A couple of years ago The Fence published an exposé of Kemi Badenoch’s brief tenure as digital director at The Spectator. I don’t know Kemi Badenoch, so for all I know the exposé was inaccurate and unfair. But it still made a memorable impression. This was because, unfair or otherwise, it described to a tee a particular type of strange creature: the SW1er. 

It is difficult to describe to the unfamiliar exactly what an SW1er is. This in itself is instructive. The SW1er is someone who doesn’t actually do things, doesn’t have a craft or calling, as such, but who lands posts with bodies usually registered in or around SW1, most often in politics or think-tanks, sometimes in journalism or other things. 

This strange scenario is instructive because part of being an SW1er is to acquire posts without actually doing jobs. It is to fill a vacancy while being essentially vacant. SW1ers are thus aptly named with a postcode, because they’re a sort of coded signifier within an organisational system; more like a numbered placeholder than a real place. 

That exposè of Badenoch described her as “unbelievably crap”, being both “inefficient and idle”. The SW1er is, by definition, incapable of actually doing things. This is odd and frustrating, because, if politics is anything, it is the art of actually doing things. 

We’ve become so accustomed to the structural incapacity of the SW1er to do things, that this incapacity has become an accepted characteristic of much of the political class. Part of the problem is that few SW1ers have done things before landing a post at a think-tank or as a staffer. I mean self-led, hard graft, work. I mean long hours with little reward, driven by passion and determination, involving a fair measure of risk and the genuine possibility of failure. I mean the sort of work that you wouldn’t want to be doing for life, but that your natural gifts require of you. The sort of work you have to work your way out of, with grit and gumption in equal measure – and by which you acquire something that you can actually do.    

… landing a post is the accomplishment to the SW1er, not the work you do when in post

Badenoch was described as allegedly spouting superficially impressive sounding phrases in meetings, which were on closer inspection empty and vacuous non-sequiturs. Landing a job in the SW1 bubble is rather like being a bubble oneself. Flimsy and insubstantial, empty and carried about on gusts of hot air. It is about knowing the right person, making a good impression. It is about cultivating people to like the cut of your jib:  your manner, mien, or demeanour, not accomplishments themselves. Indeed, landing a post is the accomplishment to the SW1er, not the work you do when in post. This is why DEI/EDI is attractive to many SW1ers — because it is all presentation, airlifted posts, and the manipulation of appearance against achievement.   

The quintessential signifier of the SW1er is the ability to present themselves … as confident, articulate, and capable

SW1ers are thus contradictory creatures, presenting themselves highly effectively, while being highly ineffective. If you ask them what they actually do, they’ll talk about “effecting change”, “genuine impact”, and “moving things forward”. If you ask them what that change, impact, or progress actually is, in concrete terms, you’ll uncover a layer of cloud: nebulous, undefined, ambiguous and, ultimately, non-existent.

The quintessential signifier of the SW1er is the ability to present themselves, spontaneously and without due preparation, as confident, articulate, and capable. This is why, if you closely inspect the working-day of an SW1er, you’ll see that what the work involves, and what fuels their careers, is just the ability to make and manipulate contacts. This also illustrates the wisdom of Dominic Cummings’ call for “weirdos and misfits” to come at work at No. 10 — that is, people who don’t present themselves well at all, people who can let their work speak for itself. 

When required to do something that involves genuine work, the SW1er will go to WhatsApp and try to find someone to do it for them. They are skilled at trying to make this happen without the other person knowing that’s what they’re doing. Everything is measured in terms of personal advancement and advantage, nothing in terms of what will actually result in real life. This relates to another alleged characteristic of Badenoch at The Spectator, as having a “kiss up / kick down” approach, being bossy and unpleasant to junior staff and seeming affably capable around her superiors. In the workplace, SW1ers can’t maintain the visage like they do on WhatsApp — meetings at which everything is delegated are too obvious. The juniors soon suss that the person can’t do the work, so they’re then pressured to do it, and blamed if they don’t do it well.  

SW1ers are not only keen but unhued 20-somethings. They include many senior politicians. If you have worked with such a creature, the vacuity is sometimes so incredibly deep-rooted that it seems unfathomable that someone so blind to the art of practical accomplishment could have become so very accomplished. Maybe at the higher levels this is shielded by the fact ministers have civil servants who are meant to do the tasks about which their ministers speak in high-flown words. If so, the deep state is only one side of the coin of what is wrong with this country, the other is the shallow politician.

There’s another characteristic of the SW1er which isn’t in the Badenoch exposé but which is incredibly common. A comment on X by Mike Jones at Migration Watch highlighted this: the pilfering and plagiarising that SW1ers do — the wholesale theft of other peoples’ ideas which are passed off as their own. For those in journalism it is endemic, for those SW1ers who float around academia it was always well-known when I was in my salad years.

Why are they like this? Because to be passionate and determined about something other than one’s own advancement, and to have put in the graft that means you’re doing something about it, invariably means having considered views, sharpened by experience, which belong to oneself. Having a grand sounding post without that basis, means you need to steal those views from others. 

This leads to the question of what is to be done. People with these SW1 characteristics can exist in all sectors. Trite condemnations of “career politicians” haven’t made any difference, and there are some career politicians with genuine integrity who certainly can’t be accused of being SW1ers themselves. Whatever the answer is — as long as Britain’s structural incapacity to tackle problems results from those who are structurally incapable of tackling problems themselves — there’s little hope of a way out of our current winter of discontent.