Gordon Brown: no mere human?

I've often thought how extraordinary a person must be to be able to feel competent to "run" a country of tens of millions of people. Of course, personally, I don't believe anyone can. The cult of leadership is unhealthy for society. The notion that one person is somehow supremely capable above all the rest of us to make decisions affecting us all as comprehensively as the tentacles of government reach into our lives is repugnant to me.

But clearly blogging John Prescott buys in to this cult of leadership:

So, wait a second; we have a former postie in charge of a £100bn plus budget, including, ultimately, decisions of life and death importance and he's still lacking a certain "je ne sais quois". We have a trained lawyer who's held more of the great offices of state, and cabinet posts traditionally associated with the senior minister - Lord Chancellor, Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Secretary of State for the Home Department - and still hasn't the "skills and experience"?

Of course we can all see that the incumbent whom Prescott holds in such esteem has been promoted beyond the level of his competence anyway. But the idea that there is some step change in skills and experience between Prime Minister and other ministers is just bonkers. Don't get me wrong, I hate the man with a passion, and this is a backhanded complement at best, but at least Tony Blair had the skills and helpers to spin his way through, to sound convincing and to persuade people, but he had no practical ministerial experience at all.

Of course, nobody has such skills, and perhaps especially those who have surrounded themselves in the political system for most of their adult lives. As the concentration of power into the hands of the Prime Minister in the UK has continued apace ever since Walpole was first in office so the world has become immeasurably more complex and fast moving, making it all the more ridiculous to expect one person to be an adequate representative for so many of us in so many aspects of governance and diplomacy. I daresay that, when the House of Lords in 1741 decried the idea that any minister should have primacy over others' departments, the daily work of those departments probably could have been handled by one person. Now, it is completely impossible and we should ditch the whole edifice.