Want to know how to be a leader of men, asks The Man? Easy. Find out where they’re going and walk in front of them! Cynical, I know, but that’s real ‘realpolitik’ for you!
He and the banker buddy are recalling his backroom deal last month with a senior government minister, a deal he hopes will fast-track him into office, preferably one with room to manoeuvre.
Such as that of the Chief Whip, the government’s senior enforcer and keeper of members’ disreputable secrets, always useful to persuade errant ministers and rebellious MPs to toe the line!
Furthermore, he says, parliament is supposed to be a real-world workshop, not an other-world seminary. So forget ‘righteous’; think ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’, to quote the late great parliamentarian Winston Churchill.
To which one might add, if one is being especially uncharitable, dishonour, deceit, lies and skullduggery, sadly the modus operandi of today’s corrupted snake-oil politics the world over.
That said, he says, where there’s a flicker of life there’s a flicker of hope ready to be fanned into a beacon of honour, honesty, truth and integrity! Or am I being too fanciful?
More than a little, grinned the banker buddy, but I get the point. And I take it you mean that with your help this new administration might scale new heights of parliamentary probity? Or am I being too fanciful?
Well, says The Man, as you know, I intend to take being an MP very seriously, which is what this backroom deal is all about. The name of the game is buying my compliance with the promise of career advancement.
And it’s a game I’m happy to play, but only up to a point. Speaking as a National List MP untainted by party politics, there’s a balance to be struck between giving the people what they want and doing what’s best for the country—which are not the same thing.
So what is best for the country, I hear you ask? In truth, there is no ‘best’. What was best yesterday may not be best today, and what’s best today will likely not be best tomorrow, or next week, or next year. It all depends on circumstances and ‘events, dear boy, events’.
So what to do?
First, sort out the National List to ensure it consists only of genuinely able and proven experts with applicable expertise, and not shopworn party hacks.
Second, make best use of these expert MPs by giving them a decisive voice in relevant government departments and select committees.
Third, employ more ad hoc Special Advisers—Spads—to provide specific, real-world specialist guidance to ministers and senior civil servants as and when required, which is most of the time.
Fourth, properly understand that, like any other business, the ‘business of government’ needs competent professional marketing and public relations to get its message across.
And finally, it would not be enough for said expert National List MPs to merely learn their lines in Sri Lanka’s ongoing tragicomic melodrama, they must also help write the script!
Well said, says the banker buddy. But it’s going to take a radical change of the collective mindset to achieve all or any of that any time soon.
Meanwhile, he says, as the famed English poet John Milton might have asked, is Sri Lanka a Paradise Lost or a Paradise Regain’d? In his own immortal words: ‘Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light…’