12 JANUARY 2008, Page 20

Birth order means more than school or faith

To understand those in power, says Alice Thomson, ask whether they are older or younger siblings. Brown, a middle son, is far less easy-going than Cameron, a youngest son Kirkcaldy High School vs Eton, Highland Scot vs Newbury toff, Edinburgh University vs Oxford. If you are choosing between Gordon Brown and David Cameron that’s what the next election may come down to. Or is there another factor? No one ever mentions birth order. Mr Brown is the classic case. With a younger brother, as well as an older one, he genuinely feels a strong moral duty to do his best for his father (son of the manse as he is) and to compete with his elder brother, who preceded him to Edinburgh University. He wants order and precision, he is conscientious and hard-working, nervous of making decisions and less open to new experiences. He is weighed down by the burden of expectation he carries on his shoulders. After all, almost his first words on becoming Prime Minister were: ‘I will do my best for all the people of Britain.’ Implicit was the fear, which David Cameron would not naturally feel, that his best might not be good enough.

David Cameron, by contrast, follows the patterns of a youngest son. Like Tony Blair, another youngest brother, he is more cavalier, easy-going and charming. Mr Blair was able to send British soldiers to fight and die in a number of controversial wars, and sleep easy at night. Mr Cameron has a similar confidence. Some would say that Mr Blair’s certainty derived from his religious belief, and Mr Cameron’s from his social background and education, but maybe there is more to it than that.

It sounds ridiculous, but in America birth order is taken very seriously indeed. However talented or dedicated you are, companies now increasingly ask people where they come in the family. International seminars are conducted into the differences between families with odd numbers of children and those with even numbers. American universities are finding that they have to skew their results as elder children seem to outperform their young siblings in tests. According to Vistage, an international organisation of CEOs, 76 per cent of chief executives are firstor second-borns.

Americans tend to prefer their presidents to be firstborn children. Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were all eldest sons. Many of their younger siblings went off the rails. Elliot Roosevelt died of alcoholism, Donald Nixon caused Richard financial embarrassment, Billy Carter became a supporter of Libya in its pariah days. Roger Clinton spent a year in jail on a cocaine charge and Neil Bush was implicated in a savings-and-loan scandal.

In Britain, we go through phases. After a hefty dose of Margaret, an eldest child, we welcomed the more laid-back youngest son, Mr Blair. But despite the charm, after ten years of guitars and photoshoots and mugs of tea, we thought we wanted the more serious Mr Brown.

In Britain the importance of birth order has been ignored for years, perhaps because it seems unfair — or absurd — that such a random event should have such influence on character and career possibilities. But the research increasingly shows that it may matter more than the time of year you are born or whether you were breast-fed and possibly as much as where you went to school.

The father of the birth-order school was the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, who invented the concept of the ‘inferiority complex’. Adler believed that older children suffered from excessive responsibility and consequent neuroticism, with a dash of melancholy thrown in because they struggle to adjust to the arrival of their siblings and find it easier to succeed through hard work than charm. Despite Gordon Brown’s recent determination to smile in public, this does sound like a rather familiar set of characteristics. Indeed, his mother has said that he was the shyest in the family as well as the most diligent.

Adler also believed that younger children like Mr Cameron and Mr Blair, or President Reagan, have the best chance of turning out well-adjusted and successful because they tend to find it easier to get on with people. But he never advanced any serious evidence for his theories, which have been disputed ever since.

In Norway, a recent study using data taken from the military records of over 241,310 people showed that firstborns generally are cleverer than any young siblings, enjoying an average three-point IQ advantage over the next child, and second-borns are more intelligent than third-borns. This they put down to more one-to-one time from parents, higher expectations of mothers for their elder children and the role they are expected to play acting as a mentor to younger children.

Elder children also tend to be taller and better built. They go into high-paying, sensible professions such as the law (both Mr Blair and Mr Cameron’s elder brothers are lawyers) and take fewer risks. Youngest sons tend to think outside the box and make better hedge-fund managers, artists, explorers and entrepreneurs — if they don’t go off the rails first. They also have a better sense of humour. Birth-order experts often note that some of the greatest satirists — Voltaire, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain — were among the youngest members of large families.

Personality tests have shown that elder children score especially well on conscientiousness, while later-borns score highly on agreeableness. One of my friends, the father of four sons, is a devotee of the American guru Denny Johnson, creator of the ‘Rayid Birth Order Model’. Depending on your perspective — and maybe your birth order — this is either revelatory stuff or no more reliable than a newspaper horoscope. My friend says it provides an uncanny insight into the personalities of his children.

According to the Rayid model, Mr Brown, coming so closely after his elder brother and being brought up very much as a team with him, has many of the characteristics of an eldest child. They tend to be dreamers and engineers as children, and ideally become leaders, public servants and visionaries. But if it all goes wrong, their inward personalities mean that elder sons can end up as self-sabotaging. Mr Cameron, on the other hand, as a third child, much younger than his first-born brother, is instinctively competitive with his siblings. His dominant skills are emotional and outward. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but these descriptions do seem to fit the Labour and Tory leaders surprisingly well.

Mr Brown is clearly a more inward-looking individual, devoted to the concept of public service, but recent events have shown his potential to self-destruct. Mr Cameron, on the other hand, is a more emotionally intuitive personality, with a more natural ability to connect with people. He is also fiercely competitive, and obviously revels in besting his inward-looking rival at the dispatch box.

No doubt Alfred Adler would have voted for Mr Cameron — maybe youngest sons everywhere instinctively feel drawn towards him. But then responsible and respectable elder children across Britain may be just that bit more likely to vote for Mr Brown.