What do “people in the real world” care about? It is a question as old as failing government itself. Yet, crucially, it is something that you – a person, in the real world – are not cleared to answer yourself. Instead, it needs a politician to inform you what you care about – and, much more frequently and much more dismissively, what you don’t care about. Once these permissible areas of giving-a-toss have been delineated, the politicians who told you what they were can get on with the long process of not fixing them, at the end of which they will tell you that those problems are fake/niche/latte-based because, out there in the world where you never go, people aren’t talking about them.
Let’s see this in action. At the height of Boris Johnson’s Partygate furore, one of his cabinet ministers ruled witheringly that none of this stuff was a concern “when you get out into the real world and you talk to real people”. Another high-profile Tory soon joined in the real-worlding, instructing people: “There are many things which matter much more in the real world.” People, so people were told, actually didn’t care about the thing they could be heard appearing to care about on phone-ins, vox pops and across their social media.
