Leading Article: Differing fortunes of two grey men

IT COULD be called a tale of two leaders. In Brittany yesterday, the French Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur, risked being slapped in the face with a wet cod when attempting to placate the leaders of rioting French fishermen. In London a few hours earlier our own Prime Minister had to summon up only enough machismo to tell the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers to stop their damaging backbiting and bickering. No need for security to search Tory MPs for wet fish hidden about their persons. In other words, Mr Balladur has real social difficulties to deal with. Mr Major's problems are, by comparison, trivially political.

The contrasting fortunes of these two relatively grey men are instructive, not least about the nature of leadership. Neither seems at first sight likely to strike a very resonant chord with the public. Both lack the normal attributes of charisma: eloquence, charm, good looks. Mr Balladur appears a trifle snooty, Mr Major somewhat too anxious to be liked.

Yet France's prime minister has become the most popular and respected leader in Europe, and is widely expected to win next year's presidential elections. His British counterpart has in the same period seen his own rating, as well as his party's, plumb new depths.

The contrast is the more remarkable since Mr Balladur's position is in several respects less favourable than Mr Major's. France's workers remain volatile, and Mr Balladur has felt obliged to propitiate them several times. In this country, hours lost through strikes have reached a record low, and trade unions are co-operating wholeheartedly in deals to maximise productivity. In France, unemployment stands at 12 per cent, is expected to rise and is seen as a potentially inflammable political and social issue. Here it stands at 9 per cent (using comparable OECD figures), and is falling in spite of periodic shock closures and large-scale redundancies. Painfully high though it remains, few people are convinced that the Opposition's suggested antidotes would prove either effective or free of unpleasant side-effects.

Above all, the British economy is expanding while France's remains in the grip of recession, for all Mr Balladur's judicious pump-priming. True, Britain's recession was far longer and deeper than France's is likely to be. Through such traumas as penal mortgage rates and home repossessions it inflicted damage on natural Tory voters that has no real parallel in France. That should only have heightened political gratitude when better times came.

Where lies the secret of Mr Balladur's success? Certainly in political as well as personal factors. When he was selected by President Mitterrand to lead the right-of- centre coalition that swept the Socialists out in last year's elections, his was a relatively new face: a welcome change from those two old rivals, his own former patron, Jacques Chirac, and the former president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Such economic mistakes as had to be corrected could be firmly attributed to the defeated socialists. The new team that set about the task had not had its energies sapped or been otherwise corrupted by years of power and patronage.

But personal qualities are needed to achieve personal popularity. Mr Balladur has proved to be not only a very sensitive political operator but also an unexpectedly impressive communicator. He gives the impression of saying what he genuinely believes, of 'telling it like it is', and of being a man of high intelligence who, for all the pressures of politics, remains true to himself. The net effect is of a man of stature; as some would say, a class act. In short, he has the ability to project himself as he is.

No one who knows Mr Major or has seen him in action at, say, an international conference, doubts that he is a very able politician as well as a very nice man. But he will have to draw on hitherto untapped reserves if he is to bridge the natural authority gap that divides him from that redoubtable operator across the Channel.