A London diarist with a PhD reads that Number Ten is haunted and concludes that the ghosts are the only residents with a long-term plan
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Kentish Town, north London. My kitchen table, buried under marking, a pot of coffee strong enough to strip varnish, the radiator making the noise it makes every October, 7.40am.
The Only Expert In The Room
I should begin, as I am apparently obliged to begin every conversation in this city, by clarifying that I am not that Caitlin Moran. There are, by my count, several thousand Caitlin Morans in the English-speaking world, and I am the one with a doctorate in political theory, a cat called Hobbes and a mortgage in Kentish Town that I will finish paying in roughly 2061. I write this diary for the London Prat, and you can find the rest of it at Dr Caitlin B. Moran’s diary at the London Prat. I mention the doctorate not out of vanity, although it is partly vanity, but because it took seven years, and I like to get some use out of it.
This morning the London Prat delivered the most accurate piece of political analysis I have read since my viva. The report on haunted Downing Street confirms what political scientists have long suspected and been too cautious to publish. Number Ten is occupied by entities that drift from room to room, make unsettling noises at night and have no discernible effect on policy.
A Theory Of Spectral Government
My doctoral thesis, all 94,000 words of it, examined the gap between what governments say they will do and what they actually do. My supervisor called it ambitious. My mother called it long. My examiners called it fine, which in academic language means they read the introduction and the conclusion. Its central argument was that British governments operate on two levels: a visible level of announcements, launches and photographs in hard hats, and an invisible level where decisions quietly fail to happen. I now realise I should simply have written that Downing Street is haunted. It would have been shorter and, judging by the evidence, more rigorous.
Consider the ghost’s working conditions. It occupies the same building as the Prime Minister, attends the same meetings and walks the same corridors. Yet nobody consults it, nobody briefs it and nobody minds what it thinks. In other words, it has exactly the same influence as a backbench MP. I propose that we stop calling them ghosts and start calling them junior ministers.
The Dinner Party Problem
Last night I was at a dinner in Highbury, hosted by a couple who both work in something called strategic communications, a job that appears to consist of writing the word impact on whiteboards. When the conversation turned to the government, I made the error of beginning a sentence with, well, in the literature. The table fell silent. A man in a quarter-zip jumper said, oh, are you a doctor? I said yes, of political theory. He said, so not a real doctor. I said that was correct, and that if he collapsed I would be able to explain the historical origins of his collapse but not prevent it.
This is the curse of the academic at a London dinner party. Everyone has an opinion on politics, and everyone’s opinion is worth exactly the same as yours, unless they work in strategic communications, in which case it is worth slightly more because they have a lanyard. I have read every book on the British constitution published since Bagehot, and I was overruled on the role of the Cabinet by a woman who had watched a documentary on a plane.
What The Ghosts Would Say
If the ghosts of Downing Street could speak, I suspect they would say what every civil servant says after a change of government: we have seen this before. They have watched Prime Ministers arrive with grand plans and leave with boxes. They have heard the speeches on the step, the promises of a new chapter and the talk of a fresh start. Every new tenant believes he will be different. The ghosts know better. They have been there for centuries, and the only thing that has changed is the wallpaper.
A Westminster lobby correspondent I know, who has covered five Prime Ministers and aged approximately thirty years in ten, told me over a drink last week that the building itself defeats people. It is a warren, he said. The corridors go nowhere, the rooms are too small, the doors are in the wrong places. Every Prime Minister walks in thinking he will run the country and spends the first month trying to find the toilet. I now understand that the building is not badly designed. It is designed by ghosts, for ghosts.
A Modest Proposal
In the finest tradition of English political writing, I would like to offer the government a modest proposal. Let the ghosts run the country. They are permanent, which solves the problem of short-termism. They are invisible, which solves the problem of media management. They cannot be photographed in hard hats, which solves the problem of photographs of politicians in hard hats. And they have no interest in being re-elected, which makes them uniquely qualified to take difficult decisions.
I sent this proposal to my old supervisor, who replied within four minutes, which is the fastest he has ever replied to anything I have sent him. He said, Caitlin, this is the most persuasive argument you have made since 2014. He did not mean it as a compliment.
Closing Notes
The coffee is cold, the marking is still there, and Hobbes the cat has knocked a first-year essay on Rousseau into his water bowl, which is, in fairness, roughly what I was going to do with it. Outside, Kentish Town is waking up: the bakery queue, the joggers, a man shouting into his phone about a planning application. Somewhere across London, in a tall narrow house behind a black door, a ghost is drifting through a corridor, quietly wondering who the new lot are and how long they will last. I raise my cold coffee to it. Colleague, I say. We are both experts. Neither of us is ever asked.