Thank God I'm a Failure

Examples of Success: Rachel Reeves, Justin Welby

I expect everyone, above a certain age, has moments when you look around you and think, ‘Well, let’s be honest, you never really lived up to your potential, did you? Actually, you’re a bit of a failure.’

If you’re lucky enough to be married, chances are your spouse will demand you exit that hole damned quick, because if you’re a failure, what does that make her/him?

So let’s just say that my early life was one of precocious over-achievement in a number of fields, in which I climbed a number of the most demanding summits British academic and artistic life has to offer. I followed all that up with unexpected and unlooked for success in Asia’s financial industry. People who knew and resented me found it both outrageous and disgusting. On my trips back to London, I got quietly ‘tapped up’ in Clubland by bibulous Tory figures, for an early entry into Parliament. I was nominated for entry to Clubland by the head of the secret service. At no point did I suffer from imposter’s syndrome.

And yet, here I am, decades later, just about keeping my head above water as an independent economist, struggling to play the guitar half-way well, and managing an inglorious 127 votes as an SDP parliamentary candidate. By my early standards, and from that point of view, this is pretty dramatic failure.

I do not lament. I do not regret it for a moment. That’s not just because in ways that really matter, things are great - the Taylor family, husband, wife, two children, are a fundamentally happy bunch who love and support each other. And in a couple of hours time I’ll pour Susie and I a rum and ginger, and toast the evening drawing in in Barbados.

But the bigger reason is this: it’s true I never climbed the establishment ranks, but good grief, looking at the establishment, you’d have to conclude that membership of it is a glaring claxon blaring out a five-star warning: BEWARE, CRITICAL FAILURE! To be part of that bunch is to confess to inadequacies of intellect, imagination, sympathy, basic ethics and competence which, in other times, would be a source of profound shame.

Generational Failure

Some of this failure is simply generational. A piece by John Greer (whose credentials include serving ‘twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America’) entitled ‘We Must Become Chernobyl Wolves’ is one of this year’s key reads.

He argues that Davos Men are ‘hilariously incompetent.’ “That the world of the future will inevitably have less room for global management is something that would-be global managers can’t even begin to conceive. Yet the system they dream of running is stunningly incompetent.” Perhaps “global managers belong to a decadent aristocracy so sheltered from the consequences of its own actions and so caught up in a world of vapid abstractions that it’s a marvel they haven’t caused even worse disasters.”

Give them time.

But in Britain specifically, the degradation and corruption of our establishment cannot be blamed simply on the deranged times in which we live. Rather, the people at the top, right at the very top, are fundamentally rotten. Let’s drag up just two examples from this week’s gutter.

The Liar: Rachel Reeves

The first is Rachel Reeves, our Chancellor, the person in charge of Britain’s finances. There’s no point in sugar-coating it: Rachel Reeves is a liar. Not a ‘political liar’ for whom broken manifesto ‘promises’ are the unwelcome but accepted currency of political life, but a personal liar. Her lies are on her CV, on her account of her life, and they have been sustained and promoted not momentarily, but over decades.

Rachel Reeves - something to hide?

These are not ‘accusations’: they are just the facts. The is a gap between her regularly flaunted CV, in which she claimed to be working as an economist at HBOS, and her actual life where she was working in some minor administrative capacity at the bank.

They are not a mistake or a momentary lapse of judgement, her credentials as an experienced economist form the basis on which she holds the Chancellorship. Now, as people begin properly to scrutinize her CV, more discrepancies, more lies, emerge.

I don’t feel the need to be kind about this, for two reasons. First, of course, it matters if our Chancellor is exposed as a longstanding liar. Quite often the City likes to think that ‘my word is my bond’ means something (the usual suspects - swaps desks, LME traders - excepted). When you are exposed as a liar, life in the City can become tricky, and your career short.

The second is more personal. Something clearly went shatteringly wrong in her early career, which found her dumped from being an ambitious Oxbridge graduated starter at Bank of England to handling retail banking complaints at a back office in HBOS in Leeds. We don’t yet know what that disaster was, but it must have been spectacular, because she’s spent the rest of her career covering the tracks and in denial. Simply not being very good at her job hardly seems to explain this disaster. (Hell, we’ve all had failures. I was fired as the founding editor of ‘EuroWeek’, for the best of all possible reasons - I wasn’t up to it. For a while I got very fond of the saying that ‘he who never made a mistake never made anything’.) So what happened? What was the Terrible Thing?

At the time of writing Rachel Reeves is still in her job. But now she’s probably the useful scapegoat for if/when Labour’s economic policies produce disastrous results (employment, inflation, fiscal balances - all likely within two to three years). In short, she’s blown.

That one of the most senior posts in the British government is occupied by a liar is also an indictment of the rest of the establishment who were either strategically incurious about her, or who knew she is a liar, and simply thought it didn’t matter. During Watergate, the killer question was: ‘What did the President know, and when did he know it?’ The same question should be asked of Sir Kier Starmer.

The Moral Vacuum: Justin Welby

The second exhibit is Justin Welby, or as he is to be addressed: The Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. He resigned last week, after a review found that he had failed to act - even just to warn - about the career of John Smyth, who ran Christian summer camps at which he practiced violent sexual abuse of dozens or even hundreds of boys. The Church certainly knew about his perversions when Welby was elevated to the head of the Anglican communion, and it seems very unlikely that he himself didn’t know. The details are, frankly, both shocking and revolting, and it seems incredible and inexplicable that the Church, under Welby’s leadership, did little, in anything, to stop Smyth. That is a Terrible Thing.

Justin Welby - actually, this was not a difficult ethical question

The question of whether or not to stop a violent pervert from preying on your young flock is not a tricky ethical dilemma demanding prayerful contemplation. This is not a ‘what would Jesus have done’ issue. In the end we are just left with the conclusion that there was a dreadful moral vacuum at the top of the Church of England.

Rachel Reeves and Justin Welby can’t be dismissed as merely exceptions to the rule. These two occupy positions at the peak of the British establishment and the British state. That, actually, is the Terrible Thing - that we’re not better than this.

Thank God I’m a failure.

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