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Sometime in 2009, as the then no longer new New Labour government of the UK was nearing its end, I had a conversation with an elderly gentleman, a neighbour, who was then in his mid-70s. I was living in a village in the green commuter belt surrounding London and my neighbour was a friendly, trustworthy man. He was of East London working class background, had trained in a building trade and then worked his way up to a management position in a construction company. In the 1980's he had built his own house in this bucolic, well to do and politically conservative part of the home counties. He liked to chat with me over the garden fence, mulling over the issues and politics of the day. He often expressed his frustrations with politicians who he saw as self-serving. On one such occasion, he volunteered: ‘To be honest, I really can't be bothered with this democracy malarkey. I'd much prefer a benign dictator!‘
I was taken aback by this statement, which puzzled me in more ways than one. Was my trusted neighbour really a closet fascist? Or perhaps this was just a disgruntled over the top strop about his frustrations with the government of the day? But what troubled me particularly was the, in my view, contradictory proposition that there could be such a thing as a ‘benign dictator’.
While in the back of my mind I was perturbed by echoes of that pernicious überapology: ‘Not everything Hitler did was bad!‘; I gently tried to point out that, based on the historical record, a benign dictator appeared distinctly like a contradiction in terms. He shrugged his shoulders. I further pointed out that when being ruled by a dictator, one was defenceless as to the whims of their decision making. Therefore, if beneficence where to turn into malevolence, there was no painless way of asking for your vote back, nor any obvious way of changing the nasty dictator back into a nice one. In response my friendly neighbour mumbled that he thought he had heard his wife call for him and exc