While recruiting for my company in the early 1990s, I met lots of business-school boys and girls. The first few struck me as completely amazing—their confidence, their projection. The things they said on their CVs about being “natural leaders”, how they were high achievers and team players, their range of smart internships worn like a row of medals, their international experience, impressive travel histories and achievements in smart hyperactive sports. And that was only the girls. It was terribly imp ressive and exciting, if a bit exhausting. But by the fifth interview I could see that they were all doing a branding job, building up a character from ready-mades, the kind they gave them at Robot School. I started to tune in to the vocabulary, and the body language (“never sprawl back in your chair—it looks disengaged—sit well forward and always make eye contact”) and longed for a candidate to tell me they collected 17th-century Iznik pottery, or better still, watched a lot of television. The same thing has happened to our elected representatives: audiences instantly recognise politicians who’ve been “done”—trained to high heaven—because their bouncy responses to questioning—never saying “yes” or “no”—are so different from how any other human would answer in the same situation, and yet so eerily alike.
