Will Self

The Peter principle states that employees are promoted to the point where they become incompetent – and there they remain, doing a crap job. What this axiom expresses is our general credulousness, bordering on collective delusion, when it comes to hierarchies. Try as we might to grasp that a more senior position in an organisation doesn’t ipso facto mean a more capable incumbent, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the belief that because, say, someone has the job title “foreign secretary”, he must be a world-bestriding statesman of great acumen.

The problem is that, while an individual may be good at job X, that doesn’t mean he’s fitted for position Y and, by the time he reaches management role Z, he may well be floundering hopelessly out of his depth. In most organisations, the Peter principle is vitiated by the well-known method of “managing upwards”, whereby efficient subordinates learn how to bolster and even control their inadequate superiors. British government ministers, who often have little or no experience of the portfolio they are given, have long been managed by their ostensible subordinates: the permanent undersecretary in whichever ministry it is.

It would be comforting to know that, in the current Middle East imbroglio, British foreign policy is not being formulated by the flamboyant white rose William Hague, but by some colourless wonk called Simon Fraser, who, apart from a brief sojourn in the Department for Business and Blah-Blah and a few years as Mandy’s Brussels bag carrier, has been steeped in the FCO’s arcane ways since the late 1970s. Comforting but, sadly, it is almost certainly not the case, because the political hierarchy is one of the few in Britain to which the Peter principle doesn’t uniformly apply.

Willie H is instructive in all this. He was a political wunderkind who addressed the Tory party conference in 1977, aged 16, with a ringing declamation about demography – “Half of you won’t be here in 30 or 40 years’ time,” and so on – and then went on to occupy the usual “coming man” positions in Oxford student politics. After his obligatory First in PPE and an MBA, Hague worked for McKinsey before entering parliament as the youngest Tory MP in 1987. Haguey-Waguey was in the government by 1990 and was minister of state for social security and disabled people by 1994. So far, so meteoric – but then comes the real zenith of his career: in 1995, Billy Fizz (as he was called by the publicans around Rotherham to whom he delivered soft drinks in the 1970s) was appointed Welsh secretary.

There! I rest my case. Is there any coupling of job title and name more apposite than this: “William Hague, Welsh secretary”?

It doesn’t so much trip off the tongue as deliquesce there, leaving a blissful residue of suitability. Every time I say, “William Hague, Welsh secretary”, I get a warm, contented feeling.

A recent psychiatric study has confirmed that saying “William Hague, Welsh secretary” over and over again like a mantra significantly ameliorates depression (the control, if you’re interested, was reciting “William Hague, Scottish secretary”). It was a happy time for Oor Wullie, too. He met and married the charming Ffion and, unlike most married couples, they still adore ffucking each other to this day.

But all good things must pass and, following the 1997 election defeat, the Tories stupidly ignored their well-tried method of avoiding the Peter principle (which is to have leaders only from a select caste, schooled from birth to assume the role) and tore Hague from his happy valleys with predictably dire results. I’ve no wish to dwell on this disaster and I think we’re all relieved that, after the interregnum of a couple of caretakers, a proper Etonian was installed in 2005; not only an Etonian, but one who had also studied at the Tony Blair Finishing School for Liberal Interventionists. The only sadness is that Cameron appointed poor Hague to be his foreign secretary.

At times like these, unless we’re all to go crazy, we need a foreign secretary who’s as steady as a rock, a colossus who bestrides the petty animosities of warring tribes. If we look back to the last time we were caught up in a situation like this, the name “Jack Straw” has just such a resonance – it’s no wonder things turned out so well.

The latest Real Meals column:

Only one kind of meal comes with an erratum slip: the catered formal dinner. My slip reads, “Please note: there is no pancetta wrap on the guinea fowl.” Fair enough – presumably some religious scruple is involved, although I’ve forgotten whose beanfeast this is: Jews or the Jewellers’ Association? Black-clad servitors are moving efficiently about the lily pond of circular tables, depositing plates at each setting. I was at a funeral of a friend recently where the eulogist recalled that the deceased had once wept at a formal dinner, upon realising his placement. I’m not feeling teary despite being flanked by middle-aged men in business suits, because, after all, I’m a middle-aged man in a business suit, too – and I’m as charismatic as Gurdjieff, with the coiled sexual intensity of a rutting rattlesnake.

Besides, the man on my right turns out to be witty and insightful. When I observe – apropos of the entrée being plonked in front of us – that the plated meal is a comparatively recent phenomenon, dating only from the late 1980s, he takes the conversational baton and runs with it: “I know. Twenty-odd years ago, all you ever got at one of these gigs was roast meat of some indeterminate kind, swimming in brown gravy.” We’re tucking in to our artful salads of French beans, grilled artichoke, black olives, confit tomatoes and soft-boiled quails’ eggs. “Nowadays, it’s always quails’ eggs,” says my man. “Which is fine, but I do wonder where they’re keeping all these quails. I mean, you never see an item on the news about how battery quails are being kept in unspeakable conditions.”

I resist the temptation to say “true dat” like a character in The Wire, confining myself to the observation that quailing conditions must be even more unspeakable than those of battery chickens, in absolute if not relative terms. Some sort of thumping electronic music has started up – I now notice that there’s a podium behind me on a stage flanked by visual display monitors and conclude that this must be some sort of awards dinner. This is confirmed when a man with one of those newscaster faces that has been basted by the regard of the multitude springs on stage and starts handing out small, gilded statuettes of the god Hermes. Jewellers – or Jews? – begin making their way to receive them; however I’m not paying much attention, transfixed as I am by the pat of butter that is positioned on a small square of bluey-grey slate in front of my plate.

I’m lost in reverie. As a child, I visited a slate mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog with my parents. After we’d been rumbled through the dripping caverns, a horny-handed miner demonstrated the divine suitability of the stone for roofing – or butter plates – by taking a chisel and hammer and tapping out thin leaf after leaf from a large block.

I come to and find that my guinea fowl has arrived: a breast stuffed with spinach mousseline and bare of its pancetta wrap lies in a semi-circular pool of jus, beside a weird, rectilinear chunk of compressed potato and two dollops of pre-splodged veg. I’m not in a position to judge how good this food is, because I haven’t eaten for 24 hours and would probably fall on Turkey Twizzlers, grunting and squealing with delight – all of which is by way of saying: it’s bootiful.

I’ve read all sorts of grisly things about how catered dinners are prepared, and I’ve no doubt that such things do occur. But this event is obviously in another league, and I’m not in the mood to be picky. Before my solipsism became pathological, I used to dread events where I had no control over who I talked to, but these days I welcome being forced to be other-centred. I’ve enjoyed talking to my fellow suits and, when the poached pear arrives, I’m so buoyed up that I cannot forbear from thanking the waitress.

“I bet you don’t get thanked that often in your line of work, do you?”
“No,” she replies. “We largely get ignored.”
“That’s why they make you wear black,” I continue, warming to my reheated theme, “so that you become invisible.”
“Possibly,” she replies, looking uneasy.
“Beneath contempt, Untermenschen -”
“You’re starting to bother me now.”

But she needn’t worry, because, at that moment, the man on my right plucks up my name card and cries: “You’re not Howard Jacobson!” Seconds later, I am being bundled from the hall by security. Ah, well. It was a real dinner – even if I wasn’t meant to be attending.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

“You-oo-oo-ve lost thaaat lovin’ feeeelin / Now it’s gone, gone, gone, /Whoa-whoa-woh!” belts out the busker in the long tunnel that connects the Central and Northern Lines of the London Underground at Bank Station. He’s accompanied by a tinny boom-box that builds a Lego-sized version of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”. I’m not saying he’s a bad singer – because he’s not a singer at all, more a shouter who strikes attitudes with the mic. It’s strange because, in these quality-control-obsessed times, you now have to audition to torture people in this way. I try hard to imagine what such an untalent show would be like, but can’t – unless, that is, the Simon Cowell equivalents of Transport for London were actively seeking crap musicians.

That might well be the case, I continue to hypothesise as I allow my jaundiced eye to scan the oncoming people stream: goofy and glassy, split-endy and bendy, tall and short and hopelessly fat, all of them click-clack-slapping the tiles with that mounting frenzy that heralds the evening rush hour. After all, a critical consideration for public transport planners has to be a concept used in the science of fluid dynamics, namely, laminar flow. In a restricted column – such as a pipe, or a tube – streams of liquid will move parallel to one another without disruption, but if there are checks or disruptions, eddies may form. A good busker, by encouraging rush-hour commuters to slow down, might create dangerous cross-currents.

During the off-peak period, a proficient up-tempo musician might be desirable, provoking dense knots of dunderheaded teenage language students and valetudinarian tourists to get a fucking move on. The complexities of scheduling good and bad buskers with different tempi utterly preoccupy me until I find myself in a people puree struggling to mush itself into a Morden-bound train. “Please allow the passengers off the train,” crackles the PA system, and then: “Move right down inside the carriages.” I’ve grown up pulsing through the teeming arteries of the urban circulatory system, happy to be just another corpuscle. Arguably, on public transport systems, big-city rush hours exemplify not the madness of the crowd, but its sanity. You get your head down and go with it; too much thought is a dangerous thing, because if you pause to consider your situation – hemmed in by the herd – you might well lose it altogether. Which I’m in danger of doing, because one train has come and gone, then a second, and still there’s no let-up.

Worse still, as we snuggle up to one another in the pack, the clones around me begin to become dangerously individuated. The tall man in the camel-hair coat whose buttocks are grinding into my thigh, I mark him well by the brocade of lost hairs on his collar, and by the shaving nick on his blueing jaw. And that young woman whose elbow is tucked beneath my ribcage, well, her pinched brow and smudging beige lipstick suggest premature despair; I can see her an hour or so hence, shovelling down microwaved Lean Cuisine in front of a soap opera, tearful in a bathrobe she stole from a Comfort Inn.

At last I manage to get on a train – or, rather, the three of us do, still welded together like conjoined triplets. It’s such a tight fit, the driver has to open and shut the doors several times, and my neck is uncomfortably kinked to accommodate the leading edge. As is always the way, within feet of this 3D jigsaw of limbs there’s ample space, because no matter how many times it is urged to do so, the crowd is too unthinking to move right down inside the carriage. Over there people are reading newspapers, while over here our forced intimacy compels us to brainlessness – if I look into Camel Hair or Lean Cuisine’s eyes, I can detect no more self-awareness than you would in the eyes of heifer being prodded towards an abattoir.

But then they probably feel the same way about me – and as we jiggle and jounce our way through London Bridge, Borough and all points south, it impinges on me how wrong I was: oh yes, you can be blithe about the crowd’s sanity so long as it’s achieving laminar flow, but in this frozen turbulence there is nothing but mental derangement. My gargoyle face distends and twists, my mouth gapes and unbidden the words splurge:

“You-oo-oo-ve lost thaaat lovin’ feeeelin, now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa-whoa-woh!”