As a sea of red flooded the streets from Nairobi to North London on Sunday, it’s possible that the irony will not have been lost on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
When he and I first met at lunchtime on the first day of our respective internships at a law firm in the mid-1980s, and ate sandwiches on a park bench nearby, it was our shared devotion to the Arsenal Football Club rather than our politics that created the first point of connection.
Delayed gratification is often the most satisfying and with Arsenal having won the English Premier League for the first time in 22 years Starmer would have been no less joyful than any of the rest of its enormous global fanbase, despite his own premiership being at rock bottom.
Starmer is desperately clinging to power ― as is the nature of the man: he is doggedly determined and hates to lose ― apparently unable to accept that he has not only “lost the changing room” but lacks the leadership capabilities needed at the highest echelon of politics.
And that’s the second part of the irony: the juxtaposition with Arsenal’s own leader ― manager Mikel Arteta ― could not be greater. The Spaniard, who fell in love with the club as a player during the final part of his playing career and was then an apprentice to his compatriot the great Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, understands the need for a strategic anchor.
In contrast, Starmer has none. Not even a clear programme for using the executive power he won with a landslide majority at the 2024 general election, let alone ideology. Anchorless, his premiership is like a boat in a storm, politically tossed around like the proverbial flotsam and jetsam.
Having supported Arsenal since my early boyhood days growing up in London, I concede that I am hardly impartial. But I do think there are important lessons to be learnt from Arsenal’s, and especially Arteta’s, story of the past seven years since he took over a despondent club in serious decline in December 2019.
Unlike so many of his counterparts in footballing management, he understood that there were no quick fixes. Throwing billions of pounds at the problem with expensive transfers is not the answer, as Chelsea and Manchester United have shown.
Strategy is one of the most overused and misunderstood words. As Mabel Sithole and I discovered when we used strategy as the lens through which to scrutinise South Africa’s post-1994 presidents in our 2022 book The Presidents, real strategy ― as opposed to planning ― requires the identification of a choice (often a difficult one) and then the courage to make the choice.
As Lawrence Freedman writes in his seminal book Strategy: A History: “By and large, strategy comes into play where there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan.
“A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns”.
Arteta knew that culture will eat strategy for lunch every day of the week. He recognised that Arsenal’s fabled values and culture had withered on the vine, and that the rot needed to be confronted and rooted out.
His foundational strategy was therefore to challenge the interests and individuals that were curdling Arsenal’s milk. It took a while and results on the pitch were inevitably mixed. But Arsenal’s American owners were patient ― against the grain of the uber-impatient zeitgeist of the present era ― and in due course Arteta was able to impose a title-winning game plan.
There are lessons here for leaders everywhere. Poor Starmer’s “owners” ― in the media, the public and even his own party ― are neither as patient nor as forbearing of his strategic failure in government.
• Calland is director of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership Africa Programme and co-author with Mabel Sithole of ‘The Presidents: From Mandela to Ramaphosa, leadership in the Age of Crisis’.
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