Matt Hancock has "an unbroken posture of confidence about everything connected to the pandemic". Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” That’s how Donald Trump proudly described his approach to Covid-19 in an interview with veteran journalist Bob Woodward for a new book. To many voters, certainly Trump voters, it probably sounded sensible enough: surely a responsible President would want to avoid panic?
But on the front page of the Washington Post, and in media outlets around the world, it was seen as proof positive of the President’s deceitful and dangerous instinct to lie to his own people for political or economic ends. To the contemporary liberal technocrat, this kind of paternalistic obfuscation is the worst crime, the very opposite of good leadership. It is the hallmark of populists and demagogues — Bolsonaro, Duterte, Putin, Trump — for whom projecting strength is the only goal, with scant regard for truth, evidence, or transparency.
But while the coronavirus crisis has undoubtedly exposed the shortcomings of the populist approach, it has been an equally gruesome period for the technocratic leadership style. Many Western governments, Britain’s in particular, have moved from making responsible attempts at passing on information about Covid-19, to actively trying to generate fear in their populations. An overabundance of data, a desire to be seen to be proactive, and a fear of political repercussions if they are not, has led us to the weird place where a British Health Secretary thinks “Don’t Kill Your Gran” is a clever slogan to encourage better adherence to Covid-19 regulations.
So how did we get here?
As an example of the opposite philosophy of leadership to Donald Trump, Matt Hancock is a reasonable place to start. Although nominally part of a radical populist government, like most members of the current Tory cabinet Mr Hancock is really a child of Tony Blair. He came of age learning from the man many in David Cameron’s team referred to as ‘the Master,’ and then received his professional apprenticeship from George Osborne, who deployed the Blairite toolkit with brazen glee.
The central tension in this type of politician-technocrat is between a theoretical veneration of “transparency,” sharing data and basing decisions on available scientific evidence, and a deep respect for “messaging” and techniques of influencing the media and voters with compelling communications. These two instincts came together in the Cameron years with the creation of the “Nudge unit” of behavioural insights experts, and the hero-worship of political campaigners like Lynton Crosby.
According to this theory of leadership, convictions don’t count for much: politics is a science, and leaders are little more than vectors, conveying carefully calibrated versions of externally-validated truths to the masses in order to secure maximum support and compliance. Reports from the cabinet subgrouping in charge of Covid policy suggest that the new ‘rule of six’ was chosen instead of eight not for epidemiological reasons, but for purposes of “messaging clarity”. It was thought that, since the number six was already out there, it should be retained for simplicity’s sake; eight would only complicate things. And so the lives of England’s 55 million citizens are to be drastically altered “for the forseeable future” according to the principles of campaign science.
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