The Great Sleepwalk

We were warned. Macmillan told us we’d never had it so good, and he was right - though he could hardly have known that comfort would be our undoing. We were so content that we stopped noticing the foundations creaking beneath us. We had institutions that worked, public services that functioned, a press that informed rather than inflamed. Then we nodded off.

Prosperity sedated us. We mistook convenience for progress and consumer choice for democracy. The welfare state became a cashpoint, the NHS a punchbag, and government a televised pantomime. We stopped asking for competence and started rewarding theatre. Politics turned from public service into a reality show for sociopaths.

And into that void slithered the populists - the snake-oil salesmen of grievance. They arrived not as revolutionaries but as parasites, feeding on the indifference of a public too comfortable to care. They told us we’d been robbed - experts were liars, institutions corrupt, and shouting “take back control” could somehow restore control. Many believed them, because self-pity is easier than self-discipline.

Nigel Farage sneered at the courts and called judges “enemies of the people.” Boris Johnson lied to Parliament and laughed it off. Rupert Murdoch turned journalism into a sewer and then complained about the smell. Liz Truss blew up the economy in a week and called it “freedom.” Prince Andrew managed to outdo the lot - a walking, sweating monument to unearned privilege and moral vacuity. Each chipped away at something vital: trust in law, in truth, in responsibility.

Meanwhile the rest of us, smug in our affluence, watched it unfold with a mixture of boredom and mild amusement - until the bill landed. Rising prices, falling services, crumbling infrastructure, polarised politics. The fruits of forty years of complacency.

Populism didn’t arrive like a coup; it crept in through apathy. It told us that complexity was conspiracy, that competence was elitism, that anger was authenticity. And we applauded, mistaking destruction for change.

Now the same people who set fire to the house are complaining about the smoke. They shout about “British values” while torching the very institutions that embodied them - an independent judiciary, an accountable Parliament, a free press, a civil service that once believed in duty.

We had it good - astonishingly good - and we mistook that comfort for permanence. But civilisation, like an old ship, needs constant maintenance. Neglect the rivets, ignore the rust, and one day you’ll hear the timbers groan.

We are hearing them now.