The sheer nerve of the British public to drag themselves to the polls across England, Scotland, and Wales today is frankly astounding. Hasn’t the Prime Minister suffered enough?
I awoke this morning in my Islington townhouse with a profound sense of dread. Not because of the geopolitical climate, nor the macroeconomic headwinds I discussed at length during a frankly exhausting panel at Davos last month, but because today, millions of ordinary people across England, Scotland, and Wales are trudging to the polls.
It is, to put it mildly, deeply unhelpful of them.
We are currently facing the biggest electoral test of Keir Starmer’s Labour government since the 2024 general election. And I must ask: why are we testing him at all? Did he not pass the entrance exam? The man has spent months meticulously ironing out any discernible policy differences between himself and his predecessors, a feat of political engineering that deserves our quiet gratitude, not a barrage of mayoral contests.
Yet, here we are. Polling stations have opened their doors to anyone who happens to live in a local authority area, which, regrettably, is most people.
I was having a rather lovely Dover sole at J. Sheekey on Tuesday with a senior Downing Street advisor. I will not name him, but let us just say his bespoke tailoring is only matched by his profound disdain for the concept of municipal governance. We both agreed that the timing of these local, mayoral, and parliamentary contests is borderline spiteful.
It is incredibly selfish of the public to demand functioning local services when we are busy managing the broad aesthetic vibes of a national economic recovery.
Giles is entirely right. The political landscape is perfectly fine the way it is. It does not need to be upended, as the sensationalists in the press are suggesting. I have looked at the political landscape from the window of a first-class carriage on the Avanti West Coast main line, and it appeared quite pleasant. It was a nice blur of green fields and appropriately distant working-class communities.
But now we have the specter of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats surging in the polls. The Greens, bless them, seem to think that local government should involve things like clean air and reliable buses. It is a juvenile fantasy. Serious governance is about forming a committee to study the feasibility of a bus, and then quietly defunding it three years later. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, are surging on a platform of aggressive competence in pothole management, which frankly feels like pandering to the lowest common denominator of people who drive cars.
And then there is Reform. I have never met a Reform voter, naturally. I imagine they congregate in places I only read about when I am skimming the property section to see how much my second home has appreciated. But their surge is a stark reminder that when you give people a voice, they will inevitably use it to say things that make polite dinner parties profoundly uncomfortable.
This brings us to the fundamental issue with devolution in Scotland and Wales. I have always maintained that giving people their own parliaments would only encourage them to vote in them. Now, we are facing a set of results that could fundamentally change the national picture in both countries. I took a brief holiday in Edinburgh for the Fringe a few years ago, and while the architecture was charming, the insistence of the locals on having distinct political opinions was exhausting. Can they not see that Keir is trying to run a very sensible, entirely friction-free administration from SW1?
The structural flaw in our democracy is this relentless insistence on feedback.
If you buy a vacuum cleaner, you do not get a say in how the company is run every four years. You just accept that it occasionally stops working and you learn to live with the dust. The state should be no different.
Sir Reginald, whom I had the pleasure of hosting at my summer retreat in Tuscany, captures the mood of the sensible centre perfectly. We have delivered a government. The product has shipped. To now demand that local councillors actually address the collapse of adult social care or the bankruptcy of municipal councils is a clear breach of the social contract, which dictates that voters should vote once a decade and spend the intervening years quietly consuming media.
I look at the mayoral races, particularly in the regions, with a mixture of pity and annoyance. These mayors will be elected today, and tomorrow they will expect to actually govern. They will want budgets. They will want to talk about infrastructure. They will want to meet with the Prime Minister, who frankly has better things to do, like attending black-tie galas to reassure utility executives that absolutely nothing will fundamentally change under his watch.
If the electorate truly cared about the stability of the nation, they would have stayed home this morning. They would have looked at the polling cards sent to them by their local authorities, recognised them for the disruptive administrative errors they are, and placed them firmly in the recycling bin.
Instead, millions are currently queuing in church halls and primary school gymnasiums across Great Britain. They are holding tiny pencils. They are making crosses in boxes. They are participating in a system that threatens to give us a mandate for something other than managed, polite decline.
It is a tragedy. And worst of all, it means I will have to spend my Friday morning reading about places like Dudley and Hartlepool, rather than focusing on the only metric that truly matters: the subtle fluctuations in the Prime Minister's approval rating among a select group of London-based political columnists.
I implore you, if you have not yet voted: consider the emotional toll your ballot takes on the people who actually run this country. Stay home. Let Keir Starmer rest.