I've a feeling we're not in The West Wing any more. Educated technocrats have been in retreat against the likes of Trump and Meloni. And even where the anti-technocrat right are out of power, they have disproportionate influence over the agenda: culture war issues and immigration are more widely discussed than economic democracy, rentierism or the poor quality of management.
Farage's talk of "PPE bollocks" was the philistinism typical of the weirdo. But in one regard he had a point: PPE does not equip one to win and retain power today. A lot of what we learn in PPE is, to paraphrase Marx, how to write recipes before you have a kitchen.
So, we need a different education. One, I suggest, is Shakespeare and in particular Richard II, the story of how he lost his kingship to Henry Bolingbroke, as this tells us much politics today.
One thing it tells us is that morality doesn't much matter. Richard thought he ruled by divine right:
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord. (Act 3 scene 2).
Those who challenged this right, he said, "break their faith to God" and "profane, steal, or usurp". He thought a criminal could not become ruler. Just like the Democrats, however, he got a nasty surprise. You don't get a clear view from the moral high ground.
Nor does truth very much. Two of the few factual claims Bolingbroke makes are quite likely wrong: that Mowbray has killed Gloucester; and that the king has separated from his wife. That didn't stop him winning power. There's nothing new about weaponizing fake news.
Something else doesn't much matter - narrative. Richard has one - that God made him king - and he has the pomp and theatricality of a divinely-appointed monarch. By contrast, Bolingbroke is down-to-earth and transactional and - on stage at least - gives no good reason why he should be king; in fact he speaks quite little, with 413 lines, many in short speeches, compared to Richard's 758.
If morality, truth and narrative are of little use, what then does matter?
Simple - power. Bolingbroke has the Machiavellian* skills - again manifested mostly off-stage - to win the support of both the common people and fellow nobles. What matters is the building of groups of supporters, and the weakening of potential rivals. And once one has a growing band of supporters, there'll be a bandwagon effect as others jump onto the winning side: Shakespeare's Duke of York joining Bolingbroke's cause prefigured American newspaper bosses aligning with Trump.
Richard's failure in this regard is described not by himself, nor even by a noble, but by a gardener:
O, what pity is it
That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest, being overproud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself.
Had he done so to great** and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live.
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown. (Act 3 scene 4)
Marx - a great reader of Shakespeare - thought that emergent trends within capitalism would, from a socialist point of view, do the gardener's job. A decline in the numbers of petit bourgeois, he thought, would "wound the bark" by weakening a class hostile to socialism, whilst a growing working class would strengthen the "bearing boughs" that support socialism.
He was too optimistic. Coalitions of interests don't just emerge. They must be created. It's in this context that policy matters. It is not merely a matter of technocratic fixes or hawking product like market traders, but a way of creating or weakening alliances.
In this, Richard was a failure. In confiscating Bolingbroke's inheritance, he not only motivated the latter to want to topple him but also alienated other barons who feared a similar fate.
Thatcher, by contrast, was - for a while - a success in this respect. She did not use sweet reason alone to persuade people of the merits of free markets: we know now that public opinion doesn't much favour these. Instead, she "wounded the bark" by weakening trades unions thus enfeebling a threat to her power. And she fostered the growth of "bearing boughs" who would support her by creating a new class of house-owners who identified with the interests of property owners.
Blair also helped bearing boughs to thrive, albeit perhaps inadvertently. In expanding higher education he created a cohort of liberal-minded people who are frustrated with working conditions and inability to afford decent housing. That's a potential source of support for the left for years to come. The right's antipathy to universities isn't founded upon clever estimates of Mincer equations, but upon the sense that graduates are, like "great and growing men", a threat to their power.
Here, we see another failure of the Democrats, pointed out by Dani Rodrik. Bidenomics, he says "paid too little attention to the changing structure of the economy and the nature of the new working class". In not doing enough to offer service sector workers good jobs, it did not sufficiently cultivate the "bearing boughs" that could be a wide working class base.
Which brings us to the question: what is Starmer doing to weaken "great and growing men" who threaten his power, and to cultivate "bearing boughs" that might keep him in office? He needs to do so because, as Russell Jones says, his "mandate is a mile wide and an inch deep."
Here, he's missed a chance. He could have used Huw Edwards' conviction as a pretext to remove the BBC's Tory-leaning senior management, and he could use newspapers' admission of criminal behaviour as a reason to launch "Leveson 2" which if nothing else would bring the press into disgrace by publicizing its crimes against some of the people's favourite celebrities. In not doing this, he's not weakening opponents.
We must also ask: what coalition of interests is he fostering that will continue to support him? So far, the strategy seems to be to cultivate business interests. Supporting Lloyds against claims for compensation for mis-selling car finance; sacking the chair of the CMA for not offering enough "pro-business decisions"; and offering big tech help with developing AI all signal that Labour is on the side of incumbent big business.
Which is not enough. As Machiavelli said:
He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people.
So, what sections of the people are going to be "bearing boughs" for Starmer? Unless he can offer better public services, more affordable housing and better jobs, the answer might well be: not enough. Labour needs to achieve these not merely out of intellectual considerations of morality or economic efficiency, but because of the brute power politics of needing a client base beyond the media and a few rich donors. There'll come a time when revulsion against the Tories is not enough.
Here, though Richard II contains another lesson for Westminster politicians. Not only does the gardener know better than Richard the skills needed to maintain power, but he also knows, before the Queen does, that Richard has been deposed. A "little better thing than earth" (as the Queen calls him) posesses more wisdom and knowledge than she or her husband.
Which tells us that ground truth and the wisdom of crowds matter. Shakespeare was anticipating Kenneth Boulding's words (pdf):
All organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.
Starmer's fate, ultimately, will be determined not by the advice of his courtiers or by Westminster bubblethink or by his own self-image but by the brute facts upon the ground: what bases of interests favour him? which ones oppose him? and what are their relative powers? If he loses grip on this, he faces a similar if less grisly fate than Richard II.
* It's not clear how much Shakespeare knew of Machiavelli. The Prince was banned in England during his lifetime, but - in an early example of the Streisand effect - seems to have been popular, and Shakespeare does make passing reference to "Machiavel" in Henry VI part 3.
** "Great" here means "powerful" rather than being a term of approval; Adam Smith used the word in Shakespeare's sense.
Another thing: in saying all this I am of course making a case for education in the humanities. Literature isn't just entertainment (though what's wrong with that?); it sheds light upon some neglected truths about the world.