Sitting here by the window over the past few weeks, I’ve seen parents taking their kids to school just before the joy of summer holidays, recycling bins being emptied, a couple of chaps replacing windows over the way, another chap building a garden wall and the Air Ambulance rumbling off somewhere overhead. Everyday life in other words.
About a year ago I posted the G.K. Chesterton quote below. It has niggled away ever since, because Chesterton was mostly right - there are vanishingly few public people important enough to be seriously missed when they are gone.
As a plain, practical man of the world, I must realize that it is the Prime Minister who has been murdered. As a plain, practical man of the world, I don’t think that the Prime Minister matters at all. As a mere matter of human importance, I should say he hardly exists at all. Do you suppose if he and the other public men were shot dead tomorrow, there wouldn’t be other people to stand up and say that every avenue was being explored, or that the Government had the matter under the gravest consideration? The masters of the modern world don’t matter. Even the real masters don’t matter much. Hardly anybody you ever read about in a newspaper matters at all.’
G. K. Chesterton – The Father Brown Stories (1929)
Yet day to day government carries on however irrelevant its political leaders are. It seems to be the outcome of huge numbers of people doing what they usually do. Complex pressures and influences working themselves out today as they did yesterday, money doing what it usually does, a culture of following procedures, doing things reasonably well. Sometimes done out in the open, often not.
If the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet were to be abducted by aliens today, new Cabinets would be in place tomorrow. Naturally there would be a certain amount of official consternation of the Something Must Be Done persuasion, but we’d be well rid of them and many people would know it.
So who really runs the show? Perhaps nobody does in a direct cause and effect sense. The show is an outcome of opaque complexities, not one with a managed and scripted beginning middle and end. It all seems to hang on enough people performing their roles reasonably well.
If a culture of doing things reasonably well goes awry then this will be reflected in how the show runs. Failures will become obvious but not necessarily explicable. Yet the top-down nature of the show cannot make finely-judged corrections - it is all too complex and opaque. It has to collide with reality first - as we are discovering.
6 comments:
Related thoughts here.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-true-and-the-false-vision-towards
Maybe that's why when asked who, apart from family, has been important in their lives people give answers that seem sentimental - a couple of favourite schoolteachers, a tutor at university, their one good boss. But maybe it's harshly realistic.
I'm coming around to the idea that Parliament is just Strictly Come Dancing for Politics. Every 'series' you get a set of newbies being guided around by the professionals - in a series of 'dances' set to entertain the public. Sometimes the 'comedy turn' gets a lot of support (Boris) and sometimes a political contestant actually appears on Strictly (Balls, Widdecombe). As such the contestants are all mostly forgettable and easily replaced.
dearieme - thanks for the link, I've bookmark it. I have another post ready to go with a quote from your earlier Daily Sceptic link by the same chap.
Yes the important people question is harshly realistic, but revealing.
DJ - yes, Strictly Come Dancing is a good analogy. I think the main political actors know it too, or they soon find out. It's an opportunity for them but not for us.
"Yet day to day government carries on however irrelevant its political leaders are"
Belgium managed to last 589 days without an elected government. I'm sure we could do better...
Dave - we certainly ought to give it a try.
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