For critics, however, the lack of a single authoritative document detailing the rules of the game, or at the very least outlining them, has long been a sore point — a source (for some, even the source) of widespread political, social and economic dysfunction. No wonder, then, that ears pricked up when Andy Burnham indicated that his plans for greater devolution “increase the case for a constitution”.

But while their excitement is understandable, it may well be misplaced. True, Burnham has already declared his commitment to proportional representation, a voting system that would spread power across more parties, potentially favor the Left, and significantly shift the country’s current constitutional balance. But his principal interest in the constitution, at least as he recently expressed it, seems only to stretch as far as a desire to better define the occasionally overlapping and therefore contested competencies of the various levels of British government, be they local, regional, devolved, or national.

This is the sort of thing that, classically, is really only a major concern for the constitutions of federal states such as Germany, even if, as purists will insist on telling you, the Bundesrepublik formally refers to that document as its Grundgesetz — fundamental law — rather than a Verfassung — a constitution. In a unitary (or at a push, hybrid-federal) state such as the UK, those competencies could be divided up without needing to come up with a completely new constitution.

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Andy Burnham's excruciating cringe

By Poppy Sowerby

However, if Burnham really is suggesting doing the latter, then he would be kickstarting a process that would inevitably take years of agonized argument to resolve. And it is worth looking at the sheer scale of what it would involve: something which, in most countries, only happens when a war or a revolution permanently destroys the legitimacy of the existing regime, obliging it, in effect, to completely re-found and rewire the state. After 1066, this country has been fortunate enough for that to have proved unnecessary even if it has, on occasion, been obliged to adapt: namely, in response to the “English Civil War” (a contested term) of the 1640s and the “Glorious Revolution” 40 years later, as well as the union with Scotland, the loss of most of Ireland and other parts of the empire, and European accession.

The UK does, of course, have a constitution. Indeed, contrary to common wisdom, many of the rules of the game are, it turns out, written down. It is just that, unlike the overwhelming majority of other democracies, they are uncodified: that is to say, they do not appear in a single, overarching document that is easily accessible (if not necessarily always easily-understood). 

What we in the UK have instead, is a hodgepodge of laws, conventions, customs and norms. And although we have something called a “supreme” court, it is not granted the exclusive and uncontested power to pronounce on whether the actions of governments, and the legislation involved, are “constitutional”. Nor do we “entrench” certain laws and rules in the belief that they are so fundamental to how we govern ourselves that changes to them should be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. If a simple majority exists in Parliament to overturn existing practice, then it can be overturned: no Parliament can bind its successor, while only in exceptional circumstances can the judicial branch get involved.

Fans of the supremacy of parliament (and they are not all Brexiteers) are prone to conveniently forgetting that one of the sources of the UK’s uncodified constitution is the Royal Prerogative. This means that, when we are talking about the government, we are talking about “the Crown in Parliament”: a concept that, in theory and practice, affords the executive branch significantly greater power than that enjoyed by governments in many other democracies — even those that are likewise parliamentary rather than presidential. Examples include the power to make and sign international treaties with little or no involvement of the legislature, as well as the ability to decide the timing of elections.

That said, most experts would probably agree that the most important source of the UK’s uncodified constitution are now (written) statutes, some of which are, or have come to be regarded, as “constitutional”. The definition of the latter was set out in the 2002 judgment by the appropriately named Lord Justice Laws (yes, really) in the so-called “Metric Martyrs” case, when he declared: 

We should recognize a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were “ordinary” statutes and “constitutional” statutes. The two categories must be distinguished on a principled basis. In my opinion a constitutional statute is one which (a) conditions the legal relationship between citizen and State in some general, overarching manner, or (b) enlarges or diminishes the scope of what we would now regard as fundamental constitutional rights. 

Should parliament want to repeal such statutes, it must do so “expressly”. It cannot, as is the case with “ordinary” statutes, do it by implication — that is, by passing another statute which conflicts with it but, because it was passed at a later date, is deemed to take precedence over it. The standout recent example of that process is probably the passing of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 in order to repeal the European Communities Act of 1972 that took the UK into the EU and effectively granted European law supremacy over national law.

Common law — the accumulated decisions of judges in cases that may well go back centuries — can matter too. It is of particular importance when it comes to the right of the courts to constrain the government and its officials, whose actions should be lawful, reasonable and fair, and compatible with the Human Rights Act (HRA). Note, however, that should a piece of legislation clash with the HRA, the courts are limited to issuing a potentially toothless “declaration of incompatibility” rather than being able (as they can in many democracies whose constitutions allow for full judicial review) to strike it down.

Other written sources such as the periodically updated Cabinet Manual and Ministerial Code also contribute to the constitution. And, like some of the constitutional statutes already mentioned, they too have loomed large in recent political controversies, as have the so-called Lascelles principles. These were based (believe it or not) on a letter to The Times in May 1950, but were much discussed in the spring and summer of 2022 when Boris Johnson, then prime minister, was hoping to hold onto his job by threatening his Conservative colleagues with a dissolution of parliament.

Yet for those who would like to turn Burnham’s vague constitutional hint into a reality, it is those maddeningly unwritten conventions that most provide the impetus. Once again, some will be familiar, having played a big part in recent rows: so, for instance, the monarch appoints the person best able to command a majority in the House of Commons to serve as their Prime Minister; the House of Lords does not delay legislation promised by the governing party in its election manifesto; and Parliament, as per the Sewel Convention, doesn’t legislate in areas of devolved competence without consent.

Trying to nail down a form of words that will satisfy both supporters and critics of those conventions will be hard enough. But there are also conventions that are so contested that some experts argue they don’t yet qualify as such. The need for a referendum over major constitutional changes, for instance, will surely raise its head among supporters of first-past-the-post or Brexit should Andy Burnham attempt to undo either. Likewise, there is considerable debate over whether explicit parliamentary approval really is needed before the government takes military action. (As if to bring us full circle, this is a power deriving from, you’ve guessed it, the royal prerogative).

A document that encompassed all of the above, in a manner that could command both cross-party and popular consent, would require an immense amount of time, effort and expertise. It is hard to believe that the Conservatives or Reform would countenance a codified constitution that placed significantly greater constraints on the power of the executive. And should such a document still be put before the electorate in a referendum, the campaign could easily end up being even more acrimonious than the Brexit vote, especially if, unlike Brexit, it required the consent not just of voters across the UK as a whole, but in each of its constituent parts.

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Don't fall for Project Smear, Mr Burnham

By Yanis Varoufakis

That is not to say, definitively, that it cannot or should not be attempted. It isn’t hard, after all, for critics to characterize the current arrangements as not merely muddled but deeply undemocratic (the unelected House of Lords) and unable to guarantee even those rights that have become taken for granted (an HRA that can be repealed by a simple majority). For those critics, the current constitutional settlement affords British governments arbitrary powers and undeserved latitude deriving from the monarch rather than the people.

Against this, however, many politicians and pundits across the political spectrum insist, with some justification, that not only are there more important things for British governments to be getting on with, but that a codified constitution would likely constrain rather than enhance their ability to act. Just as importantly, they will argue that current arrangements provide the UK with a capacity to update our constitution to take account of changed circumstances and preferences. In this view, our capacity to adapt in this way is the envy of those democracies in which such updates can only occur via a supermajority in parliament or a plebiscite.  

Codifying a constitution that has evolved over centuries into the messy but broadly workable compromise that exists today would surely use up much of the precious political capital Burnham has managed to build up since he moved into No. 10. So while he may be tempted in the long term to follow through on the hints he’s just dropped, in the short-term he should probably leave well alone.

As one rather less complacent insider once put it to me, the Conservatives effectively “behaved like a disappointed middle-aged wife whose husband’s just run off with his PA and thinks: ‘Well, give it three or four months and when he needs his socks darned and a home-cooked meal, he’ll come crawling back, begging for forgiveness.’”

It didn’t happen, of course. Blair went on to win two more general elections and it took the Tories the best part of a decade-and-a-half to make it back into Downing Street — and even then, without a majority to call their own. So hapless was the Tory party’s initial response that it arguably offers one of the best guides to what-not-to-do for any political party booted out of office.

With the Tories facing the prospect of another sojourn in political wilderness after next year’s election, the current crop of Conservatives should be trying to learn their lessons from 1997. If what happens next is anything like the period from 1997-2005, after which the Tories eventually took a punt on a shiny young moderniser called David Cameron, then they’re in for seven years of seriously bad luck.

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Keir Starmer is no Blair

By Tom McTague

Anyone who thinks that a huge defeat would be a wake-up call for the Tory party should think again. The atmosphere post-1997 was one of complacency, especially among smug Tory MPs who had managed to hold onto their seats and put their defeat down to a temporary swing of the political pendulum.

Of course, the rational thing for a defeated party to do would be to conduct a comprehensive post-mortem; perhaps one overseen by former MPs who lost their seats or have no intention of running again. But since when has politics been a rational business, or one untainted by overweening ambition?

A defeated party is far more likely to jump straight into a leadership contest (especially these days, when defeated prime ministers tend not to stick around). That almost inevitably involves the candidates telling the selectorate exactly what they want to hear. In 1997, for example, Tory leadership candidate William Hague told the party faithful that Labour only won the election because it had accepted the Thatcherite settlement. The only thing the Tories needed to reassess, he reassured them, was their creaky organisation not their outworn market-liberal ideology.

Defeated parties can also be far too reluctant to face up to the fact they’ve made a duff choice after rushing into a leadership contest — even when opinion polls make it clear that the public thinks their new leader is a hopeless loser. It was obvious within weeks, days even, that the Tories had lumbered themselves with a dud not just in 1997 but in 2001 too, when they replaced William Hague with Iain Duncan Smith. But it took years to get rid of them.

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Will Uxbridge ever trust again?

By Tanya Gold

In political exile, opposition parties tend also to worry (not unreasonably) that donations are going to dry up, making them excessively wary about spending money on expensive, in-depth research into public opinion. This leaves them trying to put right what they think they got wrong rather than realising what their real mistakes were — not a great basis for making a comeback.

All that research and innovation takes time as well as money, however. Easily one of the worst things about being in opposition, as veterans won’t hesitate to tell you, is that voters and the media don’t care much about you anymore. But trying to make them take notice by adopting headline-grabbing, populist positions is a dangerous game. For one thing, it makes you look desperate. For another, it leads to parties adopting potentially stupid stances that they will struggle to row back on and prioritising attention-seeking stunts: whether it’s an ill-advised photo shoot — Hague’s team wearing cagoules and baseball caps as they splash down a theme-park log ride springs horrifically to mind — or, in the case of Duncan Smith, insisting the party oppose adoption by same-sex couples.

Just as bad, opposition parties have a tendency to double down on issues that are assumed to play well for them, rather than engaging with the issues of the day. This is especially true when the economy is strong, as was the case between 1997 and 2005, when the Tories fell back on the so-called “Tebbit trinity” of tax cuts, Europe and immigration. It’s not that these issues don’t matter, but they are unlikely to appeal to voters more than the promise of rising living standards and visibly improving public services (particularly “schools n’ hospitals”).

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The political power of Deano

By Tom McTague

Another temptation that a recently defeated party can fall prey to is to look back with excessive pride on all the supposedly great things they did in government, believing they have nothing to apologise for. Adopting New Labour strategist Philip Gould’s “concede and move on” mantra would be a much better course of action — a lesson not lost on Keir Starmer, who lately has seemed prepared to throw pretty much any commitment overboard if polling and focus groups suggest that it’s a problem. But that requires an ability to let go, that, especially in the early days, defeated politicians find it incredibly hard to demonstrate.

Even harder for politicians is to face the fact that it’s almost impossible to shape voter preferences when you’re in opposition. Rightly or wrongly, that means accommodating them — moving to where they actually are, rather than where you’d like or imagine them to be. Anyone who doesn’t get this is best sidelined in shadow cabinet. That said, it’s never a good look if wounded big beasts aren’t brought on board; Ken Clarke in 1997 and Michael Portillo in 2001 are stand-out examples.

Perhaps the final lesson for opposition is not to allow success in so-called “second order elections” (by-elections, local elections, and referendums) to fool you into thinking you’re on the right track. At the locals in May 2000, Hague’s Tories gained nearly 600 seats, and yet polls later that summer showed Labour streets ahead. Which was the better guide to the 2001 election result?

The Tories aren’t guaranteed to learn from their 1997 mistakes — especially given the tactics Rishi Sunak has adopted ahead of next year’s election. With the economy failing to come to his rescue, Sunak looks set to play as many populist, anti-woke and “green-crap” cards as he can in order to stop the party being deserted by voters who are feeling the cost-of-living crisis and seeing public services come under serious strain. Even if his strategy ends in defeat, it’s not clear that the rest of the party will get the message. We’re far more likely to see a central-casting culture-warrior like Kemi Badenoch take power instead, perhaps after beating Penny Mordaunt in a race that could see all the serious contestants up the populist ante by pledging to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights. If so, it’ll be déjà vu with the Conservatives, as they did for nearly a decade after 1997, looking obsessive, irrelevant and, sometimes just plain nasty.

There is, though, some hope for all those Tories praying that their party hasn’t entirely abandoned the mainstream centre-right. And it lies in Badenoch’s response to criticism from backbench Tory MPs over what they saw as her failure, last month, to purge each and every bit of retained EU legislation from the UK’s statute book. “I am not an arsonist, I’m a Conservative,” she shot back, suggesting that there may, in fact, be rather more to Badenoch than meets the eye.

Anyone wanting to see the Tories spend as little time out of office as possible after 2024 should pray that’s the case. If voters do decide to cast the Conservative Party into the wilderness next year, then the last thing it will need is a leader wedded to the same quasi-austerity and performative populism that it’s currently foisting on the country. As Winston Churchill, one of the party’s more successful leaders of the opposition, is routinely reported to have said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

The Conservatives can lay claim to be the world’s oldest and most successful political party precisely because, in order to hang on to power and prevent (or at least limit) any truly significant redistribution of power and wealth, they have always been prepared to mix and match policies in way that both appeals to a wide electorate and also makes pinning them down ideologically feel like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

Admittedly, at first glance, the impression of a party totally transformed is easy to run away with. After all, Cameron and Osborne, as well as insisting on balancing the books no matter what the cost to the nation’s deteriorating public services and rising poverty levels, were often portrayed as modernisers hell-bent on dragging the Tories kicking and screaming into the 21^st century. Johnson on the other hand, whatever the cosmopolitan image he worked hard to create as Mayor of London, seems happy to cosplay the authoritarian populist — the leader of a party determined to engage in a ‘war on woke’, to defend the interests of businesses big and small, and to allow nationalism to trump his party’s traditional commitment to economic rationality.

But let’s look, first, a little closer at the Conservative Party under Cameron. Sure, it brought in equal marriage after it made it into government in 2010. But it had to rely on the votes of the opposition Labour Party to do so, since so many of its own MPs rejected the change. Similarly, while Cameron in opposition began by hugging huskies, he ended his time in Number Ten by demanding his colleagues “get rid of all the green crap” — meaning it was left to his unfortunate successor Theresa May to commit the country to net zero. Meanwhile, Cameron’s Conservatives also spent a great deal of time and effort both bringing in draconian policies (accompanied by equally draconian rhetoric) to try and crack down on immigration and badmouthing the European Union — all of which helped fuel the rise of UKIP and ultimately led to Cameron’s fateful decision to call the 2016 referendum.

As for austerity, there is no doubt that it was a reality after 2010 — but far more so for some parts of the state, and some people, than others. The NHS, as it may do now, escaped the bulk of the cuts foisted on so many other public services, while folk on pensions — unlike younger people and the poor — actually did relatively well, presumably because they constituted (and continue to constitute) such an important part of the Conservatives’ voter coalition. Admittedly, policing did suffer cuts, but that didn’t stop the party under Cameron continuing to call its main opponent ‘soft on crime’, as well as framing Labour as the party of immigrants, Europhiles, students, the chattering classes and supposedly work-shy welfare claimants.

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Inflation is never coming down

By Will Lloyd

So what about the party under Johnson? True, Sunak has raised rather than cut taxes, including corporation tax — a move which, notwithstanding reliefs on R&D and temporary cuts to high-street business rates, some pearl-clutching neoliberals will doubtless still insist on seeing as the very incarnation of Johnson’s characteristically unguarded (but also characteristically pretty meaningless) “Fuck Business!” remark. But few if any of those tax rises is remotely progressive, not least the increase in National Insurance which the party pretends will ‘fix social care’ (it won’t). Nor is there any serious suggestion of moving to tax wealth or property to anything like the extent that a serious rebalancing of the economy would require. The hike in the National Living Wage is, of course, welcome, although let’s not forget that it was George ‘austerity’ Osborne who invented the concept in the first place!

Meanwhile, Sunak rescinded his boost to welfare benefits prompted by the pandemic as soon as decently possible — a decision which, for those not in work, will not be compensated for by his eye-catching (and indeed welcome) reduction in Universal Credit’s taper rate. Nor is the Government providing anywhere near enough funding to help poorer pupils who missed so much school catch-up. The same arguably goes for climate change policy, where, especially after the Government’s policy announcements in the run up to COP26, it’s getting harder and harder to escape the feeling that the Tories under Johnson, not for the first time, seem happy to will the ends but not the means.

As for spending more generally, while capital spending and infrastructure projects have received an expected boost, day-to-day government spending (much of which filters down, or rather doesn’t filter down to local authorities) is going to be as tight as ever, making the Government’s endlessly repeated talk about ‘levelling up’ a little hard to credit — unless, of course, we’re talking about money funnelled not to those most in need but to those constituencies in the Midlands and the North which flipped to the Conservatives in 2019 and which Johnson and his colleagues are understandably desperate to hold onto.

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Is Boris taking us back to the Seventies?

By Dominic Sandbrook

For all that, barring an economic meltdown in which the cost-of-living crunch really does become a crisis and the various trading frictions associated with Brexit get worse rather than better, they stand a pretty good chance of doing so.

The voter coalition that Brexit enabled Johnson to build is made up of older voters, of sometimes ethnocentric, not particularly well-educated, intensely patriotic voters living in small towns, and of more affluent voters in already well-served parts of the country who (if they are better-educated and so socially more liberal) are prepared to set aside their discomfort with the Brussels-bashing and the culture wars so long as their taxes are kept reasonably low and their precious house prices kept high. And, like Brexit — indeed precisely because Brexit continues to simmer even if it no longer boils — that voter coalition, whose geographical distribution is nicely suited to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, doesn’t seem done yet.

Certainly I wouldn’t bet on those voters taking seriously against the Budget even if it doesn’t fall hook, line and sinker for Sunak’s ‘new age of optimism’ line as much as his adoring fandom in the Tory-supporting press. They know, we know, that this is the British Conservative Party — doing whatever it takes, two-and-a-half centuries and counting. Rishi or no Rishi, there is nothing new under the sun.

Those old enough to remember will recall that there were basically two approaches. You could simply bash the bejesus out of the buttons that controlled the flippers, not worrying too much about what the silver ball hit as long as it hit something, randomly clocking up points in the process. Or you could play things more strategically, working out which bits of the table offered the most points and, using the flippers sparingly and with rather more precision, try to ping the ball in the right direction.

On balance, the second approach may have produced less frenetic fun but it was nearly always more effective: ultimately, after all, you got to play longer and you tended to score more points — sometimes even enough to earn a replay.

And so it is with party leader’s conference speeches. Less can often be more. When you’re on the attack, aim for laconic rather than histrionic. And when you’re setting out your own stall, pointing to just a few special offers and hinting at more to come beats trying to leave your listeners spoiled for choice.

The model for me (at least for a Labour leader) will always be John Smith in Blackpool in 1992, making a speech to a party that was demoralised after its fourth defeat in a row yet just beginning to wonder whether, in the light of the chaos and incompetence displayed by the Major government in the days leading up to the Conference, the Tories were really as unbeatable as everyone had assumed.

The prospect facing Keir Starmer, another former lawyer, as he stood up to address the faithful (and the not-so-faithful) was, then, far from unprecedented.

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The man who destroyed Labour

By James Kirkup

So did he deliver? Well, maybe not totally. But, to be fair, it was far from the kind of epic fail that Boris Johnson and the Corbynite stay-behinds who did their best to heckle “their” leader were no doubt hoping for. And it may even have left some of those with no skin in the game but whose expectations were low (especially after the pasting Starmer’s 14,000-word magnum opus got from the cognoscenti), pleasantly surprised.

Personality — at least with a big P — remains a problem. As a courtroom lawyer, Starmer, unlike Smith, was never the kind of performer who has the jury eating out of his hands and the audience hanging on his every word. As a politician, nothing’s changed. I’ve never seen him on the dance floor but, as an orator, he has no sense of rhythm. Or, indeed, of tone. A party caricatured as preachy and po-faced could really do with a leader who doesn’t always sound quite so plaintive. I’ve no idea if someone on his staff has sat him down and told him he desperately needs to get some voice coaching, but they should do. After all, it never did Margaret Thatcher any harm.

Instead, Team Keir is clearly still convinced that there’s mileage in marketing their man as the antithesis to Boris — the responsible ying to the PM’s frivolous yang, the guy whose approach (as he himself, like some kind of Checkatrade-approved plumber, put it) is “Down to earth. Working out what’s wrong. Fixing it.”

Hence all the stuff about the good deeds Starmer was doing as a civil rights advocate and a prosecutor while Johnson was fannying around phoning in trivial blah, blah, blah for the Telegraph — all of which also served as a useful reminder to a public that he’s had a job that actually means something outside politics.

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Does Sir Keir have the guts to rescue Labour?

By Paul Embery

It sort of works — but even with a few jokes thrown in (of which the early one comparing hecklers with Tory MPs at PMQs was by far the best, and the best-delivered) — I’m still not sure that’s enough. To take an example, “Level up? You can’t even fill up” actually had the potential to be what passes in politics (a low bar, I admit) as a killer put-down. Coming out of Sir Keir’s mouth, however, it sounded a little leaden and contrived. Likewise, the more assertive and pleasingly alliterative “Get a grip or get out of the way.”

That said, to those who complain that we already know what Starmer got up to before going into politics, it’s worth saying (yet again) that the majority of people out there probably don’t. The same goes for him telling us (yet again) that his dad was a toolmaker and his mum was a nurse. How (and why), for instance, does anyone think so many people in London know that Sadiq Khan’s dad was a bus-driver?

Starmer’s family background shtick did tee up a peroration (“Work. Care. Equality. Security. These are the tools of my trade. And with them I will go to work.”) that was beautifully-crafted for television news. And those of us who complained about how long he was talking for as we watched live need to remember that those clips are all that sensible people (who weren’t) will ever hear.

The sheer length of the speech wasn’t entirely accidental, of course. By affording Starmer space to remind activists of his pukka-working class and NHS background, it made it harder for Labour’s Momentumite irreconcilables to lay into him in the hall — as did asking the always admirable Dame Doreen Lawrence to do his intro. They still had a damn good go, startling those in the broadcast media who, for some strange reason, think Starmer’s the first Labour leader to face a tough crowd — and so made it an integral (but totally disproportionate) part of their packages for the evening and morning news programmes.

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The speech Starmer should have given

By Ian Martin

Still, Starmer’s long address also gave him the chance to kick the Corbynites where it really hurts by promising never to “go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government” and (heresy of heresies) to “offer the Conservative party a lesson in levelling up” by listing (to one of the most genuinely striking standing ovations he received) the achievements of the last Labour government — one run by politicians who, like him, believed in “changing lives” rather than simply “shouting slogans”.

The ninety-minute speech also gave Starmer plenty of time to share some eye-catching (if not always entirely persuasive) policies on crime, state education and climate change — future-facing, focus-grouped to be voter-friendly and a retort to those who would otherwise bound to have banged on about a lack of “substance”.

To those of us watching for whom less is more, there was probably too much in there. But to those for whom “more is more” — those who might have taken the first, more frenetic approach to playing pinball down in Brighton all those years ago — that won’t have been a problem.

I’d be prepared to bet that Starmer (who’s three years older than me and so must occasionally have played when he was younger, too) would naturally prefer the second, more careful approach to the game. But this year he tried both. Whether that means he’s a wizard or whether there has to be a twist, we’ll soon find out.

One would have thought that Oliver Dowden was doing a fairly good job of pursuing the Government’s forever “war on woke”. But obviously not. The reshuffle saw Olive, as the former Statues (sorry, Culture) Secretary (now party co-Chairman) is known to his friends, summarily replaced by the preternaturally plain-speaking Nadine Dorries. She was known by her enemies as the woman who once suggested equal marriage was something which only “metro elite gay activists” aspired to and called Messrs Cameron and Osborne “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”.

Whether Ms Dorries, before accepting his commission, quizzed Mr Johnson on precisely how much he paid when he last popped out for a pint of semi-skimmed is, sadly, not recorded, although, if precedent is anything to go by, we will eventually find out. Indeed, many of the most delicious moments in contemporary histories of recent premierships are provided by their accounts of the often cack-handed attempts of their hapless heroes to inject fresh blood and get rid of dead wood.

Normally, it’s the sackings that afford the most entertainment: May’s “elder sister” slaying of George Osborne is an absolute classic of the genre — not least because it came back to bite her big time when the former Chancellor became editor of the Evening Standard, from which perch he took great delight in proving that revenge is indeed a dish best served cold (and, in his case, that meant very, very cold indeed).

This time around, however, it’s the appointments that are more intriguing. In part, that’s because the reshuffle’s two most obvious victims were (a) long-destined for the chop and (b) not particularly interesting or heavyweight politicians.

It would be hard, for instance, to find many people sad to see Gavin Williamson depart Education after what teachers, students and pupils (not to mention their parents) have been put through during the pandemic. And the now-former Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Robert Jenrick (cruelly dubbed “Robert Generic” by his detractors), was better known for bending lockdown rules, greenlighting a Tory donor’s questionable construction project, bunging big grants to towns with Tory MPs, and going on telly to defend the indefensible than he was for building more houses.

Their replacements, however, are rather more interesting. Nadhim Zahawi will, of course, be criticised for having no direct experience of state schooling, but may well be given the benefit of the doubt, at least initially, as a result of his impressive performance as Vaccines Minister and because he’s that most unusual of top Tories – someone with a BSc (Chemical Engineering, UCL) rather than an Oxford PPE.

Even more interesting, is Michael Gove’s move to MHCLG. This is not a ministry normally given to a big-hitter with a reputation (at least among civil servants) for competence as well as the ability to present a parliamentary and Cabinet case.

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Westminster's empty narcissism

By Peter Franklin

His appointment suggests – encouragingly – that Johnson realises that he can’t merely give up fundamental planning reform as a bad job and hope the problem goes away. And, while it may be true (Gove’s many fans would even say tragic) that his neo-con worldview and concerns about his reliability (perhaps expressed most shockingly and openly a few years ago by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace) mean Gove is unlikely ever to be awarded one of the great offices of state (Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary), his decision to accept the challenge — which apparently includes converting the PM’s “levelling up” rhetoric into reality – is nonetheless significant.

The test, of course, will be whether he can achieve anything without simultaneously losing friends and alienating people (including voters) – a test he clearly flunked when he was Cameron’s controversial Education Secretary.

But if Gove is something of an ideologue, he has nothing, at least on that score, on Liz Truss, the new Foreign Secretary — the first Conservative woman (and only the second woman ever) to occupy that post. And in some ways that (plus the fact that the Tory grassroots’ favourite free-market zealot was seen by those who get off on Global Britain as having done well in the International Trade brief) may be half the point.

At the FCDO, Truss has effectively been parked somewhere where her Britannia Unchained, Singapore-on-Thames shtick isn’t going to interfere too much with Boris Johnson’s rather more pragmatic, interventionist, and supposedly One Nation brand of Toryism. Meanwhile, her replacement at DIT, Brexity former International Development Minister, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, is seen as a reasonably safe pair of hands, although without Truss’s infamous flair for publicity. That said, anyone (can there still be anyone?) dreaming of a trade deal with China on her watch might be well advised invest their hopes elsewhere.

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The West can learn from China

By Marshall Aubercack

Truss replaces Dominic Raab – surely the most high-profile casualty of this reshuffle, which may seem like an odd thing to say about the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor after he was compensated with the formal title of Deputy Prime Minister. But let’s be honest: Franklin Roosevelt’s Veep, “Cactus Jack” Garner famously dismissed the vice presidency as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”; well, whatever is worth less than warm piss, that’s basically what the office of DPM is worth.

He knows it. Johnson knows it. We all know it. The fact that he was offered it at all is testimony only to the fact that, unlike some of the others who were demoted (Williamson, Jenrik, former Justice Secretary Robert Buckland and the Boris-uber-loyalist, former co-Chairman, Amanda Milling) No 10 couldn’t be entirely sure that Raab would go quietly – or, indeed, remain relatively quiet on the backbenches in the hope of a return to government (or, more likely, a seat in the Lords) in years to come.

Quite what Raab’s fellow lawyers will make of him, however, will be interesting to see. There would seem to be little chance of him going native – he was after all the first Tory during the 2019 leadership contest to promote proroguing parliament as a route out of what was then the Brexit impasse. If anything, they may want to buckle up for a bumpy ride: Raab’s combination of natural aggression and neoliberalism means he may be far more inclined than his predecessor to pick a fight with what he’ll no doubt see as the sector’s “producer groups”.

In the end, however, although we’re bound to be distracted by who’s up and who’s down, perhaps we should pay more attention to three politicians who have stuck around. Priti Patel clearly remains too totemic to shift from the Home Office: even if she can’t stop those migrants coming across the Channel in small boats she can bang on about them like no-one else, helping to ensure no space opens up on the Conservatives’ flank for a post-Farage populist right. David Frost is still what passes for the PM’s brain on Brexit. And Rishi Sunak is not just too popular to move; his reputation as a fiscal hawk (doubtless something he’ll burnish this autumn) also provides some much needed reassurance to the party’s bog-standard backbench Thatcherites that Johnson, for all his strengths as an election-winner, hasn’t led the Tories entirely off the small-state straight and narrow.

Ever since the shock win for the Lib Dems in Chesham and Amersham back in June, many on the centre-Left have been waiting for something equally arresting to confirm that it wasn’t a one off, and that the Tories might be in as much trouble in some of their southern heartlands as Labour are in the north.

But is YouGov’s eye-catching Blue Wall poll really that other shoe dropping? And even if it is, isn’t it more a faint echo than a darn great thud?

That the Conservatives are losing support in some of their seats which heavily backed Remain in 2016, and where over a quarter of residents hold a university degree, actually shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

After all, the flip side of the electoral analyst James Kanagasooriam’s observation that there were Labour seats where voter demographics (and values) meant they could easily turn Tory was always that the Conservatives should expect to lose a few seats, too. In fact, one could almost argue that it was always going to be a matter of when, not if.

It could even be that Covid is speeding the process up. The Government’s recent responses to both the ping- and pandemic have once again given people the impression that (a) it doesn’t really know what it’s doing, and (b) there’s one rule for it and one for the rest of us. Added to which, the search for space among relatively affluent city dwellers may be leading to the surrounding outer suburbs and small towns welcoming younger, better-educated and more socially liberal voters

Chesham and Amersham may be just the kind of constituency they are moving to. But if that formerly true-blue stronghold is in play, then so are a bunch of home-counties seats, although most of those are rather more vulnerable to the Lib Dems than to Labour.

Which is why it may be a little disappointing to those investing in YouGov’s latest polling to find that, at least in the seats it surveyed, support for the Lib Dems appears to have dropped (from 24% down to 18%) since the general election. If he does want take more Blue Wall seats off the Tories in 2023 or 2024, then Ed Davey is going to need a much bigger orange mallet than the one he wielded for the rather endearing photo-op that celebrated his party’s win in Chesham and Amersham.

Suggested reading

Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

Labour appears to be doing better, with its support rising four points from 20% to 24%. But if you’re excited about those numbers, then it probably says more about you than it does about them. A score of 20% doesn’t even merit the label “low base”. It wouldn’t even come close to what the party would need to pull off an unlikely victory in a classic three-way marginal. In 2019, there were just 11 English seats which had a vote-share gap between first and third place of less than 20 percentage points, and even among those the lowest winning vote share (Labour’s in Sheffield Hallam) was 34.6%.

To be fair, YouGov reckons that: “If the swings were uniform across all constituencies, Labour would be set to gain a total of nine Blue Wall seats, and the Liberal Democrats three.” However, if you look carefully, four of those Labour wins would be in London (Chipping Barnet, Chingford, Hendon and Kensington) and only one (Wycombe) is in what most analysts would think of as the “real” Blue Wall (the others being Milton Keynes North, Stroud, Truro and Falmouth, and one of the Bristol seats).

And anyway, as YouGov goes on in the next breath, even if Labour were to gain the seats listed, “it would not be anywhere near enough to offset the party’s losses in the so-called Red Wall in 2019”. The fact remains, as Keir Starmer’s new Director of Strategy, Deborah Mattinson (whose book does a great job of helping to explain those losses) has reportedly told Labour MPs: the party still has a long way to go if it is to win over the older, less-educated, and culturally conservative voters it desperately needs to get back in order to stand a chance next time round.

Apparently, she also pointed to polling and to focus group research, in which she specialises, that suggests support for Boris Johnson is waning. It’s also worth remembering that, at the end of last year, before the vaccine roll-out became a reality for most people, the gap between the two parties had narrowed. But even as the nation’s gratitude begins to fade, it remains the case that, nationwide, both the PM and the Conservative Party retain significant leads on the measures that matter — trust on who would best run the economy and who would make the best prime minister.

Suggested reading

Don't stereotype Red Wall Tories, Boris

By David Jeffreys

Sure, there are some worrying numbers for the Tories in the YouGov poll. Some 54% of its Blue Wall respondents disapprove of the Government (the same proportion who say it doesn’t listen to people in their area) – and that’s compared to only 30% who approve. Moreover, 47% think the Government is taking the country in the wrong direction compared to just 32% who reckon it’s taking us in the right direction.

Furthermore, some of the Blue Wall’s decidedly liberal views on cultural questions (for instance, 66% of voters polled by YouGov agree that a wide variety of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture compared to 50% of voters in general and 54% in the Red Wall) might give the Government pause for thought about upping the ante on its ongoing war on woke.

More generally, the fact that 55% think the Conservative Party is out of touch is hardly good news for Boris Johnson — until, that is, you realise that 58% say the same of the Labour Party. And Lib Dems shouldn’t read too much into the fact their score on that metric is 39%: a mere 18% say that they’re in touch.

Ultimately, though, most Conservatives — except perhaps those southern Nimby MPs desperate for ammunition in their battle to prevent their government carrying through meaningful planning reform — won’t (or at least shouldn’t) get too worked up about what the poll purports to tell us about the Blue Wall. This is mid-term: they should expect some serious discontent and dissatisfaction.

In any case, a drop from 52% support in 2019 to 44% support now can be made to sound steep but ultimately, in most of their heartland seats anyway, the worse that’s likely to happen to Tory candidates at the next general election is that they end up having to count the votes rather than simply weigh them.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. True, the Government had had a pretty torrid time of it over the weekend thanks both to Matt Hancock and to Boris Johnson’s failure to sack him straight away. But the canny appointment of Sajid Javid was supposed to have steadied the ship, indeed set it sailing full speed ahead for 19 July when a swathe of Coronavirus restrictions now look certain to be lifted.

Even better, the Government could point to some seriously good news from Sunderland, where Nissan, in defiance of all the Brexit-hating doomsters and gloomsters, is committing to building a gigafactory and launching a new model at its plant there.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the fence, the knives were being sharpened for the supposedly useless Sir Keir Starmer, with mounting excitement that the ongoing beef between him and his salt-of-the-earth deputy, Angela Rayner, might produce a leadership challenge. And then there was Labour’s hard Left, some of whose social media stars were salivating at the prospect of another Hartlepool-style humiliation providing them with yet more proof that the party they love (or at least started loving in 2015) has supposedly lost “the working class” by dumping the socialist policies that won it two stunning moral victories at the general elections of 2017 and 2019.

No one can say for sure why things didn’t play out the way the way the pundits and, for what they’re worth, the betting markets, thought they would. But these are my best guesses.

First up, Labour had an exceptional candidate — a woman who is not just hyper-local and highly personable but who, because of her sister, who was murdered back in 2016 when serving as MP for Batley and Spen, could claim a profound emotional connection to the place that must have swayed some voters (and not just previous Labour voters) her way.

Second, Labour’s ground campaign, turbo-charged by the MP newly appointed by Starmer to be its National Campaign Coordinator, Shabana Mahmood, did a bang-up job of identifying and getting out the vote.

Third, the Conservatives can’t have been helped by the Hancock shenanigans. But, probably more importantly, their ground campaign was apparently a bit of a dog’s breakfast – a reminder that, in a close race, having boots on the ground can sometimes make the difference. It’s all too easily forgotten that, while the Tories may have grown their vote in the “red wall”, they haven’t necessarily grown their grassroots membership there.

Suggested reading

The toxic battle for Batley and Spen

By Tanya Gold

Fourth, the intervention and non-intervention of other candidates didn’t make the kind of difference that many had forecast. Much was made of both the prospects and the appalling antics of that inveterate publicity-seeker George Galloway, who back in 2012 managed to bag himself a by-election victory in the Labour seat of Bradford West by using the same divisive tactics. Clearly, those tactics still have considerable traction: he won over a fifth of the vote. But they may also have driven others to turn to Leadbeater in disgust.

It is also entirely possible that, by standing, Galloway siphoned off some the votes which the Conservatives hoped (perhaps even assumed) would go to them as a result of the decision by the Heavy Woollen District Independents not to stand. Meanwhile, the lack of a Green Party candidate may well have seen a few of the nearly 700 people who voted for it in 2017 and 2019 plump for Labour. Which way, incidentally, the nearly 2,500 voters who supported the Lib Dems in 2019 went, who knows?

Suggested reading

Labour isn't working

By Paul Embery

The same goes, perhaps, for what all this means. Strictly speaking, the line being briefed by the Tories to anyone who’ll listen – “This is not a Labour win. It’s a Labour hold” – is obviously accurate. But – partly due to Labour’s excellent expectations management – that’s not at all how it feels.

Nor is how it will sound to the majority of people who are sensible enough not to pay too much attention to politics. All they will hear is that Keir Starmer won a close race, giving him some breathing space and a chance to put things right.

Whether he can – whether Batley and Spen can be a turning point and not just a turn up for the books – remains to be seen. As the ancient Greek historian, Polybius, very wisely observed, “Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.”

Well, let’s not be so swift to condemn. A look back at where three of Boris Johnson’s Tory PM predecessors stood a year after they too had trounced Labour at a general election gives the lie to the idea that only Boris could have blown things so badly. Sure, he’s had a difficult year. But we somehow seem to have forgotten that they had too!

So Christmas tidings of comfort and joy all round, right? Well, not quite. For two of the three Tory leaders in question, remember, it would never be glad confident morning again. Still, the whole point of history is to learn from it. So what lessons are there for Boris from their successes and their failings? Let’s start with the one whose time in No 10 was about to come to a very abrupt and unexpected end.

David Cameron, May 2016

Pride, they say, comes before a fall. And in David Cameron’s case, that fall was pretty damn spectacular. It would be unfair to say that as he went about his business at the beginning of May 2016, he was serenely confident, let alone chillaxed, that Remain would triumph in June’s EU referendum. By that stage of the game, after all, no one in No 10 imagined they would be coasting to victory. But Cameron still had every hope of victory, mainly because the economic case he was majoring on so overwhelmingly favoured the Remain cause – just as it had in Scotland a couple of years earlier and at the general election a year before.

That it didn’t go his way could be blamed partly on the fact that he was fighting the referendum campaign with one hand tied behind his back, so determined was he not to indulge in ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks. He wanted room to put the party back together afterwards, even when sorely provoked by (guess who?) Boris Johnson.

Perhaps if Cameron had displayed the same killer instinct that had helped him see off Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown when dealing with the enemy within, then Prime Minister George Osborne would now be dealing with the Coronovirus crisis – and without having to worry about ‘getting Brexit done’ at the very same time.

Lessons for Johnson:

(1) A track-record of winning referendums doesn’t mean you’ll win the next one, especially if your argument is economic and the other side’s is emotional. Denying the Scots another vote is going to be very difficult, so start thinking now about how to win hearts not just heads;

(2) when dealing with your internal opponents, attack is often the best form of defence, particularly if the alternative is appeasement. The lockdown sceptics and the Eurosceptics will never be satisfied – so stop trying, put on your proverbial big boy pants, and take them on instead; and

(3) in politics, there really, really is no such thing as a friend. Beware Rishi Sunak – and, as ever, Michael Gove

Suggested reading

This is no time for austerity

By Peter Franklin

John Major, April 1993

The fact that John Major, who had taken over a divided and demoralised Tory party after a hard-fought leadership contest 18 months earlier, won the general election of April 1992 came as a genuine shock. The polls had pointed consistently to a Labour victory or, at the very least, a hung parliament.

In the event, the Conservatives thrashed Labour in terms of vote share by 42 to 34 percentage points, winning what is still the highest number of votes for any party at a UK general election: 14.1 million. In politics, however, every silver lining has a cloud. Britain’s first past the post electoral system, which so often helps the Tories, this time rescued Labour, leaving Major with an overall majority of 21 seats, down from 102.

If Major had ever hoped that such tight arithmetic might concentrate the minds of his mightily relieved colleagues, then a year into his second term, that illusion was well and truly shattered. The reason? Not sleaze – although David Mellor’s resignation in September 1992 proved a harbinger of what was to come on that front – but the UK’s costly forced exit from the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on Black Wednesday that same month.

That external shock not only cratered the Conservatives in the opinion polls and provided proof (if proof were needed) to an as yet small but increasingly determined band of Tory MPs, that UK participation in European integration must not be allowed to go any further and, if possible, should even be wound back. As a result, ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which had originally been greeted as a triumph for Major’s diplomacy, had turned into a parliamentary and personal nightmare. It really only ended four years later when a new, convincingly centrist Labour leader finally put the Conservatives out of their misery, The rest, as they say, is history.

Lessons for Johnson:

(1) Gratitude is the most perishable quantity in politics. The credit you get, both for pulling off a last-gasp diplomatic triumph and for pulling your party’s electoral chestnuts out of the fire doesn’t last very long. Winning big in 2019 and Brexit will mean nothing if you’ve not been able to prove the latter has indeed given you squillions to squirt on schools and hospitals, and shinier town centres, in those Red Wall seats;

(2) a parliamentary majority counts for little in the face of the formation of a party (or parties) within a party. ERG, CRG, NRG. These things are growing like topsy. Buying them off policy-wise is a bad idea. But frontbench roles for their most ambitious movers and shakers? They can work wonders; and

(3) a combination of events, dear boy, events and the election of a credible, moderate and clever opposition leader can rapidly erode your lead in the polls without the pendulum swinging back to you as the next election looms. Keir Starmer might not be a full-blown heir to Blair, but he really doesn’t need to be to win the next election. The threat he presents needs taking far more seriously than it has been so far.

Suggested reading

How patriotic Labour could crush Boris

By Tim Bale

Margaret Thatcher, May 1980

It is easy to forget, in the light of her second and third successive election victories in 1983 and 1987 that, a year after her first, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was by no means mistress of all she surveyed.

True, although her parliamentary majority was nothing compared to what it managed in those later contests, it was still – at 44 – far more comfortable than John Major’s. However, the economic outlook was, if anything, considerably worse than the one he faced after 1992. Unemployment was running at over 7% (nudging 2 million), British manufacturers were going bust all over the country, and inflation stood at (from today’s perspective a scarcely credible) 22%.

And while the Labour Party was too preoccupied with its own civil war to present much of a threat, a number of so-called ‘wets’ in the Cabinet were deeply (and none too privately) concerned about what they saw as Thatcher’s nonsensical determination to stick to the fiscal and monetary squeeze that she was messianically convinced would provide a long-term cure for Britain’s ills.

That said, the news wasn’t all bad. Progress was being made on a Housing Bill which would introduce one of Thatcherism’s flagship, and electorally popular, policies – Right to Buy. And in the meantime, the SAS’s daring raid on the Iranian Embassy proved an unalloyed triumph and one which announced to the world that Britain was back as a global player.

Lessons for Johnson:

(1) Even if some of your worried cabinet colleagues are urging you to u-turn on the big shift in economic policy you’ve been talking about for a year or more, keep calm and carry on. Levelling up is vital, both politically and economically; don’t let your fiscal hawks, especially your Chancellor, talk you out of it;

(2) focus, too, on pushing through policies that will help you retain all those working class voters you won over from Labour. You won in 2019, remember, not just because of Brexit but because you promised it would lower immigration, recruit more nurses and police, and build more houses; and, of course,

(3) keep banging that patriotic drum. Voters want the country talked up, not down, to feel it has a bright future not just a glorious past. This is your greatest strength. Never, ever stop playing to it.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson could win a 'war on woke'

By Tim Bale

In the end, of course, different things work for different people – and different prime ministers — at different times. While it may have been a near-visionary sense of mission that helped Thatcher survive her very difficult first year and go on to win two more general elections, it could well be the protean pragmatism that enabled Johnson to climb to the top of Disraeli’s greasy pole in the first place that helps him stay there after his own annus horribilis. This is especially true if it means (as I suspect it does, given his penchant both for history and for breathtaking opportunism) that he is more inclined than most to learn the lessons that the past has to teach.

It’s hardly surprising then, that those hoping for a Labour government might be looking elsewhere — searching for an alternative route to power that runs not through former mining and industrial seats, but instead through the quote-unquote leafier suburbs of Britain’s big cities and some of its commuter belts. Think Guildford, not Gedling. Think also, for instance, Chingford, Uxbridge & South Ruislip, and Wycombe — places where Labour’s vote has increased substantially since 2005 and where it’s now over 25%.

Suggested reading

The last thing Labour needs is 'unity'

By Stephen Pollard

Are those doing the hoping right? Well sort of. Talk to some of the Tory-inclined analysts of the UK’s electoral dynamics and geography, including those whose work first alerted the Conservative Party to the potential gains on offer in the Midlands and the North, and they will freely acknowledge the flipside.

As values and culture become as important to British voters as valence and competence, then there are seats in southern (but not exclusively in southern) England full of well-heeled, increasingly well-educated voters which could eventually fall to the centre-Left. Canterbury as canary in the coalmine, if you like.

But ‘eventually’ is an awfully long time in politics — and, with a few exceptions, probably too long for any Labour supporters hoping to turn things around in just four years. The term ‘centre-Left’ points to an important caveat, too. Not all of what we might call the leafy liberal seats, if they do flip in the future, will flip to Labour. For instance, constituencies such as Wimbledon, Esher and Walton, and actually Guildford itself, are far more likely to turn orange than red.

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Can Dominic Raab cling on to Esher?

By Ian Birrell

That needn’t, of course, be a deal-breaker — indeed, it could turn out to be a deal-maker. The chances of Labour making it into office in 2024 on its own and without the support of other parties are, frankly, slim — since even a small overall majority would require a swing of the size last seen in 1945 and 1997, elections which back then delivered the kind of monster majorities that not even the most optimistic of optimists working for Keir Starmer can possibly hope for — especially now Scotland is all but lost.

If the best, then, that Labour can do in four years’ time is to become the largest party in parliament, it will (even if there are still Scottish seats in the Westminster parliament) have to depend on the Lib Dems capturing or recapturing at least the 13 seats that Ed Davey (presuming he’s still leader by then, too) stands to snatch from the Tories on, say, a 5% swing.

On the upside — for both of England’s ‘progressive’ parties — there is now next to no electoral competition between them. There are now just nine seats in the entire country where the Lib Dems are the key challengers to Labour, down from 76 in 2010. And none of the 11 Lib Dem MPs currently sitting in Westminster faces a credible threat from a Labour challenger.

In fact, a division of labour between Labour and the Lib Dems may, some might argue, be no bad thing since it would theoretically allow Starmer to leave the socially-liberal, pro-European stuff to Davey, while he beats a more patriotic, even authoritarian drum in order to win back the seats the party has lost since 2005.

More from this author

Boris Johnson could win a 'war on woke'

By Tim Bale

But there’s a problem with that horses-for-courses, red-orange strategy. Not all the leafy liberal seats that might swing away from the Tories — especially if they really do decide to wage the kind of ‘culture war’ that some Conservative MPs clearly see as their best bet — are winnable by the Lib Dems.

The hard truth is that Labour will have to try to win a whole bunch of seats outside the Red Wall by itself, whether they be leafy liberal or, perhaps more promisingly, some of the socially-heterogeneous seats in home counties towns that it managed to win in 1997. And doing so almost certainly rules out a transparently desperate (and as such probably ultimately unconvincing and internally divisive) attempt to embrace cultural conservatism in order to close the yawning ‘values gap’ between Labour and the voters who switched from it to the Tories in 2019.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Labour need give up on most, all or even any of the seats in which those switchers live.

In part, that’s because those more culturally conservative, provincially-minded voters are not the be-all-and-end-all of those seats. Some of those constituencies contain significant proportions of ethnic minority voters still inclined to vote Labour. And even those that don’t are not, believe it or not, like those small towns in a sci-fi movie where all the kids, the teenagers, and the young adults have mysteriously disappeared. Moreover, you wouldn’t know it to read some media commentary, but some people living in them — yes really — have even been to university. And even some of those that haven’t share the broadly ‘progressive’ views of the majority who have.

Suggested reading

Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

In any case it’s a common misconception that, when it comes to elections (and referendums) demography is somehow destiny. Of course it matters that many of those seats have (or can certainly be caricatured as having) large number of older, less educated, white working class voters who were repelled by Labour’s London-Left-liberalism — especially when it appeared to accelerate under Corbyn. But that doesn’t mean that at least some of them can’t be brought back into the fold by a palpable change of direction or at least an emphasis under a Labour leader savvy enough to steer clear of the supposed excesses of identity politics and away from any suggestion that Brexit can be unwound.

It’s an equally common misconception that all or nearly all of the northern seats that switched had never before elected a Tory MP — many of them (Barrow-in-Furness, Bury North and Bury South and Bolton North to name but the ‘b’s) did so in the 1980s before going back to Labour again in the late nineties and early noughties. In other words, a fair few of the seats that Labour needs to win back are seats that the party has lost (and often lost quite badly) in before but won back, sometimes with seemingly stonking majorities.

Nor should we discount the economic shocks resulting from both Covid and Brexit, deal or no deal. By the time the next election rolls around, the UK might not be firing on all cylinders, let alone have been ‘levelled-up’. As a result, there is really no earthly reason why Labour — decently led and with a little bit of luck — can’t snatch back many of the seats Boris Johnson captured back in 2019, in addition to winning a bunch of home counties and leafy-liberal constituencies further (but not always: think Rushcliffe and Altringham and Sale) south.

Keir Starmer would doubtless deny being a Blairite. But he is going to have to pull off basically the same trick as the man who only a small minority of his grassroots membership still regard with much, if any, residual fondness and respect.

For all the inevitable calls for him to define himself this week, in the months and weeks to come, Labour’s new leader would be far better off becoming, like Blair, a protean politician onto whom a bewildering variety of voters can project their own aspirations and concerns — and so see in him both the radicalism and reassurance they simultaneously crave.

Such an approach would actually make sense — and not just because it’s all of a piece with the hegemonic war of manoeuvre recommended by Michael Gove’s newest best friend, Antonio Gramsci. According to research published today, it is underlying socio and cultural (as opposed to economic) values that keep the Conservative Party and its electoral coalition together and give it the best chance of connecting with the voters it will need to win again in 2024.

Political scientists often make use of two sets of questions to measure people’s economic and social values. They’re designed to tap into underlying, stable, long-term ideological attitudes rather than ephemeral, short-term policy preferences.

The first set covers economic values: the distribution of wealth and income, big business, fairness, etc. The second covers socio-cultural values and includes question on things like law and order, the purpose of education, respect for traditional values, and censorship.

Essentially, this is a recognition that politics can’t just be understood as a contest between Left and Right – between state and market. We also have to take into account whether people are socially liberal or social conservative.

Further reading

The man who predicted 2020

By Aris Roussinos

Most of the time, those questions are only asked of voters – for instance by the gold standard British Election Study. But in this new study they were also asked of MPs and grassroots party members from both the Conservative and the Labour parties.

Their responses give us a sense, not just of how united or divided the parties are, but of how out of touch they are with voters – and not just voters in general but even those voters who supported them at last year’s general election.

Covid-19 is going to do some serious damage to the economy. And one only has to look back to events like Black Wednesday in 1992 and the financial crash of 2008 to see how easily that sort of setback can swiftly shred a party’s hard-won reputation for economic competence. If (some would even say when) that happens to the Tories in the months and years to come, then, the research suggests, they’re going to have to rely heavily on social and cultural conservativism to see them safely through the next election.

That’s because, when it comes to economic values, the Conservatives a) are less likely to see eye-to-eye with one another than their Labour counterparts and b) are further away, if not from the average voter, then from the voters that helped them win so comfortably in 2019. Indeed, those voters’ underlying values on the economy mean they have more in common with the Labour Party at all levels than they do with Conservative members, activists and MPs.

True, on social and cultural values, the Tories are not altogether united either.  But they are much closer to voters – especially the ones they really need to keep hold of if they are to repeat their 2019 win in four years’ time.

Let’s look, first, at economic values.  Figure 1 shows that on every question used to tap into those values apart from the first one on redistribution, the differences between what the Conservative Party’s MPs, grassroots members and voters are much bigger than they are between Labour’s people.

Figure 1

It also shows, incidentally, that, if Labour can overcome the economic competence deficit that has cost it so dear since 2010, and then get voters to realise just how differently Tory MPs think about the economy than they themselves do, then the Government could find itself in serious trouble.

Figure 2 hammers home that warning. On every economic values question, the average voter who made the journey from Labour in 2017 to Conservative in 2019 (represented by the black dot) is more Left-wing than the average member of the public, as well as noticeably to the Left of the average individual who voted Conservative in 2019.

Figure 2

Moreover, these 2019 Labour-to-Conservative switchers are far, far closer to Labour when it comes to underlying economic values than they are to the Conservatives. For instance, a full 81% of those switchers think that big business takes advantage of ordinary people – very much in line with 83% of Labour MPs and 92% of Labour members, but very much out of line with Tory members and Tory MPs, only 34% and 18% of whom, respectively, think the same way. And on whether “there is one law for the rich and one law for the poor” the 84% of Labour-to-Conservative switchers who agree are far closer to the 92% of Labour members and the 71% of Labour MPs who say the same than they are to the 22% of Tory members and 5% of Tory MPs who think so too.

Keir Starmer might have sacked Rebecca Long Bailey last week but he’s no neoliberal, and nor is his Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds.  They will be perfectly comfortable putting forward an economic recovery plan that reflects those switchers’ values. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak? Not so much. Any conversion to socialism brought on by the current emergency will, one suspects, be short-lived, leaving the party — on the economy at least — stranded way to the right of many of the voters they need to hold onto.

But when it comes to social and cultural values, it’s a whole different story – and a story with what could well be a happier ending for the Conservatives.

Figure 3

For one thing, as Figure 3 shows, generally speaking (the exception being the death penalty), the Conservative Party’s MPs, members and voters are more united than their Labour counterparts and, as a whole, tend to be a little closer to the average British voter.

For another, when we look at different groups of voters, as we do in Figure 4, we can see that — in what is essentially a mirror image of the picture on economic values — 2019 Labour-to-Conservative switchers (again represented by the black dot) are much, much closer to the Conservatives when it comes to underlying social/cultural values than they are to Labour. In fact, those switchers even sit to the right of Conservative members and Conservative MPs.

Figure 4

Ultimately, though, it is the yawning gap between the 2019 switchers and the Labour Party they abandoned that is most striking. Just 17% of Labour members and 9% of Labour MPs think that “young people don’t have enough respect for traditional British values” — a view held by 88% of Labour-to-Conservative switchers. The idea that schools should teach children to obey authority is supported by 81% of those swing voters, against just 29% of members and 41% of Labour MPs. Stiffer sentences are supported by 85% of switchers — again way more than is the case for Labour members (25%) and Labour MPs (24%).

It is also striking, again from Figure 4, but this time looking solely at parliamentarians (who are, after all, the most visible representatives of their respective parties as far as voters are concerned), that Tory MPs are far closer not just to their voters but to all voters, than are Labour MPs. That’s because, much as it pains liberals to admit it and even if things may gradually be shifting their way through generational change, Brits remain a pretty authoritarian bunch.

Given all this, some kind of culture war, however damaging and polarising some fear it would be, is arguably a perfectly rational strategic choice for the Conservatives in the years to come. It would build on — but, just as crucially now that Brexit is nearly done, allow them to build out of — the Leave-Remain identities established, to their obvious recent advantage, since 2016.

Further reading

The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

By Matthew Goodwin

Pushing back against supposed attempts by the liberal elite to make Brits ashamed of their history and downplaying structural and institutional racism are only the more obvious aspects of such a strategy. Clamping down on illegal immigration — especially now that Nigel Farage is back punching that particular bruise — will also loom large. Even apparently trivial interventions, such as Gavin Williamson’s call for schools to insist pupils face the front and pay attention to the teacher rather than each other play a part.

There are, however, just a couple of crucial caveats.

First, it takes two to tango: while there may be plenty of socially liberal Labour MPs who might easily be tempted to fall into a Tory trap on this score, for example by allowing it to look like they were lecturing Home Secretary, Priti Patel, on racism. Keir Starmer and most of his Shadow Cabinet, whatever their true feelings, seem far less likely to take the bait.

Second, but no less important, the figures above suggest that Conservative MPs are not only more socially liberal than Conservative grassroots members and Conservative voters but more liberal than most voters – and on some issues are even more liberal than Labour voters. To win a culture war, like any other war, a general not only needs all his troops behind him but they all have to be up for the fight.

So if Boris Johnson is genuinely serious about ‘levelling up’ — and indeed about ‘fucking business’ — then this new research strongly suggests that he risks a good deal of unhappiness on the benches behind him from those overwhelmingly Thatcherite backbenchers who joined the Conservative Party to promote, not mitigate the free market.

It also suggests that, on social and cultural values, those MPs have rather more in common with the old Boris, the live-and-let-live liberal mayor of London, than with the ersatz Trump some of his advisors seem to want him to become. The electoral logic, however, points strongly to him listening to those advisors rather than worrying too much about the misgivings of his parliamentary colleagues.

But it’s worth reminding ourselves, especially when we’re talking about parties that have been around a while, that they do tend to limp and linger on. They fade slowly into obscurity and obsolescence, rather than dying a dramatic death.

That’s partly because the barriers to entry for anybody aspiring to replace them are pretty damned high, particularly in plurality systems such as the UK’s. Historically, anyway, it’s been somewhere between difficult and impossible for any party that can’t manage to score around 30% of the nationwide vote here to break through — unless, like the Scottish and Welsh nationalists or the Northern Ireland parties, they can claim to speak for a particular part of the country with a particularly strong identity. Nigel Farage, in offering the Tories some kind of electoral pact with the Brexit Party, isn’t so much doing them a favour as trying to prevent a re-run of 2015 when Ukip won nearly four million votes and only one solitary seat. 

Suggested reading

How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

Britain’s big two have been so dominant for so long that they are more or less dug in in a slew of safe seats. That means that, unlike their competitors, they can actually afford to slip some way below the magic 30% and still win a reasonably respectable (and often fairly proportional) haul of constituencies.

Infrastructure keeps them in place too. They hold significant capital, whether it be physical (such as constituency offices), financial (assets and the ability to raise loans and donations), or human (members, know-how, experience, and even cosy relationships with the print and broadcast media).

Clearly, none of that stuff lasts for ever. But only very rarely does it disappear overnight. And if you don’t already have it — and new entrants by definition often don’t — then it can take time to get it together. Nor, unless success comes reasonably rapidly, can you guarantee that it’ll last long enough to consolidate for the long term what you’ve managed to build up in the first flush.

Members, in particular, may be pretty easy-come, easy-go. And the technology that new parties nowadays use to help hook them in the first place can easily be turned against them. Social media will make it obvious that an increasing number of rats are leaving the sinking ship, perhaps precipitating even more of them to do so. Even direct debits, which used to be something of a godsend to parties by making membership renewal the default, have turned into a potential liability: most people can cancel them in seconds by swiping left or right.

Suggested reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

Older parties, of course, can’t completely avoid some of the same problems. As we show in our new book, Footsoldiers, members’ loyalty can be tested beyond breaking point, especially by leaders who take the party in a direction they fundamentally disagree with. We’re seeing that more than ever during our Brexit cleavage.

But many of those members have been around an awfully long time, are socially as well as politically embedded in their local branches, may well represent them on town or county councils, and have stuck with it through thick and thin. As a result, they are significantly less likely to abandon or jump ship quite so rapidly.

What established parties do find difficult to escape, however, is being rendered increasingly irrelevant by social, economic and cultural change. Most of them will have come into being by mobilising identities that once upon a time were not only widespread, and made a lot of sense, but were also institutionally reinforced by relationships with big external players that both anchored them ideologically and supplied them with valuable resources.  

On the Left, for example, you had social democratic and labour parties which mobilised class consciousness and were supported by trade unions. They demanded the state do more to look after workers by regulating the economy and maintaining a welfare state. 

On the Right, in many west European countries, you had Christian democrats, mobilising religious adherence and supported (albeit at arm’s length) by the Catholic church. They put more of an emphasis on international integration and the market and were underwritten by a densely-woven, civil society-run safety net that promoted traditional, family values.

But class, even though it continues to play a huge role in deciding our life-chances, is no longer such a big part of people’s identities. Unions are pale shadows of what they once were as economies, at least in the liberal-capitalist West, have shifted irrevocably away from industry towards services. Conventional wisdom — partly thanks to the centre-left itself giving up the fight — has moved away from the idea that the state can and should do everything.

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs Christian politics

By Christopher Rhodes

On the other side of the fence, church attendance and religious observance has also declined significantly in most European countries. The Catholic church has been badly undermined by scandal, and the consumerism and nationalism it has traditionally frowned upon abound. Meanwhile, the welfare state, even if it’s fraying badly at the margins, has become something of a given, meaning parties of the mainstream Right and Left have to some extent become victims of their own post-war success. 

It is no accident, then, that it is parties in those traditions which (with a few honourable exceptions) seem to be suffering a slow (and, who knows, possibly in the end terminal) decline: what’s happened to both the Labour Party and Christian democrats in the Netherlands provides possibly the direst warning. This decline has been exacerbated in recent years by a failure to come up with convincing answers to widely-felt cultural anxieties brought about by mass immigration and its exploitation by arguably less responsible, but supposedly more responsive (and often more entrepreneurial) politicians – in their case, Geert Wilders and now Thierry Baudet.  

Whether we will inevitably see the same happen to both the mainstream Left and Right in the UK, however, is at least debatable. This is not necessarily the chronicle of a death foretold – for the Tories, anyway.

The Conservative Party, with its own long-lasting nationalist, nativist and populist traditions, and its reliance not on God but on Mammon, has far less compunction — as it’s proving at this very moment — about running down the radical right route than its continental, Christian democratic, centre-right counterparts. As such, its chances of surviving the near-death experience represented by the European Parliament elections this summer are probably (famous last words!) reasonably good.

Suggested reading

The coming Conservative catastrophe

By Matthew Goodwin

The Conservative party can adapt and cater to these new times – an era where belonging, as self-styled conservative communitarians like to put it, seems to be assuming more and more importance. Although doing so might (as Sajid Javid’s recent spending review seems to recognise) also involve spending more money than ‘the gods of the copybook headings’ would like on things which are seen as a vital part of that community: schools and hospitals and law and order. 

Labour, for all its own enthusiasm for such spending, might have more of a problem, however. Its romantic attachment to the working class (however outdated its conception of it) and its reliance on the trade unions make it tricky for it to transition seamlessly into the kind of internationalist, socially liberal party that would suit many of its (overwhelmingly middle-class and well-educated) members. Moreover, that space is also occupied by the Lib Dems, who also have the advantage of a clear rather than a muddied message on Brexit.

Indeed, Labour’s dilemma over the latter is in some ways its larger strategic and electoral dilemma writ large.  Does it try and hang on, perhaps nostalgically, to what some of its supporters still insist talking and (worse still) thinking of as ‘their’ people?  Or does it cut its losses, believing there’s more to be gained on what traditionalists like to stereotype and sneer at as the cosmopolitan side of town. 

Some will argue – with a fair bit of justification – that the divide between the two groups of potential voters isn’t quite as significant or, indeed, quite as zero sum as others insist. But few would deny that it exists at all. If so, can and should Labour continue to try straddle it? Or, is it about to fall — and fall fatally — between two stools?

The current Tory leadership contest is sheer agony – especially for those of us able to call to mind the calibre of some of those who have steered the party and the country in times gone by. There’s one man, in particular, whose influence on Britain and the wider word was – and continues to be – immense. And yet his name isn’t lauded like say, Churchill or de Gaulle. History seems rather to have written him off. But without him, our lives might have been very different. I’m thinking of Harold Macmillan.

Let’s begin with his more trivial achievements – well, relatively trivial. In 1956, Macmillan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was looking for ways to dampen down inflation by cutting consumption. In that year’s budget, he introduced a government-backed savings vehicle which paid out no interest but instead offered investors the chance to win a tax-free prize every month. Sixty or so years later, over 20 million people in the UK own well in excess of £30 billion worth of Premium Bonds.

A fair few of those people will also live in a house originally built in the years following the war. Some of those buildings, of course, went up during the pioneering Labour government that led Britain between 1945 and 1951. But even more of them were constructed under the Conservative government that followed it – and which ran the country for 13 years until 1964.

Suggested reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

That government’s first Minister of Housing – the man to whom many believed Churchill had given a poisoned chalice by asking him to achieve the seemingly impossible target of 300,000 properties a year – was (yes, you’ve guessed it) Harold Macmillan. Via some judicious deregulation, he not only helped the construction sector reach the target but helped it do so far earlier than expected.

Before that success, many of his colleagues had written Macmillan off, regarding him, indeed, as something of a political oddity and a personal failure (his impressive military record in WWI and diplomatic role in WWII notwithstanding).

Westminster’s worst kept secret was that his wife had been conducting an affair with his Conservative colleague, Bob Boothby, since the 1930s. And during that decade, Macmillan himself had earned a reputation as a disturbingly unconventional thinker on economic and social policy, writing volumes such as The State and Industry (1932), Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Unity (1933), The Next Five Years (1935), and, perhaps most famously, The Middle Way (1938). All of them championed the idea that governments should take greater responsibility for the economy as well as, more generally, the welfare of the population as a whole.

Meanwhile, Macmillan’s family business, in which he played an active role, was publishing John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory – probably the most influential book on economics of the 20th century. It is credited with helping to convince post-war policy makers that, via the management of demand by fiscal and monetary means, they could prevent a return to the unemployment which blighted Britain (and other countries) in the thirties.

It became increasingly clear after 1945, that the Conservative Party was going to have to reconcile itself to the public’s demand for a more activist state – one that would provide both economic growth and increased social security. And so Macmillan’s long-held beliefs looked rather more prescient. So, too, did his opposition to appeasement, which, along with that of Churchill, Eden and others, later helped to avert the charge that the entire Conservative Party had effectively given Hitler what he wanted.

As a result, and given his successful ministerial record under Churchill, it came as no surprise that, in April 1955, Eden having finally managed to winkle the grand old man out of Number 10, Macmillan was named Foreign Secretary. Later that year, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Macmillan’s elevation to the Premiership just over a year later in January 1957, however, did come as something of a shock to those not in the know. It had a great deal to do with an event that is often quoted nowadays (in the same breath as Brexit) as one of the most disastrous and humiliating episodes for a British government in recent memory – the 1956 Suez crisis.

Suggested reading

How do you solve a problem like Theresa?

By Polly Mackenzie

It might be going too far to assert that, without Macmillan, Eden would never have gone with the idea that Israel should invade Egypt in order to provide a pretext for Britain and France to snatch back the Suez Canal. But Macmillan’s enthusiasm for the plan, and his misplaced confidence that US President Dwight Eisenhower (whom he had got to know well during the war) would tolerate the operation, certainly did nothing to dissuade his colleagues from going ahead with it.

It is undoubtedly true, though, that it was Macmillan’s rapid realisation that the otherwise relatively successful intervention would have to be called off, not least in order to prevent a diplomatic disaster turning into economic chaos, which convinced those same colleagues to stop it in its tracks.

It was also Macmillan who, unlike, his rival Rab Butler, was able to convince his furious fellow Conservative MPs that the government could recover from the affair – one of the main reasons the party turned to him rather than Butler when Eden resigned.

Supermac – as he came to be dubbed – turned out to be right. Not only did he manage to repair relations with the US, later striking up a friendship with the much younger Jack Kennedy, but at the 1959 election – one unusual for being fought in the autumn rather than the spring or summer – he increased the Conservative Party’s overall majority to over 100.

This he did by persuading voters (who he famously said “had never had it so good”) that it was the architect and guarantor of their burgeoning consumer affluence, establishing the template later used to similarly devastating electoral effect by Margaret Thatcher in the loadsamoney 1980s. But he also did it by refusing to countenance the public spending constraints demanded by his supposedly proto-Thatcherite Treasury team, whose resulting resignation in January 1958, Macmillan, with his characteristic ‘unflappability’, dismissed as “a little local difficulty”.

More from this author

Why we all need a share in capitalism

By Tim Bale

In hindsight, this may have been unwise – though not nearly as unwise as his fateful decision in 1960 to commission Dr Beeching to write his report which resulted in the closure of a third of Britain’s rail network, cutting off hundreds of towns and villages from one of the most environmentally-friendly (if costly) forms of transport.

But it was surely in defence and foreign affairs that Macmillan made his biggest and most lasting contribution. He played a role in Cold War efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons but also secured the Polaris weapons system for the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. He effectively admitted that Britain’s imperial game was up and then set a course firmly for decolonisation with his ‘Winds of change’ speech in February 1960.

And, of course, after trying to establish the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as a counter to the EEC, Macmillan swiftly came to the realisation that the UK had no alternative but to join the bigger bloc, initiating its first of three eventually successful accession applications to what is now the EU.

Whether that 40-plus years of membership is about to end – and end in tears – who knows? What we do know, however, is that without Harold Macmillan, Britain and the world might well have looked very different.

The influence of Europe’s – and in particular Britain’s – populist radical Right parties is a case in point.

Although we’ve been hearing about their rising support for years now, few of them have actually won sufficient seats in parliament to force their way into national office. And, as we’ve seen in Peterborough, some of them can’t even win high profile by-elections.

Yet – often with the help (if not necessarily the support) of a media that understandably craves conflict and novelty – they’ve managed to shift the centre of gravity strongly in their direction, particularly when it comes to questions of migration and multiculturalism.

For decades, many centre-Right parties either didn’t have to think very much about those questions (because the numbers coming to their country were so small) or, like the Conservative Party here, they had established a reputation in the minds of voters for being the tougher of the two main governing alternatives on such issues.

Suggested reading

How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

Once numbers began to increase, however, those centre-Right parties, already losing support as voters lost faith in their ability to produce the economic goods, were in a bind.

On the one hand, as market-friendly parties supported by business, they could see the case for maintaining a reasonably relaxed attitude: no point, after all, in cutting off a useful source of often cheap, hard-working and flexible labour. On the other, as self-appointed guardians both of their country’s traditional values and its sovereignty, they understood and sympathised with the cultural anxieties felt by many of their ‘natural voters’ – anxieties which more extreme alternatives on their right flanks were more than happy to exploit.

Social democratic parties on the Left, meanwhile, were losing support, particularly among the shrinking ranks of the traditional working class. And they were desperately casting around for reasons why. Rising support for the populist radical Right provided an easy, off-the-shelf explanation that avoided their having to ask whether the truth lay elsewhere – such as with their third-way embrace of less redistributive, less interventionist economic and social policies, and in the seemingly remorseless displacement of authentic working class voices by well-heeled, well-educated, and more professional politicians.

The evidence suggests that the centre-Left has always been significantly less likely to lose voters directly to the populist radical Right than its centre-right opponents. Take Denmark, which is much in the news at the moment. Yes, the Social Democrats, who’d considerably tightened up their already pretty restrictive immigration and integration policies, did well in this week’s general election. And yes, the populist radical Right Danish People’s Party did badly. But the one doesn’t necessarily explain the other – not when flow-of-the-vote calculations suggest that less than 10% of the former’s vote was made up of people who’d previously voted for the latter.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Yet, predisposed as they are to add two and two to make five, Labour and social democratic politicians all over Europe have been no less obsessed than conservative, Christian democratic and even liberal parties with trying to work out how to respond to a threat that can easily appear bigger than it is. What else explains Ed Miliband’s famous immigration mug, or Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to limit free movement not just of goods, services and capital but of people, too?

The mainstream’s first response is often to try to change the subject by talking about almost anything else other than immigration and integration. That’s not altogether impossible: after all, people still care about the economy and public services. But it’s very difficult to do when voters clearly are concerned about such things and, especially when there are plenty of politicians and journalists who know that ‘floods’ of migrants, their apparent ‘failure’ to ‘fit in’, and the supposed ‘strain’ they place on the welfare state make for such arresting headlines.

The mainstream’s response at that point is to try to fight fire with facts – which, as anyone who has tried it will attest, is normally about as effective as fighting with one hand tied behind your back, especially when not everyone in the mainstream (particularly on the centre-right, it has to be said) is averse to peddling some now-familiar myths themselves.

As a result, the most obvious recourse for both centre-Left and centre-Right parties is to claim ‘We’re listening’ and to start adopting – albeit in dilute form and couched in less inflammatory rhetoric – some of the diagnoses and the policy prescriptions of their more radical opponents. The hope, of course, is that voters, realising that their concerns (many of which revolve around the sheer rapidity of cultural change that they never explicitly consented to) are now apparently being taken seriously, will end their flirtation with the extreme and gratefully return to the mainstream.

Suggested reading

The Tory plot thickens

By Various contributors

Except it doesn’t always work like that. By ‘banging on’ about the urgent need to control migration and insisting that migrants mustn’t live separate lives, as well as about (to pick two not-so-random examples) net migration targets and the big bad EU, mainstream parties only serve to up the salience of such issues. And so, rather than undermining the populist radical Right, they actually do it a favour – not least because it can always trump any restrictive (or Eurosceptic) policy that a mainstream party can dream up with something much bigger and better.

Nigel Farage will no doubt be peeved by the Brexit Party’s failure to pull off a win in Peterborough. But it won’t wipe the smile off his face permanently. Farage knows from his days as UKIP leader that all he has to do to get what he wants (which, whatever he might say about taking over at Westminster, remains, in the end, a no-deal Brexit) is to score highly enough in polls and in European and by-elections to make sitting MPs believe that his candidates are capable of stealing enough of ‘their’ voters to gift their seats to their main opponent.

Right now, then, Farage has got both Labour and the Conservatives exactly where he wants them: living in fear and promising the undeliverable.

But was she right about ‘popular capitalism‘, the intuitively plausible idea formed by Tories in heady days of the Eighties that held that spreading share-ownership via the privatisation of publicly owned firms and industries would give ordinary Brits ‘a stake in the market’ and, in so doing, would push them to vote Conservative instead of Labour?

The answer, according to some intriguing research I heard about this week during a trip to the States, suggests she might have been.

Suggested reading

Why the Iron Lady is an icon for our times

By Ian Birrell

As far as I’m aware, Lady Thatcher had no personal connection with Princeton, one of the USA’s Ivy League universities, although one of the best recent books on her was written by Sir David Cannadine, a British historian and Princeton faculty member.

But it was here that I attended a colloquium exactly 40 years to the day after Thatcher first entered Downing Street as Prime Minister, and where I heard Yotam Margalit, from Tel Aviv University, present some research he’d conducted with Moses Shayo from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Margalit wasn’t talking about Thatcher, but the findings of his research would, I’m sure, have pleased the Iron Lady no end. As a trained chemist, Thatcher would especially have liked the fact that they resulted not from desk research, but from an experiment.

The experiment was a complex one, with different ‘treatments’ applied to subgroups of the sample of 1,500 English participants. In essence, however, it involved giving the participants, most of whom had never invested in the stock market, £50 to spend over the course of two months on buying and selling stocks on a web-based platform.

In the weeks before and afterwards they, along with a control group, were also asked a range of apparently unrelated questions designed to tap into their underlying social and political attitudes, as well as some more specific, policy-related questions on tax, spending, and regulation.

The results? The people who actually got to trade stocks, they found, ‘shifted rightward’ in their social-economic values. This influenced their attitudes on economic fairness, inequality and redistribution, the role of luck in economic success. They also found that ‘exposure to the market increased subjects’ confidence in the ability of regular people to successfully invest in the market, as well as their own inclination to invest’.

More from this author

Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

Although there was no shift in participants’ views on policy, such as whether government should provide either more or less generous benefits to the jobless, they did become less sympathetic to the idea of taxing investment gains and regulating the market. They also became much keener on the idea that people be allowed to invest some of their national insurance contributions in the stock market, even if that that meant more meagre retirement funds for those whose gambles didn’t pay off.

Moreover, and in some ways most fascinatingly of all, this ‘rightward shift in social-economic values’ occurred among both left and right-wing voters but was ‘more pronounced among those on the left’. They also found ‘little evidence that the change in attitudes was determined by how well participants’ investments performed’. Amazingly, Margalit and Shayo discovered that the effects on attitudes that came about by playing the stock market were still there when they followed up participants a year later.

These results are striking but they also accord with research based on the science of elections gathered during the late 1980s, which suggests a relationship between share ownership and increased Conservative voting and a similar tendency among the millions who bought shares in the utilities privatised by Thatcher.

Even if those correlations weren’t spurious, popular capitalism (and what Left-wingers consider its evil twin, ‘the property owning democracy’ kickstarted through council house sales), could do the trick forever.

Thatcher herself was unceremoniously dumped by her parliamentary party when the economy tanked soon after her third successive victory in 1987, at which point it had become clear she and many of her flagship policies had become an electoral liability. And although her party managed to pull off a surprise win in 1992, it got its comeuppance in 1997 and, frankly, has struggled ever since.

Nevertheless, leaving time and chance aside, and incorporating a little bit of economic history, this latest research suggests that it wasn’t so much that providing people with the opportunity to own shares failed to shift them to the Right, but that it involved far too few people to pay off long-term, at least electorally.

Suggested reading

How Thatcherism produced Corbynism

By John Gray

It’s estimated that around three million individuals owned shares in 1979, and by 1987 the figure had risen to over eight million. But many of the smaller investors were in it for immediate short-term gain, while relatively few were so bitten by the bug that buying shares in privatised companies led them to expand their portfolios to include other asset classes.

In any case, eight million people was only ever a small proportion of the total population. Ownership of UK listed shares by individuals fell precipitately in the 60s, 70s, and, yes, the 80s too, and now stands at around 12%, which incidentally is around the European average. Establishing the proportion of the UK’s population that owns shares individually as opposed to through, say, pension funds, is far harder. Apparently, nearly nine million people in the UK hold stocks and shares ISAs, which constitutes less than one in five of us – a figure which accords neatly with the 19% estimate quoted in a 2015 ResPublica report.

Even if Margalit and Shayo are right, then, capitalism would need to be a lot more popular – in the literal sense of more people owning more shares – to make as big a difference to the nation’s politics and attitudes as Thatcher firmly believed it would.

Sceptics will argue that their findings were produced ‘in the lab’, and that things would be very different in the real world. They may say that in reality, people playing with their own hard-earned cash would lead to devastating losses in their standard of living as well as their faith in financial markets – the very thing the researchers think may (along with sheer familiarity) be driving the attitude shifts they observe.

But that prompts a further question. Would anything that contributed to distrust of financial markets have opposite effects to those that the research discussed here discovered?

Could another crash, or simply a gnawing feeling that the markets are rigged in favour of big banks and crony capitalists, generate support for greater regulation, a more comprehensive safety net, and the idea that failure or success is as much a product of society as it is of individual effort and responsibility? Politicians of every stripe would do well to bear that in mind.

But could Corbyn, by making what might be a big mistake in the short to medium term, end up doing the country a huge favour in the long term? By sitting on the fence he just might prevent the already painful polarisation between Leave and Remain voters from creating a partisan divide between Labour and the Conservatives to rival the one between Democrats and Republicans that’s disfiguring politics across the pond.

Declaring Labour’s support for a second, ‘confirmatory’ referendum would undoubtedly be a logical move for Corbyn. It would open up the possibility not just of topping the poll at the European elections (an accolade which on current form will otherwise go to the Brexit Party, just as it went to UKIP in 2014), but of strangling Change UK in its cradle or, if that’s too murderous a metaphor for you, blowing up its planes while they’re still on the ground. It would also stop what, after the locals, is bound to be trumpeted (with some justification, it has to be said) as #libdemfightback.

Suggested reading

How Thatcherism produced Corbynism

By John Gray

Before anyone gets on my case, yes I know – or at least think I know – why Corbyn won’t make that move.

For a start, there’s the ‘Lexiteer’ perspective he shares with his hard-Left advisors and trade union allies. Just because most economists deride the idea that EU membership presents an obstacle to a faster growing, more ‘socialist’ Britain, it doesn’t mean Corbyn and co. are going to stop believing that it does anytime soon.

And then, of course, there’s the widespread concern among many (but by no means all) Labour MPs in ‘Leave constituencies’ that being seen to do anything that smacks of stopping Brexit will lose them the support of ‘traditional Labour voters’ or ‘the white working class’. Doubtless those MPs will be citing Labour’s disappointing local election results in some Leave voting areas in the north of England as ‘evidence’.

Again, expert opinion would differ. It’s not just a matter of refusing to lump all sorts of very different people together in outdated, subjective, and fetishised categories. Or of being wary of extrapolating too much from the outcome of council contests. It’s also about preferring solid survey research over the faux-concern for their constituents or  ‘democracy’ expressed by a bunch of politicians arguably more interested in hanging on to their precious seats in parliament than the fate of the country as a whole.

Naturally, those politicians will dismiss that research: no-one but no-one, especially a bunch of ivory-tower academic number crunchers and London-based polling companies, will ever persuade an MP that they don’t know ‘their patch’ and ‘their people’ quite as well as they think they do – something which presumably accounts for the stunned incredulity with which so many defeated incumbents greet their demise at general election after general election.

But, to me at least, that research suggests that supporting a second vote wouldn’t actually lose Labour many, if any, seats anyway. And it also suggests that, even if it did, Labour might well win seats elsewhere as a result.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

We also need to factor in the opportunity costs that Labour may have to pay for continuing to sit on the fence. True, a fair few of its members and supporters, whatever their t-shirts say, ultimately love Corbyn more than they hate Brexit. But not backing a second referendum – or whatever euphemism you prefer to call it – is, over time, still going to alienate an awful lot of them.

Maybe not so badly that they’ll immediately take to Twitter with their party cards and a sharp pair of scissors. But enough to see them slowly drift away or at least out of the ‘high-intensity’ activities (canvassing, leafletting, etc.) that are still so vital in first-past-the-post contests – something that Labour learned to its advantage, and the Tories to their cost, in 2017.

The eight-month run-up to that election saw Theresa May dismiss any notion that the 2016 Referendum had produced a close result which, along with the difficulties the UK was always going to face negotiating with a more powerful interlocutor, implied the best course to pursue was some sort of Norway-style arrangement. Instead, she went for a hard Brexit designed to appeal to Leave voters – many (though not all) of them socially conservative, less well-heeled and less well-educated – and in particular to the four million voters (13% of the electorate) who two years previously had voted for UKIP.

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Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

Sadly for Mrs May (and, as it turned out, fatally for her hopes of honouring her promise to extract the UK from the EU by 29 March 2019), she was only partially successful. Although she increased the Tories’ vote share (from 36.9% to 42.4%), the narrow majority they won under David Cameron in 2015 evaporated, leaving them as a minority government reliant on a dodgy support arrangement with the Brexit-supporting DUP.

True, the Conservatives did win over (and in many cases win back) many former UKIP voters, but only rarely in sufficient numbers in the places where they stood a chance of winning seats from Labour.

Meanwhile, Labour, despite its leader’s ambivalence during the referendum campaign, and despite its pledge to honour the result of the referendum, picked up votes from those sections of the electorate most likely to have voted Remain, namely the younger, the better educated and the more socially liberal. But because many of them were located in more urban areas where Labour would have won anyway, and because Tory support also rose, the party’s big improvement in vote share (from 30.4% to 40%) resulted in a much smaller, 30-seat improvement in seat share.

At that point, the stage was surely set for Britain’s two main parties to make Brexit and, crucially, the values associated with Remain and Leave voting, the main divide between them. And in many ways it still is – but for Jeremy Corbyn.

Few can doubt that the Conservatives’ response to what has happened since – most worryingly the rise of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party  – will be to become, in nature if not in name, what Nick Timothy (once seen as some sort of Rasputin to May’s Tsarina), has taken to calling the National Party. Losing seats at the locals in some Remain-voting areas in the South might give them pause for thought, but it’s unlikely, particularly when Brexiteers can (and will) point to picking up the odd council in the West Midlands – an area that traditionally helps decide the result of general elections.

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Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

Now, if politics were physics it would presumably obey Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there would be an equal and opposite reaction. The Conservatives’ seemingly inexorable drift towards what many of its more moderate MPs see as populism, jingoism, and intolerance would be matched by a Labour Party catering only for those for who shudder to think of such things.

Anyone who wonders what that might do to our politics only has to look across the Atlantic, ideally with a copy of Lilliana Mason’s provocative but persuasive book, Uncivil Agreement, in their hands. The polarisation we are witnessing in the USA is driven not just by the fact that Americans are divided by race, religion, and whether they see themselves as conservative or liberal, but by the fact that these identities, via social sorting, increasingly map on to the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.

Nobody, surely, wants to see that kind of poisonous politics play out here. All of which raises the intriguing possibility – even for those who want to see Corbyn commit his party to a referendum and to remaining in the EU – that, by resolutely refusing to do either, he might be doing precisely the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons.

“The crisis”, according to Antonio Gramsci, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Sure, those lines were penned (in prison as it happens) sometime between 1926 and 1935. But Gramsci’s oft-quoted phrase provides an eerily accurate description of UK party politics in 2019.

For decades after Labour replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories – early in the twentieth century – this country’s politics largely (although never exclusively) revolved around arguments over the size of the state and how much governments should tax, spend, and redistribute.

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A party for the politically homeless

By Giles Fraser

Voters were relatively class conscious and often maddeningly tribal – content to choose between one of the two main players whose dominance was, at least in part, underwritten by the first-past-the-post electoral system that the UK, unlike most other advanced liberal democracies, decided to stick with.

That two-party system first began to fray at the edges in the early 1970s, its threads pulled by a combination of rising Scottish (and then Welsh) nationalism, and disillusionment with both Labour and the Tories, which led to the Liberals winning nearly a fifth of the vote in 1974. A much bigger tear then occurred in the mid-eighties, when Labour’s lurch to the Left and the Conservatives’ lurch to the Right gave rise to the SDP and eventually the Lib Dems.

Since then, the two-party system has only crept closer and closer to its eventual demise: the Lib Dems held the balance of power in 2010, forcing David Cameron into a coalition; the SNP became Scotland’s biggest party five years later, after an election in which UKIP won nearly four million votes, albeit only one measly seat.

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Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

True, the two main parties appeared to bounce back in 2017, their combined vote share exceeding 80% for the first time in a long time. But anyone who thinks their problems are over is fooling themselves, not least because cultural divides brought to a head, but not caused by, Brexit (over national identity, migration and multiculturalism, law and order, etc.) are now every bit as important as the economic divides that previously reinforced Conservative-Labour predominance. Voters are not only more volatile and less tribal; they also care more nowadays about stuff that undermines both the unity and the traditional appeals and agendas of the big two.

As a result, the Tories, despite Theresa May’s best efforts to tack to the Right, remain vulnerable to a radical populist alternative on one flank (be it UKIP/Tommy Robinson or the Brexit Party) and, precisely because of those self-same efforts, to whatever the TIG morphs into on the other.

But TIG, particularly if it manages to absorb the Lib Dems, also represents a serious potential threat to the Labour Party – all the more so if Deputy Leader Tom Watson’s newly-established party-within-a-party, Future Britain, presages mass defections. And nor, given young people’s concerns about climate change, should we completely forget about the Greens.

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The trouble with TIGgers

By Graeme Archer

The UK, then, is already a multi-party system – not just an embryonic one, but a near-term one: a living, kicking entity that reflects the sheer diversity of a truly 21^st century electorate. But it’s a system that currently can’t be born, leading to the “interregnum” we’re currently trapped in and the “morbid symptoms” Gramsci referred to – most obviously a whole bunch of voters, and their parliamentary representatives, who are disoriented, anxious and often angry about the direction that what they used to think of as ‘their’ parties seem to be taking.

What is stopping this fully-fledged multi-party system from coming into being is obvious. Indeed, it’s been staring everyone in the face for years. It’s the first-past-the-post, plurality electoral system that (unless, like the SNP, their support is geographically concentrated) massively disadvantages small parties, not least by persuading people that, however much they might like them, a vote for them is a wasted vote.

What we need to do – no, what we absolutely have to do – is to junk an electoral system that is manifestly unfit for purpose and replace it with a proportional alternative that would allow voters to vote for parties that actually reflect their shifting preferences rather than forcing them to choose which one of the big two seems likely to do the least worst damage.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Changing the electoral system; hardly a radical idea, right?  Haven’t people – often very, very boring people – been banging on about it for ages? Didn’t we have a referendum on it a few years back? And wasn’t it rejected by an overwhelming majority?

Well, yes and no. There was a referendum in 2011 (one which, incidentally, allowed the road-testing of many of the techniques later used by the Leave campaign to secure victory in 2016).  But the electorate was offered an utterly uninspiring, and some would say false, choice between FPTP and the Alternative Vote (AV) – a system whose main advocate, the by then terminally toxic Nick Clegg, had previously (and tellingly) referred to as ‘a miserable little compromise’. No wonder only four out of ten voters could even be arsed to turn out.

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Could Brexit fix our broken politics?

By Giles Fraser

Frankly, we should aim much, much higher. Like New Zealand did in the early 1990s, when frustration with the two main parties boiled over into demands to end their in-built, in-bred duopoly, we should follow a two stage process. Stage one: a chance for advocates to educate people about the myriad different systems out there and then to find out, in a referendum, which of those systems they would plump for, assuming there were to be a change. Stage two: a referendum to determine whether they’d prefer to stick with the devil they know or dump it in favour of the winner of that initial public vote.

In New Zealand, the process resulted in the country plumping for MMP – the mixed member proportional system that’s used in Germany and (although, for technical reasons, it’s less proportional there) for elections to the devolved legislatures in Scotland and Wales.

Essentially, voters get two votes – one that allows them to decide who their local MP will be and a second that sees them pick parties rather than individual candidates and that, once all the votes are counted, ensures (subject to a threshold designed to exclude really, really small outfits) that parties’ share of seats in parliament reflects their share of the vote in the country.

Were the UK to follow its former dominion’s example it would, as it did there, massively shake up and shake out politics without nixing the ‘constituency link’ we still seem to value. Even if today’s two main parties survived, their parliamentary and governmental hegemony would be challenged by a number of smaller parties, at least some of them based not, as now, simply on narrow nationalism but on big ideas – ideas that, however much some people may hate or even fear them, resonate with millions of people all over the country, but which are currently underrepresented (if they are represented at all) in its legislature.

Brexit didn’t blow up British politics. It was in big trouble already. Since there’s no point trying to put the genie back in the bottle, then I’m going to ask him to grant me at least one wish: PR for the UK. Not entirely novel, I admit. But radical? You bet.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?