Yesterday, I read Emilio Casalicchio’s excellent Politico article which gave a glimpse into the Conservative’s election campaign. I was struck by the line ‘launching the first attack by shooting yourself in the head doesn’t look so clever’.

But I was even more struck by the notion that the campaign had been led by a headstrong small team, which neither sought nor responded to external feedback. This is redolent of the flaws of Theresa May’s 2017 election campaign.

Perhaps responding well to feedback counterintuitively conflicts with the egotism necessary to seek public office. Perhaps this is only exacerbated for those seeking the top office in an era of ‘strongman leadership’.

It was certainly true that Sunak’s public response to even a hint of public criticism during the campaign was primarily defensive: he did not give the impression of being curious to better understand the alternative viewpoint, let alone to change course in response to it. It’s not like he’s alone; this behaviour is common.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a lot about the skill of constructively receiving feedback. I don’t think it is something that comes naturally to anyone, but it is a skill that’s particularly well-developed among people that I admire. Getting better at it has certainly been useful for me and has helped my professional development.

I recently read one of Arthur C Brooks’s articles in The Atlantic covering this topic, too. I enjoyed his observation that ‘once you depersonalize criticism, you can start to see it for what it is: a rare glimpse into what outsiders think.’

This is both blindingly obvious and yet also often missed: it’s easy to get too caught up in judging the person who wrote the comment or perhaps being defensive. But taking feedback exactly as it is offered—as in, this person thought X—can be radically helpful. One doesn’t need to agree with the other person’s viewpoint, but having knowledge of it can nevertheless be extremely useful.

After reading Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s book Thanks for the Feedback a few years ago, I added a link in my work email signature which gives people the opportunity to offer anonymous feedback. This has served me very well, giving me lots of opportunities to reflect and develop my understanding of others’ viewpoints. Philippa Perry’s book also offered some useful insights into contextualising and using feedback in a personal (as opposed to professional) context.

I can’t help but think that the world would be a better place if people were better equipped to receive criticism—politics would certainly be better for it. Failing to make use of feedback feels a bit like ‘shooting yourself in the head.’

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I wrote the other day about the effect on Britain of the last fourteen years. But politics is personal too.

When David Cameron became the first Conservative Prime Minister of the twenty-first century, Keir Starmer had been Director of Public Prosecutions for less than two years. He surely cannot have imagined that he’d be the next Labour Prime Minister. And yet here we are.

And yet, it must surely feel daunting. The New York Times yesterday talked about him inheriting a ‘legacy of ashes’, while Le Monde talked of ‘creaking public services and a flatlining economy’.

On top of that, he’s got a unsupportive press looking to land every possible blow, and an insurgent Reform party primed to cause as much political instability as they can muster.

It’s a tough old job he’s got on his hands, and I don’t envy him.

I was out of bed early yesterday morning.

I walked down to the Metro station, where I waited longer than I used to for the train: so many of the 43-year-old trains have fallen apart that the timetable had to be altered some time ago to remove some services.

I alighted at Newcastle station, intending to travel to a hospital for a meeting. The train was badly delayed, and eventually terminated early, before my stop. I took a taxi the rest of the way, arriving about 45 minutes later than planned.

As the taxi pulled in to the hospital, it passed a picket line of striking healthcare assistants.

After my meeting, as I huddled with patients in the small station shelter waiting for the delayed return train, they talked amongst themselves about how they couldn’t afford train tickets. The trick, they said, is to buy a ticket for a single stop, and to get off at the nearest station to your destination that has no ticket barriers. The hospital always talks about people not turning up for appointments, they observed, but who can afford to travel to hospital in a cost-of-living crisis?

Back in Newcastle, I trudged in the pouring rain from the station to the office, asked three times by homeless people for money. The broken paving splashed muddy water up my legs over and again, and I witnessed one nasty fall on poorly repaired, uneven surface.

As I walked past boarded-up shops, I reminisced about the times Wendy and I used to pop into them.

I cut through Eldon Square and M&S, where a ‘store protection’ staff member chased a member of the public out into the rain.

Once I’d restarted my work laptop a couple of times, I sat and listened to another online meeting about another reorganisation of a government body. I wondered about the point of it all, and pondered who would possibly think that this was the best use of my time.

As I trudged home in the rain, I listened to the radio. A bloke standing in the street outside his house in the pouring rain, having failed to equip himself with an umbrella, complained about another bloke’s inability to plan.

The Prime Minister told us that he’d spend the ‘next few weeks’ earning our trust. He made the same promise in the same location in October 2022, but has perhaps made less progress than he’d hoped—polling suggests his trustworthiness has fallen over that period.

The man who once promised to ‘to put your needs above politics’ chose not to stick around long enough to see through the smoking ban he claimed would ‘save thousands of lives and billions of pounds’—because politics got in the way.

As he talked about how his plan is working, I couldn’t help but reflect on the day and wonder: Which plan? What’s working?

And just as the Prime Minister reached the end of a particularly rambling 53-word sentence, the broadcast cut to John Pienaar.

“We may… we may have lost the sound there… oh no… no… I think that’s it. Yes, the Prime Minster has turned his back. He’s finished.”

It’s hard to disagree.