The next prime minister will be the wrong age for the job, by which I don’t mean lacking the necessary experience, although that may also be true. I mean roughly the same age as me. It was bound to happen. I am used to babyfaced police officers and teachers who don’t look old enough to have left school. Seeing one of my peers in Downing Street was, quite literally, a matter of time. There is nothing freakish about fortysomething prime ministers. David Cameron was 43 when he took the top job. I was 36 when he became prime minister, not a spring chicken, but springier than politics makes me feel today.
Tony Blair was also 43 when he came to power 25 years ago. Take 25 from 1997 and you land in 1972, before either of today’s Tory leadership contenders was born. When Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss perform their Margaret Thatcher karaoke tribute acts, they are dancing to a tune that is as pertinent to the challenges Britain faces today as the Suez crisis was to New Labour. That isn’t to say the past is irrelevant. But history should inform the present, not hold it hostage.
Sunak was 10 when Thatcher resigned. Truss was five years older. She and I were at the same Oxford college at the same time, but studying different things, moving with different crowds. There is a flicker of recognition when I see the pictures of Truss in the mid-90s, and the viral video of her addressing a Liberal Democrat conference. It’s definitely the same Liz Truss, to the extent that anyone in middle age is the same person they were in their early 20s.
When I see pictures of myself from that time (mercifully there are no videos), all I can think is that I was still a child, playing at being a grownup, and that I can’t pinpoint when it stopped being a pretence or be sure that it ever fully did.
“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three,” wrote Joan Didion, “is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”
That is not entirely a delusion. The world into which each adolescent generation emerges has its unique properties. For mine, it was the Great Moderation – a long period of economic expansion, coupled with a relative absence of global conflict. The end of the cold war produced a budget-swelling peace dividend and a tepid liberal consensus that many found stultifying without knowing what a blessing it was to be safely bored by politics.
When Blair used D:Ream’s song Things Can Only Get Better for his 1997 campaign anthem, it felt true. When he described New Labour as “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole” it sounded bombastic but neither sinister (as an equivalent boast might in today’s populist climate), nor preposterous. A rising national tide was obviously coming to sweep the Tories away.
Truss had by then quit the Lib Dems and joined the Conservatives, which testifies to strong ideological commitment. It wasn’t a choice any twentysomething of our generation made to be cool. Or maybe it was a shrewd political investment decision, buying shares in a blue chip institution at the bottom of the market on the bet that they will eventually rebound. She might have hit the jackpot.
Truss might also count as the first prime minister from Generation X. It depends how you measure it. We are the baby boomers’ children. Cameron, born in 1966, is on the statistical cusp. All of these labels are fictions that capture, at best, a mythology that people who were young around the same time tell about themselves. (Or sometimes, as with millennials, it is a snarky mythology that resentful older people tell about feckless youth.)
The term Generation X was coined by the US cultural critic Paul Fussell. He defined us by a restless compulsion to escape through “back doors of those theatres of class which enclose others”. The impulses driving that flight were “insolence, intelligence, irony and spirit”. I take that as a compliment, although I’m not sure it is methodologically robust.
The more salient feature of the Gen X experience is probably being the last humans to grow up without the internet. Mobile phones were still a novelty, and not smart, when Truss was clambering aboard John Major’s sinking ship. Our adult lives will be lived in the digital age, but we are old enough to remember analogue ways.
I wonder if that in-between condition makes us especially prone to nostalgia, or arrests our political development in some way. It surely defines us as much as the benign geopolitical climate at the turn of the millennium – the optimistic equilibrium that we thought was normal but turns out to have been an anomalous blip. We were lucky to be young in the blip, and maybe also unlucky that our good fortune lulled us into a complacency that equipped us poorly for the return of volatility.
The caricature of the Gen-Xer would lean into that deficiency with sardonic self-awareness. We should be observing our unreadiness for the 21st century with slacker detachment, chipping in unhelpful commentary from the sidelines. (At least, that’s how I ended up.)
But Truss has a steely confidence in her worldview that seems to come from a different era. Maybe that’s what politics makes of people, or maybe that kind of person is made for politics. Either way, I find it kind of impressive and alarming at the same time. I don’t know how anyone, still less an exact contemporary of mine, has that much belief in their prescriptions for a country in the grip of complex, interlocking crises. I can remember thinking I knew all about the world in the 1990s. But we were so much older then. I can’t help thinking we should be younger than that now.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
