Unfortunately, Prime Minister, You Have to Be in Power

Someone holds the office and sadly that person is you

You’re the prime minister of a small country, a poor country getting poorer. You’re pretty ambitious, but not as ambitious as some. Your plan was to become PM for a bit, impress the wife and kids, serve out a quiet term, then retire. After all, you’re old. People in their forties are running around with insane, psychotic visions to which you’re not party. You’re aware all the time that you are old.

But sadly, fate has decided to spit upon you. God, if he exists (you’ve got your doubts), has decided to torture you. Because someone has to be in power, prime minister, during this time of national suicide. And unfortunately, that person is you.

Someone has to be in power. Tragically, viciously, it’s you who has to be in power. Because someone has to be and this time it is you.

So, will you use your power? Probably not, if you’re like all the others. The immense civil service apparatus has every advantage over you. It is permanent, protected by statute and over a century of convention. You’re temporary — oh so temporary — and your office, your powers, are not so precisely defined. You could do nothing, like all of your contemporaries — you could allow yourself to be ruled and not ruler. Let the civil servants dissuade you from ruling the country; let the pressure groups and the donors dictate your every day’s work. Worry in Downing Street about the Today programme, the newspapers (if anyone still reads them), what people are saying about you online. That’s a case for censorship, for jail: the things people are saying about you online.

You could do all that. And then go to summits and explain that, yes, Britain is decarbonising, yes, Britain is kneecapping itself, and yes, we are walking away on bended knee from all overseas territories, and yes, we will pay for the privilege, and yes, we are very, very sorry, and yes, we won’t do it again, sir — never, sir, never once, sir — never again. You could do that. Seems like a plan. Like a plan that’s been made for more than one prime minister before you by their helpers in the regime. But it would do just as well for you. It’s been done before. Why not do it again?

The civil servants you deal with are all sub-par. You’ve dealt with cleverer lawyers in private practice. They’re officious, too, officials. Claiming everything you want to do is illegal, everything is improper and against precedent. They think their slowest and most conformist members ought to head departments as permanent secretaries. They think the most discredited, despicable among them ought to be cabinet secretary. But it’s all happened before. It’s all been done before. You content yourself that it’s all been done before.

You could let them carry on running the country, running it into the ground. Leave it as you found it. All economic activity illegal. Keep it as it is. Building anything in under 20 years remaining almost impossible, a crazy dream. Keep the courts on the throats of people who want to do things, to make things, to say things. Twenty thousand people under Security Service watch — same as it ever was.

Chase capital away by making the country’s only great city an international Mecca of crime directed against the ordinary people wandering its filthy streets. Import another million and a half forty-year-olds every year to do jobs at minimum wage, then pay for their pensions and health treatment for thirty years of retirement. It’s the social contract. It’s what the regime wants you to do. Happens on autopilot. Happens almost by itself. Don’t stop the boats. The previous guys said they were going to and then failed. Why bother, then, to say you’re going to? The regime has failed to stop the boats and said to you, too, that it cannot be done.

Sit back. Kick your feet up. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it.

Or you could do something about it.

Someone has to be prime minister and it happens, for this brief window, to be you. Someone has to be in power, and it may as well be you. You may as well save the country, right? After all, it’s something to do. Before retirement it’s something else to do.