I am just a perfectionist
The claims that Tory ministers were sometimes bullies doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Several were even called out when they were in power, for all the good it did.
The fact that the defence against these allegations is so weak is important, in fact the defence often condemns the accused with their own words.
So, just to help in identifying what is happening let me say.
If you are accused of bullying and your defence is “I am just a perfectionist, who pushed my staff to meet my own very high standards, and always demanded the best.” Then you are a 100% certified, nasty, pathetic, inadequate bully and you know it.
In fact you enjoy it. Throwing your weight around makes you feel big, humiliating those under you makes your day, threatening them, making them do your menial tasks, demanding the impossible; it is what you think is good management, humiliating and threatening people makes you think you are an Alpha male or female.
What it really means is that you are a deeply insecure, pathetically weak, incompetent manager, with no idea of how to lead or motivate and with no interest but your own warped idea of your importance.
You shouldn’t be allowed to run a whelk stall. But isn’t it amazing how many Tory ministers were like that? In fact at least two of the candidates to be Tory leader were like that.
Doubtless there will be more of this to come out, and the responses will be just as revealing. Hiding behind words like perfectionist just means you know what you did is wrong and unacceptable but that you think you can twist it to your advantage by claiming to be the best.
In fact it is really quite telling that much of the so-called leadership of what is left of the Tory party seems to be made up of deeply inadequate egotistical bullies.
What happened to the competent, experienced, rational, and responsible members of the party? The bullies threw them out.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Having had some experience with narcissistic people (fortunately only a number small enough to count on one hand - or at least that I had identified as such), these characters strike me as having highly narcissistic tendencies - which if you have ever encountered - are highly damaging to those around them as well as being completely ineffective from a social or organisational point of view (note that I am not making the claim that they are narcissists because I am neither a psychiatrist nor have observed them long or closely enough to make such an assessment, even if I had been - I am merely highlighting the traits they seem to show).
If you are looking at the Trump campaign, for instance, you can see how this kind of dynamic destroys a lot of people (although I am not crying over these as I suspect that many around him are also sociopaths or narcissists - it is just that their egos tend to lead them to believe that they can master the monster).
But, aside from the mental health issues these kind of people engender (and from my experience, they do cause untold damage), they also inflict huge amounts of damage in organisational settings. Perhaps this might be a time to start talking more about possible personality disorders and the damage they can inflict - and get a debate as to how our society is being damaged by certain types of personalities (and this would also potentially bring about a discussion on mental health - given that the previous government seemed to think that it was a huge problem and that people needed a stick to be made to go back to work).
Its well observed in development studies that for primarily static (and often collectively minded) agrarian societies to develop succesful capitalist economies, the cultural attitude to work must change away from an attitude of sufficiency to one of accumulation. This is an ideological change which permits the accumulation of capital and its deployment to further accumulation projects. The term "business" arose from this change in England in which it was observed that such people were always "busy" compared to ordinary people. This schism still exists and it can be said that our whole cultural value system is directed to maintaining it. The vast majority will say that such economic development is a public good. Its hard to argue otherwise pending the environmental consequences playing out. But it has brought with it a negativity towards rest, towards minimalism and towards ease and a cruelty in politics towards the working class which has its own specific characteristics, which is not to say that there not always been cruelty towards the poor of some kind.