The trouble is, Garnett does not suggest improvements. He just says the job of prime minister has become impossible. The implication is that things would improve only if politicians suppressed the special advisers and the media – though Enoch Powell once said that for a politician to complain about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea. As for us poor benighted voters, perhaps he could adopt Bertolt Brecht’s solution to the workers’ uprising in East Germany in 1953: that the government should dissolve the people and elect another. The British Prime Minister in an Age of Upheaval is an easy read, laced with wit and irony, though its sneering tone towards prime ministers is not to my taste. Still, Garnett makes a challenging and thought-provoking case, which it is difficult entirely to dismiss.
