…well, you know the rest:
Why does Britain keep ending up with weak Prime Ministers?
In this video, I argue that the problem is no longer simply about personalities or political parties. The deeper issue is that the UK political system now rewards the wrong qualities and filters out many of the people who might actually be capable of governing well.
Oo sir, me sir, me me!
Because politicians running things is the worst option available?
He’s right, just not in the way he thinks he is.
The UK political system ought to reward people who have done impressive things and seen a bit of life and don’t particularly want to be in politics.
Instead it rewards idlers, liars, frauds, fantasists, cowards, narcissists, nonentities, children, and fools.
He ought to start his own party.
It’s because we have a concept of “political career”.
But many of our greatest politicians have been career politicians – eg Pitt the Younger, Churchill.
What seems to have gone wrong in the last 30 years is that the selection mechanisms for party candidates produce MPs who are often venal, immature, have a very limited range of experience or are simply stupid. Moreover, who would want to be an MP when media scrutiny is intense, when you are whipped to vote through slabs of legislation you haven’t had time to read, and the job involves being a social worker?
I can’t see the quality of MPs improving until backbenchers have more opportunity to scrutinise legislation through (for example) strengthened select committees and parties are selecting candidates more on their ability to be capable legislators than on their ability to be social workers and grandstanding campaigners.
PS Listening to backbench Labour MPs on the radio during Starmer’s travails, many sound like knuckle-draggers.
What seems to have gone wrong in the last 30 years is that the selection mechanisms for party candidates produce MPs who are often venal, immature, have a very limited range of experience or are simply stupid.
Firstly, this is about the destruction of local government. Local government used to have a lot more decision making power. This had 2 benefits. Firstly, politicians gained experience and secondly, they were tested in office.
The other thing is the centralisation of political parties. “Women’s only lists” “A lists”, interference in candidate selection which fails to reflect the desires of constituencies. Local parties will pick someone like them, and this works. Not necessarily a local person, but their outlook will be like theirs. Hampstead probably loves someone like Zack Goldsmith. Maidstone like someone like Ann Widdecombe. Swindon or Nuneaton would have more of a “commerce” type.
Conservative voters are just not a load of hippy, metrosexual soy boys. And in the sort of places they don’t want that, you’ve seen the rise of Reform.
I agree with you about candidate selection. Not so sure about local government. My right-wing wife worked in local government at a fairly senior level for 30 years, and her opinion of Councils as a training ground for politicians is negative. Her view is that most councillors are in it for the local status + tea-and-buns-and-wine-at-receptions, that usually the senior politicians simply defer to the (left-inclined) officers, and that being a Councillor inclines you to be in favour of more public expenditure…
30 years is about the right time frame. Regardless of their politics, David Blunkett and Roy Hattersley were effective MPs because before that they’d had a *career* as executive councillors of Sheffield council when it had the powers to actually do things. 30 years is about the right time frame for when that finished being stripped away. Nowadays, councils don’t have power, and councillors see the position as a temporary stepping stone to Parliament.
When you mention the packet of lard as being ‘effective’, I assume you mean ‘effective’ in terms of turning a once mostly clean, safe, majority white city into an ethnic filled third world shithole.
In the USandA there’s a short list of State Governors who became President later in life. Coolidge, Reagan, Cleveland, Clinton(middling perhaps), but the aggregate of them turned out all right.
Now if the UK could devolve every power the states have to local authorities, throw in anything Swiss Cantons have as an add on, then I reckon the decaying body of the UK will revive.
Even better: devolution like this would destroy the SNP. If Highland, Glasgow City and the rest have their own planning laws, property tax system, can set their own minimum wage, drug licencing, hunting rules etc what’s the point of independence where Holyrood would get it all.
You missed the peanut farmer on that list. He was an absolute disaster of a president. Days of malaise.
‘Many’ is doing a lot of work there. Churchill had a short but significant military and authorial career before Parliament and the OP talked about ‘who have done impressive things and seen a bit of life’, which he certainly had.
Pitt the Younger, yes, but if you go back that far most men with the means to become MPs were privately wealthy.
That’s a very different beast to today’s careerists.
I beg to differ: ‘many’ is not doing a lot of work there.
A “political career” can mean ‘a career mainly in politics’, which covers many politicians – for example, not only Churchill but also Margaret Thatcher [pbuh] who, though briefly a research chemist and barrister, had a political career as an MP lasting from 1959 to 1992.
A “political career” can also mean ‘a career entirely in politics’. This is a development of the last c.40 years – in which an aspiring MP leaves “uni”, enters the policy unit of a political party/trade union/charity/pressure group, becomes a intern/gopher/special adviser to an MP while being a party activist…and ends up a prospective parliamentary candidate.
In 1979, only 3.4% of MPs entered parliament directly from a purely political employment background. By 2015–2025, apparently, 20%-26% of sitting MPs from major parties had little to no non-political work on their CVs…
By the way…Pitt the Younger – known as “Honest Billy”, because he refused all sinecures and bribes – was not independently wealthy. Until his friends actively conspired with George III to make him accept the sinecure of Warden of the Cinque Ports, he lived on credit. Even so, like his father before him, Honest Billy died in debt, which Parliament paid off – grateful for his outstanding service to the nation.
That’s a very good point about being nothing but MPs. Being an MP was a thing you did after work, unless you were a minister.
Actually running the country needs full-time ministers and MPs doing the equivalent of 1 day per week. Doing the job of non-executive directors, so to speak. Checking the general management of things, and the exceptions.
The world, in terms of how it affects matters that central government needs to address, rarely changes that much in a week, or even in a month.
You get the thing of MPs having select committees about the price of football shirts because they now have the time to piss about with it. And I think TV cameras have been a disaster for how it’s led to MPs using these for grandstanding, politicking. Not holding a committee to learn things, but to win votes.
There isn’t on simple answer and I would like to throw EU membership in to the mix. We have a generation of politicians who were brought when the EU and bureaucrats were making most of the important decisions and all they did was nod it through and when we complained they shrugged their shoulders and said they couldn’t do anything about it.
Now they not only have to have their own policies but also make the case for them to the electorate. No more hiding behind free movement when people complain about immigration, for example. Now they have to make the case and be held account for their policy.
Starmer is this problem writ large, which is why he can’t see any solutions other than being closer to the EU.
I’ve said before that we won’t get any benefits from Brexit until the government s made up of ministers who came in to politics after we left.
There’s a lot of truth to this. It’s like when technology disrupts business but the old business can’t move. Record shops can only think in terms of people going into a shop. And I think these situations are a lot about a certain type of person fitting a situation. The world changes and they aren’t that good in it.
The big change to me regarding the EU is how much the world opened up. The idea of a common European market made sense when we watched French movies and drove German cars and Church’s sold zero pairs of Brogues to China.
Most of the politicians and commentators still think we’re in the 1980s. You have people talking about the effect on farmers but that’s a piddling amount of exports. We export more whisky than meat. Single malt is about as big. Those Chinese got a bit richer and started buying Lagavulin.
Well, for starters, you have to pay serious people a lot more than £80K, in exchange for living away from home, taking a load of abuse in the supermarket, your personal life being scrutinised etc etc.
If you’re talented enough to be senior management at a relatively small manufacturing company, you have more job security, you live at home, earn more and can nob your secretary without it being all over the papers, and no-one bothers you about the price of football shirts when you’re down the pub.
Labour are mostly thickos and that’s more than they can earn in their lanyard job, and for the Conservatives, it’s rich thickos who can’t think of anything better to do.
The UK political system ought to reward people who have done impressive things and seen a bit of life and don’t particularly want to be in politics.
Whist I agree it’s not quite that simple, they still have to do the politics of persuading people that they are right and getting policies implemented, which means trade-offs. I was listening to something on LBJ, horrible human being but brilliant politician who got a lot of the civil rights legislation through that JFK couldn’t.
And destroyed the stable black family in the process by substituting the State for the father. “We’ll have them n*ggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years!”.
He can’t seriously think he could do the job? Tune into Sanity FM, knock on the door and ask for Ronnie Real.
Of course he thinks he could do the job. Walk into any pub in England and you’ll find at least 20 men who could do a better job than Starmer, or so they claim. The same men would also do a better job managing the England football team or, in fact, the place they work. Everybody thinks they can do their boss’s job better than the boss.
Mind you, in the case of Starmer, some to most of them are probably right.
Managing England is mostly about getting lucky. Roughly speaking, you win the world cup if you have a huge population of blokes that play it. Hence why it’s dominated by Brazil, Italy, Germany.
Beyond that, it’s things like home advantage and luck. Luck as in, did you happen to get a couple of amazing players born in your country at the right time. In particular, an extraordinary midfielder. Or did you get a good draw, did the other team have a serious injury problem.
All that “30 years of hurt” bollocks. It’s not like we had a record of winning the world cup before 1966. It was an anomaly. Home advantage, Bobby Moore, foreigners weren’t so good at acclimitising to Europe, and it really helped that a large part of Germany was the DDR.
OT: but how do you nationalise British Steel Scunthorpe without having a system to set the price of purchase of it from Jingye Group. The govt has made an offer of £100m, Jingye says not enough, so the government are going to pass a law to form a committee to decide the price using a ‘public interest test’.
Surely ISDS gets involved and says the government can’t do that. Too complicated for my non-legal little head
The response would once have been: ‘But how many divisions does Jingye Group have?’
Now it’s: ‘But how many Divisions does the British Army have?’
and not many aeroplanes and precious few ships.
It’s been a fair while since the Army had aeroplanes, and even longer since it had ships!
This ex army air corps attached squaddie would dispute that lack of aeroplanes. We’ve always had some. Why, at one time I had to grease the Queen’s Beaver. I don’t know if we still have ships but it was only a few decades ago.
We didn’t go as far as the Imperial Japanese Army, which had its own submarines.
I thought the Japanese military just repurposed their aeroplanes as submarines.
I had an interesting flight in an AAC Beaver when, en route to Detmold, the engine cut out just as we were approaching the Bielefeld ridge. The pilot didn’t seem to be particularly bothered, saying “We can probably glide from here” which was a slight comfort. Luckily he managed to get it going again after a bit of fiddling with the controls.
Not so. Although the army gave up fixed wing flying in 2019 it still operates helicopters (possibly more than the RAF) and as for ships The Army has its own fleet of ships and landing craft to deliver troops, equipment and supplies. Smaller boats are used to patrol harbours, rivers and lakes to help with bridge-building and ferrying operations.
Rescuing tired failing industries has a record of not working for successive governments. If it’s uneconomic and you can’t change the conditions that made it uneconomic it still won’t work. See also coal mining, shipbuilding, traditional docks, British Leyland. Just find a better way. Or just stop it, the market will sort it out.
But then what’s left of Scunthorpe? Oh yes; Muslim shithole on bennies.
AI tells me: “The Scunthorpe Steelworks is the last plant in the UK producing virgin steel, which is vital for major construction projects”.
Perhaps someone should’ve told UK Steel:
https://www.britishsteel.co.uk/electric-arc-furnace-technology-can-produce-all-steel-products-and-grades-uk-steel/
Virgin steel is becoming less important for the reason your link says – arc furnaces are now capable of producing to specifications they couldn’t a few years ago. Arc furnaces historically specialised in low-grade steel because they primarily recycle scrap of mixed and sometimes uncertain quality, with some virgin iron mixed in. These days the quality of scrap is better controlled and sorted. But the virgin iron content has also moved on due to increased use of DRI (Direct Reduction of Iron Oxides). This means an arc furnace can produce types of steel they couldn’t before – some are even making ULC/IF (ultra-low carbon/interstitial free) steel grades, which until recently was a preserve of blast furnaces.
Having (at least apparent) incompetents in Number 10 isn’t a new thing.* Their being unable to command enough support in tough times is. So is the fashion the Tories have created for trying to ditch an unpopular leader to stave off electoral defeat.
Blair was both extremely lucky and a talented politician, even if he was a long term disaster for the country. He was never going to be ousted, even over Iraq.
Brown was in for just under three years. He chickened out of having an election when he might have won it, then got swamped by the GFC. He had enough toadies to back him up when there were challenges. So did Cameron really.
Major might have gone in 1995, but Redwood wasn’t popular enough.
* The truth is that no human being is capable of doing things statists think a modern prime minister should do.
I will go through the full horrors later but the ‘summary’ is:
– any PM needs to implement rationing with Murphy given a prominent role and pension
– any PM needs to agree with his theories about economics and money
And he takes about 3,000 words to say it
Well he’s not wrong about that, but I’m not sure we’d agree with his choice of qualities and people to govern.
I also explore the extraordinary challenges facing the next Prime Minister:
I think one would need to have deep and personal attachment to some of the more extreme forms of BDSM not to feel a pang of horror at what awaits in the full transcript
Once they get into office, those conflicts will become very clear. How to manage the conflict in the Gulf is the first crisis any incoming Prime Minister must be ready to manage. That means they must be able to manage an economic recession or depression, which is going to be on their agenda by this summer. And they’re going to have to manage food shortages, fuel shortages, and household energy shortages, all of which are going to hit by Christmas, as I’ve explained on this channel. And that creates the possibility that they will have to introduce rationing in the UK for the first time since 1954, to ensure that everyone gets all those essentials that they need to survive.
All of which can be managed, and largely without recourse to rationing. Airlines are already cancelling swathes of flights. Petrol prices already have increased. Energy shortages are obviously partly a consequence of the war but are also hugely self-inflicted. Anyone looking to implement rationing without putting Net Zero on hold at least temporarily (And ideally canning it completely) would rightly be looking at the end of a rope – with every justification. I and others have already mentioned given the immigration policies of the past few years and the inability of the authorities to enforce the law effectively in countless areas, how is rationing going to work? It’s true they bottle up native discontent using riot squads but if that’s across every local government area what are they going to do – arm Muslim militias? Take off the mask?? I am guessing practicality isn’t one of your virtues.
This will mean that this new Prime Minister will have to deal with the crisis of working out who gets what. Income, wealth, and resources might have to be reallocated by the state in a way that has not been known during most people’s lifetimes. The goal is to ensure the survival of everyone, and that is a task that the state has not really taken on, except during small moments like the COVID crisis, at any time in the last 70 years.
And so we assign an almost Stalinist level of authority to the worst recorded government in human history? Hmmm. not sure I agree that’s a good idea. Indeed this is a time when Markets can provide our salvation, as the supermarkets did so well during COVID. As with the earlier Comment on Net Zero I see this as an opportunity. We could look at every public sector role still in situ which came online since 1997 and take the opportunity to radically reset state expectations – Get rid off all the extraneous bullshit like Diversity , everything relating to race, LGBTQ etc and feminism – all can go out of the door. The resultant freedom could lead to genuine innovation which might enable us to survive the coming storm? Still am guessing you would have an issue with that…..
Managing the climate crisis is one of the biggest tasks that a new Prime Minister will have to face. It is the biggest challenge in geopolitics now.
He could perhaps start by acknowledging sceptical narratives and realizing that the solutions being touted by the WEF and UN are absurd and will lead to widespread civil disorder and tyranny?
And domestically, we face another crisis not dissimilar to that problem with the USA, which is that neo-fascism is alive and well in the UK now, and is a growing threat requiring active management.
The Greens and those associated with them are indeed a very grave and present danger to Jewish people and need to be severely curtailed. There was one prominent Fenland former professor who was speculating the police had mistreated the attacker in golders Green recently – the latest in a string of anti – semitic posts. His activities certainly need to be monitored and ideally curtailed.
It would be simpler if he said
In this video, I argue.
But he doesn’t argue, he just rants.
Gamecock can translate. By ‘weak,’ he means not willing to implement communism.
Such that ‘weak’ is a desirable trait.
Because political parties are like septic tanks, the biggest turds float to the top
Seems to be arguing for a Reform government
In related news, our actual regrettable PM has just declared he has complete confidence in Wes Streeting. Such a good quip from someone I didn’t believe had a sense of humour.
Der Murpher reveals doom, candidly:
The meltdown is happening
Posted on May 13 2026
Two comments in one FT email this morning gave us a good clue that all my predictions about the failure to end the war in the Gulf are unfolding as I have predicted.
The first is this:
Construction projects are stalling around the world as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupts the supply of crucial materials and drives up prices for oil-derived products such as paint and insulation.
The second is this:
Low-cost air travel may be a thing of the past as rising fuel prices tip carriers into another crisis that could bring a wave of consolidation, bankruptcies and faster retirement of old aircraft.
The collapse is underway; Trump has no inclination to do anything about it, and a meltdown is going to happen.
This is where we are.
He’s right about Trump? The US seems to be slow-walking reopening the Strait. They’ve got enough naval and air power in the area to spot an Iranian speedboat and guide a friendly Apache gunship helicopter to intercept it and deliver their human rights long before it reaches a ship.
Yet the US is content to let the ceasefire – and Iranian threats – dangle, for now. Despite the talks apparently being a clown car shambles, the Iranian state seemingly now being hostages of the IRGC, whose only plan is “strategic martyrdom”. This war isn’t popular in the US, due to wariness of wars past and unprecedented media fuckery, yet Trump is unbothered and unhurried. Candidly, what’s he up to?
The consequences of Hormuz don’t affect the US beyond short term price rises (for their exports too), they’re not running out of oil and gas or fertilisers. They do affect China and Europe more urgently in terms of imminent physical scarcity, however. Hmm.
Yknow, maybe it would have been a lot cheaper to take Orange Man’s advice at the start, and send a couple of destroyers on a freedom of navigation / escort brief. The lawyer in Downing Street would appreciate the legal difference between (a) preventing an illegal blockade of the seas which affects UK sovereign interests and those of our allies; (b) joining the US/Israel – Iran war as a belligerent.
Like how Iran sells drones and missiles to help Russia attack Ukraine, yet swears not to be a party to the war?
Because I think the US deprecated its priority level for reopening the Strait when European “allies” refused to lift a finger to help. They’ll get round to it, just that they’re content to let certain countries sweat for a little. UK political class having a melty over an internal memo from the Trump admin considering pulling support for the UK’s position in the Falklands etc. are missing the point as usual. The point of this leaked memo was that your single most important ally in the entire world is very unhappy with you and feels unappreciated, geniuses. The job of a competent government is not to sulk about that, but to repair it. Haha, competent.
For Iran, who knows but a lot of people seem to think the massive all-arms reinforcement of US forces in the gulf is all Trump TACO theatre. I reckon they’re going to be wrong about that, again. Aircraft carriers are Chekhov’s guns. Trump is on a mission to create a legacy. He is nearly 80, can’t run for election again. The Iranian regime is talking mad shit. He’s hated the regime in Iran all his adult life. None of this sounds comforting to the future living prospects of IRGC top brass and their cardboard Ayatollah, imo.
Top post, Steve
Will the Bojaz (or whatever the foreign thugs on the streets are called) stick around if they don’t get their wages? Maybe some of them are fanatics but how many?
Israel seems to have penetrated the security apparatus from top to bottom. Expect more decapitation strikes and some unexpected (and reluctant?) promotions in the IRGC.
Here’s hoping the democratic party fails to turn victory into defeat.
He’s right about Trump? The US seems to be slow-walking reopening the Strait. They’ve got enough naval and air power in the area to spot an Iranian speedboat and guide a friendly Apache gunship helicopter to intercept it and deliver their human rights long before it reaches a ship.
They’re lacking mine sweeping capability which is where European countries would have come in on a NATO op. The problem was that they had the opportunity to take out Iran’s leadership and took it while they could and then started back filling.
After decades of having mine hunters stationed in the Gulf, the last British mine hunter to leave was HMS Middleton. The war broke out 34 days after she left Bahrain.
Let’s also not forget that Trump has just arrived in China. It rather helps his position that Hormuz is closed, which barely hurts him, but definitely hurts Xi. Sure, Iran may outlast Trump, but Trump can outlast China. Xi really needs Hormuz open again.
Once again, the Orange Man knows what he’s doing.
Much of China’s oil comes from Iran. That blockade remains in place. It would be an even bigger poke in the eye if the US started escorting tankers out of the Gulf, but not tankers taking Iranian oil to China.
Even if Suck Here the human limpet wanted to, the chances of finding a couple of operational destroyers in the modern Royal Navy turned out to be zero.
Again, it’s his fundamental disconnect.
How can he simultaneously object to pretty much every political figure since he was old enough to vote, but also demand that they be given more power over us?
Rayner ‘cleared by HMRC’, opening door for leadership challenge
Most convenient timing. HMRC can evidently get off its arse when it wants to.