Andy Burnham has, thus far, been an avowedly domestic prime minister, with his focus on devolution, housing and social care allowing Miliband more control over foreign affairs. And until now, the role has in some ways suited Miliband well. On the eve of this week’s Labour Party conference, murmurs abounded of Cabinet splits over the economy and immigration. A shift in foreign policy, however, has been more warmly received within the party. Earlier this month, Miliband announced a series of sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He has integrated elements of his old brief at the Energy Department to push for “climate diplomacy”, and has been more explicit in his advocacy for European reintegration than either of the previous two office holders. This all provides easy ammunition for rival parties and for the British press, but it’s catnip for party members.

During his Conference speech in Liverpool on Monday morning, Miliband hit all these notes and provided a clearer view of what his foreign policy will look like. “The world order needs rebuilding anew,” he said, arguing that his approach would be one of “resilient idealism”. He had made the same points at a corporate reception the previous evening, where business leaders uninterestedly chatted and chewed. In front of Labour delegates on Monday, however, he was more at home. The crowd thunderously cheered his labeling of Israeli settlers as “terrorists”, and his declaration that “our future lies in a stronger, deeper partnership with the European Union”.

Left-wing dissent towards Miliband’s agenda has, therefore, come not from within the walls of the conference but right outside. On Sunday evening, more than 50 protesters were arrested for demonstrating in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action. When I walked past the scene, there appeared to be more police than agitators. White-haired radicals sat cross-legged on the grass — standing for an extended period would have put pressure on those joints — and held up homemade signs pledging fealty to the organization, surrounded all the while by a bored-looking ring of officers. The same evening, a smaller group of activists had confronted Miliband in Pizza Express, telling him his Israel position was insufficient and demanding he abandon his doughballs to address the protesters.

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This encapsulates one of the chief problems faced by Labour foreign secretaries at a time of war in the Middle East. While the Right-leaning press decries Miliband as an extremist enemy of the people, there will invariably be a coterie of progressive objectionists who will settle for nothing less than the nuking of Tel Aviv. At the same time, Miliband, a British Jew whose mother escaped a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, has had to put up with allegations of antisemitism for his action on West Bank settlements, just as security officials brief the press that his approach to the US-Israeli offensive against Iran was “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political”.

That Miliband is political is obvious: he is arguably the most ideological member of Burnham’s Cabinet, deeply interested in ideas in a way that the more interpersonally minded PM is not. “He’s more demanding [than Cooper or Lammy],” one FCDO official tells me. “But he knows what he wants. As soon as he came in, there was a plan for how he wanted things done.” Shortly after he became energy secretary under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Miliband spoke in an interview of the need to “move fast and build things”. Initially tipped to be Burnham’s chancellor, he has put paid to the idea that a move to the Foreign brief — which for some ministers feels more like an ambassadorial role — would neuter his political influence.

As part of this new shift towards a more ideological foreign policy, Britain will have to accept its own mediocrity. Much of Miliband’s messaging so far has reinforced the image of the country as a secondary power, rather than one that should be competing with the big boys in DC and Beijing. The West Bank announcement was made in conjunction with similar action from Canada and France, other middle powers with which Britain is forging closer ties to compensate for White House capriciousness. The UK has found some success as a driver of European action on Ukraine, leading the “coalition of the willing” at a time when Kyiv has been uncertain of US backing. Miliband insisted in his Liverpool speech that “our alliance with the United States remains essential”, yet he made no effort to hide this government’s diplomatic realignment. Britons are “proud Europeans”, he said, adding: “This is our continent.” In other words: these are our true friends, not America.

While Miliband has sought to portray his plans as a radical break from the Starmer years, some of his prescriptions bear a resemblance to what came before. His talk of “resilient idealism” is immediately reminiscent of Lammy’s promotion of “progressive realism” abroad. According to that doctrine, governments “do not have to choose between values and interests”, and Left-wing ideals can still shape practical responses to global conflict. Where Miliband differs from the more Atlanticist Lammy is in the course that he is charting away from Washington and more determinedly into the embrace of Europe. Indeed, it is hard to picture him (illicitly) fishing with JD Vance.

The Foreign Secretary, then, clearly sees an opening for Britain to become, rather than a leading power, a moral brake on the worst impulses of its betters. On Monday, he vowed to “put climate at the heart of national security”. When the UK takes on the rotating G20 presidency next year, it will “lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe, and I say no tech titan should stand in our way”. Earlier this month, in relation to Gaza, he said that “Britain is not silent in the face of injustice and nor is it powerless”.

Yet Miliband risks making the same mistake as Lammy, attempting to navigate a multipolar world armed with the outmoded weaponry of the old liberal order. The UK has in recent weeks launched another round of “tough new sanctions” in Russia, with little evidence that they will have a greater impact than those which came before, while continued invocations of international law hardly deter Xi and Putin. Miliband’s assumption of a like-minded federation of European allies will be put to the test, too, by the possibility of continental powers such as France and Germany electing Right-populist, anti-Brussels parties into government in the coming decade. “Europe is not just our geography, but so much more,” he said as he called for a deeper partnership with the bloc on Monday. But how might he deal with a prospective AfD chancellor who wants out of the union altogether?

Miliband may be looking towards Europe, but these pledges are always made with one eye on Labour’s domestic popularity. The party faces a crucial by-election in Holborn and St Pancras next week, where Green leader Zack Polanski is seeking election in a constituency which in more than 40 years of existence has chosen only Labour MPs. There is a case to be made that Polanski’s initial success was the result of progressive frustration with Starmer, and that the Burnham conquest has brought the Left back onside. Miliband’s rhetoric against the Israeli government may have some moral grounding, but it also functions as an attempt to match Green radicalism on the issue.

His enemies won’t be surprised by this: he’s “Red Ed”, after all. Having been party leader for the first half of Labour’s decade of humiliation, Miliband has become a more polished, wily politician in the years since. But he’s still an idealist. “They say that as you age you become more cynical,” he declared during his Liverpool speech. “Why? Not me.” Talk of “resilient idealism” might sound appealing to the Labour base, but that resilience is only tested in times of crisis. As for realpolitik, nobody is mistaking Miliband for Henry Kissinger, but there are plenty within the party who would like him to take inspiration from one of Labour’s more hard-headed foreign secretaries — Ernest Bevin, who served in the Clement Attlee government from 1945-51.

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Bevin, a former union boss, had impeccable Left-wing credentials when appointed by Attlee, but quickly marked himself out as a realist on foreign policy. Recognizing that Britain was a fading superpower, he pushed for the creation of Nato, and its principle of collective defense, so that the country could call on a network of Western European partners ready to support its aims. He championed the development of a nuclear deterrent, and a decade earlier had admonished Labour’s pacifist then-leader, George Lansbury, for “hawking his conscience around”. Bevin also opposed the establishment of Israel, believing it would become a “racial state”, and maintained that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been a grave error of foreign policy.

Of course, Bevin failed in his attempt to block the foundation of Israel, his power only extending so far. Miliband, who has used his extensive Whitehall experience to circumvent obstacles that had thwarted his predecessors, is well-positioned to reshape the international order so that British objectives better match his own idealistic, Europhile politics.

And yet, the public may ask how far this serves the national interest. They would be entitled, too, to argue that Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry in the Energy brief constrained national industry, at a cost to the country’s hard-power capabilities. Britain has an opportunity to make something of what Miliband correctly perceives to be its secondary status, leading a set of fellow middle powers. But Miliband’s progressive ideals would be better served by pragmatism than by sanctions and stern words alone. “It’s hard to change the world,” he acknowledged in his Liverpool speech. Sometimes, it’s better to recognize the world as it is, and leave the idealism to the activists sitting cross-legged outside the conference gate.

In a sense, that’s unsurprising. It may have been the brainchild of former prime minister Liz Truss, but the Conservative Political Action Conference is a fundamentally American import, and this week’s gathering in central London borrowed its presentation and language from MAGA and the US Christian Right. Thursday morning began with a prayer session led by Judd Saul, introduced over tannoy as “the founder of persecuted.com”, who bellowed at attendees still bleary-eyed from the previous night’s World Cup heartbreak that “the West has turned away from God.”

Subsequent speakers entered to booming beach-club music and flashing overhead lights. Former Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin started his speech by thanking Donald Trump and JD Vance “for calling out what is really happening in this country”. Jack Posobiec, an American Right-wing activist, claimed from the stage that “God has a plan for Donald Trump”, exhorting supporters to “restore God to the very core of Western civilization”. While “GB” might have been tacked on to the end, this was, in spirit if not in scale, CPAC for an American crowd. Attendees were as likely to have come from Palm Beach as Paddington, with US lobbyists enthusiastically discussing how they’d save Britain from destruction.

Amid it all was Truss herself who, having lost her seat at the general election two years ago, has reinvented herself as an American-style culture warrior, appearing at CPACs from Maryland to Texas. Yet whatever her own enthusiasms — she recently claimed Trump was “right about everything” — it’s safe to say that the former PM doesn’t command Don-level support. Among most Britons on the Right, she inspires not adulation but a kind of morbid curiosity, like a Victorian circus act which, in place of physical contortions, finds novel ways to blame the “deep state”.

At CPAC GB, Truss giddily addressed near-empty rooms in a hotel next to the O2 Arena, taking aim at the “socialists, Marxists, communists, whatever you want to call them, [who] want to destroy our country”. “It used to be honorable to love your country,” she continued. “Now it’s honorable to love illegal migrants.” Never quite shaking off her much-clipped 2014 “pork markets” speech, Truss still has a habit of shouting the wrong parts of her sentences and grinning at otherwise serious moments. After the “illegal migrants” quip, she took a moment to let the joke land, with the audience remaining largely uncooperative.

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That indifference is partly a function of how quickly politics now moves. Truss had already been replaced twice in Downing Street, and with a third new prime minister arriving on Monday, CPAC felt more and more like a sideshow, whatever her claims that Andy Burnham would be turfed out of office before 2029, another victim of “40 years of massive state failure”.

Of course, for 25 of those 40 failed years, including Truss’s 50-day tenure, the UK has been governed by the Conservative Party. This isn’t a chink in her argument but a central part of it. The party of which Truss is still a member has, she claimed, been “ideologically captured” by “DEI”. Other speakers agreed. According to CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp — the husband of the gloriously-named Mercedes Schlapp, a one-time Trump official who also spoke at the conference — the party “doesn’t deserve the label of ‘conservative’”. Given all this, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith appeared hopelessly out of place when he spoke about “post-Brexit regulatory reform”, his earnest suggestions mere filler before the juicy stuff on radical Leftist takeovers.

The Conservatives, then, had no place at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In fact, contempt for the Tories stretched almost as far as hatred of Keir Starmer, and warmer receptions were reserved for Reform UK politicians including Goodwin and Suella Braverman. Kemi Badenoch’s platform, in this telling, is part of the “uniparty”; Nigel Farage and crew are the insurgents who can reverse Britain’s decline. If there was one dominant theme of CPAC GB, it was the pitting of the Right against the liberal-progressive establishment.

This antagonism extended beyond the established political parties to the mainstream press. Truss described the BBC as “basically state-controlled media, churning out propaganda 24/7”. She called for a “parallel media” to battle the institutions, given that “a lot of the truth about what’s going on in Britain is suppressed.” Anyone liable to be brainwashed by Adolescence should instead “go on X” and “watch independent podcasts”. Truss suggested, cadging a phrase from the identitarian Left, that “they need to educate themselves.”

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In the event, her media enemies were largely absent. Reporters from national papers were in short supply, and the BBC nowhere to be seen. In their place was a new class of correspondent, the “citizen journalist” or “newsfluencer” — young, enterprising content creators on the political Right with names like BasednBougie. They stood a few feet apart from one another in a foyer outside the auditorium, armed with selfie sticks and mini tripod stands and portable lights, speaking into their phones as the remnants of a dying trade looked on. Young Bob, a rising online activist who turned 18 earlier this week, observed that the CPAC attendees “are quite old, and they’re the same old people who would consume anything the Right-wing gives.” He described himself not as an influencer but as “a random geezer on the internet”. The parallel media envisioned by Truss has already arrived.

Yet if CPAC GB is so in tune with this new information landscape, the question remained: where was everyone? In a conference room with roughly 500 seats, most sessions were well under half-full. Pricey tickets might have been a factor — the priciest ran at £10,000 —  giving proceedings the feel of a corporate function rather than a grassroots rally. Ditto the fact that the bulk of the conference took place during the working week. One attendee complained that it “felt more like an elitist Westminster networking event with flashing lights” and “very few ‘normal’ people”. A faultlessly polite American man in his twenties handed me a magazine whose cover piece was titled “Conspiracy for global control”. Other articles intriguingly pointed to the “Deep state behind the deep state” and “The conspiracy against God”.

There’s also the possibility that British conservatives are simply spoiled for choice on the jamboree front. CPAC is just one of a constellation of Right-leaning, acronymed conferences to emerge in Britain in recent years, from NatCon to PopCon to ARC — or, with its own blend of deafening entrance tracks and high camp, there’s always Reform’s annual party conference.

As the event progressed, Farage increasingly felt like the ghost of CPAC future. Each speaker, including ex-Cabinet ministers and former European presidents, felt small compared to him. Truss, too, seemed less stateswoman than compere, engaging foreign delegates in the intricacies of the Westminster swamp. As for attendees, they seemed bound by admiration for the man they universally called “Nigel”. He was booked to appear at 4:30 on Friday afternoon, almost exactly coinciding with the closure for nominations in next month’s Clacton by-election.

When the British Trump finally arrived, the auditorium, sparsely populated until that point, filled almost to capacity. Around two dozen Reform staffers patrolled the edges of the room, as mainstream journalists who’d studiously avoided covering the rest of Truss’s festival descended on Greenwich. An announcer welcomed the man who found himself on the wrong end of “a kangaroo court in Parliament” to a standing ovation several times the volume of anything Truss received.

Scrutiny over his finances has already produced a darker Nigel than the chirpy showman we’re used to; during a tense confrontation earlier this month, he accused Sky News of “harassing” his family, later posting online that its reporters were “liars”. Just as Truss did at CPAC, Farage has drawn a dividing line between the political establishment and pliant press on one side, and his own populist revolt on the other. Tensions have risen further following the killing of Reform spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe last week, with some CPAC speakers preparing for battle in response. “This,” Truss stated bluntly, “is a war”.

And, to an extent, Farage’s speech echoed the uncompromising tone that preceded him. Rather than a call for unity on the Right, or a broader celebration of conservative values, Farage delivered what could fairly be described as a Reform party political broadcast. “We are the dominant force on the Right of British politics,” he announced. “I don’t believe the last Conservative government can ever be forgiven.” More cheers from the crowd. Farage’s speech also came with a New World twang. Comparing his recent financial travails to the US President’s treatment by his political opponents, he claimed he had been “demonized” by the British establishment.

Yet where Truss and the visiting Americans had positioned the coming fight as rooted in Christianity and “Western values”, Farage’s focus was ultimately on Britain itself. He was angry that the UK was “a decade away from turning into a third-world country”, and insisted that “we are engaged in a battle for the very soul of our nation.” Burnham, for his part, was “utterly vacuous” — the “great chameleon of British politics”. Tonally, too, Farage was different. After two days of MAGA playacting, his speech was serious and statesmanlike. He set out a clearer vision of British conservative values than any of the America-brained attempts that came before, praising those “who actually believe in family, community and country, and decency and democracy and free speech, and putting the national interest first”. The rapturous response only drew greater contrast between his popularity and Truss’s.

When I emerged from the scrum which followed Farage’s speech, I saw representatives from the Conservative Party and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain in the crowd, as well as Ukip leader Nick Tenconi. The British Right had stayed away for most of CPAC GB, only to gather together for the leader whose celebrity has blocked out all other ideological challengers.

The foyer was almost deserted the next morning, the exhibition stalls for Christian charities and interventionist think tanks untroubled by visitors. We sat through more of Judd Saul’s prayers, and a fireside chat with the Schlapps — in which Mercedes said she’d cut her daughters out of her will if they “become crazy Leftists” — before Truss closed off the show. “Our country has been taken over by the progressive Blob,” she declared, in case we’d missed it. “And we’re only going to be able to fight back by building a movement.” The hall, though, remained largely empty, the real movement on the British Right having left with its leader the previous night. The British fightback may have begun, but Truss’s conservatism is stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

What did Charles know? The protest was the work of Republic, a pressure group whose aim is the abolition of the British monarchy. In a statement issued later that day, the organization’s head, Graham Smith, said that “it’s inconceivable that Charles knew nothing about allegations against Andrew”. Though the King stripped his brother of various baubles last year, culminating in the loss of his prince title, a cloud of suspicion lingers; the Palace has had to deny that Charles personally contributed to the £12 million settlement paid to the late Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked her to the former Duke of York for sex. 

The Andrew scandal has brought about the monarchy’s most exacting test since the death of Diana, but the Windsors’ future may not lie in their own hands. Instead, it depends on the whim of their subjects. After France got in early by lopping off the head of Louis Capet in 1793, a wave of European countries abolished their respective monarchies over the course of the 20th century. For Russia, it took a revolution; Italy and Greece settled for democratic votes on the matter. Republicanism has never been a sufficiently popular position in Britain for a referendum to seem imminent. Yet Britain may still join the ranks of republics, for public opinion is steadily turning on the Royals. Even worse for the Windsors, the trend shows signs of acceleration on both the Left and the Right. 

 “Make some noise for the arrest of Prince Andrew!” Four days earlier, the new Roundheads were gathered in the shadow of Nelson’s Column to celebrate Republic Day 2026. Compère Eshaan Akbar was attempting to rally the hundred or so protesters, who, in response, offered half-hearted whoops, unsure whether to boo the disgraced duke or cheer his downfall. Among the ubiquitous yellow “Not my King” placards were tote bags declaring that “The only kings and queens we need are drag.” An elderly man held in one hand the Irish republican Starry Plough banner, in the other a sign blaming His Majesty for the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre. One girl, no older than 11, wielded a placard reading: “Save foxes, hunt the King”. A young man dressed as Jesus, barefoot and wearing a realistic-looking crown of thorns, enthusiastically waved a Palestinian flag.

On the evidence of this rally, which was followed by a march on Buckingham Palace, the anti-royal movement had been subsumed into the “Omnicause”. Akbar introduced a musical interlude from Nasty Fishmonger, a four-piece band who play “fist-raising hardcore folk”. They had traveled, naturally, from Bristol. Towards the end of their set, their guitarist shouted: “Down with the Crown, free Palestine, free Iran, free Ukraine and free yourselves.” Robin Wells of Fossil Free London followed them on to stage, where she railed against the broader “polycrisis” of war, climate and the cost of living. 

Linking Buckingham Palace to the atrocities taking place in Gaza might seem like a stretch, until one recognizes that the prevailing depiction of Charles on sections of the British Left is as an imperialist scion. “I don’t know if you know what the Royals did in South Asia,” Akbar said. “It wasn’t good.” He welcomed to the stage the breakfast-show commentator Narinder Kaur, who devoted much of her speech to the “theft” of the Koh-i-Noor diamond from a “10-year-old Sikh king”. She took a surprising jab at “Charles II” for paying off Epstein victims, a hitherto underacknowledged failing of the Merry Monarch. 

Otto English went even further back in time to attack the institution. “Henry VIII was a mass murderer who killed two of his wives,” cried the author. “That gets brushed aside like it’s nothing.” Charles, by virtue of his royal office, has inherited these crimes. The Omnicause, on current form, is the future of activism, bringing together a string of social-justice issues which cohere into a simplified worldview. The monarchy’s ancient crimes, according to this view, map neatly onto present-day racism and wars of expansion, and maybe there’s even room for some protesting about fossil fuels there too.

In The Enchanted Glass, his 1988 study of the monarchy, the Scottish historian Tom Nairn observed that Britain’s “real distinction was to lose an empire without trauma”, suggesting that the eventual move towards a republic would play out similarly. Yet imperial trauma has become a greater threat to the monarchy in the generation since Nairn’s book was published. Caribbean governments have demanded reparations and apologies from the King for his ancestors’ role in the transatlantic slave trade, while support for the monarchy is considerably lower among ethnic-minority Britons than it is across the UK as a whole. At the Republic march, the Nigerian-born writer Kelechi Okafor took the stage to make accusations of imperial displacement: “Because Britain was there, I am here.” 

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Not even the King’s noted climate advocacy is a point in his favor for Republic and its supporters. “Charles is a hypocrite,” Graham Smith told me as we walked down the Mall later in the day. “He has one of the biggest carbon footprints in the country.” For others present, the monarch was interchangeable with the Right-wing populists in Parliament. “Especially with Reform winning all those seats,” Akbar said of the previous day’s local election results, “we need to challenge privilege.” 

But are the populists of Reform loyal to Charles? At surface level, support for the monarchy remains high among Right-wingers. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, 82% of Conservative voters and 77% of Reform UK supporters back the Firm. Reform’s “policy brain”, Danny Kruger, told an event last month that the monarchy, far from being mere “ceremonial flummery”, truly “matters to the common life of our country”. On St George’s Day this year, as part of a series of patriotic education initiatives, Reform pledged that, under a Nigel Farage government, every state-funded school in England will have a portrait of the King in “an official communal space”. Another Reform MP, the somewhat blunter Lee Anderson, has previously encouraged republican campaigners to “emigrate”. 

Yet the conservative tradition of reverence for institutions is now in conflict with a new emotional current on the Right. A hybrid of progressivism and liberal proceduralism, many Right-wingers now believe, has taken over public bodies and cornerstones of British culture. The Civil Service, the National Trust, the museum sector: all victims, it would seem, of Lanyard Britain. Charles’s critics on the Right argue that he has taken the Crown further into this “woke” territory.

According to this critique, the Crown’s stated political neutrality is a lie. Since ascending the throne, Charles has pushed for climate ententes with France, lobbied Nvidia’s Jensen Huang about AI regulation, and held meetings with European politicians against the backdrop of his widely reported discomfort with Brexit. The role permits the monarch, as Bagehot wrote, “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. Do the King’s actions fall within these bounds?

Such concerns predate the King’s reign. In the Eighties, the ex-minister Norman Tebbit sarcastically suggested that Charles’s sympathy for Britain’s unemployed might derive from his own job status, also warning the heir to the throne against proposing “socialist” solutions to urban problems. For many years, the late Queen’s eldest son characterized himself as a “dissident” working, by way of those notorious spidery memos, against the cynical machinations of Whitehall. A few months before his mother’s death, while the Tories were still in power, Charles called the mooted Rwanda scheme “appalling”. Farage, the man who may yet become Britain’s prime minister, has called Charles an “eco-loony” and labeled his views on climate change “stupid”.

Nevertheless, in the last decades of Elizabeth II’s reign, Right-wing arguments for British republicanism were rare. Only a few Conservative MPs — such as Ken Clarke, George Walden and Anthony Beaumont-Dark — were willing to criticize the Royal Family. Right-of-center newspapers, for all their lurid coverage of toe-sucking and tampon role-play and “Squidgy”, were not inclined to mount substantive challenges on the institution of monarchy. Even Rupert Murdoch, a lifelong Republican, largely played ball.  

Now, however, there are more overt stirrings of dissent on the British Right. Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain project has a distinctly Cromwellian bent, as evidenced by the name of the party’s exclusive members’ club and the leader’s much-mourned pet dog. Restore generates much of its policy from what has loosely been termed the online Right — by no means a unified bloc, but nonetheless an influence on national Right-wing thought. Mainstream conservative commentary often follows the lead of online-Right trends and coinages: neologisms such as “Yookay” and “Boriswave” have transitioned seamlessly, if at a delay of a few months, from X to the pages of the Telegraph. If we can assume that the bugbears of this subculture tend to make it eventually into the briefing notes of Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, we should take heed of what the cohort is saying about the future of the monarchy. 

In March, a pseudonymous contributor to an influential Substack, Pimlico Journal, made a case for Right-wing republicanism, accusing the King of “multicultural paternalism” and the explicit promotion of “diversity” in his speeches. Elizabeth II, meanwhile, “never saw it fit to comment on the systemic sexual abuse of white British girls by Pakistani rape gangs”. The piece stated that the monarchy was “not just indifferent to, but actively complicit in the obfuscation of crimes against our country and its people of the most serious nature”. Even if one overlooks the ideological biases of individual rulers, the author suggested, “to conflate dynastic patriotism with British nationhood is a grievous political mistake”. 

For J’Accuse, another popular Substack on the Right, the Crown “has been explicitly part of the center-left establishment in Britain for decades”. This has become entrenched under “Woke King Chuck”, whose coronation was “an orgy of diversity and other woke crap”. Where Left-wing Republic campaigners consider the King an avatar of imperial plunder and oppression, the anti-monarchists of the online Right see him as a hapless facilitator of postcolonial surrender. A 2023 J’Accuse article posited that if he were to repatriate colonial-era objects from British collections, it would be an “egregious offense against the British people”. According to this line of thought, “the jewels of Empire are not Chuck’s to apologize for or give away”, as “they belong to the nation”. 

Could a referendum on the monarchy take place during a future Reform or Conservative government? As we walked towards Admiralty Arch, a few steps ahead of a 15-foot papier-mâché dinosaur (Republic’s mascot, Chuck the Rex) and a few behind a man shouting into a megaphone that the Metropolitan Police is full of paedophiles, I put this to Graham Smith. “If the public feeling is there,” he answered, pointing to the 1999 Australian referendum on becoming a republic, which was introduced by John Howard’s Right-wing government. British republicanism doesn’t have to be a unified movement to succeed. For Smith, and for the other protesters on the march, the process towards abolition seemed inevitable. 

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Since the King is 77 years old and has been treated for cancer, focus has turned, unsurprisingly, to the line of succession. Prince William consistently ranks among the most popular members of the Royal Family, and is held up by his defenders as a modernizing influence on the dusty Windsor set-up. Yet when Republic’s activists held up banners reading “What did you know?”, the implication was that the current Prince of Wales has also been guilty through his silence. William is far more political than criticisms of his lack of intellectual curiosity might indicate. In 2021, his allies briefed the press that he felt uncomfortable about the late Queen’s acquiescence to Boris Johnson’s 2019 request to prorogue Parliament. William, they insisted, would “robustly challenge” his prime ministers once he reached the throne. If so, trouble may loom.

But time is not on William’s side. According to polling from earlier this year, only 23% of Britons aged 18-24 support the monarchy. There is little sign that this cohort will become more reverent with age, as support for the Crown only rises to 28% for the 25-34 age group. If Charles’s liberal platitudes are off-putting for Right-wing voters, they equally count for nothing with young progressives who see only hypocrisy in his calls for a fairer world. Immigration-induced demographic changes are also creating a population with less keenly felt ties to the Royal Family. When pride in, or even knowledge of, a shared past is evaporating, what hope does the man on the postage stamps have?

Anti-Windsor feeling can build gradually, and then gradually some more, until, finally and almost noiselessly, the Royal Family ceases to serve as a national ossature. In 2021, Barbados cut ties with the British Crown. The then-Prince Charles, speaking at the ceremony as guest of honor, decried the “appalling atrocity of slavery” and told attendees: “I have heard your voice in the world grow louder.” Other voices will accumulate. Jamaica, independent since 1962, has taken steps since Charles’s accession to become a republic. The Prime Minister of the Bahamas has proposed a referendum on the monarchy. Belize has removed Elizabeth II’s face from its banknotes.

After the Caribbean nations, Australia may decide to hold another vote on its ties to the royals. In an age of Quebec nationalism and resistance to foreign powers, Canada could follow. The Windsors’ kingdom will shrink, leaving Britain as the last major redoubt.

When the real world threatens to close in, the royals retreat into ceremony. On Wednesday morning, as the royal carriage trundled down the Mall, through the hail, a crowd of tourists looked on. They didn’t cheer the monarch, only exchanging murmurs of curiosity. Which one of the figures through the rain-flecked window was Charles? Did he wave? But, before they could answer, the procession had moved on. All that remained was what the royal horses had left behind. The show over, the visitors walked away from Buckingham Palace and towards the next museum on their list.

One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt.” The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”

The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticize quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain.” And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.” 

In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. For Powell, Britain’s willingness to take in tens of thousands of immigrants rendered it “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. And compare Lowe’s talk of necessary pain to that 1968 call for an “extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take”. For better or worse, Powell presaged contemporary debates over migration and nationhood. The challenge, as Keir Starmer found out with his more milquetoast “island of strangers” line, is to acknowledge voters’ frustrations without sounding like him. 

Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. The Reform leader recalled being “dazzled”, as a schoolboy in the Eighties, listening to the former Tory MP speak. Last year, he insisted that Powell was fundamentally right about the scale of “community change” in the country. 

Yet, in his beliefs as well as his rhetoric, Lowe is a more obviously Powellite figure than Farage. He’s more interested in reducing the size of the state, is resistant to Reform’s nationalizing impulses, and is less vulnerable than his rival to charges of “socialism”. In many ways, Restore is the more conservative project, given that its central mission is to return Britain — in more explicit terms than Farage has dared — to a glorious past from its Blairite present. When it comes to presentation, Farage and Lowe — tweed-clad former public schoolboys with past lives in the City — are far closer to one another than they are to the intense, prodigiously academic Powell. Former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan found him unsettlingly zealous, complaining: “Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes.”

Where Lowe differs from Farage, though, is that he has done less to distance himself from figures and ideas which might be classed as far-Right. While the Reform leader has condemned Tommy Robinson for “stir[ring] up hatred” and stated that the activist has no place in his party, Lowe has praised Robinson’s campaigning against grooming gangs cover-ups. In 1974, Powell rejected the chance to stand as a candidate for the far-Right National Front, having left the Tories because of their stance on the European Economic Community. 

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Lowe would be wise to take such an approach with some of the groups and activists now attempting to tie themselves to Restore. Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right Britain First, has said he won’t stand candidates against Lowe’s party at local or national elections. Steve Laws, a prominent ethnonationalist who advocates for the expulsion of everyone who is not ethnically British, has committed his vote to Restore Britain and called Farage a “traitor”. On Monday, he posted to his 140,000 X followers: “I fully endorse Rupert Lowe to be PM. He will implement the majority of what I want to achieve in terms of remigration over the next 6-7 years.” 

These activists are unlikely to appeal to swing voters. Lowe, if he follows conventional electoral logic, is therefore presented with a dilemma: how to attract smart collaborators committed to immigration restrictionism, without also drawing in the cranks? The problem is that a cruder vision of nationalism pervades even the upper echelons of his party. Harrison Pitt, a writer who has been a key figure in devising policy for Restore Britain, has previously referred to mass immigration as the “ethnic cleansing” of white Britons, as well as highlighting the “erasure of [Britain’s] host population”. Additionally, he has appeared to suggest that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose parents were born in Pakistan, should return to her “homeland”, and vowed in December to make 2026 “the year of mass denaturalizations” for those who presently hold British citizenship. 

In an interview in December 2024, Lowe said that “I don’t care about people’s religion or their color,” but Restore has taken a far more robust approach to Islam than Reform has. Lowe is set on “resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam”, and his new party’s platform includes policies on outlawing the burqa, sharia courts and halal slaughter. Some of its senior figures also champion a notably muscular Christianity. For instance, Lowe’s campaigns director Charlie Downes, a Catholic convert, declared this week: “Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.”

Both Downes and Pitt are still in their twenties, and Lowe has a notable following among a particular group of politically engaged, digitally-savvy young men. There’s even a collective term which can be used either pejoratively or affectionately: Lowemosexuals. The online sphere has become a battlefield between the Restore leader and Farage, who boasts more TikTok followers than the other 649 UK MPs combined. Lowe last year labeled the Reform boss’s leadership style “messianic”, yet his own role in Restore follows similar contours, the party’s profile relying largely on his social media reach.

Capturing wider support, of course, is a different proposition. According to polling from this week, 92% of Britons are unable to name Lowe when shown a picture of him. He is popular among his constituents, viewed as a committed and unpretentious champion for Great Yarmouth, but he has a majority of less than 1,500. He is expected to stand at the next election under the banner of Great Yarmouth First, which he established as a political party in December, yet his personal appeal may count for less when divorced from a Reform UK platform. 

So the question remains: is Restore a credible Right-wing movement — able to distinguish itself both from Reform and from the crowded field of nationalist groups on the more radical fringes — or just Lowe’s revenge project? County councillors are already moving over from Reform, providing some local infrastructure. Even if Restore doesn’t win seats at the next election, it will surely still prove a spoiler for further Farage gains. 

Here, Lowe could receive extra ammunition from an alliance with another of Farage’s jilted exes: Ben Habib. Having served as co-deputy leader for Reform, Habib was demoted in favor of Richard Tice, and quit the party in November 2024. The following spring he referred to Lowe’s treatment by Farage as an “injustice”, subsequently setting up a new party of his own, Advance UK, in June. 

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On Saturday, Habib extended an open offer to Lowe to merge their two parties. Lowe politely demurred by suggesting that Habib join Restore, which “would be stronger with you in it”. But Habib, who was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK as a teenager, is not widely popular among the hardcore Lowemosexuals. David Kurten — who leads the Heritage Party, another bit-part player in Britain’s hard-Right scene — summarized the dynamic thus: “Ben loves Rupert. Rupert’s fans would deport Ben.” Richard Inman, a prominent Advance UK member and organizer for Tommy Robinson, has accused Lowe of being “driven not by love of country, but by a massive ego”, adding that many of Restore’s supporters are “ethno-nats”. 

Advance has built up a respectable profile: it now has more than 40,000 members, nine councilors through defections from Reform, and outsized publicity thanks to endorsements from Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. But the Tesla mogul, as well as boosting Habib’s party, has in recent days cheered on the progress of Restore Britain. On Wednesday afternoon, he went so far as to accuse Reform of being “Nazis” because “THEY are the ones who want race extinction.” As the world’s richest man, armed with 234 million pliant X followers, Musk’s overseas influence is considerable; his amplification of posts about the grooming gangs helped push the Government into ordering a national inquiry. 

Musk is widely reviled among British voters, but his support — both X-based and financial — could boost Restore’s international profile and increase the chance of collaboration with like-minded parties such as Alternative for Germany and Spain’s Vox. Farage endorsed the AfD in 2017 but has, in recent years, kept a deliberate distance. There is a gap here for Lowe to exploit as anti-immigration groups build ties around Europe: these are parties which are gaining influence but which are still considered too dangerous by Reform and the Tories. 

While Farage might think he flies in the face of such squeamishness, and that he is dismantling the “uniparty” consensus, Restore supporters believe he instead represents little more than a continuation of the New Labour-inflected order which has governed Britain for the past three decades. According to Downes, Reform’s senior figures “basically agree that the vision Blair had for Britain was admirable and desirable”. In his view, “it will come to pass that Farage is the Regime’s lifeline, not its nemesis.”

Lowe’s calculation may well be that he doesn’t need to expunge the less savory elements from his party’s message, and that the electorate will instead move closer to him. The UK’s Overton window has undeniably shifted on immigration; Labour’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is taking a harder line than her Tory predecessors, even as the polls are led by a party with a plan for mass deportations. Almost half of Britons say they would support an agenda in which no new immigrants are admitted to the country and large numbers of recent arrivals are required to leave. British voters’ conception of national belonging remains chiefly civic, but some of Lowe’s most influential cheerleaders believe there is further room for that ideological window to move. 

Either way, the Restore leader is not one for apologies. On Wednesday, he wrote that he is “entirely uninterested” in “being called unpleasant names”. He has repeatedly made clear that being labeled racist is no deterrent for him. Pushed to recant a suggestion that illegal immigrants should be sent to remote Scottish islands for the “midges to do their work”, he doubled down. Lowe, evidently, has a thick skin. In his previous life as chairman of Southampton Football Club, disgruntled fans used to sing about hanging him from the Itchen Bridge. 

It’s easy to forget that, even after “Rivers of Blood”, Powell was immensely popular. Polls carried out shortly after the speech demonstrated that a majority of the British public agreed with his assessment of race relations. In 2002 he was voted one of the 100 greatest Britons ever. On his death, the Telegraph wrote that he “would survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill”. Just as Powell’s fears around integration proved prophetic, Lowe may now find himself a 21st-century equivalent — an emissary from a future Britain whose decline has been contingent on its tolerance.

Ferdinand Mount, who headed the No. 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, wrote of Powell that “always, he is restlessly pursuing the ultimate safe haven: the nation.” Nationalism’s great strength, for Mount, is its “iron framework” — the “insistence that the nation is the supreme political fact”. The very act of restoration inherent to Lowe’s project is its own safe haven, as inarguable in its logic as “Make America Great Again”. He, like Powell before him, has recognized the British state as the sclerotic, rulebound husk it is. And now, as Powell was, he is filled with foreboding.

You see, Mahmood isn’t just Home Secretary: as she was so keen to remind conference-goers, she’s a Labour home secretary. Twice during her speech she put special emphasis on her party’s name, lest anyone close their eyes and think they were listening to Theresa May or Suella Braverman. And, by the standards of a senior Labour politician, this was a surprising speech. 

The main focus was the Government’s changes to “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) rules for migrants, the qualifying period for which will now be increased from five years to 10. Earlier this month, Reform UK pledged, if elected, to scrap ILR entirely, forcing migrants to re-apply for visas every five years. The radicalism of this proposal allowed Keir Starmer — himself compared to Enoch Powell by portions of the British Left — to cast Farage as “racist” and “immoral”. During a separate fringe event last night, Mahmood referred to the policy as “much worse than racism”. Indeed, Reform’s announcement was in some ways a gift to the Home Secretary, who could outline a Labour policy which is certainly robust, but which nonetheless takes a more humane approach to questions of migration.

“Open, tolerant, generous”: that was the Home Secretary’s pitch for what the UK has to offer newcomers, and that is only possible if stronger policies are introduced for protecting the country’s borders. Thanks to Conservative policies, she said, “the scale and the speed of change as well as the nature of [immigration] has frayed trust and eroded public confidence”. She added: “We need a system that is fair to people who are already here. That means cracking down on illegal working that undercuts British workers.”

But this outwardly nationalist rhetoric had its limits. If she fails in her task to stop the boats and bring down net migration, Mahmood’s Liverpool address may come to be remembered as the “Little England” speech. Surveying the crowd, she expressed her “belief in a greater Britain, not a littler England”, a line which received the heartiest round of applause of the whole speech. That response from the audience — which also cheered Mahmood’s references to her second-generation immigrant background, as well her drive-by attacks on the open-borders maniacs of the last Tory ministry — showed an enthusiasm for immigration hawkishness only if it was tempered by liberal caveats. The crowd held its collective breath when she began to criticize migrant hotels, then exhaled when she described them as “that totem of the Tory legacy”. Clearly, Labour’s conference-goers may not be ready for full-fat Mahmood. 

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Labour insiders had tipped Mahmood for the Home Office for several months before her elevation was hastened by Angela Rayner’s resignation from the Deputy Leadership. That reshuffle, early in September, gave Starmer an opportunity to bring in a tough minister to bring down both legal and illegal immigration — a task which successive governments have made seem impossible. Mahmood doesn’t deal in half measures. Last summer, in the wake of rioting across Britain, the then-Justice Secretary warned that “thugs and hooligans” would “feel the full force of the law”. A fortnight ago, she made the very same threat to Unite the Kingdom protestors who used violence against police officers. Speaking yesterday, she vowed to go after shoplifters in a vaguely Bolshevik-sounding “winter of action”.  And after she oversaw, as justice secretary, the early release of thousands of prisoners, which might have led to the resignation of a less capable minister, she turned it into an opportunity to abolish shorter sentences.

In doing so, she aimed to strengthen Labour’s appeal to the voters who are deserting the party. British electoral politics, across the spectrum, typically functions as a quest to win over swing voters who are in parts economically Left-wing, socially conservative, patriotic, and tough on crime. In its pithiest form, this worldview is summarized as: “Hang the paedos, fund the NHS.” Many of the Britons occupying this sweet spot would once have voted for Labour, but are now drawn to a Reform UK message which is tailored towards the disaffected working class. Mahmood, who settled for merely chemically castrating sex offenders during her time in the Justice Department, is viewed by prominent figures within Labour as the party’s best answer to this conundrum. Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour and an influence on Government strategists including Morgan McSweeney, has labeled Mahmood as “clearly the leader of our part of the party”.

Conscious of her role in the fight against Reform, Mahmood argued in her Liverpool speech that “working people will turn away from us — the party that for over a hundred years has been their party — and seek solace in the false promises of Farage”. The Right-wingers in teal aren’t even the most serious threat to national stability, in her eyes: at the beginning of her address she highlighted that when 150,000 people marched through London earlier this month, “they did so under the banner of a convicted criminal and a former BNP member”. In other words, this wasn’t an attempt to “unite the Kingdom” but the desperate howl of the Little Englander. 

There was once a time, as recently as the mid-20th century, when to be a “Little Englander” was not a sign of xenophobic small-mindedness but instead of progressive opposition to the British Empire. That it is now a universal term of derision is reflective of how thoroughly more middle-class, metropolitan sections of the center-left have come to dominate the Labour Party. In her speech, Mahmood stated that hers is “a patriotism that speaks but does not feel the need to shout”. That may well be true of many Britons of all political stripes, but the fact remains that Labour is now well behind in the polls to an insurgent movement which is only too happy to shout its patriotism from the rafters. 

Rather than drawing distinctions between its national plan and the pitfalls of being a Little Englander, Starmer’s party should do more to appeal to this group, which is still resolutely insular. Mahmood said in Liverpool that “where a nation is fearful, it turns inwards. When we feel safe, we can look outwards” — yet her speech was still given with one eye firmly on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), whose range of views on immigration tends to be narrower than that of voters. In response, a Reform press release stated that “her speechwriters may have toughened her rhetoric, but the Home Secretary’s speech won’t wash with the public”.

There are other issues where the position of Labour MPs and members is out of kilter with the public as a whole. Though a small majority of Britons support remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), there are more who think that the treaty should be reformed (35%) than left as it is (28%). Yet while the Home Secretary has made positive noises about reforming the ECHR, Attorney General Richard Hermer has suggested that any such move would amount to a “political trick”. Wanting to leave it altogether is a positively fringe position among MPs, and this summer’s welfare bill debacle demonstrates how hard it can be to get legislation past intransigent members of the PLP. Be that as it may, drastic legal changes may be the only way to actually remove failed asylum seekers in considerable numbers, as the steady stream of disrupted deportations implies. 

For all her strong rhetoric, then, Mahmood still needs to convince a party which, since the time of Tony Blair, has wedded itself to the cult of human rights, not to mention a Prime Minister who has become an emblem of this legalistic mindset. And the Prime Minister is likely to remain in situ. Andy Burnham Autumn has now run its course after barely a week, with the Greater Manchester Mayor telling a fringe event in Liverpool on Monday that he would not be challenging Starmer for the leadership. With the internal threat defused, the Prime Minister can focus his efforts on the Faragist menace, while Mahmood can worry less about trying to win over the Left of the party.

Despite the best efforts of Rachel Reeves, Labour is still trusted more than Reform when it comes to managing the economy. Its immigration policy, however, is a tougher sell, not least if the Chancellor pushes through a migration deal for young EU workers to boost public finances. And though Mahmood used her speech to praise the “one in, one out” deal negotiated with France by her predecessor Yvette Cooper, doubts remain about whether this ratio will hold firm in practice — and whether, more fundamentally, Starmer and his parliamentary colleagues have any desire to undertake the legal reforms that would enable Mahmood to do her job effectively. 

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“The story of who we are is contested,” Mahmood claimed in Liverpool yesterday. She was talking about Britain, and about the new class of ethnonationalists who have seized the previously unifying language of patriotism and twisted it into something darker. Yet she could just as easily have been describing her own party. As Labour’s conference moves towards its conclusion, Starmer’s assertions that he has planted his flag and made clear what he stands for are hardly convincing. Mahmood has put forward a more persuasive assertion of her personal beliefs. But she won’t win over any Reform voters by accusing their leader of racism, while Left-wingers, many of whom are presently beguiled by Jeremy Corbyn or the Greens, may be put off by her self-presentation as “a patriot, proudly so”. This Gordian Knot applies to pretty much everything Starmer does on domestic policy, and his home secretary should prepare to have her hands tied just as often. 

This hints at an even broader problem for Labour. Whatever the glamour of the conference, the fact remains that neither Starmer nor his Cabinet is currently guiding British public opinion. The Overton window is moving markedly to the Right, evidenced by the very real prospect of a governing party at the end of this decade with a plan for mass deportations. Given all this, even relative radicals like Mahmood risk being stranded as the liberal consensus folds and a political revolution rages around them. But at least she’s trying. Jonathan Rutherford, a political adviser who is another influential Blue Labour figure, has — somewhat grandiosely — hailed Mahmood as “perhaps the most astute and able politician of her generation”. She isn’t, but she may still be Labour’s best hope of stopping the more likely holder of that title from capturing Number 10 in 2029. If, that is, her party can hold its nose.

A year into Keir Starmer’s government, however, and Corbynism’s corpse is rising. On Thursday evening, Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced that she was resigning from Labour in order to set up a new party with the old leader, alongside various other independent MPs, campaigners and activists. Citing the welfare reforms, which were torturously voted through last week following an internal rebellion, she wrote that “the Government wants to make disabled people suffer; they just can’t decide how much”. She also accused Starmer’s ministry of being “an active participant in genocide” in Gaza.

Whether this new force on the Left will hold together is another matter. Corbyn was reportedly “furious and bewildered” that the fledgling party was launched before he agreed to join. “Zarah jumped the gun a bit with that,” a source close to the project admits. Corbyn has since declared that “discussions are ongoing” and “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape” — hardly as emphatic a launch as Sultana’s the previous night.

Still, the conditions are ripe for a Left-wing insurgency. The Prime Minister may have passed his welfare bill, but even the staunchest Starmerite would be hard-pressed to claim this as a success. Reforms which were set to save £5 billion will now cost the Treasury up to £6 billion, and No. 10’s authority is in tatters.

While the 49 MPs who rebelled against the welfare bill — not to mention the 126 who backed an amendment several days earlier — reach across the Labour spectrum, the group set to gain most from these humiliating concessions is the much-maligned Left of the party. Shortly after the vote, Labour MP Richard Burgon accused the Government of trying “to balance the books on the backs of disabled people”; his colleague Diane Abbott, meanwhile, said she opposed the bill “on moral, legal and political grounds”.

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This perceived shift to the Right, not just on welfare cuts but also on issues such as winter fuel payments and war in the Middle East, has fuelled a jumbled but nonetheless potent coalition of old-school socialists, environmentalists, and Palestine advocates. For all Starmer’s fears of a Faragist insurgency, the threat from his Left could be just as damaging.

Corbyn first signalled that there might be life left in his old dog last September, when he established a parliamentary alliance — alongside four other independent, pro-Gaza MPs — to challenge Labour, mirroring the politics of disaffection so cannily grasped by Farage. Where Reform has targeted Labour over “two-tier” justice proposals and Net Zero policy, the Gaza independents latched onto other issues that have public cut-through, such as welfare reform and alleviating the cost-of-living crisis. A prospective Left-wing party could harness these Labour weaknesses to great effect. Particularly if it yokes in other members of the difficult crew, including the Socialist Campaign Group which counts 26 members including Sultana and fellow suspended MPs John McDonnell and Apsana Begum. McDonnell, in particular, has proved a particular irritant for Labour, this week claiming that Starmer has “a sheer lack of understanding of what the Labour party exists for”, and suggesting that MPs are already competing to succeed the Prime Minister. Back in May, he was urging fellow radicals to “take back control of our party — before it’s too late”.

Meanwhile, the Corbyn coalition spies weakness and knows their strength. Starmer was, after all, elected Labour leader in 2020 on an essentially Corbynite platform. Starmer himself cited the party’s 2017 manifesto as the “foundational document” for his campaign, pledging to abolish tuition fees and increase income tax for the top 5% of earners — both of which have since been left by the wayside.

By running as Continuity Corbyn, minus the antisemitism scandals and Punch-and-Judy factionalism, Starmer recognised that the 2019 election was a defeat not of socialism, but instead of a particular leader’s political intransigence. Corbyn’s policies on tax, public ownership and public services were popular back then, and are even more so today. So as Starmer rows back on everything he said he stood for, could this new Corbynite coalition capitalise on the continued popularity of its key ideas? Certainly, some of the Labour rebels were reflecting wider views: after all, a plurality of British voters disagreed with the proposed cuts before Starmer’s U-turn.

But as Starmer falters, there’s another awkward squad on the move. The Greens’ deputy leader, Zack Polanski, has launched a bid for the top job, defining his platform as one of “eco-populism”, challenging Labour on Net Zero and what he sees as Starmer’s surrender to big business. He is out to prove that the Green message isn’t monoglot, and reckons his party can win over Reform voters. “We need to grow faster,” Polanski says of this nascent Left-populist movement. “The Right didn’t mess around with creating little different parties or independent groups; the Right just got on with it.”

While much of Polanski’s language mimics the cadences of Corbynism, he is not a straightforward disciple. In 2018, he suggested that his own Jewish faith was a reason why he couldn’t vote for Labour, and that Corbyn’s “complicity” in antisemitism within the party was an “existential threat” to British Jews. Two years earlier, he heckled Corbyn over Labour’s muddled position on European Union membership.

Polanski has since retreated from his stance on Corbyn’s alleged antisemitism. This disavowal may well be genuine, but it’s also true that, with the war in Gaza, the growing anti-Labour Left has found both a unifying cause and an easy stick with which to beat Starmer. In the weeks following Hamas’s attacks on October 7, the then-leader of the opposition pointedly opposed a ceasefire and proceeded to sack several frontbenchers who called for an immediate end to the fighting. Following a series of incremental shifts, he then adopted the same view which got those shadow ministers fired, albeit without acknowledging that they might have been correct after all.

One Labour source told me that the Prime Minister’s “total lack of accountability” for his previous support of Israeli military action was “shameless”. Yet that the party has now moved closer to the core plank of Corbyn’s planned party is, if not a vindication of Sultana and the Gaza independents, at least a signal that their politics should not be dismissed. Problematically, though, some of Corbyn’s fellow independents campaigned on platforms which weren’t just pro-Gaza but explicitly catered towards the significant British Muslim populations in their constituencies. Their politics are sectarian, not socialist, and might therefore be unpalatable to a wider audience.

So can any of the dissidents form a cohesive platform? The economist James Meadway has called for a “Red-Green alliance, modeled on France’s New Popular Front”. That’s the Polanski model: a Left-wing message couched in Right-populist methods. And one that he would use, should he become leader, to target between 30 and 50 seats at the next election. This would factor in defections from other parties, including, ambitiously, an attempt to entice Corbyn to go Green. I’m told, too, that Sultana was involved in discussions to join, before deciding to press ahead with the prospective Corbyn-led party.

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Yet Corbyn was always unlikely to join a Polanski-led Green Party. He thrives on protest and grassroots energy, not the everyday jostling that comes with being a member of a parliamentary party. Even after surviving the Owen Smith putsch of 2016, his greatest threat as Labour leader always came from his own MPs, among whom he never commanded broad support. As Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s former director of policy, wrote several months after Starmer ascended to the leadership, “the Corbyn project was an attempt to build the car while driving it and learning to drive at the same time, while fighting over the steering wheel.”

Perhaps this irony pertains to the radical Left as a whole. Labour’s Pasokification may have enabled the rise of the Corbynites, but Starmer’s triumph last year killed the idea that they were the Left’s best shot at winning power post-Blairism. This new movement is at once profoundly different from the giddy optimism which defined the early days of the Corbyn project, and a fruitless effort to recapture the magic of 2017.

For while sectarians, socialists and environmentalists share some goals which are born from political convenience, their aims are ultimately distinct; even the Socialist Campaign Group is too divided to make the most of its enduring influence. Yet these factions will damage Starmer by splitting the Left-wing vote. More in Common polling last month showed that a Corbyn-led party would capture 10% of the vote, trimming Labour’s total by three points — and the Greens’ by four. Starmer would be left thrashing in Farage’s slipstream, level with the Tories.

For Corbyn, though, that could be enough: to play spoiler, rather than claim the spoils. Even his supporters acknowledge that, initially at least, he had no intention of winning the 2015 Labour leadership contest. His goal, then and now, was to change the parameters of mainstream Leftist debate, to end the party’s subjugation to New Labour, and take it back towards its socialist roots. His statement on Friday pledged to “create something that is desperately missing from our political system: hope”. And that may well be his best weapon against a Labour Party which increasingly appears directionless, thoughtless and, indeed, hopeless.

Revolutionaries were never meant to master the Rube Goldberg machine of Britain’s governing apparatus. But with the British Left having dealt another blow to Starmer’s authority, they could still be the force that finishes off this government. Corbyn, belatedly, may have his revenge.

Between the riots of last summer and record migration rates of 900,000 in 2023, a broader feeling of discontent has been supercharged by the return to the headlines of Asian rape gangs — in particular, the apparent failures and cover-ups by establishment politicians. Farage’s softer nationalism, as well as his online spat with Elon Musk over support for the activist Tommy Robinson, has presented parties to the Right of Reform UK with an opportunity. Reflecting a resurgent brand of impassioned ethnonationalism, they feel like their moment has come.

At heart, the ethnonationalist believes that nationhood — and the resultant social and political benefits — can only truly be shared by those with a common race. Their movement is fueled by the sense of a coming threat, the idea that a racial identity dating back over a thousand years could be wiped out. The flood of immigration in recent years and the ensuing change to Britain’s ethnic make-up has given succor to ethnonationalist arguments, and these are growing louder on the political fringes.

The far-Right in the UK was once dominated by the British National Party, led in its heyday by Nick Griffin. The BNP reached its peak in 2009 when it secured two MEPs and a little under a million votes in European Parliament elections — spurred on by migration figures that had reached around 200,000. Later that year, the party received further notoriety when Griffin appeared on the BBC’s Question Time, during which he managed to refer to the Ku Klux Klan as “almost totally non-violent” and claimed that “a lot of people find the sight of two grown men kissing in public really creepy”.

But the 2010 general election, in which the BNP failed to win any seats, marked the beginning of the end for Griffin. He stood down as leader in July 2014, before being expelled later that year for allegedly harassing BNP staff. The party has now been essentially inactive for the past half-decade. Tommy Robinson may be the poster boy of the English far-Right, yet the English Defence League he co-founded has effectively been defunct for years too. Just as many on the ethnonationalist Right judge Farage to be a liberal in populist clothing, Robinson is also widely dismissed in those circles as a self-promoter who isn’t serious about building a coherent and lasting movement. That work is being done further below the surface.

For it is the personalities involved in Griffin’s fall a decade ago — a chain of events encompassing power struggles, ideological splits and murder threats — who are furthering the cause of Britain’s ethnonationalist Right, threatening to spill its grievances on to the streets.

One key figure is Mark Collett, who leads Britain’s largest and most proactive explicitly white nationalist group. Called Patriotic Alternative (PA), by its own count the organization has over 16,000 supporters. Collett starred in the 2002 Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi and Proud, produced when he was leader of the BNP’s youth wing. The film describes him as one of the party’s “best and brightest”, while a proud Griffin refers to him as a potential successor as leader.

But after admiringly claiming in the documentary that “Hitler will live on forever” and admitting that he was a “Nazi sympathizer”, at a time when Griffin was attempting to detoxify the BNP brand, Collett was temporarily expelled from the party. He returned, rose to become publicity director, and again positioned himself as an heir to Griffin. This progress was undone in 2010, a matter of weeks before the general election, when Collett was accused of plotting a BNP palace coup before being arrested for allegedly threatening to kill his leader.

His new organization is similarly controversial. PA has been linked to National Action, a proscribed terrorist organization, and it was namechecked last year in Parliament in relation to the new Government definition of extremism, accused of promoting neo-Nazi ideology. Unsurprisingly, Collett’s hard-Right group has thus far been unsuccessful in registering as a political party, its applications rejected at least four times by the Electoral Commission. With both the group and Collett himself banned from Twitter for, among other things, celebrating a 2023 riot outside a Merseyside hotel housing refugees, online operations have largely moved to the messaging app Telegram, where the PA leader has over 20,000 followers.

There, he argues that immigration initiatives are “all part of a concerted effort to destroy the country”, and following the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen he posted a tribute praising the National Front founder’s “pro-White ideas”. The obituary concludes: “Le Pen’s memory today urges us to continue struggling unapologetically for our worldview, which is neither right nor left, but White.”

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Central to Collett’s belief system is the idea of “remigration”. The euphemistic term for forced mass repatriation of immigrants is one well-used on the Right, and increasingly heard in the mainstream. The view was adopted by the far-Right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) which came first in last year’s national election, and invoked again at the weekend by Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), who called for “repatriations on a large scale”. When US President-elect Donald Trump proposed remigration in America, the policy was compared in the press to ethnic cleansing. The term disgusts even Marine Le Pen, who split with the AfD over proposals to “remigrate” Germany’s foreign population.

Remigration is also vital to the platform of another burgeoning force on Britain’s nationalist Right: the Homeland Party, which was established in 2023 by former PA officials who had lost patience with Collett’s messianic brand of leadership. Unlike PA, Homeland managed to register as a political party at the start of 2024, though a Home Office official had previously expressed concern that the group would try to force a successful application “by stealth”, using different names or applicants with no far-Right background. Several of Homeland’s activists have been revealed as former members of neo-Nazi groups, and have engaged in Holocaust denial. Party chairman Kenny Smith, who led the breakaway, is alleged to have recruited armed members and in 2022 pled guilty to firearms offenses.

Perhaps in an attempt to counter these optics, Homeland’s website has endeavored to convey a political platform that reaches beyond immigration concerns, addressing proportional representation, fixing road infrastructure, and preserving the green belt. Homeland will fix your potholes. Indeed, in leaked audio from the group’s first meeting, as reported in The Times, Smith, another BNP alumnus, told activists: “The organization needs a focused approach to winning power, taking control of budgets and policymaking in places. Ultimately we want local authority, and then who knows beyond that.”

But its shiny website can’t conceal the uglier views aired online. Consider its posts on TikTik, including a clip criticizing the England national football team for featuring “Africans” such as Bukayo Saka and complaining that “we have to pretend that David Lammy and Olakemi Olafonteu Adeoke [sic] are both British or English”. The latter is otherwise known as Kemi Badenoch, and Homeland accounts consistently refer to the Tory leader using her full Nigerian birth name. Smith has posted that she “needs to return to Nigeria”.

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This is arguably feeding the rising anti-immigration tendency among the young. As Paul Jackson, an expert on Britain’s far-Right, tells me, “social media has transformed far-Right politics and allows for the easy sharing of quite extremist positions.” He adds: “youthfulness and rebellion are core tropes of the far-Right, and in recent years the online space has become filled with far- and extreme-Right messages designed to appeal to these sentiments.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, around 70% of its 700-odd members are aged under 30.

But if Homeland has attempted to hide its extremist elements beneath a reasonable-sounding policy platform, other groups aren’t so cautious. Collett argues that electoral politics is “a waste of time, money and resources”, with PA instead turning to initiatives such as raising money to support the families of convicted rioters.

If anything, these hard-Right groups seem to thrive on national chaos. Another of the groups which emerged from the ashes of the BNP, Britain First, is similarly described by its leader Paul Golding as a “street defense organization”. Golding himself has multiple convictions for offenses, including acts of terrorism and religiously aggravated harassment, while former members have claimed that the organization routinely plotted violent attacks on British Muslims and harassed asylum seekers. “I want this country to become a shithole,” Golding told an undercover reporter for a Channel 4 documentary last year. “I want this country to descend into a fucking nightmare, because that’s the only thing that’s going to get people off their backsides.”

The danger here is that as Farage softens his offer, he pushes his more radical supporters towards more extreme organizations. Homeland knows this. As one of its more presentable activists, Pete North, formerly of Ukip, wrote last month, “Farage should note that while he takes the credit for killing off the BNP, he could just as easily revive it” by disavowing Robinson’s supporters and “softening his line on immigration”. North claimed that “for every new voter [Farage] attracts as he moves his party to the center, the more the grassroots right may conclude that another party better represents their interests.” Meanwhile, Patriotic Alternative has claimed Starmer’s comments about the Tories’ “open-border experiment” as a victory for the “great replacement” theory.

How, then, does mainstream politics respond to this threat? Labour cannot assume that popular anger over immigration will be confined to the comparatively benign Reform UK. Indeed, Jackson predicts that, in the next couple of decades, an openly ethnonationalist party could exceed the level of support the “amateurish” BNP commanded at its height.

As the resurfacing of the grooming gangs scandal and last summer’s riots have proved, the main parties are ill-equipped to deal with such growing resentment. And with powerful figures such as Elon Musk fanning the flames, Nick Griffin’s protégés are poised to capitalize. The sense of febrility and fury is growing; the violent unrest which tore through England’s capillary towns and cities last summer was just a taste. As Starmer’s tenure is increasingly undermined, ravaged by social unrest and economic sclerosis, the nightmare of which Golding speaks may yet lie on the horizon.

The festival, founded in 2013, will also be showcasing Mohammad Sabaaneh, whose work is alleged to contain antisemitic tropes. UnHerd has learned that one former LICAF board member, Peter Kessler, resigned from his position in July over Sabaaneh’s involvement, as well as over what he considered to be the board’s decision not to challenge the artist’s previous work.

Earlier this year, LICAF invited Sabaaneh to co-curate an exhibition on Palestinian comic-book art, alongside the writer and comic book expert George Khoury. But during online discussions with festival director Julie Tait in June, Kessler expressed concern about Sabaaneh. Citing images in which the Palestinian artist depicted Israel as an octopus in control of the global financial system, and as a locust with an oversized nose, as well as one showing a Jewish concentration camp internee in 1945 transforming into an Israeli settler, he claimed that “in putting [Sabaaneh’s] work on display, and in allowing him to speak, I’m concerned that we are giving a platform for a racist”.

Kessler added that the images in question were designed “to stir up racial hatred in the viewers” and recommended seeking advice from the British Council, which is both co-organising and contributing £15,000 towards the event. In an email response at the start of July, Tait denied that Sabaaneh was a racist and argued that “his ‘job’ is to question, to challenge […] a wide range of ‘targets’ to convey a message”. Tait added that the Palestinian artist is “a brave man, a humane man and his only ‘crime’ is his relentless pursuit of what he sees as justice for Palestinian people”. In the same message, she stressed LICAF’s “duty to uphold freedom of speech”.

Later that month, on 11 July, six members of the LICAF board, including Tait and Kessler, convened to discuss the festival’s response to Sabaaneh’s appearance. In a presentation delivered during the meeting, Kessler argued that “Sabaaneh should attend LICAF and speak at his session, but with the conditions that he is questioned about his antisemitic material and that he doesn’t use the festival as an opportunity to attack what he sees as Israeli propaganda”. Kessler added that “there is severe danger to LICAF’s reputation both in cancelling [Sabaaneh] and in allowing him to continue as planned”.

After this proposal was rejected, Kessler resigned from the LICAF board and wrote to the British Council explaining what had happened, attaching some of Sabaaneh’s more contentious cartoons. He stated that he felt inviting the artist “without addressing this more controversial aspect of his work would be tantamount to ignoring hate speech”. The next day, Paul Thompson, chair of the British Council, replied, agreeing that the images — which do not feature in the LICAF exhibition — contain “some extremely distasteful tropes”.

Scott McDonald, the Council’s chief executive, then informed Kessler that senior staff were now investigating the dispute. Kessler claims that during a later phone call, McDonald revealed how Council members had undergone trial antisemitism training sessions — but that he was unsure how successful those sessions had been. McDonald also reportedly said that the cartoons shared were antisemitic.

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In his last communication with Kessler on 19 August, seen by UnHerd, McDonald concluded that the Council “will continue to provide input to the LICAF team to support them in ensuring the safeguarding of all speakers and audience members, and providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”. In a statement, the British Council told UnHerd that “we have supported this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) by helping to fund an exhibition of work by twelve Palestinian comic artists. We are aware of concerns that have been raised regarding a selection of political cartoons previously produced by one of the curators. These cartoons do not form part of the exhibition at LICAF, which aims to highlight the unique creativity of Palestinian comic art.”

For the past decade, LICAF has been funded by Arts Council England (ACE), receiving an annual grant of £240,000. On the same day that Kessler first contacted the British Council, 19 July, he also emailed ACE to draw attention to what he viewed as a “grave failure of governance, breach of policies, and misuse of public funds”. He accused the remaining members of the LICAF board of “breach[ing] basic principles of good governance by preventing full and free discussion of a highly sensitive issue relating to race discrimination”.

ACE chief executive Darren Henley responded by saying that his organisation would investigate the claims. UnHerd was told this week by an ACE spokesperson that “Arts Council England is not a regulator, but we have comprehensive processes in place if concerns are raised with us about an organisation we fund, and we can look into whether they are in breach of their funding agreement with us”. They added: “While we cannot share details of confidential concerns that are flagged to us, we have robust processes in place to make sure organisations address them.”

Then, on 16 September, an ACE official contacted Kessler to say that the investigation was complete and that he had written to LICAF with “conclusions and recommendations”. In an email seen by UnHerd, the representative stated that “we did find minor breaches of the terms and conditions of their current funding agreement with us, relating to the organisation’s policy about handling complaints, and we are now satisfied with the actions proposed by LICAF to address these issues [sic].” The message made no direct mention of Sabaaneh, his work, or racial discrimination more widely. 

Kessler responded that he was “flummoxed”, and that ACE had “investigated something that I hadn’t actually complained about”. In a further email to Henley and the organisation’s chair, Nicholas Serota, he concluded that ACE’s handling of his complaint was “not just woefully insufficient. It borders on complicity.”

Sabaaneh is currently scheduled to appear at two LICAF events, one alongside Khoury and another in which he is set to discuss freedom of speech in comics with Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. During an interview with the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium in May, Sabaaneh said he wanted to use his involvement with LICAF to “dismantle the Israeli propaganda, dismantle Israeli discourse when they describe the Palestinian people as human animals”. Speaking to the Washington Post at the end of last year, he claimed that “my main mission is to rehumanise the Palestinians”; earlier this year, he argued online that “antisemitism has become a tool of anti-free speech and censorship. Israel uses it against anyone who criticizes it.”

The artist — whose work has been exhibited in Britain, America, and across Europe — was previously imprisoned in Israel. Arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in February 2013, Sabaaneh was kept in solitary confinement for two weeks and jailed for a further five months. The reason given for his internment was that his artwork appeared in a book about Palestinian political prisoners written by his brother Thamer, who has been accused by an Israeli military court of being a Hamas member. 

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Sabaaneh was also targeted in 2015 by the Palestinian Authority for allegedly depicting the Prophet Muhammad, a charge he denies. Earlier that year, he had marched in Paris in support of the right of artists to mock and criticise Islam, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in the city. He has previously said that Hamas “hates” him. 

Sabaaneh did not respond to a request for comment, though a LICAF board member informed UnHerd that the artist was aware of the disagreement over his appearance and Kessler’s ensuing resignation. They also made clear that Sabaaneh will defend himself against charges of racism “coherently and persuasively at the festival”.

This week, Tait told UnHerd that the current LICAF board is “fully supportive of [Sabaaneh’s] attendance”. She also stated that LICAF had been in contact with the British Council about “safeguarding all groups at the festival”. Kessler, for his part, told UnHerd that “when you see racism, it is your responsibility — especially as a publicly funded organisation that inspires others — to call it out”. 

According to its equality policy, “LICAF aims to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for everyone. We will ensure that all people are treated with dignity and respect and will challenge all forms of discrimination.” Yet speaking to UnHerd, Kessler attacked the festival’s attitudes towards discrimination: “It is not right to conceal [racism], forgive it, or deny its existence. But this is what LICAF is now doing.” 

Where Kessler believes that LICAF is promoting an antisemite, the festival board maintains that Sabaaneh is categorically not a racist and stresses the importance of upholding artistic freedom of speech. For all of the British Council’s reassurances about “providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”, next weekend’s events risk being overshadowed by the dispute.

Ford’s contemporaries weren’t kind to him. As editor of The English Review, he gave literary debuts to D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Pound repaid him by referring to him as “Forty Mad-dogs Hoofer” — Ford was then known as Ford Madox Hueffer, before changing his name after the First World War to sound less German — while another protégé, Ernest Hemingway, went on to portray him in a memoir as a rambling, foul-smelling, snobbish old man. The first posthumous years weren’t much kinder, and Ford seemed condemned to the ranks of his period’s respected but unfashionable authors.

Then came a critical revival in the latter half of the century, mainly focused on his novel The Good Soldier, before the BBC came calling in 2012 and adapted his Great War-set tetralogy Parade’s End for television. Once placed onto the period-drama conveyer belt, Parade’s End was a hit. Tangled love triangle: check. Trench warfare and sex scenes: check. Benedict Cumberbatch as a tortured, posh genius: let the Baftas roll. Yet, for all the programme’s qualities, it devoted little attention to the radical vision of conservatism central to Ford’s books.

This spring marks the centenary of the publication of the first novel in the Parade’s End series, Some Do Not …, whose description of a particular historical moment of Tory destruction bears comparison to what may come at the ballot box later this year, an all but inevitable wipeout presaged by today’s grim local election results. Talk of Tory extinction is a little too breathless, but long-term exile is entirely plausible. Enter Parade’s End, a tale of enduring ideas being debased by a political class whose first priority is itself.

Ford’s story introduces us to Christopher Tietjens — that’s Cumberbatch — an aristocratic Government statistician appraised as both “the most brilliant man in England” and “the last Tory”. Married to a compulsively unfaithful wife, frustrated by the ineptitude of his colleagues and disturbed by the onset of modernity, Tietjens has an Anglican approach to morality and a High Tory approach to tradition. At least self-aware, he observes: “I’ve no politics that did not disappear in the 18th century.”

Ford’s own politics were by turns antique and radical. A conservative by habit, he called himself an “ardent suffragette”, backed the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and despised Mussolini. Disillusioned by what he considered the Conservative Party’s abandonment of its former values, he creatively dubbed it “the Stupid Party”, and wrote of “the true Toryism which is socialism”, marrying support of common ownership with a patriotic streak and suspicion of the industrial.

A great deal of this politics makes it into Parade’s End. While Tietjens places God, King and Country above all other responsibilities, and describes himself as a Tory to anyone who’ll listen, he is still accused by other characters of being a “socialist” for his distrust of bureaucratic hierarchies and aversion to market forces. Capitalism, or at least the version of it ascendant in the world Christopher inhabits, has no reverence for continuity or rootedness. When he develops amnesia after leaving the trenches, it parallels Ford’s view of Britain’s collective forgetting of its own history.

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Today’s Conservative politicians, consumed by factionalism and engaged either in plotting or sinking-ship-jumping, would do well to remember that there is radical history within their own party. Tietjens is arguably a successor not just to the 18th century but also the 19th-century Young England group of Tories, spearheaded by Benjamin Disraeli — even if in the third volume of Parade’s End he disparages Disraeli as a “jerrybuilding Jew”. Members of Young England opposed the market-driven impulses of the new world and sought something closer to the old feudal system, with more power placed in the hands of Crown and Church.

Some of Disraeli’s Toryism, specifically its treatment of the collective, survived in modernised form in the One Nation philosophy of David Cameron’s premiership, most clearly in his Big Society. A decade on from Cameron’s time in office, however, the fragments of this vision remain scattered. Conservatism soon came to define itself through the language of personal freedom and individual aspiration, with the culmination of this reached during the ministry of Liz Truss, as un-Tietjens a Tory as Britain has ever seen.

By contrast, one modern political figure who bears some similarities to Ford’s protagonist is a Tory in exile: Rory Stewart. He too is upper-class, mournful of a lost political tradition, and exasperated by the personal and professional failings of others around him. Whether one thinks Stewart’s worldview is motivated by conservative codes or self-importance, it is hard to deny that his is an idealism absent from the present government. Some of the solutions put forward in his 2023 memoir Politics on the Edge — appointing specialists to head up Government departments; giving ministers time to implement change; ending Westminster’s culture of toadying and cronyism — sound pretty appealing. One can imagine Tietjens approving, even if he might find The Rest is Politics tediously liberal.

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For far from solely offering a view of a misty Tory past, when one looks beyond the feudalism and the fussiness, Ford’s novels also provide a glimmer of the Conservatives’ future. Much polling from the last two years bears out the idea that British voters broadly lean Left on economics and Right on culture. We have entered the age of the uniparty, where Conservative and Labour offerings on immigration, employment and the economy can appear disconcertingly similar, and the only substantive difference lies in managerial competence. Principles have taken a backseat to political expediency, and Parliament increasingly resembles Tietjens’s characterisation of England’s new ruling class: “a dreary wilderness of fellows without consciences or traditions or manners”.

But this nadir for the Conservative Party — borne out in the dismal results emerging this morning — is at the same time a chance for regeneration. The American critic James Longenbach noted that, in Parade’s End, Ford begins “to perceive the war not as the apocalypse but as an event in history”, one continuous with all that has preceded it and all that is yet to come.

Today’s MPs are just one incarnation of a party which has undergone so much reinvention as to be unrecognisable from Disraeli’s, or the Tietjens Toryism of Ford Madox Ford. As this government enters its last months, Conservatives might find some comfort in the fact that this isn’t their first apocalypse. It requires a pretty hard squint to spot the radicals in the modern Tory Party, but destruction is a precondition of reconstruction, and thoughtful Conservative voices may yet emerge from the rubble. Ford wrote in Parade’s End that we are “higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden”. On present evidence, the Tories still have some climbing to do.