As such, while promoting An American Pickle, Rogen remarked that the State of Israel “makes no sense”. He despaired that, “as a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life”. But he was also fed pickles: proper, New York, dill-and-garlic, half-sour, girthy, lacto-fermented pickles. Not the small, wrinkly, saltier-than-the-Dead-Sea variety you get in Israel, locked up in austere metal cans. No, it is in these old-world, Pale of Settlement pickles, the sort you’d find in a good pastrami on rye or speckling lumpy chopped liver, that Rogen invests his Jewishness. It is to this pickle that he writes his Jewish love-letter.

He is not the only one. The American actress Hannah Einbinder caused a stir when she said “Free Palestine” at the Emmy Awards last year. Her speech rapidly became a symbol of a much-touted rupture between American Jews and Israel, or else the pro-Israel old guard in America, who still think wistfully about their years on kibbutz in the Sixties, and the younger “anti-Zionist” whippersnappers, for whom Israel is an irrelevance at best and a painful embarrassment at worst. Einbinder is adamant that her activism, including her rejection of “liberal Zionism”, is rooted in her Jewish values and upbringing. “Something actually Jewish to cleanse the stories,” she captioned a picture on Instagram of a handsome platter of pickles: pickles, you see, are actually Jewish, while Zionism is not. “Lotta Zionists sayin im not Jewish,” she posted on a different occasion in gratingly Zoomer style; “well then explain why im drinking electrolytes out of a pickle jar ive been reusing for half a year!”

Now consider, against this vibrant, self-confident culture, the pickle of Anglo-Jewry. Our haimisha cucumbers, delicious though they are, wither at the comparison. They sexed her up, Mrs Elswood, a few years ago; and in so doing, I am sorry to say, they made her appear less Jewish. The gherkins are drenched in vinegar instead of being allowed to ferment in their own fluids: it is like making champagne with a SodaStream. There is no fresh, citrusy dill in those glass jars. There are only indeterminate “flavorings”, and a handful of mustard seeds wafting around pointlessly like dust caught in the light.

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When the English ate the rich

By Samuel Rubinstein

It is a perfect symbol of Anglo-Jewry. There is no nostalgia in Britain for the early-20th-century pickle vendor, and still less for the shtetl; there is no great longing for the old times. It is no accident that the “Els” in “Mrs Elswood” comes from Elstree, the apogee of Jewish embourgeoisement. Elstree is a leafy, affluent, commuter-belt suburb, only a 25-minute train ride from St Pancras, but tucked away safely in the Green Belt, out of Sadiq Khan’s maw. Nothing interesting has ever happened there: even Elstree Studios, where bits of Star Wars and the music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” were filmed, is really in Borehamwood. Elstree suits the purposes of a parochial, inward-looking community; 18% of all working Jews in Britain work professionally for a Jewish organization, and there’s no shortage of Jewish organizations nearby. It would be quite pleasant, I think, to begin one’s life at Barnet Hospital and end it at Bushey Cemetery; to be always tethered to this stolid patch of the world, where London meets Hertfordshire, except maybe for three enervating years studying politics at Nottingham. Britain gave its Jews all the good parts of shtetl life — the gossip, the match-making, the comforts and excitements of community — without any of the persecution and penury. It gave the Jews Elstree, and the Jews are grateful.

“I like Britain”, says Anglo-Jewry’s Nestor, Lord Finkelstein, “and its suburbs and its boring democracy and its middle class gentility and its small ideas”. What makes Britain a great place for Jews is its “bourgeois complacency”. The heartbreak of the recent antisemitic attacks in Heaton Park and Golders Green and the wider rise in hate crimes is compounded by the sense that this complacency is no longer possible. Jewish suburbia will endure, but it will have to be more vigilant, more suspicious of the outside world.

England’s bourgeois life has always appealed to Jewish immigrants. The great historian of Tudor England, Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Ehrenberg in Twenties Germany, dedicated his last book to The English, whose bourgeois ways had convinced him that he “had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born”. Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, did not, like so many of his fellow writers and artists, go berserk in the summer of 1968: “I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England, and too hung up to let it all hang out.”

It is interesting that, where Anglo-Jewry does produce genius, it tends not to be avant garde. Elton was an old-fashioned historian, and Stoppard quite an old-fashioned playwright. Both men had a soft spot for Thatcher, whose own affection for British Jews is well known: many Jews numbered among her constituents in Finchley and her colleagues in cabinet. Elstree’s seat is Conservative and always has been. There have been Jewish socialists in Britain too, of course: Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Ralph Miliband. But as Britain’s Jews shifted Rightwards, they became peripheral to the community. In 2015, only 15% of British Jews wanted to make Ralph’s son Ed Prime Minister, only slightly more than would vote for Jeremy Corbyn a couple of years later. (He is probably even less popular among British Jews today, in light of his policies as Foreign Secretary.) The paradigmatic Jewish public intellectuals of this era were rather men like Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, nobody much to the Left of Isaiah Berlin. The historian William Rubinstein (no relation) wrote in his 1982 book, The Left, the Right and the Jews, that, once British Jews had entered the upper-middle class, “the old Leftist enthusiasms of the shtetl are abandoned for the warm security of the center Right”.

Anglo-Jewry flourishes in the warm security of the suburbs, and it flourishes in a suburban kind of way. The British rabbi Lionel Blue once quipped that “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so”. Among British Jews there is a high degree of characteristically British social anxiety, tending towards conformism. This probably is not conducive to creativity and artistic experiment. Except, perhaps, for Howard Jacobson, British letters lack a Philip Roth or a Norman Mailer. Roth himself seemed to grasp why. His alter ego in Deception complains about the English character of England’s Jews. England was missing something that he was accustomed to in New York: “Jews with force…, Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence.” He finishes on that familiar American note: “New York’s the real obstreperous Zion, whether Ariel Sharon knows it or not.”

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when British Jews chafe against this bourgeois conformism — or when they express disdain, in particular, for its attachments to Israel — they are quick to look to obstreperous America. If the Jews are just like everyone else, only more so, and the British middle classes on the whole are “America-brained”, then British Jews are the most America-brained Britons of all.

In his much-discussed polemic Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel testily declares that he does not care about Israel “more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist… my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school…” None of these things, he concludes this rant, “has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”.

Most of the things on Baddiel’s list — six, by my count — do, however, have something to do with a North American country 3,500 miles away. For those British Jews who wish to forego Jerusalem, New York is the only possible alternative. It’s an increasingly attractive proposition. However Right-wing British Jews may be, four in five dislike Benjamin Netanyahu; looking only at Israel’s demographics, the trends that Netanyahu embodies are only going to get stronger. Nine out of every 10 Jews in the world live either in America or in Israel. The rest of us, the one in 10 Jews who don’t live either in America or Israel, simply choose which of those poles to look to.

If Netanyahu can be said to represent one pole, then perhaps Larry David, who appears twice in Baddiel’s list, represents the other. One thought kept coming to me while reading Blake J. Harris’s weighty new tome, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David: there could be no Larry David in Britain. Perhaps that is why British Jewish comedians like David Baddiel admire him so much. Bourgeois conformity is not kind to “social assassins”. Elstree’s no place for eccentrics.

The biography doesn’t dwell much on David’s Jewishness, but it doesn’t have to: it is simply self-evident that David is a product of a quintessentially Jewish world. Before he made his name with Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, David was best known to the American public for playing an Orthodox rabbi on the sketch show Fridays in a fictional low-budget TV show called Matzoi!. The premise is that he is some kind of kung fu master, who shouts out “Oi!” in place of “Eee-ya!”; he is protecting the world from a sinister group called “Global Organisation of Young Irrational Maniacs” (GOYIM).

Curb (much more than Seinfeld) is chock-full of Jewishness. Its soundtrack is infused with klezmer. Plotlines often involve Passover seders, Friday Night Dinners, shivas, minyans, and bat mitzvahs. There is lots about the Holocaust: the classic “Survivor Fight”, or the scene where Larry steals a pair of shoes from an exhibition at the Holocaust Museum.

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And yet what is striking about Larry David’s Jewishness, in Harris’s biography as much as in Curb, is the conspicuous absence of Israel. Only one episode of Curb features Israel prominently, “Palestinian Chicken”, and it ends with Larry stuck in the middle between a pro-Israel crowd on the one side and an anti-Israel side on the other. He, like Baddiel, is basically indifferent to this “Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”. David is not anti-Israel, by any means: he recently irritated some of his fans by mocking the anti-Israel politics of the DSA. But it seems that Israel does not play an especially significant role in his Jewish identity.

Now compare him with the British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen — at whose birthday party (one learns from the new biography) David was introduced to his now-wife. Here Israel is inescapable. Often, while playing his characters, Baron Cohen slips into Hebrew. He also has an enduring fascination with the Mossad, exhibited in The Spy (2019) and his character Col. Erran Morad, now starring in the new Ali G film. Larry David’s Jewishness is American and diasporic. Baron Cohen, on the other hand, looks to Israel.

That is quite typical of British Jews. There is, in Britain, extremely little home-grown Jewish “anti-Zionism” to speak of. While 37% of American Jews identify themselves as Zionist, 66% of British Jews do. Even among young British Jews “anti-Zionism” is practically non-existent: one is far more likely, in my experience, to be regaled with tales about “antisemitism on campus” than to encounter young Jews saying words like “genocide”, “apartheid”, or “Ben Gvir”. It is telling that the main Jewish spokesperson at the now-proscribed Palestine Action, Max Geller, is American.

The independence and assertiveness of America’s Jewish community is something that Jews in Britain have historically envied. British Jews may cling to the warm security of its boring suburbia, but they have also always admired America’s capacity for promoting Jewish flourishing. It was a British Jew, Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot” to refer to American multiculturalism. “Ah, Vera”, says a character in his 1908 play of the same name, “what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!”

But even in America, pickles and “anti-Zionism” won’t be enough. There are pickles aplenty in Curb Your Enthusiasm — there is even “the pickle boy” — but there are not only pickles. Larry David’s Jewishness draws from deeper sources. It helps that he is old enough to remember the old-timey “Noo Yawk” Yiddishkeit in its pomp. It is not clear that younger American Jews have inherited much of this, nor that their attachment to the superficial trappings of Jewish culture, abstracted to such a degree that it could be practically any Eastern European immigrant culture, can sustain a community indefinitely. America’s Left-wing Jews also face a steep demographic decline. Zangwill envied America for “looking forward”, but the “anti-Zionist” American Jews today seem to prefer looking back: at the shtetl, the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking pickle man. The Jewish community in Britain today is frightened, its suburbs most of all, and less sure of itself than usual. But it is, in its humdrum way, resilient and durable.

For a brief moment, the great and the good of the realm, bejeweled and decked out in ermine, were at the mercy of a rabble of farmers from Essex and Kent. Over in Hertfordshire, while Wat Tyler was marching up the Thames to London, the townsfolk of St Albans ransacked the archive of the abbey, searching for a charter of liberties which they claimed had been given to them many centuries earlier by King Offa of Mercia. These rebels in 1381 were looking back to a time as far removed from them as they are now from us. The English have long memories.

Do those memories still stir? Modern socialists certainly hope so. If we in England are ever finally going to have the revolution that’s evaded us for so long, then history, radical history, will be our guide. We might never have had a grand theorist, a Gramsci or an Althusser, but our Marxists more than made up for it in the history department. There was a golden generation of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. In fact, the last outstanding member of this school, the medievalist Chris Wickham, died only last week. Another of our finest Marxist minds, Rodney Hilton, shaped how we think about the Peasants’ Revolt. Over half a century after it was published, Bond Men Made Free still makes for exhilarating reading.

The elites had squeezed their peasants many times before; but now, with Parliament’s new poll tax, they squeezed too hard, inviting a reaction. That reaction was swift and bloody. It quickly became about much more than tax: the rebels demanded the end of serfdom, the redistribution of wealth, and the lives of many of the king’s counselors. (To the boy-king Richard II himself they remained deferential.) Today you can still see the mummified head of Simon Sudbury, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, in a cubbyhole at the church in the Suffolk town that bears his name. You can look into the eye-holes in his skull and imagine what expressions they might have worn on each of the eight swings of the axe. Here, then, is a monument to the Peasants’ Revolt. It was a freak episode when everything stood on its head, and the masses enjoyed a brief and bloody respite before returning, not by choice, to the grinding cruelty of everyday life.

Tyler is so feted by the Left today because he is the best medieval hero they can hope for. What, after all, could they do with Alfred the Great or Richard the Lionheart? The fact they’re both monarchs is bad enough — but an “Anglo-Saxon” and a crusader? Such figures used to be harmlessly apolitical, but few things are allowed to be apolitical today. They represent a kind of Englishness that makes progressives feel uneasy. Tyler, about whom we know almost nothing, works better as an icon: a put-upon everyman, devoting himself to the class struggle. Tyler is a tragic figure, too, stabbed in the back by the Lord Mayor of London at Smithfield, a suitably bourgeois villain.

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And so Thomas Paine exclaimed, in a footnote to The Rights of Man, that Wat Tyler’s fame will “outlive” the falsehoods spread by more disparaging historians. If the barons who obtained Magna Carta from King John “merited a monument to be erected at Runnymede”, Paine added, then “Tyler merited one in Smithfield”. Two centuries later, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn unveiled a plaque commemorating the heroes of 1381 at the Highbury Barn pub — the site of the moated home of the Lord Treasurer Sir Robert Hales, “Hob the Robber”, which the rebels burned to the ground while delivering him to the same fate as Archbishop Sudbury.

And on it goes. The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s new film on the Revolt, is a jumbled-up medley of English socialist themes. It was marketed briefly, in America but not in Britain, as a Robin Hood origin story, as if that is something anyone was asking for: The Death of Robin Hood, released earlier this year, was a box office bomb. Here Rodney Hilton’s hand is again at work: for Hilton famously argued that the fictional Robin Hood might have been a mascot of sorts of the rebels in 1381. It is tantalizing that the first surviving reference to him in English literature comes from only a few years earlier. The popular image of Robin Hood — that he “stole from the rich to give to the poor” — is, however, of a later vintage, and it has been convincingly claimed that the medieval audience for Robin Hood was most likely the well-to-do, rather than the resentful downtrodden.

The film’s politics are even messier than its history. Robin Hood is, of course, a symbol of Midland (or, in some versions of the story, Northern) disaffection. The Peasants’ Revolt, on the other hand, was really a south-eastern affair. There was, it is true, some tumult in York, but this was to do with local concerns. Greengrass is alert to this, and makes a strained modern parallel. It is, he says, a “very English rebellion story”, taking place in “all the big Brexit places”, chiefly today’s Reform UK heartlands of Kent and Essex. Tyler, this late-medieval Che Guevara, is also often presented as a forerunner to Nigel Farage. And though it was Thatcher’s enemies who, in an inspired bit of demagoguery, brought “poll tax” back into political discourse, there was, perhaps, a proto-Thatcherite complexion to the Rising of 1381: “Essex Man” telling the taxman to bugger off.

Andrew Garfield, the film’s star, describes The Uprising as a “Rorschach test”: and the same goes for the Peasants’ Revolt as a whole. There is no proto-Thatcherism in his version of the story: he wants billionaires to watch it and to be “scared shitless”. The closest to this type of politics in the film itself is a shouty John Ball, the radical preacher, played by Jamie Bell with hints of Gary Stevenson. “Surrender to the rage”, he says, “and it will set you free”. For one of the great heroes of English socialism — William Morris wrote a book about him — and utterer of the much-loved ditty, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”, Ball in The Uprising is surprisingly unsympathetic. He appears as a religious fanatic. At one point during his rantings and ravings, Garfield’s laconic ploughman asks him, “Where’s God in any of this?”; it is reminiscent of “You ain’t no Muslim bruv”. And yet, by the film’s end, the ploughman seems to have come round to Ball’s (and indeed Garfield’s) way of thinking. Entirely fictitiously, the Lord Mayor of London, Tyler’s killer at Smithfield, gets his just desserts; and as the ploughman is roughing up the boy-king Richard II in the final scene, he drops his erstwhile royalism and says, “no kings”. Confusing the politics further, Tom Hollander’s oleaginous Hales at one point makes a Clintonian allusion to “deplorables”.

The Uprising isn’t the only piece of media to emerge lately about the Peasants’ Revolt. Fortunately, Doom Painting, a new novel that vividly fictionalizes the June days of 1381, is less anxious to find contemporary resonances in the late-medieval past. Its author, A.K. Blakemore, is more willing to let the story speak for itself, and so deals better with its many complexities. Her language recalls that of Langland and Chaucer, and is leavened with playful anachronisms. She has spent much time, as anyone should, playing around with the People of 1381 database, putting flesh on the bones of names which appear as lightning bolts in the records of 1381. There is a patriotic thread in her narrative; Thomas Baker, who sets off the whole Revolt early on, is a ruddy-faced Englishman and proud to be so, “volunteer[ing] himself as a synecdoche” for the whole country. “The angels come down blessing”, the book says, “not from heaven, but from Essex!” Tyler, for his part, is gruff and worldly, a manic-depressive charmer, tormented by his experiences fighting the French, and — what motivates him more than anything — that feeling that it was all for nothing.

Tyler is on a high for most of Doom Painting — he is “Christ re-fucking born” — and his sweaty, adrenaline frenzy is infectious. The novel captures the sheer fun of revolting, the kind of fun that teenagers seem to currently be having across France. There is a scene when Tyler and Ball peer outside the window and see a “gang of raw-boned youths” playing with an effigy of Archbishop Sudbury, “laughing as they take turns to grab hold of the noosed neck and mime fucking the limp dolly from behind”. “What could be holier”, says Ball, “than the laughter of children?” These are tragic words: we all know that the boys won’t get much more than these “few summer days of gaiety”. Unlike in The Uprising, where the rebellion is continued via a forest guerrilla, the historical Revolt was crushed almost immediately. John Ball was hung, drawn, and quartered at St Albans in July, in the presence of the king. When Richard II did at last get his comeuppance, it was at the hands of his nobles in 1399 — the sorts of people, court flatterers, schemers, and usurpers, whom the peasants had perceived as their main enemy all along. One of the reasons for the Peasants’ Revolt’s hold on the English socialist imagination is that it was an utter failure.

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It’s fun until it isn’t, as Tyler and Ball learned the hard way. And if Hales, Sudbury, and the tax-collectors make the rebels easy to get behind, the socialist folk heroes are “problematic” in their own right. Contemporary chronicles make clear that the London rioting involved attacks on Flemish prostitutes and weavers. Chaucer, in “The Nun’s Priest Tale”, says that “Jakke Straw and his meynee. / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrill / Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille…” It is interesting that both Doom Painting and The Uprising, faced with this problem, adopt more or less the same strategy: to distinguish between their rebels, the good ones with pure motives, and the violent, unruly London mob. “They are of the belief” — Tyler seems to roll his eyes as he recites this hammy line in The Uprising — “that Flemish merchants are stealing their jobs”. He says this as though it is an uncouth and untrue notion: and all of a sudden our rebel is a bien pensant. In Doom Painting, meanwhile, one of the good guys is killed by Londoners while trying to intervene on behalf of a Flemish family. This, in a historical novel that is hardly light on fact, seems to be pure fiction. Is it too much to bear, for Wat Tyler’s latter-day admirers, that he probably didn’t care about London’s community of Flemish immigrants, and perhaps even thought that they had it coming? Our long memories are also selective. Like the St Albans rebels in 1381, we tend to know what we are looking for.

That leaves one more question: why now, in 2026, have two unconnected fictionalizations of 1381 appeared? The Uprising, as its confused politics suggest, doesn’t seem to know what connects us with the situation endured by 14th-century peasants. The epilogue to Doom Painting lamely offers up something about hereditary peers in the House of Lords — hastily conceding that, as of Spring 2026, there is not even any longer such a thing. The truth is that there is no obvious reason for the Peasants’ Revolt to be especially “timely” today. There is the specter of plague, on which both Doom Painting and The Uprising place great importance. But to compare Covid with the Black Death seems inapt.

I suspect it boils down to the fact that “Eat the Rich” stories are the flavor of the month, and the Peasants’ Revolt is England’s ultimate “eat the rich” story. Still, it is a propitious time for all things medieval, as the success of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum makes clear. Nobody seriously tries to make that “timely”. And when they try — as Andy Burnham wanly did — they miserably fail. In both cases, 1066 and 1381, it’s the drama, not the politics, that’s timeless.

Simplicity, though an attractive quality in a writer, is often wielded as an insult. Nobody wants to be accused of “simplifying” a subject, or, worse, to be called “simplistic”. These are, alas, the words that cling to Gladwell today. The first season of The White Lotus features prissy nepo baby newlywed: Shane, the most punchable face ever to appear on screen. Every prop in The White Lotus is there for a reason: so why is it Gladwell’s Blink (2005) that Shane brings along for performative holiday reading? Mike White, The White Lotus showrunner, provided an explanation. Gladwell, he remarked, is “the kind of writer that makes you feel smart while you’re reading it whether you are or aren’t”. Shane desperately wants to feel smart. 

We all want to feel smart: that’s what propelled Gladwell to stardom. When he published The Tipping Point in 2000, he was the toast of the town. Everyone was happily identifying the “Connectors”, “Mavens”, and “Salesmen” in their social circles. Two years ago, however, a long-awaited sequel, Revenge of the Tipping Point, met a frosty reception. The New York Times asked whether Gladwell had “run out of ideas”. In the FT, it was described as “little more than well-put-together quackery”. When people wrinkle their noses at any mention of Gladwell, you know that damning phrase — “airport book” — is never far from their lips. Airport books: big text, sensationalist claims, style over substance. It was, one imagines, at the airport, en route to Hawaii, that Shane laid eyes on Blink and was reeled in by its subtitle, “The power of thinking without thinking”. 

All this makes Gladwell an easy target for put-downs. “You’re very good at adjectives, Malcolm,” Matt Ridley once said in a debate, “but can we have some facts?” It must get under his skin. He is not, I think, a hack looking for a quick buck (although his writing has earned him millions). Gladwell is earnest; he believes in what he’s doing. That’s part of his charisma and appeal. Those are not things he is short on; nor is he short on talent. Gladwell calls his essays and books “conversation starters”, and that they are. He spins a good yarn. He might be the most influential practitioner of his genre currently living: pick up any popular nonfiction book from the last 15 years or so and you will find that every chapter begins with an arresting anecdote. People in the trade call this a “malcolm”. Montaigne did “malcolms” too, from time to time, and so have many since — but Gladwell perfected the craft. It is one of his ways of simplifying the raw material that he picks up from the social science journals. Far better to begin with a breezy, colorful story than the impotent droning of “This paper argues…” 

But the reason he now attracts so much sneering and mockery is that he was fêted out of all proportion in his heyday. He was described by The Guardian as “the man who can’t stop thinking”; he thinks so hard, said Foreign Policy, that he has “changed how we think about thought itself”. The Noughties were the golden age of popular social science. In Gladwell — skinny, soft-spoken, scruffy in just the right way — the genre found its apotheosis. It reached, so to speak, its tipping point. 

It was Gladwell, more than anyone, who decreed that the purpose of literary nonfiction was to fire insights from the social sciences at a carousel of “common assumptions”. Public intellectuals existed to make you “look at things in a new light” — or, at least, to trick you into believing as much. “The world — much as we want it to — does not accord with our intuition”, Gladwell wrote in The Tipping Point: this might as well have been the motto of the movement that spawned Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Slow, Nudge, and so much else. This genre veered between extremes: either these books would go out of their way to surprise you with something ostentatiously, screechingly counterintuitive, or else they would dress up commonplaces and clichés with fancy, scientific-seeming titles. We all know the saying about big fish in little ponds. It takes a Gladwell to popularize the “Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect”. 

All was not well with this genre, however. In the course of the 2010s, it was knocked off its pedestal. In 2012, Jonah Lehrer, a young Gladwell-in-the-making, was found to have plagiarized and falsified data in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Oliver Sacks was one of the most revered proto-Gladwells: well, it turns out that lots of his stories were made up, too. Then the “replication crisis” arrived, and with it the creeping realization that many of the famous studies and papers underpinning the genre were worthless junk. The set-pieces in these books came under increased scrutiny. Readers of The Tipping Point knew all about Kitty Genovese, the 28-year-old bartender who was brutally murdered while 38 witnesses heard her cries and did nothing. But one recent paper concludes that there is “no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive”. So much for that, then. The Stanford prison experiment is another old nag in the Gladwellian stable; but few exercises in psychology have been more comprehensively discredited. 

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Behavioral economics, social psychology: these were held up in the early 2000s as the surest paths to enlightenment. Well, whether enlightenment was the aim, or marketing advice, was always an open matter. This was a time when restaurants started putting their most expensive wines at the top of their wine list (Daniel Kahneman called this “anchoring”). Pubs, heeding the gospel of Thaler and Sunstein, painted flies on their urinals. David Cameron’s “Nudge Unit” was the highest authority in the land. But all that is gone. The age of the social scientist is over.

The time of the historian has come. History, almost by definition, is safe from the replication crisis. It offers authors “malcolms” aplenty, without having to stand for some grand, universal point. And history is what Gladwell has turned to, along with the upper-middle-brow reading public. It is, as the New Statesman announced in 2023, the stock-in-trade of “Waterstones Dad” — an archetype who was formerly Gladwell’s most enthusiastic customer, and who now, for good reason, finds ample stimulation and nourishment in The Rest Is History. In 2016, Gladwell named his podcast Revisionist History, as though to signal this new direction. 

In history, alas, Gladwell tends to find himself on weaker ground. There is some history in Talking to Strangers (2019), chiefly concerning Chamberlain and Hitler in the run-up to Munich and the Second World War. “The people who were right about Hitler”, Churchill first and foremost, “were those who knew the least about him personally”, says Gladwell; “the people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.” It is a characteristically daring formulation, neatly illustrating a wider argument about how we overestimate our ability to get the measure of the people we meet. But is it true? Not really. Horace Rumbold, Britain’s ambassador to Germany from 1928 to 1933, doesn’t feature in Gladwell’s discussion. Rumbold knew Hitler and took the trouble to read Mein Kampf; he understood perfectly well what Hitler was about. In April 1933 he reported his “impression”, borne of experience and careful observation, “that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler government are not normal”. 

There can be no room for Rumbold in Gladwell’s book, because Rumbold would get in the way of its big idea. The idea reigns supreme, and all historical facts and events must bend to it. The same flaws bedeviled The Bomber Mafia (2021), hence its hostile reception among historians. “Borders on reckless”, was the verdict of some specialists in the Second World War in Japan; “a work best avoided” was another. Gladwell flattens the complex story of Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, the American generals who clashed over how to bomb Japan, into a tedious, heavy-handed allegory. Satan tried to tempt Jesus to “do evil that good may come”, says Gladwell, and Haywood Hansel, by advocating precision striking, “sided with Jesus on that question”. But LeMay, who oversaw the firebombing of Tokyo, “would have thought long and hard about going with Satan”. We are left with a cosmic struggle between good and evil. And we are left none the wiser about the practical concerns weighing on the minds of either party.  

The American Way of Killing, Gladwell’s new polemic on gun violence, is another history book weak on history. Why, he asks, does America have the Second Amendment in the first place? Fumes of the “1619 project” waft into his answer: it is because of slavery. The author of the Second Amendment, James Madison, was a Southern planter. He was disturbed by the thought of slave revolt; he hoped that roving militias might keep the slaves in check. What he meant in the Second Amendment, according to Gladwell, was something like “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of slave-owners, the right of citizens of states like Virginia and South Carolina to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. 

There is no sense here of Madison the republican revolutionary, simply doing as republican revolutionaries do. The militia, and the arm-bearing rights that tend to accompany it, have a noble pedigree in republican thought. It animated radical Whigs and “Commonwealthmen” in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, many of whose books ended up in the libraries of America’s founding fathers. For good or for ill, the indispensability of the militia for political liberty was the sort of thing the founders drank in with their mother’s milk. It was not merely an expedient for slave-owners. A more hard-headed republican revolutionary, Madison’s near-contemporary Maximilien Robespierre, supported the right to bear arms; and he also abolished slavery. Yet again, an important part of the story is sacrificed in service to the big idea. 

Gladwell toys with the idea that Madison did not care about the Second Amendment one way or the other; it was simply a bone that he could throw at fellow planters in Virginia in order to get them on board with the constitution. Perhaps, in this book, Gladwell is up to something similar: perhaps the 1619-esque part of his argument is a bone thrown to his more progressively-minded readers. For The American Way of Killing is not, despite appearances, a conventional exposition of American progressivism. Gladwell got his start in the writing world at Right-wing magazines, such as the American Spectator. A big part of The Tipping Point is an endorsement of the broken windows theory of crime prevention, most famously put into practice by Rudy Giuliani. And the principal argument of this new book, once the patchy history is out of the way, is that police are overall good, and that there should be a lot more of them. Los Angeles, he points out, has 8,500 police officers; Berlin, about the same size, has 18,000. He posits a negative correlation between the number of police officers and violent crime; one of the reasons gun violence in America is out of control is that there is too little policing. The American Way of Killing is an angry book. Almost nowhere is Gladwell angrier than when he takes the fight to the “anti-police activists” who, in the wake of George Floyd, were effectively given a carte blanche across Blue America to make the gun epidemic worse. 

That, anyway, is my Straussian reading of his work, informed, perhaps, by my begrudging respect for a master craftsman. Most likely, he plays fast and loose with the historical record because it exists only to support whichever big idea he is pushing. Simplicity of expression is a great virtue in history; but it is hard to squeeze grand moral lessons out of the complicated facts. Perhaps social science, Gladwell’s natural métier, can brook simplification in a way that history cannot. But at least The American Way of Killing might make Shane feel smart.  

Much though this angered veterans and political opponents in Argentina, it also allowed him to become a Right-wing icon in Britain. Gone were the days of “Gotcha!” and “Argie bastards”: now Thatcher’s heirs had a friend in Buenos Aires. The sideburns, the chainsaw, the herd of cloned (English) mastiffs: he was the perfect maverick. ¡Afuera! became a well-known meme and entered the lexicon: could it not be just as well applied to the ECHR, the BBC, Net Zero, and however many quangos? Soon enough, Kemi Badenoch, who would never call herself “Britain’s Trump”, began describing herself as “Britain’s Milei”: here was a figure a divided party could rally round. Nigel Farage praised Milei’s politics as “Thatcherism on steroids” and said he was thinking about buying Argentine bonds (probably not the wisest use of his £5 million). Liz Truss said Milei was her favorite conservative; he confessed not to know who she was.

But it wasn’t going to last forever. Milei was always going to get less popular, and so he was always going to make a fuss over the Falklands. As the next Argentine election gets closer, and as his approval ratings languish somewhere in the 30s, he needs something to match the chest-thumping of his estranged vice president, for whom we British remain “pirate usurpers”. So, in a speech to the nation on 4 September, he declared that Argentina must “act swiftly” and “show a united front to the world”. The pirates will be vanquished, Argentina redeemed.

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Is Britain still fighting the Falklands War?

By Alwyn Turner

It is an occupational hazard of governing Britain that sometimes Argentines will rattle their sabers. Prime ministers have learned to deal with it from time to time since 1982, usually by rolling their eyes. But this time it might be different. What makes the present Falklands flare-up unusually alarming, from the British point of view, is a sinister allusion in Milei’s speech to “winds of change in the world that are favorable to our claim”. “Winds of change”: it is an evocative phrase, famously deployed by Harold Macmillan in Africa in 1960 to describe the inevitability of decolonization. There was no escaping or denying our decline; we could only try to manage it. The Wretched of the Earth were about to have their day, and it would be futile to resist them. Even Right-wingers like Milei — and, for that matter, General Galtieri — cast their struggle for “las Malvinas” as a noble work of anti-colonialism.

That still leaves the timing of Milei’s intervention: and here it’s tempting to imagine that he can smell British weakness. That, anyway, is an appealing explanation of his conduct for critics of Britain’s Labour government at home, many of whom are feeling understandably compromised for having previously lavished Milei with praise. After all, critics of the shambolic Chagos deal can reasonably contend that it might have planted in hostile heads the idea that Britain is no longer able or willing to defend its far-flung possessions. Starmer and Burnham certainly seem to be made of weaker stuff than Mrs Thatcher.

Yet the British Right itself also bears much of the blame. They spent years sucking up to Milei — and to MAGA and to Israel, some elements of which now seem to be most receptive to Argentine revanchism. More to the point, they have done much to play up Britain’s weaknesses, as though trying to make the country seem like an enticing target. While railing against the Chagos deal, for instance, plenty of Right-wing voices prophesied that “the Falklands will be next”. Never mind that the idea that Britain’s dealings with Mauritius would set a precedent for how it would handle another Argentine attack on the Falklands was far-fetched. Most people in Britain had never heard of the Chagos Islands; and given that their main purpose is to host an American base, it is anyway questionable how sovereign we are there. The Falklands, on the other hand, have a British population, and, at least since 1982, have been part of our national identity. British blood was spilled there in living memory; Starmer’s own uncle was almost killed. A Labour government, even a weak one, wouldn’t give them up without a fight.

Likewise, in the early phase of the Iran war, Nigel Farage tried to backtrack from his initial bout of jingoism by saying that Britain anyway lacks the “capability to offer anything of any value to the Americans or the Israelis”. Our country, in other words, is too weak even to be helpfully subservient. Milei would reasonably conclude from this that Britain is spent, and that the Falklands would be easy pickings. And, more pertinently, the White House might think that there is nothing to gain from keeping up friendly relations with Britain — so that they might as well throw their lot in with the Argentines.

A decade ago, an Argentine leader playing domestic politics with the Falklands may not have mattered much. But where Macmillan’s winds of change were blowing in Africa, these days they’re more American in nature. For it is in Washington, DC that the new “political facts” are emerging. A few months ago it was reported that the Pentagon was reviewing its position on the Falklands — until now a studied neutrality — setting off fears that it might move in a pro-Argentine direction. More recently, President Trump suggested that he would be reluctant to help us, as Ronald Reagan did in 1982, in the event of an Argentine invasion. He brings to bear his typically transactional theory of foreign affairs: we didn’t scratch his back in Iran, so why should he scratch ours in the South Atlantic?

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By Samuel Rubinstein

There’s a broader point here too. Where Milei’s Argentina could prove to be a good local ally to America, complementing Trump’s vision of a “Donroe Doctrine”, Britain is regarded as a sad old has-been, running on fumes. As one American diplomat remarked, “keeping South American countries on side” could be “more strategically important than pleasing the Brits out of a ‘sense of nostalgia’”. All of MAGA knows that Britain is in terminal decline: it is practically axiomatic that soon enough it will, in JD Vance’s infamous jibe, be an “Islamist” state. This being so, Trump and those around him might well reason, why shouldn’t they take the side of Argentina versus Britain — Right versus Left, Christianity versus Islam, the vitality of the New World versus the shabby decadence of the Old?

Shortly before Milei’s speech on the Falklands, Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, posted a photo of herself grinning next to him, captioned “Exciting things are happening in the Western Hemisphere”. It could scarcely be any clearer that she is not a friend to Britain. But at ARC in London a few months ago, as she waxed lyrical about Anglo-American friendship, a mainly British audience lapped up her every word. “Sarah Rogers is a political superstar and Britain’s New Right should be grateful for the undisguised passion she expresses in this speech for our national renewal”, effused James Orr, then still in post at Reform UK. When she promises to unleash the “full range of tools” against Britain’s speech restrictions, when she declares that “nothing is off the table”, even the free-speech liberals among us should hope that this would not cover inducing a hostile foreign power to invade Britain’s sovereign territory. It was always naïve to think she was invested in our “national renewal”. She appears to be much more interested in Argentina’s.

Britain is used to pinning its foreign policy ambitions on a vague and slippery notion of “soft power”. We hope to get into the good graces of other nations, and punch above our weight, by keeping everyone fed on a diet of Harry Potter and the Premier League. Our best soft-power weapon against Trump is, of course, the Royal Family; and we have been able to deploy it quite effectively. Certainly, he responds to it better than any hard power lever we might be able to pull — for example, refusing to let him use bases on our sovereign territory. The image we project to the world matters, and can have real geopolitical consequences.

But there is also such a thing as negative soft power. Sometimes it can suit certain purposes to make the country, at least under the present government, seem as degraded as possible. When Farage goes on American TV, or speaks at the Capitol, one gets the impression of Britain as an authoritarian police state, disfigured by mass immigration. Why should a crime-ridden hell-hole deserve to keep the Falklands? Milei understands this; he knows better than most what makes the MAGA movement tick. In his speech, he dwells on Britain’s pitiful state: “the UK is facing multiple migration, demographic, and economic crises with no clear solution”. These words are a product of Britain’s negative soft power. So too, and worse, is the fact that Trump might listen to them with open ears.

Thatcher was less naïve about the “Special Relationship” than plenty of today’s conservatives: she rejected out of hand Reagan’s efforts toward a negotiated settlement. The opposition, for its part, was patriotic to a fault. Michael Foot, speaking both as Labour leader and “Cato”, the pseudonymous author of the anti-appeasement polemic Guilty Men, said he “knew a fascist when he sees one” — he didn’t try to undermine Britain’s position to bolster his own.

Today, though, a dangerous game is being played. Its main effect might be a damaging one: to convince MAGA that Britain is a lost cause. That is the purpose Britain is usually brought to serve across the Atlantic: a vision of apocalypse, a cautionary tale. That, rather than any real desire to make Britain great again, is what sustains MAGA’s interest in British affairs. Britain’s decisive victory in the last Falklands War was much-needed proof of life after decades of decline on the global stage. Today, therefore, there could be no punishment more fitting, no better proof of Britain’s death, than Milei’s Argentina seizing the Falklands.

Trump is such a natural at this, though, that he can have a similar effect on Europe’s elite. There’s the spectacle of Emmanuel Macron massaging his ego and Mark Rutte calling him “daddy” — but however unedifying this may be, it is just diplomacy. Stranger still is the way they often seem to cede to him, unforced, a kind of moral authority. Trump brings out their masochistic streak; they become eager participants in his hobby of Europe-bashing. What pathetic little leeches we are, they cry out, when the President attacks them for being defense freeloaders, exploiting American goodwill: he has us bang to rights. 

They do not take this line on other aspects of the White House’s critique of European policy. They do not say that Trump has them bang to rights on free speech or trade or energy or immigration — to say this would be to admit the defeat of an entire moral worldview. But on the specific subject of defense their usual reflexes are suspended. All of a sudden they turn MAGA. We have been free-riding for decades, they say; Trump is “simply right” that Europe should spend more. It was only a matter of time, one can almost hear Mark Rutte suggest, before somebody intelligent and manful enough would catch on.

This is not the posture of MAGA’s European outriders. Europe’s insurgent Right-wing parties tend to take a more hard-headed view of American objectives. The nationalist Right in France, Italy, and Germany has a long tradition of anti-Atlanticism: they never subscribed to the view that American support for European defense was an act of supreme, selfless benevolence. Indeed, they increasingly appear to recognize that MAGA is an albatross around their necks. Giorgia Meloni recently had a public falling-out with Trump; she knows, in a country where only 8% have a favorable opinion of the President, that some distance from the White House can only be a good thing. Beatrix von Storch of the AfD may have a “Make America Great Again” cap on her desk in the Bundestag; but, at the same time, her party and its base tends to look at Trump’s America with a certain coolness. 

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The case for de-escalation with Russia

By Wolfgang Münchau

They are well aware that Trump is extremely unpopular in Europe. His reckless statements and interventions, and his encroachments on the sovereignty of other countries, can be a major liability for Right-wing politics internationally — as the cautionary tale of Pierre Poilievre in Canada goes to show. One wonders sometimes whether MAGA understands the toxic effect it can have on “sovereigntist” Right-wing parties in the rest of the world, and even exploits this in order to keep the establishment parties in charge.  

For Europe’s establishment parties are the real marks for Trump’s rhetoric on defense. They are the lackeys whose humiliation Trump craves and enjoys. They are used to taking their orders from Washington, and defense spending is an easy concession for them to make to Trump, in word if not in action — easier, anyway, than accepting his counsel on immigration, energy, or other areas of policy that he is wont to berate them about. So somehow, in this single instance, the Trumpian line has become a piece of European elite consensus. Sanna Marin, the former prime minister of Finland and now a strategic counselor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, wrote for the Economist last year commending the American taxpayer for having aroused from his slumber to question “why they should shoulder more of the cost of European security than Europe itself”. Alex Younger, the late chief of MI6, said similarly: “We have been infantilized and it hasn’t been healthy… we should be extraordinarily grateful to America for its generosity.” He likened Europe to a spoilt child on a “trust fund”, a spoilt child which now has to toughen up, get wise, and make its own way in the world. A belligerent Russia, the argument runs, is Europe’s problem, not America’s — and so it’s high time that Europeans take matters into their own hands. 

That Europe should spend more on defense, and on containing Russian aggression, is a fair proposition, and one which many previous American presidents have supported. “Nato 3.0”, where Europe assumes principal responsibility for its own defense, could indeed be a good thing for Europe — and, perhaps especially, for Ukraine. This is a message which Britain badly needs to hear, especially now that John Healey has conveniently forgotten the national security imperatives that caused him to resign as Defense Secretary less than three months ago. None of this means, however, that Europe’s leaders should accept the framing that American support for European defense was motivated by “generosity”, which Europeans have been greedily exploiting and for which we should now be “extraordinarily grateful”. If Europe has been “infantilized”, then that is something that the Americans deliberately engineered, over the course of many decades. Trump is not meting out “tough love”; he is not Matron making the medicine go down, or a wealthy father cutting off his pampered, profligate children “for their own good”. The “trust fund” was always an investment, and quite a profitable one at that. 

The Americans realized, after being drawn into two world wars, that isolationism was a risky and unworkable strategy. They had an interest in preventing future war in Europe. They were anxious to prevent nuclear proliferation, and to stop countries like France and Italy from falling into Communist hands. The end of the Second World War left them in a fortuitous position in Western Europe, and one they were in no hurry to relinquish. They got — and still enjoy — a military foothold in Europe, which can come in handy when, say, they want to direct logistics and communications from somewhere within striking distance of Iran.

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Suicide is a tragedy, not an argument

By Samuel Rubinstein

It was a good arrangement, while it lasted. America got fat off Pax Americana. We in Europe got a lot out of it too: a “holiday from history”, the luxury to spaff billions on welfare; billions which, in a previous age, would have been spent on dreadnoughts and munitions. Not that we Europeans were totally useless on military matters: we tended to accept that our obligations were a two-way street. If the Americans were footing the bill, then it was only fair for them to expect what little military assistance we could offer during their moments of need. That guided the decision made by many European countries to join the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq. One reason Trump’s Greenland gambit earlier this year left such a bitter taste in many European mouths is that Denmark was one of America’s more devoted European allies. Denmark had the third-highest per-capita casualty rate among Nato nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, behind America and Britain. Trump’s obsession with gratitude could easily be turned on its head. The Americans could say thank you for our help in the War of Terror; the Americans could say thank you for Ramstein, Lakenheath, and Fairford. 

The European country which has come closest to implementing Trump’s advice is of course France. France clears its Nato target of 2% of GDP on defense, and seems to spend it more effectively than other countries do, including Britain. Earlier this year this caused Britain some embarrassment when French warships, rather than British ones, sailed to Cyprus after the RAF base at Akrotiri was hit in an Iranian drone strike. France pulls its weight. And France, to the chagrin of George W. Bush’s White House, did not join the war in Iraq. Nor does it host US bases on its soil: General de Gaulle chased all of them out in the Sixties. Because France has tended to pull its weight, it has also enjoyed more strategic independence from America in foreign policy. The two go hand-in-hand. 

Suppose, now, that the rest of Europe were to follow Trump’s admonition to the letter. Suppose that the rest of Europe were to become truly “sovereigntist”, perhaps under the aegis of MAGA’s sister movements on the populist Right, and to figure out what the French figured out long ago. Is that an outcome that Trump and his coterie would actually want to come about? Recall Trump’s fury earlier this year when the Kingdom of Denmark moved a few dozen troops to another part of the Kingdom of Denmark; or his rage that European countries did not fall immediately into line when he embarked on his Iran adventure. Those countries would be a lot less pliable than they currently are if they really did get their defense spending in order. Nor is it the case that Trump is that invested, in general, in the sovereignty of his European allies. He routinely makes demands about how they should direct policy on fossil fuels and immigration, and with whom they should and should not trade. 

Europe’s leaders should, as ever, be careful not to take Trump’s words at face value. But even if they do, they are unlikely to put them into action: as John Healey’s recent U-turn reveals, welfare spending must always come first. Their hope is that Trump is succeeded in the White House by someone with a less capricious attitude toward their allies, someone who understands the upsides of the postwar arrangement, and thinks that it is still worth paying for. The alternative — slashing welfare to fund defense — is somewhat more conceivable under parties on the nationalist Right; but the practical consequences of that, a Europe composed of sovereign states capable of pursuing their own interests as they define them, would not be to Trump’s liking. Trump claims to want Europe to stand on its own two feet, but he does not want Europe to be strategically independent. He should, perhaps, be careful what he wishes for. 

There was just one problem. None of it was true. She never worked in an Indian slum or as a sex educator. She was not Jewish. None of her relatives died in the Holocaust. She had conjured up 22 Holocaust victims out of thin air, giving them Jewish-sounding names, and depositing falsified information about them at Yad Vashem. “Rachel” didn’t exist. “My daughter has many realities,” her real, living mother explained to a journalist. “I only have access to one.”

Hingst had spent years weaving a web of lies. Readers of her blog gradually began to notice small inconsistencies. Doubts started to grow. In 2019, an exposé in Der Spiegel took a wrecking ball to the whole edifice that she had carefully built up. A month later she killed herself. She was 31.

Sophie Hingst did not deserve to die. Neither did Jason Arday. We all know the mythology that now attaches to the former Cambridge professor, found dead at his home on Friday: the plagiarism, the marathons, the nonverbal autism, the brain tumor, the illiteracy, the armed intruder, the pig’s head. But beneath it all — if it needs to be said — was a man, a father, whose death marks a horrible end to a sorry tale.

Already the blame game has begun. The Labour MP Dawn Butler has written to IPSO accusing the press of a “harassment campaign”. “Many of us believe that Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail, and Spectator”. (It is worth noting that the most damning investigation of Arday, the one that really brought things to a head, was published by The Guardian, a newspaper which Butler wrote for just a few days ago.) The Prime Minister has invited us to spend a moment “reflecting on how things came to this”. Mary Beard similarly urges “taking a break from any discussion of Cambridge’s policies” in order to “remember with compassion the person who paid a dreadful price”. Thus she deftly forecloses any possibility that “reflection” might end up indicting the university for its part in the fiasco.

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In attempting such reflection on Arday, however, and on the events of the past month in the light of their tragic conclusion, we quickly run into a problem: we are bad at thinking about suicide.

I first became aware of that when I was at school. One of the older, un-PC teachers announced to the class that, due to some diktat from the higher-ups, he would no longer mark our homework with a red pen. “Apparently if I do,” he said, “you’ll kill yourselves.”

From there it was a short step toward saying that the marks themselves, and not just the color of ink they were made out in, should be shaped by an overbearing consciousness of suicide. That, sure enough, is the governing mindset in education today. Universities take a slacker approach to deadlines; discussion of in-person, closed-book exams — a pressing issue in the age of ChatGPT — is stifled by the fear that they would pile on to the already weighty burden on anxious student minds.

The word “suicide”, as this serves to show, has an extraordinary coercive power. But it has to be handled with tremendous care, not least because it can be a contagious act. This is difficult terrain, but the Samaritans provide a helpful guide. They wisely caution us, for example, against speculating about the motivations for a given suicide, or ascribing it to a single cause. Suicide tends to resist neat rationalization.

That didn’t stop Teachers’ Unions blaming Ofsted, and indeed the very notion of applying rigorous standards to schools, for the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry in 2023. Nor does it stop the constant invocation of suicide in the debate over gender transition in children. Such rhetoric explicitly intends to shut down debate. When Kathleen Stock spoke at the Oxford Union, an activist glued herself to the floor wearing a T-Shirt with the slogan, “No more dead trans kids.”

This logic is not confined to one part of the political spectrum. Pete Newbon was a lecturer in English literature at Northumbria University. He was a director of Labour Against Antisemitism and a passionate critic of Jeremy Corbyn. In 2021 a Twitter spat with the Left-wing children’s author Michael Rosen caused his employer to be inundated with complaints. Issued with a final warning, and while embroiled in a separate legal case concerning his behavior online, he took his own life. Some fellow anti-Corbynites suggested that Rosen and his allies were to blame, thus turning a complex case into a political cudgel.

Suicide is a tragedy. It is not an argument. It is not a good argument, in any case. It turns political disagreement into a hostage situation. In ordinary personal relations we would call this manipulative, even abusive. Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans, understood as much, and knew just how to deal with it. A client once rang him up, threatening that she would kill herself if he didn’t make time for her there and then. “You do that, sweetie,” he replied, “and I’ll find out where you’re buried and come and piss on your grave.” Harsh as it may seem, this was the compassionate thing to say. Varah refused to suspend his usual rules and standards to make a special case. He did not want to give the vulnerable woman the impression that her suicide threats would have their desired impact, and thereby risk encouraging her to act on them.

That the risk of suicide can be used as a means of censorship is, in Arday’s case, no mere hypothetical. Last year, a police officer called a journalist investigating Arday — an act for which the Met has since apologized — advising him to cease and desist for the sake of Arday’s mental health. There is, however, a balance to be struck between taking such a risk seriously and allowing it to place legitimate scrutiny off limits. The suggestion now being made by Butler and others is that this police officer was right all along: that the risk of suicide — a risk which sadly materialized — ought to have put the whole matter to bed for good. Tragically, the attempt to suppress scrutiny carried risks of its own: once the scandal did break, it concerned not only his academic integrity but a serious and heavy-handed cover-up.

It risks being forgotten that there were very good public interest reasons for the Arday story to have garnered so much attention. Somehow, the story damned everyone. The police, for serving as a Cambridge professor’s personal goon-squad. British libel law for elbowing out the Times Higher Education and leaving Arday in the maw of Nathan Cofnas. The fields of sociology and education, which allowed him to ascend to the top of the profession and exalted his work as “the best in the world”. The roster of universities, which patted him through without bothering to apply standards or even to check that his work was his own.

Cambridge comes out particularly badly. They appointed him to a post for which he seemed manifestly unsuited. Having spent years waving him around as a mascot, they dumped him once the details of the case, which they ought to have known all along, made him more embarrassing than he was worth. They had a stronger interest than anyone in personalizing what most of the press understood to be a much wider scandal: they were the ones who suggested that Arday was sui generis, an “aberration”. The story invited questions about all those things and more. None of those questions has gone away.

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By Samuel Rubinstein

Those are among the reasons the affair has dominated the headlines for an unusually long time. Some of it might also be because it is “silly season”. Some of it, too, can be explained by the sheer scale of the fantasy, each revealed falsehood more outlandish than the last.

It could have been otherwise: if the Times Higher Education had been able to report the story as intended, this exposé might have looked more like the Observer’s impressive investigation last year of Raynor Winn’s Salt Path.

Instead, the story unfolded in agonizing slow-motion, with Arday and those around him having to attempt live damage control (sometimes contradicting each other) as his life came crashing down. The press was relentless — one can only imagine the effect of a drip-fed character assassination on a vulnerable psyche. Here, perhaps, the straightforward demolition of his fantasies by the Guardian was, if anything, more distressing than the litany of anti-DEI columns — precisely because the details of the matter were damning enough.

Arday’s eventual resignation of his professorial chair might have thrown some cold water on the scandal, at least as it related to him personally. But then the scandal was kept alive by Simon & Schuster’s decision to publish his memoir, encouraging legions of readers to go through his made-up stories with a fine-tooth comb. At the time of writing, it still hasn’t been pulled.

When Sophie Hingst killed herself in 2019, Der Spiegel came under immense pressure. The media in Ireland, where she lived, tended toward the view that Hingst was vulnerable, her wrongdoing victimless, and Der Spiegel out of order. But Der Spiegel held their nerve. They stuck to a solid principle: investigative journalists cannot be cowed by the fear that their subjects might kill themselves. The mental health of any fabulist will suffer when their webs come unspun. The deaths of Hingst and Arday are tragic. But they cannot retrospectively make reporting illegitimate.

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

Kent always was deepest Farageland. It sums up Farage’s political vision and persona: close enough to London to understand it, far enough to be in touch with the provincial commonfolk. In this, Farage differs much from his rival on the Right, Rupert Lowe. Though both cut their teeth in the City, Farage still presents himself as a wheeler-dealer, the tribune of the petit-bourgeoisie. Lowe, on the other hand, has reinvented himself as a farmer. His concerns are basically rural, including his preoccupation with self-defense. Inveighing against “metropolitan attacks on rural Britain” in his gilet and wellies, always flanked by a flock of sheep, he claims the old mantle of the Countryside Alliance.

The contest between Reform and Restore has reached a stalemate. There are murmurings of a rapprochement. It seems probable that, if there is a general election soon, there will be some kind of pact. That would involve Restore standing down in places like Kent. It might also involve Reform leaving Lowe’s Great Yarmouth, and rural constituencies, to Restore. Farage, the “cheeky chappie”, can appeal to Kent and Essex’s Cockney diaspora. Lowe, meanwhile, can rattle off the farmers’ list of grievances.

It would be a natural division of territory. Farage is shaped by the South East, especially the Greater London periphery, at least as profoundly as Andy Burnham is by the North West. Kent was part of the South East England constituency that Farage spent 21 years representing in Strasbourg and Brussels. He spent just as long sniffing around for seats at Westminster, always favoring Kentish ones — even if they fell outside Kent proper. In 2001 he stood in Bexhill and Battle — a de facto Kentish constituency, since much of its electorate comprised pensioners from Bromley. In 2006 he contested a by-election in Bromley and Chislehurst. Twice he stood in South Thanet. Clacton, in Essex, was the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, so it’s only natural that Farage, after so many bruises, should have pitched his tent there in 2024. It has many similarities with Farage’s Kentish power-base, not least in its Reform-friendliness; but perhaps he would have been happier somewhere farther south.

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It’s ironic, of course, that Kent is in some ways the most European part of Britain. On a clear day, you can see Calais from Dover. This has been known sometimes to stimulate a certain fellow-feeling with the people over in the distance. That might have been its effect on the Kentish prime minister who took us into Europe, Ted Heath. But, as so often, the closer one gets to a boundary, the more one fashions one’s identity against the other side. Where Heath saw in the Channel a European stream to be bridged, Farage finds proof of England’s insularity. In 2016, more people in Kent agreed with Farage than with Heath.

Kent’s long Channel coastline also leaves it exposed. It is both England’s watchtower and its soft underbelly. Wordsworth wrote “To the Men of Kent” amid the Napoleonic invasion scare:

Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent,
Ye children of a Soil that does advance
Her haughty brow against the coast of France,
Now is the time to prove your hardiment.

In 1588 Philip II directed the Armada to land on Kent. It is no accident that Farage was one of the first to sound the alarm over the small boats crisis: he could witness it firsthand from the Kentish coast. “Another huge armada”, he tweeted in 2021, “has hit the Kent beaches”. Just this week, Reform has announced that it would deploy the Royal Navy to stop the small boats.

Like Farage, the South East has a radical streak. As far back as 2014, a young political scientist by the name of Matthew Goodwin was comparing Farage with the region’s most famous upstart, Wat Tyler. It is actually unknown whether Tyler came from Kent or Essex; both counties claim him as theirs. In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter: for here, in their rowdiness, Kent and Essex combine. The counties which gave UKIP its pair of MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless; the county of Farage’s seat, and the one that is his home — these were, throughout English history, the most potent sites of insurrection. Other counties could gnash their teeth and cause trouble on occasion: the peasants of Norfolk also rose up in 1381. But, unlike Wat Tyler, they were too far from London to make any difference. It is difficult, as the Norfolk MP Lowe may discover, to make parochial rural concerns impress themselves on the metropole: the closer one gets to the centers of wealth and power in Britain, the less people care about farmers and guns. Only places like Kent and Essex can encircle the capital and exert deadly pressure on it.

The trailer for a forthcoming film about the Peasants’ Revolt presents it as one fought against the King. In reality, the ideology motivating Wat Tyler and his collaborators was a loyalist one. They wanted to rescue the king from his wicked counselors: Wat Tyler claimed to act on behalf of “King Richarde and the trew communes”. When the rebels demanded the heads of the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, this was because they had been traitors to the crown. The Peasants’ Revolt also, of course, involved xenophobic violence against London’s Flemings and Lombards. In short, Kent and Essex look to London for their salvation. But they can also take it upon themselves to set things in London right.

The cause of revolt in 1381 was simple: the people of Kent and Essex were sick of paying so much tax. That spirit has never really gone away. Six centuries later, Kent and Essex were the heartlands of Thatcherism. Unlike much of the country, their proudly individualist, enterprising, and petit-bourgeois denizens welcomed Thatcher’s laissez-faire agenda. Farage, if not quite Essex Man, was at least a Kentish wide boy. Unlike Lowe’s farmers, they feel deeply that their fortunes are bundled together with London’s.

Farage was happy on the open-outcry trading floor of the London Metal Exchange after the “Big Bang”, fueled by adrenaline and a never-ending supply of drink. He always envisioned UKIP as a libertarian party cast in Thatcher’s image. The line separating it from the BNP was that “they’re authoritarian, we’re libertarian”. Farage is, indeed, a liberal at heart. His political awakening came when, aged 14, he picked up a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the Dulwich College library. He was inspired to join the Conservative Party as a teenager by a visit to the school by Thatcher’s libertarian guru, Sir Keith Joseph. Interviewed in the New Statesman in 2014, he was asked whether he was part of the “‘small c’ conservative family”. “God no!” was his answer.

Farage is, instead, a 19th-century liberal. Certainly, his libertarian instincts are at odds with Lowe’s new-found agrarian, protectionist ones. When Farage joined UKIP, it was called the Anti-Federalist League; its name evoked the Anti-Corn Law League, the 19th-century liberal campaign against Britain’s entrenched farmer class. The Anti-Corn Law League defeated the farmers, and the farmers, as a political force, never really recovered. Lowe’s efforts to champion them are unlikely to meet with much success. Lowe, the modern-day tribune of the class that the Anti-Corn Law League took on and defeated, was never involved in UKIP. Under Farage, UKIP continued to model itself on the 19th-century campaign for free trade. In a speech to the UKIP conference in 2013, Farage set out the 19th-century liberal case for Brexit: if Britain were to leave the EU, it would “get back the ability to strike free trade deals”. He even suggested “abolishing tariffs on African produce” to “do more to raise living standards there than any amount of aid”. Peace and prosperity through free trade: this was pure Manchester Liberalism, worthy of Richard Cobden.

These days, “Manchesterism” has acquired a rather different meaning. It is, we are told, the opposite of neoliberalism, the opposite of Thatcherism. The ascendancy of Andy Burnham may now put paid to Reform’s hopes of making inroads in the North. Burnham’s victory in Makerfield was held up as “proof of concept” that, with a Northerner in No. 10, and one willing to disavow Thatcherism altogether, Labour could keep the “Red Wall” standing.

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Now, Patrick Maguire claims in The Times, Farage is inspired as much by “the Eurosceptic Labour minister Peter Shore’s vision of state control of strategic industry” as he is by his liberal and libertarian idols, Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, and John Stuart Mill. But one has to wonder: was his heart ever really in it? It was awfully expedient for Farage to move in a big-state direction at just the moment he wanted to curry favor in the post-industrial North, when talk of “realignment” was filling everyone’s ears. The rise of Burnham might therefore come to him as some relief. Now, he can revert to his true, Southern, Thatcherite self. In Clacton he can also, for good measure, defeat his only serious rival in the byelection: the Shoreite SDP.

Recently, as though anticipating the Burnham shift, Reform has dropped some of its more Shoreite posturing on nationalization. Having long fantasized about a union of “socially Right” with “economically Left”, Reform appears to have surreptitiously drifted back into Farage’s small-state comfort-zone. The Reform-adjacent think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, is singing from this hymn sheet. Its first paper was published with the imprimatur of the Thatcherite Spartan John Redwood. “What to do if the UK faces a sovereign debt crisis?”, it asks. Its prescription is a classically liberal one: slash benefits, push for growth with supply-side reforms, cut red tape, trim the state. And, above all: “Do not raise taxes unless absolutely necessary”. There is not much room here for Lowe’s more agrarian vision. The next election is far more likely to be Burnham’s Manchesterism versus the 19th-century kind.

Reform may now be staking out a new path to victory, a “Southern strategy”. It probably would require some compliance from Lowe: he reaches a different kind of Southern voter (albeit a much less significant group) than Farage does. Either way, the strategy would look like this. Forget about Gorton and Denton; forget about Makerfield. Leave the North now to its “king”. Brush aside the ex-Labourite Lee Anderson, the “Red Wall” made flesh: Farage was never a likely tribune of the “left-behind” Northerners, anyway. Offer the South a kind of populist liberalism, with its recognizably Kentish precepts: sovereignty of the people, suspicion of the state, hostility to taxation, vigilance on the border. Throw some bones to Lowe’s band of angry farmers, while steering clear of full-scale protection. Do it well enough to force the Tories, the other Southern party, into a merger. And then, at the next general election, Farage can run the campaign he has always secretly wanted to, the kind of campaign that served Thatcher well enough on three occasions. The North never was Reform’s heartland. Farage’s heart always belonged to Kent.

Polanski’s Green Party is a party for the heirs of the student activists of the Sixties and Seventies, for whom it was an article of faith that “the personal is political”. And so it’s fitting that a slogan T-Shirt should have caused the greatest crisis of Polanski’s leadership so far. On Monday, he shared a post on Instagram showing one of his supporters wearing a black T-Shirt with a guillotine on it — with the caption referring to the XTC song, “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. “If I were to post anything as inciteful”, responded Nigel Farage, “then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski”. Polanski was quick to delete the post, which he shared just 19 days after Ann Widdecombe’s murder, and to declare that he “unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message”. But the police are now looking into it — and free-speech hypocrisies aside, Farage is surely right to sense a double standard.

It’s tempting to see all this as just another sign of Polanski’s immaturity, of a piece with his goofball grin and his Hackney house share. That’s true — but what’s even more striking is how his callowness has endured into middle-age. He may not look it, or act it, but Zack Polanski is 43 years old. That makes him seven older than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and nine older than Zohran Mamdani, with whom he is often flatteringly compared. He may be old enough to have some faint memory of Thatcher, and certainly remembers Section 28. If, by some strange stroke of fortune, Polanski were to become prime minister at the next general election, he would enter Downing Street about the same age as John Major did in 1990. The Green Party is achieving most of its success among Gen-Z. But its leader is only a millennial by the skin of his famous teeth.

Aside from making his wardrobe even more embarrassing, that gives Polanski something rare in politics — a life before. Since he burst onto the political scene, the picture of that life has been gradually filled. What we find is a protean creature, a sentient Ship of Theseus. His first name changed and his surname changed, for independent reasons. When David Paulden became Zack Polanski, really he should have become Zach Polinsky: Polinsky was the ancestral Jewish name, and Zach, not Zack, is the Jewish character in Goodnight Mister Tom. Between that first reinvention and his election as Green Party leader in 2025, there was a phase of Corbyn heckling, Conference gospel singing, and Clegg-Cameron Coalition boosting. But across all this — and his infamous chapter as a hypnotherapeutic breastmaxxer — there has been one constant thread: Zack Polanski was an actor.

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Acting is what turned him into a political animal. Studying drama in Wales and then in Atlanta,  his political approach to theater goes all the way to a country whose current politics Polanski admires, and with which he wants Britain to form an alliance to replace Nato: Brazil. The Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal developed the Theater of the Oppressed back in the Seventies. It was based upon his compatriot Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was published, as one might expect, in 1968. A long-haired Leftist with a New York education, Boal was kidnapped in 1971 and tortured by Brazil’s far-Right government. He was then able to develop his theories of drama and politics during a 15-year exile. He then returned to Brazil on the collapse of the dictatorship, before being elected a city councilor in Rio de Janeiro. There he introduced something called “legislative theater”, a form of participatory democracy where stakeholders and policymakers share a stage to “co-create innovative and effective solutions to complex challenges, promoting equity, creativity, and fun”. Government by “participatory theater”: has a more obnoxious regime than this ever been devised?

In Boal’s plays, the spectators give way to “spect-actors”, who interact with the actors on stage. Regular spectators in regular play are, you see, passive, bovine, clouded by false consciousness, if you are an orthodox Marxist, or mauvaise foi, if you are of a more existentialist persuasion. Spectators have no power: or, rather, they do not know what is in their power. “Spectator”, Boal concluded in his manifesto, “is a bad word! The spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness”. For him to become a real man, he first has to act; the spectator must become spect-actor.

This, then, was the apprenticeship of Zack Polanski, his rehearsal for revolution. The Green Party website declares proudly of its leader: “Before entering politics, Zack worked in community theater, specializing in Theater of the Oppressed with marginalized communities to help them tell their own stories”. He first joined the Liberal Democrats, in fact, because the Theater of the Oppressed somehow opened his eyes to the injustice of First Past the Post. Polanski’s theatrical politics gave him the impression that politics is, so to speak, all for show; politics is a morality play, where a scenario of oppression awaits its interruption by a do-gooding “spect-actor”. When he is asked to summarize his outlook, he reaches for the phrase “radical compassion”. It is not enough to “be kind”; the spect-actor has to be kind, radically.

In practice, though, this also means that the only imperative in Polanski’s politics is to be (radically) compassionate to others. There are no conflicts, no trade-offs, no difficult decisions. In many ways, his worldview is as anti-intellectual as it is anti-political; there is no room, really, for serious ideas. If only the billionaires and the Israelis and Donald Trump were more compassionate, if only Britain would prove its compassion by stripping its wealth for the benefit of the global south, opening its borders to more immigrants, and promptly dissolving itself, then all will be well. It is, in short, an immature worldview — and one shallow enough that it can be displayed on a T-Shirt.

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“When people ask for solidarity, the only authentic response is to give it”, as Polanski says in the context of trans rights. The obvious follow-up — that sometimes the interests of different people can collide, and therefore that choosing where to give “solidarity” is necessarily political — simply wouldn’t occur to him. The old binary between actor and spectator was collapsed in favor of another, a binary of justice and injustice, where the dividing line could be easily drawn by any “spect-actor” endowed with the requisite powers of compassion. Even before Polanski, the Green Party liked to fantasize about “citizens’ assemblies”; there is more than a whiff here of Boal’s “legislative theater”. It is always assumed, and with Polanski it is no different, that such assemblies would move towards something resembling the Green Party platform.

But Polanski’s “compassion”, his “solidarity”, only extends to the right kind of people. The guillotine T-Shirt makes that clear. In the end, his anti-political posturing gives way to a bracingly political worldview: he knows to extend “solidarity” to his friends and to withhold it from his enemies. He arguably shared the guillotine image because he’s inured to that strain of abrasive humor so common on the Left: “Eat the rich”, “Punch a TERF”, “the only good fascist is a dead fascist”. If so, he wouldn’t be the first Leftist to land in trouble once such slogans have escaped containment. One young Oxford student is currently awaiting trial for chanting “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground”.

This is the underlying power of Polanski’s anti-political politics. It gives you, clearly enough, an enemy. With the other parties, with the unjust status quo, he tells you, you really are a mere spectator of the world, a plaything of a venal class of billionaires. You are a passive audience. You yearn, if not for revolution — if not for the guillotine — then at least for that classic 1968 watchword: “agency”. Little wonder Polanski likes to describe himself as an eco-populist; and he has learned certain lessons from the Right-wing populism he is reacting so viscerally against. The message of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and of Polanski’s Green Party, is ultimately to “take back control”. Polanski is dressing up that old formula in such a way as to appeal to people like his younger self: recent graduates floating about, guided only by a vague sense of “social justice” and a lingering artistic ambition. The only way to escape the matrix, Polanski tells them, is to become “spect-actor” instead of “spectator”, to get up on stage. They must, in the end, become political — even if only by throwing on a T-Shirt.

The comparison is well-chosen. Like Gloriana, Mahmood is unmarried; she gives the impression of being singularly devoted to her country. In her manner and speech, she is plus anglais que les anglais. What should they know of England who only England know? Mahmood, the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, spent some of her formative years in Taif, in Saudi Arabia, where her father was a civil engineer. Prior to 2013, women in Saudi Arabia were prohibited from practicing law. Had she remained there, she would not have been able to fulfill her ambitions. But while Mahmood was in Taif, the United Kingdom, her native country, was governed by a woman — and a woman barrister, to boot. That may explain why Mahmood, unlike her new boss and most of her comrades on the government benches, venerates Margaret Thatcher as a personal heroine.

After returning from Saudi Arabia to Birmingham, Mahmood went up to Oxford to read law. At Lincoln College she was the year below noted PPE-ist Rishi Sunak, who apparently voted for her in a JCR election. Then she went to the Bar, which performed its traditional function of inculcating her with a certain identity and worldview. Her Englishness, like that of many English lawyers, is shaped by an appreciation of the common law. “My parents weren’t steeped in Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights”, she said on being sworn in as Lord Chancellor in 2024; but “they did have a strong sense, arriving here in the UK from rural Kashmir, that this country was different: that there are rules, some written and some not, that we abide by”. Her national identity is made of stronger stuff than Sir Keir Starmer’s “cutting the half-time orange”. Nor is it the watery “values” kind propounded by the Labour Home Secretaries of yore, which strung together a sequence of abstract nouns. Those “British values” of “fairness” and the “rule of law”, Mahmood was saying, are products of a particular culture and history, things that make the country “different”.

Mahmood’s robust civic nationalism means that she passes the “Tebbit test”: in the cricket, she supports England over Pakistan “all the way”. At the last Labour conference she spoke of a “patriotism that speaks, but does not feel the need to shout”, one that “embraces those who trace their roots back in this country over a thousand years, and also those who look like me”. She drew a distinction between her own sense of Englishness and Britishness and a “smaller, more divisive ethnonationalism”. When Zarah Sultana compared her views with those of another Midlands politician with a strong feeling for English history, Enoch Powell, Mahmood reacted with fury. Sultana’s remarks, the Home Secretary thundered, were “beneath contempt”.

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Mahmood characterizes her position as “the patriotism of Orwell”, and she shares Orwell’s disdain for those English elites and intellectuals who “would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box”. She therefore takes her patriotic fight to the real enemy, as her friends in Blue Labour see it: metropolitan liberals. Here it helps that she is from an ethnic and religious minority, and that she represents a constituency where problems involving immigration and demographics cannot be brushed aside. Her finest hour as Justice Secretary was her showdown with the Sentencing Council, where she prevented explicit discrimination in favor of ethnic minorities. Her finest hour as Starmer’s Home Secretary was, similarly, a sparring match with Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham. Wilkinson made a conventional hand-wringing rebuke of her “cruel” approach to immigration. Mahmood sarcastically expressed envy at his “privilege” for “walking around this country” — his posh, leafy neck of the woods — and “not seeing the division that the issue of migration and the asylum system is creating”.

Then she went in for the kill: “Unlike the Honourable Gentleman, I am the one who is regularly called a ‘fucking Paki’ and told to ‘Go back home’”. She was chided by the Deputy Speaker for her unparliamentary language; that, of course, only added to its effect. It was a fine piece of theater, consummating a long-standing Blue Labour fantasy: a tough-talking, small-c conservative Muslim woman, a “Somewhere” rather than an “Anywhere”, putting the clueless liberal elites in their place. For too long, in the view of Lord Glasman and his ilk, the Labour Party had been in tow to those who dismiss the entire subject of immigration as befitting only bigots. By repudiating Max Wilkinson, Shabana Mahmood was returning the party to its roots. She was Gillian Duffy’s revenge.

All this has, of course, come at some cost on the Left. Mahmood is the least popular cabinet minister among Labour members — a fact which ought to keep in check any leadership ambitions. Her activities as Home Secretary have caused anguish among Labour’s third-sector clientele. The anti-slavery commissioner expressed “deep concern” over Mahmood’s suggestion that modern slavery legislation can give cover to vexatious asylum claims. The Bishop of Edmonton claimed to be “shaken to the core” by some of her proposals. Zack Polanski, who hopes to make inroads among these voters, is licking his lips at the prospect of making her his principal target. Aside from her immigration reforms and rhetoric, the Greens can tap into anger over her perceived betrayal on Palestine — the same anger that slashed her majority at the last election. On the other side of the aisle, though, she has become something of a cult figure. Sir Edward Leigh, the Tory Father of the House, joked that she is “one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had”. Danny Kruger invited her to defect to Reform. Michael Gove even confessed to harboring a small crush. Like Elizabeth I, she finds herself swarmed by suitors.

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And like Elizabeth I, Mahmood is a political survivor. Reeves is out and Yvette Cooper demoted; of the three women who woke up on the morning of 20 July 2026 occupying a Great Office of State, by the evening only Mahmood was left standing. Despite Burnham’s decision to keep her on, Labour backbenchers will continue to conspire against her immigration reforms. They no doubt hope that Burnham, the mushy people-pleaser, can be easily manipulated. Angela Rayner has described Mahmood’s reforms to indefinite leave to remain as “un-British” — an audacious attempt to beat the Blue Labourites at their own game. Mahmood’s commitment to her immigration plans is undoubtedly sincere, and she wants to see them come to fruition; presumably Burnham has made some assurances to this effect. But it seems quite likely that, sooner or later, she and Burnham will be at loggerheads — if, that is, the parliamentary party doesn’t erupt in outright revolt against one of them first.

Mahmood might therefore be a political liability for Burnham. Why, then, has he decided to retain her? It was reported that he intended to promote her to Number 11, perhaps even as a means of getting her out of the Home Office. If that was his plan, it didn’t work. Mahmood might not have given him the choice: she was adamant throughout that she would prefer to remain in post. It could be that Burnham recognizes — or his new constituents in Makerfield have forced him to recognize — that the immigration issue can’t be ignored. If that is the case, then it helps him to have someone else do the dirty work — and someone who got the ball rolling under a previous administration. If Mahmood’s reforms ultimately prove to be too much for Labour MPs and members to swallow, he has the option of pinning the blame squarely on her, and even on his own predecessor.

In any case, it makes good sense for there to be a “Blue Labour” presence in Burnham’s Number 10 — whether the one in Westminster, or the one Up North. “Manchesterism”, Burnham grandly declared in the Makerfield campaign, “is the end of neoliberalism”. Nobody is quite sure what this means, if it means anything at all; but “neoliberalism” is a long-standing Blue Labour bugbear, and Burnham’s idea of somehow defeating it with localism, community, and civic pride could just as well have sprung from the mind of Lord Glasman.

Mahmood hails from Birmingham, and represents the Birmingham seat once held by Neville Chamberlain. It is tempting, therefore, to summon the ghost of Neville’s father Joseph. The comparison has been drawn before: Mahmood, like the elder Chamberlain, seems to transcend the usual political divides. The 19th-century Mayor of Birmingham was the great opponent of free trade, the determined champion of protection. Chamberlain-style, community-oriented, interventionist “Birminghamism” seems to suit Burnham’s vision better than “Manchesterism”, which of course referred originally to laissez-faire. In Burnham’s crusade against London and the South-East, it seems only fair for England’s other second city to get its place in the sun.

Mahmood is probably the only Labour politician with a serious chance of carrying out the public will on immigration. Burnham seems, for now, to recognize as much. Mahmood’s task is simple enough: to act unsentimentally while the Prime Minister does his grinning footie lad act, and to absorb all the resultant anger from the Labour Left. He can speak, in his anodyne way, about values, respect, and even half-time oranges. And she can present a more satisfying answer to the question, in law and in culture, of what it means to be British.

Personal essays, it seems, have always been Vance’s bread and butter. Even at Yale Law School, he was busy writing personal essays instead of studying law. The first draft for what became Hillbilly Elegy was submitted as a 60-page paper for a class on international business transactions; what exactly it had to do with international business transactions remains unclear. He wanted to use his lived experience to do social-science analysis of the “ills befalling working-class white people”. Swap “white” for any other racial identity, or for “queer” or “trans”, and one is left with the sort of solipsistic, self-indulgent claptrap that conservative intellectuals, Vance’s modern-day cheerleaders, tend to castigate as “woke”.

Hillbilly Elegy was not simply the narration of an exotic and unusual life — as was, say, the memoir of another politically-ambitious 30-something Ivy League graduate, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. Vance’s book aspired to be serious political science. It held the key, it was claimed in 2016, the year in which it had the good fortune to be published, to understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Even in Britain, where nobody had ever heard of Jackson, Kentucky or tasted Mountain Dew, the lived experience of this cherubic Ohioan was believed to say something meaningful about Brexit and the “Red Wall”.

It is ironic that the people who most dislike the Vice President today, and whom he dislikes the most in return, were exactly the sorts who gave him his start. The Financial Times and the Economist were among Hillbilly Elegy’s biggest evangelists. His message, after all, appealed to them: the “autoethnography” was ultimately in service to an old-fashioned, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps liberalism. Some passages could have been written by Samuel Smiles or Margaret Thatcher. “We spend our way to the poorhouse”, Vance wrote of his hillbilly kinsfolk; “thrift is inimical to our being”.

Vance has been on quite a journey since then, documented in a trickle of personal essays. At long last, he has treated us to a fully-fledged sequel to the book that made his name. Communion is, its subtitle says, about Vance’s return to faith. In fact, it is a broader Apologia pro vita sua, presenting a self-flattering account of his many conversions since 2016. It therefore considers his conversion to MAGA and his conversion to a kind of anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism, alongside his conversion to Roman Catholicism. All these, he makes clear, are closely linked.

Communion is written in the same folksy, syrupy style as Hillbilly Elegy. Vance’s first book began with a faux-modest apology, and in Communion he likewise occasionally pleads for his readers’ clemency: “Keep reading”, he says amid one long-winded digression, “there’s a point here, I promise”. The main difference in style arises from Communion’s affected piety. The sweariness of Hillbilly Elegy is toned down. Mamaw, one of the great characters of modern American literature, used to curse like a sailor; at one point she asks a young JD, then questioning his sexuality, if he wants to suck dicks. In Communion, Mamaw has lost some of her edge: now she lamely refers to “effing crooks” and “effing perverts”. The word “bullshit” appears right at the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy. Clean-mouthed, Ned-Flanders Communion ends with a nauseating “Amen”.

Much of Communion narrates Vance’s shifting relationship with Christianity. It retreads the relevant sections of Hillbilly Elegy, occasionally quoting them at length. After some adolescent Bible-thumping, Vance saw the light of atheism, and combined this in his student years with a love for Ayn Rand. In this, he was fairly typical of young men of this milieu, “freethinkers” who found refuge online from the superstitions that stifled them at home. He still shows a nostalgic familiarity with their main totems, notably Christopher Hitchens and Reddit.

Why, then, did Vance convert? One of his reasons is that religious people are the most rational and sane. His evidence is his lived experience of the presidential election of 2016. He describes seeing people, elite media types, wailing and thrashing about as it became clear that Trump was on course to win. Quite understandably, he concluded that these people “need psychological help”. “If Hillary Clinton had won”, he continued, “my evangelical, Trump-loving father would have turned off the TV, prayed, and said, ‘Well, I hope she ain’t as bad as I feared’”.

That comparison called into question his prior assumptions: “I had thought that my father was an irrational religious man…, and that these newsroom criers were sensible, logical people.” There is a glaring problem here, however. When Joe Biden beat Trump in the election of 2020, the prevailing attitude among Trump’s followers was a far cry from “I hope he ain’t as bad as I feared”. Nor was this the attitude of JD Vance himself, then freshly emerged from the baptismal font. In 2021, as his political ambition was brewing, he described Biden’s victory as “unfair”. He was picked as Trump’s running mate in 2024 in large part because he cleaves to the dogma of his new faith: that the election was rigged.

Vance offers the President more than just obsequiousness. His youth and intellectual vigor are supposed to balance out his boss’s dotage. Vance hopes to be the first millennial in the White House. Indeed, Communion is a millennial book, through and through, its themes springing straight from the generation’s roster. Aside from “work-life balance”, there’s a jab at something an author of a different bent would call “mansplaining”: those “insufferable tirades by above-average guys who think they’re brilliant”. Vance details his own sub-Seth-Rogenite college years: “Dude”, he asks a friend, “are you in love with this chick?” Once it has moved to more serious political terrain, many of the book’s barbs are aimed at the “Boomer leadership” — a group from which President Trump is curiously exempted.

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Communion, as a result, preaches a millennial faith. It is telling that Catholicism ends up, in Vance’s life, as a substitute for therapy, a way for him to “deal with his past”. Its politics are of a similar vintage: generic post-Crash progressivism. That may be a strange ideology to impute to a Republican, but there it is. “I’m uninterested in making people servants to the economy”, he says, as though shouting into a megaphone at Occupy Wall Street in 2011: “the economy ought to be serving us”. The part of the book which sets out his political vision — a foretaste, perhaps, of the presidential campaign to come — is awash with such Sandersesque bluster. He repeatedly criticizes his own party for being “far too willing to worship the market”. He anyway seems just as eager to abjure his past Randian libertarianism as his New Atheism.

A Protestant ethic, the ethic of thrift, might have suited the liberalism of Hillbilly Elegy. His new Catholicism likewise suits this postliberal, anti-market shift. In Catholicism he has found some support for his semi-sarcastic, sophomoric suggestion that “maybe economics is just fake”. Vance extols the “skepticism of free market theory” which he finds in the “Catholic Church’s ancient social doctrine”. When he inveighs against the “gods of GDP”, he can cast himself as the inheritor to a venerable tradition of Catholic social thought, critical of “consumerism”, “individualism”, and other vices of modernity, in the mold of Pope Leo XIII, G.K. Chesterton, or Dorothy Day.

One can believe that Vance is a sincere Catholic, and a sincere postliberal, while also considering some of the more cynical motivations at play. One theme of Communion is the author’s obsession with status. He knows that this used to inform his beliefs and ideas. His past criticism for Trump gave him “social immunity”, allowing him, as a conservative, to get invited to all the right dinner parties. His Ayn Rand phase used to have a similar effect: “tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite”.

What Vance never mentions is that Catholicism is a socially acceptable way to be conservative among the American elite — or, at least, that it grants entry to an elite of its own. At Yale Law School, even in its conservative circles, reversion to the hick evangelicalism in which he was reared would never have been an option. Evangelical churches, with their smoke machines and strobe lighting, their faith-healers and doomsday preachers, lack the gravitas that Vance was after. Protestants used to regard themselves as more serious, more intellectually rigorous, than those sensuous, emotional Papists. But now the stakes are reversed. Austere Presbyterianism isn’t really a thing anymore. Even where evangelicalism is on the up — as in Brazil — this is precisely because of its flashy aesthetics and “prosperity gospel”. Catholicism, on the other hand, provides its initiates with an intricate intellectual pedigree. It gives them the mantle of a storied tradition. It directs them to St Augustine (Vance’s patron) and Thomas Aquinas; it allows its adherents to seem “deep”.

The leading minds on the American Right, especially those which attended to its postliberal and communitarian turn in the late 2010s, are Catholic, whether converts like Adrian Vermeule or cradle Catholics like Patrick Deneen. The same can be said of the robustly Right-wing justices on the Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. As with any prestigious club, the Catholic Church sets some barriers for entry. Anyone and his dog can become an evangelical Christian. But to become a Catholic means that a suitably learned priest has decided that you are up to it. Vance acknowledges this directly: “I really liked that the Church required you to work a little to join”. Having cleared that hurdle, conversion to Catholicism brought Vance into this more refined set. If he was once drawn to atheism and libertarianism because they offered him a certain cachet, how do we know his Catholicism is any different?

In America, Catholicism possesses another distinct advantage. It was never the dominant religion. It is separate from the elite WASP culture that Vance likes to spurn. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance felt alienated from that culture on the grounds that he was “Scotch-Irish” rather than “Anglo-Saxon”; his conversion to Catholicism has since allowed him to also drop the P in that acronym. Catholicism gives him a certain fellow-feeling with other “white ethnic” hyphenated Americans, historically excluded from the WASP core — the Italians, the Irish, the Poles. Those groups used to be part of the Democratic coalition. The Catholic Al Smith ran for the presidency as a Democrat in 1928; anti-Catholic prejudice played a part in his defeat. Such prejudice was overcome in 1960, in the election of JFK, and had more or less evaporated completely 60 years later, when the Catholic Joe Biden beat Trump (fair and square). In 2024, buoyed perhaps by Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket, Catholics broke solidly for Trump. Latino Catholics still tend to vote Democratic, but even they are moving Rightwards. This growing alignment between Catholicism and American conservatism, along with its outsider status, doubtless eased Vance’s walk along his road to Damascus.

In a similar vein, Vance seems to like Catholicism because it is an Old World religion — he says that it was “quite literally a foreign religion to me, rooted in Roman influences that I had very little exposure to”. It gives him and his faith a certain sun-baked sophistication. In Hillbilly Elegy, he describes his identity growing up as narrowly American; he lacked what many Americans possess, that feeling of being bound to a “mother country”. But the Catholic Vance has a real stake in Europe; so now he is better-placed to polemicize fervently about its declining fortunes. He describes himself in Communion feeling haunted by an empty cathedral in Burgundy, and “what that said about Europe’s cultural decline and Christianity’s slow evaporation from the continent”. He was overwhelmed by a similar feeling of “dread” in England — where, in a detail that hardly lends credence to the strength of his recollections, he claims that something in his full English breakfast was “oozing blood”.

His general criticisms of Europe have much to do with his criticisms of European religion, or lack thereof: one of the causes célèbres in his famous Munich speech, after all, concerned the arrest of a British man for praying outside an abortion clinic. His criticism of Europe extends even to the Vatican: Communion makes ample room for the author’s frustrations with his Church. He gives an exasperated sigh over the Vatican’s “trite platitudes” about his administration’s immigration policy. The implication here is that Rome is currently doing a poor job of tending to her flock. The energetic Catholic sheepdogs of the New World are called to guide the listless, straying Catholics of the Old.

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JD Vance became a Catholic rather than a different type of Christian because Catholicism today is the thinking man’s Christianity. As Candace Owens — not, herself, much of a thinking woman — supposedly remarked to Charlie Kirk before he was murdered: “You’re too smart to be a Protestant”. In Communion, Vance describes a friend named Sam, another convert to Catholicism. He would go on “extended rants about the Reformation and immigration”, and thought America’s ills could all be traced to John Calvin. Here is a character familiar to anybody who has rubbed shoulders with young conservatives at elite institutions.

The problem for Vance now, however, is that he cannot only speak for those high-brow Catholic Right-wingers. He may wish, no less fervently than Adrian Mole, to be a Malcolm Muggeridge; but he is also the Hillbilly Vice President, the tribune of the plebs. He cannot leave his own people behind. He has therefore had to fuse his two personas into one. This is why Communion, a book about Catholicism, shows on its front cover a Methodist church. It is why its subtitle talks generically about “finding my way back to faith” — rather than the faith. It is why he describes his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio — whose population is 46% Protestant, 16% Catholic — as an effort to make “more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy”, even though he says these arguments are what attracted him to Catholicism specifically. He probably can’t even play up his Catholicism now too much, lest there be persistent traces, in Middle America, of Protestant chauvinism. He cannot, like his friend Sam, launch into diatribes about Calvin. His political ambition requires him to be ecumenical.

What, then, does Communion mean for America, the country which, two-and-a-half years from now, its author may well be leading? Time and again, reading the book, it struck me that Vance’s ideal society, the America he hopes to build, is sleepy, southern, ancien régime Europe. He wants something like the Portugal of that other Catholic public intellectual turned statesman, Antonio Salazar: a country built on a foundation of Catholic social teaching, one sapped of prosperity and dynamism, but where everybody goes to church. He wants a society where people care less about work; he waxes nostalgic about the “blessings” of being raised in a “multigenerational household”. In Vance’s America, in his crusade against the Protestant Ethic, “GDP” is a dirty word, and the chief problem in Europe is declining church attendance rather than declining wealth. It is difficult to imagine such an America putting a man on Mars. It is also difficult to imagine such a schoolmarmish message resonating with most Americans.

The seeds for Vance’s conversions — both from secularism to Catholicism, and from liberalism to post- or anti-liberalism — were, he suggests in Communion, sown before 2016 and even further from Rome. Revealingly, they first took root in a general denunciation of American culture. As a soldier in Iraq, among Christian and Muslim Arabs, he encountered a “genuinely compelling critique” of that culture in the fear that, if Iraq grew too “Americanized”, it would become too “consumerist and hypersexualized”. He then paints a picture of a contrast between one culture, pious, austere, morally upstanding, and another one, wayward and decadent. “A woman in a niqab was reading the Quran”, he quotes from some fellow Catholic intellectual, “and a man was rocking while praying, and on the TV was Britney Spears dancing in her underwear”. Which of these cultures does JD Vance prefer? Catholic his answer may in fact be; but it does not strike me as very American.

That was apparent in Burnham’s shifting pronouncements on the European Union. Burnham never made a secret of his Remainerism when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. Just last year he was trying to open up a conversation about rejoining. “I believe in unions of all kinds,” he bafflingly proclaimed: “the union of the UK. The EU benefited this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.” But the Makerfield constituency had voted Leave by two to one. Memories of the Remainer Burnham had therefore to be put out of Makerfield minds. Early in the by-election, he made the wise decision not to “re-run” the old arguments. That was enough to win the day; and now he is on track to be Prime Minister.

Plenty of Burnham’s old comrades-in-arms are, however, itching to re-run those arguments. Two days after the Makerfield by-election, on Saturday 20 June, the “March for Rejoin” descended on Westminster; 10 years of hurt never stopped them dreaming. The website advertising the march boasted a rather low-powered line-up. The only plausible A-lister was Neil Kinnock. He was joined by Layla Moran, a German MEP by the name of Terry Reintke, the anti-racism activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, and Madeleina Kay, author of Theresa Maybe in Brexitland (2018). Richard Morley, whose Rejoin EU Party got 35 votes in Makerfield, was there. Andy Burnham, who got 24,927, was not.

Burnham’s victory in Makerfield still should have put a spring in their step. The mere fact that a Remainer could win an old Leave seat, even if he had to hold his tongue, might be a sign that the Brexit divisions are a thing of the past, even that “Bregret” has taken hold and “Rejoin” is the future. Such a conclusion would be borne out by the polls. A stable majority of the British public, around 55%, supports the marchers’ mission. In the late 2010s it was common to hear the morbid claim that “cohort replacement” — the dying out of older Leave voters — made the eventual triumph of Remain a mathematical certainty. Generational patterns tell one half of the story; “Bregret” tells the other.

Burnham’s victory in Makerfield is not the only positive sign for Rejoin. One of the reasons it has been kept out of serious discourse is that nobody knows what rejoining looks like. Would we resume the status quo ante? Or would Britain, in punishment for its impertinence, have to swallow the Euro and Schengen Zone? Michel Barnier has recently said that the former ought to be on the table. For Rejoiners, that is an encouraging thing to hear.

The wind should have been in their sails. And yet they have the sad air of holdouts, of old men shouting at clouds. Despite the good conditions for Rejoin, they have not been able to sustain a mass movement. The “March for Rejoin” could not compete, in terms of numbers or élan, with Palestine marches, let alone the heights of the “People’s Vote”. They couldn’t get any celebrities; they couldn’t even bag Ed Davey. All they had to offer was a Who’s Who of Bluesky.

Burnham was right not to re-run the old arguments. Clearly that made sense in Leave-voting Makerfield; but he would be correct to apply the same instinct at the national level. I was too young to vote in the referendum in 2016, but I would have voted Remain, and nothing has happened in the 10 years since to shake my feeling that Brexit was, on balance, a mistake. Brexit has materially made my life worse in mundane, obnoxious ways. Living in Frankfurt last year, I had to wrestle with the German bureaucracy for months for a residence permit (eventually I gave up). And yet, I would sooner go through my German ordeal one thousand times over than join the “March for Rejoin”. I would stand in the queue at passport control for hundreds of hours if it meant I never had to hear the terms “Meaningful Vote”, “Malthouse”, or “Miller I and II”.

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The march’s line-up was weak because the Rejoiners have been abandoned. Sir Keir Starmer was prince of Remain in the run-up to the 2019 general election; it was he who prevailed upon Jeremy Corbyn to gamble it all on a second referendum. He was the person responsible, second only to Corbyn himself, for Labour’s catastrophic defeat. He thus had every reason to forget about Brexit once he became party leader, and to hope that everybody else would forget about it too. When Sir Robert Peel was called to form a government in 1834, he, as an old anti-Reformer, had to address whether the Great Reform Act of 1832 was game for repeal. In the Tamworth Manifesto, the foundational document of the Conservative Party, Peel declared: “I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question, a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or insidious means.” Sir Keir, as he became Leader of the Opposition, had to perform the same trick. The “great constitutional question” had been resolved. Boris Johnson had won the general election; he “got Brexit done”. The second referendum gambit proved a miserable failure. It was now time, Starmer said, to move on, to “focus on the future”, to “look ahead”. These were clichés — evasive, self-exculpating clichés — but they were necessary. Without them, Starmer would have had no chance of becoming Prime Minister.

“Bregret”, though a real phenomenon, is simply no match for Brexit fatigue. It is telling that even the Liberal Democrats don’t want to open the can of worms. Their last manifesto promised to “fix the UK’s broken relationship with Europe”. This involved a “four-stage roadmap”, the fourth stage meekly “aiming” towards “seeking to rejoin the single market”. Aiming towards seeking, and not even EU membership — that was kicked into the long grass, as a vague “longer-term objective”. Jo Swinson learned the hard way the pitfalls of being a single-issue Remainer party; and Sir Ed was eager to drop that image. When the Lib Dems now urge Labour to drop their “torpor and timidity” on the EU, by which they merely mean that Labour should move to rejoin the single market, they are being timid themselves. Lord, make us an EU member — but not yet!

The most serious effort to put Rejoin on the agenda is Wes Streeting’s. This is probably a good strategy for internal party maneuvering. He lobbed it into the Makerfield by-election like a grenade; Burnham deflected it skillfully. Streeting, the shining hope of the Blairites, still found himself chided by the Master himself. “No one,” wrote Tony Blair in his essay, “was more passionately opposed to Brexit than I was.” But the negotiations, he continued, would be as backbreaking as the ones Monsieur Barnier put us through last time. Rejoin is no panacea. We should come to the negotiating table “from strength and not weakness”.

Absent any Prime Ministers past, present, or future, the case for Rejoin being made at the march in London has been left to an amateurish cadre of Remainer ultras. Their paladin — of course he is in the march’s line-up — is Steve Bray. The onetime Lib Dem candidate is infamous for his anti-Brexit campaigning stunts around Westminster; his magnum opus was when he interrupted Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a general election with “Things Can Only Get Better”. Thanks to 10 solid years of shouting “Stop Brexit!”, the poor man has become the face of the fevered mood of the late 2010s. Anthony Seldon’s new edited volume, The Brexit Effect, portrays him on the front cover, with his EU-flag cape and “Stop Brexit” top hat.

The British media has tended to cover Steve Bray as what he is: a sad, unhealthy obsessive. But he has been egged on in his pursuits, especially from abroad. In international coverage, Britain is still analyzed as “post-Brexit”; there is a general assumption that all its ills can be traced back to 2016. The idea of “Bregret” — and of a devoted, organized constituency for Rejoin — appears more often in the French and German broadsheets than it does in even The Guardian. Even in Denmark — not a country known for its sentimental Europhilia — Steve Bray is thus treated less as an odd curiosity than a serious public figure. “Steve Bray has been roaring about Brexit since the very beginning,” proclaims the Danish state broadcaster, “even when no one else could bear to hear about it.” The article goes on to suggest that this vox clamantis in deserto is being heard at last, and that when he shouts, he shouts for millions. The international Britain-watchers would be surprised, I think, by how little the Brexit debates reverberate today. Even Bray, this monomaniacal Remainer, has wider horizons. In April, as the Mandelson scandal was entering its third or fourth phase, Bray was blasting out Barry Manilow’s “Mandy”. What’s he got against the erstwhile European Commissioner for Trade? What does any of this have to do with Brexit?

The most interesting thing about Bray is that he was not political before 2016. Nothing could better encapsulate the problem with the Europhile, Remainer ideology. It has no deep roots in British culture. It was a synthetic product of the moment that followed the referendum. Practically nobody in Britain was waving around EU flags before 2016; you would have been looked at funny if you solemnly sang “Ode to Joy”. Nobody in Britain attached any romantic warmth to Brussels. But in the early hours of 24 June 2016, a kind of ethnogenesis occurred: at long last, the “British European” stepped forth. People who had never previously given much thought or care to the EU all of a sudden decided that it ought to be at the heart of their identity. It was, in a sense, a familiar, primitive impulse: initiates to the tribe marked themselves with the acronym “FBPE”, defining themselves against a Faragist outgroup. It became a powerful means of signifying what sort of person you were — softly Left, but in a “moderate”, “sensible” way; attentive to the “experts” and wary of “Russian disinformation”. Once the Remainers were routed, once Johnson had won, that Europhile ideology disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. If we do ever rejoin the EU, it will be for the hard-headed reasons we voted to remain in the EEC in 1975, the reasons most of the 48% in 2016 voted the way they did. It will have to be for banal reasons of economic security and strategic self-interest. It will be the vindication of George Osborne’s “Project Fear”, not of Steve Bray.

That is one big problem for the Rejoiners, one reason their grand vision isn’t taking off in quite the way the polls say it should. Another is that they are ideologically incapable of exploiting the situation at hand. There is obvious, tangible evidence that Brexit failed on its own terms — the Boriswave. But that is unwieldy material for Steve Bray and company. Among the Rejoiners it is an article of faith that Brexit cut Britain off from the world, reflecting and spawning an inward-looking rainy fascist island. This is hard to square with the simple fact that the government which enacted Brexit also oversaw the sharpest increase in immigration in British history. If neither side got what it wanted out of Brexit, in fact, it is natural to begin wondering whether Brexit mattered in the first place.

What a horrifying thought, perhaps the most horrifying of all, to the small group of protestors lining the streets of London 10 years after the referendum. Of course Brexit mattered: it was the point of no return in Britain’s decline, except only for the salvation offered now by Rejoin. There’s a sunk-cost fallacy: Brexit must really have mattered, or else why would these people have invested so much time and energy into fighting it? But the facts tell a different story.

Brexit was not what most of its supporters probably wanted it to be — a formal repudiation of decades of immigration policy. Nor was it what most of its opponents, in a spirit of Schadenfreude, wanted it to be — an economic catastrophe, the moment everything turned for the worse. On most economic graphs the financial crisis of 2008 appears as the real turning point. Brexit was, at most, a catalyst in Britain’s decline. Whatever economic consequences Brexit had were, in any case, swallowed up early on by the pandemic. We left the EU on 31 January 2020; 52 days later, Boris Johnson announced the lockdown. It will fall to the economic historians to disentangle the consequences of one from the other. But suffice to say, the present state of the EU hardly lends support to the notion that Britain would be doing much better if the referendum had gone the other way. Nor was Brexit especially significant constitutionally. It was not even the most constitutionally consequential referendum called by David Cameron: that accolade surely belongs to Scotland’s independence referendum two years earlier, which put a far more ancient and profound union on the line. In the years since Brexit we have discovered, much to our chagrin, that we are not as sovereign as the Leavers would have had us believe. We may be free from Brussels, but we are still shackled to Strasbourg. Theresa May was wrong about many things; but she might have been on to something when she laid down the bargain in 2016 of Britain remaining in the EU and leaving the ECHR. Remove all the passions of 2016–9, enter the cold light of day, and Brexit doesn’t seem to matter as much as everyone thought it did.

This, I think, is the conclusion that most people in Britain, Remainers and Leavers, have surreptitiously come to. Perhaps 55% of the British public really would rejoin the EU, if they could flick a switch and make it so. But how many would rank it in their top five or 10 priorities? How many really think, the way most people on the continent seem to, that Brexit was the defining moment in Britain’s recent history, that 2016 offers the master-key for understanding all that has happened since? Probably not many. What people wanted in 2019 — even many Remainers — was to “get Brexit done”; they were bored of it all, and there is no sign whatsoever that that boredom has abated. There is no clamoring, except from this small band of Rejoiners, for returning Brexit to the center of the national drama. It is bizarre, in retrospect, how much symbolic significance was attached to Brexit while these debates were occurring. It is quaint to recall how these arcane questions were indulged in, and with such gusto, all on the precipice of what proved to be a far greater crisis — the pandemic and lockdown. Hence the instinct, when beholding Steve Bray and his ilk, to feel a mixture of bemusement and pity. They are the only ones still fighting those old battles. The country, including Andy Burnham, has moved on. We are left to wonder not only why these people still care so much, but why the rest of us ever did.

Perhaps England’s beleaguered Protestants have just become inured. Already in the Nineties, Tony Blair was a crypto-Catholic leader, straight out of the pages of 17th-century polemic. As with the Stuart monarchs, or King Ahab, it was the wife what got him. Everyone knew that Cherie took her Catholicism seriously, and that the children were being raised in her faith. But Blair himself, across his 10 years in office, purported to conform to the established Church. He converted just months after leaving Downing Street and one needn’t be Titus Oates to suspect that he had been moving in that direction for a long time. When he prayed on the eve of the Iraq invasion, might he have been thinking unreformed thoughts?

Blair’s reticence on spiritual matters prevented him from claiming the distinction of Britain’s first Catholic prime minister. The distinction is genuinely significant, given that Britain was — and still officially is — a Protestant nation, forged in the crucible of confessional controversy. No, the accolade of being Britain’s “Catholic Obama” descends upon, of all people, Boris Johnson. He cut a different kind of early-modern figure to Blair, a reverse Henry VIII. Baptised a Catholic, he entered the Church of England while at Eton, presumably as part of the High Tory shtick he was then busy cultivating. His first two marriages were not officiated in the Catholic manner. Canon law thus exonerated him on the adultery charges; technically, in the eyes of the Vatican, the two-time divorcé was a lifelong bachelor. Reverting to his childhood faith, he was thus permitted to marry Carrie, his Anne Boleyn, at Westminster Cathedral in 2021.

And now Britain, which has never knowingly elected a Catholic Prime Minister, might soon have another. Andy Burnham was an altar boy. His power base in the Northwest always was a hotbed of Romanism. In the 17th century, Thomas Fuller described the people of western Lancashire as “Popishly affected”. When Sir Henry Spiller went to inspect the county in 1621, he found no fewer than 1,800 recusants. Far from the gaze of Protestant London, it was fertile ground for Jesuits. One priest — a cousin of Guy Fawkes — wrote in 1600 that “Catholics are so numerous that priests can wander through the villages and countryside with the utmost freedom”. Manchester, for its part, was a Jacobite stronghold; it provided the only English regiment in the 1745 rising. The Catholic identity of this part of England was bolstered further in the 19th century by an influx of Irish immigration. Even today, the Northwest remains England’s most Catholic region. If Burnham pulls off the long march from Makerfield to Westminster, he will succeed where Guy Fawkes and Bonnie Prince Charlie failed.

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Though he might have lost out on being the first Catholic Prime Minister, Burnham will be the first to be meaningfully shaped by the religion, and the first to enter Downing Street with a strong British Catholic identity. A decisive personality in his formative years was Derek Worlock, the liberal, anti-Thatcher, ecumenically-minded archbishop of Liverpool. Burnham once remarked that the “political implementation” of Worlock’s teaching was the Labour Party, which he signed up aged 15. Burnham’s politics and his Catholicism were thus always closely linked.

Burnham, like many on the Left, has nonetheless had his difficulties with the Church. In 2015 he confessed that he was struggling with its “obsession with sexuality”. He waxed nostalgic about the Catholicism of his childhood, of Archbishop Worlock and John Paul II, who visited Liverpool when he was a boy. The Church that he had grown up in was “quite forgiving… quite humane, humorous, irreverent”. Things began to sour in 2005, when Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI and brought a “more judgemental mode” to the papal chair. Yet even Ratzinger’s conservatism could not dent Burnham’s long-held belief that the purpose of the Labour Party was to do God’s work on earth. “The basic tenets of the Labour Party and socialism”, he declared during his first leadership bid in 2010, “are one and the same with those of Christianity”.

There, he was giving voice to a longstanding position within British Catholicism. Thanks to the Irish connection, a general feeling of being outsiders, and a traditional suspicion of liberal and capitalist excesses, British Catholics have tended to lean Left. Catholics have broken for Labour in almost every postwar general election. In fact, it is quite surprising that Labour has never had a Catholic leader (putting aside the special case of Blair). Several have come close: Roy Hattersley, the son of a lapsed priest, wrote a history of the Catholics in Britain; John McDonnell, though now an atheist, speaks about the impact of his Catholic upbringing on his worldview. Yet there is a tendency within Labour to view religious Catholics with suspicion. In 2020 Rebecca Long-Bailey landed in some hot water when it became known that she harbored personal views about abortion, rooted in her Catholic faith, which were at odds with those of the Party. Catholic identity — especially an Irish Catholic identity — might go along well with the modern Labour Party; Catholic beliefs, however, generally do not.

Burnham Country was not only the most Catholic part of England; it was also one of the last parts of England where religion continued to matter. It was the region of England most prone to sectarian violence. Liverpool, the city of Burnham’s birth, was the closest England had to a Glasgow or Belfast. In 1819, an Orange procession in the city caused a riot; 90 years later a Catholic procession culminated in hundreds of injuries and 50 arrests. The only Irish Nationalist MP sent to Westminster from a non-Irish constituency was Liverpool’s T.P. O’Connor. These divisions were still festering when Burnham was born. When his non-Catholic father first met the family of his Catholic mother, he was worried that confessional divides would prove an issue. Thankfully, they were able to find common ground in their shared support for Everton FC.

Football, to use that cliché about modern Britain, and Liverpool especially, is really Burnham’s religion. In 2023, reconciled with the Church of his childhood, he beamingly presented the football-mad Pope Francis with a Manchester United shirt, signed by the Argentine center-back Lisandro Martínez. His campaigning material in Makerfield makes much more reference to football than God. Burnham once said that the most important things in his life, apart from family, were “Everton FC, the Labour Party and the Catholic church — in that order”.

Is it significant that Everton is traditionally regarded as the “Catholic team” in the Merseyside derby? The idea that the rivalry between Everton and Liverpool mirrored that between Catholic and Protestant — an English “Old Firm” — seems to be a myth. Both teams can be traced to a Methodist congregation in the later 19th century; Everton’s first club president was an Orangeman. Still, the myth was widely believed when Burnham was growing up, and he subscribes to it.

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By Samuel Rubinstein

The sectarianism that supposedly once clung to the Merseyside derby, Burnham has said, may have “gone with the mists of time”: but still he has never met a Catholic priest who was a Red. The Eighties, the decade of Thatcher and the Hillsborough disaster, witnessed the formation of Burnham’s worldview, based upon a distinct Northwest identity. “In the 1986 final at Wembley” — Liverpool v. Everton — “everybody sang ‘Merseyside’”. His part of England, though divided by football and religion, finds it must unite against a common enemy: “the London media, Thatcher, the establishment”.

All this serves to give the Northwest a Left-wing, anti-establishment identity, which Burnham taps into. This identity is closely linked to the region’s historic Catholicism; and hence, Burnham’s own cultural Catholicism adds to his carefully constructed image. Cilla Black remarked in 2002 that “in Liverpool… most Protestants were Conservative and most Catholics were Labour, just as Everton was the Catholic team and Liverpool the ‘Proddy-Dog’ one”. The second of those ideas might be a fiction; the first definitely isn’t. It was due in part to strong Protestant (and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish) feeling that Liverpool was solidly Tory for much of the 20th century. When Burnham speaks as though the Northwest is uniformly Left-wing, and that Left-wing values are intrinsically Manchester (or Liverpool) values, really he is appealing to a Catholic history and identity.

Either way, England’s Protestant patriots can breathe a sigh of relief: if the Catholic conquest comes, it will not bring with it much by way of doctrine. Indeed, due largely to the triumph of social liberalism within the Labour Party, British Catholics are no longer even a reliable Labour bloc. They struggle to reconcile their conservatism with Labour policy: Long-Bailey’s struggles aside, Stella Creasy’s successful push for the partial decriminalization of abortion, and Kim Leadbeater’s unsuccessful one for the legalization of assisted suicide, were never likely to keep them red. Burnham abstained on euthanasia when he was an MP, but he appears now to lean in favor. If, as prime minister, he reopens that can of worms, we could witness something similar to various episodes from the Biden presidency, where a socially liberal Catholic leader gets into awkward public conflict with the authorities of his own Church. We might then find that a Catholic Labour prime minister does nothing to arrest the trickling away of British Catholics from the Party. The political implications here will, in any case, be narrowly intra-Catholic ones. They will be of no interest to the non-Catholic and non-religious majority. Once a Roman Catholic prime minister would have been met with cries of “No Popery!”; the striking thing today is how little anyone cares. We have become men, and put away childish things.

But soon enough it became obvious, even within the bubble, that Nowak was not just a murdered teenager but a moment, a moment demanding a response. After days of trying to quell the situation, Sir Keir Starmer has hosted the Nowak family at Downing Street. Yet the response so far has generally been half-baked. There are vague references to avoiding “division”, indistinguishable from what came in the wake of Manchester and Southport. There seems to be no effort whatsoever to grapple with the — admittedly difficult — facts of the case. Nigel Farage has been met with incoherent screeching. It is seriously suggested that his call for “pure, cold rage” somehow “incited” yobs to hurl bins at discombobulated bobbies. “Eleven police officers were injured during unrest in Southampton last night”, said James O’Brien: “is that cold enough for you?” One wonders what he thinks “cold” means. Starmer called Farage’s “appeal for rage… unforgivable”, but he feels angry all the time. The Mandelson rigmarole made him “absolutely furious”. Does the murder of Nowak make him furious? Does it not fill him with pure, cold rage?  

The bubble’s response is awash with deflection and denial. Their Hail Mary is that we all have goldfish memories, or that we will have the good graces to forget the events of the past six years. “Beware those cunningly politicising people’s pain,” said Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi MP. In 2020 he wrote that “we cannot allow #GeorgeFloyd to become merely another statistic, but need structural change to ensure a better society for all”. Not only do calls for “structural change” now fall on deaf ears: you are guilty of “sowing division” or “politicising pain” if you dare to make them.

The government’s effort to cast “two-tier policing” as a crankish conspiracy theory also rests on some forlorn hope of collective amnesia. In 2020, it was unilaterally decreed that the police should junk color-blindness as an ideal. They were foolhardy enough to put this in writing: “Our commitment to racial equity… does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind’.” Shabana Mahmood recently had to intervene to ensure that the sentencing guidelines would not grant special leniency to ethnic minorities. Now they have the temerity to say that the very notion of two-tier justice is a far-Right fantasy, that the only reason anybody in Britain believes it is Elon Musk. I have always disliked that voguish and overused term, “gaslighting”: gaslighting is simply lying, and usually bad lying at that. The “politics bubble” response to Nowak’s murder, their flat-out denial of two-tier policing, isn’t making us question our own sanity. We are only questioning theirs. 

It has become the standard position of the “politics bubble” that now is not a good time to speak about the Nowak murder. This is the gist of Starmer’s response to Farage, and of the calls from various quarters against “politicizing” something that is, apparently, otherwise non-political. It is deemed improper or uncivil to try to draw any lessons from it at all. Instead we are told that the tragedy should not be “politicized” because this would be disrespecting the wishes of a grieving family. What kind of sick person would do that? Only “scum”, wrote Dan Hodges — a rather divisive word. Drawing a leaf from this book, Robert Peston asked Farage: “Why does the family of Henry Nowak mean nothing to you?” The strategy has ascended now to the highest level, to be limply deployed by the prime minister at PMQs. Rage, Starmer declared: that is Farage’s “response to a father who’s lost his son and asked for that not to happen”. 

The strategy is selective. We have heard much in recent days about “exploiting” and “weaponizing”: the bubble is exploiting and weaponizing people’s compassion. They are demanding that total deference be paid to the wishes — or, rather, what they purport to be the wishes — of a family that has been through unspeakable anguish. But no such deference has ever been paid to the family of Rhiannon Whyte, stabbed to death with a screwdriver by an asylum seeker in 2024. Her grieving mother has said that Starmer has “blood on his hands”; her message, that we should stop the boats, remains unheeded. Sir David Amess MP was murdered by an Islamist extremist in 2021. His daughter has been repeatedly appealing to Downing Street for a public inquiry. Starmer still has not commissioned one: Katie Amess says he has “just ignored us”. 

If the wishes of grieving families risk posing any challenge to the status quo, then they are ignored; if they fit the agenda, then they can be indulged. Recent years have seen a spate of “[victim’s name] Laws”, kneejerk responses to heart-wrenching tragedies, usually ill-conceived. Martyn’s Law, named after a victim of the Manchester arena bombing, is costing businesses billions, and does nothing to address the actual cause of the attack. It is not hard to see why these laws sail through parliament; who would dare set themselves against a dead child? These quick fixes duck thorny questions about immigration, integration, and crime, and bring governments back into their comfort zone: burdening businesses with statutory obligations and red tape. These laws, like the mawkish appeals now to the wishes of Nowak’s family, are examples of what Madeleine Grant calls “tweeslop”, a “mobilization of the British people’s worst instincts for sentimentality and self-congratulation”. It is, we might say, the British vice. 

The bubble repeats ad nauseam a single sentence from the statement given outside the court by Nowak’s father. It is the only part of his remarks which has garnered attention: “We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension.” The statement as a whole, however, makes perfectly clear that the Nowak family does think the murder has a political dimension. In fact it strays quite close, in places, to talk of two-tier policing, dwelling on the difference between the police’s treatment of Digwa and of Nowak. In calling for “stronger action” on the “ownership and carrying of all knives”, it seems to suggest removing the legal exemptions given to religious Sikhs. The family urges a “common sense approach to law and order”: “common sense” always was, in ordinary parlance, the antithesis to “woke”. 

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But let us suppose for a moment that the Nowak family really did want the murder to be kept out of “politics” altogether. Of course we must feel sympathy for a grieving family; but sympathy cannot be our only feeling. Victims’ families do not have a monopoly on our response to a crime. It is wrong to suggest that a grieving family ought to dictate the parameters of public conversation. To grant them such a thing would be to dissolve a foundational premise of our criminal law. Crimes are not just crimes against a person or a person’s family: they are crimes against the crown, breaches of the king’s peace, attacks on the very fabric of society, attacks against us all. There is a good reason that the case which convicted Nowak’s murderer is R. v. Digwa, rather than The Nowak Family v. Digwa.

These appeals to the supposed wishes of the Nowak family rest on the old logic of the clan. Someone from Family X kills someone from Family Y; then Family Y determines how to respond. The patriarch of Family Y, in the Nowak case, has issued (what is held to be) his definitive response; now the rest of us ought to quiet down and move on. This seems to be the government’s position. But, to put it bluntly, that is not how we do things. It is not how we have done things since the very early Middle Ages. Our systems of criminal justice moved past the feud a long time ago. We moved past it when the family or the clan forfeited its traditional monopoly; when it came to accept, in other words, that any crime is inherently political, that everyone else in society has an interest in punishing and preventing it.

 We know, of course, that not all cultures work this way. The logic of the clan and the feud predominate in many parts of the world. It is especially important to reject the clan logic in this instance, because that very logic was at play in the murder of Nowak. The family of Vickrum Digwa embodies the alternative theory of justice which England overcame long ago. Crime, for the Digwa family, really was non-political. Finding their son committing a murder — catching him red-handed — they felt no higher obligation to the state, to the crown, to the king’s peace, to British society. The mother hid the weapon. The brother spun a cover story. Even after Digwa’s conviction, they shouted at Nowak’s family in court. They resented that the case had ever got to court. Perhaps they thought the murder ought to have remained a private, family matter. 

These appeals to the wishes of families are appeals to clan logic; and if clan logic is now infiltrating wider British society, it makes sense that it should do so via emotional manipulation, to which Britain is so susceptible. The appeals are designed to banish avoidable events from the realm of the political: that is the plain meaning of “politicize” as a verb of disapproval. They turn human tragedies into acts of God, about which nothing can be done save a sigh and a sob. The British mainstream has always liked to tut at those Right-wing Americans who traffic in “thoughts and prayers” after every school shooting. But the “politics bubble” could hardly be clearer: there is to be no talk of radically overhauling the police, of abolishing “two-tier” justice, of restoring an older, liberal ideal of treating people as individuals rather than members of groups, of defining anti-racism in terms of color-blindness. There is, in the “politics bubble”, supposed to be no political talk at all. “Thoughts and prayers” are reassuringly inert and inoffensive. “Thoughts and prayers” are what they’re after. But “thoughts and prayers” do not meet the moment. And they will not spare other families from the devastation that has torn through Henry Nowak’s.  

How much ink has been spilled, in recent months, on the matter of “Anglo-Gaullism”? Here he is, at last, le Général — and he was under our noses all along! The actual policies of de Gaulle, his “certain idea of France”, all this was only secondary. The real lesson of Gaullism is this: when the state is on the edge of crisis, when it is crying out for a radical reimagining, it is best to entrust power to one who has already proved his mettle.

Tony Blair has proved his mettle. We want economic growth, political stability, and a state that can do things; he brought us all these things before, and he can do so again. Iraq might have been a catastrophe, but other countries know the benign power of his touch. Perhaps soon our cityscapes will contain his statues; perhaps our own playgrounds will teem with “Toniblers”.

Of course, we know it cannot be. Blair is unpopular, we are told, hated by the Left for Iraq, by the Right for the constitutional mess he left behind, and by both for the globalism he let rip. He continues to make fortunes from dodgy regimes and multinational companies who pay him for his advice. He was the future once, people say; he is now best left in the past. And yet the sound of him on the radio, deftly batting away Nick Robinson’s questions and presenting a considered plan for government, cannot help but make the heart flutter. The way he speaks about Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, those misguided little pipsqueaks, calls to mind that irritating centrist cliché of the “adults in the room”. He has aged graciously, and his years of rest have served him well — one gets the sense (thanks perhaps to his Big Tech, jet-setter lifestyle) that he is really plugged into the world, that he knows what it’s all about. Surely it is time to state the obvious without shame: the argument for his return has become impossible to ignore.

The Labour Party is searching for a Prime Minister who can do the job and win elections. Blair can do the job, is more popular nationally than Starmer, and would demolish any rival in a debate. He is not a sitting MP, but Andy Burnham shows us that this needn’t be an obstacle. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; surely we can find him a safe by-election.

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It’s one of those events which, were it to occur, would somehow command that powerful feeling of inevitability. Ten years in power never was enough; “the Master” was always meant to be one of those political titans who bestrides generations. It was only the pettiness of Gordon Brown (and the bellicosity of George W. Bush) that cut his time short; it was only the pettiness of two subsequent Labour leaders that kept him out of the political discussion. The old cadre of Blairites, in their wilderness years, spoke of him as though he was the Mahdi in occultation. His spirit was present in Chuka Umunna and “Change UK”; Lord Adonis was a one-man “Bring Back Blair” brigade. In 2021 it was reported, to the excitement of SW1, that Blair was “on the verge of a comeback”. Here, at last, it is.

That comeback, a 5,700-word essay, may not appeal to the soggy center. It is not a hodgepodge of clichés about “moderation” and the “sensible center ground”. It says nothing about “polarization”, “extremism”, or some abstract, demonic force named “hate”. Blair’s “Radical Centrism” is not fence-sitting Lib Demmery — at one point he takes an easy shot at the Lib Dems. It is not the centrism of The Rest Is Politics, which makes a fetish out of umm-ing and ahh-ing before concluding that we should all be nice.

Blair’s centrism is a promiscuous sort: he picks up ideas wherever he finds them and takes them back home. He was never afraid to break the Left-wing shibboleths of his own party; he is not afraid to break “centrist” shibboleths, either. He confesses an admiration for Donald Trump; he wants to abandon Net Zero; when he says that the small boats must be dealt with “whatever it takes”, he hints that Britain should leave the ECHR. He does not speak histrionically about Reform meaning the End of Britain. He struck the right note on the trans question well before For Women Scotland, while much of the “sensible center” was busy defending the indefensible. He is clear-minded about the world. When he wrote an essay on antisemitism for The Free Press, he did not duck away from something that many of his political tribe would fear to address head-on. Antisemitism in the British Muslim community, he straightforwardly declared, is “frankly unacceptable”. Whatever charges Dominic Cummings might lay at Blair’s feet, he cannot call him an “NPC”.

Although Blair remains true as ever to the Atlanticism that wreaked disaster in Iraq, his essay may reveal some ambivalence about the constitutional reforms which his governments engineered. Given his emphasis on state capacity, he must regret some of the ways he diluted Westminster’s power and outsourced decisions and responsibilities to quangos, judges, and devolved administrations. Before the Blairite restoration, there ought perhaps to be some public statement of contrition. But if we could forgive Churchill for Gallipoli, we can surely forgive Blair this.

Perhaps we are prone to romanticizing the politicians of the past, but that tendency needn’t be wrong. Blair might not hold a candle to Churchill, who might not hold a candle to Disraeli. But nobody today — not Starmer, not Burnham, not Wes Streeting — can hold a candle to Blair.

If certain journalists are doing their Blair love-in, it’s safe to say that their feelings aren’t reciprocated. Their coverage of politics is a key part of Blair’s complaint. The media has helped to force politicians into a “24-hour pressure cooker”, which prevents them from seeing and studying the world. Blair is frustrated that “politics” seems now to mean Chris Mason and Beth Rigby, having got a taste of blood in Partygate, hunting after more Prime Ministerial scalps. What will people in the future make of the fact that, on the eve of one of the great world-historic revolutions, the arrival of AI, Britain’s chattering classes were obsessing over Peter Mandelson, Olly Robbins, and Lord Alli’s suits?

Blair offers a strong analysis for the collapse of the present government. A classic insult hurled at Sir Keir is that he was a “technocrat”. It sounds right. He looks the part, and has the CV to match. Perhaps this image helped him win the 2024 election. But really, as Blair says, the problem with Starmer is that he is given to the Labour Party’s fits of passion and delusion. Arriving in Downing Street without any clear vision of his own, he made himself the tool of deeper forces. The few times he has tried to break out of the Labour Party’s rigid cast of mind — winter fuel allowance, benefits reform — he has been beaten into submission by angry backbenchers. A good Labour leader would have put them in their place, but Starmer never had much authority to do so. Most Labour MPs in 1997 were acutely aware that they owed their victory to Blair. His strategies and gambles paid off. They were not “Labour MPs”, elected to do vague Labourish things. They were New Labour MPs, and they were elected to do Blair’s bidding.

Sir Keir has never established his authority in this way. He purged Corbyn, and he was to be rewarded by the electorate for doing so. Labour badly needed a rebrand after 2019, and Sir Keir gave it one. But it was only superficial; it never ascended to the realm of ideas. New Labour figures were summoned from the past — some, such as Peter Mandelson, fatefully. But New Labour was never emphatically asserted as the correct path, intellectually as well as electorally.

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There is a revealing part of Blair’s essay where he describes meeting with Labour people before 2024. He asked them whether they were Old Labour or New Labour. The most common answer was that they rejected those categories; they were “Just Labour”. For the last two years we have had a “Just Labour” government. Starmer has implemented a Left-wing manifesto. That is true both tangibly — abolishing the two-child benefit cap, beefing up renters’ rights — and on the no less significant plane of symbolism: recognizing the state of Palestine, finishing Blair’s job in the House of Lords. And, as a token of thanks, the soft Left is scheming against him, all in favor of someone who did not even compete in the 2024 election, and can claim no part in Labour’s landslide victory. The Prime Minister, as his predecessor suggests, “totters in the breeze”. The backbenchers see this and know how to exploit it. Starmer had a mandate, but he never articulated what he had a mandate to do. Blair would have been less cautious, more forthcoming. He would have purged Corbyn, and he would have repudiated Corbynism. He would have told the party, and then the country, that they had bitter pills to swallow. They would, in the fullness of time, have to do some un-Labourish things; they would have to scrap the triple lock and Net Zero, water down the welfare state, make an accommodation with Trump, and turn the bulk of their attention to AI. Perhaps Blair, if given such a chance, would have won fewer seats at the election — but a massive majority has hardly been of much good to Starmer.

Britain faces a crisis of seriousness. We are becoming an unserious country. Blair is right to say that only an unserious country would cycle through seven Prime Ministers in ten years; only an unserious country would, as Blair says we are projected to do, spend more on disability benefits than defense. In happier times the priorities of government could be “education, education, education”. Such priorities presuppose that a government is capable of forming a clear vision, and then using its means to realize it. We cannot take these things for granted anymore. Blair is right that the priority today can only be efficacy, efficacy, efficacy.

The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke once remarked that the Prussian King Frederick William III, who was crushed by Napoleon, “seemed as if made to lead a well-ordered middling state honorably through quiet times”. These are not quiet times. It is a stroke of bad historical fortune that Starmer couldn’t have been Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007, and Blair Prime Minister today; each would have suited that moment better than the one they got. Starmer could have had that Love, Actually moment with an American president, refusing to send British troops to Iraq: he was a young and dashing human rights lawyer back then, as though plucked from a Richard Curtis romcom. Blair ripped apart a working constitution without due care; there is plenty of cause today to take a Jacobin chainsaw to the state. Blair developed a vision of social democracy that was committed to business, growth, and the extraordinary potential of technology; such a vision now is more needed than ever.

It’s not too late. Blair is a sprightly 73, a year younger than Lord Palmerston was when he began his second term as Prime Minister, over a decade younger than Gladstone during his final stint in Downing Street and five years younger than the American president was when elected for a second time. He is our Général de Gaulle; he is our Grand Old Man. We need him more than the Gazans do. Bring him back.

When, exactly, did the term “national treasure” come to mean persons rather than things? In its bald sense it refers simply to the state finances: there is a government ministry called the Treasury, and it stands to reason that the Treasury controlled the “national treasure”. But Jane Austen’s ring has also been proclaimed a national treasure. The status can carry an official meaning: these items are deemed to be of such value that they are not to be removed from our soil. It is only natural now to stretch the term to any item, tangible or not, liable to kindle some feeling of patriotic warmth: if Austen’s ring can be called a national treasure, then why not each of her novels? From there, in turn, it’s only a small step towards asking: why not Austen herself?

To be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, one first has to be dead. We used to hold our national treasures to a similar standard. In a speech of 1984, a close ally of Margaret Thatcher’s, Lord McAlpine, made the case for the rights of the living. “If we were in Japan,” he declared — a country famous for its culture of deference — “many of our artists would, even in their own lifetimes, be called living national treasures.” But, he lamented, in Britain we are “more timid about rushing to such judgments”.

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Lord McAlpine got his way in the end: that timidity no longer afflicts us. Our national treasures don’t need to be dead — though it helps if they aren’t far off. The 2000s and 2010s spawned an entire pantheon of “national treasures”, spurred on by the twee sentimentalism that suffused popular culture around that time. The gray and gritty Daniel Craig-era of James Bond gave us, as a sop, Dame Judi Dench; The Great British Bake-Off treated us to the whimsically innuendo-prone Mary Berry; the Harry Potter films brought international stardom to the wizened sages of the British stage. To console the nation through the drab stretches of lockdown, Captain Sir Tom was summoned back from our Finest Hour.

No one was safe. Not even Tony Benn — once described as the “most dangerous man in Britain” — could escape “national treasure” status when it called out to him in his final years. Benn still thought of himself still as a firebrand and chafed against it. “If I’m a national treasure in the Telegraph,” he said, “something’s gone wrong.” To be designated a national treasure, as Benn recognized, carries an air of condescension: it turns complex people into Paddington Bear. National treasures exist in order to give us nostalgic comfort: their task is to serve as “living links” with better times. Many other cultures have “community elders”: in Britain we like to think that they are under collective ownership. A national treasure is a public good. He or she belongs to us.

At the head of the pantheon, surpassing even the late Queen, Attenborough presides. In the run-up to his 100th birthday tomorrow, the homages have already been coming in thick and fast; there has been suggestion in parliament of building a “permanent public monument” in his honor. There is a sense, as there was with the late Queen, that the public needs to take a deep breath in preparation for the inevitable. In the first episode of the British SNL, Attenborough sits as Christ at a Last Supper of “history’s greatest Britons”. “I’m David Attenborough,” the sketch begins, “and it can’t be long now.”

Attenborough is the safe pick for those boring questions about whom you would invite to your dream dinner party; the people who give him as their answer are the equivalents of men who say Margot Robbie is their celebrity crush. Who ought to replace Churchill on the £5 note? Knowing now that they wouldn’t be allowed “Money McMoneyface”, the British public opts for Paddington Bear, the Sycamore Gap tree (†), or, of all the human options, Sir David Attenborough.

For his part, Attenborough is bemused by all the veneration. Asked on Desert Island Discs whether he feels any pressure being one of those “public figures with that rare unimpeachable quality”, he wittily retorts, “I’m very peachable, if people know how to peach”. It can seem at times that he alone has inherited all the positive feelings that once attached to his lifetime employer, the BBC. The BBC is still riding on the coattails of its mid-century highpoint, and Attenborough has helped to stretch it into the present. The mere existence of a state broadcaster is predicated on the notion that there remains such a thing as a coherent “national life”. David Attenborough is the old BBC made flesh — gentle, informative, and above all, unifying.

He is also a relic of a time which was at once comfy and exciting, when English boys in khaki shorts cycled around the countryside collecting ammonites and inspecting slow worms. He is an unmistakably conservative figure, conjured up from our mythical past. His Britain was an imperial Britain, in that Scouting for Boys kind of way; his BBC, likewise, was in its Reithian pomp, before the brand had been blighted by controversy and scandal. He is the last in Britain’s storied tradition of natural history, going back to Darwin; he is that familiar figure, the eccentric collector, driven through life by a childlike curiosity about the world. What people liked to say of his exact contemporary, the Queen — that she somehow embodied an entire chapter of British life — has always been much truer of him.

Attenborough sums up the trajectory and aspirations of Britain’s intellectual middle classes in the 20th century. His mother was a suffragette and campaigner for the rights and welfare of refugee children; they welcomed in two Jewish girls during War. His father went from being a Cambridge don to administering one of the newly sprung semi-universities, University College, Leicester. David, the middle son, continued his father’s project of democratizing education — bringing knowledge now not just to the provinces, but into the homes of ordinary people through the new medium of television. Attenborough embodies a certain reverence for television, and for the BBC, as a truly national institution, above all. As controller of BBC Two, he brought to the screens such milestones as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Remove all his nature programs, and he still would have made a profound imprint on British culture.

The BBC must be relieved that Attenborough tends to avoid sensitive subject-matter. The issue on which he is most outspoken, the environment, seems somehow to befit a national treasure: we British, after all, pride ourselves on our love of nature and animals. When Attenborough does wade in on such issues as immigration, as in 2016, he does not always toe the line: part of his success might owe to the fact that he is more aligned than other “national treasures” with the sentiments of the British public. But in all his career he has only ever had one small brush with controversy, and a rather minor one at that. It came in 2013, in an interview with the Telegraph. “What are all these famines in Ethiopia?”, he asked, “what are they about? They’re about too many people for too little land.” As such, it was “barmy” for the UN to send bags of flour as humanitarian aid: better to let them starve, to let the Malthusian process take its course. He knows that such a position can seem callous and unpopular. But overpopulation is, in his view, at the root of all the world’s problems, and so it is important to “just keep on about it”.

And so he has. A Life on Our Planet begins each part with statistics showing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the percentage of the planet still covered by wilderness — and then the total human population, as though this is also an obvious index of the brewing catastrophe. In 2018 he declared before the World Economic Forum that the planet “can’t cope” with overpopulation. The “cure” would either be meted out by nature, through famine or disease, or else we shall have to take matters into our own hands.

Attenborough is faithful to an old sort of environmentalism, the environmentalism of the late Paul Ehrlich. He shares it, in fact, with the Royal Family. Prince Philip infamously hoped to be reincarnated as a deadly virus, “to contribute something to the problem of overpopulation”. His son thought similarly. In 1970, Charles, freshly minted as Prince of Wales, delivered a speech in his principality concerning the environment. Fifty years later, in 2020, he reflected on it in a video posted to the official Royal Family YouTube channel. That video was intended as a kind of “I told you so”, a means of showing how much he had always been ahead of the curve. It is telling, though, what Charles chose not to revisit. In 1970, he had said “in many places the number of people is increasing faster than the resources of the local environment can cope”, and referred ominously to two possible solutions to the problem. “One is that nothing need be done about population because nature is bound to react by producing a particularly virulent plague or virus” — nature, here, is imagined as a particularly vindictive god. The other is that “something certainly needs to be done by man to prevent his overpopulation”. Such sentiments have been cautiously omitted from his more recent public musings.

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By Samuel Rubinstein

That entire line of thinking has gone out of fashion now. What, after all, can man do to prevent his overpopulation? One thinks immediately of Indira Gandhi’s vicious program of mass sterilization, or China’s disastrous one-child policy. The argument also, especially when departing royal mouths, has an unsettlingly aristocratic ring to it, as though one is speaking about culling deer on the Balmoral estate. Most importantly, though, it has simply been proved wrong by events. The extraordinary rise in the world population has not brought the catastrophe which Ehrlich confidently predicted. On the contrary: living standards across the world have improved. The problem facing us now, it is widely agreed — especially in the West, with our low fertility rates — is depopulation, not overpopulation. Even in poorer parts of the world, the size of the population is expected to plateau.

Still Attenborough cleaves to the old doctrine, if now he is careful to express himself in a circumspect manner. In his dotage, the BBC has done its best to massage his ideas about the environment, to try to co-opt them and tailor them to the fashionable green politics of the present. They play his earnest and long-held beliefs to their own advantage; it does not matter, in the end, that his environmentalism is of a fundamentally different nature from the kind that prevails among young people today. Before she embarked on her new life on the high seas, the BBC made a documentary about Greta Thunberg, A Year to Change the World. The crucial moment involves Thunberg meeting Attenborough. It is presented as the passing of a baton from the old to the young, a jedi training up his padawan. The set-piece also allowed the BBC to pat itself on the back — to claim, like the Royal Family, that on the hot-button and cutting-edge issue of the environment, they have always been one step ahead. Would Thunberg support withholding aid from starving populations, in order to let nature take its course? It strikes me as doubtful. But no matter. The point was to make Attenborough some kind of national prophet. It was to put him at the very center of Britain’s moral and national life, through all its fluctuations and upheavals. That might always have been too much weight for any mortal man to bear. And the BBC’s own claim to its centrality in British life, once unchallenged, now hangs by a thin, 100-year-old thread.

By the usual scholarly standard, Hungary: A Short History (2018) was a failure. But it doesn’t take much for the reader to figure out its real purpose. Early on in the book, Stone recalls that he knew the then-Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, back when he was a student at Oxford in the Eighties: “he has gone on to great things.” Among the pictures inserted in the book are two showing Orbán at different stages of his dramatic political ascent. The point of the book is to present Orbán as the happy culmination of Hungary’s unhappy history. Orbán had fought valiantly against “Official Europe”; he fought, during the migrant crisis of 2015-16, for “national survival”. Hungary, Stone explains, “had already had a Moslem occupation”, under the Ottomans. If Hungarians had now been delivered from such a calamity a second time, they had Orbán to thank.

Norman Stone died in Budapest — and where else? Conservative intellectuals in the 2010s swam the Danube as surely as now they swim the Tiber. What Berlin was around this time for anxious, artsy, digital nomads, Budapest was for the kinds of people who love Wagner and hate brutalism. In both cases, the expats gained local infamy for never learning the language; Stone, a virtuoso polyglot who knew Hungarian already, was atypical in this respect. Stone had advised Thatcher on European affairs; he spent his final years as an affiliate of the Danube Institute, run by another alumnus of Thatcher’s Downing Street, John O’Sullivan. 

As the Right-wing intellectuals began to move in a more postliberal (and Catholic) direction, the “illiberal democracy” which Orbán was building in Hungary became all the more alluring. Here, the Postliberal International crowed, was a little beacon of hope, a flicker of that old Europe, which elsewhere had been trampled over by Brussels and modernity. Hungary was a quaint little land, a land of Baroque castles, folk dance, and King Saint Stephen. It was a land filled with common sense, oikophilia, and serious Roman Catholicism, as embodied by that most serious papabile, Cardinal Erdő.

No matter that Hungary is less Christian (42.5%) than even Vermont, America’s least Christian state (45%). No matter that Hungary’s fertility, for all Orbán’s much-hyped “family policy”, is about the same as Britain’s, pitifully beneath the replacement rate. No matter that Hungary is one of the poorest countries in the EU — indeed, for a certain kind of postliberal, this is really rather a good thing, because poverty is godly, a triumph over luxury and Mammon. Orbán earned the praise of the Right-wing intellectuals by securing the border, by taking the fight to Brussels, by banning same-sex marriage, and, more recently, by making overtures to Putin. He kept them warm with talk of culture, values, and God.

Orbán’s Budapest had pretty cathedrals and “Scruton Cafés”; it had Old World gentility and Mitteleuropa charm. It had, too, the finest (and best-funded) network of Right-wing think tanks and institutes anywhere in the world outside America. In his master’s thesis, Orbán dealt with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci: he understood that the populist Right needs “organic intellectuals” of its own, and that it needs to aspire to cultural hegemony. From his firsthand experience of communism, he knew what cultural and intellectual power the state could wield, and the urgent need for the Right’s own patronage network. So he set about building an entire ecosystem from the ground up. Aside from the Danube Institute, there is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private university and talent incubator. Orbán’s government gave it $1.7 billion— 1% of the country’s GDP — and a satellite in Brussels, for the purpose of monitoring the beast up close. Orbánist postliberalism was becoming a globe-spanning enterprise. It was to rival goulash and the Rubik’s Cube as Hungary’s top cultural export.

“In 1989, we thought Europe was our future,” Orbán declared in 2019. “Today, we know that we are the future of Europe.” It was a tremendous weight to place upon a nation of less than 10 million. Orbán was clearly flattered by his global celebrity, and hoped, this time in vain, that it would provide some electoral advantage. Throughout his campaign, the great and the good of the international Right would come to praise him and the country he had built: winners (Meloni, Milei, Netanyahu) and losers (Mateusz Morawiecki, Liz Truss) alike. The website for “CPAC Hungary 2026” announces that, although “Brussels and Kyiv” might not like it, “Europe and the world stand with Viktor Orbán”. There was thus a pronounced globalist streak to Orbánist nationalism.

Americans, especially, would sing their encomia. The conservative intellectual Rod Dreher, a key player in the conservative Budapest scene, garlanded Orbán with the highest compliment he knows, by drawing a rather strained parallel between his life and JD Vance’s — these were the two brightest stars in the postliberal firmament. Both Orbán and Vance were country hicks, sneered at by the liberal elites: Orbán’s hometown Felcsút, apparently, is the Appalachia of the Carpathian Basin. Both managed to break into the elite, studying at Oxford and Yale respectively. Both, then, spurned the social class into which they had raised themselves: they chose rather to be loyal to the people who raised them. If this brings a manly tear to the eye, let it not be diminished by the revelation that Dreher was on the Orbán payroll: how much art and beauty, after all, has been the work of court sycophants?  

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Such, anyway, was the Budapest bacchanalia, 2010-2026. For his first order of business as prime minister, Péter Magyar will pull the plug. Already he has announced that he will investigate the state funding of MCC and CPAC. It’s not hard to imagine the Orbánist think tanks and institutes being turfed out of Budapest, much as Orbán turfed out the Soros-funded Central European University in 2018. The CEU upped sticks upriver, to Vienna; who knows where the Orbánist institutions will go, or which other European illiberal will attempt to pick up Orbán’s mantle. Slovakia seems a plausible contender; it would not be surprising to see the Postliberal International descend upon Bratislava. Prime Minister Robert Fico is rather similar to Orbán, even in his physical appearance; he supported Orbán in the election and tends to align with him within the EU, including on Russia. He might, however, now look upon Orbán as something of a cautionary tale, and consider the possibility that the ambitious and expensive intellectual project was ultimately a misfire.

Indeed, at least for the duration of the Trump administration, the intellectual Right still has a Mecca, and a money spigot, in Washington, DC. Against the glitz and glamor of the “cruel kids’ table”, we impoverished Europeans have little to offer, except for winding streets and old stone. Vance, of course, was an Orbán booster during the election, and is close to Dreher and Budapest’s postliberal circle. He undoubtedly hopes that the network which Orbán cultivated in Budapest will swing behind him, in full force, in 2028 — and indeed that, if he does become president, he can hit the ground running with friends and connections in high places in Europe. Vance had already been supplanting Orbán as the darling of the intellectual Right — and unlike Orbán, he’s a Catholic, to boot. Without being anchored in Budapest, one can imagine the old network relying more on American financial support, and becoming even more Americanized. CPAC probably gives us a hint of what this would look like in practice: more strobe lighting, more God. 

Magyar, meanwhile, is now faced with the difficult task of uprooting all that Orbán laid down. He is, as is widely observed, hardly a pin-up for liberals and Europhiles, who are cheering him only because they see him as a relative improvement. Now, as prime minister, he has to go to war against what is, in effect, an Orbánist deep state. He has to take on politically compromised and infiltrated universities. He is staring down the state broadcasters, telling them that they will not receive a penny from the taxpayer until they have restored their “public service character” and can guarantee “objective, impartial reporting”. Already he has announced his intention, in a bracingly ruthless manner, to dispatch the incumbent president, an Orbánist placeman. Even if he succeeds in all this, Orbán might not be gone for good. Trump’s comeback in 2024 will doubtless be on Magyar’s mind; as will the Right’s victory in the presidential election in Poland last year, less than two years after the liberal Donald Tusk became Prime Minister. 

Encouraged, and often handsomely remunerated, by the Orbán government, the international Right-wing intelligentsia has paid careful attention to Budapest. They have hoped to learn various lessons — about policy, tactics, and the difficult business of statecraft. But the new Hungary, Péter Magyar’s Hungary, might prove to be of interest, too. If, for example, Reform UK wins the next election in Britain, they will be met with open hostility from the universities, the civil service, the BBC, the bishops, the judges, the Lords, perhaps even the Crown. There is still much for the Right to learn in Hungary, if only they know where to look.

It did not occur to me, when I was young, that our bedtime reading was also my mother’s first encounter with the Faraway Tree series; only later did I learn that her parents had strictly banned Blyton from their house. They were not alone: children’s libraries and the BBC banned Blyton too. Blyton, it was thought, was the quintessential parochial conservative, to whom the pliable minds of children ought not to be entrusted. While never mean-spirited, as Roald Dahl was known to be, Blyton’s stories tend to reward children first and foremost for their obedience (usually, in the Faraway Tree series, with some kind of magical sweet, like “pop cakes” or “google buns”). My doctor grandmother was probably unhappy with the gender roles at play. Even among the three children in The Magic Faraway Tree, Joe is the intrepid adventurer, while his sisters Beth and Frannie are more interested in fairies and flowers. At least The Famous Five had the tomboy George.

In 1973, her fellow children’s author Aidan Chambers inveighed against Blyton’s “triviality, linguistically impoverished style, anaemia in plot and characterisation, and clichéd, stereotyped ideas”. Writing in the Eighties, Fred Inglis, a high-minded critic, accused her of “representing the crude moral diagrams and garish fantasies of her readership”, her readership presumably comprising bigots like six-year-old me. Another author said that her books were “for children who are not very old, or not very clever, or not very well” — children who needed the comfort of monosyllables, and repetitive, formulaic narrative. My unwell, dimwitted, younger self would have been reduced by all this to tears.

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Don’t mourn old England

By Samuel Rubinstein

Little wonder Blyton’s books have been tampered with for years, well before the advent of sensitivity readers. I grew up with Joe, Beth, and Frannie, and only learned later that, for whatever reason, they were originally Jo, Bessie, and Fanny. Dame Snap, the strict schoolmistress to whom the naughtiest pixies are sent, was “not at all a nice person”. Before the abolition of corporal punishment, she was even less nice: her name back then was Dame Slap (there is a good gag about this in the film).

As early as 1960, Macmillan declined to publish The Mystery that Never Was on account of Blyton’s “faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia”. Some of that xenophobia appears in the Faraway Tree series: people who are unlike ourselves are things to be gawked at. The film gets around this with a suitably diverse cast. The golliwogs in Noddy surely didn’t help Blyton’s reputation either, even if their presence in the stories was likely well-intended. The attacks on Blyton culminated — of course they did — around 2020, when English Heritage caveated her Blue Plaque with a “reappraisal”, to “better reflect today’s values”, and the Royal Mint canceled plans to give her a commemorative coin. It is probably for the best that The Magic Faraway Tree was adapted to film after those passions had begun to cool down.

More than her perceived racism, sexism, and xenophobia, what unsettled people most about Blyton was always her popularity. What did it say about British children that they so adored her books? Were they — were we — narrow-minded oiks, too? Blyton was for British children as, say, Agatha Christie was for their parents: a fine spinner of yarns, but inescapably “middlebrow”. And all this still leaves another question. How to bring Blyton’s “crude moral diagrams and garish fantasies” to contemporary audiences? How to bring Blyton’s England — the England of dandelion and burdock, where children say things like “do let’s”, “good gracious”, and “pooh!” — to an England where children are more excited by the numbers “6, 7”?

When thinking of adapting his source material, Farnaby was faced by more specific problems too. One is that the Blyton’s stories have no overarching plot fit for a feature film: they would lend themselves better to a TV cartoon of 22-minute episodes apiece, each with its self-contained adventure. Another is that the children in the books are extraordinarily insipid. The film, set in the present, solves the problem by making them angsty and screen-addled. They are not happy about leaving the city for the country. They grumble and scowl on the train to their new home; they are terrified (correctly, it turns out) that there won’t be any WiFi. The children in Blyton’s books are happy-clappy from the start; there is no arc for them to go on. “I shall pick as many flowers as I want to”, says Book Beth. Film Beth, a 2014 Tumblr feminist with Goth characteristics, seems to hate flowers: her arc is completed when she puts one in her hair. The film updates the story for the present by giving it a familiar moral: kids should put down their damn phones and play outside.

To make that moral work requires an even bigger change: the parents must be put center-stage. In the books, they are scarcely mentioned — except, of course, when the mother packs sandwiches for the children. The parents give the film a chance to flip Blyton’s traditional gender roles; we have a stay-at-home dad (Andrew Garfield) and a girlboss mom who’s nifty with a spanner (Claire Foy). Their role in the story is to drive the moral home: they were right, after all, that their kids would be happier with some country air. Perhaps children today don’t understand the kind of freedom on display in the books; or perhaps their anxious parents don’t want them to.

Farnaby has had tremendous success with Paddington 2 (2017) and Wonka (2023). Thematically and tonally, The Magic Faraway Tree is something different. Paddington and Wonka are both about the hubbub and excitement of the Big City. They are about children (Paddington and Wonka are essentially children) finding their way in an intimidating, adult world. In Blyton’s simple, rustic universe, adults and the adult world might as well not exist: the children inhabit a world of their own. It is no accident that Blyton’s peak coincided with the Second World War; though this is never explicitly stated, The Magic Faraway Tree is basically an evacuation caper, about city kids enjoying the freedom of the open air with their parents nowhere in sight. It is a paean to the countryside as a stage for the imagination, a staple of children’s literature from The Wind in the Willows to Watership Down.

Blyton’s books convey a certain image of Englishness. Her England is rural, inward-looking, and, of course, white; it is the familiar stuff of mid-century nostalgia, of “suet pudding and red pillar boxes”, and “maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning”. The more fantastical elements bear traces of English folklore: angry pixies, trickster gnomes, benevolent wood nymphs. The books play around with classic English fairytales; some of the more memorable set-pieces involve “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “Jack and the Beanstalk”.

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Such an image of Englishness still has political teeth. Blyton’s books, it was claimed in Prospect in 2017, “set the stage for Brexit fantasies”. This is an exaggeration, but there might be a kernel of truth. After all, The Magic Faraway Tree plays on a dichotomy between town and country, with the latter representing “real Britain”. The film version updates this for the present, by contrasting the city, with its TikTok and smart fridges, to the vigor and magic of the countryside. The Paddington franchise, of course, takes the opposite view. In Paddington, London — or, at least, the colorful terraces of Notting Hill — is the real Britain, the shining template for the rest of the country to follow.

Paddington, with its Big City themes, could thus be made to fit neatly into the official ideology of modern, urban, multicultural Britain. It is nostalgic, too, but its nostalgia looks back to a particular moment of postwar affluence, rather than to Blyton’s pre-industrial idyll. For his part, the bear has been transformed into the patron saint of 21st-century Britain. He accompanies the Queen to heaven as a marmalade-guzzling psychopomp. In sentencing, judges solemnly pronounce to criminals that “your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for”. A London mural much adored by Stella Creasy MP shows Paddington doffing his cap, with the caption: “Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in.” The polite, assimilated immigrant — the fact that he is an immigrant is tirelessly pointed out — has become the mascot of “British values”. Paddington has something to say, however mawkish and obnoxious, to Britain as we find it.

Blyton, provincial and backward-looking even in her own time, has far less to say to us — which is why Farnaby had to make something up about screens. But perhaps her “simplicity”, much scorned in her own life and since, was always to her advantage. She has nothing much to say to us, and therefore nothing mawkish and obnoxious. And, as her young readers are continually finding out, that’s never got in the way of her stories being fantastically, nostalgically fun.

Amid the noise, one question remains unanswered: where did Andreessen pick up this strange idea? He gives some hints in his ensuing “crash-out”. Defending the claim that “great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings”, he encouraged his 2.3 million followers on X to “read your Adler, Cuddihy, and Nietzsche, ffs”. He elaborated on the second of these in a follow-up tweet, this time with the assistance of “my sociology professor Claude”.

John Murray Cuddihy, we learn in typical AI speak, provided “one of the most corrosive critiques of therapeutic culture ever written – and it’s corrosive precisely because it doesn’t attack therapy on its own terms. It attacks the genealogy. It asks: where did this whole enterprise come from, and whose interests does it serve?” Alas, Andreessen and Prof. Claude fall short of answering their own question. “Here is the brutal Cuddihy take, assembled fully”, the tweet concludes: “[Details removed to protect the reader.]”

Who was John Murray Cuddihy? Whose interests did he think “introspection” served? What made his ideas so “brutal”, so “corrosive” — so subversive, even, that they apparently risk upsetting or scandalizing the faint of heart?

John Murray Cuddihy, an American sociologist who died in 2011, is hardly a household name. His book The Ordeal of Civility (1974) would set you back £294 on Amazon; there is not even a single copy of No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (1978) to be found in the exhaustive collection of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. But Cuddihy has always enjoyed a small cult following. When The Ordeal of Civility was published, James Burnham described it as “one of those few books likely to change history” and Cuddihy was invited to promote it on William F. Buckley’s talk show, Firing Line.

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Half a century later, his star has at last begun to rise again. Anna Khachiyan, of the Red Scare podcast, is probably his most prominent cheerleader. Just the day before l’affaire Andreessen commenced, the notorious Right-wing troll Captive Dreamer — whose 80,000 followers on X include Vice President JD Vance — was dipping into the Cuddihy œuvre. “Have you taken the Cuddihypill?”, asks fellow chud, Bronze Age Pervert. Let us take the Cuddihypill, now, and see the Matrix for ourselves.

In The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity — to use its full subtitle — Cuddihy traced the ideas of his triad of Jewish thinkers to a “Kulturkampf” which accompanied the emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century. As the Jews emerged from their cramped, smelly shtetls and ghettos, they had to adjust to a “Protestant Etiquette”. They couldn’t cope, says Cuddihy; they couldn’t abide by the code of bourgeois life. They relapsed into their old tribalism, their inwardness, their vulgar “Yiddishkeit“. They were deviant. And then — here one can see why Cuddihy’s ideas have a reputation for being transgressive, even offensive — they concocted elaborate theories to explain away their deviance, usually as some kind of “symptomatic behavior”. For Marx it was a symptom of economic exploitation; for Freud a symptom of psychosexual regression. The ideas of Marx and of Freud were Jewish ideas, according to Cuddihy, because they originated in a specifically Jewish experience — a specifically Jewish “ordeal”.

The Ordeal of Civility is principally a book about Freud. 100 pages are devoted to Freud — three times as many as are spent on Marx and ten times the paltry section on Lévi-Strauss. The book is in effect an answer to a famous question Freud once put to his friend Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor: “Why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” Cuddihy’s answer is that Freudian psychoanalysis was, from the start, an attempt to “make sense of the Jewish emancipation experience”. He came up with a Dr Seuss-style ditty to summarize his argument: “the id of the ‘Yid’ is hid under the lid of Western decorum”. The struggle between the id and the superego reflected, in miniature, the struggle between Yiddishkeit and the strictures of bourgeois respectability.

So, if we are to steelman Andreessen’s argument, Freudian “psychologism” — the set of ideas that the venture capitalist was attacking as introspection — served a particular set of interests. By uncovering the id lurking within the minds of all men, Cuddihy argued, Freud engineered a “moral equalizer legitimating social equality between Jew and Gentile”.

It’s an eccentric argument, to say the least, and it is natural to wonder about Cuddihy’s motivations in devising it. Certainly, it appears at first glance to carry strong antisemitic implications. His work is peppered with overfamiliar Yiddishisms: kvetsches, tsuris, and an awful lot of goyim. An uncharitable reader might find something sinister here; but one might instead interpret this as a sign of Cuddihy’s personal identification with the Jewish community, bordering even on what one reviewer called a “remarkable affection for and indulgence in old Jewish culture”. Cuddihy was a lapsed Catholic of Irish heritage and he shared with the Jews a feeling of alienation from the WASP “core culture” which still prevailed in America. He, like the Jewish thinkers surveyed in his book, struggled to socialize himself into modernity — because modernity was a creation of “Calvinist Christianity”, from which he and the Jews were perennial outsiders.

It is often difficult to discern what exactly Cuddihy was aiming for. His essay of 1987, “The Elephant and the Angels: The Incivil Irritatingness of Jewish Theodicy”, doesn’t explain why Jewish arguments about the nature and origins of antisemitism are wrong — only why they are liable to strike non-Jews as “irritating and incivil”. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg caught on to the slippery, double-edged nature of Cuddihy’s arguments. Was he telling the Jews that they were “incivil” and “irritating” as a piece of friendly advice from a well-intentioned outsider — or as a petty jab at a people for whom he felt genuine disdain? When, in No Offense, he reflected on Jewish “chosenness”, was he arguing for the Jews to hold true to their ancestral beliefs, including those which the “Protestant Etiquette” found chauvinistic or ill-mannered — or was he warning the rest of the world that the Jews really do believe in their own superiority?

Many of Cuddihy’s Jewish critics were quick to assume the latter. “Cuddihy aims to be revolutionary”, begins one review of The Ordeal of Civility; “he may merely be revolting”. Still, it would be wrong to think that his arguments have only ever appealed to antisemites. There can’t be many intellectuals who have been cited approvingly both by the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Kevin Macdonald and by the late Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.

Nor can Cuddihy’s arguments be dismissed outright. A celebrated passage in The Ordeal of Civility concerns the “tale of two Hoffmans”: Abbie Hoffman, the ringleader of the anti-establishment “yippie” group the Chicago Seven; and the judge Julius Hoffman, who sentenced him. (The drama plays out in Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, with the Hoffmans played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Frank Langella respectively). This, in Cuddihy’s hands, becomes an “intra-Jewish fight” acting out an “ancient scenario: the socially unassimilated Eastern European Jew versus the assimilated German Jew who ‘passes’ among the goyim”.

Each Hoffman was ashamed of the other. Julius was ashamed of Abbie for misbehaving, Abbie of Julius for behaving. It may seem a bit far-fetched to view this exchange purely through the Jewish prism; clearly there were other things at stake. And yet, “of all the material I’ve read dissecting the trial”, Abbie Hoffman confided in his memoir, “none captures my own attitude better” than Cuddihy’s. Another socialist Jew of the Sixties, Mark Rudd, also thought that Cuddihy had hit on something profound. Cuddihy was fascinated by “the curious, secret, adversary relationship of the secular Jewish intellectual to the Jewish bourgeoisie”, according to which “the intellectual is sensitive and refined; the bourgeoisie, obviously, is vulgar”. Why, I now think to myself, I am a sensitive and refined Jewish intellectual — and I feel nothing but love for the Talis and Yonis of Edgware, with their IDF jumpers and flashy Magen David necklaces!

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So sometimes, it must be conceded, Cuddihy was on the money. He understood the peculiar neuroses of the Jewish diaspora better than many Jews understand themselves. But that is not the reason The Ordeal of Civility is enjoying its modest resurgence. Andreessen holds it up as a source of secret knowledge, and gets a kick out of the idea that it’s blasphemous and controversial. He thinks it offers a convincing theory about the origin of this pernicious idea of introspection. He thinks, in his own words (or Claude’s), that “therapeutic culture” serves some Jewish interest, and that Cuddihy demonstrated this by reference to Freud. This argument is plainly wrong. Cuddihy’s analysis doesn’t even work as an interpretation of Freud. How can it work as an interpretation of the entire phenomenon of Jewish intellectualism? The argument falters on a single point: Freud did not emerge from the shtetl. His “id” had nothing at all to do with the “Yid”: not even the rhyme works in the original German. Freud’s thought was not the product of a clash between the Jewish “Middle Ages” and bourgeois modernity. His father was Germanized, much as Marx’s had been. Unlike Abbie Hoffman, he felt no real compunctions about that fact. Nor was there any wrenching “struggle” with modernity. Freud was in Vienna by the time he was a toddler.

Cuddihy’s mode of analysis is a kind of ham-fisted determinism. Any thought which has ever been had by a Jew is by nature a Jewish thought, produced solely by its thinker’s Jewishness. The Jewish dog, in Cuddihy’s telling, salivates at some suitably self-serving Jewish ideology whenever the bell of modernity is rung.

Such an approach is astonishingly unscientific, but it is unscientific less in the manner of conspiratorial antisemitism, than in a manner unfortunately characteristic of “social science”, which reduces all human ingenuity to the products of hazily-defined “environmental factors”. “To make any kind of sense”, Cuddihy warns his readers at the outset, The Ordeal of Civility “should be placed in the context of my interests and convictions, and a certain indulgence will be asked, allowing me simply to assert these convictions and interests, rather than to argue them”. Well, this will not do. One of Cuddihy’s affected Yiddishisms springs immediately to mind: this is a work of chutzpah. Cuddihy’s critics held him to be an antisemite, and his latter-day admirers, Andreessen among them, have squeezed a certain frisson out of that fact — all the more in a moment when antisemitism is gaining ground. I do not think that Cuddihy was an antisemite. But he was something worse: a sociologist.

The worry today among Englishmen is less that the King of England will break down their castle’s door, than that he will look on passively when others do. The 21st-century Englishman doesn’t just fear that the state cannot defend his property; he fears that the state will punish him if he has the temerity to defend his property. Here is the essence of one of those celebrated mots du jour, “anarcho-tyranny”: the state is idle, even indulging, when violent criminals commit violent crimes; yet somehow it whirs into action when those crimes are resisted by upstanding, law-abiding citizens.

This is the diagnosis made by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain: the country nowadays, we learn from their recent policy paper, is “more coddling to the wicked than it is safe for the virtuous”. The “castle doctrine” used to be as dear to the heart of every freeborn Englishman as those other palladia of liberty, Magna Carta and the jury trial, and the “anarcho-tyranny” which reigns today is proof that it has been chipped away. The paper makes five concrete policy proposals for reversing this catastrophe, all, presumably, oven-ready in the unlikely event of a Restore Britain government. It is more likely that bits of it will be poached by Reform or the Tories in the run-up to the next election. Both parties are probably already sympathetic to the paper’s arguments, and the cause of beefing up the “castle doctrine” had already been taken up by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada, which even after its defeat remains for them a source of inspiration. Therein lies the paper’s claim to our attention.

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Is Reform going too Christian?

By Samuel Rubinstein

Its proposals are as follows. Pepper spray should be made legal, as it is in several other European nations, in order to give ordinary people a fighting chance against their assailants. The jury trial should be preserved for all criminal cases, as is already being urged by the legal establishment, because jurors tend to look more favorably than judges on violence committed in self-defense. The attorney general should be personally required to greenlight prosecutions brought for excessive force in self-defense (presumably it is envisaged here that future attorneys general will be of a higher caliber than Lord Hermer). Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which makes possible the prosecution for speech crimes even if the speech is uttered in the privacy of one’s home, ought to be repealed by Westminster forthwith. All these sound like good ideas. The last, especially, is essential for securing the boundary between public and private life that is at risk of breaking down completely.

The Restore Britain paper also calls, however, for “retaking the English castle” by establishing that householders have no duty of care to trespassers if the trespasser has criminal intent. No duty of care? Any criminal intent? Would it be fine, if some ruffian tries to make off with a £10 Amazon parcel from your front porch, for him to be killed? Some response, even a violent response, might of course be appropriate under such circumstances. But surely we owe people — even trespassers, and even trespassers with criminal intent — some basic duty of common humanity, and some principle of proportionality.

The report purports to set out, much in line with the new party‘s name, a grand project of restoration. It presents the theory that Britain has undergone a “silent regime change”: Blair and his band of Jacobins, an “unrooted ruling elite” of “card-carrying members of the Fabian Society”, razed the English castle to the ground; they “abolish[ed] our inherited folkways and common law traditions through a campaign of stealth”. There is, of course, a knee-jerk tendency on the Right — usually not without reason — to blame New Labour for any perceived deviation from Britain’s constitutional traditions. Here, however, matters are complicated by the fact that one of the report’s examples of an injustice produced by the legal status quo — Ted Newbery, who wounded a burglar with a shotgun, getting sued successfully for civil damages — occurred in 1988. Indeed, the law which Restore Britain wishes to amend was put on the statute books in 1984. If a precious English birthright has been sold for a mess of pottage, it was sold by Margaret Thatcher, not a stealth cadre of Fabians and Blairites.

Has a precious birthright been sold, though, and do we need wholesale legal reform to return us to the days of Entick and the Elder Pitt? The status quo, unusually in this instance, doesn’t seem all that bad. For one thing, home burglary, and other types of crime targeted by this proposal, are in decline. For another, there are already substantial protections for law-abiding individuals who are unlucky enough to end up in these predicaments. In 2018, Richard Osborn-Brooks, a pensioner, was attacked at his home in London by a pair of armed burglars; he stabbed one of them, Henry Vincent, with a kitchen knife. Osborn-Brooks was arrested on suspicion of murder. But he was, in the end, released without charge: the law is clear already that killing in self-defense is not murder.

The cause célèbre, mentioned in the Restore Britain report, is Tony Martin, who in 1999 killed a 16-year-old burglar with an unlicensed shotgun. He became a sort of martyr among the country gentry, around the time the fox hunting debate and foot-and-mouth were already radicalizing them against New Labour. He was convicted of murder, later reduced to manslaughter. Ironically — given the claims made in the report as to the natural sympathy of jurors, endowed with their earthy English common sense, towards Englishmen who defend their castle — it was a jury that convicted Martin of murder, even when the option of a manslaughter conviction was on the table. The reduction in his sentence was made, meanwhile, by three high court judges.

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In any event, Martin shot the burglar while he was already fleeing, and there are good reasons why such action should not be legally permissible. In 2008 Munir Hussain was attacked at home by three masked intruders, in what was possibly an “honor” crime avenging some alleged infidelity; he and his family were beaten and tied up. After Hussain freed himself, he and his brother chased one of the intruders, Walid Salem, down the road, and attacked him with a cricket bat. Hussain was found guilty of GBH and given a 30-month prison sentence, which was later reduced on appeal.

Anybody can understand what motivated Hussain in those moments, and anybody can feel some of the concomitant revulsion that he was charged and convicted at all. But on closer inspection one realizes that this has nothing to do with the castle doctrine, or with self-defense, after all; and, indeed, that the whole drama serves as a good advertisement for the law being the way it is. As the judge said, in sentencing Hussain: “The prosecution rightly made it plain that there was no allegation… in respect of the force you used against Salem in defending your own home and family or of the force used by either of you in apprehending Salem.” In other words, the judge was as deferential to the principle that the Englishman’s home is his castle as the people at Restore Britain would want him to be.

So, too, as it happens, was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, noted card-carrying Fabian Keir Starmer QC. “There are many cases,” he said, “some involving death, where no prosecutions are brought… We would only ever bring a prosecution where we thought that the degree of force was unreasonable in such a way that the jury would realistically convict.” Everybody is agreed, it appears, that, if Hussein had killed Salem while breaking free, or while otherwise embodying the principle that the Englishman’s home is his castle, no legal action would have been forthcoming. In fact, though, Hussein, when he bashed Salem’s head in with a cricket bat, was embodying a very different principle of justice.

What happened to Salem was, said the judge, a “very violent revenge attack on a defenseless man”: and we do not want to live in a society where revenge attacks can go unpunished, and where the family feud supersedes criminal law. We want to live in a society where all justice is the King’s justice — what could be a more ancient and venerable principle of English law than that? — and for such a society to exist, we recognize that the state must have a monopoly on violence. We need restrictions on the principle of self-defense, because we know that the line between self-defense and vengeance is easily blurred. We need also to drag people — often, indeed, people who acted nobly under horrifying circumstances — over the coals of legal investigation in order to establish, to the satisfaction of the state and of the jury, that they acted out of one set of motivations and not the other.

The Restore Britain proposal, seen in this light, has the air of defeat. It takes the view that the state has already surrendered its monopoly on violence, and that, this being so, the best thing to do is to empower ordinary people to take their security into their own hands. It cannot be extricated from the burgeoning idea that the country is on the precipice of civil war (it is interesting that David Betz, the KCL academic who has gained prominence for propagating this view, appears in the acknowledgements to Restore Britain’s last policy paper). As Joe Gargery says in Great Expectations: “Still a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle, and castles must not be busted, ‘cept when done in war time.” Home burglaries may be down; the status quo may be fine; proportionate self-defense, even to the point of killing an intruder, may already be permitted. But, when war time comes — and perhaps it’s already here — an Englishman’s castle may be busted at any moment, and he must prepare himself accordingly. As such chatter grows louder on the Right, it’s not hard to imagine Reform or the Tories arriving at similar conclusions.

Such a view rests on the idea that the future promises more anarchy than tyranny. In reality, though, we should more fear tyranny than anarchy. The castle is under threat: by overbearing bureaucrats and petty police officers who feel empowered to arrest you for the things you say and do in private. Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act is, as the authors of the Restore Britain paper recognize, a case in point. So too might we think of the encroachments on privacy that accompanied the lockdown: the ban on visiting second homes, restrictions on whom you were allowed to invite into your house, Matt Hancock’s dictate that only those in an “established relationship” are allowed to have sex. We ought to recover the original meaning of the castle doctrine, in the sense that Pitt the Elder understood it and Entick and Carrington experienced firsthand. Intruders and burglars should know already the risks to which they are exposed if they cross your moat and drawbridge. It’s the King of England, now as ever, who has to be kept at bay.

Galloway — investor, entrepreneur, blogger, professor, public intellectual — is as inescapable now as Peterson was in his heyday. The Washington Post bills him as one of the people shaping American society in 2026. He rears his bald head often on Instagram and TikTok; his voice is a mainstay on the podcast circuit. “I’m good at being right”, he tells Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom; “I’m not good at being effective”. Galloway was first propelled into the spotlight back when he used to teach a brand strategy course at NYU’s Stern School of Business; to become more effective, he has created a brand of his own.

Brand Galloway promises to make young men fitter, happier, more attractive to women. Indeed, his advice is markedly similar to Peterson’s: show up early, have good manners, be a protector. Rather, the difference between Peterson’s “clean up your room, bucko” and Galloway’s “get your shit together”, is one of tone, not substance. The difference reveals something interesting about the two sides of the American culture war: conservatives want their gurus to dress up their life advice in Jungian psychoanalysis and confused allusions to the Book of Genesis; liberals want theirs to be sweary management professors who speak in the language of McKinsey slides — hardly the stuff to keep kids flocking back over the long term.

Before Galloway was a lifestyle guru, he was a finance guru — and reviewing his career, one might reasonably ask why his advice now ought to carry much weight. After all, his knack for bad analysis once caused him to become the butt of the joke. A few years ago, some finance wags came up with the Anti-Galloway Index, allowing punters to earn their fortune by betting against Galloway’s predictions. Since October 2019, the Index tells us, “tech companies that the Professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the S&P 500 and seen a whopping 61.48% return”. The greater part of this was due to the continued growth of Tesla, on which Galloway’s powers of prediction are clouded by personal animus. Galloway believes, incidentally, that Elon Musk has locked him out of X.

Galloway has long presented himself as the enemy of Musk and his ilk. In The Four, published in 2017, he made the case for breaking up Big Tech. Today he speaks with revulsion about those Silicon Valley CEOs who’ve prostrated themselves before the Trump administration, and has launched a campaign against them, called “Resist and Unsubscribe”. Recently, he seriously weighed up running for the presidency.

Life advice is the continuation of politics by other means. Galloway’s tips are spliced with political calls to action — for free education, housing reform, even national service along the lines of the IDF. These are tucked away in his books, hidden beneath a pile of snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom. His works of self-help have big font on small pages; the chapter headings often take the form of equations, like “Credentials + Zip Code = Money”, or “Car < Lion” (which means that you should invest in experiences over things). According to Galloway arithmetic, “1 + 1 > 2”. Instead of just using the English language to tell young men to drink less, we get a picture of a martini = sad face emoji. Perhaps this helps the message stick in the minds of his audience. Peterson, it must be said, always expected slightly more from his readers.

Why, then, is Galloway so popular? Why, given he once said that “taking life advice from a depressed and insane professor may not make sense”, does he get feted by liberal stalwarts on both sides of the Atlantic? The answer is simple: for all the mockery he gets from himself and from others, in truth he is one of life’s winners. He looks and sounds the part. He’s six-foot-two, well-dressed and well-spoken. He has that air of competence. Plenty of his business ventures have failed, but enough of them have succeeded. He owns a townhouse in London by Regent’s Park, a home in Florida, and a sumptuous Manhattan apartment. He reckons his lifestyle costs him $350,000 to $425,000 a month.

Peterson’s earthly successes occurred after his pivot from academia to self-help; Galloway’s were present before. The point of Peterson’s “12 rules for life” was not that young men might, by adhering to them, become more like him (and, certainly, Peterson nowadays seldom takes heed of his tenth rule: “Be precise in your speech”). With Galloway, it’s different. His breezy references to his own personal shortcomings are part of that air of humility which successful people are expected to cultivate. He knows that young men would quite like to enjoy a lifestyle that costs $350,000 to $425,000 a month. The object of Brand Galloway is to mentor young men into becoming more like Scott Galloway. In this respect, his way of keeping his audience captivated has more in common with Andrew Tate than Jordan Peterson: he is selling them his own story, a story of success with money and with women.

His story is much enhanced by its rags-to-riches element. His parents got divorced and his mum was poor; he talked his way into UCLA, despite bad grades, where he smoked weed, memorized every line of Planet of the Apes, and “majored and minored in horniness”. When he speaks of his success, he is always careful to underscore — herein his woke credentials — that he won the lottery by being born a white heterosexual male in California, and that this allowed him, along with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, to climb up the ladder. He doesn’t drop his guard on matters intersectional: when expressing concerns about the plight of young men, he is eager to add that the issues and challenges that they face are “especially acute among young men of color”. He doesn’t believe in God, and therefore hasn’t followed Peterson down the torturous path of mystical and metaphysical speculation. Still, he prays as a mark of gratitude, especially for his mother and family. “The reason I am wealthy”, he recently told Esquire, “can be distilled down to one word: women“.

Galloway has thought hard about how his own successes can be translated into general life lessons. Everything in the Galloway universe exists to impart lessons; life is one grand preparation for that job interview where you’re asked about what challenges you’ve overcome. He pays his children to do chores, to instill them with a hunger for work; and then sometimes he mugs them on the way back to their room, “as that, too, is a life lesson”. Everybody in the Galloway universe speaks the way he does, in a series of catchy and obnoxious made-up names for complex human experiences. During the breakdown of his first marriage, he visited a counselor, who asked him: “What city do you want to live in, Marrytown or Singletown?”. This sparked an epiphany. He had already set up shop in Singletown.

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A tough-love tone permeates Galloway’s latest meditation on masculinity, Notes on Being a Man. “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach”, he declares, “big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory”. Peterson, of course, was never quite so crude. But more than that, Galloway’s point is undercut by a certain mawkishness: for it appears that one can grow one’s big-dick energy, according to Galloway, by being kind. Masculinity, moreover, is perfectly compatible with vulnerability. Like Peterson, and like much pop culture directed at young men in the last decade, Galloway is a passionate evangelist for crying. Unlike Peterson, however, he knows to hold himself together in public. It is hard, in fact, to imagine him crying, even though he says he does so often. It is so incongruous with what is ultimately a conventional, alpha persona.

And yet, despite the macho self-presentation, the title on the front cover of Notes on Being a Man appears in a noticeably feminine hand, with rounded curves and flowing loops. Here, perhaps, a clue as to how its publishers have imagined its typical buyer. “My biggest fans are young men”, Galloway tells Triggernometry; “my biggest supporters are mothers”.

The problem for Brand Galloway is this: young men do not want to read things their moms approve of. They would want to read Page 3 or Nuts Magazine, if only they still existed; nowadays they seem to content themselves with Clavicular, Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker — and Andrew Tate, who Galloway so tentatively tried to mimic. Jordan Peterson could compete, for a time, but only because he was supposed to be subversive. It never mattered that he was telling young men what their moms were telling them already — clean up your room!; he was popular, in the end, because he was “controversial”, went against the current on trans and gender issues, and totally OWNED Cathy Newman. There was a certain frisson to Peterson at his peak, a frisson which Galloway is unlikely to match — whatever his current popularity with the Guardian or the The Washington Post. The lady in Adolescence was never going to direct the boy in her charge to 12 Rules for Life, but it’s easy to imagine her enthusing about Notes on Being a Man. Much of Galloway’s advice for young men is right, but, in the spirit of the Anti-Galloway Index, you should bet against it being effective. The liberal Jordan Peterson eluded us for so long because it was always a contradiction in terms. 

The task of political scientists during the 2010s was to spin a mythology in which the elites could cocoon themselves. “The extent of Russian-backed fraud means the referendum is invalid,” said one social scientist; Brexit was a “tsunami of bile” vomited up by the Murdoch press “that has downed and drowned a once great nation”, said another. All this was par for the course in Goodwin’s old milieu. In his most recent book, Bad Education, he reveals that one of his colleagues at the University of Kent gave lectures in a “Bollocks to Brexit” T-Shirt. You can hardly blame him for wanting to leave that sordid world behind.

He has left it for the no less sordid world of politics. When Goodwin, as a young scholar in the late 2000s, first embarked on his academic research into the radical Right in Britain, it was in the manner of Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees; now he is swinging from tree to tree as Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. He has been plotting his entry into electoral politics for some time. He had promised that, once he had got to 100,000 subscribers on Substack, he would launch a party of his own. It’s probably for the best that Reform snapped him up before he reached that milestone: what with “Advance”, “Reclaim” “Restore”, and “the Conservative and Unionist Party”, the last thing the British Right needs is another vanity project splitting the vote.

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Academics tend not to fare well in the political domain. A dozen years ago, when still deep in the weeds of the Right as associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham, Goodwin co-wrote Revolt on the Right with Rob Ford. The book’s early drama involves the trials and tribulations of Alan Sked, the LSE historian who set up UKIP in the Nineties. Sked was no good at politics: he was “only interested in obscure constitutional issues, and had little grasp of how to run a campaign”. Having written several books about political campaigns, Goodwin is today at some advantage — though it will still be a tall order for Reform to win in a constituency which is over a quarter Muslim. It is presumably for this reason that he has so far toned down the strident anti-immigration views for which he has become notorious, such as his claim that people from ethnic minorities born and raised in the country were not always British.

Sometimes Goodwin’s unusual 15-year journey, from liberal political scientist to Right-wing pundit and thence to Reform politician, is presented as a Damascene conversion — or, by the more cynical among his critics, the product of audience capture, ego, or grift. His earlier academic work does, however, contain some seeds of the Substack and the GB News show that have since come to flower. Goodwin himself describes his early endeavors as having argued that “the people voting for things like Brexit had legitimate grievances over issues such as mass immigration”. His 2018 book, National Populism — co-written with his former doctoral supervisor, Roger Eatwell — did not shy away from addressing those “legitimate grievances”, and neither did his public interventions around that time, including for UnHerd. That he had some sympathy with the grievances of his subjects was sensed, in fact, rather earlier, by the BNP’s Eddy Butler, who wrote in 2011 that the young scholar might have “an element of empathy with [our] aims if not the means”. “Perhaps,” he conjectured, “the hours of interviews he has undertaken has had a Stockholm syndrome effect.”

Largely on the basis of conversations with Butler and his ilk, Goodwin has for a very long time been banging the drum — or sounding the alarm — that there exists in Britain far broader support for the radical Right than the elites and political scientists would wish to think. Already in his first major book, New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party (2011), one can sense his frustration at the complacency of other political analysts, who believed that “extreme Right parties like the BNP will never attract and sustain mass support”. There existed, for parties on the radical Right ranging from the extreme BNP to the more mainstream UKIP, a natural constituency of “angry white men”. Goodwin has been consistent, throughout his career, that this constituency could not be easily ignored.

Notwithstanding this degree of consistency, the younger Goodwin certainly cut a different figure in the public sphere from the one he cuts now. He was happy, for a time, to add his voice to the elite chorus. In 2013, during the Cameron era, he argued in the New Statesman that UKIP’s popularity had little to do with immigration concerns after all, and that everyone in the country would be happier if we had simply stopped talking about the subject altogether. He would surely include his past self in the “elite failure” which was in his view responsible for the riots of summer 2024.

Likewise, where now he paints a gloomy picture of demographics and integration, his earlier work tended to sound the hopeful note that social cohesion and tolerance would triumph. The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (2010) — another collaboration with Eatwell, and one markedly different from National Populism — ends with a point about “the football” that prefigures the preoccupations of the Southgate Era: “Squadloads of young fans play soccer games on their Xboxes and PlayStations which feature the slogan ‘Let’s Kick Racism Out of Soccer’, and they are the future.” The presence of black players in the England team seemed a sure sign that liberal multiculturalism would win the day, and that the natural constituency of the populist Right would die out eventually. The “angry white men”, the “losers of modernization”, would stay forever in their place: a “quiet revolution” in attitudes about immigration and diversity would leave them as yesterday’s men.

Goodwin’s stated positions were elite ones then, and in a certain sense they remained so. You would hardly know it from all the criticism lobbed at him from the sequestered and low-powered faculties of sociology and political science at Britain’s middling universities, but his interpretation of Brexit, set out immediately after the referendum, has more or less dominated discussion and steered policy for the past 10 years. His analysis tended, at least initially, to devote more attention to the economic and cultural depression of Britain’s “Left Behind” than to any specific concerns over immigration — and this, in essence, was the logic that allowed Boris Johnson to combine his “Levelling Up” agenda with unprecedented levels of immigration. Indeed, there is a moment in Values, Voice and Virtue, his 2023 polemic against the “new elite” that drove the country into the ground, when Goodwin sheepishly admits that the true meaning of Brexit — that it was, in essence, a scream of the “Left Behind” — had been grasped by Theresa May and Nick Timothy in the damp squib campaign of 2017.

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Goodwin’s books are markedly Blue Labour in places, with all the anti-Thatcherism and anti-liberalism that this implies. Values, Voice and Virtue contains some praise for Peter Shore, even Tony Benn, and trots out the well-worn Lord Glasman narrative about how the socially-liberal Blairites — the lanyard classes — betrayed Labour’s working-class base. Goodwin, like Glasman, describes himself as economically Left and culturally Right. He will want Reform to pursue this political sweet spot, and to realize what he has long prophesied as the “great realignment” — the potent combination of social conservatism with economic interventionism. That alignment was supposed to occur with Brexit, and then it was supposed to occur with Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019. These, in Goodwin’s view, were two false starts, two wasted opportunities — the latter, with the “Boriswave”, amounting even to betrayal.

Will Reform, with Goodwin’s assistance, at last bring the great realignment to fruition? It seems quite likely that he will once again be disappointed. Nigel Farage is on the economic Right, and Zia Yusuf even more so. As are all the recent arrivals from the Conservative Party, with the exception of Danny Kruger. The presence of such people and ideas in the Reform coalition — low tax, small state — is something that Goodwin’s model of politics, with the “great realignment” as its logical terminus, has always struggled to accommodate. One of those interviewed in Revolt on the Right is John, a 64-year-old factory-worker from Nottingham; he voted for the Tories under “Maggie”, shifted to Labour after she resigned, came close to voting BNP in 2005, and backed UKIP in the EU elections in 2009. Goodwin (and Ford) used this example to substantiate what is in effect a “postliberal” theory of modern British politics, to tell a certain story about the “Left Behind” and the “losers of modernization”. Does it not matter, here, that John is a Thatcherite?

Clearly Goodwin believes that Reform’s current popularity is the product of material grievances on the ground; clearly, too, he thinks those grievances have much more to do with immigration than he used to. But he also knows, to quote from an article he wrote when he was 26-years old, that parties have the power to “influence their own destiny”, and that their fortunes depend as much on “organization, personnel, and propaganda” as to the conditions that push and pull ordinary voters in various directions. For someone with considerable ambition, or an appetite for power, this would quite naturally provide a strong incentive to quit merely observing political trends and to enter the fray in order to shape them. “Many people”, he says at the end of Values, Voice and Virtue, are “searching for a radical alternative… the only question that remains is what form this radical alternative will take and when it will arrive”. This, really, is how all his books have concluded, even the ones he wrote back when he was cooped up in the Ivory Tower. He used to have to go into the field to see what form it would take. Now, he can fancy himself in the mirror instead.

Of course, the trial will reveal further details about Pittman and the attack on the Beth Israel Congregation. For now, though, we may sketch out the following picture. The teenager’s alleged actions seem to have been premeditated: members of his gym claim to have heard him say that he wanted to set fire to a synagogue. It appears, moreover, to have been the culmination of the suspect’s increasingly erratic and threatening behavior: his mother has told the FBI that she had recently considered locking the bedroom door during the night. It should go without saying, too, that the attack was antisemitic in nature: Pittman has apparently admitted that he went after the synagogue for its “Jewish ties”.

Crucially, there is good reason to suspect a religious motive. Pittman is said to have referred to his target as “the synagogue of Satan”, a staple of Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the 4th-century homilies of John Chrysostom. On social media, he describes himself as a “follower of Christ”; when read out his rights he said, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. It would not be the first time, as it happens, for this synagogue to have been attacked in an act of terror by extremists of the Christian Right: in 1967, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

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There is a powerful tendency to regard modern, racial antisemitism as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from an earlier, religious anti-Judaism. This is seen most clearly in discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust. “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition,” Hannah Arendt asserted: Auschwitz marked a total break from the course of Europe’s Christian civilization. In 2000, more than 220 Jewish intellectuals and rabbis signed a document called Dabru Emet, “Speak the Truth”, affirming that “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon”. All this complemented a certain view of Nazism, making it the very antithesis to Christianity, and instead either atheistic to its core, like Soviet Communism, or else pagan and esoteric — perhaps even amounting to a religion in its own right.

The notion that the Nazis had nothing in common with the fanatical, Christian Jew-haters of earlier centuries is no longer tenable. There was no straightforward transition from “religious” to “racial” thinking: in fact anti-Judaism had already long had an important “racial” component. Jews were identified as a group in the Middle Ages not only on the grounds of their rejection of Christianity, but also by their immutable physical characteristics. A Jewish handbook, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, written in Germany in the early 14th century, tells us how Christians would often taunt their Jewish neighbors by asking, “Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?” Around the same time, Jews were already being depicted with hooked noses.

Moreover, modern racial antisemitism, epitomized by National Socialism, was more fundamentally religious — more Christian — than has often been supposed. An influential book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, argued more than 20 years ago that there was a “religious dimension to Nazi antisemitism, which coexisted with and in some ways even informed the racist dimension”. Much of Nazi Christianity was built atop the fancy that Jesus had really been an Aryan. “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes,” said Hitler in 1921; “the devil, however, only with a Jewish grimace.” Seeking to keep the SS from fracturing along religious lines, even the pagan Heinrich Himmler forbade “any attacks against Christ”, including the attack, “without doubt historically false”, that Christ had been a Jew. Some Christian Nazis hoped to reform their religion by jettisoning the Old Testament from the Biblical canon. But still there were plenty of others who were perfectly conventional and orthodox in their beliefs.

In Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form, Joseph Goebbels’s strange semi-autobiographical novel, the protagonist insists that “Christ is the genius of love, [and] as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate”. The Nazi struggle, thought Goebbels, was one “between Christ and Marx”, to be waged “until victory or the bitter end”. Hans Schemm, the head of the National Socialist Teachers’ League, put it more succinctly when he declared that “Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland”. The law of race did not need to contradict the revealed law of Christianity; race, after all, could be construed as an integral part of God’s Creation. “We, the racists, are the only ones who render to Christ the homage that is his due,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Herbert Meyer. Whatever his private beliefs, Hitler too presented himself as having been charged with a religious mission. As he wrote in Mein Kampf: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Those who emphasize the distance of Christianity from the theory and practice of Nazism are often, it would seem, committing a No True Scotsman fallacy: no true Christian would be an antisemite, because Christianity is really a religion of meekness, self-sacrifice, and neighbor-love; and no true Christian would be a Nazi, because no true Nazi would ever wish to be a Christian.

Christianity also played a part in the development of modern antisemitism closer to home. The British Union of Fascists had several churchmen in its ranks. George Henry Dymock, vicar of St Bede’s in Bristol, inveighed against the Jews in 1935 for engaging in “vile usury”. The Reverend M. Yate Allen, influenced perhaps by the religious declarations of Hitler’s top brass, thought that Nazi Germany was “truly on the side of Christ”. The newspaper British Fascism came up with a pithy formula in 1930: “There can be no true Fascism that is not Christian, for Fascism is military Christianity.” An earlier group produced a “Children’s Fascist Creed” in 1925, whose opening is unmistakably Nicene: “I am a Fascist. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit…”

Under the leadership of John Tyndall — and under the spell of postwar neo-Nazi mythmaking — the BNP was broadly anti-Christian. When Nick Griffin set out to “modernize” the party, he therefore had to Christianize it. He succeeded. In 2008, the party underscored the point that “Christianity is so large a part of our identity that to give it up would mean giving up that identity”. In the European elections of 2009, in which the BNP won two seats, the party (much to the dismay of the established church) ran an expressly Christian campaign. A poster cites John 15:20: “If they have persecuted me they will also persecute you.” “What would Jesus do?,” it goes on to ask. The answer: “Vote BNP.”

Shortly before the attack in Mississippi, an account belonging to Pittman posted the “happy merchant” antisemitic meme. This account also promotes a website called “One Purpose”, which advocates “scripture-backed fitness” and “biblical nutrition”. He would seem therefore to belong to a subculture familiar to any young man who has spent time on the online Right — one which mixes edgy internet humor and aspirational self-improvement with an ultra-reactionary, identitarian version of Christianity. The antisemitism draws from both these sources. Sometimes, these cohorts are written off as “nihilistic”, their religion as mere “LARP”; but here, again, the No True Scotsman rears its head. “Christ is King”, sounds the battle-cry of the Groypers. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the “trad” Catholicism of Nick Fuentes and his ilk is anything other than sincerely felt. Indeed, it underpins everything they say and do. It is central to their entire narrative about the decadence of modern liberal, secular society — which, predictably, is imagined to have been engineered by the “perfidious Jews”.

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For all this, we ought not to miss the wood for the trees. It remains obvious that the major threat to Jewish life in the West comes not from Christian, but rather Islamic, religious extremism. The attacks in Manchester and Sydney amply demonstrate as much. Insofar as the blood libel — an English invention — is alive and well in modern Britain, it has principally sustained itself as a more recent import. Muslim antisemites, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, often “have to borrow — when they want to be anti-Jewish — the rubbish of medieval Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox antisemitism”; though Hitchens was quick to add that they equally possess a vigorous antisemitic tradition all their own. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is probably the 21st century’s most concerted effort to revive the kind of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism that was de rigueur prior to Vatican II and Nostra aetate. Not for nothing did it prove a smash hit across much of the Arab world.

The institutions of mainstream Christianity deserve credit for opposing antisemitism on theological and moral grounds. Fuentes might hold Jews collectively responsible for the death of Christ, and advance an extreme form of supersessionism, dictating that the New Testament replaced, rather than fulfilled, the Old. But when he does so, his fellow Roman Catholics can appeal to the contrary pronouncements of another Chicago native, Pope Leo XIV.

Indeed, Christianity has always possessed strong tools for opposing antisemitism. In the medieval Rhineland, itinerant preachers launched crusades against Jews — yet local bishops also offered sanctuary to the victims. It may well be that Protestant Christianity was not incidental to Nazi ideology; that Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, oversaw the Holocaust in Slovakia; and that the ratlines which conveyed several high-ranking Nazis to Latin America ran through the Vatican. But none of this can dampen the Christian courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or the Scholl siblings. Their courage might now serve as an encouraging example, much as the attack in Mississippi ought to serve as a warning. There is, so to speak, a homegrown strain of antisemitism which is quickly gaining ground. If we are now witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism in the West, we should not be surprised to sometimes find it clad in its ancient, Christian garb.

I have often thought that some enterprising American hack of our own times should attempt something similar (a British equivalent, for that matter, could make light work of Zahawi, Jenrick, and whoever else jumps ship to Reform). Such a book might commend itself to the Resistance Lib for good bathroom reading, much as the 191 blank pages of that gimmicky The Achievements of Kamala Harris are to be met with in MAGA homes. The Beauties and Deformities of Trump, Vance, and Rubio would, of course, include Vance calling Trump “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”; Trump’s attacks on “Little Marco”, not least for his prodigious sweating; Rubio returning the volley by calling him a “con artist”; and much else besides. It would contain lots of grandstanding, lots of backpedaling, and little dignity.

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Some of the select quotations would have the added beauty and deformity of being occasionally prescient, even vindicated. “The delegitimization of the election results is something that I worry a ton about,” said Vance, beardless and cherubic, back in October 2016: “the delegitimization of the media and so forth, that really, really worries me.” Another good one resurfaced recently, for inauspicious reasons. “We’re liable to wake up one morning,” Ted Cruz warned the American electorate around the time Trump was calling his wife ugly, “and Donald, if he were president, would have nuked Denmark”.

It happens in cycles: the Republican bigwigs denounce Trump, with good reason, and then they fall lamely back in line. The coalition limps ever onward. 2016 was one long year of this agonizing process, crescendoing with the hullabaloo over the Access Hollywood tape, when several senior Republicans resolved to throw in the towel and sit the election out; it was easy enough back then, when he seemed to have no chance of actually winning. One presidency later, January 6 saw a repeat of the dynamic, in miniature, and again with the apparent security that Trump was finished for good. You could put together a Beauties and Deformities from that day alone. “There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill,” tweeted Rubio, presumably quaking in his boots in some underground bunker; “this is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.” Today, he belongs to an administration which, as its first order of business, extended an unconditional pardon to those anti-American third-world anarchists. The administration’s position, blasted across its official channels, is that the election in 2020 was stolen, that Mike Pence was a traitor, and that the people who ransacked the Capitol had right on their side.

Now, some Republicans are pushing for full-scale annexation of Greenland: Randy Fine, a corpulent Floridian who calls himself the “Hebrew Hammer” and has earned plenty of groyper opprobrium as a result, has introduced a bill to this effect. Others, though, have done their best to keep their heads screwed on and their feet on the ground. “I’m sick of stupid”, says Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has the distinct advantage that he will not be seeking re-election later this year. “Stupid”, in the form of slavish loyalty to the whims and passions of the President, might sometimes be an indispensable vote-winner, in GOP primaries especially. But even Tillis can’t bring himself to criticize Trump personally, preferring to do what court sycophants have always done — blame the advisors. 

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Both houses may move to block Trump from taking Greenland by force, with some congressional Republicans going as far as to warn him that this would mean the end of his presidency. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska sums it up: “This is appalling. Greenland is a Nato ally. Denmark is one of our best friends… the way we’re treating them is really demeaning and it has no upside.”

No upside, indeed. Any talk of invading Greenland — whether or not it be followed through — is enough to spook America’s allies, indelibly cheapen its word, and upend decades of diplomacy and strategy. Trump’s erstwhile fans in Britain and on the continent — including, to his credit, Nigel Farage — are no less appalled by the whole spectacle. That it is nonetheless being cheered on in some quarters of the American Right, whether as a meme or in earnest, is as sure a sign as any of its intellectual degeneration. Indeed, such degeneration appears to be located at the very heart of the MAGA project: Stephen Miller, who has long been feted even by Trump’s European admirers as the brains behind the administration’s robust immigration policy, also appears to be the principal architect behind this belligerent and self-sabotaging turn in Trump’s foreign policy.

The online catchphrase “You Can Just Do Things” has seemed to become a license for doing things which are, as Rep. Bacon has put it, “dumb”. There are lots of things which an American president, with all his colossal might, can “just do”. He can threaten to send the gunboats to Greenland; he can bring back measles; he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the Conservative Party of Canada; he can keep on pretending that 2020 was stolen, and perhaps the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to boot. All these things are perfectly possible. But all these things are dumb.

Musk’s X has turbocharged the dumbness. It often seems now as though the entire administration is built atop a foundation of mocking and memes. Trump cannot escape the Boomer’s insatiable appetite for AI slop: hence he posts videos showing him dumping shit on the “No Kings” protestors from a fighter jet. The hardline Zoomers charged with running the Twitter account of the Department of Homeland Security appear to have defter hands. There you will find a torrent of videos on the more extreme end of edgy internet humor.

Dumb, also, because unpopular; and here, again, the dynamics of X, which reward loyalty to Trump and Musk and which encourage ever more radical and eyeball-grabbing slogans, ideas, and memes, are partly to blame. Following the killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration went all-in on a George Floyd Culture War Round 2, tasking JD Vance with defending the indefensible. Only 28% of Americans think her shooting was justified; 53% think the ICE agent should face criminal charges. Trump’s designs on Greenland, meanwhile, have even less popular backing. The President gazes through a White House window upon a picture of Greenland; “tap to monitor the situation,” tweets the official White House account, to 16 million views and 31,000 likes. Only 4% of those polled think it would be a good idea for the US to take Greenland by force. Trump, personally, is now extremely unpopular; it can’t be politically expedient, to give one recent example, to declare, after the murder of a beloved film director, that this was the result of “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”. Nothing in fact could have better vindicated Rob Reiner’s view, expressed back in 2017, that Trump was “mentally unfit” for office.

The President has a mandate. The election wasn’t just a rebuke of Harris (though lacking in achievements) and Biden (though senile); nor was it solely a matter of some post-pandemic anti-incumbency swing, or the automatic product of an economic input (by the time of the election, in any case, inflation had abated and the economy was strong). Culture wars were in play, in which Democrats had often taken the wrong side. Clearly there was a great desire to secure the border and crack down on immigration, if not quite to the point of executing middle-aged moms in the street; clearly there was a desire to make America strong again, if not to the point of bullying friendly nations with tariffs or worse. But, since obtaining that mandate, much of the American Right has memed itself into positions which are as untenable and unpopular as they are stupid.

One year, now, of the MAGA restoration; three more, at least, to go. There seem now to be some quickenings of sanity, even in the Republican Party; and for the Right in Europe, one gets the impression that this Greenland business has been something of a wake-up call. Still, more than mere murmurings are needed to start people from their stupor. Senior Republicans will have to remember what “beauties and deformities” they once hurled at Trump, and consider that they might still be true. The coalition will have to splinter; or, like Fox-North, risk being crushed under the weight of its contradictions, swept aside (the 25th amendment beckons), or, if it comes to it, forcefully rebuked by the electorate. The people in power will have to be “sick of stupid”: and, this time, they’ll have to mean it.

The presence of death has become more tangible in recent years. The first thing a Yom Kippur shulgoer will notice now is the security. There may be a police car or two in sight, and watchmen at the door, eagle-eyed for suspicious behavior. In order to enter a Yom Kippur service at a synagogue in Germany earlier this year, I had to present my passport to a gruff Israeli bouncer. He was satisfied by my Jewish name and countenance; another man in the queue behind me was patted down.

Over the years, Jews have had to grow accustomed to such inconveniences and precautions. Jewish schools have tight security, and they have emergency procedures in place, in case that security were to fail. They run drills and “invacuations”. In 2015, after a spate of antisemitic attacks on the Continent, it was reported that children at Jewish primary schools were being trained to play “sleeping lions” when the alarm sounded.

But Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the calendar, is both a moment of heightened vigilance, and a moment Jews have their guard down. The Arab states worked this to their advantage in 1973; and vigilance was proved necessary, again, by Jihad al-Shamie at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue earlier this year.

Hanukkah is the opposite of Yom Kippur: it is frivolity. Some Jews gripe about its commercialization, the way religious Christians do over Christmas. But Christmas was the birth of the Messiah, the Incarnation of God; Hanukkah celebrates a historical event, the Maccabean wars, which do not even merit mention in the canon of Jewish scripture. It is widely admitted that Hanukkah attained its prominence, both among Jews and in the non-Jewish cultural imagination, as an explicit counter to Christmas. Shorn of long prayers and arbitrary restrictions, and bringing with it a bounty of gifts, doughnuts, and chocolate coins, it is naturally the festival that children most look forward to.

This was the jubilant mood, blessed with Antipodean sunshine and golden sands, that a father-and-son pair of Islamists, Sajid and Naveed Akram, saw fit to desecrate. The attack at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah was the deadliest terror attack in Australian history, and the second-deadliest mass shooting. It was an attack on a robust Jewish community, with the largest per-capita population of Holocaust survivors anywhere outside Israel. One of those Holocaust survivors, Alexander Kleytman, was killed while shielding his wife of sixty years, Larisa, from the bullets. Another of those murdered was Eli Schlanger, a rabbi born in London. It speaks to the smallness of the Jewish world that one of Rabbi Schlanger’s relatives served as rabbi at Heaton Park.

Jews are frightened and angry, and they recognize where the threat is coming from. Of course they are concerned about the far-Right, and the Pittsburgh attack in 2018 gave them ample reason to be — not to mention the subsequent rise of Nick Fuentes. They have reason to worry about the far-Left, too: when Aaron Bushnell set himself ablaze for the sake of Palestine, it was feared that such propensity for violence would soon turn itself outwards; and so it did when Elias Rodriguez killed a young couple working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. But Jews in the diaspora perceive Islamist terror as the principal danger. They saw what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023, and they now see similar occurrences closer to home. The rap sheet is long. The Jewish school in Toulouse. The Jewish Museum in Brussels. The kosher supermarket in Paris. The Great Synagogue in Copenhagen. The synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. The synagogue in Manchester. Bondi Beach in Sydney.

A report published earlier this year by the Counter Extremism Group — “Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate” — found that, in Britain, “speakers in certain mosques have promoted the idea that Allah is pleased by the killing of Jews, led prayers for the Mujahideen (without directly naming Hamas), and promulgated conspiracy theories about the 7 October atrocities”. Plenty of those who recite the slogan “globalize the intifada” on London’s never-ending Saturday marches do so out of conformity and ignorance. They might prefer not to give much thought to what it means in practice; but others take the precept very seriously indeed.

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The modern Hanukkah may be a frivolity, but it imparts a powerful message. Partly that is one of hope, of light in the darkness: hope found, in Sydney, in Ahmed al-Ahmed, the heroic fruit-vendor who disarmed one of the attackers.

The Hanukkah story is not just a generic “festival of light”, however: it has teeth. It is the classical expression of Jewish defiance. No matter that it is uncanonical: the story is known to every Jewish child. It is the story of Judah Maccabee — Judah the Hammer — and his brothers redeeming their homeland, by force of arms, from the Seleucid Empire. It is, in a sense, a national epic, whose heroes win the day through sacrifice, valor, and divine favor. There is an episode, in the first book of Maccabees, when Eleazar Avaran, one of Judah’s brothers, charges at a Seleucid war elephant, and stabs it at the belly; he brings the beast down but is crushed beneath it. Al-Ahmed clearly possessed that Maccabean courage.

The Maccabees story is rousing stuff. Emma Lazarus — the poet best known for her sonnet “The New Colossus”, now inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty — was much moved by it: “Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day / The glorious Maccabean rage, / The sire heroic, hoary-gray, / His five-fold lion-lineage.” So was another, lesser-known 19th-century Jewish woman poet, Marion Hertog: “And still the Festival of Lights / Recalls those deeds of yore / That make our history’s page sublime / And live for evermore.” Probably the most consequential echo of the Maccabees story occurs at the crescendo of Theodor Herzl’s clarion-call for Zionism, Der Judenstaat. “A wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again; the Jews who wish for a state will have it.”

Jews know well what Maccabean defiance looks like: it looks like Israel. If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, and, generally, less fun. There will be more drills, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. There will, for all this, be more attacks and more deaths: no matter how much security is tightened, something will always slip through the cracks. There will be a lamentable turning-inward. Some Jews may choose, this Hanukkah, not to put their Chanukiah on the windowsill, lest it be seen by malevolent passers-by. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will come more closely to resemble Israel: sealed off from the world, armed to the teeth, and terrified, with some justification, of the enemy at its doorstep.

Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty once boasted the world’s finest erudition — Erasmus, Archbishop Whitgift, and the “greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred”, Richard Bentley. Now it’s the kind of institution that “challenges itself… to think more deeply about race and to learn from those who have been marginalized”. A few years ago, Jordan Peterson was offered a visiting fellowship; a gaggle of students and academics ensured that this was abruptly rescinded. When Peterson was re-invited to Cambridge some time later, a group within the faculty, calling itself “Divine Dissent”, resolved to expose the “alt-/far-Right influence” in their midst. They doubtless had a particular character in mind.

James Orr, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty, is best known to the world as JD Vance’s “British sherpa“. He has recently acquired a further title: Nigel Farage’s Svengali. He has been dipping his toes into turquoise waters for some time: his think tank, the Center for a Better Britain, is housed with Reform HQ at Milbank Tower, and has been busily supplying the intellectual foundations for Farage’s wider project. Orr might be to Farage as Keith Joseph was to Thatcher, or Anthony Giddens to Blair. As Farage’s senior adviser, Orr’s principal task is to prepare for government.

The Britain which Farage and Orr hope to inherit has, it would be fair to say, seen better days. It is plagued by sporadic bouts of violence; its social contract seems to be falling apart; there is little economic growth to speak of, and even less any notion of national ambition or self-belief. The British people are responding to the hanging sense of gloom in various ways: some by throwing their lot in with Zack Polanski or Zarah Sultana; others, who made their presence felt at the Unite the Kingdom rally, by committing themselves to a renewed kind of Christian nationalism. Orr is convinced, like many, that Britain’s present crisis is fundamentally spiritual. Who better to cure the nation’s souls than a Cambridge divine?

Orr has already been engaged in some soul-curing closer to home. Not far from Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty is Orr’s sprawling estate. The Catholic writer Rod Dreher once excitedly described it as a “form of the Benedict Option”, putting into practice his recommendation, in his book of that name, for Christians to retreat from the world and form communities of their own. Orr, for his part, jokes that Orr’s home is a “Right-wing Mecca”. The whole place sounds almost like a Cambridge college, perhaps even a “safe space”: somewhere for young people of a particular disposition to rub shoulders and nourish their minds, far away from the Harry Potter shops and Progress Pride flags that have taken over the city center. Clearly it is not quite Benedictine: it’s more like a Cambridge Asturias, preparing for an anti-woke Reconquista. Half the Right-wingers at Cambridge seem to have moored themselves there at some point or other, lodging in huts in the garden like a revolving cast of Catholic gnomes.

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Orr is very much a man of the establishment. Like Boris Johnson, he grew up in Brussels and read Greats at Balliol; in the intervening years, he was the year above Rishi Sunak at Winchester. He is a devout follower of Sir Roger Scruton, whose bust watches over his home and whose Legacy Foundation he helps to run. What sets him apart among Scruton’s many scions on the conservative landscape is his fluency in both languages of the contemporary Right. Here his middle-agedness is an asset. With the old Tory patricians, he can harp on about faith, family, flag, freedom, and “common sense” — although, since his jump to Reform, he has been able to speak about the “dinosaurs” more freely. He is equally in his element with the younger, hard-edged “new Right”, which is laser-focused on immigration and views all else as a frivolous sideshow. When interviewed by Steven Edginton on GB News, Orr is at ease in such “very online” matters as “Yookay Aesthetics”. He endears himself to his interviewer with his knowledge of Lee Kuan Yew quotations and his roster of statistics about demographics. It’s hard to imagine a “postliberal” of the old school launching into the conversation with such gusto.

At one point in that interview, Orr laments that Cockney English is in decline. His affection for Cockney may help explain his improbable friendship with Tom Skinner, who describes Orr as “one of the most educated geezers” he knows. Orr’s mission in Reform is to bring in talent, and Skinner has been touted as a potential standard-bearer, even perhaps a London mayor. Interviewing Matt Goodwin on his podcast, First Light, Orr worries that Reform has a personnel problem, and urgently needs to attract bright young things to prepare for government. One wonders whether there will be any Orr-backed alumni on the ballot in 2029.

But strange things are afoot on the religious Right, especially on the younger end. The self-declared “Reactionary Catholic Zoomer” Connor Tomlinson, who is close to Liz Truss and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and boasts almost 100,000 followers on X, questions whether those adhering to “any faith other than Christian”, or belonging to “any ethnicity besides British”, should be allowed to hold public office.

Then there’s the Reverend Calvin Robinson, who, like Tomlinson, is an affiliate of the Lotus Eaters podcast, and who has spent the last few years jumping from one Christian domination to another. Earlier this year he was defrocked by the Anglican Catholic Church in America for doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute at the National Pro-Life Summit. Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, loudly proclaims that he has found God, and what remains of UKIP marches under the Cross. In reaction, perhaps, to rising sectarian politics under other guises, Christian nationalism is now finding form on the fringes. Fearing that Reform might follow suit, Neville Watson — until recently the party’s only black branch chair, and himself an evangelical Christian — has decided to quit.

Towards the end of his conversation with Edginton, Orr expresses some reservations about the more radical elements. He is eager to disavow any conspiratorial thinking about mass migration. Nor, he maintains, did it ever occur to him or his fellow Wykehamites in the Nineties that the teenage Sunak was anything other than English. In response to Edginton’s insistent call for mass deportations — he tends to close his interviews this way — Orr insists that Farage has to “broaden out” and can’t “keep throwing red meat to the base”. The Caerphilly byelection has since proved the point: Reform must be careful not to frighten too many people into tactical voting. Part of Orr’s task will be to rein in the overexcitable youngsters, for pragmatic as well as conscientious reasons.

Orr might, however, compound Reform’s problems. Farage’s closeness to the Trump administration is already a millstone around his neck (he will be painfully aware of what happened to Pierre Poilievre in Canada): 55% of British voters dislike the American President. Orr’s buddy Vance is running at net disapproval even among Reform voters; of those who supported the Conservatives last year, 68% views him negatively. Nor will Reform be much helped by Orr’s views on social policy. His opposition to abortion under all circumstances is shared by only 6% of the public — hardly the stuff of a populist mass movement.

American conservatism is off-putting to the British mainstream in part because of its religious style. The gaudy enthusiasms of the evangelical Right are liable to produce an aesthetic revulsion in the British observer; something of this was conveyed even by Orr himself, when he remarked, of Charlie Kirk’s memorial extravaganza, that it was “not quite how we do things in Britain”.

Ultimately it would not be in Reform’s interest to become, or to be seen as, a “Christian party”. Indeed, the nonreligious currently outnumber Christians among Reform voters. The politics of the established church, meanwhile, are far more “Divine Dissent” than Orr: observe the recent furore over graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral, criticized by JD Vance, and Farage’s quarrel with the Archbishop of York. Britain’s actually-existing Christian politics, then, it is not one that Right-wingers tend to care for.

Orr is but the latest conservative Christian public intellectual to find himself swimming upstream in this manner. As another resolutely Right-wing Cambridge don, Maurice Cowling, once recognized, “the habitual sensibility in contemporary England is post-Christian or anti-Christian [and] it will require both intellectual effort and an effort of the will if it is to be modified”. Cowling was hopeful on this score, but it must be admitted that it hasn’t happened yet for a reason. There is plenty of effort and plenty of will coming out of Orr’s farm, but their fruits will find little appetite among the secular British public.

That, coincidentally, is the nostalgic-sounding title of Peter Laslett’s great work: The World We Have Lost, published in 1965. Nostalgic only to a point: Laslett tells us at the outset that the world we lost with the arrival of industrialization was “no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness”. Daily life was as painful as it was tedious. The simplest things required painstaking effort: “drawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy.” Nor did the Industrial Revolution bring with it oppression or exploitation: all that “was there already”.

The majority was illiterate, and therefore excluded from political and intellectual life. What is worse, early-modern parish records, which Laslett and others had pored over relentlessly, revealed plenty of parents who had themselves signed the marriage register, but whose children were unable to do so: there was no guarantee of linear improvement across the generations. True, pre-industrial life left a greater role for the family, but this should not elicit any pangs of nostalgia either: the family was not only a “circle of affection” but also the “scene of hatred”.

Vestiges of that world can still be found all around us. Its nastier aspects, like the dark side of family life, have been “half-remembered” in fairytales. One crucial feature of pre-industrial society, its obsession with rank, was better preserved in our country than almost anywhere else: “the British go on awarding the symbolic titles”, knighthoods, peerages, and all the rest, as much now as in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

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On publication, The World We Have Lost earned Laslett plenty of enemies. The early-modern historian Lawrence Stone called it “slipshod, muddled, pretentious, and unscholarly”. Marxists especially despised his effort to “entomb” the very idea of a 17th-century “English Revolution”: E.P. Thompson, in his affectedly parochial fashion, sneered at his interest in historical demography, the science which “has of course come from France”. The World We Have Lost was a defense of this foreign science from its many detractors, complementing its new major English center which Laslett helped found, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. 

Laslett himself seems a figure from a world we have lost. At one point, on the fraught question of whether people used to, or even could, have sex in private, he says: “those with experience of living within severe spatial restrictions, such as a man who served as I happen to have done in a grossly overmanned naval vessel, will know that privacy is not entirely a physical affair.” He had an eclectic career of the sort that feels impossible today. During the Second World War, he mastered Japanese at Soas, after which he worked at Bletchley Park, decoding Japanese intelligence. 

As with many of the great intellectuals of his generation — here, too, glimpses of a world we have lost — Laslett had one foot in academia and one in the BBC. His broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme were an important part of his academic strategy; it was there that he issued his call to arms to Britain’s antiquarians to dive into their wealth of local source material, and thereby to construct a vivid picture of the social structure of early-modern England. The French demographer Louis Henry called Laslett’s amateur army “le secret weapon anglais”. Many chapters of The World We Have Lost were initially written as radio broadcasts. Later editions are full of gratitude, and well-earned nostalgia, for the BBC at the height of its Reithian powers.

The “We” in Laslett’s title refers to the English. Although he emphasizes the contrasts between our world today and the one we have lost, he dwells on the few points of common ground. We know what a culture is by observing its habits and customs; we know what English habits and customs are by testing their consistency over time. One defining characteristic of Englishness is the small, nuclear family. This, Laslett was adamant, was not an invention of industrialization, of modernity; in fact in England “there was actually an increase in the tiny proportion of more complicated households in the period of economic transformation”.

Laslett’s later involvement in the University of the Third Age owed something to his belief in the “null hypothesis”, that family organization in England was “always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven”. He disliked the suggestion that “lonely old people” ought to be “restored to the family, where they belong”, because this was no real “restoration… in the sense of returning to the historical past”: it had never really been customary among the English for the elderly to live with their children.

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Likewise, Laslett identified a consistent English custom of marrying relatively late, in the mid-Twenties. When Shakespeare had Lord Capulet say that Juliet “hath not seen the change of fourteen years”, he was indulging in his imagination and nothing more. Laslett even broaches the possibility that late marriage proved the key to English prosperity, without which the “coming of industrialization… might never have occurred”. The book, and others like it, are therefore of much use when attempting to answer the vexed question of what it means to be English, in a historically grounded fashion.

With the rise of generative AI, one often hears that we are on the cusp of something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. As the English did, or had to do, in the Industrial Revolution, so too are we now forced to ponder what types of labor will endure, and what will fast become redundant. Since so much is downstream of labor, we must consider what changes the coming decades herald for things as basic to us as our households, our families, our social structure.

Already, even without AI, there have been some profound shifts. One of the characteristics of pre-industrial society, as Laslett says, is that the household was the primary locus of economic production; and so it was, thanks to Zoom and furlough, during the coronavirus lockdown. ChatGPT, some say, threatens literacy, or at least makes literacy less essential for social functioning, and Laslett paints a vivid picture of what the illiterate world of our past looked like. Laslett shows us just how much things can change, and how lost our lost world really is. But he also shows us those features of English life which have remained more or less constant for the last thousand years, and which we thus have reason to expect will stay with us. Nostalgia is not usually subject to reason; reading Laslett will hardly cure us of all our dreams of simple, old-fashioned living. But trying to imagine the world we have lost, as it actually was, will temper that nostalgia, and make us appreciate the world we have now. 

That is owing to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Once, McSweeney was called a “Blairite”: it was he, after all, who had steered Liz Kendall’s ill-fated 2015 attempt at a New Labour restoration. He remains aligned with Kendall; both have spent the last week under extreme pressure from backbenchers over the welfare reform bill. He has however found that the Blue Labour outfit, at least as far as the rhetoric is concerned, fits him better than the Blairite one: Alasdair MacIntyre beats Alastair Campbell. Maurice Glasman has described him as “one of ours”.

The outfit does have the tactical advantage of being amorphous, of revelling in “the politics of paradox”. It is rhetoric as much as ideology. Sometimes it presents itself merely as a strategy for winning back the “Red Wall”; other times it is a fully-fledged philosophy, which promises to defend the dignity of man against commodification and atomization, those wretched hallmarks of modernity. Blue Labour is, broadly speaking, anti-woke, anti-euthanasia, anti-austerity; it is pro-union, pro-nationalization, pro-“Levelling Up”. Its adherents can usually be spotted by their watchwords: “work”, “community”, “tradition”, “faith”, “flag”, “family”. If these sound ubiquitous and banal, that’s partly the point.

It is best understood as the peculiarly British variant of “postliberalism”. American postliberalism tends to carry a reactionary flavor. Many of its adherents are Roman Catholics, more often by conversion than birth, aiming more or less openly at Catholic integralism. There is a Right-wing postliberalism in Britain, too, represented in Parliament by the Conservative MPs Nick Timothy and Danny Kruger. But in Britain’s postliberal scene the Left has the upper hand. The academic Adrian Pabst, who co-edited one of the “Blue Labour” books, wrote the book on postliberalism in 2021; and John Gray can usually be found banging the drum in the Left-wing New Statesman. Britain exported its finest postliberal, Alasdair MacIntyre, to the United States; but although he swam the Tiber, as American postliberals are wont to do, his thought remained much infused by his earlier dabblings in Marxism.

When the British postliberals cast around for an illustrious, indigenous pedigree, they find one on the Left, inhaling the fumes of an old, patriotic socialism. Unlike in America, Catholics do not hold a monopoly on postliberalism in Britain: there is a strong Dissenting element here. The British postliberals can take their cues from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), the most widely read history book in interwar Britain. They can conscript to their squadrons the “guild socialism” of G.D.H. Cole, the Romanticism of William Morris, even the half-crazed rantings of Thomas Carlyle. They can tap into the Englishman’s radical historical memory: Blue Labour is surely the only political force in modern Britain which trades seriously in the language of the “ancient constitution” and the “Norman Yoke”. In its mixture of high-minded intellectualism and the robust common sense of the working man, Blue Labour calls forth the proud tradition of working-class autodidacticism, now largely lost.

Related to all this is the Blue Labour version of Labour Party history, which rejects any notion that the Labour Party was the inheritor of 19th-century Liberalism. This is a heresy which Glasman ascribes to Anthony Crosland — a pernicious turn in Labour’s sense of itself, laying down the foundations for its Blairite hijacking and subversion. No matter that Keir Hardie (for example) started life as a Gladstonian Liberal: Blue Labour is true Labour, promising salvation after prolonged apostasy.

As Blue Labour and postliberalism have risen in recent years, so too has a standard line of attack. Its locus classicus is a brilliant 2023 article by one J. Sorel. It argues, in effect, that the postliberals have already won: that Britain, at least since 1997, has been dominated by the “community” at the expense of the “individual”. Sorel’s is a fair objection. After all, lockdown was sold to a compliant public precisely by making reference to “social bonds”, “responsibilities”, and “community”. Markets were shut down for “the common good”: behold the postliberals’ ultimate victory.

Already in 2022 Glasman was writing about the lockdown with a certain nostalgia. Furlough gave a “substantive role” to the state “in support of the workers”, as he had always dreamed of. The pandemic reminded us all of the quiet dignity of labour: “Pakistani nurses, Nigerian cleaners, Portuguese carers and Bolton lorry drivers all risk their lives to keep things going.” The pandemic focused “the importance of place, of neighbours, of mutual aid and community”.

The Blue Labour sense of being stalked by the phantom of “individualism”, contrary to so much recent experience, quite clearly bears the imprint of the Eighties. For postliberalism is every bit as much an ideology of the Eighties as, say, Thatcherism. It owes much to the critique of Thatcher by the Tory Wets, and to a widespread disgust at the excesses of capitalism as represented by crude caricatures of “neoliberalism”, such as “Loadsamoney” and Gordon Gekko. Britain’s Left-wing postliberalism then formed part of a wider reaction against the liberalism that emerged triumphant out of the Cold War: Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”, so often made to stand for this moment’s hubris, appears as the punching-bag in every book in the postliberal canon.

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While the wildest dreams of the liberals were being realized, the British postliberals had all their hopes betrayed. Glasman’s doctoral thesis, co-supervised by John Gray, praised the West German social market, and asked why other countries had not implemented its model. Poland might have; the labor movement Solidarnosc had inclined in that direction under communism. But once communism fell, once Solidarnosc had attained power, it succumbed immediately, on Glasman’s telling, to the forces of Western capital. The intervention of Western “free-market fanatics” was to blame; and those same fanatics were responsible for much “unnecessary suffering” in Britain, too.

The doyen of the Polish economists, Tadeusz Kowalik, wrote a rejoinder in the New Left Review, criticizing Glasman for overplaying the extent of “individualism” in Nineties Poland. Glasman’s portrayal of Poland’s “libertarian atomisation” bore no resemblance to reality. Rent and heating were still subsidized; “there is no basis to Glasman’s later statement that there has been ‘a virtual abolition of welfare’”.

These shortcomings could be described as an early instance of the “Blue Labour fallacy”: the assumption that all social ills owe their existence to the excesses of “liberal individualism”. A good example of it can be found when, while dipping his toe into Blue Labour in 2015, David Lammy described the 2011 riots as “the product of a ‘me-first’, ‘take-what-you-can’ culture” — individualism run amok. Gangs are communities of a sort, so their part in the lawlessness had to be brushed aside.

There is, as Sorel observed, also a distinctive postliberal style, characterized by new terms for the various dichotomies and cleavages of modern society. Take David Goodhart’s “Somewheres and Anywheres”, or Danny Kruger’s lesser-known “The Order and the Idea”. Glasman’s 2022 book has “Mercurians” and “Apollonians”, which map more or less onto the Goodhart formula. Mercury is the Anywhere god, the god of commerce and capital and all those who do not till the land. Apollo is the Somewhere god, the god of (to use a postliberal cliché) that sense of place. When Glasman reached for this terminology, as his footnotes make plain, he was — quite strikingly — referring to Yuri Slezkine’s ingenious and controversial book, The Jewish Century (2004).

In that book, Slezkine argued that, in medieval and early-modern Europe, the Jews were “Mercurians” par excellence, “service nomads” who filled a social and economic niche. But Mercury fast became the presiding god of all modernity: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate… modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.” Zionism was one response to this. Whereas America, the destination of many European Jews, stood for “unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism”, the Zionist project stood for “unrelenting Apollonianism”. It promised to return “the world’s most proficient service nomads” to the land; to transform Mercurians into Apollonians, or “rootless cosmopolitans” into hardened sabras.

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Israel is now the world’s finest exemplar of the “Apollonian” postliberal state: it places enormous obligations on the shoulders of its citizens (such as military service); it sanctifies community and family life; it is robustly “civic-nationalist”; and it reaps the rewards, as postliberals would have it, in its high fertility rate and few deaths of despair. It can draw on a proud socialist, communitarian heritage, too, with the kibbutz standing in for the British cooperative. When Glasman decided to take his signal inspiration from Slezkine — rather than falling back on Goodhart’s terminology, as he might have done — he was setting out what might be described as a kind of Anglo-Zionism. Labour, in his telling, has too often exalted the Mercurian way of life over the Apollonian; Britain today, thanks to the depredations of liberalism and capitalism, is too Mercurian. To restore Labour to the Apollonians, to Make Britain Apollonian Again, is the central mission of the Blue Labour project. It is, much as Zionism was for the Jewish diaspora in the 20th century, a matter of restoring to an emasculated nation its manhood.

This last metaphor ought to be taken seriously. In an earlier outing of Blue Labour ideas, in the aftermath of New Labour’s downfall in 2010, Glasman made essentially the same point, though with a more familiar dichotomy than “Apollonian vs Mercurian”. Labour then, in Glasman’s analogy, was a strained marriage between a university-educated, progressive Mum and a salt-of-the-earth, traditionalist Dad. The story of the Labour Party was the story of Mum taking over; under Blair and Brown, “the Dad might as well have left home”. One Labour MP, Helen Goodman, was not pleased with the gender politics at play: “it looks more like something suitable for the psychotherapist’s couch than a political tract.” Perhaps this is why Glasman chose to abandon it for “Mercurian” and “Apollonian”.

Blue Labour prides itself on its sense for British history, but here it is selective and superficial. It privileges the rural over the urban, the agrarian over the commercial, the “Apollonian” over the “Mercurian”. Its national feeling tends towards the twee parochialism of Morris dancers and Maypoles. It abhors aspects of our history for which many feel some affection: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of enterprise and free trade. “Commerce” means at least as much in Britain as “community”. In excoriating the vice of “individualism”, Blue Labour dispenses with one of the most precious parts of Britain’s cultural inheritance. Blue Labour dislikes “modernity”, but Britain fared rather well in modernity; modernity is in a sense our creation. A certain “rootlessness”, a devotion to Mercury, is an inevitable characteristic among a people with a diaspora as large as ours. One might go so far as to say that Britain — more like America than Israel — is a Mercurian nation.

But do the British people yearn for more social obligations? After the lockdown they might have had their fill. Do they want higher taxes, as the ideal Blue Labour programme would likely entail? It’s unlikely; the tax burden is already the highest it’s been since the Second World War. Do they want more power in the hands of “local communities”? Perhaps — though they are hardly impressed by devolution in its current form, and might prefer a centralized state which can actually do things. Are they much roused by talk of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Rerum novarum? Even the heartiest Blue Labourite will surely admit that they are not. Blue Labour, in short, is based on a series of misapprehensions about the country it wishes to govern and reform. Britannia is not whispering about “the common good” and “that sense of place”; instead she shouts four rather familiar words, “lower taxation, lower immigration”. The future now belongs to whoever listens.

Whether we like it or not, we are all in bed with In Bed with the Right: the podcast reflects a worldview that is still ascendant in high places. One of its co-hosts, Moira Donegan, is a columnist for the Guardian US, which is gradually overtaking the mothership in the race for relevance even in Britain. The other, Adrian Daub, is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Stanford, as well as director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Although they indulge in some sweary pugnacity, along with some “populist” postures on economic issues, the podcast’s nerdy aspirations elevate it beyond, say, the “dirtbag” Leftism of Chapo Trap House. Nor do they go in for the Parks and Recreation-style wonkery of Pod Save America; there is no glib “Obama nostalgia” here to be found, their gloominess about America’s past is outmatched only by their gloominess about its future. But whereas the former podcast provides a window into the peripheral and not altogether flattering underbelly of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the latter a subculture of D.C. sad-sacks, In Bed with the Right reveals the state of Left-wing opinion in one place it is still very much alive, and flourishing like never before: humanities faculties at elite universities. It is self-consciously high-minded — even when applying those high minds to low subjects — and determined to assert its monopoly over all serious thought in general, and to discussions of gender in particular.

In Bed with the Right promises all manner of confrontations, but tends to take the easy route. In the first episode, we are confronted with the interesting question: why did the intricacies of the debate over gay marriage so quickly get “memoryholed”? Daub and Donegan alight upon the uninspired and unconvincing answer that the opponents of gay marriage simply “moved on to the next-best target”, namely trans people. Of course, the real story of gay marriage is much more interesting than that, as they elsewhere acknowledge. Its dynamics cannot be mapped neatly onto those of earlier or later “culture wars”. People were sometimes on unexpected, and unpredictable, sides. Andrew Sullivan — “not a good guy”, they say, a “frequent subject of dunking on this podcast” — was among the most influential proponents of gay marriage, and now hitches his wagon to the “TERFs”. They appear to regard this, however, not as a provocation for inquiry into Sullivan’s actual thought and motivations, but as the inexplicable foible of one lesser man.

“How”, asks Donegan in a similar vein in one of her articles, “did transgender children in the US become so politicized?” Again she takes the easy route, pointing her finger at “one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history”. To this J.K. Rowling replied: “Minors sterilised, healthy breasts cut off teenaged girls, a total failure to address kids’ mental health problems and a major study suppressed because it didn’t show what an ideologue doctor wanted it to. ‘You’re only upset because baddies brainwashed you’.” Donegan never explains why such concerns are figments of imaginations, primed for bigotry by “propaganda”. But Donegan exists, writes, and thinks in a milieu where such things can be taken as a given, and where the likes of Rowling can safely be smirked at. Facing such arguments head-on is simply not something one would ever have to do, and may be viewed as a mark of legitimation — and therefore also of suspicion.

Unsurprisingly, such arguments as Rowling’s were absent too from the whole In Bed with the Right episode devoted to “Trans Kids”. There they roll their eyes at the thought of anyone on the “gender-critical” side really caring about women’s sport. “It’s never trans men in sports” that people are worried about, Daub says at one point. One suspects a child would be able to explain to him why this should be the case.

In their recent and ongoing series, they narrate the history of Germany in 1933 month by month. Their motivations here are expressly political, with an eye on the present moment: the whole point of telling the story is to find parallels between then and now. When Daub describes Germany’s collapse into fascism, Donegan lets out sardonic exclamations like “Wow, that’s crazy!” — the experiences of 1933 are uncannily alike her own in 2025. “Nazi” is a word used liberally on the podcast, and the two hosts are mightily pleased that on this occasion nobody can accuse them of hysteria or exaggeration — or threaten to sue for libel.

In an earlier episode Donegan insists that “democracy is intimately bound up in policy outcomes for the Left”: the more democratic the process, the more Left-wing the outcomes. This might explain why, in their election debrief, they laugh off the idea that voters thought Harris was “too woke” — even though there is extremely strong evidence that this was so. Were they, in any case, to consider such a thing, they would deploy the same manoeuvre as they do with the “trans panic”: “baddies brainwashed you”. Indeed, they did exactly this in their discussion of the recent German election. A political moment which was, by common consent, principally about immigration, becomes, in their hands, about everything else. The notion of a misogynist backlash against Angela Merkel — who, one would like to remind them (Daub, who is German, especially), ceased to be chancellor four years ago — gets more attention; and all talk about immigration is airily dismissed as the product of yet more “propaganda” or unacceptable dog-whistling.

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“Every year,” writes Daub in What Tech Calls Thinking, peering down at Silicon Valley from nearby Stanford, “I get emails from anguished parents asking me what their kid could possibly do with a degree in, say, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.” I am inclined to sympathise with his frustration: lots of worthy academic disciplines cannot be justified on such narrow, utilitarian grounds. The problem with such increasingly popular areas of study isn’t that they won’t lead to a good job; it’s that they shouldn’t lead to a good job, in a just world, because they are not conducive to good thinking. They stack the deck unfairly, in favour of certain “factors”, in ways that more traditional subjects in the humanities, like history and literature, do not: they tell you, in other words, where to look first when seeking to explain certain phenomena, rather than letting the evidence lead you there naturally. “X–studies” are not to be trusted for this reason: the Copernican point, around which all inquiry must revolve, is right there, preordained in the name.

An “expert” in “feminist studies” looks at the recent German election and thinks something latent and Oedipal about Angela Merkel has more explanatory power than unprecedented levels of immigration. An “expert” in “gender studies” takes it as axiomatic that his or her ideas about gender are correct and J.K. Rowling’s are false, and for this reason sees nothing wrong with treating Rowling as an astronomer might treat an astrologist, or a mathematician might treat someone who believes that 2 + 2 = 5. An “expert” of such a bent will invariably look at Germany in 1933 only in order to find weak parallels between then and now. It is hardly surprising that, in academia, these disciplines form the most dogmatic echo-chambers of all. And nor is it surprising that those who purport to be their most intellectually curious adherents would, in the end, rather spend time in bed with a strawman.

The article in question is an introduction to a much longer piece of work, a 393-page chronology of Bismarck’s career up to 1867. This chronology is a most impressive feat of scholarship, 20 years in the making. It occurred to me, while reading it — with Otto Pflanze’s three-volume biography of Bismarck to hand, as per the author’s instructions — that Cummings might have a stronger grasp over all things Bismarck than any professional historian currently active in Britain. There might yet be a handful of German eggheads who could give him a run for his money.

Cummings’s obsession with Germany’s first chancellor began as a teenager, and shaped his thinking while he was attempting to pilot our own ship of state through the stormy weather of Brexit and Covid. “I’ve recently read some of the media commentary about 2019 that I ignored at the time and it’s amazing how many hacks thought I was trying to use [von Neumann’s] game theory”, he complains. “I was not. I did pinch ideas from how Bismarck dealt with the Prussian constitutional crisis.” With the parliamentarians in 1862 refusing to comply with the government’s wish to increase military spending, and the Kaiser supposedly on the brink of resignation, Bismarck stared them down, brushed them aside, and ultimately got his way. There were indeed traces of “Blood and Iron” in Cummings’s and Boris Johnson’s resolve over parliamentary prorogation in his first days in Downing Street.

That the media is wrong about everything is an axiom of Cummings Thought. He felt it necessary to sketch his Bismarck-chronology partly because the 19th-century media was no better, and has deceived many historians. His inside knowledge of political life thoroughly disabused him of the reliability of “official stories”. He learned to recognize that the things people say about politics are seldom actually the case; and so it follows that the things people say about political history are seldom actually the case, either. The Bismarck chronology thus isolates those few things about Bismarck’s career which we can know more or less for certain, and around which we can then attempt to construct more robust narratives and theories.

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That, in itself, is a lesson worth learning: the stark disconnect between “official stories” and what really happened. Nowhere was this clearer than in the spectacle of conspiracy theories (Russian misinformation, Cambridge Analytica) solidifying into “official stories” in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum: “the media is incapable of analyzing the intersection of politics and technology” and actively “disinforms the public”. The “official story”, moreover, tends to flatter decision-makers, giving them agency and control; and one thing Bismarck can teach us, as Cummings is keen to stress, is the importance of dumb luck. Bismarck, he notes, was only appointed in the first place because of a “meltdown in royal circles” over which he had no real control. And if the aim of one would-be assassin, Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, had been only slightly different in May 1866, “the German states would certainly have evolved in a different way” — no First World War, no Hitler.

But if Bismarck had been entirely at the mercy of fortune, what would be the point of encouraging aspiring leaders, as Cummings did in his “Essay on an ‘Odyssean’ Education”, to take heed of his example? One aspect of Bismarck’s genius — Cummings does not shy away from that word — is that he harnessed the randomness of the world to his advantage. He was a brilliant practitioner of what Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (another Cummings favorite) called “Cheng/Ch’i” operations, feigned unpredictability to throw off the enemy. One hears much about “grand strategy” in international affairs, but Bismarck’s example suggests that the best way for countries to ruthlessly pursue their interests is by not “picking a strategy” at all. It may be no coincidence that Cummings had these thoughts during the early phases of the first Trump administration, nor that he senses amid the chaos of Trump’s present term some opportunities for wholesale reform.

Cummings is ever eager to emphasize that his admiration for Bismarck is not of a moral kind; indeed, he often says that the world would be better off today had Bismarck never existed. Still, given the extent of his enthusiasm — and of his vanity — it is natural to wonder whether he sees something of himself in Bismarck. The historian Katja Hoyer thinks so, and even traces some vague points of parallel between Bismarck’s career in government and Cummings’s — although even in a rather hostile article, she is too polite to point out that it is difficult to imagine the Iron Chancellor getting outfoxed in the halls of power by Carrie Symonds (Bismarck excelled at freezing the Kaiser’s wife, Victoria, out of the Prussian court). Hoyer claims, meanwhile, that Bismarck would never have written an “itemized response to every rumor that his enemies spread about him in the press”, but this I don’t find too difficult to imagine. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen said in 1875 that Bismarck “nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered”; and who knows how these might have manifested had Bismarck been acquainted with Substack.

Some of Cummings’s political behavior has a Bismarckian flavor. He is proudly cynical and non-partisan, and, like Bismarck, partial to the “secret meeting”: Bismarck with the flamboyant socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle; Cummings with everyone from Jeremy Corbyn’s communications team in 2019 to, it recently transpired, Nigel Farage. Notwithstanding his occasional social media rantings, Cummings strikes me as less of a mess of a man than Bismarck, who was constantly in tears and threatening to kill himself; tantrums and high emotions are not to be underrated as blunt instruments in his “diabolical” toolkit.

Beyond all this, I am not so sure that Cummings does fancy himself as a latter-day Bismarck. The subtitle to his chronology is “A Case Study of the Unrecognized Simplicities of High Performance”, and Cummings, who hawks books such as Superforecasting and The Scout Mindset to anyone who will listen, strives to be an expert “recognizer” of things “unrecognized”. Cummings’s Bismarck, at least when seen from the outside, is more a phenomenon than a human of flesh and blood; he is, in fact, a “super-intelligence”.

Cummings has used this metaphor on multiple occasions, and he means it seriously. Watching Bismarck “play politics” is akin to watching the best computers play chess; they’re not just playing it better than the rest of us, but “so differently that it’s really a different game”. Elsewhere, Cummings writes that the question Bismarck forces us to ponder — a question “relevant” to debates over AI today — is “how much was the effectiveness bound up with the dangerousness”. Cummings’s chronology lingers on the bourgeois teetering that met Bismarck on his elevation to the chancellorship in 1862 by those who recognized neither his effectiveness nor his dangerousness; he draws for us an intellectually hollow world order utterly unprepared for what was about to hit it, incapable even of seeing it for what it was. And those few who did recognize Bismarck’s brilliance — Albrecht von Roon, for example, who summoned him to be chancellor with his famous telegram, Periculum in mora — made the other fatal error, of assuming that he would “align” with their interests rather than pursuing his own; they recognized his effectiveness but not his dangerousness. Bismarck was not predicted or understood by “professors” and “pundits”; “the odd ‘maverick’ warns ‘you’re making a fatal error, I beg you to reconsider’ but is dismissed by the experts”. Cummings clearly isn’t Bismarck in this story: he’s the “maverick”.

Sir Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, wrote that Cummings “resembles those Germans who, as Max Weber observed in 1917, admired [Bismarck] not for the ‘grandeur of his subtle, sovereign mind, but exclusively for the element of violence and cunning in his statesmanship, the real or imagined brutality in his methods’”. Perhaps there is some blind power-worship afoot; some of Cummings’s ramblings certainly give that impression. Yet Bismarck, for Cummings, isn’t just a character plucked from the past for shrewd leaders to emulate, but a phenomenon which shrewd leaders will have to learn to recognize: something that transcends the usual rules and orders, something that threatens to upend everything, something — like, perhaps, Artificial Intelligence — that leaders will have to see even when elite opinion or the “official story” does not. On that recognition, the future of humanity might well depend; yet, with enough Bismarckian initiative, those threats might even present opportunities. Some of Cummings’s earliest published thoughts on AI, composed back when he was a little-known minion to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, closed, much in this vein, with one of Bismarck’s most celebrated bons mots. “Technical changes such as genetic engineering and machine intelligence are bringing revolution. It would be better to undertake it than undergo it.”

Sex and Character found particular success among tortured, brooding young men like its author. Ludwig Wittgenstein read it as a schoolboy, and remained devoted to it for the rest of his life. In a letter to his protégée, Elizabeth Anscombe, he favoured Weininger above Kafka: Kafka gave himself a “great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble”, whereas Weininger had the courage to face it all head-on. Weininger provides Ray Monk’s masterly biography of Wittgenstein with its master-theme. What Wittgenstein took from Weininger was the “twist” to Kant’s moral law that Monk made the subtitle of his book: “The Duty of Genius.”

Most who read Sex and Character today find their way to it via Wittgenstein. In August 1931 Wittgenstein remarked to G.E. Moore that Weininger “must feel very foreign to you”, and he is bound to feel even more foreign to the 21st-century reader. His intricate intermingling of misogyny with antisemitism is as baffling as it is off-putting. Yet although he makes an apology, early on, that the book “is for the most part not of a quality to be understood and absorbed at first glance”, it is surprisingly readable. Sometimes it rings familiar. Weininger combined ideas which we now would find only in the more esoteric corners of the online Right with ideas which are nowadays espoused in gender studies departments. He’s Judith Butler meets Bronze Age Pervert.

The main target of Sex and Character is femininity. Weininger knew his book was liable to offend its few female readers; he notes at the beginning that nothing would “rehabilitate” him in their minds. He was not so distressed at the thought of their disapproval. “The male,” he writes, “lives consciously; the female lives unconsciously.” Women do not think thoughts but rather what he called “henids”: half-baked notions more akin to feelings. Women are gossipy, sensual, vacuous. Their one love in life, so we are told, is matchmaking.

Yet when Weininger speaks of men and women, he is not speaking of biological categories. He is, in fact, an early critic of biological essentialism and a proponent of gender fluidity. All people, he claimed, are a mixture of maleness and femaleness; all exist along a spectrum, in various “transitional forms”. Weininger presented his argument as a “complete revision of facts hitherto accepted”, and it is a revision which has kept a foothold ever since.

Those few women whom Weininger liked or respected thus turn out to have been men all along. “These so-called ‘women’ who have been held up to admiration in the past and present, by the advocates of women’s rights, as examples of what women can do, have almost invariably been what I have described as sexually intermediate forms.” George Eliot was more man than woman; in her movements as in her prose she “lacked all womanly grace”. Weininger remained firm in his conviction that in the “real female”, talent is “rare and feeble”, and therefore that talented women (often lesbians) were basically men.

Sex and Character isn’t just a series of armchair speculations; Weininger also ventured into the field, so to speak. Part of the book is devoted to the “laws of attraction” governing sexual relationships. Weininger believed he had discovered the basic law, for which “almost every couple one meets in the street furnishes a new proof”. The law dictates that everybody seeks their sexual complement. If an individual is three-quarters male and one-quarter female, they will be most attracted to one who is one-quarter male and three-quarters female. Weininger proved this law by showing pictures of women to his male friends and guessing who they would find most attractive (he boasts about his perfect score). This law, he added, offered an obvious “cure” for homosexuality: “sexual inverts must be brought to sexual inverts, from homosexuals to Sapphists, each in their grades.” That is to say, the most effeminate gay men (who are, as Weininger would have it, basically women), ought to be set up with the manliest lesbians (basically men) — and that way constitute a heterosexual pairing, by anybody’s definitions. “Knowledge of such a solution,” he hoped, “should lead to the repeal of the ridiculous laws of England, Germany, and Austria directed against homosexuality.”

Real salvation, however, could be achieved only in celibacy. Weininger’s answer to the “Woman Question” is that “man must free himself of sex”. His misogyny is not therefore one which calls for the subjection of women, but rather their total obsolescence: he is much closer to Nick Fuentes, who preaches that “having sex with women is gay”, than Andrew Tate. The ordinary objection to universal celibacy — that human beings would go extinct — is no match for Weininger’s ferocious intensity. Such an objection is impious, since it denies eternal life after death for those who merit it, and cowardly, too; he is scathing about St. Augustine for weaselling out of the logical conclusion of his premises.

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As this may suggest, Weininger had, in the year before his death, swapped Judaism for an idiosyncratic Christianity. His blend of misogyny with antisemitism characterised Judaism as “saturated with femininity”. Jewish traits, to his mind, were feminine ones: the Jews were “habitual matchmakers”, “devoid of humour but addicted to mockery”. Jews were, to Weininger’s odd mind, all basically women. Although Zionism had “brought together some of the noblest qualities of the Jews”, and appeared to represent Judaism at its most assertive, ambitious, masculine, it was doomed to failure by the fundamental fact of Jewish effeminacy. Jews ought, according to Weininger’s counsel, to convert to Christianity; but fully escaping one’s Jewishness was a difficult task, and only one man had ever managed it. Christ was born a Jew for a reason, according to Weininger; “it was his victory over Judaism that made him greater than Buddha or Confucius… Perhaps he was, and will remain, the only Jew to conquer Judaism.”

Weininger was not Christ, so he took the only other path available to him. Eckart was probably right to speculate that Weininger killed himself as a self-hating Jew. There is a certain logic to the absurdities of Sex and Character, and Weininger doggedly pursues them all to their conclusions, even to the point of death. The arguments of the book — and there can be no doubt that Weininger believed them intensely — leave him with little alternative. There may be some consistency in madness.

Sex and Character was a particularly fevered product of anxieties about a “crisis of masculinity” and “feminisation of society” that we still hear a lot about, both within and without the manosphere. However eccentric and often outright loathsome, some of his ideas left more than a trace. One would be hard-pressed to name an early-20th-century figure who wasn’t influenced by him: Freud read and critiqued the earliest draft of Sex and Character, and James Joyce drew upon it when crafting Leopold Bloom. Sex and Character is, moreover, perhaps the fullest exposition ever written of the pathologies of the self-hating Jew. It is no wonder, then, that Weininger is often taken as the perfect, parodic encapsulation of the tensions and traumas of the Vienna of his day — of a society that entered the new century with its identity confused and its confidence lost.

For all that Wittgenstein matured out of his Weininger-fandom, he never shook off his fascination. It wasn’t necessary, or even possible, to agree with Weininger, he explained to Moore, “but the greatness lies in that which we disagree”. If one were to add an enormous negation sign to the whole book, he said, one might get at an important truth. Now, I am not convinced of this either: Sex and Character would probably be as mystifying with a negation mark as without one. But it is worth reading as a historical document, because of how well it captures the neuroses of the age in which it was written. And it is worth reading for the reason that all the world’s weirdest books from bygone eras are worth reading — to grimace at the unpleasantness and foreignness that Wittgenstein warned Moore about, and then be struck by those occasional jolts of familiarity.