After so many U-turns, we can extend the Prime Minister the charity of precision. Having already committed 15 or 16, the marginal political benefit of pinning another one on him is low and we can, if history is any guide, be confident another will be on its way shortly.
Thus, I don’t think we need formally to see the tortured handwringing over Iran as a reversal. There is a difference between saying, “You can’t use our base to attack a foreign country with a legally dubious casus belli” and saying a couple of days later, “Now that the country you’ve attacked is attacking innocent parties who are our allies, if you want to use our base to go after their weapons, knock yourself (and hopefully them) out.”
The trouble is that the second situation was entirely foreseeable while we were debating the first. It was widely reported over the past months that the Gulf States were urging caution because they knew that if America attacked Iran, Iran wouldn’t attack America, it would attack them. Since we were always likely to end up here, it would have been politically wise and indeed, statesmanlike, to make it clear that if the facts changed, so would the government’s policy.
But, for an administration with a chess champion (perhaps) as its 2-IC (that’s Integrative Complexity Thinking for the uninitiated – like the editor), thinking more than one move ahead is something our current rulers are spectacularly poor at. The vast majority of the U-turns have come when the eminently predictable had not been predicted, but had come to pass. Who would have thought that pensioners might object to losing the Winter Fuel Allowance, and who would have thought that the prospect of granny freezing to death might tug at the nation’s heart-strings? Well, everyone outside the corridors of power apparently.
It is, I think, this basic lack of competence which explains much of the government’s current travails. Yes, Starmer is an odd fish and yes, on vote share, it wasn’t starting from a high base after the election, but if the electorate doesn’t expect the authorities to be right all the time, it does prefer them to be right most of the time and, at the moment, they just aren’t.
Unfortunately, people have been keeping score and the government has been bumbling along at “friends and family” levels in the polls for a while now. As, to be fair, have the Conservatives. Yougov’s latest has Labour five points behind the Greens, sparking a bout of fevered commentary. There is, after all, nothing else happening right now…
It is, of course, “just one poll”. The Greens have just won a by-election, so there may be a “strong horse” effect. We are at the stage in the political cycle where governments are usually unpopular. Etc. etc. We could, if we were so minded, point out that, after such a run of serial incompetence, still coming third suggests things can still come good if the government can just start to get things right. If.
The dog which hasn’t barked, however, is the Lib Dems. Remember them? Well done if you can. Only 14% of those surveyed were willing to hold their hands up and pledge allegiance to the political wing of the John Lewis Rewards Program.
It is not for the want of trying. Everyday Ed Davey stands up and signals his virtue over the pressing issues of the time. Every election, he channels a divorced dad trying to re-connect with his kids at Centre Parcs. And he’s getting nowhere.
Which is strange. If the Tories spent 14 years proving their incompetence, and Labour have spent 14 months doing the same, Surely Ed’s band of happy warriors are perfectly positioned to capitalise. The tuition fees debacle is a long way in the rear-view mirror, and there’s nothing in their policy proposals to scare the horses. Yes, they give every impression of believing they have a better moral “pot to piss in”, but so does Keir Starmer – and it hasn’t held him back.
Politics, they say, is showbusiness for ugly people. Without making any ungallant comments on our leaders appearance (although Ed Davey’s physical resemblance to Wayne Rooney is, I think, underexplored in the public discourse), we do treat it as a branch of entertainment. PMQs is a weekly rap battle, events in the Gulf a war movie or video game depending on your generation. But the focus on personality can lead us to overlook the more structural aspects of the ways we govern ourselves.
At the last election, the “centrist” parties (Labour/Lib Dems/Tories) took just under 70% of the votes (more if you adjust for the Scot Nats and Plaid Cymru for whom most, thankfully, cannot vote). On Yougov’s numbers, they are currently getting 46%. That is roughly a quarter of voters who have abandoned the centre parties and, we might presume given the lack of switching to the Lib Dems’ available alternative, the centre.
Instead, it is the extremes which are benefitting. To be clear, “extreme” is a relative description, not an absolute one. I’m not about to suggest that Reform are Nazis. The Greens seem to be offering eco-socialism with a twist of Islamism, Reform Thatcherism with border guards or socialism with border guards, it’s not entirely clear. But there will be border guards.
As to whether either of these will work, I am unconvinced. Actually, I am convinced the Greens policies wouldn’t work unless you wish to cosplay the Stone Age. Reform’s last manifesto makes it hard to shake the suspicion they are the committee of a provincial golf club, high on their own supply.
It is just one poll, but if Yougov’s results were replicated at an election, we would be in uncharted waters. For we are used to politics acting as a spectrum. The right of Labour overlaps with the Lib Dems who overlap with the left of the Conservatives. There is a continuum. You get Blue Labour and you get Red Tories. You don’t get Greens for repatriation, and you don’t get Reform for open borders. The continuum would become a rupture.
The centre may not work very well, but it lowers the temperature. It is not of world-shaking significance whether Labour or the Tories get in. Their current incarnations are sufficiently similar to allow the losers to put up with the winners. Would that be the case if it were Nige and Zack facing off every Wednesday? Or would every election become more existential? Even Ed Davey might be better than that…
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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