In an interview on The French Revolution

A nice thought on which to end, thank you very much for your suggestions.

Before Cameron kills him off.

In an interview on Lobbying

I’ve been reading Machiavelli and having a marvelous time trying to figure out which particular aspect of The Prince makes it top of your list of books on lobbying.

I studied political theory when I was in college and Machiavelli was always intriguing to me. It’s a description of the human character and in my profession, lobbying, which is all about influencing people, it’s important to get some insights into human nature. Obviously there’s a debate about what Machiavelli really meant: whether it was meant as a parody or satire. But I thought he had a good understanding of human nature.

But it’s a very, very cynical understanding of human nature. For example he says it was Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty’ that allowed him to succeed.

That’s true, but then you can take someone like Hobbes, who says that life is nasty, brutish and short. If you are trying to influence policymakers, one can be realistic, one can be cynical, ultimately it’s about what you think the human condition is like. And when Machiavelli talks about flattery, when he talks about characteristics like that…

There’s certainly something to be said for being realistic. I particularly like this quote: ‘How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live...’ It’s hard to disagree with that one. Also this idea that being naïve about the world has its own dangers: ‘Who tries to be virtuous soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.’

Yes, and you could also quote Lord Acton saying ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ In my life you have people coming to Washington who want to do good or turn the country around and are seduced. They are seduced by power, they are seduced by wanting to stay in office. It’s fascinating, because whether you’re talking about MoveOn.org [on the left] or the Tea Parties [on the right], that’s what happens, that’s what’s happening now. There are people who have been seduced by Washington, and in that sense Machiavelli is also apt. But the reason I started with The Prince, which was written in the 16^th century, is also to show that this matter of influencing, this matter of governing, this matter of reconciling various interests, reconciling various goals, various personal and public ambitions, goes all the way back to the beginning. It’s not a new phenomenon.  We talk about lobbying - the term was first used to refer to the British parliament - but it goes all the way back.

On a day-to-day basis, what is the most useful lesson of The Prince as you grace the corridors of power?

This question of how to govern. The isolation of the policymakers, who are surrounded by adulators, the flattery, the seduction of power. It’s all of those things that characterize human frailty, human hubris, which he picks up on.

So you try and play on those weaknesses?

I’m not sure I play on them. I understand them – I try to understand human nature as well as I possibly can. When I looked at The Lobbyists for example, and I read what the author there, Jeffrey Birnbaum, said about me. In many ways - yes. I was exploiting what Machiavelli said to exploit: being deferential, flattering people…

In an interview on Negotiation

You definitely need patience for that. Your first choice is The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, which you studied at university.

History students at Oxford have to read The Prince. It has the benefit of being very short and it stuck in my mind. While at Number 10, I was looking for a book on how to wield power in practice. I chose this one. Many books deal with the theory of the British constitution but few look at how power works in practice. It’s almost treated as a dirty subject. Machiavelli was one of the earliest diplomats. Negotiation was his life; he saw it as power. That’s what really got me interested in him.

Do you think the fundamentals he discusses remain the same?

Very much so. The reason we still read the book today is that, like Shakespeare’s plays, it’s based on human nature. Just as you nod along to Hamlet or Macbeth and acknowledge that aspects of human nature in them are present in people today, the same is true of The Prince. Machiavelli broke away from the Augustinian notion of what the world should or ought to be. He wrote about what he observed around him. That’s what makes him so interesting.

The book obviously had a big effect on you because your recent book is The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World.

Yes. Instead of writing another memoir of the Blair years, I did something a little different. I took Machiavelli’s maxims and principles – like the one about a leader being a lion and a fox – and tried to see if they still worked in modern politics. Surprisingly, many of them did. Tony Blair’s negotiating tactics in Northern Ireland were largely based on the lion-and-fox approach. There’s no way he could have moved forward if he’d not possessed some fox-like qualities. He calls it ‘constructive ambiguity’ in his own book: trying to lead people into agreements for which they weren’t necessarily ready. Equally, if he hadn’t been a lion and believed he could do it, he wouldn’t have got there. British leaders like Winston Churchill had given up on Northern Ireland. Because he thought he could solve it, Blair did not. You need both ‘lion’ and ‘fox’ attributes for that.