The Crown That Eats Its Wearer

Image: Knelstrom Media

By Martin Foskett / Dispatches / Knelstrom Media

​Power, in every era and postcode, displays the same party trick: it expands until the furniture buckles. The theme is older than any constitution and twice as unflattering. Officials insist on benevolence, departments insist on necessity, and the public insists on pretending the whole arrangement is temporary. Meanwhile, the machinery of authority grows like ivy in fast-forward, decorating the brickwork while quietly prising it apart.

The working Theory is well rehearsed: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The modern twist is how eagerly institutions now sprint towards that absolute bit, as if competing for a trophy no sane competitor should want.

The spectacle begins in the quiet districts where ordinary residents attempt to live modest, unbothered lives. Each year, their routines collect new mandatory forms, new compliance manoeuvres, and new advisory notices that read like polite threats. Local offices claim these expansions of oversight will "streamline public confidence". The only element being streamlined is the citizen, squeezed between policy enthusiasm and budgetary déjà vu. Even the pavements appear to surrender, repeatedly patched by contractors funded by levies that were meant to be ring-fenced until someone mislaid the ring and fenced off the funds instead.

Meanwhile, up the hierarchy, departmental chiefs parade their latest strategic initiatives, each one fashioned from the same material: the belief that the state hasn't been tried hard enough yet. Power cultivates faith in its own indispensability, and this faith breeds an odd form of optimism — the type where everything is perpetually "on track" provided additional authority is granted immediately. When results lag behind the promotional brochures, officials respond with the bureaucratic equivalent of multiplying mirrors: more oversight, more framework reviews, more panels, each devised to investigate why the previous layers of oversight and framework reviews proved insufficient.

Industry analysts observe a trend: the more resources a department consumes, the more confidently it declares itself irreplaceable. Power, having acquired its taste, pursues further helpings with the guilty enthusiasm of a teenager raiding the festive biscuit tin. Some consequences follow.

In the business districts, entrepreneurs attempt to navigate the regulatory labyrinth assembled by committees that have never attempted to run anything more commercial than a lunchtime seminar. Investors whisper about "political risk" with the same tone reserved for unstable weather systems. Small firms improvise survival techniques: hiding behind larger firms, outsourcing the paperwork to remote specialists, or adopting the classic British strategy of hoping no inspector turns up until next quarter.

The machinery of the state rarely grasps the concept of proportionality. To it, a corner shop and a multinational conglomerate are merely entries in a ledger requiring identical paperwork, because absolute power loves symmetry. The cost, of course, is borne by the shopkeeper — a person expected to master accounting, logistics, employment law, environmental compliance, and whatever new directive emerges from an advisory panel convinced that the true threat to civilisation resides behind the pick-and-mix counter.

In Parliament, the mood swings between gladiatorial theatre and amnesia. Each faction accuses the other of authoritarian impulses while simultaneously proposing expansions of its own. Ministers speak reverently of "temporary measures" that develop the longevity of heirlooms. Opposition benches demand inquiries with a frequency that suggests an addiction. All of it leaves taxpayers wondering when the grown-ups will arrive to switch off the microphones.

Observers frequently point to historical cautionary tales of rulers who believed destiny had appointed them guardians of the national purse, the national conscience, and, occasionally, the national recreational habits. Absolute power behaves like a draught: invisible until the roof tiles start shifting. Constitutional checks — courts, assemblies, watchdogs, even the suburbs themselves — exist to keep the place structurally sound. Yet those same checks are treated by rising powers as hindrances to their grand architectural vision.

A curious irony emerges: power often claims to protect the vulnerable while quietly manufacturing more of them. Workers in regulated sectors understand this intimately. They spend their days dodging mandates designed in committee rooms situated several socioeconomic galaxies away from any actual workplace. A forklift driver in Dagenham finds himself subject to guidance drafted by a panel whose closest interaction with heavy machinery is the office photocopier. When the rules inevitably clash with common sense, employees adopt unofficial workarounds and hope enforcement teams remain distracted by larger trophies.

In the financial sector, savers are instructed to trust institutions that revise their risk models whenever reality becomes inconvenient. Power promises stability but redistributes uncertainty instead. Taxpayers provide the cushion when those models go sideways, while being assured that oversight mechanisms operate with flawless rigour. Anyone questioning this rigour is reminded that excessive scepticism threatens confidence, which is itself treated as a national resource requiring careful protective legislation.

Further afield, international bodies convene conferences where delegates proclaim their commitment to transparency, inclusion, sustainability, and whichever fashionable virtue has risen in the index since last quarter. Yet the logistics of these summits — the motorcades, the closed-off boulevards, the flotillas of security personnel — reveal how absolute power prefers to travel: insulated, fortified, and utterly immune to the conditions it presumes to regulate. Residents observe the procession and conclude that, somewhere along the line, the machinery designed to serve them has developed an independent survival instinct.

Back home, civic institutions demonstrate a similar drift. Cultural boards rewrite funding criteria with missionary zeal, ensuring approved art reflects the priorities of the approving board. Public broadcasters assemble panels designed to discuss plurality while featuring a single approved viewpoint in several regional accents. University committees introduce codes that require students to navigate linguistic minefields with the caution of archaeologists. Power rarely censors directly; it merely constructs a landscape where dissent becomes administratively unwise.

None of this arrives in one dramatic swoop. Absolute power accumulates gradually, like limescale. It appears harmless at first; however, the boiler suddenly malfunctions, and the entire system requires an expensive intervention. Citizens long for reforms that restore basic competence, but reforms that threaten entrenched authority tend to be postponed, re-evaluated, or gently smothered under feasibility studies until only their abstract memory remains.

Yet the country persists. Entrepreneurs test new ideas before the paperwork catches them. Workers sustain industries through sheer stubbornness. Taxpayers grumble but keep the lights on. Even the political class occasionally demonstrates clarity, usually after an election reduces their majority to a souvenir. Power may corrupt, but the public develops antibodies. Absolute corruption faces the same obstacle that empires have always encountered: ordinary people refusing to conform to theoretical models drafted on departmental laptops.

The central truth refuses to budge. Power that forgets its limitations begins consuming itself. The crown eats its wearer. The machinery grinds its operators. Sooner or later, voters demand a renovation of the entire structure — not out of ideological fervour, but because the plumbing has started making that noise again.
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And in this stubborn, weather-beaten insistence on self-correction lies the final defence against absolutism. Not a grand revolution, just a collective refusal to be impressed.