Meet The New Boss

Ben Wildsmith

In an era when human creativity has lost much of its currency, we are, perversely, required to actively imagine our lives as never before.

Whilst AI models elbow their way into writing, art, music production and everything else we previously imagined sitting at the apex of the human experience, our certainties are disintegrating in front of us.

At the very point when political leadership is necessary, we are confronted by shrugging politicians who seem astonished that their roles require more than base politicking and media expertise.

We are at the business end of a 1970s disaster movie starring Keir Starmer, Robert Jenrick, and Zarah Sultana. We’re going to need a bigger boat…

The 1970s was the last time any proper political thinking was done in the UK.

The Fisher Price version of monetarism that Keith Joseph sold to Margaret Thatcher hasn’t been challenged by anything more ambitious than minor tinkering by subsequent governments.

The current outfit’s protestations of radicalism rest on nationalising the railways – a public service that could never be truly privatised anyway and which had become a nightmare to run for the companies involved.

The people’s flag is deepest pinstripe, I’m afraid.

Our ‘unwritten constitution’ was revealed as a sham by Boris Johnson’s predictably contemptuous attitude towards precedent. Prorogue Parliament? Where does it say that I can’t?…

So much of the UK’s modus operandi has relied on decent chaps doing the right thing that virtually anything can be made up on the hoof without a written law to constrain it.

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has managed to plummet through the class system, losing titles as he went, because nothing substantial defined his position in the first place.

Dress-up

It was all dress-up and make-believe, apparently. But only for him. Oh, and Fergie. And possibly Harry, definitely Meghan, her duchessness was flushed out of a Boeing 777 somewhere over the Atlantic, surely? No, apparently it still clings to her, embossed on notepaper and mispronounced by Californian heiresses at charity auctions… the majesty of it.

But Charles, Camilla, William, and Kate remain definitely, indisputably royal. The latter pair were apparently in Llanidloes today, where you’d hope they’d have had the sense to have the liver and onions at the Red Lion. After the offal year they have had, it might cheer them up….

At the locking-up-royalty end of things where we find ourselves, it pays to wonder who is pulling the strings. I’ve been unable to enjoy the tormenting of Andrew and Peter Mandelson as much as some of my comrades on the ill-tempered left.

It has the surface appearance of egalitarian justice being applied to the overmighty, but something doesn’t sit right. Like everything else nowadays, it seems to have been handed down from on high and abroad.

This isn’t ordinary citizens bringing down the ruling class, it’s a new, probably worse, ruling class asserting itself over the rotting carcass of UK PLC.

If it wants us to eat chlorinated chicken, my guess is we’ll be chowing down on urinal cake flavoured nuggets soon enough.

Opportunity

There will, however, be opportunity in the chaos. We have been shown that nothing in UK life is resilient enough to retain permanence.

If royalty can crumble as quickly and quiescently as it seems to be, then the rest of the constitutional status quo could, and likely will, go the same way.

Who knows, perhaps culturally cohesive units like Wales might find a degree of autonomy by negotiating directly with the tech overlords? With your internet set to be beamed at you from space, the nation state is losing its grip on people.

If the UK continues to dawdle into decrepitude, some fresh thinking here might bypass it altogether. We’ll still be serfs, but at least we won’t have to curtsey.