How to build a good prime minister

We've fucked it up not once, not twice, but at least seven times in succession. Perhaps it's time to rethink how we do it.

This is probably the point that we needed to recognise we had a problem. Photo by Mathew Browne on Unsplash

There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken recently about the UK being ungovernable. Britain has a strong central government, a long history of liberal democracy, broad social acceptance of the law, a free press, a deep sense of national identity, robust institutions and a vibrant civic society. It is genuinely hard to think of anywhere on earth which is more governable than this place.

The problem is not that we are ungovernable, it is that we are badly governed. Acting like it’s some kind of physical law of the universe lets the people responsible off the hook.

We are now entering into a leadership contest. One way or another, it’s coming. So instead of moaning about a mythical flaw in the country’s fate we should be focusing on the kinds of qualities a prime minister should have. We’ve now seen things go wrong plenty of times and we can come to some conclusions about what we’re looking for.

Vision

The basic approach to successful governance is really quite simple. It is composed of a vision, the policy which implements that vision, and the mechanisms which deliver it. It begins in the sky and ends in granular street-level local detail. They say that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In fact, you govern in the style of a technical manual.

The best period for this approach was during the Tony Blair administration. What was the purpose of his first term? Well he told us, over and over again: Education, education, education. This message was stated so often nearly everyone could repeat it by instinct. This meant that there was a clear sense of the planned direction of travel and a set of potential tests by which you could evaluate government performance. It also meant that there was a general mandate for the approach, secured at the election, which could justify any difficult decisions you’d take to get there.

This message was also directed inwards: to the civil service and in particular to the Treasury. When you go into an election with a clear message like that, it helps the internal machinery of government understand what is required and acclimatise itself to it. It gives people in the state bureaucracy a sense of what it is the prime minister wants and this works to increase efficiency. Many things can take place without them having to sign off on it because they are a known quantity. They’re not all left hanging around for a very busy person to pay attention to the issue.

Simply having a vision is very much at the piss-easy end of things. Of all the ideas we will discuss here, it requires the least effort. But how many prime ministers can we really say had one?

Gordon Brown? No. He found a vision when the financial crash took place, but that was just a freak accident. Before that, he had no idea what he wanted to do. He was a covetous chancellor who had long ago forgotten why he wanted the prime ministerial position by the time he secured it. David Cameron, to his credit, had a specific vision. Austerity brutalised the British economy, needlessly impoverished us, led directly to Brexit and will be a stain against his name in history, but at least everyone understood what he wanted to do. Theresa May was involved in a desperate fight for survival, which she executed ineffectively, without elegance, grace or honesty, until the final termination of her witless premiership. There was no vision for it, except ‘Brexit means Brexit’, a phrase so empty that it serves as a fitting tombstone for her record. Boris Johnson aspired to a purpose with the levelling up agenda, but it had no true meaning and he would not have had the consistency or mental clarity to deliver on it even if it had. Liz Truss was the end of human thought. Rishi Sunak tried to find a vision every four months, like a middle manager in a suburban supermarket trying to decide which microwave meal he’ll have for dinner. And Keir Starmer barely even seems aware that he does not have one. I suspect that he thinks of visions as exotic continental innovations which should be treated with suspicion.

What has been the effect? Starmer took no vision to the country and therefore had no idea-mandate. He communicated no vision internally to the civil service or the Treasury, so it has been uncertain what to prioritise. The machine cannot take decisions without him because he is such a blank slate no-one can predict what he would want. The result is inertia. Stasis.

Delivery

Once you have a vision, it needs to be translated into reality. This will usually be through legislation, or it might involve departmental reorganisation or budgetary changes or something like that. When officials are helping a prime minister put together a king’s speech, for instance, they are essentially trying to tell a story. What is the government trying to achieve? How does each bill work towards doing that?

In New Labour’s first term, they published an education white paper called Excellence in Schools. It contained a wide range of detailed ambitions, including maximum class sizes for children under seven, ‘expected standard’ targets for English and maths for 11-year-olds, a structured hour for literacy in schools each day and the creation of a numeracy taskforce. The vision was translated into a set of really quite specific practical aims.

You then have to set up a system that ensures the delivery of those pledges. This is the hardest part. Different departments fail to communicate. Problems emerge and it’s not clear who is in charge of solving them. The Treasury becomes intransigent. Government’s become distracted - by war, by scandal, by leadership threats - and the mission stalls.

The collapse of delivery is extremely common. You can see that now, with Starmer’s ‘missions’ - once upon a time the core pledge of the government, now barely an irrelevance. I’m literally not sure whether they technically still exist. But accomplishing the vision, making it real, providing voters with proof that you will do what you said you’d do - this is how we show that democracy works. It is transactional but it is profound and at the heart of our entire way of life.

In Blair’s first term he had Michael Barber set up the standards and effectiveness unit in the Department of Education, allowing for the daily communication required to make things happen: Keeping special advisers, ministers, civil servants, the prime minister and the Treasury on the same page, executing day-to-day decision making according to established benchmarks towards the ultimate goal.

In his second term, this unit system had been refined and elevated to Downing Street, stretching across multiple departments. It was able to deliver on Blair’s election promises despite the fact that he was focused that entire time by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It insulated him against distraction. Then we got the 2005 election and people wondered how Blair could win despite how unpopular he was. Well the answer is that he had a downpayment with Barber: do the work towards the targets, no matter what else is going on out there. So education was getting better. Schools were getting better. Trains were getting better.

The frustrating thing about the Starmer government is that many of the same figures are still around. Barber himself has been involved in Starmer’s Downing Street. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, is a crucial part of the team. But without a clear direction set from the top the machine cannot start.

I don’t want to make all this sound easier than it is. Governing is hard. But this is the pattern you would expect to see if things are going to work properly: A clearly-articulated vision, the measures to implement it, and the mechanisms to deliver it. Without it, you’re fucked.

Courage

In the current period, courage is perhaps the most important attribute a prime minister can have. This would not have been the case for Blair, who was operating in a much more generous era. It is the case for the next prime minister, who is operating in a terrible one.

There are no good choices facing a British prime minister today. The basic problem is economic. The financial crash eliminated our productivity. Austerity cut us to the bone. Brexit undermined our trading position. Covid and Ukraine played havoc with our economy. And then Truss finished us off with a shotgun to the head. No country can shrug off this series of events. It has battered the shit out of us.

Every avenue is pain. If you change the fiscal rules to allow you to borrow more, there is a chance of a severe bond market reaction. This is not a lazy right-wing scare story. It is the reality of how we have been treated since the Truss debacle. No point crying about it either. No-one owes us money. People are entitled to risk-assess a loan to us if that’s what we’re asking for. The only option then is to raise taxes, but this also carries major dangers to growth and to public trust. Alternatively, you can cut spending, but after austerity there is nothing really left to save.

It’s a grim state of affairs. The only way out is to stop pretending that the public is right. On issue after issue, the public holds an objectively wrong opinion, sometimes to the left and more often to the right. In politics, everyone knows it - pollsters know it, think tank nerds know it, civil servants know it, ministers know it. But no-one will admit it out loud.

For instance, it is objectively wrong that we can raise all the additional money we need on the back of a couple dozen billionaires. There is no mythical tax rise which can solve all our money problems but will not be felt by us or anyone we know. The public has grown to only support taxes which it will not pay, but that is not how solidarity works or how a society looks after itself. It is a form of tax infantilism.

It is objectively wrong to reduce immigration to below 100,000, as we almost inevitably will this year, and expect to enjoy a successful dynamic economy. It is simply not going to happen. You are starving the Exchequer of funds and discouraging the most productive and innovative people from coming here.

It is objectively wrong to think that you can fix Britain’s trading status outside the EU. It goes against everything we know about customs and regulatory checks and the friction placed in the way of goods and services.

But somewhere along the line, we stopped having prime ministers who were prepared to lead. Instead, they tried to work out where the public were and said whatever it was they wanted to hear. They stopped believing they could change public opinion, and restricted themselves instead to working within it. But public opinion is strangling us. And things will not improve until we can breathe properly.

I’m not expecting a Labour leadership contender to come out and do an all-singing, all-dancing pro-immigration speech. I’m not that naive. But it is worth watching candidates for small acts of bravery, things which are hard to say, or unpopular, or difficult for them, but they decide to say anyway. This suggests they may have the character to do something really brave in power.

For instance, Kemi Badenoch once nearly told the truth, almost by accident. There was a brief moment in January 2025 when she wobbled on the pension triple-lock. Clearly, she knew it was untenable, but clearly she knew it would be dangerous to say so. The reaction was instantaneous, from the press but especially from other parties. In that moment, we got a glimmer of her true leadership potential. Would she show bravery? Would she stand up, despite the intense pressure to bow to the political consensus? Fuck no. Obviously not. And now we see the kind of leadership she provides: always doing the easiest, stupidest, laziest thing. Those little moments give you an indication of how someone will behave in power.

Decision-making

I can’t quite believe I need to write this down, but we do require prime ministers who can make decisions.

For a start, they need to be able to adjudicate between ministers. This seems so obvious that it barely needs saying but apparently it does. If the Treasury wants to rein in spending and the Ministry of Defence wants more money, someone has to actually make a call on that. That person is traditionally called the prime minister. At the moment, we have someone who refuses to do that. It would be better if we had someone who would do it.

The ability to reach decisions takes place in a specific psychological space. Years ago, I gave a speech to a group of opposition MPs and spoke afterwards to a politician who is currently a government front bencher. I was immensely impressed with their intellect. I was barely halfway through a sentence when they were completing it and asking me the next pertinent question.

It turns out this individual is a nightmare at their department. They are immensely talented at collating information and scrutinising it from every angle, but they just can’t make a decision. They become so obsessed with collating all the information that it paralyses them. The talent I witnessed actually made them ideally suited to be the chair of a select committee, but they were no good in a decision-maker role.

There is another problem where a PM is able to make decisions but is too controlling about always being the one to do so. They become zealous, insisting that everything is passed up to their desk for sign off. This was the issue with Brown and Sunak, both of whom created decision-making choke-points at the desk in No.10.

Prime ministers need to be psychologically capable of making decisions, willing to amass the right amount of information before doing so, refusing to become paralysed by it, sticking with the call once they’ve made it and deferring to other figures where appropriate.

Curiosity

One of the frustrating things about Westminster right now is that there are so many good, thoughtful ideas floating around and yet there is seemingly no-one in a position of authority open to learning about them.

For over a year now, political scientists have warned Labour that a reactionary message on social issues will lose them voters on the left without attracting voters on the right. This month’s local elections demonstrated that proposition in extremely vivid terms. But honestly, watching No.10 react, it was as if it was the first time they’d ever encountered these ideas. They had clearly shut themselves off from all sources of information outside of their chamber.

There are brilliant ideas out there, across the political spectrum. There are dozens of think tanks, policy institutes and academic units working on policy proposals, ready to be picked up by a politician and put into practice. On tax reform alone, we are surrounded by proposals which have been refined across decades, just waiting for someone with the vision and bravery - shit, the patriotism - to pick them up. But for that to happen the prime minister needs to have curiosity about the world around them. I know this sounds crazy, but they need to actually be interested in politics, excited by ideas to make things better.

Many years ago I was in the green room with former Labour minister Alan Johnson waiting to do a debate about something or other. He sat next to a producer, then another guest, then a trade unionist, if I remember correctly. Each time, his face lit up and he started asking them questions: What do you do, how does that work, how’re things going with that, what are the problems you face, why is it done this way?

The questions didn’t matter really. What mattered was the look on his face, that enthusiasm about finding out something new, that desire to look outside of your normal experience. It means that those in power have a disposition towards finding a wide range of ideas.

One of the depressing things about politics at the moment is how self-harming it is. A politician prepared to search widely for ideas will improve their own career as well as the country. But we do not select for those sorts of people. MPs are selected by the local party for being loyal party people, parliamentary private secretaries are selected for their fidelity, ministers are selected for their loyalty. At each stage of the political process we prioritise obedience and organisational narrow-mindedness over openness to ideas. But we do not have to. We can embrace and reward curiosity.

These are the things to look out for in a leader: vision, delivery, courage, decision-making and curiosity. The prime ministers of the last few decades have possessed few, if any of these qualities. They have been shit. This time, we could pick someone with most, or all, of these qualities. They might not be shit.

It won’t happen, obviously. We’ll likely make the decision on a series of completely unrelated points. We are fucking awful and we deserve that’s coming to us. But there is a different path available should we choose to take it.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Three pieces for the i paper this week - one on how the Labour leadership fight will drive us towards a more pro-European agenda, another on the utterly muddle-headed response to the inflationary crisis, and a third on how distant public perceptions of immigration are from reality.

The first episode of our Origin Story two-parter on JK Rowling is out. This is effectively a mystery episode, as we try to unravel what makes her tick. Has she simply been radicalised by the internet? Or was she always like this, but managed to conceal her true disposition? Or, and this is probably the most sensitive explanation, was she simply someone who refused to explore the ramifications of her political demands?

It’s a complicated story. As we lay out the narrative of her life, the birth and evolution of the gender critical movement plays out alongside it, providing a strange new alternate history of British feminism in the online era, through the medium of one very famous celebrity. As Dorian says in the clip below: “This is the first civil rights debate to play out on social media… What we’ve got here, which is incredibly unhealthy, is a sort of proxy war over a celebrity.”

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or just watch it below.

I can’t stop listening to Rosalia at the moment, in particular the album Lux, and even more in particular the track Focu ‘Ranni. I was wondering the other day exactly what genre it is and then I made what I think is a mistake. I started imagining that perhaps this was a new genre, that she had invented something so unusual that it really won’t fit into any pre-existing category and we’ll need to find a new one. And then I realised, no, fuck that, what nonsense. This is pop music. But I have become so used to boring, run-of-the-mill pop that something this ambitious, this vast in its intentions, sounds almost alien. It’s not the easiest album - there are big hooks, but she has so many ideas that none of them are given time to dig in. But then, that just makes me admire it more, and be all the more astonished for its success.

Right, that’s that cunts. Have a lovely long weekend. Do not read the news. See you here next week. Fuck off.