Cult of the gifted amateur persists

When Rory Stewart got back to work as a junior minister in the UK government after watching his beloved 93-year-old father die, his boss, the then environment secretary Liz Truss, asked how his weekend had been.

“I explained that my father had died,” Stewart writes in a new memoir. “She paused for a moment, nodded and asked when the 25-year environment plan would be ready.”

Stories like this bristle throughout Politics on the Edge, Stewart’s brutally frank account of his nine years as a UK member of parliament (MP) under prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May.

Reading the book last week, I was struck by what it showed about the chilling levels of inexperience that still pervade Britain’s governing classes

He arrived in Westminster to find a fellow Tory MP who, when Stewart tried to sit next to him in an empty seat, growled: “Why don’t you just f**k off!” He accepted his first ministerial appointment wearing a suit he’d just accidentally doused in cappuccino. He worked to the point of exhaustion. He once briefly thought about killing himself.

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But reading the book last week, I was struck by what it showed about the chilling levels of inexperience that still pervade Britain’s governing classes. Or as Stewart puts it, “the Edwardian fantasy that a first-class degree from Oxford was qualification enough for anything”.

Inexperience was much in the UK news last week after Dame Sharon White, boss of the troubled John Lewis retail group, said she would step down after five years in the job. This will make the former civil servant and media regulator boss the shortest-serving chairperson in the retailer’s history. And although the chain was in strife before she arrived — and she had to immediately steer it through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis — a lot has been made of the fact that she came to the job without any retail experience. As it would be.

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The boards of large companies typically choose leaders with at least some relevant industry experience. They have increasingly sought chief executives with chief executive experience as well.

The share of S&P 500 company chiefs with prior chief executive experience grew from 4 per cent to 16 per cent between 1997 and 2019. Interestingly, this does not always produce the desired result. A number of studies have shown the financial performance of repeat chief executives lags that of rookie first-timers.

That may be because they’re brought in to revive more troubled outfits, or they rely on old playbooks that don’t suit a new business. Either way, it is relatively rare to see a big chief executive post filled by someone with zero experience in the field.

It’s different in politics. The cult of the gifted amateur may not blot British national life to the extent it once did. But even pivotal Westminster posts are filled in a way that would seem cavalier in other realms.

Stewart was more likely to notice this, having been a soldier turned diplomat, adventurer, author and Harvard professor who worked in Afghanistan before he was an MP. He quickly discovered such experience barely counted in parliament, and not just in his own case.

In 2011, when thousands of British troops were deployed across Afghanistan, he counted 50 Conservative colleagues with some type of military experience, including a full colonel, a Scots Guards captain and former special forces members. Cameron overlooked them all when he chose a new defence secretary that year.

While the UK was appointing a string of defence secretaries with no background in defence, their US counterparts ranged from a senior CIA officer to a four-star general from the Marine Corps

Instead, he picked Philip Hammond, a transport secretary who, Stewart writes, “had no previous interest in defence or foreign affairs, had never even visited Afghanistan, and 10 years into the war, had still not seen the need to learn basic elements of Afghan history and geography”.

Stewart readily concedes that Hammond was no dud; experts often get things wrong and a fresh pair of eyes can be valuable. Hammond also had obvious political skills.

But it’s hard to fault Stewart’s view that it was “close to insane” to imagine there was nothing to be gained from military knowledge when the country was engaged in a major conflict.

Moreover, while the UK was appointing a string of defence secretaries with no background in defence, their US counterparts ranged from a senior CIA officer to a four-star general from the Marine Corps.

Yes, the US system makes it easier to appoint outside experts. But Stewart’s message is just as pertinent. Two weeks before his book was published, Grant Shapps became the latest UK defence secretary. It was his fifth cabinet post in less than a year.

— Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023