Politics & Power Quote by Walter Bagehot

Bagehot pulls a neat reversal: boredom, that alleged civic sin, becomes a democratic virtue. The line is a Victorian jab at the romantic craving for “great men” and high-drama politics. If Parliament feels dull, he suggests, it’s because the machinery is working well enough that it doesn’t need heroics, panic, or theatrical rupture to function. The real scandal isn’t tedium; it’s excitement.

The intent is quietly polemical. Bagehot isn’t praising apathy. He’s defending routine, procedure, and incrementalism at a moment when Britain’s constitutional order was both consolidating and expanding (industrial upheaval, electoral reform, mass politics knocking at the door). Parliamentary government, in his view, is excellence measured not by inspiration but by predictability: budgets passed, ministries questioned, compromises brokered, crises absorbed rather than inflamed.

Subtext: spectacle is usually a symptom. When politics becomes gripping entertainment, something is often breaking - legitimacy, consent, institutional capacity. “Dullness” signals that conflict is being domesticated into rules, that ambitions are being slowed down by debate, committees, and clock time. It’s a rebuke to the impatient temperament that confuses noise with progress.

Bagehot’s own craft matters here. As a writer who anatomized the English constitution, he understood politics as performance with consequences. He’s warning that audiences who demand constant narrative twists invite demagogues to supply them. A parliament that can afford to be boring is one that has made power, at least partially, unglamorous - and therefore safer.