Blogoir: August

A thoughtful reader writes:

There is one issue that occasionally troubles me.  It is quite obvious in politics and senior positions elsewhere, that leaders cannot have a grasp of everything.  Thus they must trust to their judgement on whom to believe on particular issues. 

This is particularly important on issues where the informed consensus (or its self-professed members) have not got it right, either totally or in significant part.  I think here of issues such as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  Eventually, any wrong consensus must break; how can that be made to happen sooner?

So, how is it best for leaders to decide whom to believe, on matters beyond their personal detailed competence (and also those where there is not time to learn up on the whole issue)?

Very good questions.

In the British system at least, our leaders rely upon a combination of formal and informal advice.

On the formal side there are the posts of Chief Scientific Adviser, Chief Medical Officer and so on -- senior experts tasked with making sure that top levels of government have the best possible scientific/technical advice available. As well as that, individual Departments also may have in-house experts in science, economics and other specialist fields.

Leaders also likely to have a range of senior outside experts upon whom they call now and again to get a feel of the ebb and flow of debate as seen by clever people not within the system.

Plus, of course, individual experts may well send in their suggestions and complaints about official policy; a well-written letter from a senior expert sent to the Prime Minister will require an answer served up by the Whitehall system as a whole, and the fact that the letter has been read so widely down the policy chain itself acts to keep people on their toes and not take conventional wisdom for granted.

Beyond all that lies the hullabaloo of democracy. Think-tanks, commercial research organisations, scientists working for large corporations, amateur enthusiasts and energetic bloggers: they are all whirring away to get their points across in one way or the other. Letters to government ministers and/or MPs make an impact in this sense. The official system has to keep alert to public thinking and concern, whether it wants to do so or not.

All that said, no leader can take into much of this stuff. At the high policy levels knowledge declines steeply and instinct kicks in. The more so since the issues leaders in fact focus on may not be the issues under discussion.

Take the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The assembled armies of climate NGOs and lobbyists seemed to think that the issue was all about "climate change". But as the conference end-game loomed quite different priorities emerged for the key leaders concerned, namely their own reputations and how their own countries might best jostle for position in the new global order. Hence the ensuing fiasco.

Climate Change is perhaps the classic example of policy area where it is impossible to pull together an expert consensus. Partly because the science itself is so complicated. But more importantly because expertise is required from so many different areas and such long timescales are involved. Not to forget the enormous financial and other costs needed to change course in any way which counts.

Sir David King previously was the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and a prominent voice calling for Action to deal with CAGW. I myself lost faith in his judgement over his emotional reaction to unwelcome facts in a completely unrelated area.

How does a consensus break down? Depends what you mean by consensus.

Even if a large bloc of scientific opinion takes one view, public opinion may not take the same view. This in fact is a genuinely difficult area for leaders. On the one hand, they are being given credible expert advice pointing clearly in one direction. On the other, they know that if they move in that direction they are likely to lose votes.

The Climategate episode exemplifies this dilemma, albeit in a not unhelpful way in that it points to the need for much greater transparency and integrity in scientific process -- in a world of highly networked collective intelligence, the days of a small elite telling us all what to do and think our numbered. I hope.

Conclusion?

Leaders are no different from the rest of us. They sit in an office having little idea of what is going on down the corridor, let alone further afield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge they face is not mastering scientific briefs, but rather avoiding the temptation constantly to be "doing something" when each and every problem appears.

Over at Business and Politics is my latest piece, on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It looks in a roundabout way at issues of information flow, risk management and 'corporate culture':

Perhaps our hard-pressed rig operator makes the mistake of fact, misinterpreting the information being pushed to him by all the safety systems. Maybe he makes a mistake of judgement: he reads and analyses all information intelligently, but decides to take a decision which makes everything far worse.

In either case it is possible that the decision taken would not lead to disaster, had it not been for an underground factor previously undiscovered or not identified as likely to cause extra risk. In other words, the operator was doing his best at the very frontier of scientific knowledge, but that frontier itself was just not good enough.

Of such tiny subtleties are vast calamities made. Lawyers can not wait to get their hands on these problems in any subsequent enquiry or lawsuit. Anyone facing extended cross-examination by a wily barrister over split-second judgement calls is likely to end up sounding, looking and feeling confused or foolish...

On this site I have warned readers about the pernicious impact of the EU's several attempts to limit working hours by law, especially in the UK National Health Service.

See eg here.

And here.

My best friend happens to be an NHS consultant. He has warned me for years about the way the Working Time Directive has scaled back training hours for doctors, which must lead to more blunders in treating patients when the doctors are finally working alone.

Plus he made a not so obvious point about 'information decay'. The more shifts you introduce into hospital work as caused by the WTD, the information about patients has to be passed from doctor to doctor more often and so tends to decline. Decisions become less smart. 

Not to forget the fact that a new trend must emerge, namely slowing down one's effort as a shift draws to an end and leaving any tricky issue to the next doctor.

All of which is duly happening:

Consultants who took part in the study were most damning about the impact of the changes on their trainees.

Among responses from more than 500 senior surgeons taking part were repeated warnings that the rules were creating a generation of "clock-watchers" with a "lazy work ethic" who no longer felt personal responsibility for their patients.

Trainees were now spending so little time in operating theatres that they would lack the "cutting skills" required to perform safely when they became consultants, many warned.

College president John Black urged the Government to take urgent action to address the concerns, having pledged in its Coalition agreement that it would work to limit the application of the EU rules in the UK.

He described the situation facing the NHS as "acutely urgent".

Mr Black said: "Without action we are going to see a generation of specialists with less experience than any that have gone before."

As previously noted, the vile Precautionary Principle is used to stop all sorts of actions by citizens on a 'just in case' basis. But when it comes to official policies which are obviously likely to lead to people dying at the hands of the state, it is nowhere to be seen.

Madness:

The heart surgeon, 48, said that by the time she became a consultant, nine years ago, she had undertaken 900 cardiac operations. The current generation were likely to become senior doctors after performing less than 300, she said.

This morning I appeared on LBC's Nick Ferrari Breakfast radio programme.

I was invited to join Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman) to talk about the forthcoming visit to the UK of Pakistan's President Zardari.

Mehdi led off, unexpectedly (for me!) praising David Cameron for speaking out about the fact that elements in Pakistan were supporting or engaged in terrorism, even if India might not have been the best place to make such remarks for obvious reasons (Kashmir etc).

I then briefly made some of the points previously made on this website about the What, the How and Why of public pronouncements and the negative way they might be received.

I suggested that far from making the President's visit more problematic, the episode had raised the political intensity of the visit in a way both sides could use to good effect.

There probably would be a private tete-a-tete discussion between the Prime Minister and President to get their personal relationship on track; President Zardari might frankly tell Mr Cameron that he was doing his best to deal with extremist tendencies, and say that he did not need outside statements which made that thankless task more difficult by frothing up populist anti-Western sentiment.

Mehdi eloquently wrapped up by reminding listeners of many other statements of concern from Western leaders about divisions within Pakistan, now brought to the fore by the Wikileaks documents.

* * * * *

The more I do media work (and I do very little), the more I admire the skill of those politicians and pundits who do interviews often and to good effect. You need heroic concentration to maintain focus and not get wrapped up in interesting but confusing detail and/or blurt out supposedly clever things which pop up in your brain when you're talking live on air.

In case you want even more on this business about Cameron/India/Pakistan (or even if you do not), read this businesslike piece by Hasan Suroor in The Hindu.

It reminds us helpfully of one footling British diplomatic error after another:

This is not the first time that a British leader has gone to the subcontinent and returned with a bloodied nose. Indeed, there is a history of British politicians blundering into controversy on their visits to the region, leaving Whitehall to pick up the pieces.

Remember January 2009, when David Miliband, the then Foreign Secretary, found himself thrust into the centre of an ill-tempered row over his tactless remarks on Kashmir and the Mumbai terror attacks?

Or 1997 when Robin Cook, the newly-appointed Foreign Secretary, nearly ended up wrecking the Queen's visit to India by infuriating Delhi with an offer to mediate on Kashmir prompting I.K. Gujral, India's Prime Minister at the time, to tell him to mind his own business dismissing Britain as “a third-rate power”?

More recently, Gordon Brown was involved in a very public spat with Islamabad when on a visit to Afghanistan in the dying days of his premiership he said that two-thirds of all terror plots foiled by British intelligence agencies were hatched in Pakistan...

What is it, then, about the subcontinent that causes the famous British stiff upper lip go all a-quiver?

It is striking that while the more gung-ho Americans seldom put a wrong foot, the British despite their supposedly better understanding of the region and particularly Indian-Pak sensitivities never seem to get it right.

Mr. Cameron is simply the latest casualty of a tendency that, one suspects, has something to do with a mindset which refuses to recognise that the era of Britain lecturing its former colonial subjects while they listened quietly is over.

Yup.

Only tip-top speechwriters need apply for a job involving British oratory in that part of the world.

See the wild reaction on the streets of Karachi, as angry but illiterate crowds protest against the British Prime Minister's remarks about Pakistan and terrorism

Tsk.

It should either be Loo's or Loos'.

See also the distinguished role being played in the drama by HM High Commissioner to Pakistan, Adam Thomson, namely to be 'summoned' and given a severe talking to by the Pakistan government.

I wrote about this sort of thing back in May last year (alas the link to my DIPLOMAT magazine article back then no longer works):

You know the story. Only too well. Your spouse yells at you for what you have done. Or for what you have not done. Or for what you have come to represent in the tumultuous relationship. Frustrated and cross, you yell at your children. And in their frustration and crossness, your children kick the cat.

So it is with foreign ministries. Taking heat from public opinion and the prime minister/president on an awkward foreign policy problem? Frustrated and/or cross? No local cat available? Find a foreign one! Kick (out) a diplomat!

Mind you, Adam has strong family form in that part of the world and so should cope with this situation most decorously.

My piece analysing David Cameron's high-profile speeches in Turkey and India has attracted some attention, and various well-taken comments.

Part of the problem for a speechwriter for a top politician is to work out who the audience is, and craft the words accordingly.

Most speeches of any consequence by (say) a British Prime Minister overseas have several different audiences. They include:

• the people sitting there on the day, among whom may well be some local VIPs whose ears will be closely tuned to note certain policy nuances and inclusions/omissions of familiar diplomatic code-words
• the local media outlets (electronic and newspapers) for the in-country foreign audience
• the UK media - what is the headline you want them to carry?
• the international media: what headlines do you want to see in other countries who maybe follow closely UK policy and the policies of the country you're visiting?
• academics, think-tanks, chattering analytic classes - they'll pore over the text in slower time to see what if anything looks to be new/different and what may lie 'behind' any changes
• the PM's own political allies in his own party and its coalition partner - do some different policy emphases there need acknowledging/fudging?
• the PM's domestic opponents - what will the Opposition look to attack

In other words, it's all very well talking blithely about a speech needing 'key messages'. But getting exactly right different key messages to these different audiences is no easy job.

And let's not forget one other audience: history. How will this speech read in ten or fifty or one hundred years' time?

One other point about Key Messages. In the immortal words of Frank Luntz, It's not what you say - it's what they hear.

The speaker may think that the key messages in the speech are neatly turned for style and significant in policy terms. 

And they may well be. My point in that earlier piece was to suggest that they also might come across - be 'heard' by one or other of the various local audiences - as patronising or trite.

Getting that right is not about being good with words. It's about having a subtle, experienced understanding of what works and does not work for Indians, for Serbs, for Brazilians, for Malaysians and so on. Each community has (for better or worse) its own sense of what British Prime Ministers represent and how they should behave.

Hence the fact that many Bosnians felt insulted when PM John Major appeared in war-torn Sarajevo in a military jumper. That mode of dress may or may not have won some brownie points with TV viewers back in the UK. But it blew the whole visit presentationally in Bosnia. 

He was saying: I have come here to help.

They were 'hearing': This person is treating us disrespectfully - if our leaders can manage to look smart in this ghastly war-zone, so should a British PM! 

See also the bizarre visit of PM Tony Blair to Sarajevo in late 1997, when his spin-doctors refused to let him say a single word to Bosnian media people. The Bosnians 'heard' from this visit: rude, too grand to talk to us, flying in and out in a couple of hours - he doesn't care.

All of which brings us to David Cameron's unwise remarks about Pakistan and terrorism during his India trip. As Andrew Rawnsley describes it:

That remark was not planned. It came in an answer to a businessman at the very end of a Q&A in Bangalore.

It was a gaffe. I am using here the classic definition of a gaffe: it is to say something which is true, but liable to cause controversy, embarrassment or harm if spelled out in public. Scoring him on presentation, he stands tall at home, but is still finding his feet away...

Here is the view of John Elliott who is based in New Delhi:

Cameron was of course on target with his criticism of Pakistan, but India was not the place to say it because it diverted attention from his investment-oriented visit – unless you take the Machiavellian approach that it increased media coverage of a trip that might have otherwise made few headlines.  

It was also unwise to make such a snap remark without planning for the downside – in this case endangering Britain’s links with Pakistan’s intelligence services.

That's mainly right. Pakistan opinion will be all the more likely to be really annoyed by senior British remarks such as this when they are made in India. All sorts of subliminal and other thoughts surge to the fore in Islamabad:

• is he taking India's side in the Kashmir problem?
• why is he saying such things before he's even talked to us, and on the eve of the President's visit to London? Deliberate provocation?
• why is he undermining the people in Pakistan who want to modernise the country? This sort of thing simply allows the extremists to play populist cards against the West and makes a hard job even worse...

Key message for senior speechwriters and speakers?

Remember that there are many audiences listening to or reading your every word.

And that what you are saying and what they are hearing may be quite different.

Update: a very clever piece by Hugo Rifkind over at WSJ muses on what if anything in David Cameron's recent so-called public speaking gaffes was in fact wrong or unwise or ineffective. See eg this:

The spin, from Britain's Conservative Party, is that Prime Minister David Cameron did not commit "gaffes" on his recent, whirlwind world tour, but was in fact just "speaking his mind."

I am always wary of people who say "I speak my mind," as though that was a good thing to begin with. It's a better strategy, surely, to think your mind, pick out some edited highlights, and speak those. Otherwise, what's the point of having a mind at all? You might as well just have your mouth wired up directly to somewhere else entirely...

Yet, which of these messages was really a gaffe? It's a decent rule of thumb in politics that you can always afford to annoy the people who need you the most.

British Conservatives need David Cameron, so he annoyed them to agree with America. Israel needs British support, so he annoyed them to agree with Turkey. Pakistan needs Britain in Afghanistan, so he annoyed them to agree with India.

True "plain speaking" could never manage so many twists and turns. This was David Cameron speaking his mind by speaking the minds of other people. Gaffes aside, to my mind, this was a pretty impressive performance.

Not that I'm speaking my mind, of course. No. This is just the edited highlights.