Sunday 21 September 2008

The Lammy leadership checklist

A fascinating contribution just now from David Lammy as the 'Can hope win?' discussion has got into how political vision and values and personality interact.

Peter Kellner was making a cogent case that Labour's political difficulties go much deeper than the personality of the leader.


I don’t think Gordon Brown’s personality is at the core of Labour’s problem. I think it goes much deeper than that. Could Gordon do more to speak human? Yes, I’m sure he could. But I am not sure it is a massive contribution to Labour’s problems, nor would a massive change make much difference.


Lammy was warm and generous about Gordon Brown, and argued against the idea of their being a template for political leadership. But he also set out a fascinating checklist for effective political leadership;


I believe we will see Gordon Brown set out his vision and values powerfully to the conference on Tuesday. And I believe that politics accommodates different kinds of characters in political leadership.

I think there are six things you need to be effective in political leadership

To be a public communicator

To be able to express a strong vision

To have political skill

To have organisational capacity, to get people to do things for you.

To have a cognitive intelligence

To have an emotional intelligence

And what we see is that both of the US candidates have those things in abundance.

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