International affairs might also play to the Conservative advantage. Farage has benefitted from being Donald Trump’s favorite Englishman, but Trump will not last forever and anyone who cares about British interests will be in despair about an American president who threatens to invade a Nato country and punish those who get in his way.

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Will the Tories go extinct?

By Richard Vinen

In the next few months, the future of the Tory party will likely be decided. Farage has said that Tory defectors will no longer be welcome in his party after the local government elections of May of this year — not, incidentally, a remark that suggests that he has great respect for the motives of those Tories who jump ship. If significant numbers of senior Tories defect, Reform may become the new force on the Right and the terrified remnants on the Tory benches might force Badenoch out so that they can do a deal with Reform that would save some of their seats.

It is fairly certain that the local government elections will see a big vote for Reform (because voters use these occasions to protest against established parties); it is also fairly certain that this victory will be a pyrrhic one, because nothing is more calculated to reveal the weakness of the party than having lots of its ill-tempered and inexperienced activists installed in local councils.

Things will start to get easier for Badenoch, though, if she makes it through the spring. Her position will be stronger because her most dangerous rival in her own party has gone and also because she has begun to show the ferrous qualities of her character. Like Margaret Thatcher, she is beginning to look like someone who is at her best when the going gets tough.

There are other things in her favor. Farage and his Tory admirers may talk about “uniting the Right”, but the truth is that the struggle between Reform and the Conservatives is a civil war within a fairly extreme part of the Right — one that is obsessed with nationalism and, increasingly, with race. One wonders what Edward Boyle, the Conservative MP for Birmingham Handsworth until 1970, would have said about Jenrick’s remark that one does not see a white face in the area.

Reform now seems to be abandoning free-market principles, at the very moment when Rachel Reeves has made even the most socialistically inclined voters think that perhaps entrepreneurs might understand the economy better than politicians and civil servants. This opens up the possibility that the Conservatives might spend a little less time hanging union flags on lampposts and return to their natural territory as a party that exists to defend capitalism. Badenoch might even think of bringing economic liberals such as Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak back to the center of power in her party.

If Reform supplants the Conservative Party or takes it over, then, in a strange way, the British political party system will stay the same. There will be a single party of the Right confronting a single party of the Left. In fact, having Farage as the effective leader of the official opposition is probably the only thing that could save Keir Starmer’s political career. A significant minority of British voters would vote for Farage but a majority would vote for anyone but Farage. In 2002, the French Left rallied behind Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election under the slogan “vote for the crook not the fascist”. One can imagine a variety of similarly unappealing slogans under which the anti-Farage electorate might grudgingly vote for Starmer’s Labour Party.

The tectonic plates of British politics will really move if the Tories survive as a significant force. If this happens, Reform will not go away. Rather there will be two parties on the Right. There will also be fragmentation on the Left — partly because it will be harder to rally the Left-wing vote behind a single party if there is no single party on the Right to oppose. To an extent, this is already happening: there are already more than 120 Members of Parliament who do not belong to either Labour or the Conservatives (in 1951 there were just six) and the great majority of these identify as Left-wing. Badenoch’s survival would, in itself, damage Starmer — because her decisiveness highlights his weaknesses: the more she looks like a pitbull on speed, the more he looks like a robot with a flat battery.

In Britain, we have taken the two-party system for granted. Third parties have either been absorbed into an established party (as Joseph Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists were absorbed into the Tories before the First World War) or have replaced an established party (as Labour replaced the Liberals after the First World War). But there is no reason why the two-party system is bound to survive. Most European countries are governed by multiple parties (sometimes fairly ephemeral ones) that move in and out of alliance with each other in a perpetual Brownian motion.

Tories who are nostalgic for the huge Thatcher majority of 1983 do not find multi-party politics appealing. But, in fact, Conservatives have often done well from allying with other parties — they were the dominant element in a succession of coalition governments that ruled from 1931 to 1945.

Coalitions do have their advantages. Politicians can do things that they know to be necessary, but which would be unpalatable to their own party, by explaining that they need to please their coalition partners. This might be particularly useful to the Tories now — because the party has given rank-and-file members the final decision in leadership elections. It is said that David Cameron promised the Brexit referendum because he assumed that his coalition with the Liberal Democrats would endure after the 2015 election and that his political partners would save him from having to honor his promise.

A multi-party system and the resultant coalitions might, in fact, allow a re-alignment of British politics. Once the two major parties reflected a real social division that pitted the cloth cap against the bowler hat. But the old maps of politics are less reliable now. The working class is much reduced and a large part of the middle class now works in the public sector.

This might simply mean a coalition of Lefts confronting an alliance of Reform and the Conservatives, but it might allow for more complicated alliances. Blairites in the Labour Party and those in the Liberal Democrats who remember Gladstone (or even just David Laws) might be willing to support a free-market government. There must be Tories who privately dream of reversing Brexit. Some important Conservatives — including Boris Johnson — took climate change more seriously than Starmer does.

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By Jonny Ball

There is one politician who has, effectively, been operating in a European political system for many years: Farage. His only real experience of elected office was gained in the European parliament. He has long understood that having a majority in parliament may not be the key to getting what you want — he has, after all, placed himself at the center of the political system when he still has only half a dozen MPs in parliament. He has no institutional attachment to a particular party, beginning life as a Conservative (though he much admired Enoch Powell who had left the Conservative Party) before joining UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform. His parties have always been built around him and his freedom of maneuver is greatly enhanced by the fact that he has not had to worry about votes by the rank and file. His political language derives from business: he talks of Reform as a “startup” and once suggested that he might engineer a “reverse takeover” of the Conservative Party. All this suggests a view of politics that revolves around deals and opportunism — there is no one who feels more at home in the smoke-filled room than Farage. His political style would be familiar to, say, a Radical in the French Third Republic or an Italian Christian Democrat in the Seventies.

Perhaps it is time that the defenders of political convention at Westminster began to study the skills that Farage picked up in Brussels and Strasbourg. As for the objection that multi-party systems produce weak governments, has Britain ever had a weaker government than it has now at a time when the ruling party has a huge majority?

Charles de Gaulle’s new constitution and the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 were designed to sweep all that away. The most significant powers were given to the president (elected for seven years) rather than a prime minister (dependent on the whim of parliament). In any case, parliament now had less power.

All of this has now fallen apart. François Bayrou was the second person to have been prime minister of France since President Emmanuel Macron unwisely held parliamentary elections last summer. Bayrou had to be sustained by a rickety coalition, a delicately balanced house of cards that he has now upset by calling a vote of confidence in his government. In doing so, he transformed a debate about a particular measure (a budget) into a decision on Bayrou’s government, the President, and the whole state of France.

Bayrou’s hero is a Fourth Republic prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose own government lasted for eight months. Modeling oneself on a man who never again held office after his resignation as prime minister in 1955 sounds like an odd strategy. But Mendès’s now famous phrase “to govern is to choose” underpinned Bayrou’s insistence on a confidence vote: it would force the political parties to make hard choices about public finances. A devout Catholic, Bayrou made a moral argument: piling up public debt places an impossible burden on future generations and creates a vicious circle as baby boomers are supported in their dotage by young taxpayers who cannot afford to start families. Mendès, too, was ostentatiously moral and, though he was a secularized Jew, he attracted particular admiration from progressive Catholics.

Yet the comparison with Mendès does not always work to Bayrou’s advantage. Mendès was serious and brave. He jumped from the window of a Vichy prison and made his way to London to join the Free French air force. This gave him a reserve of moral credit that no present-day politician can match. Mendès was a conservative (a liberal in the French sense of the word) in his attitude to public finances but progressive (a liberal in the Anglo-American sense of the word) in his attitude to other matters. The great achievement of his short-lived premiership was to extract France from Indo-China. And so even the student protestors of 1968 admired Mendès — rather as if stoned teenagers at Glastonbury were to chant “Oh George Osborne”. Bayrou has all the unpopularity that derives from his fiscal conservatism without the prestige that goes with a resistance record or support for decolonization.

Mendès was the real deal. The novelist François Mauriac admired both him and de Gaulle but suggested that the more uncompromising of the two when it came to hard choices was Mendès. Bayrou, by contrast, comes across as calculating and false. Some think that he knew that he could not win a vote of confidence and preferred a spectacular confrontation on an issue of principle that would allow him to present his defeat as an honorable one. More cynical observers point out that Bayrou has run for the presidency three times and suggest that he wishes to run again when Macron comes to the end of his second presidential term in 2027. Defeat now allows Bayrou to say “I told you so” about the economic state of France in two years’ time.

Bayrou’s demise reflects broader changes — some of them peculiar to France and some of them significant for most Western democracies. One major shift is in the nature of the French presidency itself. Since 2002, presidents serve five-year terms rather than seven, which has diminished their power to impose long-term stability. While De Gaulle and Mitterrand cultivated a monarchical mystique around their office, François Hollande ran in 2012 promising to make the presidency “normal” and fulfilled this banal ambition so well that he did not even try to run for a second term. Since 2017, Macron has worked hard to restore the prestige of the presidency — he has a taste for political theatre that owes much to de Gaulle. However, more than at any point since 1958, the presidency now seems a political office like any other. Some of those who voted against Bayrou were really voting against Macron and hope to force the President to resign before the end of his mandate.

Changing political communications have also contributed to a crisis in governance. Mendès used radio addresses to appeal directly to the French people over the heads of parliamentarians. Today, with no state monopoly of broadcasting and, even more importantly, since radio and television have lost their grip on public information, politicians like Bayrou resort to launching their own YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, a 74-year-old man in a tie did not match the appeal of skateboarding cats or the Gen Z media-fluent president of le Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella.

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Macron’s own decision to found a new party — at first called En Marche and now called Renaissance — has disrupted the party system. En Marche enjoyed a period of spectacular electoral success, but its subsequent precipitous decline has not restored the fortunes of the parties that it displaced. The 577 deputies in the French parliament include members of 11 different groupings. No party comes close to commanding a majority of deputies and no politically feasible coalition could command such loyalty either.

In a strange way, bitter political hostilities were what once made France governable. In the Fourth Republic, there were times when the Communist Party got more votes than any other party — but the understandable desire to ensure that a group expressing unqualified admiration for Stalin should be kept out of power underwrote electoral alliances that brought the other parties together. More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National aroused uncomfortable memories of Vichy and antisemitism. When Le Pen got into the second round of the 2002 presidential election (with just under 20% of the vote), other parties united to support the Gaullist Jacques Chirac under the unappealing but effective slogan “better the crook than the fascist”.

But today, some leaders of the mainstream Right — including the Gaullist former president Nicolas Sarkozy — treat the RN as a party like any other and say that they would not rule out an alliance with it. If there is a political untouchable in France, it is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left La France Insoumise. Mélenchon is often denounced for allegedly flirting with Islamism or antisemitism — though, in truth, his party’s policies would have seemed unexceptional on the French Left just a couple of decades ago. Mélenchon’s political isolation is attenuated by an unspoken alliance with the far-Right. Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon benefit from having each other as enemies and from a general sense of political crisis. There will be a kind of general strike — an attempt to “block everything” — on Wednesday. It seems to have originated with social media posts from the far-Right before being picked up by Mélenchon. Revealingly, the Rassemblement National, now torn between a desire to bring down the system and a desire to pose as a potential party of government, has slightly distanced itself from the upcoming protests.

All this means that France is getting dangerously close to the point at which protest parties that trade on denouncing the “system” have attained a level of support that means that the system cannot function without them. None of this would matter if the financial problems to which Bayrou alludes were not real. His opponents say that France’s problems are hardly more serious than those of some other countries (which is not saying much) or that France can still service her debt (which is obviously true until it stops being true). The stability of the Fifth Republic was founded partly on the rapid growth of the Trente Glorieuses. De Gaulle was never a great one for financial rigor (Mendès resigned from his provisional government in 1944 because of their disagreements on this) but he avoided awkward fiscal choices because state finances floated on rapid economic growth. It is unlikely that any future French government will get such an easy ride.

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What happens now? Macron could dissolve parliament, but he is unlikely to repeat a stratagem that proved so disastrous for him last time. His numerous enemies want him to resign. But a Fifth Republic president has a right, some would say a duty, to serve until the end of his elected term. Only de Gaulle resigned before this. Pompidou died in office; Mitterrand served two full seven-year terms, though he was often in agony from the cancer that killed him just months after he left the Elysée Palace. In spite of his unpopularity with both the political class and the electorate, Macron has many strengths. He is still only 47 years old — more than a quarter of a century younger than Bayrou and younger than de Gaulle was in 1940 — and is possessed of extraordinary vigor and self-confidence. The very fact that the constitution prevents him from serving a third term gives him a kind of freedom: he does not have to care about opinion polls or maintaining alliances. However chaotic France’s domestic politics become, the president still controls a domaine reservé of foreign and defense policy, matters that have special importance because of Gaza and Ukraine.

When Italy faced similar circumstances in 2021, Mario Draghi formed a government of technocrats. Things are more complicated in France. The president who chooses the prime minister is himself both a technocrat (like most recent presidents, Macron is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and also, unlike his Italian counterpart, a party politician, who would find it hard to present himself as the arbiter of an apolitical solution. Probably Macron will find a prime minister who will stagger through government — obtaining a majority for particular measures without risking an overall vote of confidence. This will suit the centrist parties in the short term — because they defer a parliamentary election in which they would probably do badly. It will suit la France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National in the long term — because they will go into the next presidential election with all the advantages of being the anti-establishment parties.

The British should not be smug when surveying events across the Channel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced his Bayrou moment when his government proposed benefit cuts. Unlike Bayrou he did not dare make the vote into one of confidence, but this has not made the problem go away. Starmer seems to enjoy a large parliamentary majority, but the most striking novelty of the last election was the arrival of small protest parties — one of which might conceivably be the largest party in the next House of Commons. Labour looks less like a party than a sprawling alliance of political factions of the kind that would be familiar to students of Fourth Republic France.

It is hard to see how any prime minster, on either side of the Channel, can succeed with an electorate that rejects both public spending cuts and tax rises and with such a fissiparous party system. I suspect that the most pronounced political trend in the next decade or so will be the near certainty that incumbent parties cannot win elections. To paraphrase Mendès France, “to govern is to lose”.

They endured crushing electoral defeat at the hands of the Liberals in 1906, and then again by Labor in 1945 and 1997. In the early years of Thatcher’s term of office, a public opinion poll suggested that the party might have won just one seat (and not Thatcher’s) if an election had been held on that day.

Some Conservatives now derive comfort from the fact that the party was not destroyed by these travails. I have heard senior Tories in private suggest that their party is the cockroach of the political world — not an appealing creature, but one that is able to survive any catastrophe and outlive its competitors. They talk of the “will for power” and capacity to adapt. They point to the “secret weapon” of loyalty, but also to the ruthlessness with which failed leaders are deposed.

There is something to be said for these arguments. The party reinvented itself to deal with a widening suffrage in the late 19th century and the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century. It endured 13 years of opposition, two electoral defeats and four changes of leader after 1997, but still came back to dominate — indeed, for better or worse, to transform — British politics in the 14 years after 2010.

Should they panic now? Is it possible that the oldest major party in the world will cease to exist? Polls show that it has been pushed into third place by Reform UK — a party that has existed only for a few years and currently has just four MPs in parliament. The British electoral system is hard on third parties, and this tendency has, for the past hundred years, benefited Labor and the Tories.

But if another party overtakes the Tories by even a small margin, the advantage could be reversed. Tough-minded will for power has saved the Conservatives in the past, but it will have the opposite effect once the political cockroaches decide that they stand a better chance of re-election with Nigel Farage’s face on their leaflets. It is too soon to write the obituary, but it is worth examining the history of the Conservative Party if we want to understand its current dilemma.

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Will anyone miss Rishi Sunak?

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The Tories were in power, on their own or as members of a coalition, for almost three quarters of the 20th century. Their success depended above all on the fact that they wanted to win elections and they wanted to govern once they had done so. This is not as obvious as it might sound. There are politicians who prefer opposition to government; after 1968, the Tories were fortunate that Enoch Powell was such a person. Others refuse to make the compromises that go with holding power. Charles de Gaulle resigned twice, first as Prime Minister, then as President. He had not been defeated in an election, but he preferred the gloomy solitude of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to the prospect of remaining in office without being sure of getting what he wanted.

Tories, though, have liked being in government. The late Lord Carrington first held junior office in the government of Winston Churchill in 1951, then served in the cabinet of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974 and that of Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1982. For men such as this, the Tories were, above all, the party of government. They sometimes talked of resisting the “state”, by which they meant trying to restrict its spending or interference in private business, but they took for granted that their purpose in life was to defend the state insofar as it incarnated the continuity of British institutions and the assertion of British power abroad. Tory prime ministers worked closely with civil servants — especially those from the Treasury and, revealingly, the Foreign Office. Winston Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, hugely influential from 1951 to 1955, was from the Foreign Office, as was Philip de Zulueta, who served the same function for Harold Macmillan. For all the jokes about Sir Humphrey, civil servants were vital instruments of the Thatcher project. John Kerr, seconded from the Foreign Office to the Treasury, helped implement monetarism in the early Eighties. Robert Wade-Gery, seconded from the Foreign Office to the Cabinet Office, planned how the government would crush the National Union of Mineworkers.

Tory interest in government always involved a certain tension. The things they said to win elections did not always match the things that they did once they were in government. Margaret Thatcher had a particularly sophisticated understanding of this political game. In the run up to 1979, she talked the talk of Right-wing populism about race and the death penalty, but she rarely walked the walk of policy on these issues. In government, she was a model of balance. She was willing to risk an economic policy that was, in the short term, unpopular. However, when her more literal-minded ministers pointed out that the logic of their position required them, for example, to abolish the $10 Christmas bonus to pensioners, she overruled them for electoral reasons.

Being the party of government gave the Tories three advantages. First, they communicated a sense of experience and competence that attracted many voters. Second, the prospect of ministerial office could be dangled to keep rebellious back benchers in order. Third, the mystique of the prime minister’s office conferred a special prestige on the party leader in the eyes of ordinary party members. Constituency parties were ferociously loyal to party leaders.

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Things have changed. The dizzying pace with which the Conservative party has switched leaders has, in itself, undermined the mystique that the office once conferred. Psychologists used to test for senility by asking their patients who Mrs Thatcher was. Now even young Conservatives might have trouble naming every Conservative leader between 2016 and 2024. Once people who might have considered themselves well qualified as Prime Minister would serve loyally in cabinets led by other people — think of Hurd and Heseltine in the government of John Major. Now every senior Tory has their eye on the next leadership election. I suspect that some ministers of the last government spent more time thinking about such matters than they did about the mundane business of running their own departments. Nothing weakens Kemi Badenoch more than the sense that she is weak. Her powers of patronage count for nothing because few of her colleagues believe she will be in place at the time of the next election.

The quality of Conservative politicians has certainly declined, but the most damaging Tory leaders of recent years were both, in their very different ways, able. Boris Johnson was the most impressive Conservative electoral campaigner since Stanley Baldwin. He was also lazy, indecisive and terrified of unpopularity. These qualities made him catastrophic as a minister — let alone as Prime Minister. It is significant that he quarrelled with civil servants and was, in the end, destroyed partly by the intervention of Simon McDonald, formerly the senior official at the Foreign Office. Rishi Sunak, by contrast, was an outstandingly able minister but a disaster as a campaigner. It is as though the two great strengths of the modern Conservative party — the ability to win elections and the ability to govern — have become divorced from each other.

None of this would matter if we still lived in a two-party system. The Tories would have been sure of getting back into power sooner or later and, given the ineptitude of the current government, it would probably have been sooner. As it is, the very weakness of Labour is also a threat to the Tories because it opens space for new parties and, particularly, for Reform, which looks as though it might be the asteroid that will finally consign the Tory dinosaur to extinction.

It may yet be that the Tories will pull themselves out of their death spiral. Getting rid of Badenoch may help — not because she is a bad leader, but simply because the drama of bloodletting might be cathartic and because her successor is bound to be stronger (Conservative MPs will hesitate before disposing of two leaders in quick succession).

It might even serve Tory purposes if Reform were to win the next election. It is hard to believe that Farage — who had never held office or, indeed, done very much in his whole life except make speeches and appear on television — would be a successful prime minister. Could Reform assemble 20 potential cabinet ministers without scraping a barrel that contains some disturbing eccentricity? Plenty of Tories will join Reform if it looks like winning an election, but Suella Braverman and Liz Truss might not add to its appeal.

A more likely prospect is that Reform will get more votes than the Tories but not win enough seats to form a government. Most likely of all is some kind of deal between Reform and the Tories. In the past, Conservatives have benefited from political alliances. Only too late did other members of the National Government in the Thirties, or the Liberal Democrats after 2010, appreciate that Tory flexibility is that of a python, which squeezes its prey tight or swallows it whole.

Talk of snakes puts one in mind of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Of all prominent Conservatives, he is the one who has most consistently suggested an alliance with Reform. Being, for now, out of parliament, he has a useful freedom of maneuver. He personally would be well suited to thrive in a coalition because he combines the style of the most old-fashioned Conservative with a willingness to countenance constitutional innovation that makes the late Tony Benn sound like Walter Bagehot. He solemnly declared that MPs could not eject Boris Johnson as Prime Minister without triggering a general election because we now live in a “presidential system” — a remark that would once have earned one of the Queen’s ministers a stern letter from an official at Buckingham Palace.

Rees-Mogg has always been ostentatiously nice about Farage, on whom he confers the Wodehousian compliment “good egg”. Before they sign up to an informal pact over lunch at the Drones club, however, Farage might be wise to remember that Rees-Mogg also once pledged loyalty to David Cameron and Theresa May, and to ask himself whether is likely to be Wooster or Jeeves in any future cohabitation.

I am sure that some prominent members of the Conservative Party will hold office in future governments. It is possible that they will do so as members of a party that continues to call itself Conservative. But the virtues that even opponents of the party would once have recognised as being represented by the Conservatives — skepticism about rapid change and a willingness to take the hard choices required by holding office — seem to have gone for ever.

The mere idea that Donald Trump might be compared to Charles de Gaulle will provoke howls of outrage — and not just in France. De Gaulle lived a life of austere simplicity. When his grandchildren came to tea at the Élysée Palace, he told the servants to bring him the bill for the cakes that they had consumed. He read widely and took great pains in the composition of his own books. One should never say never when talking about Donald Trump, but I feel on moderately safe ground in predicting that The Art of the Deal will not, unlike de Gaulle’s memoirs, be published in the Pléiade series that is devoted to great works of literature.

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And yet, despite their differences, both men referred, with almost obsessive frequency, to “greatness”. De Gaulle said that France cannot be herself without greatness just as Trump promised to “make America great again”. But greatness is a revealingly vague term. Leaders of states that really exercise great power — namely, Britain in the late 19th century or the United States in the late 20th century — rarely talk about it. They mask their hegemony beneath talk of cooperation and altruism. The British sometimes gave the impression that ruling the largest empire that the world had ever seen was an inconvenient burden of which they were too honourable to divest themselves.

Trump and de Gaulle both ruled — in Trump’s case will probably rule again — nations in decline. In France’s case, the decline was obvious. The country was defeated in 1940. Stirring broadcasts from London and the presence of small numbers of Free French troops in the allied forces could not change this fact. Churchill was cruel when he told his foreign secretary that the number of Canadians who had shed their blood to liberate France was greater than the number of Frenchmen who had done so, but in purely statistical terms he was probably right. After the Second World War, France lost its empire and the most dramatic moment in this process came in 1962, when de Gaulle, to the bitter disappointment of a million European settlers and much of the French army, decided that France could no longer hold on to Algeria. “High Gaullism” — the period from 1962 to 1967 — was marked by flamboyant gestures in foreign policy but the territory that de Gaulle ruled was smaller than that of the Third Republic (1870 to 1940), which de Gaulle talked of with ostentatious disdain.

American decline is more complicated. It is still the richest and most militarily powerful country on Earth. Trump’s detractors make much of his chequered business career. In truth, though, Trump’s time in business was a good preparation for leading the United States in the 21st century. The USA, like the Trump Organization, inherited much from an earlier generation, which built the country’s power and prosperity after the Second World War. But the United States is living on borrowed money because it has huge debts. It is also, like Britain and France in the Twenties, living on borrowed time. The end of the Cold War brought its apparent zenith — just as the peace settlements after the First World War brought the apparent zenith of Britain and France — and no other country is yet able and inclined to challenge America as the global power. But America’s economic superiority is finished. China’s growth may have stalled in the last few years, but everyone expects it to outstrip the United States within the foreseeable future.

Trump understands the underlying weakness of his country. Hence his obsession with the Chinese challenge and his desire to stop paying for the defence of other countries. Like de Gaulle, Trump has used a smokescreen of grandiose rhetoric to cover what is really a retreat from American commitments overseas. He understands that American greatness has become an illusion to be sustained rather than a reality to be defended. De Gaulle was also an illusionist, and it is no accident that, in their very different ways, both men were products of the television age. De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was built on the spread of television sets in the Sixties — and state control of the national broadcast — as much as Trump’s political take-off was built on cable TV and Fox News. De Gaulle’s stage-managed press conferences and dramatic addresses to the nation in moments of crisis were as contrived as Trump’s performance in The Apprentice.

When it suited him, De Gaulle would turn a blind eye to repression in other countries if he wanted their leaders as allies. He was on an official visit to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania when the student began tearing up the cobblestones in May 1968. Trump is equally sure that morality should have no role in foreign policy. He respects power and leaders who are not afraid to use power. If the circumstances are right, he is happy to do business with Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

Since the Second World War, most democratic leaders have had a particular emotional attachment to one country: the United States. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all believed that America was a repository of virtue. There are two great exceptions. One was Charles de Gaulle. For him, America was simply a centre of industrial and military power; American idealism meant nothing. The American politician whom he most respected was not Kennedy or Roosevelt but Nixon. The other exception is Trump: a man who once, when asked to explain why he was not worried by the fact that Putin was a “killer”, replied: “You think our country’s so innocent?”

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There is, of course, one respect in which Trump and de Gaulle differ dramatically. Trump has never accepted the result of the 2020 election and did everything that he could to cling to power after it. De Gaulle, by contrast, sometimes seemed eager to leave office when confronted with the mere hint of an electoral reverse. In 1969, a cause that he supported in a referendum was defeated. This had no constitutional implications — his presidential mandate had another three years to run — but he had resigned, packed his bags and returned to his country house in Colombey-les-deux-Églises within hours.

It would, though, be too simple to see a neat division between de Gaulle the defender of democratic propriety and Trump its enemy. De Gaulle had returned to power in 1958 as the result of what was, effectively, a military coup, during which the army took power in Algeria and threatened to take it in mainland France. De Gaulle did not endorse the actions of soldiers — but those who thought that they were speaking on his behalf did so and de Gaulle never disavowed them. He told the president of the two houses of the National Assembly that, if they did not support this return to power, he would do nothing — but that they would then “have to explain themselves to the paratroopers”.

If something kept de Gaulle from making himself a dictator, it was not admiration for democracy. His last visit abroad was a trip to Franco’s Spain in the summer of 1970. Rather, de Gaulle was restrained by a sense of balance and measure. He thought that dictatorships were likely to finish badly because they would always be sucked into “exaggerated enterprises”. He anticipated that the United States itself might choose “some general” to sort things out during the chaos of the late Sixties, but that this general would probably fail.  Most of all, de Gaulle was distinguished from Trump by his pessimism about all human endeavours including, in the end, his own. He was intensely aware of the difference between de Gaulle the public man — an image that he had so carefully constructed for the French people — and de Gaulle the fallible human being. For more than a decade before his death in November 1970, his writing was frequently marked by reference to old age and the turning of autumn to winter. Somehow, I suspect that Trump — who is now one year younger than de Gaulle was at the moment of his death — is not as reconciled to his own mortality.

In some ways, the relatively slow pace of Lawson’s political career is itself the point. Lawson was chancellor during the deregulation of the City of London in the “Big Bang” of 1986 and it was he, in 1988, who introduced a top rate of income tax of 40% — lower than it had been for many years before and lower than it is now. In short, Lawson achieved more without being prime minister than any recent prime minister achieved during their time in Downing Street. Lawson, in fact, was a rare example of a British politician who had the sense to recognise that his great gifts did not necessarily make him prime minister material. He was never a candidate for the leadership of his party.

One of the problems created by the febrile state of Conservative Party politics in the years since 2016 is that any Tory MP thinks he or she could be prime minister. Shortly after losing his parliamentary seat, Steve Baker gave an interview to Spectator TV in which he seemed to suggest that having read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People gave him a unique insight into ”leadership”, equipping him to lead his party and his country. Sunak is the last survivor of an age when senior Tory politicians were expected to be substantial and able people. As well as Lawson, the Thatcher Cabinet contained, at various times, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, Ken Clarke, Cecil Parkinson and Norman Tebbit, all of whom achieved important things in their ministerial positions. All were people who might plausibly have been prime minster, or else have had a successful career out of Parliament. Heseltine, for one, had made a fortune in business. When he resigned from the Cabinet, he took his ministerial driver onto his own payroll — probably offering him more money and a flashier car to drive.

Like Heseltine, Sunak had a successful career in business before he went into politics. His enemies sometimes say that he was well qualified for any position other than prime minister, but the alarming thing about his two potential successors is that they seem unqualified for all jobs as well as that of prime minister. If you were interviewing for a post in middle management and the recruitment agency sent you the CVs for Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, you would ask for your money back. Many of the most able Conservatives — Dominic Grieve or David Gauke — were driven out of the party by Boris Johnson, and I suspect that some Conservative MPs are beginning to feel uncomfortably like those Red Army soldiers in June 1941 who had to go into battle after Stalin had shot their best generals.

The second respect in which Sunak’s departure marks the end of an era relates to the politics of conviction. Sunak’s enemies portray him as a mere technocrat. They imply that he would be happier in the later stages of Ted Heath’s administration than in the government of Margaret Thatcher. This is an absurd misunderstanding. Having convictions, and being willing to act on them, is not the same as making statements about the importance of convictions. On the whole, the language of the Thatcher government was remarkably moderate. It had a small number of central principles and was usually pragmatic about the means by which it implemented them. Thatcher’s ministers did not, for example, say in public that they wished to crush the National Union of Mineworkers; they probably did not even say it in private until they had decided that there was no other means to get what they wanted. Compare this to the public war dances of senior Tories as they declare their willingness to fight some inoffensive institution — the Office for Budget Responsibility or European Convention on Human Rights — to which leader writers on the Daily Mail have taken a dislike.

Sunak talked soft but did more to implement the policies of the current Tory Right than any other front bencher. He voted for Brexit in 2016. As chancellor, he seems to have argued against lockdown more than any other minister and to have done the most to ease its impact. As prime minister, he did not even pay lip service to environmental policies — incidentally, this last stance would have pleased Lawson but exasperated Thatcher.

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The contrast between Sunak and Liz Truss is particularly marked. Sunak is the urbane Jesuit who turns out to be willing to kill or be killed for his faith. Truss, by contrast, resembles a character in one of the more depressing Graham Greene novels. She believes in belief but does not have it. No one seriously thinks that she believes in anything. Perhaps she hopes that she will be granted the gift of ideological extremism if she goes on talking to Tucker Carlson — just as Greene’s characters hope that they will be granted the gift of faith if they keep on attending Mass and making their confessions.

If we truly want to understand why Sunak’s departure matters, we should think back to a phrase that Lawson coined to refer to the government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy in the early Eighties: “Rules Rule Ok.” It sounds a banal remark until one looks at the context. Lawson’s view was that economics must be governed by predictable and inflexible consequences — people must know that if they contracted debt they would have to pay it back and not see it inflated away. Lawson wanted to escape the notion that the government might suspend what he saw to be the rules of the market when it became electorally advantageous to do so. This meant, by the late Eighties, that Lawson supported the creation of an independent central bank. It was also the reason why Lawson was sometimes, at that time, interested in an alignment of European currencies. He would probably not, even then and even in private, have put it in such blunt terms but, effectively, he liked Europe for the very reason that modern Conservatives dislike it — because it keeps important decisions out of the grubby hands of the British electorate.

 A Conservative Party that revolved around rules had implications that extended beyond economics. Thatcherism was, above all, a response to the disorder of the Seventies — street crime and violent picket lines played a large role in the evolution of Conservative thought. It is interesting, incidentally, to note how often British Conservatives in the Seventies saw the United States — with its drugs, student protest and the dystopian chaos of New York in that decade — as a kind of anti-model for their own politics. More than anything else, Thatcher believed in the rule of law. It was, admittedly, an easy belief for a Conservative to sustain when so many judges made no secret of their own Right-wing opinions.

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What has changed since then? One simple answer is that Thatcher won. Rules matter most to those who are weakest, and the British middle classes often felt weak in 1979. Ten years later, it was the organised working class which felt the need for protection — hence the increasing enthusiasm of trade unions for Europe and its myriad regulations. Anti-Europeanism became both a cause and effect of changes in the Conservative Party during the Nineties. The journalist Hugo Young noted that Eurosceptic Tories moved away from a belief in sound money as the desire to control their own currency became a feature of their case against the European Union.

Lawson, of course, became a Eurosceptic himself, as did his admirer Sunak. But this was partly because both men thought that the disciplines that they valued would be imposed at national level — particularly, of course, by the independent Bank of England that was created by Gordon Brown in 1997. Sunak’s case against Truss in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign was partly about fiscal discipline and the need to observe rules associated with the Bank of England, as well as the simpler and more brutal edicts issued by Her Majesty the Bond Market.

But the end of Sunakism is about more than economics. Sunak stands for personal qualities that would once have been valued by Conservatives. He is courteous and disciplined — one cannot imagine him referring to the Tory party as a “cuntocracy” which is, according to Boris Johnson, what another former minister did. Sunak’s enemies reproach him for not concluding a tacit or explicit alliance with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But, as the personal attacks on Sunak during the electoral campaign and the riots after it showed, Reform is intertwined with a violence and vulgarity that can easily slip into mob rule, a prospect that terrified the Thatcherites during the Seventies. Thatcher would have been stunned to hear Conservatives denouncing the police or expressing sympathy for rioters.

The truth is that the social groups which gained most from Thatcherism have little to fear now. Their privileges are safer than ever — the Labour government is obviously shaken at the prospect that its policies might cause the rich to leave the country or even that it might make the slightly less rich send their children back to state schools. Perhaps indeed, as a Marxist might suggest, the problem with the Conservative Party is precisely that it has ceased to be a useful instrument for the social class that was once behind it.

Oddly, the one group among the English bourgeoisie who look scared are Conservative front-benchers. Theirs is a miserable life. They may win the election in five years’ time but if they do, it will be back to the faction fights and plots of the last few years. Constituency parties are controlled by people who make the Trots at the grassroots of the Labour Party in 1978 look tolerant; all the while, the threat of Reform looms over party leaders. Perhaps the mystery is not that no talented person wants to lead the Conservative Party but rather that any sane person would even consider the prospect.

Pretty much as soon as the first results were announced after the 1983 election, any well-informed person could tell where the country would be by the time of the next election. Large-scale privatisation was promised in the Tory manifesto and, in more general terms, private enterprise was obviously going to get stronger. With the exception of Arthur Scargill, everyone understood that trade unions would be weaker.

But where will Britain be in four years’ time? The next government will come to power staggering under the weight of its self-denying ordinances. Starmer has made more promises about what he will not do — reverse recent tax cuts, abolish the triple lock on pensions — than promises about what he will do. Positive proposals are remarkably vague — “Great British Energy” sounds more like a slogan from a Seventies advertising campaign than a policy.

Partly, of course, the problem lies in the practical constraints that will face the next government. The Covid pandemic and lockdown will make themselves felt for decades more. Just before the election was announced, the compensation scheme for those who were infected by blood transfusions brought the prospect of another £10 billion on the national debt. The fact that Labour has been so far ahead in the opinion polls for the last few years has produced an odd situation: the official opposition — which expects to be in government for several years — has worried about public finances more than the government. Once he had headed off the crisis of crashing bond markets in 2022, Jeramy Hunt has not had to do much except ensure that the government did not actually go bankrupt until it had staggered over the finishing line of electoral defeat — at which point he can arrange lunch with a head-hunter and start talking about how to restore his own finances.

Being in opposition — even when the opposition is heading for defeat — can be fun. Think of Neil Kinnock appearing in a Tracy Ullman pop video or William Hague knocking nine bells out of Tony Blair at PMQs. Starmer and his team look miserable. Not since 1945 has a ministerial team looked so exhausted on the cusp of victory. The desperate concern to avoid mistakes make the shadow cabinet appear as if they are at the end of a marathon egg-and-spoon race rather than sprinting to victory.

What happens after the election will depend, in part, on the scale of a Labour victory. Psephologists insist on the size of the swing that would be required to give Labour an absolute majority. But in a strange way, not getting a majority might be useful for Labour. It would give them a means to escape from the straitjacket that they have squeezed themselves into. A government dependent on the votes of Liberal Democrat or Green MPs would be able to blame policy shifts on other parties. It would, to take the most obviously example, be much easier to take Britain back into the European Single Market if this could be presented as the price that Labour had to pay for Liberal Democrat support.

All the signs suggest, however, that Labour will get an absolute majority and probably a large one. I can imagine lots of things that might go wrong for the Conservative Party in the near future — presumably, they can too, which is why they have decided not to hold out for a later election. It is harder to see what might go wrong for Labour. Keir Starmer’s weaknesses are very different from those of Donald Trump but, in both cases, the weaknesses have been so obvious for so long that they are priced into the electoral market.

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In addition to this, Starmer is a pure-blooded Labour man. He does not like other parties and seems to have no more time for those of the Left than for those of the Right. In this respect, he is very different from Tony Blair, who learned from an eclectic group of what he would have called “progressives”. Mainly this meant Roy Jenkins and some of the other figures who had left Labour to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981 (an unforgivable crime in Labour orthodoxy), though he also picked up ideas from, for example, writers who had been associated with Marxism Today.

Starmer is also a traditionalist in his attitude to Labour voters. He seems to rejoice more in the return of prodigal sons from “Red Wall” seats than he does in the possibility that the party might build a different kind of support base among people who have not previously voted Labour — or not previously voted at all.

In a strange way, this traditionalism was accentuated by Jeremy Corbyn. The struggle between the two men felt like the last battle in the Labour civil war of the early Eighties. But now it is less obvious what Left and Right mean in the Labour party. Green politics cut across conventional views of industrial growth. Opposition to the European Union was a Left-wing policy in the early Eighties but now most of the Left opposes Brexit, and, though Starmer seems determined to ignore this fact, so does most of the electorate. Similarly, the use of allegations about support for terrorism or antisemitism against the Corbynistas seems a bit odd now that the United States is desperately trying to rein in Israel.

The most important question about the aftermath of the election, however, involves the losers. Elections produce seismic shifts when — as in 1945 or 1983 — the losing party recognises that they need to adjust their policies in the aftermath of defeat. Usually this has meant accepting some element of the policies of the winning party. It seems unlikely that the current Conservative Party will react in this way to a Labour victory. Many on the Tory Right have very safe seats; John Hayes, who heads the Common Sense Group, has the largest majority in the country. It is possible that tactical voting will take some of these down or that Tory voters will rebel against a former Home Secretary who slagged off the police and got herself sacked twice. But, on the whole, I would guess that the Tory right will be strong after the election. Indeed, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch may be the only politicians looking to the near future with relish.

Will the Conservative Party survive? Some say that its instinct for power is its secret weapon. But this cuts both ways. What purpose does the party serve if it looks as though it may not be in government for a long time? Centrists may quietly join other parties or leave politics altogether — on the whole, the moderate Tories are the ones who stand a chance of getting a job in the real world. It is possible that the Conservative parliamentary party will eventually shrivel to a rump of rent-a-gob backbenchers who would be happy to trade the prospect of ministerial office for a regular gig on GB News. Nigel Farage is right to say that he and Jacob Rees-Mogg ought to belong in the same party, but that party is not going to be anything that would be recognised by Thatcher or Macmillan or, for that matter, the Third Marquess of Salisbury. The kind of grouping that might be formed by a merger of Right-wing Conservatives with Reform would attract a significant electorate but, without the brand loyalty that went with traditional Conservatism, that electorate would probably not be large enough to form a parliamentary majority.

Labour might also run into problems. I doubt if rebellion on the Left (mainly expressed in university towns and seats with large Muslim populations) will do it much damage at the coming election, and I would guess that Starmer can count on a very disciplined parliamentary party afterwards. But Gaza, green politics and opposition to Brexit are not going to go away. These are often the issues that the young care about most and also, curiously, the issues that are most likely to unite parts of the Labour Party with other political groups — including some who might, until recently, have described themselves as Conservatives.

Perhaps all this will eventually create a different kind of movement — not necessarily one that operates inside the Labour Party or even in any conventional party. Not only am I unsure which party will win the election after next, but I am, come to think of it, not even sure that I know which parties will be serious contenders when the time comes.

There might, though, be some ways in which a Trump comeback would be salutary for Europe — and, especially, for the United Kingdom.

Our relationship with the United States has, in the last few decades, become an unhealthy one. We are like adult children who live with their parents, sulking and complaining but assuming that someone else will do the laundry. If Trump wins it will feel as if Dad has had a sex change and Mum has shacked up with a member of the Hell’s Angels. Perhaps we will finally decide it is time to get a flat of our own.

After all, it is high time to remind ourselves that American hegemony is a recent phenomenon. The United States has been the richest country in the world since the late 19th century, but at first its wealth had little effect on the politics and society of Europe, except in so far as the daughters of American tycoons brought generous dowries and a healthy dose of red blood into a few declining ducal families. The United States fought briefly in the First World War but retreated into isolationism afterwards. And though the Second World War turned American into a global power, it was not obvious even in 1945 that this new role would be sustained. At first, American military commitments were wound down and there were those — especially the southern Dixiecrats — who would have liked to withdraw from world affairs again. What prevented it was the Cold War.

This period, in which America’s special relation with Western Europe was established, was a peculiar one. First, the United States had a significant economic advantage. It had boomed during the war while many European countries had been destroyed: these are the conditions that gave us the Marshall Plan. Second, the United States faced an exceptional political threat. The Soviet Union was not just another great power; it was a state with ambitions to exercise influence in every corner of the globe, and one that attracted idealistic loyalty from people around the world (even if its own leaders were cynical). And so, Nato was born.

Conditions are changed now and the phrase “second Cold War” obscures more than it reveals. Russia is smaller than the Soviet Union. Countries that were allied with the USSR in the Warsaw Pact — indeed, countries that were once part of the Soviet Union itself — are now members of Nato. Russia seeks to exercise power not to export an ideology. And the nation is, of course, not popular in the West. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reckoned that a quarter of his fellow students at the École Normale Supérieure in the late Forties were card-carrying members of the Communist Party, breathless in their admiration for Stalin. I should imagine that these days the number of normaliens who are, say, Zoroastrians is probably higher than the number who admire Vladimir Putin.

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All of this means that Trump is perfectly reasonable in saying that the United States bears a disproportionate share of Nato’s military burden. It is hard to imagine the circumstances in which Putin’s military adventures could pose a direct threat to America. By contrast, it is easy to imagine how they might threaten Poland or Lithuania, and easy too to imagine how threats to those countries would destabilise Britain and France — if only by pushing vast numbers of refugees west. So, it would not necessarily be a bad thing if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were to be replaced by some purely European body. That alliance could focus on containing Russia — no longer a priority for the US. It would also mean that Europe would not be caught up in American military adventures. It’s worth remembering that the only Nato member to have invoked Article 5 of the organisation’s constitution — which says that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all — was the USA itself, after 9/11.

It is also worth remembering that America became a global power in order to fight communism rather than to defend democracy. In Western Europe, the two pursuits went hand-in-hand, but in Latin America or Asia, fighting communism often meant allying with brutally undemocratic regimes. And while the US gave plenty of aid to countries with Left-wing governments in Europe, at home, in the Fifties, democratic Leftists were often treated as though they were communists. Far from intervening abroad in the name of democracy, the United States often became more democratic as a result of its foreign interventions. Civil rights for African Americans were partly a product of the Cold War. The racial integration of the army, during and after the Korean War, was arguably more important than the Brown v. Board of Education judgement; subsequently, America’s desire to be recognised as a racially just society owed much to the need to command global support against the Soviet Union.

This has implications for how Europe should treat Trump. There is no natural reason why America should be, as Biden recently put it, a “beacon of democracy”. We should recognise that the United States, like any nation, may simply be guided by its interests. Trump’s America First rhetoric should remind us that it is high time to start dealing with the US in the same way that we deal with China or Russia, working with them when it suits us and defending our own interests when necessary. Europeans need to regain some of the hard-headedness that used to define our attitudes to America.

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For the first 30 years after the Second World War, our political leaders recognised that the United States was a necessary ally, but they felt little emotional attachment to the country. Harold Macmillan told Richard Crossman that the British should be to the Americans what the Greeks had been to the Romans: both classicists, each regarded the Greece of Homer and Thucydides as a much greater civilisation than the Rome of Julius Caesar. Macmillan did not bother to visit his mother’s birthplace, in Indiana, until it suited British foreign policy to do so, in 1956. He would have cringed with embarrassment had he seen the gushing excitement with which Blair or Cameron treated each visit to Camp David, as though they were schoolgirls with a crush rather than prime ministers of an independent country.

It’s as if we forget, sometimes, that in the Special Relationship-era America owed as much to us as we do to them — if not more. To a remarkably large extent, post-war American foreign policy was made by Europeans. Influential figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981) and Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001) were born in, respectively, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Henry Kissinger did not come to the United States until he was a teenager and never lost his thick German accent. I cannot help suspecting that the late Dr Kissinger never actually liked America much — he even preferred soccer to the game that Americans call football. He rarely moved much outside the narrow band on the east coast that stretched from Cambridge, Massachusetts in the north to Washington DC in the south; Texas or the Midwest probably seemed as foreign to him as China. He never stood for election and seems to have regarded the vulgarity of American politics with distaste — though, significantly, this did not prevent him from talking to Trump.

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Kissinger perhaps embodied the attitude we should now adopt towards the United States, in that he did not consider it to be a representative of a higher morality. Kissinger knew that, at least for the foreseeable future, the United States would be the most powerful country in the world. He knew that, in at least some respects, its role in the world was a benign one. But the place that he cared about most was Europe. He was fascinated by men such as Bismarck who served monarchs and could, therefore, plan their diplomatic policy over long periods — undisturbed by the convulsions of electoral politics. The 20th-century leader whom he most admired was Charles de Gaulle, the man who took France out of Nato’s combined command structures in 1966.

Of course, De Gaulle was not really the naïve souverainiste that he pretended to be: he knew that there were times when France had depended on American support — his ostentatious bad manners were designed to conceal this, and to promote a strong French self-image. He also understood, however regretfully, that a degree of European integration was inevitable. Today’s European politicians should therefore make him their model. They should regard the United States — however terrible its leaders or political system — with a wary respect. But they should also look to one another for the defence of their own continent, regardless of the results of this year’s elections.

By contrast, only a small number of Grinches with long memories and cynical dispositions point out that Churchill opened his wartime premiership with the promise of nothing but “blood, sweat and tears”. (His government of 1951, by contrast, promised to “set the people free” and ended up being, even in the eyes of his greatest admirers, an embarrassing shambles.) As for Reagan, his success owed at least as much to fear — of the Soviet Union, of national decline, of urban disorder — as it did to hope. Rambo not Rockie is the film to watch if you want to understand American politics in the early Eighties. We Grinches would point out that the most successful politician of recent times, Donald Trump, trades on the feeling that “carnage” is just around the corner.

Of course, the Left has a particular problem. It is, or has been, about selling change. Left-wing candidates have usually sought to persuade their supporters that things can get better, whereas British Conservatives argued that change was likely for the worst.

This brings us to the current state of the Labour Party. A few years ago, it looked as though Starmer would be Neil Kinnock — painfully leading his party back to electability but not quite fast enough to get elected himself. Now everything is going right for him. He is ahead in the opinion polls; his party is disciplined; his opponents — the SNP as much as the Conservatives — are falling apart. Prudent commentators talk of the dramatic swing that would be necessary for Labour to get an absolute majority in parliament, but my own money is on something close to a landslide.

This is not, though, quite the same as saying that Labour should be optimistic. In his conference speech last week, Starmer blamed the Tories for “kicking the hope out”. But this is not a hopeful time. Tony Blair came to power in almost uniquely propitious circumstances. Norman Lamont lost the Tories their reputation for economic competence with the sharp drop in the value of the pound on Black Wednesday of 1992, but Labour inherited the benefits of Ken Clarke’s competent Chancellorship that followed Lamont’s dismissal. Blair also reaped the results of patient negotiation by the Major government in Northern Ireland. This was good news for the province but also for the climate in Westminster: for the first time since the Sixties, senior ministers could walk the streets without a phalanx of nervous-looking bodyguards.

Conditions beyond the reach of the British government’s policy were also good. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that peace and democracy seemed to be on the rise. Almost everywhere except North Korea, spending on armaments dropped in the Nineties. World-weary commentators had spent years saying countries that had lived under Communist rule would take decades to adjust to liberal democracy but, as it turned out, the Czech Republic — one of the more repressive countries in the eastern bloc during the Eighties — was a liberal democracy within a few years. Even China seemed to have moved away from the repression of 1989, which was why the handover of Hong Kong did not, in the short term, produce the exodus that some had expected.

Compare this with what is likely to hit the next Labour government. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, he will face the worst circumstances that any new British prime minister has faced since May 1940. The sadistic relish with which Jeremy Hunt references economic figures makes one suspect that, first, he has given up all hope of buying the next election with tax cuts and, second, he does not even want to buy the next election because he knows that the consequences of Brexit and Covid may still be making themselves felt in five years’ time. And that’s not to mention the larger, sometimes existential, problems that the next government is going to face: Putin, Trump, China, climate change.

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So, the model for an incoming Starmer government should not be Blair’s victory in 1997 but Thatcher’s in 1979. She was not swept into power by a wave of hope; she floated in on a tide of despair. The Labour Party was exhausted after five years of trying to rule with a tiny minority. One of its most important leaders, Roy Jenkins, had effectively given up on the party. Not that the Tories were bouncing with excitement. At the time, the body thinking most usefully about the future of the Conservative Party was The Authority of Government Group: it met in an atmosphere of Eeyorish gloom. Its members thought that the power of the unions, among other things, might make Britain ungovernable — they were particularly worried by the prospect of future miners’ strikes, which they thought they would be unable to “win”. Some of them privately admired the Callaghan Labour government of 1976 to 1979, and doubted whether they would be able to do any better if they were elected.

Britain today is gripped by the same kind of pessimism that prevailed in the late Seventies — and Starmer needs to recognise this. The Labour Party should act within its constraints rather than acting as their job is to cheer everyone up with a group sing song. Indeed, nothing will undermine the Tories more than their recent, and most un-Tory, displays of optimism. Rishi Sunak’s new slogan seems to be “Long-term decisions for a brighter future”. If I were a Labour strategist, I would plaster the country with photographs of a grinning Boris Johnson having his cake and eating it.

Labour should play down expectations. It is often said that the public have lost faith in politicians. This is the exact opposite of what has happened. They have lost respect for politicians but, in some respects, this is precisely because they have too much faith in them. The public has come to treat politics as 17th-century peasants treated witchcraft — as a source of unlimited, if often malign, power. The fact that the NHS has long waiting lists in the aftermath of Covid is assumed to be the result of incompetence or bad intentions by ministers, rather as crop failure would once have been regarded as the result of some unpopular old woman putting toads in her cauldron.

Thatcher’s great achievement was to persuade people that there are many things that a government cannot do much about. Furthermore, when a government can do something, it invariably means making ruthless decisions about the balance between harm and good; as Nigel Lawson, quoting the French politician Pierre Mendès France, put it in his resignation speech: “To govern is to choose.” For Thatcher, this insight was applied to the economy: subsidies were withdrawn from industries that were bound to fail. The area of brutal choice for Starmer will be the environment.

Currently, the Labour leader is running scared from the result of the Uxbridge by-election, where opposition to Sadiq Khan’s measures against the most polluting cars seemed to account for an unexpected Tory victory. Starmer is also given to spouting nonsense about how everyone will benefit from a “Green industrial revolution”, when the truth is that protecting the future of the planet — or even just protecting the lungs of children who are unfortunate enough to live near the Westway flyover — is not going to come from a cosy, win-win solution. People, particularly vociferous middle-aged men, will be made to stop doing things that they want to do. Similarly, Starmer, who campaigned so energetically against Britain leaving the European Union, can hardly now plausibly claim that there is a “good Brexit” — especially at a time when the public seems to be losing faith that such a thing exists. Starmer should level with voters: his negotiations with Europe will be an exercise in damage control.

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The other lesson of 1979 is that parties should not be sentimental about their voters. Many Tories were heartbroken that Scots abandoned them in that election: it is said that “Rab” Butler told Thatcher that she would have Scotland engraved on her heart as Mary Tudor had Calais, lost to the English crown in 1558, engraved on hers. But it was a small price to pay for winning seats in Essex or the Midlands. Labour should write off part of the Red Wall vote. Losing Birmingham Northfield, a working-class seat that used to revolve around the Longbridge car plant, is a small price to pay for holding every other seat in the city. There has been much talk recently of the “woke elite” holding “luxury beliefs” when it comes to, say, immigration — but “woke elite” in this context really means an educated middle class that is larger than ever before, and politically engaged. In truth, there would be no more self-indulgent luxury for the Labour Party than to hold on to a diminishing group of traditional working-class voters out of nostalgia, as if Left-wing politics is a Hovis ad.

Of course, there are some respects in which the first Thatcher government is a bad model for Starmer. Thatcher was lucky because Britain became a net exporter of oil early in her government and because General Galtieri was stupid enough to give her an opportunity for an easy military victory and, thus, a much higher level of electoral support. This meant that, for her first few years, Thatcher just had to survive, whereas she could afford to be radical — even, sometimes, optimistic — after the 1983 election. It is hard to imagine fortune smiling in this way on any British government in the next few years — and easy to imagine scenarios, such as a Russian attack on Poland, that would make a sizeable dent in Starmer’s good luck.

Unlike Thatcher, Starmer cannot afford to wait. He should take brave and controversial decisions early on — prioritising those, such as making some serious progress on the HS2 rail line, that would be hard for any subsequent government to reverse. Because for all his optimism, he cannot bet on a second term. Perhaps, in short, the best hope for the next Labour government would be to start with as little hope as possible.

The collapse of French Communism, which started slowly in the Seventies and accelerated in the Nineties, has had important effects on the banlieues. The party was never in a position to form a government — even when, in the late Forties, it was the largest party in France. Other parties allied to keep the Communists away from power and, in the Fifties, its intellectual supporters, disgusted by revelations about Stalinism and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, tore up their membership cards. However, the working classes — always, one suspects, a bit more hard-headed about the uses and abuses of Stalinism — largely stuck with the Communist Party. Though it never stood a chance at national power, it did rule in its own little worlds. Party militants, with almost unlimited energy for tedious and thankless tasks, did much to hold communities together.

Then came de-industrialisation, which infected Europe just as Communism ceased to be a global movement: the same year the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, the Renault factory at Boulogne Billancourt, once a bastion of working-class power, closed. Five miles away, Nanterre became the epicentre of another development that shook the world of French Communism: immigration. In the Sixties, a large bidonville (shanty town) sprang up there, dominated by North Africans on the western side and Portuguese on the eastern. At first, this had almost no effect on the politics of the area. Immigrants did not vote, and were rarely organised enough to mobilise in any other way. However, as they — or, in recent years, their children and grandchildren — became more established, things changed.

The Communist Party had been successful in establishing support among earlier generations of immigrants. The Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards fitted fairly easily into the political culture of the French Left and had, in some cases, left their homes to escape Right-wing oppression. Immigrants from outside Europe, especially Muslims, posed more awkward problems for the party, since they tended to be culturally conservative. In areas where they were numerous, Communist mayors sometimes argued against providing them with accommodation.

Meanwhile, the French Left itself changed, largely thanks to the University of Paris branch that was established in 1964, at Nanterre. This was the campus where Franco-German student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit ostensibly pursued his studies, and the birthplace of the student movement of 1968 — which dealt a severe blow to French Communism. Workers, against the advice of Communist leaders, supported the students, launching the most significant general strike in French history — probably, in fact, in the history of any country. Workers, however, were not really the winners of 1968. Students achieved some tangible, lasting benefits, while workers got only a few short-term benefits, in terms of pay. There was no transformation of their lives, and the futility this bred caused Labour militancy to drop off sharply in the Seventies; there were more strikes in the UK, and indeed the United States. In the long term, 1968 helped create a Left that revolved around things like culture, sexuality or environmentalism, rather than the working class.

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At first, the beneficiary of these changes was François Mitterrand, leader of the Parti Socialiste, who was elected in 1981. Now, the most prominent defector from Mitterrand’s party represents a post-class Left. Emmanuel Macron is Left-wing in terms of style — he looks as though he would be more at ease rolling a spliff than loading a hunting rifle. And he was supported as a presidential candidate by Nanterre’s very own Cohn-Bendit. But his economics make Norman Tebbit seem like a Guardian-reading sociology lecturer. Just before the riots, a mother took him aside on an official visit to Marseilles and complained that her son could not get a job. She probably expected sympathy. Instead, Macron offered to take her round the Vieux Port where, he promised, she would find at least 10 vacancies.

Apart from a brief stage at the French embassy in Nigeria, Macron has spent his whole working life in Paris, having taken a tour of its finest educational establishments. In spite, or perhaps because, of his privileged background, Macron understands the lessons of 1968. The first of these is that any French government is more likely to give concessions to students than to the underprivileged. This is partly a matter of class: children of prominent politicians were on the barricades in 1968. But concessions to students are also cheaper.

The second lesson is that the protests of 1968 only began to have a serious impact when the Nanterre faculty was closed, and demonstrations moved into central Paris — occupying the Odéon theatre and the Sorbonne. The present wave of protest has, for now, stayed largely in the poorest neighbourhoods. The targets are generally the very things — bus stops, schools, libraries — that serve those neighbourhoods. There have been some attacks in city centres — notably around Les Halles, just north of Notre-Dame, which feels like a central Paris outpost of the banlieues, because a number of RER lines converge there. But the government has only to close the public transport system if it wants to isolate its poorest citizens.

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It is often said that France is a statist country, which is misleading. It implies that the state is homogeneous, unified. In reality, the state encountered by the inhabitants of the banlieues is utterly different from that which exists in the bourgeois quarters of large cities. You can see this in the educational provision. Louis-le-Grand, which Macron attended, is technically a state school but it, like other institutions in central Paris, offers an education that can only be obtained in Britain for fees of 30 grand a year. Its pupils are overwhelmingly bourgeois. A boy born in a rough neighbourhood on an RER line stands a better chance of playing for the Arsenal first team than he does of getting into Louis-le-Grand. Riots will make education in the banlieues harder — teachers already regard working in them for a couple of years at the beginning of their career in the way young people once regarded military service. Now they will be ever keener to escape. The state provision of almost everything will be, even more than before, inferior to that in privileged areas.

The attack on the house of the mayor of L’Hay les Roses, a suburb in southern Paris, will have a similar effect. Even before the riots, mayors had begun to withdraw from public life. In the old days, Communist municipal politicians would have gritted their teeth and carried on. They were, after all, hardened to abuse and used to physical danger; some had lived through the occupation. These days, between 400 and 500 mayors resign each year. The figure has increased sharply in the last decade. The best-known recent example is Yannick Morez, the mayor of Saint-Brevin, in the Loire Atlantique, who stepped down after being physically attacked for supporting the installation of a refugee shelter.

Morez is not, though, a mayor in the banlieues, and the attacks on him came from the extreme Right, not from young rioters. Herein lies another lesson from 1968. The protests then were spectacular: France came to a halt for over a month and de Gaulle seemed to teeter on the edge of resignation. What happened next? A crushing victory for the Gaullists in the parliamentary elections and then 13 years of Right-wing government. The rioters of these last few days are numerous, but they are a minority, and the Left-wing intellectuals who express their sympathy for them are an even smaller minority. Alongside the privileged inhabitants of the beaux quartiers and the underprivileged inhabitants of the banlieues, there is a third France. It is made up largely of white people who live in what sociologists call périurbain regions.

For the British, small-town France conjures up an agreeable picture of walking home in the morning with a warm baguette. But this is a fantasy. Bakeries are closing. Shopping means stocking up the freezer at a hypermarket. People who cannot afford to live in town centres are isolated and dependent on their cars — which is why high petrol prices are so often a cause of anger. It was these people who supported the yellow vest protests, and it is generally these people who support the far-Right of Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour. They may be the former industrial workers who might once have voted Communist. But watching the banlieues go up in flames is unlikely to arouse liberal sentiments among them.

Though he will be roughly the same age that Charles de Gaulle was in 1940, Macron will be prevented by the French constitution from running for a third term in 2027. His movement, En Marche, is not the kind of structured organisation that will produce an obvious successor. This will leave a big political opening. My guess is that both the far-Left and the far-Right will exploit it — but, as ever, the Left will make the noise and the Right will win the votes.

After all, both have changed. On the Right, Marine Le Pen has done much to tone down her movement’s radicalism, to make it seem less threatening to centrist conservatives. On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise has associated itself strongly with discontent in the underprivileged areas. Mélenchon himself has said “the police kill” and talked about “insurrection” — a word that implies a rebellion that falls short of revolution, which not even the communists will champion now. The Communist Party, or what remains of it, has not associated itself with the violent rebellion in the banlieues.

Not that doing so would serve the Left. Across France, if a candidate says anything that suggests sympathy with riots, looting or crime, they will hand votes to the Right, who now have a useful shorthand. Ronald Reagan said that when running for governor of California in the Sixties, he found that the single word that served his purposes best was “Berkeley”. Right-wing candidates in the French presidential election of 2027 may find that their magic word is “Nanterre”.

British reactions to Thatcher’s death raised all sorts of questions. A Korean journalist told me that he had spent all afternoon trying to find someone who would admit to having voted for her, and came to wonder how she had won three elections. Meanwhile, the burning of effigies in mining towns seemed to me uncomfortably reminiscent of the head shavings inflicted on French women accused of “collaboration” with the Vichy government: misogynistic violence by men seeking to allay the humiliation of their own defeat. “Ding Dong the Witch is dead” was sent to the top of the British music charts: this, too, seemed simultaneously sexist and naïve. Britain was not a fairy-tale village that would live happily ever after if freed from a spell cast by one woman.

The focus on Thatcher as an individual in 2013 contrasted with the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism as a system through much of the Eighties. The term “Thatcherism” was first used, in a systematic way, by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today, in an article published in January 1979, before she had even been elected. It referred to “Thatcherism” nine times and only once to “Mrs Thatcher”. Hall, married to the eminent feminist historian Catherine, understood how personal attacks on Thatcher slid into sexist sneers. But his austerely impersonal approach was also representative of the Left’s at the time, which emphasised structures. Whereas I sometimes wonder whether my younger colleagues today are aware of anything that is not reported in the Guardian, Hall’s generation of Left-wing intellectuals were assiduous readers of the Financial Times, and always on the look-out for a “crisis of capitalism”.

Early Left-wing writers on Thatcherism were rarely sentimental about what it replaced. They had disapproved of the Heath government of the early Seventies — particularly because of its attempt to implement legislation that would have restricted trade union power. Equally, they often recognised that Thatcherism was part of broader wave of political rethinking that sometimes encompassed the leadership of both major political parties. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan, from 1976 to 1979, had been marked by both a degree of social conservatism (not for nothing was Callaghan a parliamentary representative of the Police Federation) and by a move to a more free-market kind of economics. Peter Jay — Economics Editor of The Times — was the leading British advocate of monetarism. He influenced people in both the Labour and Conservative Party, but he was himself a member of the former, and Callaghan’s son-in-law.

Now, sixth formers are ritualistically trained to write about the end of the post-war consensus; but they are rarely taught one simple fact: in the early Eighties, the fiercest attacks on consensus came from the Left. It was Labour who fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that would, among other things, have meant British withdrawal from Nato and the European Economic Community. Some on the Left had even felt a grudging admiration for the radicalism of the first Thatcher government. They shared its distaste for condescension that some citizens experienced when they dealt with powerful agencies of the state. Like Thatcher, they disliked the complacency that they associated with established politicians of both parties.

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Everything changed after Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983. The challenge of Thatcherism demanded that the Labour Party ease its way back to the centre ground. The Tories, too, saw that there was not much point in ostentatious radicalism, once the major victories of the early Thatcher period had been won — particularly after the National Union of Mineworkers had been broken in 1985. They were now presiding over a new consensus, in which weaker trade unions and the sale of council houses were widely accepted. Privatisation, a word that they had barely dared use as late as 1979, was commonplace. Thatcherism had triumphed.

But Thatcher’s personal style — her flamboyant awkwardness and her obvious distaste for her political enemies — did not suit the new mood. She was never comfortable with consensus, even when the consensus in question was one that she had helped create. The personal myth of Margaret Thatcher began to diverge from Thatcherism. Earlier in the Eighties, for all her strident tone, Thatcher had been a politician, intuitively conscious that she needed to compromise and sometimes even retreat if she was to survive and achieve some measure of what she wanted. Later in the decade, she was increasingly prone to present herself as a kind of British de Gaulle — a national saviour who was above politics.

The emphasis on Thatcher as a person created problems because, as the writers behind Marxism Today had rightly sensed, Thatcherism had not really been about Thatcher. Her government had contained able and powerful ministers who pushed through different aspects of its policy. Indeed, Thatcherism was built on a kind of coalition that involved compromises and alliances between different kinds of people with different priorities. Keith Joseph was the most prominent political thinker behind the whole thing but useless at practical politics. Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker were indifferent about — in Walker’s case hostile to — some of the economic theory that underlay Thatcherism, but both men delivered spectacular practical results.

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Not surprisingly, Thatcher’s emphasis on her own personal significance and her alienation from the mundane compromises of domestic politics annoyed her colleagues. (It was an alienation that was increased by the fact that she came to think of herself more and more as an international stateswoman rather than a British politician.) It helped precipitate her eviction from the leadership of her party and thus from Downing Street. Thatcher’s fall was, though, a revolution within Thatcherism rather than a revolution against Thatcherism. The economic policies of the Thatcher government continued. Indeed, in policy terms, Major was more Thatcherite than Thatcher: he privatised the railways — something that she had hesitated to do — and closed the last British coal mines.

Thatcher’s fall further divided the cult of Thatcher as an individual — let’s call this “Thatcherianism” — from the policies of Thatcherism. Thatcher had been on the Conservative front bench for most of her political career. Now for the first time she was freed from the constraints of practical politics. She became more extreme and was deeply bitter towards party leaders, especially Major, whom she believed had betrayed her. The myth of her martyrdom was cultivated by a small number of loyalists who had followed her into political exile, as well as by younger people who came into parliament too late to have direct experience of what the Thatcher governments had actually done.

“Thatcherianism” began to acquire its own political identity, separate from Thatcherism. It revived the social conservatism that had been part of Thatcherism in 1979 but had largely disappeared from the policies of the Thatcher government by 1989. Most important, it pushed a ferocious hostility to the European Union — particularly after Thatcher presented herself as the standard bearer of opposition to the Maastricht treaty in the early Nineties. This was quite a break with the past: it had been Labour that spoke of leaving the European Community in 1983. Thatcherites had welcomed West-European unity as a means of resisting Communism and promoting free markets. Thatcher was always emotionally ill-at ease with Europe but, during most of her years as prime minister, she was also realistic enough to know that emotion is a bad guide to politics. As late as 1988, she would regarded leaving the European Union as bat-shit crazy.

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In an odd way, the rise of a personalised “Thatcherianism” cult played into John Major’s hands in the early Nineties. The intemperate, ungracious nature of attacks by Thatcher and her remaining allies occluded the extent to which the Major government was really continuing her economic policies. It also contributed to the sense that Major was a moderate and consensual figure — and this, in turn, helped make policies that might once have seen as highly controversial seem like a new kind of common sense. Tory frontbenchers in the Nineties managed to imply that they had moved on from the savage conflicts of the Eighties and that it would be unreasonable to hold them responsible for the policies of the Thatcher governments — governments in which many of them had served as senior ministers.

Of course, the success of Thatcherism extended beyond the Conservative Party. The truth is that large parts of the British establishment — civil servants, Labour politicians and even the occasional trade unionist, such as Frank Chapple — regarded much of what the Thatcher government did, notably breaking the miners, as necessary. There was also a more general shift in public opinion and behaviour. Dozens of small-scale actions — buying shares in privatised companies, voting for demutualisation of buildings societies (or taking the bonuses even when we voted against) — made most of the British middle class complicit in one way or another. Indeed, it is extraordinary how the free-market pervades everyday life in modern Britain. I am writing these words in Delhi. When I first came here, in 1984, the notion of haggling over money when, for example, one took a ride in an auto-rickshaw, still seemed odd. Now we are, in effect, haggling over money every time we book an Uber online.

Andrew Gamble was the single most important person to write on Thatcherism for Marxism Today. When he kindly came to speak to my students about this part of his career, he remarked on the brief commercial success of the magazine after it was stocked by W.H. Smith. The students asked whether this meant he got paid more. He grinned ruefully and said that he — and, so far as he knew, the other contributors — never even thought to ask about payment. Things have changed. A friend of mine gave a television interview after Thatcher’s death. A child of the Eighties herself and with a keen entrepreneurial instinct, she was much impressed that the leading public intellectual with whom she shared the studio negotiated ruthlessly about his appearance fee. Finally, the cameras went on and the interviewer asked what Thatcher had done to the country. The leading public intellectual paused to compose his features into an appropriately solemn expression and said: “I am afraid that she made us all much more selfish.”

For almost a century, the question of how to deal with the working class was at the centre of British politics. This period stretched from 1884, when the Third Reform Act enfranchised a significant group of working-class men for the first time, until March 1985, when those miners who had stayed on strike for a year staged a last show of defiance by marching back to work behind their colliery bands. Of course, the working class mattered to the Labour Party (which became the dominant party on the Left after the First World War). The trade unions were the pillars of the Labour Party. Most of its voters were drawn from this class — as were, at least at first, a certain number of its MPs.

But in a more complicated way, the working class mattered to the Conservatives, partly because they needed to contain its power, but also because they needed to win at least some working-class votes if they were to form a government. And the fact that Britain was ruled by mainly Conservative governments for most of the 20th century shows how successful they were.

When did things change? The Labour Party under the leadership of Jim Callaghan from 1976 to 1980 was closer to the trade union movement than at any point before 1914. But, perhaps for this reason, it was troubled by the number of strikes — often ones that involved a breakdown of union power rather than its assertion. The Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership from 1975 still assumed that it was going to have to live with a large industrial working class; the party came to power in 1979 aiming to revive British industry, not destroy it. It also came to power with a surprisingly large working-class vote. Such voters had often voted Tory in earlier times in spite of being working-class (because they were deferential to those they imagined to be their social betters or because many voters, especially women, didn’t identify as working-class at all).

In 1979, however, some voted Tory because they were working-class. This was partly because they were voting against the various forms of pay restraint that the Labour government had practised (Thatcherite faith in monetarism meant that they were the first significant group of politicians since the Sixties who thought that government might simply absent itself from private-sector pay negotiations). The Tories also actively courted working-class voters in 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards. Watch Norman Tebbit (then Secretary of State for Employment) giving his “On yer bike” speech to the Tory Party conference in 1981. He is wearing a badge that says “CTU”: the initials stand for Conservative Trade Unionist.

Of course, the Tories wanted to reduce trade union power and, in particular, to break the National Union of Mineworkers. All Conservatives had wanted this for the whole of the 20th century. The desire was, in fact, particularly strong in the non-Thatcherite section of the party — it was, after all, Heath who had been destroyed by his confrontation with the NUM in 1974. However, the desire of the Tories to break the miners in 1979 was a bit like the desire of 16-year-old boys to sleep with Debbie Harry out of Blondie. They fantasised about it but did not think it likely to happen, or have any concrete plans to bring it about.

Indeed, the Thatcher government was nervous of the miners and backed down quickly when faced with potential strike in February 1981. But then Arthur Scargill became leader of the NUM. He took it into a strike in the worst possible circumstances, just after a Tory election victory, at the end of winter and after he had exasperated other union leaders and a significant minority of his own members. The Tories could not believe their luck. It was as though Ms Harry had stepped out of the poster on the bedroom wall and laid her head on their pillow.

The defeat of the miners changed the British working class. The miners themselves had once been its archetypical representatives — there had been over a million of them just after the First World War. Their numbers had been declining for decades but that decline became dramatic after 1985. By the early part of the next decade there were more university teachers than miners in the United Kingdom. Other unions were now wary of going on strike. Since the unions were often strongest in the public sector, privatisation (which took off after 1985) was both a cause and a consequence of weaker unions.

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All of this fitted into to longer term changes. The total number of manual workers had been declining since the Sixties. The working class was increasingly divided — by sex or race, or by the growing difference between public sector workers (who were increasingly likely to be white collar and female) and those in the private sector. The working class also became less visible in a literal sense. In the Seventies, you could catch the 63 bus from Birmingham city centre and tell, almost at a glance, which of the passengers belonged to which class — you could, in particular, have a very good guess as to who was going to get off at the stop by the university and who would stay on until they reached the giant Longbridge car factory. You could hardly do that now (not least because Longbridge closed almost 20 years ago).

The miners’ strike has lodged itself in the public and historical memory, and this fascination springs partly from the fact that it seems so archaic. It involved an entirely male and almost entirely white group of workers who earned their living by hard and dangerous manual labour and worked for a single nationalised company. It seemed to mark the end of a struggle that had begun in 1926 and rapidly became associated with the end of a whole industry. Mining now plays a strange part in the British self-image. Almost no coal has been dug for years but people still talk of “pit villages”. The NUM is still, in an odd way, one of the most important unions in Britain, fighting for the rights of former miners and curating the memory of the “great strike”.

Focus on the miners has, however, had odd effects on how we see the working class. For one thing, the emphasis on a single, long strike involving a large number of workers is as deceptive as trying to understand contemporary warfare with reference to Western Front in 1916. Even before Scargill led his followers to defeat, most union leaders understood that the working-class is, almost by definition, weak. Outright confrontation with an employer or government was dangerous. Strikes now are short and intermittent. They are conducted by people who are often ostentatiously reasonable in their aims. The post-Scargill leaders of today have learned the hard lessons of the mid Eighties as much as the pre-Scargill leaders remembered the hard lessons of the Thirties.

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An emphasis on the numerical strength or weakness of the working class can also be deceptive. In many ways, the most successful strike of the Seventies was not that of the miners which brought down the Heath government but that organised by the Ulster Workers’ Council a few months later. A relatively small number of workers (rendered more powerful by the fact that Protestants monopolised the best paid and most important jobs) were able to bring the province to a halt and force the government to abandon plans to introduce power sharing between Protestants and Catholics. The Conservatives, by now in opposition, studied the strike carefully. It taught them how much power might be exercised by small numbers of workers in key positions. They showed how well they had learned their lesson in 1984. The defeat of the miners was partly rooted in a willingness to appease other unions whose members might have helped the miners. The relatively high pay of train drivers now derives partly from the fact that they kept working during the miners’ strike.

In some ways, the previous balance of forces between workers and the middle classes has been reversed in recent years. Once, the great majority of the population were working-class but only occasionally and with difficulty could they assert their power in ways that redistributed wealth in their direction. Now a large part of the population has acquired attributes that would once have been associated with the middle class. They are likely to do white collar jobs, to own their own homes and to send their children to university — indeed access to university and to the “property ladder” are often foci for Left-wing complaint.

A small working class is not, however, necessarily a weak one. Covid illustrated the sharp distinction between those whose presence in the workplace was required and those who could work from home: “Virtuals” and “Physicals”. I am not sure that people have yet fully grasped the importance of this distinction. Anyone who can do their job from their bedroom will have shown their employer that their job can be done by someone much cheaper in Chennai or Manila. It will take a long time for employers (especially in the public sector) to act on this lesson but it will happen.

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In recent years, it can seem as though the working class is a matter of purely historical interest — in universities, it feels as though even historians who once worked on the working class belong to the past. E.P. Thompson is often talked about as a quaint relic of a bygone age. Mobilisations around gender and race have attracted far more interest. If economic divisions are discussed at all, they are presented as ones that divided “the people” from the “1%” — as though an equitable division of wealth would be arranged in a manner that caused no inconvenience to anyone who is not a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Strikes, of course, bring back a simple question. How essential is your job and who would notice if you stopped doing it? After each strike by university teachers, we get a polite note from the administration asking us to specify which days we were on strike. I am guessing that Avanti do not need to ask the driver who is responsible for taking the 8.10am out of Euston whether or not he turned up for work. I doubt if there is going to be a great resurgence of working-class power, partly because the working class was never that powerful even when it was most unionised. But some workers have begun to realise again that withdrawal of labour is a powerful weapon — and one that may reveal how much the distinction between manual and non-manual workers still matters.

If he returned to the UK today, on the BBC’s 100th anniversary, Morris would find that pretty much all of its output is one long advertisement for itself. In one series, the presenter unearths “lost” BBC recordings with all the reverence one might expect an archaeologist to accord to some piece of Etruscan pottery. In another, the son of the DJ John Peel (the BBC gives much airtime to broadcasting dynasties) discusses his father’s record collection. The BBC, forbidden from carrying paid advertisements on its own channels, pays for posters that advertise its own programmes but also for a more general form of advertising that promotes the whole BBC with slogans such as “This is our BBC”.

The sense that the BBC is “ours” and that it is a “national institution” has, in fact, done great damage to the broadcaster. There is a cosy, self-congratulatory tone to much of its programming. Its presenters can expect to become “national institutions”, which greatly increases their earning power from sources other than their formal salaries. Meanwhile, its position as the national broadcaster has made its political reporting lazy. It expects to be at the front of the queue for interviews and inside information: there was, for example, much indignation last Friday when Liz Truss failed to give the BBC first dibs in her press conference. This means that its definition of journalism often means just repeating what politicians tell their interlocuters: “Friends of the Prime Minister tell me that…”, and so on. What gets lost in this is real research.

The keystone of the BBC is the licence fee — an institution similar to one of those ancien regime taxes on windows or powder for wigs. Everyone who watches is required to pay for the privilege and the fee is complicated and messy to collect. Every householder in the country gets stern letters telling them that they must pay and, ostensibly, detector vans can pick up illegal sets in much the same way that the Gestapo could find the position of Special Operations radio operators in occupied France. The exception to this is the BBC World Service, which is paid for out of general taxation. It is also the part of the BBC that commands most respect. Anyone following events in Ukraine will note that the experts from the World Service are usually less smooth than their counterparts in the mainstream BBC, but they are almost invariably better informed and more interesting.

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The problems with the licence fee are obvious. Once the BBC had an effective monopoly on Broadcasting in the UK — though there were always a few heroic dissidents who insisted on getting their information from Radio Tirana. Independent television companies have existed since the Fifties but they were regulated in ways that meant that they had to observe the same kinds of rules as the BBC. Now, however, anyone with a computer can watch programmes from anywhere in the world and many don’t bother with television sets at all. Anyone who listens to France Culture or watches the Franco-German television channel Arte would regard the suggestion that the BBC is the best broadcaster in the world as laughable. Most of all, the BBC faces competition from the big American streaming services which have deep pockets and the advantage of starting from scratch, unencumbered by the veneration for its own traditions that does the BBC such damage.

There is a simple way out. Sell the BBC, or sell the particular programmes that it makes. This would be less of a break with the past than it might sound. The BBC already sells its formats to foreign broadcasters. Some say that it would be wrong to sell the BBC because its programmes are popular, but this is an absurd argument — popular programmes are precisely the ones that will get made by private sector companies. And they will be made much better. Not least this will be because Netflix will make celebrity programmes that feature real celebrities rather than just people who are slightly famous because they have appeared in other BBC programmes. There is a core of news and documentary programmes that will probably not attract commercial buyers. But these are precisely the kind of programmes that are made well by the current BBC World Service. A slightly expanded version of this service could be funded by the state — perhaps from the receipts from selling off the rest of the BBC. It would concentrate on factual broadcasting and its gravity would be greatly enhanced by the fact that its presenters would be relatively unknown people who would concentrate on doing their job. They would not have their own twitter accounts and they would certainly not perform cringe-making imitations of Duran Duran, which is what Andrew Marr, until recently the lynchpin of the BBC’s political reporting, once did on one of those charity marathons that the BBC periodically inflicts on its audience.

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By Tanya Gold

So why does no one do it? The Right claim to believe in the free market and constantly mutter about reducing or abolishing the licence fee, but the truth is that they like the BBC as it is. It is, like almost all parts of the establishment, conservative at heart: its coverage of the death of the late Queen would have embarrassed the most slavish of Soviet broadcasters. The Chairman of the BBC from 2011 to 2014, Chris Patten, was a former Tory politician — only in the insane world of current British politics can someone who was a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher be described as a member of the “liberal establishment”. There is plenty of pantouflage between the BBC and the Conservative Party. Michael Gove has worked for the Corporation and Allegra Stratton moved from being a presenter on Newsnight to being Boris Johnson’s press advisor. Robbie Gibb had a 25-year career at the BBC before spending two years in Downing Street under Theresa May and then returning to the BBC board. When Jeremy Paxman stepped down as presenter of Newsnight, he was filmed in a matey little scene cycling a tandem into the sunset with Boris Johnson.

Most of all, Conservatives like the BBC because it is easily bullied. Every time a journalist says something that they do not like, they can make threatening noises about the duty of impartiality and hint that they might appoint some particularly brutal Gauleiter as chairman of the governors. Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph perfectly encapsulates this relationship. For a while, he refused to pay his licence fee. The ostensible casus belli was, in fact, a good one. The BBC refused to sack the oafish, pretentious, and unfunny comedian Russell Brand after he used a radio programme to make offensive remarks about a young woman to her grandfather. However, refusing to pay his licence fee has not stopped Moore from appearing on the BBC or from presenting programmes (for which, one assumes, he was paid with licence payers’ money). It was even suggested that he might be made chairman of the BBC governors.

The Left should put a stop to all this. Getting rid of the BBC would end the absurd Tory pantomime of simultaneously getting uncritical coverage and complaining about Left-wing bias. An enlarged World Service would be much better. Neutrality, objectivity, and balance are all problematic words but a broadcasting service that has managed to annoy the governments of China and Russia must be doing something right.

The next government is probably going to be a Labour one and no one doubts either that it is going to have to deal with appallingly difficult circumstances. The BBC has done much to trivialise politics — think of the cringe-making television career of Ed Balls after he lost his parliamentary seat. But if a small, news-focused BBC core were built around the World Service, it would encourage seriousness about public affairs and a new level of clarity and concision from our leaders. Perhaps we will go back to the wonderful days when Clement Attlee was asked whether he wanted to comment on some matter and replied with one word: “No.”

Lord Hailsham famously wrote that Toryism was about fox hunting and religion (by which he meant the Anglican religion of the Book of Common Prayer). More generally, Conservatives were united by a moral belief that people had the right to dispose of their property and a practical sense that capitalism was likely to provide people with the most property to dispose of. Most of all, Conservatives believed in inequality. They thought that some people deserved to be richer, more powerful and more respected than others.

Well, fox hunting and the prayer book have both gone and no Conservative government is going to bring them back. The positions of capitalism and property are more complicated. Boris Johnson must have been the first Conservative prime minister who would not have been mortified to see it reported that he had said “fuck business”. This is partly because the Conservative Party has changed. Its leaders are relatively young, and if they pursued any career outside politics, it is likely to have been journalism.

It is also because capitalism has changed. Once it could be taken for granted that captains of industry were Right-wing in ways that bore no direct relation to their business interests. In 1977, when the CBI was asked to canvas opinions from its members about what a Conservative government should do, suggestions included restoring national service, controlling immigration and deterring couples from “living in sin”. Such opinions would be unimaginable now.

Toryism and capitalism were once joined together in institutional terms. The heads of large companies who funded the party took it for granted that their opinions would be sought and that they would count for more than rank-and-file party members. Today, however, the whole nature of business has changed. The very notion of a British company seems quaint. Note the studied vagueness of BP about what the “B” stands for and remember Margaret Thatcher’s fury when British Airways replaced the Union Jack on the tailfins of its planes with an abstract design.

Most of all, though, the Tories have lost contact with the central core of their beliefs, from which everything else springs: inequality. Just before the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the historian Maurice Cowling edited a collection of conservative essays in which he dismissed the idea, which had become widespread during the Cold War, that Conservatism was about the defence of freedom. Conservatives, he insisted, only believed in freedom as a means to create inequality or defend existing inequalities.

I doubt if the smooth young men in Conservative Central Office would have put it in such blunt terms, but they (especially those who had recently been taught by Cowling) would have understood what he was driving at. Conservatives are less likely to defend inequality now. This is partly because nothing makes rich people more uncomfortable than the discovery that some people are even richer than themselves. Globalisation has created, and made visible, a class of super-rich people who make a Chancery QC feel like a pauper. Rishi Sunak must surely be the first Conservative politician whose career has been damaged by the fact that he is, in the eyes of many party members, too wealthy.

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Real Tories believed in inequality for reasons that went beyond economics. They lived in a world of hierarchy and authority. It was a world in which tough-minded magistrates gave stiff sentences to poachers. It was underwritten, for much of the 20th century, by military experience. No institution in England reflects the class system more faithfully than the army and no social distinction is more ruthlessly policed than that between “officers” and “other ranks”. The two World Wars and the retention of conscription until the early Sixties meant there was a time when most British men had military experience. This did not make them all Conservatives — servicemen gave the Labour Party a large majority in 1945. What it did mean was that those people who were already Conservative had their belief in hierarchy reinforced.

Conservative leaders — captain Macmillan, lieutenant colonel Heath — derived much of their prestige from military rank, as did the local notables who organised the party at local level. Yet only a tiny fraction of the population has military experience now. In spite, or because, of this, Conservative fantasies focus ever more on a certain image of the military — but it is an image that is, in its odd way, democratic rather than hierarchical. For instance, one of the strongest themes in Conservative thinking now involves not the imposition of authority but the defence of relatively low-ranking soldiers who have infringed criminal law or military regulations — hence the campaign against soldiers being prosecuted for their actions in Northern Ireland or Afghanistan.

The decline in military experience goes with a more general change. Grassroots supporters of the Conservative Party have always been relatively old but the party used to have complicated relations with this group. An internal document from the early years of the Thatcher government suggested that the party’s support among the retired was a source of problems: “The Government’s economic policy is a long-term policy and the elderly do not think long term.” Of course, real Tories used to think long-term because they saw themselves as part of institutions that would continue beyond their death or simply because they spent a great deal of energy devising trust funds to benefit their grandchildren.

But this kind of long-term thinking is rarer now. Almost the defining feature of Conservative policy — with regards to everything from public debt to fossil fuel — is a slash-and-burn attitude that focuses on material gains to be made in the short term. I sometimes think that the only real Tories are the dreadlocked activists of Extinction Rebellion: people who understand that politics is about debts that might be owed to generations yet unborn and who display a commendable indifference to the short-term vagaries of electoral politics.

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Is this the end for Liz Truss?

By James Sean Dickson

In any case, old age is not what it used to be. Life expectancy and early retirement have both increased — so a disconcertingly large proportion of Conservatives have not worked for many years. A person born in 1926 could claim, with some justification, that they had had a harder life than their own children and might, therefore, have been exposed to harsh realities. This is conspicuously not true of someone born, in, say 1948. These are people who were born into peace and the welfare state. They bear a disconcerting resemblance to their contemporaries who joined student protests in 1968. A part of the press serves the same function for Tory activists that hallucinogenic drugs served for the soixante-huitards: the Mail and the Express are now so removed from reality that their readers might as well be getting their information from the website of David Icke. In fact, the most notable feature of Conservative supporters is often their reluctance to grow up — which may explain why they have, in the past few years, been prone to identify with young or, in the case of Johnson, ostentatiously juvenile, leaders.

A belief in inequality co-existed awkwardly with the extension of democracy. The third Marquess of Salisbury once wrote that it would be absurd if the votes of “two day-labourers” counted for more than that of the Baron de Rothschild. What made the Tories successful in the age of universal suffrage was deference. A political scientist working in the Sixties found that many working-class Tories believed that an Etonian would make a better prime minister than a grammar schoolboy.

The problem for Conservatives now is that democracy has become far too egalitarian. Social media has encouraged the idea that everyone who can hit a keyboard has a right to have their opinion respected. Class divisions count for less as everyone affects a plebeian air — Boris Johnson seems to have been popular with working-class voters not because he is an Etonian but because they think he is “like them”. Worst of all, democracy has infected the Conservative Party itself. It seemed like a revolution when, in 1965, Tory MPs were first given the chance to elect their leader (rather than having him — it always was a him — imposed by a “magic circle” of party elders). Now, power has passed from MPs to party members, and this summer the party members imposed a leader that the majority of MPs did not want.

In easier times, Liz Truss might have been the leader to restore Conservatism. Her own origins are on the Left and her beliefs are probably those of a classical liberal, but, perhaps for that reason, she sometimes seems to understand the traditions and style of Toryism better than people who were born into Conservatism. Most of all, Truss believes in the one thing that has most embarrassed Tories in recent years: inequality. Cutting taxes for the rich would have been as Conservative as cutting benefits for the poor.

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Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

By John Oxley

As it is, things do not look good for the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects but those of us who feel nostalgic for real Conservatism should not despair. Winning elections is over-rated. Toryism was, for much of its early history, a movement of opposition. True conservatism has, of necessity, a pessimistic, almost Sisyphean, quality: its practitioners know that they cannot really hold back change and that they will always be fighting a doomed rear-guard action.

Pessimism can produce two different forms of Conservatism. One emphasises the need to keep things going with as little damage as possible and therefore to hold on to power at all costs; the other appreciates the symbolic value of the hopeless fight. The conflict between the two approaches was incarnated in the bitter rivalry between the managerial Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, who could not see a three-line whip without voting against it or a ministerial office without resigning from it. Margaret Thatcher managed, at least when she was most successful, to combine pragmatic action with principled rhetoric — so that she sometimes seemed like the leader of an opposition to her own government.

If the most dramatic opinion polls of the last few days are correct, the Tories might not just cease to be party of government; they might not even be the Official Opposition. This would be no bad thing. Fifty or sixty Tory MPs would be just the right number. They could make their voices heard without any serious chance of controlling the commanding heights of policy. If they concentrated their efforts, they might even succeed in bringing back fox hunting.

The death of the Queen might eventually invite more sceptical and wide-ranging reflection. Georges Clemenceau said of the French Revolution that it was a bloc — to be accepted or rejected as a whole; the same is true of the British royal family. Any individual monarch is the product of an institution that revolves around the hereditary principle. Real monarchists must ask themselves whether they believe in this system enough to accept all its potential consequences. Remember that if Prince Charles had broken his neck playing polo in 1976, we would now be awaiting the coronation of King Andrew.

Curiously, a “successful” monarch and, especially, a long reign weakens the monarchy as an institution. During such a reign, loyalty comes to focus on a person, rather than on the Crown as an institution. Note how frequently, in recent years, politicians have answered questions about their views on monarchy with some anodyne remark about their admiration for the Queen. The cult of an individual sovereign increasingly overshadows all other members of their family, including their eventual successor.

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That heir, waiting in the wings, will have accumulated a great deal of baggage by the time that they get to the throne — whether that baggage means actresses and obesity (as in the case of Edward VII) or an unsuccessful marriage and a history of publicly expressing political views (the case of Charles III). The problems of a long reign are exacerbated when the monarch is a woman. Partly because they were comparatively rare in British public life until recently, Queens lend themselves to mythologisation.

There are two striking and worrying precedents for what happens when a long-serving monarch dies. The first is Elizabeth I. Her death was followed by an unsuccessful king (James I), a catastrophic king (Charles I), civil war, regicide and, for a time, republic. The second is Victoria, whose death was also followed by a period of turbulence for the monarchy, culminating in the abdication crisis of 1936. I am not being entirely flippant when I say that the First World War was, in some ways, a civil war within Victoria’s own family — in which the English branch came off much better than the German or Russian ones.

Their long reigns served to occlude problems that then came back to haunt the next monarch. Elizabeth I — who refused to “open a window into men’s souls” — was careful to cultivate a useful ambiguity over religion. But that ambiguity was linked to her personal idiosyncrasies — her refusal to marry, for instance, avoided the question of whether she would take a Protestant or Catholic husband — so that it was hard for the monarchy to sustain after her death.

The ambiguity of Victoria’s reign was less deliberate. Her long period on the throne and, particularly, her partial withdrawal from public life after the death of her husband, helped to conceal the extent to which (much to Victoria’s own distaste) the monarchy had lost its political power during her reign. It was significant that politicians did not consider it necessary to call a general election when she died: they had done so as a matter of course after the previous monarch’s death. Still, the monarchs that came after her did not really reconcile themselves to the institution’s loss of political power until the accession of George VI in 1936.

The central ambiguity of Elizabeth II’s long reign revolves around Britain’s relations with the wider world. Before her accession, she pledged herself to serve “our imperial family”. But the empire went in the early years of her reign and was replaced by the Commonwealth — Enoch Powell, always attentive to the precise meaning of constitutional terms, believed that the most important speech he ever made concerned the addition of the letter “s” after “realm” in the Royal Titles Bill of 1952. Elizabeth’s death has now raised awkward questions, long suppressed, about what the Commonwealth itself means and, in particular, whether the British monarch will remain its head.

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The moment the monarchy nearly toppled

By Mary Harrington

In some ways, the personalisation of the monarchy is more marked now than it was in 1901 or 1603. This is partly because of other changes in the British state. It is often suggested that every aspect of the constitution hinges on the monarchy. But in some ways, the reverse is true: the institutions of the British can get along perfectly well without a monarch — as was shown during the interregnum of 1649-1660 — though the monarchy has, in the past, been sustained by its relations with an infrastructure of ancien regime institutions.

In 1953, I suspect the Queen herself would have said that being head of the Church of England was the most important of her duties. Now the idea of a state church seems peculiar — most vicars would give you a blank look if you point out that parliament has not sanctioned the prayer book used in most churches. As for the House of Lords, it is now, for the most part, an assembly of retired, middle-ranking politicians — not a single one of the six surviving former prime ministers has bothered to take a peerage. The institutions that have long propped up the monarchy are ailing.

She was also always held to be above politics and often presented as representing an integrity that elected politicians lack. Yet the briefest glance at the register of members’ interests or parliamentary expense claims reveals that MPs most interested in personal enrichment tend to be fervent admirers of the Queen — and keen collectors of honours. One might also point out that two of the most important figures at the court of King Boris (the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, and Lord Geidt, advisor on ministerial standards) had previously worked in the royal household.

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The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the monarchy being “apolitical”, no serious observer doubts that the monarchy serves the interests of the Conservative Party — often, as when George V promoted “National Government” in 1931, serving those interests by going along with the Conservative claim that their own policies were “apolitical”. A group of MPs closely associated with Thatcherism, including Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, wrote an interesting document in 1978. They were struck by the show of affection for the Queen during her Silver Jubilee; they recognised that it might reflect “a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past”, suggesting that they needed to be careful with calls for radical change. All the same, they concluded that the spirit of the Jubilee would work to their advantage: “People will be more attracted by a promise … to restore some of the valued things they have lost than by promise of a vague, bright tomorrow.”

But Conservatives are not quite the royalists they sometimes make out. They are heirs to a political tradition that looks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when James II was abruptly ejected from the throne) and emphasises the pre-eminence of the parliament — especially the House of Commons. Churchill paid ostentatious deference to the young Queen Elizabeth and took the side of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. All the same, Churchill was blunt to the latter: “When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.” He also, as First Lord of the Admiralty, once tried to name a ship HMS Oliver Cromwell.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

Conservatives found it easy to be loyal to Elizabeth II because her public statements — in favour of family, nation and the armed forces, and prone, in recent years, to evoke a certain memory of the Second World War — fitted with their own political vision. It will be interesting to see how they get on with a monarch who recently, albeit unintentionally, let it be known that he disapproves of their asylum policy and who has devoted much of his life to drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

King Charles will, I suspect, not have an easy time. His reign will be relatively short and he will spend much of it in the shadow of his mother. The historian Peter Hennessy recently wrote that his generation (he is more or the less the same age as the King) found it hard to imagine any monarch other than Elizabeth II. Like many remarks that sound conservative, this is, when you think of it, profoundly subversive. Saying a monarch other than the present one if unthinkable is, in effect, saying that the continuation of monarchy is unthinkable.

And, while we are on the subject of unthinkable things, consider the dramatic constitutional rethinking likely to be brought about by, say, the break-up of the union, an attempt to re-enter the European Union, or the creation of a written constitution — all things desired by a significant minority of the population and all things that might raise questions about who should be head of state. For all the talk about centuries of continuity, I doubt if any realistic observer is sure the monarchy will survive for another 70 years. If it is to do so, it needs to get away from an emphasis on the supposed personal qualities of any individual King or Queen and rest once again on the abstract quality of the Crown. Perhaps one day historians will recognise that the most important constitutional commentator of the period was not Sir Simon Schama or Lord Hennessy but Johnny Rotten, who marked the Silver Jubilee of 1977 with the words: “She ain’t no human being.”

And yet it is in Birmingham that the two contenders for the Conservative leadership will face each other tomorrow, and it is there again that the winner will address the party at its annual conference in October. So, what makes the current Conservative Party so keen to court the city?

Part of the answer to this question lies in the very incongruity of the association between Birmingham and the party. At a time when the competition for Tory leadership pits a woman who began her career at Shell against a man who began his at Goldman Sachs, Conservative spin doctors want to create some distance from the global capitalist elite. Birmingham is a good place to start. Shell had a small back-office there once but most of its back-office work is now done out of Chennai or Manila. As for Goldman Sachs, I suspect that most of its employees have never set foot in Birmingham — though some of the more erudite ones may recall that there was once a Birmingham stock exchange, which closed in 1986, just as the London exchange took off.

More generally, in the aftermath of Brexit, Conservatives like to see themselves as representatives of “deep England”. Birmingham, an unglamorous city in the centre of the nation, looks like the capital of this fantasyland from the Home Counties. When people, Tories especially, imagine the “real England”, it is almost invariably rural and, to a surprising extent, rural imagery often comes from Birmingham. Think of Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”, a place that seems to derive from the — then semi-rural — suburb of Birmingham in which the author grew up. Radio 4, keen to demonstrate its non-metropolitan credentials, sometimes ships its presenters to Birmingham for a few hours of Today or Start the Week, but practically the only BBC programme that is still produced in the city is The Archers. It was in here that Theresa May delivered her speech of 2016 in which she remarked that “citizens of the world” were “citizens of nowhere”.

Birmingham is also a perfect case study for the current Conservative fascination with “levelling up” the provinces. Joseph Chamberlain, much admired by May’s advisor Nick Timothy, is often presented as having been the incarnation of municipal activism when he was mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s. Later, after he moved to national politics and left the Gladstonian Liberals to join forces with the Tories, he became the incarnation of Right-wing populism.

There are, however, some odd things about Birmingham’s current place in the Tory imagination. The notion that its population is deeply rooted would not survive the briefest glance at the census. If anything characterises the city, it is migration. Work has always drawn people there — from surrounding counties in the 19th century, from Wales in the Thirties (3% of the entire employed population of the principality moved to the Midlands) and from overseas in the period since 1945. Go back a generation or two and the “somewhere” from which Birmingham people come is likely to be Galway, St Kitts or the Punjab. Birmingham Conservatives, by the way, did not always have easy relations with the city’s immigrant population — though were more discreet in the expression of their opinions than their counterparts in neighbouring Smethwick, who became notorious for using a racist slogan in the 1964 general election.

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As for “levelling up”, the city’s history shows how vacuous the concept is. Joseph Chamberlain was a powerful local figure who had great resources at his disposal. Birmingham’s rise was engineered by its own local elites, particularly the network of intermarried Unitarian families who gathered around Chamberlain. He did not depend on favours from national government. The current Conservative mayor of the West Midlands — Andy Street — is an amiable and well-meaning man but hardly in the Chamberlain mould. He won his position by a narrow majority: the proportion who voted against having a regional mayor at all, in a 2012 referendum, was larger than the proportion who voted in favour of having a Tory one in the 2017 election. He also has little money to spend: Conservatives in the Eighties stripped local government of much of its financial power. And while Chamberlain ran a small empire of municipal enterprises, the initiatives that come from Andy Street are less tangible — I suspect that most people living in the band that extends from the university to the site of the old Longbridge factory (my mother among them) would be surprised to hear that they inhabit the “Central Technology Corridor”.

In any case, Birmingham people with long memories may suspect that central government attempts to level up are more likely to be a source of problems than a solution. Many of the city’s economic problems in the Eighties sprang from the fact that the Board of Trade, keen to move industry to the “Development Areas” of the North, refused to grant permission for the establishment of new factories in Birmingham. As a result, the city was frozen into an economy that revolved around motor manufacture.

The relations between Conservatism and Birmingham are, in fact, so odd that it is worth dwelling on their history — a history that might raise awkward questions. In political terms, Birmingham was born in opposition to Toryism. It first attained parliamentary representation as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill, but not as a passive beneficiary of largesse from London. The Birmingham Political Union had been one of the most important instruments in bringing the Reform Bill about, and it had done so in opposition to the most famous Tory of the early 19th century: the Duke of Wellington. For slightly more than the first half-century of its parliamentary representation, Birmingham only once, and briefly, returned a Tory MP.

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In some ways, the city was an anti-Conservative place even before there was much in the way of formal political activity there. The ancien régime institutions that Toryism existed to defend were all weak in Birmingham. There was no real aristocracy in the town. It is true that the aristocratic Calthorpes owned the Edgbaston estate — which became the suburb in which much of the local bourgeoisie lived. But the Calthorpes were not really great figures in the city, and a member of the family was trounced when he was foolish enough to stand as a Conservative in opposition to the Chamberlainite Liberal machine.

Meanwhile, in statistical terms, Birmingham was an Anglican town (unlike the industrial towns of the North). Still, it had no Cathedral until the 20th century. The only real centre of Anglican and Tory power, until the City council managed to bring it to heel, was King Edward’s grammar school, which had been run since the 16th century by a self-selecting oligarchy of governors. King Edward’s has indeed produced some significant Tories but the intellectual self-confidence that the school imparts does not always fit easily with the party. One sees this in David Willetts, so intelligent that he sometimes doubts that he is really a Tory, and Enoch Powell, so intelligent that he made the rest of his party doubt that they were really Tories.

No one incarnated Birmingham’s natural anti-Tory bent better than Joseph Chamberlain. At a time when the Conservatives stood for Church and crown, he began his career as a republican and ended it as an atheist. He regarded the aristocracy with open contempt. However, he broke with Gladstone over Home Rule in 1886 and, thereafter, worked in alliance with the Conservatives. Birmingham became a Conservative, or, strictly speaking, a Unionist city, and this was seen most strikingly after Joseph’s death. Between the wars, there were times when Conservative cabinets contained three Birmingham MPs, including Joseph’s sons, Austen and Neville.

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Neville, though, was both the epitome of Conservative success in Birmingham and the instrument of its downfall. When he became prime minister in 1937, every single Birmingham MP was a Conservative. In 1945, five years after his death, the Labour Party won ten out of the 13 Birmingham seats. This was partly because appeasement so discredited the Chamberlain tradition (though several Birmingham Conservative MPs had, in fact, opposed it) and partly because the war economy had created a more self-conscious and unionised working class. Factories associated with the motor industry had been centres of Tory power between the wars. Herbert Austin, owner of the Longbridge car factory, was a Conservative MP who often sacked trade unionists and kept his men working late to stop them voting in municipal elections. Austin, like Chamberlain, died early in the war; by its end, Longbridge was heavily unionised.

Birmingham was a boom town after 1945. School leavers could find jobs in days. Conservatives were not always comfortable with full employment. Walter Higgs, a motor manufacturer who had been Conservative MP for West Birmingham, remarked, just after the 1945 election, that “the only way to get Birmingham people to work is have ten men after every nine jobs and empty bellies”. Another notable wrote in a private report that Conservatism in Birmingham was suffering from “over full employment”. But, though prosperity broke the Conservative monopoly of the Thirties, it did not create a new monopoly for Labour. Birmingham voters were what sociologists labelled “affluent workers”. Their support for Labour was an instrumental one based on what they took to be their interests rather than a product of ancestral loyalties. It may be because loyalty to Labour was never particularly deep that the city never turned against the party with the bitterness seen in some Northern constituencies in recent years.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the turning point for Birmingham came in 1979. “Thatcherism” was made in Birmingham — in the sense that Stuart Hall’s article on “The Great Moving Right Show” (published in Marxism Today in January 1979), which first used the term “Thatcherism” in a systematic way, was written while he was at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was made in Birmingham too in that Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to define itself against two displays of working-class power — that seen in 1972 when striking miners and their allies from Birmingham blockaded the Saltley coke depot and that seen in strikes at the Longridge car factory, which was, by now, part-nationalised.

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There was, though, something strange in all this. Significant numbers of Birmingham people voted Conservative in 1979. It was no surprise that Sutton Coldfield (a leafy suburb that had only been annexed to the city in 1974) should have the largest Conservative majority in the country. It was odder that Northfield and Selly Oak — the two constituencies closest to the Longbridge car plant — both went Tory in 1979. Partly, this was the last hurrah of the post-war “affluent worker” — a vote against the pay restraint of the Callaghan government. Sections of the white working class perhaps expected the Thatcher government to be more radical on social and cultural issues (particularly immigration) than it turned out to be. Birmingham people certainly did not expect the Tories to be so radical on economic issues and the city’s economy dived in the early Eighties — this was the era when UB40 were in the charts and when the Kenrick and Jefferson stationery company were said to be almost the only thriving local business because they had the contract to print UB40 forms.

Birmingham has regained much of its prosperity in recent years but the vestiges of the Thatcher years are still visible. The city includes areas with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The Longbridge factory finally closed in the early part of this century and the area around it is the one area that resembles the “Red Wall” Tory seats of the North — it voted for Brexit and voted Conservative in 2019. However, the prosperous commuters of Sutton Coldfield and the white ex-car workers (or their widows) of Northfield are now the only people in Birmingham to vote Conservative. All the other eight Birmingham constituencies returned Labour MPs at the last election.

The oddest thing about Tory evocations of Birmingham is the very idea that the city ought to stand for something. It is a big, heterogeneous place and, partly because of its catastrophic development around busy roads in the Sixties and Seventies, different parts of the city can feel utterly separate from each other. The notion that this is “deep England” is a myth — but then, so is the notion that there is a “deep England”. The Tory fantasy implies something permanent and natural — rural, even (one thinks of Churchill addressing the population “in your cottages”). Yet Birmingham is above all a man-made place. It manufactured an image of rural England as much as it once manufactured the Spitfire. Any local asked to identify a landmark would talk about Spaghetti Junction or the Sentinel towers, rather than a hill or river. Joseph Chamberlain, meanwhile, would have despised all the talk of “heritage”, “ancestry” and “roots” that goes with deep England; he knew that the Tory party he helped create was no more “natural” than the orchids he grew in his hothouse. For him and his associates, Birmingham went, above all, with the phrase “self-made”.