Britain has a leadership fetish

What is it with Britain and the word “leadership” these days? We have had seven prime ministers in 10 years — four of whom were unelected, one of whom won 411 seats only to sink to a -66 net approval rating within a year, and one of whom failed to outlast a rotting lettuce — and yet our pundit class sometimes seems convinced that all our problems can be solved by putting someone new in charge. Politics is increasingly a personality contest, a mad scramble to find the right mixture of working-man relatability, glib TikTok presence, and good taste in pub snacks, to bring Britain’s decades of post-imperial flailing to an end. In civilian Britain, the obsession with leadership is even worse: head teachers have been rebranded “school leaders”, the NHS has set up a “Leadership Academy” to train