Deeply humiliating

Tertius Bonnin has a topical CAPX on Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female Prime Minister. Essentially a story of leadership and that rare ability to blend leadership with tough-minded political honesty.


What Britain can learn from Japanese Thatcherism

The parallels between Japan and Britain are striking – and for Westminster, deeply humiliating
Sanae Takaichi has proved that the public doesn’t want consensus if it means standing still
Japan’s Prime Minister is creating a new generation of popular capitalists

In the pre-dawn stillness of Tokyo’s Nagatacho district, the lights on the fifth floor of the Kantei remain stubbornly ablaze. Inside, Japan’s first female Prime Minister is likely to be on her fourth cup of tea and her eighteenth hour of work. Sanae Takaichi does not believe in Japan’s legendary ‘lost decades’ (roughly 1991-2021) of stagnation, only in the ‘work, work, work’ philosophy that has become her trademark, and now, her country’s new mandate.

For Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the last few years have been a slow-motion descent into the political abyss. Bogged down by archaic slush-fund scandals and a public weary of institutional inertia, the party’s brand has rarely been more toxic. And yet, Takaichi has found a way to capitalise on her party’s decline as her personal popularity has soared.


Well worth reading as a reminder of something we in the UK don't have and are apparently unwilling to vote for. The contrast with Keir Starmer's government could hardly be more humiliating.


The parallels between Japan and Britain are striking – and for Westminster, deeply humiliating. Both are island nations grappling with the weight of past glories, ageing demographics, high levels of national debt and a productivity puzzle that has defied a decade of technocratic tinkering. However, while Britain remains trapped in a cycle of managed decline, Takaichi’s Japan appears to have found an offramp.