To be premier of a country is no longer the highest office a person can achieve in his or her lifetime. With the advent of continent-wide councils and world-governing organisations, the honour of being selected for a Presidency or Prime Ministership has been reduced to a CV filler — another rung on the career ladder — for those with ambitions of world leadership.

Over the course of the election campaign, rumours emerged that Rishi Sunak intends to seek employment in the American tech sector after serving his term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But he is not the only party leader who daydreams of a career beyond the corridors of Westminster. Asked by Emily Maitlis, “Davos or Westminster?”, the leader of the Labour Party and new Prime Minister incumbent, Sir Keir Starmer, disclosed that he would rather expend his energies at Davos. 

Voters have sat baffled by the disconnect between themselves and their leader-to-be. With Sunak dipping out of D-Day celebrations, and Starmer asserting that he would not seek private health care for a family member in desperate need, it seems is not the sentimental, patriotic electorate upon whom these men wished to make a good impression, but someone else.

Those who recognise that for Sunak and Starmer, a role in IT or Davos to be a promotion and not a demotion understand how the supremacy of the nation state has come to be supplanted by supranational organisations and trillion-dollar businesses to whom the whole headache of running a country is being outsourced. 

Emerging world-governing bodies, supranational banks, and trillion-dollar businesses can simply be more powerful than nation states

Stonewall resolves for the Department of Education what sex education shall entail for state-educated children. Parliament continues to deliberate over whether autonomy should be surrendered to the World Health Organisation in the case of a global medical emergency. Despite not operating under the Euro, Britain, when it was a member of the European Union, had to present its budget to the Union for assessment before it could be presented to the House of Commons. The United Nations would impoverish the world with their prescriptions for Net Zero, and, if the confessions for former Prime Minister Liz Truss is to be believed, the Bank of England commands the Cabinet Office.

Emerging world-governing bodies, supranational banks, and trillion-dollar businesses can simply be more powerful than nation states. The market value of Apple is twice that of the GDP of Mexico. Meta is worth four times that of New Zealand. The whole of Microsoft could be traded for the country of Italy. When it comes to resources, manpower, and the constraints of law, nations find themselves at a disadvantage. Colossal corporations and intercontinental councils know not the bounds of coasts, coal-fields and five-year election cycles. If a country transcends their national borders in search of manpower and material, they are deemed expansionists, warmongers, and colonialists; if a company transcends its national borders, they are simply becoming “international”. They are neo-nations in their own right, with their own legal apparatus, systems of ethics, and cultures of work and play: those that are ambitious no longer strive to become nation leaders but CEOs.

It seems to have been concluded that for the nation-state to remain competitive it needs to reduce itself to an economic zone, whereby a citizen is only a unit of productivity, and each “global city” resembles the next. A nation is styled by its customer feedback forms, and the only tourist attractions such a nation can pride itself upon is its job market and the size of its social safety net. Under such circumstances, the role of president or prime minister is reduced to that regional manager of whichever global brand they have allied themselves with.

But what of those who — like most of Britain’s recent Prime Ministers, the present one included — have ambitions to be movers and shakers in one of these neo-states? For a Sunak or Starmer, his country is his portfolio, and his tenure over a nation offers a sneak peek into the policies of the man that would be not just “regional manager” but CEO.

Such an individual risks instrumentalising his country to his own careerist ambition. With his country, he alludes to what advantages — what resources, information, manual labour, infantry — he would be willing to leverage towards the prosperity of the conglomerate brand. He stakes what “investments” he is willing to make towards the global agenda of each world governing body, bank, business, council, or forum upon which he has set his sights. In short, he indicates which parts of his nation state he would be willing to sacrifice to the superstate for his own advancement.

This is not to propose that this kind of “offering up” of resources is not the way by which civilisations have understood and tolerated each other since the dawn of time. It is. It is to say that the target of this bartering — for it is far grubbier than a mere “trade” — is no longer country-to-country but country-to-corporation, and the nation-state becomes an Argos catalogue.

But I, for one, maintain that Britain is not for sale. 

Until the nation state becomes the locus of our purpose once more, Britain — like most developed countries — will be doomed to have transient leaders with transient ambitions, because they know, the nation itself is no more important than the latest iPhone.