Boris Johnson was so personally careless and irresponsible that it was tempting to think of his prime ministership as an aberration, after which things would return to (relatively) normal. After the chaotic last few weeks, something much darker and more dismaying comes into focus. While the Queen, her funeral watched with awe by the biggest TV audience in history, was doing her best from beyond the grave to burnish the image of a ‘dignified’ British state, her heads of government were playing out a black farce of incompetence and malignity.

Even allowing for Covid, it is clear that beneath the pomp and circumstance, the UK under the Tories has collapsed into a downwardly-mobile country, a state which no longer knows what it is for or doing.

In the last year, while the world has been grappling with global polycrisis, the one thing of substance that UK governments have a chance of succeeding with is the most draconian public order bill in our history – together with mooted anti-strike legislation a grim testimony to the authoritarianism that is the sole common policy denominator of the three prime ministerial regimes that Downing Street has hosted since July. But how could it be otherwise, given a rate of ministerial churn that precludes any but the most simplistic form of government? 

Since 2015, when the Conservative government promised to replace ‘the chaos of coalition’ with ‘strong and stable single party government’, ministers have whistle-stopped through revolving doors at health, education, business and justice departments at the rate of one a year, sometimes more – barely time to locate the office canteen, let alone master departmental briefs or form productive relationships with civil servants.

In one sense that didn’t matter, since government had long since chillaxed into managerial single-mindedness. After 2010 the overriding central policy was austerity, everything else delegated to the market. When results failed to please the electorate, the government pivoted smartly to Brexit – up till then a far-right policy only officially supported by UKIP – which enabled it to outsource blame on to Brussels and immigrants and pitch the idea that ‘taking back control’ would allow John Bull’s sturdy character to trump proximity to the country’s biggest export market as a passport to economic success.

Today’s dominant departmental policy-setting mode is the U-turn, so fast and frequent it is hard to keep track. Thus a long-mooted cross-country Northern Powerhouse Rail project was developed and then downgraded under Johnson, re-pledged under Truss and is now being de-pledged again by business secretary Grant Shapps in his third ministerial manifestation of the year. In his first 10 days as prime minister Sunak U-turned half a dozen times, with more to come as he calculates how many of the promises he made in the summer’s leadership contest he can get away with breaking.

Unsurprisingly, the result of the unravelling of government since 2010 has been uniformly disastrous – for government, for democracy, for the country and for the Conservative party itself. Confounding airy promises of a Brexit dividend, disintegration has accelerated since 2016. A few figures offer a stark snapshot of the precipitous decline. 

Since 2015, GDP has grown by 24 per cent in Germany, 18 per cent in France and just 10 per cent in the UK. That leaves the UK economy 70 per cent the size of Germany’s, against 90 per cent in 2015. UK GDP growth is likely to be zero for the next two years, less than every other substantial nation except sanctions-hit Russia, so the gap can only widen. Blame Brexit, which will slash GDP growth by 4 per cent or 5.5 per cent, depending who you believe, over 15 years. As interest rates rise, latest estimates are that the UK is about to experience the longest recession since the Great Depression.

For the market’s view of Brexit Britain’s prospects, look no further than sterling’s 20 per cent depreciation against the euro and dollar over the last six years, and the ‘moron premium’ now applied to our borrowings. Cheaper sterling notionally makes exports cheaper and easier – but unlike other European countries, which have bounced back over the last year, the UK’s exports remain stuck at depressed Covid levels. In the three years after Brexit, a UK that traditionally ranked in the world’s top five exporters sank from 5th to 11th place, where it resides below Mexico and just above Belgium.

At the level of the individual, the effects of the Great Unravelling have been camouflaged by a decade of easy money and low interest rates that enabled them to keep on buying even as they were getting poorer. But as Sarah O’Connor pointed out in the FT, you know that era is coming to an end when Deliveroo tweets that you can now buy meals with Klarna, a by-instalments payment app. As the dust clears after Covid, it has become startlingly clear how poorly off most of the UK has become. Alongside its richest (inner London) the UK is home to nine of Europe’s 10 poorest regions; and after a lost decade the UK’s poorest people are now an extraordinary 20 per cent worse off than their equivalents in Germany and France. By 2024 the average Slovenian household will be better off than its UK counterpart. The UK is often glibly called the fifth richest country in the world: with the lowest GDP per capita in northern Europe, it is better described as a poor country studded with pockets of the extremely rich . 

Moreover, this understates the inequalities since the poor make greatest use of public services, many of which are nearing collapse. Reviewing the most important, the Institute of Government concluded in October that ‘public services won’t have returned to pre-pandemic performance by the next election, which in most cases was already worse than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010’. There is nothing else to cut. Apart from the BBC, which successive governments haven’t managed to trash, and British government itself, which they certainly have, these services include those that have traditionally underpinned the UK’s ‘soft power’ as a civilised, stable and respected society – police, the justice system and the NHS, all now in meltdown. Add in the appalling Home Office, supposedly the guardian of British values, and the UK holds a full house of decrepitude and shame.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng weren’t wrong about the need for growth. Nor is is stupid to want British workers to be able to find work at home if they want to. But the supply side that the pair enthusiastically trashed in the infamous Britannia Unchained is not made of economic abstractions but people and things, who are now giving them a hard lesson in realism. No one should be surprised that business investment plunged in 2016 when companies faced exclusion from their main markets; and to imagine that will change in response to a few tax changes in an economy that is already lightly taxed and largely deregulated, not to mention in recession, is simply unmoored from reality. It’s equally absurd to expect sectors whose business model has been based on the free movement of labour  – agriculture, hospitality and the NHS, to name but three – to adapt overnight to an exclusively British workforce, and vice versa. Nurses, doctors, chefs, butchers, careworkers, even agricultural workers need encouragement and training – another notorious UK weakness. Whatever happened to common sense? 

The one consolation of the recent carnage is that its most spectacular casualty is the Ayn Rand wing of the Conservative party that created it. Can the Conservative party as a whole survive the bleak period of policy desert bequeathed to it, the only things on offer being austerity and social clampdown? It must be seriously in doubt. As he prepares his weekly interview with the prime minister, the newly installed King Charles might be permitted a wintry smile: while his government, the supposedly ‘efficient’ face of the state, has been turning itself into a spectacle of public ridicule, he can point to the ‘dignified’ branch, the monarchy, as currently the only part of the institutional infrastructure that seems to know what it is doing.