The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World

273 Pages·2011·1.35 MB·English

by  Jonathan Powell

ALSO BY JONATHAN POWELL
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland
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To Sarah
Contents
Preface
Introduction
In Defence of Machiavelli
Chapter One
‘Of New Princedoms Which a Prince Acquires With His Own Arms
and by Merit’
Coming to Power
Chapter Two
‘The Prince’
Leadership
Chapter Three
‘The Best Form of Government’
Cabinet, the Civil Service and Making Things Happen
Chapter Four
‘That Flatterers Should be Shunned’
The Court
Chapter Five
‘Of Those Who by Their Crimes Come to be Princes’
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor
Chapter Six
‘Whether it is Better to be Loved or Feared’
Politics and Parliament
Chapter Seven
‘Sundry Reflections on Strategy, Tactics, New Devices and Discipline’
The Importance of Being Strategic
Chapter Eight
‘Calumnies are as Injurious to Republics as Public Indictments are
Useful’
Spin Doctors and Media Moguls
Chapter Nine
‘How Necessary Public Indictments are for the Maintenance of Liberty
in a Republic’
Scandals, Inquiries and the Police
Chapter Ten
‘How Unity May be Restored to a Divided City’
Europe
Chapter Eleven
‘A Staunch Friend and a Thorough Foe’
War and Peace
Chapter Twelve
‘The Arrogance of One Who Rises to Power in a Republic’
Hubris and Leaving Office
Bibliography
Preface
Let me first be clear what this book is not. It is not another memoir of the Blair
years; there are enough of those already. It is not an academic treatise on
Machiavelli; there aren’t enough of those but I am not the person to write one.
And it is not a considered history of the Blair era; sufficient time has not yet
passed for such a work to be written.
Instead it is designed to be three things. Firstly, it is an attempt to test whether
Machiavelli’s maxims still hold in the world of modern politics as well as they
did when they were written. Secondly, it tries to draw some lessons on leadership
and the exercise of power for future practitioners, based on my experience in
Number 10. And lastly, it illustrates a series of generalisations by means of
anecdotes from my time in government with Tony Blair and my knowledge of
other British governments and US administrations, in the same way that
Machiavelli illustrated his works with personal anecdotes from his time in the
Florentine government. These anecdotes form the raw material for the use of
future historians, not an attempt at writing history itself.
I am conscious that it is foolhardy to compare myself to Machiavelli. He was
a genius and I am not. His works have lasted centuries and mine will not. It is
also rash to try to rehabilitate the thinking of Machiavelli given how deeply
rooted his caricature is in our culture. The fact that I am writing about him will
be held by opponents to prove that the Blair government was unprincipled all
along and it will certainly lead to my being described as ‘Machiavellian’, which
will raise a smile on the lips of my former colleagues at Number 10. If anything
I was at the ‘Candide’ end of the spectrum rather than calculating, and like
Voltaire’s hero I was an innocent unable to stop asking gauche questions and
blurting out the truth, however inconvenient. But I am not too worried by any
such criticisms because they will just illustrate the ignorance of those who make
them about Machiavelli himself, about his thinking and about the way in which
the Blair government really operated. And it is worth risking the opprobrium
because I hate to see myths remain unchallenged when British politics
desperately needs a dose of realism and honesty.
I would worry, however, if anyone read this book and thought politics was just
about cynical manoeuvring and manipulation. It is not. After thirty years in
government I am, if anything, more optimistic than I was when I started about
the ability of government to change things. Politics is above all about idealism,
values and ideas. This book is of limited scope, though, and does not address
those important aspects. It is confined to looking at the art of government and at
the mechanics of power, not why a leader might want to get hold of power or
what they would want to do with it once they got it. It is worth writing because it
is important that idealistic and optimistic people who come to office understand
the reality of how power can be wielded effectively so they can make the
country a better place.
The book is based on Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses. The
bibliography sets out the editions I have used and lists his other works and wider
reading about Machiavelli. For raw material I have drawn on my diaries from
1997 to 2007. I have kept a diary on and off since I was fourteen years old and it
was never intended for publication but rather as a means of letting off steam and
recording what I thought at particular moments. It has, however, provided an
extraordinary quarry of anecdotes with which to illustrate this book. In 1995, I
stumbled across the first few pages of a handwritten diary that Tony Blair had
started to keep as Leader of the Opposition in the study of the family home in
Islington. It is a great pity he did not continue or we would have had a
remarkable, vivid, first-hand account of a prime minister’s life, but there simply
isn’t time for a prime minister to set out detailed reflections and lead a country at
the same time.
The problem with a diary is that it gives one person’s view, not an overall and
well-rounded appreciation of events, and so it is skewed. No one could describe
this book as objective; it is entirely written from my viewpoint. And
furthermore, diaries are not holy writ – they contain errors. When I made a TV
programme about the Northern Ireland peace negotiations I discovered that even
on obvious things you can be just plain wrong. In my diaries, I had described a
green space outside the Clonard monastery in West Belfast (where Gerry Adams
and I had met for some of our most interesting conversations) as a graveyard for
the monks. I was amazed when I went back to the monastery to film to discover
there were no graves at all. It was just a garden.
But even if they are not always right, diaries have one big advantage over
other recollections: they are completely free of the sin of retrospection. They
give an accurate account of how I saw things at the time. Most political books
are written to justify what you did or didn’t do. You can’t do that with honest
diaries. They uncompromisingly illustrate your idiocies and your mistakes.
Because I am not publishing the diaries, there is no point inreferring to the
particular entries that are drawn upon, so there are no footnotes in this book.
Passages in quotation marks are taken from the diaries, for example things that
Tony Blair told me Gordon Brown had said to him immediately after they had
met, rather than verbatim accounts of their conversations.
This book is the second of three about the Blair years. The first was Great
Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland. The third will be a
defence of liberal interventionism and an account of foreign and defence policy
under Tony Blair. For that reason this volume has little on Northern Ireland or on
foreign and defence policy. I know I will be criticised for not writing in detail
about Iraq, but the critics will just have to wait for the next book for that.
I would like to thank Will Sulkin of Bodley Head and Natasha Fairweather,
my agent, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day, and
my editor David Milner, without whom it would have been an indigestible lump
of words rather than a book.
I am enormously grateful to Tony Blair for allowing me the privilege of being
part of his Number 10 and putting up with me for so long when I must have been
deeply irritating for much of the time, and I would like to pay tribute to all of my
colleagues in Downing Street and more widely in government, civil servants and
politicians and supporting staff, most of whom I have spared the embarrassment
of being mentioned in these pages despite the central roles they played.
Dr John Adamson, Dr Leslie Mitchell, Professor Anthony King and my son
Charles Powell have all kindly looked at parts of the text for me and I am
grateful to them for their advice. All the mistakes are of course my own.
I would also like to thank my long-suffering assistant Debbie Ailes for her
help with the book and in looking after me more generally, and my colleagues
Thomas Kaplan, Ali Erfan and Aamer Sarfraz for their understanding and
tolerance.
Above all I would like to thank my wife Sarah and my children John, Charlie,
Jecca and Roa for their support and love during my time in government and in
writing this book. I am really more grateful than I can say, even if I didn’t
always show it.