One of the very hardest things for a newly elected leader is to move into a new frame of mind – and give organisational expression to it.

Above all, how best to deploy the people who have slaved away to achieve victory and now expect a role in Power?

The problem is that running a government is completely different from running an election campaign. Will the people did such a fine job in the latter in fact be any good at the former?

And in ways which are impossible to explain to outsiders or even to insiders, it all starts and ends right at the very top. The tone of voice, the air of authority, the confidence and courtesy and wisdom of the people immediately around the Leader all combine to send positive signals through the government system as a whole.

Which also works the other way. Ill-temper, discourtesy, disorganisation, indecisiveness and so on at the very top spread downwards and outwards very fast.

My own classic example of this was when John Major visited Moscow as PM. He made a good personal impression when talking to people. But there was just no Authority. He did well at a press conference, but as he came back-stage afterwards his question to his team was a sort of uneasy "How was I?".

Not: "They nailed me on that one – kick the sorry asses of the people who wrote that brief, and let’s get it right next time!"

In short there was a baffling lack of self-confidence right at the top, which led to the sense of doomed ‘greyness’ of the people around him – they could not be more bright and positive than the PM was. And that permeated the government as a whole.

Whereas with Tony Blair there was the opposite phenomenon, which also has been disastrous – a breezy instinct for charming spin, ‘winging it’ from the sofa without doing the work, getting away with just what is needed and no more, avoiding confrontation, politics by bubble.

And let’s not mention Gordon Brown’s calamitous team.

All of which leads us to various hard-edged looks in the USA at where President Obama has been going wrong. They do not make pretty reading.

He looks to have given too much power to a tiny core of trusted people whose ambition and vanity has got far out of control. Much to the detriment of good advice and steady policy-making:

… needed advice from a broader range of advisers "is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang’s tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office, but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured."

Memo to Next Leader:

Start thinking now about how you are going to bring into your close, most trusted circles people you never may have met, but who will be vital to delivering the right results – and how you are going to nudge some of your current most trusted people away from the policy roles they so fervently expect.

Otherwise you’ll just make a hash of a huge opportunity – as Obama is doing.