and lack of judgement. Underneath the robes, the medals, the fancy title and the flattery that you believed to be the truth, you are revealed pitilessly as just another human being.
One of the clients I most admire has taken the same Executive PA with her throughout her roles over the last fifteen years. The apparently humble title should not deceive anyone. My client frequently remarks that this woman shares with me the duty of candour, a relationship where she can be herself, admitting to uncertainty and lack of confidence when facing a big decision or a personal crisis – and willing to listen when she needs challenge as well as support.
Modern leadership is a mixed blessing. You may get the grand title and an enviable salary but everything you do is scrutinised. Privacy is harder and harder to find. To protect yourself you may retreat into that inner circle. If so, make sure it includes someone like a Court Jester, possibly an apocryphal role, but by legend one where this character could speak truth to power without fear of punishment. As was said of Shakespeare’s Feste in Twelfth Night, he was ‘wise enough to play the fool’.
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