“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Churchill’s words must have been on the Prime Minister’s mind this week, so far getting him through the worst crisis of his premiership. 

Unfortunately for Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party still hungers for the Churchillian stereotype they feel owed — a strong leader with cast iron principles, one willing to shed the “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” Churchill promised the country in 1940, and whose work ethic — and unyielding attitude — were mirrored by the first female Prime Minister almost 40 years later. David Davis’s intervention at PMQs, quoting Leo Amery’s condemnation of Neville Chamberlain, speaks to this parallel in a way designed to wound the Prime Minister. 

To be fair to Boris, by pushing through Brexit he has partially fulfilled one of the key tenets of great leaders: to defeat their opponents and redefine their times. But Brexit will not be remembered as a war waged by one person, but as a political realignment won by outsiders — most memorably dissenters like Nigel Farage who secured a referendum against the odds, the millions who cast their votes against the establishment, the MPs who held the line against a half-in, half-out Brexit deal. 

Yet in most areas Boris has fallen short of his Churchillian promise after scoring the biggest majority for the Tories in more than 30 years. He had his hero’s crisis, yet few could claim it has been a triumph — if anything, the remainder of Johnson’s premiership will be a reckoning on the decisions made during the pandemic and its ramifications. On policy, his desire to make Britain a high-wage economy is weighed down by unpopular tax rises and green levies. This lack of coherence makes it much harder to define ‘Johnsonism’ than ‘Thatcherism’. 

But I sometimes wonder whether such ideas of leadership do more harm than good. 

Don’t get me wrong: Churchill and Thatcher were colossal figures who fought for freedom and won; the former against fascism, the latter against the Soviet Union and trade union dominance. What I mean is that their prominence in our political pantheon impedes how our leaders operate. After all, all modern leaders who have tried to emulate them have failed.  

Theresa May offers a case in point. Casting herself as someone with steely ‘Iron Lady’ resolve, proud of being considered ‘a bloody difficult woman’ — something which went against her mild-mannered, managerial instincts — she lost her majority, the support of her party, and — after two torturous years — her job. David Cameron, too, in his battle for the centre, tried to forcibly shape his Party in his own image, not realising that it was well beyond his power. 

Labour leaders also imitate our two most influential 20th century prime ministers. Tony Blair wanted to outlast Thatcher’s time in office and to play a similar role on the world stage. He would argue that intervention in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan followed the moral principles she encapsulated, even if he lacked her sense of history and fearlessness. I sometimes wonder whether the Government’s scientific advisers, when standing at their podiums in Downing Street, were secretly hankering for their own Churchill moment.  

But it’s not Churchillian principles of leadership that are wrong, I hear you cry, it’s the calibre of their imitators. I sympathise, and were it only the return of someone with Sir Winston’s gifts — not least a defining vision encapsulating the present and anticipating the future — I would be the first to champion it. But I fear that such a view of modern politics may speak more to the nature of the problem than the solution.   

We thirst for clarity in an age of confusion and divided narratives. The world has become so large, so incalculably complex for a single human mind to fathom, that we crave someone who makes sense of it. On the Left, Corbynism offered a simplistic and backward-looking socialist answer. In his own way, he conformed to a faint echo of the idea that principles drilled home to the bitter end offer a solution.  

But to solve the problems of our time perhaps a different kind of leader is needed. The historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin identified two different types of great leader: the kind who govern through ‘concentration of willpower, directness and strength’ — a Churchill or Thatcher — and those who ‘possess antennae of the greatest possible delicacy’ — i.e. those whose skills are multifaceted, and require a more subtle form of political genius in order to navigate the complexity of their age. If politics is the art of the possible, then these leaders are capable of pushing that possibility to the edge without disturbing the equilibrium. 

Today, such a great leader would need to be fluent in the age of mass communications and the web of interconnected systems that control the world; they would need to have their eye on the big issues coming down the road: mass migration, big data, artificial intelligence, climate change, the encroaching threat of cultural and political authoritarianism. They would look beyond the narrow definitions of leadership we thirst for, and see there are other ways of governing more conducive to what is required, artfully outmanoeuvring and out-thinking the vested interests, especially in Whitehall. 

This is the essence of what Dominic Cummings has been saying all along, though it has been misinterpreted by those who think he merely has an axe to grind. If one reads his blogs, it is the dysfunctional institutional structure that is his enemy more than prime ministers themselves. Only by reforming the systems of governance — the Blob, for want of a better word, though in reality it runs deeper than that — can the country advance. 

These light-touch, multifaceted skills were the traditional toolkit of the British prime minister before the age of absolutism of the 20th century, and I wonder whether we might need to see their return if we are to survive, and thrive, once more. Churchill and Thatcher were iconic leaders of their time, offering no shortage of lessons for today — though the next generation of leaders might need to channel their best elements, plus something more. That said, politics being as it is, would they ever win a Tory leadership contest, let alone a general election? 

An alternative might be to accept that we all have limitations and embrace real cabinet government, making full use of the skills of others, rather than placing an over-reliance on civil servants or ruling by cabal. 

So if you’re reading this Boris, it is time to think differently, or bring in a team who can. In this sense, Churchill does serve as a helpful guide. As he remarked: “There is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”

Francis Dearnley is Assistant Comment Editor for The Telegraph. You can find him on Twitter at @FrancisDearnley