Deciding who's the best

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Just before Christmas, Gareth Hughes posted on his view that Ieuan Wyn Jones is Plaid’s nost successful leader.  It’s an opinion which some will share, and with which others will disagree.  It’s inherent in the issue that a large element of subjectivity comes into play, but it’s worth considering some of the factors that lead to such a judgement on any leader, in an attempt to take a more abstract view.

The first factor is about defining some criteria on which to judge 'success'.  Gareth seems to base his conclusion largely on the fact that after 80 years of being an opposition party, Plaid first entered government under the leadership of Ieuan.  But that isn’t the only possible criterion for judging success as a leader – and given that there was no Assembly in which to form a government, it’s not something which any of his predecessors could ever have achieved anyway.

If I may diverge to consider the Labour Party for a moment, there is surely no doubt that Tony Blair was the most electorally successful leader that that party ever had.  Unfortunately, that success was achieved by abandoning much of what the Labour Party had traditionally stood for.  My personal favourite Labour leader was Michael Foot.  He was not only a great orator, but also a man of principle, who never feared putting the difficult and unpopular arguments.  He was an electoral disaster, though.

And that’s the point.  How do we measure the ‘success’ of any leader of any political leader?  Is it in electoral terms, in being in government, in achieving aims, in behaving with principle and integrity, or in putting the difficult arguments?  All are relevant, but any assessment of ‘success’ in a leader owes more to the weightings attached to the different elements than to the inherent qualities of those being judged.

The second factor is to do with attribution.  There is a tendency to attribute success of an organisation to the nature of its leadership, but it ain’t necessarily so.  Indeed, Gareth himself recognises that when he points out that Plaid’s best-ever election result was in 1999 under Dafydd Wigley – and then goes on to attribute the success not to the leader, but to the campaign manager, one Ieuan Wyn Jones.  It fits Gareth’s own position, of course, but it also opens the door to other interpretations.

Over-attribution of success to individuals is extremely common in the corporate world.  Sometimes, indeed, business managers do achieve success for their organisations, although there is some variety in the way that they do that.  Some are simply inspirational leaders, others are superb facilitators who create space in which the talents of the workforce can shine through.  But there are others who run their organisations by creating a climate of fear.

Far more common, in my experience, are those who just happen to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and are able to claim the credit for events over which they had little real influence.  And it’s not uncommon for organisations to succeed in spite of, rather than because of, their leadership, as motivated people who know what needs to be done simply ignore the titular leader.

I can think of nothing there which applies in the business world which does not also apply in the world of politics.  Some leaders are regarded as 'successful' because of what they do and say, others regardless of what they do and say, and some in spite of what they do and say.  Mis-attribution of success, and over-attribution of success, to the person who happens to be at the top at the time are natural tendencies.  The main difference that I can think of between business and politics in this sense is that political parties - or at least those claiming to be run democratically rather than hierarchically - should probably expect the personal influence of the leader on outcomes to be lower than it would be in companies.

So, in judging whether a particular leader was or was not a successful one, we need not only to decide on the criteria, we also need to judge how far the leader was actually personally responsible for meeting those criteria – and that’s much harder to do.

And that brings me to the third factor – timescale.  Looking back, it seems to me to be quite rare that the initial judgement made of any political leader stands the test of history.  Some get re-evaluated upwards, others downwards.  Two reasons for that immediately strike me.

The first of those is that more information, facts, and opinions emerge over time.  History, rather than hagiography, requires that more rounded set of inputs.

But the second, and the more important, is that the passage of time provides context.  And any period of political leadership needs to be judged in the context of what follows it as well as what precedes it.  It is only the passage of time which can provide that context.

To return to the specific subject of Gareth’s original post, namely a judgement on the 12 years which Ieuan Wyn Jones will have spent as the leader of Plaid Cymru, there are a number of possible sequences of events which can follow from this point on.  I choose two not because there are only two, nor because they are necessarily the most probable, but because they illustrate the importance of historical perspective in making a judgement.

In scenario 1, Plaid simply continues from where Ieuan leaves off.  Its official core aim is regarded as nothing more than a ‘long term aspiration’ to be mentioned as infrequently as possible, and the party becomes a party of government based on an appeal to the same middle ground as the other parties in Wales.  In that context, the last 12 years would be seen as a turning point in the party’s history.

In scenario 2, Plaid rediscovers a sense of historical mission and sets out to shift the focus of political debate towards its own position.  In that context, the last 12 years would be seen as something of an aberration.

Neither approach would necessarily lead to success, of course; but the way in which IWJ came to be regarded in each would be very different indeed.  History is neither kind nor cruel, it just is; and perspective is all in interpreting events.

I don’t agree with Gareth’s conclusion, but I recognise that it’s at least partly a result of looking at the same facts and events and applying a different interpretation to them.  I simply don’t know which view history will eventually uphold.