On my slight acquaintance with quantum physics, the most appealing concept is Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment of the dead and alive cat. You might remember how it goes: the luckless feline is sealed in a box with poison and a radioactive atom, the observer cannot know if the cat survives or not until the box is opened, so while in the box it is both dead and alive simultaneously. Writing amid the turbulence of science and politics in the Thirties, Schrödinger demonstrated the impact external observation has on any experiment and its conclusions. But the idea popped into my head as a strangely adept metaphor for the battles at Westminster.
We live in the era of Schrödinger’s politics, in which the two main parties jostling for power are simultaneously winning and losing, depending on what we want to hear and who is making the judgment. And in the manner of his experiment, that leads to a lack of certainty about what is likely to result.
Only a week ago, a poor result in the Conservative MPs’ confidence vote had Boris Johnson on the ropes and screeds of “it is only a matter of time till he goes” analysis. That moment passed quickly. Not so much as to evaporate, but enough for Johnson to plan his summer use of the Chequers retreat. In the unstable compound of politics, he remains stubbornly there even when reportedly on the way out. Schrödinger’s PM: either the defiant leader who refuses to budge or the dead man walking.
This week, attention shifted across the line to Labour. The fundamental problem with Johnson as PM is that his lack of judgment and discipline might lose the Tories the next election — the fear which motivated many of his backbenchers to vote against him. Conservative MPs also fret about losing their seats over the challenges of recession (the greatest killer of governments being economic malaise) and the backwash of Johnson’s sundry misjudgments over partygate. So, the conclusion should be that Labour is inexorably advancing — or at least could deny the Tories a majority, relying on Lib-Dem and SNP votes. But quantum-theory politics inconveniently raises a question: if Labour is doing so well, why is the party not more clearly on the road to success?
Leaks from yesterday’s shadow cabinet report on Sir Keir Starmer angrily objecting to being called “boring”. I am afraid that the need to insist you are “not boring” vindicates the charge that you are. The worry, as one veteran backbencher (and Keir loyalist) puts it, is not that Starmer is dull but “that my constituents are barely aware of him at all”.
Last night, I bumped into a successful scion of New Labour. He reminded me that Starmer has been careful in his rising years to keep his distance from the Blairite wing of the party and that he had advanced adeptly to the top job by being a bit pro-Corbyn when the wind blew that way and is now an avowed centrist — though battled-hardened New Labourites remember only that he avoided supporting them on market-orientated solutions, let alone the trickier end of geopolitical alignments.
It is telling that the Opposition belief is much firmer on the need for a change of government (reasonably enough after a long period of Tory rule) than the expectation that it will reliably happen. How many senior shadow cabinet folk really believe they will end up in a Keir-led cabinet? So much so that they would bank their career on it happening?
Out of this situation sprout Schrödinger-style policies, which are a more serious shortcoming. We have a Northern Ireland trade agreement which is alive-but-dead and a Government tearing up the agreement it signed to deliver it, with no stable end-state in mind. Priti Patel’s Rwandan asylum plans are tending towards a fully Schrödinger outcome: a noisy statement of intent to deport asylum seekers, which has so far ended up with a messy judicial process and the first flight cancelled at the last minute. Besides, there are people seeking to cross the Channel by boat at the mercy of people smugglers, so the purpose of the experiment looks dubious. In both cases, the stories reflect optics and intentions, rather than outcomes.
The one semi-constant is that Johnson will be confidently predicted to be nearly gone and yet still there. To adapt Schrödinger, a dead cat can still bounce back. That is the conundrum for the Conservatives — and fear of failure that haunts Labour.
