The Prince in No. 10

I was intending to continue with Michel Foucault throughout the week, and next week I was going to turn my attention to Niccolo Machiavelli, but it is all about "events dear Boy" (Harold Macmillan). I have shoehorned Foucault in later on, but it seems UK politics is still fascinating at a Practical Philosophy level.

Downing Street feels more like a Shakespeare stage than a seat of power today. Anonymous briefings slip through the cracks, whispers of betrayal echo in corridors, and the Prime Minister insists he never authorised attacks on his own ministers. Politics has always been theatre, but today the audience is exhausted and uneasy.

Wes Streeting denies plotting to replace Keir Starmer. No 10 denies attacking him. Everyone denies everything, and yet the air is thick with the sense of quiet conflict. In Machiavelli’s Florence, this would not be chaos, it would be strategy. Power, he reminds us, must be held tightly, and disorder crushed before it multiplies. A leader who allows division inside the household invites ruin. Starmer’s problem is not that he has enemies, but that they appear to live within his own walls. Once the palace leaks, even the strongest foundations are at risk.

Machiavelli would not simply tell Starmer to punish or silence his critics, he would ask a deeper question: why do they feel free to move against him? Authority rests on loyalty and the careful balance of fear and affection, and right now, both look shaky. The public sees drift, ministers smell weakness, and affection has faded, while fear has not taken its place. Lingering dissent corrodes faster than scandal. The leaks, the whispers, the briefings, they all must be addressed decisively, swiftly, and visibly. Rivals cannot be allowed to fester; those whose ambition threatens the centre of power must either be integrated or neutralised. Unity must be projected at every level, and every policy win, every small success, should be leveraged to reinforce authority. Leadership is as much about controlling the narrative as it is about controlling events, and perception can be the sharpest sword or the cruelest enemy.

Machiavelli’s advice is grim but honest: better to be the director than the script. Control is never absolute, but the art of leadership lies in making it appear so, in turning weakness into authority, indecision into strategy.

And yet, as Foucault reminds us, power is never fixed in the throne or the office. It circulates, flows, and mutates through words, institutions, and the habits of obedience. What we call a “leadership crisis” is often power redistributing itself, not disappearing. No 10 may leak because the centre is no longer the centre. Machiavelli teaches control; Foucault teaches us to see how control itself is already shared, contested, and performed in every whispered conversation that pretends to deny it. The contrast in views between Foucault lends a question, is the Prince in charge or the institution. Machiavelli might say the Prince (PM) must always enforce power, Foucault may say that the institution, the mandarins at no. 10 and in the civil service will always be directing the societal control.

In the end, the drama of Number 10 is a mirror. It shows us that authority is fragile, loyalty is earned, and perception shapes reality. Whether in politics or daily life, leadership is less about holding the reins and more about mastering the theatre, knowing when to act, when to observe, and when to bend the currents of power before they bend you.