From Mr I. M. Caldwell, FRPharmS
SIR,—What's in a name? Quite a lot to judge from the report by a group of Council members on the election of officers and the possibility of devaluing of the office of President. It is always difficult to comment on a report using only a precis (PJ, December 11, 1999, p942) no matter how good that summary may be, but comment I must. The working group certainly reached the correct conclusion regarding the election of the officers being held in public. The rest of the summary would appear to indicate that they had then departed from reality - a President, a Chairman and a Vice-Chairman? Even a simpleton would view such an inelegant mixture as a recipe for disaster.
Should a review be necessary, it must start by looking at the role of the President and Vice-President, both offices being enshrined in our Royal Charter. The President is the public face of the profession, not a political totem in the American political sense. It is his or her job to take Council policy and project it into the broadest possible arena - to government, to political parties, to other professions, to Europe, the Commonwealth and the international scene - to encourage other UK organisations to embrace Royal Pharmaceutical Society policy and to ensure above all that our own members are aware of and supportive of these policies. It is the President's duty to be aware of the nuances of every sector of our profession —academic, community, hospital and industry. All this is done by someone who is clearly seen by outside bodies and other learned societies as the authoritative voice of our profession. It cannot be done by some glad-handing, free-loading puppet whose strings are being pulled by some "political manager", no matter what title is bestowed on this person.
It may be that the proponents of this new "role" are seeking to mimic the structure of other organisations. If this is the case, they are completely ignoring the fact that such bodies are totally different in that they are trade union or managerial entities with a single purpose as distinct from our broad professional responsibilities under a Royal Charter. It is the Council, not some projected political gnome, which determines policy, which proposes the way ahead, which responds to threats and opportunites, which is collectively responsible and which is answerable to the electorate. If the working group does not understand this, it is we, the electorate, who have failed to appreciate what candidates proclaim in their various manifestoes. Again, it is the Council which is most aware of its own members' abilities as chairman, strategist, politician, conversationalist and ambassador and consequently as a potential President.
The working group seems to set some store on creating a Chairman. To what end? We have a President who chairs Council meetings, determines the priorities for agendas in consultation with the officers, attends and contributes to committee meetings and carries the ultimate can for ensuring that the work of the elected Council is progressed speedily and completely. Were it not so, neither the President nor anyone else would be sufficiently aware of the big picture to carry out the public role required by the Society. In all of this, the President can and does delegate some functions to the Vice-President, both as a means of smoothing the path to what is, usually, succession in a form of apprenticeship and as a means of spreading the workload. Mr Darling appears to suggest that the workload of the President is increasing. I would suggest that it was always a full-time job, back to Mr Darling's own tenure and before that, but now that the number of Council and committee meetings have been halved, some of the strain should have eased. As a measure of the level of involvement, some recent Presidents have been audited at 200-plus days per annum on Society business, the equivalent of a scholastic year. These figures are not exceptional; they are known to any potential President and may be seen as a barrier to offering one's services. It is up to any candidate to decide if he or she is prepared to make that level of commitment, given his or her personal, social, family and business life - there can be no soft option.
Splitting duties between the President and a new entity would inevitably lead to unseemly squabbles over who does what, when and why. Conflict is made more certain by neglecting the Vice-President and dumping from the officers the Immediate Past President with his or her hard won experience and personal contacts. To suggest that any senior Council member would be willing to forget that he or she is, at heart, a pharmaceutical politician just to don the chain of a diminished Presidential mummer is to suggest the improbable - the leopard's spots do not vanish.
I commend Professor Schofield's comments on another matter at the December Council meeting as I suspect he could well have repeated them in the debate on this report since it also smacks of structural nit-picking.
Ian Caldwell
Larkhall, South Lanarkshire