A patient told us this week that his dad named all his teeth after Prime Ministers. We assumed this was a charming quirk. Then we looked at the record and realised it was basically documentary journalism.
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1. Neither is built to last.
Baby teeth are twenty temporary placeholders, holding space until something more permanent arrives. The UK has had seven Prime Ministers in roughly a decade, averaging about seventeen months each. A central incisor serves for six to eight years without complaint. A central incisor is, by any measurable standard, the more committed public servant.
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2. Everyone can see the exit coming before they can.
A loose tooth wobbles visibly for weeks while the child insists, with increasing desperation, that it is absolutely fine and not ready yet. Boris Johnson held on through Partygate, through Cabinet resignations arriving daily like an advent calendar of institutional collapse, through the moment his own MPs were being told to pretend everything was normal. The tooth was hanging by a thread. Everyone in the room knew. The tooth did not know. This is the same situation.
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3. Neither leaves quietly.
Liz Truss lasted 49 days and was publicly outlasted on a Daily Star livestream by a supermarket lettuce. Rishi Sunak delivered his resignation speech in the rain outside No.10 while a protester on the pavement played Things Can Only Get Better on a nearby speaker — a detail so perfectly calibrated it reads like the country had been rehearsing it. A baby tooth, for its part, gets held up to the light, shown to both parents, a grandparent, and at least one neighbour, photographed, and placed in a small decorative box before anyone accepts it has actually gone. Every exit has a moment. Some moments are more dignified than others.
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4. Someone else usually makes the final call.
Teeth do not remove themselves. The removal requires a tongue, a parent, a tissue, string, a door handle, or — in genuinely committed households — a small controlled mechanism that nobody involved will fully describe afterwards. Prime Ministers rarely leave simply because they have privately decided to. Usually the Cabinet withdraws support, or the party withdraws confidence, or the electorate withdraws everything. Keir Starmer was removed by his own party rather than the voters, which is, clinically speaking, the string-tied-to-the-door-handle method.
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5. The replacement looks almost identical and everyone pretends otherwise.
A new tooth grows in, occupies exactly the same space, performs exactly the same function, and is forgotten within a fortnight. A new Prime Minister arrives promising to fundamentally rewire the relationship between the state and the individual, and the country spends the first three weeks cautiously deciding whether this one is structurally different or just a slightly different shape doing the same job in the same location. The honest answer, in both cases, is: it depends how long you give it.
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6. Nobody can remember most of them individually.
Quick: at what age did your lower lateral incisor come in? Now name every Prime Minister between 1955 and 1975 without searching. Take your time. The point isn't that you've failed — the point is that the question is genuinely the same question, and the answer to both is somewhere between I think I know this and I'm going to say Harold.
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Baby teeth are temporary by design, which their critics will note as a flaw. What those critics cannot explain is how something explicitly temporary still manages to outlast, on average, two full governments. A central incisor does its job, causes no constitutional crisis, and is replaced in an orderly fashion at a predictable age.
Right now, that makes it the most stable institution in British public life.
Book your child's check-up — we'll keep the whole cabinet in good shape, unlike some cabinets we could mention.
#LittleSmiles #PaediatricDentistry #Burnham #Truss
The takeaway
Enjoy the daftness — the naming, the wobbles, the tooth-fairy negotiations. But keep those little teeth healthy while they're in office. Their term is short, but it matters.
Book a children's check-up and we'll keep the whole cabinet in good shape.
