A brief history of time?

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It was Harold Wilson who declared that a week is a long time in politics, but other units of political time have been invented in the subsequent years. A couple of years ago, there was the Truss, equivalent to 49 Earth days. The unkind amongst us might equate one Truss to half-a-lettuce, but that would be unfair, since the lettuce didn’t make its appearance until close to the end of the Truss. More recently, we had the Scaramucci, equivalent to 11 Earth days, and then last week, we had the Zacharia, equivalent to 5 Earth days. It demonstrates how changing the units of measurement can appear to change the perspective: Truss lasted for almost 4.5 Scaramuccis, or a whopping 9.8 Zacharias, both of which sound rather more impressive than a mere 1 Truss.

Inventing new units to measure the passage of time doesn’t change the objective reality – 49 days is still 49 days. However, as Einstein told us, time is also relative. 49 days would look like a very long time to the average lettuce if sentient enough to care, but for the brief occupant of Number 10, it was probably not even enough to change the curtains. The more important question is what was achieved by those who have time periods named after them – and what we have learned.

The Truss taught us that presenting a dogma-based budget bypassing the ‘independent’ scrutiny put in place by one of her predecessors, and without having a clue about the likely consequences, is a really bad idea. The problem is that she’s not the one who learned that lesson, and as for those who did, it simply turned them into even more zealous supporters of neoliberalism rather than encouraging them to challenge orthodoxy in a more constructive way. The Scaramucci taught us that, in the court of King Donald, being seen to be brighter than the king is a career-limiting move. At least, that’s the way he seems to put it in a show of modesty which is ‘interesting’, but even if true it wasn’t exactly a high bar to jump. And the Zacharia taught us that choosing someone because the king thinks she looks good on TV is not the best way to hire the most talented people. It’s not at all clear that the one who most needed to learn that lesson has actually learnt anything remotely like that.

The common thread is that all three were the wrong people for the job in which they found themselves. The good news is that all three were found out fairly rapidly. The bad news is that there are probably many more who simply haven’t been found out yet. Not having a period of time named after you might turn out not to be a glowing endorsement.