Well, I tend to agree

Though this may be an age thing.

Blair was all style, no substance. Brown was all substance, no style. Intellectually, give me Brown any day of the week, despite his personality (yes I did meet him professionally, more than once).

But politics today is all about the optics. Stephen Timms (for example) is an extremely competent, thoughtful, likeable man. Yet he never made Cabinet, despite several people who were intellectually and personally inferior doing so.

The only reason I can assign - and I know, first hand, that this view is supported by extremely senior Civil Servants - is that he looks, well, a bit odd.

There are very competent, likeable Tories who have similarly failed to attain the rank a purely talent-based assessment might indicate.

There are some very stupid, unlikeable people from both parties who have instead attained that rank.

Having spent some decades in the Westminster Village - and fairly uniquely having gone into it all predisposed against the tribalism rather than identified with one or other side of it - it's all a bit disappointing, really.

Posted By: Old Man, Mar 27, 01:08:43