In November 1990, I watched a Prime Minister removed from office. Not by the electorate. Not by a general election. Not by any mechanism the British people could touch. Margaret Thatcher — whatever one thought of her — had won three general elections, and she was destroyed in a fortnight by her own party, in private meetings, through whispered arithmetic and ambition dressed as principle.
I remember the lesson landing with absolute clarity: this was never about us.
The machinery of Westminster does not exist to serve the British people. It exists to manage the careers of the people inside it. When the interests of the public and the interests of political survival collide — and they collide constantly — survival wins. Every time. The events of 1990 simply made it visible. A leader was not judged on what she had done for or to the country; she was judged on whether she could still win seats for the people sitting behind her. The country was the audience, not the client.
That was the catalyst. The idea took another eighteen years to become a decision.
By 2008 I had watched the New Labour project complete its arc, and the pattern of 1990 had repeated itself in a different key. Tony Blair had entered office with a historic mandate and left behind:
Then the gun went off, and Gordon Brown — the Chancellor who had designed the regulatory architecture that failed — was the Prime Minister tasked with managing its collapse. The crash of 2008, the bailouts, the debt, the contraction. And amid it all, “Bigotgate”: a Prime Minister caught describing a lifelong Labour voter with contempt the moment he thought the microphone was off. A small incident, but a perfect one. The mask had slipped again, and behind it was the same face as 1990.
That was the year I stopped asking “who should govern?” and started asking “why does it keep happening regardless of who governs?”
Here is the uncomfortable truth I had to accept: Blair and Brown were not aberrations. Neither was Thatcher's defenestration. I had been watching this system fail in the same way, for the same reasons, since I was a young man in the late 1970s. Different parties, different decades, different rhetoric — identical failure mode. Consider the ledger:
| Prime Minister | Years | The failure that defined them |
|---|---|---|
| James Callaghan | 1976–79 | The Winter of Discontent; the IMF bailout; bottling the autumn 1978 election for party advantage and losing everything |
| Margaret Thatcher | 1979–90 | Communities deliberately broken by deindustrialisation with nothing built in their place; the Poll Tax — and a removal that proved the party, not the people, was sovereign |
| John Major | 1990–97 | Black Wednesday — £3.3 billion lost in a single day defending a doomed currency peg; the sleaze era that normalised cash for influence |
| Tony Blair | 1997–2007 | Iraq; PFI; the financial deregulation that primed the 2008 collapse |
| Gordon Brown | 2007–10 | Presiding over the failure of the regulatory system he himself designed; rising national debt; “Bigotgate” |
| David Cameron | 2010–16 | Austerity that hollowed out public services; gambling the country's entire constitutional settlement on a referendum called to manage his own backbenchers |
| Theresa May | 2016–19 | The Windrush scandal; the hostile environment; three years of Brexit paralysis driven by party management, not national interest |
| Boris Johnson | 2019–22 | Partygate — lawmakers breaking their own laws while the public buried relatives alone; the VIP lane for pandemic contracts; an unlawful prorogation of Parliament |
| Liz Truss | 2022 | A mini-budget that crashed the markets, spiked mortgage rates for millions, and ended in 49 days — yet the system that elevated her remained untouched |
| Rishi Sunak | 2022–24 | The Rwanda scheme — hundreds of millions spent, courts defied, nobody removed; record NHS waiting lists; a premiership nobody outside his party ever voted for |
| Keir Starmer | 2024– | The pattern, continuing: manifesto positions abandoned within months, U-turns forced by backbench arithmetic rather than public argument — party management as government, again |
Eleven Prime Ministers. Both major parties, repeatedly. Some clever, some hapless; some decent, some not. It does not matter. When eleven consecutive leaders across five decades produce the same category of failure — the public interest sacrificed to political survival — the rational conclusion is not that Britain has been unlucky eleven times. It is that the machine is working exactly as designed, and the design is the problem.
A system built on careers will always protect careers. A system built on parties will always serve parties. A system in which power is won by performance and kept by loyalty will always select for performers and reward the loyal — and the country will always come second.
You cannot vote your way out of this, because every option on the ballot is produced by the same machine. Changing the driver does not fix an engine that is built wrong.
So in 2008 I began the work that became Direct Democracy & Sortition Assemblies: a complete civic architecture in which there are no careers to protect, no parties to serve, and no leaders to topple in private — because governing is done by citizens, selected by lot, serving their term and returning to their lives. Nobody campaigns. Nobody owes a whip. Nobody's survival depends on anything except doing the job in front of them, in public, on the record.
It took the failures of the late 1970s to teach me the pattern, the events of 1990 to show me its true face, and the wreckage of 2008 to convince me that nobody inside the system was ever going to fix it.
DD&SA is what I did instead of waiting.
If you want to know what the architecture actually is, start with What is DD&SA? → This page is why it exists.