In April 2022, the Metropolitan Police did something no force had done to a serving British prime minister before: they fined him. Boris Johnson had broken the lockdown rules his own government had written, at a gathering in Downing Street while the rest of the country sat indoors, alone, obeying them.
He apologised. He paid the fine. For a while, it looked like nothing would change.
Here’s the strange part. The system worked exactly as designed. There was outrage, an inquiry, resignations, headlines for months. Eventually Johnson did leave office — but not, in the end, because voters removed him. He resigned under pressure from his own MPs, worried about their own re-election prospects, months after the fine itself.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: what is an election actually supposed to punish?
We tend to assume democratic accountability means voters get rid of leaders who behave badly. But elections happen on a fixed clock, not the moment trust breaks. Between votes, a leader can survive almost anything if their party calculates it’s still the safer bet. The mechanism we rely on to enforce honesty in politics only fires once every few years, and only if enough people turn up.
I kept coming back to this while researching how political systems actually hold power accountable — not in theory, but in practice, in real time. It’s one of the questions I explore in my book, The Answer, which looks at how a very different, much older method of choosing decision-makers might close that gap entirely.
Should accountability in politics depend on when the next election happens to fall — or should it happen the moment trust is broken?
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