Is this Britain’s worst government ever? Not compared to this lot...

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Kelly Rissman

US News Reporter

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Chris Bryant, the Labour MP with a book to sell, has started something. His book is, in fact, a sensible and witty manifesto for changes he would like to see as chair of the Commons committee on standards.

In the course of promoting it, though, he said he thought that this parliament had reached its sell-by date. This encouraged others to indulge in hyperbole. “This is the worst parliament in history,” said Peter Stefanovic, a Twitter loudmouth.

People on social media are given to exaggeration. Ella Toone is the greatest footballer ever, until someone else scores a goal for England. If there are no spaces at the Boris bike dock outside parliament, that makes my day the worst day ever. But even wild overstatement serves a purpose, because it invites us to ask: what was the worst parliament ever?

The Addled Parliament of 1614 was pretty useless. It sat for two months and passed no laws, as the conflict between crown and parliament, which would eventually lead to civil war, deepened. But you don’t have to go that far back to find a parliament that rivals the current one for public scorn.

The Deadlocked Parliament of 2017-19 managed to vote “meaningfully” three times against enacting the instruction given by the people in the referendum. I have complained many times that Labour MPs should have voted for Theresa May’s deal, and that their wrongheaded attempt to prevent Britain from leaving the EU meant that we ended up with a needlessly hard Brexit.

But it seems odd to describe parliaments as good or bad, and to rank them accordingly. The point of our party system is that parliaments sustain governments, and it is governments that take responsibility for the nation’s affairs. Which brings me to a slightly different question, asked by one of my Independent colleagues yesterday: “Is this the worst government ever?”

To which the answer comes in two parts. The first is “Of course not.” And the second is “What do you mean by ‘this government’?” If you mean Rishi Sunak’s administration, it has hardly had a chance to prove itself. If you mean the Conservative government during this parliament, or since 2010, then successive administrations have been so different that it seems perverse to judge them as a single entity.

If each prime minister should be judged separately, we should still guard against social-media hyperbole. Even Ian Leslie, very much the opposite of a Twitter loudmouth, said last year, of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss: “Three of the most incompetent prime ministers ever, in a row. What are the odds?”

This is part of a larger problem, though: that of recency bias. We tend to think that the politicians we have now are uniquely awful, and that they would be towered over by the giants of the past if set next to them.

This bias was demonstrated with statistical neatness by an Ipsos poll earlier this month, which asked people: “Do you think that each of the following prime ministers changed Britain for the better or for the worse during their time in office, or neither?” The poll listed all the prime ministers from Thatcher to Truss, and the “net better” scores, subtracting “worse” from “better”, were in reverse chronological order, precisely. From Thatcher, plus nine, to Truss, minus 67.

One beneficial effect of recency bias is that, at last, Tony Blair scores well – plus six – because his premiership was a long time ago now. It does mean he is beaten by John Major, on plus seven, but Major’s score is inflated by a large number of people saying “neither”.

But what is striking is that, until Sunak – who is not included on the list because he hasn’t finished being prime minister yet – each prime minister is judged to have been worse than their predecessor. Talk about declinism.

I don’t think this is right, because I think Blair was better, on balance, than Thatcher, and much better than Major. I think David Cameron, May and Johnson should probably be on about the same level, although their personalities were very different, and the assessments are complicated by Brexit. Truss was clearly the worst, but didn’t last long because democracy self-corrected. And Sunak is potentially better than any of them since Blair, but he has inherited a wasteland.

So it doesn’t matter, in the end, whether we take parliaments or governments as our unit of analysis. It is unfair to blame Sunak for the failings of Johnson and Truss, but that is how the party system works: the Conservatives have governed for the whole of this parliament, and they will be judged at the end of it.

Chris Bryant is right to observe that this parliament is beginning to feel as if “you have sat here too long for any good you have been doing”, in Oliver Cromwell’s words addressed to the Rump Parliament in 1653. In my view, that feeling only adds to the case for a four-year maximum for parliaments rather than five.

By the time this parliament faces the voters, the mood may well be unforgiving. A Redfield and Wilton opinion poll published today asked people intending to vote Labour what their “biggest single motivation” was for the decision. “I dislike the Conservative Party and what they stand for” came top, as the answer chosen by 27 per cent.

Sunak is likely to pay the price, on behalf of the Tory party, for the feeling that, since the golden age, things have only got worse.