Somewhat depressingly, my order for the least worst Prime Ministers of the 21st century goes
- Blair
- Brown
- The other brown one
- Lord Cameron of Diddly Squat Farm
- Boris
- Mrs O'Leary
- Sir Keir
- Lady May
I suspect Mr Burnham will slip neatly into place either just before or just after the current No 7*.
In reality, they have of course all been fairly terrible. What is interesting though is that there's a discernible sense in which they generally get worse as time goes by, and not just because of "events, dear boy, events!". Indeed, even general entropy and decline, not to mention political evolution (not to mention "devolution"), the ever expanding and less efficient "civil" service, and quite simply "modern difficulties" (ageing and increasingly "diverse" populations, "secularism", etc.) don't quite account for the distinctly palpable sense that each new PM will in all probability be more politically incompetent than his or her predecessor(s). But then maybe I'm being optimistic.
The cretinous Sir Keir Starmer - in reality an over-promoted government bureaucrat rather than a politician as the term is normally understood - must surely be a case in point. How does one account for the little creep's sheer awfulness? Despite having survived in No 10 for barely a couple of years, the man's "war record" is prodigiously impressive. Just to list out his achievements, since he took office he has declared war on:
- landlords;
- political protesters;
- schools;
- churches;
- farmers;
- war veterans - Ireland and Iraq;
- employers;
- unborn children:
- teenagers;
- trail hunters;
- what remains of the British Empire; and, of course,
- our country's most important international ally.
In fact it was of course the last of these that finally did for him. The desperate need to replace our man (or person!) in Washington, who is normally a career bureaucrat, with a twice-failed career politician (i.e. the opposite of what had been done in 10 Downing Street!) was because of the Labour Party's bizarrely ill-advised decision to intervene in American politics by sending its goons to campaign for the Democrats at the last Presidential Election. Sir John Major, after all, might have warned them about the perils of that sort of thing - not to mention Lord Cameron, whose equally disastrous decision to get his black pal Barack Obama to intervene in British politics on the side of the Remain campaign was similarly poorly judged.
In reality, I think it has to be confessed that the problem is liberalism itself - or, in its developed forms, Marxism and nationalism. People don't become politicians anymore because they don't like politicians, and they don't like politicians because the whole concept of state authority has to a large extent broken down. Why should someone who's just like me get the authority to tell me what to do? Well, unless you genuinely think it's OK for a majority to use its sheer weight of numbers arbitrarily to bully a minority into doing what it was - including giving up its property and income for the sake of the supposedly greater good - it's quite hard to explain why being "democratically elected" means anyone should be able to tell you what to do. And in our heart of hearts we all know that it doesn't. And thus liberal democracy is to a certain extent self-discrediting. Ordinary decent people prefer to give it a wide berth because they know it's fundamentally unfair and quite frankly just not right.
And so the sort of people who end up getting elected (or, in the case of the creature that's about to start inhabiting No 10, not even elected) just go from bad to worse to worst.
*The sheer unbridled catatonic pointlessness of the last must never be repeated.
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