There’s a particular sound a country makes when it has run clean out of outrage, and it isn’t a roar. It’s a sigh. You could hear it on the morning the latest Prime Minister went from squaring his shoulders to packing his desk in the time it takes a kettle to boil twice — somewhere between the second cuppa and the bus that was late again. No torches. No mob at the gates. Just a bloke on the platform glancing at his phone, muttering “another one,” and going back to checking whether the 8:14 had been cancelled.
That sigh is the story. Not the resignation. The shrug.
Cast your mind back to 2017, to a woman in Bristol confronted by a reporter with the news of yet another snap election. “You’re joking,” she said. “Not another one.” Brenda became a meme, a national mood in a single weary face, because back then exhaustion at the carousel of politics was still funny. It was still a novelty to be sick of it. We laughed because we recognised ourselves, and recognition is the first step before resignation sets in proper.
Well. Nobody’s laughing now. We’ve gone past the punchline.
The maths nobody bothers to do
Let’s count, since the country can’t be arsed to. Theresa May, gone. Boris Johnson, gone after the kind of slow-motion implosion you usually only see in demolition footage. Liz Truss, gone faster than a lettuce — and yes, that joke is now so old it qualifies for a bus pass. Rishi Sunak, gone at the ballot box. And now another exit, another lectern, another set of removal vans idling on Downing Street like they’ve got a standing contract.
That’s a turnover rate that would shame a kebab van. We have churned through Prime Ministers at a clip that makes Italian coalitions look like models of stability, and the truly grim part isn’t the number. It’s that you had to stop and think about the number. You’d lost count. So had I. So has everyone, and that’s precisely the point.
When the extraordinary becomes routine, the muscle that registers shock simply stops firing. It’s the same reason you no longer flinch at the third strike notification of the month, or the fourth water company tipping shit into a river it swore blind it was protecting. The capacity for alarm is a finite resource, and Britain has been spending it like a lottery winner on a bender.
The grift of permanent churn
Here’s what the permanent churn actually does, and it’s nastier than mere instability. It teaches everyone — the public, the press, the politicians themselves — that nothing needs finishing. Why commit to a ten-year infrastructure plan when you’ll be filing your CV by Christmas? Why level with the voters when you can simply outlast the news cycle? The whole rotten apparatus has been quietly recalibrated around the assumption that the top job is a temp position, and temps don’t fix the boiler.
The people who thrive in this arrangement aren’t the statesmen. They’re the operators. The dodgy characters who treat Number 10 as a stepping stone to the speaking circuit, the memoir, the consultancy gig advising the very industries they spent eighteen months failing to regulate. Permanent churn is paradise for the grifter, because a country that’s stopped expecting competence has stopped demanding it. You can’t disappoint a punter who’s already written you off.
And we have written them off. That’s the bit that should frighten us more than any single resignation. A democracy runs on a kind of bargain: you lot govern, we lot judge, and the judging only means something if we’re actually paying attention. The moment we collectively decide it’s all a circus and reach for the remote, the contract is void. The grifters know this. They’re counting on it.
What the shrug costs
There’s a comforting little lie doing the rounds, which is that British phlegm is a virtue — that our refusal to riot in the streets over a change of government is proof of some deep democratic maturity. Keep calm and carry on, and all that. Lovely sentiment for a tea towel. Complete pants as a description of what’s actually happening.
This isn’t maturity. It’s numbness dressed up in a stiff upper lip. A mature democracy gets angry at the right things and holds the right people to account. A numbed one just sits there, vaguely nauseous, scrolling past the headline because it’s seen this episode before. The difference between resilience and resignation is whether you’re choosing to stay calm or whether you’ve simply lost the will to do anything else.
We’ve lost the will. And the muppets at the top have noticed.
The genuine danger of this leaderless drift isn’t that the wrong person ends up in charge. It’s that the question of who’s in charge stops feeling like it matters at all — and a public that no longer believes its choices change anything is a public ripe for some mug who promises to burn the lot down. That’s the off-ramp from democratic boredom, and it isn’t pretty.
Brenda from Bristol was right, but not in the way we thought. She wasn’t fed up with elections. She was the first to spot that we’d started treating the whole business as something that happens to us, rather than something we do. The joke was never “not another one.”
The joke is that we stopped counting.