To interrogate and contribute to Bennister, Worthy and t’Hart’s work on ‘leadership capital’, by analysing two versions of one type of leadership, transformational and charismatic, as identified by MacGregor Burns (1978) and Weber (1964). We shall identify and critique transformational leadership from an operational perspective, and charismatic leadership from the definitional perspective. We shall then elaborate what we see as a more helpful (working) definition: leadership as an ‘event’ within an (imagined) relationship. We shall pay special attention to the iconographic as integral to performance as event. Then follows case study analysis and comparative analysis of four political ‘performances’ from leaders on the left of the political spectrum (2 British, 2 French) – Tony Blair, François Mitterrand, François Hollande, and Ed Miliband, that is to say, performance of ‘themselves’, and their deployment and display of ‘characters’ with personality traits. We shall examine the relationship between these ‘characters’ and the wider discourse of the left. We will test our own notion of ‘characterial capital’, and its contribution to Bennister, Worthy and t’Hart’s working definition of political capital and their development of a leadership capital index. We shall place special emphasis upon the cultural conditions of performance: national, historical, institutional, and narrative/ideological. The four case studies are: Blair and the death of Diana (we shall draw upon research already done here, particularly by Bennister); the iconography of Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential elections; the first year in office (May 2012-May 2013) of Hollande; and conference performance of Miliband (here we will draw on our own previous, and an emerging body of recent research by inter alia, Finlayson, Atkins, Street…). Emphasis will be placed in our analysis upon ‘actual performance’ in our case studies, and the relationship of each to their own formative narratives, institutions, and political culture.
