Earlier this week Michael Fallon warned that the Tories could use nuclear weapons as a pre-emptive measure. This is seen as evidence of "strong leadership" rather than the threat of a psychopathic war crime. At the same time, Labour's promise of more Bank Holidays is presented as something fluffy and non-credible rather than as part of a plan to improve the UK's terrible productivity.

Something odd is going on here.

The story of Juan Carlos Enriquez tells us what. He was ripped off by Donald Trump, and it took years to get his money back. But he voted for Trump.

What we see here is that there's a demand for bastards. Being a dishonest psychopathic bully isn't a disqualification, but a sought-after trait.

I'm not thinking here of the fact that many people prefer the unpleasant but competent boss to the nice but ineffective one. What I have in mind instead is that people interpret nastiness as a sign of competence. Nasty=tough=effective, at least when the nastiness is towards migrants or benefit recipients rather than to (perish the thought) bosses.

It's not just in politics that this happens: boardrooms are stuffed with narcissists and psychopaths.

What's going on here is a cluster of mechanisms. One is a form of wishful thinking. Just as people want to believe lies, so they want to believe a strong person can transform companies and societies.

Another is a fallacious form of the halo effect. People infer from the cliché that Mussolini made the trains run on time that you have to be like Mussolini in order to make the trains run on time. This is not necessarily true.

Another is that we mistake overconfidence for actual ability. We thus imbue the confident narcissist or tough talker with talents which he doesn't actually possess.

A third is a tendency to under-rate emergence and bounded rationality and knowledge. This leads to a demand for "strong" leaders and a dismissal of uncertainty as weakness rather than what it is - a recognition of our complex world and limited cognition.

In her endless talk of contrasting here "strong leadership" to the weakness and chaos of Corbyn, Theresa May is of course exploiting all these tendencies.

There's just one problem here. It's often wrong*.

George Osborne tried this trick. He wibbled about "tough choices" which mediamacro interpreted as evidence of strength and competence. But of course, it wasn't: the government borrowed £52bn in 2016-17, £31bn more than the OBR forecast in 2012, which means austerity failed in its own terms. It was pure vandalism.

And Fred Goodwin was a tough and ruthless leader at RBS, but also one of the most catastrophic bosses in history.

Sometimes, bastards are just stupid bastards.

As Archie Brown has shown, the desire for strong leaders is often erroneous:

Popular opinion about whether a leader is strong or weak in the sense of being a dominating or domineering decision-maker can be extraordinarily wide of the mark...There is no reason to suppose that the "strength" of a prime minister's leadership (in the sense of a domineering relationship with Cabinet colleagues) leads to successful government (The Myth of the Strong Leader, p 120)

In a complex society, decentralization and "weak" leadership might work better. As Clement Attlee said: "The foundation of democratic liberty is a willingness to believe that other people may perhaps be wiser than oneself."

All of which leads me to agree with George Monbiot: "After 38 years of shrill certainties presented as strength, Britain could do with some hesitation and self-doubt from a prime minister."

* But not always: one defect of agreeable people is that they can agree to the wrong things.