And Starmer isn’t the only Labour figure to have a recent swing. In January, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, declared he would “rewire” the civil service — in front of a neon sign reading “move fast, fix things” — with no “sideways shimmy to another team or department if you fail to perform”.

The archetypal mandarin, then, is lazy, obsessed with process over outcome, and something of a stranger to their office desk. (Plus, the PM seems to be implying, secretive and conniving.) For a clever graduate, in this telling, the civil service offers an easy life: a well-pensioned, squishy middle ground between the corporate grind and the high-status penury of the arts. The last jobs-for-life left in 21st-century Britain. 

Is that account accurate? Pilfer an unattended lanyard and slip into SW1’s stately buildings. What you see will, in fact, have more in common with the artsy end of the employment spectrum than with the corporate world. Job cuts, low pay and scant promotion prospects have turned working for a nuclear-armed state, one that oversees the world’s sixth-largest economy, into something approaching a hobby career.

Behind the edifices of creamy Portland stone which run along the 640 meters of Whitehall are the offices from which much of the world was run for much of the past two centuries. Their present condition could be a metaphor for the nation. “You’ll have some nice parts where you can host dignitaries,” says James*, a youngish diplomat at the Foreign, Common and Development Office, of his department’s headquarters at King Charles Street. “But where you work, there’ll be damp; the toilets will be blocked; the wi-fi [will be] pretty crap.” It’s very Slow Horses, James says, in both office décor and the corresponding gallows humor.

These offices are staffed by much the same people as any halfway-prestigious private company: graduates, usually with humanities degrees from decent universities, in smart-casual dress, or a suit (but no tie) for big meetings. They write reports, send emails, and do generic admin. In this case, not in service of selling vacuum cleaners or bonds, but serving the political wishes of the government of the day by helping them formulate policy, then carrying it out. Everything from drawing up a new geopolitical strategy, to making sure a Commonwealth reception is stocked with enough sandwiches, can fall under a civil servant’s brief.

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Rachel* joined the civil service — the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to be precise — from a different industry, and worked there for a couple of years in her mid-twenties before going back to the private sector. The money was one motivation for leaving: her salary when she quit was around £45,000, a lot less than what followed. Another was that familiar beast of Whitehall: bureaucracy, especially after Labour returned to power in 2024. “We would say all the time, ‘We never thought we’d miss the old Tory SpAds,’” she says. “[But] they were just so much easier to work with than the [Labour] ones.” Her team went from being able to liaise directly with government special advisers — political appointees working for Tory ministers — to being instructed to instead contact a minister’s private office of civil servants.

It was an “added layer of communication”, Rachel says, “which slowed everything down so much”, negated the actual hard work her team was doing, and contributed to a frustration which had her eyeing up the exit. The main reason she left, though, was the department’s promotional system, or lack thereof. “Essentially, someone has to leave the job for a promotion to become available.” 

Rachel’s is not the kind of story you want to hear if you care about Britain’s state capacity: someone talented and hard-working, who’s left money on the table to enter public service, being spat out. For what it’s worth, Max*, a twenty-something at the Treasury, thinks the idea that maddening layers of process drive civil servants out of the business — if you can call it that — is “slightly overdone”. James similarly believes that “the machine can move fast with the right incentives, or responding to the right demand signal”. True as this might be, a reputation for bureaucracy, even undeserved, will have its own damaging deterrent effect on those considering entering Whitehall.

What is agreed upon is the money problem. Max says that the lowest rungs of the Treasury are poorly paid even by general civil-service standards, with starting salaries well under £30,000. (Their US equivalents in Washington start on between the equivalent of £42,000 and £52,000, depending on their education level.) “I know of people who were actually cutting into the savings they had made from previous jobs in order to afford to be in London to work at the Treasury.” As much as people might want to work there, plain financial reality might quickly force them out. The result? “A big blob of the Treasury is actually south-west London private school types,” Max explains, “who can afford to grit their teeth and power through.” Pay-to-play is bad enough in arts and media. Do we really want it corroding the government’s economic engine?

James works abroad, in what’s called a “hardship area”: essentially, a poor, chaotic country which an urbane diplomat needs extra inducement to move to. It means a rather cushy setup: his accommodation is paid for, he gets around 40 days of annual leave, and he also receives a “flight package” to cover trips to the UK and elsewhere. And if you’re a diplomat with kids being educated where you’re stationed, the government has an obligation to maintain that same level of schooling. If they were at a fancy international school abroad, that often means the British taxpayer continuing to cover a private education when the family moves back home. But the Foreign Office has “taken a real hit” budget-wise, says James. “You are starting to hear stories of seniors being told the office won’t cover their kids that are upper-sixth at private school because it’s costing too much.”

With Foreign Office restructuring plans entailing a headcount reduction of up to 25% in the next few years, there’s a de facto “promotion freeze”, says James, with a lot of voluntary exit packages waved around threateningly. Similarly, says Max, the Treasury’s self-image as one of the “big-dog departments” means that people prefer not to move anywhere else in government. As a result, promotion within it is “very, very difficult” — creating additional pressure on those who can’t afford to wait things out. The City, with its big salaries, is ready to embrace those who bail.

The cost-cutting is affecting the quality of the civil service’s staff. Whitehall has traditionally leaned on high-caliber individuals who don’t have the stomach for 100-hour workweeks in the City, but the ever-increasing financial tradeoff is slimming down their number. Max says his senior bosses in their forties would generally affirm that “the top, top, top people from the various unis they went to would all try and get into the civil service”. He doesn’t see many quite as “high-grade” people closer to his own age. James makes a similar point: the FCDO has a class of “very competent” managers from their mid-forties to early sixties. “Would those people necessarily be doing the job now if they started with me? I think, increasingly, the civil service will become less attractive to that cohort.”

What does keep people involved? Something that money can’t buy, obviously. The same thing that makes people stomach shit pay and shit hours in capital-P Politics: proximity to power. Particularly if you’re at the FCDO, Treasury or Cabinet Office — the latter acts as a hub for much of the running of government — you can plausibly claim to have your ear next to the heartbeat of the state. You are the person, says Max, chatting to the person “who’s chatting to the Chancellor about [something] at 1pm”. It means that “at dinner parties, people will often want to hear about your job”, says James, in a way they don’t if you tell them you’re just another corporate lawyer. 

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Of course, being close to power is not the same as having it, and confusing the two can be farcical. The department’s middle management, Max says, has plenty of “existential, balding, early-thirties men who aren’t quite clear where their life is headed. A lot of them do tend to enjoy having a Treasury email address. I think an exact thing a manager of mine said at one point was, ‘I have a Treasury email address, and they need to respect that.’” Above them, among the department’s senior staff, is a tinge of fatalism. “If you have chats,” says Max, “they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, things are shit.’ But even how they speak about it, you can kind of tell they enjoy knowing the ins and outs of why things are the way they are, and aren’t quite exactly like public discourse suggests.”

Alongside that is what Max calls a “weird scoffing” about the private sector; of seeing it populated by “bullshitters to the nth degree”. This antipathy, he suggests, “energizes a lot of people in different ways”. Are they so wrong to feel that way? The big-picture story of the past decade has been that states — their borders; their armies — actually matter again. Britain’s own state has again reached the size to which it swelled in the Seventies, with public spending around 45% of GDP, though much of that now goes on hospitals and care-home beds rather than typical appendages of Leviathan’s might.

What we are now learning is that size doesn’t always translate into efficacy. Advocates of a muscular, activist state must prevent that muscle from running to flab. The public sector’s inability to recruit the best people, largely because of the economic (some might call it parasitical) dominance of the City and adjacent industries, has a tangible impact on state capacity — on sovereignty, even. A weeks-long delay on sending a British warship to the drone-hit military base in Cyprus; the Office for National Statistics declining to the point where UK employment figures are almost guesswork — these and other examples of the Government’s eroding ability to exert control at home and abroad are partly a resource problem, but they are also crises in competence.

Maybe this only increases the importance of being closer to what’s left of our sovereignty. “There’s a widespread recognition,” says Max, “that this government, that government, all these governments are shite, and we break our backs trying to make them look decent. So do you want to be as close to the levers of power as possible? Or do you want to be in the backwaters feeling the frustration the country’s feeling?” The most basic, most essential kind of power there is — “the power of the government over the freedom of its subjects”, as Tom Wolfe put it in The Bonfire of the Vanities — will always retain some faint flash of glamour.

*Names have been changed

But there’s another item in his wardrobe that is more revealing of the man, and more revealing of contemporary politics in general. It has gone remarkably unremarked-upon that Starmer is, as far as we can tell, the first British prime minister to wear a Stone Island polo shirt — formerly a calling card for football hooligans — off duty. It’s not unauthentic. He’s a middle-aged Arsenal fan. Of course he owns a bit of Stoney.

This is a leading aesthetic indicator of what we could call blokeism: a progressive, 21st-century incarnation of the middle-aged white working-class men who came of age under Tony Blair. They are not quite like centrist dads, whose equivocal politics are primarily shaped by comfortable middle-class upbringings. These progressive blokes owe their outlook to Britain’s blissful run of years in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when economic growth and cultural confidence gave Blair’s liberal refashioning of the country a weighty cosign, even to those with more hardscrabble origins.

They are earnest; mostly Left-leaning but not radical; patriotic but not nationalistic; worried about the future of the country, but not as much as they ought to be. They might be buying Gareth Southgate’s book, Dear England: Lessons in Leadership — the former England manager, a conservative tactician who mused on modern patriotism in a 2021 open letter, is blokeism incarnate.

Sources of authority recognize blokeism’s power and use its language to instruct the public: the British Transport Police’s “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan; the Mayor of London’s “say maaate to a mate” anti-misogyny campaign. Blokeism’s working-class nature anchors its authority with a power rootless, middle-class centrist dads can only envy.

Blokeism holds sway at the top of the Labour party and in Left-leaning culture and media. As well as Starmer and Southgate we could pick out Andy Burnham; Gary Lineker, podcast empresario and Gaza advocate; Gary Neville, an on-off Labour outrider who recently said he tore down a Union flag put up at one of his construction projects for its nationalist implications; and John Fisher, the influencer better known as Big John, who found fame consuming hefty Chinese takeaways and saying “bosh” but has been drafted in as an icon of progressivism for his media appearances defending migrants.

Remember Burnham’s navy worker’s jacket, which went viral in 2020 when he wore it in a speech criticizing the then Tory government’s Covid rules? Mix with his black North Face cagoule, and his black Clarks Wallabees, and you have a strain of dadcore with distinct class implications — no burgundy chinos here. The month before the 2024 election, Labour released a promo video of Neville lobbing softball interview questions at Starmer with a bucolic Lake District backdrop. Both were in black straight-legged jeans and technical black jackets. They talked about going on humble family holidays in the British countryside as kids; about the importance of government delivery. The purist of blokeism.

All these men were born within 14 years of each other, the youngest being Neville, 50, and the oldest Lineker, 64. They all have working-class backgrounds, or at least working-class affects. Lineker’s dad was a greengrocer; Burnham’s was a telephone engineer; Starmer’s was, as you certainly know by now, a toolmaker. Fisher used to run a small cheese business. Neville is a semi-exception: his dad, the emphatically named Neville Neville, was a cricketer and football administrator. Besides Big John’s outer-London home of Romford, none of them are from the capital, though Starmer and Lineker now have nice houses there.

In May 1997, when New Labour came to power, these men were between the ages of 22 and 37. What phase is that in a man’s life? Maturing. Marriages, mortgages, kids. If a political gear-change syncs with a personal gear-change, of course it’s going to seep deep into your understanding of the world. The Blairite liberal revolution came early enough in their lives that they were open to it, but late enough that they had a full sense of what it was replacing. John Major’s sleazy Tories to Blair’s shiny teeth and shiny government — the improvement was obvious. It’s no wonder they cling to “grown-up politics”, as the comfort-blanket phrase has it. This is the politics that came in when they were themselves growing up.

And so we have this reflexive rhetorical allergy to “division”, as if division wasn’t a fundamental part of politics itself. “Anyone else feel politically homeless?” Lineker tweeted in 2017, after the lose-lose election between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?” “You’ve got extremists on the left, and extremists on the right, and neither of them are any good for society,” Fisher told GQ in September. “We are reasonable people,” Starmer said of Britain in a New Statesman interview this June. When asked about the recent flag-raising campaign on his book tour, Southgate affirmed that “there’s more that bonds us all than separates us”.

What looks like complacency from a lower generational rung makes more sense when you consider that the Blair settlement is associated, in these men’s minds, with long, sustained prosperity. By the time of the 2008 crash, since which UK real wages have stagnated, our blokes were between the ages of 33 and 48 — more than old enough to have established a career and bought at least one house. Hence their tenuously founded optimism about Britain’s prospects. “I don’t agree when Farage and others say we’re a broken country, I don’t subscribe to that, and I actually think it’s unpatriotic. True patriots don’t say their country is broken,” Starmer has said. “There is no place like Britain,” thinks Big John. “When we’re down on the floor, we can joke about it, do you know what I mean?”

Blokeism has always been pretty relaxed about moneymaking. Lineker first advertised Walkers crisps in 1995; was the BBC’s highest-paid employee for seven straight years; and co-founded Goalhanger, the media company behind the podcast phenomena The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics. Neville has a Manchester-centered property empire that includes co-ownership of two hotels and Salford City football club; his company, Relentless Developments, is in the middle of a private-equity-backed £400 million redevelopment in central Manchester.

It’d be easy, then to cast the Garys’ social progressivism as hypocrisy. Easy but wrong. The young online Right’s mockery of middle-aged men reverent of “diversity” ignores how prominent xenophobia was in everyday life until quite recently. Lineker says he was subjected to “racist abuse” at school and by fellow footballers, for having “darkish skin” despite being white; monkey chants and banana skins were still being directed at black players in the early years of his sporting career. In 2004, monkey chants were also being directed at Neville’s black England teammates during a friendly against Spain in Madrid.

For football players, and for football fans like Starmer and Burnham and many other blokes, the Premier League’s modern pre-eminence is a lesson in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. Look what happens if we let in talented people from around the world! What works for Arsenal and Everton must surely work for the rest of the economy! The uptick of migration in the Blair years, and the adoption of diversity as a hegemonic establishment value, was twinned with, again, economic prosperity. If life is good when X thing is happening, surely X thing is itself good?

Blokeism emphasizes that, contrary to what the new Right think, social liberalism is not just an elite practice. From 1983 to 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of people who thought same-sex relationships were “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9%. In the World Values Survey conducted in two dozen countries from 2017 to 2022, Britain presented itself as impeccably tolerant, with citizens the least (or among the least) bothered about having neighbors who are gay, immigrants, or of a different race or religion.

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As for the hyper-online derision for a purely civil conception of nationhood in the form of “British values” — 2024 BSA data shows that, of all ethnic, religious and civic markers, “to respect British political institutions and laws” is the most widely supported test of being “truly British”, with 86% agreeing. These numbers are more than capacious enough to swallow up a good chunk of middle-aged, white working-class men, and perhaps explain why the Blairite liberal settlement has lasted so long after Britain’s post-2008 slump. Cultural predilections that have successfully filtered down through society are hard to attack and hard to shift.

Britain has changed a lot over the lifetimes of our blokes. Maybe to the point where they can’t believe things can change much more. But we are where we are, with insurgent populist parties, Reform and the Greens, now often outpolling the traditional, sensible duopoly of Conservative and Labour. Blokeism is not oblivious to this — it is, by virtue of its demographic basis, more tapped into Britain’s discontent than blissfully ignorant middle-class centrism. “I’m a bit disillusioned by politics as a whole”, Fisher told The Sunday Times, and said he understood why people felt they had to “take it on themselves” and raise the St George and Union flags on lampposts across the country. He even tweeted that he planned to vote for Reform himself, “as a protest against the big 2”, until Zia Yusuf accused him of being an establishment “counter signal” to Thomas Skinner.

Skinner is another “bosh”-loving influencer, but one who’s distinctly Right-leaning – and, at 34, of a notably younger age than Fisher. Skinner was six when Blair entered government. That’s the only political settlement he knows, and as such, he has no particular love or sentimentality for it. Younger blokes do not subscribe to blokeism. That’s one of the things their older peers are worried about. Burnham, for his part, has spoken of an “existential” threat to the current order from Reform, and how politics has to “change quite radically” to face it. But in general, the rest are too old, and too entrenched in their worldviews, to understand this. Blokeism’s power came from it being a generational phenomenon, the very same thing which will make it helpless in the political world to come.

Breakneck, a well-reviewed new book by Dan Wang, makes the case that China is catching up with America because the former is run by can-do engineers, and the latter by don’t-do lawyers. But if America’s lawyer problem is bad, ours is worse. Not worse because our lawyers are more powerful — America’s codified constitution and litigation addiction suggests the opposite — but because our lawyers simply weigh heavier in the makeup of our elite. The US has Silicon Valley, a colossal military-industrial complex and various other fearsome power centers that fight for control of the national steering wheel. In the UK, what is there outside of the City-adjacent, high-end service sector, of which corporate law is a dominant constituency? A few bioscience labs in the southeast, barred from expansion by bat-shagging Lib Dem councilors.

Corporate law, consulting and finance, the troika of City professions that Britain has bet the house on since Thatcher, are pitilessly effective at sucking up our elite graduate class. It’s the third and sometimes the second, closely identified with hyper-capitalist greed and PowerPoint-tweaking bullshit artistry, which get most of the attention. But corporate law might be the most symptomatic of a service-geared economy that’s totally dependent on the global financial tides for business — reactive rather than weather-making. “A bank is ultimately more real economy than a law firm,” says Jack*, an Oxbridge humanities graduate who works at Slaughter and May, one of the five “Magic Circle” companies which constitute the pinnacle of British corporate law. Banks have money, with which to do stuff. Corporate law firms are hired to help banks (and other businesses) do their stuff, whether it’s mergers, acquisitions, due diligence or whatever else. “We’re facilitators rather than actual doers.”

Jack, who’s around 30, is one of many humanities grads to have gone into corporate law recently. That’s another thing about the profession. Consulting and finance tend to attract those wanting to make a lot of money. But as mounting property and day-to-day living costs push formerly middle-class jobs like teaching into the precariat, corporate law has emerged as the profession of choice for clever, well-educated sorts who don’t have a particular facility with numbers or passion for business but would still like a salary that allows them the comfortable life they expected growing up. “When I was at uni,” says Adam*, another Oxbridge humanities graduate around 30, “there was a lot of quite confusing talk about finding a passion, that I listened to and got quite engaged with for a couple of years. And then I started to think a bit more practically about it.” He ended up at the London office of an American corporate law firm.

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And neither are they especially worried about AI eating their Pret lunch. They use the technology to do basic research, but find it’s still too inaccurate to rely on without proper checks. Law firms don’t want to be feeding confidential info into AI systems anyway, which is perhaps why there doesn’t seem to be any immediate squeeze in hiring trainees quite yet. In the longer term, who really knows? AI evangelists would say that corporate law is exactly the kind of structured, fact-rich knowledge work that will be well automated sooner or later.

It certainly puts a faint crack into the profession’s reputation as the platonic ideal of a stable upper-middle-class career. But in the more immediate term, isn’t it the stability itself that’s the problem? Becoming a corporate lawyer “is the opposite of doing anything entrepreneurial”, says Jack. It’s for “very smart people who are fundamentally not risk takers”. The fact it holds such appeal contributes to Britain’s “massive growth problem”. When “the smartest people in the country go off to be fucking consultants and lawyers”, what hope do you have of founding companies and industries that actively shape the world rather than being dependent on globalization cruising along as usual?

Reactive doesn’t necessarily mean constricting, thinks Jack, who says that though “excessive or incorrect legal frameworks are not helping the UK”, this is not a problem of bad lawyers but “a problem of bad laws” — and bad laws are the fault of politicians, who increasingly conceptualize law as an immovable obstacle rather than something that their mandate demands they shape and reshape. But maybe that conceptual blindness is, as Wang says of America’s politics, due to a legalism which ultimately flows from the profession’s popularity and prestige among our elite. If every politician’s son and daughter and partner and best friend is a lawyer, why wouldn’t they adopt a similar mindset?

And in our case, there is no Californian tech idyll on hand as an alternative. There is, simply, the City. Trump 2.0 coupled up with Silicon Valley in its anti-legalistic crusade. Britain’s populist troublemakers will have to fight on their own, because there’s no extra-government power center that shares their sensibilities. (That’s if the Labour government of lawyers doesn’t pre-empt them, as Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has recently shown intimations of doing.) Good corporate lawyers, and good lawyers in general, might know how to wind their way around Britain’s legislative maze with consummate skill. But a non-legalistic kind of politics knows a more effective trick: that the best way around something is often through it. You don’t unpick the knot — you take a knife to it.

*Names have been changed

It’s probably apocryphal. Lewis writes that he “heard many versions of this vignette”, which was “all over Cambridge in a week, Oxford in two”. But it has a deeper kind of truth: one society’s elite, wearing a grin that might be a grimace, bowing to another’s. Because when the City of London was deregulated in the Eighties, culminating in the “Big Bang” of 27 October 1986, when a whole load of trading restrictions were wiped away at once, Britain’s brightest (or at least, most prestigiously educated) graduates put their noses in the air, and sniffed.

They followed the smell of money to the City, which was soaking up both the investment and the working culture of American firms. In-person trading and a clubby, old-school-tie vibe were replaced with walls of computer screens and punishing office hours. Britain’s elite sloughed off its ambivalence to moneymaking and paternalistic sense of public service, and joined a carnival of pinstripes, braces, champagne and mobile phones as big as bricks.

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Neither of those qualities have grown back. Banks, consultancies and corporate law firms still take a heavy tithe of Oxbridge graduates, even the airy-fairy humanities ones. But we’re not in the Eighties and Nineties anymore, when finance’s power to shape the world eclipsed that of democratic politics. Rather than being high-rolling, cork-popping masters of the universe, the modern banker is a sober, industrious creature. Money is not their liberator; it is something they need in abundance just to keep their head above water in London’s property market. The glamour has died but the drudgery of the day-to-day work remains. As once-solid upper-middle-class professions (teachers, doctors, etc) are being pushed into precarity, finance is in turn becoming a solid, even stolid, upper-middle-class profession. Banking is boring now.

When Donald Trump returned to the White House this year, much was made of a “vibe shift” in American finance back to old-school, red-blooded capitalism and its attendant cultural values. A bull market bellowed, and fig leaves of progressivism were blithely abandoned. JP Morgan swapped DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) for DOI (“diversity, opportunity and inclusion”). Deloitte told staff working on US government contracts to remove their pronouns from their email bios. “I feel liberated,” one “top banker” told the FT. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

To be a fly on the wall of that banker’s office during Trump’s tariff shenanigans. Was the freedom to shout slurs across the trading floor worth the biggest stock market fall since Covid? Though the bond market might have disciplined the President into putting a 90-day freeze on most of his tariffs, he still freestyles market-upending proposals in public: a 25% duty on iPhones and 50% on all EU goods, at time of writing, but there’ll be a new batch by the time of your reading. The business world is locked in a perpetual frenzy of second-guessing. These days, “finance is obviously subordinate to politics”, says James*, a finance worker around 30, who I meet in a west London pub one listless Sunday afternoon to get a sense of the modern reality of things.

Our cultural conception of finance is a bit out of date, partly thanks to Industry, the TV series that follows a bunch of young finance guys and gals as they drink, snort, fuck and occasionally trade their way through London. The series’ creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both worked in finance in the early 2010s and have always maintained that the on-screen hedonism they cook up is generally accurate. But James says that in four years in banking, he has “never, ever heard [of] or seen anyone doing drugs in the office”. Even putting aside the fact you’d get “absolutely fucked up” by HR if you were caught, “no amount of coke can make you feel better” if you’re working 100 hours a week, as young finance foot soldiers typically are.

Which is probably just as well: he says that colleagues around 50, who very much lived by the “work hard, play hard” principle in the first decades of their careers, have noticeably more chronic health conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc) than other professionals their age. Instead, finance’s ultra-competitive ethos has made it the ideal host for infection by the wellness craze. People run half-marathons at the weekend, and wear smart watches that track their health data rather than Rolexes.

This is a world almost entirely alien to the one that Jacob Phillips entered in 2000, aged 21. He hadn’t gone to university, and fell into one of the City’s “parasitic” ancillary industries, media monitoring for financial PR firms. It had a “rough-edged, Thatcherite kind of mindset”, he says. There were no meaningful HR processes. It was difficult to fit in without drinking at lunchtime. On Fridays, “it’d be pretty normal for people to be passing a wrap around and popping into the toilet towards the end of the day”. His bosses “were completely open about the fact that they only wanted to employ young people, because you can push them around”.

Finance is still powered by young people pouring their evenings and nights into numbing, repetitive work, but they are not quite as docile about the arrangement as before. In 2021, junior Goldman Sachs employees launched a high-profile campaign to carve out a sliver of guaranteed free time away from the lair of the vampire squid. James, similarly, says that Gen Z staff are “a lot more open to complain to seniors than we ever were”, which helps keep upper management in check even if it does mean his direct underlings are “very whiny” at times. Sarah*, another banker a few years into her career, sees a distinct culture shift with new Gen Z recruits. “They are very good at their jobs,” she says, “but don’t sign up to the narrative that you need to get in before the boss does and leave after.” This, she thinks, is down to there being “less scope to make lots of money over the next 20 years”. If you can get less out, you’ll put less in — it’s not an equation you need a quant for.

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This is the latest chapter in what’s been a deeply generational story. Along with wider cultural shifts, there’s an underappreciated and very specific factor driving finance’s death of largesse: banks, private equity houses and the rest becoming publicly listed companies. Goldman and BlackRock in 1999; Lazard in 2005; Evercore in 2006; Blackstone in 2007; KKR in 2010; Carlyle in 2012; TPG in 2022; CVC in 2024. These listings made a small group of senior partners fantastically wealthy, but invited in far more scrutiny from shareholders and the wider public. Salaries and bonuses have to be justified to outsiders; tightening expense accounts bounce employees from business-class flights to economy.

Essentially, boomers who had their fun in the buoyant Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s decided to cash out at the expense of their juniors. Where have we heard that one before? It’s a mirror of the generational distribution of wealth in society at large — in fact, the dynamics are even more distorted, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. Those who started work by about 2000, and so achieved a degree of seniority before the 2008 crash, are rich rich. Anyone younger is merely very wealthy. The guys in their 50s and 60s “come from a very different world”, says James, and the best anecdotes, like buying more than one Ferrari in a single year, are usually theirs. So why wouldn’t their Zoomer juniors quiet quit? The sadomasochistic contract written down the spine of the industry — work like a dog for me, and one day you’ll be as rich as me — is provably false.

Let’s get this in proportion: no one here is on less than six figures, and if you do well, your salary will probably start with a 2 or 3 by the time you’re 30. But the cost of London property, plus the sky-high cost of everything else, leave psychological scars that embed an “upper middle-class mindset where you are very rational with the money”, says James. “I know people who take home over a million pounds a year and absolutely stress over the temperature at which their flat is set up. If I earned a million this year, my lifestyle wouldn’t change at all.” People, in general, aren’t flashy — what’s the finance bro obsession with outdoorsy brands like Patagonia and Arc’teryx if not a performative disavowal of finery and frippery? And there’s always the axe hanging overhead. “Banking workforces are constantly getting squeezed,” says Sarah, “so there’s concern the money train won’t last forever, which holds people back from spending.”

When Phillips was in the City, he says there was a pervading, “subtle sense that markets rule everything”. He left after five years, in 2006, and has since become a writer and academic. But when he first read the accelerationist writer Nick Land, his mind was taken back to his old career. “It really rang true with this sense there that the market was this strange, complicated, sinister, untameable beast which could ravage anything in its way. You either rode the tiger or you’d be destroyed by the tiger.”

Now, “governments matter”, says James. “What we had in the Nineties and 2000s was an anomaly.” In a funny way, we’ve gone full circle. Before the Thatcherite revolution, finance was a stable, comfortable career. In Liar’s Poker, his book about his years at Salomon Brothers, Lewis meets a minor City grandee who tells him he disapproves of workdays longer than eight hours, because “you then arrive at the office in the morning with the same thoughts you left with late the night before”.

Work patterns are now very different, but finance is, once again, an industry where the overriding attraction is stability rather than possibility. You’ve heard the stats, or a variation on them, before: in 2002, the house price to median earnings ratio in London was 6.9; in 2023 it was 11.9. For day pupils, average private school fees as a percentage of the median national salary have increased from 30.6% in 1999 to 48.2% in 2024. If you want an upper-middle-class life, can you afford not to go into banking, or similar industries like corporate law and consulting? This leads to a vicious cycle — prices go up as London becomes more and more globalized and financialized — and a brain drain, as all the pin-sharp Oxbridge STEM graduates are tempted away from the laboratory. If the government can make a meaningful dent in the housing crisis, and build the Oxford-Cambridge Arc to let loose Britain’s life-science capabilities, maybe there’s hope of all this human capital flowing elsewhere. But as many politicians have found, breaking the tight, wrinkly grip of boomer “stakeholders” is no light task.

James, as we reach the dregs of our Morettis, is candid. “If I was born in our parent’s generation, I would have probably not worked in finance. I enjoy being quite comfortable, having a fat savings buffer, but back then, if a London Zone One flat was £300,000, £200,000, I would’ve happily worked in a general corporate job — maybe even marketing [or] journalism. But because we are where we are today, and how uncertain the next 10, 20 years look like, I want to absolutely max out on income.” It’s hard to blame him, or all the other bright young things in their down-padded gilets streaming through the grey dawn into central London every morning.

*Names have been changed

The Paris La Defense Arena is where, last night, Swift began the European leg of her Eras Tour, which sprouts records and superlatives like Midas makes gold. The 2023 dates made it the first concert tour to ever gross a billion dollars. It’s forecast to double that this year. After sweeping through Asia — where a minor diplomatic incident went down when Singapore offered government subsidies to get regional exclusivity — Swift has now reached the old world. Four shows in Paris and 51 across the continent in total, ending with a five-night run at Wembley Stadium in August. She’s not the only American in town. Both the Eurostar from London and Paris itself ring out with well-projected US accents. Forget the doomy warblings about Washington’s geopolitical ebb: the spring sun is out, the dollar is strong and Europe is America’s playground.

Concertgoers — mostly young, mostly female — are in sparkly dresses, cowboy boots and glitter. The few guys here are dressed down to the point of invisibility; tonight, humanity joins those few species of birds and insects where bright colours are for babes only.

Swift is scheduled to start at eight. Two minutes beforehand, a clock on the giant screen which stretches across the back of the stage counts down — and right on time, we begin. As the arena lights dim, the tens of thousands of swaying smartphone cameras illuminate, like a phosphorescent ocean. Dancers shimmy out trailed by billowing fabric, which they manipulate to form a kind of liquid clam shell. And out of that, like Botticelli’s all-American Venus, emerges Taylor Alison Swift, 34, of West Reading, Pennsylvania, USA.

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Taylor Swift inspires love, dedication and obsessive fandom. In me, she has kindled about a decade and a half of mild but increasing curiosity. There are seven Swift songs I recognise from their titles, and none come after 2014. My musical knowledge of her petered out when she was merely a very big star, and in an era where culture was coherent enough for everyone to absorb a certain level of commercial pop. Then I started seeing her in Bloomberg and the Financial Times, attached to stories about inflation and foreign policy.

Taylor Swift’s current era — dating, it seems, from the pandemic onwards — is out-and-out imperial. She was last year’s best-selling artist worldwide, and the year before that too. Her current relationship, with the puppyish American footballer Travis Kelce, is theorised by the more batshit US conservatives to be an elaborate psyop to boost Joe Biden in this year’s presidential election. The European dates of the Eras Tour are the first after the release of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April. It was not a critical success. “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!” read a review in Paste magazine — anonymous, because writers who criticise Swift can reliably expect online death threats from fans. Nevertheless, upon release it smashed multiple streaming records.

After the opening number, Swift pauses, for half a minute at least, to take in the sound of the crowd. Blown up to a giantess on screen, Swift looks overwhelmed, as if she hasn’t experienced this reaction before. She has, hundreds of times. But each and every member of the audience must be broken free of the billions of dollars of revenue they represent and made to feel seen. After the pause, Swift extends her wrist, as if offering it up to be kissed, and says: “Enchanté.”

The Eras Tour, as its name suggests, cycles through each of Swift’s “eras”, or albums. The various stage setups reference cityscapes, forests and, at one point, a surreal landscape of steel cages sunk into the ground either side of an open highway. Periodically, Swift sinks down a trapdoor in the middle of the stage, into what must be her era-shifting chamber, then remerges, moments later, from an ingenious new position and in a different outfit. I get the sparkly costumes now, because this is very much what Swift goes in for herself. Sparkly hot pants, sparkly ball gown, sparkly miniskirt with sparkly thigh-high boots — even what looks like a sparkly dressing gown. The battalion of dancers go through endless outfit changes too, but no-one’s allowed to sparkle quite like Swift.

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Singing and dancing her way through a typical Eras setlist lasts between three and four hours. Swift began her career writing and performing country songs in Nashville, Tennessee, where music is whittled down to a perfect product. These days, she embraces an opposite but equally American approach: superabundance. Song piles upon song. And every great American genre seems to get a hearing: pop, rock, country, folk, rap, R&B (slow and sultry), R&B (fast and spiky). I almost expect a banger inspired by Washington DC-style hardcore punk.

Not everything works. An hour in, we’ve entered the era of Folklore and Evermore, her pandemic albums. It’s ballad central: wafty and witchy and, to be honest, a bit snoozy. But then we go back in time to 1989 (or 2014, which is when that confusingly named album came out). She launches into “Shake It Off” — one of my precious seven songs — and my subconscious flashes up memories of chugging brilliant blue alcopops in sticky student nightclubs. It’s glorious.

Swift is big in the way that no other modern superstar is. Orders of magnitude bigger. The logarithmic scale could have been invented for her. This bigness manifests in the thousands upon thousands who attend her concerts, and the probable millions that try and fail to get tickets. But out of the many, one — e pluribus, unum, as a teacher might have put it to Swift in an American history class around the turn of the millennium. At one point in the show, Swift compliments the crowd. “I’m making extreme eye contact with everyone; I’m dancing with everyone; you’re so present,” she says. “And it means the world to us as performers.”

Yes, it’s what the pro that she is would and should say. But in the moment, it sounds sincere, or at least well-meaning enough to discourage any attempt to prod at its veracity. For three hours and seven minutes — this ends up being a comparatively brisk performance — Swift assembles her fans, usually only joined up by the spindly limbs of social media, into a physical community. These fans don’t just adore her; they end up adoring each other. Inspired by one of her stray lyrics from 2022, they now make friendship bracelets to trade with strangers at shows.

Truly mass culture in its most tribal form barely exists anymore. The all-consuming influence of the internet has degraded it in two substantial ways. Algorithmically generated feeds on everything from Instagram to Netflix have given us all tastes which are similar but slightly different — amid this torrent of content, it’s harder for youth tribes such as punks or New Romantics to cohere around sets of cultural tenets. And the isolated and antisocial manner in which we consume what these feeds serve up — on our phones, alone — acts as a barrier to shared experience.

But Swift is one of mass culture’s last bastions. And she presents a very good case as to why we should cling on to what’s left of it. She, like few others, can out-muscle the brute force of the algorithm and bring people together to commune around her music — some of which is good, and some of which isn’t, but that’s hardly the point. The point is the ecstatic crowd in front of her.

Her last song is, again, one I don’t know. It’s an up-tempo electropop number with sugar-rush synthesiser lines, and as it plays, we’re dazzled with sparkles, primary colours, fireworks and confetti — all that is good in the world. Swift bows with her band and her dancers, then bows alone. Then she descends, for the final time, into that hole in the stage, to get ready to cast the same spell tomorrow.

The most common interpretation is that the ad is meant to be Draper’s: he co-opts the hippie spirit he encounters to sell a surgery drink. Similarly, the torrent of creativity in Sixties American advertising, as dramatised in Mad Men’s preceding episodes, is usually seen as a more-or-less cynical appropriation of the burgeoning counterculture for commercial ends. But it might not be. The Conquest of Cool, a 1997 book by Thomas Frank, co-founder of The Baffler, makes the case that the liberal revolution came from within the business world as much as outside it. Capitalists embraced “hip”, long-haired dope smokers because they recognised them as fellow fighters against conformity. “Hip,” he says, “became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” This deep identification with hip has persisted, and is the ultimate reason why modern multinationals insist, however implausibly, on branding themselves as progressive revolutionaries.

Fifties America is looked back on as a black-and-white decade: office workers in grey flannel suits commuting, in gas-guzzling, chrome-slathered cars, between hierarchical offices and square suburban homes. And the people who lived it knew it. “By the middle of the Fifties,” says Frank, “talk of conformity, of consumerism, and of the banality of mass-produced culture were routine elements of middle-class American life.”

Advertising exemplified the Fifties funk. In big Madison Avenue agencies, rote formulas were preferred over creativity. Copywriters would work in separate rooms to art directors, sending their text over in pneumatic chutes for illustration. Their output addressed consumers as if they were small children, or disobedient dogs: “You can have a lovelier complexion in 14 days with Palmolive soap, doctors prove!” or “Fast! Fast! Fast relief!” from Anacin aspirin. Detroit’s big three carmakers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, hawked their latest models by naming them things like “Starfire” or giving them space-age doodahs such as “Jet-Trail Tail Lamps”.

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Then everything changed. Doyle Dane Bernbach’s adverts for the Volkswagen Beetle, beginning in 1959, “invented what we might call anti advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism […] to consumerism itself”. They were clean, eye-catching and intelligent. They didn’t talk down to their audience but shared a joke with them — a joke that was usually on other car companies. A tiny photo of the Beetle, an acre of white space, and the slogan “Think Small” — this vehicle would save petrol and get through fewer tyres, because it didn’t have the cruise-ship proportions beloved by domestic brands. Another ad had a picture of the car with the caption: “The ’51 ’52 ’53 ’54 ’55 ’56 ’57 ’58 ’59 ’60 ’61 Volkswagen.” No planned obsolescence from these trusty Teutonic engineers.

By the end of the Sixties, pretty much the entirety of Madison Avenue was converted to the ways of DDB. Clients were toured around agencies’ creative apartments to see the blue jeans and miniskirts of the young staff. The long hippie hair of industry stars was discussed as if it bestowed Samson-like strength in selling. Andrew Kershaw, president of Ogilvy & Mather, insisted in 1970 that he had been a Beatles fan “since before the time they became famous”.

This spirit suffused their output too. Every brand became anti-establishment. “Join the Tool Revolution!” declared the radical wrench-makers at Vaco. Clairol cosmetics announced “The Great Beige-In!” to commemorate the launch of “three psychedelicious beiges frosted for lips and nails”. Oldsmobile started calling their cars “Youngsmobile”. These were not just clumsy pitches at young consumers: by Frank’s reckoning, at least half of all ads in the mid-market magazines Life and Ladies’ Home Journal were “hip” between 1965 and 1970. “Madison Avenue,” he says, “was more interested in speaking like the rebel young than in speaking to them.” Ironically, given the frugal message of DDB’s original VW ads, hip became the perfect way to stimulate consumerism: valorising the young, the cool and the new leads people to buy more stuff, more often.

Contemporary reviews of Frank’s book complained that he was too hard on the hippies, conflating the Leftist politics of the counterculture with the business-friendly fashions and tastes of youth culture in general. But was it really such a reach? In 1964, five years after its first VW ad, DDB produced a commercial for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign: a girl picking, and counting, the petals of a daisy, which morphs into the countdown for a nuclear explosion. It helped Johnson convince the country that his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a war-mongering maniac. The election was a Democrat landslide.

In truth, Goldwater would have fitted right in at DDB. When he accepted the Republican nomination for president, he declared his cause was “to free our people” from suffocating big government and promote “diversity” and “creativity”. Though he lost, he laid the foundation for Ronald Reagan’s libertarian, New Deal-busting brand of republicanism. In The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the historian Gary Gerstle argues that the “neoliberal order” became hegemonic because it offered something for everyone: intoxicating social freedoms for the Left and economic liberalisation for the Right. Hip consumerism wasn’t an oxymoron, but ruthlessly coherent.

Madison Avenue could never declare its revolution won. The charismatic outlaw stuck around, for there were always new things for him to sell to a public that continued to revere him. “We believe in the rebel Sixties,” Frank says, “in the uprising against the humourless ‘establishment’, like we believe in World War II as ‘the good war’.” Such a semi-mystical treatment of the young has continued, too. Writing in 1997, Frank observes the Sixties trope of Boomers being “cynical and savvy about advertising” re-enacted “almost mechanically” about Gen X, who according to one New York Times report had been hardened by “excessive exposure to glad handing salesmanship early in life”. Combing through modern marketing reports on Gen Z throws up the same kind of stuff: “avoid going straight for the sell”, “put values first”, and “speak their language”. A line in a 2018 McKinsey article could be lifted from the lips of Sixties ad man: Gen Z’s “search for authenticity generates greater freedom of expression and greater openness to understanding different kinds of people”.

In 2017, Pepsi released a very bad ad. Kendall Jenner, who has abandoned a modelling shoot to march with diverse protesters carrying generic signs such as “join the conversation”, hands a police officer a can of Pepsi in some supposed moment of anti-establishment subversion. Earlier, a photographer in a hijab scrunches up her work in frustration, then joins the pro-conversation demonstrators as they pass by. Her eyes light up when Kendall whips out her anti-fascist Pepsi: finally, something authentic to capture!

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This kind of message was nothing new for the perennially second-placed soda brand: in the Sixties, it used hip consumerism to try to differentiate itself from Coca-Cola, then an icon of the conservative capitalist establishment. Campaigns for the “Pepsi Generation” showed young people riding motorbikes, or amphibious cars. An ad depicting surfers describes them as “Board members of the Pepsi Generation”. They were held in such high esteem by their creators that one ad man later confessed his guilt about soft drink-fuelled generational conflict: he felt they “contributed to some of the rebelliousness that was going on within the country”. The 2017 commercial, however, was criticised so heavily it was pulled a day after release.

In 1997, Frank could talk about the contradiction of a market-based society that required you to behave at work, but ritually transgress when spending your wages. “Hip and square are now permanently locked together,” he says, “in a self-perpetuating pageant of workplace deference and advertising outrage.” Things feel different a quarter-century later. Though ad agencies still style their campaigns as revolutions, socially progressive causes are accepted to the point where ads such as Pepsi’s 2017 opus can’t even plausibly pretend to shock us. Instead, they veer towards the patronising tone of the Fifties: for a British example, see this summer’s “Maaate” anti-misogyny campaign from Transport for London. Hip has become square. But if hip is how American capitalism understands and explains itself, then its impotency spells trouble. The very first thing the system must be able to sell is itself. Someone get Don Draper out of retirement.

At some point after the angsty vortex of teenagerdom, this flips around. Kids who want to be adults grow into adults who want to be kids. Many young(ish) professionals in their twenties and thirties are “kidults”: they spend their free time and disposable income on experiences such as Bubble Planet, which opened last weekend in London. This 11-room “immersive experience” is filled with giant pink balloons, bouncy inflatable clouds, a hall of mirrors, and an LSD sheet’s worth of colourful projections.

There’s also Dopamine Land, an “interactive sensory museum” with pillow fights and musical tiles, and Ballie Ballerson, where you drink cocktails and flail in ball pits with other consenting adults. The London Transport Museum, ostensibly aimed at children, has offered evening “Permission to Play” openings for grown-ups. Kidults are also propping up the physical toy industry, particularly at the higher end of the market — £150 water guns and £735 Lego kits are a bit out of reach for pocket money. “Disney adults” dedicated to Mickey and friends are such an established subculture that they’ve got their own gift guides.

The reason why adults might want to pretend to be children is obvious: growing up has turned out to be a trap. Buying a home, particularly in a city, is nigh-on impossible. With so many young people stuck in a cut-throat rental market, or even living with their parents, it’s unsurprising that they’re getting married and having children later, if at all. Why not spend the little income that doesn’t go to your Boomer landlord on tranquillising yourself with nostalgia?

At KidZania, in the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, children can explore a miniature city in which they do work-like activities and earn pretend money called kidZos. The professions on offer skew towards what kids think are cool (pilots and firefighters), and those that uphold KidZania’s state security apparatus (spies, police officers and bank guards). The kind of midrange email jobs which most kids will grow up to do are absent. KidZania has adults-only nights too, where you can put yourself in “the driver’s seat of your dream career”. Adults are playing at being kids playing at being adults, because the grown-up futures they used to act out were so much more hopeful than the ones they got.

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Childishness is also rampant in cinema. Marvel’s all-conquering superhero films, numbering 33 and counting, have generated a combined $30 billion at cinemas. The beginnings were inauspicious: the first movie based on a Marvel comic character was 1986’s Howard the Duck, about a duck from outer space. It didn’t do well. Robin Williams voiced Howard for about a week before quitting in disgust. “I can’t do this,” he reportedly said. “I am being handcuffed in order to match the flapping duck’s bill.” But since Iron Man was released in 2008, things have gone rather better, and Marvel has absorbed practically every A-list actor and director into its sprawling, easy-watching empire. (One notable exception is Leonardo DiCaprio, who once warned Timothée Chalamet: “No hard drugs and no superhero movies.”)

After the success of Barbie, the toymaker Mattel is trying to emulate the Marvel empire. We can look forward to Daniel Kaluuya starring as Barney the purple dinosaur; Lena Dunham directing Lily Collins as Polly Pocket; and J.J. Abrams cook up an “emotional and grounded and gritty” take on Hot Wheels, those tiny cars that do loop-the-loops. Mattel executive Kevin McKeon is clear about the intended audience. “We’re leaning into the millennial angst of the property rather than fine-tuning this for kids,” he told The New Yorker, in reference to the Barney project. “It’s really a play for adults.”

Why are so many talented artists debasing themselves like this? It’s not just about money. There has always been money in trashy films. But there used to be some amount of stigma around “serious” people getting involved. The art critic Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, set out the binary: avant-garde art of all mediums was abstract and hard to understand; kitsch, a product of industrial capitalism, could be gulped down effortlessly. “Kitsch’s enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself,” he wrote, and many ambitious artists “will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely”. Hence all the discourse around Barbie: did director Greta Gerwig have her pink, frosted cake and eat it, by making a weird, ironic film about a doll, or did she lose by the very fact of making a corporate-sanctioned film at all?

That the critics squabbled over this shows that any remaining stigma about “selling out” is too partial to be effective. The battle has already been won on a different terrain: pop music. In 2004, a New York Times article by Kelefa Sanneh took a stand against “rockism”. “Rockism,” he wrote, “means idolising the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionising punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.” Old dudes who played “real” instruments like guitars did not have a monopoly on quality.

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The opposite to rockism is “poptimism”: successful music is often very good, the thinking goes, and should be treated as such. Poptimism has largely taken over music criticism. Pitchfork, a website once synonymous with snooty taste, went from reviewing Kylie Minogue as an April Fool’s joke to putting her in its “Best Songs of the 2000s” list. A lot of pop music, Kylie included, is very good, and it’s good that it can be properly appreciated. Poptimism can also apply to children’s art: for example, the Studio Ghibli cartoons. Plays based on My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away are currently running or scheduled to run in London, thanks to demand from adults as much as kids. And why not, when the works in question are brimming with soul and subtlety?

But poptimism comes with a bias towards celebration rather than critique, which obsessive fans of stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift zealously enforce. When one Pitchfork writer only deigned to give Swift’s album Folklore an 8/10, she got death threats. Another poptimist assumption is more sinister: that might is right. If millions of people like something, then who are you to disagree? When anyone, from Martin Scorsese down, suggests that filming people in tights against green screens isn’t the pinnacle of cinema, they get called elitists. It just so happens that going along with this non-elitist conception of quality makes a lot of rich people in Hollywood even richer. People have sleepwalked into arguing that the LA executive is more a man of the people than the struggling indie film director.

There are no kidults without poptimism. You can only jump into a ballpark aged 30 without shame if you’ve been warmed up on Harry Potter reruns. So what’s the alternative? High culture is silly too. Arthouse films generally consist of rich Europeans being sad or poor Europeans being happy. Contemporary art sometimes feels like a practical joke pulled by PhDs on the public.

But at least it preserves your agency. Being a kidult is about more than activities or aesthetics — it is about throwing away responsibility and letting other grown-ups, whether they be events companies or film studios, take control. These grownups are not your parents, and they do not have your best interests at heart. They want your money, and your pliant acceptance of their output.

The subversive beauty of high culture — or simply carving out your own tastes, whatever they are — is that it encourages self-improvement for its own sake. It provides pleasure that is heightened because it is difficult and demands effort. (And gives you a bit of cultural capital to flaunt at friends who might have more money than you.) So stop listening to mum and dad, because you’re an adult with a self to form.

These are not excerpts from an ill-advised Church of England youth outreach programme. These are some of the 250-odd “Lad Commandments”, upon which the blokey media empire LadBible was founded in 2011. Lad culture had passed out of its Nineties pomp by then, but it remained potent. The Sun was still publishing topless models on Page 3. The Inbetweeners had shoved words like “clunge” and “minge” into the public consciousness. “Proper Moist”, a comedy song about girls “walking like Robocop” after a night of lovemaking, reached number 15 on the UK singles chart in 2014.

It was a time when Facebook was filled with teenagers rather than pensioners. I was one of them, sharing the now-antiquated memes — “one does not simply walk into Mordor” — that Elon Musk still finds funny. LadBible’s Facebook posts, which mainly concerned hot women, were ubiquitous. The last item of 2011 is a poll of words for breasts: “melons”, “jugs”, “fun bags”, “barrys”, “tats”, “boobs” and “chebs”. In 2012, one post asks: “What do you think of Miley Cyrus’ Side boob lads?” (Side boobs, being titillating but non-pornographic, were a major preoccupation.) Other features included the self-explanatory “Bumday Mondays” and “Cleavage Thursdays”.

Browsing through those early Facebook posts today is akin to wading through hastily shredded documents in an abandoned embassy. The images don’t load properly; the links direct to a page on its website which reads: “Sorry, this content isn’t available right now.” Around 2015, LadBible cleaned up its act. Co-founder Alexander “Solly” Solomou redefined the lad as “someone who spots a grandma crossing the road with heavy shopping, someone with manners, who is polite, who can be a hero”. He didn’t regret the earlier material but described it as a “learning curve”. Misogyny had become a commercial drag: “We realised that certain things needed to change if we wanted to compete with those guys in the States.”

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This proved to be correct. In December 2021, the controlling LadBible Group floated on the second tier of London’s stock market at £360 million. It now has multiple brands and boasts of “a global audience approaching 1 billion”, of which 40% is female. The focus is on less controversial, more easily monetised content: “Man goes on Antiques Roadshow with Ark of the Covenant from Indiana Jones”; “Seven signs you have a work husband or wife”; a video of a guy trying, and failing, to jump across a canal.

The chauvinistic weekend warrior was not just a limited audience but a shrinking one. After MeToo, lad culture lost its virility. The original lads grew up and settled down. Now they prefer weightlifting to binge drinking, and their wives tick them off if their banter goes too far. Gen Zs use second-hand drag slang — “it’s giving”; “throwing shade” ­— rather than patter like “reem” or “mint”. Lads thought girls were “gagging for it”, but today’s male contestants of Love Island handle the sexual agency of women with Clausewitzian levels of strategic delicacy. Modern footballers are upstanding, campaigning public figures rather than vodka-chugging louts (Jack Grealish the honourable exception). There is, of course, still plenty of grim sexism about, but misogyny no longer has a winking cultural ambassador to egg it on.

In truth, LadBible was driven by a different, more durable male archetype: the hardscrabble Thatcherite entrepreneur. Consider Solomou, a Stockport grammar-school boy who traded clothes on eBay in his early teens. In 2012, while studying business at Leeds University, he came across the embryonic LadBible and bought it from its creator, Oxford Brookes student Alex Partridge, for a reported £300. Arian Kalantari, Solomou’s childhood friend, came on board, and the duo’s knack for clickable content drove a breakneck expansion of the brand’s social media presence.

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In 2018, they took over their competitor Unilad in a distinctly sober bit of manoeuvring. Unilad — a similar proposition to LadBible — was founded by Partridge, too, but he was forced out by his partners, leading to a lengthy legal battle after which the company was ordered to pay him £5 million. As Unilad struggled with debt and tax issues, the pair acquired the £5 million liability from Partridge, helping them swallow their rival outright. (Solomou is now the last man standing: last month, Kalantari left the company to pursue “new challenges and new adventures”.)

Similar commercial realism has spurred LadBible’s high-profile good works. In 2016, it launched a men’s mental health campaign called UOKM8?, which it reprised in 2018 and 2019. (It’s currently involved in Sadiq Khan’s “Maaate” campaign against sexual harassment.) And in 2019, Unilad set up an “illegal” blood bank for gay and bisexual men to protest a now-abolished law banning them from donating unless they refrained from sex. This, from a brand which temporarily shut down in 2012 after a piece remarked: “85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Whatever their industry, blue-chip firms are far more likely to work with media organisations that say men should open up than those that make rape jokes. And a smartened-up LadBible has built a prolific sponsored content operation: it leverages its audience for branded campaigns with the likes of McDonald’s chicken nuggets, John Lewis, Nando’s, Google and Durex (who “came to us to kick start the conversation” around different condom fits).

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Yet it is LadBible’s zeitgeisty mental health drive that is most revealing of its evolution. Brands that sell stuff to men — such as Nivea, Lynx and Gymshark — are now very interested in how those men are feeling. You can even buy a £795 jacket from Frahm which has “don’t keep it buttoned” stitched into the lining. (“Could this jacket help prevent depression?” asked the FT.) For his part, Alex Partridge, who presumably had some role writing or publishing the Lad Commandments, now posts on LinkedIn about his ADHD and #neurodiversity.

Many companies have gone on a similar journey to LadBible. Lynx, for example, used to make adverts about how its deodorant was irresistible to women, a quality touched upon in one particular Lad Commandment: “Thou shall always wear Lynx deodorant, as it is the deodorant which rakes in the pussy.” But as lad culture started crumbling, they enthusiastically began assembling their new ideal consumer: a soft, sensitive geezer who finds it okay to say he’s not okay.

This is a convenient customer to have. For one thing, he is happy to blame his problems on himself. The corporate vision of mental health is distinctly individualist: you’re sad because your brain isn’t quite right, so exercise consumer choice and get online therapy with BetterHelp. The alternative vision — that being miserable might have a lot to do with external things, such as economic rot and a loss of status in a post-patriarchal world — points to collective political action, and maybe higher taxes on those firms that seem so concerned about us. This scenario is clearly less appealing.

Yet while the lad has had his day, something worse might have taken his place. The popularity of Andrew Tate has proved that misogyny, though mostly cleared from the public sphere, is still widespread in young men. The vacuum left by the original LadBible was ripe to be filled. But while Tate is a sexist, he is not a lad — he is an individualist, with a lonely, materialistic vision of alphadom that offers a warped counterpart to the cuddly mental health discourse about working on yourself.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature of lad culture was its camaraderie. What is “bros before hoes” if not an uncouth expression of male bonding? Lads are surrounded by their mates. Tate is surrounded by his Bugattis. Lads bunk off work. Tate sees wealth as the making of the man. How ironic, then, that as it has transformed its brand in the name of profit, LadBible has hemmed far closer to Tate’s view of the world than that of its one-time audience. Behind the beer goggles was always a cold, dead-eyed stare.