The Spectator:

Any time we see a politician fail, or an idiotic policy collapse as it passes through parliament — which these days seems like a regular occurrence — we are left with a familiar feeling. That this screw-up is the result of a chancer at work. Someone who has, at the very best, a shallow understanding of the country they’re trying to govern. Someone who knew how to come up with a headline-grabbing idea, and how to make it sound convincing and radical — but didn’t ever have the faintest idea how to implement it.

What we see perhaps less often is that the UK has — for a variety of cultural, social, and economic reasons — set up our public life so that the chancers are best suited to the system, and are most likely to rise to the top.

This is what you might call the British bluffocracy. We have become a nation run by people whose knowledge extends a mile wide but an inch deep; who know how to grasp the generalities of any topic in minutes, and how never to bother themselves with the specifics. Who place their confidence in their ability to talk themselves out of trouble, rather than learning how to run things carefully. And who were trained in this dubious art as teenagers: often together on the same university course.

This malaise is not confined to politics, but is present in a terrifyingly wide range of our institutions. The way we educate the people who will enter public life, the way our career structures work, and the institutions themselves that we have built — from parliament to the civil service to the political press gallery — all favour the bluffers. David Cameron was teased as the ‘essay-crisis’ prime minister, a governing style that worked for him until he failed his Brexit essay. But other consequences are deeper still: the short-termism of our institutions is, in no small part, due to bluffing. As the Brexit preparations (or lack thereof) are beginning to demonstrate.

The typical British bluffer is male, well-polished and the product of public school: the same sort of chap with the same sort of chat. It’s invariably a chap. Women make up two in five senior civil servants and one in three MPs. People of black and minority ethnic origin make up 15 per cent of the country but just 8 per cent of MPs, 7 per cent of senior civil servants, and 6 per cent of national journalists.

Being governed by a bluffocracy creates a skills gap that political bluffers like to bemoan: one recent study suggests just 9 per cent of candidates at last year’s election had degrees in science or technology. This is true of only one of Labour’s 258 MPs: Chi Onwurah, an engineer. The British system of government often sees ministers with no expertise being put in charge of — for example — the National Health Service, one of the largest organisations on the planet.

As a result, top politicians of both parties end up spinning arguments they often barely understand and certainly don’t mean. The supposed watchdogs — political journalists — are often just as bad. And the crisis of trust in mainstream politics and journalism alike does raise the question of whether the bluffers are being found out.

The blaggers meanwhile, are becoming more brazen. Look, for example, at George Osborne, who became editor of a major newspaper with only a few weeks of journalism work experience to his name. His secret? Being utterly unfazed: by that, or the other five jobs he took on. Then take Brexit, the biggest overhaul in British government for a generation or more. And advocated with utter confidence by bluffers who, it quickly turned out, had no idea what they were talking about.

Most bluffers are made, not born — and the archetypical bluffer’s degree is, of course, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. It’s taught at a number of universities across the UK, but is most strongly associated with Oxford. Students are marinated in an adversarial university tutorial system which favours the quick thinker over the deep rival. A standard setup for a politics tutorial, for example, is to have one student read their essay while the other is encouraged to attack it. If they don’t, their own work will come under far closer scrutiny.

This is how the school for bluffers works. Those who prosper are not those who possess the deepest knowledge, but who can deliver a clever quip or a leftfield surprise argument. The ‘essay crisis’ skill trains people to cram what’s supposed to be 20-odd careful hours of reading, research and writing into five hours, and to disguise their shoddiness by delivering a counter-intuitive argument so bold that it disguises the fact that they have not done the work. It’s a skill for life. Or at least for government.

 

 

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