Politicians have always been unloved, but the present sense of despondency – and at times outright hostility – towards those elected to govern us seems acute. It is not a despondency peculiar to any one nation in particular; it is observable in almost every liberal democracy across the West. At core, this despondency stems from a sense that the current generation of political leaders is somehow deficient – somehow less capable than previous ones. Such a sentiment is tied to the growing belief that politics itself is broken; that whoever gets elected, things broadly stay the same.

Irrespective of one’s particular views or values, there seems to be a consensus that the current political class is missing something important. What is it? Convictions? That surely cannot be it. You cannot say that Liz Truss, or Donald Trump, or Marine le Pen lack strong convictions about what direction their respective countries should go in. Indeed, in the case of Truss, she was eventually harangued for pursuing her own convictions too dogmatically.

Is it, rather, a seriousness, a sense of responsibility? Rishi Sunak always appeared a deeply serious prime minister, telling the country that spending on HS2 was runaway and that he would no longer write a blank cheque for the project, and criticising the disconnect between the idealism of the net zero agenda and its practical effects on UK households. So does Joe Biden, as he clings to power when most other 81-year-olds would have opted for the peace and quiet of retirement.

Surely it’s not intelligence that our political leaders are lacking. They have all gone to the very best universities – the very same university, to be precise, in the case of the UK – and won the best degrees. Nor are they any less cunning or calculating than previous generations of politicians. Keir Starmer has shown ruthless discipline in his ascent to power, and brutality towards his opponents within the Labour movement.

No — the quality that our politicians are deficient in is something simultaneously more specific and more difficult to put your finger on. ‘We speak’, as Isaiah Berlin put it in his essay On Political Judgement, of,

an exceptional sensitiveness to certain kinds of fact; we resort to metaphors. We speak of some people as possessing antennae, as it were, that communicate to them the specific contours and texture of a particular political or social situation. We speak of the possession of a good political eye, or nose, or ear, of a political sense which love or ambition or hate may bring into play…

This political quality is not to be found in the substance of any particular value or conviction or body of knowledge, but rather in an attitude towards how all of these things should be weighed up in the process of decision-making. We call this quality judgement. And once you know that this is what makes for a good politician, you see it, or more precisely you see its absence, everywhere.

Take the history of recent British prime ministers. It was poor judgement for Sunak to call an early election when positive economic news and immigration statistics were around the corner, or to leave the D-Day landing commemorations prematurely to conduct a television interview. And it was poor judgement to hang an election on a policy issue – ‘stopping the boats’ – over which he had little control. It was a lack of judgement, too, that animated Truss’s decision to dismiss Tom Scholar, the respected Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, and launch her mini-Budget without a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). These choices may not have been flawed in and of themselves, but in a context of market uncertainty, they suggested that the Government had something to hide over its fiscal plans.

Johnson’s handling of Partygate. Theresa May’s calling of a snap election in 2017 and not fighting it on the narrow issue of delivering Brexit. Even, perhaps, David Cameron’s gamble on the Brexit referendum. None of these decisions constituted failings in intelligence, or earnestness, or even responsibility in any particular sense. They were more precisely failings characterised by a lack of judgement.

The same can be said about leaders in a range of democracies. It was poor judgement for Donald Trump to encourage rioters in the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential Election, as it was poor judgement for Hilary Clinton to refer to Trump’s supporters as deplorables four years earlier. And to some extent, the failure to recognise the threat posed by Putin by all Western leaders was itself a failure of judgement.

The problem, though, is that judgement is a rather difficult quality to get a grip on. It isn’t a prescription for specific decisions to be made in particular circumstances. In fact, it is almost the opposite of that. Judgement is a dispositional attribute; it refers to an attitude towards the taking of decisions in a context of imperfect information and uncertainty, when the best course of action cannot be known in advance.

For the sociologist Max Weber, judgement denoted the ability to weigh up and strike a balance between two divergent ethical imperatives: one, to follow one’s convictions; and the other, to take responsibility for the consequences of pursuing one’s convictions. Such an activity is moral, rather than scientific; there is no formula for how to get a ‘correct’ mix of conviction and responsibility in any particular decision. It is this uncertainty that distinguishes judgement from something like intelligence or ‘knowledge’. To make a judgement is to come to a decision without knowing whether it is the correct one, but to do so effectively, and responsibly.

This uncertainty was critical for Weber. And it was partly what characterised politics for him. In science or law or medicine, dilemmas might be soluble through the application of reason. We can have a degree of certainty about what is true and what is false in such fields. Yet what distinguished politics from other professions for Weber was the fact that he considered it a domain of human endeavour that cannot be straightforwardly understood in terms of truth and falsity. Politics in Weber’s mind is defined by the clashing of and compromising between various irreconcilable moral imperatives. It is a profession entirely unsuitable for those who cannot cope with such a lack of certitude.

The other thing that characterised politics for Weber was power. That the political practitioner must make decisions about the use of power – to force people to do certain things and to stop them doing other things on pain of punishment – and do so in a context of profound uncertainty made politics sui generis, investing it with a distinctive ethic of its own. When ideas crash and burn on impact with reality, academics or philosophers can throw up their hands and lament that their theories were not attempted with sufficient rigour or blame their failure on the irrationality of the world. But the politician, or at least the good politician, can never enjoy such innocence, for they wield the morally ambivalent means of power to mould reality in the shape of their ideas. In politics,

No ethics in the world can dodge the fact that in numerous instances the attainment of ‘good’ ends is bound to the fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones — and facing the possibility or even the probability of evil ramifications.

We seem to be singularly lacking in political leaders with judgement in the West. But what might be the solution to this paucity? How do we get more individuals with judgement into positions of political leadership?

Someone putting forward arguments about this issue with much eloquence at the moment is Tory outcast Rory Stewart. Stewart’s lament since leaving Parliament has been about the lack of ‘seriousness’ among the British political class. His memoirs on his time in government are laced with Weberian language. ‘Many of the political decisions which I had witnessed’, he writes, ‘were rushed, flaky and poorly considered, the lack of mature judgement was palpable, the consequences frequently catastrophic.’

Stewart’s conception of what makes a good politician is fundamentally divergent from Weber’s, however. He thinks a lack of judgement ultimately stems from a lack of experience or knowledge. He writes of how ‘grotesquely unqualified so many of us were for the offices we were given’ – and he includes himself in this analysis. I was ‘put in charge of all the prisons in England and Wales knowing nothing about prisons, the Prison Service, the law or probation’. The implication is that the best prisons minister would simply be the person who had spent the longest working in the sector.

In this, Stewart betrays a conflation of judgement with expertise. It is an old conflation which has its roots in the 18th century, and which is grounded upon the view that politics might be reduced to a social science; that with enough knowledge, a person may become an expert in the practice of politics. But as Weber knew, the politician is demanded to act and decide upon things of which he or she cannot have knowledge or certainty. The trade-offs between competing, equally legitimate interest groups, the acceptable price to be paid for a certain course of action, the way social burdens ought to be distributed — these sorts of choices are in essence political, and they are political because they are not susceptible to knowledge.

Perhaps it is ironic that Stewart’s memoirs were released with the title ‘How Not to be a Politician’ in the US. Because in many ways, Stewart’s proposals are fundamentally anti-political. They express a disdain, perhaps even a contempt for politics. And like many others, he wishes to disinfect British government by replacing politics with ‘expertise’, and politicians with ‘experts’. There is, though, no reason to think that this will lead to greater or better judgement amongst our political class.

For all that is original and entertaining in Stewart’s book, the remedy he expresses elsewhere for this dearth of expertise is the now standard-issue demand for electoral reform, a new political party of the centre, and the technocratisation of ministerial positions that comes predictably and regularly from those with a particular interpretation of what has gone wrong over the last decade in British politics.

Curiously, it is not the position advanced by the individual who has become most closely associated with the depoliticisation of British public life. In his latest book, On Leadership, Sir Tony Blair offers an account of what it is be a good politician that is far more persuasive than that given by Stewart. ‘Political Leaders should not be captivated by experts’, even if they should be respectful of them. Experts should inform policy, but they should not ‘decide policy’.

The defining quality of the good political leader for Blair, as it was for Weber, remains the ability to act in circumstances of uncertainty, and accept responsibility for the consequences:

A Leader steps out when others step back. The mantle of responsibility is being passed around and the Leader willingly takes it upon their shoulders… [they] have the courage not to go with the flow. They act when others hesitate. They take the risk, not because they fail to identify it as risk but because they believe a higher purpose means the risk should be taken.

Blair’s On Leadership is an undeniably thoughtful book, and contains a wealth of wisdom and insight. Nevertheless, at moments, it, too, slides into that common view of politics as applied science. It has been marketed as a manual for aspirant political leaders, and commences with a chapter on the ‘science of governing’. But there remains something essential about politics that is insusceptible to codification.

Weber described politics as a ‘beruf’ or ‘vocation’. The word has a double meaning in German: it expresses not just the idea of a profession, but a calling, too – the Lutheran notion of a task ordained by God; Weber fully intended both meanings in his use of the word. In this idiom, the qualities of the good politician cannot be learned from a manual. Nor does the judgement required to be a good prisons minister, for example, derive straightforwardly from experience within the prison system. Likewise, the answers to most political questions are not ones to which, with sufficient knowledge, we can provide scientific or objective answers.

Politicians need convictions as a guide to action, and they need a dutifulness, and sense of obligation that comes from feeling responsible for the consequences of one’s decisions. These are matters of moral character, not professional experience, nor intelligence. The ‘enlightened views and supreme wisdom’ which define great leaders, as De Gaulle wrote, ‘cannot be drawn from acquired knowledge any more than they can be imposed by rule. These things are all a matter of intuition and character which no decree can compel, no instruction impart’.

The West faces great problems, and many of them are not straightforwardly about policy, but politics – about compromises between different and potentially irreducibly conflicting interests and values. Some of those problems – ageing societies, global immigration trends, the development of artificial intelligence –  are driven by factors that seem entirely out of the control of individual political leaders. But it is the condition of being a politician to take responsibility, rather than to leave things up to fate.

Good politicians believe that their decisions will have impact and consequences, and that they are ultimately answerable for those consequences, too. But they cannot be paralysed by that responsibility. They must also have convictions about where we ought to go, and they must decide how we should get there. Being effective at weighing up these different considerations defines the Weberian notion of judgement, and it is this ability which our current elites lack.

Providing the space for our political leaders to begin to address the great tasks before us requires that we put aside our cynicism about their profession. That we recognise that politics is purposeful and distinctive as a sphere of human activity in and of itself. That we appreciate again that being the man or women in the political arena can be a noble enterprise. Improving the quality of our political leadership will not come from disparaging their endeavour. Nor will the situation be remedied simply by importing more experts or people from different occupations. We need more politicians, not fewer.