Downing Street has confirmed that the Prime Minister remains fully in control of the government while holidaying in the Maldives, which is the political equivalent of saying your car drives itself while you’re asleep in the passenger seat. Officials insist he is “in contact” with staff, a phrase that could mean anything from hourly briefings to WhatsApp messages that say “lol ok” with a thumbs-up emoji.
Reform UK immediately called him out for bunking off, which is rich coming from a party that treats parliamentary attendance like a Netflix subscription. But they’re accidentally correct. The government is functioning normally without the PM present, which raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly does he do when he’s here?
If Britain runs on autopilot while the Prime Minister sips piña coladas, we have two possibilities. Either the civil service is so competent it doesn’t need political leadership, or the PM is already a sophisticated language model responding to pre-written prompts. Both explain why every statement sounds like it was generated by committee and tested against focus groups.
Downing Street’s insistence that everything is fine because the PM has a phone suggests they’ve confused governing a country with managing a Slack channel. The fact that this required an official statement—that government continues to exist when the leader takes time off—says everything about how little we expect from the role anymore.