If I could subpoena Cameron and Clegg to do a leaders’ debate now, I most definitely would. As a student of a MBA course going at a very fast rate, it is easy to get a feel for a flavour of the management and leadership styles of David Cameron, and to understand why he personally, and his Tory-led government, are doing catastrophically badly. I exclude Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, whose ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to transform the nature of politics on the left-wing has been utterly wasted. Nobody sane would expect Nick Clegg to face the music in a Leaders’ debate in 2015, for example.

The issue with the Tory-led government is that they have a sole core competency, that is to reduce the deficit. However, the mechanism by which they are doing it is causing considerable damage to the recovery which had started in the first few months of  their current (and probably) last term of government. By having no coherent policy for generating growth, they potentially could worsen the deficit by decreasing tax receipts and increasing benefit spending. It’s like having a credit card when you’re unemployed, but you are sanctioned from having any source of income.

David Cameron also fails as a leader in a number of textbook ways. As a potential transformational leader, he does not have the support of key followers essential for a  change management to succeed, say in the public sector. Essential in this change management is not doing the change too fast, and having some symbols of success. Instead, David Cameron faces increasing waiting times and a plethora of equally disastrous metrics in NHS management, and the ultimate accolade in manufacturing output, the GDP, is deterioriating all the time. His preferred management style for running the public sector is ‘lean management’, which runs two grave dangers. Firstly, it can be extremely difficult to do a root cause analysis of problems when things go wrong, and secondly there is little functional slack. Take for example the recent riots. In an overstretched, underfunded, police service, it is difficult for the police and justice system to mount a satisfactory response. Amazingly, they have, but despite a dangerous level of cuts.

David Cameron has equally proven himself as a poor crisis leader. Over the riots, where he was accused of spending too long in Tuscany, and over the hacking crisis, where the evidence provided by Goodman, Coulson and Murdoch continues to cause problems, Cameron has been seen naked in responding way too late after the events; and again he suffers from a lack of trust by his followers, the UK general public.

Furthermore, in textbook terms, David Cameron fails as a charismatic leader. This was first identified really by Mary Liddell who wondered some time ago whether the general public could grow to embrace David Cameron. Indeed, Liddell was right. They couldn’t. The result was a hung parliament, with a completely ineffective Nick Clegg, driven by a personal dislike of Gordon Brown and ‘liberal principles’, led his party at Westminster to vote against EMA and the rise in tuition fees. No wonder his political party was slaughtered in the local elections.

So, I do come back to my basic thought: if I could subpoena Cameron and Clegg to do a leaders’ debate now, I would. Tragically, the country is stuck with them until 2015.

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