Faust in Downing Street

One rainy night many years ago, a mysterious gentleman called 10 Downing Street.

The butler announced his arrival to the newly elected Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was pondering in her office how to remake a country devoured by inflation and unemployment.

The visitor was carrying a black briefcase from which he extracted a book:

“My name is Mephisto”, he introduced himself.

“I will fulfill all your dreams: the City of London will become the world's financial epicenter, and you will be re-elected to the popular clamor.

But when you die, the soul of the country will belong to me for eternity."

The problems of the United Kingdom derive from this (fictitious) Faustian pact, sealed by Thatcher and ratified by her successors.

Thanks to radical deregulation, the British economy grew more than the European average until the dawn of the great recession, but paying the price of high inequality and intense imbalances, which now make it languish against competitors such as Germany.

Faced with this panorama, the response of the British rulers has been evasion, blaming external enemies, from the bureaucrats of Brussels to the immigrants of Bulgaria.

Such political indolence is not due to the character of the current ruling class, to the fact that instead of characters like Churchill or Gladstone, we have the dilettante Cameron or the liar Johnson, but rather there is a fundamental change in the articulation of British politics.

For centuries, Parliamentarism at Westminster has aroused world admiration for its ability to maintain the integrity of Prime Ministers vested with such colossal power (because of their absolute majorities and the absence of a written constitution) that they are known as “elected dictators”. .

Compared to the rulers of other countries,

they have been involved in few corruption scandals because they have been disciplined by their own deputies, who owe their seats to the will of the voters, not their leader.

But, with Boris Johnson, this has failed.

Too many Members have supported too long a

too incompetent for the post.

And the reason is that, for a growing number of British politicians, loyalty to the boss matters more than to the voters.

Whoever is elected as the new Prime Minister, Mephisto will visit Downing Street again.

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