The Death of ‘Silly Season’

‘Silly season’ is supposedly upon us. Traditionally, the parliamentary recess marked a brief lull in political news. Ministers retreated to their constituencies, MPs disappeared on holiday and newspapers, deprived of Westminster intrigue, filled their pages with escaped llamas, giant marrows, seagulls stealing chips on Scarborough seafront and other harmless absurdities. The absence of serious political news was taken as evidence that, for a few weeks at least, the machinery of government had slowed to a crawl. As a teenager, I remember wondering: “If the news stops when Parliament stops, perhaps less government would mean less news.”

Silly season no longer seems to arrive. Every summer now brings another existential crisis demanding constant commentary. Brexit negotiations gave way to Covid and lockdowns. Covid gave way to Ukraine. Ukraine gave way to inflation, leadership contests, small boats, riots and a seemingly endless succession of emergencies. Westminster has become a theatre in permanent performance. There is no interval, and the actors never leave the stage. There is only crisis.

In the midst of all these crises, each year there seem to be more calls for Parliament to shorten its summer recess. Ministers, we are told, should remain in their departments to deal with the latest furore. Increasingly, I find myself wishing the opposite. Not because the country faces no serious problems, but because so much of what now passes for governing consists of performance rather than the exercise of power: full of sound and fury, signifying… nothing.

The last fortnight has been a perfect illustration, as both the media and the online sphere have been full of breathless analyses of the implications of our most recent palace coup. Some excitedly tell us that everything will be much better under the brilliant Burnham; others grimly assure us that everything is about to get much worse. I tend towards the latter view, but I suspect that the trajectory will hardly change at all. If it does, it will have less to do with Burnham or his nearly-new cabinet than it does with the machinery they’re supposed to operate.

This isn’t just a complaint about the quality of modern politicians, although there is something to be said about that. Politics has always attracted people who want to be seen and listened to, and so it has always had an element of theatre. After all, as the old joke has it, “politics is show business for ugly people”. In anything even resembling a democratic system, performing for the audience, convincing them that you’re the right man (or woman) for the job and that your programme is the better one, must necessarily be part of it. When he gave his funeral oration, Pericles was performing; when he stood up in the Senate, Cicero was performing. So the problem isn’t with the element of theatre; the problem is that there is almost nothing left in politics but theatre.

Do our politicians govern? Strip away the personalities and the party labels and ask yourself this: looking only at the country’s long-term trajectory, which major trend has any government since the financial crash genuinely reversed? Taxes consume a larger share of national income than they have for decades. Government continues to borrow heavily almost every year. Productivity growth has remained stubbornly weak since the financial crisis. Energy has become more expensive. Illegal immigration remains a persistent political issue despite successive governments promising to solve it. The state of our military has been in decline more or less since the end of the Cold War. Some of the negative trends accelerated under Starmer (and some didn’t, or even marginally improved), but the problems themselves are structural and longstanding. It seems unlikely that £2 bus fares, £45 a year off energy bills, a wealth tax, a Prime Minister who works from home, or a No 10 of the North are actually solutions to the structural problems.

Ultimately, the link between winning elections and changing the direction of the country has weakened. Governments still gain office, but they find it very difficult to change the direction of the country, or even the department they nominally lead. Courts, regulators, devolved administrations, international commitments, statutory obligations and an ever-expanding administrative state mean that much of government runs under its own momentum regardless of who occupies No 10. Those institutional constraints are then compounded by lobbying interests, international capital markets and economic realities. This helps explain why so much political energy is now devoted to symbolic action. Announcements, honours, summits, inquiries, carefully calibrated condemnations and endlessly repackaged, trivial initiatives all remain available to ministers long after meaningful structural change has become extraordinarily difficult. Politics becomes increasingly performative because performance is often all that truly remains within a government’s immediate control.

In the end, the state has become vastly more complex and self-sustaining, which is at the heart of the issue. Ministers rotate from department to department every few years, inheriting organisations employing tens of thousands of people, administering statutory regimes accumulated over decades and interacting with any number of other public and arms-length bodies. Even the most intelligent and diligent minister possible will spend most of their tenure learning the system they are supposedly directing. By the time they begin to understand it, they are reshuffled. In the meantime, they still have to give the appearance of competence and convince interviewers on the Sunday morning round that they’re on top of their brief and everything is under control. The easiest way to do this is performance. Learn your lines, deliver them confidently and with conviction, avoid improvisation and never stray too far from the script. In a political system where appearances are more manageable than outcomes, it is hardly surprising that good performers prosper.

In fact, all organisations recruit for the skills they value and reward. In a system where you are more likely to progress quickly through the ranks if you can give a strong interview to Laura Kuenssberg than if you have a burning passion for lasting reform of the education system, you will naturally end up with a cast of insubstantial entertainers on your front bench. Once your potential candidates understand that the route to achieving their political ambition passes through their communication skills, your back benches will also be filled with troubadours. Quite apart from anything else, if you truly are someone who wants to change the world, how crushingly disappointing must it be to achieve political power, only to face the realisation that you can’t do anything meaningful? Earlier, I mentioned the question of the quality of our political class; this partly explains it. The country may well still contain many potential statesmen, but most of those statesmen have better things to do than become involved in politics and can achieve more if they avoid it.

Both the good news and the bad news are that this doesn’t particularly matter. The good news is that it seems unlikely that our new Government will manage to make things much worse than they were going to become anyway; the bad news is that they probably can’t make things better either. It’s become something like a provincial repertory theatre: the actors rotate out every now and again and the title on the poster might be new, but the costumes, the sets and the stage itself are the same.

I’m not saying governments lack legal authority. I’m saying they increasingly lack either the incentives or the willingness to exercise it. A government with a majority and the will to act could still change direction. What we have instead is a version of the ‘trolley problem’: keep the lever where it is and the long-term damage continues, but your career survives, or pull it and accept short-term personal pain for longer-term national recovery. I know which I would choose. But I also know I would never have dedicated my life to politics.

Political journalism still assumes that politics consists of powerful people making consequential decisions. Because of this, it analyses personalities with extraordinary intensity. Every reshuffle is treated as epoch-making. Every adviser is portrayed as the architect of history. Every leadership contest becomes a battle for the nation’s soul. In reality, though, all we’re doing is reviewing casting decisions. Political journalists have become close to theatre critics.

Looking back to the days when we still had a silly season every summer, perhaps it’s not really that I miss the giant marrows or the escaped llamas in the headlines. Perhaps, rather, I miss the reassurance that the politicians could go quiet for a couple of months without feeling the constant need to tell us that they were actually useful and actually in charge. The constant performance, the perpetual signalling, is really just a show to distract us from the fact that they don’t really know what they’re doing, and they’re far less in control than they would like us to believe.

With a background in history and political philosophy and after a long corporate career, Matt Roberts now writes on the political system and current affairs. Find him on his Substack page, the Traditional Pragmatist, and on X.