Britain will next year mark the 300th anniversary of the office of prime minister. It was on 3 April 1721 that Robert Walpole, as First Lord of the Treasury, began formally to act as George I’s first minister – such an arrangement, hitherto ad hoc, now had to be regularised because of the instability caused by the South Sea Bubble speculative boom. The king spoke hardly any English and was therefore unable to oversee the nation’s affairs at this critical time in the way his predecessor and second cousin once removed, Queen Anne, had attempted to do. It would once have been an interesting after-dinner game to discuss who had been the worst prime minister, and had the lowest-calibre cabinet, in those 300 years; but now the answer is so indisputable that the exercise would be pointless.
Even where administrations have in living memory been obvious failures – the sheer incompetence of Theresa May’s, for example, or the long road to oblivion of John Major’s, or the catastrophic sequence of wilful misjudgements and lies that brought about British participation in the second Gulf War under Tony Blair, or the debacles of both the Heath and Callaghan ministries in the 1970s – all who led them, with the exception of Blair, had reasonable to extensive experience in government. All surrounded themselves with people of high intellect and deliberative ability, or engaged with others at the highest level whose opinions were contrary to their own. None of this is true of Boris Johnson’s administration.