Leadership Quote by Kenneth Baker

A tidy national stereotype, sharpened into a paradox: the English get credit for intelligence (practical acuity, competence, the knack for making things work), while the French are tagged as intellectual (ideas-first, theory-heavy, proudly abstract). Baker isn’t just contrasting temperaments; he’s assigning cultural prestige and cultural suspicion in the same breath. “Intelligent” reads as a compliment that carries authority in Anglo political life. “Intellectual” lands with a faint sneer, conjuring cafes, manifestos, and people who can explain everything except how to govern.

As a politician, Baker is working a familiar British register: respect for cleverness paired with mistrust of the “intellectual” as a social type. The subtext is less about France than about Britain’s own anxieties - a country that likes its brains discreet, preferably wearing pragmatism as camouflage. French intellectual culture, by contrast, has historically been more publicly ceremonial: the writer-philosopher as celebrity, the grand system as national sport. Baker compresses that into a quip that flatters English common sense while implying the French overthink.

The line also smuggles in a postwar context: Britain’s self-image as steady and administratively competent versus France’s reputation for ideological drama (existentialism, structuralism, revolutionary memory). “It was always said” matters, too. He launders the judgment through hearsay, making it sound inherited rather than invented, the way stereotypes survive: repeated until they feel like anthropology.

The wit is that both traits are forms of intelligence; the politics is that only one is deemed safe.