Keep calm and carry on

Few would argue that a cool head in a crisis isn’t a vital quality for a good leader. Perverse then, that when trouble strikes, media pressure often forces a knee-jerk or gesture response from our politicians. Hence David Cameron’s hasty return from holiday during the riots, clearly driven by the need to be seen to be ‘doing something’. Likewise the sentences handed out to convicted looters seem designed to appease an angry public rather than crack the riot problem at its source.

In such a frenzied climate, with left and right wing commentators blaming each other for our urban meltdown, it’s certainly tough to take a dispassionate view. The riots are either a product of social deprivation or woeful parenting depending on which side of the political divide you're on.

So it was encouraging to hear Tony Blair’s recent take on things. Love him or loathe him, he can still cut a dash through UK political debate. His view was that both left and right had rushed to judgement – just as he had done, he admitted, in the Jamie Bulger case back in 1993.

Although keen to deny that his successive governments oversaw national moral decline, his point about muddled analysis is well made. The causes of the riots lie somewhere in the no man’s land between the entrenched thinking of left and right – as do the solutions.

But ambiguity is unsettling. Our adversarial style of parliament rails against it. Will David Cameron’s announcement of a major review of all government policies turn out to be the right call? Or is there a danger that by scoping the review to get to the bottom of our ‘broken society’ it may well end up answering the wrong questions?

Approaching the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the benefits of calm crisis leadership are even more in the spotlight. Bush’s mistake was to convert his countrymen’s anger and grief over those terrible events into a foreign policy. And we all know how that turned out. “Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob” claimed Oscar Wilde. Let’s hope that David Cameron can prove him wrong.