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Good morning. Monday night’s vote in the House of Lords derailed the government’s plans to cut tax credits and was a personal defeat for the Chancellor George Osborne. He and his party are now having to deal with the fallout from that. But setting aside the rights and wrongs of this particular issue I think living through defeat reveals more about character and motivation than sailing from success to success. Anyone who aspires to lead, whether in government or at the local bowls club has to manage defeat. Part of my job is to administer small financial grants to clergy to go on courses and conferences that will help develop their ministries. Quite a number want to enhance their leadership skills or to find ways of managing conflict. Sometimes there’s a back story: perhaps an individual has come up with what seems like a brilliant plan to re-order and modernise the parish church. But when all the work has been done, the arguments eloquently put and the budgets and time scale presented the people who seemed to be going along with it all suddenly find they are unwilling to let go of the old box pews and dodgy heating. A defeat is like a slap. It smarts. The first thing you have to manage is your own disappointment. Some nurse the hurt, blaming others and plotting vengeance. But others will sit back and think. Once, when I had lost an argument to colleagues and was pretty fed up about it a phrase came into my mind – the title of the 18th century comedy by Oliver Goldsmith, ‘She stoops to conquer’. In the play the heroine pretends to be a low class maid in order to woo her would be lover who is frightened of women of his own rank. Terrible sexist classist plot but it is hilariously funny, and it contains a pearl of genuine wisdom. To ‘stoop to conquer’ suggested to me that I should adopt a kind deliberate lowliness and stand aside from my passion for my own plan: not necessarily from the plan itself, but from my own investment in it. And then from that detached place to try to work out whether the plan was actually worth saving, whether there was another way to achieve the same ends, or whether I should admit defeat, and start all over again. Stooping in this way is a surrender of self, a spiritual decision that re-opens the future. That is difficult when the problem is urgent, the budget tight, and there is no consensus. But it is just at that moment that I would advise the frustrated to adopt a certain crafty lowliness. It displays what I can only call grace under pressure and lets more voices into the conversation. That’s why looking at the bigger picture we find it is tyrannies that can never bear to be defeated, while sometimes, as individuals we have to be.