Column

Comment

Humility

Politics

5 October 2023

4 min read

Why radical humility challenges personality politics

Amid the political party conferences, George Pitcher searches for the flickers of radical humility.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A cropped image of the face of RIshi Sunak with colours of a flag behind him

Rishi Sunak at a previous party conference.

BNN.

As a glutton craves a fast, so might regular consumers of party political conferences, stuffed with a surfeit of arrogance, yearn for a display of a little humility.

It would, admittedly, be a tough trick for a conference speaker to pull off, when the whole point is to achieve a standing ovation. Unlike his immediate predecessors, prime minister Rishi Sunak did try. Humility is an extra challenge for him, being a multi-millionaire former investment banker married to a billionaire heiress.

But he raised his humble origins again, as he did in his party’s leadership contest, paying tribute to his immigrant parents, a GP and pharmacist in Southampton. Herein lies another problem: As the old saw has it, as soon as you claim humility, you lose it.

So, one is left to wonder whether humility is a desirable quality in our politics at all, or even possible. Kenneth (now Lord) Clarke came close, in a number of Conservative ministerial positions, saying calmly and honestly what he thought. Labour’s Frank Field was another, possibly informed by his quietly devout Christian faith.

Further back, Labour’s post-war prime minister Clement Attlee had a gentle and unassuming demeanour, which only led Winston Churchill to observe that he “had much to be modest about.” There’s the problem. Humility is seen as a sign of weakness.

This is radical humility, a Cinderella quality to its ugly sister “radical honesty”.

But it can be found in politics. Baroness Cathy Ashton, whose many achievements include brokering an agreement between Serbia and Kosovo and negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, has written a memoir.

She was a guest on The Rest is Politics, the podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, of both of whom a neuro-surgeon might observe that humility bypasses have been a complete success. But she is a perfect exemplar of what Stewart called, towards the end of the interview, “radical humility”.

This, Stewart observed, counters the “Great Man” theory of history, the super-hero who saves his people – the character currently channelled by so many populist leaders, with Donald Trump as its apotheosis.

Ashton herself said things like “we do our best”, that there’s a web of small, interconnected acts that reach a successful resolution and that the deals aren’t hers to make, but belong to the people making them. A lesson that could be taken from Kosovo to complex circumstances such as British transport infrastructure, the nature of our union, or local governance from Birmingham to Newcastle.

This is radical humility, a Cinderella quality to its ugly sister “radical honesty”, the latter developed since the Nineties by the American psychotherapist Brad Blanton, which is really a licence for being rude. Radical humility, by contrast, puts its practitioner firmly at the service of those affected by a political situation and enables them to resolve it.

Impressed as he was by the concept, Campbell neatly summarised the problem of deploying it as a political slogan: “What do we want? Radical humility! When do we want it? Now!”

But radical humility should be a given for the way we manage the administrative organs of our faith, the Churches. Cardinal Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster who never forgot he was foremost a Benedictine monk, springs to mind.

As does Rowan Williams, whom I observed from the Daily Telegraph and then as his principal spin-doctor between 2008 and 2011, holding the complexity of the Anglican Communion together by empowering its components.

The point about radical humility is that it subsumes personality into the lives of those it serves.

Their aim, in perhaps unconscious application of radical humility, was like Baroness Ashton to give those they convened room to tell their stories, to take ownership of them and become co-narrators. And that has a central gospel provenance. Jesus of Nazareth led by story-telling, the parables inviting listeners to reach their own conclusions – even and especially today.

Radical humility doesn’t invite servant ministry. It is service ministry, precisely because it puts the governed in charge of their own story, which in a grander context could be called their destiny.

Whether that kind of liberation could be applied to our secular politics is a tall order. As I’ve said, there are flickers of radical humility in Sunak, but when he claims to be proud to be the UK’s first Asian PM and “even prouder that it’s no big deal”, he paradoxically feels obliged to proceed to slam Labour for its lack of diversity.

It was telling that home secretary Suella Braverman, in her somewhat incoherent speech this week, widely cast as a leadership bid, claimed that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer didn’t have the “personality” to be prime minister.

The point about radical humility is that it subsumes personality into the lives of those it serves. It’s one reason, perhaps, why we know so little of the personality of the Nazarene. But the likes of Braverman and other populist politicians can’t see beyond personality.

Maybe she, like other politicians, wouldn’t recognise radical humility. And it can’t be transformative unless it’s listened to.

Column

Culture

Migration

Politics

20 November 2025

4 min read

From MI6 to migration: the tangled legacy of empire

Britain’s security dilemmas, from LinkedIn spies to post-colonial legacies, reveal a deeper global story

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Home Office.

There’s a food chain in the British intelligence services and the government offices they serve. The Foreign Office is advised by MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or more usually simply “Six”, which, though it would deny it in favour of claims of collaboration, looks down on the national security service, MI5, which serves the Home Office.

An old acquaintance from Six used casually to call the parochial Home Office the LEO, short for Little England Office. There’s less of that now, to be sure, as they struggle to accommodate their political masters. Foreheads were rubbed wearily at MI6’s HQ by Vauxhall Bridge when Yvette Cooper, fresh from proscribing Palestine Action at the Home Office as a terrorist organisation alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, was made up to foreign secretary at the last re-shuffle.

Meanwhile, over the river, MI5 faces the challenge of a new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who may believe that the prospect of limiting leave to remain to a maximum of 20 years and confiscating their jewellery might dissuade those with ill intent against the British state from embarking on a small boat.

Taken together, these challenges make it not a good time to be an intelligence officer, or even an intelligent one. It gets worse on the canvas of large superpowers. The problems with an erratic clown of American jurisdiction are well recorded. But China is something else.

They’d be chuckling merrily at MI6, if it wasn’t so serious, at the headlines this week, suggesting that China’s principal infiltration of the British state is through agents posing as headhunters on LinkedIn. The immeasurably greater threat from Chinese intelligence has come from the global march that China has stolen in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the network of Chinese-sourced sensors, software and chips embedded and monitored in technologies that connect and exchange data globally.

This isn’t tin-foil hat conspiracy territory; it’s real and has been called out for years. It’s significantly why the case against two alleged British spies for China was recently withdrawn. Britain has to keep China sweet for fear of what it knows of and could do with British data. That’s a massive US problem too.

To that end, trade and co-operation are the way to keep China onside, not confrontation. It’s an example that the Foreign Office might set for the Home Office. And, indeed, the two might work more closely together (just a suggestion).

The Home Office has long acknowledged that there are “Push and Pull” factors to our immigration crisis. It almost exclusively concentrates on the Pull, by trying to make the UK a less attractive destination for migrants through limits of right to remain and by nicking their jewellery. The Push factors are war, oppression and economic deprivation and these are very much more the territory of the Foreign Office.

A big problem arises when the Home Office tries to do the Foreign Office’s job, as when Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa bans for the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Namibia. Good luck with that – it betrays a neo-colonial instinct and there, perhaps, is the rub.

We pay a post-colonial price in both illegal and legal immigration. A predominantly Christian Europe and New World endeavoured to make disciples of every nation and now many of them are coming home. Christian culture as a former weapon of oppression is perhaps overstated, but there’s some truth in it. An even more stark truth is that we have to address the Push elements of migration if we are to find common ground on which we can make progress.

Our colonial oversight left Afghanistan a modern and post-modern historical mess. Syria is almost untouchable in its post-Assad dynastic horrors. The Indian subcontinent is still a wreckage that we abandoned only some 80 years ago.

Trying to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan or the former al-Qaeda breakaway al-Sharaa interim regime in Syria may not be so much a triumph of hope over experience as of naivety over history. But our current position with China may point a way forward. Tariff-free trade and economic co-development is a surer way to address migration crises than making arrivals unwelcome.

It’s admittedly more complicated than China. A US/UK post-colonial future will need to align neo-Christian western cultures with an enlightened Islam that concentrates on the Quranic instructions of co-existence, respect, fairness and the explicit injunction that there can be “no compulsion in religion”. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

That’s the call of the 21st century and it is, quite clearly, a global rather than nationalistic one. The US will need to recover its position in the world. And, in the UK, foreheads will need to be raised from being banged on desks to solve foreign crises before they wash up on our shores.