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.