Secret weapon every leader needs

It’s a special quality that all of the great leaders have. And it could be the factor that decides the next elections both here and in the UK.

If ever there was a shining beacon for politicians the world over, it is Jeremy Corbyn. Strategists and statesmen across the globe should look at everything the UK Labour leader does and then make sure they do exactly the opposite.

After calling for an election for years and then locking himself in the broom cupboard when he got offered one, Corbyn finally agreed to his own demands with all the enthusiasm of a death row convict.

He certainly wouldn’t be the first politician to live in fear of the electorate – in Australia we call them “senators” – but he is probably the first to admit it.

Still, he is right to be paranoid. Even Corbyn’s own colleagues don’t like him, so no prizes for guessing what the rest of the country thinks.

After he effectively ran dead in the 2016 referendum – thus ensuring the Brexit Labour opposed was successful – his own MPs voted 197 to 40 to get rid of him, a result which only raises the question of where on earth he found the 39 others.

Now it takes a special kind of emotionally deadened horse post to want to work for an organisation where five out of six people want you sacked but fortunately for the Conservative Party – if not the nation – Jeremy Corbyn is just such a man.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the start of the general election campaign in London on Thursday. Picture: AP Photo/Frank Augstein

And so where any normal human being would have immediately withdrawn with the usual niceties, Corbyn instead decided to dig in like the angry little badger that he is. He forced a vote of the Labour membership and – as he had a year earlier – won a thumping majority.

Then, in the snap election after the pro-Brexit vote – for which the Conservative Party inexplicably put up an anti-Brexit leader – the Tories got a good old-fashioned British spanking and the Labour Party did surprisingly well.

This led some to come to the mistaken conclusion that Corbyn was actually popular rather than the since-proven thesis that the Tories were simply a total basket case undergoing the most public mental breakdown since Kanye’s last speech at the Grammys.

And so ever since the rise of the Brexit buccaneer Boris Johnson – who is as pure a populist product of the Conservative right-wing base as Corbyn is of the hardcore Labour left – Jeremy has been Marmite on toast.

He has been consistently outrun, outflanked and outmanoeuvred by an opponent who has the same populist instincts but infinitely more intellect and charm. And given that Corbyn has never had a single original idea that isn’t ripped from the seventies socialist songbook, he is utterly incapable of countering any of Boris’s feints.

He is also incapable of rallying the intelligent left behind him, which is why his own MPs have defected and the anti-Brexit forces are split between Corbyn Labour and a resurgent Liberal-Democrats. This would not be a problem in Australia’s two-party preferred system – in which the votes from the third-placed party would flow to the second and propel it to victory – but it is political suicide in the UK’s first-past-the-post system, in which the party with more votes than any other wins the seat.

Thus even if most UK voters may now oppose Brexit, Johnson is still favourite to win because they oppose it in two separate camps, each of which trail well behind the Conservatives – often by double digits. Another Corbyn coup!

And yet this curmudgeonly old commie keeps marching catatonically from one brain-dead decision to the next. Having been dragged to the polls against every effort of obstructionism he could muster, he then declared: “We will now launch the most ambitious and radical campaign for real change that our country has ever seen.”

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Colourful UK PM Boris Johnson is seen as the frontrunner in the coming election. Picture: Chris J Ratcliffe/WPA/Getty

That sentence alone should be enough to scare the shit out of any nation, let alone a country that has spent the last three years proving it is incapable of radical change. Indeed, it is fair to say that most of Corbyn’s colleagues called for a fresh pair of trousers as soon as it lobbed in their inbox. Honestly, if you gave this guy a grenade he would shove it down his Y-fronts and wear the pin as an earring.

The fact is Corbyn is just not quite right, and that is not even his fault. Anyone who has had anything to do with the Labor movement here or abroad knows that there are countless dimwitted dead-eyed socialists out there and it’s the job of the movement to stop them achieving power.

Unfortunately, in Corbyn’s case, the system failed.

This is why I have a bit of sympathy for the powerbrokers of the NSW Right, who for decades devoted their lives to stopping Australian communists from seizing power in the Australian Labor Party. The only catch was they ended up giving that power to Chinese communists.

Oh well, swings and roundabouts.

But the greatest irony – and it is great in both senses of the word – is that the Labor left has produced a leader in Anthony Albanese who is actually more pragmatic and moderate than the right-wing leader he replaced.

To be fair to Bill Shorten, he didn’t really believe the quasi-class war rhetoric he employed because he thought it would help him win. And to be fair to Corbyn, he really does believe it and probably doesn’t care if he wins or not. This is the difference between a Machiavellian power player and a genuine dipshit.

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Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has a key quality other leaders lack. Picture: AAP Image/Gary Day

Still, how refreshing it is to now have a leader of the Labor Party who both sounds sensible and is. “Nicer than Shorten and smarter than Corbyn” is a pretty good platform as far as I’m concerned.

All of this should be a lesson writ large in 20-foot letters of fire for those demanding Albo be more aggressive and radical. For the sake of politeness I won’t name names but it’s worth noting that one was a key player in making the Labor government suicidal in 2010 and the other was a key player in making the Labor opposition unelectable in 2019.

These are the Berenstain Bears of politics. Just like the hapless dad in The Bike Lesson – and Jeremy Corbyn in The Brexit Lesson – they should be listened to attentively purely so students of politics know precisely what not to do.

Albo, on the other hand, has been a case study in careful restraint. He has refused to be drawn into battles the government is attempting to wedge Labor on and is instead carving out a practical policy position that will place the ALP as the sensible centre of Australian politics.

His repositioning of the party’s position on climate change in his first major policy speech is a perfect example of this. Instead of frightening, shaming or lecturing people on the issue, he has recast it as an opportunity for jobs and economic growth. Leaders need to win over hip pockets as much as they do hearts and minds.

This is in direct contrast to the hard left Corbynist style, which is just to angrily repeat the same mantra over and over again and, when that doesn’t work, angrily repeat it even louder. Albo is responding to the electorate rather than dictating to it. No prizes for guessing which approach the electorate will reward.

But there is a far more time-honoured and effortless way to detect deadbeat leaders than even that simple test. What belled the cat for Martin Amis, a major left-wing intellectual who at his peak was the greatest British writer of his generation, was Corbyn’s utter lack of humour – a character deficit virtually copyrighted by socialists.

His key piece of evidence was an interview in which Corbyn solemnly declared: “Anyone who wants to be a beekeeper should be a beekeeper.”

“Nobody with a sense of humour,” Amis concluded, “could possibly have said that.”

He is right. And it is no coincidence that the centre-left’s most successful leaders in recent decades were not just intellectually and economically astute but also funny: Bob Hawke, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Paul Keating, Barack Obama.

Albo, I am relieved to report, also has a sense of humour. Indeed, it is telling that immediately after becoming leader he hired The Australian’s sketch writer James Jeffrey as his speechwriter. Jeffrey, for anyone who doesn’t know, was the second funniest columnist at News Corp for the entire time we worked together.

Keating once said it takes a big heart to run a country. I would add it also takes a big laugh. Good leaders need to laugh a lot and great ones laugh all the way to the bank.

Because if you’re not laughing, chances are the joke’s on you.

Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Channel 10 | @Joe_Hildebrand