Last week the British media was full of the story of how the former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Fred Goodwin, was to be stripped of his knighthood for having ‘brought the honours system into disrepute.’  He had been knighted in 2004 ‘for services to banking’ but a series of ill-judged acquisitions led to the collapse of the bank and, amid the chaos that followed, he was thought to have behaved insensitively and inappropriately with regard to his pension. Amid all the discussions about fairness, unfortunate comparisons were made with Anthony Blunt (discovered to have been a spy), Robert Mugabe and even Nicolas Ceaucescu, all of whom had also had their knighthoods stripped away but were surely in altogether different categories of wrongdoing. I’d have forgotten about this but on the long flight home a throwaway remark by ‘Taki’, read in the Spectator , got me curious. So whilst waiting at Heathrow I Googled honorary British knighthoods and discovered that quite a lot of stripping has gone on. Those stripped of their knighthoods include Franz Joseph I (awarded 1867, annulled 1915), Wilhelm II (awarded 1861, annulled 1915), and Benito Mussolini (awarded 1923, annulled 1940). Spot the pattern? Indeed, the strangest of the lot is Emperor Hirohito of Japan (picture), who was made a knight in 1921, saw his knighthood stripped away in 1941 and was made a knight again in 1971. I post this useless information in case anybody out there is making a political anoraks’ version of Trivial Pursuits.

My flight back to Europe wasn’t until the evening and so this afternoon I made the most of the balmy conditions and walked the Freedom Trail in the beautiful city of Boston. This was of particular resonance for me because a fellow member of my writers’ workshop is writing a screenplay about the events leading up to the Boston Tea Party and all of the buildings and places I visited are, of necessity, in the script. I love the way these old historic buildings and burial sites nestle away amid the skyscrapers and I found visiting the graves of my friend’s characters (Samuel Adams in the picture) particularly poignant. My friend’s script is good in highlighting the inanity of the Stamp Act and the way it fanned fear and resentment for, as Adams put it, ‘if our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves – It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?’

All good things must come to an end and it is already the last day of the course.  It has been hard work and good fun and very interesting. There has been a lot of interactive work with peers, bouncing ideas off of one another, interspersed with lectures and discussions with visiting professors. It’s always slightly invidious to single out speakers but for me there have been two highlights this week. One was Amy Cuddy, a psychologist by training, who spoke to us about the significance and the power of non-verbal behaviour. She was particularly fascinating on how brief non-verbal expressions of competence and power and warmth can alter levels of testosterone and cortisol. The other was Ron Ferguson (picture) an economist by training, who spoke to us eloquently about inclusion and ‘movements’ and how to progress through any process involving others. It sounds dry on the page but his exposition was equally fascinating.

My former Bruges students will recall how I always warned against the inherent bias in empirical analyses of the European Parliament’s voting behaviour. This was because most of the time the Parliament simply votes by hand, or electronically, but roll call votes are only more occasionally used (by the political groups) for three main reasons (I am quoting Corbett et al, eighth edition, p.199): ‘to put a Group’s position on an issue firmly on the record; to embarrass another Group by forcing the latter to take a publicly recorded stance on an issue; and to keep a check on their own members’ participation in a vote, and the position they take.’ In other words, roll call votes are not necessarily the most important or the most significant and, in any case, tell only part of a story that cannot be fully told (because it’s impossible to make accurate empirical analyses of shows of hands). In similar vein, today I read a fascinating short article in Bloomberg Businessweek about legislative bills in Congress. In 2011, 5,929 bills were introduced, of which just 80 became law. The explanation is that ‘House members have been working on measures intended not to become law, but to score election-year points by forcing the other side to vote for or against them.’ In other words, these bills, many crafted deliberately to fail, are the equivalent in Congress to many roll call votes in the European Parliament. So now you know.

Of course, the media over here are full of comment and analysis following Rick Santorum’s wins in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri and what these might portend for the November contest. But my eye was caught by a thought-provoking article in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled ‘The 2016 Election, Already Upon Us.’ It carried the startling subtitle ‘After November, Obama will no longer be the future of his party.’ And, of course, that must be right. If Obama wins, it will be his last term, and if he loses, he surely won’t get another chance. So whilst most attention is on the Republican primaries at the moment, a quieter, but just as significant, campaign is getting under way in the Democratic Party, and bets are already being staked, with the potential future candidates fashioning soundbites in anticipation of the win and the lose scenarios. Hillary Clinton has declared that she will be retiring after November but if the polls start going pear-shaped for Obama attention will inevitably start to focus on her. And if they don’t, the media will focus on the next generation. What a fascinating country!

I am sharing a flat with a Dutch Senator, Joris Paul Backer. Like me, he’s a jogger, so we’ve been getting up at six to jog along the river. Also like me, he’s something of a political anorak and we have a number of common acquaintances so the early morning conversations have been good fun. Through my research work into the antecedents of the European Economic and Social Committee I am becoming interested in Senates, or second chambers. In particular, the composition of appointed or indirectly-elected senates can, it seems to me, be very similar to the composition of advisory economic and social councils. Of course, in the Netherlands there is also a Social and Economic Council. What these bodies frequently have in common is the representation of organised interests rather than (or in addition to) political parties.

This evening the Kennedy School hosted the Harvard University John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, a televised debate. I found a vantage point and listened in. The guest speaker on this occasion was Peter Thiel, founding Chief Executive Officer of PayPal and a member of the Board of Directors of Facebook. Fabulously rich, Thiel, because of the stock market flotation of Facebook, is about to become fabulously fabulously rich (or maybe that’s fabulously to the power of three). The staging was a ‘conversation’ with Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Now Thiel, improbably young and already wise beyond his years, was not without piercing observations. The best, I thought, was his realisation that ‘the tournament just goes on and on’. When he got on to policy, he was very soon out of his depth, though he never floundered. But the star of the show in my opinion was his affable interlocuteur, Niall Ferguson. Let’s face it; the Americans like the occasional Brit grit in their media oysters: Harold Evans, Tina Brown, Piers Morgan, Chris Hitchens… I’ll quote just one Ferguson phrase, summing up a long and complicated question from a member of the audience to enable Thiel to reply: ‘Peace produces welfare but you need warfare for progress.’ Maybe the phrase has been coined before but he slotted it in with consummate ease and timing.

I inadvertently excited my prof., Marty Linsky, this morning. I had read the course material – notably three chapters in a book co-authored by Marty (together with Ronald A. Heifetz) – and whilst I benefitted from a number of valuable insights, I couldn’t entirely agree with the underlying assumption. The subtitle of the book hints at the problem: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Leadership is dangerous for those doing the leading. Staying a leader is what counts. Losing leadership foolhardily is – well, foolhardy. Avoid foolhardiness and you can continue to lead and retaining leadership is the most important consideration because leadership is a good thing and if you retain leadership then you can continue to … lead. Now, I am the first to argue that leadership is frequently a public good, but surely not always and perhaps not even mostly. And I just couldn’t agree that all leadership is intrinsically good. One of Linsky’s own arguments, for example, is that false clarity wins over honest confusion every time (because people crave clarity and continuity in their leaders). So I tried to argue that the ethical dimension was also necessary. There was, I ventured, a trichotomy of immoral, amoral and moral leadership. (In the absence of such an ethical or normative motivation, leadership would, it seemed to me be primarily amoral leadership – coincidentally of precisely the sort so well portrayed by Jeremy Irons in Margin Call.) Marty feistily swatted my semantic distinction aside on the pretty reasonable grounds that everybody in the room was a moral leader because otherwise they would not have come to the Kennedy School to improve themselves. Fair dos.

It should have been the perfect moment to be in New England. Tonight the New England Patriots met the New York Giants in the Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis to see who would be the 2011 season National Football League Champion. Each team had won the Super Bowl three times, and there was a healthy New York-Boston rivalry. The match, which the Giants came from behind to win 21-17, was full of characters, incidents, brilliant athleticism and, from the commentators, superlatives. I won’t pretend I know all the ins-and-outs of the game but I found a bar with plenty of atmosphere and watched pretty much the whole match, including the famous funny ads and Madonna’s much-discussed half-time show. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  Maybe Hugo of New York could demonstrate his learning and explain, in a comment, why in the last minute or so of the match the Patriots let Bradshaw run into the end zone uncontested (actually, he appeared to pull up, turn around and sit down). The streets were very quiet as I walked home… Postscript: Hugo has since obliged and now all is clear. It was truly a cliffhanger!

And so, in the afternoon, down to business. I am here at Harvard to attend a leadership course at the Kennedy School of Government entitled, rather portentously, ‘Chaos, Conflict and Courage: Leadership in the Twenty-First Century.’ As an icebreaker we had to introduce ourselves and then recount a significant episode from our school days. There were plenty of moving examples. I’ll give just three. There was an American, now heading up a police department, who grew up in Chicago’s badlands but, despite all the temptations and violence, refused to get involved in the gangs and the drugs trade. There was a high-ranking civil servant, a permanent secretary, from a Caribbean island who was once embarrassed as a boy because he didn’t know how to eat with a knife and fork. The episode drove him to escape his poor social origins. And there was an Indian senior manager who, as a fourteen year-old, missed the train that would take him from the south to the north of the country in one day and so set off on a three-day epic journey involving bullock carts and overcrowded buses. The experience led to his whole philosophy of life, which is that the journey is more important than the destination. We are a rich mix and I am much looking forward to the week ahead.