How to be a guru

Rory Sutherland, who is the vice chairman of the Ogilvy and Mather group of advertising companies, writes articles for the Spectator as the 'Wiki Man'. He is a perfect example of the well-known type, let's call them 'Blue-Sky Thinkers' (BSTs, or 'gurus' or 'village explainers'), who make a solid living from spouting clever-sounding rubbish for a large fee.

However clever-sounding it may be, it is still rubbish. But they have learned the technique of making a startling, counter-intuitive assertion and then moving on quickly to another startling assertion before their listeners or readers have time to realise just how wrong the preceding startling assertion was.

Sutherland recently asserted the total superiority of electric vehicles to traditional internal combustion vehicles because the former produced motion exclusively through rotational motion, whilst the latter, being reciprocating engines, were thus somehow deficient. The back and forwards motions of the pistons had to be converted to rotary motion by the crankshaft. Because of their technological superiority, the eventual triumph of electric cars was thus only a matter of time and all the hurdles that stand in their way will be easily overcome.

Typical of the BST, this assertion takes less than ten seconds to make, whereas readers have to focus their thoughts for perhaps a minute or two in order to realise that the startling profundity of Sutherland's assertion is just so much low-grade tosh. By then, Sutherland is a few more startling assertions down the line. After half an hour of this, readers and listeners who have not engaged their brains may come to the conclusion that they are in the presence of a second Einstein.

The 'Wiki Man's' latest series of startling assertions related to the government of the UK. He kicks off with a reasonable sounding premiss:

…we have a cabinet which is packed with second-rate lawyers and economists but, as far as I can see, no one who has worked in the private sector at all, except as a lawyer or an economist.

Well, I'm as fond of a bit of broadbrush opining as the next person, but even I would like a bit of data to back up this claim. But now comes a pea-under-the-thimble move: under a headline 'A foolproof way to pick a leader' Sutherland first talks of the cabinet being packed with lawyers and economists, then shuffles the thimbles so that he is talking of all MPs:

All that is needed is for The Spectator to create an index by which we judge all parliamentary candidates at the next election. I am open to people improving this, but here is a first stab. You must ignore political affiliation completely.

If a candidate has studied law or economics, subtract 20. If they are married to a lawyer or economist, subtract a further 20. For a STEM qualification add ten. If in maths or engineering, add ten more. …

Here is where my ranking takes an unexpected turn. If the candidate hasn’t been to university, add five points. If he or she has done a proper working-class job, add ten. Also add ten if the candidate has been a frontline public-sector worker – e.g. a cop or nurse. If they run a business, add 20. If they have launched one, add 30.

And so on through the plus and minus of various factors. Very amusing, but a preselection process that is outrageously undemocratic. It's bad enough 'vetting' candidates for their opinions and lifestyles, but marking their CVs and 'ignoring political affiliation' is a step too far. The reader is given no time to ponder this suggestion – BST man has moved on.

This needs further refinement. But by my calculation, the best scoring governments of the last century would have been the Attlee cabinet and the first Thatcher cabinet of 1979, so it has some empirical support.

'By my calculation', except that he doesn't show us his workings, that would be far too empirically tedious. As a result of his 'calculation', he managed to land on the most left-wing and the most right-wing governments in recent UK history. How this assertion qualifies as 'empirical support' is beyond me. Had I spent the hours needed to plug through the CVs of the members of the postwar cabinets, I would be keen to lay the results of my labours before a waiting world. In Sutherland's case the omission makes us wonder.

I would certainly be interested in the way he managed to get the Attlee cabinet on to the pedestal. In my opinion it was the most disastrous – and consquentially disastrous – government in recent British history: in the mere six years of its existence (1945-1951) it fired up the immigration conveyor that has cursed the UK ever since; it established an unfunded pensions system that has kept generations of the elderly in relative poverty; and it established the National Health Service, a soup-kitchen when it was created and still a soup-kitchen today. It established a dependency culture which has grown over the years to become one of the curses of modern Britain. If Sutherland is taking the Attlee government as a gold-standard for political competence he needs to go somewhere quiet, suck a boiled sweet and have a little think about it.

After another moment's thought it occurred to me that both Attlee and Thatcher were barristers. Sutherland himself read Classics at Cambridge. No manual labour for him.

Beware BSTs. They demand large fees, consume fine dinners and talk and write inconsequential, unsubstantiated rubbish.

British Prime Ministers, 1900-2026

Since Sutherland has set this hare off running, let's do the legwork he ducks and look at British Prime Ministers from the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of their education and background.

Of the 26 PMs listed here, only six were lawyers. A further six took jobs or went into business. There are five PPEs, but I would not go so far as to call them economists, with the exception of Harold Wilson, who was intellectually a cut above the others.

Sutherland's predeliction for employees and entrepreneurs in the private economy is not supported – apart from Churchill the cavalryman (which barely counts), the wage slaves are not marked by their brilliance. The hyper-educated, for example Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Brown, under the pressure of politics, turned out to be only partial geniuses at best, proving the old adage that all political careers ultimately end in failure.