Peter Mandelson’s flaws were mistaken for credentials to represent Britain in the court of a rogue president

You can’t kill something that is already dead. New details about Peter Mandelson’s disastrous appointment as Britain’s ambassador to Washington can trigger more paroxysms of outrage in Westminster. They can sharpen the pitch of opposition calls for the prime minister to resign. They can reinforce the view among Labour MPs that Keir Starmer shouldn’t lead them into a general election. But they can’t produce consensus around a replacement, or invent a way to choose one without self-destructive factional feuding.

Labour MPs’ craving for better leadership has been finely balanced with fear of holding a contest and emerging with someone worse. There is no final straw yet to come because the camel’s back was broken months ago.

To rebuild relations with Europe in a dangerous world, the prime minister needs to win big arguments, not hide behind outdated red lines

In opposition, Keir Starmer pushed Brexit to the margin of debate. In government, he has learned that Europe is central to Britain’s interests whether you talk about it or not. The avoidance of painful arguments from the past turns out to be a handicap when making plans for the future.

This was predictable. Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto pretended that Brexit was a historical event. It was something Boris Johnson got “done” in 2020, in fulfilment of his winning campaign pledge from the previous year. The terms could be tweaked, but Starmer promised to preserve the substance. That was an indulgence of public fatigue with the whole issue, made electorally expedient by fear of offending former Labour supporters who had voted leave in the referendum.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here

Some people know from an early age what they want to do in life. I was never one of these. I never in fact found a job I was really suited for. I didn’t have the social skills to be a journalist, nor the confidence in forecasting to stay in investment banking, and I didn’t have the academic’s capacity to devote myself to a narrow field of learning or to

cope with reviewer 2.

In my 60s, however, I have finally discovered what I was cut out for - to be a dilettante. I go to a class on Shakespeare each week, learn Italian, study music theory and composition, play guitar, read novels and history, and cultivate a garden as well as writing this Substack. I know a little bit about a lot of things: you want me on your quiz team.

Which poses a question: which is better - to be a dilettante or a fanatic?

I use the word “dilettante” rather than polymath not from modesty but from reality. Knowledge has advanced so much that it’s no longer possible to be a true polymath. Maybe John von Neumann or Jacob Bronowski came close, but they were rare geniuses even three generations ago. What Adam Smith said of the production of goods applies also to the production of knowledge: it requires a division of labour, people who devote much of their life to a single narrow subject.

We need fanatics who do just this. And not just in academia; musicians, novelists and artists must be fanatical enough to practice enough to master their disciplines.

Fanaticism doesn’t always foster knowledge, though. Liz Truss is a fanatic, but not overly freighted with knowledge or wisdom. She’s an extreme example, but you know many less extreme others, and if you don’t just look at any Question Time audience.

And even where fanatics do learn, Smith’s analogy goes further. Just as there are diminishing returns to the production of goods so too are there to the production of knowledge: research productivity is falling. And fanaticism coupled with pressure to publish leads some academics to falsify data, use AI slop or simply to make claims that aren’t true - hence the replication crisis.

Also, of course, Smith wasn’t entirely admiring of the division of labour. It causes people, he said, to become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

That’s perhaps an exaggeration for most professional people. But it contains a germ of truth. The Christmas editions of University Challenge are a little dumbed down because people who’ve had distinguished careers (a malefaction I avoided) haven’t had the time to cultivate wider knowledge.

The fanaticism that leads one to identify closely with one’s work can also lead to professional deformation, a failure to see that one’s professional standards cannot always be applied to the wider world. Academics, for example, are prone to seeing bad policy as intellectual error rather than what it often is - the product of power struggles or bad incentives.

Another fault of the fanatic was exemplified recently by Marc Andreessen saying that people 400 years ago didn’t do introspection - oblivious to the fact that the title character in Shakespeare’s most famous play does exactly that.

Dilettantism is a correction to this error. What I’m learning is that there are different ways of learning. For most of my life, I’ve been able to flip through papers and books on economics thinking “I’ve got the gist of this”, and this has been good enough. In other subjects it’s not. In learning a language or playing guitar what matters is that you just immerse yourself. James Buchanan’s advice to young researchers is correct: “keep your ass in the chair.” When reading Shakespeare and other literature you must look not merely for clarity as you do perhaps in scientific disciplines but for ambiguity. The meaning of “to be or not to be”, for example, varies depending on which word is emphasized. And whilst the search for absolute precision and for general laws is good in physics, it is often silly in the social sciences.

Fanatics who have stuck to one discipline neglect these differences - especially if, like too many techbros, they overvalue high IQs. That leads to a mistaken belief that because they are masters of one discipline (or fancy themselves as such) they can apply their expertise to anything else. Andreeson’s silly remark continues a long tradition of people who excel in one field making fools of themselves in others: Bobby Fischer, William Shockley, James Watson, Richard Dawkins, pretty much any businessman in politics, and so on. A good dilettante, on the other hand, at least knows enough about other disciplines to know his limits.

A related mark of the fanatic is the habit of seeing things from only one point of view. We see this sometimes in economics, when conventional economists try to squeeze every “shock” into a DSGE model without considering whether such models have their limits - not least being that they have so many “shocks” that are exogenous to their system. Better economists follow Dani Rodrik’s advice and use different models in different contexts, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of all. They’re dilettantes.

What’s true of economics is also true of politics. There are those so wrapped up in their own mindset that they can’t escape it. The absurd extreme example of this is Trump’s war on Iran. As a narcissistic solipsist he has no theory of mind, no insight into his opponents, and hence no strategy, with the result that he was surprised when the Iranians fought back.

Sane people, however, are prone to a less idiotic form of what I mean, and the vice is far from confined to so-called extremists. When he blamed Today’s falling listenership on “news avoiders” Nick Robinson failed to appreciate that the journalist’s point of view is only one of many, and that intelligent people are increasingly cheesed off with it. And mainstream economists sometimes cannot think outside of their preferred theory, whereas we Marxists can use Marxism or conventional economics as the context requires, Marxism for me being an antidote to ideological fanaticism.

In these respects the dilettante is a close relation of Richard Rorty’s ironist - one who forever doubts their own beliefs and vocabularies, aware that there are other sometimes compelling ones and able to step into them when required.

Here, however, we run into a problem. Social structures sometimes select for fanatics.

Dilettantes can set up a successful businesses, but they sell out for a few million and retire to the country. What distinguishes them from billionaires isn’t ability so much as the fact that the billionaire is fanatical enough to keep going. This is true of work generally. Whereas fanatics try 9-9-6 working (at least for a while!) dilettantes jump off the partnership tracks, change career, downshift or retire early, allowing fanatics to rise to the top. No wonder, then, that so many CEOs are sniffy about home-life balance. Corporations are sometimes likened to psychopaths, because they often end up being run by those with a monomanic obsession with “success”.

The business people we hear most from - billionaires and CEOs - are fanatics.

The same’s true of politics. Being an MP means your evenings are taken up with meetings and your days with attending to constituents and lobbyists with bees in their bonnets. That means the political process selects for fanatics, and so even the best politicians are unrepresentative of intelligent thinking. For example they overvalue hard work, failing to see that for millions of people it is drudgery and unfreedom, and overestimate what policy can actually achieve.

Years ago, journalists spoke of MPs such as Jenkins or Heath having a “hinterland”. That’s gone out of fashion.

One might imagine there’s an upside to fanaticism in business and politics, expressed (pdf) by George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

He wrote that in 1903. The following four decades showed the problem with it - that the enemies of progress are even worse fanatics. We now face the same problem we had in the 30s: how to defeat the forces of reaction, those who would reverse the progress made on racial and gender equality?

Not with dilettantism or ironism. Robert Frost warned against this when he said that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” That’s great for civilized discussion in SCRs, but less so when fighting the far right. As Toby Buckle says, those who believe in liberal equality need to state their case more strongly - to be more fanatical.

Here, our national mythology disguises a nasty fact - that Stalin and communists did more to beat Nazism than liberal westerners. Dilettantes and ironists might be civilized people, but on their own, civilized people don’t defeat Nazis.

“MPs are all in it for themselves and are out of touch with the real world.” I don’t know how true these cliched sentiments are; like Elizabeth I, I have no window into people’s souls. But I know something else - that they are irrelevant.

Almost everybody in work is in it for themselves. Doctors, binmen, guys on the checkout at Lidl - none would be there if they weren’t being paid. And do you care what a dentist or mechanic knows about the real world? No.

Why, then, do we put our trust into these people who are all in it for themselves and are out of touch with the real world? And why, so often, is this trust justified?

Incentives, that’s why. The mechanic who couldn’t fix your car, or dentist who couldn’t mend your teeth, or the shop that sold you mouldy veg, would soon lose business. And, being in it for themselves, they don’t want that. As Adam Smith famously said:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

And here’s the problem. Whilst the self-love of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker gets us our dinner, that of politicians doesn’t so often do so. As voters we are beggars, depending on the benevolence rather than self-interest of politicians.

This is because well-functioning markets (which are only a subset of all markets) give people who are in it for themselves incentives to act in our interests. In politics, however, these incentives are weaker and even perverse.

In theory, this shouldn’t happen. Politicians want to get re-elected, and this should incentivize them to pursue the public interest.

One problem with this is that voters don’t know what the public interest is because they are systematically misinformed about social affairs. They have no idea about the size and composition of public spending; misunderstood the impact of EU regulations; overestimate the numbers of asylum seekers; overestimate (pdf) spending and fraud on welfare benefits (pdf); and don’t understand how economics works.

Politicians feel incentivised to pander to such ignorance. Cameron and Osborne spoke of the “nation’s credit card”; Labour promised in 2024 not to raise income tax rates; and the Greens and LibDems want the government to respond to high energy prices by cutting fuel duty. In any rational polity, all these statements would be greeted by voters with contempt and plummeting support. But they weren’t.

Politicians who are incentivized to pander to public opinion thus give us bad government, because voters’ preferences aren’t a good guide to their interests. The fact that voters sometimes wise up to their mistakes - for example by regretting Brexit or being cheesed off with declining public services - does not overturn this point.

There’s another bad incentive: there are no penalties for failure. There have certainly been many such, from privatized water through fiscal austerity to Brexit and privatized probation services and children’s homes. But the authors of these have not suffered. Quite the opposite. Cameron and Osborne went onto big money jobs. Even Chris Grayling, one of the most egregiously abject of ministers, got paid £100,000 a year for seven hours work a week on leaving office. And advocates of Brexit such as Daniel Hannan or Nigel Farage are still raking in cash despite having been proven wrong.

In fact, failure can sometimes be good for politicians even in electoral terms because, as Gilles Saint-Paul points out, it can maintain a government’s client base. He gives the example of pro-poor parties that would lose their supporters if they actually abolished poverty. But there are others. The fact that Brexit hasn’t worked gives its advocates the chance to whine that it hasn’t been properly tried. And grievances about immigration have to be maintained by parties trying to appeal to anti-immigrant voters.

The converse is also true: success doesn’t get you elected. Rising incomes for workers under the Labour governments of the 60s and 70s meant that many felt themselves sufficiently well-off to vote Tory. And the 1997-2010 Labour government did a good job of reducing pensioner poverty - with the result that pensioners stopped voting for it.

Politicians don’t, then, have strong incentives to avoid bad policies. But they do have incentives to chase corporate donations and cushy jobs after leaving office. This encourages them to not regulate industries harshly; to not demand value for money in procurement (pdf); and to extend profitable subcontracting. Wes Streeting’s keenness on introducing more private companies into the NHS might be founded less upon fine considerations about NHS productivity and transactions cost economics and more upon the career prospects of an MP with a majority of only 528.

The claim that politicians are “in it for themselves” therefore misses the point. Incentive structures in politics encourage those who are “in it for themselves” to make bad policy. Whereas well-functioning markets can make bad people do good things, political systems can make even good people do bad things.

Incentives matter. In failing to see this, people are substituting moralistic cliche for analysis of systems.

What to do about this? You can perhaps all think of ways of changing incentives - though almost all those ideas run into the problem of how to actually achieve such change.

You might, therefore, that this is a case for having more public-spirited people in politics, for somehow strengthening the notion of “public service”.

But “find a saint” is not a reliable political strategy. And even if one could do so, the fact remains that politics is not merely a matter of good will. The politician’s job, like that of the dentist or car mechanic, requires technical skills: the ability to recognise trade-offs and explain them to voters; an understanding of decision theory and cognitive biases; an awareness of the key mechanisms in the social sciences; an ability to drive through the implementation of policy; an ability to get elected; and so on.

Herein lies yet another problem. Our degraded public sphere is dominated by noisy fanatical partisans who demand only that politicians echo their prejudices - hence the Tory party electing Truss or Badenoch. Nobody is much interested in encouraging (or even defining) the technical skills of politics. And so these wither away.

It’s a tired cliche that we get the politicians we deserve. But it’s true.