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Let me kick off by letting a little daylight in on magic. If you’ve got a book out in September, you’re probably sending the publisher the final version of the introduction four months earlier. So I guess the moment I truly knew that Keir Starmer was finished was the moment, in the first days of May, when I typed the words “we’ve had three prime ministers since my last book”. At that point it became an absolute cast-iron cosmic inevitability that we would have had yet another prime minister by the time the book was out. Nailed on. It’s the equivalent of lighting a cigarette so the bus turns up immediately.
So, four prime ministers in four years … Good times, possibly, for someone whose job involves writing about prime ministers. But not good times for Britain, or indeed for the seemingly endless series of outgoing premiers. Being British prime minister has become the biggest ejector-seat job since the noughties, when the US would announce they’d killed “the al-Qaida No 3” about twice a month.
And yet, on a personal level, sometimes I think the weirdest thing about our weird times is that I actually remain a long-term optimist. But I’ll explain that strange little secret later.
Because, first up, it must be said that many, many people went too early on the optimism. In the couple of years leading up to the 2024 general election, I did a lot of audience events, and I got to notice that the same question would crop up again and again. And that question, as we inched towards the overwhelming likelihood of a Labour government, was: “What on earth will you find to write about when this is all over?”
Well, now. Short answer: this. All this. The long answer – which I gave as tactfully and sensitively as I could at the time, given the political horror show everyone had been living through for the past few years – was to say that while it was a lovely thought that “this” would be “over” with the dispatch of the Conservatives, I regretfully didn’t think it would be. I didn’t think the fundamentals of Britain’s decline were remotely easy to deal with, and I didn’t think the Labour leadership were any good, or had any realistic idea of how to get growth, or were so infinitely morally superior to the Tories that it would be like living in some kind of serene yesteryear utopia, where you went back to only having to check the news every week or so. And when you did, the news was still mostly as you left it. No one had kidnapped a president, attempted to annex a country, or done ketamine in the White House. Equally, I didn’t want to be a complete Debbie Downer, so I’d try to end the answer on an up note, saying stuff like, “But, you know, maybe it’ll all turn out great!”
If you’re watching the events of the past few years on catchup – or simply using this article to get you up to speed – then I apologise for dropping a spoiler in here. But, hand on heart, it all did not turn out great. If it’s possible to get buried by your own landslide, Starmer achieved it. Within months of “the grownups” being in charge, quite a few people already wanted the toddlers to be given the reins again. And a whole lot more wanted flashy Uncle Nigel to have his turn instead. I find it hard not to have at least some sympathy with many of these reactions in the abstract. After years of dysfunction and desperation, people are right to think they deserve better, even if you disagree with how they think that better will come about. It’s when they stop even expecting anything better at all that a country feels most lost.
Still, what a cast of characters has adorned public life in recent years. I’ve always found it helpful to think of the people I write about as characters in a drama/comedy/extreme horror movie. Maybe it puts things at one remove and makes it easier to find the jokes. In fact, my favourite emails are always from Guardian readers in far-flung corners of the globe who write and say things like, “I have zero idea who any of these people are, but I enjoy the soap opera.”
Even so, at no point during the last few years did I have an absolutely clear handle on who many of the lasting leading lights of this show would be. Some public figures who I thought would stick around ended up lasting the equivalent of a three-episode arc. Farewell, Rupert Murdoch’s dental nurse turned prison chaplain fiancee – we knew you too little. (Please remember, this was the year in which Murdoch – then 92 – got engaged twice.) I knew Liz Truss had deteriorated beyond safety standards – lettuce rejoice! – but her failure to reckon with her reckoning meant she kept popping back up, along with some of Britain’s other, worse exes. Boris Johnson, say, who protested his innocence from the maximum-security international lecture circuit, at least until Nigel Farage hit on the tactical masterstroke of naming an immigration wave after him. Even former president Donald Trump seemed like an ex after he was found to have broken a few laws – until he broke every law of politics and became current president Donald Trump once again.
Others were unexpectedly promoted from the chorus line and ended up becoming stars. Take Lauren Sánchez. You could be forgiven for thinking that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos placed a personal ad in Billionaire magazine – “Top 3 Croesus seeks force of nature” – and the rest was history. But just a few short years ago, Lauren was actually still just a “journalist and helicopter pilot” – not Mrs Bezos, nor the recipient of multiple philanthropy awards. Not, in fact, an astronaut. Or take Mark Zuckerberg. At his regular summonses to Washington, the Meta boss once used to apologise for things and dressed like the reluctant teenage best man at his mother’s third wedding. He now thinks all previous apologies were a mistake and dresses like an Armenian who owns an adult webcam business. Or take ChatGPT, which a few years back would itself have sounded like the name of a premium-rate adult sexline, but is now responsible for everything from your work presentation to an unspecified percentage of global policy drafting, to informing you why it is that guy won’t message you back.
Strange to think that just four years ago Farage was enjoying one of his 37 retirements from public life. Then in June 2024, he unresigned again, and this time it was serious. His party, which has had more previous aliases than a rogue double-glazing salesman, was now called Reform. Nigel rapidly gained a whole new friendship group – and, in typical Farage style, lost some of them pretty fast, too. Sad to see him go no-speaks with a trillionaire we came to know as the US president’s “first buddy”. But, thanks to Elon Musk, we got to see a president turning the White House lawn into an electric-car dealership. (“Wow! Everything’s computer!”) Love him or hate him, let’s just agree Mars would be a great place to keep Elon. In fact, if there’s space in the space compound, I’d love him to take Fifa president Gianni Infantino, whose baddie glow-up has been as swift as it was inevitable in his endlessly rancid organisation.
Upbeat moments? In terms of landmark events in legal history, we were gifted the no-stakes hilarity of the Gwyneth Paltrow ski-massacre trial. We got the tireless heroes of the Post Office scandal. We entered the jam‑pushing years of Duchess Meghan, Montecito’s most down-to-earth homemaker.
That said, some things don’t change. It was yet another difficult few years for “difficult” men, with female TV stars and beloved female authors still lagging vanishingly far behind in the sexual misconduct stakes. Come on, gals – harassing, grooming or assaulting much younger juniors is an absolutely essential part of the artistic/retail mogul process!
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Meanwhile, Gregg Wallace, hemmed in for lucrative decades by a BBC that simply failed to recognise his behaviour was some kind of disability, finally released himself back into the wild.
And we had Jeffrey Epstein, a guy who bizarrely turned out to be one of the most consequential figures in transatlantic public life, capable of wreaking the highest-level havoc from beyond his grave. Some got away with posthumous exposure; Russell Brand simply rebirthed himself as a messiah figure in a Thames baptism performed by Bear Grylls. And all the many, many hangers-on and enablers who stood discreetly by for these men simply melted back into the world, presumably waiting for the next situation vacant.
As for the whole tenor of the period we have just lived through – in fact, are still living through – it’s hard not to look back on it and feel that chaos and disorder is now the norm. In fact, it’s hard not to look out of the window on any day and not feel it’s now the state in which we live. Let’s face it, the arc of history hasn’t been having a normal one for a while. Or, to put it another way, we seem to be living through a period of political and social entropy, having moved from a state of something that felt more like order towards increasing instability and an agonising loss of institutional effectiveness. Nothing brings it home like the US president using his private social media platform to share an AI-generated video of a swimming-trunked him and Benjamin Netanyahu sipping cocktails on sun-loungers in a lavishly redeveloped “Gaza riviera”. No, wait – nothing brings it home like the US national security adviser accidentally adding a journalist to a Real Housewives-style group chat that also included the defence secretary and the vice-president, in which live and operational details of a US forces mission were shared alongside punching fist emojis and metaphorical drink tosses at the Europeans.
But I do want to end this on an up note, because – strange as it might seem, in the circumstances – I am an optimist. No, but really. Always have been. I do have faith that humans can get ourselves out of a lot of the holes we’re in, even if we fall into some others in the process. We’ll fix a lot of the problems that right now feel intractable. And, sure, we’ll create some more seemingly intractable problems along the way. That’s inevitable. But I just cannot help feeling that humans are amazing and ingenious and hardwired to make it. To quote The Big Lebowski: “I guess that’s the way the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuating itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time.” Strikes and gutters, ups and downs. Yep, I truly do believe there is light at the end of this tunnel. Unfortunately, the tunnel is filled with sewage – but the glimmer is there.
Can I let one other chink of daylight in? Like a lot of deadlines, in my experience, that final, final book introduction deadline that I mentioned up the top of this article turned out to not actually be final. And so it is that I contrived to do a genuine last‑minute rewrite to keep pace with the sheer warp‑speed churn of leaders charged with rescuing the UK from the mess it’s in. But I swear to God, if anything happens to Andy Burnham between you reading this and the book being published in a couple of weeks, I will not be responsible for my actions. OK, OK. I will be responsible for my actions – but you’re going to need to give me a pass on being responsible for the error. Because, if we’ve learned anything over the past four years – and I’m not especially convinced we have – it’s that life moves pretty fast.
