Britain is a great country being ruined by its incompetent governing class

I did worry that last week’s column, when I suggested that Rishi Sunak may be on the brink of making an extraordinary comeback, wasn’t going to age particularly well. They say a week is a long time in politics, but in this case that’s proved to be an understatement. Following Nigel Farage’s resurgence and the Prime Minister’s disastrous decision to leave the D-Day commemorations early, it’s fair to say that my column now looks about as prescient as David Ike. 

Forget Theresa May claiming “nothing has changed” in 2017 as her campaign collapsed around her. This extraordinary blunder is up there with Gordon Brown’s 2010 hot mic moment, when the then prime minister called Rochdale voter Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” behind her back, not realising he was still being recorded by Sky News. 

The trouble for Sunak is that his hasty departure from the Normandy beaches, where thousands sacrificed their lives for our freedoms on June 6, 1944, doesn’t just look disrespectful; it looks politically incompetent. Even his apology seemed flimsy: “On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay in France longer.” A phrase involving Sherlock Holmes springs to mind. 

What on earth were he and his advisers thinking? It wasn’t even a complicated call. The question was a simple one: should I remain at the 80th anniversary of a remarkable feat of bravery that laid the foundations for the Allied victory against Nazism? Or should I return to the UK early, apparently merely to conduct a pre-recorded TV interview? 

It wasn’t just a problem that our last remaining veterans, some over 100 years old, had managed to go the distance; even German chancellor Olaf Sholz recognised the importance of attending the later international ceremony at Omaha Beach. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was also there, for pity’s sake, and I think we can all agree he has some pressing matters to deal with at home. 

Moreover, this was the last major commemoration those D-Day heroes are likely to be able to attend, which gave it an added poignancy that appears to have been lost on Downing Street. Unfortunately, for the “Ready for Rishi” brigade, this will go down as one of the biggest PR disasters in British political history. They want 18 year olds to do national service – but didn’t ensure that the Prime Minister stuck around until the end of the day. It’s mind-blowingly feckless. 

Yet sadly, it is simply another example of something we’ve grown used to: a governing class that is incapable of getting the basics right. As the Prime Minister was performing his mea culpa on X – of all places – the Government had David Johnston, the children’s minister, out on the airwaves trying to sell the Tories’ pledge to allow households earning £120,000 a year to keep all their child benefit. 

A simple manifesto promise to land, you would have thought. But when asked how much the child allowance is, Johnston was unable to answer. “Er… That, I’m afraid, I don’t know. It’s actually not a Department for Education policy,” he told Nick Ferrari on LBC. “I should have found out before I came on here,” he conceded. But this really isn’t rocket science. 

And don’t for one minute think it will get any better should Labour take power, as the pollsters are increasingly predicting. On my Sunday morning GB News politics show, I have asked four different shadow ministers – Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper – how they will cope with the predicted exodus of private school pupils into the state sector as a result of Labour slapping VAT on school fees. Will they build temporary classrooms in our already overcrowded state schools? None of them has been able to answer this most straightforward of questions. 

Money Saving Expert’s Martin Lewis hit the nail on the head on Good Morning Britain this week when he asked Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth how the party would deal with the “black hole” in Britain’s finances. When he couldn’t elicit an answer, Lewis commented: “You can increase debt, which you’ve said you won’t do; you can print money, which would be inflationary; you put up taxes, which you’ve said you won’t do; or, you could cut spending, which you’ve said you won’t do, which means if you can’t do any of those, we’re living in fairy-tale land.” 

All of which plays nicely into Nigel Farage’s hands. Because it taps into the central tenet of Reform’s campaign: that we are led by a bunch of out-of-touch amateurs incapable of fixing a Britain in which nothing works any more. When he announced he was taking the helm of Reform and standing in Clacton on Monday, he said he intended to lead a “political revolt”, insisting that the political status quo “doesn’t work”. 

He added: “Nothing in this country works any more, the health service doesn’t work, the roads don’t work, none of our public services are up to scratch; we are in decline, this will only be turned around with boldness – we will only recover our position through economic growth, that will only come when we get away from just half a dozen multinationals dominating the thoughts of our politicians and allowing real entrepreneurialism to flourish”. 

Even those who find Farage’s rhetoric on immigration uncomfortable will struggle to disagree with this analysis – which will appeal not only to those in the red wall but the blue wall, too. As the D-Day debacle shows, our governing class is riddled with incompetence. And it’s an incompetence and mediocrity that has spread right across the rest of the public sector and quangocracy. 

You can’t get HMRC to pick up the phone to you. If your local area is anything like mine then the roads are constantly being dug up – often with little or no prior warning – while potholes are left unfilled, or when they are finally filled, filled in badly with temporary grit which doesn’t remotely resemble actual Tarmac. The NHS regularly messes up appointments, sending letters to patients after they are meant to have been seen. The authorities seem incapable of doing anything to stop teachers flagrantly flouting rules on teaching woke nonsense in the classroom, while universities have allowed our supposedly brightest minds to run amok with their intimidating anti-Israel encampments. 

There seems to be no agility and no ability to think ahead among our rulers. Instead, we appear to have become a country lurching from one crisis to another, ruled by an establishment class that is itself constantly embroiled in chaos. So it’s perhaps little wonder that, when Farage comes along and points out the basic problems we’re facing, it resonates with the public. 

I can’t bear talking about Britain like this. I love this country and everything it stands for – exemplified by D-Day. But voters deserve better.