On the buses

This week: I spend a day on London’s new “express” bus “network” superloop and gradually bid goodbye to my sanity. But first: the cleverest idiot in Downing Street.

There’s a Cabinet meeting due at 4pm. Nobody knows why. I hope that rumours of a July election, which Downing Street has pointedly failed to rule out, are true, while also suspecting they aren’t. We’ll know soon enough. But since this may be yet another example of how Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is just catastrophically bad at politics, here’s something else on that theme.

The thing that got me the most shit on the internet this week – the thing that would have ruined the last day of my holiday, had I been sucked into explaining myself instead of turning it into the thrilling copy you’re about to read – was the suggestion that Sunak had been ruined by being clever. Last weekend, you see, the Times reported that the Prime Minister apparently only wants the best and the brightest coming here to study at British universities: this is from one perspective strange, as higher education is one of Britain’s most successful export industries, and no other industry declines to sell to a customer just because their intellect was not thought up to scratch by a politician.¹

Anyway, this has not proved popular around the Cabinet table, the newspaper reports. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary David Cameron and education secretary Gillian Keegan have all raised concerns, relating to economics, Britain’s soft power and the financial stability of the HE sector respectively. Department for Education modelling has suggested that the existing policy of banning foreign students from bringing relatives to the UK – not a further tightening, you understand, but the bit of the policy the government is already doing – could halve the numbers and thus lead to a 0.5% reduction in GDP. This feels potentially not great.

What really struck me about this story, though, was what it reveals about Sunak. It does, after all, take some doing to come up with a policy which will be simultaneously opposed by the ministry responsible and two of the three great departments of state. (The Home office was not mentioned, but based on that department’s recent monomaniac commitment to being mean to foreigners we can probably assume they love it.) It is baffling that such a policy should have reached the stage at which senior ministers are resorting to briefing a friendly newspaper to kill it. It should never have got this far.

So why did it? My guess was that Sunak has always been clever. He thus makes the mistake that many clever people do of assuming everyone else to be stupid.

A lot of responses to this suggestion put forward a rather simpler explanation: that Rishi Sunak was in fact terribly stupid. I’m not saying there’s no evidence to support this thesis, but consider his CV: Oxford, Stanford, Goldman Sachs; MP at 34, Chancellor before 40, Prime Minister within barely seven years of entering parliament. In the narrow academic sense, experienced by the type of person who gets to be, say, head boy at Winchester College – that of a person who does well at exams, hits professional targets, gets promoted ahead of time – Sunak is clearly very, very clever indeed.

The problem is, of course, that there is more than one way of being clever. Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and work with other people. Wisdom, and the ability to make judgements. There are a lot of academic high flyers who get out into the world and discover fairly swiftly that they know nothing. Far worse, though, are those who miss out on that vital and humbling life experience, and are never forced to get to grips with the fact there are things they do not know.² 

This, I think, is what’s ruined Sunak. And so, he micromanages via spreadsheet. He makes unforced and obvious errors. He wastes time on niche personal obsessions with no wider valency, because the very fact they are important to him is taken as evidence in and of itself of their importance.

And he ignores those who present counter arguments, even from within his Cabinet, and grows visibly annoyed when challenged. This is a man who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know

The stilted kids TV manner in which Sunak addresses the nation, which we’re likely to see a lot more of in the weeks to come if the balloon really does go up, has often been seen as yet another way in which he’s simply not good at this. That’s true – but it’s also I think more evidence that he thinks you, and I, and almost everyone else out here in the world, are idiots.

He would also like your vote.

The book bit

This week I saw the cover for the Italian version of A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines On Our Maps, which is exciting but which I don’t think I’m allowed to share yet. Here, though, is the North American version, which is out in the autumn:

If you’ve bought/read/enjoyed it, would you mind awfully leaving me an Amazon review? It apparently helps. Of course, if you’ve bought, read and not enjoyed it, I’d rather you didn’t do that, because that wouldn’t help at all. 

Some other places you can buy it: Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles.

A bus odyssey

“If you want to board this bus,” the driver growled, “you’re gonna have to switch off that bloody noise.” 

“Your bus makes noise,” replied the guy with the boombox. “This is music.” He did not turn off that bloody noise. There then followed a brief standoff in which the driver refused to drive, the guy with the boombox – who even has a boombox these days? – refused to switch it off, and the rest of us did our best not to make eye contact. With an estimated eight hours of bus travel ahead of me on seven different buses, it did not feel like an auspicious start. 

It was the last day of April, the first properly sunny day of the year, and I was in Thamesmead: a train-free housing estate on some former marshland in the wilds of south east London, and probably the biggest chunk of the city unserved by its rail network. The Superloop, a network of express bus routes intended to improve orbital links in outer London, had been launched nine months earlier at a cost of £6 million. I’d read the claims that it was meant to compensate for policies, like the expansion of the Ultra-Low Emissions Charge, intended to encourage suburbanites out of their cars. I’d noticed the panels announcing the network on lucky bus stops, including the light up signs on the roof which suggested we were meant to think this something special. 

Despite my long-standing interest in urban transport, though, I had not so much as set foot on it. I was also, if I’m honest, cynical. Express orbital Green Line Coach services had linked the suburbs for much of the mid-20th century, but passenger numbers had declined and few had survived into the modern era. Several mayoral candidates – including Boris Johnson, who’d actually managed to get elected – had proposed bringing them back.³ But they’d never actually happened. It felt like there was probably a good reason for that.

The Superloop though, had apparently gone well enough that, a fortnight before this month’s election, mayor Sadiq Khan had made expanding it a major campaign pledge. And so, I decided it was time I gave it a go. According to my trusty journey planner, travelling on all seven buses which made up the orbital section of the network should take roughly 405 minutes: throw in six changes of buses, and that was probably about eight hours. I’d almost certainly be sat at a laptop for eight hours anyway – why not just treat London’s newest transport mode as my office for the day? What could possibly go wrong?