Category: Reading and writing

I feel a little sorry for David Cameron, whose appearance on the first TV Leaders’ Debate has been criticised for failing to be entirely factual in his re-telling of anecdotes used to make his political points.

OK, so his “recent” visit to a Humberside police station happened last year, and the cost of a new Lexus isn’t exactly £73,000. But does that invalidate the point he was making?

We expect our politicians to be honest – certainly;  but don’t we also want them to be instructive and inspirational.  A good communicator will always use examples, if not stories, to illustrate a point, or to bring colour to an otherwise dry message.  Dogma or political point-scoring is hardly the best way to garner support, and we should welcome politicians telling us stories and drawing on real experiences to communicate their messages.  Surely, we don’t expect those stories to be scrupulously detailed and correct.  Based on fact, yes, but true?

Of course, a carefully selected, well-told story can communicate ‘truths’ which a factually-correct account of an incident might not.  Does it really matter for instance, whether or not the Good Samaritan crossed the road to assist the person beaten and robbed by thieves?  Or whether there were five or six fish to go with the loaves which fed the starving thousands?

Not that I’m comparing Cameron to Christ, by the way.  But the comparison here will help to illustrate what the problem is in the case of Cameron.

Jesus Christ got away with his various stories because he had a close connection to the people about whom and to whom he was recounting them.  There was an understanding, an engagement, a ‘veracity of experience’, let’s call it – if not in the experience itself, then in the telling.  The best story-tellers – whether novelists or simple tale-spinners – demonstrate an acute engagement with the experience they are re-telling.  Did Defoe need to travel to a desert island to convey the daily trials and difficulties experienced by Crusoe?  No, but the language – with its laboured, methodical, attention to detail – takes us there, and gives the reader a genuine belief in the ‘veracity’ of the narrator.

Cameron’s problem is that he cannot really communicate that ‘veracity of experience’.  He appears detached from the very people he’s talking about or wanting to connect to.  His language is, inevitably, the language of a politician – and his experience feels far removed.  As the leader of the Party, he’s further away.  And, as an old Etonian from a wealthy background, the extent to which he can convey a sense of engagement and connection with ordinary people is becoming very tenuous indeed.

The telling of illuminating and insightful stories is one thing, but if Cameron is serious about demonstrating his experience of the needs and desires of ordinary people, then he needs to be a little more careful about his selection of stories and the honesty with which he tells them.

This is a follow-up to a post I put up just before the Labour Party Conference in September 2009. That one’s worth reading again I think: What is Gordon Brown reading?, modelled on Yann Martel’s delightful website for the Canadian PM. Like Martel, I have no aspiration to create a definitive reading list for the PM – this is, rather, a set of musings on how literature might provide some food-for-thought for an embattled Prime Minister.

Things don’t seem to have changed much for Gordon since the Conference. He’s still under pressure from all wings of the Party, and still seems vulnerable, despite Hoon and Hewitt’s failed coup.

So, where might he turn for some inspiration or some solace? Just as I recommended in September last year, I think he could do a lot worse than read Michael Rosen’s Chocolate Cake. A wonderfully mischievous excursion into the pleasures of taking risks, seen through the eyes of a young boy.

A much more macabre and thrilling version of this theme of risk-taking is provided by Blake, that great proponent of passion and energy, in his ‘Proverbs of Hell‘, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There’s plenty for Brown to chew on here.

“Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead” advises the narrator – I can imagine that advice being given by one particular member of Brown’s Cabinet.  Indeed, the poem appears to have other echoes of life behind the doors of Downing Street: for example, Brown has been criticised for being a ditherer, such that it might feel as if “one thought fills immensity”; on the other hand, he would rightly point out that “the hours of folly are measur’d by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure”.

Blake’s poem provides an array of intriguing pronouncements, and the challenge for Brown is to navigate his way through the range of voices providing instruction and advice – to know when to be ruthless (“sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”), and when to be thoughtful and restrained (“the weak in courage is strong in cunning”); when to take advice (“the thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest”), and when to ignore his advisers and, Malcolm Tucker-like, vent his anger (“the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”).

So what can Brown take from this poem?

He needs to be wise and cunning, that’s for sure. But he also needs to learn ruthlessness and ensure that his desires do not remain unacted on. Time is running out for uncertain leadership. Like the boy in Rosen’s poem, Brown needs to take his chances. Come May 6th, we might know if he has reached Heaven or Hell.

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twitter:  @graham_hitchen

A previous boss of mine once gave me, and the rest of her small team, a small book on the theory of management and organisational change which was told in the style of a long fable.  Written by two leading “marketing consultants”, the book was entitled ‘Good Luck’ and purports to be a “whimsical fable that teaches a valuable lesson:  good luck doesn’t just come your way – it’s up to you to create the conditions to bring yourself good luck”.  By choosing a book in the form of a story or fable, my boss wanted to show that she was an imaginative manager, providing a thought-provoking and creative approach to management theory.

I duly read the ‘Fable’ but found it deeply frustrating and uncreative.  Granted, fables can often be deliberately didactic and sombre in tone – but this one was just too simplistic, substituting bland assertions about organisational and personality types in place of the complexities and subtleties of human behaviour.   Rather than being stimulated by the book, I was left with a deep sense of disappointment.  Rather than being thoughtful and inspiring, the book seemed naive and unimaginative**.

My thesis is not that books on management theory cannot be stimulating and thought-provoking.  Nor am I suggesting that the quality of the art is diminished because of an intended artless message (all sorts of examples of powerful political statements come to mind – from Gullivers Travels,  to Picasso’s Guernica).

The point is not that art and management theory don’t mix.  It’s just that sometimes the most powerful understanding of change and its potential comes from the originality of art directly.

I came across this quote from Yann Martel recently which is relevant here: “The originality of fiction addresses the individuality of its reader. How that reader then acts with others—in other words, becomes political—will involve a dilution of that originality, a regard for the conventions and sensibilities of others. And that’s all right. We have to get along with others. But the cost of an artless life is that in being fed no originality, the person’s sense of individuality is eroded. Which is not only sad, but dangerous, since the citizen whose precious individuality is not nourished is more subject to the claims of demagogues and tyrants”.

 

 

** As it happens, I gave my boss a book in return – a group of short-stories by DH Lawrence, drawing her attention to ‘You Touched Me’, which tells the story of a woman whose future appears pre-destined by a mistaken ‘touch’ between herself and a male friend.  But which paints a disturbing picture of the chauvinism and sheer poverty of opportunity and choice in an early twentieth century mining community.