Not at all. But crucially, I don't think anyone, leading any political party can promise or do things that will changes lives (significantly) for the better. I don't want Johnson or Corbyn saying that all the problems can fixed by being knobs towards Brussels or bankers. As you allude to, the country has deep, structural problems which aren't solved by a new guy with a vision of how to fix everything. Because there isn't a unifying, ideological solution at the moment, fixing one thing will break another.
So you have to manage all the bits into a boring, structural place where eg nationalising major industry doesn't screw pension funds. Or building entire new towns doesn't leave new schools and hospitals without qualified people to staff them. Or introducing massive new taxes on the bits of the country that currently make all the money without them going somewhere else and you getting no tax from them instead. Or how you promote an ethical foreign policy while your net zero commitments are reliant on Lithium and Cobalt mined by children in central Africa. It's a complicated world where taking one Jenga block out screws up something else, and any politician who is comfortable enough saying "if we just do this then we're fine" is probably a bad person to be in politics.
I get people want to be inspired, but I'll be pretty comfortable with the novelty of thinking that those in charge are doing it because they at least think they're trying to make things better for the country rather than seeing it as an opportunity for themselves. While bleak and not going to get the crowds at Glastonbury, that's still better than we've seen for while. And I'm quite happy that the guys five years ago had that same motivation, which is why (while it would have been internationally shambolic) it would have been miles better than what we actually have had. In five years time things will almost certainly be as bad as they are now. But any politician who might have the nous to be able to do something about it is stuck with the Catch-22 situation of being aware enough to know that, while having to sell something to the country to get elected. And the best slogan I've got for Starmer is that I think he gets that there isn't a button to press (either labelled "tax more and nationalise stuff" or "tax less and kick the foreigners out") that magically fixes it all. And if he does get that, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
It's a bit like people demanding an Emery and for us to sign Moussa Diaby for £50m when we sacked Di Matteo. The country isn't at the Emery stage. Starmer isn't even Smith, he's Steve Bruce. He's the boring one that nobody likes, nobody wanted in the first place and nobody is sad to see the back of. But at least he's not setting fire to the dressing room, and (hopefully) when you look back the others bits don't happen without him signing Ahmed El-Mohamedy and Robert Snodgrass. There will absolutely be a Henri Lansbury style screw-up along the way (and probably even a Scott Hogan), but at least there might be a modicum of sense to the bad decisions for a change.
While I'm stream-of-consciousnessing on the topic:
Gerrard - Johnson. Minor success with a similar but smaller role and massive public profile which meant loads of people thought it would be a triumph, but even a cursory glance below the surface, and his personality meant it was always going to be a disaster. It was always about him, not the thing he was responsible for.
Sherwood - Truss: Speaks for itself.
Cameron - Lambert: The few bits that he got right and the shiny, initial popularity mask the fact that it was all a facade for gross institutional decline behind the scenes which led to far greater failings later.
O'Neill - Blair - the great hope after two decades of bleakness. Only to make really obvious mistakes which sour his legacy and make all the people who really liked him at the time, now hate him. Yet, they can't escape the fact that what he did was still better than the fifteen years either before or after. Around fifty percent of people will always hold his decisions around Europe against him.
Houllier - Brown - was always going to be a bit deflating after what went before, and it always felt like the end of an era. But there was a bit of logic in why it might have worked. Bit tin-earned to why people weren't on board with what he was trying to do, and it always felt a bit weird to see him there given he'd always been around doing something else for much of the previous decade.
Sunak - Di Matteo - when the last "season" was a disaster, why not roll the dice on a guy in a suit who could at least point to a time when people thought (albeit wrongly, and in extreme circumstances when their minds were on other things) he was good a few years back?
There's probably an essay in that Prime Ministers vs Villa managers somewhere. Or at least a fanzine article.
