25 Jul 2026
issue 25 July 2026
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A couple of years ago we rented a villa in Ithaca. ‘Who wants to go see Odysseus’s palace?’ I said to everyone sitting by the pool. So I went alone. High on a hill overlooking the sea, among the pines, I found the remnants of a citadel. Last Friday evening I was transported back there by Christopher Nolan’s epic. Settling a few feet in front of the huge West End screen – the last seats available – my neighbour did what no one does in a cinema and introduced himself. He was a Labour minister, one of their brightest young stars, looking a little distracted. Watching a tale of betrayal and meandering missions: he was just preparing for the week ahead.
If Britain had been fighting the Trojan war we’d be on our seventh Agamemnon by now. Each recent one arrives in Downing Street promising a break with the past. ‘Westminster isn’t working,’ these fly-by-night premiers intone. ‘The elites have failed you for 40 years.’ I don’t understand why they all choose to trash the very profession they practise – or the machineries of Whitehall and parliament, which are the only tools available to them. If you tell people that politics itself is broken, no wonder they don’t look to career politicians for the solution. Perhaps acknowledging the successes of politics past would be a better place for these mainstream parties to start: the rescue from industrial bankruptcy under Thatcher and Major; the improvements in healthcare under Blair and Brown; the full employment, regional devolution and rise in education standards under Cameron. After all, it was only ten years ago that we were the darling of the bond market, had an economy outpacing the US, northern cities on the rise and international wealth flocking to our capital rather than fleeing it. We could just start by trying to get back to the home we left.
