ONE of the more cringe current centrist slogans is “the adults are back in charge” — meaning that there is a sense of maturity being shown by the Labour and Tory parties converging on the same old market-oriented politics.

Centrists like talking about “the grown-ups in the room” bringing technocratic calm to replace immature demands for public ownership or more taxation of the rich. It is a shallow argument, and it’s also another case where centrists have been so scared of a touch of socialism that they ended up borrowing an argument from the right.

When Keir Starmer fans make the “listen to the grown-ups” argument, it is supposed to make them seem mature — as if they are one of the grown-ups who need listening to. But it has the opposite effect, making it sound like they are the child who, unable to get the other kids to play with them, is calling for the “grown-ups” to come and help them out.

Actual grown-ups don’t generally call other adults “grown-ups.” It very much comes from a “politics as vibes” attitude, where liberals feel a bit out of their depth arguing why the public ownership of water or energy is bad, so just revel in the feeling of politics in a stiff suit.

It reminds me a bit of O Superman, the 1981 hit song by performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson, which lists all the different kinds of glue holding society together:

“When love is gone
There’s always justice
And when justice is gone
There’s always force
And when force is gone
There’s always Mom. Hi Mom!”

It’s the babyish urge that underlies the authoritarian personality, as Anderson sings, the call to “hold me, Mom, in your long arms, your petrochemical arms, your military arms.”

The “grown-up” argument is related to a very long history of associating conservative politics with maturity and radical politics with youth. But that traditional argument gets used less because few people really like to celebrate being middle-aged or denigrate the young — at least not since youth culture made the former look beige and the latter look colourful and vibrant.

The “old farts” are now seen as having been largely wrong on so many enjoyable things, whether it was sex before marriage, gay life, or unusual hairstyles. The “grown-up” argument tries to get around this by painting opponents as daft spoilt children, rather than groovy teens or young adults.

It’s another case where Labour’s centrists, scared by the revival of the left, turned to the right for ideological support. I looked at some newspapers to see when “adults” and “grown-ups” got “in the room” or “in charge” as a political metaphor. The database of the Times shows the phrase isn’t really used there until about 2015.

There is related talk of “grown-up politics,” mostly relating to John Major, who used the phrase to end his speech at the Tory conference in 1994. Which makes privatising the railways, introducing PFI, cuts to NHS beds and messing up the economy “grown-up.” Inevitably, given their association with rip-off public service privatisation, Tony Blair and his government used “grown-up politics” a bit too.

The first major appearance of “adults in the room” in the British press came in 2015 — because Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, used it about Greece. The IMF wanted to impose deep cuts on Greece as a result of the post-financial crash crisis. So that’s one point where the phrase really got a boost in Britain.

Those calling for the “grown-ups” and “adults” to run politics want Major and Lagarde imposing cuts or introducing wonky privatisations that will, like the rail privatisation, collapse within a decade after fatal crashes.

Look at newspaper databases covering the US and you see a lot of even more embarrassing variations of the full “grown-ups in charge/adults in the room” phrase going back to the 1990s — it’s a US Republican fetish.

Some examples jumped out. In 1990, centrist columnist David Broder wrote there were “grown-ups in charge, thank goodness” in the first Gulf war — the grown-ups being president George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Gulf war was a military victory followed by a grim policy which left Saddam Hussein in power over a desperately impoverished nation and allowed for the crushing of a popular rebellion.

Then in 1993 US conservative Charles Krauthammer attacked president Bill Clinton over the “youngsters in the White House” when they needed “grown-ups in charge.”

Then after the September 11 terrorist attacks, there were a flurry of Republican “grown-up” calls.

“Compassionate conservative” pundit and sometime George W Bush adviser Mervin Olasky wrote that “in our war against terrorism, it’s a good thing that the grown-ups are in charge,” praising Bush for his “anti-terror” legislation, his support for reduced liberties at home and willingness to go to war abroad.

Conservative pundit Kathleen Parker wrote she was “grateful there are adults in charge” and getting ready to invade Iraq in 2003 while anti-war protesters were just having “temper tantrums.”

But it turns out the grown-ups were wrong, while the kids were right. Post-war Iraq was a disaster, and the weapons of mass destruction were a fairy story.

The call for the “grown-ups” to be in charge is something that comes largely from US Republicans, especially concerning calls for — frequently disastrous — foreign wars. So the centrists who got scared by Corbynism have ended up grabbing a slogan and idea with rotten roots as a way of calling for a return to the “normal” politics of privatisation, deregulation and war.

The recent revival of the slogan also doesn’t bear close inspection. The stand-out use of “grown-ups” in politics in recent editions of the Times comes from Starmer himself.

He wrote a 2017 Times article claiming: “The public have lost confidence that this government can deliver the Brexit deal Britain needs. Labour are now the grown-ups in the room. Not acting for narrow political gain. But in the national interest.”

In what cause was Starmer enlisting the grown-ups? Why, in his demand that post-Brexit Britain “retain the benefits of the single market and the customs unions.” Starmer has now, with little explanation,  abandoned this call. Which shows that supposedly grown-up politics are all about unprincipled twisting in the wind.