ABSTRACT
Machiavelli was if nothing else a politician. He understood politics and, after his death, the publication of The Prince changed politics in such a way that politics would never be the same again. My career has been both in politics and in business for 15 years when treasurer of the Conservative Party, at the nexus of both these arts. Arts indeed they truly are, for Machiavelli regarded politics with much the same enthusiasm that his colleagues in Renaissance Florence regarded paintings and sculptures. His approach to politics and its conduct was as painstaking as the approach of the great painters and sculptors, his contemporaries, to their art. Machiavelli refined the art of government to a point where it was no longer a job, rather a scientific occupation based on the experience of history, changed and adapted to apply to the lives of his contemporaries.
