THE UNGOVERNABLE KINGDOM

One hears it everywhere now, murmured in the pubs of what remains of England, whispered like a password in the comment sections, and occasionally shouted from the back benches by some poor soul who still believes in elections: Britain is ungovernable. The phrase has acquired the weary glamour of a terminal diagnosis. Six prime ministers in a decade, or thereabouts; the economy performing like a one-legged man in a three-legged race; and a political class that treats the electorate’s wishes with all the reverence a teenager shows his parents’ vinyl collection. Yet here we are, on the cusp of another coronation—this time for the Honourable Andy Burnham, lately of Manchester and now, by some miracle of by-election mathematics, MP for Makerfield and presumptive saviour of the realm. One feels the urge to applaud, or perhaps to reach for the sherry and the revolver.

The people, in their stubborn, bovine way, keep voting for things the actually want. Lower immigration, they said. Proper Brexit, they added, with the air of someone ordering a pint that actually tastes of beer. Biological single-sex spaces, because the species has managed for several million years without pretending otherwise. And equal opportunities regardless of race—meaning, one naively assumed, that no one should be excluded on the grounds of melanin content, least of all the native population. These are not exotic demands. They are the sort of modest requests one might make of a functioning democracy. Instead, our political masters have delivered the opposite with the tireless enthusiasm of a zealot handing out leaflets. More immigration, closer ties to Brussels in all but name, men in women’s refuges and changing rooms (because fairness, apparently, requires pretending biology is a social construct invented by the patriarchy on a slow news day), and job schemes and diversity initiatives that treat whiteness as an original sin best atoned for by exclusion. 

It is a spectacle of almost heroic perversity. One is reminded of those Roman emperors who, faced with a restive Senate, simply declared themselves gods and carried on. Our own emperors do not bother with divinity; they have focus groups and civil service briefings instead. The result is the same: the governed are treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a sovereign whose consent must be renewed. Brexit was supposed to restore parliamentary sovereignty. Instead, it restored the sovereignty of the permanent bureaucracy and the NGO complex, those tireless guardians of the progressive conscience who know better than the oiks in the red wall seats. The oiks may vote, but they are not consulted. Their role is to provide the raw material for policy—taxes, soldiers in past eras, and nowadays net contributors to a welfare system that somehow never quite reaches the bottom of the list. The elite gaze upon the native working class much as Victorian explorers once regarded the natives of distant lands—quaint, superstitious, in need of civilising. Where once we sent missionaries with Bibles, we now dispatch diversity coordinators with training modules. The effect is broadly similar: resentment, followed by quiet withdrawal, followed by the occasional explosion at the ballot box that is then solemnly diagnosed as “populism,” that dread disease which only afflicts those insufficiently grateful for their betters’ wisdom. 

And now cometh Burnham. One must admire the man’s timing, if nothing else. Fresh from his by-election triumph, he stands ready to inherit a Labour Party that has already demonstrated, under Starmer, a remarkable capacity for disappointing everyone simultaneously. The public, we are told, is exhausted by chaos. Burnham will bring stability. Stability, in this context, appears to mean continuing the same policies that produced the chaos, only with a more reassuring regional accent and better hair. One pictures him in Downing Street, sleeves rolled up in that carefully cultivated “man of the people” manner, announcing yet another review into immigration while the small boats continue their daily shuttle service across the Channel. The reviews will be thorough. The conclusions will be nuanced. The numbers will keep rising.

The despair one feels is not (yet) for Burnham personally. He is, by all accounts, a competent enough administrator, the sort of figure who once made the trams run on time in Greater Manchester—though even there, the superlatives were delivered with the caution of a man walking on thin ice. No, the despair is for the pattern. Here is a country that voted clearly, repeatedly, and often against the preferences of its educated classes, only to watch those preferences reimposed through administrative fiat, judicial creativity, and European alignment by other means. Single-sex spaces? The Supreme Court has nodded towards biology, but one senses the civil service treating the ruling as a regrettable suggestion rather than the law of the land. Equal opportunities? Only if “equal” is understood in the Humpty Dumpty sense: whatever diversity targets require. Brexit? We are not rejoining, perish the thought. We are merely harmonising, aligning, converging—euphemisms for the slow surrender of what was won.

Britain is not ungovernable. It is governed, relentlessly, in defiance of its governors’ mandate. The people reject the offer at every opportunity, as the man on X so pithily put it, and the machine grinds on. Reform UK polls strongly; Nigel Farage hovers like Banquo’s ghost at the feast. The establishment warns darkly of extremism while pursuing policies that make extremism inevitable. Andy Burnham’s government, when it arrives, will be presented as the last bulwark against the barbarians. In reality, it will likely be another chapter in the long book titled How to Lose a Country Without Really Trying. One can already write the obituary. There will be earnest speeches about “healing divisions.” There will be new strategies for integration that ignore the basic arithmetic of numbers. There will be more of everything the public has said it does not want, delivered with the serene confidence that this time, surely, the natives will be grateful. And when they are not—when the polls shift again and the next crisis arrives—the explanation will be the same as ever: the voters have failed to understand. Not the politicians. Never the politicians.

In the end, perhaps that is the most British thing about it all. We do not revolt. We grumble, we vote against, we watch as our wishes are filed under “considerations noted,” and then we queue patiently for the next disappointment. It is a form of constitutional masochism that would impress even the Stoics. God save the King, and deliver us from our representatives. They seem quite beyond saving themselves.

BREXIT @ 10: THE REFERENDUM THEY NEVER FORGAVE

Ten years on from that shimmering June morning in 2016 when the British people, in a fit of what the bien pensants still insist on calling collective madness, voted to leave the European Union, one is tempted to raise a glass of something suitably flat and warm—perhaps a pint of warm bitter, the national drink of a nation that has specialised in lukewarm compromises. Here we are in 2026, and the anniversary feels less like a celebration than a coroner’s report on a patient who briefly showed signs of life before relapsing into the familiar coma of managed decline. Brexit was not the disaster, dear reader; it was the last time the electorate was permitted a proper democratic victory. Everything since has been a masterclass in how to snatch defeat from the jaws of self-determination, administered by a procession of prime ministers whose collective inadequacy made even the average EU commissioner look like a titan of vision. 

Let us first dispense with the polite fictions. On 23 June 2016, 17.4 million souls—more than had ever bothered to turn out for a general election in living memory—looked at the supranational pudding and decided they had eaten enough. They did not do so because they hated foreigners, or because they had been mesmerised by a bus with a dubious slogan, or because they secretly yearned for the return of rationing and powdered egg. They did it because, in their bones, they sensed that sovereignty had become a polite euphemism for “please consult Brussels first.” 

It was, in its clumsy, sunburnt, English way, a genuine assertion of democratic will—the sort of thing political theorists used to write misty-eyed essays about before they discovered that actual voters were distressingly deplorable. Christopher Hitchens, had he lived to see it, might have observed that the British public had finally done what the commentariat always urged in theory but recoiled from in practice: they had exercised agency. And like a man who has ordered the steak and then been presented with the bill, the establishment spent the next decade trying to send it back to the kitchen. 

Teresa May, poor soul, inherited the china shop and immediately set about proving that a vicar’s daughter could negotiate with the EU like a maiden aunt haggling over a church fête. Her red lines were drawn in watercolour. She spoke of “Brexit means Brexit” with all the conviction of someone reading the small print on a dodgy insurance policy. The result was a Withdrawal Agreement that managed to leave Northern Ireland half-in, half-out, and the entire country wondering whether sovereignty was now measured in millimetres. 

May’s failure was not merely technical; it was spiritual. Here was a woman who had campaigned to remain (quietly) and then tried to deliver leave with the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a prepared statement. One almost felt sorry for her, until one remembered that sympathy is the emotion reserved for those who do not hold high office while demonstrating why it should not be held by them. 

Then arrived Boris Johnson, the great blond hope, the man who could charm birds from trees and, apparently, majorities from hitherto safe Labour seats. For a brief, chaotic moment, it seemed as though Brexit might actually mean something. “Get Brexit Done” had the merit of brevity, if not intellectual depth. 

Johnson delivered the formal exit, waved the fish-and-chips flag, and promptly discovered that governing without the EU’s scaffolding required rather more than a few Latin tags and a talent for dishevelment. One might charitably say his administration was distracted by events—parties during lockdown, wallpaper scandals, and the eternal circus of his own appetites. Less charitably, one notes that the man who had once written columns about the absurdity of Brussels bureaucracy now seemed oddly comfortable with the machinery of globalist entanglement elsewhere. Trade deals were signed with fanfare, yet the lorry queues at Dover and the paperwork for exporters suggested that sovereignty, like charisma, has its limits when confronted with spreadsheets.

Liz Truss, bless her lettuce, lasted approximately as long as a snowflake in a sauna. Her crime was not so much ideological as existential: she attempted actual Conservative economics at speed, and the markets, those delicate flowers, reacted as if she had proposed sacrificing virgins to the bond gods. Her brevity was almost poetic. Britain briefly had a prime minister who seemed to believe in something, and the system promptly ejected her like a malfunctioning vending machine returning the wrong crisps.

Rishi Sunak, smooth as a technocrat’s conscience, arrived promising competence and stability. He gave us the appearance of adulthood—suit, haircut, spreadsheets—while continuing the stately drift towards whatever fashionable global consensus required the least confrontation with reality. Net Zero targets, endless migration pressures, and the quiet realisation that “global Britain” often meant Britain as a polite adjunct to everyone else’s priorities. He was, in many respects, the perfect post-Brexit manager: someone who could administer the estate without ever questioning why the estate no longer felt quite like home.

And then Keir Starmer—ah, the man who promised to make Brexit work while looking as though he would rather it had never happened. His tenure, cut short amid the usual revolts and disappointments, exemplified the Labour Party’s approach: treat the referendum result as a regrettable outbreak of plebeian opinion that must be sanitised, regulated, and aligned with the greater European project in all but name. Under Starmer, as under his predecessors, the great insight of 2016—that nations might still wish to control their borders, laws, and destinies—was quietly reclassified as a problem to be managed rather than a principle to be upheld.

What unites these administrations, from May’s dutiful misery through Johnson’s fireworks, Truss’s brevity, Sunak’s spreadsheets, and Starmer’s managerialism, is a common thread of inadequacy dressed up as sophistication. Each prime minister, confronted with the raw fact of democratic instruction, felt the gravitational pull of globalism not because they were evil masterminds of Davos, but because it was easier. 

Globalism, in its current form, offers the political class what they crave most: the ability to outsource difficult decisions to technocrats, markets, international forums, and the great swirling vortex of “rules-based international order.” It absolves them of the need to confront their own electorates, to make hard cultural choices, or to admit that running a country requires more than good intentions and a compelling LinkedIn profile. Brexit exposed their limitations; rather than rise to the occasion, they chose the comfortable exile of transnational pieties. 

Cameron himself had called the referendum out of party management, not conviction—a classic case of a man using democracy as a tactical tool only to discover it had ideas of its own. His successors merely continued the pattern, each more convinced than the last that the voters had been a momentary aberration. The economic numbers, those dreary companions of anniversaries, will be marshalled by both sides. Some will speak of GDP losses, trade frictions, and the usual regressions. 

Others will point to sovereignty regained, regulatory freedom exercised (if not always wisely), and the quiet satisfaction of no longer pretending that ever-closer union was destiny. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the spreadsheets and the soul. Nations are not balance sheets. The real cost of the last decade has not been measured in basis points but in the evaporation of trust—the sense that even when the people speak with unprecedented clarity, the system will find ways to muffle, dilute, reinterpret, and ultimately neuter their voice.

Ten years after Brexit, Britain finds itself in that most English of conditions: muddling through, slightly poorer on paper, considerably more confused about its identity, and still possessed of that strange, stubborn refusal to admit that the project was entirely misconceived. The electorate’s victory in 2016 was real. The failure since has been almost total. It is not the fault of the 17.4 million who voted Leave. It is the fault of those who were meant to implement their decision and instead treated it as a problem of public relations.

One can only hope that somewhere, in a quiet corner of the shires or a forgotten corner of Westminster, the lesson is still faintly audible: democracy is not a suggestion box for the clever classes. It is the sovereign speaking. The rest of us—politicians especially—should have the decency to listen, even when it inconveniences our dinner invitations in Brussels, Davos, or wherever the next global consensus is being lightly brokered over canapés. 

Happy anniversary Brexit, the cake, like so much else, tastes faintly of regret. But at least we baked it ourselves.

THE RESINGATION OF SIR KEIR STARMER: A STUDY IN MANAGED MEDIOCRITY

It is with the sort of restrained satisfaction one reserves for the removal of a stubbornly persistent stain that one greets the news of Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation. After two brief, blundering years in office—years that felt, to the suffering electorate, rather more like a prolonged hostage situation—he has at last decided to fall on his sword. Or, more accurately, to allow the sword to be gently pressed into his unresisting abdomen by colleagues who had grown tired of watching him fumble with it. The man who arrived promising renewal has departed as the most spectacular confirmation that New Labour’s final mutation was not a renaissance but a quiet surrender. 

Let us be precise about the scale of the under-achievement. Starmer inherited the largest Labour majority in a generation, a historic mandate handed to him not so much by popular enthusiasm as by the exhausted revulsion at fourteen years of the other lot. The country was placed in his hands like a delicate antique. He proceeded to use it as a coaster. Illegal immigration soared, taxes spiralled up, promises dissolved faster than a Temu bath bomb, and the cost-of-living crisis was met with the sort of sympathetic head-tilt one might offer a dying relative one has already written out of the will. Unemployment climbed to historic levels while the Prime Minister maintained the expression of a man who had just remembered he left the gas on. 

His government’s greatest innovations were largely repressive. Crackdowns on protests, particularly those concerning immigrants committing rape and murder, revealed a man uncomfortable with any dissent that might disturb the smoother functioning of the establishment consensus. He backed conflicts with the unblinking loyalty of a junior civil servant who has spotted which way the wind is blowing. Digital IDs rolled out with the quiet inevitability of parking restrictions. Young people were to be shielded from the perils of social media—presumably so they might better concentrate on the approved curriculum of managed disappointment. All the while, leasehold reform, that modest sop to the property-owning aspirations of the middle classes, was abandoned with the alacrity of a man spotting an awkward acquaintance across the room. 

The personal dimension is where the true comedy, if one may call it that, resides. Here was a figure who had spent years presenting himself as the decent, methodical lawyer who would restore competence to government. In practice, he resembled nothing so much as a senior partner in a provincial firm who had been elevated far beyond his natural ceiling and was now quietly terrified that someone might notice. The face—earnest, slightly pouchy, forever arranged in an expression of pained forbearance—suggested a man who had discovered the difference between being trusted with the petty cash and being trusted with the national finances. His speeches achieved the rare feat of sounding both scripted and extemporaneously dull. One imagined him practising them in the mirror, adjusting the tie, and still failing to convince his own reflection.

The electoral verdict was merciless and, in its way, rather beautiful. Labour haemorrhaged nearly 1,500 council seats in a single set of local elections. The net approval rating sank to minus sixty-six, a figure that places him in the exalted company of history’s more enthusiastically disliked prime ministers. Yet the real sting lay in where those votes went. Only a handful defected to Reform. The bulk migrated leftward, to the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Starmer, the great triangulator, the man who had neutered the Corbynite left with the ruthless efficiency of a party apparatchik securing his own advancement, had succeeded only in alienating precisely the constituency he was meant to have pacified. He was never there to represent them. He was there to neutralise them. Mission accomplished, as the post in question so dryly observed. Sort of. 

One searches for mitigating qualities and finds the cupboard embarrassingly bare. There was no grand vision, no memorable phrase, no moment of genuine moral courage that might redeem the record. Instead, there was the careful cultivation of the appearance of seriousness while the substance leaked away. Peter Mandelson’s early elevation—Epstein’s man in Britain, as the sharper tongues had it—set the tone. This was not renewal; it was the restoration of the same old revolving door between power and the more discreet forms of influence. Starmer governed as if the primary duty of office was to avoid frightening the horses. The horses, unimpressed, bolted anyway. 

Nowhere did the pinched soul of the man reveal itself more completely than in his response to the Southport murders, that pitiless slaughter of three little girls—Bebe, Elsie, and Alice—stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift dance class by a known quantity the state had repeatedly declined to restrain. Here was a Prime Minister confronted with raw, unbearable horror, the sort that should have cracked even the most lacquered political carapace. Instead, Starmer offered the nation the spectacle of a man auditing his own decency in real time. While the country reeled, he pivoted with the alacrity of a cornered accountant: swift condemnation not primarily of the killer but of the “far-right” disorder that followed, as though the true outrage were not the butchered children but the inconvenient eruption of public anger. 

No visible flicker of paternal grief disturbed those lawyerly features; one half-expected him to bill the parents by the hour for his condolences. He spoke of “terrorism has changed”—loners, misfits, bedroom radicals—as if the atrocity were a fascinating policy brief rather than the blood-soaked consequence of institutional cowardice and open-borders dogma he had done nothing to challenge. The families received platitudes; the rioters received a violent disorder unit. In that moment, Sir Keir Starmer stood exposed not merely as incompetent but as something colder: a functionary so thoroughly marinated in the preservative fluids of establishment self-preservation that the screams of murdered infants registered only as a threat to narrative control. A smaller, meaner man is difficult to conceive; one who could gaze upon such innocence destroyed and calculate first how best to spin it deserves not the pity of history but its permanent contempt.

In the end, Sir Keir Starmer will be remembered not as a tragic figure but as something smaller and more contemptible: a technician who mistook caution for wisdom and obedience for leadership. He entered Downing Street with every advantage and left it having proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the centre cannot hold when it has nothing at its core but the polished vacancy of ambition. Britain, poorer, angrier, and rather more cynical, waves him off without affection. The establishment, one suspects, will find a suitable sinecure. There is always the Lords for those who have served it faithfully, however incompetently.

Good riddance to a man who was, in the final analysis, one of the most thoroughgoing disappointments in modern British political history. Not evil, perhaps—just irredeemably small. And in politics, smallness, when dressed up in the robes of high office, is its own special form of insult to the public. One awaits the next with suitably lowered expectations.