Fingerspitzengefühl: a natural flair for politics
Some political leaders are possessed of remarkable instincts for leadership and persuasion, with an ability to assess the prevailing culture, but they are rare
I will try to keep this essay short—famous last words, I realise—because it’s intended as a sighting shot, laying down a marker and giving me an opportunity just to lay out the framework of an issue I will come back to at greater length. I want to look at the idea of politicians who have an innate or instinctive gift for the business of politics; by that, I mean the mechanics of building popular support for an ideological platform, understanding the prevailing trends of public opinion, crafting a message that strikes a chord with the electorate and connecting with voters not only beyond your traditional base but beyond those who habitually take an interest in politics and are active and engaged citizens.
These are the things you have to do if you want to be a seriously successful politician, if you want to be able to promote your ideas and lead your party to government. No party will ever achieve major electoral success simply by keeping its natural supporters happy. Feeding your committed partisans red meat may feel good for a while and provide instant comfort, but giving even greater cheer to those who will vote for you anyway will not bring major change. You also have to appeal to those who are undecided, and persuade those who would naturally or habitually support another party to cross their normal boundaries and come with you.
My friends will tell you, probably with a weary sigh of familiarity, that I’m fond of invoking the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl. The Germans always have a word for it. Literally “fingertip sensitivity”, it represents an inbuilt situational awareness and an instinctive flair for managing a situation to your advantage. In this context, I use it to mean the way that some people know how to create a narrative, how to express concepts in a way which is straightforward, easy to understand and resonates with voters in a profound and persuasive way. Specifically, I use it here in the context of leaders rather than backroom strategists, politicians who understand that they are part of their message: they are, if you like, player-managers, or performers who write their own lines.
At this point, then, I am excluding those who are, if you like, political ventroliquists, providing the message but not themselves able or willing to be the medium. That is not by any means a criticism. In the way I use it now, it is a gift which is given to very few, and that doesn’t diminish the very considerable talents and achievements of gurus like Michael Fraser, James Carville, Karl Rove, Peter Mandelson, Matthew Taylor, Lynton Crosby, Steve Hilton and Dominic Cummings. I’m talking about something more.
I’m 46 and have lived under 10 prime ministers, but almost half my life was under just two of them, almost two-thirds under three. That tells you something, as I will explain, but longevity is not the only marker of success. Equally, “events, dear boy, events” can curtail the careers of even the most instinctively talented politicians.
Those two prime ministers who have governed Britain for nearly half my span are, of course, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Each was a brilliant politician, in the sense of the projection and communication of ideas and the creation of powerful and victorious electoral coalitions. Each won the votes of people who had never supported their party before, and perhaps did not do so again, and that ability to change behaviour, to “cut through”, as we now say, was an intrinsic part of their talent. But I think they were different in nature, and certainly in character.
Margaret Thatcher was not, at first glance, a natural politician. Certainly she was fiercely intelligent, dauntingly hard-working and dedicated and forensically analytical in her thinking. Those were qualities which made an immeasurable contribution to her ability as prime minister, as the leader of a government and the chairman of a cabinet, but that is not what I’m talking about. She could be awkward and prickly in interpersonal terms: she did not excel at small talk, and was not in any way a rounded human being, lacking, to use the word popularised by Edna Healey through her husband Denis, a “hinterland”.
She had played the piano and enjoyed reciting poetry as a child, and her first boyfriend at Oxford, Tony Bray, described her as “very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist”, but these traits seem to have atrophied as she matured and focused on her personal and professional life. Thatcher had no interest in theatre, her taste in films was no more outré than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and her appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1978 revealed mainstream tastes in music like Beethoven, Verdi and Dvořák, though she supposedly had a deep love for opera. Although she read voraciously, her attitude was such that it tended to be heavyweight volumes of political philosophy like Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.
Nevertheless, Thatcher had a natural feel for electoral politics. She understood how to make a complex ideological message digestible for the ordinary voter, how to reduce her world view to a broad brush attitude and approach which the electorate could grasp and by which she could differentiate herself from her opponents. And, although we tend to over look this now, she possessed an extraordinary pragmatism: she could analyse and assess a political situation, understand the edge of what was possible and modify her objectives accordingly. Not was she as inflexible or uncompromising as she sometimes preferred to appear. It is true that these qualities diminished in the latter stages of her premiership, but we have to remember that she became increasingly isolated from her ministers, fretting that she had no obvious successor. And the sheer length of her tenure in Downing Street was bound to blunt her sensitivity: she was prime minister for 11½ years, more than all but six of the 57 prime ministers we have had, and longer continuous service than anyone except Walpole, North and Liverpool.
Tony Blair was a more straightforward figure who was self-evidently a deft and agile political operator. He came from a background of reasonable privilege, his father a barrister and law lecturer, and attended a prestigious fee-paying school, Fettes College in Edinburgh, and one of richest and most prestigious colleges, St John’s. Yet he would come to demonstrate an uncanny ability to project an Everyman image. He would consistently be mocked for the way in which he modified his speech to become more demotic, dropping gs and inserting glottal stops, but it successfully defused his socio-economic status as a vulnerability. When he faced John Major, who genuinely had come from a humble background of straitened circumstances, his enemies were not able to make any real headway on the issue.
The Labour leader was much more approachable and, in some superficial ways, more ordinary than Thatcher. He presented himself as the embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of a great sweep of the electorate: as he ameliorated, further still than Neil Kinnock who had led the party between 1983 and 1992, the image of Labour as a dogmatic left-wing tool of the trades unions, he created a “big tent” in which he gathered not just traditional Labour voters but those undecided and habitually Tory-inclined. Blair convinced that uncommitted centre of the electorate that, whatever their previous loyalties or instincts, he was a man who understood people’s everyday worries. He portrayed himself not as a rulebook-obsessed party man nor as an unblinking dogmatic Marxist but a genial, inclusive figure who would not disrupt the tectonic shifts of the Thatcher Revolution, but make the country more civilised, more caring and refreshed. The Conservatives had been in power for 18 years by the time Blair led Labour into his first general election, a position from which they would have found it desperately difficult to win under the best of circumstances, and he combined the offer of change with a reassurance that a Labour government would not return Britain to the shabby, cramped, dysfunctional days of the 1970s.
One of his most potent qualities was his ability to grasp not only what the electorate wanted to be told but how it wanted to hear the message. Blair’s range was impressive: he could talk informally and approachably as the father of young-ish children (his eldest son, Euan, became a teenager at the beginning of 1997) and the sort of man you might encounter in a café or at parents’ evening, but he also nurtured a moral purpose which derived from a strong Christian faith (his wife, Cherie Booth, was a Catholic and his children were raised in the Catholic faith; he would eventually convert to Roman Catholicism in 2007 but many suspected he had informally been part of the church for longer than that). On a platform, if not so convincingly in the House of Commons, he was an impressive orator, able to make prose sing, but he also possessed a lightness of touch by which he could undercut himself with humour. His ultimate achievement was not simply returning Labour to power after two decades of opposition, but, within an astonishingly short period of time, to make it seem like the natural party of government, balancing economic prosperity with a comforting sense of societal cohesion and well-being.
Of the other prime ministers of my lifetime, Boris Johnson is, in a very specific way, and extremely gifted operator. He used his singular character to subvert the normal expectations of politics. After a long period of ever-more-groomed and tightly controlled party machines, Johnson was self-consciously shambolic, often unkempt in appearance, vague and meandering in speech. Although his background was undoubtedly that of the political élite—Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, his father an international civil servant then a Conservative MEP—he simply refused to regard that image, with all its prejudices and baggage, as any kind of a disadvantage. Bending reality to his will, he would say whatever was necessary for success in the immediate context but seemed immune to any kind of shame if challenged. Indeed, he simply refused to acknowledge any inconsistencies or inaccuracies in what he might have said. Things were true in the moment in which he said them.
Strangely, this peculiar combination of traits made voters identify with him more readily than with most politicians, and regard him as more “authentic” (though few politicians have more carefully cultivated their personae). Before his reputation began seriously to decline in 2021-22, he was regarded with unusual affection, free from the cynicism and suspicion which voters apply to most MPs. This have him an enormous advantage as a disruptor, and a handsome win at the 2019 general election was his reward.
David Cameron too possessed a reflexive ability to convince and cajole. Though his reputation is currently dominated by the Brexit referendum of 2016 and his failure to win for the Remain side—I don’t know if he will ever be rehabilitated, but we certainly won’t know for a good 20 years—his achievement in detoxifying the Conservative Party’s brand between 2005 and 2010 was substantial. Like Thatcher, he had an ability to assess situations rapidly and accurately, and to understand what was possible within the confines of the moment. The reverse of that was a grasp of when audacious behaviour would unbalance his opponents and seize the initiative, as he demonstrated in outflanking the Labour Party in the days after the 2010 general election and concluding a full-scale coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats.
Defining these qualities I have been describing is difficult. This ability to “do” politics by instinct is like quicksilver and cannot be learned. Sometimes it is only glimpsed when a politician manages a situation deftly and unexpectedly, and you look back with wonder and admiration. It is also, as I have suggested, vanishingly rare.
One example of a manifestation outside the mainstream is Nigel Farage: many bridle at saying anything good about Farage, and I am by no means a paid subscriber to his fan club, but his influence has been huge. Michael Crick, in his 2022 biography One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage, concluded that Farage “will go down as one of the great political communicators of our age, a man with a rare instinctive feel for public opinion”. David Runciman’s review of Crick’s book for The Guardian calls Farage “the greatest support act in the recent history of British politics”, while Simon Heffer, admittedly a long-standing friend of Farage, in his Telegraph review notes that the former UKIP leader is “brilliant at getting on with everyone”, and he is “in no doubt that Britain only had a referendum in 2016 because of Farage’s political power”.
(I am still astonished by the extent to which some political commentators, porceeding from the assumption that Brexit was a mistake and probably a knavish one at that, cannot see the history in anything other than moral terms. Professor Martin Shaw of the University of Roehampton, reviewing Crick’s biography, sniffs that “While Crick documents Farage’s record of racism, he disappointingly avoids judging it”. What on earth does he think Crick is trying to do? Biographies are not moral judgements, but Shaw cannot conceive that Farage should be portrayed other than negatively. And he is very far from being an isolated example.)
Farage has proved that he is not a one-trick anti-European pony. His battle with Coutts and its parent NatWest Group over his supposed “debanking” was, whatever you think of the merits of either side of the argument, a deeply uneven contest between an experienced politician with an eerily accurate ability to perceive a certain strand of public opinion, and a financial institution which could not comprehend that it had done anything wrong but brought a knife to a reputational gunfight. I wrote about the affair in The i Paper and City AM, and am still agog at how clumsily NatWest handled things.
That is probably enough for now. I merely wanted to leave my visiting card, as Enoch Powell supposedly said of his minor showing in the 1965 Conservative leadership election. The subject has been in my mind principally because of the return to prominence of Sir Tony Blair over the last year or so. There are many whose dislike of Blair is so strong that they cannot judge him sensibly or accurately, and I was a virulent anti-Blairite at the time. Seeing him now, however, especially alongside the staid and unexpressive Sir Keir Starmer, is a searing demonstration not just of the gulf between the two men in terms of natural feel, but also of the ease and smoothness of Blair’s grip, even now. I know there are people who will disagree, and that is as it must be, but I am as certain as I can be.
As I said, this instinct, this Fingerspitzengefühl, is a rare quality. Who, if anyone, has it at the moment? As I discussed when considering big beasts, I think we are in a lean period. Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2011 to 2019, exhibited a rare spark of electricity, appealing far more widely than any Scottish Tory had for decades, and at the Scottish parliamentary election in 2016 took her party into second place behind the SNP, where it remains. The following year, the Conservatives had their best result in the Scottish local elections since devolution, winning in improbable places like Paisley and the East End of Glasgow. She had already been mooted as a potential leader of the party as a whole, though those who proposed the idea tended to be somewhat hazy on how in logistical terms this would happen. For a while, Davidson only ruled out a move to Westminster “for now”.
Interviewed by The Sunday Times Magazine in September 2018, she finally put to bed any notion she would seek the premiership or the overall party leadership. “I value my relationship and my mental health too much for it. I will not be a candidate,” she told Decca Aitkenhead. In July 2021, she was ennobled as Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links. Although she is only 45—more than a year younger than me—she seems to have turned a page in professional terms. When The Sunday Telegraph interviewed her at the end of 2019, it is true she left the door open:
It may well be that my time in politics doesn’t come again until we’re in opposition. I’ve probably got more experience than anyone in the party on how to lead from opposition.
The House of Lords Reform Act 2014 does contain a provision for life peers to retire permanently from the House of Lords and then stand for election to the House of Commons, so in theory Davidson could return to the front line, but I have seen little indication she has given it any real thought over the past five years. There was a brief rumour storm in the summer of 2022 that she might become involved in some kind of new party or political force with Blair, but it always had a feverish, silly-season feel to it.
If I were forced to nominate one Labour politician? Many on the centre-left would look longingly at David Miliband, currently in his eleventh year as president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the New York-based humanitarian aid organisation. For many years he was the obvious crown prince of New Labour, director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Blair from 1997 to 2001 before entering the House of Commons and being promoted to cabinet in 2005. He was a PPE graduate from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a Kennedy Scholar at MIT, described by Bill Clinton as “one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time”. A member of Blair’s inner circle once remarked that Miliband “is very smart, he’s pretty normal, and he’s nice, and—admittedly the standards of the New Labour cabinet—he was regarded as charming and down-to-earth.
I think he was, at least in terms of raw political gifts, overestimated, weighed down with the hopes of Labour modernisers. This became all the more acute when, against expectation, he was beaten to the party leadership by his younger brother Ed in 2010 and, bruised and hurt by the experience, retreated from the centre stage before retiring as far as New York. In truth, however, he was always too much of a nerd, a geek, a wonk: he has an appealing intellectual curiosity and a lack of side, but was too other-worldly and trapped within the Westminster bubble. As Andrew Rawnsley noted in The Observer as early as 2002, “an absence of guile may make him a nicer person, but it could also be handicap”. The New York Times remarked that he is “a very English person, his reserve and self-deprecation intertwined with self-assurance”. He still sometimes hints at a return to domestic politics, but his reputation has been flattered by absence and its axiomatic effect on the heart.
I admit I have long had my curiosity piqued by Dan Jarvis, Labour MP for Barnsley Central since 2011 and mayor of the Sheffield City Region (later South Yorkshire) from 2018 to 2022. When he was first elected, he seemed a gift to the Labour Party, distinct and out of the ordinary with an appealing back story; he spent 14 years in the army, leaving the Parachute Regiment as a major after tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq; he had been widowed and left with two young children the year before he was elected to the Commons; and he combined the brisk, open, capable manner of a good officer with a solid Labour family background. A New Statesman profile in 2015 described him as “affable, relaxed and the same time deeply serious about his job as an MP and the concept of public service”, and at that time he was seriously touted as a potential leader (and was so again in 2019-20). He is level-headed and thoughtful, and since September last year he has been shadow security minister, keeping Tom Tugendhat reasonably honest. But there is something missing, either that last kindling spark of brilliance or, perhaps, a final ounce of ambition and hunger.
In conclusion, British politics awaits a new star, a transformational figure who will shift the way we do or see public life. But such celestial bodies are not always visible from the beginning: Blair certainly was, as to an extent was Cameron. Thatcher, by contrast, was not. She was always clearly gifted and hard-working, but her capacity to grow and lead, and then to transform the landscape, was not obvious even 12 months before she became leader of the opposition, the direct inversion of Tacitus’s judgement on the emperor Galba: “capax imperii nisi imperasset”. Thatcher was only thought capable of leading once she became leader. Perhaps we will be blindsided, but perhaps we are destined to endure a period of muted managerialism. The prospect of a Starmer premiership tends to make me suspect the latter.