Leadership Quote by Michael Foot

A Royal Commission looks busy because it is designed to look busy. Michael Foot's line turns a peculiarly British habit of governance into barnyard farce: the state as a broody hen, solemnly warming a china egg that cannot hatch. The image is comic, but the target is serious. Royal Commissions carry the aura of grandeur and neutrality - "royal" suggests dignity, "commission" suggests expertise - yet Foot implies they are often political decoys: a way to park a controversy somewhere warm and harmless until public heat dissipates.

The brilliance is in the mismatch of textures. A hen is all instinct and earnest labor; a china egg is polished, delicate, and fake. That clash captures the central cynicism: sincere effort can be marshaled in service of a process whose outcome is predetermined, ornamental, or indefinitely deferred. Even the word "broody" lands as a double hit: it means intent on hatching, but also moody, inward, self-absorbed - a committee sunk into its own atmosphere.

Foot, a Labour tribune with a taste for literary daggers, was writing from inside a system that excels at procedural theater. When governments face messy reform - media regulation, constitutional change, scandals that demand accountability - a commission promises action without committing to it. The subtext is a warning about how democracies launder inaction through legitimacy: appoint the wise, wait for the report, thank them profusely, file it quietly. The hen keeps sitting; nothing is born.