The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius had the Delphic Oracle smashed up in 390 AD, but the gifts of the old gods were already well on the way out.
The Sibylline Books were burned shortly after. Scrying glasses across the ancient world had misted over. The prophets fell silent. Well, they hadn’t seen that coming. It was now impossible to foresee what was going to happen next, let alone any further down the line.
You can see where I’m going with this. Who will be prime minister at the end of the week? What brave new policies, set in stone days ago, will be forgotten like waking dreams? Suella Braverman sent some very salty tweets about police commissioners and demonstrators at the weekend, the kind of thing that in a newly appointed Home Secretary would normally lead to a raft of think pieces setting sail. But she could be a backbencher by Thursday, so what does it matter? Why bother?
The answer to every political question right now is ‘your guess is as good as mine’. Columns are being scrapped all over the land, leading to an intolerable burden on the working lives of pundits. Won’t somebody think of us?
Where such people go wrong, I think, is in eschewing the woolly language of the top-flight professionals like Nostradamus
Penny Mordaunt wrote a piece for the Telegraph pleading for stability with Liz Truss, which is a bit like pleading for celibacy with Katie Price. It’s best read in the tone of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka when one of his child guests meets a sticky fate – ‘Oh no please, everybody, don’t make me Foreign Secretary, please no, anything but that’.
It seems to me that despite Theodosius’s best efforts, predictions and prophecies remain a big part of our discourse, and the antics of the past few weeks have robbed us of this rudder. This was obviously very disconcerting for the markets, but their disquiet has now fed back, like most things that happen there, to all of us.
In this desperate scrabble, we seek new prophets. Was Rishi Sunak right? Well, not quite – none of Truss and Kwarteng’s crazy ‘I’ll explain to the Bank of England later’ stuff was in her campaign, and nobody foresaw that, or even quite understood it, until it detonated.
Similarly, the people saying Boris Johnson would be a disaster got none of the details right. Nobody expected on the night of the landslide that the Tories soon would destroy it all themselves, without anybody else having to lift much of a finger.
Predicting and prophesying starts from a rational place. ‘If you do X, then have you considered that Y might happen …’ is friendly advice. But much of the foresight dished out goes far beyond this. In many striking ways, the role of augur in ancient times is now taken by opinion pollsters and columnists, often with a similarly dismal hit rate. What people tell pollsters is very often not what they actually do in the seclusion of the ballot box. And there are some media voices who are especially eager to deliver very bold predictions based on straws in the wind.
Polly Toynbee is fated to be the reverse Cassandra – her predictions are believed, but she is always wrong. Owen ‘Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried’ Jones is, of course, tied to the historical inevitability of socialism. The exact difference between socialism and the Rapture establishing heaven on Earth has always been a mystery to me.
Where such people go wrong, I think, is in eschewing the woolly language of the top-flight professionals like Nostradamus. If Owen had decreed ‘The Bearded One will speak in harmony with the voice of the Rose’ he could’ve spun it any way when the chips fell badly.
It’s an interesting point for columnists, in a tomorrow’s fish supper wrapper way, that even in the indelible internet age nobody cares enough to pull us up on our fortune telling, although quote-tweeting with ‘this aged well’ takes considerably less effort.
While politicians tend to make sunny predictions, about themselves anyway, creatives are far sexier because they get to be doomy. We’re always hearing about ‘chillingly prescient’ and ‘scarily relevant’ films, but I can’t think of any fictional dystopia that posited a world where, for example, saying there are two sexes made you a despicable bigot. Pop music has an even worse strike rate; we weren’t on the eve of destruction, two tribes didn’t go to war, Mrs Thatcher did not institute a ‘fascist groove thang’.
In science fiction and fantasy TV reviewing, predictions are a great way to hold an audience’s attention. I admit it, I’ve dropped a couple of these myself. ‘Blah blah something exciting will happen rhubarb rhubarb in the season finale’ is very handy when you don’t have a story that grips by itself.
So. In the spirit of people making predictions that are completely wrong, here’s mine for Britain, whoever is prime minister next week or in three years’ time. There will be continued economic decline and cultural decay. There will be more bad faith, grievance, and lack of generosity. There’ll be a gradually increasing level of incompetence, with services swallowing ever more money and just not functioning properly. Unfortunately it will never be bad enough to spur anybody to actually do something about it.
Unless something unforeseen happens. Mighty Zeus, let it.
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