Chris Battle is the author of The Satoshi Strategy: Bitcoin, System Dynamics, and the Architecture of Sound Money, and runs a tutoring business in Bedford.
Westminster is full of highly educated people. Many have passed through Oxford or Cambridge, having studied PPE, economics or law. Some even made it onto the intellectually rigorous Civil Service Fast Stream, which has an acceptance rate of close to 2 per cent.
They are good at absorbing information, interrogating a brief and mastering the language of policy. But the complexity of modern government requires something more than mere credentials and fluency. It requires politicians with sufficiently deep intellectual frameworks to know what they believe, why they believe it and when the assumptions presented to them should be challenged.
That is the distinction between being ‘well informed’ and being ‘intellectually formed’. Serious reading does not guarantee good judgement, but it can give politicians the historical perspective, conceptual depth and conviction needed when events force difficult choices. Figures such as Javier Milei and Michael Gove show what can happen when ideas are carried into policy. Boris Johnson, on the other hand, shows why learning and instinct alone are not enough if they do not govern judgement under pressure.
Some politicians can identify almost exactly when their intellectual framework changed, and Milei is one of them. Before entering frontline politics, he had spent years teaching economics when a colleague recommended Murray Rothbard’s Monopoly and Competition.
After reading it, Milei concluded that “everything I’ve taught about market structure in the last 20 years in courses on microeconomics is wrong.” His response was not, as some might do, to skim a few related articles. Instead, he went to a specialist bookshop, purchased “at least 20 or 30 books”, returned the next day for more and began reading Rothbard, Mises, Hayek and other Austrian economists “very intensively”. He recalls starting Mises’s Human Action one weekend and not stopping until he had finished it. It was, as he put it , “a true revolution in my head”.
Milei consequently entered Argentine politics with an economic philosophy formed before he had acquired power, with a deep enough understanding to reconstruct his existing worldview and develop an answer to a basic question British politics often avoids: what should the state do, and what should it stop doing?
Here the connection to British Conservatism is already explicit. Kemi Badenoch has described Milei as an economic and political “template”. When the Financial Times asked whether Britain needed a Milei and whether she could be that politician, she answered rather bluntly: “yes and yes.”
Other Conservative politicians – both past and present – have also leant on intellectual depth as a means to govern properly. Michael Gove, for instance, drew heavily on cognitive science and writers such as Daniel Willingham and E. D. Hirsch in making the case that factual knowledge was not the enemy of critical thinking but one of its prerequisites. The argument did not remain in speeches, but rather informed changes to the curriculum, exams and overall expectations in schools.
Gove’s ideas were visible to me when I taught at Bedford Free School. Every day, pupils spent thirty minutes together reading classic literature, with every child expected to read aloud when called upon. It looked almost defiantly old-fashioned, and yet I watched pupils who initially struggled to sustain a paragraph become more confident readers who were willing to tackle difficult prose in front of their peers.
International comparisons since then are striking. England ranked 11th in mathematics and 13th in both reading and science in PISA 2022, compared with 27th, 25th and 16th respectively in 2009. PISA cannot by itself prove that Gove’s reforms caused the improvement, but that caution was not always so prominent when Finland’s earlier PISA performance was invoked as evidence for a very different educational philosophy.
But well-read politicians have their limits as well. Take Boris Johnson, for instance. Classics at Balliol, years of journalism and an entire book on Winston Churchill gave Johnson no shortage of historical reference points. His political persona was also built partly around suspicion of excessive state interference. Nor was he incapable of political clarity. “Get Brexit Done” gave his 2019 campaign a simple organising proposition and showed how effectively he could impose his own framing on a complicated political problem.
Then came Covid. By June 2021 vaccination had advanced rapidly, yet Johnson postponed the final lifting of restrictions from 21 June to 19 July because of the Delta variant.
Once vaccination had substantially changed the relationship between infection and severe disease, the question was not epidemiological alone. Scientists could estimate transmission, hospitalisation and vaccine effectiveness. They could not decide how much liberty, commerce and ordinary social life should be traded for a further reduction in health risk. That judgement belonged to our elected officials.
During the same crisis, Johnson behaved very differently on vaccines. The Vaccine Taskforce combined Civil Service, scientific, academic and private-sector expertise and was structured to enable unusually rapid decisions. The later government review highlighted its agility, use of outside expertise and direct engagement at the top of government.
For lockdown policy, Johnson largely accepted the framework presented by the scientific and administrative machinery around him. For vaccines, he backed a structure able to challenge normal processes and move quickly. The same Prime Minister could therefore be institutionally deferential in one sphere and entrepreneurial in another.
None of these cases supports a simple, uniform rule. Milei allowed reading to overturn his economic worldview. Gove carried an argument about knowledge into public institutions. Johnson had learning, liberal instincts and a demonstrated capacity for political decisiveness, but those ingredients did not always govern judgement when a crisis placed them under strain.
The lesson is not that well-read politicians are automatically right. It is that governing well requires more than intelligence, qualifications and access to expert advice. Ministers need ideas of their own, deeply enough understood to survive contact with events.
Westminster has no shortage of people capable of understanding a briefing. What it needs are politicians capable of judging the assumptions behind it, challenging them when necessary and knowing which principles they are prepared to defend when circumstances become difficult.
That is why the useful question is not simply: what are you reading? It is: what have you read deeply enough to change the way you would govern?
Chris Battle is the author of The Satoshi Strategy: Bitcoin, System Dynamics, and the Architecture of Sound Money, and runs a tutoring business in Bedford.
Westminster is full of highly educated people. Many have passed through Oxford or Cambridge, having studied PPE, economics or law. Some even made it onto the intellectually rigorous Civil Service Fast Stream, which has an acceptance rate of close to 2 per cent.
They are good at absorbing information, interrogating a brief and mastering the language of policy. But the complexity of modern government requires something more than mere credentials and fluency. It requires politicians with sufficiently deep intellectual frameworks to know what they believe, why they believe it and when the assumptions presented to them should be challenged.
That is the distinction between being ‘well informed’ and being ‘intellectually formed’. Serious reading does not guarantee good judgement, but it can give politicians the historical perspective, conceptual depth and conviction needed when events force difficult choices. Figures such as Javier Milei and Michael Gove show what can happen when ideas are carried into policy. Boris Johnson, on the other hand, shows why learning and instinct alone are not enough if they do not govern judgement under pressure.
Some politicians can identify almost exactly when their intellectual framework changed, and Milei is one of them. Before entering frontline politics, he had spent years teaching economics when a colleague recommended Murray Rothbard’s Monopoly and Competition.
After reading it, Milei concluded that “everything I’ve taught about market structure in the last 20 years in courses on microeconomics is wrong.” His response was not, as some might do, to skim a few related articles. Instead, he went to a specialist bookshop, purchased “at least 20 or 30 books”, returned the next day for more and began reading Rothbard, Mises, Hayek and other Austrian economists “very intensively”. He recalls starting Mises’s Human Action one weekend and not stopping until he had finished it. It was, as he put it , “a true revolution in my head”.
Milei consequently entered Argentine politics with an economic philosophy formed before he had acquired power, with a deep enough understanding to reconstruct his existing worldview and develop an answer to a basic question British politics often avoids: what should the state do, and what should it stop doing?
Here the connection to British Conservatism is already explicit. Kemi Badenoch has described Milei as an economic and political “template”. When the Financial Times asked whether Britain needed a Milei and whether she could be that politician, she answered rather bluntly: “yes and yes.”
Other Conservative politicians – both past and present – have also leant on intellectual depth as a means to govern properly. Michael Gove, for instance, drew heavily on cognitive science and writers such as Daniel Willingham and E. D. Hirsch in making the case that factual knowledge was not the enemy of critical thinking but one of its prerequisites. The argument did not remain in speeches, but rather informed changes to the curriculum, exams and overall expectations in schools.
Gove’s ideas were visible to me when I taught at Bedford Free School. Every day, pupils spent thirty minutes together reading classic literature, with every child expected to read aloud when called upon. It looked almost defiantly old-fashioned, and yet I watched pupils who initially struggled to sustain a paragraph become more confident readers who were willing to tackle difficult prose in front of their peers.
International comparisons since then are striking. England ranked 11th in mathematics and 13th in both reading and science in PISA 2022, compared with 27th, 25th and 16th respectively in 2009. PISA cannot by itself prove that Gove’s reforms caused the improvement, but that caution was not always so prominent when Finland’s earlier PISA performance was invoked as evidence for a very different educational philosophy.
But well-read politicians have their limits as well. Take Boris Johnson, for instance. Classics at Balliol, years of journalism and an entire book on Winston Churchill gave Johnson no shortage of historical reference points. His political persona was also built partly around suspicion of excessive state interference. Nor was he incapable of political clarity. “Get Brexit Done” gave his 2019 campaign a simple organising proposition and showed how effectively he could impose his own framing on a complicated political problem.
Then came Covid. By June 2021 vaccination had advanced rapidly, yet Johnson postponed the final lifting of restrictions from 21 June to 19 July because of the Delta variant.
Once vaccination had substantially changed the relationship between infection and severe disease, the question was not epidemiological alone. Scientists could estimate transmission, hospitalisation and vaccine effectiveness. They could not decide how much liberty, commerce and ordinary social life should be traded for a further reduction in health risk. That judgement belonged to our elected officials.
During the same crisis, Johnson behaved very differently on vaccines. The Vaccine Taskforce combined Civil Service, scientific, academic and private-sector expertise and was structured to enable unusually rapid decisions. The later government review highlighted its agility, use of outside expertise and direct engagement at the top of government.
For lockdown policy, Johnson largely accepted the framework presented by the scientific and administrative machinery around him. For vaccines, he backed a structure able to challenge normal processes and move quickly. The same Prime Minister could therefore be institutionally deferential in one sphere and entrepreneurial in another.
None of these cases supports a simple, uniform rule. Milei allowed reading to overturn his economic worldview. Gove carried an argument about knowledge into public institutions. Johnson had learning, liberal instincts and a demonstrated capacity for political decisiveness, but those ingredients did not always govern judgement when a crisis placed them under strain.
The lesson is not that well-read politicians are automatically right. It is that governing well requires more than intelligence, qualifications and access to expert advice. Ministers need ideas of their own, deeply enough understood to survive contact with events.
Westminster has no shortage of people capable of understanding a briefing. What it needs are politicians capable of judging the assumptions behind it, challenging them when necessary and knowing which principles they are prepared to defend when circumstances become difficult.
That is why the useful question is not simply: what are you reading? It is: what have you read deeply enough to change the way you would govern?