Why do we trust the political class?

IT began, as most national embarrassments do, with good intentions and a graph. Gordon Brown, that high priest of responsible arithmetic, decided around the turn of the millennium that Britain owned too much shiny metal and not enough moral superiority.

- by NEIL BRYAN

Gold, he explained, was an anachronism — a barbarous relic sitting idly in vaults when it could be sold to buy something properly modern, like foreign debt. So between 1999 and 2002, he flogged almost four hundred tonnes of it at what historians now refer to as the bottom — at the time, about $275 an ounce. Today, the same pile would buy you the NHS, two aircraft carriers, and a mid-terraced flat in London.

But let’s be fair. It wasn’t just a financial decision; it was a theological one. Brown believed — and belief is the operative word — that the future would reward faith in clever men and their spreadsheets. Gold didn’t pay interest; trust did. So we swapped our tangible wealth for promises denominated in confidence, which is now Britain’s primary export.

Two decades on, gold’s up tenfold, belief’s down to zero, and the same cast of managerial mystics are still on television. Brown materialises at global summits, gravely diagnosing the problems he created, while Tony Blair runs a consultancy empire that appears to offer redemption to anyone who can afford his rates. The nation listens as though they were oracles, not retired salesmen pitching the same product with new packaging. We even call them ‘statesmen’, which is British for too embarrassing to prosecute.

And yet, we still trust them. Not because they’re credible, but because we’ve invested too much in pretending they were. The psychologists have a phrase for this: the sunk cost fallacy — the inability to walk away from a disaster you’ve already paid for. It’s the same logic that keeps people in bad marriages and governments in office.