For a few brief hours this week it seemed the Prime Minister was, like me, a nap fan, catching 40 winks every now and again in his hectic schedule. It was a glorious moment of nap-rebranding. Apparently, this is another way in which our bombastic leader was just like his idol Winston Churchill. Naps aren’t just for babies and toddlers, the message rang out. No, they can be a power tool for leaders, to help them surge through the day from dawn til midnight.

And then someone in Downing Street panicked and a withering denial was issued by the PM’s spokesman. Naps are for wimps, they might as well have said, not for our guy BoJo. What a wasted opportunity to bond with a sleep-deprived nation, where lack of good quality pillow time is costing us £40bn a year.

Sleep is one of the three most important things humans do, along with eating and drinking. Without these three basics, we quite literally can’t do anything. Our bodies stop functioning properly. So why is sleep the only one people eternally boast about doing without?

Yes: there are clean eating and fasting trends, but anyone who goes for less than one proper meal a day is basically considered a kook by mainstream society, in the same bucket as people who steam their vaginas. No one has ever crafted a political narrative about how little they eat: even freakishly thin celebrities usually claim they consume loads and “have a fast metabolism”.

And does anyone ever show off their bravado by claiming they like to get through the day in a state of chronic dehydration? My wisecracking stepfather habitually claims he never drinks water, because fish poo in it. But even he drinks other fluids without a modicum of shame.

But sleep machismo? It’s everywhere. Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump and Richard Branson have all claimed to need only four hours of sleep. Business “influencers” endlessly exhort us to get up at 5 or even 4am. The latest self-help book phenomenon is the Power Hour which tells us we can get everything we want done if we only get up an hour earlier. Ignoring the fact that what most of us want to do is get an extra hour’s sleep.

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Millions of us are chronically sleep deprived. One in three, according to the NHS, putting us at risk of developing obesity, heart disease and diabetes as well being an all round grumpy sod for half the day. Good sleep makes you happier. It improves your sex drive and your fertility. It can help you get slimmer, wards off a range of health conditions, and even helps boost your immunity. Sleep deprivation has been linked to several air disasters, while the risks of dying in surgery far greater if the medic has not had a proper night’s sleep. Since none of us would want our pilot or surgeon to be sleep deprived, why would we praise it in the men and women making life-and-death decisions in government, and whose errors can kill thousands.

Since the pandemic, millions are getting worse sleep. They may have to get up earlier or stay up later to fit work around caring commitments or home schooling. Sleep may be disrupted by the simple anxiety of this hellish year, or by addictive doom scrolling for news on social media sites. Sleep disruption is also one of the cruel symptoms of Long Covid: the enduring illness many coronavirus patients are now reporting — often with no end in sight.

One simple recommendation made by lots of sleep experts is to practise sleep hygiene by keeping your bedroom exclusively for sleeping: but of course you can’t do that if, like for many younger workers, the bed is the only quiet place to work.

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So this was a moment for the Prime Minister to shout it loud and proud in favour of good sleep. Yes, damn it, I take a nap sometimes, he should have said, hammering his fist down on the Despatch box.

Was it just machismo that prevented this? Or was it a bigger issue? This after all was a week in which rumours circulated of a desire to deregulate Britain’s workplaces and reduce workers’ rights. If the PM made the case that — sometimes — naps make you better at your job, would he come under pressure to make work more flexible for everyone? So that everyone who’d benefit from the flexibility to juggle their working hours and power up with a bit of shut eye could do so? Of course he would.

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He might also have come under pressure from sleep evangelists (well, me, for sure) to make changes to our public health services so the help with sleep is available for every one, especially parents who are struggling. There’s a sound public health case to invest in better sleep for all of us: flexible working schedules; proper advice and support. Perhaps most of all, though, we need an about turn on the anti-nap stigma that sees sleep as a sign of weakness instead of a sign of strength.

Of course, there’s a healthy debate to be had about whether Boris Johnson is a good prime minister. And sure, if he’s just passing out at his desk because he had a kilo of pasta and a bottle of wine for lunch, then questions should be asked. But please, come clean and admit that the spokesperson was wrong to correct the story. The naps happen. They’re a good idea.

It’s a deeply religious project, firmly rooted in the Christian story, conceived and executed by a community of profound faith. So what is it that warms the cockles of my deeply atheist heart? I think it’s the strength of the promise: the coming of hope after a brutal, bitter year. For me, that hope is primarily in the shape of a vaccine being dispensed in hospitals and clinics in every corner of the country.

Is it sacrilegious of me to think of the coming of a vaccine — bringing with it a temporal salvation — as analogous to the coming of Christ? Or is it simply that religious stories work so well precisely because they are the archetypes of so many individual human experiences? I don’t know. But one thing I appreciate about Advent is the way Christianity gives us 24 full days to prepare ourselves for the arrival of hope. After all, if you step out of the dark into the light you will be blinded; you need time to adjust.

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Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly Mackenzie

The Covid-19 crisis is not over. But the vaccine does herald the end of the worst; even if this latest surge were to push us beyond the peak hospitalisations of the spring, at least the fear that this is forever has gone. So, as we navigate the next few difficult months, we need to prepare ourselves to step into the light again. Am I the only one who thinks that will be hard?

Launching the vaccine, Matt Hancock said this was “a day to remember in a year to forget.” A beautiful line, of course — but balderdash. We should not forget; we can’t, even if we wanted to. This year has scarred us and bereaved us. We need to grieve what we have lost. The book that’s been helping me do so is Good Grief: Embracing Life At A Time of Death. It is a memoir of the first half of the year by Catherine Mayer and her mother Anne Mayer Bird, who lost their husbands within five weeks of each other around the beginning of this wretched year.

It would be a stretch to call Catherine a friend, but I know her a little and admire her a lot. I’ve been to the flat where many of the events in this remarkable book played out, above the recording studio where her rockstar husband played and recorded his last music. I’ve met, all too briefly, many of the characters whose deaths she recounts, or who help her, sometimes clumsily, to grieve. But it’s the universality of the experience of loss, not its closeness to me, that sticks.

The book as a whole is a metaphor for grief. It’s jumbled. It skips forward in time and back again. The chapters are themed, but messily so, taking you with them through surges of emotion just like those which hit you unexpectedly after the loss of a loved one, just as you’ve decided you’re going to be ok. Its greatest strength is a series of letters from Anne to her dead husband, with whom she wanted so desperately to share the experience of this dreadful year. Written at intervals during the worst phase of the lockdown, they punctuate the book, acting as a trigger for the reader’s own detailed memories of how it felt, then, to be scared, or worse — scared and alone.

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I’ve been finding it hard to remember much of this year. It blurs. We did the same walk in the same park so many times it’s hard to be clear about what happened when. Even specific trips, like the one time we visited my mother, or an eat-out-to-help-out lunch in my hometown, seem to have an ethereal, faded quality. But without memory, there is no healing. Catherine and Anne’s book is a catalyst for all our memory, and a playbook for how to deal with its darker corners.

There are dead people everywhere in Good Grief, brought to life by the stories Catherine tells of them. Some you’ve even heard of like Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. They are not gloomy spectres haunting the text, but the warm spirits of what Catherine calls the “lovely dead”. Catherine and Anne are both advised to leave the homes they shared with their husbands, to escape the memories. But they do not want to escape the memories: they bring them joy. It reminds me of the lines Shakespeare gives Constance in King John:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty look, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Mourners are told this is pathology. This is how you get stuck in grief, and forget to live. But the central message of Good Grief is the opposite: we live well by doing justice to the lovely dead. We live well by making time and space for grief, making it “welcome,” not trying to suppress it. That is how we will do justice to this year, as well: not by pushing our grief away, but by making space for it.

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Unless you are the luckiest person in the country, you have lost something this year. Your freedom. Your peace of mind. Your watercooler moments. Your sense of smell. Your favourite pint. Your club nights. Your income. Your security. Your prospects. Your university place. The list is endless. And our feelings of loss will not go away simply because the experience has ended: they need to be discussed, and processed, and dealt with.

Good Grief helped me to see that leaning into grief is not self-indulgent. Experiencing your loss is the best way to understand what you had; it’s even a way to relive the joy of what was. The dead, of course, can only return in memory. The same is not true of the opportunities to create new memories that we lost in this catastrophe, of course. But it is worth spending time with your grief this winter to help you work out what you want back. Will you keep up the volunteering or the zoom calls with your family? Will you return to the commute? Will you join a campaign for a living wage? For changes to local government funding? Will you eat differently? Will you spend more time in the park? No-one could come through a crucible like 2020 unchanged. How has it changed you?

Since we’ve been told to celebrate Christmas as little as we can, now seems like the moment to ask that question and start to find the answer. Let grief fill up the room, if only for a few hours. Let it walk up and down with you, and see what it says. Matt Hancock got it wrong: this is not a year to forget, but to remember. We will be best prepared for the dawn if we allow ourselves to experience the darkness which precedes it.

The message is simple: My side is allowed to have double standards. My opponents are not.

This level of political and intellectual contortion may be entertaining to watch, but it has serious implications. Slowly and steadily the party activists and ministers who peddle this line are contorting the very concept of political independence out of existence. Alex Allan, who wrote the report into Priti Patel’s behaviour, was known as the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards. His departure suggests there is no place for independence in this Number 10.

We have reached a level of partisanship in our politics that makes it truly hard for many of our political leaders to even conceptualise what it might mean to be independent. It’s the politics of medieval warlords: unless you are on our side, you must be our sworn enemy. And while it is the Right putting this into practice, it is the Left which has created an entire intellectual architecture for this mode of thinking in the shape of critical theory. When deployed in the service of political movements, it means: you’re a trans ally or a transphobe, you’re an Anti Racist or you’re a racist, you believe in Modern Monetary Theory or you’re a neoliberal capitalist sellout.

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It is astonishing to me to see formerly serious, sensible Conservatives getting sucked into this vortex, and yet in defence of Priti Patel they have. She only shouted at civil servants in the first place because they refused to do her bidding as part of a deep state conspiracy against Brexit, apparently. Alex Allan’s report is not independent, it’s a continued effort in the war against Brexit: senior civil servants trying to take down a popular minister securing a popular agenda.

This is what these Priti-protectors want us to believe: there is a Deep State. It is against Brexit. Civil servants are strongly against doing popular policies because they want to be despised. Civil servants who work in the Home Office, dedicating their lives to policing and security, are firmly opposed to Priti Patel’s agenda to increase policing and tighten security law. The Deep State has decided, at the eleventh hour, to make a final attempt to sabotage Brexit by trying to remove a Minister (who has very little to do with Brexit), while leaving the Prime Minister (who led the Brexit campaign) well alone.

It reminds me of the old Sherlock Holmes adage: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth.” Flip it around: to convince yourself that something implausible is true, you have to first convince yourself that the more plausible alternatives are, in fact, impossible. That’s the magic trick partisanship has pulled off.

It has made it feel literally impossible to believe that Alex Allan is a genuinely independent mind, giving an unbiased opinion. It is impossible to believe that a civil servant who messes up or gets confused or makes a mistake is just a bit useless. And even more impossible to believe that a civil servant who says a policy won’t work is giving accurate, independent advice, instead of pursuing a partisan agenda.

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There are some civil servants who don’t particularly like this government: of course. But they don’t stay to sabotage. If they really care, but don’t want to lose the pension, they disappear from the centre and trot off to work on eggs policy or widget regulation for a few years. The vast majority just carry on, and they take their job as loyal servants to their minister extremely seriously. I know this because I worked in a government — the coalition — where there was a Deputy Prime Minister whose very job description included “stopping the Prime Minister and his Cabinet from doing stuff we disagree with”.

That coalition did many things that the Deep State is supposedly against, and for once it had a democratically legitimate ally right in the heart of Whitehall. If the Deep State existed, it would have leveraged us. And yet in five years, our overwhelming experience in engaging with departments was their utter loyalty to their minister, and their minister’s choices, however loopy. In five years there was literally one occasion when we received covert information from a department: from a very junior civil servant who happened to be friends with someone in the DPM’s office. It wasn’t even very useful.

Our civil service is not perfect, but it is independent of politics and loyal to the government of the day. But it isn’t enough for me to believe that. It needs to be believed by ministers, by Parliament, and by the public too. Independence that used to be held up as one of the great accomplishments of the British state but now it is viewed with scepticism by partisans who believe we must all take sides. Partisans who cannot comprehend how to not take sides, or believe failing to do so is collaborating with the enemy. Partisans who say they would never be friends with an MP on the Conservative benches, or believe going on a Pride march is equivalent to trying to overthrow the government.

Independence used to be an aspirational word: while it was never a roaring commercial success, the Independent newspaper captured the spirit of what it meant to be independent: free from fear or favour. The fortunes of the concept have been mirrored by the publication: now it only exists online and it no longer has an independent agenda but mostly parrots the platitudes of the new Left.

We need to fight back against the idea that independence is mindlessness. It is, in fact, the only way to be open minded. Partisans hate to be reminded of the evidence, chronicled in The Political Brain, that taking a political side alters your brain so that you respond emotionally, instead of logically, to facts. To remain independent is to remain flexible, to be free to respond to new evidence and new ideas.

The real danger to the good governance of the nation is not too many independent civil servants, or some imagined Deep State. It is those who have taken sides, closed their minds, and granted themselves the freedom to make, with impunity, the mistakes for which they want their enemies punished.

I understand that when you’re doing the most important job of your life, feelings run high. You can have more impact in a day in Number 10 than in decades in most jobs. So much is at stake that sometimes you have to go to the mattresses to get what you need. So there will be arguments. There will be anger. There will be rivalries. In a high-functioning organisation, those tensions are the grit in the oyster that helps to get the job done. But today’s Downing Street is all grit and no oyster.

This matters, as if we needed reminding, because there is work to be done. We are in the midst of a global pandemic and staring recession and large scale unemployment in the face. We are on the brink of Brexit, the biggest structural disruption to our trading relationships in generations. The longest political union in the world’s history, between England and Scotland, is fracturing before our eyes. And those are just the small problems.

Climate change. Our ageing population. Building solidarity between increasingly diverse citizens. Technology firms that stretch our understanding of the relationship between state and corporation. Global power shifting eastward… Every moment spent bitching about colleagues is a moment wasted.

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Downing Street should be a serious place. It should attract and retain serious people. I don’t care if the Prime Minister’s chief of staff once had a job as a chicken: everyone has to start their career somewhere. I care if he — or she — has a theory of change, an understanding of how they might make a difference in that job to the wall of policy problems we face. I expect them to be wise enough to understand what has been tried before, confident enough to try something new, but humble enough to learn from what others figured out first. All we get from the current crop is the arrogant assumption that their personal brilliance is enough to conquer all difficulties, an assumption made even more laughable by the fact that they can’t even get the person sitting at the next desk to like them.

Almost everyone in Number 10 at the moment is a campaigner at heart. There should always be campaigners in the Prime Minister’s office. People who are good at the game of politics. They are the people who keep the ship afloat. But they are not the people who choose the destination or the route. You also need a cadre of thinkers and deliverers, who will make the difference to what the government does, not just what the government says. Without them, politics is just a parlour game — and it is no wonder it descends into briefings, counter-briefings and subterfuge.

In her book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, Isabel Hardman argues there are systemic problems with candidate selection, and the way people get promoted to high office. The system is set up to choose and elevate people with a set of skills that isn’t actually what a modern democracy needs. I agree with every word she says. And there are similar systemic problems that mean we get the Wrong Political Advisers too. Fiona Hill, who served as Theresa May’s joint chief of staff, gave evidence this week to Parliament’s Public Administration Committee in which she admitted it was nearly impossible to persuade anyone good to go and work for the Prime Minister’s office when she was there.

We assume that Boris is just too tribal to offer a job to anyone outside the Vote Leave camp. But it’s also possible that no one else would take the job, given the conditions on which it would be offered. As a friend who considered a senior cabinet office role put it to me: “They’ve made it clear they don’t want to be helped, so what’s the point in expending any personal political capital on them?”

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We live in challenging times. We are told that millennials are queuing up to find jobs with purpose. So public service ought to be an attractive option for talented people who want to make a difference. But what do you get for giving up a few years of your life to the Downing Street machine? Mediocre pay. Terrible working conditions. The knowledge your boss — the PM — might quit or be ousted any moment. The constant fear that colleagues will be briefing the press about your mistakes, or leaking secrets of your personal life to undermine you.

One of my colleagues in Number 10 put his name to a briefing which happened to note that the age of consent was lower in some other countries. It explicitly ruled out lowering the age of consent in the UK. Nevertheless, a Conservative colleague leaked the briefing and my friend was named in the Daily Mail as little better than an advocate for paedophilia. Who would want to work in a toxic environment like that, where you can trust no one?

The very virtuous might put up with it out of duty and purpose. You ought to get a positive feedback loop: as the government demonstrates its impact, more and more people want to be part of it. Boris’ majority government could have switched us into this mode. Unfortunately, we are still stuck in the negative feedback loop that started under Mrs May. The worse the government is, the fewer good people want to get involved. Sacrifice my comfortable life to end homelessness? Maybe. Sacrifice it to spanner about, accomplishing nothing? No thanks.

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So we end up with the Wrong Political Advisers — the ones with few options, less experience, and limited social skills — working for the Wrong Politicians. It’s hardly a surprise that government has been such a basket case for so long.

The news that Dominic Cummings is off does give Boris Johnson the chance to press the reset button. A Prime Minister with an agenda, and a commitment to delivering on it, ought to be able to attract talented people who want to keep their heads below the parapet and do the job. He simply needs to make Downing Street a healthy place to work. Recruit doers, not ranters. Build a culture of trust and compassion between colleagues. Make sure people go home on time, and see their family. Give them confidence their jobs will last for years, not weeks. Stop fighting and start getting things done.

Later today, I’ll give evidence to Parliament’s Public Administration Committee on the operations of Number 10. It will focus on the usual controversies and challenges faced in that poky building. But as I reflect on my five years there I can’t help but conclude that the worst thing about Downing Street is its addictive power.

Politics and elections are bad enough: I was once told by a campaign organiser that blisters on my feet weren’t a reason to sit down. I should only stop delivering leaflets if they started to bleed, and only then in order to apply plasters. But once you’re working for the Prime Minister, fatigue becomes a badge of honour.

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You don’t need to look far to see leaders boasting about their inhuman resilience. Margaret Thatcher claimed to only need four hours sleep. Donald Trump has done the same. When Dominic Cummings advertised for new special advisers, he made clear they’d not see their friends or daylight if they took the job. Boris Johnson claimed for two weeks he was working through his Covid symptoms, because sickness — like sleep — is for wimps. It was only once he was admitted to intensive care that they admitted someone else might need to take the tiller of government for a couple of days.

Did they learn from that? Of course not. A couple of weeks ago,  minister Nadhim Zahawi was challenged on Sky News about the performance of Dido Harding, the beleaguered boss of the beleaguered test and trace system. He leapt to her defence and claimed she is working 19 hours a day, seven days a week. We can only hope he’s mistaken, because if this is true she might as well be running the place drunk.

The impact of chronic sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is profound. The scientific literature shows people think slower, and — if pressed for time — make more mistakes. Their memory gets foggier. They learn less easily. And they have “difficulty determining the scope of a problem due to changing or distracting information”, a phrase which sounds like it came from a public inquiry report into the Test and Trace shambles.

The AA estimates that up to 25% of fatal accidents are caused by motorists falling asleep at the wheel. If you’re driving an organisation, rather than a car, you’re running the same risk. “Working 19 hours a day” is a sure fire way to make yourself worse at your job. But what’s madder: doing it, or seeing someone else do it and being impressed? Zahawi clearly thought he was complimenting his fellow minister for her dedication and self-discipline. He — and most of the nation, it seems — has fallen prey to a collective delusion that working yourself to exhaustion is the way to look tough. It’s a rotten mix of machismo and masochism.

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It’s not just politics. Step into the swamp of LinkedIn and you’ll find endless “hack your body” mentors instructing you to get up at 4am. This is wakefulness inflation: 20 years ago Robin Sharma created the “5am club”, advocating people get up at this ungodly hour for 20 minutes learning, 20 minutes planning, and 20 minutes exercise before anyone else woke up. But once 5am was popular, you had to be in the 4.30am club to be special. And then 4am. Soon you’ll have to get up before you go to bed in order to keep up with the business influencers.

The absurdity of this is that it’s not about what you’re achieving. It’s about showing that you’re working more than other people. You want to be the first in the office and the last to leave because it looks good. The most depressing part is that it often works to help individuals get ahead. So many bosses are rubbish at measuring performance, so they measure who’s there instead. Men end up working more hours than women, because they’re less likely to have caring responsibilities. They’re more likely to be able to put their hands up for the overtime. And that drives the gender pay gap even wider.

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But if our work addiction is toxic when it comes to overtime, it’s even worse when it comes to sick leave. If you want proof of our cultish delusion, spend half an hour watching adverts for cold and flu remedies on YouTube.

You know the routine. Person feels ill. Person drinks medicine. Person gives a brilliant presentation / performs brilliantly on stage / plays enthusiastically with their children at a crowded activity centre. The message is obvious: take our pills and you can carry on with your life, regardless of how far you spread your disease by doing so. There was even a postie coughing all over the letters and parcels before he delivered them. After all, nothing says hard work like pushing disease vectors through people’s front doors.

In fact, a decade ago when Benylin launched an advert encouraging people to stay at home when sick the Federation of Small Businesses reacted with horror and disgust. “These terms make a mockery of how serious it is not to turn up to work,” said the boss of the FSB. “If people have real flu then of course they should take the day off, but if it is just a cold then they should not.”

Are they stupid? It’s completely counterproductive to tell people to come to work while infectious, even with a cold: you’ll just end up with the whole team falling ill. And yet the official representative body of small business says that’s precisely what we should do.

The work-til-you-drop culture is reflected in our ludicrous sick pay system, which only requires your employer to pay you if you’ve been off for more than three days. Even then, it’s less than £100 a week. So — unless your employer is more generous — you basically have to show up for work unless you physically can’t. Which means people trek their viruses and bacteria to work and we end up losing more — instead of fewer — days to ill health. And that’s before you even count the productivity loss of wooly-headed snifflers trying and failing to do their jobs when they should be at home with Netflix and a duvet.

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If Covid-19 has taught us anything, surely it has taught us to change these rules? And change the culture that underpins them. When you’re sick, you should stay at home. When you’re tired, you should sleep. Sick people and exhausted people are bad managers, they’re bad leaders, and they’re bad colleagues.

In the early days of the pandemic, the money guru Martin Lewis was presenting a live TV show about how to manage your finances during the crisis. At one point, he had to cough. He shocked his audience by observing that it was suddenly less socially acceptable to cough on live TV public than to fart. But I’ve realised this is a social stigma we should stick with. I’m no particular fan of flatulence, but what harm does it do? It’s coughs that spread disease. We shouldn’t be shaming people for staying in bed to cough and sneeze. We should be shaming them for taking their coughs and sneezes out with them to the office, the shop, the factory, and the bus. Freedom for farts. Stigma for sneezes. It’s the way forward.

It’s been more than 200 years since Welsh mill owner and labour rights activist Robert Owen argued that what we need each day is simple: eight hours labour, eight hours recreation and eight hours rest. Those 200 years haven’t changed human nature. If you’re working more than Owen prescribed, chances are you’re not being a strong and powerful leader. You’re taking work away from others who need it and undermining your own performance.

Being at work is not a virtue in and of itself. Being productive is what matters. When we see a crisis of bad management like Test, Trace and Isolate, we shouldn’t ask why the team aren’t working harder. We should ask why they are working so much. You cannot run a marathon at a sprinter’s pace. Whether it’s senior management or a junior worker, in public services or private enterprise, we will get more from our people if we ask them for a little less.

Is this a symbol of growing political corruption? The takeover of an independent civil service by a cadre of shadowy operatives, appointed through nepotistic networks and accountable to no-one? Is it a growing army of true democrats helping ministers assert authority over the unaccountable civil service and unresponsive deep state? Or is it simply a defence mechanism against 24/7 media and the growing demands of tribal politics? How should ministers access expertise and political advice in a modern democracy? Who should walk in the corridors of power? Who should speak for ministers, and under what veil of anonymity?

You might expect to find answers to some of these questions in a book entitled The Secret Life of Special Advisers, out today. But the latest offering from Peter Cardwell is not an attempt to expose misdeeds or solve constitutional dilemmas.

Instead, it is a delightful, charming, witty political memoir from a delightful, charming, witty man. Peter has seen the inside enough ministerial offices and cars to have a lifetime’s worth of dinner party anecdotes about who said what to whom, and when, and why. Conveniently, given that dinner parties are banned for the foreseeable, this book allows you to make Peter your virtual guest. Just read it with a glass of wine and a takeaway.

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The book has an endearing cast of affable characters, many of them household appliances: a mini-fridge, James Brokenshire’s four ovens, and the CCHQ toaster, which apparently couldn’t be used before 7.30am on pain of political excommunication. Peter’s good nature enables him to find nice things to say about almost everyone. Characters I worked with and despised for their Machiavellian ruthlessness are somehow sublimated into feisty, friendly chappies, just doing their bit for Queen and country. For example: it is hard to find anyone in Westminster with kind words to say about Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s erstwhile joint chief of staff. But Peter has kind words for her. It’s almost bizarre when, in a later chapter, he swerves off for a paragraph to be rude about Emily Thornberry. Was that his evil twin typing, I wondered?

Only on the final page does Peter permit himself a meta-level reflection about the purpose and value of spads. “I concluded the following,” he writes. “SpAds are something we need in UK politics. They help government function as it should.”

Well, I’m pretty certain I agree with that. But I was left craving more depth, more substance and more analysis.

Take Windrush, one of the greatest scandals of governance in my political lifetime. Special adviser-led policy on the “hostile environment”, to drive illegal immigrants out of supposedly comfortable obscurity, was the catalyst for gross injustice. The Wendy Williams review on lessons learned from the crisis shows that the mistakes were long-lived and deeply entrenched in a problematic culture within the Home Office.

So when I’m reading an insider account, I don’t really want to know that Amber Rudd told her team she was worried about Windrush via Whatsapp, or that one of Peter’s colleagues got told off for getting a haircut. I want someone who was inside — even briefly — to give me a sense of what he really thinks. How did it happen? What could have made it better? How should political accountability work, when a minister is hung out to dry for the policies of their predecessor? These pages will leave you none the wiser.

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Tabloid fake law is not the only fake law

By Adam King

Those who are suspicious of spads will be angered by this book. The secret life it depicts is one where jobs go to friends and friends of friends; where advisers eat avocado toast with their Minister and carry emergency chocolate bars; where Players Bar and the Corinthia Hotel are second and third homes; where political negotiations and stock market prices hang on a misjudged Whatsapp message or a hilariously mislaid ministerial box. It’s a light-hearted world full of people trying to do their best and then leaking the story because they had “too many shandies”.

Maybe this is just the raconteur’s art: spinning a yarn because it makes for an easy read and everyone likes a bit of gossip. Marie Le Conte wrote a book — Haven’t You Heard — based on that premise alone. If anecdotes are all the publishers will print then who can blame a lowly author for obliging? But my lingering fear is that politics — and spaddery in particular — really has become this threadbare.

We’ve expanded to more than 100 political appointees and ended up with less heft than we had with a dozen great minds in No10. David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, who served Thatcher, were then and have remained some of the great conservative minds of their generation. Michael Barber and Geoff Mulgan in the Blair years: profound strategic and operational thinkers who brought transforming zeal to the heart of Whitehall. I will believe Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza are this generation’s equivalent when I see them accomplish something other than a campaign victory.

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A Halloween ghost story

By Graeme Archer

Special advisers used to be special. But now there are more than a hundred, the word has been diluted to homeopathic levels. We should stop using it and reform the whole concept. We need to attract serious talent into our government, and these half-baked jobs no longer make sense. Too political for most experts. Too risky for anyone with domestic responsibilities: you can lose your job overnight and even have to pay tax on your redundancy settlement. It’s a job that only really works for people who love the game and the gossip of politics more than they love their family, their friends or their financial health.

Instead of spads, Ministers need to be able to recruit a wide range of experts into their department, to drive through the agenda in their manifestos. These need to be serious jobs for senior people, not kids treating politics like a virtual reality Game of Thrones. Dominic Cummings’s famed open recruitment process was the precise opposite of what we need: a focus on mavericks with no interests beyond work, and a paucity of social skills. Instead we need to offer stable jobs, with work life balance, decent pay and no requirement to eat avocado on toast unless you really want to.

Everyone is looking at Scotland. The coronavirus crisis has given Nicola Sturgeon’s government renewed purpose, increased visibility, new chances to differentiate from England and the opportunity to boast about its supposed superiority. Scotland likes nothing more than to complain about mistreatment by its English overlords. It’s no surprise that the polls now show a remarkable majority for an independent future for Scotland.

But all this excitement about England’s northern border is distracting us from what is happening on its western one. Exactly the same political forces are conspiring to boost the Welsh government and with it the legitimacy of the campaign for Wales’ freedom. Don’t get me wrong: Welsh nationalism is still a minority sport. But polls in the last month or two suggest now a third of voters would choose independence in a referendum tomorrow. 46% of under-25s say they want Wales to be an independent country.

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Wales has never been a nation

By Francis Young

Perhaps you need to know more about Welsh history to understand how truly astonishing this is. In particular, you need to understand that Wales has never actually been an independent country. Coronavirus is conjuring a modern nation state from the mists of myth and fantasy.

The Welsh are a people, no question: a people with a language, a culture and a heritage. But what are their lands? The Welsh (and the Cornish) are, in fact, the original British, driven west by the Anglo Saxon invasions that followed the departure of the Roman Empire from these shores. The Welsh word Cymru, used from the seventh century, means the land of the Cymry — it refers not just to the residents of the western part of the British Isles but also to the men of the North of England. And the English word Wales, similarly, was originally used to mean simply foreigner — a reference to any of the non-Anglo Saxon peoples of these islands.

The area now governed by the Welsh Senedd was, in medieval times, a set of warring principalities. The ruler of the strongest of those was known as Tywysog Cymru: ruler, or prince, of the Welsh. But that didn’t give him power or hegemony over the other principalities. The closest a Tywysog — cognate of the Irish word Taoiseach — ever came to ruling the whole of modern Wales was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, who secured the rule of Gwynedd from his uncle Owain and brother Dafydd in 1255. By 1267, he dominated modern-day Clwyd, Powys and Ceredigion.

But Pembrokeshire, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire — the whole of south and south-west Wales — remained under the rule of the Marcher Barons. And that was the peak of his power. In 1276, Edward I declared Llywelyn a rebel and marched a huge army against him. Llywelyn lost control of everything but Gwynedd, and after a brief resurgence of power in 1282, he was killed at Builth Wells. Llywelyn was, at best, the Temporary Prince of Part of Wales.

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Who do the English think they are?

By Razib Khan

Owain Glyndŵr was another great hero of Wales and the leader of a 15th-century rebellion against the English. He was immortalised as Glendower in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. No one knows when or how he died because he simply disappeared, possibly living out his final years in disguise at his daughter’s house. So he has a place in Welsh myth as a kind of Arthurian-style once and future king. Yet even this great leader was not a Prince of Wales as we might imagine it.

Partly that’s because Wales in the 1400s was so integrated with England. The Tudor dynasty itself proclaimed its Welsh origins. There were hundreds of Welsh archers who served at Agincourt. Glyndŵr himself was a Welsh-born nobleman, but he operated as part of an Anglo-Welsh elite that operated seamlessly across the modern border. He was apprenticed in London as a lawyer, and served extensively in the English army. It’s possible he served as a squire to Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV.

Glyndŵr went home to declare himself Prince of Powys in 1400 over a border dispute with a neighbour, Baron Grey de Ruthin, who had seized territory in the north of Powys. The English king had not intervened to settle the dispute. So Glyndŵr set about a rebellion, known in Wales as the Last War of Independence.

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Magna Carta proves the English aren't exceptional

By Polly Mackenzie

My interpretation is that independence wasn’t quite what Glyndŵr had in mind. In 1405, he negotiated the “Tripartite Indenture” with Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland against Henry IV. The Indenture agreed to divide England and Wales among the three of them. Wales would extend as far as the rivers Severn and Mersey, including great swathes of modern England: Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire. Mortimer would take southern England, and Percy the North. The implication is that Glyndŵr sought to maximise his territory, and to eliminate the threat of a powerful, united England. That’s not quite the same as wanting independence for a romanticised Welsh people in their native homeland.

Glyndŵr was defeated and disappeared. His plans for an uber-Wales that was united, extensive, and self-governing faded into history. That’s why I’ve never before imagined that this never-quite-a-country could ever become an independent, modern nation state. What would hold it together? As the global West becomes ever more diverse, and international migration grows exponentially, the era of self-determination on the basis of an ethnic identity is over. I believed that the logic of a federal structure would hold Wales permanently in the union: local freedom within the protective embrace of a larger country.

Only now, as Cardiff’s leadership effectively erects a land border down Offa’s dyke, and bans the English from entering, does it seem a possibility. Perhaps the deepest irony is that among the highest support for Welsh independence is in the south west of the country: Pembrokeshire. But it is also one of the parts of Wales that never even fell to Llywelyn: it has never been part of a sovereign “Wales”.

Wales may be a generation behind Scotland in its journey toward independence. But if the union starts to crumble; if the logic of Brexit drives us toward a united Ireland; if Scotland paves the way with an exit out of our union and into the European one; then Welsh independence will become an inevitability. Perhaps a thousand years later than expected, the nation of Wales will finally come into existence.

King John is reluctant to accept the idea that the monarch should be subject to the rule of law, and he believes God — at least in the form of Pope Innocent — is on his side. But John is at an impasse. He cannot defeat the barons, who now hold London. And Pope Innocent is far away.

The worst clause in Magna Carta, from John’s perspective, is the one which gives authority to 24 Barons to adjudicate disputes, and overrule the king if they believe he is breaking the law — known to us as “Security Clause”, or Clause 61. So, John pulls off one last trick: he attaches his seal to the document before the barons have chosen their 24 names. The chance to name them in writing is gone, and by the time John’s son Henry III re-issues Magna Carta in November 1216, after his father’s death, that crucial clause is gone. Yes: the king is subject to the law in theory. But there is no mechanism to enforce that law.

Despite its flaws, we British love Magna Carta. But what if John, who reignited the civil war by trying to flout its restrictions almost immediately, had never agreed to it?

The barons hated their king. The medieval chronicler Matthew Paris gave a good sense of the esteem in which the monarch was held when he wrote upon his death in October 1216: “Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of John.” John’s greatest predilections were for arbitrary justice and punitive taxation, much of which might have been forgiven if he hadn’t also had a remarkable ability to lose the expensive wars on which he embarked.

He lost all the territory in France that his father, Henry II, had conquered, and when he attempted to retake those lands in the Anglo-French War of 1213-14, he was comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Bouvines in July 1214. The barons, who had been taxed through the nose to pay for this war, were furious. It is hard to overstate their determination to bring the king under the rule of law.

To do so they forged allegiances with Alexander II, King of Scotland, and Llewelyn the Great, the Welsh Prince, and both rulers took up arms against John — despite the fact that each was married to one of his daughters.

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By Peter Franklin

If John had refused to agree to Magna Carta, the rebellion would have continued, and the determination to shift the balance of power against the monarch would have deepened still further. John had castles, and armies — largely of French mercenaries — but with Alexander to the north, and Llewelyn to the west, he was in trouble. Llewelyn’s wife Joan had already told her father in 1212 that he was likely to be killed by the Welsh if he tried to take their lands. So it is not hard to imagine the assassination, or death in battle, of the king, if the war had continued.

You might argue that, given John died of dysentery the following year anyway, history would have plotted a very similar course. Prior to his death, half the barons had turned to Prince Louis of France as an alternate monarch, and invited him to invade, which he did. When John died, allegiances shifted to Prince Henry, John’s nine-year old son, as he looked easier to control than an ambitious French prince. In the end Louis had to be bribed to give up his claim and go home, becoming King Louis VIII of France the following decade.

But without a legal declaration of Magna Carta, I believe history would have played out very differently. The terms of peace treaties are settled by power. With John dead and only a boy prince to turn to, the barons would never have dropped their demand for that crucial legal power: the right to overrule the king. This would have made us unique across Europe, effectively giving us a constitutional monarchy 400 years early.

First: this would have put us at odds with the most powerful man in Europe, Pope Innocent III. Innocent issued a papal bull annulling even the watered-down Magna Carta: he condemned it as “illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people”, and declared it “null, and void of all validity for ever”. He would have been horrified by the complete version — as would Prince Louis, who I doubt would have taken up the invitation to invade if it had come at such a cost.

As Henry VIII discovered 300 years later, disagreeing with the Pope is rather a slippery slope. If he’s wrong, why agree with anything inconvenient about the hegemony of the Catholic church? Why have a king at all, even one you can control, if you can just agree the laws among yourselves?

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By Suzannah Lipscomb

Those 24 barons could have formed a different way of running the state — similar, perhaps to the system developed by the Swiss Confederacy a hundred or so years later. An oligarchy of the great families, each with their own dominion, and an Extra-Magna Carta to take the rule of law to an even higher level. Llewelyn and Alexander might have joined as equals, or partners. Instead of the nation of England dominating these islands, we might have seen England fragment to a loose alliance between micro-nations like Northumbria, Cornwall, Mercia and Yorkshire, living largely peaceably with the other small nations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

If that sounds outlandish, remember that most of Europe was made of tiny states for the first 800 years of the last millennium. Of course, the Holy Roman Empire brought many nations — including the Swiss confederacy — under its orbit, but the countries it comprised still existed, and were small. A confederated realm of German princedoms existed until 1871, when it united as a nation-state. The unification of Italy’s city-states and princedoms was completed in 1861. France consolidated earlier, but its territorial history remains immensely complex, including unification with Brittany, Burgundy and Savoy, and various degrees of autonomy in more remote regions. England didn’t have to be England.

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Would the British confederacy have been as ambitious in its colonial ambitions? It seems unlikely. The baronial oligarchy would have been established as a direct result of failed attempts at territorial expansion in France; it seems likely they would have given up on expensive wars at least for a time, not least because any attempt to take their pioneering system of government across the channel might have brought papal authority down upon them. Simply defending their shores, and ironing out the inevitable inter-baronial disputes, would have been the priority.

In our national myth, we think of England as manifest destiny: it’s there in the Arthurian legend. The formation of Albion, as John Hurt endlessly intoned in BBC adaptation of Merlin a decade ago. It’s King Alfred’s tireless goal in the Last Kingdom series, adapted from Bernard Cornwell’s novels about a Viking warrior who fights alongside the West Saxon king.

But the reality is that England is too big for these islands. Its size is what makes the Union impossible. England has about 56 million inhabitants, 84% of the UK’s population, and 78% of all those living in the British Isles, including the Republic of Ireland. We cannot have an English Parliament, because it would so absurdly dominate the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish equivalents. And that leaves the English with a sense of national identity that has been sold in myth and legend for 800 years, but no government of their own.

If the British confederacy had been founded back in 1215, it might have unified like Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century. But it would have been a partnership of many equals, instead of a single giant state setting out to dominate its smaller neighbours. England might not be England. But, unlike our current, fracturing union, my hypothetical Union of the British Isles might have a chance of remaining united. It might even have stayed in the European Union.

I am angry. And I’m pretty sure I am not alone.

The proximate cause of my anger is the ludicrous non-quarantine quarantine to which my family is currently subjected, after a brief trip to France. It’s not that I object to making a sacrifice for public health. It’s that I’m pretty sure, from the way they’ve gone about things, that the Government has absolutely no interest in whether I break the rules or not. There was no information or signage at the Channel crossing, and at no point has anyone told me what the rules are. I got more information from a twitter quiz in the Telegraph than I did from our government.

In this latest phase of Covid-restrictions, we’ve gone for full-throttle half-arsed-ness. Wear a face mask, but don’t worry, we won’t check and no one will enforce it. Go to school, and if you don’t we’ll fine you, except we probably won’t because headteachers won’t bother reporting you. Do a quarantine, but you can still go to the supermarket, only once, and don’t worry no one will check. Submit your details for Test and Trace, but we probably won’t get around to calling you or telling you what to do.

This is much more than a recipe for confusion. It’s a clear path towards growing resentment and division between citizens, who find themselves surrounded by Other People behaving badly and not being punished. And from there a collapse in trust between people the institutions they look to for guidance.

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Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Before ministers take another step down this path, they should read The Hidden Wealth of Nations, by David Halpern, which argues that social trust is the essential foundation not just for wellbeing, but for economic growth.

Of course, Halpern is in many quarters persona non grata these days, because of the perceived failings of the Behavioural Insights Team, which he leads, during the early phases of the pandemic. He was on TV mid-March using the phrase “herd immunity” which gave him a passport to cancel-land.

But Halpern’s work on prosperity, published in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is vital reading. He shows that “our ability to get on with our fellow citizens oils the working of markets, lowering the costs of transactions and speeding the flow of information on which economies rely”. Countries and regions with the highest levels of social trust tend to have not just the strongest growth, but the greatest levels of subjective wellbeing, too.

Halpern goes on to observe that: “The resilience of a community or nation to survive through economically difficult times rests heavily on its hidden wealth — not the money that its citizens have squirreled away under their mattresses, but the preparedness of citizens to help each other.”

Britain scored well on this metric in the early months of the pandemic. We volunteered in our hundreds of thousands. We suffered the hardships of isolation or overcrowding in lockdown for the sake of others. We cheered on our care workers. We had a single, simple set of rules that applied to everyone. Even those who disagreed could see that those rules were broadly and justly applied. But since rules got complicated, and attempts at enforcement were replaced by a vague plea to be sensible, that unity and solidarity is ebbing away. In Mid May, the ONS recorded that more than 60% of people believed Britain would be “very” united after Covid-19. By the end of June that was down to 28%.

Halpern’s book is a vital reminder that this division is not just a sideline issue, to be worried about by soggy social scientists. If we can’t find a way to get along, we can’t rescue our economy.

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A portrait of power, warts and all

By James Kirkup

Our Treasury is now desperate for growth. To save town centre economies from collapse, the Government has unilaterally decided that workers are more productive in offices, and is trying to bully people back to them. The Prime Minister launched an all-out war on obesity, and then the Government spent a month subsidising fast food with Eat Out to Help Out. They will reach for anything, no matter how contradictory, to leverage up the economy, and with a wall of redundancies coming this autumn, I can’t blame them

They imagine that the best path to growth is complex public health rules, varied by postcode, age, ethnicity, risk factors, and a general sense of whether you can be bothered doing what the Government says. This is because their mathematical models show that complexity liberates the maximum number of people possible.

But their utilitarian calculation misses out the basic societal principle that all should be equal before the law. If you want a strong, trusting society, then fairness has to be a factor. Halpern’s book suggests to me that if public health strategy divides and discombobulates the population, stimulus will not thrive.

The Government should base its economic and health policies on the goal of rebuilding social capital. Covid-19 brought mass volunteering. It stopped millions from commuting, freeing up more time for family and neighbourhoods. It helped us see the networks and connections between people more clearly than ever. That social trust was not some fluffy distraction from the real business of the economy: it was a great foundation for recovery. We just need to hang on to it before it disappears.

I was reminded of this very human weakness as I listened to Dominic Cummings exhaustively describe the “complicated, tricky situation” that had led him to drive his family to Durham at the end of March. He seemed to think that “complicated” and “tricky” were evidence that his circumstances were exceptional. Because, like my school friends, he was blind to the complexity of others’ lives — the thousands upon thousands of other parents who also had little children, sick spouses and important jobs.

The government wrote a lockdown policy that was radically different to the norm in our common law system. Under common law, everything is legal unless prohibited by law. During the lockdown the default was the opposite: it was illegal to leave your home unless you had a good excuse. That shift puts an impossible burden on those who draft the law, to think of every single good reason that could arise, in the infinite variety of human experience.

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There is no mental illness epidemic

By Polly Mackenzie

They missed a few. Of course they did. They deluded themselves that a short list of legal exemptions would be enough. They deluded themselves that tricky and complicated were rare.

This is an affliction that runs right through the heart of policymaking. We build models and spreadsheets to establish what the impact of a policy might be. To fit into those spreadsheets, the people have to be grouped into categories of similar people, and then all the inconvenient and incompatible details of their lives have to be stripped away. And that’s when we’re doing things properly. Half the time, we simply make an assumption that everyone in the population is very much like us.

In the 2005 General Election, my job was to research and advocate for the Liberal Democrat plan to replace Council Tax with a local income tax. I spent weeks poring over data about household composition: who lives in what family groups. I remember being astonished by how few families met the model I had in my head for normal — in other words the model I had grown up with — two full-time working parents with children. At the time, less than one in 10 households had two parents working full time, and children at home.

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By Trevor Phillips

It didn’t stop the media writing up reports about the terrible impact of the Lib Dems’ proposals that were almost always based on the calculation of two full time workers on the average income. I counted it a victory for common sense on the rare occasions they bothered to put the mother on the average female income, as it brought the total down by several thousand pounds. But even then single parents, retired people, disabled people, students, working people who lived on their own: the impact on them was obliterated by the urgent yearning for simplicity among the people who designed infographics.

That yearning for simplicity is at the root of countless policy failures. Take Universal Credit. It was designed to radically simplify the welfare system, which everyone agreed was far too complicated. Wouldn’t it be easier, we asked ourselves, if people got a single, simple payment to meet all of their needs? If all the benefits were rolled into one, and you could apply via a single online portal?

I fell for this delusion myself. I watched experts draw graphs on whiteboards in meetings, and say things like “smooth taper” and I found myself seduced. This would be so much better than what I’d described in speeches as the “rollercoaster of tax credit overpayments”. I failed to fully understand that tax credits had become chaotic for claimants primarily because their lives were chaotic. Their incomes were unstable. They could get more hours one week, and lose them the next. Their childcare could fall through. They could be booted out of their home. They could be victims of fraud.

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By James Kirkup

Of course, I knew these things were possible. But I didn’t recognise that they were normal — more likely to happen than not, for the people who would use UC. The welfare system shouldn’t be built for the average person. It has to be built for the extreme cases — or at least for the average claimant. And the average claimant is more likely to have a mental health problem than not, so making the system accessible for people with mental illness isn’t a luxury. It has to be your starting point.

The sad truth is that not even treatment pathways for people with mental health problems have been designed to suit the needs of the people they serve. They send appointment letters to people’s homes, not recognising that half of people with a mental health problem report they struggle with opening the post. I’ve heard stories of people blacklisted from treatment because they didn’t turn up for appointments they didn’t know they had.

Take sentencing policy. It is almost always written by people who’ve never committed a crime, and assume they understand the way to deter people who have from doing it again. They imagine that a long sentence will be a better deterrent, because they themselves would hate to go to prison. They rarely stop to think about the complex interplay of forces that drives kids to carry knives or join a gang: fear, status, opportunity.

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Eight ways to unite the nation

By Polly Mackenzie

A benefits adviser I met a couple of years ago told me about a single mum who’d got into debt to buy a 52-inch flat screen TV. No matter how bad things got, she wouldn’t get rid of the TV. It was the biggest on the estate. Plenty of people would be quick to judge her. But she kept the TV because it was status for her teenage son: he and his friends would stay indoors and play video games. It kept him out of a gang.

No one is going to suggest a national programme to buy large TVs for teenagers at risk, and I wouldn’t want them to. Only a parent could possibly know that this was the one thing that would make a difference for their child.

But we have to stop with the cookie cutter policies, imposed on everyone as if we were all identical. This is about so much more than lockdown. Complicated and tricky is everywhere you look. One-size fits all policies designed in Whitehall can’t possibly accommodate the infinite diversity of human experience. Central policy makers need to develop the humility to understand that other people’s lives are just as multi-coloured as their own. We must stop blurring out the background, and give people who can see the problem for what it is, the power to fix it. That means more flexibility — whether for benefits advisers, youth workers, therapists, community groups or local councils. One size fits no one.

I was reminded of the late John Diamond’s words when Dominic Raab described the Prime Minister as a fighter. I know Raab was simply trying to gee up a beleaguered nation worried. So we can forgive him for the callous implications of his remarks: that all those who have lost their lives didn’t fight hard enough. But the implication is there. It’s a common fantasy to which many of us succumb, in our desperate wish to have the power to stave off death.

Death cannot be fought, though. We are all dying. The only real question is how fast it is happening. All we can hope for is the deferment of our sentence, and that its approach will be benign when it comes.

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Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly Mackenzie

If you ask them, most people will tell you that they would like to die suddenly, at home, in their sleep. So frightened are we of death that, if we could, we would ask it to creep in unannounced. It’s not the being dead that frightens us, but the act of losing life. Or as Francoise de Beauvoir says in her daughter Simone’s memoir, A Very Easy Death: “Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.”

We want to die at home, comfortable and in familiar surroundings. We want friends and family close by to say farewell. And one of the great tragedies of Covid-19 is that it robs us of these simple hopes to make that last jump easier to bear.

The published data on daily deaths tells us only about those who die in hospital. The real number could be about 7% higher, once deaths outside hospital — at hospices and care homes — are taken into account. But still, the vast majority of people are dying in hospital, a fate only 1 in 15 of us would choose. And not just any hospital or any ward: they are treated by medics in protective equipment that might as well be a space suit. Faces obscured. Hands double-gloved; not even the comforting touch of skin on skin at the last. It is hard to even imagine how frightening this must feel like to someone in and out of feverish consciousness, or someone with dementia.

Doctors and nurses are going to heroic lengths to make this easier for struggling patients. Finding phones and tablets to bring relatives into the ward by video conference even if it’s just to say goodbye. Displaying a photograph of themselves on the outside of their PPE, to show there’s a human under all that plastic. Sharing kind words, compassion, and care that go far beyond the medically necessary. As Vice President Mike Pence said a few days ago: “They are supplementing for family.”

But still, for hundreds of people a day in our country alone, their last sight will be hospital scrubs, face masks and visors, the mottled, easy-scrub floor tiles. They will hear the endless disharmonic beeps from a ward full of monitors. Their last thought will be the desperate struggle for air as their lungs drown them from the inside, before they are sedated, tubes inserted for a ventilator, in a last heroic attempt to keep them alive.

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By Tom Chivers

For most patients, it seems to be their immune response, triggering what’s called a cytokine storm, that brings their life to an end. Being a fighter is no longer any use. How can you fight your own immune system?

But the great theft perpetrated by Covid-19 goes deeper. It is not just robbing us of the good deaths we hope for. It is also robbing us of the good farewell. Funerals are being restricted to just a handful of close family members. Protections have been put in place to ensure that, for as long as possible, religious rituals will be honoured, and no-one whose religion forbids it will be cremated.

But all of us are adapting our traditional ways of saying farewell to the dead: the condolence calls traditional during Shiva, the Jewish period of mourning, are suspended, for example. In China, millions who would have visited their ancestors’ graves this weekend for the Qingming festival — an annual tradition which has been honoured for 2,500 years — were unable to do so.

Most difficult of all is the rule that if anyone in the family has symptoms of the disease which just killed their relative, no-one in the household can attend. Perhaps the most awful example that’s hit the news is of the south London Abdulwahab family, who lost a 13-year old son, Ismail Mohamed. His younger brother and sister developed symptoms — no surprise when they had been sharing a home with him. So Ismail Mohamed was buried with no family present at all.

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Coronavirus coverage is making me feel ill

By Ed West

People, in their infinite ingenuity, are reinventing the funeral as best they can. I’ve heard tell of a family concert put on by video conference to celebrate the passing of a grandfather. I’ve seen reports of a funeral director driving the hearse round a whole village, to let every friend and neighbour say goodbye. Heroic vicars and imams and rabbis and crematorium directors are rigging up cameras so loved ones can say farewell from afar.

This process of honouring the dead spans cultures, and it spans history. One of the earliest tragedies from Greek culture is that of Antigone, who would rather die (and does) than see her brother go unburied. Each culture has its own way of doing things. Some consider burning a great honour; some consider it barbaric. Some tear clothes, some sit in silence.

But the honest truth is that none of this is any use to the dead. They are long past knowing. Funerals are for the living.

Perhaps that’s an atheist view. Some believe that the ritual process — whether it is burial in consecrated ground, burning, or the speaking of words — is essential to enable a soul to pass on to the next realm of existence. Even then, the greatest comfort, surely, is for the living, who feel reassured that their loved one has found that better place.

For all of us, a funeral confirms that our loved one mattered. We tell the story of their life and we imbue it with power and meaning. We celebrate them. We remember them. It helps us believe that we, too, matter. That life has meaning and purpose. As de Beauvoir puts it in that incredibly moving and candid account of her mother’s death, “We [are] taking part in the dress rehearsal for our own burial.”

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Covid-19 is the nail in the coffin for traditional funerals

By Andrew Watts

That’s why there is nothing more important in the grieving process than what they call ‘a good send-off’. It is a celebration of life. Even in shattering, crushing sorrow we can give thanks for their past life, and for ours, which continues.

Elisabeth Kubler Ross, the psychiatrist who identified the five stages of grief, said this: “It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth — and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”

Covid-19 may rob us of a good death. And it may rob us of a good farewell. But perhaps it might have one gift, to those of us who survive: a recognition that we must live each day to the fullest. That’s the only fight worth having.

More importantly do you know anyone who wouldn’t answer “Hell, no,” to every one of these questions right now? Except perhaps a medical professional or a shelf-stacker who’s absolutely playing a useful part in things, but probably hasn’t slept well in a fortnight.

The questions are from a standardised mental health screening tool called the GHQ 12. It’s used in surveys all across the world to get a sense of how many people are struggling with mental health problems at any one time. To qualify as having a “diagnosable mental health problem” you need to score 12 points or more.

Every “Hell, no” gets you three points. And if you didn’t score your full 12 with the questions I started with, don’t worry, you have eight more questions to complete. Eight more chances to qualify as struggling with your mental health.

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In other words: yes, we are all a little bit crazy right now.

Of course, you might argue that this kind of mental distress doesn’t count as mental illness, or that it should be classified differently from conditions that occur spontaneously. Depression that creeps up on you for no reason and takes over your life is certainly different from what so many of us are experiencing: feeling shit because life is shit. And that’s especially true when we know that life is probably going to get back to normal-ish in a few months.

But we must not be complacent. It is true that mental health problems can come from ‘nowhere’, but it’s also true that they can be caused by poverty, trauma, pain and turmoil, and all too often are. What follows is a huge oversimplification of what little is understood about the reasons for the strong links between life experiences and mental health problems. But I hope it helps make sense of what’s going on.

When bad things happen to us, our thought patterns change. Run out of money and get into debt: you start to feel anxious. Stuck in an abusive relationship with someone who might hit you if you upset them: you become hyper cautious. Witness violence: you worry for your own safety. Lose a loved one: you shut down emotions that might overwhelm you.

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These thought patterns become a “diagnosable mental health problem” when they affect your ability to live well. That might be because the problems don’t go away: debt doesn’t fix itself and abusive partners don’t turn into Prince Charming. But it might also be because you get stuck in those cycles of thinking even after the problems have gone away. The mental pain that started as a response became self-sustaining.

In normal circumstances most of us can bounce back from difficult experiences. But not everyone can, and not everyone does. And the longer our trauma lasts, or the sharper it is, the harder it is to get back to how we were before.

That means that there will be a huge and lasting impact on our collective mental health from what we live through over the coming months. We have to prepare ourselves for it.

Before you point out that we’ve lived through worse: I know, we have. Of course we have. We could list examples of collective trauma from human history for as long as this quarantine lasts, and we wouldn’t reach the end. But sanities were shattered by those experiences. For most of history, what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder was the standard form of our existence. When most mothers lost children; when most men witnessed war: these were not times for human flourishing. Most of us will have a living or remembered relative who can barely speak about their life in war. We humans can survive almost anything. But the conditions for our thriving are utterly different. Those conditions are what is under threat.

Early studies from Italy confirm the truth of this. In a recent study of nearly 3,500 people, not one said they weren’t anxious. People with health problems and women in particular are riddled by anxiety. Middle-aged people — those with both parents and children to worry about — are reporting the highest levels of worry.

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So how do we respond? Well, despite my personal despair at the impossible standards expected of us by the fitness guru Joe Wicks, keeping us all healthy and active in this lockdown time is going to be vital. Keeping us on top of our finances is probably next on the list — and if the “money saving expert” Martin Lewis isn’t offered a knighthood, a dukedom or the monarchy by the end of this, then our honours system needs a serious overhaul.

Everyone’s talking about home education, but it isn’t just the children who should be logging on. People who keep learning are the most likely to stay resilient in the face of mental health problems. Keep learning and you will keep well. So this really is the time to take up cooking, or the piano, or to grow your own vegetables — just expect yourself to be bad at the start, and never get further than mediocre.

But there’s one thing we mustn’t do, and that’s catastrophise. Donald Trump has started arguing against his own public health experts by saying that the shutdown should end soon, because a recession will “cause” suicides in the thousands. That is reckless, wrong, and downright dangerous.

Suicide rates do tend to rise during recessions. But that is not inevitable. Most importantly, public messaging about suicide will have a dramatic effect on the number of people who try to take their lives.

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Every suicide is a tragedy. But it is also a rarity. Every year 5.4% of 16- to 74-year-olds have suicidal thoughts; 0.7% of us make an attempt to end our lives. And only 0.01% complete a suicide attempt. Another way of thinking about this is that the vast, vast majority of people survive suicidal thoughts.

If you’re feeling at the end of despair, and you hear your leader confirm that suicide is normal, it will do nothing to bring you back. It is the worst message to send. Suicide is not normal. Suicidal thoughts are survivable. Most people live through the worst of thoughts. Most people find purpose and meaning in life again. Or as the Sufi poets have it: this too shall pass.

We are all struggling right now. Struggling for purpose. Struggling for coherence. Struggling to understand. We have to acknowledge the difficulty if we are to have a hope of conquering it. But we must tell ourselves the truth, too, that conquering things is what we humans do. We have lived through worse. And we will live through this.

It is the act of saying this that makes it true.

But I am frightened to be paying my respects to this much loved old man: frightened because it will be a gathering of dozens of people in their seventies and eighties, and I can’t know if they will be safe there, however many times I wash my hands. 

Coronavirus has sent a shudder of fear through our society about interacting with others. There’s that moment when you reach out automatically to shake the hand of a friend or colleague, or exchange a hug. And then you pause. You wonder if they’ll think you timid if you pull back — or will they be horrified if you press ahead? We giggle awkwardly, we touch our elbows, and then the next person we greet charges in with a kiss on the cheek and you wonder why you bothered. Everyone we meet could be the carrier, even the people we love the most.

An argument broke out on my local internet forum about how we can best look after the elderly. One kind woman wanted to launch a new initiative where we all reached out to the older people on our streets and asked if they needed any help — could we pick up groceries, or just make sure they’re not lonely if they want to stay in to keep safe. But soon others pointed out that visiting is more likely to harm than to help, by exposing them to people who may unwittingly be carrying the disease. After all, one of the key factors in keeping our schools open is the fear that, without them, grandparents would end up looking after grandchildren, and getting infected that way.

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That’s why I’m so baffled by those who see this epidemic as a corrective that will restore communitarianism, as we abandon global supply chains and go back to self-reliance. I see the exact opposite happening, as we all retreat into digital fortresses. The people who are smugly content right now are not communitarians. They’re the “extremely online” millennials who are as happy in confinement as anywhere, so long as they can get to Tiktok. And the hyper libertarian preppers who’ve been stocking extra loo paper for decades, and buried their gold somewhere in the woods.

The lesson thus far is that if you rely on other people, you’re at risk. As this crisis continues, we will be pushed to do more and more online. We will distance ourselves from physical contact in favour of virtual interaction. Those who persist with the kissing and the hugging will start to be pariahs.

It’s happening not by accident but by design. Universities are cancelling classes and telling people to log in to a virtual classroom. Some schools are doing the same. The NHS is talking about a target of 50% of GP appointments being held over the phone, app or video. There’s a government initiative with supermarkets to introduce shop-by-phone for elderly people who don’t trust the internet when it comes to ordering groceries.

This is a digital inclusion programme on steroids. The reality is that the more we can enable people to stay indoors, and stop breathing on each other, the safer we will be. Digital transformation has been slow in the past decade because of the complexity, the resistance of staff, and the fears of leaving older and more vulnerable people behind. But now all those reasons — good and bad — for moving slowly will be swept away in a blizzard of emergency initiatives from video courts to robot health assessments.

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And don’t tell me these are temporary measures. Putting women in the factories in the First World War was a temporary measure: it transformed women’s role in society and life was never the same again. Millions of sceptics and reluctant adopters of technology will try out the online version and — perhaps grudgingly — use it. Our high streets are struggling already with the competition from online.

Two weeks of isolation will push almost everyone into trying online shopping, which is great if you’re a neoliberal who cares only about price, competition and choice. But less good if you’re interested in the human interactions that happen on high streets, when we queue together, chat together, and simply see other people and how they live their lives. On Amazon I see only products for people like me. At the local shop (even my local Tesco) I see products for people like my neighbours too.

But these tiny treasures are easily swept away by the efficiency demands of AI-optimised services. Over the next few months, huge public funding will be thrown at keeping people fed, happy and healthy without leaving their homes. So we will have got over the big costs and upheaval of introducing digital access. Public services and businesses alike will be reluctant to go back, when they think of the savings they can make by closing down physical locations.

I’m not a technophobe. Of course, digital services can be just as good if not better in some circumstances. But if we move things online we have to notice what we lose, and find a way to get it back. We are in real danger of disregarding the social and emotional value of face to face public services and of human contact with neighbours, fellow parents, fellow patients, fellow shoppers, fellow worshippers, fellow pupils.

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With a cloud as big as coronavirus, it’s only natural to look for silver linings. So I understand why people are praying it will call a halt to the things they hate, whether that is neoliberalism, globalism or even Borisism. But we must not be naive. Social disruption of this scale will never take us back to an old way of being; it will only accelerate change. We have to be clear about the kind of society we want. We have to face the truth about the forces we are fighting against.

We all know the economy will take a knock from coronavirus. So we talk about a fiscal stimulus to get it back to health.

Let’s admit that our society will take just as big a knock. Weeks or months of staying indoors, not trusting strangers, second guessing every cough and every handshake: this is social poison. When this is over we will need a social stimulus on a massive scale: a rebuilding programme for relationships, friendships, and communities.

What do I mean? Perhaps a national C-Day celebration when we’ve beaten back this bastard disease and can move freely again: with streets closed and lunch parties and union flags and bunting. A national commitment to our relationships at the heart of all our public services: job clubs for unemployed workers; expert patient clubs for people with long-term conditions; parent clubs at every school; tax breaks for employers to fund after-work social activities; doubling the number of parks, and ensuring people don’t need a licence to do anything interesting in them; a parish council in every community with a mandate for parties and friendliness and little else. 

In the past the state didn’t need to worry about this. But as our society atomises, and diversifies it could become its most important job.

The only downside is a horrific book we foolishly withdrew from the library, called Pirate Pete’s Potty. We should have known it would be bad: it has a button on the front; press it and a tinny, echoey sort of cheer emerges from somewhere within the cardboard. All books with electronic sound effects should be banned, I’ve come to conclude.

But Pirate Pete’s Potty offends me for another reason. It’s horrifically literal. It might as well be an instruction leaflet from IKEA. Here’s a sample: “‘The potty is for doing your wees and poos in, instead of your nappy,’ explains Mummy.”

Wow. Thanks Mummy Pirate. I really needed this information to be printed onto dead trees and bundled up with a battery and plastic speaker so that it can never be recycled. I’d never have been able to explain this to my child alone. Here was me thinking that books were supposed to have stories in — to use narrative and creativity to explore the emotional reality of childhood experiences. More fool me.

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Fortunately, there is one really great piece of literature about potty training: the 1986 classic by Tony Ross, I Want My Potty. In this book, a small princess navigates the ups and downs of life without nappies. It seems absurd to summarise the plot of a 12-page book for toddlers, comprising perhaps 100 words in total, so I won’t. What matters is the book has a plot. It has ambition and despair, admiration and shame, jeopardy and disaster. And it’s funny. It’s even funny for parents, as the adults of this peculiar fictional kingdom (king, queen, admiral, prime minister) move heaven and earth to cater to the needs of their tiny overlord, only to fail. Every parent has felt like that.

A great children’s book goes far beyond the words on the page. It pulls you in. You can talk to your child about every aspect of it. You can make things up. You can imagine more. And you can spot little things that are perhaps only for you, the parents: something to help you feel you’re not alone as you struggle through the days of dirty knees and runny noses.

One of my favourites is The Baby’s Catalogue, by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. At first glance you’d think it’s just one of those “baby’s first word” books: lots of pictures to point at and practice saying the words. It is certainly useful and fun for that. But it’s also an intimate portrait of life for exhausted parents.

Among the pictures are: a little girl bringing her dad a cup of tea as he turns off the bedside alarm with an expression of despair; a mum and dad asleep on the sofa in front of the TV; a mum washing her hair in the sink. The kids won’t notice, but the parents will smile, and feel understood.

And The Baby’s Catalogue is political, too. It’s more than 30 years old but it’s a more compelling vision of liberalism than most contemporary naked attempts at propaganda — a celebration of some quieter kinds of diversity. Five families feature — including breastfed babies and bottle fed babies, working mums and stay-at-home mums, of different ethnicities. There’s a dad changing a nappy and another at the park on the swings. They eat different food and wear different clothes and have different pets and have different accidents, but the comforting sensation is that they are all the same. All caught up in the story of surviving daily life.

So my children and I have read through The Baby’s Catalogue a hundred times, and none of us is bored, because you can’t be bored when life is in the pages.

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All our favourite books are old. Peepo — another one by the Ahlbergs — is truly extraordinary. It’s a little rhyme about a baby who looks around him; on every other page is a little porthole to peep through to the next picture. My younger son still thinks it’s a book about a baby called Peepo. I, by contrast, think it’s a portrait of wartime life to rival Tolstoy. A father, home from leave. Granny takes the children to the park so the parents can be alone. A mother so shattered she “dozes in the easy chair”. At the end, Father is in uniform again, his helmet ready. Will he return? We don’t know.

My son doesn’t notice any of this, he just likes the rhythm and the pictures and the little portholes to put his fingers through. But both stories are there; there are as many stories as you want to find.

Maybe I’m just sentimental about the books of my childhood, but it seems so rare to find a modern children’s book that has that kind of multi-layered narrative. The Gruffalo is perfectly nice but it’s about how small people can be powerful, and, well, that’s it, isn’t it? Of course, it’s a message that goes down well with small people but is there anything else to it? The Snail and the Whale is a different story with the same meaning, and so is What The Ladybird Heard and half the rest of Julia Donaldson’s oeuvre.

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But at least it’s a better message than the one put forward in Guess How Much I Love You, in which a narcissistic and hyper-competitive sociopath of a father repeatedly belittles his son’s attempts to communicate his love.

Fed this sort of mono-dimensional, humdrum literature, how are our children supposed to grow up into fully-rounded adults? Are we trying to create obedient drones or independent-minded human beings? These saccharine books are now handed out in their millions by well-meaning charities, as if any book will do when it comes to child development. We’re obsessed with helping them learn to read when we should be focused on helping them learn to think.

If our children are to have a hope of thriving in our increasingly complicated world, they need more than the narrative equivalent of instruction manuals. They need to get beyond the Aesop’s fable kind of story which has one meaning, one moral, and one message. To develop a really first class understanding of the world, and their places in it, children need complexity. They need something to talk about with their grown ups. They need books that can keep on giving as you get older, and be rediscovered at a different depth in adulthood.

So goodbye Pirate Pete. You’re going back to the library where you belong. We’ll see off the nappies with our imaginations, and be all the better for it.

They don’t know how lucky they are. As a child, my mother would always make us eat a savoury pancake — usually wrapped around an old bit of bolognese sauce, or ratatouille — before we got to the pudding ones. And it wasn’t just because she’s a rapacious user-up of leftovers. She did it to honour what she saw as the real tradition of pancake day: using things up in preparation for the Lenten fast.

These days, far more people celebrate Pancake Day than bother with fasting afterwards. Those who do follow tradition tend to cut out alcohol, or chocolate. As a child, I always decided to give up chocolate, and then promptly forgot until I found myself half-way through a KitKat, when I’d give up and vow to try harder next year. I’ve still never managed it.

But this year, my goal for Lent is not about food at all. I don’t want to learn to live with only the nourishment I actually need: I want to learn to live with only the stuff I actually need.

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Just to be clear: I am an atheist. But I often find inspiration in the rhythms of religious rituals. I don’t think religions would have the great pull they have over so many billions of people if they didn’t offer so many little patterns and behaviours we human beings need. And Lent seems like the perfect time of year for radical decluttering of the whole house, not just the larder.

There’s a Persian tradition, also honoured in this season, called khooneh takouni: in English, ‘shaking the house.’ In preparation for the New Year — Nowruz festival — families clear their home from top to bottom, washing carpets, painting the house, and even decluttering the yard and attic. Cleanliness is seen as a way to keep evil away, in preparation for a fresh start, physically and mentally.

What I like most about this tradition is that it comes around every year. You’re never supposed to be fixed, or perfect. The year will accumulate its chaos around you, and every year you take on the challenge of pushing it back outside. Like the tide and the seasons, a big spring clean isn’t a sign of failure, it’s a natural ritual of life.

And as carpets get hung in the street to have the dust beaten off, and paint is slapped onto the walls of houses, it ends up being an explosion of colour in every town and village: a celebration of life. Tidying isn’t a chore: it’s living.

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This isn’t the kind of tolerance you get from the tidying evangelists who’ve become fashionable. Japanese ‘organisation consultant’ Marie Kondo says tidying is ‘life-changing magic’. Academic Jordan Peterson is clear that you’re basically a failure in life if you can’t keep your room tidy: his mantra is ‘sort yourself out’. They dole out their lectures about how to live and seem to expect you immediately become a perfect carbon copy of them. I am certain that both would look down their noses in contempt if they had to come back after a year and sort you out a second time. Frankly, I’d be frightened to get their help.

This year, I finally feel free enough to tidy my house because I’ve come to terms with the truth that it will never be finished. Yes: living with children is basically engaging in a permanent war with entropy, as you struggle to tidy faster than they can disarrange. But what’s the alternative? Living without them?

And honestly, I don’t think the chaos of my home is their fault. It’s mine. I think I hold onto things because of the potential they symbolise. The books I will read, some day. The clothes I might fit into again. The baking tin that might be useful if someone wants a train cake for their birthday. The ravioli maker that might be fun to use with the children if they ever start to like ravioli. The spare bits of fabric I might repurpose into a cushion or a costume for World Book Day; the sewing machine I might get fixed so I can do so.

The person I might be: the creative decorator, the well-read aesthete, the domestic goddess, the better mother, the more patient wife. All these futures have to be let go.

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There is also a lot of guilt to be dealt with, in our age of excess consumption. While you hold onto something you don’t need, you can still fool yourself that it was worth buying. Those trousers that didn’t look right; that juicing machine that was such a faff to clean; that box set you never watched. The moment you let these things go, you have to face the truth of the mistake you made. But I believe — and hope — that accepting that truth is the best way to learn to live differently.

I have not clutched objects to my heart and asked if they spark joy; I haven’t thanked any of the objects I have thrown away. My goal is not to have a home fit for an interiors magazine. It’s simply to let go of the lives I will never lead, in order to better appreciate this one. This is about living in the present — not just letting go of the past, but the future, too.

I have some tips to share, if you are a fellow hoarder, or just someone without visible horizontal surfaces in your home. Do something — a little something — every day. I set the whole family a challenge: we each took our age, and put that many items away every evening; even the littlest could manage two, and it’s such a faff counting all the way up to my advanced years that I just carried on and on until I was sure I’d done about double.

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Another good trick is the “30 day declutter”, where you give away one item on day one, two on day two, and by the end of the month you’re 465 items lighter. By breaking the job into tiny pieces, it helps conquer the sensation of being overwhelmed.

But above all, accept the ebb and flow. You will always make mistakes. The job will never be done. When the shed is tidy, and the toys are in boxes, and the washing up is done you’ll feel wonderful. And when they aren’t, don’t fret. There will always be another spring on the way, another opportunity to make pancakes out of your leftovers, and another chance to try again.

The reality is that recruiting into the public sector is a ceaseless slog. Have you ever wondered why there are always so many adverts for life in the army? For teacher training? For the police? It’s not because recruiters like spending money. It’s because they are always in desperate need of talented new people, and such people are hard to find. These public services have to have high standards, whether that’s good qualifications, good fitness, or a clean criminal record. Pay isn’t great. Working hours are tough. Scrutiny is endless. And the UK has more people already in work than at any point since the early 70s.

No wonder the NHS has more than 100,000 vacancies. Social care has more than 110,000 vacancies. The police, the army and the fire service tend to get plenty of applicants, but they end up turning thousands away because they don’t measure up. The army met its recruitment target last year, but only after five years of failure — and after launching a new boot camp to help the unfit get up to standard before taking their entry tests.

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Half the staffing battle isn’t recruitment at all: it’s stopping people from leaving. 15% of teachers leave in their first year; 30% within their first five years. In 2010 I helped plan for a coalition policy to recruit 4,200 extra health visitors. By the end of our first meeting, the plan had transformed: we had to recruit about 9,000 health visitors, because so many were planning to retire in the coming years. The recruitment drive was then ditched by the 2015 government — and as soon as it was, numbers slumped back, falling by more than 3,000 over three years.

It’s like trying to fill a bath with no plug in it. There are alarm bells ringing about how crappy it is to work in so many of these frontline jobs, and instead of fixing those problems, we’re exhausting all our energy desperately trying to recruit people who aren’t that fussed. The difficulty of finding good people for the public sector doesn’t mean we should give up trying. But it does mean we should try something different.

Instead of panicking about the high turnover rates in the public sector, we should see them as inspiration. It probably is too much to expect people to work in a front line public service job for the fifty years that will soon comprise the average working life. So let’s stop pretending these are vocations, or jobs that should take you from pimples to wrinkles. Soon the majority of us will live for a century: everyone could expect to have two or three careers in that time. So a spell in public service should be a part of every citizen’s life.

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Initiatives like Teach First and Now Teach have got the right idea: make it clear that public service is a great way to start out in the workplace; a great way to return to work after having children; a great way to find purpose later on in life; a great way to spend your last years before retirement. Dogs may be for life, but jobs are not any more.

It’s not good for our society to have one group of people who work exclusively in the private sector making the money, and another group spending it. It breeds resentment and misunderstanding. I’ve lost track of the number of senior business people who bleat that everyone in the public sector is a lazy and inefficient jobsworth. They imagine they’re the only ones who work hard, because they’ve no idea what it’s like to hold the hand of a dying patient, or coax ambition from a struggling teenager, or wrestle an attacker from their victim.

I’d like to make it compulsory: everyone should spend a minimum of five years working somewhere in public service. You wouldn’t be able to claim your state pension unless you’d done it. The days of conscripting all our young people into the army have passed, and I’m glad of it. We don’t need armed national service. But we do need a culture of civic service, a recognition that you need to do more than just pay your taxes to be part of a society. You have to be involved.

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The pathway should go both ways of course. Plenty of public servants have a toxic view of what life is like in business. They imagine rapacious greed and profit to be the only topics of conversation at the watercooler, and have an unhealthy contempt for words like “efficiency”. The civil service is slowly getting better at sending people out on secondment to businesses for a couple of years at a time, but there’s often still suspicion of anyone who does it. Rules set up to prevent grift end up acting as a huge barrier to anyone leaving, building up expertise about life outside government, and returning to make public services better.

By insisting everyone spend part of their career in public service, and part in the private sector, we could transform both. We could inject the values of purpose and service into our businesses. We could bring ideas and innovation into the heart of the public sector — and perhaps even make those jobs easier and more fulfilling to do. And we could build a culture of compassion and understanding between private and public sector workers, who might stop complaining about each others’ excessive pay or cushy conditions, and instead value the contributions each make.

So let’s stop with half measures — trying to recruit just enough people to fill the vacancies and then panicking five minutes later because someone retired. We should double, or treble, our ambition when it comes to recruiting teachers, nurses, doctors, soldiers and police officers. Let’s train everyone we can get our hands on. We have to make it normal for everyone to serve their country, whether it’s for five years or fifty.

I was bored a decade ago when Julia Goldsworthy got told off for wearing formal shorts in Parliament. I was bored when Tom Brake upset Peter Bone by asking a question without wearing a tie. I was bored when Jeremy Corbyn was accused of disrespect for wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph. I was bored when Theresa May was pilloried for wearing expensive trousers. And this week I am so much more bored by it all that I fear my head may explode simply because Tracy Brabin decided to reveal the scandalous truth that she has a shoulder underneath her clothes.

These are the people who run our country. They make decisions that matter. Their clothes do not matter. H&M or Hermès. Trousers or skirt. Shoulders bare or swathed in cashmere: clothes signify nothing about the content of your character. I would say I wouldn’t care if they turned up in a clown suit, except that I would care because the godforsaken newspapers would run pages and pages about who had the longest shoe or the best-applied lipstick, and I’d have to hide under a bush for a week just to escape it all.

And I’m sorry, I can’t even summon the energy to be feminist-ly outraged by the attempt to police Tracy Brabin’s fashion choices because, well, you know: the internet melted when Obama wore a beige suit, and you could probably cover Norfolk with newspaper photos of Dominic Cummings looking shabby, as if that affected the workings of his brain.

There’s only one solution to make all this stop. Uniforms.

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What I have in mind are jumpsuits, issued in party colours, made of the same thick polyester they make children’s school trousers out of, so they don’t need ironing or carry stains. They should be just ill-fitting enough to ensure no-one can look attractive in them, because there are several Parliamentarians who could probably rock the jumpsuit look. And we don’t want anyone looking attractive, lest it distract the public from hating their MPs, as they are supposed to do.

On the front would be a little name badge, like the ones janitors wear in American high school movies. This would be a huge benefit to news broadcasters and picture editors at newspapers: no more pesky mix ups between black women MPs who dare to have similar skin colour and hair styles to one another. (White male MPs have, of course, have had similar skin colour and hair styles to one another for hundreds of years, but inexplicably never got mixed up. Nevertheless, the name badges would help avoid future confusion even for them. Some are getting a little old, after all).

And we’d stick the constituency names on the back, like on a football shirt, to make it easier to remember who represents are — essential, given MPs are (bizarrely) still not allowed to refer to one another by name.

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Wearing party colours would also be a boon to MPs. No more would fellow MPs assume Kemi Badenoch or Bim Afolami are part of the Labour party, simply because of the colour of their skin. The radiant blue would announce their affiliation to the world. And no female or ethnic minority MP would ever again be mistaken for a secretary, because the jumpsuits would only be issued to the elected representatives, as a symbol of their high office.

Just imagine how gloriously colourful Parliamentary events would become. No more boring sea of charcoal and navy suits, enlivened only by the occasional bright dress. Instead, a surging sea of red and blue, with hints of yellow, orange, and green. A live action recreation of a Jeremy Vine election-night animation, played out daily for all to see. A source of bright light and optimism for the whole nation.

You may think this absurd. But judges wear uniforms. Police officers wear uniforms. Fire fighters, nurses, checkout assistants at B&Q. Black Rod wears a uniform, and hers includes knee breeches, which are several measures more absurd than a jumpsuit. So many of our fellow citizens consider a uniform routine that there’s even a dating site for uniformed professionals — surely many of our single MPs would be delighted to join their serried ranks, in search of love.

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By Peter Franklin

It shouldn’t have come to this. Human beings are smart, and capable. Why are we so easily distracted by the design of a collar? The cut of a coat? The colour of a pointless piece of fabric encircling someone’s neck? We’re rather like the dog in the movie Up: capable of thought and speech, but instantly bedazzled by a squirrel passing into view. We know we should care about the words, the meaning and the impact on lives, but if there’s a sequin in view, our frontal lobes shut off and the lizard brain responds: “Scandal!”

After all: can anyone tell me what question Tracy Brabin asked while wearing the offending item? It’s hard to pay attention when all you hear is outrage, pomposity and misogyny. Only uniforms can save us from our weak little distractible minds. In the Jumpsuit Parliament, we would be obliged to focus on what our representatives said. Instead of filling pages and pixels with fashion analysis and faux outrage we’d have to focus on the facts.

MPs might even have an incentive to spend their time on policy, not polish. Or is that the biggest fantasy of them all?

Stage one was shock. I didn’t stay up for the count. I went comfortable to bed believing my side would prevail. I woke at 3 and checked the news. I didn’t sleep again: the shock wasn’t about the practicalities or about the policy. It was that I didn’t know my country. Was this my beloved home, suddenly now so unfamiliar?

I couldn’t knuckle down to proper work so I trundled off to Ikea to buy furniture for the new office my charity was moving into. Because what more European place is there than Ikea? They even have the right brand colours: blue and yellow. Just as in Harry Potter the cure for a brush with the dementors is chocolate, so the cure for a brush with the Brexiteers is surely a Swedish meatball.

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Accept it Remainers, you've lost

By Douglas Murray

Stage two: denial. I spent a couple of months expecting that we would leave but not really leave. So many leavers had said we’d stay aligned, we’d stay close, we’d still have perfect access to the single market and frictionless trade. I believed them. We could just duck out of the institutions of the EU but play along as if little had changed. Boris Johnson himself helped sustain this fantasy — his first article in the Telegraph after the referendum spelled out a vision of our future as the closest of buddies with our erstwhile partners.

Stage three: anger. All that came to a juddering halt when Theresa May gave her Lancaster House speech, full of red lines, incompatible promises and economic incoherence. I raged about David Davis turning up in Brussels without any papers. I was furious with Liam Fox for his pointless job as Secretary of State for Trade-Deals-We-Aren’t-Legally-Allowed-To-Sign-Yet. I drafted and deleted endless bitter tweets at pundits who thought it would be easy to run a Midlands car factory without just-in-time access to goods, simply because they could ski across the Swiss border on holiday.

Stage four: bargaining. This is when the false hope started to dawn. In the psychological literature, bargaining is the stage where you obsess about what you could have done differently — and try to strike a deal with God (or the universe): “I’ll be different, I’ll pray every day, I’ll be kind to my sister. Just make it go away.”

In Brexitland, bargaining was when we devised a thousand strategies to trip us into another referendum, another election, another chance to roll the dice again and get a different answer. I wasn’t part of those campaigns but I dared to hope. “If we stop Brexit it will be because of them, and their intransigence,” I told myself, almost ashamed that I hadn’t stood with them — that I was the sort of capitulator who assumed that a referendum, when lost, was lost.

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Stage five: depression. This started to creep up my spine during December’s general election. The debate was shifting away. The activists in their blue and yellow robes still thought we could stop Brexit but the voters didn’t. They wanted it over, even though few thought it would do any good. Boris Johnson offered relief from the trauma, the opportunity to end it all.

Depression’s power is immense. It brings with it a desperate yearning for sleep, for peace, for finality. As Edward Thomas, one of the most depressed poets England has ever produced, put it: “There is not any book, or face of dearest look, that I would not turn from now, to go into the unknown.” So in our depressive state, unable to summon the energy to fight any more, we allowed the end to come.

Stage six: testing. We asked ourselves: might it be ok? Might it be alright in Northern Ireland? It’s just a little more paperwork. Can the Union with Scotland hold? Will this new government adopt a liberal immigration policy, and an active industrial strategy to alleviate the damage of our departure? Will the new Conservative seats in the North give the party impetus to govern differently? Would it be better for all of us if we found a way to get along? Were we ready to forgive?

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By Ed West

Stage seven: acceptance. To end the grieving process, acceptance has to be unconditional. It isn’t whether Brexit is better, or worse, or better than it could have been. It simply is. An unchangeable, immutable fact.

The prayer used at Alcoholics Anonymous is well known: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Well, I have lived in politics for nearly twenty years. Politics is about training yourself to file almost everything in the “things I can change” box. It’s about never settling for a world less perfect than you can imagine. So accepting this loss is hard. It goes against my soul. I loved my place as a European citizen. I loved the freedom. I loved the belonging. I loved the solidarity. All this is lost to me and to my friends, and my countrymen. But worst of all, this is a thing I cannot change.

Some people will laugh at this article. How could I possibly equate the process of leaving a multilateral organisation as equivalent to losing a loved one? Laugh away, if you like. When I spoke about my sadness a couple of years ago, on Newsnight, the Express wrote that I had “sparked anger” by doing so. Someone emailed to tell me that my “liberal tears” tasted sweet.

I know it is not easy to be gracious in victory. You have put your all into fighting, and you deserve a moment of glory, and celebration. But the others fought too. Their tears are not sweet. They are as bitter as yours would have been. Don’t demand grace from the losers, the ones with nothing to show for all their work, ambition and hope. Their hands are empty; yours are full. So show compassion.

To all those who raise a glass as Britain leaves the European Union: you have your Brexit. Leave us our grief. It’s the least you can do.

My father is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, so I grew up with the opposite world view: that we’re all a bit damaged, dysfunctional and deluded. On more than one occasion, when I expressed some teenage angst, he chuckled and — with great affection in his voice — said I was a fascinating bundle of psychopathology. When I accidentally stabbed myself in the hand with a pencil while revising for my A Levels, he described this as a “particularly primitive piece of acting out.” He was probably right.

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By Ian Birrell

Slowly, the world has come round to my father’s point of view. We have new shibboleths proclaimed by mental health advocates: mental health exists on a spectrum, just like physical health, they say. Sometimes we’re up, and sometimes we’re down. One in four of us is experiencing a diagnosable mental health problem at any one time: two thirds of us will experience mental illness in our lifetimes.

All this is technically true. But as a public narrative it’s creating its own disasters. If everyone is a little bit crazy, and everyone should ask for help, it creates a wall of demand that medicalised mental health services will never be able to meet, and that is compromising our ability to help those most in need. We are not in the middle of a mental illness epidemic. We are in the middle of a treatment crisis, where there is not enough help to go around.

Yes: about ‘one in four’ of us has a diagnosable mental health problem. But it was about one in four back in 1993 when we first asked this question in a survey of what’s called “Adult Psychiatric Morbidity”. It was one in four in 2000, in 2007 and in 2014. Of course, it’s absurd that this survey is only done once every seven years: we won’t have the next survey results until 2023 at the earliest, so maybe things have changed. But long term, the pattern is clear. Numbers of people with poor mental health are pretty stable.

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In praise of failed resolutions

By Polly Mackenzie

So what’s changed? Why all the noise about a crisis? We’ve done something wonderful by stripping the stigma from mental health problems. We’ve empowered people to come forward and ask for help, instead of suffering in silence. Between 2007 and 2014 the number of people in treatment rose from 25% of those with symptoms of a common mental disorder to 40%. That’s an extra 1.5 million UK adults who felt able to ask for help, and got some.

So why am I not celebrating? Because providing treatment for those “common mental disorders” too often comes at the expense of help for those with less common, but more serious, conditions.

It’s vital to understand that there isn’t one single thing called “mental health problem” just as there was never a single thing called “lunatic”. Depression is not the same as bipolar disorder, which is not the same as anorexia, which is not the same as schizophrenia, which is not the same as post-traumatic stress disorder, which is not the same as post-natal depression, which is not even the same as post-natal psychosis.

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Diagnosis itself is, of course, controversial in mental health circles, and among people with these conditions or symptoms. We are largely swimming in the dark when it comes to understanding what is happening in the brain, or in what you might call the “mind”, if you believe such a thing exists separately from the squishy mass of neurons inside your skull. What we do know is that all of these conditions come with pain: pain so profound that it sucks the purpose from life and can lead people to isolation, rage, self-harm, and suicide.

The first job of our health services has to be to help those at most risk. The NHS often talks about people in crisis: that includes people considering ending their life, hurting themselves or someone else, and people experiencing psychosis — a break in their ability to comprehend reality that may include hallucinations or delusions. People going through a crisis of this sort need expensive care — either in-patient care in a psychiatric hospital, or intensive support in the community.

And you don’t need to be in crisis to need hospital care. People with eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-natal depression and a range of other conditions can also need intensive support for weeks or months at a time, to help them eat enough, care for their baby, or process their trauma. Doing that at home often just isn’t possible, and certainly not possible when you remember how little support is available. But we’ve all read stories of people denied help, or shipped to a hospital the other side of the country, because there just aren’t enough places to go around. We have fewer beds for this kind of treatment than we did in 1998.

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That should be the story that dominates our headlines, not yet more celebrity interviews about challenging stigma that encourage everyone to put their hands up for help. I know celebrity depression is a lot more beautiful than a homeless man with schizophrenia who hasn’t washed since he lost his home because he thought the rent collector was a demon. But we mustn’t let the easy story crowd out the difficult one.

We have thrown extraordinary levels of political capital at stripping away stigma, and telling people it’s good to talk. There’s been an upsurge in the number of people getting treatment but no corresponding dip in the number of people with problems. This deluge of demand isn’t curing anyone, it’s overcrowding our stretched mental health services, and it acts as an epic distraction from providing intensive care for the 5% or so who are quite literally struggling to stay alive.

Veganuary-style health kicks and detoxes will succumb within days to the allure of that last half-jar of Stilton and the little gift bottle of Port that needs tidying up. The pledge to run every day will slowly convert itself into a general promise to be more active, and eventually the buzzing and the nudges from that fitness tracker you unwrapped on Christmas day get turned off, you lose the charger, and put it away.

Surely every house in the land has borne witness to countless diaries filled in religiously for a few weeks, half-heartedly for a few more (with a couple of days written at once to cover up a missed entry or four). Then one skipped day becomes five, and 50, and the diary quietly slips under the bedside table to be discovered in some burst of pre-Christmas cleaning, when — after the dust inspires a few sneezes — the blank pages inspire a few quiet seconds of bittersweet contemplation about our failure to live up to our aspirations to do better, be better.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Honestly, I don’t know why we choose this time of year to make resolutions. We want to beat our instincts: use our rational brain to conquer whatever habits our emotions have drawn us into. We know that’s going to be hard: we’ll need to stretch every sinew to reinvent ourselves as that ur-version we have in our mind. And we decide to start the job in the cold, dark and wet, when our yearning for comfort and hunkering down is at its strongest. It’s as if we want to fail.

Yes, the allure of a new year is like the fresh beauty of a new notebook. And perhaps the indulgences of Christmas count as “rock bottom” to inspire habits of clean living. But come on: this is a rubbish time of year to be changing yourself.

At least most of us never take it as far as Benjamin Franklin, founding father not just of the United States of America, but of the school of self-improvement. In 1726, at the age of 20, he wrote a list of 13 virtues, from temperance to tranquillity, industry to justice. He tried to practice each virtue in turn to perfection, switching on to the next virtue once a week and putting a red mark in his diary every time he failed. The book, unsurprisingly, filled up with red marks, and while Franklin eventually stopped writing in it, he carried it with him until his death. It was a constant reminder of his imperfections.

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Most of us don’t carry around a literal book with which to brutalise our consciences. But whether it’s our failed resolutions, our failed diets, the books we didn’t read, the letters we didn’t write, the mothers we didn’t call, the businesses we didn’t start or the single-use plastics we didn’t shun: I think all but the most narcissistic of us carry some measure of guilt about the better person we could have been; the better use to which we could have put our time. A palpable sense of our own inadequacy seems to be part of the human condition. Why else would advertisers who urge us to enjoy the moment have come up with the slogan: Be More Dog? It seems the only way to truly let ourselves off the hook of self-improvement is to channel a different species.

That is, of course, what the research into mindfulness tells us about the best way to be happy. We have to be more dog. We have to let ourselves indulge in the experience of every moment, instead of letting our anxious minds plague us with thoughts of what comes next. There is something delightfully twisted about making a New Year’s Resolution to be more mindful. In a sense, mindfulness is the opposite of resolution-ing: it teaches us to accept rather than to aspire, to tolerate rather than transform.

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But I for one would be sad to see the end of resolutions. Dogs, after all, did not conquer the world, invent the wheel, the semi-conductor and antibiotics — and not just because they don’t have opposable thumbs. We did, because we never settle. Because we’re never quite content, and that’s what keeps us going – keeps us away from chasing sticks and rolling in mud all day just for the glory of it. And I value that bit of doubt, that little dose of self-loathing, the modicum of shame, that drives me to do better, be better, try harder. Our desire to transform ourselves is not just our greatest curse, it is our greatest blessing too.

We need to find a way to balance acceptance and aspiration. Of course, in the Christian faith that’s relatively easy because Jesus comes along, sees our inadequacy, loves us anyway, and does all the forgiveness on our behalf. No wonder it has such appeal for its billion followers.

But those of us who don’t happen to believe that Christ is the salvation of mankind need to work at forgiving ourselves. That’s a resolution that makes as little sense as a resolution to practice mindfulness. But it might be the best one available to us all.

There isn’t much point in making New Year’s Resolutions. But there isn’t much point in many of the things we do. So make some. Fail them in style. And find a way to love yourself just the way you are.

This is the magic of some lies, and some of the liars who tell them. We willingly conspire in our own deception because of the way it makes us feel, and the comfort it brings. It’s even used as the inspirational finale of the Christmas classic Miracle on 34^th Street. “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile or a truth that draws a tear?”. In the last decade, we’ve decided, quite firmly, to choose the lie. After all, who wants what Al Gore described as “inconvenient truth” when you can willingly suspend your disbelief and go along with promises of the moon and the stars, delivered yesterday and paid for by someone else?

My book of the decade is one that offers us a masterclass in the performative lying to which we are becoming accustomed: Gone Girl. I’m about to spoil the ending of this and several other novels of the last decade, so if you prefer your thrillers thrilling, and your plot twists fully twisted, skip to the end.

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Gone Girl is the story of a woman — Amy — who appears to have been murdered by her husband — Nick. The first half alternates between her husband’s account of her disappearance and entries from her diary. The diary tells the story of a woman abused and manipulated by a dangerous man. We feel, as we read, that her diary entries are showing us the real story, behind his professed innocence, and we suspect him more and more.

It’s half way through the book that we discover the diary is faked. She’d spent months planning her own disappearance and laying a trail of evidence in the pages of her journal that would implicate her husband. It was a plot to destroy him.

It’s a good novel. An enjoyable thriller. It’s clever in its use of domestic abuse as a theme: we increasingly understand that marriages which appear happy on the outside can mask almost anything that happens behind closed doors. The twists turn us into credulous fools; your desire to ‘believe the victim’ makes you a victim, too.

But what fascinates me about the novel is how much less enjoyable it is to spend time with Nick than it is with Amy — even after she’s revealed to be irretrievably awful. For most of the novel, he’s a hopeless drip and his attempts at revenge are easily outdone. Her determination to shape her own reality and force all those around her to conform to it may be horrifying, but it is compelling. I think we understand why, in the end, Nick stays with her. Perhaps he had read Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Truth’, which argues that truth will only ever be as beautiful as a pearl, while lies are like diamonds — beautiful in every light. Nothing is more seductive than a liar. Amy is a diamond.

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Gone Girl seemed to spark a trend for thrillers with these “unreliable narrators”: the critics’ label for an authorial trick where the person telling the story turns out to be deceiving you. The Girl on the Train: half of her memories turn out to be false. The Woman in the Window: she talks to her husband throughout, but he’s actually dead. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: same, but it’s her mother who’s dead.

It’s almost got out of hand: if I pick up a modern thriller, I pretty much expect a plot twist like this. Think you committed a crime? You’ve been framed, or drugged, or lied to. A character who only exists on the phone? Definitely dead.

To be fair to The Woman in the Window, it has another set of plot twists that it took me slightly longer to see through. But if accounts are to be believed, the novel’s author, A. J. Finn, seems to be a champion of performative deception himself – a real life unreliable narrator who’s alleged to have made up stories including a PhD from Oxford, a brain tumour, and the death of his mother. He reminds me of our Prime Minister, and of President Trump, who both have relationships with truth that are even more casual than their relationships with women. After all, why let the facts get in the way of a good campaign slogan? Why choose a truth that draws a tear when you can have a lie that draws a smile?

This trend for unreliable narrators feels like part of the same phenomenon that enables people who play this game to make it to the top. We are now caught in a permanent twilight where every fact can be questioned, every truth undermined. Photos and videos can be faked. Every anecdote is questioned with the accusation that it “didn’t happen”. Social media has been a powerful force for the democratising of information but it’s also made it harder to tell what’s true and what’s false.

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By Douglas Murray

I don’t mean we all fall for fake news all the time. Some people do, of course. But most people are good at questioning the reality of what we see — wondering who made it up and why. The problem is that means we need to question everything. We can never just stop and rely on one set of facts. It’s exhausting. Uncertainty and ambiguity are hard for our brains to process. So playing the game of truth and lies through fiction or politics offers us a release.

We love being sucked into the dramatic aura of an Amy or a Boris: into a vortex where we are released from the gravitational pull of the truth. We never really believe them. But we suspend our disbelief because it is convenient and comfortable. It offers us a chance to play out the fantasy of being able to shape our own reality: to say that this is so simply because I say it is. We get to be Gods for a moment. How can uncomfortable truths ever compete?

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

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What if we gave children a vote?

By Polly Mackenzie

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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By Peter Franklin

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

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The abusive inhumanity of our politics

By Polly Mackenzie

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.

You probably think I’m overdoing the value of a bit of sport and the dancing and pyrotechnics of the opening ceremony. I’m not. But let me first persuade you that the identity politics culture war is one of the biggest problems of our age. Then I’ll explain why those Olympics were a model solution.

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

Of course, politics and identity have always been intricately linked. For many voters, their choice of party is linked to their sense of who they are, be that a member of the working class, an entrepreneur, a public servant, or a revolutionary. The thing we now condemn as “identity politics” started somewhere better: it brought us civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and with them a generational shift towards individual freedom of which we should all be proud. The Paralympic movement wouldn’t exist without this kind of identity politics, which fought to prove all kinds of human experience and endeavour have value.

But those triumphs come into question when celebrating your group’s identity morphs into rejecting other groups’ right to exist or make change. The same arguments that used to liberate historically oppressed groups are now being used by white power leaders and men’s’ rights activists to reverse those gains. This new kind of identity politics, which exists on the Left and the Right, is all about closing down debate and denying voice to anyone who isn’t like you. It denies the simple truth articulated most brilliantly by Jo Cox: that we have more things in common than things that divide us. And it makes it almost impossible to make progress as a nation, because everyone’s at war with everyone else, unable to trust each other.

Nations need a demos — a way of being together, under a common flag, with a common direction and identity — if they are to feel the sense of solidarity on which we build public services and the rule of law. In other words, we need to vaguely like each other if we’re to pay taxes, and follow rules, that benefit other people. Identity politics eats away at that sense that we all belong.

As Francis Fukuyama put it: “Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure.”

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By Mary Dejevsky

So, rebuilding a common sense of identity is the greatest challenge facing our current leaders. And it isn’t easy. We are diverse: racially, religiously, culturally, geographically. Our economic and cultural lives are atomising: gone are the days when we all shopped on the same high street, watched the same television channels, and worshipped in the same churches. We must not erase the multiplicity of human experience: we need instead to find a story that can contain it all.

And Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony showed us that we can do it. Yes, it was a bit sentimental. But a national story needs a good dose of sentiment. And that opening ceremony (watch the video again: it’s worth your time) contained everything you’d want in a vision of modern Britain. Creativity. Optimism. Technological aspiration. It was unafraid of embracing diversity yet relaxed about being distinctly British, rooted in our unique land and unique history. It revelled in the absurd counterpoint between our two favourite national symbols: the feudalism of our monarchy and the socialism of our NHS. And it was full of ironic humour, surely the most vital pillar of what it might mean (or should mean) to be British.

You can’t, of course, govern in a dance routine. Our dear old Queen can’t leap out of helicopters on a regular basis. If you think visual symbols are less important than facts and policies I’m afraid you are probably a robot. What we see in the world profoundly shapes the way we feel about the world. That’s why Lindsay Hoyle put the wigs back on the Commons clerk this week: to symbolise a new era. It’s why we talk about blue passports. Rainbow flags. Poppies. Images resonate into our brains far more than words ever can.

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Eight ways to unite the nation

By Polly Mackenzie

We are often told that politics has moved on from the battles between Left and Right that characterised most of the last century. That these days, the argument is between open and closed — David Goodhart calls them anywheres and somewheres; Stephen Kinnock calls them cosmopolitans and communitarians. Certainly, in the last decade, the biggest political fights have been on this axis, Brexit most of all. But 2012 was the year that showed us most clearly that this is not a fight we need to have.

Heart and head can rule together. You can love Britain and see our faults. You can love the Queen and be a democrat. You can love the NHS and believe in a market economy. You can love your family more than strangers and believe in universal human rights. You can listen to facts and listen to instinct. We human beings are full of contradictions and confusion, and we’re at our best when our rational capacity is given force and purpose by our emotions.

The next great Prime Minister will not be a champion for open or for closed. They will be the one who finds a way to bridge that divide, and a way to make us all feel as welcome under that single flag — just as our Olympic team did, parading into that Stratford stadium in 2012.

Politics is a funny sort of business. Half the time you end up wanting bad things to happen because it’ll help your lot in the long run. Labour moderates see the benefit of Labour’s disaster because it might help them win the party back. Centrist Conservatives wanted Boris to do badly to prove they were right that his politics was toxic.

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By Polly Mackenzie

There are people in Westminster quietly hoping that Boris will fail. They’re hoping the economy crashes, that negotiations with the EU fall into ignominious failure, that his efforts to rebuild the economy of the North will stumble, that A&E waiting times will rise, and that our Prime Minister will make some grotesque gaffe on the international stage that humbles him permanently. Some of these dreamers will even be Conservatives: those of a moderate hue, who want their party back from the Vote Leave tribe.

I accept that they are wishing this with the best of intentions. They believe they would do better, and they know they won’t get power unless and until he fails. But I’m done with this partisan thinking. I can’t take it any more.

I don’t want Brexit to be a disaster for communities in the North to teach them a lesson about the value of experts. I don’t want a recession to prove that economics is important. I don’t want a crappy winter in our NHS to prove the Conservatives don’t care about it. We’ve had enough bad government. Whether he is fit for high office is now irrelevant. He has it. I want him to succeed.

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The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

When he launched his campaign, Boris said he would unite the country. I was sceptical he knew how. But with this majority, he has freedom to do pretty much whatever he wants. So I will take him at his word. He wants to unite the country? These are my first thoughts about how:

1. Hold the union together. Scotland is on its way out the door if we don’t take action. If anyone can understand that the economic arguments are irrelevant, it should be you, Boris. This is about identity. Go to Scotland – go 10 times a year. Wales and Northern Ireland too. Listen. Care. Convene a national conversation between the citizens, not the politicians, of all our nation states about how we renew the union: make it deeper not weaker.
2. Don’t govern from Downing Street.  You hate Parliament and all those difficult questions. Fine. Get out of London. Go on tour, and take your office with you. I’d love us to move Parliament to Manchester, but you probably won’t do that – so modernise Parliament with electronic voting so you can spend weeks at a time away from London. Make our democracy feel different.
3. Help us get to know each other. Launch a national town-twinning programme, bringing leave and remain places together through school visits, council exchanges, and cultural events. Expand National Citizen Service and give everyone a right to time off to volunteer.
4. Reinvent the honours system. Use the Royal magic to celebrate places, as well as people. Let every town get involved in choosing the people to be honoured from their place – instead of having the lion’s share of honours going to Londoners. Create honours for towns and villages, too: the right for every place to be Royal for a year, instead of only Leamington Spa and Tunbridge Wells.
5. Let people into the policy decisions. You’ve pointed the way with your plan for a cross-party agreement on social care. Don’t leave this to a bunch of politicians. Put it to the people. Hold a real citizens’ assembly, and pledge from the start that you’ll follow the people’s choices. Do you really care whether we create a charge or an insurance system? A tax or a fee? Or do you just care about getting something through so people can live in dignity? If it’s the latter, have the confidence to delegate your authority to the citizens. It’s the only way to get an agreement that will last.
6. Especially on climate change. Do the same with climate change. These are policies that need to last for 30 years or more. We need to agree them together. You’ll look good as a leader who gets things done, you don’t need to make all the decisions with only blue-blooded Conservatives in the room.
7. Open your mind to hypothecated taxes. We all know your manifesto means you’re going to be spending a lot more money, and we’ll need more tax. Treasury people will tell you that hypothecation – matching particular taxes to particular spending – is bad economics. But we need to tell a better story about what taxpayers are buying, if we expect people to pay more. So sod the experts – you’re good at that.
8. Shut up about Brexit. Do as little economic harm as you can, but don’t make a big deal of it either way.  If the nation is going to come together, we need to spend our time talking about the things we agree on.

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Time for Boris Johnson to show his true colours

By Matthew Goodwin

This is not a partisan prospectus. The temptation now they’ve grasped that precious majority will be to do everything they can to protect it: to change the rules of politics to make life harder for Labour, and easier for themselves. I understand why. But democracy relies on the consent of the loser, more than anything else. That is precious. You’ve beaten them, you don’t need to crush them. Great leaders are magnanimous in victory.

Of course, greatness takes effort. Ambition. Chutzpah — of which Boris has plenty. It’s not the easy road. But why be small, when you can be great?

The date was awkward and unremarkable. We talked about meerkats and Milton, as pretentious university students are wont to do. There was no parting kiss. I walked home cold and fed up.

Returning home to that solitary, slightly charred sausage gave me a sense of belonging I think you only get in your chosen family, the group of friends with whom you share your first independence. I felt that opposite of loneliness for which we have no word. Though I am glad they didn’t try to sellotape any mashed potatoes to the door.

There is a science of giving, though it doesn’t have much to say about sausages. Economists will tell you that gifts destroy utility: they’re an inefficient way of spending money because the giver never makes as good a choice as the recipient would. They’ve conducted surveys of gift recipients and asked them: how much would you pay for that jumper from Aunty Eileen, or that Lavender-scented Gift Set from Mum? And, on average, people offer a lower price than the one paid by the giver.

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How Advent became peak late capitalism

By Polly Mackenzie

If you buy something for £10 and give it to someone who thinks it’s worth £7, you’re destroying value. But you’re also distorting the market because retailers know they can charge higher prices for gifts: often simply by slapping the word gift on the label, or placing the items in a section of the website called “For that special someone”.

From the perspective of economics, giving is a disaster. It persists despite its destructive financial impact because of social pressures we would do better to disregard. Anthropologists will tell you that in most societies, gifts are about power: exhibiting your strength and imposing obligations on the recipient. That’s why every year, in the run up to Christmas, clever, financially savvy people such as Martin Lewis campaign against “unnecessary” gifts, trying to stop us spending money on each other.

Of course: it is absurd to spend money you don’t have on presents that don’t matter for people who won’t value them. But we would lose something precious if we let the economists run Christmas, and allowed them to turn it into a series of bank transfers. We usually give our neighbours a box of chocolates at Christmas to thank them for accepting so many parcels on our behalf. There is no way I’m turning up this year with £4.75 instead.

The act of giving is an essential one for our souls and our happiness. It is one of the “five a day” actions we should take to protect our mental health: we are a social species, and building up a network of giving, receiving, obligation and gratitude is precisely what we humans need to thrive. We must make sure efforts to stop people wasting money don’t devalue the act of giving. We need more giving in our society, not less.

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How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

So how do we make the difference between bad giving and good? There are a few good rules of thumb. First: if you’re buying something in the Black Friday sales, you’re making a mistake. These are not exciting special offers, these are product clearance strategies by large retailers who have been planning these price reductions all year. Their main goal is to clear last year’s product lines before releasing the new ones for Christmas.

So, no: Black Friday is not the perfect time to complete your Christmas shopping, unless you want Amazon, Microsoft and Tefal to be in charge of what you buy. Choose presents based on what your loved ones want or need, not what suits the warehouse manager of a large retail chain.

Second: if your gift comes with the word “gift” on it, or is displayed in an aisle marked “gifts”, put it back on the shelf. Do not cross the threshold of Cards Galore. These are presents that you only buy when you don’t know what to get. If you don’t know what to get, you don’t know the recipient well enough to be buying them anything. You’re not giving out of love, you’re giving out of obligation. Don’t.

If you really do have to give this unfamiliar person a present, buy it in a charity shop. That way, if it’s just junk they don’t want, at least you haven’t added to the total sum of pointless junk in the world, you’ve just recycled an old piece. And the money’s gone to charity, not to fund the factories churning out novelty gifts fit only for a quick chuckle and a lifetime in an understairs cupboard.

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What if we gave children a vote?

By Polly Mackenzie

I don’t want to urge you all to make presents at home. I don’t preach — or even know — some way of making meaningful gifts out of string and beans. I still have about three kilos of Shea butter from two years ago when my daughter decided we should make lip balm for everyone. It seemed better to buy the ingredients in bulk, but it isn’t actually cheaper if you only use a tiny amount and leave the rest to fester. The little pots of lip balm ended up costing about £3 each to produce. Don’t try that at home.

Besides, spending money on other people is good. I have a real problem with those economists and their experiment. Perhaps my neighbour would spend the £4.75 on cheese, and be marginally happier than with his chocolates. But choosing something for someone else is an act of love. When someone chooses for us, it allows us to receive more than when we choose for ourselves, whether it’s different, better, more challenging, more exciting, or even more laughable. Sometimes, even often, it will be wrong. But when it’s right it can be transcendent.

My godmother is the best present buyer I know. I adore her. She gave me presents I didn’t think I needed, that helped to shape the person I aspired to be. She bought me a trinket box with a duck on that made me want to collect things, and keep things tidy. She bought me a hen plate that inspired a lifelong love of crockery. She bought me my first pair of tweezers, just when I was getting to the age when personal grooming starts to matter. Where a less adept adult might have told me to pluck my eyebrows (one did, and I shouted at her), my godmother bought me Tweezerman tweezers, with a note as if she were letting me into a secret that ‘these are the best’. I loved them.

And sometimes it’s wonderful to spend more money on someone than they think they deserve. If you can say: “This is the best. I know you wouldn’t buy it for yourself. But I want to.” That’s not economic efficiency. That’s love.

And presents don’t even need to be any good to be part of our lives’ story. When I was eight years old, my brother asked for “something round” for his birthday, meaning that he wanted a ball, but was ambivalent about what kind. I found and wrapped a pea from the freezer, thinking this was the best joke ever. Then, in doubt, I bought him a four pack of Mars bars as well. Then I got hungry and ate one. His tenth birthday present was a pea and three Mars bars. This was a bad present; possibly one of the worst presents ever given. And yet it has brought us 30 years of laughter. Economists can’t measure that.

“Will you let them drink and smoke, too?”

This is usually the first response I get when I propose enfranchising all citizens under the age of 18. The answer is, obviously, no. We have laws that prevent young people from drinking and smoking because these things are harmful. Voting, by contrast, is not harmful; drawing an X on a ballot paper is substantially less dangerous than inhaling toxic smoke into your lungs.

Before you start freaking out, let’s be clear: this wouldn’t mean the sudden election of a government that promised free ponies and paintball instead of the NHS. At the last count, 17% of the population were under the age of 18, and I am not proposing that only children should vote — simply that they deserve to have a voice in shaping our shared future.

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Still, there are two significant arguments for continuing to deny children the vote. Firstly, that they are too young to understand politics, or the consequences of their decisions; secondly, that they are vulnerable to outside influence, and will just vote the way their parents do — or against their parents to spite them.

The first is a reasonable concern. But we have already set, as a nation, an age threshold at which we expect children to understand the law sufficiently to be able to abide by it. It’s the age of 10: the age of criminal responsibility in England. From 10, a child is required to follow the law, and if they do not, they can be punished by the state.

How can we argue that a 10-year-old has the judgement required to understand the law and the consequences of breaking it — and then argue that a 10-year-old doesn’t have the judgement required to understand democracy or the consequences of voting? If you have to follow the law, you should have a role in making it.

And until you reach that age of 10, your parents should be able to cast your vote as your proxy. Clearly, a small baby would struggle to exercise their vote directly, given their basic inability to control a pencil. But a parent with a second vote, to cast in their child’s name, could be expected to consider that child’s interests, and talk to them about their choices and ideas from an early age.

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Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

Of course, this brings us to the argument of undue influence. Whether the parent is directly casting their child’s vote or not, we can expect the family environment to shape a child’s choices. But then, you could say the same thing about any one of us. None of our votes really make sense, from first principles. We all have stories and experiences that shape our political identities — and the votes we cast from election to election. If some children vote the way their parents do, that makes them no different from millions of adults. If some children vote to spite their parents, the same is true of some adults.

If some children vote without really understanding the facts; if some spoil their ballot paper with a drawing of a penis; if some vote for the candidate whose surname starts with A simply because they’re at the top of the list; if some vote for the party with the prettiest logo: they are simply following in the footsteps of generations of voters before them.

There is no test of wisdom or thoughtfulness for over-18s. A distant relation of mine voted Leave in the referendum convinced that Turkey had already joined the EU. She was wrong. But she still had the right to vote: the right to be wrong, and the right to be heard anyway. We shouldn’t use age as a proxy for seriousness: we should enfranchise every citizen, wise or foolish, young or old. The right to vote should be inalienable.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Now, there is a toxic movement, in particular on the Remain side of the Brexit debate, to celebrate the idea that Leave voters — and social conservatives more broadly — are dying off. That’s evolved in some places to proposals to strip the vote of the over-70s, arguing that they don’t have a stake in the future, in the way young people do. These arguments are repugnant. Every citizen has a right to their vote, no matter their age.

But we do have a problem when the electoral system is inherently biased towards the 83% of the population who are over 18. By granting the vote to all children — exercised by proxy until they reach 10 — we would simply rebalance the system to recognise that all citizens are equal.

At the next election, our Parliament is facing an exodus of capable, competent women who are giving up on a career in politics long before their time. Yes, it’s normal for a cadre of MPs to step down at any election. And the number of women doing so is in proportion to the (paltry) number of women in Parliament overall. But the average number of years these women have served is about half the number of years served by the men choosing to retire from Parliamentary life. They’re bowing out early, driven out by abuse, exhaustion and the hope of a simpler life.

A political career is decades in the making, especially if your party is in opposition. So be under no illusions: if talented women are giving up after five or 10 years, they are giving up the chance to secure lasting power or impact. If you can’t hear the alarm bells ringing for the quality of our politics, you need to take a syringe to your ears.

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How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

Being an MP has always been a pretty awful job. You have to have the skills of a social worker to deal with the problems your constituents bring you. You need a capable legal mind to navigate through your responsibilities as a legislator. If you take your constituency seriously, you have to split your life in two: live in the constituency and spend most weeks away from your family, or live in London, and shuttle the family up and down the motorway every weekend — until the children are teenagers and refuse to leave their friends, at which point you barely see them.

Most MPs want to make a difference. They want to improve the lives of their constituents, and the citizens of our country. They will put up with all of the crap if they know it serves a higher purpose. Half the problem is that our politics is so obsessed with Brexit at the moment that it’s hard to know what difference any MP is making, even if they do slog away for 80 hours a week.

On top of that, the party system is eating itself, putting more and more power into the hands of the most extreme. Imagine going home to your beloved constituency every week and being answerable not to your voters, but to the hundred or so most unrepresentative, most rabidly engaged activists who happen to be your local party.

Yes, MPs are well paid for the work they do, earning twice the average full-time salary of someone in their forties. But their decent pay packet, and their privileged role in our democracy, have started to be seen as a reason to dehumanise them completely.

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Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

It’s your fault: you voted the wrong way, the haters say. You took this job: you deserve everything that’s coming to you. Abuse against our MPs has reached epidemic proportions. On all sides — Leave, Remain, Left and Right — abusers on social media and in the streets have found a louder and louder voice. Death threats. Rape threats. Threats against family members. Dog shit through the letterbox.

It shouldn’t surprise us that women are more likely to buckle under this horror. Women are more vulnerable to physical threats, most of which come from men. Much of the abuse is gendered, with pregnant MPs singled out for attacks. And, because of the imbalanced way in which most parenting still happens in our society, women are also more likely to carry the burden of balancing family life with the challenges of their career.

If we lose the women from our Parliament, we have no hope of governing our country better. In the last months, Parliament has heard powerful testimonials from women speaking about miscarriage; sexual violence; abortion; living in an abusive relationship, and more. A Parliament without these voices would be impoverished, and that’s the Parliament we’re in danger of reverting to.

But it isn’t just talented women we’re in danger of losing. You don’t have to be a woman MP to think: why am I doing this to myself? More and more brilliant people seem to be leaving politics simply because they have better options: more money, more fun, less hatred, less work. And brilliant people who ought to go into politics look at the morass and say: never in a million years.

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By Tom Chivers

This is a crisis for our politics. If the best people run for the hills at the thought of a life in politics we will end up with the worst people in charge: and we the citizens will suffer.

There’s a Netflix series, Mindhunter, which tells the story of the first psychologists to study serial killers. The lead woman is an academic who’s spent her career studying psychopathic business leaders. Someone asks her: “How do you get to be a CEO if you’re a psychopath?”. She replies: “How do you get to be a CEO if you’re not?” These are the rules now governing our politics, too: ladders of opportunity for those who least deserve them. A pathway to a country led by shits and weirdos.

If we want great people to run our country, we need to make being an MP a fantastic job again — and stamping out political abuse is only the start. Change the rules so we genuinely attract and reward the best talent. Open primaries to create real opportunity for democratic engagement, and break the stranglehold of obsessive activists. Better paid and more qualified staff, so you know you’re doing a decent job. Proper parental leave, with Parliament by video conference for half the week so you can actually see your children from time to time, and stay in touch with your constituents.

We’re not good at democratic reform, I know, here in Britain. But the case is now urgent. Unless you really do want a country led by shits and weirdos, in which case: good luck to you. view comments]]> https://unherd.com/2019/11/the-abusive-inhumanity-of-our-politics/?edition=us?appcommentsnew https://unherd.com/2019/11/the-abusive-inhumanity-of-our-politics/?edition=us/feed/ 23764 https://unherd.com/2019/10/magna-carta-proves-the-english-arent-exceptional/?edition=us https://unherd.com/2019/10/magna-carta-proves-the-english-arent-exceptional/?edition=us#respond https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/GettyImages-455155220.jpg?w=526 https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/POlly.jpg?w=96 Polly Mackenzie is Director of Demos, a leading cross-party think tank. She served as Director of Policy to the Deputy Prime Minister from 2010-2015.

“Invoke Clause 61 of the Magna Carta,” declared the petition. “The right to lawful rebellion.” Tabled earlier this year on Parliament’s website, the author went on to explain that this ancient legal text specifies that when Parliament has betrayed the people, the people can lawfully storm Parliament.

Now, my medieval Latin is no great shakes, but unless I’m missing something, this nameless petitioner is wrong on a number of counts. First, as any constitutional pedant will tell you, it isn’t the Magna Carta, just Magna Carta, because Latin doesn’t use articles like the and a. Second, the document doesn’t actually have any clauses — in its original form, it was just continuous text.

The clauses have been added on in later versions to make it more comprehensible. And finally, rather importantly, Magna Carta says nothing at all about storming Parliament, which didn’t exist yet, and didn’t have its own building — rather a prerequisite for being stormed — for another 300 years.

In fact, the words usually referred to as Clause 61 set out how 25 Barons may confiscate the property of the king if he defies them (with a special exemption for the Queen and the royal children, who retained the dubious privilege of remaining the King’s property whatever he did).

And yet I understand why this petitioner made his mistakes. He has soared to the Premier League of our national pastime of misremembering Magna Carta: what it was for, what it achieved, and what it means today.

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By Robert Tombs

Magna Carta, a treaty signed at Runnymede by King John in 1215 at the behest of his barons, is part of our national myth. Salisbury Cathedral (which owns one of the four original copies from that year) describes it as a “symbol of justice, fairness and human rights”. Lord Denning, a respected judge from the olden days when judges were respected, called it “the greatest constitutional document of all times — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

Oh how charming, and comfortable it is, to imagine that Britain invented human rights and freedom from tyranny. It fits with such a delightful story about England, the Mother of Parliaments and the champion of democracy. It’s the tale told in that ghastly standard historical text of the post-war era, Our Island Story, recently republished after a campaign by a bunch of people who believe the sole purpose of our school system should be indoctrinating every child in the fantasy of English exceptionalism.

But Magna Carta is not the foundation stone of freedom. It was a peace treaty on victor’s terms, establishing an oligarchy of the barons, satisfying their narrow interests and protecting their property from an overbearing king. Read through the text and you won’t find any uplifting prose about the value of humanity: no “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; no “all men are created equal.”

Instead you’ll find a section compelling the removal of all fishing weirs from the rivers of England. You’ll find new laws to prevent Jewish moneylenders from claiming their debts. Rules are set out on how guardians should manage land for any heirs too young to do it themselves. A whole paragraph is devoted to making sure someone called Gerard d’Athee — along with all his relatives — is thrown out of the country as soon as possible.

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Magna Carta specifies that no town should be forced to build bridges over rivers, and that the Royal household will no longer take wood for the castle without consent. Magna Carta is page after page of score-settling by grumpy barons, on everything from the return of hostages to the establishment of standard measures of wine, ale and corn (not imperial measurements, traditionalists will be disappointed to hear, but the “London quarter”.)

Of course, there are good bits. Taxes, after Magna Carta, required consent, and couldn’t be imposed by royal fiat. In the document, the King pledges not to “sell, deny or delay right or justice”. The document includes the beginnings of the principle of jury trial when the King promises not to “proceed with force” against anyone except “by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land”.

But Magna Carta also establishes legal principles that we should shudder at, most notably that no man can be imprisoned on the testimony of a woman, unless it’s for the murder of her husband. All these new freedoms and legal protections apply to free men, and free men alone. Villeins, merchants, and women are clearly lesser subjects. All are to be judged only by their equals: there is no question of challenge to the feudal hierarchy.

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By Polly Mackenzie

All this can be forgiven. There is no reason why Magna Carta, written in 1215, should have anything other than medieval sensibilities and prejudices at its heart. It’s only a problem when we try to pretend that these few hundred words of Latin make Britain, or England, the inventor of freedom and justice — an old democracy which has a right to lecture others who learnt about human rights so much later than we did.

Magna Carta did not give us a democracy or anything approaching universal human rights. Magna Carta did not prevent decades of state-sponsored, religiously motivated persecution, as we oscillated between Catholicism and Protestantism. Magna Carta did not prevent a civil war. Magna Carta did not stop us having constitutional prejudice against Catholics built into our laws until the 21st century. It didn’t stop us deporting British citizens to the Caribbean after 60 years of life in the UK. It’s just a fusty old bit of Latin, full of the prejudices and preoccupations of its time.

We are a young, imperfect democracy, not an old one. Our citizens have had an equal right to vote for only 91 years. That’s nothing to be ashamed of: I love my country, and there is much to love about it. But we’re still making mistakes, and still working on getting freedom right. So marching around the world smugly declaring that we invented freedom 800 years ago doesn’t just do a disservice to history. It distracts us from our obligation to keep reforming, and keep improving, our system of government.

That petitioner was right: our Parliament has let us down. But we don’t need to storm it. We do have the right of lawful rebellion, and it’s our right to vote. Let’s hope we vote in a new Parliament that’s as ready for change as King John was back in 1215.

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So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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By Giles Fraser

I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

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As a headstrong activist, I was a dangerous thing

By Paul Embery

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.