Inside The Chaos Machine

So much for the Liberal Establishment, Keir. In the very Economist, Bagehot writes:

Politicians often promise what they cannot achieve. Usually it is the prospect of national glory or prosperity without pain. But even the most prosaic pledge can sometimes fail. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, entered office with an offer to bring “calm” to a country fed up after a decade of political ructions. Sadly for Sir Keir, it is not in his gift. British politics is built for chaos.

British politics should not feel feral only three months after Labour won a historic 180-seat majority. Yet voters are in a capricious mood. Labour sit four points above the Conservatives, according to some polls. About one in five Labour voters already regrets their choice. It is rare for an incoming government to be polling so badly, so early. The Conservatives have probably hit their floor. Only the grim reaper can take it much lower (their voters are an elderly bunch). How low Labour can go, no one quite knows.

Capricious voters collide with an electoral system that can no longer properly account for their wishes. For Labour, the margin between a decade in power and a humiliating defeat at the next election is tiny. It would not take much for Labour’s huge majority to disappear—a 4% swing against the party would be enough, reckons the Tony Blair Institute, a political advisory firm founded by the former prime minister. The electoral equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane in Westminster.

A small swing to Reform UK, an insurgent populist party, could make it a viable opposition; a modest recovery from the Conservatives could put them back in office. In 2019, at the height of the Brexit drama, there were four parties within a few points of each other in the polls, at around 20%. The same could easily happen again in this parliament. At that point, Britain’s first-past-the-post system becomes a random number generator. An electoral set-up designed to lock in representative, stable government increasingly guarantees the reverse.

Naturally, the prospect of electoral chaos is cheered on by Britain’s media. The British press has always been undomesticated, but it was once easier to control. In the 1990s Sir Tony Blair’s team ruthlessly managed the media. But any strategy devised three decades ago is bound to show its age (imagine if Sir Tony’s team had tried to ape the media-management tricks of Alec Douglas-Home). Declining circulations mean newspapers today offer only a pastiche of popular opinion; broadcasters reach far fewer people than they once did; deranged TikTok videos will determine the next election as much as what leads the evening news. Where there was once a discernible set of narratives, whether positive or negative, there is now chaos.

For those at the top of the parliamentary party, chaos is a problem. For those at the bottom, it is much worse. Labour now suffers from what Peter Turchin, a historian, calls “elite overproduction”. When too many elites chase too few positions, chaos follows. Not all the 404 Labour MPs can expect a long, storied career. This realisation has come early for many. The golden boys and girls of the 2024 intake have already sauntered into government. Meanwhile, those left on the outside can busy themselves making Facebook posts defending the government’s decision to cut winter-fuel payments to pensioners.

The lot of a backbench Labour MP is not a happy one. If promotion prospects are slim, job security is non-existent. In 2019 the average Labour mp had a cushion of 12,500 votes. Now it is 7,800. The typical Labour intake is a hyper-ambitious 30-something, who will probably spend five years on the backbenches dealing with insane demands from constituents before being turfed out by those same people. You didn’t get four As at A-level for this!

For a man keen on calm, Sir Keir owes his rise to chaos. He is the political equivalent of Forrest Gump, a man who finds himself at the front line of history almost by mistake. He makes no secret of the fact that his initial aim in politics was to spend a few years as attorney-general before retiring. Instead, Brexit, chronic Tory incompetence, a fiscal emergency and an inflation shock dumped him in Downing Street. By contrast, Sir Keir leads a cabinet containing psychotically ambitious 40-somethings, who had their political careers mapped out before they had finished puberty.

How, then, does Sir Keir keep leadership rivals in check? He is not a master of oratory. He is not a parliamentarian par excellence, nor is he a party lifer who knows where every body is buried and who put it there. He styled himself as a bureaucrat, yet the initial errors of his operation stem from bog-standard mismanagement. Sir Keir’s legitimacy comes not from his leadership, but from his almost ludicrous success. Practically any criticism can be dismissed by asking whether the person offering it has won the second-biggest majority in almost a century. But that is also a brittle argument. If a repeat of this success looks unlikely, the party will panic. If the polls don’t look up, why not gamble on a different leader? The result: more chaos.

Two-year Keir?

Writing off Sir Keir’s Labour Party has been a historically bad bet. Since changes of government are so rare, people forget they are, often, chaotic. The coalition government led by David Cameron lost a cabinet minister in its first three weeks in an expenses scandal. Labour’s path to a second term is also easy enough to plot. If Labour can improve the lives of Britons, they will be rewarded. Voters have forgotten that things can actually get better.

However, waver from that route, even slightly, and the results will be messy. A fractured and fractious electorate, an increasingly uncontrollable media and an easily frustrated parliamentary party make serene government harder than ever. Sir Keir may want to usher in a period of calm. But he sits atop a system that is far more likely to turn his promises to dust.