A thought for Mahinda Rajapaksa, until last week the long-serving president of Sri Lanka. He has, admittedly, been accused of war crimes. But it was hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy at the manner of his departure. Worried about his dire approval ratings – that’ll be the alleged war crimes – he sought the counsel of his astrologer, Sumanadasa Abeygunawardena. Abeygunawardena consulted the heavens and suggested a snap election, in which Mr Rajapaksa was duly thumped.

“Not all of Nostradamus’s predictions have come true either,” said the seer forlornly as he contemplated unemployment. (It is telling that Nostradamus, a man famous for being wrong, clearly remains the ne plus ultra of the business.) All astrologers might be looking at the stars, but for now Abeygunawardena is very much in the gutter.

Yet Sri Lanka is not the only country where this ancient profession still holds sway. Across the Palk Strait in India, Pranab Kumar Bhatt has a reputation as the no-nonsense astrologer to a number of high-profile individuals, including current prime minister, Narendra Modi. “Pay your fees, ask your questions, hear the answers and get lost,” Bhatt has been quoted as saying.

Nor is the Sri Lanka fiasco is the first time an astrologer has failed to deliver the goods. In 2001 the Nepalese royal astrologer, Mangal Raj Joshi, admitted that the death of the entire royal family in a hail of bullets had been “unforeseen”. Perhaps he would nearly agree with Donald Rumsfeld, that while there are foreseen foreseens and unforeseen foreseens, the real doosras are the unforeseen unforeseens.

In fact, it is possible that Rumsfeld got the idea from one of his previous employers, Ronald Reagan, whose wife Nancy engaged the services of Joan Quigley, a Californian astrologer, after the attempted assassination of Ronald in 1981. “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made … was cleared in advance [with Joan],” wrote chief of staff Donald Regan in his memoir.



It is easy to be scornful. Modern convention has it that the closest advisers of western leaders should consist exclusively of cronies from school, quackish economics graduates, and tabloid newspaper hacks, who respectively provide the wisdom, science and low cunning needed to run a state successfully. But, then again, Reagan created 16 million jobs and ended the cold war. In the UK, how much better are we governed than we were under Elizabeth I, who leaned heavily on her polymath astrologer John Dee? If the recession taught us anything, it’s that financial tea leaves are no more reliable than the real kind. At least horoscopes usually have the decency to remain ambiguous.

And while our suspicion of astrology might feel scientific, it is not necessarily democratic. A 2012 survey of Americans, reported in the New York Times this week, found that 10% believed astrology to be “very scientific,” and another third believed it to be “sort of scientific.” More of the population, in short, believe in their horoscopes than believe that fossil fuel usage affects the climate.

Perhaps we do get the political advisers we deserve.

