A colleague has just returned, fretfully, from a leadership course. Asked if he would describe himself as a worrier, he agreed he was. This was listed as a professional hindrance. But my colleague frowned that worrying shows you mind and want to do things properly.
A breezy type myself, I have always wanted worriers close to me. They stand between you and calamity. Not everyone is as indulgent as the late Lord Rothermere, the proprietor who mused after one of my disasters at the London Evening Standard: “Editors are like canaries, they fall off their perches and you just have to lift them back up again.”
We know that chance, faith, will and hope can spur achievement and that committee-minded caution can hold you back. In foreign policy we might cite the Falklands War or the UK’s military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 as successful acts of intuitive will. But then there is Iraq, and the banking crisis. It is significant that the worrier-in-chief Gordon Brown fulfilled his destiny only when his worst fears were realised and the financial system tottered. Tony Blair may have seen Mr Brown as an irritant, but was he not also the safeguard?