IT’S said history is written by the victors. Given the repeated shocks to the system of the last decade, the revisionists are getting to work early.

Former BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg’s three-part State of Chaos series — tracing the course of politics from the Brexit referendum to the fall of Liz Truss — ended this week. 

It has a stellar cast of real power-brokers. Three ex-chancellors, a former foreign secretary, special advisers from inside Downing Street, civil servants of the highest rank.

A glimpse into the corridors of power? If so, it’s startling how little light is shed on anything that happened between 2016 and 2022.

In the blurb at the start of each episode, Kuenssberg describes her then job as “to try to make sense of what on Earth was going on.” 

Arguably she moved beyond analytical journalism into partisan political activity — selectively editing an interview with Jeremy Corbyn to make him look soft on terror (the BBC had to apologise for that), or arranging the resignation of a shadow cabinet minister live on air.

But park that for now. Labour barely registers in her account of 2016-22 in any case, and for the same reason the series, seemingly so well informed, explains so little. State of Chaos is a court drama.

It fixates on the office politics of Number 10. The course of events hinges on the words of a spad or the insular nature of a prime ministerial clique. 

The loss of the Tory majority in 2017 following Labour’s biggest vote increase in 70 years is put down to Theresa May’s failure to consult the Cabinet about her manifesto (Corbyn gets one mention in the coverage of that election, when an interviewee observes that due to Theresa May’s mistakes “the momentum had passed to Jeremy Corbyn”). The shambolic retreat from Afghanistan is put down to Boris Johnson’s failure to run a collegiate government team in the way David Cameron did.

There’s a place for court drama. But not when it masquerades as serious history. Kuenssberg sums up “six years of chaos, where so often the Tories turned in on themselves and viciously on each other — while the rest of us, the country, could only watch on.” One of her main interviewees, former deputy cabinet secretary Helen Macnamara, asked to explain the turbulent politics of 2016-22 shrugs: “I think we all lost our minds.”

Here are two key messages State of Chaos promotes. That the polarised political scene between Cameron and Sunak was a crazy aberration, something barely comprehensible (Kuenssberg ends by asking where “the method was in all that madness” and asserting that “if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes, you might not believe it happened at all.”)

And that it was an insider affair. But the idea that the country “could only watch on” as governments fell, Britain left the EU and hundreds of thousands of young people turned the tables on decades of declining political participation to join Corbyn’s Labour is the complete opposite of the truth.

The reality was put well by former Corbyn adviser and current Morning Star political reporter Andrew Murray in an article in June: this was an era, however brief, when “mass popular movements of discontent [imposed] themselves briefly on the heavily policed citadels of conventional politics.”

Kuenssberg might retort that the show isn’t about Corbynism. But Labour’s absence from the narrative makes many of the actions of the Conservatives inexplicable. And it is not just Labour. 

These politicians and mandarins exist in a bubble in which real social and economic forces barely get a look-in. The smooth operation of the system is seen as the ultimate good, regardless of how anyone is doing outside it. 

Perhaps the strangest example of this is when William Hague says the Brexit vote was a shame as it ended the premiership of Cameron, who was a very good prime minister. 

Good, it emerges, means he got along with his cabinet and didn’t ruffle the feathers of the Civil Service. Ignore the way Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme undermined essential services, setting the scene for Britain’s disastrous pandemic experience — a Tory grandee like Hague probably doesn’t agree that it did. 

But even in ruling-class terms the idea that a prime minister who opposed a significant constitutional shift like Brexit, but blundered into it in a failed attempt to shut up a wing of his own party, was good at his job is a bit of a stretch. 

And that takes us back to the real lesson of the last decade, the one alluded to by Murray. This was a time in which things did not go to plan for our rulers. 

They did not want the Brexit vote: the Tory government backed Remain, the Labour opposition backed Remain, the Scottish and Welsh governments backed Remain. The most unashamed champion of “the system” — as he himself refers to it — interviewed by Kuenssberg is probably a former permanent secretary in the Foreign Office, Simon McDonald, and despite the Civil Service’s official neutrality he reveals he told his team following the referendum that he was a Remainer, while others working in the department describe colleagues weeping and commiserating with each other at the Leave vote.

The point is not to reopen Brexit wounds, but to counter the myth that the vote came out of thin air. Nothing in State of Chaos looks at the social origins of the Leave vote, at deindustrialisation, poverty, the erosion of stable employment by 40 years of neoliberalism that made the offer of “taking back control” appealing. 

Similarly, the failure to acknowledge the growth of a mass socialist movement from 2015-17 makes a nonsense of May’s loss of authority and the reasons the Tories turned to a populist like Boris Johnson in the first place (though this is alluded to vaguely by Dominic Cummings). 

Incidents like the fall of Cummings are presented as examples of poor PR; the way the wheels came off the Johnson project once it lost its only leading figure with a political programme is ignored, though the Tory revolt against the higher public spending, bigger-state vision pitched to the electorate in 2019 could actually tell us something important about the nature of the party (and of that election).

Because context is removed, the show can end on the note that things are now back to normal. 

Special adviser Cleo Watson contrasts a government and opposition led by Johnson and Corbyn to ones led by Sunak and Starmer, claiming people are happier with the latter (though the current party leaders’ personal ratings suggest otherwise).

Simon McDonald is more triumphant still, asserting that “the British system was able to deal with” the chaos and quickly despatched two prime ministers “it” deemed unsuitable (Johnson and Truss). His view that the state prevailed over politics is in fact identical to that expressed by Nadine Dorries, though he applauds and she resents it. 

So, the system won, the drama recedes.

It could hardly be more important to demolish this narrative. Parliament and Whitehall were forced to confront the power of popular movements from 2015 in a way they are rarely made to do.

The received political wisdom was shown to be out of step with public opinion. It still is, and shows like this attempt to mask that.

The crises that produced Brexit and Corbynism haven’t gone away but are worsening as incomes fall, services deteriorate and our planet heats up.

Corbyn, when asked as leader if he was stressed about the constant personal attacks, pointed out that whatever stress he felt as a politician didn’t compare to the stress of not knowing where the next rent was coming from or how you would feed your kids through the holidays.

That’s exactly the perspective that disappears when politics is viewed through the eyes of the elite. So the Sunak premiership can be portrayed as a return to calm after years of political chaos, when for most people 2023, with the cost of fuel, food and housing going through the roof, is at least as stressful as what came before. The system may have restored order, but the majority are worse off — because the system doesn’t work for the people.

None of this means you shouldn’t watch State of Chaos, which is still available online. It’s a window on the way the people who run the British state think, and has some genuinely entertaining moments, like Dorries’s assessment that Johnson’s main flaws were that he was “too trusting … too loyal … too kind,” or Kwasi Kwarteng’s admission that his mini-Budget sent his own mortgage through the roof.

But its message is fundamentally misleading. The “state of chaos” was not random but the result of a system under severe strain as it proves unable to meet the expectations of the public to a reasonable quality of life and a future for their children.

And the tragedy is not that the institutions of the British state took what Kuenssberg describes as a “battering” — but that they were not, in the end, brought down.