Susan Sheridan replies:

My review of Oliver Dennis’s edition of Lesbia Harford is positive, indeed enthusiastic. She is a significant poet, and this generous selection of her work is well edited and presented. I do, however, disagree with his view that Harford’s poetry is ‘pure, incidental song’ (for reasons given in the review) and with his editorial decision not to include the dates she attributed to individual poems. These dates are of interest to a reader seeking to understand their grounding in experience, personal or historical. My concluding invitation (not ‘injunction’) to visit the Poetry Library website to see earlier editions of Harford was made in the expectation that some readers may like to know more about this poet and her world: I am sorry if Mr Dennis took it to imply invidious comparisons with his edition.

No straw man

Dear Editor,

I appreciate the detailed and generous account by Stephen Mills of my book The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (ABR, November 2014). Nevertheless, he is wrong in dismissing the ‘strong man’ as a ‘straw man’. One of my central theses (reflected in the main title, with the subtitle indicating the book’s broader scope) is that clamour for a strong individual leader who will dominate his or her party and Cabinet is widespread in democracies (not least in the United Kingdom), that party leaders go to great lengths to portray themselves as strong and their principal opponent as weak, and that this obsession with domination rather than collegiality is inimical to effective democratic government.

Mills misses the point on Tony Blair. His style of leadership (and his justification of it in his exceptionally egotistical memoirs) represents what I am arguing against. Having to accept constitutional reform he did not particularly like, and having to play second fiddle on economic policy to a particularly powerful chancellor, Gordon Brown, Blair decided that he was personally entitled to make the big decisions on foreign policy. Ignoring the advice available to him from people who knew a lot about the complexity of Iraq, he took Britain into a war whose disastrous consequences are still being played out. As for the creation of ‘New Labour’, far from making Blair a ‘redefiner’ of British politics, this merely moved his party into the new centre ground as determined by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. Little wonder that she saw Blair as an important part of her legacy or that one of her ablest ministers, Kenneth Clarke (until recently a member also of David Cameron’s Cabinet), described Blair’s policies as ‘Thatcherism with a human face’.

There are also two factual errors in Mills’s review. He confuses H.H. Asquith with Stanley Baldwin when he says that I argue that ‘Asquith was tougher than Blair on the media tycoons’. I say nothing of the sort about Asquith, but I do make that point about Baldwin. He is also wrong in saying that I am ‘oddly dismissive’ of Martin Luther King Jr. Every reference I make to King is entirely positive. Perhaps this misunderstanding arises from a sentence in which I say that charismatic leaders ‘can be a Hitler or a Martin Luther King’, but since the previous sentence makes the point that ‘Charismatic leaders may, indeed, do either appalling harm or great good’, can there really be any doubt as to which of these two people personified ‘great good’?

Archie Brown, St Antony’s College, Oxford, UK

Stephen Mills replies:

In chipping Archie Brown’s ‘oddly dismissive’ treatment of Martin Luther King Jr, I meant that, in a 450-page text on political leadership, King – a brilliant strategist, inspiring speaker, and human rights visionary; in short, a leader – is notably underdone: rarely mentioned in the text and not listed in the index. If, as Brown argues, ‘transformational’ leaders are defined as those who bring systemic change, fewer such leaders will be found within liberal democracies than within the brittle, failure-prone authoritarian systems of apartheid, Francoism and Maoism, as Brown relates. Even so, was not the defeat of Jim Crow also a system-transformation?

When it comes to British prime ministers, I plead guilty to the Baldwin–Asquith confusion. Mea culpa. But I feel on firmer ground in insisting that Brown’s otherwise fine book is tarnished by his determined use of Tony Blair as a protracted metaphor for the evils of ‘strong’ leadership. Western democracies pose particular analytical problems for leadership scholars, with their dense and competitive institutions, complex patterns of accountability, adversarial and self-regarding rhetoric, and perverse incentives on policy-making. But whatever Margaret Thatcher may have thought of it, it seems clear to me that Blair’s redefinition of Labour as ‘new’ made Labour electable. Equally, a capacity to reorient a party towards electoral success – call it ‘strength’ – seems a desirable attribute in a democratic leader. As a recently departed Australian political leader told his own Labor Party in similar circumstances in the 1960s, ‘Only the impotent are pure.’