Being in England at the moment, I suffer not so much from a state of cognitive dissonance as from a state of emotional dissidence.
On the one hand, I have nothing but contempt for the prime minister, Keir Starmer. He is dull and humorless and has the soul (or perhaps I should say he appears in public to have the soul, since I do not know him personally) of an apparatchik advanced to the rank of the nomenklatura. His ideas are pure gimcrack, and therefore he has only to be faced by a choice to make the wrong one. Although claiming to be working class (which he assumes to confer on him the status of moral aristocrat), he made an excellent living, before turning politician, in that most parasitic and destructive of all branches of the law, human rights. Even his face, his very hair, is boring. He is the kind of man who is able to bore at a distance.
On the other hand, I do not want him to resign as prime minister because he would be replaced only by someone worse. As the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins put it with regard to depressed states of mind, “No worst, there is none.” This, perhaps, is not strictly or literally true, for it is difficult to imagine anyone’s regime worse than that of Pol Pot or Macías Nguema, but within quite wide limits it is always possible to wrest deterioration from a bad situation. And the lamentable fact is that the possible replacements for Starmer, were he to resign or be forced to resign, are yet worse than he.
He does have one card up his sleeve against his rebellious troops, the members of Parliament of his own party: namely, that it is within his power to call an early general election, in which case the great majority of those members of Parliament would lose their seats, for no government has ever been more unpopular than his. (Interestingly, I heard a professor of political science, a subject in whose existence I do not really believe, predict, before Starmer was elected, both that he would be elected and that his government would within a few months be the most unpopular in history—a prediction so uncannily accurate that it made me almost believe that political science was, after all, a real subject.)
The general consensus, however, is that Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered. I saw one article with the headline “Starmer has to go but his successor will be worse,” and I thought that was similar to a suicide note. If his successor will be worse, why should he have to go? In politics, the usual choice is between the bad and the worse, not between the bad and the good—and history shows that those who elect a politician because he is good, and not because he is merely better than the alternative, usually end up disappointed, disillusioned, and even embittered. Politics, at least in the modern age, is not a metier for good people.
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