For a long time, I believed in backing ideas, not people, both in business and politics. In business, I looked at the VC industry and was baffled: founders raise multi-million rounds on seemingly harebrained ideas, and incubators like YC boast about how often the start-ups they invest in end up building something totally different to what they pitched. It’s almost as if good ideas and grounded business plans do not matter.

Well, duh. Good ideas and grounded business plans don’t matter when it comes to investing. The former are a dime a dozen, and anyone with above moderate intelligence and with access to a computer can put together a business plan; and as I’ve written before, even executing a bad business plan well can be immensely profitable.

No, what matters far more is the character, the ability, and the drive of the person pitching the idea. Do you know the best predictor of whether someone will click on an online ad? It’s not the relevance of the ad, or the gender of the viewer, or the platform on which they see it — it’s whether that person has clicked on an ad before [citation needed]. Similarly, a track record of doing amazing things (or even just getting things done) is a much stronger predictor of success than a well-written pitch deck. This explains why VCs are willing to throw so much money at second-time founders, even before they’ve written a single line of code for their new venture.

(Good investors and bankers don’t even require a track record: their strength is their ability to spot talent and drive.)

All this is well-known in tech circles. But the notion that character matters more than ideas is more contentious in politics, contra that verse in Hamilton:

I have never agreed with Jefferson once We have fought on like 75 different fronts But when all said and all is done Jefferson has beliefs; Burr has none

Or perhaps I’m not quite right. People care about character when it can be used as a cudgel against their political opponents, yet when their own preferred candidates’ character comes into question, the standard response is either to dismiss such attacks as ad hominem, or to say ‘I don’t care about their personal life, I don’t have to like them, I care about their policies’.

The problem here is that this feeds populism: when a politician says the things we want to hear, we’ll cheer for them, even when we admit they are weak, incompetent, corrupt, or duplicitous. The effect of this is that we elect people who, because of these defects, will probably not deliver on their promises, but who *will *do damage in other ways: people who are weak or incompetent will be unable to get things done, while those who are corrupt or duplicitous will choose not to if it’s inconvenient.

Investors’ and bankers’ faith in people over ideas works well. We ought to follow their example as voters, but we run into two problems. The first is that in business, there is broad consensus on what constitutes success: profit and material progress (judged by improvements in technology, consumer benefit, &c); it is acknowledged that anyone who embarks on a business venture is aiming for the same things. In politics, people have wildly different objectives, not just different ideas on how to achieve the same purpose. So a voter might prefer an incompetent idealist over someone who will effectively pursue an objective the voter believes to be evil.

At least, this is what we’d conclude initially. But on deeper reflection, we ought to realise that even if voters have radically different ideals, there is a lot of common ground on the path to these ideals:

For example: you may be a libertarian who believes people ought to keep the vast majority of the wealth they generate; and your friend might be on the Left and think there is no justification for inequality. But I imagine you’d both agree it’s absurd that young people cannot afford to buy a house, or that it’s unsafe to walk in London holding your phone. Given that no government can plausibly change a country like the UK to a libertarian utopia or to a communist collective overnight, you should be willing to support a government that can address these issues, regardless of its ostensible philosophy.

So this first problem is not that hard to overcome: all it takes is a dose of pragmatism, and the realisation that it does not make sense to stop progress if it falls even a little short of your ideal state (though so many people fail to realise that — witness NIMBYs who block housing development because the proposals do not promise sufficient affordable housing, ignoring that blocking development results in no affordable houses at all).

The second problem though is much more despair-inducing: it is that if we were to vote for character and ability, we wouldn’t have anyone to vote for (in the UK at least).

Labour have proven themselves to be utterly incompetent: they perform more pirouettes than ballerinas (winter fuel, grooming gangs inquiry, welfare bill, Mandelson’s sacking, definition of the word ‘woman’, planning reform, and I’m probably missing a few). There’s no point in voting for Labour because of the policies they advocate, because they are incapable of carrying out any policies whatsoever.

The Tories had fourteen years in power, throughout which period they enjoyed solid majorities in parliament, and what do they have to show for it? Sleaze, in-fighting, backstabbings, constant reshuffles, the tragicomedy of the mini-budget, record immigration, crumbling infrastructure… there is no reason to believe they will do any better under Kemi’s leadership, especially because the waves of purges following leadership changes has robbed the party of its most talented and competent politicians.

Farage has a track record of making outlandish promises and predictions, but no experience in running anything other than political campaigns (he does that well, I’ll give him that). Here’s the thing: it’s not racist to claim immigration is too high, and that the British government ought to priorise the welfare of British people instead that of asylum seekers and foreigners. But Reform and many of their supporters are racists, and they are ghouls: you can wish to cut immigration without being callous and cruel. And not only they’re ghouls, they’re incompetent ghouls: they managed to get five MPs elected in 2024, only for one of them to defect barely a year later, and another to resign the whip after being accused of securing COVID loans for dormant companies (having also been convicted for assaulting his girlfriend). Their chairman resigned and then rescinded his resignation a day later. They removed more than 100 candidates from their ballot. With all the problems facing the UK, they are banging on about banning halal meat. They are deeply unserious people, who will prove incapable of governing should they be given the chance (as they have been in the councils they’ve won).

The Greens are a protest party of hypocrites, who claim to believe in renewable energy, but block new renewable energy projects. Their leader is a former hypnotist who claimed he could help women grow their breast size. … . Really??

Your Party have splintered before they even came up with a real name. If they can’t manage a group of like 10 people, how can we trust them to run a country?

The Libdems are the Libdems. They’re non-entities. They stand for nothing, they don’t have any politicians of consequence and ability as far as I know. The best that can be said about them is that they’re not as awful as the rest, if only because they haven’t been given the chance to prove they are (though in their defence, they acquitted themselves well in the coalition; I know most people dispute that, and believe that the coalition is when they proved to be useless, but I think this is unfair — the coalition was probably the UK’s last competent government, in that it achieved its objective of stabilising the British economy (and managed to run a whole term without in-fighting and political drama)).

The thing is, modern politics do not reward competence and virtue, nor do they always penalise their absence. Besides the fact that competence is hard to observe in a domain like politics (and even more so when ministers seem to be playing musical chairs, changing portfolios every year or so), many voters like to dismiss competent politicians as ‘technocrats’. A politician who hunkers down to get things done is seen as lacking flare and charisma.

As for virtue, it is trite but true to say that honesty is penalised because voters don’t like to hear bad news. A politician who tells the truth (like the fact that the triple lock is not a sustainable policy) is unlikely to get elected.

Then there’s the fact that voters care much more about what politicians say than what they do, and so they do not decry bad behaviour as much as they should. Any principled leftwinger should be outraged at the improbity of Angela Rayner’s mortgage shenanigans; but Rayner’s fans care about what Rayner says, not what Rayner does. Similarly, conservatives ought to hate Trump, a serial philanderer whose behaviour is a far cry from toned-down, conservative ideals. But he says he advocates conservative values (even if he doesn’t embody them), so people vote for him. In Greece, SYRIZA, the radical left-wing party, elected as its leader a golden boy who had worked for Goldman Sachs and made a fortune flipping ships (which he bought with a mysterious ‘personal guarantee’ loan). All he had to do to secure the vote of the radical left was to declare himself leftwing. Granted, all the above did receive flak from ‘their side’; but they all still had (or still have) many more supporters than they ought to have had if voters really cared about how one acts instead of what one says.

Unless this changes, unless we start holding people to account for what they do, not what they promise, we are unlikely to see good leadership. So what can we (as individuals) do differently?

First, since all parties are awful anyway, we should stop voting for people based on which party they belong to, and start evaluating them as individuals. If someone is decent, hard working, and honest, vote for them, even if they belong to a party you despise.

Second, we should criticise our side when they get things wrong. Don’t mistake defending an individual for defending their purported ideology. You’ll only end up hurting the ideology anyway. Don’t engage in whataboutism. If someone on your side has got it wrong, first sort out your house, then talk about others.

Third, and conversely, we ought to start applauding people who get things right, even if they belong to the other side. Perhaps if more people (including Tories and Reform) had voiced their support for Starmer when he tried to make tough choices (tough choices with which they agree! the Tories and Reform agree benefits need to be reduced, but they’d rather score points than work with Labour to get it done) he would have stuck the course.

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