It’s 50 years since the intense heat of the 1976 drought hit the UK.

The country’s worst drought for 200 years, and one of the most severe ever, left reservoirs dry, cracked land, and melted tarmac on roads. For 15 consecutive days, temperatures hit 32°C in parts of the country. The record temperature for a June day was equalled, and still stands (for now).

What became known as the “drought of the century” resulted in the UK’s driest 16-month period for more than 200 years.

In that summer of 1976, people struggled to go to work on public transport in searing heat, wildfires sprang up in paper-dry woods and forests, farmers battled to save their harvests , and it was reported that 400 spectators were treated for heat exhaustion at Wimbledon in one day.

Weeks and weeks without rain led to national appeals to save water. An emergency powers bill, announced on July 3 1976, gave the government extra power to ration water use.

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In south-east Wales, Yorkshire and north Devon, people queued for water at standpipes in the street, while other areas experienced interruptions to their water supply. Meanwhile, food prices went up as farmers’ crops and garden vegetables died in the hot weather.

But the public of 1976 learned to cope with these unusual weather conditions, and per-person use of water dropped from an estimated 190 litres per day in 1972 to 95 litres in 1976. This was a generation with direct or family experience of the hardships of the second world war – including following government restrictions on food, clothing and fuel rationing, which finally ended in 1954.

Some of them had also experienced extreme weather in preceding decades, such as the significant droughts of 1949, 1955 and 1959 – as well as the “great freeze” of 1962-3, which caused an estimated 90,000 excess deaths.

These experiences, plus a public that was generally more trusting of government policy, meant compliance with restrictions was high.

What would happen today?

The environment, the economy and society have all changed since 1976. But drought risk is increasing.

The UK’s population has grown from 56.2 million in 1971 to 69.5 million in 2025. By 2021, one in six residents of England and Wales were born outside the UK, an increase of 2.5 million since 2011.

In 1976, 78% of the UK population lived in urban areas, increasing to 83% by 2024 – or from 43.7 million in 1976 to 57.6 million in 2024. This is also a population that experiences less time spent in nature than previous generations.

But compared with 1976, the UK is now more likely to experience higher summer temperatures, protracted heatwaves and drier soils.

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Read more: England’s sewage spills: why citizen scientists want to test for pollution themselves

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Our array of washing machines, dishwashers, power showers, pressure washers and paddling pools means we have come to expect water to be in our taps, regardless of what is happening to the weather and environment or our rivers.

When taps do not run, there is considerable frustration and anger, as has been experienced in the South East Water region during 2025 and ’26. Importantly for any government struggling to deal with a drought, trust in privatised water companies is low. This follows legal cases over sewage spills, worries about declining water quality, and perceptions of failing regulation.

During the UK’s 2018 heatwave, trust and willingness to act was seen to be dependent on the belief that water companies were also doing their part to reduce water consumption. But a 2023 survey by Ofwat on customer trust in these companies found 47% of respondents felt their water provider put the interests of its shareholders and owners first. Trust fell to the lowest level in a decade.

Around 60% of households now have a water meter, compared with none in 1976. But while smart meters are good at identifying leaks and tracking water use, reports suggest many consumers do not yet check them regularly to reduce use.

Another challenge is how to reach the public with updates and requests to reduce water use. Communicating about a drought is very different to 1976, when news channels were limited to BBC TV and radio, ITV and independent radio and print newspapers.

News is now widely consumed through social media as well as other media channels. But misinformation also spreads quickly through social media.

How can the UK prepare?

In preparing for the next major drought, the first and fundamental change required is to stop thinking of the UK as a wet country. London, with 690mm of annual rainfall, is drier than Rome’s 878mm and Paris’s 720 mm.

We, as consumers, should also start to think about how we do or don’t value water in our everyday actions. It’s important that households understand, and reduce, how much water each uses. If nothing changes, by 2055, the nation will need up to an additional 5 billion litres of water per day.

A 2020 survey found that 46% of respondents believed their household used less than 20 litres a day, while 17% said they consumed between 20 and 39 litres a day, and 15% thought they used 40 to 59 litres. The reality is between 135 and 150 litres per person, per day.

The biggest challenge for any current government and the water sector generally is likely to be gaining public trust in heeding national requests to save water.

New policy proposals for infrastructure investment, improved regulation, greater fairness and enhanced environmental resilience aim to reset confidence in the water sector as a whole. But as water bills rise to pay for this investment, and if issues around water quality and sewage pollution continue, it may not reset the balance of public trust.

Nonetheless, we should all also start to value water more, and use less, in order to adapt to a climate where intense droughts are an increasing risk in the UK.

Kevin Collins receives funding from the Environment Agency, Affinity Water, and UKRI.

Whatever your politics or profession, leaders who dominate our collective memory are rarely the quiet, methodical ones. They are the ones who stepped on stage or screen and made people believe in a vision, a company, a movement or a future. They all had charisma.

Think of leaders who have captivated the public imagination: Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Jobs, Margaret Thatcher. Not universally liked, but they all had something.

In contrast, the UK’s “deeply unpopular” prime minister, Keir Starmer, has suffered for his widely perceived lack of charisma.

So what, exactly, is this seemingly magical quality? And why of all the characteristics we might prize in a leader – competence, integrity, careful judgment, ethical courage – do we so consistently fall for it?

The word “charisma” comes from the Greek khárisma, meaning a divine gift or grace. The German sociologist Max Weber first applied it systematically to leadership in the early 20th century. He described charismatic authority as a form of influence rooted not in any formal rules, but in a leader’s extraordinary personal qualities.

Today, psychologists recognise charisma as a cluster of characteristics and behaviour that signal authenticity, emotional competence, persuasiveness, passion and enthusiasm – and which together mobilise followers towards a shared goal or activity.

Success influences perceptions of charisma, of course. Perhaps more worryingly, how someone looks is also important, and we form those judgments in an instant.

Ratings of charisma based on five-second silent video clips were found to correctly predict how some people judge leaders over much longer periods, using richer observations. In other words, we often decide very quickly whether someone “looks like a charismatic leader”.

Charisma is teachable

However, not everyone agrees that charisma is so superficial. Others, like the British sociologist Max Atkinson, believe it is primarily a social skill that can be taught. Perhaps, even to those who don’t have the requisite looks.

Indeed, few experts have done more to strip the mystique from charisma than Atkinson. His work focused largely on the content and delivery of political speeches – another key determinant of how people view a leader’s charisma.

In his 1984 book Our Masters’ Voices, Atkinson used systematic analyses of political speeches to demonstrate that what audiences experience as charisma in oratory is, to a considerable degree, the product of identifiable rhetorical techniques that reliably trigger applause and emotional engagement.

Atkinson identified a small number of structures that generate spontaneous applause in political speeches. These include two-part contrasts (“not this, but that”), three-part lists (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”), and the packaging of praise or attack in ways that signal to the audience when to respond in an immediate, unified way.

Such techniques have an immediate impact on judgments of charisma. They are not, however, accidents of natural talent. They are rhetorical devices at least as old as Cicero, and as teachable as any other communication skill.

Atkinson put this to a striking test in a 1984 Granada TV programme. He coached a speaker with no prior public speaking experience to deliver a conference address to the Social Democratic Party’s annual conference.

The coached speaker won multiple rounds of applause and a standing ovation. BBC commentator Sir Robin Day called it “the most refreshing speech we’ve heard so far”. The audience had no idea they were responding to a method.

This anticipated what researchers such as John Antonakis would later confirm: charismatic leadership involves specific, teachable behaviour. He identified both verbal features (including use of metaphor, storytelling, and rhetorical questions) and nonverbal ones (animated voice, open gestures, facial expressiveness).

Speeches that used more of these features received significantly higher ratings for trust, competence and leadership potential from independent raters. This work points to the same uncomfortable conclusion: much of what we experience as a leader’s natural magnetism is, in fact, a performance based on specific features that can be deliberately scripted.

Evolved strategy

Why, then, are we so susceptible to these signals? One answer comes from evolutionary psychology. Charismatic leadership is thought to be an evolved strategy for group coordination.

Our brains evolved in small-group environments where following an inspiring, confident individual in times of threat may have helped us survive because we acted together.

This may help explain why we are more susceptible to charismatic leaders in times of crisis. When things feel uncertain or dangerous, people might reach for the visionary. Yet the very leaders we feel most drawn to in those moments – the boldly confident, the certain, the inspiring – may not always be well-suited to navigating such complexity, if they resist the open-minded, ambiguity-tolerant thinking that difficult problems require.

There is another important consideration. The qualities that make someone appear charismatic overlap with some less flattering personality profiles. Studies have revealed positive correlations between charisma in leaders and narcissism.

While narcissism may help leaders rise to positions of power, it does not predict effectiveness once in those roles. Indeed, an inverted U-shaped relationship between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness has been found.

Charisma is clearly not without value. The ability to communicate a compelling vision, build trust and mobilise people towards a common goal is very important, as is the resultant hope.

But the modern obsession with charisma as a primary criterion for leadership can be distorting. We can end up giving too much weight to charisma in selection decisions, and too little to qualities like integrity, intellectual humility, and the willingness to say “I don’t know”.

The task of a sophisticated follower, whether in a boardroom, a ballot box or a town hall meeting, is surely to slow down, look past the performance, and ask harder questions. Remember, first impressions are not always right, but they are incredibly sticky.

Geoff Beattie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.