The lessons of good leaders... by Gavin Esler

WINSTON Churchill once said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

Today’s political leaders must read those words with envy, for in the modern world the idea that people believe everything they are told is the stuff of fiction. Instead, politicians’ lives are picked apart and probed by an insatiable media ready to expose any signs of weakness and incongruity.

For many people, this kind of intrusion is too big a price to pay for high office, but despite the constant scrutiny some politicians, business leaders and celebrities are still revered by the masses. So what is it about one person that makes them more appealing, and believable, than the next?

It’s a question, along with 
many others, that Newsnight presenter and journalist Gavin Esler tackles in his latest book – Lessons From The Top: How Successful Leaders Tell Stories to Get Ahead – and Stay There. Esler, a Leeds University alumnus, is appearing at both the Morley Literature festival and Ilkley Literature Festival on Sunday, when he will be discussing 
the merits of different leaders’ stories and why some work better than others.

He says the initial idea for 
the book came while he was covering the 2010 General Election. “I was watching a programme with Piers Morgan interviewing Alistair Darling, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer during the worst economic crisis of my lifetime, and he asked him ‘are you good in bed?’ I thought ‘why does he think he can ask a question like that?’

“Then I remembered a few months earlier Nick Clegg 
had been asked how many 
lovers he’d had, and in a newspaper interview David Cameron, who was leader of the opposition and whose wife Samantha was pregnant at the time, was asked how they had conceived,” he says.

“It got me thinking because Mrs Thatcher would never have been asked these kind of questions, nor would Harold Wilson, or Ronald Reagan, or Winston Churchill. So what had changed in the way leaders tell a story about themselves?”

One the reasons is the 
changing role of TV and newspapers. “The media has changed in the last 20 or 30 years which means political leaders are being asked questions they would never have faced before. There has been a collision between celebrity culture and political culture, the people in power, since the end of the Cold War.”

He uses Bill Clinton as an example of this uninhibited world. “He was repeatedly asked about allegations of adultery. Now he’s not the first adulterer in the White House, JFK was a notorious womaniser and everyone in the Press corps knew about Franklin Roosevelt’s affairs but never published it.”

This has coincided with what he calls the “globalisation of gossip”. “Now we have iPhones and 
Twitter and 24 hour rolling news which started back in the 90s and as the form changes so does the content and there became a greater appetite for things. TV shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer, where celebrities would appear and talk about their lives, have become hugely popular all over the world.

“These TV shows were little more than free adverts for 
famous people, and politicians and their advisers recognised this was a good way of getting publicity. Also a ‘soft’ interview with Hello magazine or on a TV talk show was better than appearing on the Today programme, or Newsnight, where they will get a grilling.”

Esler says that anyone who aspires to be a leader now has to tell their own story and convince the public that it’s genuine.

“All successful leadership stories involve three parts. They have to explain ‘who am I?’ as a person, ‘who are we?’ to their followers and ‘where will my leadership take us?’ Most people aren’t interested in specific policies, they want to know who the person is.

“Margaret Thatcher repeatedly told her leadership story that she was ‘a grocer’s daughter from Grantham’ and in just five words she told people that she didn’t go to Eton and wasn’t part of the London elite.

“She also made a point of saying that she enjoyed doing the dishes and was often photographed in the kitchen in Downing Street. It’s the same thing today when we see pictures of Boris Johnson or David Cameron out on a bike, they’re telling a story about who they are.”

It’s perhaps questionable whether people are more concerned with, say, George Osborne’s privileged background than they are about his 
economic policy, but it’s 
worth considering that the 
person who’s raised the biggest cheer at the Conservative Party conference this week is London Mayor, Boris Johnson. He isn’t even an MP but he has in spades what many of his parliamentary colleagues are often lacking – charisma, and it’s this, rather than his views on Europe and gay marriage, that are behind his popularity.

Esler says Bill Clinton is a classic example of someone who has used their “story” for their own advantage.

“When I first met him he said he was ‘just a boy from Hope’ and later when he faced allegations over his private life and Monica Lewinsky he became ‘the Comeback Kid.’

He connected with American voters because they could understand that and perhaps 
even relate to it. Clinton also 
said early on that he smoked cannabis when he was a student so no clever journalist could 
turn round and say ‘gotcha,’ although in the past this kind 
of thing could have destroyed 
his career.”

Two of the people Esler says he was most impressed with when he met them weren’t politicians, but a film star and a singer.

“One of the problems some celebrities face is how do they change the story that people are writing about them?

“Angelina Jolie was seen by some as a bit of a spoilt brat from Hollywood but she recognised what business leaders so often fail to recognise, which was she needed to change her story. I interviewed her after she’d become a UN ambassador and she probably thought that I would think she was just another airhead, and I did.

“But during the course of our half hour interview she came across as an intelligent woman who was educated about landmines and could talk about issues in Cambodia and Syria. She was the complete opposite of a Hollywood brat and showed that she cared about other people.”

Dolly Parton was another.

“Most people have an image in their heads of what she’s like but they perhaps don’t know that she employs about 3,000 people in Tennessee through her ‘Dollywood’ theme park and is closely involved in a project to get books to children from poor backgrounds to help them read.”

When it comes to politicians, Esler suggests if they were more honest then the public might have more respect for them.

“Politicians find it difficult to say they got something completely wrong. But if they said ‘you know what I was wrong about that, but I’m going to get it right next time,’ then people might engage with politics a bit more,” he says.

Which brings him back to the importance of knowing your story and telling it effectively. “The leaders who do it best, people like Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair and Mandela, are the ones who are the most memorable. While those who end up being undermined, like Sarkozy and Berlusconi, didn’t get their story across properly. Gordon Brown had a great story to tell but he never quite connected with the British people.”

Perhaps in the end we get the leaders we deserve. “If Winston Churchill was fighting an election today he would face all kinds of personal questions that nobody would have dared ask him 70 years ago. He would probably be interviewed by Piers Morgan and get asked if he drank too much. If he said ‘no’ people would then call him dishonest and if he said ‘yes’ they would say he’s not fit for office. Either way he probably wouldn’t have been Prime Minister, or tried to be, and you have to ask yourself is that a good thing? I’d say probably not.”