Britain deserves better than our cabbage patch politicians
It’s easy to forget how little most people pay attention to politicians. The only thing that really matters to the public is the cost of living, and no politician seems to get it, says Tom Harwood
I was carrying a cabbage in my hands on the way into work on Monday. Yes, a cabbage. In my bare hands. On the tube. It was for a wholly unoriginal yet mildly amusing bit on my GB News show: while Liz had her lettuce, Keir has his Cabbage.
Little did I know that mere hours later Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar would have called time on Starmer, and the cabbage began to look like an ever sounder bet.
But before the intervention of Sarwar, before too the resignation of Tim Allan as Downing Street Director of Communications (Starmer is now recruiting for his fifth in just 18 months), I was simply a man with a cabbage.
This is when a fellow tube riding Londoner broke the hallowed unwritten rules of the morning commute, and struck up conversation with me.
“Is that your lunch?” she asked. A little taken aback, I unplugged my airpods. Sorry?
“Are you going to eat that for your lunch?” Now, while I am sure my 79p white cabbage would have been delicious, I explained I was a journalist, and that I had bought it as a prop to count down the time the Prime Minister had left, just as was famously done in the dying days of the administration of Liz Truss.
“Who?” came the (genuine, earnest) reply. Liz Truss. “Liz Trust?” No, Liz Truss. She was Prime Minister. “Was she?”
It’s easy to forget, as someone who follows the news, just how many simply don’t. How many people tune it all out. How many millions of rational people in this country do not want to devote an iota of their cognitive capacity to remembering the names or even recognising the faces of the people who run the country.
Because they are exhausted.
Trust has collapsed
This week former Downing Street head honcho Dominic Cummings published his findings from 30 focus groups conducted over the last few months. They don’t make pleasant reading for politicians. “Voters are undoubtedly more angry and depressed than I’ve seen them since I first did focus groups in 1999” writes Cummings.
In short, he believes the gulf between Westminster insiders and actual voters has never been wider. Trust has collapsed. Of those that think about politicians at all, people’s thoughts turn from anger to contempt.
Political insiders like to think through the prism of ideology but that’s not how average voters think at all. There’s a greater sense of ‘them and us’, the idea that elites live in a separate world and ignore ordinary people’s struggles.
The biting thing about scandals over multiple paedophile-adjacent political appointments isn’t just the lack of judgement but the fundamental distraction it all presents. The staggering decisions followed by self indulgent psychodrama
The biting thing about scandals over multiple paedophile-adjacent political appointments isn’t just the lack of judgement but the fundamental distraction it all presents. The staggering decisions followed by self indulgent psychodrama.
Psychodrama that is utterly removed from people’s concerns. How the cost of living is the overwhelming thought of the overwhelming number of voters. How the cost of living is the prism through which everything else is viewed: be it perceived cost of immigration, welfare and government distraction.
Cummings explains how voters are already primed to believe MPs either do not care about their lives or are increasingly actively working against them. “It’s like they hate us, they’re not on our side” said one participant.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about all of these dozens of hours of conversations with voters is that they were all conducted before the Mandelson scandal really took off. Before the government committed to publishing all of their Peter Files.
Keir may yet outlive my cabbage. But he shouldn’t take solace. The real story is how little idea politicians have of how little the public thinks of them.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GBNews