David Cameron spends a lot of time staring at Harold Macmillan. A photograph of the last Old Etonian to lead the Tory party into power faces him in his Commons office, a reminder of a time when prime ministers did little and said less. When a crisis was breaking, Supermac was more likely to finish another chapter of Jane Austen than to rush before the cameras.
That was 50 years ago, a time when the public had not developed an expectation of constant attendance by its elected leaders. The role of government was limited, and a collective phlegmatism defined the national character. Seldom did we demand that "something must be done".
It stayed like that for a surprisingly long time. Even in the 1970s politicians were not held to account in the same way. Hard to credit but there were days when Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the opposition, chose to stay in her seat during Prime Minister's Questions and leave Harold Wilson alone. Even she, on occasion, had nothing to say.
How distant that pre-Blackberry world seems. We are in our 13th year of government by frenzy, led by subsequent premiers who could not bear to be silent or still. Initiatives, action plans, launches and re-launches, lip-trembling statements, gurning YouTube appearances and the endless stream of announcements from Downing Street, all designed to imprint the personality of the man in charge on to our cerebral cortex.
It would be hardly surprising to find, after this terrible summer for politics, that exhausted voters want their national leaders to go away and leave them alone. Surely the days of "eyecatching initiatives that I should be personally associated with" – in Tony Blair's revealing phrase – are over?
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