Welcome to the chumocracy. Credit: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty
Good God, I thought as the news broke yesterday morning, is there nothing the man can’t do? George Osborne, one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer and architect of the austerity programme little loved by the nation’s cultural institutions, has added to his portfolio of part-time jobs by becoming the Chairman of the British Museum.
What is it, you might wonder, that makes Mr Osborne the best qualified person to do this job? Does he spend his idle hours thinking about the best way to facilitate the curation of valuable collections and the ethics of repatriating plundered antiquities? Is he a scholar of archaeology and an expert on the way museums are run around the world? Does he have outstanding contacts in the arts world? Or is he, rather, The Right Sort Of Chap?
This appointment reminds us that the economy in this country is essentially divided in two. There’s a very big bit of it, involving most people, where you are expected to develop skills in a particular job. You train as a doctor or a lawyer, or you apprentice as a stacker of shelves or a maker of widgets. If things go well, you steadily ascend the ladder of your chosen career, becoming more senior and better paid. If things go badly — say, they invent a robot that can do the same job more cheaply, or people cease to want coal dug out of the ground — you are stuffed. You have to “retrain”, to move into another sector.
Then there’s this small other part of the economy — which is, incidentally, the part in charge — where you need no specific skills at all. It is about being, like George, The Right Sort Of Chap. You have ascended to a level of seniority by sucking up to the right people and getting in the right gang — and once you’ve made it, you’ve made it. Being The Right Sort Of Chap trumps any domain-specific knowledge or experience. You will swan into one board-level job or consulting gig after another. What they want is your contacts in the corridors of power and your name on the letterhead.
The Right Sort of Chap is a part of the nepotistic, private-school-dominated establishment, in which your path is eased by knowing the right people and projecting the right front (as a public-school educated brat myself I check my privilege in that department); but they’re what you might think of as the god-tier version. Public school chutzpah can help get you to the top of a profession; Right Sort Of Chapness, once you’ve got there, renders your specific profession irrelevant. You can run companies, newspapers, universities, cultural institutions or countries with equal confidence.
Sometimes people make it to this stage by toiling up through the first section of the economy and reaching escape velocity: they are at board level in their chosen industry and find themselves, in the silver back end of their career, accumulating seats in the Lords, directorships and chairs here there and everywhere. There’s the assumption, perhaps not always wrong, that corporate governance is a transferable skill. And there’s the agreeable sense that if you sit on each other’s remuneration committees everyone can be accommodated in a civilised way.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeLOL. This is certainly not the first article to vilify the old boy (and old girl) system but it’s certainly one of the most humorous. Trading on connections is an old story but one that reinvents itself year after year.
My next comment might not be popular on Unherd but this article is the latest that makes me wonder where Unherd is going as a publication? The articles over the past few weeks have been heavily weighted towards UK politics and politicians. That’s fine. I’m not knocking UK politics as a subject of interest, but is that really what Unherd is becoming? It started off as a breath of fresh air challenging covid lockdown orthodoxy and has now morphed into what–yet another UK political magazine? Surely that niche is filled.
I know Unherd is based in the UK and my impression is most readers are British, but I’d hoped it would deal primarily with issues of general interest in this time of upheaval throughout the Western world. A week of articles along the lines of “The narcissism of John Bercow” leaves my attention wandering.
I wonder whither it wanders. What would you like to see more of?
“What would you like to see more of?”
Great question. I’d like articles about how we can push back against progressive politics. Specific suggestions not just general statements about ‘resisting’, and examples of organizations that are successfully pushing back and how they’re doing that. I’d particularly like to see articles about the legal avenues available to people who have been cancelled solely based on their opinions.
I’d like to read an article (or watch an interview) that summarizes the huge body of covid data and can begin to answer questions such as the mortality rate, over time, in different countries that followed different lockdown policies. People like Michael Levitt have been steadily analyzing that data and are surely in a position now to summarize it. I would like the article/interview to be provided by someone who has stronger communication skills than Levitt. He’s a brilliant man but he tends to ramble.
I’d like to read several articles, from various perspectives, about the state of the global economy, especially the effect of the massive government spending to support people before and after the pandemic. Is this really sustainable? Are the MMT folks correct that sovereign states can print money indefinitely or are we about the re-learn the age-old lesson that there’s no free lunch.
I’d like to read articles about China’s weaknesses. It’s had a ‘good’ pandemic and is riding high just now. It’s also pursuing a very aggressive international agenda, but is it really as strong as it seems? Ian Bremmer at his GZero site is a bit of waffler but he has some good insights about China, imo. He has pointed out the many serious challenges it faces in the decades ahead.
Another commenter has suggested articles about the on-going effects of technology on our jobs and lives. That’s a vast area by itself.
I’m sure we could all add to this list.
I know Unherd has published some articles about these issues. I guess what I’m asking is whether Unherd will focus on the issues of the future that apply to all of us, or at least those of us in the Western world, or does it intend to have a UK focus with an occasional glance beyond the UK’s shores?
Yes and I would like more rational and empirical evidenced based discussion on climate change,another taboo subject where only one version of ‘science ‘ is publishable
Proves my point,no takers
Excellent post. I am an UnHerd fan but would relish these issues being put under the microscope.
As for a counter attack on wokeness, perhaps a portal bringing together, or providing links to, sources and publications that resist the “forces of PC/wokeness”, to paraphrase Blair, would create a rallying point.
I agree – it’s all been a tad parochial of late. Also reminding us of Bercow was unforgivable, no one deserves that, and they should be doing everything in their power to make people forget about the existence Bercow. Plus, the articles recently have become very “gone politics” heavy – lookback in anger or sorrow type of thing. Personally I hope for a lot more focus on technology driven change.
Also they have traded short articles (Accuracy, Brevity, Clarity) for the American style (Bloviate, Bloviate, Bloviate).
Bloviators have a help group called Onanonanonymous.
I suspect George’s appointment reflects a desire in government to replace the woke occupants of these positions with more thoughtful and less partisan figures.
We have, for example, a National Trust whose leadership is preoccupied with preaching Marxism because that’s the brief they’ve been allowed to write for themselves. A more thoughtful leadership team would reflect that, as a conservation-of-houses organisation, they should be focusing on the history of the houses, the houses in history, why the occupant was important, and what there is to see today that links to that.
Instead the NT has no interest in history and a total focus on latter day leftist politics.
A sea change is needed in how these rackets are run. If that requires more George I’m fine with that. He’s in the job because he’s not a mindless doctrinaire leftist wrecker; good.
The alternative is probably someone like “Dame” Suzi Leather, who somehow went from being an unsuccessful trainee probation officer to chairing an NHS trust with nothing to recommend her except, presumably, her plumbing and her politics. We never read articles sneering at how people like her grease their unqualified way into those sorts of position, and certainly not from her own side, as here. Why not?
Very good point
Bang on indeed. If our museums are stoped from turning into communist brainwashing centres, then on with the job.
One of your strongest articles so far in Unherd. Very illuminating and sickening, its the way of the world where there’s money or power.
As the superbly well-read Mr Leith knows, it’s all there in Trollope.
Surely the role is primarily a fundraising one? And he knows a lot of wealthy people. It may seem like a totally inappropriate appointment, but on his occasion he may be quite good at fulfilling the brief. I doubt many academics know as many rich people, or can persuade them to part with their cash.
I suspect it is more complicated that that. The revolving roundabout is noticeable in the world of the NHS, the police and the quangos. These are hardly bastions of the Right Sort of Chap. Mind you, T Hunt probably was. But Tom Watson?
There’s an old tradition in Britain of dividing people into amateurs and professionals (eg gentlemen vs players).
The twist is that Britain puts the amateurs in charge, and professionals do the implementation – but don’t take the decisions.
While this creates the “Right Sort of Chap” problem – which is worth a good grumble – I quite like the principle that non-experts frame what they would like to happen, and the professionals are then tasked with making it work. The inverse ends up with professionals telling us what to do – often for their benefit – ignoring what we actually want or need.
Of course Osborne has another job – how is that a surprise to anyone? His entire tenure as Chancellor unfolded nightly on the BBC News like an episode of Mr Benn, where our hero appeared every day in a new outfit, visiting another business for another job-sampling adventure. Hard-hatted and hi-vis-ed one day, hair-netted and lab-coated the next. By the time wee Gideon left Govt he’d dipped his toe into almost every job in the country at one time or another – but always with the grin of creamy self-satisfaction, forever impressed by his own performance in whatever role he was pretending to do.
He’s merely carried this on into his post-political career.
For years this country has been blighted by the merry-go-round of quangos, grossly over-remunerated sinecures and grace-and-favour appointments for the same parade of frightfully well-connected, though far less well-qualified, people. Osborne is different in only one respect – EVERY SINGLE one of those others are sub-Blairite, fashionably metropolitan-left in their outlook. Any of the “conservatives” who’ve held such posts have been lib-dems at heart. In that crowd one imagines that Osborne is seen as a heartless Tory, the architect of (vicious Tory) Austerity – by which they mean those merciless and savage cuts that saw public spending wantonly slashed from £617 billion in 2010 to only £842 billion (pre-Covid) by the end of 2019.
Osborne is a classic example of the modern career politician, who spent his youth and adolescence already planning his climb up the greasy pole – that is not a normal person, that isn’t someone who has the grounding in real life that politicians used to have. No ‘Hinterland’ as (I think) Denis Healey described it?
If one chooses to go into public life later on in one’s career it is likely to be driven by ideas of service or a wish to tackle specific issues in which one has an interest or expertise. A desire to enter politics straight from university is likely only about one’s own advancement, as a stepping stone to vastly well remunerated institutional sinecures and consultancies.
The long-ago promised ‘bonfire of the Quangos’ would have been a start, but it never happened. What this country actually needs is a clear-out of these Fauxialist placemen that will make the cleaning of the Augean stables look like a spot of light dusting.
Despite the hugely generous pay deals these people invariably snaffle up, none of these grace and favour appointees appear to take any personal responsibility for failures in the organisations they are given to run. On the very rare occasions when their failures are too public, too egregious for them to remain in post, they’ll leave, but only to resurface moments later in another position – like an unflushable t*rd bobbing about in the bowl of British public life.
Osborne did the job he was appointed Chancellor to do: protect the ‘right sort of chaps’ companies’ from paying more tax. Having done that, he has their undying gratitude and patronage.
Mr Osborne’s appointment at the British Museum, is what will euphemistically be called a fresh pair of eyes( knowing bug**r all!) Nobody is particularly surprised, because their role is titular. When the general gets shot or the conductor fails to turn up, the junior officers and NCOs take field command, the second violins, could get on with Beethoven’s 5th.and the show goes on.
At the sharp end, competence matters. The dilemma is when the skilled linguist, scholar, teacher, engineer, programmer, can’t find better renumeration without relinquishing aptitude, for the bureaucratic greasy pole. Mr Osborne’s role is essentially a plate on the door.
On the other hand, the “Right Sort Of Chap” phenomenon appears to have characteristics that are very much global and wide-spread to ignore, so cross-pollinating. It is as much British, as it Canadian.
So true. As one more example, since 2014 Sajid Javid has been Culture Sec for 2 yrs, Business Sec for 1 yr, Housing Sec for just under 2 yrs, Home Sec for 1 yr, Chancellor for 7 months and he is now Health Sec. They’re all the same. They almost never do anything and have no measurables against which they can be tracked. May was Home Sec for an extraordinary 6 years but the Home Office is as useless now as it was before and through her tenure. The real job spec is always the same: to absorb waves without them hitting No.10 and to cheerlead for whatever the govt’s priorities are at that moment. It will never change because that is the Westminster system absent real ministerial accountability – and the last of that kind was Carrington in 1982.