Rishi Sunak - gutless coward...

In the last week a nurse has been sentenced for mass murder, some of these murders perpetrated after her NHS bosses were alerted to her suspicious behaviour. A policeman – or more accurately another policeman – has been convicted of rape: which comes while memories are fresh of the horrific murder of Sarah Everard by another officer. The country now has 175,457 asylum seekers awaiting processing; last Tuesday alone 881 migrants arrived on the Kent coast. And, after some delay, the director of the British Museum has resigned, admitting he mishandled warnings in 2021 about thefts from the museum.



The institutional failure of the National Health Service, the police and the Home Office that can have lethal outcomes can be blamed on public sector incompetence; but the private sector is close behind, as is the voluntary, as the British Museum farce proves.



As this year has shown, it is not that leaders no longer resign or are fired. But they do so with extreme reluctance and demanding handsome payoffs.



Dame Alison Rose, who felt it commensurate with her duties as Chief Executive of the NatWest Group to share the details of a client of one of its subsidiaries with a BBC reporter, is apparently eligible for a £2.4 million payout. But then Cressida Dick, who presided over a scandal-ridden Metropolitan Police that contained at least one murderer, two serial rapists and an anti-drugs officer alleged to smoke cannabis daily, left with £165,727.36 (for those who think the 36p a nice touch, note that she asked for £500,000; the refusal to pay shows that a little sanity prevails).



Well-rewarded institutional failure in Britain is now endemic. One could add the scandal of our publicly funded universities, whose humanities departments seem to exist mainly to indoctrinate students about the supposed evils of Britain’s past, of colonialism and the patriarchy, and of Western culture. Their courses train the minds of the leaders of tomorrow not to take responsibility and solve problems, but to feel guilt and shame. Vice-chancellors, as we have seen in freedom-of-speech issues, often fear to intervene, or simply do not wish to. And our courts system is on its knees, with a massive backlog of cases partly because of the pandemic, but largely because of poor leadership at the top.



“Responsibility” is the key word. Institutions fail because they are badly run by those who cannot grasp what “responsibility” truly entails. Many in senior positions were not appointed on merit, but because their face fitted. What it often fitted was a race, gender and identity diversity agenda in which having the brains and, more to the point, the character and experience to do the job come second to box-ticking. The stereotypical middle-aged white male is far from beyond reproach; but we appear to have passed, as a society, from having our institutions run by one group of mediocrities to another that is even worse.



It starts at the top. Doubtless each generation has its own moment when it realised standards had slipped. Mine was when one of those middle-aged white males, John Major, saw no need to resign after the international humiliation of his failed economic policy on Black Wednesday in September 1992.



I recall sitting in my office that evening in a state of utter disbelief as it became clear that the man who had presided over the greatest economic debacle in Britain since we were forced off the Gold Standard in 1931 had no intention of paying the traditional price for his mistake.



Now politicians cling on to power when it is obvious they had lost public confidence: the nadir was reached when it took the resignations of 56 members of his payroll before Boris Johnson, with enormous reluctance, thought the game was up.



This diseased attitude has seeped through the public sector, starting in Whitehall, where the default mindset of many senior civil servants is to ensure that nothing resembling authentic Conservative policies is allowed to be imposed upon a country that voted for them.



That is why we have chaos in the asylum system, and why the prime minister’s pledge to “stop the boats” has become a joke. It is why an often catastrophically useless, cadre of management survives in an NHS screaming out for rationalisation and reform. Of the 1.2 million full-time equivalent staff in the NHS, just 164,000 are doctors and 360,000 nurses and midwives. It is why our state education system is so poor and, above all, why so little has happened to capitalise upon Brexit. Each failing institution answers to a failing minister. The box-ticking culture is embedded in the cabinet too, and we shall see in the forthcoming reshuffle how far Mr Sunak recognises that and is prepared to set a different example.



At least the private sector has shareholders who can react to the loss of value caused by an incompetent executive and demand they be kicked out – which is what happened to Dame Alison Rose at the NatWest Group after a late-night board meeting resembling a panic attack. One wonders how interested Dame Alison ever was in maximising value for NatWest’s investors: when appointed, she emphasised her commitment to equality and tackling climate change, which should have set alarm bells ringing.



When appointing leaders who eventually fail, businesses often install those who mostly want to grandstand. Where does that leave the institution they lead, and its effectiveness? And why is the man who supported Dame Alison throughout, the company’s chairman, Sir Howard Davies, still in his post, when he was proved so woefully wrong?



He is there for the same reason that so many useless ministers, civil servants, senior executives and quangocrats survive: because nobody understands, until the veil is ripped away and the realities exposed, just what it means to take responsibility, to see that the institution that you lead is run effectively, and what the consequences are of not doing so. They have included dead children, bereaved parents, a woman murdered while walking home, rape victims, immigrants drowned in the Channel, betrayed taxpayers, cheated shareholders and failed school and university students.



When institutions fail so widely, anarchy is close behind. Only serious leadership, and the swift removal of the incapable, are going to begin to rectify that.