I wrote the other day about the effect on Britain of the last fourteen years. But politics is personal too.

When David Cameron became the first Conservative Prime Minister of the twenty-first century, Keir Starmer had been Director of Public Prosecutions for less than two years. He surely cannot have imagined that he’d be the next Labour Prime Minister. And yet here we are.

And yet, it must surely feel daunting. The New York Times yesterday talked about him inheriting a ‘legacy of ashes’, while Le Monde talked of ‘creaking public services and a flatlining economy’.

On top of that, he’s got a unsupportive press looking to land every possible blow, and an insurgent Reform party primed to cause as much political instability as they can muster.

It’s a tough old job he’s got on his hands, and I don’t envy him.

A battered, faded and slightly wonky UK goes to the polls today, with the incumbent party dogged by scandal and ‘rotted through with individually minor corruptions, increasingly detached from the nation it governed, seemingly on the verge of final collapse’. Even The Sun, never shy about regurgitating Conservative talking points, couldn’t bring itself to back them.

As we tune in this evening to watch the results, we’ll witness the peculiarly British spectacle of election winners surrounded by defeated novelty candidates in outlandish costumes, only one of which will be called Jacob Rees-Mogg.

We also have to listen to a lot of blowhards making outlandish claims about the result. In the aftermath of the 2019 election, Donald Trump promised ‘a massive new Trade Deal’ between the UK and USA but couldn’t deliver it; Sir Ed Davey called the end of Nicola Sturgeon’s 2019 campaign ‘not very dignified’, before he spent most of the 2024 campaign deliberately falling in lakes; and the received wisdom among most political commentators on election night was that the Tory ’80-strong majority could be big enough to repel Labour’s next advance in five years’. Ho hum.

But not all of the commentary is nonsense. In the aftermath of the 2019 election, The Guardian’s view was that ‘Mr Johnson has won a great victory. But his problems are only just beginning.’

We couldn’t know at the time how salient that observation was. One suspects that the same will be true for tomorrow’s occupant of 10 Downing Street.

The final Survation MRP poll of the UK general election campaign was published yesterday evening, predicting that the Conservative Party will secure only 64 Parliamentary seats. I don’t have much faith in that number—I reckon they will end up on three figures—but it is undeniable that the self-styled ‘most successful political party in the world’ may be losing its touch.

It’s less than three years since we were told that Boris Johnson—out campaigning for the first time yesterday—was preparing for a further decade in power, aiming to beat Thatcher’s longevity as Prime Minister. He’s now the last-but-one Prime Minister and seems likely to gain his third successor by the end of the week.

As it seems likely that the latest era of Tory government is finally limping to a conclusion, it’s worth reading William Davies in The LRB summing up the approach to government over the last fourteen years.

It is mind-boggling to contemplate that of those fourteen years, only three and a half were spent with a Prime Minister enjoying a majority they secured at a general election.

Of those, two and a half were achieved thanks to Johnson and Dominic Cummings installing the Vote Leave campaign in Downing Street, kicking high-profile Tory Remainers out of the parliamentary party, and then fighting an election on the single pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’. That leaves just the single year Cameron enjoyed following the 2015 election, which he had fought on a promise to hold the referendum that ended his premiership.

It’s also startling to think that, in many ways, the most politically stable years were those between 2010 and 2015, with hardly any turnover of cabinet ministers despite—or perhaps because of—the fundamental challenges inherent to coalition government. If it weren’t for all that followed, we might reasonably conclude that an unstable foundation begets unusually stable government.

International politics looks set to cause some significant instability in the next fourteen years—indeed, in the next fourteen months—so goodness knows how our new Government will fare. On hope so much depends.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

On Tuesday, I recommended an election-themed tour of Britain from Le Magazine du Monde. Perhaps I just like plebiscite travelogues, because today I’m recommending this one from Jennifer Williams in the FT Magazine, where she tours parts of Northern England.

At Stockport’s recently renovated train station, the familiar words, “We are sorry to announce… ” bounced from the tannoys and around the platforms like abandoned campaign promises. My eastbound train was late. The westbound Liverpool train was also late. So was the northbound service from London to Manchester.

It was 11am on a weekday, but my train was standing room only. It was so tightly packed with passengers clutching luggage from nearby Manchester airport, so crammed with students, business people, families and pensioners headed towards Sheffield, that the member of staff pulling the catering trolley struggled to get it past us.

A couple of days later, a friend sent me a TikTok of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who had apparently caught a train. “The train was great, thoroughly enjoyed it,” he said. “Been taking lots of pictures and videos and sending them back to my kids.” My eyes narrowed.

I liked how Williams captured the sense that ‘everywhere, people were doing remarkable things to move their places forward, but were losing faith in the state’s will or ability to help.’

That chimes with my experience, and I think offers a good explanation as to why the election polls portend poorly for the incumbent Government. It’s a theme she returns to at the end of the article, with the ’Stockport isn’t shit’ carrier bags.

I also smirked at a line from one of Williams’s interviewees:

On a visit to Grimsby in summer 2022, the levelling-up secretary Michael Gove toured the East Marsh estate. “We call it the poverty safari, don’t we, when all the rich white men come.”

In my line of work, we have similar epithets for when politicians or other national leaders visit, one of which is ‘the fascination tour’—for the number of times we’re told how ‘fascinating’ our work is.

Williams mentions the dominant narrative of ‘broken Britain’ in politics, which is clichéd—but clichéd for a reason. Across this article and the one I recommended yesterday, the fundamental observation seems to be that the state isn’t working, not just at one level, but at many.

The state is not protecting the most vulnerable in society, as exemplified by James Picken from Hartlepool in yesterday’s article, or the tripling of the number of tooth extractions in Bradford’s children in William’s article. But nor is it working at the higher level, as shown by yesterday’s observation about the pound losing 20% of its value, or Williams’s point about Local Authority bankruptcies.

The problem for Labour—if we accept that Labour is almost certain to form a Government next week—is that none of this is easily fixed.

In Le Magazine du Monde, Eric Albert—Le Monde’s departing London correspondent—takes a tour around the country to assess how it has changed since he first arrived:

On May 31, 2003, on an unusually warm spring day, I arrived in London somewhat by chance. I was living in Thailand at the time, and my partner had found a job in the UK capital. Arriving with no particular preconceptions, I discovered a surprisingly dynamic country, open to the world and happy with its multiculturalism.

At the time, the French were arriving in droves. An organization was set up to welcome young adventurers who arrived on the Eurostar with their rucksacks, helping them find a job and accommodation within a matter of days. At the other end of the social spectrum, graduates of France’s top business and engineering schools were snapping up trading jobs in the City. The fee-paying French Lycée in London could no longer keep up with demand.

Twenty-one years later, I’m about to return to France for professional reasons. The UK I’m leaving bears no resemblance to the one that welcomed me. The pound has fallen by almost 20%, immigration has become an obsession and the French Lycée has closed its doors, after many families left.

It is well worth reading the whole thing. The distance afforded by both time and an outsider’s perspective brings into sharp relief the sense of decline across the country.

It feels to me like so much of our election coverage in the UK focuses on the political parties rather than the state of the nation. I think Albert’s article offers more insight into the state of the election polls than any number of headlines about senior Tories’ alleged gambling crimes, or any other of the myriad campaign gaffes. The campaign isn’t working because the country isn’t working.

I was particularly struck by Albert’s mention of James Picken, a Hartlepool resident. It feels to me like this sums up so much:

Picken’s story is complicated. The 42-year-old didn’t need the current British decline to fall into poverty. His mother died of a Valium overdose when he was 15. His brother died of a heroin overdose. Having been a welder on gas platforms and worked in Norway, among other places, he then fell into a downward spiral. Alcohol, drugs and prison – the vicious circle began almost two decades ago.

What has been more recent is the harshness of the system, which pushes him back into a rut each time he tries to climb out of it. A few months ago, he missed an appointment at the Jobcentre state employment agency. The penalty was immediate. “Normally, I get £276 in welfare benefits every month. My rent is taken care of, but that has to cover all my bills – electricity, gas and phone – and all my food. After the penalty, I only got £18 for the whole month.”

What was bound to happen happened: Picken stole a stash of chocolate bars (“I was craving sugar”) and some chicken from a store. “When I got caught, I was almost relieved, thinking that at least in prison I’d have two guaranteed meals a day.” This system infuriates Bedding from the Annexe organization. “Who benefits from this situation? We put him in prison for eight weeks, which cost society thousands of pounds, because they wanted to save £200 initially on his welfare benefits. What was the point?”

‘What was the point?’ is, perhaps, a question with wider relevance and resonance.

When I’ve been subject to media training, the mantra ‘address, bridge, communicate’ is oft-repeated: ‘address’ the question you’re asked, ‘bridge’ to the wider point you want to make, and ‘communicate’ that point.

Rishi Sunak used this strategy in a pool clip last week after being criticised about leaving the D-Day anniversary events before their conclusion.

Address: ‘Having attended all the British events with British veterans I returned home before the international leaders’ event later in the day. On reflection, that was a mistake. And I apologise. I think it’s important though, given the enormity of the sacrifice made, the focus should rightly be on the veterans who gave so much.’

Bridge: ‘People can judge me by my actions when it comes to supporting the armed forces.’

Communicate: ‘In this campaign, it’s the Conservative Party led by me which is increasing the amount of investment that we’re putting into our Armed Forces to 2.5% of GDP. That’s not something that’s been matched by the Labour Party.’

The problem is, of course, that his bridge doesn’t connect the two statements. The message he wants to communicate is nothing to do with actions by which we can judge him, it’s a pledge about future intentions. It is counterproductive and strange to invite people to judge him by his actions when he is apologising for his actions.

The overall effect wasn’t enhanced by saying, moments after making his political comparison with the Labour Party, ‘I don’t think it’s right to be political in the midst of D-Day commemorations. The focus should rightly be on the veterans and their service and sacrifice for our country.’

So here is a conundrum. As far as I can make out, one of three desperately unlikely and seemingly implausible things must be true: Sunak walked into the pool interview without an agreed answer to the obvious question; an answer which literally asks voters to pay more attention to the error was agreed by his team; or Sunak forgot his prepared lines.

I look forward to Tim Shipman’s inevitable book revealing the answer in five years’ time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It feels strange to live through an election period where a change of Government is forecast with—by the sober analysis of The Economist—99% certainty. While it’s democratically essential, even going through the motions of the campaign feels a little disconnected from reality, even before one considers the specific promises made by candidates.

Tonight, Julie Etchingham will host the first televised debate of this election, ostensibly between the two candidates who could plausibly be Prime Minister on 5 July—though it’s hard not to wonder whether more people ought to be involved if a 1 in 100 chance is considered ‘plausible’. It feels like false equivalence—not that I have a better suggestion. It also feels narrowly composed: the recent experience of Prime Ministers leaving office between elections shows us that the candidates are asking us to place our confidence in the leader selection process for each of their parties as much as in them personally.

On Saturday, the always-excellent Stephen Bush had a brilliant article in the FT Weekend exploring how British politics has lost touch with reality. He points out that both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are guilty of promising things that they cannot plausibly deliver. It is this three-paragraph excoriation of Rishi Sunak’s failure to make even the simplest of changes that particularly stands out:

Remember, too, that Sunak has been unable to achieve some seemingly achievable policy challenges. Although it is early days, it is hard to see how any political party in the general election will manage a better argument as to why Sunak should not be re-elected than the one that came from the man himself. He described his failed attempt to ban future generations from buying cigarettes as evidence of “the type of prime minister I am”, and he was right. Rishi Sunak is the type of prime minister who, when he wants to do something, when it is backed by large majorities in both his own party and the Labour opposition . . . still can’t reliably deliver.

In this case, his attempt to bring about a “smoke-free generation” — the flagship not only of his attempt to rebrand himself as a “change candidate” last autumn but also one of his signature achievements in his speech calling the election — came unstuck because he couldn’t manage the simple trick of not expediting the legal change ahead of an election he didn’t need to hold.

Whether you agree with Sunak’s phased smoking ban or not, the difficult truth for the prime minister is that passing his ban into law was a public policy challenge with the difficulty turned all the way down to “casual”. Yet he could not manage it. Nor is it an isolated example. One of Sunak’s earliest initiatives was a push to teach all children in England a form of maths until 18. If, as looks likely, he leaves office in five weeks’ time, the country will be less equipped to teach maths to 18 than when he took office — because there are fewer maths teachers. There is no prospect that Sunak, a limited prime minister with few achievements to his name, is going to be able to keep the promises he is now making, any more than he could make the snow fall on Christmas Day and the sun shine in June and July.

In 2024, comparisons are inevitably drawn with the 1997 election. In the exit poll for that election, 57% of the respondents felt that John Major could be trusted, versus 56% for Tony Blair. At the start of the 2024 election campaign, 21% of respondents considered Rishi Sunak to be trustworthy, and 28% considered Keir Starmer to be trustworthy. Those figures portend poorly for Sunak, but perhaps worse for the population, representing as they do a complete collapse of trust in politicians.

We can debate how much of that collapse is attributable to a failure to keep simple promises, and how much to the criminal behaviour of some politicians. But it seems unlikely that the continued disconnect between political rhetoric and reality will repair trust—or that a fantastical television debate will do anything but further damage trust in our politicians.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Today, the UK’s parliament is due to be dissolved, meaning that we cease to have members of parliament (MPs), because there’s nothing for them to be a member of. But when, exactly, does this happen? It’s taken more reading up than seems sensible, but I think I now know.

If the Prime Minister had decided to just let the parliament expire, it would have been automatically dissolved ‘at the beginning of the day that is the fifth anniversary of the day on which it first met.’

I’m not completely sure of the meaning in law of ‘the beginning of the day’—I assume it’s effectively midnight, but perhaps the intention is the beginning of the parliamentary day? In which case, I’m not sure whether that would mean immediately after the close of the previous day’s session (which could run past midnight), or the morning after. But we needn’t detain ourselves on this point, as the Prime Minister asked the King to dissolve parliament early, which is done through royal proclamation.

You might think that a royal proclamation would come into force at the moment it is signed by the monarch, or perhaps the moment the seal is affixed, or perhaps some moment when it’s read out in parliament, but you’d be wrong.

Under the Crown Office Act 1877, a royal proclamation takes effect from the moment it is published in The Gazette. In recent years, there seems to have been a convention that proclamations are published online at midday, so it seems likely that we’ll have no MPs from this afternoon.

In 2015, along with over 1,000 other people from over 100 countries, I attended an international conference of health professionals in Geneva. One delegate gave a fascinating presentation on their country’s response to the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.

Early in her presentation, she spoke self-deprecatingly about how her country previously hadn’t needed to develop public health guidance for high consequence infectious diseases. Instead, her agency simply looked at the guidance on the USA’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website, looked at the guidance on the UK’s Health Protection Agency website, and split the difference.

“There was one problem with that approach this time,” she said.

After a dramatic pause, she flashed up a screenshot of the gov.uk homepage, quipping “Good luck finding anything useful on there!”

It was a joke that brought the house down. The UK was a laughingstock; gov.uk was the punchline.

My friend James O’Malley wrote an excellent Substack post a few days ago, in which he called gov.uk “genius” and “the best thing the Tories did in office”. As always, he makes brilliant points. He knows more about technology and the web than I could ever hope to. His post is much better informed than mine and is definitely worth more of your time. Yet, my perspective differs a little from his.

I agree with many of James’s arguments: renewing a passport is miraculously easy; the site’s layout is brilliantly clear; the design principles and style guide are first-rate (though too rarely followed in practice).

But there are problems—or, if we want to be optimistic, opportunities for future development. These were evident when the service was being designed, but making passport renewal easier and putting bunting on the bank holiday page were, it seems, greater strategic priorities.

The first issue was the decision to sweep away many professional-facing websites and to collect everything on one giant gov.uk system. James links to some other people who have issues with this, but it has been a particular concern in the health field.

One major problem is that specialist-facing content is very difficult to find. I don’t see the advantage to a primarily public-facing website hosting, say, the request form that microbiology labs must use to refer gastrointestinal bacterial isolates to the national reference lab. What member of the public needs to see the form to request intrathecal antibody testing for Hepatitis C?

I know from frequent complaints that people often find it difficult to find that sort of thing on the site, even all these years after it launched. The problem is compounded where animal and human health cross: hosting content about testing birds and testing humans for influenza on a single platform is a recipe for confusion. This wasn’t true when the content was hosted on a previous website targeted quite narrowly at health professionals.

The mixing of public- and professional-facing information and the resulting unnavigability of the site became a particular problem during the COVID-19 pandemic, as already cited in evidence given to the COVID-19 enquiry. It is quite likely that professionals were, at times, taking the wrong action because they couldn’t find the right guidance among the morass of COVID-19 content that was being published daily. That’s a pretty major failing.

There are also two other significant effects of this approach.

One is that government agencies increasingly publish resources outside of gov.uk, usually partnering with non-governmental bodies to host content that would not be allowed—or be easily added to—gov.uk. I’m not going to point to specific examples for obvious reasons—if you know, you know.

Another is that a lot of content is simply not published any more, as it was deemed inappropriate to sit on a public-facing website—much of this sort of thing is no longer published online, and is therefore inaccessible to professionals and the public alike. The decision to sweep away professional-facing websites has had a chilling effect on government transparency—even while people celebrate gov.uk as a transparency success.

In 2010, when the gov.uk strategy was being developed, it was entirely foreseeable—and foreseen—that the spread of unreliable information would be an ever greater challenge.

Perhaps the single most baffling decision for gov.uk has been the choice to seemingly ignore that. This presents itself in three ways.

First: When government agencies need to give emergency messages—“there’s a big fire so close your doors and windows”, for example—these are routinely distributed via social media. If there were ever messages you’d want to present first on a stable, reliable, verified site and then syndicate elsewhere, those about public safety would seem to be at the top of the list. Instead, presumably because the gov.uk strategy didn’t account for this “user need”, the government has de facto outsourced low-level emergency messaging to Twitter. This sort of thing used to be routinely published, but doesn’t appear on gov.uk—we don’t give the public the opportunity to check facts they’ve seen on social media.

To take a really minor example: instead of this quote being published on a government domain, as it would have been before the launch of gov.uk, it’s now on a Twitter account that could have been set up by anyone. Without gov.uk, it’s likely that the quote would have been on a verifiable departmental website and linked from Twitter.

Second: Accuracy doesn’t seem to be prioritised. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a page about public transport on gov.uk that gave blatantly incorrect advice, suggesting that COVID-19 persisted longer on surfaces than human hands. This resulted in a deluge of questions for hospital infection specialists—and despite a chorus of complaints, the page wasn’t corrected for—literally—weeks. There is a guidance document on another topic live on gov.uk now with a persistent error in it—years after the error was first reported. If the information on gov.uk can’t be trusted to be reliable, then it undermines the whole endeavour.

Third: gov.uk doesn’t follow its own advice. In his Substack post, James celebrates the success of gov.uk Notify—a service which is routinely used to send unsolicited messages to members of the public exhorting them to click embedded links. This is not a shining example of thought-through technological prowess—it’s a tool that trains people to fall victim to scams. And, just as James says, this vision of insecurity is actively pushed across all government departments—because a failure to think in a cyber-secure way isn’t limited to a single area of government but is automatically propagated to all.

In his post, James says

To give you a sense of where it was starting from back when GDS was created, the government didn’t know how many websites it had.

In that narrow sense, I think the situation is now worse: I don’t think the government knows how many sites it ‘officially’ posts on. We’ve gone from a situation where official government content is spread over an uncountable number of accountable government websites, to one where it’s spread across countless websites which aren’t even in the government’s control. Many of them aren’t even based in the UK, and there’s no mechanism for professionals or the public to verify that the content is genuine.

Some professional content on the ‘official’ website is so difficult to find that it is likely to have caused people to come to physical harm. Factual errors in content persist for years, meaning that it’s difficult to trust the content that is on there. And some things are just not published any more, making government less transparent than it used to be.

The bits of gov.uk that work are, as James says, brilliant. But some of the strategic and cultural change that has happened around the introduction of gov.uk, partly driven by the limitations of the system, has been damaging in ways that are under-recognised. If you ask me—and there’s no reason why you should—it all needs a bit of a rethink.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In this election, Keir Starmer is keen to tell us that it’s time to ‘turn the page’ after the past fourteen years.

In The Sellout, Paul Beatty writes:

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

To improve the standard of government in Britain would be wonderful. But even if that’s achieved, the trauma inflicted by the last fourteen years—the emotions, the song, the things that stay with us—feels like it might take far longer to heal.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.