December 8, 2025

Political skill [is] the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

Sir Winston Churchill (1875–1965), British prime minister and statesman, The Cynic’s Lexicon, Jonathon Green, ed. (London: 1986), p.48

In the absence of a fully-functioning crystal ball, are you silly enough to make predictions about what is going to happen down the road? If you don’t, you won’t have to explain why you were so wrong. Or do you think the public has no memory?

This suggests that political skill is the equivalent of fortune-telling. It isn’t. Rather it is the ability to see and anticipate the impact of an issue before it becomes a problem. As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: “…at the beginning…an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.” In terms of political advice, that’s platinum.