There was a time, not so very long ago, when becoming a Member of Parliament implied, at the very least, that one had a functioning grasp of the world beyond the constituency boundary, a vague acquaintance with maps, numbers, and the difference between conviction and confusion.
Today, one wonders whether Westminster has quietly adopted an open door policy, no experience necessary, curiosity optional.
Is it a sign of the times that everyone now thinks they can be an MP? Apparently so. We live in an age where confidence is confused for competence, where having a strong opinion is mistaken for having a strong mind, and where the bar for entry to the legislature appears to be somewhere around the height of a pub table.
I was reminded of this, painfully, while watching University Challenge, a programme usually revered as a cathedral of cerebral endeavour, though one where standards have an unfortunate habit of slipping the moment celebrities are involved. Even so, when a Green MP, no less a recent Green Party leader, confidently offered Minsk as a Russian city, the response was not merely embarrassment but a kind of geopolitical vertigo. Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a country whose very existence has been central to the European security conversation for years, was casually relocated eastwards by someone loudly invested in the Ukraine war. How can this be? How can one thunder about sanctions, sovereignty, and strategy the way Carla Denyer does, while apparently lacking the faintest idea where the places in question actually are?
This was not a momentary slip of the tongue. It was a flashing warning light. Geography is not trivia when you are helping to shape foreign policy. It is the skeleton on which understanding hangs. Remove it, and all you are left with is noise.
And then there was that famous Mastermind episode that still makes me cringe. Watching David Lammy, our now Deputy Prime Minister in the chair was less a test of knowledge than a test of endurance. The questions were straightforward, the answers elusive, and the overall impression was not of a man momentarily out of practice, but of someone for whom recall and reasoning are occasional visitors rather than permanent residents. I try to say this without malice, but my twelve year old niece could genuinely have done better.
Nor is this confined to television quizzes. When I wrote to Labour MPs about the Chagos Islands recently, a matter of serious geopolitical consequence involving sovereignty, military basing, and international law, the replies that came back were astonishing. Garbled logic, shallow analysis, boilerplate moralising, and in most cases a clear failure to understand the issue at all. These are the people running the country. These are the minds steering the ship through a world of rising powers, collapsing alliances, and technological upheaval.
Of course, not everyone can be Einstein. Nor should Parliament be a sterile laboratory of identical intellects. Some MPs bring deep community knowledge, emotional intelligence, or lived experience that cannot be measured by exams alone. That matters. But it cannot substitute entirely for basic cognitive competence. At some point, surely, we must ask whether there should be a minimum threshold, an expectation that those entrusted with nuclear policy, fiscal strategy, and foreign affairs possess an IQ of some standing, or at least an intelligence level exceeding what it takes to pull a decent pint on a Friday night.
This is not elitism. It is realism. We would not accept a pilot who gets confused between Paris and Prague, or a surgeon who thinks the liver is next door to the spleen. Yet we appear strangely relaxed about lawmakers who cannot distinguish Libya from Syria, Belarus from Russia, or economic theory from wishful thinking.
What we are witnessing is not merely individual error, but a systemic lowering of expectations. Politics has become a theatre of vibes, slogans, and social media performance, where the appearance of certainty matters more than the substance beneath it. Clever people still exist, of course, but they are increasingly drowned out by those who mistake loudness for leadership.
If democracy is to mean more than a talent show judged by applause alone, we may need to rediscover an unfashionable idea, that governing a complex nation requires intelligence, preparation, and the humility to know what you do not know. Until then, we will continue to watch our MPs on quiz shows, in interviews, and in the Commons itself, and wonder, quietly at first, then aloud, how on earth we ended up here.
