BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
It is a truth universally acknowledged, yet whispered only in enlightened places, that the first-past-the-post British political system is a machine designed with one grim weakness: to periodically vomit into power a last-man-standing government of Muggles. Not the whimsical, wand-waving kind, but a far more desolate breed: the Labour Muggle. This unsightly creature is not born, but unexpectedly elected. Its natural habitat is the seat left festering after a Conservative collapse, its sustenance the diktats of trade union focus groups fed fat on biscuits, and its highest ambition the serene, managed administration of national decline.
In this foetid political ecology, one party stands supreme: the Labour Party is now, irrevocably, the Muggle Party.
The engine of this farce is our archaic electoral alchemy, where a party out of power for years finds itself in power after those years have ground down its opponents in government. There is a British ritual – not to discover brilliance, but to exterminate it. A candidate with vision and nerve is a menace; they spook the horses and, more catastrophically, the voters of Nuneaton. The system is a great, clanking sieve, and when it finally ruptures, the Labour Party in its current, one-term incarnation is the coarse, toxic grit that spills out.
And what coarse, toxic grit it is. We are governed by a Chancellor who embellished her CV, a Business Secretary who fantasised on LinkedIn about being a solicitor, a (now ex) Transport Minister with a criminal record for fraud, an Energy Minister who is a living walking caricature, a home secretary whose ‘home’ is highly questionable, and a former Deputy Prime Minister for whom a tax return is a work of speculative fiction. This is not a movement; it is a custodian agency for the Muggle-minded – a temporary caretaker for a nation that now prefers its problems sedated, not solved. They are the sartorial slobs who wear grey shoes with grey suits, who toast Marx in North London kitchens while his Venezuelan disciples butcher the last lion in the Caracas zoo for stew.
And so, we are supposed to kneel under the Muggle Administration of Sir Keir Starmer, a man whose defining trait is a vacuum where a personality should be (let us add ‘presumably’, as those Ukrainian rent boys, alas, were sufficiently gagged).
To observe the podgy, bespectacled Starmer is to witness the very essence of Muggle governance: a fanatical belief that every profound, bloody, human mystery can be solved by a policy document drafted by a spotty Fabian incel, and a skewed, ‘multi-stakeholder’ consultation. His fractured government cannot stride with conviction; it shuffles with the petrified gait of a Health and Safety inspector from Islington who has been informed the floor is not only slippery, but also a racist, sexist, heteronormative construct.
This is the Muggle Party laid bare: an organisation pathologically terrified of its own shadow.
Behold their legislative programme, a museum of Muggle thought. First, the Assisted Suicide Bill, a piece of legislation so sodden with bureaucratic pathos it could make the grave seem tedious. The genius grasps that mortality is a terrifying, sacred mystery. The Muggle Party sees it as a service delivery issue. They have not wrestled with the angel of death; they have established a cross-party working group to draft its terms of reference and tender for approved celestial facilitators. The forms will be triplicate, and your final exit requires two forms of ID and a fifteen-minute slot booked via a broken GOV.UK portal.
Then, the farmer’s inheritance tax. The genius understands land as a living entity, a covenant of soil and soul. The Muggle Party sees an asset class. Their solution to the crisis of our agricultural heartland is to apply the cold, dead logic of the spreadsheet, ensuring the son inheriting land his family has worked for three centuries is treated with the same fiscal brutality as a landlord passing on a buy-to-let portfolio of mould-infested terraces in Croydon. It is an act of profound imaginative poverty, a failure to comprehend that a nation has a soul, not just a balance sheet.
And finally, the digital identity card, the ultimate Muggle fetish. Devoid of any complex inner life, the Muggle is obsessed with cataloguing the exterior. The genius understands that liberty is the right to be unknown, to move in the shadows, to possess a self that is not quantified, tracked, and stored on a server in a Slough trading estate. The Muggle Party, trembling before this unregulated darkness, seeks to flood it with the sterile, white light of the database. They do this not (all) out of malice, but from a dim, witless, administrative compulsion. A world where everyone is numbered, filed, and verified is, to them, a tidier and more taxable place.
It is the logic of the librarian who yearns to burn every book that won’t fit neatly on his shelves.
We are thus condemned to the Muggle Peace. For the three and a half years remaining of their shambolic ‘regime’—should they, or the economy, last that long—there will be no grand visions, no heroic failures, no terrifying triumphs. There will only be the gentle hum of compliance, the soft rustle of risk-assessments, and the steady, draining hemorrhage of anything wild, poetic, or economically valuable from the national spirit.
The Muggle Party is ‘in charge’. It has pronounced, with the full, suffocating weight of its mediocrity, that this is not merely the best we can hope for, but all we shall ever be permitted to have until 2029.
Slither away, you reprehensible socialist snakes.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).