Thursday, September 18, 2014

David Cameron's Leadership Flaws

As we await the results of the Scottish referendum - and with the No vote sounding more confident than they have done for the past fortnight - reflections are obviously turning towards the post-vote fall-out.  There has been a widespread belief that David Cameron would not have survived a Yes vote.  The question is whether he can survive a No vote.  His credibility is at an all time low with his backbenchers, who believe he has ill-advisedly offered the Scots too much on the devolution front in his panicky attempts to ensure the Union stays together. 

Gaby Hinsliff, in the Guardian, has provided a very effective analysis of the Cameron leadership and its flaws.  One prescient passage notes this:

It’s become a bit of a cliche to accuse the prime minister of treating government like it’s an undergraduate essay crisis, with everything tackled at 10 minutes to midnight in a caffeine-fuelled blur. Cameron is neither so dim nor so thoughtless as he’s sometimes painted, and nor is he the only senior politician ever secretly reduced to crossing fingers and hoping for the best. But he has now flown so often by the seat of his pants that they’re getting worryingly threadbare. Too often he has either busked his way to the “right” result for all the wrong reasons, or got the wrong result for what were frankly good reasons – namely that he didn’t deserve to win.

She provides evidence of his leadership style throughout her piece, but he can be effectively summed up as the  threadbare prime minister.

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