Male and Female Leadership

The picture is from a tapestry cartoon by Guyot in 1607, after Caron, and is a scene from the life of Artemisia, Queen and Admiral. There was a woman almost as great as Catherine the Great....


Amidst all the brouhaha that swirls around our probably ineluctable crisis, male and female styles of leadership have been on display. Men, such as Gordon Brown (whom I like) have allowed themselves to be portrayed as heroic, determined, and possessed of an answer to the troubles.

There is a certain sort of British person, of course, who is never happier than when the toilet roof is falling in, as my leaseholder says mine might be. Many people on the continent don't quite understand this. Perhaps it is bred by the weather here. Perhaps it stems from the near instant suffocation of great ideas quite regularly by the political class. When you look around, there is a comfort in sitting on the rubble, striking a pose and hoping for a pineapple.

We live in a country where eighty per cent of the voters did not vote for the government, owned by banks that are now leeching public money whilst refusing to pass it back on, and are warmed by foreign companies administered by stupid people who bought their way through their education when they didn't just jump through hoops. In such circumstances, drink, delusion, necessary hypocrisy and sheer defiance are the pub door props of liberty, and always have been. By liberty, of course, I mean a tenuous hold on individual sanity.

None of it really matters though. Gordon Brown couldn't have stopped this crisis when he was chancellor because the public who now denounce him were determined to borrow, and to inflate housing and treat it as a source of wealth and not a depreciable asset mostly owned by the bank. He managed an economy sold off to people I have characterised as coked-up gilded parasites and soulless retailers decades before, whose imports ballooned with every boom because it didn't make anything anymore.

This country wasted North Sea oil and Gordon knew it; he could not confront the public with the consequences, nor many of the halfwits in his own party with the need to pay off debt and cut government, and to be fair, he didn't want to.

He also possibly knew, because he knows the American republic, that that country-continent was in a four-decade grip of the sort of decadent self-righteousness and lunacy that could only end in tears, but that no one could ever be told. With China and India rising from two hundred years of drugged stupor and the west burning, what was he supposed to do? I wonder if he is sometimes wistful.

So now he grandstands, because that is what he is expected to do and perhaps he can save some jobs from the mess.

Meanwhile, President Sarkozy, Barack Obama, and Silvio Berlusconi jostle with Hank Paulson and whoever is running Japan this tuesday to stave off a great deflation when the cult of economics finally begins to draw its agonal, dusty breaths.

It's all very different from Germany, isn't it? Angela Merkel, whom I think the smartest leader in Europe, has been almost invisible. Angie being Angie though--diligent, determined, clever Merkel, working into the night--she has managed to deliver an economy with a budget until recently in surplus. Germans, with their detested rhineland model of regulated capitalism, social ownership, and land-based lending, have managed almost alone to make renewable technologies based around the global warming nonsense a viable future source of technology and jobs. Germany moves on--albeit, into the worst slump since 1949. At least it has its dignity, and can say it tried.

It isn't all her doing, of course. She does not claim it is. Isn't that a sweet thing? The woman ought to prosper mightily, and her country is at least in a better position (if trapped in the euro) than many others.

Martine Aubry may be many things. One thing she did despite the rumours was to manage to restrain the insane sacrifice of life to the idol of vain money when she had national power, and to lower unemployment. All of this was when she was in Jospin's ridiculous cabinet.

Now she has managed to capture control of the rabble that is the parti socialiste. I can't help feeling that Sarkozy, who is basically buffing Gaullism, wouldn't have got through the French elections if he had to face her and not Segolene Royal's celebrity psychodrama.

Even Sarah Palin is just getting on with things. I have my arguments with bargain basement social science retreads who proffer themselves as feminists to get on--in fact I can't resist winding them up. Real female leadership, however, in Europe as in elsewhere, is much better than some of the silliness that goes on. Think about it. Compare the Southall Black Sisters, or Mothers 4 Justice, or indeed any such group, to any notional male equivalent. No nonsense, just sense--when Helmut Schmidt and Jerry Ford did that, they kicked them out.

When they're awful, they're awful of course, but that is true of everyone. I believe in person-centred politics that is gender blind, but there is no getting away from the differences of men and women. Perhaps first-rate women do normalcy better whilst remaining first rate.

I wonder if childbirth has something to do with it; what's a challenge after that? Or is it a psychological consequence of the loss of a child to adulthood, or is it just that women aren't defined by children but by what they put up with in general? Or that managing the chemical soup in which their brains are bathed is a more sophisticated effort than keeping control of the broth of testosterone, alcohol and cholesterol that define many of my moods. I love women but I suspect that it would be dangerous to understand too much.

Many women just yearn for the normal, which men don't get (and often that's why truly sexy women are deranged to men not that far from themselves, most of the time). men who are normal are looked down on. If truth be told half of the great Reggie Maudling's problem wasn't drink, it was normalcy. The other half was, even if was the only half-measure Reggie was ever seen with.

Just wait and see, though. Wait till 'no-drama Obama' starts making the monstrous teenage legions on the press bus bored.

And that is why many politicians are mad if they aren't stupid. Occasionally, some are both. They are encouraged to be like that. I think the journalists like it that way, but I just want normal, sensible, decent people in charge rather than a demented conspiracy of mediocrity in the media-political class, and most normal, sensible people have some little bit of crazy in them but keep it in check. Wouldn't that be great, for a change?