Why brains aren't a prerequisite for a good leader

I lay aside the volume of Anton Chekhov's deeply meaningful short stories I have been reading to ask you to think of an Australian writer you greatly admire. Perhaps it is, say, the novelist Tim Winton (a designated national Living Treasure), or the poet Judith Wright.

Now ask yourself whether you think these sorts of towering, treasured literary figures would make better Australian prime ministers than some career politicians do.

Back to this intellectual challenge in a moment.

First, though, to how when one is a terrible intellectual snob it feels especially horrifying to have thick, stupid people as your nation's leaders.

And so, knowing it is aimed at snobs just like me, I have enjoyed the challenge of reading Henry Oliver's piece In praise of stupid politicians - Literary intelligence is not everything.

Oliver's piece was written on the eve of the famously stupid Liz Truss, a dill, this week becoming the UK's prime minister.

Liz Truss's name and the words "stupid" and "stupidity" have always shared the same sentence in discussion of her.

So, for example, when on Tuesday Russian state-controlled TV greeted her accession to the UK's prime ministership with the announcement "stupidity has triumphed", the Russians had in mind Truss's proven ignorance in many Russia-pertaining matters.

As Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and in hectoring conversation with Russia's Foreign Minister, she had mixed up the Baltic and Black seas, and got other matters of geography hopelessly wrong.

The UK satirical newspaper The Daily Mash has just captured a popular view of Truss with a piece purportedly written by her headed I Am An Inspiration To People Of Stupidity. In it "Truss" enthuses "I hope that stupid schoolchildren see me and say 'I'm thick as pigshit. There's no way I should be running a country. But Liz has shown me I can!' Then take up a career in politics..."

Henry Oliver in his piece for The Critic finds these sorts of criticisms of Truss tinted with intellectual snobbery.

As a prime example of this kind of snobbery he mentions (it is what prompts my challenge to readers in this column's opening words) philosopher Mary Warnock famously arguing that the great and sensitive writer Virginia Woolf would have been a better prime minister than the cold, thick Margaret Thatcher was.

Oliver gives lots of instances of ostensibly "stupid" leaders, not fashionably learned, who have been just what their nations needed.

"Something about the idea that leaders have to be smart in a bookish way doesn't quite work," Oliver insists.

"What is seen as intelligent might not always be very useful when it comes to politics. Personality matters. Leadership is a question of values and policy but also of steel and character. Ultimately we are more concerned that our leaders ... will be up to muster when it comes to the hair-raising moments. Aristotle identified three sets of virtues: intellectual, practical and moral. Leaders need to combine all three."

"There are worse things than simple mindedness," Oliver accuses, quoting Christopher Hitchens, "pseudo-intellectuality, for example."

Ouch! Oliver's barb pierces this columnist's conscience.

Perhaps one has been too quick to feel a snob's horror when a leader seems stupid, when one senses he or she is pig-ignorant of Shakespeare, of Chekhov, of Tim Winton. I own up here to being routinely, unthinkingly contemptuous of the yokels of the National Party, to being horrified for the whole of the prime ministership of ignoramus Tony "I'm not the suppository of all wisdom" Abbott.

But in a moment of honesty I think how useless those of us who live our lives with our high-falutin' heads full of opera, poetry and Chekhov would be at practical, essential, running-the-country things. What doth it profit a country if its leaders read Chekhov and can find the Caspian and Black seas on a map but lack practicality, perhaps turning to jelly in the hair-raising moments?

In recent days and between my Chekhov readings and with a growing sense of my pseudo-intellectual uselessness, I followed the Jobs and Skills Summit.

How one admires the summit's leaders of politics, industry and labour, who with their feet on the ground and their practical minds untroubled by Chekhov's existential themes (frustrated dreams and unfulfilled expectations, society's dissolution and depravity, man's tragic subservience to natural forces beyond his control, etc) are indispensable to the daily running of the nation.

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