Opinion | Hong Kong urgently needs a great leader – just don’t hold your breath for the chief executive election
City is in crisis, but whoever wins in March can only turn out to be a disappointment
Hong Kong is in crisis and people are crying out for a strong, unifying leader. The theory of leadership holds that for leadership to exist, a leader has to cross paths with a crisis. In the words of British author Thomas Hardy, crises are the “sinister mate” of great leaders.
Far from bringing out the best in our leaders, crises expose their inadequacies
Yet great leaders are few and far between. And they are far less common than their “sinister mate”. We should know for we are living in an age of fake leaders and leadership failures. Far from bringing out the best in our leaders, crises expose their inadequacies. Or, as Warren Buffett puts it so vividly: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
Former British prime minister David Cameron is a case in point. His statecraft seemed to consist in one thing and one thing only – letting the people decide. So he introduced referendums on everything from voting reform to the UK’s continuing membership in the European Union.
This is no way to serve the people. As the philosophical founder of modern conservatism Edmund Burke told British voters some 200 years ago, the elected politician owes the people his judgment and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion.
But the problem lies not only with our leaders but also in our overestimation of them. John Adams, the second US president, detected something both unwise and undemocratic in the lionisation of leadership. The country will make progress, he said, only when the people begin to regard themselves as “the fountain of power”.