THE IMPOSSIBLE JOBS

In the grand tradition of national self-flagellation, Britain has long maintained a shortlist of positions so manifestly thankless that only the terminally ambitious or the quietly masochistic would apply. Once upon a time these included commanding a penal colony in the Antipodes, or being married to Henry VIII. Today the honours belong, indisputably, to three roles: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, manager of the England men’s football team, and showrunner of Doctor Who. Each promises glory, delivers migraine, and ends in ritual humiliation before a public that demands miracles while reserving the right to jeer at the first sign of human fallibility. 

Consider the evidence. Five prime ministers in seven years, none permitted the luxury of a full parliament. Seven foreign secretaries, six chancellors, four cabinet secretaries. The turnover resembles a particularly indecisive game of musical chairs played on the deck of the Titanic while the band strikes up Land of Hope and Glory. Sir Keir Starmer, arriving with a majority that would have made Clement Attlee blush, already finds himself eyed nervously by colleagues who have absorbed the modern parliamentary sport of regicide via WhatsApp. Britain, we are solemnly told, is not ungovernable. One wonders whether the country has simply become ungovernable with dignity. 

The England football manager’s lot is, if anything, more honest in its cruelty. Graham Taylor christened it “the impossible job” long ago, and subsequent incumbents have done little to disprove him except by looking increasingly like men who have seen the abyss and discovered it wears an England shirt. You are expected to restore a nation’s manhood using players who, at club level, cannot always be trusted to pass accurately to a team-mate standing six yards away. Fail, and the tabloids will compose elegies in the key of contempt. Succeed modestly, and you will be praised for “managing expectations” - the political class’s favourite euphemism for lowered horizons. At least when the Prime Minister fails, the pound merely wobbles. When England lose on penalties, middle-aged men in pubs question the purpose of existence. 

Then there is the role of Doctor Who showrunner, the third circle of this particularly British hell. Here the challenge is metaphysical. You must satisfy fans who treat the programme’s continuity as holy writ while simultaneously attracting new viewers who merely want entertaining nonsense about an alien travelling in a magic police box. The job requires the diplomatic finesse of a Prime Minister, the tactical flexibility of an England manager, and the creative stamina of someone who has not yet realised they are writing for an audience that will complain about both change and the absence of change. Previous occupants have aged visibly; one almost expects the next regeneration to occur on camera, out of pure exhaustion. 

What unites these three positions is the gap between expectation and delivery—a chasm wide enough to swallow several careers. The public, nourished on instant delivery and algorithmic certainty, wants problems solved by teatime. Prime ministers discover that levers of power connect to little more than regulatory spaghetti and arm’s-length quangos. England managers learn that talent is finite and opposition players do not read the Daily Mail. Showrunners realise that the TARDIS may be bigger on the inside, but the budget and patience of the BBC are not. The article currently exercising the commentariat notes, with the air of a man discovering fire, that governing has become harder. Crises arrive in battalions: financial crashes, Brexit, pandemics, energy shocks, Trump. Leadership skills are wanting. The civil service is obstructive or demoralised, depending on whom you ask. Social media accelerates rebellion; backbenchers have discovered the joys of performative disloyalty. Voters demand results yesterday and resent the mention of trade-offs. All true, and all rather beside the point. 

The deeper satire lies in how seriously we take the spectacle. We affect to believe that the right person in Number 10—or the right centre-half, or the right head writer—could restore Britain to a prelapsarian state of competence and glory. This is charming nonsense. The country has always been difficult to govern; it merely used to do its grumbling with more stylistic flair. Today the grumbling is continuous, amplified, and accompanied by polls. Every setback becomes evidence of systemic collapse rather than the ordinary friction of reality meeting human limitation. Prime ministers, like England managers, are now judged less on steady administration than on narrative satisfaction. Did they provide “optics”? Did they dominate the news cycle? Did they give us a story we could retweet? Doctor Who showrunners face the same demand, only with added Daleks. The result is a festival of short-termism in which long-term pain is forever promised for the day after tomorrow, a tomorrow that never quite arrives. 

One almost feels sympathy for the incumbents. Almost. The Prime Minister who cannot shift the dial on productivity or immigration discovers that saying difficult things is career suicide. The England manager who fails to qualify discovers that tactical nuance is irrelevant when the nation requires blood and thunder. The showrunner who dares to evolve the formula discovers that nostalgia is a harsher master than any Cybermen. Each is paid handsomely for the privilege of public execution, which rather undercuts the tragedy. Yet the jobs endure because the alternative—admitting that some problems are structural, that expectations must be managed, that competence is often boring—is intolerable to a nation that still half-believes in miracles. We sack the manager, change the government, regenerate the Doctor, and wait for the next saviour. The cycle is as reliable as the English weather and considerably more predictable.

In the end, these three impossible jobs reveal less about institutional failure than about a national temperament: romantic, impatient, and strangely addicted to disappointment. We do not want leaders so much as figures who can embody our longing for lost greatness. That they usually fail is not the scandal. The scandal is how eagerly we line up to watch the next one try. The TARDIS spins on, football never quite comes home, and Downing Street welcomes another tenant doomed to discover that the levers do not work, the electorate will not wait, and the only certain reward is a decent pension and the chance to write lucrative memoirs explaining why it was not, in fact, their fault. God save the King. And pass the aspirin.

THE MARCH OF THE UNMENTIONABLES

One pictures the scene in the corridors of power this past weekend, as the reports filtered through: Keir Starmer, lips pursed in that characteristic expression of pained rectitude, staring at footage of ordinary British families processing through London with the sort of horror usually reserved for discovering one has invited the wrong sort to a garden party. Here they were, these dreadful people—workers, pensioners, mothers pushing prams, even a smattering of ethnic minorities who had failed to read the memo about their own oppression—expressing concern about the country they foolishly believed still belonged to them. The sheer cheek of it. One almost expects the Prime Minister to have demanded a recount of reality itself. 

Matthew Goodwin, that tireless cataloguer of the bleeding obvious, did his best to describe what actually occurred at the Unite the Kingdom rally. No rivers of blood, no pogroms, no impromptu book-burnings of The Guardian. Just people. The sort who pay taxes, obey the law, and have begun to notice that their streets, schools, and hospitals increasingly resemble the arrival lounge of an especially chaotic international airport with no departures board. Goodwin called them patriots. The establishment, with its customary lightness of touch, called them far-right. One wonders what the term "far-right" is supposed to mean these days. Once upon a time it denoted chaps in jackboots yearning for a spot of genocide before tea. Now it appears to encompass anyone who wonders whether importing hundreds of thousands of people a year, many from cultures with rather robust views on integration, might eventually have consequences. 

This semantic inflation is a marvellous political technique. It is rather like declaring that anyone who complains about the weather is a "climate denier" while simultaneously insisting that rain is a social construct. Stretch the elastic far enough and it loses all useful tension. Starmer and his colleagues—Sadiq Khan among them, that noted enthusiast for London's vibrant diversity until the wrong sort of vibrancy turns up with Union flags—have been particularly energetic stretchers. They have expanded "far-right" to cover the views of roughly half the native population, or at least those who lack the good grace to applaud their own demographic displacement. 

One must admire the sheer brass of it. Here is a government presiding over record net migration, strained public services, grooming gang scandals swept under various carpets, and neighbourhoods where English is increasingly the second language of the street. And their response to citizens noticing these minor details is to denounce them as extremists. It is gaslighting on an industrial scale, the sort of thing that would make Orwell blush at its crudity. "Nothing to see here," they intone, while deploying thousands of police officers, facial recognition technology, and pre-emptive bans on foreign speakers, just to be on the safe side. One pictures the Met's command centre: a hive of activity not unlike the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, except instead of Klingons the enemy consists of retired accountants from Essex waving flags. 

The spectacle has the delicious absurdity of a Whitehall farce. The political class, comfortably insulated in their Islington redoubts and heavily policed constituencies, lectures the working class about 'hate' while pursuing policies that amount to a slow-motion cultural lobotomy. Uncontrolled mass immigration is not, apparently, the threat. The real danger is the far Left's curious alliance with certain imported theocratic tendencies that view Western freedoms as decadent abominations. But no—best not to notice that. Better to smear Dave the plumber from Bolton as a fascist for wanting his grandchildren to grow up in something recognisably like the country his own grandparents knew.

Starmer himself emerges from this episode looking rather like a man who has mistaken his own propaganda for reality. There he stands, the great defender of working people, the former human rights lawyer, the solemn guardian of British values, casually writing off swathes of the native population as beyond the pale. It is a remarkable transformation. For what we see is not mere political calculation but a deeper, more revealing indifference—an autocrat's chill. He appears to possess no particular affection for the historic British people, those stubborn islanders who built the place he now governs. Their concerns are not to be addressed but pathologized. Their patriotism is not celebrated but pathologized as 'hate.' Their very existence as a coherent demos seems an inconvenience to the grand project of managed demographic change.

One suspects that in the quiet hours, when the red boxes are closed and the spin doctors have retired, Starmer contemplates the electoral mathematics of the future with something approaching private rapture: the prospect of a new, more reliably grateful electorate, less inclined to awkward questions about free speech, women's rights, or why the local park now requires separate hours for different communities. The traditional British working class, with their tiresome attachment to things like fairness, history, and the rule of law, can be dismissed as relics. Far-right, naturally. Problem solved.

This, of course, is where the satire curdles into something bleaker. The real threat to the traditional British way of life has never been a few thousand flag-waving patriots on a Saturday afternoon. It is the combination of ideological fervour from the far Left—eager to dissolve national identity in a warm bath of multiculturalism—and the sheer scale of uncontrolled immigration that makes such dissolution inevitable. The former provides the intellectual justification; the latter supplies the numbers. Starmer's government, like its predecessors, seems content to let both processes accelerate while policing the complaints rather than the causes. 

The march exposed the lie, as Goodwin suggested. Not because the attendees were saints or political philosophers, but because they were so manifestly ordinary. The establishment's hysterical reaction revealed more about its own disconnection than any supposed extremism on the streets. In the end, one is left with the image of a Prime Minister lecturing his own people on hatred while demonstrating a profound lack of love for them. It is not an attractive sight. Britain deserves better than to be governed by men who view its native population as an obstacle to progress rather than its foundation. The patriots, for all their rough edges, at least understand that much. The autocrats, it seems, never will.

KING OF THE NORTH TO LOSE HIS THRONE?

In the great British tradition of political theatre, where ambition is dressed up as public service and the electorate plays the role of a sceptical audience armed with rotten tomatoes, one can only admire the latest plot twist involving Andy Burnham, the self-styled King of the North, and Sir Keir Starmer, the man who makes a cardboard cut-out look like a bundle of raw charisma. Burnham, having long ruled Manchester like a benevolent satrap with a slightly better haircut, has decided the time is ripe to descend from his mayoral throne and contest the Makerfield by-election. The local Labour majority sits at a slender 5,000 or so—thin enough to make a bookmaker nervous—and recent council results saw Reform UK gobbling up seats like a man who has discovered the all-you-can-eat buffet after years of rationing. One is tempted to ask: has Starmer, that master of the quiet knife, engineered a subtle trap for his ambitious colleague? Or is this simply politics as usual, where the gods of electoral arithmetic laugh last and loudest?

Sir Roger Scruton, had he still been with us to sharpen his pen on this particular folly, might have observed that British politics has always been at its most entertaining when it resembles a provincial repertory company performing Macbeth with a budget shortfall. Burnham arrives not as a humble servant of the people but as a figure of almost messianic self-regard, the sort who has spent years cultivating the image of the plain-speaking northerner while presiding over a city that, to the less charitable eye, occasionally suggests a municipal experiment in how many problems one can accumulate while issuing press releases about levelling up. His popularity in Greater Manchester is real enough—local boy made good, photogenic in a hi-vis jacket, capable of delivering a soundbite with the weary gravitas of a man who has seen too many trams delayed. Yet Makerfield is not Manchester. It is the sort of constituency where the phrase "left behind" was practically invented, a place where the abstract promises of Westminster meet the concrete realities of post-industrial life, and where voters have begun, in alarming numbers, to flirt with alternatives that do not involve another lecture on net zero or diversity workshops.

The numbers, as the post in question dryly notes, are not encouraging for the aspiring Prime Minister-in-waiting. A majority of 5,000 in these febrile times is less a cushion than a trampoline—liable to launch the candidate skyward at the first gust of anti-incumbent sentiment. Reform's local successes speak to a deeper rot in the Labour coalition: the old working-class base, long taken for granted, has started to notice that the party of Attlee and Bevan now concerns itself more with pronoun etiquette and international climate summits than with wages, borders, or the price of a pint. One pictures the canvassers trudging through the streets, clipboards in hand, encountering not the deferential voters of yore but citizens who have watched their towns stagnate while the metropolitan commentariat clucks about "populism" as if it were a mysterious virus rather than the entirely predictable immune response of a body politic fed up with being ignored.

Here the sardonic mind turns to Starmer himself, that paragon of cautious competence who somehow contrives to make competence look like a mildly embarrassing condition. Could he have deliberately set Burnham up for a fall? The suggestion has the delicious tang of palace intrigue, the kind that keeps political journalists in overtime and the rest of us in popcorn. Starmer's leadership has been defined by a certain ruthless tidiness—clearing out the Corbynites, triangulating with the centre, and maintaining the expression of a man perpetually disappointed by the shortcomings of reality. Burnham, with his northern power base and telegenic profile, represents a rival centre of gravity. What better way to neutralise a potential leadership challenger than to encourage him into a contest where victory is possible but defeat plausible, preferably splashed across the front pages as a humiliating verdict on "Starmer's Britain"? If Burnham wins, Starmer can claim credit for the masterstroke; if he loses, well, one troublesome prince has been bloodied in the provinces. It is the sort of calculation that would have earned a wry chuckle from the more Machiavellian minds of the Blair era, though one doubts Starmer possesses quite that level of feline cunning. He may simply be relieved that someone else is willing to take the risk while he clings to Number 10 like a limpet on a particularly unyielding rock.

Of course, one must not overstate the conspiracy. British politics runs as much on incompetence and accident as on grand design. Burnham may yet prevail, buoyed by residual loyalty, tactical voting, or the sheer inertia that still propels the Labour machine in its traditional heartlands. The bookies, those cold-eyed realists, seem to fancy his chances. Yet the very fact that a figure of Burnham's stature must fight on such contested ground tells its own story: the Red Wall, once thought rebuilt, is showing fresh cracks. Reform channels a discontent that the main parties dismiss at their peril—part economic anxiety, part cultural revolt, part sheer exasperation with a governing class that lectures more than it listens. In Makerfield, the voters will not be choosing between nuanced policy platforms so much as delivering a verdict on whether Westminster still speaks their language.

One is left reflecting, in the best Scrutonian tradition, on the absurdity of it all. Here is modern Britain: a former mayor eyeing the premiership via a by-election in a marginal seat, while the actual Prime Minister navigates scandals and slumps with the air of a man wondering why the script keeps deviating from the focus-grouped version. The electorate, meanwhile, watches with the jaundiced eye of theatregoers who have seen too many revivals. Whoever triumphs in Makerfield, the larger drama continues—the slow, often comic unravelling of certainties that once seemed as solid as the mills and mines that built these towns. Politics, as ever, provides the entertainment. The joke, as usual, is on all of us.