In a matter of days, Andy Burnham will walk through the famous black door of 10 Downing Street to become Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in ten years. Last week, I had the privilege of hearing a lecture by the man many feel is “the one that got away” and many are speculating is about to return.
David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, Labour Party leadership candidate, and current president of the International Rescue Committee, delivered the annual Rabbi Sacks Memorial Lecture at the LSE. His subject, appropriately ironic given the current political environment, was power – who holds it, who checks it, and what happens when the checks fail. But what struck me most wasn’t Miliband’s own analysis, sharp as it was. It was how directly he drew his analysis from Rabbi Sacks’ own ideas.
Rabbi Sacks was never a religious leader who confined his thinking to the pulpit. He spent his entire life arguing that Jewish tradition had something indispensable to add to, as he called it, “the conversation of humankind”, by which he meant the world at large. When it came to influencing secular discourse, one of his most impactful teachings was a distinction we have almost entirely lost the habit of making: the difference between power and influence.
In the Hebrew Bible, as Rabbi Sacks taught and David Miliband recalled, leadership was deliberately split three ways. Kings held power – formal, coercive, and therefore dangerous. Priests held institutional authority: the guardians of law, order and continuity. Prophets held no formal office, only the moral standing to say uncomfortable things to whoever did hold power. Rabbi Sacks’ point was not that one of these was superior to the others. It was that a society only stays healthy while it keeps all three in equilibrium. A king unrestrained by a priest or prophet becomes a tyrant. A priesthood without prophecy hardens into bureaucracy. And prophecy without institutions to answer collapses into a righteous, but ultimately useless, noise.
That last failure mode should sound familiar. We live in an age saturated with prophetic voices – commentators, activists, a whole economy of opinion, even politicians who believe themselves to be prophets – and comparatively few of them are tethered to any institution they might actually be held accountable to.
Rabbi Sacks located the danger in this precisely: moral and political decisions, he argued, are meant to be distinct, but where the two drift apart, politics turns amoral and then corrupt. Prophecy exists to close that gap – to hold rulers to a standard beyond the merely legal, judging them not for wielding power but for wielding it in their own interest rather than the national interest. Meanwhile, the kings, so to speak, feel less constrained than they have in a generation: independent courts denounced, civil services politicised, elections increasingly contested not on ideas but on the legitimacy of the result itself. Rabbi Sacks would have recognised this instantly, because he spent his career warning that a society that flattens the distinction between power and influence eventually loses its grip on both.
This is where I think Miliband’s lecture, drawing on Rabbi Sacks’ ideas, offered something genuinely useful for the days ahead – not a verdict on any particular politician, but a test that outlasts them all, and that applies in liberal democracies the world over, whether in this country, America, or Israel. The key question is not “what does the incoming Prime Minister believe?” It is “what still stands between him and the unchecked exercise of power, whoever he turns out to be?” Courts, a free press, local government with real authority of its own, a civil service that will tell an uncomfortable truth: these are not obstacles to good government. They are, in Rabbi Sacks’s terms, the priesthood and prophecy that keep kingship honest. A political culture that treats them as enemies to be defeated rather than checks to be respected is a culture that has already forgotten the lesson.
There’s a second idea of Rabbi Sacks’ here that matters just as much, from his book The Dignity of Difference: the conviction that a healthy society can hold real disagreement without either side needing to win outright. Rabbi Sacks was a conservative in temperament and a liberal in generosity, and he was read seriously across a political spectrum that agreed on little else. That is not a minor achievement, and it points to something we have allowed to erode. Taking an idea seriously enough to argue with it – rather than simply cheering for your own side or dismissing the other – was, for Rabbi Sacks, close to the whole point of politics. Not a contest to be won by whoever shouts loudest, but a shared discipline of thought that survives the result of any single election. Oh, how we long for those days to return.
And then there is the quieter, universal lesson, the one I suspect matters most for the man about to move into Downing Street, whatever you personally think of his politics. Rabbi Sacks insisted, as did Miliband, against the instinctive order of things, that hope does not lead to action – action leads to hope. It is easy to promise renewal. It is much harder to do something concrete enough that renewal starts to feel plausible again. This country, indeed the West at large, is exhausted by promises and starved of ideas being taken seriously. That inversion is not a rhetorical flourish. It is close to the only leadership lesson that still counts.
Rabbi Sacks has been gone five years, and it would have been easy to imagine that his ideas would have become a moral philosophy for a calmer age. Instead, argued Miliband from an LSE stage, the opposite is true: the harder and more divisive our politics becomes, the more his wisdom applies, not less. Between power and influence. Between disagreement and enmity. Between the hope we long for and the action that alone produces it.
Those are not the property of any political party or any individual. They belong to whoever is still willing to take an idea seriously – which is, in the end, exactly what Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks always asked of us.
Dan Sacker is a strategic communications consultant, a trustee of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy, and an inaugural cohort member of President Herzog’s Voice of the People initiative
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