When Leaders Sounded Like They Believed in Something
From Reagan and Thatcher to the age of spin, the strange decline of political conviction.
I would make a terrible leader. My voice, for one thing. It simply doesn’t carry. I practically have to use sign language in a crowded pub. A leader’s voice, on the other hand, must rise above the din in every sense and make even ordinary utterances sound consequential. When a person’s voice physically resonates, the meaning vibrates along with it. This is especially useful when the stakes are high, when a leader’s words must lift a people and give them courage. We think of Churchill’s stirring vow to “fight them on the beaches” or Kennedy’s appeal to “ask what you can do for your country”. But it also works the other way, making false sentiments sound a little more noble, dishonesty a little more authentic. Obama has a resonant voice, the smooth variety. Trump has it in that strange barking register. Then there was Thatcher, whose clipped, metallic delivery didn’t so much resonate as lance the eardrums like a nail gun.
Britain’s Keir Starmer, the latest prime minister to come and go, has one of the worst voices any leader could hope for. An adenoidal robot, Starmer is what an AI would think a technocratic prime minister should sound like. This is not exactly why he failed, of course, but it’s not irrelevant either. Successful politicians are not merely in the business of making arguments. They capture a mood, find the cadence, and give voice to the concerns of the people they’re elected to represent. A leader has to make a country feel that someone is speaking from a real place. Starmer failed on every count, as did his recent predecessors, making 10 Downing Street seem like an Airbnb for political office.
We’re used to despising politicians, but something feels different now. The political leaders of the late 20th century might have been ruthless or morally compromised, but they also possessed qualities that made them impossible to ignore. Their voices carried conviction, competence, or simple courage in a way that seems a little incongruous to us now. The current batch of Western leaders (Trump aside) often seems depressingly forgettable and mediocre by comparison, as if politics has become a recruitment process for people who respond well to media training and tick the right demographic boxes.
The first political leader I remember was the one who appeared on television in the corner of the living room. Children’s TV had a dedicated hour each day – we had three channels back then – and on each side of that were soaps and sports and, most vividly, the news showing the occasional mushroom cloud, a preoccupation with something called the USSR and, at the centre of things, someone I assumed was the President of the Earth and all-round figure of benevolence: Ronald Reagan. This was not entirely inaccurate.
Though my mature understanding of Reagan is retrospective, built from history books and YouTube clips, even as a child watching that screen, I could sense the humour and affability, as well as the solemnity of his historical declarations. “Tear down this wall”, he said, in a way that was impossible to refuse. Few leaders today would dream of uttering such commands to an enemy. Trump might give it the volume but has none of the gravity.
America in the late 1970s was starting to look like a nation in decline – inflation, humiliation abroad – so when Reagan promised a new morning in America, he was already engaging a receptive audience and few, I imagine, were inclined to doubt him. The genial certainty that his critics read as dangerous simplicity looks to me now like someone who understood that leadership is not only administration. It’s the ability to tell a nation what story it’s living inside.
On foreign affairs, Reagan seemed to grasp the Manichean drama of the Cold War in a way that technocrats, then and now, would have found embarrassing, which is probably why they underestimated him. Sometimes the world is not crying out for nuance, but for someone to call the thing in front of them what it is. The evil empire really was evil, and saying so plainly played a significant part in ending it.
Thatcher was the other political figure who loomed from the television, though with little of Reagan’s glamour and absolutely none of the humour. Thatcher was the unfunniest person alive in the 1980s, although she made great comic material for satirists. Where Reagan was sunny confidence, she was weather of a much harsher kind, like a tornado swinging a handbag while telling you to clear up the mess.
It took me many years to appreciate Thatcher because, right up to and including my university years, she was synonymous with all the worst things we were taught to associate with the right: selfishness, greed and a lack of compassion. Much later, I understood that she was an anomaly: Britain’s first female prime minister conquering an aggressively male-dominated arena through sheer conviction and total self-confidence, imposing direction on a country that had grown used to managed decay. By rights, she should be a feminist icon, but she had the wrong politics for that. In any case, she would have rejected any such accolade. For Thatcher, individuals succeed through discipline and hard work. She didn’t want to be treated as “a woman in politics” so much as a politician who happened to be a woman. Identity politics was an indulgence of the other side. She had work to do.
