Democracy Is Becoming Theatre… And We’re Still Buying Tickets

Have elections quietly stopped being about choosing our future and started being about choosing who gets to manage our disappointment?

Every few years, the British public is handed a stubby pencil on a length of string and invited into a plywood booth to decide the fate of the nation. I’ve always found the string rather telling. We are trusted with the future of the country, its economy, its schools, its hospitals and whether or not it goes to war, but not, apparently, with the stationery.

So we put our cross in the box, fold the paper the way the nice lady at the trestle table told us to, and post it into a black tin that looks as though it was borrowed from a church hall jumble sale. Then we go home, stay up far too late watching exhausted people in rosettes stand on a stage in a leisure centre somewhere, and listen to the winners thank their families while the losers thank “the people of this great constituency” through teeth clenched so tightly you can almost hear the enamel going. By the following weekend, the posters are curling in the rain, the promises are being “carefully reviewed”, and the whole thing goes back in the cupboard for another four or five years.

We call it democracy. And technically, it is. But I’ve started to wonder, from my rather unusual vantage point in a cave on a Spanish hillside, where the campaign literature can only reach me through a temperamental phone signal (frankly the best filter I’ve ever had), whether we’re actually choosing who governs us… or simply choosing which production we’d prefer to sit through.

It’s an uncomfortable question, and I’m aware of that. Democracy is one of those things we’re encouraged to treat as faintly sacred, somewhere between a cup of tea after bad news and the unwritten law of the queue. I also grew up in a service family. My father served in the Royal Signals and rose to Warrant Officer, and I spent seven-odd years in the RAF Police myself. I’ve stood among people who wore the uniform for the specific purpose of protecting the right of complete strangers to put a cross in a box, including strangers who would happily have voted to cut their pay. I don’t take that lightly, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who did. The right to vote was bought and paid for, and the receipt is carved into the war memorial of every market town in Britain.

But the fact that something was expensive doesn’t mean we should stop checking whether it still works. If anything, it’s the opposite. Nobody inherits their grandfather’s watch and refuses to wind it out of respect. You look after it precisely because of what it cost, and part of looking after it is noticing when it starts losing time.

And I think ours is losing time. Not through some grand conspiracy, and not through tanks on Whitehall or a general reading a statement on the BBC at dawn. Something slower and considerably less cinematic is going on: a gradual transformation in which the appearance of democratic choice stays perfectly intact while the substance becomes harder and harder to find, rather like a high street shop that keeps its lovely Victorian frontage long after the inside has been turned into a vape outlet.

The machinery is all still there, polished and ready for the next performance. We have elections, parties, manifestos and televised debates in which seven people stand behind identical lecterns and talk over each other for ninety minutes. We have campaign buses with slogans painted down the side, some of which turn out to be more reliable than others. And we have that great British electoral tradition, the politician in a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket, standing in a factory they will never visit again, nodding earnestly at a lathe.

The question that nags at me is what happens once the hard hat comes off. How much meaningful influence do ordinary people actually have over the direction of their own country once the posters have come down and the bus has gone back to the hire company?

The performance begins long before polling day

At sixteen or seventeen, I worked for an insurance broker in Hull. It was a good grounding in a lot of things, but the main lesson was this: the business ran on persuading people they needed more cover than they did. Nobody lied outright, exactly. They just became very good at working out what a customer was frightened of and then gently, sympathetically, nudging the premium upwards. When I was later offered the chance to take the business over, I turned it down, because I’d seen what it was really selling and I didn’t fancy putting my name above the door.

I mention it because it taught me something that has been useful ever since, through a career in uniform and a good many years in senior security management. The most effective salesman isn’t the one who lies to you. It’s the one who has done his homework on your anxieties.

Modern political campaigning has become very good at homework. Parties now employ communications specialists, advertising professionals, data analysts and strategists whose entire job is to understand what voters want to hear, how they react emotionally and which messages are most likely to tip them over the line. Whole elections have been fought over imaginary people with names like Worcester Woman and Workington Man, composite voters assembled in focus groups like political Mr Potato Heads and then courted with the kind of devotion normally reserved for a lottery winner’s long-lost cousin.

None of this is new in spirit. Politicians have always wanted to win, which is rather the point of standing. What has changed is the sophistication of the machinery around them, and the degree to which political communication now resembles commercial marketing. Voters become demographics. Concerns become campaign opportunities. Public opinion becomes something to be measured, managed and nudged, and the leader is packaged like a premium product, complete with carefully selected photographs, rehearsed spontaneity and a small collection of reassuring phrases engineered to survive a hostile interview on the Today programme without saying anything that could later be quoted back at them.

We are sold competence, strength, compassion, stability and change, sometimes in the same leaflet, occasionally in the same sentence. The packaging is redesigned every few years. The sales technique would be instantly familiar to anyone who once sat behind an insurance broker’s desk in Hull.

Then comes the awkward bit. Once elected, politicians discover that governing is considerably less fun than campaigning. Mario Cuomo, the former Governor of New York, once observed that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, and I’d only add that the prose usually turns out to be a Treasury spreadsheet. Promises collide with budgets, legislation, international agreements, economic reality, institutional resistance and the deeply inconvenient fact that a large chunk of the country didn’t vote for the manifesto in the first place.

Some compromises are unavoidable. Some are genuinely sensible. Others are simply political expediency wearing a nice suit and calling itself responsible government. But when the gap between what was promised and what is delivered grows wide enough to park one of those campaign buses in, voters are entitled to wonder what exactly they took part in. Were they choosing a programme of government… or signing up to a policy with an awful lot of very small print?

The illusion of choice

One of the founding assumptions of democracy is that voters face a meaningful choice between competing visions of how the country should be run. In theory, this is beautifully simple. Different parties offer different policies, different priorities and different ideas about what sort of society we ought to be. The electorate weighs them up, picks one, and off we all go.

In practice, the distance between those alternatives can turn out to be surprisingly narrow. Governments change, ministers change, leaders change, and the rosettes change colour accordingly. The language changes too, sometimes dramatically. Yet beneath all that activity, certain fundamental economic and institutional assumptions have a habit of staying exactly where they were, like the furniture in a holiday let that has been “fully refurbished” with a new set of cushions.

Part of the reason is genuinely structural. International obligations, financial markets, established bureaucracies, security arrangements and powerful commercial interests all shape the space a government has to work in. A new Chancellor can arrive with the boldest plans in the world and discover within a fortnight that the bond markets have opinions of their own… and the bond markets didn’t vote either.

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the point at which a certain kind of article swerves off into talk of shadowy cabals and men in a dark room pulling strings. I spent long enough in security to know that genuine conspiracies are rare, largely because they require competent people keeping secrets for long periods, and both of those are in much shorter supply than the internet would have you believe. Elected politicians are not powerless, and every government is not simply taking dictation from unseen masters. That explanation is tempting precisely because it’s simple, and reality is rarely that obliging.

It does, however, raise a fair question about the limits of electoral choice. If voters keep electing governments that promise significant change, only to discover that the room for manoeuvre is a fraction of what was advertised on the side of the bus, at what point does democratic choice start to feel rather theoretical? It’s a bit like being offered a choice of two taxis, a red one and a blue one, with very different drivers and very different music on the radio, only to find that both have been booked in advance to the same destination, and neither driver will quite tell you who made the booking.

We choose the driver, certainly. I’m just less sure than I used to be that we choose where we’re going.

The permanent machinery of government

Anyone who has watched Yes Minister will already know where this section is heading, and anyone who has worked in the civil service will tell you, usually after a second drink, that it was less a comedy than a training video.

Politicians come and go. Governments fall, elections are held, new faces move into old offices and the removal vans do a brisk trade in Westminster. But the permanent institutions of the state carry on regardless. Civil services, regulators, security organisations, the courts and a great many other established structures provide the continuity, expertise and stability without which a country would collapse into permanent improvisation. They are essential, and I say that as someone who spent most of his working life inside institutions of one kind or another. You do not want a country run entirely by whoever happened to win last Thursday.

Continuity, though, brings its own questions about accountability. Elected representatives arrive with policies, promises and, quite often, not a great deal of experience of running anything larger than a constituency office. The permanent institutions have accumulated knowledge, settled procedures and considerable influence over how, or whether, those policies actually happen. That relationship can be perfectly healthy. Experienced officials should advise ministers, flag practical problems and challenge proposals that are unworkable or unlawful. That’s their job, and a minister who refuses to hear it is a minister heading for a very public fall. But there is a world of difference between advising elected representatives and quietly deciding the boundaries of what they’re permitted to attempt.

After the RAF, I spent years as an Operations Manager in civilian security, where I picked up the nickname Mr Memo. Whenever there was a problem, I wrote an open memo about it, and I required people to sign to say they’d read it. It wasn’t always popular. Then something would go wrong, the Directors would need to establish who had known what and when, and my little pile of signed memos would suddenly become the most treasured documents in the building. I learned then that the single most important question in any organisation is “who decided this?”, and that large organisations are extraordinarily good at making sure nobody can answer it.

Government is no different, only bigger. The public sees the minister announcing the policy, the opposition denouncing it and the interviewer demanding to know why. We see considerably less of the machinery behind the decision: the drafts, the advice, and the options that were quietly removed from the table before anyone elected ever laid eyes on them. Democracy depends on accountability, but accountability becomes almost impossible when you can’t work out where responsibility actually sits. When something goes wrong, responsibility can travel through a truly impressive number of departments before disappearing into the administrative equivalent of a locked filing cabinet, the key to which has been temporarily mislaid pending an independent review that will report shortly after everyone involved has retired.

The media has a part to play

It would be unfair to examine all this without turning to journalism, and I say that as someone who now spends most of his days on the writing side of the fence.

A free press is not an optional extra. It is one of the essential safeguards of an open society, the mechanism by which governments are scrutinised, claims are tested, and uncomfortable questions are put to people who would much rather not answer them. Every would-be authoritarian in history has understood that, which is why the newspaper offices are usually the second building they visit, right after the broadcasting station.

Yet the modern media environment has problems of its own. News organisations are businesses competing for attention, and attention has become one of the most fought-over commodities on earth. Stories are chosen, framed and served up in an environment where speed, clicks and commercial survival all matter, sometimes rather more than they should. Political coverage consequently drifts towards a contest of personalities, rival accusations and carefully harvested soundbites, rather than any sustained examination of policy and evidence.

We learn which politician made an embarrassing remark at a fundraising dinner, who walked out of which interview, and which party is supposedly “surging” on the strength of a poll of nine hundred people conducted on a wet Tuesday. We are treated to endless commentary on the horse race, complete with form guides and expert punditry, as though government were the 3.30 at Kempton. What we get rather less of is patient, unglamorous examination of what government decisions actually do to people’s lives two or three years down the line, long after the cameras have moved on.

The internet was supposed to fix all this. We now have access to more information than any generation in history, and yet I’m not remotely convinced we’re any better informed. Social media algorithms reward engagement, and nothing engages quite like fury. Outrage travels at the speed of light. Nuance arrives several hours later, exhausted, slightly damp, and carrying a heavy bag of supporting documents that nobody wants to look at.

We increasingly take our political information from sources that tell us what we already believe. We share the stories that confirm our suspicions and scroll past the ones that challenge them, and every click teaches the machine to serve us more of the same. In doing so, we risk becoming willing members of the cast in the very theatre we claim to despise.

The electorate cannot escape responsibility

This is the least comfortable part of the discussion, and I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed writing it. It’s considerably easier to blame politicians, journalists, corporations and faceless institutions than to take a long, hard look in the bathroom mirror.

But here we are. We complain endlessly about dishonesty in politics, then reward the politicians who tell us exactly what we want to hear and punish the ones foolish enough to tell us the truth. We criticise tribalism while defending our own side with the blind loyalty of a football supporter whose centre-forward has just been caught on camera elbowing a defender in the face. “He was provoked.” “It’s a contact sport.” “Did you see what their lot did last season?” We demand accountability from our opponents and then discover an almost saintly capacity for forgiveness when our own representatives are caught doing precisely the same thing.

We say we want evidence, then settle for confirmation. We complain that politicians dodge difficult questions, yet how often do we sit with the difficult answers when they’re finally offered?

Democracy is not simply a system in which citizens periodically select representatives and then go back to the telly. It’s a responsibility that extends well beyond polling day. It requires an electorate willing to examine competing arguments, challenge comfortable assumptions and accept that the truth will occasionally be inconvenient, expensive or both. That’s a far more demanding proposition than turning up at a church hall every few years, wrestling with the pencil on a string and hoping for the best.

Perhaps one of the reasons political theatre works so well in Britain is that we already have a national art form built on exactly this model. It’s called pantomime. We know who the villain is before the curtain goes up, and we boo him on cue. We cheer the hero, shout “he’s behind you!” at the appropriate moments, and enjoy a hearty round of “oh no it isn’t” and “oh yes it is” without anybody’s mind being changed in the slightest. Then we all go home pleased with ourselves, having participated enormously while influencing absolutely nothing.

We have our favourite performers, our preferred storylines and our predictable reactions. We boo the opposition, applaud our own side and occasionally grumble that the script has become a bit repetitive. Meanwhile, somewhere backstage, the people who actually write it carry on working, and they very rarely come out to take a bow.

Democracy was never supposed to be a spectator sport

It’s worth separating democracy as a mechanism from democracy as a principle, because we tend to blur the two and then wonder why we feel short-changed.

The mechanism gives us elections, representation, constitutional arrangements and, crucially, the peaceful transfer of power. Having spent part of my childhood as a forces kid in Cold War-era Germany, when the alternative to all this sat just the other side of a heavily guarded border, I’m not about to sneer at the peaceful transfer of power. It’s a genuine marvel, and plenty of people in plenty of places would give a great deal to have it.

The principle is something broader. It’s about the ability of ordinary people to influence the decisions that shape their lives, to challenge authority without fear and to hold those exercising power to account. You can have the full machinery of democracy, every lectern and ballot box and swingometer, without necessarily achieving any of its ambitions. A beautifully maintained engine isn’t much use if nobody has connected it to the wheels.

None of this means elections are meaningless, or that democratic institutions should be torn down and replaced with something shinier. Quite the opposite. It means they deserve more scrutiny, not less. A healthy democracy should be robust enough to tolerate uncomfortable questions about its own performance. It should welcome criticism, protect dissent, and understand that public trust cannot simply be demanded because an institution has been around for a long time and has rather nice architecture.

Trust is earned through conduct, transparency and accountability. It is not an automatic entitlement that comes attached to a ministerial red box, a seat on the green benches or an impressive collection of official stationery. Even the pencil on the string has to earn its keep.

Living as I do now, off-grid with a small group of friends, has taught me a few things about how decisions actually get made when they matter. When resources are finite, and somebody has to deal with the firewood, nobody gets to sit back for four years and then tick a box. Everyone has a say, everyone is accountable, and anyone who promises something they can’t deliver finds out about it at breakfast the following morning. It’s not a model you could scale up to nearly seventy million people, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. But it has convinced me that participation is a muscle, and that ours has been allowed to waste away from lack of use.

So perhaps we ought to think harder about what democracy looks like between elections. Public consultations that genuinely consult, rather than decorating decisions already taken. Real local decision-making with real budgets attached. Independent scrutiny with actual teeth. Citizens’ assemblies, which Ireland, for one, has used to work through some of its most divisive questions with rather more grace than Westminster tends to manage. Stronger mechanisms for holding representatives to the promises they made back when they wanted our votes.

None of these is a magic solution, and each has its own flaws. But a democracy that expects its citizens to remain essentially passive for years at a time, before briefly shaking them awake to choose again, is surely missing something rather important.

So, what exactly are we voting for?

I don’t believe democracy is finished, and I want to be clear about that before anyone fires up the comments section. Nor do I believe that every politician is a liar, every institution rotten or every election rigged. Those conclusions are easy to write; they get plenty of shares, and they tell us almost nothing useful.

What worries me is the widening gap between the democratic ideal we celebrate on commemorative occasions and the political experience that a great many ordinary people actually recognise. People feel ignored. They feel that the decisions that matter are made somewhere beyond their reach, by people they didn’t choose and couldn’t name. They watch governments change while the same old problems sit stubbornly in place, like a damp patch that every new landlord promises to fix. They hear grand promises of transformation, followed a year or so later by carefully worded explanations of why transformation isn’t quite possible at this time, owing to circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

Eventually, frustration curdles into cynicism. Cynicism hardens into disengagement. And disengagement creates exactly the kind of environment in which those holding power face the least meaningful scrutiny of all. It’s a dangerous cycle, and one that feeds itself very nicely without anybody needing to plan it.

Democracy doesn’t only collapse when someone abolishes elections or tears up a constitution. That’s the dramatic version, the one they make films about. The quieter version happens through public indifference, institutional complacency, tribal loyalty and the slow, shrugging acceptance that ordinary people have little say in what happens to their own country. No tanks required. Just a great many people deciding, one at a time, that there’s no point.

The theatre carries on. The seats stay full. The applause arrives on cue, and the interval ice creams are as overpriced as ever.

Perhaps the important question isn’t whether politicians are putting on a performance. Ambition and presentation have always been part of the trade, and I’ve never expected anyone seeking power to turn up without their make-up on. The more important question is why so many of us have become content to accept the performance as a substitute for genuine participation, and to call that democracy.

Maybe it’s time to stop arguing about which party deserves another turn on the stage, and start asking whether the audience has any real say in how the theatre is run.

After all, democracy was supposed to belong to the people. I’m just not entirely sure when we stopped being the cast and became the paying customers… or whether any of us thought to keep the receipt.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham