Lessons in leadership

This interview was first published in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine, September 2024.

At last year’s Labour party conference, the UCL Policy Lab was joined by a distinguished guest from a world not usually represented either in academia or policy-making: the legendary television football commentator, Clive Tyldesley.

At that event, Tyldesley kept the audience rapt with his stories of  how football clubs in communities across the country act as a power for good and how the loyalty and passion of football fans across Britain can also be channelled into deserving social causes.

As Britain elects as its new Prime Minister, someone with a long-held dedication to football, Keir Starmer, we returned to Tyldesley to ask him what lessons Britain’s national pastime might have for its incoming government.

Pressure, it is the most overused and under-defined word in sport, in politics, in life itself.

Pressure is expectation. Add the expectations that your public has of you to those you have of yourself, and the grand total is your pressure reading. It’s a sliding scale depending on the individual under pressure.

Boris Johnson’s needle slid to a pitifully low level by the seedy end of his era. He somehow succeeded in ridding himself of the pressure of any real scrutiny or judgment, because nothing he did surprised or appalled us beyond a shrug of the shoulders. It didn’t even seem to be his fault because he was clearly as ill-fitted as his clothes to the pressures of political leadership.

In football, Gareth Southgate had no such excuse. He was the perfect fit for England manager. Experienced, intelligent, capable, decent and likeable, he made the beautiful mistake of raising our expectations above a level we had any right to entertain until nothing he could do ever quite satisfied us anymore. He cooked his own pressure.

I believe that there is an awful lot more Southgate than Johnson about Keir Starmer. And therein lie both the PM’s strongest sources of appeal and doubts. He looks the part and has dared to give us some hope. And we all know what kills us. It even did for Boris in the end.

If there is a lesson to learn from the England football team, it is ‘be careful what you wish for.’  But will we? Starmer’s trump card should be that he is from a different pack to all the knaves, queens and jokers that preceded him, but the nation’s gamblers quickly forget their last hand, however bad it was.

And they seem to love a face card – a Jack of Hearts - more than an ace. Southgate was dealt a busted flush in 2016. If a defeat to Iceland felt like the very bottom of the barrel, Sam Allardyce still had some scraping to do. It was England’s Partygate period. All they were short of was a kit designed by Lulu Lytle and paid for by Lord Brownlow.

Southgate’s sheer ordinariness was just the medicine we needed back then, but all the natural competence with which he cured our ills only gave us a taste for stronger drugs.

The very qualities that so suited him to the juggling act of getting results for the country while also setting standards and examples for us all were being held against him. His strengths were suddenly his faults. Too sensible, too measured, and too diplomatic to catch the fevered mood of madness that grips “Dear England” during a tournament.

But if the pressure got to anyone it was us, not him. The theatrical fiction became our virtual reality. Southgate was still trying to be the man the play is loosely based upon, but the audience wanted the fantasy of James Graham’s considerable artistic licence.

Be careful what you wish for.

The initial feeling that has followed Starmer onto centre stage is one of relief that there is a grown-up in the room again. That sense of assurance only gives you breathing space, though. The clock ticks quickly. Southgate was about as adult as this country has got over the last eight years, but we actually began to grow weary of him for that. Like young children chorusing ‘aw dad!’ at bedtime, we started to cast him as a kill joy.

When a ‘safe pair of hands’ at the helm is seen as a shortcoming, we all need to eye the nearest lifeboat.

If Starmer had a pound for every time he has been called ‘boring’, he could have f illed all the black holes in the economy and every pothole in the roads already.  His first cabinet is a collection of round pegs in round holes, the political equivalent of playing players in their club positions. It hasn’t been picked to play to the crowd but rather to get results.

“Public opinion is a restless creature led by the fickle fads of trending agendas and nuanced news outlets. Mistakes and misadventures will happen. Neither sport nor government are scripted dramas. How you respond to setbacks and set-to’s  is a big part of turning  L’s into W’s.”

Most football fans convince themselves they want entertainment over results.  Or they do until the results dry up. It’s the difference between what is populist and what is popular, the difference between what we think we want and the means to practically create and achieve it.

Every fan and every voter loves the idea of a headline philosophy, but ideas never win a football match or an election. Of all the middle grounds in modern politics, the land of results is the most important for a leader to claim. And results are usually won by sound management and workable policies. Good defences win titles. Boring but true.

If Starmer fought a defensive campaign, it was partly because he knew it was an election Labour could only lose, but also to manage expectations in the wake of an increasingly inevitable victory. Every new boss asks for time and patience. Few get much of either in football or politics. The polling on ‘a decade of change’ begins the moment the referee’s whistle blows. 

I was present at a private Downing Street gathering of supporters and donors last month where Starmer said, ‘we need to take decisions and we won’t get them all right.’ The acid test of the hope and expectation he has raised will be whether he’s stockpiled sufficient trust to be so refreshingly open and honest in his approach going forward. Whether he dare.

Public opinion is a restless creature led by the fickle fads of trending agendas and nuanced news outlets. Mistakes and misadventures will happen. Neither sport nor government are scripted dramas. How you respond to setbacks and set-to’s is a big part of turning L’s into W’s.

Trust is key to the kind of serious leadership that Starmer and Southgate try to provide. The more of it you ask for, the more expectations you raise. If you’re just playing at politics, as the last regime appeared to be on the way out, it’s  only a game. If you look like you mean business, the pressure grows on you  to deliver results.

The only certainty that comes with leading the country in parliament, or on the touchline, is that one day your job will be someone else’s. Gareth Southgate got to choose that day, Keir Starmer may never know that luxury.