The new government’s challenge is to reconstruct the country, says Ad Scheepbouwer.

After the elections I gave Mark Rutte and Diederik Samsom an honest piece of advice: skip the formation period and don’t waste your time drafting a government accord. Make sure you agree broadly on a couple of things, jot them down on the back of a beer mat, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

They don’t need your encouragement, people told me. Samsom and Rutte said they’d hurry, didn’t they? Well then

Now, two months after the elections and six months after the fall of the last cabinet we have a government accord but no sooner was it presented than it needed to be mended. And it won’t end there. Everyone is now ready to pounce and exact their pound of flesh.

Beer mat

That is good news. Rutte is given another opportunity to heed my advice and reduce the size of the accord to the back of that beer mat.

He doesn’t have to make a song and dance about it in parliament but he could bring it up when he’s chatting with his ministers in the Trêvezaal.

It could go something like this: ‘Listen up chaps, and I don’t want you to blab about this, but about the government accord: I know we have been saying we have one but by now the whole country knows it will have to be re-written not once but many times. But what people don’t know is that we will do the rewriting ourselves. That way we’ll keep the initiative.’

And if the ministers’ eyes haven’t glassed over by then Mark can hold forth a bit more on the art of government.

Balance

‘Maybe Diederik and I didn’t have a clear idea of what it meant to govern. Last week Trouw columnist Hans Goslinga quoted Piet Lieftinck, the post-war finance minister. To govern a country shouldn’t mean you put yourself in a straightjacket, he said.

‘It is a continuous process of re-evaluation, of struggling to get the balance right. That will be our new challenge. I see this cabinet as the last in a line of cabinets that have had to reconstruct the country’,  Rutte could say.

Let me start by saying that I’m very happy to see that the post-war cabinets of Drees and Schermerhorn have not been forgotten. Unfortunately they are far too reminiscent of the political quagmire of The Hague when what Rutte and Samsom need to do is to look to the world of business for inspiration.

When a big company employs a trouble-shooter he will start by throwing open the shutters. ‘Look this is what’s happening’, he’ll say. ‘Our customers are going elsewhere, investors are dumping our shares, and the creditors are banging on the door. It won’t be long before we’re in the hands of the receivers’. That is how he galvanises people into action and creates consensus for new policies.

KPN

When I was CEO of KPN my colleagues and I didn’t exactly go around polling the staff in the office garden but we did go out and ask key figures inside and outside the company to come up with ideas. Not that we were going to please everybody but we did at least strive for transparency.

The negotiators of Rutte 2 did exactly the opposite. They closed the shutters and announced that no information would be given. That obviously meant no information got in either. And then they pulled this enormous rabbit from the hat. Nobody understood how it was done and what should be done with it now that it was here.

The accord has at least resulted in a consensus about the rashness of the plans.

Not to worry. It can still all turn out ok. There’s every sign that the great hammering out, the adjusting, the moulding and the polishing has started. Rutte 2 is finally governing the country.

Ad Scheepbouwer is a private investor and former chief executive of KPN.