"But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics"
About this Quote
Continuity is the unsexy demand that exposes almost every political performance. Jonathan Coe’s line sounds mild, even procedural, but it carries a novelist’s impatience with the way modern politics sells rupture as virtue. “Entitled” is the tell: not “we hope” or “we prefer,” but a consumer-rights word smuggled into civic life. The citizen isn’t a fan waiting for the next plot twist; they’re owed coherence.
Coe’s fiction has long worried at the gap between public narrative and lived reality, particularly in post-Thatcher Britain where governments rebrand, parties splinter, and ideology gets swapped out like a logo. In that atmosphere, “continuity” isn’t conservatism; it’s the minimum condition for trust. Policies take years to bite, institutions rely on predictable rules, and ordinary people build lives around assumptions that can’t be rewritten every election cycle. When politics prizes reinvention, it offloads the cost of instability onto everyone else.
The subtext is a critique of a media-political complex that rewards novelty over stewardship. Continuity reads as boring on television, so it’s treated as suspicious, as if consistency implies stagnation or lack of ambition. Coe flips that: the real irresponsibility is the constant need to appear decisive by changing everything. The sentence is spare, almost bureaucratic, which is part of its bite. It refuses the melodrama of “new eras” and “fresh starts” and insists on a quieter standard: political maturity looks like memory, not amnesia.
Coe’s fiction has long worried at the gap between public narrative and lived reality, particularly in post-Thatcher Britain where governments rebrand, parties splinter, and ideology gets swapped out like a logo. In that atmosphere, “continuity” isn’t conservatism; it’s the minimum condition for trust. Policies take years to bite, institutions rely on predictable rules, and ordinary people build lives around assumptions that can’t be rewritten every election cycle. When politics prizes reinvention, it offloads the cost of instability onto everyone else.
The subtext is a critique of a media-political complex that rewards novelty over stewardship. Continuity reads as boring on television, so it’s treated as suspicious, as if consistency implies stagnation or lack of ambition. Coe flips that: the real irresponsibility is the constant need to appear decisive by changing everything. The sentence is spare, almost bureaucratic, which is part of its bite. It refuses the melodrama of “new eras” and “fresh starts” and insists on a quieter standard: political maturity looks like memory, not amnesia.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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