What are the characteristics of good political leadership?

In spite
of the length of the Reflections and its somewhat rambling style (which
caused Burke's main , Thomas Paine, to write that "Mr Burke's book is all
miscellany") Burke's "formula" for proper political leadership can be
reduced to a few simple principles. Foremost is that government should be based on tradition, on
long-standing values and practices. He cites the declaration of Parliament during William and
Mary's reign that they, the English people, bound themselves and their posterity to the monarchy
and its posterity "forever."

Burke's implication, ridiculed of
course by Paine and others, was that the British had deliberately given up the right to choose
their leaders or system of government. Burke did not literally mean this, but his point was that
the only valid kind of political leadership was that based on tradition, on the established
manner in...