Our most serious commentators are certain the arrivistes in our politics cannot govern. The record establishes only that certainty is the one thing we do not have.

In 1970, a Conservative MP who was also a serious historian, Robert Rhodes James, published a study of Winston Churchill and titled it, without irony, Churchill: A Study in Failure. The dates on the cover were 1900 to 1939. For the whole of the decade before the war, Churchill held no office at all.

He had crossed the floor twice – ‘Anyone can rat,’ he said of himself, ‘but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat…’ – and the double crossing was held against him in both camps as the unanswerable proof of opportunism. As Chancellor, he had forced Britain back onto the gold standard and – under the Ten-Year Rule he did so much to entrench – presided over the running-down of the armed services.

He spent the early 30s leading a doomed revolt against self-government for India and was wrong-footed by the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. He was closely bound up in two of Britain’s most serious military debacles: Gallipoli and Norway – the first of which cost Australia, the second of which brought down the government.

And on the deepest question of the age – Germany – Churchill was not the earliest to read the regime’s character, nor the most penetrating. A year and a half before Churchill made his speech in 1934 that was, in fact, a fairly typical parity-defence hawk speech, Austen Chamberlain – the architect of Locarno, a Nobel laureate, and former Foreign Secretary who in his youth had studied in Berlin and spoke the language – had already spotlighted the character and intent of the new German regime.

In April and July 1933, he said plainly what the new Germany was. Whereas Churchill – until 1938 – mostly lamented that Britain was falling behind militarily, Austen almost immediately highlighted a regime which had ‘an added savagery, a racial pride’ one that proscribed its own Jews and would not stop at its borders. The speeches were gathered that autumn into a pamphlet, Speeches on Germany.

To read the character of a regime – to name it and to stake your judgement on what it will do – is costly, and falsifiable, and rare. Providing such a clear and prescient view is invisible these days. Not only were Churchill’s first mutterings not equivalent; to many, the great man’s Germany laments were just another Churchill vacillation – this time between retrenchment and rearmament. They were one more alarm amongst the many: his condemnation of first one party then another, the gold standard, the India rants, the abdication.

Austen’s warning was quick, spot-on, and rare. And the establishment mocked him. The notorious ‘Chips’ Channon revealed in his diaries what respectability and sophistication had concluded about the senior politician. In August 1936, Chips recorded that Austen was aboard a friend’s yacht off Germany ‘but he refuses to put foot on German soil’. ‘The doyen of the donkeys,’ Channon sneered, ‘an old fossil.’

There it is, in a single entry: the society man deriding the individual who had first pinpointed the problem and made his conviction open in public speech and action. Much of the British establishment had not just failed to spot the danger. They had laughed at the person who did. The other side was no better placed to see it: Labour spent the mid-30s opposing rearmament altogether.

People loved listening to Churchill’s rhetorical brilliance but few thought him other than erratic – grandiose, ungrounded, a man with no fixed loyalty beyond staying in the game. Had his story ended in 1939, Rhodes James’s title would not have been a provocation; it would have been the settled verdict of history.

The figure the commentariat now reaches for whenever it wants a word for what a great leader looks like had spent almost 40 years appearing quite the opposite – someone who was neither obviously flawless nor visionary.

I resurrect the whole tale because the modern descendants of this same commentariat in the anglosphere have again oversimplified the situation. One Nation has briefly led the major parties on the primary vote in Australia. Reform has done practically the same in Britain. And a response has settled amongst writers I respect and enjoy reading: which is that – ultimately – none of the surveys or local results matter, because the insurgent leader cannot govern. The claim is rarely put so baldly. The commentators are too well-bred, as Charles Moore points out, to shout. The claim arrives nevertheless.

In the Australian, Alexander Downer worries that fragmented parliaments will lose ‘the capacity to make difficult but necessary decisions in the national interest’ and that the consequences for economic management and social cohesion could be profound – profound, I guess, in terms of unmitigated disaster.

In The Spectator, Matthew Parris is more direct: you cannot lead a party that aspires to government without a team, and Nigel Farage, by his very nature – the scorpion that must sting the frog it carries; the Upas tree under which nothing can live – repels the colleagues he desperately needs. In the Telegraph, Charles Moore argues that Reform is ‘not in a position to prove it would know how to govern’.

There is a single law. The outsider is not fit to govern. She or he is unfit by temperament or skill, unfit by team, unfit often by association with the people who would vote for them – a circular logic which Hillary Clinton so well illustrated in her throwaway term: ‘deplorables’. The law is declared with the calm of those who consider the matter closed.

Only that the argument doesn’t fit the record. History refuses to supply a law, and offers instead a scatter of experiences that give no conviction about either the establishment or the arrivistes.

Let’s return to Churchill. Having successfully led Britain through the war, he lost the immediate general election – and to whom? Labour – the era’s equivalent of Reform or One Nation… Clement Attlee was dismissed in his own day as a nonentity, ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’, a grey little figure that Churchill’s shadow could swallow whole.

Attlee was also, by the near-unanimous testimony of those who served under him, the most formidable chairman of the modern era – a man who united a Cabinet of enormous and clashing egos, brought every discussion to a brisk close with a summary of a sentence or two, and wasted not a word. And under that unprepossessing chairman, Britain made as hard a run of decisions as any peacetime government has faced: the devaluation of the pound, the secret resolution to build an atomic bomb, independence for India, the founding of Nato, the creation of the National Health Service.

This man, who would have failed every test our commentators now apply, built the postwar British settlement. He is the standing refutation of the idea that the unclubbable, the underestimated, the wrong sort cannot run a country. Many argue that he ran it better than the men who looked the part.

Both Churchill and Attlee, each in their own way, proved surprisingly good for the times. Other, more recent, surprises have included Thatcher and Meloni.

When Giorgia Meloni won in Italy, the market did exactly what the commentariat does now: it priced her unfitness. The spread on Italian debt widened on the logic that a post-fascist outsider could not be trusted with the public accounts. The market made the bet our writers are making, but in numbers – with its own money. And the market lost. The spread has since fallen to multi-year lows and the deficit has been hauled back under control. The outsider, about whom experts warned in no uncertain terms, turned out to be the one the experts’ own instrument came to trust.

Something interesting happens if we set four of Britain’s leaders in a line and use the establishment rule to determine their fate. The consensus would have stopped Churchill, dismissed Attlee, deposed Thatcher, and waved through Truss. The approach would have failed in each of these cases. The only point I want to make here is that the criterion is probably not up to the task…

What it is measuring is the thing Moore let slip about Aberdeen: respectability – prudence, team, legitimacy, the right standing. But these are not tests of whether a person can govern; they are tests of whether a person came up the right way, through the right process, in the proper company. The experts resort to the familiar and call it common sense.

The whole discussion reminds me of poor Anne in Jane Austen’s novel, Persuasion, and a closing line from my favourite of the film adaptations: ‘Anne? You want to marry Anne? Whatever for?’

The navy, like politics, ‘Brings persons of obscure birth into undue distinction.’ The insurgent is unfit by nature, and the insurgent’s admirer is suspect by association. The recommendation, as Lady Russell might well have argued, is to choose the nominally respectable party, or to look foolish before the year is out. A boundary of class and manners, policed top and bottom, wearing the costume of an assessment.

There is one charge among the three commentators I have mentioned that does try to be an assessment, and it deserves a straight answer. Downer’s is checkable: he warns the system risks losing the capacity to make hard decisions.

But that is such a strange argument. The displaced did not walk out because the major parties made hard choices good for the country but which the voters disliked. The electorate was not perverse. The voters walked out because the hard choices were consistently ducked – deferred, focus-grouped, talked around for too long. We used to laugh at the TV programme, Yes, Minister, over 40 years ago. Not anymore.

Downer measures the insurgent against a standard that the incumbents – indeed, the legacy parties in general – have scarcely met over the last 20 years or so. This is why everyone mourns – and rightly so – Hawke and Keating.

Attlee made decisions beside which the modern front bench looks like someone timidly rescheduling a dental appointment in case a filling might be necessary. Meloni made the fiscal consolidation which Italy’s responsible men had postponed for a generation.

So the charge fails twice over, and the two failures lock together: outsiders have turned out well, and old parties have created some of the most ineffective, meaningless governments – ones that a future survey will glide swiftly past, as they do when considering lesser-known US presidents. I imagine Downer would never, in his wildest dreams, have picked Meloni. I doubt he would even have selected Churchill – my guess is that he would have gone for Lord Halifax.

So, can outsiders govern? Do insiders always perform a lot better? On the evidence, the only intellectually honest answer is the one no one in this argument is willing to give: we do not know. Some outsiders have governed greatly, some catastrophically, some have been failures for 40 years and then saved the nation in five. Meanwhile, insiders have ruined parties in government just as easily as they have companies in the business world.

The record is not a law but a scatter chart, and a scatter chart does not allow a straightforward conclusion. You can write the study of failure, or a study of triumph, only after the life is concluded. Our pundits are writing the outcome beforehand – passing a verdict now which history reserves the right to overturn – and has done, on more than one occasion.

The pundits may be right about Hanson. They may be right about Farage. I make no claim about the eventual truth of their views. However, they cannot know it – and arguments such as respectability or commonsense or foolishness or understanding sound to me like a triumvirate of voices I’ve heard before – Lady Russell, Mary Musgrove, and Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion.

Why should we not love Anne?