A weak and insecure woman

There are many facets of yesterday’s hack of the NHS computer systems that can be laid squarely at the government’s door.  Most obviously, the discovery that among the “inefficient back office functions” that Jeremy Hunt had happily taken the axe to was the small matter of keeping the NHS computer security up to date.  As the BBC reported:

“Up to 90% of NHS hospitals are still using the Windows XP programme, with experts suggesting that the 2001 operating system has made the NHS vulnerable to cyber-attacks.”

Perhaps less obviously, it is now clear that the malware that shut down the NHS systems was created by the security services.   The development of these tools – and the risk that they would fall into the hands of criminals – was a key reason that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (and many others) warned Theresa May that her Snoopers Charter would lead to exactly the kind of events that unfolded yesterday:

“This snoopers charter has no place in a modern democracy - it undermines our fundamental rights online. The bulk collection of everyone's internet browsing data is disproportionate, creates a security nightmare for the ISPs who must store the data - and rides roughshod over our right to privacy. Meanwhile, the bulk hacking powers in the Bill risk making the internet less safe for everyone.” (My emphasis)

On these two grounds alone, the government must be held to account.  There is, however, another facet of yesterday’s events that is far more worrying than a serious but transitory computer hack.  This is the haste with which Prime Minister Theresa May abandoned the campaign trail in order to “take control” of the unfolding situation.

I had studied this behaviour before, but in a different context.  It reminded me of the antics of General Neil Richie, the dangerously incompetent commander of the British Eighth Army in North Africa whose attention to detail and constant interference in the work of his subordinates led to the piecemeal destruction of his army, the fall of Tobruk, and, were it not for the last ditch actions of Auchinleck to hold the Germans at El Alamein, might well have cost Britain the second world war.  Too much attention to detail and too much interference with one’s subordinates turn out to be common traits that define incompetent leaders.  According to General Messervy (quoted in Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence):

“Richie was all haywire by then.  All for counter-attacking in this direction one day and another the next.  Optimistic and trying not to believe that we had taken a knock.  When I reported the state of 1^st Armoured Division to him at a time when I was planning to use it for counter-attack, he flew to see me and almost took the view that I was being subversive...

 “Confident and decisive in his speech, but one did not always feel he was quite so confident and decisive in his own mind.”

Dixon suggests that the drive to leadership that produces both successful and incompetent leaders is a matter of motivation.  The first are those who seek success, the second are those attempting to avoid failure:

“Although these two sorts of achievement-motive may bring about rapid, even spectacular, promotion, their nature and effects are very different.  The first is healthy and mature, and brings to the fore those skills required by the job in hand; the second is pathological, immature, and developing of traits, such as dishonesty and expediency, which may run counter to those required of high command.”

The comparison of military leadership (and competence) with government is apt.  Not least because in Brexit the UK undoubtedly faces its worst crisis since the end of world war two.  Get it wrong and the consequences could be truly devastating .  So we need to be sure that the leader we choose to lead the negotiations is up to the job.

There is good reason to believe that May is not the strong and stable leader we need.  She has surrounded herself with incompetent ministers – not only her useless Health Secretary but also a Justice Secretary who fails to uphold justice and a Foreign Secretary who is so dangerous that he is apparently locked in a cupboard somewhere in the middle of the Gobi Desert where there is no chance of his getting in front of a camera or microphone until the election is over.  If May is the strong and stable leader she claims to be, how is it that these buffoons are still in her cabinet?  And if they are not buffoons, why is it that May interferes in their work and refuses to let them out on the campaign trail?

Nor is it only her dealings with cabinet colleagues that suggests that May is not the strong and stable character that she claims.  She has form when it comes to her staff too.  Back in February Mrs May effectively fired the esteemed Sir Mark Lyall Grant for what the media chose to refer to as “mansplaining” but might more accurately have been a senior civil servant patiently explaining why Mrs May could not have her own way.  If this were an isolated case, we might give Mrs May the benefit of the doubt.  But far from a one off, it is beginning to look like May’s modus operandi.  At the start of the election campaign, Mrs May lost both her Press Secretary and her Director of Communications:

“Both Ms Perrior and Ms Loudon had experienced frustration in accessing key meetings and information in Downing Street since their appointments last July.”

These resignations give us some indication of what Kenneth Clarke meant when he referred to May as a “bloody difficult woman.”

The very decision to call a snap election at the start of a brief 24 month window in which the UK’s exit from the EU has to be negotiated smacks of incompetent leadership.  If May truly was strong and stable, she would be overseeing her ministers and senior civil servants as they negotiated Britain's exit from the EU.  Instead she is on a bus that makes clear the election is all about her fragile ego (no obvious mention of the Tory party). 

The risk is that she will do to the Brexit negotiating team what she has previously done to her own staff, and what she did to the hapless Hunt in the face of what turned out to be a fairly ordinary malware fraud.  That is, like General Richie in the North African desert, she will interfere and flip-flop to such an extent that her negotiating team is paralysed in the face of an EU team that simply cannot afford to let the UK leave the EU with a good deal.

If the polls are correct, then Mrs May will be back in Downing Street on 9 June.  If so, I fear that a weak and insecure woman who is motivated more by fear of failure than any true desire for her country's success is about to deliver the worst possible Brexit – the one the EU bureaucrats on the opposite side of the table want; the one that punishes Britain as an example to any other member state that contemplates leaving.