Opinion and Analysis
As a leader, inspire those around you to improve their work ethics for effective service delivery. PHOTO | FILE
By MIKE ELDON, mike.eldon@depotkenya.org
In Summary
- What you need to ask yourself is what you should be doing more of and less of to deliver.
Every week, I receive my copy of The Telegraph, the weekly world edition of one of Britain’s upmarket dailies.
Admittedly from an unashamedly Conservative perspective, it
keeps me informed on the state of British politics and often provokes
comparisons between how politicians behave and are viewed in Britain and
how their counterparts are assessed here.
(As my readers have learned from time to time, the
consolation for Kenyans is that Britain’s political class is as unloved
as ours.)
In a recent edition, I saw that Andrew Marr has
published his first novel, Head of State, a satire that revolves around
No 10 Downing Street.
Marr is very familiar with No 10, having
interviewed five prime ministers there during his 30-year career as a
political journalist.
He describes it as an astonishing place which forms
an intense, overheated atmosphere around the leader of the day, one
where you find “150 paranoid gossips squeezed together in a small ship
in the middle of a hurricane”.
Every No 10 takes its character from the prime
minister living there at the time, Marr tells us, making it a very
different place with each new tenant.
Marr reports that Tony Blair enjoyed a No 10 “full
of very beautiful girls who were half in love with him” (while his wife
Cherie “followed around with a scowl”).
By contrast, his successor Gordon Brown populated
his office with “a gang of florid-faced big boys, rather overweight, who
glared at you a lot”.
Margaret Thatcher? “She had a lot of very bright
former civil service and business and PR people all working for her
right outside her office.
There were very tight lines of communication, and
the whole place was almost pin-drop silent in case the PM walked
through. They adored her, but were terrified of her.”
As for incumbent David Cameron, he is loved by his
civil servants, not least because when they send him papers in the
evening they come back the following morning, fully read, ticked and
underlined, with a “yes” or a “no”.
“He is a very good dispatcher of business,” notes
Marr, adding: “He looks and sounds like a prime minister, and conducts
business at No 10 very well.”
(Good news for the Conservative-leaning Telegraph.)
So, dear Business Daily readers, it’s time
to reflect on how we imagine Marr would have written about our State
House had he visited to interview Kenya’s successive presidents?
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