The Portrait of a Manager

Contemplating the hubris of politicians hanging their portraits in Parliament.

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In February 2025, a portrait of Lord Nelson that had hung in the parliament building was taken down and replaced with a picture of the Labour Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. Cooper typifies the toxic pixie physiognomy found in so many females in positions of authority within Britain's feminised and sclerotic bureaucracy. She is a particular type of person in 21st Century Britain, just as Lord Nelson was a specific type of Englishman from a different, more heroic age.

Yet, what I found strange about this instance of iconoclasm was not that it had happened (we're used to that by now) but that the replacement figure was not someone dusted off and brought out from the cupboard of leftist mythology, but a person who was actually in the current government, in one of the most influential roles. The system justifies its iconoclasm, its war on cultural symbols, by invoking the representation of the underrepresented and unprivileged, such as women and minorities. Yet the system exists primarily to serve and pander to women and minorities, so the Yvette Cooper painting in parliament is really just a ruling class celebrating itself, narcissistically gazing at its own reflection, and falling in love with what it sees.

The portrait itself, which, if you look carefully, appears to have in the region of a thousand flowers blooming, invites us to gaze adoringly at our very own Joan of Arc. Our very own managerial midwit saint competes with a clock as a halo, time as progress. We're being told that this was all inevitable, Yvette Cooper was inevitable, and progress was inevitable, just like runny snot in winter and ingrown toenails.

Dystopian literature plays very well in Yookay because the cultural and aesthetic symbols of England are so universally recognised and related to. It's the comfort of familiarity; it signifies safety, civilisation, and solid existential footing in a chaotic world. The killer plants of Day of the Triffids are not very scary, but the fact they're in the English countryside and mundane housing estates is. It isn't cyber-punk, or terminators or post-nuclear wastelands that make British dystopia so compelling, it's the subversion of the relatable, the comforting and familiar. It isn't the violence that makes A Clockwork Orange impactful, but that the uniforms and institutions and accents of British authority are all immediately understood and related to.

The bureaucrats and the managerial system are constants in British dystopia, even if London Bridge, a functioning atmosphere, and the crumbling infrastructure are not. When AI takes control or nuclear fallout belches across the Home Counties, we can rest assured that along with the cockroaches and rats, the quangos and civil service will be operating and making demands on the corpses. When eating the wallpaper or roasting the family dog in the cold, have no fear that a BBC license fee reminder will still drop through the letterbox onto the rubble.

How could the nation that created 1984 end up living in it? Wasn’t it a warning and not an instruction manual? Was there some dark, esoteric energy released that made it as inevitable as Yvette Cooper’s portrait? Or was it that Orwell’s critique and insight into James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution was more incisive and profound than anybody knew?

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The Yvette Cooper portrait represents two realities: the reality that I and most of you live in and the reality that the system has created for itself, which it demands we all believe in. Managed reality, that can suit our managed democracy, with its managed morality and managed public sentiment. The portrait, like their version of the country, is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a faded and distant symbol. In their reality, the faded form of the past is still ever-present, still looming large as something to be deconstructed, attacked, and fought against. In ours, it’s all but a distant past memory.

We all know that 13-year-old white boys aren’t the ones stabbing women and girls, but the alternative reality is unsettling for the managers, so they created their own. They managed the fake narrative after creating the fake story and will bolt it on to their censorship apparatus. Fake solutions can be conjured up to solve fake problems. Young, intelligent white boys allow for an allure in which credentials can be gleaned, truncated intellectualism and psychology can be wheeled out rather than staring at images of the brute, unthinking barbarism they’re truly responsible for. Humans are just machines to be regulated and fed the correct inputs. If one particular model is malfunctioning, it can be repaired. The idea that there exists more than one model of human is a heresy for which there is no frame of reference, so performative solutions will be put on display for the only model conceived of.

In his book, The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz (CHESS-lahv MEE-lohsh) explores the intellectual life of Poland under Communism. He introduces a concept from the Islamic world called “Ketman” to offer revealing insights into how people exist within systems built on lies. Ketman is the practice of lying to survive or to make life bearable. Miłosz cites renowned Islamic scholars who were atheists, artists who knew their work was hypocritical trash, and bureaucratic flunkies who relished tormenting free thinkers while knowing themselves that the free thinkers were correct and that they were liars.

The practitioner of Ketman is not a true believer; he’s a cynic who understands that the incentives are skewed to Machiavellianism and dishonesty. The female artist who created the Yvette Cooper portrait that replaced Nelson’s is called Hannah Starkey, and she specialises in depicting women in city settings. She describes her work as “explorations of everyday experiences and observations of inner city life from a female perspective”. Is Hannah Starkey a true believer? Or does she simply understand where the most lucrative career path is to be found, which is to say, is she a practitioner of what Miłosz (Mee-losh) calls “Aesthetic Ketman”?

Think then of the various decisions that were made before the replacement happened. The focus groups, reports by diversity commissars, meetings of budgets and where and how to slush taxpayer money into the project. Were they all true believers, or adhering to professional Ketman?

In truth, we do know. We have no clue as to how many people operate within the system and believe in its ethos, and now many are merely playing the Ketman game of lying and following incentives because they know where the money and career opportunities are.

My cynical nature tends toward the view that more people within the system are dimwitted jobbers lying to get ahead rather than true believers. I do not believe, for example, that every councilor and police officer at Rotherham and Telford are true-believing leftists; they just knew which course of action would result in a bonus and a mortgage and which would not.

Miłosz goes further in this line of thought. It isn’t just that those practising Ketman are dishonest; there’s a particular type that revels in the naivety and idealism of those who question the nature of the system. Convictions and ideals can be expensive in a system built on lies, and some enjoy needling and tormenting them for it.

Yet, the portrait of Yvette Cooper that replaced Lord Nelson’s is one of victory by idealists. It represents the victory of equality and diversity over tradition, nationalism, and history. In truth, it is the triumph of the managers over authenticity. It seems narcissistic because it is; it is the flunkies and the midwits celebrating and ionising the flunkies and the midwits. The orcs in Return of the King defacing the majestic towers of Gonder with iron cladding and rusting platework.

It is a celebration of low cunning and, when all things are considered, lies.

Thanks for listening, folks.