There are many downsides to a life in the SW1 bubble, but one of the more useful ones is a process of disenchantment: the gradual realisation that there is no separate space where super-competent people are making the real decisions. Government, like any human organisation, is just people and rooms — and you increasingly know the people. Inevitably, per The Great Gatsby, your stock of enchanted objects is diminished in the process.

Whether or not this is a welcome revelation or an unwelcome one depends on you. It can be a bleak realisation; on the other hand, it does explain a lot — and makes much less impossible-seeming the prospect of one day being one of the people in the rooms where the decisions are taken.

It is more just an inevitable process of growing up. Or so I thought, anyway, unless I read this extraordinary line from Tim Shipman’s look ahead at 2025: “Starmer discovered, ‘within days of entering No 10’, that ‘there was no plan’.”

There is a thesis to be written about the use of “discovered” in that sentence. More than one, even. It boggles the mind. How do you get to be the Leader of the Opposition, with two years where you’re streets ahead in the polls and near-certain to become prime minister, and still think that it’s someone else’s job to be coming up with the plan?

It’s almost charming, in a Peter Pan-ish sort of way. Somehow, Sir Keir Starmer has managed to reach the highest rank in British politics whilst maintaining throughout his firm belief in the secret room of competent people. Perhaps it was a nagging fear about the fragility of this belief that led to his not checking they were there, even though they were in this case supposed to be reporting to him!

Managerialism makes sense if you don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong

Perhaps, as a civil servant and especially as a lawyer, the Prime Minister simply truly believes that the real driving forces of British governance lie outwith politics — in the realm of the expert and impartial Civil Service, or the wielders of protean but all-powerful international law.

But even then, he must have realised that his government had at least some small role to play in keeping the cogs oiled, and it apparently did not occur to him that he was the person who should be deciding what that role was.

The results have been plain to see. Labour’s rancid start in office is not entirely its own fault — the walls of British politics are simply closing in as entitlement spending commitments run away from tax revenues — but it has played a bad hand extremely badly. It is hard for a Tory journalist to claim without looking drearily partisan, but it’s as if ministers sincerely thought that not being the Conservatives would be enough, that there were some growth buttons the Tories simply weren’t pressing because they’re Tories.

As a result, the only signs of life come from individual ministers. Wes Streeting is having a game go at fixing the NHS with no money, although even he has had no choice but to punt an answer on social care (which has been an obvious problem since at least the 2017 election) into the long grass for want of a plan. Ed Miliband is beavering away at his Net Zero agenda, and Bridget Phillipson is taking an ideological hatchet to a quarter-century of cross-party school reform.

But from the centre, nothing. Starmer is having to come up with missions, milestones, and more on the fly. Having attained the highest office, he must now confront the thorny issue of why he wanted it, and doesn’t seem to have a compelling answer.

This ought to be remarkable. Yet it isn’t, sadly. After all, Starmer’s managerialism is not all that different from Rishi Sunak’s. The day-to-day business of government provides plenty of work to keep one busy, and busyness is a common refuge from the big picture in all walks of life.

More puzzling, to me, is why anyone without that sense of mission, some vision, would want to go into politics. For the able — and those who reach the very top usually are able, whatever their shortcomings — there are far richer rewards to be had in private life, and for much less sacrificed. Going into politics means taking a pay cut to give up your privacy and have lots of people shout at you.

At the lower rungs of the political ladder, and especially in the wider Bubble beyond elected office, the presence of people with scant interest in policy makes more sense. This is a low-wage country, and politics can offer an easy road to relatively well-paid, high-status, and low-accountability employment. Even on the backbenches, there are clearly people for whom getting barracked for £80k per annum is a better deal than they’d get elsewhere. But at the top? 

Perhaps it is simply a generational thing. Starmer is very likely the last Boomer who’ll serve as prime minister. But more broadly, what unites him with Gen Xers such as Sunak (and Kemi Badenoch, albeit both narrowly) is that they’re of what we might call the This Is Fine generation — basically people who were able to more or less sort their adult lives out before the Crash in 2008, and have thus lived in a fundamentally different country to people who weren’t.

Managerialism makes sense if you don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong. And Sunak, for example, clearly didn’t. Shipman provides another eye-opening quote with the former prime minister bleating “Why do people not realise I’m right?” as the last government collapsed about him. This from a man who decided to meet an historic stall in growth in productivity, real wages, and GDP per capita by tinkering with school exams and cancelling a railway.

People with an actual cause — with a proper diagnosis of a problem, let alone a prescription — don’t need prompting to set it out. Like many senior politicians from all parties, Starmer instead talks about Britain’s fundamental problems the way a husband apologises to an angry wife: he knows he has to, but he obviously isn’t sure why.

It thus doesn’t really matter whether or not he eventually alights on a compelling narrative. If he does, it will only be because much younger advisers have handed it to him. The real question is whether the sort of politician he represents will die out once people who have never known wage growth in their entire working lives start reaching the top.

Hopefully, the obvious misery of his ministry will speed the process. It is past time our political class left Neverland behind, and grappled with the (only getting more difficult) challenge of governing the country we actually live in.