A groundbreaking new treatment of King Lear opened last year in London, with a tour of Broadway this spring. The conventional treatment of Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy has been to cast him as a tragic victim of his own hubris and caprice, unwittingly stripped of all dignity and worth by unloving daughters who are composed of few, if any, redeeming characteristics.

This new treatment inverts things not just by having Lear played by a woman – the towering thespian Glenda Jackson – but by suggesting that Goneril and Regan are actually sympathetic characters, moved to their manipulative entreatments by the complete insanity of their father. Their desire to trick Lear into handing over the kingdom to them is motivated less by greed than by an urgent desire to save it from an unfit king who, once shorn of power, must not be allowed any return to it lest he do further damage. Far from being a graceful slow exit, Lear’s attempts to hand over his kingdom while still retaining “the name, and all the addition to a king” is an attempt by a madman to preserve his clutches onto power.

The king’s flailing attempts to retain the keys of a kingdom he has gifted away reminded me of Helen Zille’s latest decision to re-enter politics and assume the power she had relinquished to another very recently.

The golden rules of leadership and management vary from book to book, but one which seems to be sacrosanct is for leaders not to give in to the worse angels of their nature and attempt to rule from beyond the grave.

Never think of yourself as indispensable, but know when to go. Allow others to choose your successor. Don’t dictate to him or her when you leave. To do any of the above is to potentially undermine, to threaten the kingdom with chaos, as Jackson’s crazed Lear does.

Several cautionary tales spring to mind. The most obvious is Churchill in 1951 – when the 74-year-old astonished his long-standing deputy Anthony Eden by refusing to step down and insisted on running for a second term of office, despite Eden having effectively run the country during the war years, and having waited in the wings for so long. Within a year of resuming the prime ministership Churchill had had a debilitating stroke. Yet limpet-like he clung on for several more years until the clock finally ran out on a sclerotic premiership. Poor Eden. He was so exhausted at having wasted an entire decade; within 18 months of assuming power he was duped by the Americans at Suez and had to resign in disgrace.

More recently, Malaysia’s Mahatir Mahomad meddled in politics long after he had left office – and extraordinarily even engineered a return to the top in 2018 at the age of 92. Mahatir, who first assumed power in 1981, groomed his first successor Anwar Ebrahim to take over from him but seems to have changed his mind soon after. Ebrahim was imprisoned twice on what seemed to be trumped-up charges of sodomy. Mahatir then helped a second protégé, Najib Razak, gain power in 2009 – only to subsequently work tirelessly to evict him from office. Malaysia is now ruled by a nonagenarian who periodically makes bizarre anti-Semitic statements about how a Jewish cabal rules the world.

In India, we had the unedifying spectacle of that grand titan of industry, Ratan Tata, handpicking his successor, Cyrus Mistry – and then re-entering the scene to play grubby boardroom politics in a bid to oust him shortly after the new man had decided to can some of Tata’s cherished but underperforming projects. Ratan Tata has since handed over to a new chairman – but the temporary period was one of intense volatility for the normally staid Tata Group.

Which brings us to Zille. “After careful consideration and consultation,” her statement read, “I have submitted nomination forms to contest the position of chair of the [powerful] Federal Council. In recent months, the DA has been through a period of turmoil and distress. If elected… my objective will be support the leadership in its goal of stabilising the party and getting it back on track.”

Perhaps this is unfair, but given Zille’s track record of undermining previously hand-picked successors like Lindiwe Mazibuko as well as the current leader Mmusi Maimane, her moves reminded me of an Energiser bunny, the one which refuses to die – and doesn’t know when to sod off. Is this really in the best interests of the party, or herself and her old support base within the party who have resisted attempts at progressing the party’s social agenda?

Of course, without knowing the internal machinations of the backroom deals of the DA, the question is supposition, but Zille’s behaviour over the last two years has been – depending on one’s level of charity – either bewildering, petulant or egotistical.

As national leader of the DA, she chose not to be in Parliament but to remain in the Western Cape as Premier while Lindiwe Mazibuko nominally spoke in Parliament. When she officially stood down as national leader, she made it very clear who her choice of successor should be – Maimane, someone she had brought into the party and had had fast-tracked. Yet she saw no conflict or potential to undermine the inexperienced leader by remaining on as Western Cape Premier. There seems to have been little introspection or self-awareness that as such a dominating personality, her remaining on the scene, Lear-like, “with reservation of an hundred knights… and all the addition to a king” might cause discomfort to the new king.

And the discomfort was not long in coming, in the form of the infamous colonialism tweet. Rather than contriteness, she doubled down and, Churchill-like, became a limpet. The experience was humiliating for the new leader and hardly helped the party’s chances of winning over suspicious black voters. Then, when she finally did retire in 2018, there came the barrage of further tweets which undermined the direction Maimane was attempting (unsuccessfully) to steer the party to. And now, this. A re-entry, Mahatir-like, to usurp power from the once-protégé.

Why does she feel that it is only her who can save the party? Why does she not allow other, younger, leaders to stake a claim, if a competing vision is to be presented? Where has it ever ended well when former leaders believe only they have the answer?

The ego has landed. DM