Mick Hartley

Great column by James Marriott in today's Times:

Watching Justin Welby bleat out vapid non-apologies for his handling of the church abuse crisis on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, I wondered what St Anselm or Thomas Cranmer would make of the most recent occupant of the See of Canterbury. Not much, one suspects.

Welby — with his bland managerial face, his rimless spectacles, his shapeless paunch and his casual open-collared shirt — has all the archiepiscopal gravitas of a mid-ranking management consultant. I would not trust him to restructure the regional distribution networks of a medium-size company, let alone save my immortal soul. He was not wrong to warn of the “immense distrust for institutions” currently prevalent in society. But his performance emphasised another important threat to British institutions: the mediocrity of those who lead them.

21st-century Britain is beset by mediocrities. Every new scandal at every supposedly august organisation seems to reveal that there were never any grown-ups in the room, only spineless non-entities squatting ineffectually on top of the mess. Paula Vennells at the Post Office is perhaps the pre-eminent example. And the type is notably well represented in the senior management of our universities….

Britain seems peculiarly vulnerable to such characters. I suspect part of the problem may be traced to the fact that our economy is heavily weighted towards the service sector. Many in Britain’s elite have spent their careers at several removes from real life and real consequences, in industries such as public relations or consultancy. It surely matters that where once our leaders were imperial administrators, soldiers and industrialists, we now draw our overclass from professions oversupplied with what the anthropologist David Graeber famously called “bullshit jobs”.

The bias towards bullshit extends deep in British life, from hospitals that are run by managers not doctors, to universities that employ vast bureaucracies staffed by administrators who are better paid than actual academics.

They're the same people who put pronouns in their bios, and make sure that everyone goes on Stonewall courses about trans inclusivity. They didn't get where they are today by thinking for themselves.

Then again, on X – "You’re lucky to have mediocrities. We here in the States can’t seem to find anybody that good."