Zhou Enlai died half a century ago this year. His legacy? As he might have said, too soon to tell.
One view is that Mao’s suave premier curbed and contained the Great Helmsman. Sceptical historians look at the Cultural Revolution, among other excesses, and mutter, “Some curb.” A similar debate goes on about Talleyrand. Napoleon’s diplomat conspired against his out-of-control boss to the extent of giving foreign states clandestine advice. Judged on results — a wrecked Europe, a vanquished France — this high-minded treachery had slim effect.
Beware the trope of the “adult in the room”: the colleague or subordinate who restrains a bad leader. It is false hope. In fact, in democracies, it is often what lulls voters into gambling on an unfit candidate. Their bet is that wise courtiers will stop the worst from happening. The US elected George W Bush, an obvious naïf, in part because the people around him were so seasoned. Two botched wars later, it was clear that most of them were worse than the boss.
And still, in 2016 and 2024, it happened again. Those who voted for Donald Trump out of conviction are coherent, if nothing else. Those who did so in the hope that unspecified grown-ups would clip his wings are harder to defend.
The adult-in-the-room argument does not even work in principle. If the leader is rogue, how would he or she appoint wise subordinates in the first place? By definition, the necessary judgment is lacking. Hence Trump’s adults. “The one thing I’m sure about is that Putin isn’t marching into Boston,” said Treasury secretary Scott Bessent last autumn, thus undermining Nato’s Article 5 in full view of the west’s enemies. Nor does Trump’s crusade against the Federal Reserve suggest a calming hand on the presidential wheel. Marco Rubio, the other candidate for in-house adult, has overseen not just a bungled war in Iran but an ongoing indulgence of Russia that is at odds with his former worldview.
And so the best case for these adults becomes what? That without them things would be still worse? This is worth taking seriously. In 2017, according to Bob Woodward, the White House chief economics adviser saw a draft letter on Trump’s desk that sought to end the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. He swiped it before it could be signed. As a check on daft power, this is not negligible. But it has to be weighed against something else: the undue credibility, and therefore lifespan, that adults confer on a government just by being there.
Imagine an administration of wall-to-wall jokers and zealots, of Pete Hegseths and Kash Patels. It would be watched like a hawk, if it was able to function at all. It is the sprinkling of adults, the veneer of seriousness, that tricks a nation (or planet) into complacency. This is a dilemma that has haunted good people through the centuries. Serve a rogue government, and in doing so moderate it, or refuse, and in doing so perhaps hasten its end? It is a fine judgment. Leave it to the individual conscience of a politician.
What a voter should do is rather more obvious. Never elect a leader whose stated beliefs, implemented in full, you couldn’t live with. It is rash enough to expect Congress and the courts to dilute a bad programme. Betting on the leader’s own hires to do so via palace intrigue is unserious citizenship.
Blame it on TV — House of Cards, The Thick of It — but people overrate the importance of underlings. A government is the leader’s character, magnified. This is doubly true in the presidential US and quasi-presidential UK, but it tends to hold even in coalition systems. If Giorgia Meloni, the “good” populist, has surprised European liberals these past four years, it is not because some éminence grise is prevailing on her. (Her governing partner Matteo Salvini is, if anything, more extreme.) It is just that she herself is less Russia-smitten than others on the Italian hard right.
In retrospect, the best political courtiers I have covered as a journalist belonged to the best leaders: that is, to those who least needed the help. And the worst to the worst. In Britain, the most disastrous recent chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, was the hire of the most disastrous recent prime minister, Liz Truss. But of course he was. A leader bad enough to need curbing wouldn’t be able to recruit someone capable of doing it, except through fluke. And so the idea that secondary figures are the real power is self-cancelling nonsense.
No “adults” will save an electorate from a bad choice of leader. Their reassuring presence just encourages the choice to be made in the first place. If the Bessents and Rubios are little use against Trump now, imagine the next two years. He can’t run again. At 80, he hasn’t decades and decades of post-presidential life to preserve his reputation for. What he does have is a humiliation in Iran to avenge, and control of the armed forces for 27 months.
As with Trumpsplaining — the reading of grand strategy into the president’s erratic doings — the adult in the room theory is emotional self-protection. We need to feel the world has a hidden order. It would feel improper to disabuse people of this hope, if events were not doing that work for me. The adult and the room that matter are the swing voter and the quadrennial polling station.