CHRISTOPHER BOOKER THE LAST WORD

Theresa May is rightly ridiculed over Brexit, but she’s not the only leader to be having problems

Preoccupied though we may have been by the unending chaos in Westminster and the possibility that we could be headed for our greatest political and economic crisis since the Second World War, it might be observed that across the Western world, Britain is not the only country to be experiencing an unprecedented breakdown in the way it is governed.

The most obvious example is what is now going on around President Trump, the man from “outside the system”, who is now beset on every side: by the resignation of his chief of staff, with seemingly no one rushing to replace him, and the imprisoning of his former lawyer following an utterly squalid court case, and the televised spectacle of Trump in the Oval Office, shouting at senior Democrats that he will “shut down the government” unless they agree to pay for building his ridiculous Mexican wall.

In France we see the popping of the bubble created by the vainglorious little President Macron, another man from “outside the system”, as the streets of Paris fill with anarchic mobs he has no way of satisfying. In Germany we see the authority of Angela Merkel visibly waning, after 10 years when she was the most powerful politician in Europe, again with no one in view to replace her.

In Italy, ruled by a bizarre coalition of others from “outside the system”, they wait for the collapse of their teetering economy and see no end to their migration crisis. Apart from taking a hard line over Brexit, the authority of the EU itself also continues to wane, as the countries of eastern Europe such as Hungary and Poland become ever more rebellious, while next year will see yet another bunch of faceless nonentities replacing those making up the current European Commission.

Therein lies the clue to what has happened to the politics of the West in recent years. Long gone are the days of the Eighties, when politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher. Chancellor Kohl, President Mitterrand and Jacques Delors in Brussels – the last generation who could remember the Second World War – still seemed, for good or ill, like distinctive individuals of weight and force of character.

Since then we have seen the stature and competence of our politicians visibly draining away, to the point where hardly one of them any longer commands proper respect. Those who arise from “outside the system” to challenge it, turn out to be to be just strutting, empty poseurs. Everywhere, low-grade groupthink and make-believe rule. It is little consolation that today the only politicians who still seem to carry real weight in the world are those from outside the West, such as Presidents Putin, Erdogan and the increasingly autocratic and terrifying Xi Jinping of China. Hard, dark and ruthless all of them. It is a prospect which offers little to cheer us in an ever more confused and bewildering time.

Last week brought Britain a step closer to the moment I have long been predicting, when our entire electricity supply will fail. On Dec 4, National Grid told us that there had been a “100 per cent probability” that our lights would go out within 24 hours, if it had not been able to call on emergency power at way over the market rate from a Welsh coalfired power station.

It is over 10 years since I first began to warn what our makebelieve national energy policy seemed to be heading us towards, as the Government planned to phase out fossil fuels in order to rely ever more on weatherdependent renewables. More than once last week coal and gas were still able to provide around 60 per cent of our power, with only a fraction coming from wind farms.

Yet of all the coal-fired power stations which in 2015 were still supplying nearly a third of our electricity, only six remain. And even these are scheduled for closure, still kept open only by exorbitant subsidies and “emergency backup” schemes such as that used last week to save us from a collapse of the grid.

Now the European Court of Justice has ruled that, under the EU’S “state-aid rules”, such subsidies are illegal. But even without that, our politicians still seem bent on making it inevitable that sooner or later we shall face what National Grid calls a “100 per cent probability” not just that our lights will go out but that our now almost wholly computerdependent economy will grind to a halt.

Those from ‘outside the system’ turn out to be strutting poseurs