• Our leaders

The big difference, of course, is that – however much Maxwell and Goldsmith would have wished matters to have been otherwise – they were not ruling the richest and most powerful country in the world.

This position should, or so many would argue, call for higher standards of behaviour than apply to the rest of us. By extension, anyone who makes or enforces laws or runs governments should be hewn from a finer clay: examples for us all to follow and setting the standards for moral excellence from which we all derive inspiration.

The reality, as even the briefest survey of politics and history reveals, is the polar opposite of this. Politicians and police officers – to name but two groups of those who have power over us – exhibit behaviour that generally varies between the average and the reprehensible. The Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king, whose internal wisdom and harmony would translate into a universal benefit and happiness for the subjects was just that; an ideal.

So too were other such confidently stated outcomes, like the Marxist idea of the withering away of the state and St Augustine’s certainty about the fundamental goodness of everything that had been created by God. It’s far from an original observation that we’re a lot better at imagining perfection than we are at achieving it.

• Size and irrigation

The question then arises as to why we consistently get rulers that fall short of almost every ideal or even reasonable expectation. By “we” I mean pretty much all of us, everywhere. Some places, like Russia and China, seem to suffer more extreme forms of tyranny than do others. Perhaps the larger the area and the more people being ruled, the more autocratic the rulers tend to be.

There are other factors. Once we settled down as farmers, it became necessary to create systems of irrigation. Once created, these required defence against invaders and roads and bridges for armies and messengers. All of these demanded central control. The larger the resulting states became, the more power was needed to keep them together.

Perhaps the USA, a large country which with some glaring exceptions has been well governed, became this way because it didn’t have many obvious external threats trying to take over what it had created. It also had the good fortune to be founded on principles developed during an age of comparative enlightenment rather than of brutal necessity.

• A reflection

Another explanation of this slippery idea of bad governance is that rulers are a reflection of the ruled and that, as de Maistre observed, every country gets the rulers it deserves. This was suggested to me by a friend (another friend: amazingly, I have more than one) whom I called on Wednesday evening to discuss this idea. However, he was walking across Salisbury Plain at the time, watching the golden late-evening sunshine playing across the landscape and contemplating the prospect of the menu at a nearby pub, so this was not the right time or place to continue the discussion.

There’s much to be said for this point of view. Rulers are, after all, people. Cupidity, power and influence are motives we can all recognise. Any business discussion, market-place haggle, queue-jump or shopping around for the best broadband deal involve just these things. Multiply them by a million and you have Trump, Putin or Xi.

It doesn’t even matter what the political orthodoxy is. As Orwell concluded in Animal Farm – a book I seem to be referring to every week – in the final analysis we’re all pig-humans trying to play our Ace of Spades out of the back of the pack.

• The greasy pole

One could also argue that it’s not where we come from that causes the problem but how we get there. The ascent up the greasy pole to power requires a shedding of extraneous baggage. Morality, honesty and other associated indulgences are often the first ones to be discarded. This point can best be illustrated by spending a couple of hours or so watching MacBeth.

This assumes either that (a) some people are more loosely attached to such attributes than others; or that (b) no matter how benevolently embarked upon, every such ascent will demand such sacrifices. It all depends on how much you want it.

That goes for everything. David Attenborough, Zadie Smith, Richard Branson, Taylor Swift, Robert de Niro and Chloe Kelly all are pre-eminent in their professions. Don’t tell me that they didn’t step on someone else’s fingers to get there. They certainly had to make sacrifices and difficult choices.

In general, though, they aren’t given a hard time by us. Perhaps this is because whatever they shed it wasn’t principally their moral sense. It’s also because they aren’t ruling us: although it could be argued that in their very different ways they influence us. They’re people who’ve become successful by following a path towards the top that we at one time might have dreamed of for ourselves. They made it: we didn’t. Any distaste we feel for them might therefore be born less of moral superiority than of jealousy.

• Different backgrounds

A child who said they wanted to follow any of the above six professions would be regarded as normal, though perhaps gently advised to choose a less demanding alternative. To say that they wanted to be PM or president would, however, be seen as the worst kind of arrogance. I can’t imagine any job more awful than these. I’d like to think that this makes me a better person but it probably just makes me weak. The two are hard to tell apart in a bad light.

There are many exceptions to this rule but there seem to be two main ways that help people aspire to and achieve power: entitlement and deprivation.

The latter only kicks in if the turmoil of the country provides the kind of blast-furnace of change that can give such aspiration wings. It’s therefore no co-incidence that, a few years ago, the leaders of four of the world’s five permanent UN Security-Council member nations fitted into this pattern (the fifth, France, doesn’t so I’m conveniently going to ignore it).

Trump and Johnson were dripping with entitlement, their comfortable but competitive upbringing generally allowing the expression of a desire to be followed fairly swiftly by its realisation. Both also have oratorical skills that work so well in times of political division. Both cleverly fabricated enemies and used them as stepping stones. Both regarded truth and morality as either flexible friends or dispensable inconveniences.

Xi and Putin’s childhoods, on the other hand, seem to have been horrific. Formative years spent in post-war Leningrad or dodging the purges of the Cultural Revolution can have been no laughing party. Both rose single-mindedly through the ranks of the very different Communist parties that those countries offered and, in Putin’s case, in what followed. Both developed a very clear sense of the importance of having power over others, rather than the reverse.

None of these four were in the slightest troubled by what we might call morality. For their different pairs of reasons, the matter was an irrelevance. Others had to shed this on their way up the greasy pole. Their journey was easier because they were never bothered by it in the first place.

• The national interest

What all of them also managed to do was associate this personal mission with a vision of what the country needed. This makes all the difference: a good deal of your own ambition can can then be associated with something in which all can share. Whether it’s MAGA, Brexit, victory in Ukraine or the belt and road, their desires have become part of a national narrative and, in each case, a defining moment in their country’s performance.

The national interest, to go back to dealing with irrigation and invasion, is in many ways no less complex now than it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. To pick one possible pair of examples – Charlemagne and Trump – both assumed power (in 800 and 2016/2024 respectively) over a state which had once been more influential than it was.

Both used ruthless methods to suppress dissent and to divide and defeat internal enemies. Both insisted on Christianity, focussed their energies on increasing their power and sought to reward their followers and humiliate their enemies. Above all, both saw themselves as the embodiment of righteousness.

“L’état, c’est moi” Louis XIV is reputed to have remarked. The idea would have been familiar to Charlemagne, were he then to have been around. Trump is doing his best to ensure that it can also be applied to him.

Both also needed more land. Charlemagne conquered it. Trump has so far only threatened to. Both acted or are acting from exactly the same motivations. After all, you can’t have too many castles, rich farmland, serfs or hunting forests: or, for that matter, too many deep-water ports, rare-earth mines, cheap labour or luxury golf courses.

• A rational view

Machiavelli, whose career was about half-way between that of Charlemagne and Trump, believed that the role of The Prince, the title of his most famous work, was to use any means necessary to retain and extend power to safeguard the state and to combat anarchy. It has been described as a great work of political philosophy, a product of pure evil and just about everything in-between.

In fact, it’s a supremely rational view of the way in which life is (just as Plato’s Republic was not). For Trump, Johnson, Putin and Xi – the four topics of this rather rambling dissertation – it would also be a work of instruction and confirmation.

We can demand more morality, empathy or whatever from our leaders than we ourselves possess but we would be wise to expect a lot less. As for our leaders moderating their behaviour for the better after achieving power, what is “for better”, anyway? To make themselves weaker? To loosen their grip on power?

We don’t live in a just world. In our own way, we all get whatever advantage we can. This may be by persuading others of our beliefs about altruism, abstinence, AI, creationism, communism, capitalism, climate change, Chelsea FC – whatever our views, we’re seeking to get them more widely accepted.

Above all, on their terms these people succeeded. They lied, litigated, invaded, intrigued, bullied and bombasted their way to the top. If whatever combination of these methods worked to get them there, why on earth would they change now they’ve achieved it? We claim that we live in a rational age. For these people to alter their behaviour would be irrational. They won’t change – in their shoes, would you?

And finally…

• “In their race to push out new versions with more capability,” The Washingtom Post writes, “AI companies leave users vulnerable to LLM grooming efforts that promote bogus information.” As explained on BBC R4’s Media Show on 30 July, this relies (or so I understand it) on the simple idea that AI learns from the totality of what’s on the web. The more websites that exist to push a particular view (the example cited on this programme being Russia’s view of the Ukraine conflict), the more this version will find its way into what is increasingly becoming the AI-defined orthodoxy. R4 referred to one pro-Moscow website which published 3.5m articles last year.

Never mind quality or accuracy: the future belongs to those who can react at scale. The observation, variously attributed to Voltaire and Napoleon, that God is on the side of the big battalions has never seemed so true.

• The UK government has effectively said that it will recognise the state of Palestine (just at the moment when it seems about to vanish), promising to do so in September if a number of conditions that Isreal seems very unlikely to adhere to are not met. I’m not sure if this represents progress or not.

Mind you, I don’t know what progress in that part of the world looks like. My thoughts return, as they always do when confronted with the Middle East, to my salad days studying the Crusades at university. This should have given me some insight into what’s happening there. I’m afraid it hasn’t. It’s just a case of history repeating itself: the actors change but the story stays the same.

Monotheism is an inherently inflexible and intolerant concept. To have one such faith in your back yard is bad enough. It seems terribly unjust on the inhabitants that all three of the world’s major monotheistic religions should have started in the same place with each claiming to be the real one.

• I don’t understand what all the kerfuffle was at the end of the fourth test between England and India. England captain Ben Stokes displayed, to my mind, a lack of grace for sulking when the Indians refused to accept his offer of a draw at about six o’clock on the last day. There was no chance of any other result but India had two batters who’d displayed a heroic resistance and who were nearing centuries, one of whom had a previous test best of 96. There were also thousands of Indian supporters who’d paid good money to witness this. Why should they have gone off? They didn’t, until both had got their richly deserved tons: and then they did.

What’s the problem, Ben? Sour grapes that you let them off the hook because you were too unfit to bowl in the second innings and so perhaps shouldn’t have played at all?

• And so to unquestionably the biggest sports story of the week, the Lionesses’ repeat victory in the Euros final. Contrary to what I wished for last week, it did go to penalties, during which the excellent Spanish team completely fell to pieces. Never mind football, this has done a great deal to give girls successful role models. For centuries, these didn’t exist at all (unless you wanted to be a nun) and are still far too infrequent.

Football is one of the great unifiers and common currencies in the world and so anything accomplished in this sphere, good or bad, is influential. I’m particularly delighted for the women to have accomplished this as it will only lead to good societal results. I’m afraid it’s also one in the eye for my gender. We’ve long talked about bringing football home: the women actually did it – and now have done so twice…

Across the area