PANEM EN CIRCENSES, REEVES EDITION ...

One pictures Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, surveying the smoking ruins of the British economy like a minor Roman emperor who has just discovered that the Visigoths are at the gates but the lions in the Colosseum are looking a bit peaky. What to do? Raise taxes again? Talk sternly about fiscal responsibility while borrowing like a sailor on shore leave? No, no. Far better to announce the Great British Summer Savings scheme—a title so cloyingly upbeat it sounds as if it were focus-grouped in a primary school sandpit. Cheaper theme park tickets. Free bus rides for the little ones. VAT slashed on children's meals and a merciful truce declared on the price of biscuits. Behold, the bread and circuses of our age, served with a side order of self-congratulation. 

Christopher Hitchens, had he lived to witness this, might have observed that British politics has finally achieved the perfect synthesis of the nanny state and the fairground barker. Reeves, with the air of a particularly earnest comprehensive school deputy head who has just been promoted beyond her competence, declares that families deserve to "enjoy time together without worrying about the next bill." Quite so. One wonders whether she has noticed that the "next bill" in question is often the energy one, which—thanks to various global unpleasantnesses and domestic green enthusiasms—threatens to rise like a bad soufflé this summer. But never mind that, have a slightly cheaper ice cream at the zoo instead. The lions may be extinct in the wild, but at least the ticket price is down to 5% VAT.

This is not policy; it is performance art. It is the slimy lawyer in Jurassic Park—you remember the chap, the one who suggested a 'Coupon Day' as the dinosaurs began eating the tourists—reincarnated in a sensible suit and a red rosette. When the fences are down and the velociraptors of reality are loose (uncontrolled net migration that has turned large parts of the country into a demographic experiment no one voted for, housing shortages that make a sardine tin look spacious, energy costs that have households choosing between heating and eating), the bright idea is to hand out discount vouchers for the gift shop. "Don't mind the T. rex, kids—here's 15% off a plush stegosaurus!"

The numbers, such as they are, have the whiff of desperation about them. A temporary VAT cut here, some fiddled import tariffs on ketchup and marmalade there, free buses in August so the little darlings can be ferried about while their parents pretend everything is fine. All of it "up to businesses to pass on," which is politician-speak for "we've done our bit, now you sort it out, and if prices don't fall we'll blame profiteering." The hospitality sector is thrown a bone, no doubt because it employs people who might otherwise notice that their taxes are funding other things. Meanwhile, the real circus continues uninterrupted: small boat arrivals that mock the very notion of border control, a population growth driven almost entirely by immigration that has even the most Pollyanna-ish statisticians raising an eyebrow, and an energy policy that combines net zero zealotry with dependence on imported gas from volatile places. 

One almost admires the chutzpah. While households brace for higher fuel prices at the pumps and winter bills that will once again test the limits of human endurance, Reeves is out there promising cheaper entry to soft play centres. It is as if Nero, instead of fiddling while Rome burned, had announced subsidised lyre lessons and a summer festival of toga discounts. "I recognise that what matters for families," she intones, "is not just getting by..." Quite. Getting by is for the little people. The government, meanwhile, will ensure they can queue for a slightly less extortionate ride on the dodgems while the NHS waiting lists stretch into the next parliament and the housing stock groans under the weight of unplanned demographic expansion. The Labour government presents itself, as ever, as the party of compassion. Yet compassion, in this context, looks suspiciously like distraction. Real wages have been squeezed, infrastructure creaks, cultural cohesion frays, and the public realm feels ever more like a strained pantomime in which the audience is too polite—or too exhausted—to boo. 

Instead of addressing the fundamentals (energy security that doesn't rely on the kindness of sheikhs and wind turbines, immigration policy that distinguishes between national interest and open-house sentimentality), they offer the political equivalent of a children's lucky dip. Reach in, little voter, and pull out a slightly cheaper zoo ticket. Don't think about the elephants in the room. Or the people-smugglers. Or the bills. There is something peculiarly British about this blend of earnestness and evasion. We do love a summer scheme. We do love to pretend that a temporary fiscal tweak constitutes bold leadership. Reeves and her colleagues, cornered by events and their own previous pronouncements, have reached for the oldest trick in the authoritarian-lite playbook: when you cannot fix the important things, make the unimportant ones temporarily cheaper and call it a vision. Panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. Or, in modern translation: beans and bouncy castles.

One suspects even the Romans would have found it embarrassing. At least their circuses had gladiators. Ours have VAT reductions on family tickets to Legoland. The barbarians are not yet at the gates; many are already inside, courtesy of a Home Office that treats sovereignty as optional. The energy bills are climbing. The winter is coming, as they used to say in that other long-running saga of incompetent governance. But fear not, Britain. For one glorious summer, the Chancellor has ensured that your children can ride the bus for free.

Enjoy it while it lasts. The discount ends in September. The problems, one fears, will not.

THE WHITE VAN ORACLE

On the dual carriageway of British politics, where the laybys are forever littered with the discarded manifestos of the great and the good, one figure has long served as the most reliable barometer of the national mood: the White Van Man. Not for him the polished focus groups or the carefully calibrated WhatsApp leaks from Islington dinner parties. He speaks in the unvarnished vernacular of the forecourt, the depot, and the dual carriageway, his views delivered with the blunt force of a diesel engine on a cold morning. And in Leeds the other day, at a humble petrol station, one such exemplar delivered his verdict on the current administration with all the subtlety of a St George’s flag fluttering from the roof rack. 

Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, found herself on the receiving end of this traditional diagnostic tool. The man, evidently no stranger to hard graft and rising costs, bellowed the sort of home truths that rarely trouble the corridors of power: get Starmer out, get Labour out, you’re ruining the country. References were made to fuel duties, England flags, and even a hopeful plea for Nigel Farage. Reeves, in the manner of a headmistress addressing an impertinent lower-form boy, responded by declaiming her love of country and the paramount importance of good manners. One almost expected her to demand he write lines after assembly. 

This, one feels, is the authentic sound of the haughty technocrat encountering reality. Here was a minister of the Crown, architect of fiscal policy in an age of squeezed households, lecturing a working man on etiquette while standing amid the very pumps where his livelihood is measured in litres and pence. The condescension dripped like cheap petrol. Love of country, she insisted, includes good manners. Quite so. But manners, like taxes, are reciprocal. One does not reasonably expect deferential courtesy from a populace one has treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a sovereign body to be served. 

The White Van Man has always been democracy’s rough-hewn seismograph. In the days when 'Essex Man' was first anatomised, or when the tabloids celebrated the aspirational white working class, his instincts were courted, however cynically. He represented a broad, unpretentious swathe of opinion: patriotic without apology, sceptical of grand schemes, acutely sensitive to the cost of living because he pays it in full at the sharp end. He is the man who keeps the country moving—literally—and therefore notices when the burdens grow heavier while the rhetoric grows lighter. Typically, White Van Man is working-class, probably a Brexiteer and holds a healthy scepticism for state interventions (he thought Covid was a load of bollocks). He is socially conservative, married with children (little ‘uns/nippers) and likes dogs. His driving is much like his politics: high risk, occasionally high reward and anarchic.  

In 2014, Labour MP Emily Thornberry fell foul of White Van Man by tweeting an image of a house in Rochester, Kent adorned with England flags and with a white van parked on the driveway. She soon resigned amid uproar from both sides of the political divide. David Cameron condemned her tweet as ‘appalling’, citing it as evidence that Labour held the patriotic working-class in contempt. Ed Miliband, Thornberry’s close political ally and then Labour leader, lambasted Thornberry publicly, blustering that of course Labour could speak to White Van Man as voter. 

His marginalisation in elite discourse has been one of the quieter scandals of recent decades. What was once mainstream sentiment is now treated as a regrettable atavism, to be soothed with platitudes or dismissed as “not very British.” Labour’s tenure, nearly two years in, has provided ample fuel for his discontent. Promises of national renewal have collided with the stubborn realities of household budgets, strained services, and a cultural climate that often seems to view the van driver’s England with a mixture of embarrassment and suspicion. Fuel duty debates, those perennial symbols of the gap between Westminster and the road, crystallise the point. When even modest relief at the pumps is grudging, and when global pressures meet domestic tax appetites, the man filling his tank feels the pinch most acutely. 

Reeves’s performance—arrogant in its assumption that lecturing equals leadership, haughty in its detachment, condescending in its tonal policing—encapsulates a government that appears increasingly out of touch. To demand good manners while presiding over policies that many experience as indifferent to their daily struggles is not statesmanship; it is tone-deafness raised to an art form. One half-expects the next ministerial broadcast to include helpful instructions on the correct way to curtsy while paying one’s council tax. Hence the rise of Reform UK, that awkward, un-ignorable beneficiary of accumulated grievances. Polling consistently shows them leading or near the top, drawing support precisely from those whose views were once taken for granted by the major parties. 

The White Van Man, and all he represents, has not disappeared. He has simply been told, repeatedly and with varying degrees of politeness, that his opinions are no longer required. When the established order treats a significant portion of the electorate as embarrassing relatives at a wedding, they will eventually find another table. The irony is exquisite. A government elected on a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment now finds itself heckled for behaving like the establishment it once affected to replace. 

The White Van Man, bless him, remains the perfect, unpolished mirror. Ignore him at your peril; he has a habit of being right about the road ahead. And the road, as any driver knows, eventually demands payment.

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.