Jürgen Klopp’s departure holds lessons for leaders everywhere

Simon Kuper in The FT

In an era short on admired leaders, Jürgen Klopp has been a rare role model. The German football manager, who announced on Friday that he is resigning at the end of this season after nine years at Liverpool, offers numerous lessons for his counterparts in business and politics. 

First, he turned himself into the embodiment of the institution he led. He always presented himself not as a mere technocrat but as somebody who loved Liverpool FC. Having joined the club as an outsider, he worked to understand what it meant to everyone involved in it. In his hugs and emotional sprints along the touchline (and sometimes into the field), the giant with football’s most joyous smile expressed the feelings of every Liverpool fan. 

When the club won its first English league title in 30 years in 2020, he said, “I never could have thought it would feel like this, I had no idea,” and cried. He told Liverpool’s supporters: “It is a joy to do it for you.” He probably wasn’t faking it, giving that he has kept up the act practically daily since 2015. He understands that the whole point of professional football is shared communal emotion. 

Second, he treated his players and staff as humans, not as mere instruments for his own success. When one staff member was unaware that full-back Andy Robertson would soon become a father for the first time, Klopp asked: “How can you not know that? That is the biggest thing in his life now.” 

Klopp wanted to know everything about his players — “who they are, what they believe in, how they’ve reached this point, what drives them, what awaits them when they depart training.” And he meant it: “I don’t pretend I’m interested, I am interested.” 

Klopp is often praised as a motivator, but in fact few top-class footballers need motivation. His man-management was more sophisticated than that. His understanding of people helped him find the right words in clear, simple and cliché-free English, his second language. In 2019, after a 3-0 defeat in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final at Barcelona, he bounded smiling into Liverpool’s deflated changing-room shouting, “Boys, boys, boys! We are not the best team in the world. Now you know that. Maybe they are! Who cares? We can still beat the best team in the world. Let’s go again.” Before the return leg at Anfield, he told his players: “Just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.” 

He was lifting his men while also lifting the pressure: he gave them permission to fail. Instead, in perhaps the most breathtaking match of his tenure, they won 4-0, and went on to clinch the Champions League. His Liverpool lost two other Champions League finals. With a touch more luck, their achievement could have been generational. But even at the leanest moments, all the constituencies that make up a club — owner, players, staff, fans, media — wanted him around. Klopp made ruthless decisions without making enemies. 

Another leadership lesson: he could delegate. A football manager today is less autocrat than chief executive, overseeing a staff of dozens. Klopp provided the guiding vision, of a pressing game played at frenzied pace: “It is not serenity football, it is fighting football — that is what I like . . . Rainy day, heavy pitch, everybody is dirty in the face and they go home and can’t play football for the next four weeks.” 

He left most of the detail to specialists. For years he outsourced much of his training and match tactics to his assistant, Željko Buvač, whom Klopp called “the brain” of his coaching team. 

Klopp was so obviously the leader, an Alpha male blessed with empathy, that he felt secure enough to listen to others and admit error. In 2017, when Liverpool needed a striker, the club’s data analysts lobbied him to sign the Egyptian Mo Salah. Klopp preferred the German forward Julian Brandt. It took time, but eventually Klopp was persuaded to buy Salah. The Egyptian became arguably Liverpool’s most important player. Klopp later apologised to the analysts for his mistake. 

In a profession that attracts many megalomaniacs and then places them under inhuman stress, he was rare in never taking himself too seriously. He had views outside football — for leftwing politics, against Brexit — but he rejected the temptation to cast himself as a universal leader. When Covid-19 was spreading in early 2020, and a journalist fished for his views, he said experts should speak, not “people with no knowledge, like me . . . I don’t understand politics, coronavirus . . . I wear a baseball cap and have a bad shave.” 

His last leadership lesson: leave at the right time, with dignity. Today he explained his resignation: “I came here as a normal guy. I am still a normal guy, I just don’t live a normal life for too long now. And I don’t want to wait until I am too old to have a normal life, and I need, at least, to give it a try.” 

He also admitted fallibility, with a typically well-chosen metaphor: “I am a proper sports car, not the best one, but a pretty good one, can still drive 160, 170, 180 miles per hour, but I am the only one who sees the tank needle is going down.” It was a message to every failed leader currently clinging grimly to power.

Britain is not America. But we too are disfigured by deep and pervasive racism

Yes, it would be foolish to see only parallels in the US and UK experience. But to downplay our own problems would be shameful writes David Olusoga in The Guardian


 

Demonstrator at a Black Lives Matter protest on 6 June 2020 in Cardiff. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


One of the more pertinent statements made during this past extraordinary week appeared in one of the last places I would have thought to look – in the pages of Vogue, not a publication I instinctively turn to at a moment of profound political tension.

“Racism is a global issue. Racism is a British issue. It is not one that is merely confined to the United States – it is everywhere, and it is systemic,” wrote Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of the magazine’s British edition. The ubiquity of racism has been brought to stark and sudden attention by the killing of George Floyd and by the unprecedented wave of protests, demonstrations and rioting that followed.

Filmed by many witnesses and now viewed millions of times, the killing of Floyd by a Minnesota policeman, a 21st-century lynching, is so sickening a crime that the revulsion it has induced has become a global phenomenon.

The demonstrators and activists who have taken to the streets have, however, been motivated by more than revulsion. They have also been stirred to action by acknowledging a fundamental truth – that the killing of Floyd has to be understood as a symptom of systemic racism. By building their campaign around that reality they have promoted radical and challenging conversations – in countries on both sides of the Atlantic – about the nature of racism and the actions that people of all races can take in eliminating it. These are conversations that we have needed for a very long time.

Led by young people, many of them inspired by Black Lives Matter, and involving people of all ethnicities, the protests have morphed into a worldwide anti-racist movement. No longer is this moment solely about police violence nor is it limited to America. Both online and on the streets it is calling out racism, wherever it exists and in whatever forms it is found. In both the US and in Europe, people are asking, tentatively, if this might be a defining moment of change.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The British actor John Boyega speaks to the crowd during a Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park on 3 June 2020 in London, England. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death there was little reason to imagine anything would be any different this time around. For African Americans, one of the most appalling aspects of Floyd’s murder was that they had seen it all before. The same story with the same outcome, all that changed was the name of the victim – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Walter Scott.

For many black Britons, Floyd’s death stirred memories of another list of names, those of the members of their community killed or rendered disabled in similar circumstances at the hands of the British police or immigration officers. On Tuesday, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London – the closest thing we have in this country to a museum to the black British experience – tweeted the names and the photographs of some of them – Mark Duggan, Sheku Bayoh, Sean Rigg, Sarah Reed, Cherry Groce, Leon Briggs, Christopher Alder, Brian Douglas.

Yet almost instantly a predictable chorus of voices, emanating from predictable corners of British public life, rose up to dismiss the whole thing as an irrelevance. Using a familiar playbook, they accused those black Britons who see reflections of their own situation in the experiences of African Americans of making false comparisons.

The US situation is unique in both its depth and ferocity, they say, so that no parallels can be drawn with the situation in Britain. The smoke-and-mirrors aspect of this argument is that it attempts to focus attention solely on police violence, rather than the racism that inspired it. Those who make it usually point to the ubiquity of firearms in US law enforcement, as proof that the US reality is beyond meaningful comparison. But firearms had nothing to do with the killing of George Floyd. Neither were they a factor in the death of Freddie Gray or the sidewalk killing of Eric Garner, who, like Floyd, pleaded for his life, saying 11 times to the officers who pinned him down: “I can’t breathe”, the same words Floyd used in his final moments. Nor were guns involved in many of the cases when black people have died in custody or during arrest in Britain.


Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history

When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical. Few people would deny that in many respects life is better for non-white people in the UK than in the US. The problem is that it is not as “better” as some like to believe. Black men are stopped and searched at nine times the rate of white men. Black people make up 3% of the population of England and Wales but account for 12% of the prison population and not since 1971 have British police officers been prosecuted for the killing of a black man, and even then they were charged with the lesser crime of manslaughter and that charge was later dropped.

To say that the racism that infects parts of our police force and criminal justice system is less virulent than that which poisons the lives of 40 million African Americans is not much of a boast. Is that really the extent of our ambition – to be a somewhat less racist nation than one led by a man who describes white nationalists and members of the Ku Klux Klan as “very fine people”? Surely we who dwell in what the actor Laurence Fox recently assured us is “the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe” have higher hopes?

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history. It began in 1807, with the abolition of the slave trade and picked up steam three decades later with the end of British slavery, twin events that marked the beginning of 200 years of moral posturing and historical amnesia. The Victorian readers who rightly wept over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, conveniently forgot which nation had carried his ancestors into slavery and didn’t dwell on the fact that most of the cotton produced by American slaves like him was shipped to Liverpool.

For two centuries, we have deployed American racism as a distraction. It’s as if we find it easier to recognise American forms of racism than we do our own home-grown varieties. Convenient, as pointing fingers is always more comforting than looking in the mirror.

How much talent does the difficult player need?

Exceptionally gifted but unreliable players are often given lots of rope by management, but far too many seem to believe themselves to be deserving of that leeway

Ed Smith

May 20, 2014

 

	It's no surprise that Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and not be dropped for it © Getty Images  Enlarge

It's been a mixed week for sportsmen out of love with the authorities. Michael Carberry, overlooked after the Ashes tour, publicly stated his frustrations about a lack of communication from the selectors. Many assumed that Carberry, aged 33, had signed his own death warrant and would never play for England again. But the selectors have made a shrewd decision in recalling him. He is a decent, understated man; the England management now looks magnanimous in overlooking a few surprising quotes in a newspaper.

No such luck for Samir Nasri, the wonderfully gifted but moody French footballer. He has been left out of France's World Cup squad. France's coach, Didier Deschamps, explained his decision with bracing honesty: "He's a regular starter at Manchester City. That's not the case today with the France team. And he also said he's not happy when he's a substitute. I can tell you that you can feel it in the squad." Deschamps went further, anticipating his critics by conceding that Nasri was more talented than some players he had selected: "It's not necessarily the 23 best French players, but it's the best squad in my eyes to go as far as possible in this competition."

Talent v unity: an old story.

Rugby union, though, has also brought two mavericks back into the fold. Gavin Henson, Wales' troubled but mercurial playmaker, looks set to return to the red jersey. And England's Danny Cipriani, another flair player who has never found a happy home wearing national colours, has been thrown a lifeline. A last chance that both Henson and Cipriani cannot afford to miss? I bet they have heard that before. And then been handed just one final, last chance. That's often the way with rare talent: different rules apply.

As always, these debates have generally descended into an argument about abstract principles. Pundits have rushed to say that French football has a problem with finding a home for left-field characters. Other have bridled at Deschamps' logic: who should be happy being put on the bench anyway? It is the job of managers, we are often told, to finesse and handle talented but unconventional personalities. Indeed, with a moment's reflection, anyone can produce a list of world-beating players who didn't conform to a coach's template for a model professional - from Diego Maradona to Andrew Flintoff.

Such a list, sadly, proves absolutely nothing. Because it is just as easy to find examples of teams that began a winning streak by leaving out a talented but unreliable star player. The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 left out both David Ginola and Eric Cantona, just as the current side have now omitted Nasri.

In the popular imagination, the argument about dropping and recalling star players revolves around the juicy, gossipy questions: how difficult are they, how does their awkwardness manifest itself, has anyone tried to talk them round? This is naturally intriguing stuff. But the other half of the question - the crucial half - is too often ignored. Quite simply, how much better are they than the next guy?

	When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance

If you are a lot better, it is amazing how forgiving sports teams can be. Luis Suarez was banned for eight games for racially abusing Patrice Evra. He then served another ten-match ban for biting a Chelsea player. Obviously Liverpool sacked him instantly on the grounds that he was bringing the club into disrepute and becoming a distraction from the task of winning football matches? No, they didn't do anything of the kind. They calculated that Suarez was the best chance, their only chance, of mounting a challenge for trophies. If Suarez had been Liverpool's sixth- or seventh-best player, rather than their star man, he would have been kicked out years ago.

In other words, the best protection from being dropped for being "difficult" is to be brilliant. Even as a young man, England midfielder Paul Gascoigne was a heavy drinker and an unreliable man. But he was a sensational footballer. Coaches put up with him because they calculated it was in their own and the team's rational self-interest. By the latter stages of his career, Gascoigne was still a heavy drinker and an unreliable man, but he was now only occasionally an excellent footballer. Glenn Hoddle felt Gascoigne was too unfit to play at the 1998 World Cup. The glass was half-empty.

When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance. That is why Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and (nearly) always stay in the team. Any rational man who asked himself the question: "Are Australia a better team with Warne in it?" came to the unavoidable conclusion: "Yes, definitely."

Here's the central point. At this exalted level of elite sport, a great number of players have an epic degree of self-belief. Being convinced of their own greatness is an aspect of their magic. They back themselves to shape the match, to determine its destiny - especially the big matches. Instead of seeing themselves as just one of a number of exceptionally talented players, in their own minds they are men apart, special cases.

They aren't always right, though. So the question becomes: how good, how difficult? They are two aspects of the same equation, a calculation that is being made every day by coaches all over the world - on the school pitch, in the reserves squad, all the way to the World Cup final.

A player, too, must make his own calculation. Would pretending to be someone else - a more compliant, easy-going man - centrally detract from my performances? Must I play on my own terms, behaving as I like? But this question must coexist with another, less comfortable one: am I good enough to get away with it?

Not many. Fewer, certainly, than the number who think they can.

Match Fixing in Football and in the UK too?

Fifa wants tough sentences for criminals who are caught match fixing

• Governing body's security head says sentences 'too weak'
• More than 700 suspect football fixtures under investigation

• David Conn
• The Guardian, Monday 4 February 2013 19.51 GMT

Fifa has called for longer prison sentences for criminals involved in match-fixing after the EU intelligence-sharing agency Europol said more than 700 matches worldwide are suspected of having been manipulated.

Ralf Mutschke, Fifa's head of security and a former Interpol official, said: "Match-fixing and match-manipulation is a global problem and is not going to go away tomorrow." He argued that although "a member of the football family" can be given a life ban by Fifa, "for people outside of football, the custodial sentences are too weak, and offer little to deter someone from getting involved in match-fixing".

An unidentified European Champions League tie played in England "within the last three to four years" is one of the matches under investigation (Editor's note -Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet reported it was Liverpool’s 1-0 win over the Hungarian team Debrecen in the 2009 Champions League group stage), Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said. While the "focus" of the investigation is not on England, Wainwright said: "Given the scale of corruption involved, it would be naive and complacent to think that the criminal conspiracy does not affect the English game."

The Football Association said that while it takes "matters of integrity in football extremely seriously", Europol had not informed the FA of its suspicions about the Champions League tie.

"The FA [is] not aware of any credible reports into suspicious Champions League fixtures in England, nor has any information been shared with us," an FA spokesman said.

More than 380 football matches in Europe are under investigation for match-fixing, Europol said, including top-flight domestic league matches and qualifiers in the European Championship and World Cup. In addition, some 300 matches in Africa, Asia, South and Central America are suspected of having been fixed by "an extensive criminal network".

Europol said 425 people from more than 15 countries are suspected of being involved in attempts to fix the 380 matches played at different levels of professional football across Europe. Those under suspicion include players, match officials, club staff and "serious criminals". Europol calculated that more than €8m (£6.8m) in betting profits had been corruptly made, with in excess of €2m in "corrupt payments" made to football people.

"This is a sad day for European football and more evidence of the corrupting influence in society of organised crime," Wainwright said. "This is match-fixing on a scale we've not seen before, involving hundreds of criminals and corrupted officials and players, affecting hundreds of professional matches and generating very large amounts of illicit profits. It is the work of a sophisticated international organised crime syndicate based in Asia and working with criminal facilitators around Europe."

Some of the cases have been prosecuted, while others remain the subject of continued investigation. Following an investigation by prosecutors in Bochum, Germany, 14 people were convicted of match-fixing, and received prison sentences totalling 39 years. Andreas Bachmann, of the Bochum prosecution service, said that 20 further arrest warrants have been issued, along with 86 search warrants for premises in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He said the €2m Europol has calculated to have been paid in bribes should be assumed to be "only the tip of the iceberg".

Laszlo Angeli, from the central investigative chief prosecutor's office in Hungary, referred to a friendly between Argentina and Bolivia as one of the matches under suspicion.
Europol has had an investigation team, codenamed operation Veto, running since July 2011 to share information among EU countries, and is co-operating with Interpol for the matches under suspicion outside Europe. The agency alleges that the betting gangs are based in Asia – the Bochum investigation found the operation was run from Singapore – and associates were required to bribe the football people involved.

Investigations are also ongoing into alleged laundering of the proceeds in tax havens. "All those responsible for running football should heed the warnings," Wainwright said.

Fifa said that it is committed to tackling match-fixing, and aside from calling for tougher penalties also urged stronger co-operation between sporting bodies and law enforcement agencies.

Wainwright said he will be providing Michel Platini, the Uefa president, with details of the investigation, although Europol did not identify the allegedly suspicious Champions League tie, or any other match or person subject to investigation.

"Uefa is already co-operating with the authorities on these serious matters as part of its zero tolerance policy towards match-fixing," Uefa said.

-------

'Match-fixing is reality' says Burkina Faso coach banned in Belgium

Paul Put claims practice has always existed in football after Europol announces up to 380 matches are under suspicion

• 
• • Jonathan Wilson in Nelspruit
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 5 February 2013 18.21 GMT

Paul Put, Burkina Faso's head coach, served a three-year ban in Belgium after being found guilty of fixing two matches. Photograph: Armando Franca/AP

 

For Paul Put, the Belgian coach of Burkina Faso, the statement from Europol that it had found evidence that as many as 380 matches in Europe had been fixed came as no great surprise. He is one of the very few coaches to have been banned for fixing games, serving a three-year ban in Belgium that expired in 2011 after being found guilty of fixing two matches while manager of Lierse.

He remains adamant he was just a scapegoat and that the practice is widespread. "Match-fixing has always existed in football," Put says. "If you look at cycling, at Lance Armstrong, it's always him who is pointed at but everybody was taking drugs. It's not that I've been doing match-fixing, not at all, but it has been declared in the media like this. I also played football and I saw a lot of things. I don't think you can change it. It's unfortunate but I think in every sport you have to face those things. That is reality but what can you do about that?"

The Armstrong defence is unlikely to win Put much sympathy and it is not entirely clear whether he considers himself innocent of the charges or whether he simply regards it as unfair that he was punished when so many others who are allegedly guilty have not been.

"I accepted the ban because Fifa said I could work, so I didn't make any trouble in Belgium," he says.
Does he, then, view himself as a scapegoat? "Yes," the 56-year-old says. "It's the same like Lance Armstrong. It's the same. Everybody is pointing at Lance but without this he is the biggest champion. I don't think this is right. You have to see what's going on in football. There are a lot of big international players who are involved in match-fixing. I think it was worse in the past and these teams have survived."

What is known is that Lierse twice unexpectedly fielded reserve teams in Belgian top-flight league matches in 2005, seemingly as part of a match-fixing ring allegedly organised by the Chinese businessman Ye Zheyun. An international arrest warrant was issued against Ye in 2006 but he returned to China and denies all charges.

Lierse were the only club sanctioned and Put the only individual. Forty people, including Put, have been charged and face a criminal trial but that is unlikely to come to court for at least another two years.

"The suspension was a decision of the federation," Put says. "You always have to make an example for the whole world. We were all surprised because they took only one.

"You know there are more than 40 people. The whole of Belgian football was sick at that time. I was threatened by the mafia. My child was not safe. They threatened me with weapons and things like that. It's not nice to talk about these things but this is the reality."

So is he saying he was forced to fix games? "I was forced but 'fixing games' are big words," he says. "The team at that moment had nothing. It was in a very bad condition. There was no hope, no money, nothing.

"They made up a crazy story about match-fixing but other teams did the same. You have to see a lot of things and how it came about. It was not by our will. I am not a manager – just a coach.
"This is not a decision of a coach and a player. It is a whole team. If you want to fix a game you don't need 12 players. If you want to fix a game you can do it with one. That's what I don't understand – people didn't speak of the reality."

As the scandal broke, Put left Belgium and became the coach of Gambia, where he had significant success, taking them to a record high of 65 in the Fifa rankings. His achievements with Burkina Faso are even greater.

Apart from 1998 when they hosted the tournament, the Stallions had never progressed beyond the group stage of the Africa Cup of Nations but on Wednesday they face Ghana in the semi-finals, having gone 367 minutes in the tournament without conceding a goal.

Put regards their progress as some kind of redemption. "I have been working very hard," he says. "It was a very hard time for me and my family and my friends.

"If they point at you and you are the only one, it is hard. I've been fighting, fighting, working, working, day and night, and at least I now I have satisfaction."

He knows the route back to Belgium is probably closed forever, but Put dreams of better things. "My challenge," he says, "is to go to a big country with a big team and prove myself." What he has done with Burkina Faso will not clear his name but it may help people forget his past.

Policy can trump unpopularity - A way to solve the EU crises

By Martin Hutchinson

As is well known to readers of this column, it is my considered opinion that economic policy and management reached a global all-time apogee (so far - one can always hope) under the British prime ministership of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord Liverpool (prime minister, 1812-27). However Liverpool is generally thought to have had one enormous advantage over modern policymakers in not having to deal with a modern democracy. Unlike modern democratic leaders, he was thus only moderately constrained by his policies' temporary unpopularity.

The Greek crisis has however graphically illustrated that popular resentment at unpalatable economic change is very much as it was in 1812-20, and that policymakers responding to that resentment are at least as insulated from popular feeling as were Liverpool and his government. Unfortunately, unlike Liverpool, they are not using that insulation to good effect.

If the European Union's policy elite had possessed Liverpool's depth of economic understanding, the crisis would have been easily solved, and indeed would not have arisen in the first place. Liverpool would have put Europe onto a gold standard; if he had been thwarted in that he might well have supported the euro but would certainly not have admitted Greece into its membership.

He would immediately have spotted the disgraceful discrimination against the private sector involved in the Basel Committee's zero rating of government debt, a principal cause of the crisis because it has favored bank funding of excessive government deficits over productive lending to the private sector. He would have opposed root and branch governments increasing their deficits through "stimulus" spending, pointing out the superior recession-fighting record produced by his own 1816-19 austerity.

Once the crisis had arisen, Liverpool's solution would have been simple and complete. He would have perceived by a simple analysis of relative productivity that Greece had no hope of solving its problems while it remained a member of the euro. He would thus have forced it to readopt the drachma when the crisis first arose, in spring 2010. Following such re-adoption the drachma would have immediately devalued by about two thirds, taking Greek per capita income down to about $11,000 from the $32,000 at which it stood in 2008.

Naturally a further result would have been a Greek debt default, from which Liverpool would have stood back entirely. If the Greek government wished to bail out its banking system with drachma paper (thereby weakening the drachma further) that would be its choice, but not one cent of German and Swedish taxpayer money would be provided to facilitate this process.

Similarly, Liverpool would have allowed the Irish government to default, as a result of its foolish 2008 attempt to bail out its banking system, and would have given Spain, Italy and Portugal the alternative of leaving the euro or adopting austerity programs rigorous enough to keep them members (those austerity programs would have needed to be less rigorous than Latvia's, but in any case their adoption would have been a matter for the national governments themselves, with neither coercion nor extra resources provided by the EU.)

Should Liverpool's rigorous policies have caused problems in Europe's overleveraged and badly managed banks, Liverpool would not have stopped the European Central Bank from providing resources to eurozone banks, but only on the terms eventually prescribed by Walter Bagehot - short-term loans against first-class security at punitively high interest rates. There would have been no bailouts, as Liverpool, with his knowledge of the 1720 Mississippi and South Sea crashes, would have regarded "too big to fail" as being equivalent to "too big to be allowed to live".

Liverpool's policies would thus have been dictated neither by sentimentality about the inevitable short-term pain his policies would cause, nor by political considerations of their probable unpopularity, but simply by their likelihood of solving the problem in a market-friendly way and thereby allowing economic growth to resume in the Eurozone as a whole. They would have been basically free-market oriented, but not dictated by free trade or other dogma, as were the policies of the free traders a generation later.

By their apparent harshness, they would have made him highly unpopular, yet they would have stopped economic decay in its tracks and would have allowed Europe to rise above the problems of its periphery, while that periphery led productive existences at the lower living standards justified by their modest output potential.

The Liverpool government's attitude to popularity was best expressed not by Liverpool himself but by his colleague Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, who as leader of the House of Commons bore much of the opprobrium for Liverpool's policies. In 1821, after the 1816-19 "double-dip" recession had lifted, he remarked "I am as popular now as I was unpopular formerly, and of the two, unpopularity is the more convenient and gentlemanlike."

Some years ago I wrote a piece quoting Castlereagh and extolling the virtues of unpopular economic policies. The piece was picked up by the Almaty Herald - it was doubtless to the taste of Kazakhstan president (since 1991) Nursultan Nazarbayev, who felt it proved that his economic policies, being unpopular, must therefore be beneficial. I would like to correct any misapprehension: my extolment of unpopularity was not intended to justify every action of Central Asian dictators by suggesting their economic policies must be superior. The unhappy fact that good economic policies are often unpopular does not imply that unpopular economic policies are ipso facto good.

Liverpool would have understood the EU bureaucracy's desire to insulate itself from populism, and would have been intrigued by the ingenuity of some of the mechanisms by which it achieves this insulation. The idea of a permanent appointed secretariat that was only distantly accountable to the electorate would have seemed to him a plausible alternative to the pre-1832 franchise of rotten boroughs, open vote purchase and limited voting rights.

However, he would have scoffed at claims by the EU leaders that their supposed democratic antecedents gave them a moral superiority and would have correctly pointed out that his pre-1832 franchise was far more accountable than the EU bureaucracy, in that it gave considerable weight to public opinion when broadly held over a prolonged period.

In any case, Liverpool would have had no time at all for the policies the insulated EU bureaucracy pursues. He would have regarded its economics as riddled with error, and the mantra that "economists never agree" as a mere excuse to justify that error - he would have pointed out that the members of the average high school algebra class don't agree on the solution to the week's problems, either, but that's because half of them have bungled their calculations.

He would have regarded EU attempts to impose their lifestyle and ideology choices on the people of Europe as appalling tyranny, which would have reminded him most of the fanatical and cruel Jacobins of Maximilien Robespierre, a movement with which he was very familiar. As I remarked above and Liverpool was well aware, insulation from democratic accountability does not necessarily produce good policies, and in the case of the EU apparatchiks it has bred arrogance and corruption.

Whereas the policies and desires of the EU bureaucracy would have appeared strange and repellent to Liverpool, those of the Greek rioters would have been completely recognizable. His ascent to power, after all, coincided with the Luddite anti-machinery riots. The fury of a populace finding unpalatable change imposed on it by economic forces outside its control would have been entirely explicable, as would the even greater fury of a people losing economically unjustified comforts to which they had become accustomed.

Greek prime minister George Papandreou's claim on Thursday that "We are bearing a cross and we are being stoned", with its extreme biblical overtones, would have appeared very similar indeed to the rantings of "Orator" Hunt and his peers.

Perceiving the Greek problem and anticipating the Greek reaction to policies imposed by the EU bureaucracy, Liverpool would have rightly informed German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the correct response to such rhetoric and disturbances is firmness, not handouts.

In the Greek case, firmness, ie forcibly restoring the drachma, is perfectly feasible, since the EU authorities are not in reality subject to significant democratic control. Moreover, the economically superior outcome of a firm policy, as with Liverpool's own firmness in 1816-19, would restore tranquility even to the aggrieved Greek populace within a very few years and would preserve economic stability and growth elsewhere.

In this crisis, there is thus no excuse for Europe's leaders not pursuing policies that actually work.

Martin Hutchinson is the author of Great Conservatives (Academica Press, 2005) - details can be found on the website www.greatconservatives.com - and co-author with Professor Kevin Dowd of Alchemists of Loss (Wiley, 2010). Both are now available on Amazon.com, Great Conservatives only in a Kindle edition, Alchemists of Loss in both Kindle and print editions.