Britain is ungovernable – these numbers prove it

It’s not just Prime Ministers who are leading truncated political lives. Other posts at the summit of the British state have also seen high turnover in recent years as Britain, copes with a period of unprecedented political volatility.

There have been four cabinet secretaries – the head of the civil service – since the death of Sir Jeremy Heywood in 2018.

Between November 2020 and the resignation of Morgan McSweeney in February this year, eight people served as Downing Street chief of staff (the post is currently being shared by Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson).

‘It’s not a left/right thing’

The extraordinary turnover at a time when the UK seems to be struggling to solve so many problems – from boosting economic productivity and cutting the cost of living, to dealing with an ageing population and curbing illegal migration – has led people to ask whether the country has become “ungovernable”?

It is not the first time the question has been posed – the same refrain emerged during the political and economic turmoil of the 1970s. But pollsters say the current scale of public frustration and despondency about politics and the state of the country shouldn’t be underestimated.

Luke Tryl, the director of the More in Common think-tank, told The i Paper: “So many members of the public just think that the social contract is so broken.

“It’s not a left/right thing. They tend to think it’s broken in the same way – which is that you do the right thing, you do your bit, and you don’t get rewarded.

“If you’re on the left, you might be more likely to say ‘and billionaires are taking advantage of you’. On the right, you might be more likely to say ‘it’s migrants’.”

For Tryl, the political volatility we have seen in recent years is the result of that “pervasive sense that the system isn’t working, and politicians explicitly running against that system, but then being unable to deliver”.

He thinks that a tendency to duck difficult decisions over the last couple of decades – from replacing the UK’s nuclear plants to reforming the planning system – have compounded the situation.

“The reason we might be ungovernable is because people think we’ve been in a mess for so long, it’s now much harder to make those longer term, ‘jam tomorrow’ arguments to the public, because they think, ‘well, we’ve been told it’s just one more push for however many years, and it’s never gotten better’.”

Rise of 24-hour news and social media

Another factor widely blamed for our current political dysfunction is the profound changes which have taken place to the media landscape. The 24-hour news cycle and rise of social media have increased scrutiny of ministers and collapsed the time they have to take decisions.

Sir John Major, who was prime minister between 1990 and 1997, told the BBC earlier this month that the job is “certainly getting harder because of the external pressure of social media”.

Alex Thomas, an executive director at the Institute for Government think-tank, says that “information fragmentation and radically different ways of consuming facts, information, analysis and political messaging” represents a “huge shift” which politicians are still struggling to get to grips with.

Algorithm-driven social media has also played into a breakdown of traditional party loyalties among voters. Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, thinks this has encouraged politicians to engage in a bidding war of unrealistic promises which has inevitably left people disappointed.

“Realising that they can no longer command such a large number of loyal voters, [politicians] are much more attuned than perhaps they used to be to the so-called ‘floating voter’ and giving them what they want,” he says.

“That sometimes has unfortunately encouraged politicians to make promises that they simply can’t keep.

“You have a sort of awful vicious cycle where you get a politician promising something which he or she can’t deliver, failing to deliver it, their party therefore getting restless and eventually replacing them, at which point the whole cycle starts again.”

Party discipline has been eroded

Social media has also eroded party discipline in Parliament. It has never been easier or more tempting for MPs to vent their frustrations to vast numbers of people. A smartphone allows even the most junior backbencher to curate a personal brand and build a following.

Bale says: “The number of rebellions has obviously increased over time. Social media means that people don’t have to serve the kind of apprenticeship that they used to, before they became sort of big names, big beasts in the party.

“It’s perfectly possible for somebody to make a name for themselves and as a result, be brought into government, simply because they are great on podcasts and have a good Twitter game.

“Jacob Rees-Mogg is a very good example of that, someone who traditionally would have been completely ignored and thought unsuitable… becomes a darling of the [Tory] party on social media.”

“It’s possible for people to become sort of ‘legends in their own lunchtime’.”

For Bale, another factor contributing to political volatility is the power which has been handed to party activists. “In both the Labour and Conservative parties, it’s their grassroots members rather than their MPs who have the final say in leadership contests, which means more people getting elected who aren’t backed by a convincing majority of their parliamentary colleagues.

“Given that’s the case, it’s not entirely surprising that when and if things start to go wrong, moves to unseat them – some of them ultimately successful – begin far sooner than they used to.”

Brexit referendum and unforced errors

If these are the volatile ingredients of “ungovernable Britain” – ducked challenges, information fragmentation, voter fragmentation, declining party discipline – then Brexit was the event which caused them to seriously combust.

It destroyed the premierships of David Cameron and Theresa May. The divisions it left in the Conservative Party – and the taste which Tory MPs acquired for political blood – finished off Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Given the challenges to Starmer’s authority, it appears the Parliamentary Labour Party may have picked up the taste too.

When it comes to Starmer’s own woes, the experts think that while he inherited a set of daunting structural challenges, his problems are also partly of his own making.

Tryl says: “When this government came in it made a series early political mistakes. And had it not, I think we might be in a different place.”

The two key elements of Labour’s “change platform”, he argues, was a promise to “move on from Tory austerity” and to clean up politics after a series of scandals, the most damaging of which was Partygate.

But in a matter of a few months, Starmer blew public support on the former by making his “first big policy thing” cuts to winter fuel payments, which he had to U-turn on, and on the latter by becoming embroiled in the freebies controversy, when it emerged in 2024 he had received more free gifts and hospitality than any other MP since 2019. “We do have politicians making avoidable errors,” Tryl says.

He also made a series of poor decisions on personnel. While the appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as US ambassador was the most disastrous, Tryl thinks that moving McSweeney from political strategist to No 10 chief of staff was also a mistake.

The appointment was just the latest in a long series of “bringing campaigners” into a role which also requires formidable administrative skills, he says. The last person to truly last in the role – Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn – was cut from very different cloth (after leaving No 10, he went on to be an ambassador and still works in the civil service under the current government).

Tryl is quick to point out that “you can’t just be an administrator”. “You’ve got to have that rare blend of being a political administrator,” he says. “There’s been too many round pegs in square holes.”

Thomas thinks that recent prime ministers have meanwhile not appreciated the importance of having a “strong cabinet secretary”. “The cabinet secretary is the person who brings together the apparatus of the state with the objectives of the Prime Minister,” he says.

“Political appointees have a really, really important role. But there’s something about a prime minister investing authority in a cabinet secretary who can then really crack heads together across the system.”

He thinks that the current incumbent, Dame Antonia Romeo, has made a confident start, but that there should also be a new “Prime Minister’s Department”. Staffed by a “small group of highly talented people”, this would provide a stronger centre to set direction for the rest of government.

Perhaps most importantly, prime ministers may need to start properly levelling with voters about the tough decisions and the trade-offs the country faces if Britain is to get out of its current rut.

Fear of making an argument

“There seems to be much more of a fear of making arguments,” Tryl says. The public respond well to arguments.

“I almost think our policy politicians have become too timid… at a time when people are crying out for authenticity.”

Bale agrees: “Sometimes voters behave like children, but that’s because they’re talked to like children. And if, perhaps, they were talked to like one adult to another, maybe they would be more prepared to hunker down for the long term.”

Thomas says: “It’s really important not to get into a kind of counsel of despair – ‘everything is awful, and it’s going to stay awful forever’.

“It’s really important to counter that mindset and to be conscious of what political leadership and vision can achieve.”

“Setting Britain on a democratically legitimate and more resilient trajectory is eminently achievable.”