BY MANRAJ ATWAL
The King is dead; Long live the King!
Or so the media declare as Britain faces up to its seventh Prime minister in a decade. The seemingly ritualistic axing of our head of government has been accompanied by all the usual rites. The choir of voices declaring “The grownups are back in charge”, the scuttling of MPs as they preach the virtues of their latest leader with the new gospel in their hands and hopes of promotion on their mind; and the insistence by all that this will herald a new age of politics. That this time things will be different!
But in and among these rantings and ravings is the same essential diagnosis. Britain doesn’t work. Its institutions are out of date; its practices out of step and its state model out of time. And aren’t they right? Isn’t it true that in place of efficient execution we’ve had unparalleled chaos at every level of government, with most ministers lucky to last two years at the head of their departments? That instead of a state that builds, we’ve got a state that consults, one that spent fifteen years planning a railway to Manchester before abandoning it, having sunk £2.3bn on a stretch of the railway that got cancelled. A railway which, in the stretch we are still building, will cost more than Britain’s entire nuclear deterrent.
And, to give Burnham his credit he does seem to have his finger on the pulse of the electorate. People, especially in the North or the sea-side towns, do think that fundamentally the nation took a wrong turn in the 80s, that the 70s were generally a better time to be alive and that for too long politics has been absorbed in a groupthink from Blair onwards. Devolution, his answer to the nation’s woes, is not a diagnosis. It is a deflection.
We have faced times of crisis before. We have dealt with insuperable problems before. We have overcome them before. The difference now is not that our institutions have failed us, or that Britain is fundamentally broken; but that the men who lead our institutions have simply lost their nerve.
The pattern is not new. In 1756 the British government under the Duke of Newcastle (Main image) had suffered a series of humiliating reverses, endured riots in the country, and been censured in the Commons and by the City of London, triggering a risk of capital flight at the exact moment Britain needed confidence most. And yet, by 1757, under William Pitt, the groundwork was laid for a strategy that subsidised Prussia to bleed France dry on the continent, turned the Navy loose on France’s colonies rather than holding it back in reserve, and coordinated assaults on Quebec, Louisbourg, and French India as parts of a single global design rather than scattered skirmishes. By 1759 it had produced an annus mirabilis: Quebec fallen, the French fleet broken at Quiberon Bay, Minden won, Guadeloupe taken. Two years, one ministry in collapse and one in triumph and the difference was never the hand Britain held, but who was playing it.
In the 70s, the pattern recurred again. Both Heath and Thatcher faced similar structural circumstances; one Premiership ended after three years in electoral defeat, and the other won three elections, lasting a decade in power. Structurally they faced the same stagnant economy, the same overbearing union power, and the same political establishment unwilling to brook new solutions. What distinguished the two was not the hand each was dealt, but the will to play it.
None of this is to say structure doesn’t matter. No Prime Minister, try as they might, can conjure up stable finances, a growing economy and stronger institutions by will alone. But then, that has never been the test for leadership. True leadership lies not in wishing circumstances away, but in the will to bend them rather than be bent by them.
And it is here that the failures of the past decade come into view. Failures not representative of systemic decline, but choices. Bad choices. After all, no structural force compelled Theresa May to call an early election; fight said election on a losing platform and then convert a working majority into a hung parliament. No structural force compelled Boris Johnson to lie, repeatedly, about lockdown parties or the indiscretions of his deputy chief Whip. No structural force compelled Truss to force through a mini-budget that crashed the economy or compelled Starmer into the litany of u-turns that came to define his premiership. None of these were the symptoms of “broken Britain” or “the tepid bath of decline”. These were real decisions, made by real people with consequences that were theirs and theirs alone.
So before Burnham shuffles off responsibility for the ‘wrong-turns of the past 40 years’, he would do well to remember; it is not structural forces that undo Prime Ministers, it is their own decisions and ultimately their own hubris.
Manraj Atwal is a History undergraduate at UCL and the incoming President of its Conservative Society.