It’s the despair that’s going to kill us

Time to cheer up

The morning after the 2015 election, when the party I worked for was nearly obliterated, I went to the pub and got drunk. The morning after the Brexit referendum, I went to Ikea, bought furniture and ate meatballs to feel vaguely European.

It feels like the mornings after are coming thicker and faster now. But I’ve no space for new furniture and these days I’m too middle-aged to bounce back quickly from hangovers. So it’s time to try something new. Cheering up.

For the last few months, I’ve been looking in depth at the science and innovation landscape: why the pipeline from scientific breakthrough to practical change is so sluggish and leaky. I’ve spoken to perhaps 50 people working on various parts of this problem, from universities to research funders, from scale-up businesses to healthcare charities. The ones who annoy me are the ones who agree with the analysis of what’s wrong and then say:

“It’s systemic. You can’t fix it.”

In the Times, Patrick Maguire recently published an anonymous essay that had been circulated over the summer around the Parliamentary Labour Party. It was no surprise to me that it reeked of the same despair: the country is ungovernable. Nothing can be fixed. And it was no surprise that MPs had lapped it up, hungry for the dismal pain that nothing can be done, because at least then it’s not their fault.

There is a market for despair. Despair about our failed state, the disease of Treasury Brain, the machinations of the deep state and the paralysis of the Blob or the omni-cause of climate-capitalism-colonialism. Despair about marches and outrage and collapsing democratic norms. Despair about the failure of our politicians even to stop embarrassing themselves by accepting free tickets to things. If you want to be miserable today, only a few seconds browsing on social media or news websites will find you an article to take you there.

The problem is that despair becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most problems are hard but fixable.The despair gets in the way of getting started. I want to read about problems in a way that helps me get a handle on what to do about them. I want to feel inspired to get started, not compelled to run away and spend my time watching videos of cute rabbits eating vegetables.

So: my plan is to write what I want to read. For two years I’ve been part of a podcast on Times Radio called How to Win An Election. Here I want to turn to the question that ought to follow that but too rarely gets attention: How to Run a Country.

Because I have lowbrow tastes, one of my favourite pieces of political satire is a children’s book, Vote for Duck, by Doreen Cronin. Duck decides to organise an election for control of the farm. He defeats Farmer Brown and takes charge. Duck then discovers that running a farm is ‘very hard work’. At the end of the day, he is covered in ‘mud, muck and coffee stains.’ So he decides to leave Farmer Brown in charge and run for Governor, and then President. On discovering that running a country is also very hard work, he retires to the farm to work on his autobiography.

Too many of our politicians are like Duck. They’re interested in the campaign, but the moment they find themselves covered in the mud, the muck and the coffee stains of government they get bored, overwhelmed, or convince themselves that someone somewhere (the deep state, the Russians, the voters, big tech) is conspiring to make life difficult for them.

But running a country IS hard work. It is mud, and muck and coffee stains.

Our politics doesn’t just have a terrible attention span. It also has the wrong mental model for what change looks like. When the media discuss policy, which they do too little, they discuss it as a simplistic set of trade-offs between nasty medicine and sweeties: ordeals and rewards. So many ministers come into office imagining that their job is to about pressing buttons: they only need to decide the right pattern of rewards and punishments to make it to boss level.

But Ministers need to lead, not just decide, because change is not a quick shot of medicine. It’s more like switching to a healthy diet - patient work with slow gains. It’s a regime not an ordeal - gardening (which never ends) not architecture (which does).

Spoiler alert: even though I am calling this newsletter How to Run a Country, I do not expect to provide anything that qualifies as a complete answer. What I do have are some prior convictions about the way to approach the question.

I started with the first: Cheer Up. Doom isn’t doing you any good.

The second: Be brave. Notice that half the appeal of populism is in its ambition and its confidence.

Progress doesn’t have to start with grand consensus but with modest, imperfect action: testing small interventions that shift the field enough to open the next possibility. It’s a strategy of movement, not mastery: start where the energy is and keep going.

The third: Join in. Running a country is not the job of the government. It’s the job of all of us.

The daily accumulation of incentives, habits, and relationships - the quiet work of managers, front-line workers, neighbours, small-business owners - is what actually makes up the life of the nation. We are all powerful. Instead of convincing ourselves that nothing will change and waiting for someone else to deliver the miracle we need to take on our own share of mud, muck, and coffee stains.

So: as I go about cheering myself up, by uncovering the people and the systems that are making things better - I’d love your help.

Read, comment, subscribe - and share what gives you hope. Or videos of rabbits eating vegetables, I’m always up for those too.