Five years ago, one hot spring night in the Canaries, my partner and I stared at our phones in a hotel restaurant and awaited the result of Meaningful Vote 2.
We were talking about what we were watching, and occasionally read out particularly funny tweets to each other. Nonetheless, we chose to give up a night of our holiday to watch events in Westminster, 1,800 miles away, just in case the government fell. I can’t remember at this distance what the point of Meaningful Vote 2 actually was, but I do know it’s not consequential enough to make it worth bothering to check. The government did not, on that occasion, fall.
The last few years have been full of nights like that – and in my partial defence, on some of them prime ministers actually did fall. There were other meaningful votes over Brexit, interspersed with less meaningful ones, which felt of national importance at the time but were all but forgotten within days. There were the times when holders of great offices of state resigned, releasing thunderous statements about what seem now like the political equivalent of angels on the head of a pin, to tee up the leadership challenge that they’d publicly deny they were making, releasing anonymous briefings in the name of their “friends” all the while.
There were years of prime ministerial press conferences as national media events, at which Boris Johnson failed spectacularly to channel Churchill, or Theresa May to reassure the nation that nothing had actually changed (late at night, after hours of rumour stating the exact opposite). There was the day Suella Braverman was sacked, the day she was reinstated, and the day she was sacked once again. In a little over eight years, Britain ran through six prime ministers, eight chancellors, and 14 different housing ministers.
All this was sometimes, if you were a political obsessive, the most tremendous fun. At other times, though, it wasn’t any of the sort, but a sort of weary duty, a thing you had to keep watching just in case you missed something (quite possibly, an entire housing minister). One day in 2022, beset by a bug or a hangover – history does not record – I did not get out of bed until lunchtime. When finally I checked my phone, I learned the economy was on fire thanks to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, and I could no longer follow the memes.
The large majority of events, though, proved a fraction as consequential, and effort put into keeping up with politics for all those years has proved as useful as keeping up with Emmerdale. Really, we might as well not have bothered. It’s been a great time for columnists and podcasters and anyone else promising you a path through the chaos. It’s been a bad time for everyone else. All the while, the country was breaking.
One of the things the Labour Party promised in the recent election campaign was a “politics that treads more lightly in people’s lives”. This seems, at first, an odd thing to pledge, when everything from the creation of Great British Energy to rail nationalisation to the resurrection of industrial strategy suggests a bigger, more interventionist state than we’ve had for years. But this, surely, is what it means: a politics you can ignore, without worrying there’ll be a change of prime minister or a serious constitutional crisis while you’re not paying attention.
Partly, this is possible because Keir Starmer has a parliamentary majority and political capital unseen since before the referendum, of course. But only partly (Boris Johnson’s majority, too, should have delivered stability). There seems to be a conscious commitment to making politics dull again, summed up in another slogan: “Stability is change”. The striking thing about the legislative agenda set out in the King’s Speech, the longest such statement in over 20 years, was how essentially all of it had been trailed in advance. The only surprises were disappointments about measures not included. No rabbits emerged from any hats.
Whether this will be sufficient remains to be seen; there were socially useful but pricey rabbits, such as the completion of HS2 or, especially, an end to the two-child benefits cap, it would have been genuinely reassuring to see. But Starmerism already feels less like an ideology than a process, a way of governing by flow chart rather than by headline and methodically moving step by step. It is at least possible, if optimistic, to believe that more radical measures could yet follow.
What seems far less likely, though, is that the fate of the nation will rest once again on the results of a late-night parliamentary vote any time soon. Keir Starmer, the prime ministerial equivalent of a tin of magnolia paint, will not be announcing wrenching changes to domestic or foreign policy from behind an unexpected lectern of an evening as we’re all preparing to log off.
For those of us who write about Westminster, this could come as a disappointment. Everyone else who has to live in this country, though, may feel rather differently. To misquote Confucius: may we live in tedious times.
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