Alistair Mant is the author of Intelligent Leadership (Allen & Unwin), a leadership consultant and chairman of the United Kingdom’s Socio-Technical Strategy Group, which studies system function and dysfunction. Mant spends a third of his time in Australia working with government and private sectors on leadership, government modernisation and organisational structure. I published his expose on the terrible downside of mixing the public and private sectors in Muddying the waters between guardians and traders. This piece was first published in the Sunday Age and is republished with the author’s permission.

 

In any survey of political psychology, John Howard and George Bush probably ought to be dealt with separately. One is the most powerful man on earth – the other the smallish prime minister of a smallish, fairly prosperous democracy tucked away somewhere near the South Pole. Yet, psychologically, they occupy the same corner of the classroom. They are best understood as chronically naughty boys.

You could call it the psychology of the smart alec or, in modern parlance, the smartarse. Most smart alecs learn to make others laugh because they have to. In a seriously tough school, it may be the only way to avoid being roughed up by thugs; that was Clive James’ route to celebrity. But not for Howard and Bush.

There are certain men who seem impelled to be naughty. They end up in sales, politics, big business, the law (as barristers) and crime – any field where excitement is to be got by bending or breaking rules. They delight in outfoxing people, or seducing them, and they love the riskiness of rule-breaking. Names such as Abbott, Keating, Costello and Rumsfeld spring to mind.

There is a respectable argument that some people who are drawn to police work have stronger than normal delinquent urges as a result of an over-strict upbringing (often in a police household). By submitting themselves to rigid discipline and by projecting guilt onto other people, they can keep at bay their own overwhelming need to be naughty.

Many people, especially Sydneysiders, have come to see John Howard as the standard, boring, conventional, suburban solicitor – but one who got lucky and rode a political wave all the way to the beach – until he was beached, perhaps.

But most people in Australia have not heard him on the 1955 radio broadcast of Jack Davey’s Give it a Go quiz show. It is mighty revealing. The Prime Minister (then 16) is exposed as a cocky kid with absolutely no clue about the answers, but a cheeky confidence in going for it, anyway. He walked away with 100 cakes of Velvet soap.

All schoolteachers are familiar with this kind of kid – basically ignorant but always open to negotiation when it comes to catching the teacher’s eye. It is an old plaint of feminists that the schoolgirl who happens not to know the answer won’t put up her hand; the boy with half an answer (or in young John’s case, none at all) will still have a crack at it in the hope that something will turn up. In the broadcast, it becomes evident that the audience (which probably doesn’t know the answer, either) begins to side with the kid, and the quizmaster, sensing this, encourages him – an early lesson in populism; perhaps a crucial one.

It now seems that Howard should have retired gracefully last year, and that the decision to stay on may cost the Coalition dear. Why did he stay? The naughty-boy thesis would be that he could not help himself – he was just having too much fun! Ten years ago, everybody wrote him off, but now he’s the king of the castle.

Peter Costello may have the Blairite brains and the stylishness, but Howard has the Bushite power, and it intoxicates him. It’s as if the teacher has left and he rules the classroom.

The psychological link with George Bush could not be clearer. At Yale, Bush was known as “lip” for his wisecracking persona and his self-imposed role as nicknamer of everybody else. Nothing has changed. Bush can be charming, but cruel. The English journalist Julie Burchill memorably described him as exhibiting all the sullen anger of the reformed drunk.

Where does this anger come from? Why did the privileged first son of a wealthy dynasty become a drunkard and hell-raiser in the first place? That question cannot be answered without an understanding of the Bush family project.

The cognoscenti in Washington will tell you that Team Bush has had but one aim over four generations – the getting hold of and hanging onto power. Business success feeds political advancement; political advantage feeds business success.

If you seem to have the right stuff for the dynastic project, you will be a favoured son. If you seem to lack presidential timbre, you will likely feel frozen out.

George W. went from sweet-natured and charming child to spoilt brat in just a few years; from then on, his three brothers looked like better bets for the family project. History had different ideas once George found God.

Here the similarities with John Howard end. Young John was as ambitious as many of the students at Canterbury Boys’ High School, but there was apparently no unusual burden of expectation from his service-station-owning parents and, anyway, he had an older brother to mop up those expectations. But Howard adopted his parents’ political heroes in pretty much the same way as the young Margaret Thatcher did – in a backward-looking embrace of an old and more settled political order.

None of that sentimental nonsense for George Bush – you either had the capacity to play for the team, or you didn’t. For years he seemed unworthy. Now the family waits patiently in the wings.

Bush and Howard resemble each other in another respect – their shared hatred of clever liberalism. Both are very skilful indeed at reaching out to other people who resent cleverness and learning.

Bush, as clever as a fox when it comes to political chicanery, presents himself as an amiable Texan cowpoke. Yet, it is clear that his resentment of East Coast intellectuals is quite genuine. It is why he became a smartarse at Yale in the first place, and why he loathes John Kerry. It is why he does the cowpoke thing so persuasively.

Howard’s identification with the battlers is just as authentic – it is how he reaches out so successfully to anyone with a sense of grievance or resentment. He has described talkback radio as the iron lung of political opposition – necessary because of the centre-left disposition of other media.

We live in interesting political times. The arrival of Mark Latham lends a drama to forthcoming events. Like him or not, Latham presents as an anointed man. The mantle (at Werriwa) was laid upon him by the great Gough himself, but that is not the point. Anyone who has met Latham knows that he carries with him a sense of historical destiny. It is why he writes interminable books on deep and meaningful subjects (imagine John Howard writing the 391-page Civilising Global Capital in his own words).

Members of the acting profession understand the meaning of the term presence – you cannot describe what it is, but you surely feel it when the dramatic hero enters. The best way to appreciate this may be to watch the body language at question time in the House of Representatives – but with the sound turned off. But that is another story.

John Howard is a skilful and lucky politician, but no one, not even in the Coalition ranks, feels him to be an anointed leader. Peter Costello, another younger brother, has the makings if he can shrug off the naughty boy persona more successfully than Bush has done.

If John Howard should now fall from power, he will take it in his stride – he has already far surpassed anybody’s expectation of him. The naughty boy got away with it. If Bush fails, the consequences may be catastrophic for him – this would be yet another life-consuming failure and a crippling blow for Team Bush.