There are six requirements to be a successful politician:

1. Vanity
2. Stupidity
3. Greed
4. DAR
5. DAS
6. CDS

There may be others, but these are the core values for any successful political career.

VANITY             You need to be sufficiently vain and arrogant to believe that somehow you have the right to tell millions of people how to live their lives. Often this is the result of going to an exclusive school which has a tradition of producing arrogant half-wits, or a university. A lot of these were tolerated for centuries as a kind of national loony bin where people could go and study stuff and never be heard of again. But  in the past few hundred years they have become a breeding ground for entitlement and conceit. Of course, it can be done from the other direction. You can belong to the “Working Class” and still feel just as smugly superior to everyone around you. Or you can be a secret schemer, bursting out of your natural habitat, Mum’s Back Bedroom to conquer the world. A Crusader or bigot as it is properly known. These last are especially dangerous, their contact with reality, ever fleeting, will not survive the harsh world where people get in the way of ambition.

STUPIDITY        You will need to be very stupid to think that you can understand, let alone master, the intricacies of all the problems allied to government. You need to be stupid enough to think that you will be competent to run a department, knowing absolutely nothing about its purpose, its workings, or its risks and dangers. Of course, you will rely on advisers, who will be unable to convey to you the enormity of the tasks ahead and will therefore feed you a dumbed down version of the options, slanted to the outcome they have already selected. Thus rendering you pointless.

GREED            This is hardly worth mentioning in the current political climate where backhanders are replaced with incompetent contracts for ridiculous sums and without any safeguards, adequate performance requirements or such trivialities. As the gravy train trundles by, some is bound to slop into the laps of you or your cronies. It’s only natural innit? Of course you can always make sure your relatives, in-laws, etc. get a good splashing at the same time.

DAR     Decision Avoidance Radar. This is absolutely vital. In both politics and business, it is very important to see a decision looming ahead and take avoiding action. Go on holiday, have an accident, be ill, take an official trip as far away as possible. You will also need:

DAS     Decision Avoidance System. This is now standard issue for all middle and senior management in business and is necessary for the ambitious politician. The main tactic is, of course, Spray and Delay. Spray it around. The intention here is to take a subjective assessment of a problem, opportunity, or risk, and disguise it as an objective outcome. Example: you have a group of people in a room and you need to decide to stay indoors or go outside on a cloudy day. Easy peasy. You give each of them a form to fill in, grading from 0-10 the likelihood of rain, hailstorms, sunburn, lightning strikes, avalanches, and earthquakes. Everyone has an opinion and nobody can be sure. So you collect up the results, average them, even add a weighting factor if you like. And, voila: an “objective “ decision.

The other clever tactic is to let this review and analysis go on and on. Have a PowerPoint presentation, a committee or two, an inquiry, a judicial review. Keep it going until it either rains, or the sun comes out, and if doesn’t : you still have that assessment to fall back on. Now, of course, once the inevitable has happened and you have pretended it was a decision, you will need to deploy your:

CDS     Culpability Deflection System. This is usually a cabinet or committee or something like that. You then claim that, if things go wrong, it was a Collective Decision, made in the light of a Review of All the Available Data, and probably Following the Science or the Advice of Acknowledged Experts. Obvs, if all goes well, then it was your decision all along.