Politics has always been about power – who has it, how they exercise it, in whose interests they use it. Yet, increasingly politics has become associated with a professional elite who live, breathe (and have only ever worked in) politics and are, in how they see the world, divorced from the vast majority of the population.
This group operate as a self-serving selectorate, sometimes described in the UK as a ‘chumocracy’. As we’ve seen with Boris Johnson, the corporate class and the COVID-19 contracts, this system is much less warm and friendly than that name might imply.
But it’s not new. This is the story of Britain and most of the developed world in recent decades. Most of the time it is hidden from public view, rarely debated, and carried out without a real mandate from voters. Once in a while, as with a recent biography of Boris Johnson, it reveals itself for all to see.
