Failure: nothing to fear in it. As long as you don’t deny it

When I was a teenager, I read some books about playing chess, in the mistaken hope that I had it in me to learn to be a good player. Only one lesson from that time sticks in my mind: the advice never to play out a losing game. If your position is hopeless, the book told me, concede and start a new game, since that will give you more useful practice.

I never got any good at chess but the lesson stayed with me forever: if you’re getting nowhere at what you’re doing, stop and try something else. That way you’ll have learned something from a failure and, far from being a blow, it will have become a precious lesson.

Probably one of the most frequently quoted sayings about failure comes from the American basketball star, Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.

My view is that there are two principles in what Michael Jordan’s saying: the first is the same as mine with chess, that there are lessons to be given by failure, maybe indeed lessons that can only be learned from failure; the second, that fear of failure makes success impossible – if you’re not prepared to run the risk of failure, you can never win.

What is essential, though, is to be prepared to recognise your failure. Otherwise, there’s no chance of learning from it.

I played the piano for thirty years. At the end of that time, I realised that my two sons were taking three weeks to learn to play pieces more competently than I had in three decades. It finally came home to me that my talents, such as they were, lay in a different direction – and I embarked on that direction.

These are issues of burning importance in Britain today.

Theresa May once pulled a parliamentary vote on the deal she had negotiated with the EU to cover Britain’s departure, because she feared she would lose. How justified her fear was became clear when she finally did put it to the vote, and lost by the biggest majority ever inflicted on a government in a British parliament.

Even then, though, she didn’t recognise that she’d got nowhere and submitted the same deal to parliament again. This time she lost by a majority not quite as huge as the first time, but still a crushing one.

She seems completely fixated on her deal. Nothing will deter her from it. Indeed, she’s talking about submitting it for a third vote, not apparently prepared to admit that doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. I sometimes think of May as a visionary, if that term can be used for a tunnel-visionary: someone who simply can’t see out of the sides of the extremely narrow blinkers she’s wearing.

She clearly hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise her own failure. But others in her Conservative Party clearly have. It’s up to them to remove her from office as quickly as possible before she does much more damage.

Still, it’s not the Conservative Party that’s my concern. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life and have no intention of changing my mind now. A much more serious worry to me is what’s happening in the Labour Party.

The dismal faces of British politics
Their failure would matter less if their followers recognised it and acted on it

In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a man whose whole life has been about mobilising mass movements to achieve political ends. And, boy, does he have the opportunity to do that now. The petition to revoke article 50 – to cancel Brexit – has now attracted more signatures than any previous petition on Parliament’s site. A million turned out in London for the latest anti-Brexit march, but as usual Jeremy wasn’t there. Indeed, as usual on these marches, one of the chants was “Jeremy Corbyn, where are you?”

Even his deputy, Tom Watson, who apparently can recognise a mass movement when he sees one, was there and showing he could both walk the walk and talk the talk. Among other intelligent suggestions, he offered Labour backing for May’s plan on condition it was made subject to a new referendum with Remain as an option. Jeremy, meanwhile, was canvassing for local elections in Morecambe Bay, about as far from the march as he could get without leaving England.

It’s true, as Corbyn recently said, that problems such as poverty and climate change are more urgent than Brexit. What he doesn’t seem to recognise is that both of those problems will be made worse by Brexit. And, most important of all, Brexit is the question that faces any British politician now. 

Clement Attlee, who had the task of rebuilding the Labour Party as leader in the 1930s would, I’m sure, far rather have been dealing with creating a National Health Service or nationalising some key industries (as he did in the government he led after 1945), but right then, the key issue was the rise of Hitlerite Germany and how Britain would address it.

Attlee rose magnificently to the challenge.

Corbyn, faced with his challenge, ran away to Morecambe Bay.

Like May, he’ll never recognise his failures. But it’s time that Labour members did. And drew the glaringly obvious conclusion that Corbyn just isn’t up to the job.

Never play out a losing game. Call a halt and make the necessary changes. The most necessary of all? Part company with both Corbyn and Corbynism.

And time’s short, so do it fast.