1
ECPR Joint Sessions, Salamanca, April 2014
John Gaffney, Politics and IR, Aston University, UK
Transformational and Charismatic Leadership Revisited: Contribution
to the elaboration of the Leadership Capital Index.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to analyse two of the most influential versions of
one type of leadership, ‘transformational’ and ‘charismatic’, as identified
by James MacGregor Burns (1978) and Max Weber (1964). We shall
look at the issue from a theoretical perspective, and identify and critique
transformational leadership from an operational perspective, and
charismatic leadership from the definitional perspective. We shall then
elaborate what we see as a more helpful (working) definition: leadership
as a performed ‘event’ within an (imagined) relationship. We shall also
pay special attention to the iconographic as integral to performance-asevent.
There then follows case study analysis and comparative analysis of
four political ‘performances’ from leaders on the left of the political
spectrum (2 British, 2 French) – Tony Blair, François Mitterrand,
François Hollande, and Ed Miliband; that is to say, four performances of
‘themselves’, and their deployment and display of a character with
personality traits. We will test our own notion of ‘characterial capital’ and
the ‘personalised political’, and their contribution to Bennister, Worthy
and t’Hart’s working definition of political capital and their development
of a leadership capital index. We shall place special emphasis upon the
cultural conditions of performance: national, historical, institutional, and
narrative/ideological. The four case studies are: Blair and the death of
Diana (we shall draw upon research already done here, particularly by
Bennister); the iconography of Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential
elections; the first year in office (May 2012-May 2013) of Hollande; and
the rhetorical performance of Miliband as party leader (here we will draw
on our own previous research, and an emerging body of recent research
by inter alia, Finlayson, Atkins, Street). Emphasis will be placed in our
analysis upon the ‘actual performance’ itself in our case studies, and the
relationship of each to their own formative narratives, institutions, and
political culture. For the first two case studies (Blair and Mitterrand), we
shall treat briefly just the ‘event’ itself. In the second two (Hollande and
Miliband), we shall also examine the wider situation of the left and of
leadership in France and the UK.
Looking for Leadership: The Conditions of Production and the
Morphology of Leadership Performance
2
This contribution to the workshop is intended to add to and interrogate
Bennister, Worthy and t’Hart’s development of the concept of leadership
capital and the leadership capital index, by analysing the place and role of
culture and performance in the creation and mediation of political
leadership persona. We shall concentrate on two versions of one
characteristic type of leadership, transforming leadership as identified by
James MacGregor Burns (1976) and charismatic leadership as defined by
Max Weber (1964). We shall identify and critique the notion of
transformational leadership from an operational perspective. MacGregor
Burns’ transactional/transformational leadership types have become
currency in leadership studies and public perceptions of leadership. We
shall then critique the universally influential yet in my view inadequate
notion of charismatic leadership, in particular, from the definitional
perspective. Our comparative analysis of four political ‘performances’
from leaders on the left of the political spectrum – Tony Blair, François
Mitterrand, François Hollande, and Ed Miliband – performances of
‘themselves’ as it were, and their deployment or display of a character
with personality traits, will test our own notion of ‘characterial capital’,
its place within the wider political culture, and its contribution to
Bennister, Worthy and t’Hart’s working definition of political capital and
its role in developing a leadership capital index. 1
As we identify and
elaborate types of leadership, and deepen the notion of political capital, I
want to look at one obvious category or area i.e.
transformational/charismatic leadership, because it is perhaps the most
demonstrative and widely-recognised type or variation of leadership and
certainly, by its nature, the most compelling.
Following MacGregor Burns2
, transformational (or rather,
‘transforming’) leadership – unlike its counterpart or antithesis,
transactional leadership – is inspiring, visionary, i.e. not transactional. A
first question is: assuming we are not talking about ideal types (which this
author has always considered a severely questionable intellectual
category in the social sciences), and assuming for the moment that
transformational leadership exists: can a leader be 100%
transformational? That is to say, what is the nature and range of this
transformational quality and can it be all of a leadership, all of a leader?
If the essential quality of the transformational is to transform, a further
series of operational questions arise related to the act of transforming and
the experience of being ‘transformed’ (assuming for a moment that it is
those who are led who are transformed); how much are they transformed?
When? What exactly is the transformational leader transforming? Is
he/she doing this all of the time? What emotions are related to the ‘being
transformed’? Can being transformed be a state of mind? Is it an
3
intellectual, rational decision or recognition of a changed state of mind
(Gandhi transforms me), or an emotional one, of varying (and how
varying?) degrees of emotion? Is there a heightened perception, a sense of
well-being? Is the transformation to these ‘higher states’ (both intellectual
and emotional) a gradual, a sudden, a durable, a permanent process? Is
becoming transformed different from being transformed? And how is
such a synthesis or synchrony between leader and led maintained over
time? Or is transformational merely a way of describing the attractiveness
of a particular leader?
In the area we are studying here, along with Weber on Charisma, James
MacGregor Burns’ Pulitzer Prize-winning study of political leadership
has become normative, in particular his distinction between
‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ leadership. We need, therefore, to
devote some space here to a critique of MacGregor Burns. Received
wisdom in academia but also in politics, business, the media, and public
perceptions is that this distinction exists and is explanatory of types of
leadership, types of leader. So strong are the assumptions, leaders can be
– and are – slotted easily into one of the two categories: e.g. Churchill
transformational, Attlee transactional; de Gaulle transactional, the Fourth
Republic’s politicians transactional; Kennedy transformational, Johnson
transactional, and so on. A thorough review of the book 3
shows that this
is not the thrust of MacGregor Burns’ argument at all. In fact, a first point
to note is that he does not actually use the term ‘transformational’ but
‘transforming’ (transactional, he does use); and we can immediately note
that ‘transforming’ is what a leader does (transactional what s/he is). We
shall come back to this crucial distinction.
If we return to our transformational list – Churchill, de Gaulle etc.,
MacGregor Burns himself hesitates over other ‘obvious’ candidates, in
particular Hitler. For MacGregor Burns, Hitler is not in fact a
transformational nor transforming leader, but a ‘power wielder’, as is
Lenin, and so on (and he qualifies this sometimes with ‘naked’ (p. 19) or
‘raw’ power (p. 106)). A first conclusion we can draw is that his
leadership categories are a mixture of analytical/descriptive and
moral/normative. In this extremely long and influential book we realise
that it is almost impossible to put Hitler into that category. 4
In fact,
throughout the book although he refers to scores of actual leaders
throughout history, it is extremely difficult to clearly place any of them in
one of the two categories transforming/transactional, and that most seem
to be in the transactional category. It is also, difficult to see, first, if
‘power wielders’ and ‘tyrants’ are leaders at all, and second, whether all
of his other categories: revolutionary leadership, heroic leadership,
4
reforming, ideological, opinion, group, legislative, party, or executive
leadership are sub-categories of transforming/transactional or variants, or
other forms of equal (or category-mistake non-comparable) leadership
types.
For MacGregor Burns, that is not really the issue, for his interest lies not
in what leadership is but what it should be. It is no wonder that Hitler and
Stalin (Lenin is a borderline case, but for MacGregor Burns the second
generation of leaders – e.g. Stalin - always reverts to the transactional)
cannot be transforming, because MacGregor Burns’ Leadership is,
because partly normative, a guide to leadership. In Hitler’s case, he is a
‘power holder’, because of his ‘abdication of any potential for
transforming leadership after he won total authority’ (p. 92). For us, we
wish to know from what it was he abdicated. 5
MacGregor Burns’
argument allows him to keep evil leaders out of his category by
characterising transforming leadership as something that transforms
(hence the verb) fundamentally. This renders his categories if not
unusable generally, then certainly not for our purposes. This is in part
because the transformations have to be, more or less, in the moral
direction of history – genocide therefore precludes the ‘power’ leader; the
relationship leader/led also has to be positive and interactive although it is
clearly pedagogical; it is to ‘induce people to be aware or conscious of
what they feel’ (p. 44); although this begs the question of the depth and
complexity of ‘feeling’; and the transforming has to be intended (p. 414).
The first category (moral direction) is too subjective to use, the last
(induce feelings) is very weak from the leadership psychology point of
view, as if a leader is able to make a clear link between what they intend
and what they do; and there is a curious link made between intention and
success, because leadership will be ‘tested by the achievement of
purpose’ (p. 251). Churchill’s leadership is transformational only on
condition Britain wins the War … Curiously, de Gaulle would fail on
that count, because to claim that in 1958 he actually knew what he
wanted (apart from power)would be a mistake. More curiously still, for
MacGregor Burns de Gaulle is not a transforming leader at all because he
did not bring about fundamental change in French society. Apart from
this being very debatable (although this is, in fact, the received view of de
Gaulle, outside France), it demonstrates that MacGregor Burns’
categories are of no use, as he is uninterested in leadership as
performance; and so, methodologically, appraisal can only be
retrospective (and probably therefore alterable which invalidates the
category); 6
so much so that throughout the book there are no descriptions
of actual examples or moments of transforming leadership.
5
On this question of psychology, MacGregor Burns’ psychological
characterisation of the followers is very simplistic. He argues,
innovatively, that ‘true’ leaders make leaders of their followers, that
leadership is a structure of interaction; but throughout his analysis, the
followers are near-Pavlovian in their needs and wants. They have a
hierarchy of needs, from satisfying hunger, through safety, affection,
belief, and esteem; but it is not clear whether they would respond to
leadership on a sliding scale from transforming to transactional, or the
other way round. For us, the ‘transformational’ is not a quality of the
effect, but a quality of the act of leadership. Because of this, we need to
know why a Churchill speech made people want to go down to the
beaches of Whitstable and Eastbourne and fight off the invaders.
Nowhere does Macgregor Burns show how transforming is something
that is desired. One wonders whether MacGregor Burns’ imagined
audiences could feel such emotion. Nevertheless, the transforming leader
recognises the needs of his audience/followers and lifts them up to a
higher level (p. 4). There is something Platonic or Aristotelian in
MacGregor Burns’ conception of leadership. Leadership is the proper use
of power. Indeed, in his discussion of intellectual leadership he calls it
‘transforming’, though it is difficult to see of what. He clearly has much
more sympathy for the philosophes that for Robespierre, but can see they
only offer the intellectual context of revolutionary leadership.
Towards the end of his analysis MacGregor Burns tries to solve the
dilemma he has created by arguing that transforming leadership can take
place within a system as well as being transforming of systems, that most
systems don’t change but change within systems can be transforming (pp.
415-420). One could counter this by saying that in fact there is no such
thing as the overall change of a system anyway (just as there is no such
thing as a revolution). It is arguable MacGregor Burns is by this point in
his analysis lost as to what he means by ‘transforming’. He defines it
thus: ‘I mean here real change – that is, a transformation to a marked
degree in the attitudes, norms, and behaviours that structure our daily
lives (p. 414). First, how do we measure the ‘marked degree’ and do all
of the above have to change; and how do we define change?
Transformation? The argument is tautologous.
One ends with the view that MacGregor Burns’ real desire is that
transactional leadership be transforming. One even has the impression
that leadership performance is itself part of the problem: ‘The ultimate
success of the leader is tested not by people’s delight in a performance or
personality but by actual social change’ (p. 249).
We return to our search for the performance of leadership.
6
MacGregor Burns’ approach seems to raise more questions than it
provides answers. One wonders whether any of our earlier questions can
be addressed using MacGregor Burns, other than transformational is not
transactional. We need not go into the nature of transactional here, but
can raise similar questions: transactional when? transactional where? (in
the leader? in the follower?); in a word, transactional how? Let us use
Burns’ term – or the received view of them – for a little longer.
A second question is related to the first concerning transforming
leadership’s definition or quality: is there a moral dimension to
transforming leadership? As we have seen, this is certainly true for
MacGregor Burns. Let us just assume for a moment that Adolf Hitler was
a transformational or transforming leader. Winston Churchill was a
transformational leader too, but more important perhaps in the appraisal,
certainly of the latter and arguably of the former, were the status and role
of the speeches in terms of their transforming status (our references to the
former and the latter mean simply that the claim to transform in the case
of Hitler is mitigated by the severely coercive nature of Nazism, not as,
for Burns, it was a failure because it was not unpinned by ‘end values’
(pp. 74-5)).
A third and related question for us is: can a leader be a transforming
leader through his/her speeches? Transforming leadership is perhaps
dependent upon rhetoric, but if so, how is an audience transformed by a
transforming leader or a transforming speech? What are the rhetorical
modalities of transformation? Is the transforming leader one who
transforms his/her audience, i.e. is there a relationship involved
somewhere? And if so, where? And if so, what is the nature of the
relationship? How should we characterise the relationship between a
transforming leader and his/her audience?
On this crucial question of the leader/follower relationship perhaps we
should begin by saying this is not necessarily where the answer lies i.e.
‘transformational leadership is part of a relationship’, but that this is
where the question lies: what is it about the leader/follower relationship
that makes the site and quality of the transformational so difficult to
identity? The Hitler/Churchill contrast is instructive here. It may well be a
false distinction but in part, because of history and we would hope,
ethically, Hitler is the villain and Churchill the hero. This is also related
to the question of consent in each case. Most studies of Hitler’s
charismatic ‘appeal’ 7
are based upon a premise of manipulation,
coercion, and an allegiance not freely given but ‘taken’; a nation
7
bewitched by evil intent. This may tell us something about Nazi methods,
but tells us little about the relationship. 8
Churchill studies, on the other
hand, emphasise his ‘inspirational’ qualities, the intensity of allegiance
given – albeit in severe and dramatic psychological circumstances –
freely. Neither of these approaches touches upon the operational vectors
of the relationship or the allegiance; and each approach is rudimentary –
and philosophically confused – in its psychological or emotional analysis,
of the kind, Hitler is bad and (therefore) coercive (and vice versa);
Churchill is good and therefore not (and vice versa).
We should also mention the question of office here (and there are cultural
questions here too which we shall return to later - i.e. that the norms,
powers, perceptions of office are culturally informed; there is a
morphology to leadership/s). Put simply, one of the reasons for the
perceived leadership of both Hitler and Churchill was the fact that they
were, in reality, leaders. Leaders, unlike those not in leadership positions,
lay easy claim to leadership; and such claims are recognised as
legitimate: people take orders from leaders, leaders have the apparatus of
the state at their disposal, and in varying degrees, access to the media and
public communication, and so on. These structures, processes, and
institutions will shape leadership – although they will not exhaustively
define it. To distinguish between, say, Winston Churchill and Clement
Attlee’s leadership as Prime Minister, however, we would need to
examine the office, but also the style of the men, and the circumstances of
their office, namely - and this too is crucial to our overall analysis and
definitions - the nature of the ‘crisis’ they operate within. This raises the
further question of what has been called transforming leadership being
itself a leadership of crisis. This too would need to be defined properly
(e.g. one could argue that Attlee’s premiership was not at a time of crisis,
and therefore, one of a different nature from Churchill’s), as would the
idea of crisis itself.
On this question of office and its relationship to style, the French case is
instructive. The question usually asked about French presidentialism is
why was Charles de Gaulle seen as the quintessence of French
presidentialism by which all subsequent Presidents would be judged?
And at the time of writing, a breathtaking comparison can be made
between de Gaulle and the actual incumbent, François Hollande. The
problem with this approach is the assumption that Charles de Gaulle
‘possessed’ presidential qualities and that François Hollande does not
possess them. We can add the caveat that Hollande often makes appeals
to such presidentialism – attempts at gravitas, constant references to the
majesty of the state or of France, ‘the values of the Republic’, his central
8
role in decision-making, the developing role of the first person pronoun in
his discourse, and so on. But a great deal more mileage can be gained by
asking a different question or set of questions, before we, in our turn,
‘assume’ we know what presidentialism is or presidential qualities are. If
we ask a different question: what did Charles de Gaulle bring to or do
with the office of the presidency, we go to the heart of the issue. He was
indeed aloof, ‘presidential’ etc., but it was the bringing of himself to the
configuration and mobilisation of the institutions in and after 1958 that
gives us insight into the true nature of the Fifth Republic; the bringing of
‘himself’ and the idea that although he had not been ‘chosen’ by the
French (he had been chosen by history), he had been ‘recognised’ by
them (and given authority to act by them). In no other regime in France –
and this includes absolute monarchy where roles are severely prescribed
and proscribed – was such scope given to the construction of an imagined
relationship between a personal leader and an (imagined?) public as in the
Fifth Republic, with all the consequent effects upon it of the ‘character’
of the principal actor, and the relationship of the public to the presidency
and the regime. We shall come back to the role of character within
institutions (and culture) in the body of our analysis. First, however, let us
sum up so far and suggest what we might call the morphology of
leadership performance.
Leadership can best be understood as a performance. The performance
itself takes place within a configuration of institutions which have two
essential aspects. The first is a practical one: institutions and structures
offer practical benefits to leaders in the form of resources and ‘places’ to
perform. They also offer, and in terms of our analysis this is probably
more important, legitimacy and symbolic status: the leader enters the hall
last because he/she is the leader. He/she is above us upon a stage with a
sound system because he/she is the leader. We listen because he/she is the
leader. Institutions, therefore, are the practical and symbolic conditions of
leadership performance. The institutions, and especially their
configuration and status, are also embedded within and continuously
informed by culture, and culture in both its prevailing and deeper context.
By the former we mean its tangible/visible expression – ways of doing
things; the culture of Whitehall, the role of committees in one polity as
opposed to decisive and consequent action by individuals in another, or
the formative role of back-room deals and unofficial agreements or
understandings in another, the role of drama and adversarial politics in
one polity, or its absence in another, and so on. All of these correspond to
the institutionalism identified first by March and Olsen. 9
And in this,
they are everyday expressions and assumptions of historically determined
developments (though perhaps ‘determined’ is not the right word). Also
9
historically determined or conditioned are deeper cultural traits. To give a
comparative Anglo-French example, we can point to the dramatic
difference in the role of and cultural allegiance to personal leaders and
‘personality politics’. In each country, this is a historical and institutional
phenomenon, and has significant effects upon forms of political
association and thereby upon organisation. It also is in a dynamic
relationship with rhetoric and discourse, and is related to notions such as
the idea of crisis and the role of individuals in relation to it, and the
activity and influence of the myths and symbols related to these.
The morphology of leadership performance is such, therefore, that leaders
have a constructed image (constructed by them, the institutions, the
culture, the audience, and the performance), and performance takes place
within a historically fashioned institutional configuration which is imbued
with norms and expectations, as well as opportunity itself, and is
embedded within – and this more or less deeply and therefore
consequently according to each case – a culture which informs the way in
which institutions and leadership operate, both in terms of constraints and
opportunities.
If the contexts of leadership performance are necessary conditions of its
production, and of our understanding of it, we still return to the question
– in its transforming or charismatic expression, what is it? One of the
elements that we shall elaborate below in relation to Max Weber is the
question of the relationship between leader and followers. In leadership
studies, the relationship is contentious but is always an element; indeed, it
has to be a given in that leadership is inconceivable without it. Without it,
leadership becomes an absurdity. But what kind of relationship is it? In
one sense, this brings us to a central issue because it raises the question of
who thinks what – or feels what – in the relationship, and the degree of
autonomy/coercion or autonomy/seduction in the relationship, and the
question of the assumption of or the possession of, or the dichotomy of,
leadership’s transforming or charismatic qualities. We can here, however,
make three obvious points about the relationship which we can take to be
true and formative (but which are singularly lacking in most studies).
First, the relationship takes place, as we have seen, in a situation, i.e. in
the Sartrean (en situation) sense of a context in which the relationship is
implicated (Sartre 1943). Second, it is a relationship in which inspiration
or a ‘higher level’ of experience occurs, and third and relatedly, it is an
emotional relationship, or one in which emotions play a part.
This raises the fundamental question of the status and contribution of
‘each’ in the relationship; and we have to immediately concede that
10
although there may be communion there is not, almost by definition,
equality. Whether ‘raised up’ or moved to emotion, the audience depends
upon, is dependent upon the ‘transforming’ leader/speaker. At best, in
order that this state be attained, the leader seduces, bewitches, enchants.
We also need to interrogate the extent to which audience agency is
involved here. Are the bewitched free agents? Perhaps not. Are the
enchanted? Perhaps. So in one sense, another aspect of the relationship is
that in a range of degrees of allegiance or recognition, the art of
leadership persuasion is an act of seduction. Can we also say there is
always, therefore – in the moment of seduction or if the seduction is
maintained over time – some kind of charismatic bond that is binding of
the receiver by the sender?
Let us then look at Weber’s theorisation of the concept of charismatic
leadership. In the case of MacGregor Burns, what interested us in
particular was the unhelpful operational nature of its definition or
characterisation and its problematic normative nature; in the case of
Weber, we take issue with its problematic definitional ambivalence.
In spite of a century of theoretical/methodological difficulty 10
with
Weber, his notion of ‘charisma’, elaborated in Economy and Society, and
later in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1964; 2004) still dominates. 11
Inside
academia, it prevails. Outside academia it is universal. But, it is my view
that the continuing emphasis upon and use of (a version of) charisma is
one of the reasons for our other dilemmas regarding the normative and
the manipulative, their relation to rhetoric and the interpolation of
persona within it, and the perpetually vexed question of where charisma
resides and what is its nature or what are its elements. Let us look at
Weber’s definition:
‘A certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set
apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural,
superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.
These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are
regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the
individual concerned is treated as a leader’ (Weber, 1964, 358).12
What can we say about this definition? A striking yet uncontentious first
point we can make is that it is long. Do long definitions actually ‘define’?
But it is not just long; it is unclear, tentative and assertive at the same
time, and contradictory. It is as if the ‘definer’ himself is trying to
identify charisma rather than tell us what it is. And closer inspection of
this iconic definition confirms this notion of definitional hesitation. What
is the difference between a quality and a ‘certain’ quality. And are there
11
charismas (exceptional powers (plural) or just charisma (a quality))? And
are ‘powers’ and ‘qualities’ different entities? Does this mean that there
are specific powers and/or qualities? What does ‘by virtue of which’
mean? Does it mean ‘and because of this’ or ‘which has as a
consequence’? The charismatic individual is ‘set apart from ordinary
men’. How? In the minds of the ‘ordinary men’? Is it they who do the
setting apart or does it just happen because of the qualities? Is being
ordinary a necessary quality to recognition? Would a more than ordinary
man ‘see through’ the qualities? Or is it simply the consequence of their
not possessing this qualityor these qualities? How though do they
recognise the charismatic individual? Is it because he is simply not like
them? How? Are ‘supernatural’, ‘superhuman’ and ‘exceptional’ the
same thing? Is there a difference in quality between the divine and the
exemplary? Are these two types or else two ways of seeing one type?
And of course there remains the long-standing problem with the term
(because of different emphasis in different sentences) as to whether the
quality or qualities are possessed or ascribed: they are only ‘regarded as’
divine. Does this mean the ascription may be a false one? What does this
mean about the qualities? Moreover, the definition is ‘framed’ in three
‘ascribed’ assertions: at the beginning ‘treated as’, in the middle
‘regarded as’, and at the end ‘treated as’ again. But we cannot get away
from the fact that these are also qualities of ‘personality’ that are being
ascribed or perceived, and that the thrust of the definition still points to
something – or some things – that is or are very special.
What is charisma then for Weber? Well, from the definition, it is difficult
to pin down what it is, mainly because it is difficult to pin down where it
is. It is based on several things not one thing (‘qualities ascribed’), as
well as upon both qualities (plural) and ascription. If we are talking about
where the charisma is, is it in the ascribed or the ascribing? And ‘where’
is each of these? The latter, ascribing, is where the focus of attention has
come to be placed, in our post-modern, relativist world. It is in the eye/s
of the beholder/s, rather than in the qualities held. Does this actually get
us very far? In fact, it takes us off in the wrong direction, away from the
persona we are trying to analyse. The most extreme form of this view,
and extremely influential, is Theodore Adorno’s development of the idea
of the ‘authoritarian personality’ (Adorno, 1950). In a word, Adorno
identified Hitler’s persuasive power as lying in the psychic dependence of
a particular type of audience (possibly comprising virtually the whole
German nation), and its need for authority and domination. General use
of this idea is more benign than Adorno, namely, that the power of
charisma proceeds from those in its thrall. We do not, however, get very
far in identifying charisma if, in response to the statement ‘That man has
12
charisma’, we ask, ‘Then tell me about you’. Similarly, the following
does not get us very far either: I am charismatic because you are
delusional or seriously neurotic, at worst; I am charismatic because you
ascribe to me the quality of possessing grace, at best. Neither of these
helps us; or helps us identify either a Hitler or a Churchill (as a deployed
and/or imagined character). Hitler, in part because it does not matter – if
the ascribing is done by mass neurosis we hardly need to probe any
further than: here we have a nasty man, and for some just a clown, yelling
and threatening the heavens with his fist, in the context of a clinically
bizarre nation of very gullible Germans; Churchill, because it is the
motives for the ascription, through emotional allegiance, of the qualities
of an inspirational leader, which is all we need to know. Britain somehow
‘needed’ a Churchill and provided one (though we still do not know what
the ‘one’ is). We must, however, return to the term, charisma. After the
war, in radio and television programmes about the 1939-45 period, there
was often a fierce allegiance to Churchill expressed by many interviewees
which was highly emotional and ‘attached’. The memory, at least, of
those interviewed was that they would have done anything for the war
effort because of Churchill’s speeches. Responses were of the kind ‘We
would have gone down to the beaches and fought the Germans with
broomsticks’ (in fact, in 1940 there were only broomsticks, most of the
military hardware having been left on the beach at Dunkirk...). What we
need is some way of apprehending both this relational allegiance and its
intensity (whether real or ‘constructed’ later is a separate issue), as well
as the elements of the rhetoric and the persona of Churchill. Essentially
(especially given the actual effect of – i.e. none at all – hitting a Panzer
Tank with a broomstick), what is being expressed is a willingness to die
because of dramatic radio broadcasts in a crisis situation. Charisma as a
concept does not really offer very much, either as a relational concept –
leadership qualities ascribed and (perhaps) possessed; nor does it help us
see why the listener was prepared to die, or what precisely it was they
were prepared to die for. The listener’s emotions are involved in a series
of complex relationships with all the elements of rhetoric, but we can see
that, apart from our criticisms of Weber’s definition, what is dramatically
missing from Weber’s analysis is precisely the drama of the relationship,
its emotional character (Willner, 1984). What it is that provokes the
emotion and allegiance is very difficult to grasp. Could we say perhaps
that there is something in the nature of the, let us call it here ‘charisma’,
that we do not know what it is? Is charisma a Je ne sais quoi, I know not
what? Of course, that is not sufficient for scientific analysis; but the
problem with seeing charisma as just a relational concept (however
complex), is that it still leaves us with the ‘not knowing’ of ‘what’, the je
ne sais of quoi! Having said that, and before moving on, this writer does
13
hesitate over his own argument (the idea that we are indeed searching for
the ‘qualities’ of leadership): surely Churchill’s leadership of the British
public, 1940-1945, is relational; and that that fact is a key to
understanding Churchill’s ‘success’? There is something very profound in
a relationship that is akin to an emotional interdependence, or an
emotional complicity about something treasured, e.g. ‘our island’
(Cannandine, 1989). Although it is clearly not a one-to-one relationship
(there is only one speaker, and it is he who discursively invents the
‘island’, and probably the qualities of the audience too), but there is
something emotionally shared by all those subscribing to the relationship.
It is perhaps akin to, or rather an adaption of, another Sartrian notion, that
of the group-in-fusion (Sartre, 1960) – that each person, through sharing
what is both an ontological and emotional relationship to Churchill,
shares with one another, and that each is ‘held’ by the other in their
mutual emotion vis-à-vis Churchill, and this is dramatically reinforced by
their sharing the same crisis situation. The difference from Sartre is that,
in the ‘Churchill’ case, the leader participates in the relationship
(replacing ‘revolution’ as the agent of ‘fusion’), and shares a place within
the crisis of the impending invasion. But if the audience is ‘sharing’ with
each other the perception of a quality ascribed, what is the ‘quoi’ of the
quality?
We shall come back to Churchill below, but the ‘charisma’ and the
rhetoric must be linked to the notion of leadership ‘success’ or rhetorical
purpose (however we define these). 13
There is a detailed literature on this
(Kohrs Campbell and Hall Jamieson, 1990; Hall Jamieson, 1992; Windt
and Ingold, 1992; Wills, 1992; Cohen, 2013), on what success or purpose
is and how to measure it in terms, for example, of presidential ‘effect’,
the effect of presidential discourse, for example upon agenda-setting.
However, we need to know not only (or for our purposes, even) what its
effects are, but what it is, what presidential discourse, for example, is in
its deep texture and complexity, and beyond its ‘success’ in, or beyond,
the discourse, what the cherished leadership ‘image’ or persona is, as it
were, phenomenologically. What is it that is successful? Once again,
saying it is relational does not capture it (although we must accept that it
is relational, either before, during or after the rhetorical experience).
Perhaps we have to accept that the thing we are trying to capture seems to
exhibit the quality of the ineffable, perhaps even unknowable, a truly je
ne sais quoi. That is not to excuse our efforts at trying to capture it, nor to
say that we cannot, but simply to say a) how difficult it is to grasp, and b)
that the ineffability may be one of its major qualities and functions. This
is truly tantalising. Part of the quality we are trying to grasp may be by
definition elusive, hence its allure and compelling nature. This may also
14
have a psychological dimension. Our response to leadership may have a
relationship to childhood, perhaps even the pre-verbal (hence the inability
to ‘put it into words’ – or it may, indeed, be like listening to music); or
the symbolic e.g. the leader as the (literal) embodiment of desire; and it
may – surely does – have a mythical dimension too, mythical in the sense
that the leader or aspirant leader evokes legend (e.g. Lancelot undergoing
trials, slaying dragons etc., in a (mythical) place the speaker has taken us
to), or religious/symbolic interpolations: it is not without significance that
many of the aspects informing Western leadership – special grace, the
bringer of comfort, justice, succour, deliverance, and so on, evoke the
West’s Christian tradition (itself ‘mythical’); not without significance that
the cult of Eva Peron (after her death, because of her life) occurs in a
deeply Catholic, Madonna-fixated culture, and, of course, that charisma
means ‘grace’.
Those leaders we call ‘charismatic’ do seem to possess ‘a certain
something’ and a something that we can’t quite ‘put our finger on’. No
wonder Weber’s definition is long; ‘charisma’ is truly hard to define.
Social science, in fact, seems here to be little further forward than ‘The X
factor’; charisma as ‘Star quality’. We have, therefore, a term which
almost will not go away, and yet is highly problematic, if not downright
misleading. Moreover, if it is related or contained within Bennister et al’s
notion of political capital, it can be both won (unless it is already
possessed) and lost through a series of factors: changes in comportment,
performance, institutional framework, culture, audience response, or
events.14
If not MacGregor Burns or MaxWeber, however, who can help us out of
our dilemma? Let us see if Aristotle can. For Aristotle, as for MacGregor
Burns with leadership, we need to address, before we continue, the issue
of rhetoric as normative. For Aristotle, rhetoric is infused with normative
concerns; one might arguably or ultimately say just one normative
concern, namely, that rhetoric be used to good purpose; the Rhetoric, in
parts, reads like a manual designed to enhance and nurture the happiness
and the good life advocated in the Politics and the Ethics (Aristotle, 1991,
1981, 2009). Today, such preoccupation is – quite rightly – driven to the
edges of rhetorical studies; rightly, in that concerns with normative
outcomes should not interfere with analysis, as we have argued as regards
MacGregor Burns. If we take two emotional and morally-charged
examples: we cannot analyse Ronald Reagan’s Challenger Disaster
speech (28 January 1986), or Tony Blair’s speech on the death of Diana
(31 August 1997), while imposing our normative intent upon Reagan and
Blair’s normative intent. We cannot – to put it bluntly – understand the
15
rhetoric of homage and of sadness while maintaining the view that the
violent death of the young and beautiful is tragic. We have to be aware
only that such rhetoric takes place in situations where such views prevail.
The analysis of rhetoric has to be sensitive to the strategic intent
prefacing it, and political effects flowing from it; and to that extent, it is
helpful to ‘put ourselves in their shoes’; but our concern is structural and
stylistic. Or, rather, it should be. To put it bluntly again, is the
prescription I am advocating sustainable? Can the study of rhetoric be
value neutral? There is, moreover, an irony in Aristotle’s own
prescription, in that the rhetoric of malevolence has known much more
attention over the last century (perhaps the last twenty centuries) than the
rhetoric of homage. Much of Aristotle’s endeavour, in his identification
and proscription of the all too prevalent other feature of rhetoric:
demagoguery, was to counter appeals to unreflective surges of emotion
(Le Bon, 1986). He is concerned with appeals to all the emotions, even
anger; but he is quite restrictive about who should do the appealing and
who should be getting angry. Much of this concern was political.
Aristotle’s political paradigm was for enlightened but limited democratic
rule by an aristocracy, and this in the context of a fundamental
disapproval of democracy itself, viewed by him as a kind of rule by the
mob, or rather by the demagogues who might inflame the mob. Our
thinking today too is informed significantly by notions of the rhetoric of
manipulation for the purposes of evil, and this, from the soap powders
promoted by the hidden persuaders (Packard, 1980), to the populism of a
resurgent far right, to the mix of high emotion, dissimulation, and appeal
to cruelty of a Goebbels, for example. Perhaps the normative is
inescapable after all, and there is no benign approach to rhetoric. Because
of the close relationship between atrocity and rhetoric in the twentieth
and, still, twenty first-century, the analysis of the rhetoric of
‘demagoguery’ is unavoidable, and value neutral analysis is arguably
impossible. Their norms v. our norms, and this, ironically again, thanks to
the teaching of the master himself, Aristotle and others (Cicero, 2006;
Quintilian, 2010). It is perhaps inevitable that we study Aristotle but try
to believe in the morally relative Machiavelli (Machiavelli, 2003), and all
this while trying to behave, or approach our objects of study, like
objective evidential scientists. Standing in the wings of all rhetorical
inquiry, therefore, are the ghosts of the normative and, by extension, the
prescriptive, ready to beguile our efforts. The post-twentieth century
intellectual is constantly drawn back to the normative, knowing that
rhetoric really should serve the good life because it so often serves the
bad. All rhetoric is, in some form, the art of seduction; and as often as
not, perhaps more often than not, the seducer intends to deceive,
intending something other than what the seduced, upon sober reflection,
16
might perceive as their own good. By definition s/he would have us in
another place to where we would be without the rhetorical appeal or
exchange. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rhetoric
of crowds and of state propaganda brought, as often as not, utter ruin. The
rhetoric inviting us towards the good life (for Aristotle, enlightened
aristocracy, for us enlightened democracy (Uhr, 2014)) is usually more
subtle and more quiet and, because less passionate, has gone hand in hand
with evidence: higher living standards, relative freedoms, education,
security, and social harmony; although we need to add that passion here
too has been of the essence in bringing these things to pass: nothing, as
Emmeline Pankhurst told us, was ever gained from the British
government without something approaching a revolution. The rhetoric of
the democratic state seems generally, however, less ‘empty’ than the
‘signifieds’ of demagoguery, and perhaps more empty than
demagoguery’s signifiers. Since the Enlightenment, the drive towards
democracy has, however, in spite of the struggle for democracy, been
ever prey to the rhetoric of populism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser,
2012). Indeed, as we have said, we would probably not have attained the
levels of democracy we have without it. So if we cannot free analysis of
the haunting presence of the normative, then we need also to recognise
that rhetoric is an emotional and dramatic issue (Marcus, 2002).
The rhetoric of drama can serve ‘the good’, but often only in crisis. One
thinks again of Churchill’s rhetoric versus Hitler’s (Cannadine, 1989;
Burke, 1989; Bosmajian, 1960), although – returning to our earlier point
about the normative – choosing between the British Empire and Nazi
Germany – is a classic example of the analyst’s difficulty finding neutral
ground.15
Moreover, as we venture towards the rhetoric of drama, we
should add that one person’s – perhaps also one analyst’s – rabble rouser
is another’s inspiration. Perceptions of Malcolm X in the 1960s would be
a good illustration of this, but we could put a Martin Luther King into this
category too (Washington and King, 1986; Breitman, 1990). For many at
the time, King was nothing but a troublemaker. Now, he is a saint (as X
perhaps, should also be). Perhaps the rhetoric of persuasion, by definition
a rhetoric of ‘trying to get things done’, depends for its ultimate analysis
and significance upon what subsequently does get done. Such relativism
does not preclude analysis: grasping the structure of the March on
Washington Speech does not depend upon the outcome of the Civil
Rights movement’s struggle; nevertheless, others’ normative concerns, as
well as, at a further remove, our own, should not determine our analysis
of rhetoric, but they do seem to be its ever-changing context. That
rhetoric will always have in some sense a political purpose informs all
analysis. And as regards ‘the good life’, Aristotle is a handbook for
17
contemporary democracy, although he himself was not a democrat. For
Aristotle, good rhetoric, therefore, from a normative point of view, is that
which contains and nurtures, in today’s terms, democracy and the good
life; and bad rhetoric is that which draws us down the road to destruction.
That is demagoguery. So a fundamental problem here, analytically, is that
rhetoric is not just about rhetoric, but about values, and about the
analyst’s worst enemy, emotion, which we shall come on to below. Here
we can say that in the study of rhetoric, the analyst’s relationship to the
normative is a constant preoccupation but, as we have indicated, should
not deter us.
The emphasis within rhetoric (epideictic, forensic, political and
demagogic) upon persuading people to do, think, or feel something other
than what they are doing, thinking, and feeling (or to remember or relive
already experienced thought or feeling) brings us to a second and related
point. The analysis of rhetoric is ever-subject to an understanding of the
social, cultural, institutional, and political relationship between listener
and hearer, both in the minds of each and in the rhetoric itself (Kane,
2001). In order to understand the tale, we must inevitably understand the
teller and his/her relationship to those they are telling their tale to, so that
concern with the relationship between (or, rather, imagined relationship
between) speaker and listener is a constant (Gaffney, 2001). Second,
fundamental to that relationship, in order that it be lived as ‘real’ and to
purpose, is the question of trust. Trust or empathy is perhaps essential to
rhetoric’s effectiveness upon the listener, but is so upon the analyst too in
a strange sense (Warren, 1999). One does not need to be a Nazi to
appreciate Hitler’s rhetoric, but at least pretending to be a bit of a
sympathiser in order to grasp the Fuhrer’s rhetorical power probably
helps. Third, just as norms do not determine rhetoric or its analysis but
are its ever-active context, so too are emotions such as desire (to be
persuaded or delivered or included), sorrow, need, exhilaration, and trust,
and so on: emotion is ever-present in or around the rhetoric. This brings
us again to Aristotle, and to his categories of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Contemporary rhetorical studies emphasise the latter two, and in
particular how, to good or bad purpose, they interact with one another:
how argument and emotion interact with one another to consequential
reaction. What has been less focused upon (and often taken out of the
Aristotelian triptych and treated separately as ‘image’, persona, or
character) is ethos. This is in part because, unlike Aristotle, we are less
interested today in the standing of the speaker and whether or not he
(then, only he) is worthy etc. But the standing of the speaker in the
rhetoric and, therefore, ethos as a relational term (to pathos, logos and
the audience) is crucial to the contemporary analysis of rhetoric. In fact, I
18
would argue that not only is ethos the least focused upon today, it is the
most important element. Ethos is the fundamental component of rhetoric:
the imagined persona of the speaker as an active, enacting part of the
rhetoric, and his/her imagined or perceived relationship to normative
issues, to emotion, to argument and, especially, to the audience, are the
keys to contemporary rhetoric.
Underlying these three ideas concerning social and other contexts is the
notion of the comportment and character of the speaker; his/her
‘personality’, projected in the rhetoric as well as imagined outside it (as
with Aristotle). So for us – as analysts – what ‘today’s’ Aristotle means
when he ponders whether rhetoric serves the good or the bad is: what is
the intention (strategic and political, as well as emotional and moral) of
the speaker vis-à-vis the audience; and, for us also, how does the
audience see and feel about him/her in the context of his/her intentions
and their desires? Let’s take as an analogy the Pied Piper of Hamelin: the
tune (its ‘rhetoric’) was there to enchant, and we could analyse how it did
so (if only we knew the tune). The tune he played and the way he played
it would be our focus. But we cannot help but witness the results and
reflect: see the foolish children go, and the foolish parents deceived. The
Piper’s tune was literally, musically, enchanting. What did the Piper get
out of this? We shall never know of course. Do we need to know the
Piper’s intention or desire to understand the tune and its effects? Hamelin
the village gained nothing but disaster and heartbreak (and bitter
wisdom). Normatively and prescriptively, and as regards demagoguery,
proscriptively, rhetoric is ‘bad’, if intention is bad. In The Odyssey, the
Sirens’ music was, by definition, irresistible. The ropes that lashed
Ulysses to the mast were the only form of resistance to its call. Yet the
intention was nefarious – the Sirens’ desire was to emotionally disarm
before dashing the crew cruelly upon the rocks (it really would be good to
know what all this music sounded like!); so, should we leave to the
moraliser, the Piper and Sirens’ intention; to the ‘rhetorician’, the analysis
of their enchanting tunes? It should be that simple. Among analysts, it is
probably the general view that today the rhetor’s norms should not worry
us unduly. Few believe (anymore) that rhetoric is ‘understandable’ by its
ends or – speaking as scientists – that its ends should be to enhance ‘the
city’ (although we should bear in mind the normative preoccupations of
MacGregor Burns and others). Second, and conversely, ‘fear’ of rhetoric
remains very strong, socially and culturally, and the analyst is probably
not free of this either. Third, the fact that rhetoric can enhance the
purposes and interest of the uncivic individual haunts the city and the
study of the city. Fourth, those whose rhetoric contributes to a selfserving
purpose should not persuade us; and yet in a strategic sense all
19
rhetoricians have only this purpose. The thing about rhetoric is, as we
have seen, that the purposes of listener and speaker are often not the
same. The Pied Piper must have had a cruel or heartless reason to take all
those children away and break so many hearts (although even here, there
was perhaps some pedagogical purpose to the act (don’t trust strangers
with piccolos!); and, indeed, in some rare versions of the story, the
children live happily ever after in their new home). Our point is that,
whether normative or other, the ethos of the speaker informs everything,
and in leadership studies, the overwhelming need for analysis is to show
how argument and emotion serve the purpose of enhancing the
relationship between speaker (leader) and audience. We are as concerned
with what the leader/speaker made the audience feel about the
leader/speaker as we are about what they made the audience feel about
the issues.
We can see, therefore, that we cannot distinguish completely between the
speaker or rhetor’s intention, the interpolation of intention (the rhetoric),
the audience relation to the speaker, and the audience’s relationship to
culture and norms, and to its (or their) own desires. But the task for the
analyst is nevertheless forensic. Like a psychoanalyst or biographer, or a
surgeon, or a UN investigator gathering evidence for crimes against
humanity, we negotiate norms and emotions, while also knowing we
should try never to make the analytical distinction between the rhetoric of
Hitler and the rhetoric of Churchill on the basis of anything other than
their rhetorical qualities. ‘How do they get us out of our seats’, not
‘why?’ should be our main question – although we are constantly drawn
to wanting to know why too (Roberts, 2004). Since the Enlightenment,
our mission is secular, but it, the normative, is there all the time. The
analysis of rhetoric falls into the interpretivist tradition (Bevir and
Rhodes, 2003). Our essential point is that all of the issues we have
identified as inevitably informing, if not ‘interfering’, in our analysis of
rhetoric, apply even more so to our appraisal of one rhetorical element,
the ethos, the ‘character’ of the persona – deployed in discourse,
perceived through the rhetoric, and ‘imagined’ before, during, and after
delivery. Analysing the persona who interpolates the rhetoric, who is the
rhetoric’s ‘voice’, raises methodological but also normative issues which
inform us, of the kind: what do I think of this (imagined) person? In this
way, normative and moral concerns are at their most acute when it comes
to the deployment of the character of the speaker. Our norm-based
emotions (and our curiosity?) about the character of the speaker is the
context of our analysis of the speaker’s treatment (the rhetoric) of the
audience’s norm-based emotions.
20
In leadership rhetoric, therefore, we make a distinction about the person,
or rather the imagined persona of the speaker. Although the ‘secular’
analysis of rhetoric is our aim, the moral and other dimensions (e.g.
psychological) of the teller of the tale inform our view of the tale told,
and are linked to the idea that the rhetoric’s purpose is to tell us about the
speaker, as well as about the speaker as an agent in the process of
persuasion.
If we cannot or should not make a distinction between rhetoric to good or
bad purpose, perhaps we can overcome the problems posed by normative,
and possibly emotional ‘interference’, by taking the bull by the horns and
saying that Hitler and Churchill had precisely the same purpose and
should be analysed accordingly? That the only intent of the speaker that
should interest us is the desire to make a good speech and win allegiance
to the ‘self’ of the speaker. We need perhaps to depict ‘self’ as persuasive
and exemplary in order to show how self persuades and exemplifies, and
to ‘neutrally’ (re)construct his or her persona. We need therefore, to
analyse leadership rhetoric, its relation to intention, and to its audience, in
terms of that element within it concerned with ‘the character’ portrayed
by the rhetoric, but who also is outside the rhetoric, i.e. the (perceived or
constructed) speaker imagined and/or standing right in front of us, the
audience. What is the nature of the ‘imaginative’ interaction of speaker
and audience? And why are they listening to him or her?
Before looking at our four contrasting examples, let us make a
methodological point, which is that the performance of a political leader
can be analysed from a myriad of perspectives: from one performance, a
speech for example, or performances over a period of time, or from the
point of view of the leadership image deployed, the rhetoric used, the
world view projected, and so on. The potential analytical perspectives are
almost infinite. Our appraisals will touch upon several of these, but we
shall give special emphasis to two things: 1). the way in which culture
informs performance and 2). how leader performance both mediates ideas
and fashions leadership persona. In order to do this, we need to introduce
more firmly into our appraisal, questions of language and rhetoric, as well
as the roles of institutions and culture.
21
1). Tony Blair and the Diana Speech 31 August 1997 16
It
is
worth pointing out here, indeed reminding ourselves, how popular Blair
was at this time. He enjoyed the longest ‘honeymoon’ a modern British
Prime Minister had ever enjoyed. We should also remember how he had
already begun to ‘mix’ the public and the private selves before becoming
Prime Minister (receiving journalists, mug of tea in hand; declaring
himself a ‘regular guy’ on radio) so that when, as Prime Minister, he
stepped forward to make the Diana speech he was already a new kind of
politician, young and trendy, indeed, in a comparable vein to the person
whose life he was commemorating in such an apparent state of grief.
Tony Blair made his Diana speech on the afternoon of her violent death
in Paris in the early morning. 17
The clip shown on television and which
has become ‘the speech’ (he actually made several more remarks in the
full version) was 286 words long. The short speech is a rare example of a
speech that captures a national mood. We need, however, to show how
this ‘mood’ is ‘captured’; in fact, the speech both captures and creates the
mood, and it is this that gives it its iconic status.
A first point we can make is that Blair’s speech, through hesitations,
pauses, slightly trembling lips, sentence constructions of a kind that
suggest someone searching for expression, a mixture of phrases that seem
22
to mix the ‘official’ and the spontaneous, and a combination of clichés
and personal comment, does three things; it expresses: a truly national
disbelief at the unexpected, violent and painful death of – at the time –
Britain’s most famous and iconic and highly mediatised woman; the
highly emotional public reaction that accompanied the disbelief; and,
perhaps most importantly, the immediate posthumous rhetorical invention
of a new Diana, associated forever – through the short speech – with Blair
himself. This was an event, like the death of JFK or the release of
Mandela, that certainly the whole UK and much of the world population
took (passive) part in. Blair therefore, perhaps more than anyone else,
literally gave voice to this shocking event.
Another immediate context was its protocollary aspect. Blair ‘assumed’
responsibility for public comment about the death. She had no
constitutional position, nor he, therefore, any official role. Not that
anyone knew who was supposed to say what to the press/nation. In this
way, Blair was a kind of official/unofficial spokesperson for a media icon
rather than the official commentator on the death of a member of the
royal family. A further immediately influential factor was that everyone
knew that she was dead. Blair’s was not an announcement but a
comment, a (national) expression, of an event that everyone knew had
taken place, and which was captured in the opening line: ‘I feel like
everyone else in this country today’, expressing his own disbelief and
emotion which immediately become an articulated sense of national
disbelief.
The setting for the speech was also arresting in its simplicity and
symbolism. Blair stood in front of an old churchyard wall (it was in his
Sedgewick constituency) beyond which one could see the tops of old
gravestones, and the stone church. Between Blair and the bottom of the
wall there is grass, and behind him on either side in the Churchyard are
tall green trees, in front of him three (grey) microphones clumsily taped
together. The colours are all muted yet complementary: shades of green,
grey and brown, and in fact his own more defined tan, and brown hair,
and black (his suit and tie), and a touch of white (his shirt)
‘foregrounding’. The scene is, moreover, in four almost equal horizontal
parts: the strip of grass, the church wall, trees and church, and the church
roof and sky. The three main colours (grey, green, brown) are separate
yet complement each other, and there are shades of each. The scene
therefore is (with each of the three main colours sharing a hint of the
other two - there is, for example, green in the grey wall, rich brown in the
green trees, all ‘backgrounding’ the speaker); like a rather perfect
23
watercolour of a nineteenth century ‘authentic’ scene (Austen, Brontë),
sombre, muted, rural, and quintessentially ‘English’.
Blair’s head movements also complement the sense of authenticity. It is
not just the hesitations of voice, but the way (with no script) he turns his
head throughout slightly to the right. The impression is of someone
searching – spontaneously – for expressions (and his eyes are constantly
moving as if he is trying to find his place/comprehend the event. It is
clear he is indeed doing this in part, searching for at least the central
threads of his ideas (semi-prepared speech). He also is in fact turning to
the figure, just off to the right, and who we cannot see, and who triggers
his speech with ‘can we have your reaction’). Given these idiosyncrasies,
when Blair does turn full face to the camera (us, the viewers), the effect is
all the greater, the words all the more effective, because we have seen
him as if struggling with emotion, searching for the right words then
overcoming this, and looking straight at us: ‘how many times shall we
remember her, in how many different ways …?’ not just addressing us
directly but sharing the emotions projected (‘we’ ‘many times’ ‘in many
ways’). 18
Blair’s language is – indeed, like a lot of people who speak at
funerals or commemorations these days – like everyday language, but one
that visibly strives for a higher register. We should point out here that
Blair’s language is not only ‘like ours’ – and like ours in an emotional
moment, suggesting the veering away from what has to be said, as it
were, to emotional disarray and back again, but it is ‘like ours’, in that it
resembles the dominant media clichés of the time, used in both the
tabloid and serious press: ‘her two sons, the two boys’, ‘our hearts go
out’, ‘wonderful and warm’, ‘with joy and with comfort’ (cf. ‘comfort
and joy’ of the carol), ‘deeply painful’ and so on, all topped off by the
Hello Magazine ‘people’s princess’ cliché (evoked more strongly because
‘people’ appears twice in the previous sentence). Blair thus contributes to
the instant mythification of Diana that was already taking place. Twice,
Blair refers to the difficulties of her life. This too was a true expression of
Blair’s style and overall manner. The automatic response – as is normally
the case with ‘famous’ deaths – would have been eulogy. This speech, as
Bennister has pointed out, is part epideictic, part conversational, 19
part
oration, part confessional; for Blair insists not just upon the Diana of
official status but the Diana in the popular imagination and media fame.
Diana had been divorced the year before, 1996, and both when married
and during her divorce she had gained vast media exposure and public
sympathy (along the lines of a fragile young woman in search of love
after a loveless marriage), and not a little public concern that she was
becoming mentally unstable. In 1995, one year before her divorce, she
had given a very strange TV interview to the BBC on ‘Panorama’ (she
24
even looked very strange with an inordinate amount of mascara, for
example) where she referred to herself as the ‘Queen of Hearts’ an
expression echoed by Blair ‘The People’s Princess … will remain in our
hearts’. Rumours abounded about her private life, nocturnal trysts, the
paternity of Harry, her relationship to Dodi Fayed, to name just a few.
Blair’s allusions to these ‘How difficult things were for her’ brought out
this aspect of the public’s riveted interest in this side of the complex
Princess Diana. Interestingly, Blair – who knew her personally –does not
present himself as an acquaintance of Diana. In fact, and this explains in
part the public effect of the speech, he speaks throughout as if his
knowledge of her is our knowledge of her, the tabloid Diana, the tragic
and complex Diana of Anna Karenin proportions. Having alluded to this
(‘often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched …’), Blair then moves
from the troubled Diana to the Lady Bountiful Diana, arguably an
archetypal female myth in British society: ‘she touched the lives of so
many’, and the image of the other Diana, or the ‘other side’ of Diana
(also highly mediatised throughout the 1990s): her devotion to causes –
sick children, Aids, the abolition of landmines – coexisting with the tragic
Diana. Blair refers to her ‘compassion’, but interestingly it is an
archetypal female compassion; all her causes were about caring,
nurturing, giving succour, and protecting children and the vulnerable, and
of course she was herself, as we are reminded, a young mother.
Paradoxically, therefore, Blair’s oration, born of surprise and disbelief,
elevates Diana to the status of an icon; born to die young like Marilyn,
James Dean, JFK, etc, she is raised to their status as if joining them and
confirming the myth ‘only the good die young’.
It is impossible to know what role Blair’s speech played in the rapid
media-saturation of national grief that Diana’s death generated. However,
it clearly legitimated, from government, a kind of semi-official national
state of mourning. For those who remember her death and funeral, the
astonishing placing of millions of flowers, bouquets, and wreathes in
public spaces in the days and weeks after her death (echoed by the
flowers from the lined streets thrown across her hearse on the long slow
drive from London to Northamptonshire), Blair’s speech legitimated a
new form of national grief. It was also evidence of his acute sense of the
national mood beyond the chattering classes’ and left’s general lack of
interest in or sympathy for Diana in life. And this is the key to Blair’s 286
words. He says ‘country’ once, ‘this country today’, ‘Britain’ three times,
‘nation’ once, ‘a nation in a state of shock’, ‘the people’ three times,
‘we/our’ nine times, ‘they’ (i.e. the British and everyone) four times –
and all these ‘signifieds’ are associated with her, named or named
25
pronominally, fifteen times. There is, therefore, a large discursive
association of the country, us, with her. In this way, Blair in part
transformed her violent death, and gave voice to her death as a national
event. In so doing, Blair ‘invents’ this nation in his speech, and
rhetorically ‘invents’, as it were, the ‘People’s Princess’.
At the end of the speech Blair partly lowers his head after saying ‘in our
hearts and in our memories forever’ signalling the end of the speech, as if
bowing to pray (in the actual speech delivered he says two lines more, but
the BBC clip has become the kind of ‘official’ speech).
2). François Mitterrand. Campaign Poster for the 1988 Presidential
Elections.
The above was
François Mitterrand’s
main campaign poster
for the 1988 presidential
elections. It was part
of his successful bid for
a second seven-year
term, and before and
during this campaign
Mitterrand had
become extremely
popular, with a
‘Father of the Nation’
image (which was projected on to the public as ‘Génération Mitterrand’,
thus including it in the relationship). In order to grasp the significance of
26
this poster, let us make a series of points in the form of questions. First,
what is he looking at? Most people would say at France or the future or
the future of France or ‘La France Unie’. 20
This is an immediate
indication that political images have a ‘grammar’ understood by the
designers but also by the public. And yet, the real answer is that we do
not know. And that also is a clue: he is looking at something (France, the
future) we cannot see. And we can add that we understand the ‘grammar’
of the iconographic because we think what we think (about him) partly
because he is turned away but partly quite simply because there is a light
shining upon his face; Western (and specifically French) culture
‘recognises’ that light upon the face of the ‘gazer’ is religious in origin –
the light of grace or otherworldliness. A good contrast to this, moreover,
would be UK or US political posters – only very rarely would such an
angle be used. In fact, Anglo-Saxon posters are much more likely to have
a full face, smiling ‘honest’ friendliness. In France, the fact that the
subject is contemplating – looking away from us – is complimentary to
his image. In the UK, such a gaze would be seen as suspect, suggesting
almost the delusions of a Mussolini. 21
But in France, the political
contender can also be a philosopher, a thinker, and one therefore capable
of contemplating something we literally cannot see. This is, in fact, the
essence of French leadership: the leader who can ‘envision’: so we have
here a glimpse of him envisioning, not us, but ‘la belle France’ or some
such (something we ourselves would like to envision).
What of the angle of the photo itself? No matter where the viewer places
him/herself, he/she is ‘below’ the subject looking up. The figure is benign
– contemplating, almost the beginnings of a smile, a knowing gaze, and
the perhaps reassuring ‘crow’s feet’ wrinkles around the eyes –
portraying the wisdom of age. In fact, the crow’s feet give us another
clue: we are not only below the subject but very close to it (one is still
photographically close even if far away – and many of these posters were
billboard size). This raises a further question, that of ‘intimacy’. How
close does one need to be to another person before they see crow’s feet?
As close as a lover? Or perhaps a child? So a certain physical intimacy
between viewer and viewed is present, is imagined. The angle or view
therefore becomes that of a child ‘looking up’ to a kind figure of
authority like a father or grandfather. The wise kind human features also,
however, suggest their opposite (political iconography often mediates
opposites or contrasts: attractiveness/wisdom, kind/austere, etc), namely,
something statuesque about the pose. The features are chiselled, and not
only by the light. The ‘looking up’ is therefore transformed into as if
looking up at a statue – in fact, were one to push the nose slightly to
profile we would have the profile of an emperor, as on a Roman coin. So
27
we have a blend of wisdom and kindness, imperium and intimacy,
reverence and subservience from us, all linked to the envisioning gaze of
the intellectual ‘hero’. This is a million miles from say UK political
culture, yet a perfect expression of the chivalric myths underpinning the
presidentialism of de Gaulle’s – here Mitterrand’s – Fifth Republic.
3). François Hollande. His First Year in Office
The
case
of
François Hollande’s presidential persona should be seen in the context of
the points we have made about François Mitterrand. Hollande gained the
presidency in 2012 as the first Socialist Party President since the end of
Mitterrand’s presidency in 1995. Between then and 2012, the right had
won three presidential elections, two by Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) and
one by Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012). All of Hollande’s predecessors, de
Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand, Chirac, and Sarkozy
had been very well known to the public before they became President,
and each in their own way responded to the exigencies of the Fifth
Republic presidency i.e. by entering into versions of the ‘self’/France
relationship outlined earlier. Sarkozy had somewhat abused this balance
by pushing the relationship between ‘self’ and France/the French to the
point of a kind of ‘disenchantment’ of the presidency. He seemed too
active, too involved with his relationship to the public (thanks in part to
the emergence in the 2000s of the ‘peoplisation’ of politics), and too little
involved in the ‘higher’ relationship of self to ‘France’: too much like an
overactive Prime Minister and too little like a President. Moreover, the
move (voted in 2000) from the seven to the five year term has
dramatically altered the ‘presence’ of the President. It was designed
simply to align the presidential and legislative terms, but it has meant that
the President is expected to be ever present, and ever-performing. This in
turn has major effects upon the symbolism of the presidency, in part
28
reducing it but, more importantly and worryingly, making the two sides –
the political and the symbolic – interface with one another on an almost
daily basis. Hollande’s response (successful for the duration of an antiSarkozy
election campaign) was to adopt a persona, ‘Mr Normal’ that
was the negation of Sarkozy’s persona. Sarkozy’s persona was indeed a
near-abuse of the role of presidential self; Hollande’s persona a rejection
of this, but implicitly it was also a rejection of the presidential ‘model’ of
the Fifth Republic. When we say ‘model’ we simply mean by this that
there is something chivalric about the French presidency. Because of de
Gaulle’s very romantic world view, the President is a knight, come to
rescue ‘France’, and display devotion to ‘her’, and so on. To trivialise this
is to undermine one of the presidency’s strengths. Hollande entered the
presidency without a presidential self, and within a few months had
become the most unpopular – and most rapidly unpopular – President of
the Fifth Republic. Let us now look at his first year in office. We shall see
that the dramatic effects of the string of mishaps were the result of a
fundamental failure to understand the symbolic exigencies of the Fifth
Republic, in particular the need for ‘character’, which Hollande had
replaced with a series of claims to moral exemplarity, but which would
very rapidly become a new persona, created by circumstances: indecisive,
blustering, incompetent, unreliable, and very ‘ordinary’, a person
inadequate to the office.
On the day of François Hollande’s inauguration as the seventh President
of the French Fifth Republic, 15 May 2012, it poured with rain all day
long. Inexplicably, no one offered him a raincoat or the protection of an
umbrella. He spent the day’s ceremony drenched to the bone, his glasses
steamed up, his sopping wet suit and shirt flattened against him. It was a
sign. It seemed to rain forever after.
Less than three months into his five year term, François Hollande was
close to becoming a lame-duck, if not a dead-duck President. He still
carried the legitimacy of direct election, but very little authority. By the
time of the 8 May 2013 commemorations of the Allied victory of 1945,
Hollande was there, of course, as was his government, the military, and
the veterans, but the Champs Elysées were deserted. The year before – to
show how near to the people he was, and as he had throughout his
election campaign – he went walkabout into the crowds, shaking hands
and kissing babies. Now, there was no one to shake hands with, no
women to ‘faire le bisou’ with, and no babies to kiss. There weren’t even
any Japanese tourists. How did this happen?
29
It is not as if he had no political power base. François Hollande, the
Socialist Party’s candidate, was elected President in May 2012, ousting
the deeply unpopular President Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande saw himself as
a kind of antithesis of Sarkozy, a ‘Mr Normal’ to Sarkozy’s ‘Mr Bling’.
The Socialist left had never been so strong politically. Upon his election,
the National Assembly was dissolved, and in the June 2012 parliamentary
elections, with its Radical Left allies, the Socialists won an outright
majority. They therefore controlled the presidency, the government, both
houses of parliament, the regions, and all the big towns and cities. Neither
the right nor the left had ever held such power. Hollande held in his hands
a royal flush no one had ever dreamed of, and he could have done
whatever he wanted. And yet in his first twenty four months in office,
President Hollande and his government did virtually nothing while
everything got worse and worse. Why? There were lots of things they
could and should have done, and lots of other things they would much
better have avoided doing. Why such potential power to change France
forever and yet such impotence to do anything at all; why such inaction,
such mis-management, and above all such bad leadership? That is the
lesson, the question raised by Hollande’s catastrophic first two years.
Part of the problem was that the party had no ideas; no strategy, no
vision, no policies holding the party together and moving it forward. For
the previous ten years, at the national level, the party was just an
irrelevance, going nowhere, its leaders fighting with one another like cats
in a bag. Just as importantly, the party had theorised nothing; not the
economy, not society, nor the regime itself, and certainly not the
presidency they coveted, nor what a strange multi-faceted institution it
was. They had had ten years and more to rethink it and themselves, and
French society, and the regime, yet they did nothing to prepare for power.
Hollande’s successful election campaign in 2012 was based quite simply
upon exploiting the quite visceral public dislike of the hyperactive,
inconsistent, and noisy Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande presented himself in
all things the antithesis of Sarkozy: modest not bling, moral not immoral,
uninterested in money, simple and ‘normal’, as opposed to part of the
celebrity culture and one of the beautiful people; calm not prone to
hyperventilating with rage, exemplary and attentive to people, unlike the
incumbent, who had been interested only in banquets and yachts.
Whether or not Hollande believed this myth, made of partial truths and
many misperceptions – for such differences are stylistic, and politics –
and people – are more complicated than such Manichean notions suggest,
as Hollande would soon learn – the result was that he had given no
thought to how to ‘inhabit’ this strange office, and how to be the things
he claimed he was. And the fundamental problem with his holier-than-
30
thou approach is that it actually enhanced the main feature of the French
Republic that Hollande was trying to ‘tame’, namely, its emphasis upon
the personal and upon character: what Hollande did by putting a
searchlight upon Sarkozy’s fault, was to walk into the Elysée Palace with
every searchlight trained upon him; upon him and his claim to exemplary
moral status, and modesty, as well as upon the idea that these qualities
alone would deliver France from its growing sense of economic and
social turmoil.
After his election, he appointed his government. As a gesture, everyone
including the President took a salary cut. There were a lot of them to do
so, 38 ministers in all. There was also gender parity, a first in French
politics. It was as if the new, exemplary President would now transform
the unjust regime into an Exemplary Republic. And at several
international meetings in quick succession immediately following his
inauguration, he seemed relatively at ease and capable. Two anecdotes
are worth recording here, however, and involve his meeting with Angela
Merkel, followed by one in the US with Obama. Each tells us about how
things would develop. The meeting with Merkel was frosty, and relations
with Germany deteriorated for months to come; but for our purposes,
what is crucial is that Hollande was already using his presidential ‘self’ as
the embodiment of France, not ‘giving in’ to austere and exacting
Germany. His public ‘friendly tension’ with Merkel, as he called it, saw
the personalised use of hostility to prevailing European policy, tinged
with a slight virility issue – Hollande, the man imposing himself upon
Merkel, the woman. This was a serious personalised miscalculation
which by the end of the year had escalated into wild attacks by
Hollande’s own party upon Germany as the cause of Europe’s ills, and
upon the ‘selfish intransigence’ of Merkel herself (and in the end,
Hollande signed the agreement he had said he would change, without a
comma having been altered). In the US, with Obama, there was no
frostiness (even though Hollande had come to tell Obama he was
withdrawing all French troops from Afghanistan). What did strike
observers though was related to image. Next to the gazelle-like
nonchalant elegance of his smiling American counterpart, in his opennecked
shirt, Hollande seemed like an uncomfortable insurance salesman.
‘Normal’ next to ‘presidential’ was never more stark.
Throughout the summer of 2012, the sense of growing crisis was palpable
– Peugeot-Citroën inconveniently announced 8,000 redundancies;
unemployment was going through the roof (in the first year
unemployment rose relentlessly to over 10%). Hollande’s first response
as the new captain of the ship now heading directly into the hurricane
31
was… to go on holiday. National disbelief was now palpable too, and the
incredulity never stopped growing. If Hollande had stayed in Paris
working with a small team around him, while others – and the French
themselves – took their holiday (with an ‘I’ll come down for a long
weekend’ to his partner, Valérie Trierweiler), Hollande’s presidency
would have started in a fundamentally different way. Indeed, the
symbolism of staying behind at the office to sort out France’s crisis
problems would have made a profound statement about Hollande’s desire
to find new solutions for France’s old problems, and would have been a
real display of ‘character’. He did do this the following year, but it was
too late; but by 2013 his popularity ratings had fallen to circa 20% and
would not move.
The reasoning was that he wanted to demarcate himself from his
hyperactive predecessor, so he made no move at all – twiddling his
thumbs – or, rather, swimming, and strolling around in his chinos in
Brégançon - while Paris and unemployment, as it were, burned. The
obsession with being and doing everything that Sarkozy was not made
Hollande oblivious to the actual situation the country was in. This
mistake of defining himself in relation to his predecessor rather than to an
‘imagined’ and imaginable ‘François Hollande, President of the
Republic’ stemmed from a more fundamental mistake or failing, namely,
an incomprehension of the subtle norms and exigencies of the office he
held; in a word, he and the people around him did not understand the
republic they were in charge of. This not understanding the republic and
its presidency explained every dreadful mistake Hollande made. The
result was that he was the architect of his own misfortunes. By September
2012, Hollande’s popularity was already below 50%, and the new
government had barely started. It then went into free-fall.
Hollande had fought the election campaign claiming he would be a
Normal and Simple President, like a Prime Minister in fact, which is not
what the French presidency is (although it is, in all but name, that too).
The presidency is a major site of ambivalences, and is in a complex
relationship to the French and their problems, anxieties, desires, and
reflections. There is a psychic dimension to the French presidency and its
relationship to the French. And there is an element of narcissism, in its
clinical sense, in the French and their desire for a President (when
everyone else gets on with having a P.M. or a Chancellor for the political
life) as both their political leader and their Head of State. The President
embodies metaphorically, indeed almost literally, the French state itself.
It was not just that unemployment was going up. It was also about what
the relationship of the President was to the country. It was not just his
32
policy intentions that mattered, but his emotional relationship to the
people his policies affected. It was not just about displaying competence
but about gaining public confidence. The emotional subtlety of the office
means that a strongly ethical dimension to the persona of the President
was inevitable. This can hook on to, as it were, issues such as a devotion
to France, or republican integrity, or modernisation, or confronting
injustice or righting wrongs. However, to state this claim to ethics overtly
is a fundamental mistake with enormous ramifications. Hollande’s
constant stress upon his greater moral status than Nicolas Sarkozy and
upon the idea that he would bring integrity through his own comportment
and that of the people around him was to expose him to constant scrutiny
– and lampoon – almost from the moment he took office. The
searchlights would seek out not just the simple and normal persona and
its variants, but every ethical implication of every action. It also meant
that every move he made – or did not make – would be as if driven by
‘justice’ rather than efficiency, by the righteousness of the new Good
King, rather than because it actually worked. ‘Normal’ and ‘Simple’ were
bound to descend very quickly into farce; Hollande’s claims to virtue
would, if undermined, turn farce into tragedy. Every personal
characteristic, trait and failing, especially anything to do with personal
morality and ethical comportment – anything that suggested he was ‘just
like all the others’, or hypocritical - would be exposed to scrutiny. Every
move he made would be subject to moral appraisal. He had said there
would be no more corruption, no more bling, no more scandals, no more
headlines in the Hello Magazine press. There were to follow two years of
nothing else. Three moments in the first year stand out.
The first was the bizarre and headline-attracting comportment of his
partner, Valérie Trierweiler. She soon put paid to the no more headlines
issue. First, her barely concealed feud with Hollande’s former partner and
presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, became a national talking point in
June 2012 when she tweeted – i.e. told the whole of France – her support
for Royal’s rival in the legislative elections (and Royal lost…). Also, as a
journalist (for Paris Match), she said she did not want to be a ‘potiche’ (a
trophy) First Lady. But then she kind of did. Her uncertainty betrayed a
self-centred caprice, in an ingenuous relationship with both the office and
the media (a slight echo of Princess Diana’s relationship). She also,
indeed, appeared to have a temper.
Polls saw Trierweiler, the ‘First Girlfriend’, disowned by the French with
a 67% disapproval rate. Hollande was caught on camera on one of his
walkabouts being told by a very ordinary local woman not to marry her,
and that the French did not like her. Trierweiler remained in the headlines
33
throughout the first two years until February 2014 when – because of the
‘Closergate’ affair, she became the only headline, with Hollande’s
presidency now resembling an episode of ‘Dallas’. 22
The second ‘moral’ hostage to fortune was the myriad of little lifestyle
changes Hollande and his entourage undertook to (ostentatiously) remove
ostentation from the presidential function: he would take trains instead of
taking jets. In reality, his taking trains - usually accompanied by Valérie –
became media events (and the couple never seemed to have any luggage);
and he might take the train there and the jet back (which had to fly there
to get him), or else take the official limousine back, which early on was
clocked at 110 miles-an-hour on the A1 motorway. Hollande told his
ministers off for taking private jets to get about, and then used them
himself. He would live simply, except that Valérie spent a fortune (paid
for by the state?) on cushions and such and their transportation to their
summer holiday residence in 2012. It no longer mattered whether half
these things were true; the damage was done because of the earlier claims
to moral rectitude. Any pol.com advisor should have told him, if you
want want to win you can use the moral card; if you then want to
effectively govern or preside, you had better not. The fall in Hollande’s
popularity was vertiginous. In January 2013, a successful military
operation and the freeing of a family held hostage in Nigeria barely made
a blip on his popularity ratings. By this time, a qualitative decline in not
just Hollande’s popularity but his credibility had taken place. He had said
he would, throughout his mandate, stay in touch with the people through
provincial tours and visits, for example to his adopted Corrèze. Hostility
or even worse, indifference, met him everywhere. By the Spring of 2013,
the provincial visits had become yet another PR disaster. And when it
seemed it could not get any worse, the third scandal, the Cahuzac affair,
was of nuclear proportions.
The Jerome Cahuzac affair was the catalyst for an avalanche of crises
engulfing the government in the early months of 2013. It started off as a
relatively ‘discrete’ issue, involving only one man, albeit a Government
Minister: did Jerome Cahuzac, the Budget Minister, have a secret
overseas bank account, and if he did, he would have to resign (he said he
didn’t have one). But the shockwaves from his resignation on 19 March
(yes he did have a secret Swiss bank account, and admitted as much)
seemed never-ending to the point where not just the government but the
regime itself appeared in danger of going into a tailspin. What is
astonishing is that this was not foreseen – not the Swiss bank account,
which many insiders were clearly aware of – but the fall-out. The reason
why the fall-out was not foreseen is the same reason why Hollande and
34
his team got into such a mess: they did not understand the nature of the
Republic they so extolled, nor the symbolism of leadership in it. The
Cahuzac affair was a personal tragedy for Cahuzac and a sad comment
about politics (he was a tax fiddler whose job it was to – with due and
righteous indignation - chase tax fiddlers). But, politically, it is Hollande
who was the real victim. It was not Hollande’s own integrity which was
being pilloried at this point but his incompetence. If he knew the truth
about his Budget Minister he looked bad; if he didn’t know, he looked
equally bad; as if he were the last to work out what was going on. The
press compared the hapless Hollande to Mitterrand, the master
Machiavellian: none of his ministers would have dared lie to him.
Hollande’s earlier campaign association with Mitterrand, to the point of
quite literally impersonating him – e.g. in his Le Bourget speech – now
made him look pathetic, and their righteousness of Hollande’s comments
following Cahvzac’s disgrace, even more so.
Hollande reacted falteringly to the Cahuzac scandal, promising major
changes (most of the measures actually existed) including making all
government ministers declare their fortunes and tax arrangements. The
ones with little fortune declared immediately (although in some cases
declaring the value of their homes when they had bought them rather than
their current value immediately gave the whole procedure an air of
suspicion). No one seemed to have a car (all used ministerial cars). No
one invested in the dynamic economy. Property (or properties) was the
main source of wealth. And there were eight millionaires in the
government! The combination of voyeurism and the perception of large
fortunes made the situation even more farcical, and the President did not
declare his own fortune… One of the little-remarked upon features of this
affair was that Hollande made the situation worse by his own selfdramatization.
He had by this time lost all reputation through his inaction;
now, by being so solemn and self-righteous in his pronouncements, upon
something he should have ensured did not happen in the first place and
for which he had been elected to make not happen, made him look like a
ham actor rather than a President.
In a poll in early May 2013, it appeared that if a presidential election
were to take place, Hollande would not even make it through to the
second round. 7 in 10 of those polled in April already thought Hollande
as President was a disaster. By the end of the month, 8 in 10 were in
favour of a new government of national unity. The public were clearly
very angry, and what was worse, utterly disillusioned with politics. When
a population – particularly one in the middle of a crisis like France was
going through, with unemployment over 10% and hundreds of firms
35
closing every week – believes that all politicians are corrupt (‘tous
pourris’ or incompetent), this helps the extremes, in particular the
extreme-right who stood to gain from this growing sense of economic,
political, and now moral turmoil.
The fragility and complexity of French politics was exposed by this
scandal. Much of the stability is based upon the intricate and interactive
relationship between the French and their President. François Hollande
seemed after year one to have completely lost the French along the line
(and they weren’t expecting that much in the first place, but they certainly
weren’t expecting what they got). And the republic was not more simple,
normal, or moral than it was before. In mid-May 2013 a staggering 75%
of those polled actually said nothing had improved from a year ago. Part
of the disillusion stemmed from three issues – two things he did not do,
and one he did: he did not make it clear how difficult the economic and
social trials were going to be; he did not make it clear how deep the cuts
in spending would be; but what he did do was he told the French that
ethically, his rule was going to be a new dawn. In fact, it turned rather
into something of a nightmare. The negative impact of these three issues
made him appear dishonest as well as aimless. In all polls, the French
overwhelmingly did not know where the government was going, or where
the President even wanted to go; worse, no one believed a word he said
anymore. In the autumn of 2012 he gave a TV interview to France 2, and
later a press conference. He made a robust New Year’s message at the
end of 2012, watched by millions. 75% of viewers didn’t believe a word
of it. It was the same for his long TV interview of March 2013 on Fr2.,
then his interview to AFP at the end of April followed by a further press
conference, end of year wishes, and another press conference in January
2014 (as the Closergate scandal broke). After every public intervention
his ratings fell, so that every appearance, every performance, became a
moment in his decline in popularity. One had the impression that even if
people were listening, they did so with a profound scepticism and in the
vain hope that they might just catch something positive; this was the case
briefly for the ‘Responsibility Pact’ he announced in his January 2014
press conference, but within weeks this too had run into the ground
dragging his popularity down further.
No President of the Fifth Republic had become so unpopular, so fast. No
other had shown how complex is the architecture of French political
leadership.
4). Ed Miliband. Leadership and Authorship in Opposition
36
In this
section, we are concerned with how Ed Miliband attempted to shift the
ideational and discursive parameters of the UK Labour Party and then
become, through a particular rhetoric and image, the spokesperson for,
then the author of, the party’s ‘new’ discourse. Our analysis here is based
upon two pieces of research. 23
The first took all the main party texts after
the defeat at the general election in 2010. We identified major texts,
approximately a dozen of them; in fact, one of them predated the election
defeat which offers a clue to what they were all doing. The debates,
colloquia, articles, booklets, books, and radio programmes, were
essentially an ideological revision in the form of a Policy Review. The
texts pre-dating the election point to the idea of an origin, a founding
moment (of the search for truth) before the disastrous 2012 election
(arguably the worst defeat in Labour’s history). The texts indeed follow
the structure of a narrative. There is a beginning, as we have said, then
catastrophe (the election), then the search for truth through various texts
and from various sources as the ‘story’ tries to identify the wrong paths
taken (1979-2010) (at one point, with Blue Labour, even 1945 is a wrong
road), and highlight the right road, namely an earlier (utopian?) time
when communities thrived (1930s socialism) and the left knew its
purpose. This then becomes the application of this ethos to now (One
Nation) and policy elaboration in the future. Thus the party created a new
discursive, narrative ‘arc’ from circa 2010 to … 2015 (and hopeful
triumph and the victory of the good). By applying narrative theory to the
party political texts emerging within the UK Labour Party after 2010,
which make up the corpus of One Nation discourse, we can grasp the
underlying significance of this ideational revision of Labour Party and
leftist thought thus:
37
(Gaffney & Lahel, 2013b).
Through an identification and analysis of the sequence of texts and their
constitution as a ‘story’ that interpolates an underlying ‘plot’, we can see
how a revision of Labour’s ‘tale’ offered to leadership a new party
discourse appropriate to it, mediating – if not reconciling – the
problematic duality of narrative authorship by both party and leader.
Into this developing ‘narrative arc’ the leader enters – in particular at the
Manchester party conference of 2012. At this conference, through his
speech, the leader, Ed Miliband, becomes the author (and hero) of the
narrative itself. Two aspects of the Miliband’s appropriation of the One
Nation discourse, over and above his adapting and giving voice to its
ideas (as if they were indeed his own ideas), impose themselves. The first
is that his adopting One Nation as a moral code is the result of a very
personal narrative. In the Manchester speech, Miliband talked at length
about his childhood and the moral, political, and personal experiences
that shaped him. In this way, through affect and morality, the child is the
father of the man, the child’s experience the father of the man’s narrative.
The second is that in the Manchester speech a great deal of emotion
irrigates the appropriation of the One Nation narrative. There is humour
which is also part of the presentation of the character, but the most
38
significant feature is the projection of emotion such as his references to
the Milibands’ family friend, Ruth First, assassinated by the South
African police. 24
From our analysis we can see the role of rhetoric, persona and celebrity,
and the effects of performance on the political process. Our analysis
identified how, through performance of ‘himself’ and the beginnings of
the deployment of an alternative party narrative centred on ‘One Nation’,
Ed Miliband began to revise his ‘received persona’. By using a range of
rhetorical and other techniques, Miliband began to adapt the Labour
narrative to what we have termed the ‘personalized political’.
By 2014, the Labour Party began to bring forward policies for 2015 (not a
moment too soon). The time for Policy Reviews, which really were a
synopsis of contemporary social theory and philosophical reachings back
for inspiration, and not of policy, then went into partial eclipse; it has
served its narrative purpose. Miliband (and his new cabinet reshuffled in
Autumn 2013) began talking real bread-and-butter issues, the ‘cost of
living crisis’: a price freeze on energy bills, a levy on the payday loans
industry to pay for local credit unions, joined-up healthcare, Rachel
Reeves being tough on benefits, tough on the causes of benefits. For the
next six months Labour continued filling its market stall of policies
before the general election, each policy being announced by the leader or
people close to him.
Miliband was seen to ruffle a few feathers in the process, especially by
pledging to freeze energy prices for the first two years of a Labour
Government. It is not worth repeating the arguments against the move.
Safe to say, however, that the policy is most likely unworkable; even
Miliband admitted he could not control fluctuating global oil and gas
prices. But to criticise the policy for this reason alone was fundamentally
misguided. Polls showed the energy freeze was popular. Polls also
showed that it was considered probably unworkable. How could both of
these ideas be held as being true?
What was missing from analysis, by supporters and ‘Milibashers’ alike,
was that the measures Miliband announced were not designed to be
technocratic responses to the rising cost of living. Instead, they marked
the creation of a narrative of leadership in the Labour Party. Miliband had
spent the last three years having his credibility as a future Prime Minister
questioned. By personalizing party discourse, he began mounting a
challenge to this narrative.
39
This revamped narrative depicted a strong leader who was not afraid of
overruling predatory markets to get fair outcomes for struggling and
marginalised groups. The narrative was a direct appeal to emotions by the
leader of the left, and this made it almost populist, no doubt. Populism –
the rhetoric of popular appeal, at least, particularly when it is personalised
– is an effective discursive strategy, especially when the Opposition was
setting the agenda in order to focus on the everyday, human impact of the
coalition’s economic policy.
We can see then how the measures contributed to the cultivation of an
understanding of Miliband’s character in the public’s imagination. He
built policy not just on calculations of cost and benefit, but also on how
policies would fundamentally reflect his own moral values. Miliband
positioned himself as friend of those who could not make ends meet, a
loving son defending his father’s memory, 25
a bulwark against vested
interests, and the ethical leader prepared to stand up to the likes of Rupert
Murdoch, or against a rash military attack upon the Syrian regime, and so
on. Labour’s emerging policies were to make Miliband the tribune of
Labour’s anticipated constituencies. As the policies emerged, ‘joined up’,
over the coming months, on housing, on healthcare, on families, on
community, they had strong emotional appeal, for him and his team to –
literally – give voice to them.
It was not just the policies he and his team were now beginning to deploy,
but Miliband himself and the character he was trying to portray which
was important, Miliband’s personal vision of society before 2015, in a
Britain that was fair, local, secure and respectful. Through this rhetoric of
the ‘personalised political’, the strategy allowed the public to ‘see’, as it
were, One Nation Britain.
Conclusion
We can draw conclusions relevant to the development of the overall
Bennister et al project by contrasting some of the elements related to
leadership performance. Before doing this, we can make a few specific
observations. First, the role of character in the political process is part of
the political process, and in particular moments it almost is the political
process itself. Second, and relatedly, a moral dimension has become a
part of leadership performance, although it is a highly unstable or
unpredictable political resource. Not to refer to it and the leader appears
without depth; overuse or over referencing as in the case of François
Hollande, and the topic can become very disadvantageous, as any failing
or inappropriateness can trigger the charge of hypocrisy. Third, emotions
on a range from humour to deep sadness are now mainstream elements
40
within political discourse, in part because of the heightened focus upon
the personal and therefore upon the personality of the leader, but also
because of the personalising of the political itself (e.g. Miliband’s
credentials being marked out personally); so the political becomes
personalised and the personal politicized. In turn, this focus means that
personality is in a dynamic relation to policy and policy elaboration,
sometimes almost replacing these, sometimes becoming the vehicle of
their presentation, such as Miliband’s announcing an energy price freeze
at the 2013 Labour Party Conference. Fourth, not simply because politics
is largely a male affair through force of numbers but because of the myths
underpinning political systems, in particular myths about male courage,
vigour, potency, action etc, leadership performance is in a relationship to
what is perceived as ‘male’ – not necessarily ‘masculine’ in a traditional
virile way – but leaders need to negotiate this role which appears to be
one made for a male, preferably an alpha-male. This also means that the
leader’s relationship to women and to ideas about women will become
more than significant in the projection of leadership persona (in our
examples, this is particularly true of Blair, of course, and Hollande, but
also of Mitterrand in terms of his patriarchal pose). Finally, we can say
that the different institutions play a part but do not always function in the
way they are designed. The relative presidentialisation of the UK
premiership can be noted, as can the more prime ministerial style of
François Hollande. What really distinguishes the two countries is the
culture that underpins the institutions. As regards the personalisation of
politics, because of a long tradition of allegiance or recourse to the
‘providential man’, France is very receptive to if not indeed dependent
upon it. Leaders may ‘envision’ because the French believe there are such
men. In the UK too, personalisation has become part of the fabric but it is
of a different type, more akin to the projection of a competent, affable,
‘regular guy’ image, although not exclusive of more grandiose claims,
depending upon the occasion.
If we turn now to contrasting our subjects, the contrast between
Mitterrand and Hollande demonstrates that a kind of presidential
grandeur is not given but has to be ‘performed’. The ‘real’ innovation of
the Fifth Republic was to bring ‘self’ centre stage, much more so than
before or elsewhere. What becomes of self, however, depends upon a
series of things including and especially leadership performance.
One of the consequences of the French system as opposed to the UK is
that leaders can ‘own’ discourse and rhetoric more easily. By creating
changes within the French Socialist narrative (essentially by heightening
Millenarianism), Mitterrand was able to create a leftist rally discourse
41
around himself, and harness it to an idea of a movement that carried him
and the left to power. 26
This was so successful that after gaining power,
by the mid-1980s Socialist discourse was whatever he happened to be
saying; he completely owned it, more or less until he left power in 1995.
The effect upon French Socialism itself was to drain it of its narrative.
One can argue that it never recovered from the experience, and even the
evolution and development of a coherent social democratic discourse,
better adapted to political conditions today, and which Hollande might
have rhetorically profited from, has still not taken root (his claims to
being a social democrat in his January 2014 press conference sounding
almost childish is its lack of reflection).
In the UK, there is an opposite phenomenon. One of the striking features
of the narrative evolution of the Labour Party after the 2010 defeat and
the ‘fall’ of Gordon Brown, was how rich the textual production and
creativity was. The Party saw the blossoming of a kind of communitybased
socialism reminiscent of 1930s socialism, adapted to the present,
and given voice quite literally by Miliband himself. The difference
between this and the French Socialist Party of the 1970s and 1980s was
that the UK’s much more restricted use and tradition of personalisation
meant that Miliband was much less able to ‘lift’ the narrative to a rally
around himself. He faced strong criticism from the spokespeople of other
narrative traditions such as the post-war left e.g. Roy Hattersley, the
radical 1980s left represented by such figures as Billy Bragg, a more
sober social-democratic left highly critical of Blue Labour (e.g. Polly
Toynbee), and so on. More significantly still, the other ‘big beasts’ in the
shadow cabinet like Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, and others
made no reference to Miliband’s putative One Nation rally discourse. The
kind of personalist rally around Miliband was both ideologically (the UK
left is very hesitant about such) and rhetorically limited, severely so when
contrasted with the French case.
A further contrast that emerges from our study is that, acutely so in the
French case, ‘performance’ politics is gendered. Interestingly, of the four
leaders examined here, Tony Blair is the least implicated by this and yet
arguably the most ‘attractive’. This perhaps reflects the culture of the
period; and his own persona: unpretentious, talkative, modern, and,
paradoxically, the occasion itself that implied no male dominance. 27
When he became Prime Minister he was seen as a young modern 40something
husband (a widely circulated picture of loving happiness of he
and his wife showed them hugging and smiling on the steps on No. 10).
He had small children, and in fact, he was the only Prime Minister in
living memory whose wife conceived while in office (Cherie Blair’s later
42
allusions to their highly active sex life probably damaged this image
rather than enhanced it). The overall image of Blair in 1997 created an
ideal persona to represent a nation and a generation’s grief when the
iconic, young, beautiful (and female) Diana was killed.
For Mitterrand, the attractive male but now older sage-like image of the
1988 poster had as its gender context, the widespread unofficial
knowledge of Mitterrand’s many romantic conquests, even though
married (in fact, it later emerged that he had two families and a ‘secret’
daughter, Mazarine). This sexual dimension to French leadership, until
the ‘DSK affair’ of 2011 (and even then …), has, unlike in the UK,
always been seen as permissible, if not almost necessary. All French
Presidents have been known for their amorous adventures, as it were
(apart from the faithful, Catholic, and austere de Gaulle, although there
were even rumours about him and a woman from the Comédie
Française). In the case of Hollande, this backfired and seriously damaged
his image at the start of his presidency because of the ‘Valériegate’
affaire. 28
There was no disapproval of his separation from his former
partner Ségolène Royal (in fact, it was never clear who actually ended the
relationship), and his new life with Valérie Trierweiler (although their not
getting married when he became Head of State was viewed with public
concern, particularly as regards (international) protocol – an aspect of life
the French are obsessed by). But Trierweiller’s outburst against Royal –
in the form of tweeting support to her rival for a parliamentary seat in
2010 – gave the impression – he was relentlessly lampooned in cartoons
and comedy shows – of a man utterly incapable of controlling ‘his
women’ and at the mercy of female fury. The image, coupled with his
own relative unattractiveness, severely undermined his image as a
powerful leader. He seemed more like the henpecked husband of saucy
seaside postcards. In fact, he seemed the antithesis now of the man who
should have been ‘king’ but who fell from grace for the opposite reasons
of Hollande’s ‘harmless’ sexual image, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Hollande’s affair with Julie Gayet, revealed in January 2014, altered his
image once again. And, in fact, his somewhat cold announcement of the
end of his relationship with Trierweiler gained her sympathy, and he the
image of a rather heartless man.
Ed Miliband, again, in part because of the culture, is much more in the
tradition of Blair. In fact, he strove to adopt and even update that image
with many publicity shots of him ‘naturally’ as a thoroughly modern dad.
He lacked the ‘sex appeal’ of a Blair given his rather ordinary looks
(caricatured as Wallace of Gromit fame), but also because of the more
glamorous older brother David – the rightful heir, as it were – who he
43
beat in the 2010 party leadership contest. Ed Miliband’s image was also
affected by a somewhat ‘nerdy’ received public image.
We can see that the institutional configuration is crucial to an appraisal of
leadership performance, and the difference between a presidential and a
parliamentary regime is marked, for better and worse. The former lends
itself more easily to the stress upon individual leadership. It is not,
however, the institutions alone which drive performance, nor even the
differences between the UK and France, but the culture. The expression
upon Mitterand’s face as he gazes into the distance has a long pedigree in
French political history. 29
And the institutional structure of the Fifth
Republic encourages and legitimises this deep trait in French political
culture, if not indeed in the French psyche. There are also, as we have
seen, more minor cultural traits that inform leadership performance and
image; the one we concentrated upon here was the question of the
gendering of leadership, for French political culture is male in as much as
it is chivalric: the state/France/republic – the latter two often seen as
‘female’ – face periods of crisis and danger. France is like a beautiful but
vulnerable woman. Romantically, individuals arise whose destiny it is to
overcome crisis and decadence with vigour and will. This is not, of
course, the case in the UK where leadership is more diffuse (and the
institutions much more solid). Here, however, leadership has often had
the function of giving voice to a national sentiment, and acting as a
spokesperson for that. Blair’s Diana speech should be seen in that
tradition.
One final point regarding the doctrinal/party provenance of the four case
studies. Being on the left in Blair’s case probably had an oblique effect.
As Prime Minister, Blair was in a national rather than partisan role, and
he represented a ‘new’ left, a modernising, centrist left, untied to leftist
doctrine, nor to any hostility to or disapproval of the monarchy. He does,
moreover, talk in a relatively casual way. This is to speculate, but a
Conservative PM would probably have sounded more protocol-bound and
official. Blair’s down-to-earth sadness is the key to the speech’s success.
In the case of Mitterrand, we can see the extent to which French
Socialism had succumbed to personalisation. By the time of the 1988
election, French Socialism had become whatever Mitterrand said it was.
He, indeed, incarnated it – much to the dismay of the party by this time,
and much to the party’s subsequent difficulties in developing as a
doctrine. The current difficulties of the Hollande presidency are in part
due to this.
44
As for the François Hollande case study, not only was socialism unready
for power, it was also unready for presidentialism. Although the left had
adapted to the personalisation of the regime, it did not really know what
this meant (even though Mitterrand had shown them). Hollande’s early
attempts to domesticate the presidency and make it ‘normal’ were an ealy
indication of the depth of the misunderstanding.
Miliband is our only case study of a left leader not in power, and in some
ways is the most interesting from the point of view of the leader and the
left. What we see with Miliband is a UK leader attempting to oversee the
emergence of a new/old party narrative, and then take authorship of it,
and move towards policy elaboration using his persona (personalisation,
use of humour, emotion, and so on, as we have seen) and the new
narrative as the rhetorical vehicle of policy presentation.
Notes
1
‘Leadership Capital. Measuring the Dynamics of Leadership’. M. Bennister, P. t’Hart & B. Worthy.
Political Leadership and Statecraft in Challenging Times. UEA, 17/1/2014.
2
J. Macgregor Burns (1978) Leadership. New York: Harper Collins.
3
I first read the book 30 years ago. Rereading it, it is clear that transforming leadership is a minor
concern of MacGregor Burns. Leadership in its many forms is his real subject.
4
MacGregor Burns does have a particular fascination with Mao Tse Tung who he does regard as a
transformational leader. Also in his references to Bolivar, Ho Chi Minh, Castro inter alia, he has a
particular belief in revolutionary leadership, and it needs to be said, in revolutions too, i.e. that they
exist, which this author is much less certain of.
5
There is also a great irony in that MacGregor Burns pays great respect to the classic self-help book
How to Gain Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. There are, in fact, striking similarities
between the two works.
6
The nearest MacGregor Burns gets to performance is his discussion of ‘Activation’ (p. 130) ‘an initial
act that stimulates a response’.
7
See Gaffney, J, ‘The Dark Matter of Charisma: Lessons from the Nuremburg Rallies’, Berfrois, 19
December 2012.
8
T.W. Adorno (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. New York: John Wiley and Sons (1964).
9
March, J. G & Olsen, J. P. (1984) ‘The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political
Life’. Americal Political Science Review. Vol.78. No. 3. pp. 734 – 749.
10
A.R.Willner (1984) Spellbinders: The Charismatic Political Leadership, Willner: Yale University
Press. This text has a very good (and positive discussion) of Weber’s term. For sources critical of
charisma, see the many articles on Weber in the Journal of Classical Sociology (London: Sage) and the
British Journal of Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell).
11
Parts of the text here are taken from J. Gaffney ‘Performative Political Leadership’ in P. t’Hart and
R. Rhodes (eds) (2014) The Oxford Companion to Political Leadership, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
12
“Charisma” soll eine als ausseralltäglich (ursprünglich, sowohl bei Propheten wie bei
therapeutischen wie bei Rechts-Weisen wie bei Jagdführern wie bei Kriegshelden: als magisch bedingt)
geltende Qualität einer Persönlichkeit heissen, um derentwillen sie als mit übernatürlichen oder
übermenschlichen oder mindestens spezifisch ausseralltäglichen, nicht jedem andern zugänglichen
Kräften oder Eigenschaften oder als gottgesandt oder als vorbildlich und deshalb als “Führer” gewertet
wird. Wie die betreffende Qualität von irgendeinem ethischen, ästhetischen oder sonstigen Standpunkt
aus “objektiv” richtig zu bewerten sein würde, ist natürlich dabei begrifflich völlig gleichgültig: darauf
allein, wie sie tatsächlich von charismatisch Beherrschten, den “Anhängern”, bewertet wird, kommt es
an. (M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, vol. 1., Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964, p.179).
45
13
I do not mean success in MacGregor Burns’ terms but in terms, say, of gaining the audience’s
allegiance, inspiring them, getting them to agree, persuading them of his/her leadership quality, and so
on.
14
See note 1 and J. Kane (2001) The Politics of Moral Capital, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
15
I am, for the purposes of analysis, idealising somewhat one of the two protagonists of 1940-1945. It
would be extremely difficult to overstate Hitler’s wickedness; regarding Churchill, I am treating him
here as the hero of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz (though this too can be contested, Calder, 1991;
Knight, 2009). There is the question of his recklessness or questions concerning his moral rectitude in
other areas e.g. support for ‘Bomber Harris’’ tactics; or again the role of the Black and Tans in Ireland
who, when under the authority of the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, among other things,
blew this author’s grandfather’s house up.
16
Tony Blair, Prime Minister (31st August 1997). Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8nuyI9WJY
I feel like everyone else in this country today -- utterly devastated. Our thoughts and prayers are with
Princess Diana’s family -- in particular her two sons, the two boys -- our hearts go out to them. We are
today a nation, in Britain, in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us.
She was a wonderful and warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by
tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain -- throughout the world -- with joy and with
comfort. How many times shall we remember her, in how many different ways, with the sick, the
dying, with children, with the needy, when, with just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than
words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity. How difficult
things were for her from time to time, I’m sure we can only guess at -- but the people everywhere, not
just here in Britain but everywhere, they kept faith with Princess Diana, they liked her, they loved her,
they regarded her as one of the people. She was the people’s princess and that’s how she will stay, how
she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.
17
In contrast to the Queen who did not comment publicly for several days. Blair may have saved the
monarchy.
18
In another slightly longer version, we see the (‘can we have your reaction’) person and another, and
Blair’s wife and children pass behind him very briefly, as if at a funeral; so our mental image of them,
as they walk quickly left to right behind him, is that they are going into the Churchyard or Church.
19
M. Bennister (2014) ‘The Oratory of Tony Blair’ in Hayton, R. and Crines, A. (eds) Labour Oratory
from Bevan to Brown. Manchester University Press.
20
Note that his name is small below La France Unie as if his real identity is not his name but his being
La France Unie.
21
Ironically, the Le Pens, both father and daughter, use much more often the Anglo-Saxon full-on face
22
J. Gaffney (2014) ‘Hollande and the French Kiss Goodbye to era of private presidential affairs’, New
Statesman. Available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/01/hollande-and-french-kiss-
goodbye-era-private-presidential-affairs
See also, J. Gaffney, (2014). ‘Sex and the King's Two Bodies: the French Presidency and the HollandeGayet
Affair’. [Online]. Available at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/professor-john-gaffney/francois-hollande-affair_b_4600434.html
23
Gaffney, J. & Lahel, A. (2013a) ‘Political performance and leadership persona: The UK Labour
party conference of 2012’. Government and Opposition, 48, 4, 481-505, and Gaffney, J. & Lahel, A.
‘The Morphology of the Labour Party’s One Nation Narrative: Story, Plot and Authorship’. The
Political Quarterly, (2013b) 84, 3, 330-341. Also distributed as part of a special collection of essays at
the 2013 Labour Party Conference.
25
In September and October 2013, the Daily Mail ran stories attacking the character of Miliband’s
father the Political Scientist, Ralph Miliband. The attacks were pathetic and the paper apologised.
26
See J. Gaffney ‘From the République Sociale to the République Française’ in G. Raymond (ed)
(1994) France During the Socialist Years, Aldershot: Dartmouth.
27
A. Finlayson (2002) ‘Elements of the Blairite image of Leadership’. Parliamentary Affairs. 55, 3,
586-99.
46
28
See J. Gaffney ‘The French First Lady has Found a Role for Herself: Making the President Look
Stupid’. Berfrois Magazine, 4/7/2012. Available at: http://www.berfrois.com/2012/07/john-gaffney-a-
royal-incident/
29
J. Garrigues (2012), Les Hommes providentiels, Paris, Seuil.
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