Our comic-opera politicians have become the new normal
In the dying days of the Habsburg Empire, people in Vienna quipped that the situation was disastrous, but not serious. Modern Britain is in a similar state, with comic opera politicians pretending to respond effectively to chronic failings in government and society.
Some of these crises are slow burning, with 12 million people, nearly one in five Britons, living in absolute poverty. Others are more immediate with the Government this week facing the potential collapse of Britain’s largest water utility, Thames Water, supplying a quarter of the population. Despite such menacing signs that parts of the British state are disintegrating, Rishi Sunak’s main political energies are devoted to pushing through Parliament legislation declaring Rwanda to be a safe place and thereby thwarting a Supreme Court decision that it is demonstrably unsafe. The purpose of this weird scheme is clearly to promote an issue that the Tories hope will help rescue their political fortunes before the general election, rather than a serious attempt to stop asylum seekers crossing the Channel in fragile boats.
Much of the British population now demonises the Government, but most striking for me is not its evilness but its frivolity, its lack of seriousness.
When I look at recent prime ministers and ministers and ask myself if they resemble any of the real-life villains and fools of British history, the characters that spring to mind come from comic literature and light opera. Sunak, who once presented himself as the straight-talking grown-up alternative to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, has turned out to have many of the same characteristics as Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, whose oily plausibility masks a selfserving opportunist.
Truss reminds me strongly of Florence Craye in Jeeves Takes Charge by PG Wodehouse, the short story in which Jeeves warns Bertie Wooster against her “highly determined and arbitrary temperament”. She is intent on moulding Wooster, who wants to marry her, by getting him to read the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Truss would probably have recommended right-wing economic icon Friedrich Hayek).
“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir,” says Jeeves. “He is fundamentally unsound.” Much the same is true of Hayek.
Johnson has been compared with some reason to Silvio Berlusconi, the late Italian populist leader, and to Donald Trump, but he reminds me rather of that shady aristocrat, the Duke of Plaza-Toro, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera The Gondoliers.
The Duke has turned himself into a limited company which has “just been floated at a premium”. He and his duchess sing of how they exploit their social position by dishing out titles, making paid-for speeches, promoting “bubble companies” and rehabilitating dodgy characters.
“I’m pretty well paid for my trouble,” sings the Duke, as he and his duchess retell with relish their various moneymaking ventures.
Good fun can be had by identifying the doppelgängers of past and present Tory ministers in comic literature. Grant Shapps, for instance, currently Defence Secretary after earlier occupying a ludicrous number of senior ministerial posts, has much in common with Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, whose jobs include acting simultaneously as First Lord of the Treasury, commanderin-chief and Archbishop of Titipu.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is sometimes unjustly compared to Wooster, but this is surely unfair on Bertie, who is a much more believable character.
I used to draw some comfort from a feeling that dysfunctional though these supposed decision-makers might be, their very shallowness and incompetence limited their ability to do much harm.
A formidable figure like Dominic Cummings seemed a far greater threat to democracy than the floundering Johnson. Cummings famously compared Johnson’s wobbly judgement and hourly changes of mind to a supermarket trolley veering from side to side.
Yet Sunak, who originally sold himself as “Mr Stability”, routinely out-trolleys Johnson, piously calling for moderation while, at one and the same time, vigorously stirring up communal fears and hatreds stemming from the slaughter in Gaza.
How did so many lightweights rise to the top? Support of powerful Tory newspapers explains a lot and Brexit was the vehicle for a toxic new rightwing leadership cadre.
Fear of mass immigration fuels populist nationalism everywhere in Western Europe and in the US. Rising prices threaten the living standards of many who once accepted the status quo but are now fair game for any snake-oil salesman promising to put things right. Yet reliance on the fundamental silliness of British political leaders to hobble their authoritarian instincts is a dangerous business and involves a fair amount of wishful thinking.
Silliness does not matter too much when the gravity of crises rates fairly low on the Richter scale, but at some point a government of blunderers will blunder into real minefields and blow everybody up.
The Viennese who flippantly discounted the failings of the AustroHungarian Empire learned the hard way that it really does matter who was in charge when their rulers stumbled into the First World War.
As we approach the next general election, it is worth asking how much lasting damage has been done to Britain by strange political creatures like Johnson, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and a dozen others, and – moreover – how come this toxic crew came to be in charge of a country full of intelligent, able and moderate people?
The media has a good deal to answer for its political bias and pretending that ministerial Pooh-Bahs with no record of achievement and a few months in office could deftly manipulate the levers of power.
The extraordinary events of the past eight years will be the background to the general election and will determine its result. But there is unlikely to be much productive debate about why Britain had its most lightweight government in its history trying vainly to cope with some of the greatest challenges it has ever faced, from Brexit to Covid-19 to the war in Ukraine. Elections are usually reported as horse races, with obsessive interest in who has a nose in front at any given moment, rather than drilling deep into broader issues and motivations.
British politics has become a sort of black comedy, though the same could be said of the US. Maybe lightweight governments are the new normal, dominated by leaders whose skills are in making their voices heard – through shrieking loudest, provoking outrage or simply providing entertainment – amid the oceans of information pouring out of the internet, television, radio and print.
Trump and Berlusconi became successful politicians, though visibly poor at running their countries, because of their attention-grabbing expertise in dominating the news agenda. Sunak would like to do the same thing, but he is not very good at it.
Cummings seemed a far greater threat to democracy than Johnson