WHAT does true leadership look like? Last week’s TV offered us a range of options. The clearest contrast — ideal for those earnest conferences at which bishops and archdeacons employ consultants in costly but futile attempts to make their clergy more effective — was within one programme. Which of the two presented, I wonder, is closer to our experience of a PCC or diocesan synod?
First, President Putin sat enthroned in a vast marble and gilt chamber, having summoned his leading deputies and generals to tell him, Yes, or No, whether they supported aiding provinces of Ukraine in throwing off the supposed Nazi yoke of Kyiv. This was naked, brutal autocracy — the acolytes all clearly terrified, fully aware of the consequences of dissent — but purported to demonstrate collegiate responsibility.
Second, just a few bitter hours later, when missiles, bombs, and tanks showed up Russia’s protestations of not planning to invade as the hollow lies that they always were, we saw President Zelensky and four other senior Ukrainian leaders, all in fatigues, gathered in a dimly lit bunker, having rejected the helicopters prepared to fly them to safety.
Most of those who could were fleeing, or at least ensuring their family’s flight; at that hour, staying and resisting meant, surely, certain death. Zelensky said, clearly and simply: “We’re all still here, we’re not leaving.” The Zelensky Story (BBC2, three parts, from 4 September) is an astonishing narrative. Many nations have to put up with a leader widely considered to be a clown: Ukraine elected, by a landslide, as President not just their most popular comedian, but, life unimaginably copying art, one who, in the hit series Servant of the People, was already playing that part. Fantasy morphed into hard reality. Even more bizarrely, Zelensky the comedian was overwhelmingly popular in Russia as well as Ukraine: Mr Putin, to demonstrate his common touch whenever an election loomed, ensured that he was filmed in the front row of Mr Zelensky’s show, smiling wanly at the satire eviscerating his leadership.
This is a remarkable documentary, with contributions from most of the key players — above all, President Zelensky himself, seeming, to me, utterly direct and candid. It is, of course, a work still in life-or-death progress.
More retrospectively, Amol Rajan Interviews: Tony Blair (BBC2, Wednesday of last week) offered analysis of Sir Tony’s premiership alongside reflections on the present and future, worldwide. Rajan posed good questions, probed courteously and yet insistently, and enabled good and revealing conversation. Sir Tony still has flashes of boyish, compelling charisma.
Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg (BBC1, Sunday) secured the first major interview — in the Cabinet Room of No. 10 — with our new PM. Uncharismatic but solid, even stolid, Sir Keir finally sprang into engaging animation when revealing his family’s tussle over a new pet.