Who do we really trust? One hopes, our partner, relatives, friends. But the list is actually much wider. We trust – or need to trust – doctors, teachers, builders, train drivers, pilots, motorists, shopkeepers, restaurant chefs and, indeed, almost anyone who provides us with key services. Every time we leave the house (or indeed, stay inside it) we are putting our faith in the human beings around us. We need to know – and we assume – that the people who, at any one time, can uphold or compromise our wellbeing, are not going to lie to us or hurt us. Just as a personal relationship can only survive if each person trusts that the other loves them, tells them the truth and means them well, the public sphere operates according to trust above all else. If we cannot expect to receive the services or treatment that we have promised one another, either formally on a ballot or contract or simply by default, our society cannot function. It is the most basic element of a system that depends on the enforcement both of written and unwritten rules.

So why don’t we trust politicians? Why is it now seen as “baked in” that we cannot, or must not, trust the people who control every aspect of our public, and often private lives? Why, indeed, is someone perceived as hopelessly naïve for doing so?

Polls indicate that trust in politicians is at a record low. A YouGov survey in November found that two-thirds of the public thought politicians were “merely out for themselves” – a rise of nine percentage points in eighteen months. Just four per cent believed that MPs were “doing their best for the country”. Meanwhile, the Office of National Statistics last year reported that just 35 per cent of the population trusted the government – compared to 80 per cent for the NHS.

Certainly, much of the problem lies in individuals – specifically our political leaders. Rishi Sunak came into office promising integrity and has never delivered it. It’s not simply the multiple appointments of inadequate ministers, or even the race-baiting policies on Rwanda and immigration; he can’t even deliver on his own very narrow set of political pledges. He made matters worse with the recent failure to show up in Parliament to vote on the Privileges Committee report on his predecessor, which found that Boris Johnson had held Parliament in contempt. Sunak favours political expediency over leadership, and squandered the chance to demonstrate that he will stand up for honesty and decency, and by extension public trust, in politics.

The lion’s share of blame naturally lies with Johnson himself. No modern political figure has done more to alienate people and convince them that politicians are serving their own interests, not the public’s. Part of that relates to Johnson’s inherent narcissism: he made the entire country an extension of his ego. Its obvious manifestation was Partygate.

That political scandal was never about cake. It was about trust. The covid lockdowns were not something we were asked, but instructed to follow. Every day from the Downing Street lectern ministers reiterated the public-health imperative to adhere to the rules and the criminal sanctions if we did not. The rules were draconian and their policing zealous, and three years on, people are still being prosecuted for their breaches at the time. And yet, all along, those in charge didn’t care. The people who wrote and enforced the rules for everyone else simply believed themselves exempt. There could be no blunter encapsulation of moral decadence – or decay – in public life.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of the influential investigative journalism group Bellingcat, has suggested that Partygate will do more than any event since the Iraq War to propel disinformation and conspiracy theories. When people feel betrayed by politicians, or the mainstream media, they will simply stop believing them – and that could have severe repercussions.

Of course, the mistrust has been brewing for many years. Before Partygate, three political events rocked public confidence in different ways: the economic crash, Brexit, and covid itself.

Britain has been operating in various stages of economic turmoil for the last fifteen years. Since the recession of 2008-9, the deepest since World War II, wages and growth have stagnated and austerity has continued its grim impact on public services and Britain’s poorest. Now we confront rising inflation and interest rates while the pride of the nation, the NHS, faces collapse. Most economists agree that the seven years since the Brexit referendum have compounded the malaise, triggering widespread disinvestment and lost economic potential, a falling pound and significant disruption to trade as a result of leaving the single market and customs union. Covid naturally deepened the trouble. Some of these problems were outside the government’s control, others the result of deliberate political choices.

Much of this has amounted to generational betrayal. People who came of age in 2008 or after have never known a period of solid economic growth, sustained wage increase or job security, let alone the promise of owning a home. This last item, in particular, reinforces the social contract of British capitalism: namely, that you must suffer routine indignity and exploitation in the labour market but at the end of it have a plot of land to call your own. No more. Today’s young people are expected to work unsteady or low-paid jobs, face ever-steeper rents and tuition fee repayments, and ultimately find themselves with little, in material terms, to show for it. It speaks to an economic culture that appears rigged in favour of the wealthiest.

There’s no blunter encapsulation of moral decadence in public life than Partygate

Brexit and Covid have affected trust in different ways. Of course, Partygate strongly shapes people’s attitudes to the pandemic in retrospect, but the anger and grief at over 200,000 deaths is unlikely to abate. The current inquiry will resurrect difficult questions about, for example, the treatment of people in care homes and ministers’ prioritisation of politics over public health.

Brexit, for its part, remains the foundational lie of British politics. None of its purported benefits has yet come to fruition and ordinary businesses are feeling its harm. Polls report that record numbers of voters consider it the wrong decision to have left the EU, and according to a YouGov survey in May, 37% of Leave voters agree that it has failed. And yet the political class is adamant: Brexit is going to be a success and is not responsible for any of our problems. If politicians admitted the truth, they would have to explain why they allowed a voluntary act of economic sabotage in the first place – so they don’t. But this masks a deeper problem. When our leaders remain so determined to lie about a key government policy, how can they be trusted to tell the truth about anything else?

In reality, Brexit exposes the new contagious disease in British politics: lackofaccountability-itis. No senior minister ever resigned over Brexit, even when they hadn’t voted for it and knew it was going disastrously wrong. But the greater cultural failure is that very few of our leaders take responsibility for anything that goes wrong on their watch, or ever have the courage to admit inconvenient truths.

It has become a truism in politics that nobody now carries the can. Everything is always the fault of someone else; ministers plough on until they are prised out of office. Resignations on matters of high principle, or to guarantee personal or professional integrity, were once commonplace. There was Estelle Morris, who resigned as Education Secretary because she didn’t consider herself up to the job, Robin Cook over the Iraq War, and even the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, who voluntarily left government at the start of the Falklands War. In recent times only Sajid Javid has come close, stepping down as Chancellor because he refused to sack his personal advisers and accept the bidding of Number 10. Today’s Conservative political class is dominated both by those (such as Gavin Williamson, Dominic Raab and Chris Grayling) who fail upwards through successive government posts, and the many others who either lack principles or ignore them.

The worst aspect of this is that entire governments, not just individual ministers, act with impunity. The most egregious example was Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament in 2019 to force through Brexit, but his government regularly jettisoned convention and flirted with illegality. Sunak may appear endowed with stronger ethics but his government is not. Ministers have admitted that the Illegal Migration Bill could place the UK in breach of international law, and in the last few weeks, the government has forced through secondary legislation to the Public Order Bill that overturns the will of the Commons – a brazen assault on the democratic process.

The culture of mistrust transcends individual governments. It infects our political institutions too. We apparently accept the fact that Britain, a supposed model democracy, operates a legislative chamber that is not only unelected but part-hereditary. Worse, politicians are seen to reward patronage by filling the House of Lords with party donors, cronies and hangers-on. In his now notorious resignation list, Johnson has not simply honoured former junior staff as a reward for loyalty, but given some of them permanent voting rights in parliament. For all its value in holding the Commons to account, the Lords is an instrument of corruption.

Democratic reform of the Lords is only one step on the road to re-establishing public trust. Our system for electing members of the Commons is wildly undemocratic in the sense that elections frequently depend on a few tens of thousands of voters in a few dozen constituencies. If more people felt enfranchised by a fairer and more proportional electoral system, more of them might have faith in politics.

Perhaps the broadest and most impactful constitutional reform is also the most obvious: to actually write a constitution. The problem with Britain’s system of gentlemen’s honour is that it requires honourable gentlemen (and women). A patchwork of legal precedents and parliamentary conventions are no match for a comprehensive document that clearly separates powers, delineating the roles and limits both of elected politicians and the monarch. Such a constitution could also permanently enshrine (and expand) citizens’ rights, itself a valuable tool to establish public trust, and perhaps also decentralise government. There could even be a move towards a more federal UK, which might improve regional devolution and increase powers for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments.

A codified constitution is a shield against the future. The monarchy may be benign but depends on an honourable incumbent – while the prorogation court case illustrated how much power the royal prerogative invests in the sovereign’s prime minister. A future Boris Johnson cannot be allowed to operate their own fiefdom until a legal challenge to their overreach happens to be successful.

None of this, of course, is going to make Britain a fully equal place. On its own, it may not effect much discernible change at all. It won’t assist the election, say, of a socialist government, or obstruct (or perhaps even much alter) the makeup of Britain’s establishment. The most powerful people in the country will still be the most privileged and still be cast from the same dozen schools and two universities.

To date, one school – Eton – has produced over a third of all the UK’s prime ministers. The entire state sector has produced only a fifth. Its headmaster between 1984 and 2001, John Claughton, recently lamented in a letter to The Times that he had failed to save alumni such as Johnson from the “sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can… damage a country’s very fabric.” Certainly, it should be the ambition of policymakers across the political spectrum to neuter the old boys’ network that powers so much of Britain’s governance. And yet, even if private (or public) schools were to be abolished, this sense of entitlement would live on. Our “revolution”, such as it is, is not to abolish class per se, but to enshrine a basic degree of fairness in public life. That, in turn, can foster trust.

No political system can take trust for granted, and once lost, it does not easily return. But that loss of trust, and its companions, accountability and respect, are not acts of God or inevitable features of decay in public life. They have diminished as a result of a series of political choices – and other, fresh political choices can help earn them anew. The revolution may not be perfect, but it is within our grasp. And it can start now.

Jonathan Lis is a political journalist and commentator and broadcaster