Britain's first Generation X Prime Minister

Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest will be a child of the Eighties

Whatever happens in the Tory leadership contest, the next Prime Minister will be from Generation X. This has never happened before. Britain has had Boomer PMs since 1997. Thatcher was from the Greatest Generation. John Major was part of the Silent Generation, as is Joe Biden. Trump, George W. Bush and Clinton are Boomers, but only just (they were all born in 1946). Obama is a younger Boomer but a Boomer nonethless.

Aside from Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zawahi, who are at the older end of Gen-X and are both rank outsiders, all the leadership hopefuls were born in the sweet spot between 1973 and 1980. Like me (I was born in 1976), they are children of the 1980s and teenagers of the 1990s. People born in those years had the privilege of being young during that brief period of optimism between 1989 and 2001 when you didn’t have to worry about being nuked by Communists or blown up by Jihadhis.

We didn’t have everything handed to us on a plate, but things turned out alright. And being alright is all we have ever striven for, if striving is not too grand a word for the ambling pub crawl that we call adult life.

When Boris Johnson (a boomer born in 1964) said he wanted to serve three terms, I hoped he would. He could then pass the baton to some little pipsqueak in ten years or lose to Keir Starmer (a boomer born in 1962). Either way, Gen-X would be well out of it.

Frankly, the UK neither needs nor deserves someone from my generation being in charge. We are fundamentally unserious people. From the outset, our whole thing has been not drawing attention to ourselves. We let the Millennials and Boomers take the bullets while we keep our heads down and go about our relatively carefree lives.

The people born after 1980 (or 1982, depending on where you get your arbitrary definitions) were originally called Generation Y. This wasn’t very interesting so they were changed to Millennials.

The people born in the mid to late 1990s were originally called Generation Z but they were soon upgraded to being Zoomers, a nickname that came a little too near the knuckle when schools and universities switched to ‘online learning’ in 2020-21.

We were called Generation X and nobody bothered to change it because we didn’t have any distinguishing traits and nobody cared. Not caring is also our thing. It isn’t a good trait for a leader of a G7 country and nuclear power.

The few leaders on the world stage who have come from Generation X have tried to compensate for their inherent apathy and listlessness by trying to care too much. The worst of them, notably the cringe-worthy Justin Trudeau and nauseating Jacinda Ardern, were elected as Gen-Xers but govern like Millennials. The worst of both worlds. Macron is a bit better but then he is married to a Boomer. Apart from Zelensky, who was forced to be serious by forces beyond his control but would rather be pretending to play the piano with his penis, I can’t think of any others.

Generation X has contributed remarkably little to politics or culture and that’s the way it should stay. Whoever wins the leadership contest will get no more than two years in power and it will be a disaster. After that, they should hand the torch over to the next generation.

Or to the previous generation.

Whatever.

UPDATE

As has just been pointed out to me on Twitter, David Cameron was born in 1966 and is therefore Generation X. I had genuinely forgotten about him. This new information torches much of this article but I stand by every word of it.