Rosamund Urwin: The next generation – do government leaders have a ‘political shelf life’?

Aging: The Cabinet has an average age of 53
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Rosamund Urwin24 August 2017

A French friend — forced in 2012 to vote for either Nicolas Sarkozy or François Hollande - likened it to “picking your favourite member of N-Dubz”. So trying to decide which of the runners and riders to replace Theresa May is best seems akin to choosing your numero uno in Blazin’ Squad. There’s too many of them, some seem interchangeable — and there’s no Justin, no obvious star.

Dominic Raab, a man who once said food bank users just had episodic “cash-flow problems”, pops up on these lists in the “outsider” category. Yesterday, he was on both the Today programme and Good Morning Britain to claim the Government’s climbdown on the European Court of Justice wasn’t a climbdown at all.

On Today, he managed to sound both robotic and patronising. On GMB, he got the same punishment as other feckless folk on TV: a savaging from Jeremy Kyle. The kinder responses on Twitter included: “Listening to Raab is like testing the tensile strength of bulletproof glass with your forehead.”

God help the Conservative party if Raab is its future. But then, where’s the talent, the imagination in the Cabinet itself? May has created a Cabinet so stale that grey incarnate Philip Hammond is the one I’d have dinner with.

Oh, how I long for the glory days of John Major’s government! The zombie Prime Minister leads an army of the resurrected and recycled. There’s the scandal-survivors: Liam Fox and Boris Johnson. There’s the leadership losers: Andrea Leadsom and David Davis.

There’s the clingers-on: Jeremy Hunt still at health despite being reviled by NHS staff and former justice secretary Chris Grayling, now at transport despite introducing the prisoner book ban and the criminal courts charge (asked to name Grayling’s biggest mistake, a QC told me: “That’s like asking which bomb was worst in the Blitz — you need context to see the scale of the destruction”).

The Cabinet feels like it has been around too long. The mean age of members is 53. But the feeling isn’t about how close they are to getting a free bus pass: Financial Times columnist Henry Mance argued recently that what matters is “political shelf life” — how much longer the public will buy what you’re selling. The egg-timer tips over once you’re near the top. Take Boris: the joke is wearing thin.

May, of course, cut short her own shelf life. There were alarm bells before she called the election. In her interview with US Vogue she admitted she doesn’t read much history and the interviewer dubbed her “wilfully unimaginative”.

She clearly doesn’t value fresh thinking in others, either. Cabinet members are long on soundbites, short on original thought. Whenever I’ve interviewed one, they remind me of those dolls with buttons you push to make them say a stock phrase. The mediocrity of the Cabinet is one reason we haven’t yet seen a challenge to May. This is a way to cling on to power: don’t have an heir apparent who could take your job.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is not so much a stalking horse as a pantomime horse

It also partly explains how Jacob Rees-Mogg — a crafted caricature — could be talked about as a plausible challenger. One of his contemporaries at Oxford recalls that Rees-Mogg — who always wore a three-piece suit, apparently — was “treated like a tourist attraction” by other students. He hasn’t really changed. He’s not so much a stalking horse as a pantomime horse.

That the talent is ebbing out of politics is a common complaint — and I don’t think it’s true. There is Tory talent; it just isn’t at the top. The best of the next generation haven’t been promoted fast enough: Jo Johnson, the infinitely preferable brother; Tom Tugendhat; Nusrat Ghani; Johnny Mercer; Lucy Frazer.

Some have suggested that the Tory party should skip a generation for its next leader. It should. Right now, the lack of star contenders most benefits a 68-year-old who’s been in parliament half his life yet is still deemed “fresh” — Jeremy Corbyn.

Ozark’s dark lesson in money-laundering

Ozark — the new Netflix thriller set near the Missouri mountains — isn’t quite the ad the local tourism board might have hoped for. There’s too much murdering, too many disembowelled animals and too many locals who look like those Uber drivers you cancel because you fear you’ll end up dead in their boots.

In the series, which was just been renewed for a second season, Jason Bateman plays financial planner Marty Byrde, who is laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel and has to flee Chicago for this backwater.

It’s dark and twisty, and despite a “meh” reception in the US, it’s suddenly what everyone I know is binge-watching.

The show is especially good on how quickly your ethical code can erode during desperate times, how the deplorable becomes normalised until you’re poking a submerged cadaver with a fluorescent paddle.

Ozark also gives a little lesson on laundering — useful for the unlucky folk stuck on juries for those interminable financial crime cases (a friend lost six months this way), but perhaps also a primer for those hoping to avoid ending up in the dock.