Burning Down the House

This week: summer’s here, so you know what that means – a new Prime Minister, again! Also: my adventures on the Paris Metro; and a map of some places in London to cool down.

It’s as regular a feature of the British summer as a once-in-a-century heatwave. Precisely one year and 353 days into his premiership, Keir Starmer got the lectern out, having been forced to accept it was over. Surviving til less than a fortnight off his second anniversary means he did at least outlast his immediate predecessor, Rishi Sunak (1 year, 255 days), who did not, as I had confidently predicted, cling on til the last minute in the hope something would turn up. But Starmer was some way shy of his immediate Labour predecessor, Gordon Brown, as well as Theresa May and Boris Johnson, all of whom are in the league tables hovering somewhere around the three year mark. As the crowning achievement of a 40 year career, through most of which Sir Keir Starmer KC had been conspicuously successful, it isn’t much. No wonder he cried. If he’d managed to show that level of emotion for anyone else’s problems at some point in the past couple of years, perhaps he wouldn’t be in this mess.

There are two interpretations of this turn of events doing the rounds. The one most popular among more casual observers is essentially: this is weird. Four of the last 11 summers have seen an internal party coup of some kind; a fifth, a change of government at a general election. Yesterday, a child born on the day of the Brexit referendum would have celebrated their 10th birthday; they will reach the seventh Prime Minister of their lifetime in a matter of weeks. I was older than that, albeit slightly, by the time I reached my second. By the time I hit my seventh I was 38.

So the obvious conclusion is that Brexit made Britain ungovernable. Maybe it’s the way it created a new dividing line that cuts across the two traditional parties. Maybe that it raised a bunch of expectations that no one can actually fulfill. Maybe it’s just that it made us poorer. Whatever it was, though, it was the referendum.

I have some sympathy with this idea – Brexit, and I don’t know if I’ve ever made my views on this clear, was extremely and catastrophically bad. But it was striking that the people most baffled by Britain disposing of yet another prime minister seemed to be either foreign observers, or people who have better things to do than follow British politics.

To those who were following more closely, this turn of events was not baffling at all, because Keir Starmer was extremely bad at being prime minister. He didn’t just struggle to make difficult decisions: he seemed not to understand it was his job, with insiders claiming he would get angry when advisors suggested something involved trade offs and required his judgement. At the same time, he preferred not to talk to MPs unless forced to; he didn’t like ministers to promote their own ideas, but seemed incapable of articulating his own. The result is that there are vast swathes of the state – the higher education system is the one with which I’m most familiar, but I have little doubt there are others – which are in serious active crisis, but on which no one in government has tried to get a grip.

At the same time, he’s repeatedly claimed to be taking personal responsibility while throwing underlings under the bus. He’s made some catastrophic errors in judgement, most notably the appointment of disgraced former minister and Jeffrey Epstein groupie Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, and while such things can too often be survivable it should hardly surprise us when they are not.

Most foolishly of all, from a self-interest point of view, Starmer has presided over a political strategy that meant attacking his voters and their values, in a doomed attempt to impress those on the other side. Those who’ve felt under attack in some way or another during his tenure have included protestors, migrants, refugees, trans people, welfare claimants and the aforementioned universities – all groups either important to left-leaning voters or an actual major provider of them. Politicians are often hated by their enemies. Keir Starmer went out of his way to be hated by his friends, too.

I understand that these granular details of British politics are not visible to observers in, say, Minnesota. But no, it is not strange that a Labour party looking down the barrel of extinction, just two years after a huge election victory, might be open to pitches from other potential leaders. This is not an irrational decision by a party that has lost its mind.

This is the real trend since the referendum. Three of the five Tory prime ministers to have held office since 2016 were forced from office by their own parties¹; two of those had behaved in a manner which made clear that they simply should not hold the role. Only May was consumed by the contradictions of the referendum. Brexit was dreadful. But it has not finished a Prime Minister in seven years.

I loathe Brexit. I think it was a huge geopolitical blunder which has weakened our economy and soft power and left us poorer and more vulnerable in an increasingly hostile world. But the question in my mind this week is not whether Brexit has left us ungovernable. It’s why British politics keeps promoting Prime Ministers who are simply unable to do the job. I’m sure Brexit is a factor. But as with the state of the economy, I suspect the rot is deeper than that one, stupid vote.

A quick commercial message for the North American market

Americans and Canadians! You can currently get 25% off pre-orders of my new book at Barnes & Noble. Apparently premium members can actually get 35% off? That’s a pretty big discount, I’d order it right now if I were you. Click here.

Some notes on the Paris Metro, from the parochial perspective of a Londoner

I have a bad habit, when reading other people’s histories, of seeing them through the lens of my own. Because histories are first and foremost stories, any set of dynastic or national myths you can think of will almost certainly include heroes and villains, some queens seen as snakes and some placed on pedestals, a revered figure who was actually a genocidal monster, a defeat that’s been reframed as a victory. Nerd that I am, I’ve had a lot of fun reading French or American history and exploring the parallels and contrasts. History may not repeat, exactly; but it certainly tends to rhyme.

Something I realised on my recent travels is that I also do this with, er, transport networks. Much of my time in Paris was spent rushing about looking at things and generally being a tourist. But at times I needed to catch my breath; and after realising that if I did that on a train I could see more of Paris, sort of, while also reading and sitting down, much of that breath catching happened on the Metro. This was also, I realised later, how I first explored London back when I was still a baby nerd.

And just as there are rhymes between English and French history, so there are parallels and contrasts with the London Underground and Paris Metro. So. Some thoughts.

Maps, colours and names

The first time I can remember giving any thought to the question of how Parisians got around their city was about a decade before I ever set foot in it. Some time in the late 1980s my uncle David, who collected such things, showed me a map of the Metro, telling me, “The thicker lines are mainline rail.”

I’ve just spent an hour trying to track down that specific map, which is a stupid thing to do because I saw it for five minutes nearly four decades ago, and these days I have to think quite hard to recall what I had for breakfast. The mainline railways David referred to were actually the RER – Réseau Express Régional (regional express network); basically, Crossrail – and there were then just three of them, which means it predates RER D in 1987. Here’s my best guess: