Charlotte Grimshaw: In a precarious world, there are a few old men with too much power
A “No Kings” protest march in New York City in October 2025. Photo / Getty Images
When US President Donald Trump made his address at Davos, there was a weird disconnect between content and delivery. Styled as a 1930s-style fascist rant, the speech should have been shouted with the intensity of Hitler. Instead, it was delivered in a low-key mumble that sent listeners into a trance of boredom and claustrophobia. And afterwards there was fawning, deference and tiptoeing as the President received his applause. It’s horrifying the way power can make people bend.
In a precarious world, there are a few old men with too much power. Three in particular, the most powerful men of all. No one who’s a lawless crook should be in power. No one should appoint himself leader for life. No one should stay in power for 25 years, behave murderously, and start mindless territorial wars.
I read a scientific study of the effect of power on humans. Power affects all aspects of behaviour. Holding a position of high authority causes physiological changes in the brain. Wielding power lessens empathy and creates a sense of impunity. Those who hold power over others for a long time are more likely to believe themselves above the law. They say, “I’m so senior, I can break the rules.” Yet power, simultaneously, makes them self-righteous: they punish others for transgressions they’re guilty of themselves.
Abusers of power are everywhere. They are everyman; potentially they are any of us. Could we all (yes, you) look in the mirror and find, in some aspect of ourselves, a large, golden, charming, entitled, self-indulgent, power-wielding, Teutonic, 79-year-old narcissist? Definitely! In our own way, on our own scale, each of us could be that guy. What we have to do is keep ourselves in check.
It is possible that all I have been writing about all my life is power. American writer Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
When I write about family, I’m writing about power. When I’m writing about world leaders and politics, I’m thinking about power and powerlessness. In fiction, too, writing to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, I’m also thinking about the good and bad, the light and shadow in all of us.
Exploring light and shadow, good and bad, I spent the holiday reading Claire Tomalin’s famous biography, Charles Dickens, A Life. I think about Dickens’s characters, the villains and the good. I read English literary critic James Wood’s book, How Fiction Works. Wood asks, “Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves?” The vitality of literary character, Wood notes, “has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility – let alone likeability – than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake”.
What could be more deeply important to us, more profound, than the fate of the world? Writing to find out what I think, I have another idea running alongside. The most powerful men (the one who’s a law-breaking crook, the one who wants to rule forever, the one who’s ruled for 25 years) are only characters in a very short play. If I write about one or two of them, it’s because I want to say just that.
To write about them is to put them in their place, not as gods, but as characters in our human story. Ordinary men who ought to do better, stop wrecking the joint, going off, firing their egos over the suffering face of the world.