David Cameron is no leadership guru
Irecently had a week in the UK and spent much of the time thinking about an SA company, Discovery. Built by Adrian Gore from a medical aid administrator into a financial services giant offering everything from insurance to investment, Discovery is holding a leadership summit in Johannesburg this week.
According to its organisers, the event’s aim is to “provide a platform for some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers” to share their leadership strategies as well as insights.
It just happened that while I was in the UK, London had what its mayor, Sadiq Khan, called the “biggest protest since the Iraq war”, with about 700,000 people taking to the streets to protest against the impending disaster, Brexit.
One couldn’t help think what those Brits would make of David Cameron, the man responsible for that particular mess, preaching leadership qualities to Africans as one of the main speakers at the Discovery event.
Barring a deal with the EU in the next month or so, Britain could be on its way to crashing out of the world’s richest trading bloc of about 500million people in exactly five months without a transitional agreement that would at least ensure business runs as smoothly as possible while a new trade relationship with the bloc is being negotiated.
It’s hardly a shock that headlines in the British press don’t make happy reading, considering the potential economic impact as the country faces the prospect of tariffs, customs checks and other risks that were not made clear to the electorate when they voted to leave the EU in 2016.
And then there’s the general poisoning of the political discourse. Who would have expected the head of Britain’s tax and customs authority would become a subject of news beyond the dry sort, with lots of numbers, that make ordinary people fall asleep?
SA and Tom Moyane are a different issue, of course, but here we are supposed to be talking about one of the world’s most mature democracies.
Yet a Financial Times report last week quoted Jon Thompson, CEO of HM Revenue & Customs, saying police were investigating two death threats against him “for speaking truth unto power about Brexit”.
His crime was to dare to suggest that a customs plan favoured by Brexit supporters would be costly to the economy.
The UK Sunday Times a week ago led with a headline about how Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, has entered what it described as the “killing zone”. Belatedly, she’s given up on the bravado, but her plan to seek a compromise has infuriated the radicals within her own party. With five months to go, the government itself doesn’t have a settled view on how to deliver the “people’s verdict”, let alone settle differences with the other side.
When talk of needing to stockpile vital drugs becomes part of everyday discussions, and supermarket bosses openly discuss the need to do the same with food, it becomes ever harder to make positive arguments for Brexit.
Hoarding food and medicines isn’t what one would normally associate with one of the richest countries on earth. Syria and Venezuela would be more plausible candidates.
Having been resident in the UK throughout Cameron’s premiership, my impressions are decidedly less sentimental than Discovery’s. It’s not unfair to say he dedicated much of his time in office to demonising the EU and adopting the antiimmigration rhetoric of the UK Independence Party, which was outflanking the Tory party on the right, and eventually allowed himself to be panicked into promising a referendum that would give voters a binary choice on a subject the complexity of which is only now becoming apparent.
While he campaigned against Brexit in the end, believing, as Discovery put it, Britain’s “future was best served being a member of the EU”, the damage had already been done.
Having spent years courting votes by embracing Euroscepticism and never having anything positive to say about the EU, the prime minister, who once described refugees as a “bunch of migrants” trying to “break into” Britain, was hardly going to transform into the most effective spokesperson for the benefits of membership.
Having gambled with that future and lost, he promptly left the scene for a lucrative new life as a public speaker, leaving others to deal with the aftermath. It doesn’t sound like a great leadership lesson.
It’s unlikely he’ll go there, but if we do have to take lessons from Cameron, it should be that flirting with the forces of nationalism and xenophobia for electoral gain is never a good idea. Once you let that particular genie out of the bottle, it’s impossible to put it back.
IF WE DO HAVE TO TAKE LESSONS FROM CAMERON, IT SHOULD BE THAT FLIRTING WITH THE FORCES OF NATIONALISM AND XENOPHOBIA FOR ELECTORAL GAIN IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA