B ACK IN 1997 Warren Bennis, a management guru, invited this columnist, who then had the onerous job of reporting on California, to a soirée in his house on Santa Monica beach to discuss the evergreen topic of leadership. A junior guru presented a paper on how today’s leaders needed all sorts of touchy-feely qualities such as empathy. Yours truly annoyed everyone by arguing that Margaret Thatcher had been a pretty good leader without knowingly engaging in empathy. Then Peter Drucker, speaking in a heavy Viennese accent and dressed in a three-piece suit, threw his own hand-grenade. “I don’t know why people are so fixated on the subject of leadership,” he said, or words to that effect. “What we really need to think about is followership.”

It is worth remembering Drucker’s words whenever people talk about Britain’s crisis of leadership. There is no doubt that Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are singularly unimpressive figures. But Parliament also contains a fair number of people with sparkling CV s, such as Rory Stewart, or remarkable life stories, such as Angela Rayner. Regardless of their abilities, political leaders have to perform before an increasingly hostile audience which routinely questions their motives and trashes their achievements. Followers are a tougher crowd than they used to be.

Ipsos MORI’ s annual survey of the trustworthiness of professions repeatedly shows that people don’t trust politicians. Last year they came second-to-bottom, just above advertising executives, with 19% of the public trusting them. A study of what words people associate with politicians discovered that the most common were sharply negative: contemptible, disgraceful, parasitical, sleazy, traitorous. The crisis in followership is spreading from the citizenry to the political class itself—and even into the government. The past couple of months have seen cabinet ministers voting against a three-line whip and a defence secretary sacked for leaking to the press from the National Security Council.

Walter Bagehot argued that, in order to survive, a political regime needed to gain authority from the citizenry, and then use that authority to get the work of government done. Since Bagehot’s time, British politicians have employed three mechanisms to gain that authority. The first is deference, when voters support leaders they consider their social superiors. The second is class-loyalty, under which people vote for those who represent folk like themselves. The third is competence, when people vote for a candidate the same way they might hire a plumber—because they can fix a problem. Britain used to be remarkable for its ability to combine all three methods, for example putting trade unionists into the House of Lords for their services to class politics, or ennobling civil servants for their services to competent government. But today all three are in trouble. Deference has faded. Class consciousness is fuzzier than it used to be. And thanks to the Iraq war, the global financial crisis and the Brexit negotiations, voters no longer trust the established parties to provide competent government.

This collapse of legitimacy has been hastened by a widening of the gap between leaders and followers. The gap is usually explained in terms of the insulation of the elite, as politics has been taken over by a class that glides from studying PPE at Oxford to a career at Westminster without holding what most people regard as a “real” job. But it can also be explained in terms of the erosion of a civic culture that once linked Westminster to local politics. In 1963 two American academics, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, argued that Britain combined a high degree of faith in political institutions with a flourishing local civic life. Since then civic life has received a succession of blows: the contraction of the trade-union movement, the centralisation of decision-making in Whitehall, and the hollowing-out of regional economies.

The loss of confidence in leaders has sent new forces surging through the body politic. One is know-it-all cynicism. A striking number of Britons are becoming like sports commentators who are ready with criticism but who couldn’t kick a ball if one landed at their feet. A second—and opposite—problem is sudden, inchoate enthusiasm, such as the green Extinction Rebellion that recently paralysed much of central London. But the most dangerous of all is the combination of anger, disappointment and bloody-mindedness that political scientists label “resentment”. The new Brexit Party is on course to top this month’s European election because of Nigel Farage’s mastery of the politics of resentment.

Rebels without a cause

It is hard to see how these forces can solve Walter Bagehot’s twin problems of gaining and using authority. Know-it-alls corrode authority. Enthusiasts ignore the trade-offs that are at the heart of all serious politics. And masters of resentment like Mr Farage discover betrayal in every compromise. Britain’s political parties are all suffering badly. Labour is under-performing because a band of enthusiasts have installed a second-rate purist in the top job. The Conservatives are languishing because a different band of enthusiasts have undermined a pragmatic prime minister. Change UK has failed to launch because a bunch of professional politicians cannot decide whom to make leader. And even the Brexit Party, riding high for now, has bet its future on one man and one issue.

The only way to create a bond between leaders and followers in a post-deferential and post-industrial era is to restore officeholders’ reputation for competence. Mrs May tried to do this with her combination of respecting the referendum result (“Brexit means Brexit”) and tackling its causes (“burning injustices”). But she merely compounded the problem, beginning the Brexit talks without a plan, bungling an election and drawing red lines that she would inevitably smudge. Perhaps a more skilful prime minister will succeed where Mrs May has so singularly failed. But Drucker’s insight points to a darker possibility: that the politics of resentment will trump the politics of problem-solving for some time.