Right now, it feels particularly difficult not to harden our hearts to the governments of our recent past. Layer upon layer of political failure has consolidated into a deep rock of mismanagement which grows more obdurate by every passing generation. Britain is just so bleak: the sense of decay and neglect is palpable across the country. Everyone knows something is fundamentally off; that things are out of kilter.

Was anyone really that surprised by the report published earlier this week which found parts of Birmingham and the North East are now among the poorest places in Europe? You only have to walk around these places to know they are profoundly poor.

During my last trip to Birmingham, the city of my birth, I watched a group of Bayern Munich fans wandering aimlessly through the town ahead of the match against Aston Villa. What were they making of our second city as they compared it with their German hometown? Britain must have seemed so much poorer. This wasn’t because of anything dramatic — boarded up shops or jarring poverty — just an unmistakable feel.

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The city’s problems run particularly deep, of course: failures of local government exacerbating failures of national Government. I’ve been reading David Lodge’s Nice Work, set in the depressed Birmingham of the Thatcher years. What is so striking about that novel, written almost four decades ago, is just how relevant it remains. That sense of decline and neglect captured by Lodge in 1988 has, if anything, only become worse.

Governments have come and gone, new ideas have been tried, grand promises made. And yet, here we are, Birmingham among the poorest places in Europe, a failing city at the heart of England: once Tory, then Labour and then Tory once again, but now, potentially, Reform. It should be no surprise that Nigel Farage chose the city for his party’s “BIGGEST Event Yet” last night.

But as deep as Birmingham’s problems go, they are far from unique — and it is this which goes at least some way to explain the national popularity of Reform in the polls. Even in London, which cannot be said to be a failing city in any real sense, there is now a sense of listlessness and decay in the air. As someone recently said to me, “It feels defeated.” London gambled on globalization before 2008, and now, like the rest of the country, seems lost.

Everything here seems to be out of sync. What were once seen as basic life expectations have become aspirational luxuries; three-bed semis, family doctors, functioning A&Es, pleasant town centers and simple family holidays. Those jobs that once guaranteed a comfortable standard of life and status, no longer do: teaching and medicine, social work and military service. A friend of mine calls this the crisis of the “downwardly mobile professionals” — the DMPs or dumpies. These are not the “left behinds” of lore, but the quietly seething dumped upon, unsure who or what is to blame, but aware that something is wrong.

Who should the dumpies blame? In one sense, it’s easy: the Tories. There is a strong empirical case that the government from 2010-2024 was the worst in Britain’s post war history; a period of rule almost entirely without merit. Not only did the Conservative Party leave office with taxes at record highs but public services were at record lows and people’s living standards had barely improved since they took power. The country’s prisons were full, its military power reduced, its police forces cut and utility companies disgraced. Heathrow was not given its third runway, HS2 was not finished, the Northern Powerhouse was abandoned, and old-age care left to rot. The failure is almost impressive in its totality. Not a single prime minister or senior figure from this period emerges with credit: from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak via Theresa May, Boris Johnson and the Liz Truss moment.

Such is the Tory record, it is fanciful to think Badenoch might have turned things around in the short time she has been limply in charge of the party. Yet, brother man, for the sake of honesty, we should not harden our hearts too much. The Tory record is disastrous, but it was book-ended by crises beyond even its own ineptitude. No one serious can account for the years of Tory failure without acknowledging the crash of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. We continue to live with the seismic consequences of those two events, as well as the stains of the 2016 Brexit crisis, which Cameron, May and Johnson cannot so easily wash from their hands.

But things go even deeper. It is not possible to travel around the UK without seeing not only the failures of the last period of Tory rule, but also the failed promise of the Blairite years of plenty before that, and the epoch of upheaval under Thatcher before Blair and Major. Andrew O’Brien, from the Council for National Resilience, has calculated that in 1975, when Thatcher became Tory leader, the country was spending around $19 billion a year in today’s prices on support for nationalized industries and employment programs. Today, we are spending $41 billion on unemployment assistance alone. We have few nationalized industries ensuring that the essentials of advanced economic life — like steel — are produced in Britain.

Given our current predicament, O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidizing British industry all over again. That we are even contemplating such things is telling. Old answers no longer make much sense. The country today is walking around in a daze, like those Bayern Munich fans, dimly aware that something isn’t right, but unaware how to fix it.

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All certainties are gone. In the Conservative Party, the children who worship at Thatcher’s feet have suddenly found their assumptions turn to dust. The transatlantic alliance, which was the alternative to Europe, is crumbling along with America’s commitment to free trade. What, then, is supposed to take its place? The Labour Party, meanwhile, has inherited a state which does not work in the way it assumed; it is unable to deliver either the improvements in public services or the economic growth necessary to begin to shift the malaise which is powering Reform into contention at the next election.

And yet, even Reform — Westminster’s disruptors — still cling to old Thatcherite orthodoxies which no longer make sense in a world where Trump and Putin hold sway and national resilience is the key, not just nationalism.

The failures of four decades have combined in this moment of profound national malaise. But Mantel’s plea for the compassion of future generations, contains a profound truth about life — and politics. It is too easy for us to pass judgement on those who made decisions in the past. Who, though, has the political bravery to try something new today? We should not harden our hearts to those who fail, only to those who never bother trying.

Keir Starmer is currently wrestling with two Kissingerian tests of character: austerity at home and the Trump storm abroad, both of which are fast emerging as twin issues for which the Prime Minister and his government may — in the end — come to be judged.

By instinct, Starmer is a cautious and moderate politician who seeks to avoid radical decisions which might bind him and his government in uncomfortable positions. He weighs each decision on what he considers to be its merits, unbound by some grander ideological framework or great narrative. The hard edges of the Government’s political message are left to Morgan McSweeney to help construct.

This inherently conservative approach is most obvious in foreign affairs, where Starmer is doing all he can to protect as much of the transatlantic status quo as possible from the consequences of Donald Trump. Each move Starmer has made since Trump returned to the White House can be seen in this light: praising the US president’s leadership, thanking him for “creating an opportunity for peace”, and not retaliating against the steel tariffs imposed on the UK.

Submarine-like, Starmer hopes to quietly surface with Britain’s interests protected, a trade agreement reached which removes the tariffs and an American security guarantee still in place — perhaps even extended — supporting the “army of the willing” he is trying to assemble with Emmanuel Macron in concert with Ukraine. Who knows, it may work.

Starmer is certainly being advised by those closest to him that the best strategy available at the moment is to remain calm and not make any rash statements about the future. What “bold” moves he has made — increasing defense spending by cutting international aid and offering British troops as peacekeepers — are, in the end, intended to protect the essentials of the current geopolitical status quo.

At home, a similar story is playing out. Thus far, Starmer has shown a notable willingness to take decisions the previous Conservative government wanted to but couldn’t: closing NHS England, reforming planning laws, setting highly politicized house building targets and, now, cutting welfare. In recent weeks — and for the first time since he became prime minister — there has even been a tentative sense that the Government is finally finding its feet, although it has once again started to wobble in the face of the revolt over the proposed benefit cuts.

Still, even Starmer’s most vociferous supporters would admit that the sum of the Prime Minister’s decisions doesn’t add up to a radical vision of an alternative Britain, just one which looks strikingly similar to the one that exists today — only one that works. And perhaps this is all that is realistically available to us. Casting a jaundiced eye back over our post-war history, it is tempting to conclude that no prime minister has fundamentally shifted Britain’s economic position in the world. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most radical, only managed to reduce government spending by a few percentage points of GDP.

In many respects, then, there is something to be said for Starmer’s caution. “Since the affairs of the world are subject to chance and to a thousand and one different accidents, there are many ways in which the passage of time may bring unexpected help to those who persevere,” the 16th-century Italian statesman Francesco Guicciardini advised. Bide your time, in other words, don’t rush into decisions you do not have to. “Unless forced by necessity, do not restrict yourself.”

Over the past quarter century, we have seen the careers of countless great men (and women) left in ruins by the “bold” decisions they took during moments of crisis, believing they would usher in a better future — but which instead helped bring about a world entirely at odds from the one they wanted. In 1999, Tony Blair used the Parliament Act to force that year’s European Parliamentary elections to be held under proportional representation, giving a young firebrand called Nigel Farage the most important break of his career. Without another of Blair’s more radical decisions — his decision not to impose transitional controls on the rights of Eastern Europeans to move to Britain for work in 2004 — Farage himself has said Brexit would not have happened. The paradox of Blair, then, is that the liberal Britain he wanted to build would have been better served had he been more conservative in government.

Similarly, Angela Merkel’s decision to close Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident in 2011, and to open the country’s borders to those fleeing the Syrian civil war in 2015, were both “bold” decisions which have come back to haunt her party. The decision to change the German constitution to impose a new “debt brake” in the wake of the global financial crisis is another move which might have fitted the zeitgeist then, but which has restricted the country’s ability to adapt years later.

The problem for Starmer today is that to protect the status quo at home and abroad requires ever more radical decisions which are politically disrupting. Take the scale of the proposed welfare cuts, the details of which will be set out today. These amount to billions of pounds a year, which, in practical terms, means taking thousands of pounds off millions of people. Until the weekend, the brunt of this would be borne by those in receipt of disability benefits who would see their support frozen — a real-terms cut. At no point during the years of austerity did George Osborne ever make such a decision. Similarly, to protect the party’s pledges not to raise taxes and to retain its own self-imposed “fiscal rules”, government spending in departments outside health, education and defense would have to be squeezed to an extent that even Osborne concluded was politically undeliverable.

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The Prime Minister’s push towards becoming ever more conservative, then, is leaving his party questioning its very purpose. And it is here that the danger of Starmer’s caution begins to reveal itself. As Kissinger observed, the central challenge of leadership is not simply to make decisions before all the information is available — but to make them before the moment at which they are no longer effective.

By waiting months before making up her mind what kind of Brexit she favored, Theresa May squandered the opportunity to set the agenda in Brussels — something which helped destroy her premiership. By the time she alighted on her “Chequers Plan”, it was too late — the EU had set its red lines and rejected her proposal outright. Similarly, Gordon Brown had an opportunity to call an early general election, which might have secured his premiership for five years and destroyed David Cameron, his most formidable opponent. He blinked, lost his chance, and the rest is history. Such is the lot of political leaders. Cameron himself sought to move early to avoid a future British crisis over Europe by calling a referendum to settle the issue for a generation. While he accepted — in Kissingerian terms — that the decision wasn’t strictly necessary, he believed he could better control the course of events by managing them himself. He was wrong.

The paradox of leadership is that just as Guicciardini advised leaders to bide their time he also says that opportunity often only knocks at their door once. “In many cases you have to decide to act quickly,” he wrote. “Lucky are those to whom the same opportunity returns more than once. For even a wise man may miss it or misuse it the first time. But not to recognize or use it the second time is to be very foolish indeed.”

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Both at home and abroad, the challenge facing Starmer calls for caution and radicalism. Such is Britain’s exposure abroad, and so tight are the constraints of our fiscal position at home, he cannot afford to misstep: he might catch Trump’s ire or spook the bond markets. Yet such is the degree of turmoil, he also has an opportunity to push for something new. He would, though, need to have the vision for something different, something worth the toil — and risk — it would take to get there. Here, in a nutshell, is the skill which separates the real figures of history from the rest — not their ability to control events, but the chance to exploit them for their own ends — and their country’s.

Trump’s incessant, chaotic radicalism today holds out what the American geopolitical analyst Ryan Evans has termed “Trumportunities”; by accident or design, the US president offers even those he holds in the highest contempt the chance of significant change. For those in Europe who have long complained about US imperial overreach, Trump presents the opportunity to finally break free. For both Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, there is an obvious opportunity to define themselves against Trump politically in a way that will cause Farage particular trouble. For Britain, meanwhile, there is the opportunity to carve a new role in the world to replace the one that has not — after all — served it particularly well over the past 25 years. Being America’s willing imperial sidekick has led Britain not only into Afghanistan and Iraq, but Libya and now — potentially — Ukraine. But no one in British politics at the moment seems to have any idea what that role might be. Nor who might fill it.

The difficult truth for Britain, then, is that it has not worked out how to replace that political and economic settlement which settled in the mid-Nineties and was then blown apart by the great financial crisis of 2008. In the quarter of a century that has passed since then, the country has deteriorated, growing ever poorer and more exposed on the world stage. Britain is yearning for something new. As a moment for change presents itself, Starmer must be careful. But not so much that he misses his chance.

The world of February 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” began popping up in Crimea has now — beyond doubt — irrevocably disappeared. That was the world of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, European demilitarization and global interdependence. Back then, Russia provided Europe its gas and the United States its defense, while China provided the entire world with the raw materials needed for the technologies which would drive the future. All these assumptions now lie in tatters; that era finally brought to a cataclysmic end by Russia’s attempt to finally subjugate Ukraine in February 2022.

Three years on from that fateful decision, a million men at arms are still battling it out in trenches, hunted by drone armies powered by artificial intelligence. Imperial carve-ups are taking place in the marbled halls of Saudi Arabia while the transatlantic alliance teeters on the brink of collapse. And a new trade war is threatening to send the world economy into recession, risking not only the future of NATO but Europe’s entire social-democratic model. Yet behind the scenes in Europe’s capitals, a dispiriting refusal to abandon the dogmas of old still lingers. And among the worst offenders are those who are performatively leading Europe’s response to Donald Trump: the British and French.

Beyond the warm words over the past few weeks, London and Paris are largely sticking to the tired national strategies they have clung to for much of the past 50 years: the French talking of European autonomy but in reality pursuing national autonomy; the British pretending they are a mini America but, instead, becoming an ever cheaper imitation. The irony is that, as much as it might pain either side to admit, each would be stronger if it became a little more like the other.

As the former French ambassador to the US, Gerard Araud, has repeatedly pointed out, the Gaullist insistence to retain some national independence from America has proved more farsighted than Britain or Germany would like to admit. While the British military has long prioritized obtaining the latest shiny piece of American military kit available — even at the cost of becoming ever more dependent on the States — the French have prioritized retaining national autonomy, even at the cost of paying more for less.

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One such example is the French insistence on a sovereign space policy. They spend around three times more than we do on space programs, but end up with an inferior product to the one we access courtesy of the Americans, according to those I spoke with. Another example is the French satellite communications operator Eutelsat, which now wants to replace Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine in order to protect European autonomy. But Eutelsat has far fewer satellites operating at far higher altitudes resulting in slower connections. European autonomy, in other words, means paying more for a worse product — at least in the short term.

The upside of this French insistence on national resilience is that in the event of a genuine American withdrawal from NATO — and, perhaps, even an alliance with Russia — the French would at least have the foundations upon which to construct a genuinely independent military. Britain, in contrast, has built its entire strategy around the principle of interoperability with the United States, and so would be sent into a crisis, forcing it to question everything from scratch.

Yet, the corollary of the French insistence on national resilience is that, for all their talk of European autonomy, they cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary to genuinely move in this direction — since it would inevitably undermine their own independence. The most obvious example of this paradox is the fact that in Ukraine’s great battle for survival against Russia — a war Emmanuel Macron has held up as an existential test of European security — France has fallen far behind the UK and Germany in supplying the necessary arms for Kyiv to prevail. Why? The answer, it seems, comes in two parts: first, France continues to prioritize national self-reliance over European solidarity; and, second, as one analyst put it to me, France appears “more genuinely broke” even than Britain.

In total, Britain has contributed around €10 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared with just €3.5 billion from France. As part of this, Britain has been prepared to run down its military stocks. “We’ve given it all away,” said one official I spoke to. By one estimate, Britain has just 14 pieces of heavy artillery left in Estonia, I was told. The French would never entertain this level of exposure. The result, however, is that in the fight for Ukraine’s national survival, Britain has shown more European “solidarity” than France.

Talking European but acting French is the straitjacket Paris seems unable to escape, limiting its ability to lead the Continent into the European revolution it has long championed. Again and again this conundrum plays out. Twenty EU states — including Germany — have called for greater coordination with the UK defense industry to boost the Europe’s resilience, but the French rejected the proposal. Britain has sought a defense pact with the EU in recent months, the process has been held up by the French insistence on negotiating access to Britain’s fishing waters. The inevitable result: French autonomy, European weakness.

A similar story has played out on the biggest question of all: nuclear weapons. In France, the independence of the country’s deterrent is sacrosanct. There is understandable pride — especially today — that it is less dependent on American cooperation than British equivalent. Yet, for this very reason the French have proven unable to move beyond the Gaullist doctrine which states that its nuclear deterrent serves only its vital national interests. Yet, this means it cannot be extended to Europe. And so it is stuck.

Britain, in contrast, has always been much more willing to be dependent on American cooperation, but also to place its deterrent at the service of NATO. In the event of full-scale American isolationism, the cost for Britain of maintaining its nuclear deterrent would be prohibitive. As such, the lack of interest in strategic national autonomy has left it in the similarly invidious position of being tied to a superpower that increasingly fails to hide its contempt for its supplicant partners. Whatever happens over the coming months and years, Britain will at some point be forced to confront the question it does not want to answer: what will it do when the Americans are gone and there is no NATO?

The costs of real independence from the United States, then, remain too high for either Britain or France to seriously entertain. The scale of our dependence was revealed by the former head of British intelligence, Alex Younger, this week when he said there were “no circumstances” under which European troops could be sent to Ukraine without a peace deal — and that even with an agreement it would be “irresponsible” to do that without strategic support from the US. According to one senior military adviser I spoke with, Europe needs to spend around 3.5% of its GDP for the next decade simply to get its armies into a position to independently deter Russian aggression. Until then, Europe’s collective forces would be vulnerable to a Russian incursion into the Baltics without the Americans.

Yet, even at this level of spending, Europe would still have to remain under the American nuclear umbrella. Without it, military advisers believe, Europe remains vulnerable to nuclear coercion. “We don’t have the answer to tactical nukes,” as one official put it to me, bluntly. An answer would cost Britain and France more like 4.5% of GDP — unless the Germans finance it. But while nuclear autonomy remains “the big play” for France and Britain in the coming years — the grand offer reshaping the continent for the 21st century — neither seems capable nor willing to make it.

In Ukraine, as many as two million drones are now produced each year, an increasing number of which are being controlled by artificial intelligence. Ukraine now trains its soldiers to launch combined operations with drone armies at land and sea, while its traditional military is dependent on high-end American intelligence and technology that Europe does not have. The nature of war itself is changing, which in turn, will force the armies of Europe and the United States to revolutionize themselves irrespective of the outcome.

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In turn, both Ukraine’s drone production and America’s military might are dependent on the supply of critical minerals — including rare earths — which are sourced via an extraordinarily complicated global network which must be protected, in the end, by military power. Strip away everything and there is a Leviathan holding a sword and a scepter — the only question is who that is.

If Europe is serious about its autonomy, then, it will need not only its own militaries, but its own supply of critical minerals, artificial intelligence, semiconductor plants and reliable sources of energy. It is for all these reasons that neither Britain nor France today is rushing to grasp the opportunity presented by Trump of “independence” from the United States. Neither can afford it.

Here is the rub. Britain and France are far too poor to play the role they want. Last year, the French government ran a deficit of more than 6%, far outside the limits demanded by the European Commission. Yet it has so far proved impossible to assemble a majority in the National Assembly to pass a budget to bring this under control. Instead, Paris has relied on constitutional powers to enact the budget without a parliamentary vote. In Britain, meanwhile, which has similar levels of national debt, the Government has a large majority, but is gearing up for a Spring Statement which most analysts believe will contain fanciful forecasts of undeliverable spending cuts.

The painful truth facing both London and Paris is that while Britain will need to become more French to thrive in a world of American withdrawal — and France will need become more British in its willingness to rely on others — both countries will need to become something new if they are ever to become truly independent in this new world. Henry Kissinger did note that Donald Trump may be “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The trouble is, neither Britain nor France seems willing to stop pretending.

When Vance asks what America has to gain by risking a war with Russia, Britain, too, will soon begin to ask what is in it for us as part of the proposed peace keeping settlement. When Vance demands that Europe pay more for its own defense, Britain will also want to know why it should shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden for the continent’s defense without recompense. Germany, for all its current economic difficulties, remains far less indebted and much wealthier than Britain. Norway, meanwhile, has spent the past decade growing ever richer as a result of the spike in gas prices. Shouldn’t both of these countries, then, be contributing more in financial terms towards any future British deployment? Finally, when Trump himself complains that Europe is treating the US unfairly while asking for its support, surely it is reasonable to ask why British troops should be sent to defend the EU’s borders when the EU itself refuses to negotiate even the most basic defense “pact” with Britain until it hands over access to its fishing grounds?

At the heart of the Trump-Vance strategy is the pursuit of a new grand bargain in global affairs, in which the US acknowledges the emergence of a new multipolar world governed by great powers rather than international law. While Europe is not — yet — one of those powers, it too faces a moment of reckoning; when the old EU order is no longer enough to govern the continent’s security, new grand bargains will be demanded. It has not gone unnoticed in Downing Street that today, Europe’s security is increasingly dependent on four countries none of which is a member: Britain, Norway, Turkey and, of course, Ukraine. If America’s position in the world is no longer sustainable, then neither is the current concert of Europe. Whether any of Europe’s current leaders can rise to the challenge and create something new is far less clear, although Emmanuel Macron made an effort to do so last night.

In an address to the nation last night, the French President argued that “the future of Europe cannot be decided in Washington or Moscow”. He said that while he wanted to believe that “the US will stand by our side”, Europe had to be ready if that wasn’t the case. “We need to be able to recognize the Russian threat and better defend ourselves in order to deter such attacks. We need to provide ourselves with more arms. We need to do more than we have in the past to reinforce our security.”

In a sense, then, Vance, is both a harbinger of our upheaval — and an author of it. As such, he is a curious character to capture. He is not the Appalachian red-neck of general European disdain; he is far too Ivy League and Silicon Valley to be understood as such. But nor is he merely a tough-talking under-boss of the Dick Cheney variety: Vance is something sharper and more elusive; closer to Richard Nixon than most recent holders of the Vice Presidency. He’s a man of power and ambition who is offensive to European sensibilities not just because of the dishonesty of his casual asides, but the fragility they reveal about our own predicament.

Over the course of the past month alone, Vance has outraged public sentiment across Europe by — in turn — claiming the continent’s attitude to free speech is a greater threat to its security than Russia; condemning the German “fire wall” against the AfD in the run up to its general election; berating Volodymyr Zelensky for daring to question him in the Oval Office; and, finally, claiming that the offer of “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years” was no guarantee of security to Ukraine. Vance’s latest remark, in an interview on Fox News, sparked particular condemnation in Britain and France — the only countries which have publicly offered troops. Britain has spent much of this century fighting — and dying — alongside America. “Have you said thank you once,” has become the meme response, Britain’s diplomatic esprit de l’escalier.

Vance insisted his remarks were not aimed at either country. Yet he quickly added another pointed criticism in its place: “Let’s be direct: there are many countries who are volunteering (privately or publicly) support who have neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful.” This latest criticism is a reminder that the real reason Vance is so offensive is often because he reveals our own weakness. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the painful truth is that the US did not need our support, was not particularly impressed by our efforts, and has concluded subsequently that we have run down our militaries to such an extent it no longer even needs to be polite about the nakedness of our own position.

The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan remain a trauma for the British body politic, but not for the reason they should — that we lost them both. In the years that have followed these invasions we have agonized over their legality and morality, wisdom and effect, but not so much over our own military failures. Addressing British troops in Iraq in 2003, Blair claimed that not only had they won the battle, but they had “gone on to make something of the country you had liberated”. This, he said, was “a lesson for armed forces everywhere the world over”. Britain was still Greece to America’s Rome. Yet the story was not true, if it ever was.

By the summer of 2007, the Americans had come to the conclusion that in Iraq “the British have basically been defeated in the South”, as the former reservist and diplomat Frank Ledwidge wrote in Losing Small Wars, his account of Britain’s military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. By this point, Blair had ordered a draw down of British troops, leaving the army with a garrison of 500 in Basra under siege from the local militias. The Americans, by contrast, had begun “the surge” under David Patreus to restore order. Still, though, Britain continued to advise the Americans on the way to defeat an insurgency. “It’s insufferable for Christ’s sake,” one senior figure closely involved in US military planning is quoted in Ledwidge’s account. Britain had lost the war — and with it the right to offer advice. Still, we persisted.

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After withdrawing from Iraq, vanquished and dejected, Afghanistan offered an opportunity for us to rebuild our reputation. Around 3,500 troops were deployed to Helmand to restore order and defeat the Taliban. Yet, as Ledwidge writes, such numbers were nowhere near enough. Once Britain’s forces were spread throughout the province — the size of Wales — Britain ended back in the same “self-licking lollipop” position it had found itself in Basra, capable only of defending itself and little more. The capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah — a city of 200,000 people — ended up being patrolled by about 80 British soldiers, although there were never more than 20 on the ground at any one time. Outside the city, the entire Brigade could only muster 168 combat troops to conduct operations. The result, like Basra, was failure and, eventually, withdrawal.

Has Britain ever properly come to terms with its military defeats in these wars — or those that followed? In Libya, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy led an intervention dependent on the US which turned into another disaster. Is it any wonder that this American administration shows such disregard for the latest Anglo-French initiative?

At the heart of Vance’s complaint is not just a frustration with European capabilities — a long-standing source of annoyance — but a fundamental rejection of what is, at heart, an attempt to extend America’s security guarantee to Ukraine primarily to protect our own security. The US has made clear, repeatedly and explicitly under successive administrations, that it will not fight a war with Russia for Ukraine. Until now it has agreed to pay for Ukraine to fight the Russians, but it has consistently refused to go any further than this. Europe’s attempt to wrestle out of Trump a “backstop” commitment is, in effect, an attempt to change this policy as part of any future peace agreement. Trump has said no.

For Europe, this presents a fundamental dilemma: is it prepared to fight a war with Russia for Ukraine? Today, no one in Europe is prepared to answer that question. For all the talk of “strategic autonomy” or even “independence” from the US in recent weeks, Europe has sought to answer this most existential of questions with a sleight of hand, suggesting that it was willing to fight while seeking to draw the Americans in.

The central reality in European politics today is that there is a panicked scramble to protect the essential bargain of the transatlantic status quo and America’s supremacy in continental affairs, not to seize the moment for its own independence. For sure, the world is changing — more European spending on defense and a willingness to consider the previously unthinkable: that America might one day be a threat to European interests. But at the summit in London on Sunday, while Volodymyr Zelensky was comforted and embraced, he was ordered to make up with the Emperor over the water. Two days later he duly did so.

The paradox of JD Vance is that his insults only matter because we are too weak for them not to — yet if we choose to become strong, we will begin to sound more like him. We are dependent and so we are craven. If we become independent, we will surely ask more from Europe for the commitments we are making. Friedrich Nietzsche warned that when fighting monsters beware becoming a monster yourself. Perhaps, though, this destiny is unavoidable.

Watching Donald Trump over the past week has felt like one of those moments when history was being made: new narratives emerging out of the old. For a few days at least, Europe seemed to have been jolted out of its complacent malaise. “Germany became Gaullist, France became British, and Britain became European,” joked one French diplomat. The fear of America’s withdrawal from Europe had seemingly prompted a revolution. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron flew to Washington to rescue the old world and seemed to succeed: our American Caesar offered his clementia and all was well, apparently. But then Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in the Oval Office and it was not American withdrawal that was on offer, but American supremacy, uncloaked — angry, imposing, imperial. Do what we say or we will hand you over to your executioners.

This has been the story of the past week. One moment, Europe is in a spin as Zelensky is denounced as a dictator; the next, it is happy as Ukraine hands over half its natural resources to America. And then it heads into the weekend with feelings of sadness, shame and even humiliation. Zelensky, the weakest of Europe’s leaders, was treated as every European leader would be were they not as craven as our own.

The end result is a mixture of embarrassment — that of the schoolchild who avoids being bullied — and lasting geopolitical unease. What does diplomacy matter in a world where all that counts is power and you are a supplicant? Starmer may have flown back to Britain happy that he had secured a public commitment from Trump for Nato’s mutual defense clause. But does anyone now believe that anything the President said yesterday really matters? Perhaps more profoundly, does anyone — deep down — believe that it is acceptable to be so dependent on Trump’s whims or those of his nation? Ukraine can hardly be blamed for being so weak. Britain and the rest of Western Europe have no such excuses.

In the end, everything has changed and nothing has changed. Trump means what he says when he says it — and then doesn’t. The US is both withdrawing from Europe and expanding at the same time. An epoch of ambiguity has arrived and it’s far more dangerous than we realize.

Take the “minerals deal” between Zelensky and Trump that was supposed to be signed yesterday, but so painfully wasn’t. Far from acting as a brake on American imperial overreach — which many in Washington have called for — the agreement would have essentially extended US interests even further into Europe. Under the terms of the deal as proposed, the United States gains a 50% stake in Ukraine’s mineral wealth in perpetuity: a permanent stake.

Trump acknowledged the importance of the proposal before his blow-up with Zelensky. He indicated that the deal would serve as a security “backstop”, ensuring Putin did not restart his war for control of Ukraine. “I don’t think anybody’s going to play around if we’re there with a lot of workers,” Trump declared. The new doctrine, it seemed, would be “peace through economics”, as Le Monde put it. Zelensky would be forced to the table through an acceptance of partition and extraction. The strategy is not new — Britain was forced to abandon its imperial trading system in return for American support in the last world war. But what is unusual here is the steel being displayed without any sheath of idealism. This was a display of imperial power that was hard to unsee.

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Even if the minerals deal were to be saved, the “security” it would offer Ukraine — and Europe — is far from clear. The implication is that Trump wants to take on a new economic colony in the knowledge that Russia would not dare attack it. But is that the case? Russia knows that an attack on any Nato country would risk sparking — in theory — a war with the United States and its allies, a direct confrontation it could not win. But an attack on a country in which the US simply had mining interests would not be the same. The response that such a provocation would trigger has been left entirely uncertain.

To clear up the ambiguity, Britain and France have offered to send troops to Ukraine to secure whatever peace agreement Trump can strike with Putin, and with it America’s new interests. But why would Russia now accept the informal absorption of rump Ukraine into the American economic sphere with its new assets protected by its clients, the British and French? Especially after witnessing that display in the Oval Office yesterday.

The idea of a sustainable peace agreement consequently remains remote, even if the breakdown in relations between Zelensky and Trump can be patched up. Without American support — assuming Europe fails to fill the gap — Ukraine would be forced to sue for peace on Russian terms. But once Trump carves out his stake in Ukraine, the peace negotiations enter a new phase: to the winner the spoils, literally.

You have to wonder what the likes of Elbridge Colby must make of Trump’s handling of events. Colby is one of the most eloquent exponents of American “restraint” in Washington, hired by the President as the policy lead in the Department of Defense. Colby argues that the US has become overstretched by its imperial commitments, and needs to focus less on Europe and more on what he considers the principal threat to America’s global primacy: China’s ambition to retake Taiwan. Colby’s argument is not “isolationist” in any sense, nor civilizational like Steve Bannon’s, who wants the US to form a Christian-Nationalist alliance against globalist China. Colby is arguing for a form of imperial prioritization which would push for Europe to become more independent. Yet Trump is seeking a minerals deal with Ukraine that would draw him further into Europe — even as he mocks and berates its most embattled leader.

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The new President’s defenders would argue that Trump will eventually bully his way to the best of all worlds, extending America’s power and economic dominance at very little cost. Indeed, Ukraine will, in all likelihood, eventually agree to become an American economic protectorate irrespective of the President and his ambitious Vice President. The alternative — national elimination under Putin — is worse. Yet it strikes me that — first — Europe’s voters will not be able to unsee what they have just witnessed. And — second — the United States itself has made a curious bet that it can project its power into Ukraine without any real idea of the force necessary to accompany its new economic interests.

The situation reminds me of the build up to the Suez crisis in 1956, when Britain withdrew its forces from the canal zone in Egypt, while insisting its economic interests remained secure. The Tory MP Enoch Powell warned the then government that any agreement with Egypt would not be “worth the parchment on which it is engrossed” because the remaining British technicians in the canal zone would be hopelessly vulnerable to, and ultimately forced out by, terrorism and harassment. Can we really say that Trump’s potential miners in Ukraine without American military protection would be any different?

But we do not yet know the strength of America’s commitment to Ukraine. For this reason it is worth playing out the scenario in which Zelensky swallows his pride and Russia acquiesces to the partition of Ukraine. In this scenario — under the current terms being pushed by Starmer and Macron — British and French troops would find themselves massing somewhere in Eastern Europe, if not in Ukraine itself, with the stated aim of deterring Russian aggression, based on some vague promise of American air support which might or might not exist. Is this really enough to deter Russia anymore than it was to deter Colonel Nasser in 1956? And what if it isn’t? Are we prepared to go to war with Russia for Ukraine? From Taiwan to the Donbas, ambiguity mixed with menace now reigns.

Stories allow us to live because they turn daily chaos into something hopeful or inspirational; it’s a tale that offers explanation or revelation — or, at the very least, comfort. Yet what is emerging from Donald Trump’s unpredictability looks like a fable that no-one with any self-respect can believe in any longer. Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky all flew to Washington this week looking for a story they could tell to their expectant nations at home. Two succeeded — for a few hours. But all we will remember is the drama of the failure.

The scale and speed of this geopolitical shift was captured by the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, when, responding to his party’s victory at the weekend, declared that his priority would be to “achieve independence from the US”. Once the archetype of a solid West German realist, Merz declared that Trump’s behavior had left Europe with little choice. Two days previously, the CDU leader had even argued that Germany needed to begin discussions with Britain and France about “nuclear sharing” because the US could no longer be relied upon.

Nor is Britain quite as allergic as it once was to such talk. Following the emergency summit called by Emmanuel Macron last week to discuss the Trump administration’s opening of peace talks with Russia, Keir Starmer declared that Europe could no longer “cling to the comforts of the past”; it needed to take responsibility for its own security.

In Paris, were it not for France’s own political crisis, there might have been a sense of delayed gratification. For as early as 1962, de Gaulle had been clear about the purpose of what was then the Common Market. “What is the point of Europe?” the general asked. “The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans.” And so it seems today.

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For most of the French presidents who followed de Gaulle, this central vision remained the unrealized — but axiomatic — purpose of what became the EU. In one of his first major interventions after being elected in 2017, Macron called for the continent to rapidly carve out its own autonomy from the US. “We cannot blindly entrust what Europe represents [to] the other side of the Atlantic,” he declared, only to be mocked for his apparent naivety. Macron claimed that the central reality Europe needed to face up to was the “gradual and inevitable disengagement by the United States” from the continent, which, in turn, demanded Europe develop its own “autonomous operating capabilities”.

If anything, Macron’s speech has proved too timid. Back in 2017, he was calling for an autonomous European force capable of “complementing” NATO. Today, Germany’s Merz is questioning whether the trans-Atlantic alliance even exists in practical terms any longer.

The appeal of the Gaullist argument always lay in its apparent moral clarity and dignity. As Thomas Paine might have put it: There is something absurd in supposing a continent be perpetually governed by an Empire on the other side of the ocean. Perhaps, but the problem has never really been one of morality — rather the reality of national ambition lurking underneath. As de Gaulle said, Europe was not so much the means to make Europe great again, but France. It was, he said, the means for France to “become again what she has ceased to be since Waterloo: First in the world”.

Macron’s 2017 speech is a reminder that just beneath the European surface of French foreign policy lurks that old Gaullist national interest. As well as calling for European autonomy to protect the continent’s interests from an American withdrawal, Macron also called for the EU to develop a foreign policy focused above all on the Mediterranean and Africa, and for the euro to be placed at “the heart of Europe’s economic power in the world”. Neither of these priorities speaks in any way to the one country France would need to support a policy of European autonomy from the United States: Poland. In fact, the focus on the Mediterranean and Africa is a transparent attempt to use the power of the EU to pursue what are, in effect, French strategic concerns.

A regular complaint from American officials over the years has been that, despite repeated demands for European autonomy, there was never much interest shown in the practical realities of turning this into genuine continent-wide integration supporting any war for survival against Russia. It is notable, for instance, that Macron’s speech from 2017 focuses on threats from terrorism and instability in Africa but not Russia, despite the fact that it had already invaded and annexed land from Ukraine.

Even today, many of the old instincts remain. Starmer’s hopes for a new defense and security pact, for example, are currently being held up by discussions over fishing rights. Those close to Starmer remain deeply skeptical that there will be any significant change in the EU’s willingness to compromise its single-market “red lines” in order to forge a closer relationship with Britain’s defense industry — something which could be a key asset in developing European military-industrial capacity. “The French see no benefit opening up the market to British competition,” one British official put it. The simple fact remains that whatever the rhetoric coming out of Berlin, Paris or Brussels about nuclear deals and “resets”, the old red-lines of the Brexit negotiations remain: if Britain wants more than it has today, it will have to accept the EU’s rules.

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Amid Trump’s disregard for Europe’s interests — and sensitivities — it is understandable why the allure of de Gaulle has returned to the continent’s politics. As Julian Jackson put it in his biography of the general, although much of what he stood for was built on the myth of French victory in the Second World War — ”throwing dust in the Allies’ eyes so that they might be blinded into thinking that France was great” as he put it — de Gaulle really did save the honor of France, while posing many the questions which continue to dominate Europe’s discussions today, including, most pertinently: How to create ‘Europe’ itself?

Yet, de Gaulle was also a deeply flawed prophet, casting his country “into a role which was beyond her power”, as Britain’s ambassador at the time, Gladwyn Jebb, remarked. This remains a core challenge for Europe today. While there are questions of indignity and morality, there are also questions of means and will. France, Germany and Britain remain bound by fiscal and political constraints — many of their own making — which make any serious push towards strategic autonomy hard to take seriously.

Right now, Germany is in the fifth year of an unprecedented post-war economic stagnation, having seen each of the core planks of its geopolitical strategy ripped apart following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having bet the house on its export-led industrial economy, it was ultimately dependent on Russian gas, Chinese trade and American defense. Today the German economic model faces the existential challenge of losing all three of these core pillars in one go. Having also removed all nuclear energy in a gamble on renewables, and tied itself to the most extreme form of fiscal conservatism imaginable by shoehorning a “debt brake” into the German constitution, the incoming government’s room for maneuver is extraordinarily limited.

The initial results of the election suggest that Merz will not have the required two-thirds majority in the Bundestag necessary to remove the debt brake, making any significant uplift in defense spending extremely difficult. In July last year, the previous coalition government agreed to cut military aid to Ukraine by almost half to €4 billion in its draft budget for 2025, despite Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende — or turning point — speech declaring a whole new attitude to defense following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In France, meanwhile, Macron has no majority in the National Assembly to pass any budget, and lost three prime ministers last year trying to do so. Faced with a blocking majority of the hard-Left and hard-Right, much of which is skeptical of the war in Ukraine and opposed to significant cuts to pensions or welfare, it is similarly difficult to see a path to significant defense spending increases in the foreseeable future — unless new elections later this year can break the impasse.

Even in Britain, which has the most parliamentary powerful government of the three major European powers, there are severe fiscal constraints against any rapid increase in defense spending of the sort required to achieve independence from the US. According to senior British officials, even increasing the budget to 3% of GDP would only strengthen the conventional forces we already have, allowing London to fulfill the role demanded of it by Nato. To fill the hole left by the United States — including, as Merz suggested, an independent European nuclear deterrent against Russia — would require an uplift of the order Trump has demanded: to 4-5% of GDP.

For any British government, such a choice is not only politically unfeasible, but far from obviously militarily desirable. As one senior official put it, in some of the core aspects of modern defense — from space, to drones and AI — European states dreaming of autonomy from the US could quickly look markedly unattractive to the UK, which may choose to partner with fast-moving, well-funded American programs, rather than speculative, expensive and unproven European alternatives. These also come with the added risk that Britain could be “blocked at the last minute because Breton langoustine fishermen are unhappy”.

But as the spectre of de Gaulle looms over a Europe bickering over seafood, the continent should find inspiration in another figure: not the great man of France, but the founding father of modern Europe, Jean Monnet.

In his biography of the great statesman, François Duchêne sets out how Monnet used moments of crisis to pursue new ideas, rather than simply leaning on those old maxims of foreign policy: “He suspected history of being a crutch,” Duchêne wrote, “for those who hoped relying on it would be easier than thinking for themselves.”

Indeed, one of the interesting things about Jean Monnet is that he is not simply revered by Europe’s federalists as the founding father of modern Europe, the first to be given named an honorary “citizen of Europe”, but that he is also held up as icon among eurosceptic revolutionaries such as Dominic Cummings who see him as one of the geniuses of modern politics, able to give institutional life to his ideals. Monnet led a remarkable life: French official and European hero, but also a man of the Western order who was knighted by the British, worked for Churchill, proposed the union of Britain and France and was seen by de Gaulle as being too much of an anglo to be trusted.

The highest praise Monnet had for any statesman was that they were “generous”, the opposite of which he called the “spirit of domination” whereby these men seek only to further their immediate interests within their narrow positions of power. Looking out across Europe today, it is hard to see much generosity among its statesmen — or indeed any of Monnet’s genius for taking an idea such as “strategic autonomy” and making it real For Monnet, in fact, one of the central purposes of the “Europe” he created was to keep together the Atlantic world and what he originally saw as its three component parts: the continent; the British Commonwealth; and the might of the United States.

There were, for Monnet, very few politicians who combined the skill of high office with the “generosity” to achieve results that went beyond immediate national interest. Without that generosity, Monnet argued, men turned too often to what he called “little solutions to big problems”. If there is a description of modern Europe’s predicament, it is this: a continent stuck in its old ways of thinking, still focused on its old red lines and petty nationalisms — and still lacking the generosity required to break free from the indignity of Trump’s domination.

In the summer of 1945, with Europe lying in ruins, Charles de Gaulle and Jean Monnet were the two dominant Frenchmen of the day. Having returned from a visit to Washington, the general and the “inspirer” as de Gaulle dismissively referred to Monnet, held a long discussion about the state of the continent. “You speak of greatness,” Monnet told de Gaulle, “but today the French are small. There will only be greatness when the French are of a stature to warrant it… For this purpose they need to modernize.” De Gaulle had returned from American stunned by the prosperity — and power — of the new hegemon. “You are certainly right,” he replied. “Do you want to try?”

The rest is history. But some things remain unchanged. Europe today is small and it will only achieve greatness when it assumes the stature to warrant it. Instead, no doubt, Berlin, London and Paris will argue about fish and plead for America to stay just a bit longer.

This analysis sprang to mind when I saw Powell arriving in Paris alongside Starmer on Monday. The two were there to attend Emmanuel Macron’s hastily arranged meeting of European leaders to discuss Donald Trump’s decision to open peace talks with Russia. The talks, which began in Saudi Arabia yesterday, came after Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that the US would not provide any peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in future, nor provide any further funding to keep the war going. The message was clear: it was up to Europe to protect itself from now on. Taken alongside J.D. Vance’s uncompromising attack on European domestic affairs in Munich last weekend, the past week has been a geopolitical shock to Europe — the moment the curtain may have started to fall on the transatlantic alliance and a new world came into being.

Can Starmer turn the crisis to his advantage? With Powell at his side, the Prime Minister has taken a notably resolute posture, declaring his willingness not only to share the responsibility for Europe’s defense, as demanded by Trump, but even to consider sending British troops to Ukraine to defend the country in future if necessary. “We have to recognize the new era we are in, not cling hopelessly to the comforts of the past,” Starmer declared after the meeting in Paris. “It is time for us to take responsibility for our security, for our continent.” If true, this really will be a moment of history.

For many on the Left of the Labour Party, such statements are evidence of Powell’s Blairite influence over Starmer. “Advising Starmer about sending UK troops to Ukraine are Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson,” wrote Diane Abbott on X. “Both relics of the Iraq War era. What can possibly go wrong?” Since his return to Downing Street in November, nearly two decades after his stint in Tony Blair’s No. 10 came to an end, Powell has established himself as a figure of significant influence in the Starmer operation, trusted by both the Prime Minister and his influential chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. In fact, inside Downing Street, The New Machiavelli is held up as something of a guidebook for how to wield power in modern politics.

The irony of Powell’s return to Downing Street, however, is that Starmer — at least on the face of it — appears to be anything but the “conviction” politician praised in The New Machiavelli. In a new book on the Labour leader, Get In, written by the journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, Starmer himself appears to make this explicit. “I don’t have any ideology at all,” he reportedly declares at one point. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I will make decisions one after the other.”

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Despite Starmer’s openness to sending British troops to Ukraine, his response to the Trump crisis hardly fits Powell’s definition of a conviction politician. Just after saying that it was time for Europe to take responsibility for its own security, for example, Starmer also insisted that there had to be a “US backstop” to any future peacekeeping effort in Ukraine. The comforts of the past are not easy to give up.

Domestically, too, Starmer is facing a battle just to marginally increase defense spending from the current target of 2.5% — half the level the Trump administration has demanded from Europe. According to influential UK advisers I have spoken to this week, Britain’s spending on conventional military forces in reality amounts to little more than 1.5% of GDP once its spending on other areas of defense, like Trident, are accounted for. Britain simply is not capable of stepping into the gap left by any US departure. Starmer’s mission to Washington next week is that of a supplicant. And Trump knows it.

So far, Starmer’s response to the crisis has been entirely conventional. Much like all British prime ministers since 1945 — with the one notable exception of Ted Heath — Starmer wants to act as the bridge between Europe and the United States as part of a wider strategy to protect the transatlantic alliance and the primacy of NATO as the guarantor of European security.

Yet the danger for Starmer is that he finds himself being buffeted by events in much the way Powell set out, reacting to the latest challenge without any overarching strategic goal beyond the conservation of a rapidly vanishing  order.

There is, of course, every reason to be cautious about Trump’s bombast. During his first term, he repeatedly chastised Europe about its defense spending but left office with more American troops stationed on the continent than he inherited. The read-out from yesterday’s talks in Saudi Arabia did not suggest any real progress had been made.

As one influential UK adviser put it to me, it makes sense for Starmer to do all he can to protect the status quo and hope it survives Trump’s second term. Practically, there may be little other choice. From Starmer’s perspective, neither the UK nor Europe as a whole is in any position to step into the United States’ shoes. Britain has no industrial capacity to replace American arms manufacturers. And besides, as the former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, said, Britain simply does not have the numbers of troops available to make any significant contribution to Ukraine’s defense. The British Army today has barely 75,000 personnel. The Russians, in contrast, are recruiting 30,000 soldiers a month.

Europe’s political and fiscal restraints are so acute that it is inconceivable that a European army could replace the US in any meaningful sense. Starmer’s government is already perilously close to breaking its borrowing rules. France is unable to pass a budget without presidential decree. And Germany is about to enter a period of coalition-building instability. Only the Poles today are spending the kind of money the Americans are demanding, but even they have signalled they are unwilling to allow troops on the ground in Ukraine. If Europe is about to be humiliated by the Americans in Riyadh, it will have brought it upon itself.

Yet every crisis offers political opportunity. Having spent his first six months as Prime Minister being buffeted by events, Starmer could seize this moment to reset the terms of British politics. As one influential figure told me: “People are yearning for a change in direction after all the years of muddling through. This is it.”

Some of those close to Starmer are now advising him to cast off the shackles of the Treasury so as to rapidly increase defense spending and rebuild Britain’s domestic industrial capacity. Perhaps he will need to cast off Rachel Reeves in the process. Yet, in order to succeed, such moves cannot be mere tactical maneuvers. To reset his government in a moment of global crisis, Starmer needs to make a political argument to the country for why everything has changed and so too, therefore, must his program of government.

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He could turn to Ted Heath for inspiration. In 1971, Ted Heath used the sense of malaise which had settled over the country as the context for his push to lead Britain into the Common Market — an ambition he’d had since the birth of the Coal and Steel Community two decades earlier. “For 25 years we’ve been looking for something to get us going again,” Heath said. “Now here it is.” Today, with Britain in a new age of stagnation, Starmer too needs a national mission — and some of those close to him believe that mission should be one of national security. And not just military security, but everything from energy to food and industrial capacity.

To achieve this, however, Starmer would have to make sacrifices that would be difficult for his party to accept. If more borrowing, higher taxes or further spending cuts are required to protect Britain’s national security, Labour will struggle to maintain spending on foreign aid and welfare at today’s levels. In this scenario, energy security would also have to become a priority, which would mean subordinating the drive to Net Zero and pushing ahead with a host of grand projects from the roll out of small nuclear reactors to the rapid expansion of Heathrow and the like. Starmer, meanwhile, is being advised to use the crisis to pursue closer alignment with the EU in areas such as food and animal safety.

Yet this path is fraught with geopolitical dangers. The American commitment to NATO may really be coming to an end. Serious analysts close to the PM are concerned Trump might well agree terms with Russia deemed unacceptable across European capitals. And even if he does, there is little proof that attitudes in Europe will shift in any material way. For all Macron’s talk, British officials believe there is no evidence that he is willing to consider a new security infrastructure outside the confines of the EU to accommodate the UK. The reality is that Britain — like the rest of Europe — is not in control of events. The decisions that will shape the future of the continent are being taken in Washington.

In The New Machiavelli, Jonathan Powell wrote that leaders needed not only to be “blessed with fortune” but also the ability to “take advantage of her”. This, ultimately, is the alchemy of political leadership. So far Starmer has shown little sign of possessing the gifts necessary to master such a crisis. Yet this may be his last opportunity to reset his government before it is too late. He should take it and show us he has a sense of direction after all.

It is hard not to read the coverage of Thatcher’s first few days in the job and not marvel at the parallels between then and now. Today, Kemi Badenoch is struggling to make any impact as Tory leader, dismissed as both too lightweight and too divisive to appeal beyond the narrow confines of the Conservative Party membership. Her first three months as leader have been so underwhelming that her position is under threat. Meanwhile, to her Right looms the presence of Nigel Farage, the man whose schoolboy hero was Enoch Powell.

Like Badenoch, Thatcher was written off early in her leadership. The day after her election as Tory leader, in fact, the Times warned that she needed to move quickly to “broaden her appeal to those who are not Conservatives” because “at present the Conservative Party looks wholly like a minority party, and the Labour Party, with all its conflicts and misjudgments, looks like a governing party.”

Given all this, it is tempting to use Thatcher as evidence against those like Dominic Cummings who have written off Badenoch as a “complete useless dud” who must be shoved out of her position “ASAP”. And yet, while there are certainly lessons to be learned from the past, history is a poor guide to today’s politics. The parallels between 1975 and today are real, but are far less important than the differences between then and now which give substance to Cummings’s condemnation of Badenoch’s leadership so far.

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The most obvious difference between 1975 and today is that the electoral task facing Badenoch is simply far greater than that which faced Thatcher. Not only is the Labour majority far greater than it was then, but the depth of the Tory crisis is far more severe. Regardless of Enoch Powell’s popularity among a certain section of the country in 1975, he simply did not represent an existential threat to the Conservative Party in the same way Reform UK does today.

The central force driving British politics today is that Reform UK has now established itself as a party realistically capable of securing 20-25% of the vote at a general election. This fact alone changes everything for both parties, though neither yet seem to have adjusted to the situation they now face. The decisions both parties take to deal with Reform will shape the next four years in British politics.

For the Conservative Party, Farage poses an existential threat. With Reform this high in the polls, it is almost impossible for the Tories to win a general election. The situation is worse than this, in fact. One of the central reasons people vote Tory is to stop Labour. But if Reform is 5% ahead of the Conservatives by the time of the next election — as it is today — then voters may conclude that the best chance of stopping five more years of Keir Starmer will be to vote for Farage. The Conservative vote would then fall even further.

In 1975, Thatcher dismissed the idea of bringing Enoch Powell into her shadow cabinet after he had left the Conservative Party. By contrast, Farage is now simply too established as a political force — and the Tories too weak — for Badenoch to be able to convincingly dismiss the notion of some kind of pact with him. The idea that Farage or Reform will melt away as a political force no longer looks even vaguely reasonable. Equally unbelievable, though, is the idea that the Tories will disappear as a major political party by the time of the next general election. Given that the two parties are now if not indistinguishable ideologically then, at the very least, overlapping, the only way to avoid cancelling each other out, guaranteeing another Starmer term, is for them to acknowledge each other’s presence. This, at least, is now the position not just of Cummings, but of an increasing number of Conservative thinkers.

Initially, I was skeptical about the threats to Badenoch’s position as Tory leader. But after a week of conversations with senior figures in Westminster, I now find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is more likely than not that she will be replaced before the next general election — if not at some point this year. Similarly, it is now the case that whoever emerges as Conservative Party leader will be forced to negotiate some form of arrangement with Reform before the next election. Events may yet intercede, but as of today the prospect of Prime Minister Robert Jenrick, supported by First Secretary Nigel Farage, is no longer outlandish.

Those close to Starmer are certainly not complacent, convinced that “populist nationalism” will find a way to challenge for power in one form or another before the next election.

For Labour, the rise of Reform is not existential in the same way it is for the Conservatives, even if Farage’s party threatens its position in scores of seats across England and Wales. Encouraged by his most influential adviser, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer is now trying to see off Reform by making a series of high-profile announcements on immigration and welfare. The Home Office released a series of videos earlier this week showing an illegal migrant being arrested and then deported from Britain. The idea is that voters, cynical about the Government’s intentions, need to see evidence that their concerns are being addressed.

Similar tactics were deployed under Tony Blair. Yet as McSweeney understands, the level of public cynicism about politics today is far deeper than it was even 25 years ago when Blair was at the height of his powers. To persuade voters that the Government is serious about immigration, therefore, Labour may need to go much further than it is willing to. The risk for Starmer, then, is that he might performatively move Right but achieve little either practically or electorally from doing so, while at the same time undermining his support on the Left. The same is true on a host of issues beyond immigration and welfare, from Net Zero to taxation and public service reform.

Another striking difference with the New Labour period is that while Blair was clearly to the Right of Starmer ideologically, he also had a far more substantively Left–wing agenda too, from constitutional reforms to the huge increases in public spending overseen by Gordon Brown. As Blair leaned Right on issues like crime, his chancellor spent billions trying to eradicate child poverty. Today, Starmer looks like a soft-Left prime minister pretending to be more conservative than he is but without any of the “stealth” radicalism which defined the previous government: New Labour without Blair or Brown.

The problem for both Labour and the Tories is that they risk learning the wrong lessons from history, and end up in a worst-of-all-worlds position because the political reality today has fundamentally shifted. Badenoch, like Thatcher in 1975, was elected because of her appeal to the party grassroots. She was a straight-talker with a clear set of Conservative principles. That was the pitch at least. Yet if Badenoch isn’t careful, she will become merely the caricature of late-Thatcher without the political nous, skill and adaptability Thatcher showed to win power in the first place.

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“She is an exceptionally astute politician and an accomplished party tactician,” the High Tory commentator T.E. Utley wrote in The Spectator in August 1986, dismissing Thatcher’s reputation as an unbending ideologue. “It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal,” he added.

Utley was obviously correct. In 1975, Thatcher — the future Eurosceptic icon — sat alongside Ted Heath in the referendum campaign on Britain’s membership of the Common Market, demurely praising the man she had removed as leader for being the “master” of European affairs. During the next four years she reassured voters she wanted good relations with the trade unions. And then, once in power, she ordered her ministers to settle with the miners when she felt she was not yet strong enough to defeat them in open confrontation.

In 1975, Enoch Powell complained that had the Tory leadership election happened six months earlier, somebody else would have claimed the crown. Three months after Badenoch’s election, the painful reality is that if there were another contest today, it is likely that it would be Jenrick who would win, not her. If she is to survive in the job for much longer, she will need to show less of Thatcher’s apparent obstinacy and more of her astute political skill. And even if she does, the facts on the ground today suggest that it will be “plainly politically suicidal” for her to go into the next election without some kind of arrangement with Reform. Half a century is a long time in politics. The world has irrevocably changed, but neither the Labour Party nor the Tories have yet adapted sufficiently. Farage may be the heir to Powell’s insurgent conservatism, but he is now far more dangerous to Badenoch’s Tories than Powell ever was to Thatcher.

I’m reminded of that image as I consider the sense of deja vu currently hanging over British life; it feels as though we have been here before, and on more than one occasion. To live in Britain today is to be gripped by a sense of overwhelming, unshiftable malaise, which in recent months has morphed into something darker and more violent: a mood of bubbling resentment and anger that feels ready to explode. In many respects, this atmosphere is entirely new: a reflection of the globalised, social-media age in which we now live. And yet, it also feels so jarringly, achingly familiar — a dim folk memory from our recent past. Poor, rainy Britain, once again unsure what to do with itself, buffeted by the ideological storms rolling in from the United States, humiliated by those to whom we cling closest.

Exactly how our American cousins choose to belittle us might be new, but Elon Musk and Donald Trump are characters with whom we are all too familiar. Who is Trump, after all, but some cartoonishly outsized version of Billy Bob Thornton’s déclassée commander-in-chief in Love Actually. To complete the picture, we now have Keir Starmer forced to cosplay Hugh Grant, who himself was cosplaying the Tony Blair of Middle England’s fantasy back in 2003.

Yet, Trump’s familiarity is not only cultural. Britain’s three great post-war lows came in 1956, with the calamity of Suez; 1976 with the humiliation of its IMF bailout; and 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. In each case, Britain’s shame was not alleviated by its alliance with the US, but rather compounded by it. At Suez, Dwight Eisenhower’s threat of economic ruin forced Anthony Eden’s retreat. During the IMF crisis, Gerald Ford’s administration refused to play “host to a parasite”, imposing an austerity Britain previously considered unimaginable. And then, in 2003, it was the desire to avoid a calamitous break with America that ultimately doomed Blair’s premiership. Are the indignities of the past few months really so different?

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Of these moments, it is the late Seventies which — at first — appear the most obvious parallel. Battered by both our own economic failures, and the storms blowing in from the US after Richard Nixon’s decision to unilaterally abolish the Bretton Woods order, Britain suffered calamity after calamity until the Thatcherite revolution of 1979 changed everything. That, at least, is the story that is now told. Such, in fact, is the power of this Thatcherite fable — what we might call “Iron Ladyism” — that it has become the conventional account of Britain’s entire post-war history: First decline and then renewal. Now, of course, we are back to decline.

Yet, the more I stare down the well of our recent past, the more it seems necessary to look beyond the Seventies, to the tumultuous decade that came before, in order to glimpse of the real significance of our present turmoil. While the Seventies were the years when the post-war order finally spluttered to its end, it was the Sixties which paved the way for this collapse after years of imperial retreat, military humiliation, domestic violence, ideological upheaval and, finally, conservative rebellion. Sound familiar?

For much of the Sixties, the eventual turn to the Right under Nixon in the US, and Ted Heath in Britain, had looked anything but inevitable. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory over the radical conservative, Barry Goldwater, with a promise to bring forth “the Great Society”. In Britain, meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s hero Harold Wilson came to power promising to unleash the white heat of technology to burn away the stultifying amateurism of old Tory England. The future was liberal — or at least progressive.

By 1968, however, both the United States and Britain had entered a far darker world than that which had once been imagined; American prestige collapsed in Vietnam, Johnson announced his departure from politics, Martin Luther King was assassinated, Chicago burned and Nixon triumphed. In Britain, meanwhile, 1968 is the year Enoch Powell’s blood-drenched prophecies of ethnic war and national suicide prompted an explosion of street protest: previously considered impossible, somehow, in sleepy old England. In his diary, the Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman wrote that Powell had “stirred up the nearest thing to a mass movement since the 1930s”.

Yet, the real significance of Powell’s emergence in 1968 was not confined to Rivers of Blood, but what the Left-wing historian Tom Nairn prophetically saw as his ideological ground-clearing for a new politics of the Right. Writing in the New Left Review, in 1970, Nairn argued that Powell was the leader of the “New Right” then emerging to fill the void created by the failures of the old consensual conservatism typified by Harold Macmillan and his protege Ted Heath.

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As Nairn had spotted, Powell’s ultimate aim was not simply to stop further immigration — and, indeed, to begin a process of repatriation (now euphemistically called “remigration”) — but to redefine British nationalism “in terms appropriate to the times”. For both Nairn and Powell, this meant creating a new post-imperial nationalism which attempted to recast Britain as a country somehow unchanged by its imperial adventures and, therefore, still bound to its ancient past. For Powell, the Britain of the Sixties was still a kind of Greater Shire, connected by a thousand years of unbroken history to its Saxon forebears. Nairn argued that Powell had combined this mystical vision of ancient England with an embrace of Hayekian free market radicalism and opposition to Commonwealth immigration to form a new conservative ideology.

Casting forward, Nairn wrote that Powell’s real significance, then, lay in the fact that he had created a “ready-made formula” for the future leaders of British conservatism to pull off the shelf when the next crisis came — as it surely would. Powellism, then, was little more than a “preliminary ground-clearing exercise” for a future administration. Today, it is hard to read Nairn’s essay without being struck by its clarity of foresight, accurately predicting the eventual triumph of Margaret Thatcher, almost a decade later, following Britain’s IMF prostration in 1976 and industrial anarchy of James Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent in 1978-79.

Today, that late-Sixties sense of social unease, ideological ferment and geopolitical upheaval prevails. The parallels to that time of war and strife are, of course, inexact. Though a victory for Russia in Ukraine would be a seismic strategic defeat for the United States, it is not equivalent to the calamity of the Tet Offensive of 1968. There are no American soldiers dying for Ukraine as there were for South Vietnam. Also, whereas in 1968 Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were both slaughtered — and Paris burned — Donald Trump avoided assassination by a matter of millimeters last year, and Emmanuel Macron crawls on despite widespread revulsion at his regime.

But the riots of 2024 are the closest thing Britain has seen to the outpouring of populist fury since Enoch Powell’s sacking in 1968. And if Powell has a political heir, it did appear to be Nigel Farage, the man whose first taste of political action was chauffeuring Powell around Newbury in a by-election for UKIP in 1993. Farage rose to influence combining two of Powell’s core passions: Europe and immigration. Farage has less time for Powell’s unionist purity on Northern Ireland — and none of his anti-Americanism.

Yet, for all of Farage’s evident political nous, he is not capable of Powell’s mystical recasting of conservatism “in terms appropriate to the times” as Nairn put it. Whereas Powell was creating a new Toryism for Britain’s post-imperial age, today that world has gone. In its place, we have a new age of imperialism and expansion, great power competition, technological revolution and even galactic exploration. It demands new ideologies on Left and Right to replace the glaringly inadequate answers offered by most mainstream politicians today — including Farage, who has yet to shed his loyalty to the old Thatcherite answers of his youth.

In Robert Jenrick, the boy from Wolverhampton raised in Powell’s political shadow, there are stirrings of something new on the Tory Right, in which Powell’s focus on questions of identity is combined with a new idea of cheap energy as the route to Britain’s reindustrialisation. Yet, Jenrick is not the driver of today’s new ideological upheaval in the way that Powell was of Thatcherism in the late Sixties. For that, we must look to the States and the twin motors of the zeitgeist today: Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

The significance of Musk’s partnership with Trump is that it has refashioned Trumpism from a set of inchoate instincts about lost American greatness into a starkly contemporary ideological response to today’s world. The old Trumpian nostalgia for the American glory years of the Sixties — when it put a man on the moon and reached for the stars — are there in this new “Muskism”.  Yet it has been turbo-charged with an expansionary techno-futurism, embodied by Musk’s Space X and Trump’s imperial instincts to conquer Greenland.

In this new iteration of Trumpism, American glory is once again cast as being for the “Free World”, as it was during the Cold War, only now it has been redefined in civilisational terms against the digital totalitarianism of China, apparently alien fanaticism of radical Islam and even the domestic liberal extremism of “woke”. Somewhere in this jumble of ideas and instincts lies the essence of the new Trumpism. Its importance, though, lies not in its ideological coherence, but in the fact that it offers what Nairn described in 1970 as a “ready-made formula” for others to adopt as their own, and fill their own ideological vacuum.

Today, we do not know whether the beneficiaries of this new ideology will be Tory or Reform. In the end, the past is not a guide to the future. Yet, as we squint at the burning scrap of paper, falling down through the ages of our recent past, we can at least see the familiar conditions for a great upheaval to come. The Enoch Powell of our age does not appear to be Robert Jenrick or Nigel Farage. It is Elon Musk.

In this adaptation of Julia Donaldson’s children’s book, an imaginative little fish is saved by the “tall tales” he makes up to keep him out of trouble. “I was lost, I was scared, but a story led me home again,” he declares. Donaldson describes her story as a celebration of childhood imagination, which encourages kids to lose themselves in their dreams. Yet it strikes me that there’s something deeper going on. Donaldson has written a modern fable of sorts. Across the West, we are more than a little lost. The stories we once told are no longer believed and those we need to tell new ones have lost their power of imagination.

The central conceit of much political analysis today is that there is something called “populism” which tells tall tales to gullible voters in order to win power. Opposing the populists, in this telling, are the “centrists” who deal in facts and figures. We might call this the Alastair Campbell account of modern politics. The irony of this view, though, is that it has become the very thing it thinks it opposes: a comforting but ultimately hollow fantasy.

In one sense, it is possible to understand 2024 as the year the hollowness of this centrist fantasy became so obvious voters couldn’t take it seriously any longer. In France, the story of Emmanuel Macron’s Jupiterian competence is no longer believable even for those who want it to be true. In Germany, meanwhile, the idea that Olaf Scholz could possibly lead a Zeitenwende looks just as ridiculous, as he clings to power desperately casting his opponents as warmongers. In the United States, meanwhile, the extraordinary reality is that Donald Trump cut the more substantive figure in their presidential election than his opponent by having actual policies. Has there ever been a more vacuous candidate in modern presidential history than Kamala Harris? Is anyone today able to say what she actually stood for other than her own ambition and the interests of the Democratic Party?

Here in Britain, meanwhile, the hollowness of our order is exposed by the simple fact that it is simply no longer believable that we are a well-governed country. The deterioration of living standards and public services are too obvious for anyone to be able to make this case with any degree of sincerity. However we define the status quo, it is surely failing. The last time there was a similar breakdown of the legitimacy in our governing order came in the Seventies when a series of crises exposed its failings. For Starmer and his government, the great fear is that the turning point in this story — the 1979 of our own era — was not the election in July, but the one yet to come.

Part of our current dilemma lies in the fact that our world no longer bears witness to the wisdom of the old solutions. On economic questions, for example, the idea of free trade in the era of Chinese industrial power looks increasingly sado-masochistic, especially when shackled to our drive towards Net Zero. There is real panic today in Whitehall at the prospect of imminent industrial collapse which risks fracturing the entire governing consensus around our decarbonising commitment — much as the post-Brexit immigration boom under Boris Johnson similarly robbed the Conservative Party of its legitimacy on that subject.

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Standing ready to benefit on both of these counts is Nigel Farage, the populist Grendel stalking Westminster’s imagination. Johnson was once the figure who was supposed to have slayed this Kentish monster with his promise to Get Brexit Done and “level up” the country, only for the hollowness of his commitment to be exposed, allowing Farage to return stronger than ever. Since then, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have come and gone, each slain by their own inadequacies, leaving Starmer with the sword of state tasked with defending the Mead Hall. But within a matter of months, his government is also in trouble.

With his noble missions as his guide, Starmer hopes to demonstrate to voters that he can deliver tangible improvements to their lives in a way that the populists Boris Johnson and Liz Truss never could. The strategy behind this is to paint Farage not as the solution to today’s crisis of government, but as a return to the populist chaos of the Tories. There is merit in this approach, but in the end, if a wave of car plant closures is blamed on Ed Miliband’s drive to Net Zero, the debates about Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and George Osborne will feel as irrelevant as the figure of Ted Heath did in the aftermath of 1979’s Winter of Discontent.

The danger for Starmer is that trying to defeat populism through “delivery” not only leaves him at the mercy of forces he cannot control, but also ties him inextricably to a system that voters have already rejected. This, in a sense, was the story of the American election, in which a party with an apparent record of delivery was defeated by an insurgent populist. To win, Starmer needs more than a spreadsheet with the figures moving in the right direction. He needs a story about what went wrong before and why his government is different. He needs a story about what his government is for, morally and ideologically.

Unfortunately for Starmer, there is a concurrent shift in attitudes across the Western world which Starmer also needs to contend with. As a senior diplomat put it to me, the mood in European capitals has dramatically shifted since Trump’s victory, embracing his power in a way that indicates a new and far more cynical Western zeitgeist. “So many have now embraced the world of Game of Thrones, Billions and Succession,” this official said. “A world in which power is the only currency and morality is most likely to be a flaw.”

In this view, to be seen attempting to play by the rules of the game while everyone else takes advantage of you is not noble, but contemptible. Having recently found myself invested in the TV series Yellowstone, this observation struck me as highlighting a key element of our modern psyche. In Yellowstone, the anti-hero is the patriarch of the family doing everything and anything to keep hold of his family ranch. Much has been said about Yellowstone’s distinctly conservative vision of America. Yet, in a more profound way, it is actually offering a vision propounded by the Left, which long ago rejected the idea of a noble America born in liberty seeking an ever-more-perfect union. Instead, America was cast — correctly in many ways — as a slave republic which came into existence through violent colonisation.

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The irony here, though, is that this successful challenge to the foundational myth of America has given rise not to some pained wish to repent among today’s newly enlightened generation, but a deep cynicism about the nature of the world, which has only served the interests of the Right. If there has never been a moral mission in the world — if it is all just a made-up story — then why create one now? Might is right, after all. No matter how many people the patriarchal rancher must kill to keep his land — or what was done to win it in the first place — he remains the hero simply by dint of striving to keep what is his.

This story does not bode well for those like Starmer who are seeking to defend the decency of the old order. In this world, little is to be gained by giving away sovereignty in the Indian Ocean or sticking to your climate commitments. What voters want, it seems, is for someone to protect their inheritance; their prosperity; their country; their land. Of all the characters in British politics, the one who clings closest to the Yellowstone version of morality is, of course, Farage. The point about Net Zero, for him, is not who is to blame for climate change, but who is going to defend British prosperity.

If Starmer or, indeed, Kemi Badenoch, is to counter this story of modernity, then both will need a better story than the one they are telling us. It will need to capture the public’s imagination as much as Farage’s tale; to explain, in moral and ideological terms, what has gone wrong and why only Labour can fix it. It will need to explain the collapse of the old order’s legitimacy and work with the cynicism of our new age. Ultimately, it will need to be more political: to be for some people and against others. McSweeney and McFadden need a new story. It can be tall or otherwise, but it can no longer be as hollow as the one we have lost faith in, otherwise we will not find our way back.

It might sound absurd to the casual observer. These men hold wildly varying beliefs and, in many ways, define themselves in direct opposition to each other. McSweeney’s entire project is predicated on the idea that Blair’s “radical centrism” is not only out of date but politically objectionable for not taking seriously the working classes Labour exists to represent. Blair, in turn, remains eyerollingly dismissive of McSweeney’s “blue” Labourism and his attempt to win back the disaffected old voters lost in the years of high Labour liberalism. Both men, in their different ways, reject out of hand what they would see as Cummings’s brand of anarcho-conservative populism. Cummings, meanwhile, believes that McSweeney and Blair are both achingly anachronistic in their understanding of the modern world and what is necessary to make the British state function.

And yet, there is much that binds these three figures together. Within weeks of entering No. 10, McSweeney had come to the same conclusion as both Cummings and Blair: the British state, in its current form, is not fit for purpose and needs what Keir Starmer has since called “a complete rewiring”. Of all the influential figures in British politics, Blair and Cummings today are among the most convinced of the seismic nature of the coming technological revolution, not just for jobs and wages, but for politics itself. All three are also convinced that without fundamental reform, the duopoly which has ruled Westminster since Labour broke past the Liberals in the Twenties may not have long for this world.

With the election of Donald Trump in November, and the rise of Elon Musk as a figure of epochal power, Westminster has entered into a tailspin of speculation about the prospect of Nigel Farage being the figure who might finally put this teetering political system out of its misery. Despite having only five MPs to Labour’s 402, there is now open speculation that Farage may not simply expand his party’s presence in parliament at the next election, but win the next election, becoming prime minister himself.

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Farage himself plays up such speculation for obvious reasons. “We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war,” he told The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards. “Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election.”

It is worth stressing at this point that the barriers to a Reform victory remain enormous. To win outright, Farage would need to double the party’s vote share and see both Labour and Tory support collapse. Reform now lies in second place in 98 constituencies, 89 of which have a Labour MP. The Tories, meanwhile, are in second place in 292 seats, 218 of which have a Labour MP. The fundamentals of British politics, in other words, make it far harder for Reform to win the next election than the Tories.

Historically, too, it is hard to find any precedent to bolster the idea that Reform can go from five MPs to a majority in one term. The Labour Party won its first seats in 1900. By 1918 it had increased its representation to 57 seats and then 142 in 1922, when it finished second for the first time with 30% of the vote. Still, it was not until 1923 that Ramsay MacDonald became prime minister at the head of a minority administration, and 1945 before Labour won a majority.

Yet what is remarkable is how many serious political operators and insiders in British politics now believe that there is a plausible (if still unlikely) chance of Farage becoming prime minister in 2029 or 2034 because the old rules no longer apply.

Blair’s view, for example, is that just as the industrial revolution gave rise to new political movements, so too will the technological revolution we are now entering. A world of automation, AI, Silicon Valley and China simply cannot sustain the same political divides which existed at a time of industrialization and mass trade unionism. In Blair’s view, only if the two main political parties reform to reflect the reality of the world that now exists — or will soon come into being — can they hope to survive.

Cummings, similarly, believes the conditions are coming together for a period of far deeper and darker upheaval; the failure and corruption of the old order will become so systematic that it breaks down at rapid speed. Brexit, in his view, was an attempt to get ahead of this change. The revolutionary nature of AI, which may wipe away the industries on which Britain depends — law, accountancy, finance and the creative arts — will only accelerate the implosion, Cummings suspects, releasing forces as unpredictable as they are unmanageable.

These forces could combine to squeeze the life out of British industry just as Donald Trump sends the US economy into overdrive with his program of massive tariff increases, tax cuts and spending reductions. It is a perfect storm. And at this point of chaos, a Trump-light alternative in Britain, fueled with money from Elon Musk, could sweep Farage into power. Given the right funding, senior figures in the wider Conservative movement believe that Reform could launch a hostile takeover of the weakened Tory party, like a spider crab shedding its old shell as it grows.

In one sense, it is possible to see Blair and Cummings as the yin to the other’s yang. Cummings sees history as a dark, chaotic process of disorder and renewal, while Blair cannot escape his faith in progress. Both, though, see the world entering a period of climactic change which may result in something entirely new coming into being.

Enter McSweeney, whose politics are less sweepingly visionary than either Blair or Cummings, rooted in the grind of British life rather than the sweeping historical forces which will or will not overwhelm the country. Yet he too recognizes the global move towards conservative populism, and believes, for Labour’s part, that only tangible improvements in people’s everyday lives will be enough to hold back the Faragist advance. His party’s campaign strategy for 2029 is already set: don’t risk a return to chaos with Farage and Badenoch.

Earlier this year, in advance of the election in June, McSweeney and his team in Labour HQ analyzed every possible threat to a Labour victory, including from Reform. All potential vulnerabilities were identified and, where possible, closed down: Green pledges abandoned, spending plans watered down, and language around immigration and Brexit tightened up to leave no doubt in voters’ minds. As part of this work, the party’s most senior figures delved into the danger of Farage’s insurgency. McSweeney had two essential observations which guided Labour’s strategy: first, in the election in 2024, Reform would probably help Labour by splitting the Conservative vote; second, that this story could change dramatically by 2029.

The truth is that Reform remains more of an existential threat to the Tories than Labour. It is far from impossible that Labour will limp through both this term and a second because the Right has split in such a way that even with less than 30% of the vote, Starmer remains in power with Liberal Democrat support.

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But the nature of Britain’s electoral system means that once a threshold has been passed, the barriers which once held an insurgent party from growing can suddenly accelerate its rise. The model here is the SNP in Scotland, which rose from six seats out of 59 in 2010 to 56 in 2015. Those looking for straws in the wind point to the recent council by-election victory for Reform in St Helens in Merseyside, one of the safest Labour constituencies. In a ward where there was hardly any Tory vote to cannibalize, Reform topped the poll in a first past the post.

The central reality of British politics today is that the window of possible outcomes appears to be widening at an astonishing speed. We have never before been in a position where an insurgent political party is level-pegging with both main parties while being supported by both the richest man in the world and the most powerful.

Nigel Farage may finish the next election in second place in the popular vote and fourth in terms of actual MPs. Alternatively, he may follow in Ramsay MacDonald’s shoes by leading his party into second place in a hung parliament and become Prime Minister of a minority government. But the most remarkable fact of British politics today is that the best observers I know are no longer able to say which one of these two scenarios is more likely.

Looking at where the McSweeney-Blair-Cummings venn diagram overlaps, we can draw one central conclusion: revolutionary change is coming. The question is: who will thrive in the chaos it unleashes?

To take the interventionists at face value, you would think the fall of Assad in 2024 is somehow proof of their own wisdom in supporting airstrikes on his regime 11 years earlier in response to his use of chemical weapons. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said last week that “if the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone”. By not intervening when it had the chance, the West “created a vacuum that Russia moved into and kept Assad in power for much longer”, Streeting argued. It’s a neat story with a pleasingly simple moral at its core: take action or somebody else will.

Streeting’s account of recent history — notably far from his health brief — is the conventional view in London, Paris and Washington; the view of what Barack Obama once described as “the blob”. It is no surprise, then, that it was echoed by George Osborne on his podcast, Political Currency, last week. Osborne described David Cameron’s failure to win parliamentary authorisation for military action in 2013 – inadvertently setting off a train of events culminating in Barack Obama’s decision not to impose his red line against chemical weapons — as one of his greatest regrets from government. “Forget about the suffering the Syrian people have endured for the past 10 years as a result [of non intervention], look at the massive migration flows into Germany, the pressures that put on European governments, the collapse of more moderate centrist administrations, ultimately the small boats that come across the English Channel,” Osborne explained. All could be traced back to the West’s failure to take control back in 2013 when it had the chance.

To support Osborne’s case, he played a clip of the British diplomat Hugh Powell reflecting on the lost parliamentary vote a decade in.

Powell was Cameron’s deputy national security adviser in 2013, and scion of Britain’s greatest diplomatic family. He is the son of Margaret Thatcher’s former foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, and nephew of Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan. In Hugh’s view, the 2013 vote against intervention was “a massive mistake”. The key point, he said, was that the Assad regime was always fragile and could have been knocked out of power with more forceful Western intervention. “2013 was an opportunity to help crack it well before Hezbollah and Russia came to its rescue,” Powell told Osborne and his podcast partner, Ed Balls. “And with Assad gone we had a good chance of installing a power-sharing government in Damascus that might well have prevented the hidden expansion of ISIS.” It’s a neat story.

The thing is, though, Powell’s explanation is exactly the opposite of what David Cameron insisted was the case at the time. In 2013, Cameron told MPs that he was seeking parliamentary approval for military action for one reason alone: to deter the use of chemical weapons. “The question before the House today is how to respond to one of the most abhorrent uses of chemical weapons in a century,” Cameron began in his statement pleading for their support. “It is not about taking sides in the Syrian conflict, it is not about invading, it is not about regime change, and it is not even about working more closely with the opposition; it is about the large-scale use of chemical weapons and our response to a war crime — nothing else.”

So, which is it? Was it a missed opportunity for regime change, as we are now led to believe. Or was it a failure to punish the use of chemical weapons that had nothing to do with regime change, as Cameron insisted then?

Powell’s apparent admission that there was a wider ambition was picked up by Ed Miliband to defend his decision to vote against military action. Responding to Wes Streeting’s comments, Miliband correctly stated that the 2013 vote was — at least ostensibly — to authorise a “one-off bombing of Syria”. However, Miliband then claimed the reason he did not support this one-off bombing mission was because “there was no plan for what this British involvement would mean, where it would lead and what the consequences would be”.

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Miliband’s account is just as lamentably dishonest as Cameron’s. If Western intervention would have made no difference to Assad’s grip on power because it was a “one-off”, then his argument for not punishing Assad in 2013 is logically bogus. But if it were not, then he cannot at the same time claim with certainty that the air strikes would not have undermined Assad’s grip on power. They were either one-off strikes or they were not. Miliband, like Cameron and Osborne, is trying to have it all ways.

Just as it now seems obvious that Cameron was hiding the real motivation of his policy 2013, so too does it seem obvious that Miliband was too. Cameron couldn’t be honest about his intention because it would’ve sparked even more opposition. Miliband couldn’t be honest, because his calculation was fundamentally not about the policy but his own self-interest. Labour opposed intervention in Syria in 2013 because they believed it was necessary to win the general election in 2015.

The dishonesty of the two sides trying to recast their roles in recent history captures the essence of our governing class’s failure in recent years. For so many of our leading politicians and diplomats, it seems, their views are essentially unfalsifiable acts of faith. Casting my mind back across the great titans of 21st-century British policies it is hard to think of a single big beast who appears capable of genuine reflection on the inadequacies of their way of understanding the world. The world of podcasts is teeming today with former ministers or political leaders explaining why what they have always said remains entirely true.

It is for this reason that I find myself reflexively jumping to Miliband’s defence despite his reprehensible behaviour in 2013. For Osborne, nothing seems capable of shaking his faith in the benign power of the West and its ability to make the world better for all.

Osborne’s attempt to claim the Syrian non-intervention led to the small-boats crisis is particularly lamentable. Of those trying to make it to Britain illegally today, most come from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Albania — none of whom are wanting for lack of Western intervention. What is more, the ability of the EU to deal with illegal migration flows across the Mediterranean have grown immeasurably worse because of the Cameron-Sarkozy decision to intervene in Libya in 2011, toppling the Gadaffi regime and creating an anarchic vacuum of power which continues to this day. Where is the real reflection from Osborne et al about this failure, let alone the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

There is a fundamental complacency to our outgoing political class today, which seems happy to wallow in what Keir Starmer might call the “tepid bath” of its simplistic analysis, unable, it seems, to wrestle with the complexities of foreign and economic policy today and to level with people about the trade-offs. It is striking that David Lammy’s “progressive realism” places ever greater emphasis on the realism of its creed rather than the progressivism, emphasising, for example, the recent push to develop ties with the Gulf. The days of Tony Blair’s Chicago speech setting out his interventionist “doctrine of the international community” seem as ancient as those of Kissinger.

In Hugh Powell’s account of 2013, for example. Western intervention would have led to the fall of Assad and the emergence of a unity government of some kind. In Osborne’s telling, this would have prevented the various crises which swept over Europe thereafter. Both are essentially declarations of faith.

Today, Powell says the only outside power able to impose order on Syria is Turkey and that President Erdogan will need to send a Turkish Richard Holbrooke figure with the skill and determination to pull Syria’s various ethnic and religious factions together in a Lebanon-style power-sharing arrangement. The references to Holbrooke and Lebanon are inadvertently telling.

Lebanon is a failed state with a record of catastrophic mismanagement and corruption that has destroyed a once thriving country. Living in Lebanon might have been better than living in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan in recent years, but it was worse than almost everywhere else outside sub-Saharan Africa. Is this really the best solution?

Richard Holbrooke, meanwhile, might be a hero to the interventionists today, but his record carries lessons that are more uncomfortable than they imagine. A biography written by Holbrooke’s friend and admirer, George Packer, is a reminder that he rose to prominence in the Sixties as a far-sighted diplomatic realist who saw that America’s war in Vietnam was going catastrophically wrong in a way that the country’s foreign policy establishment seemed incapable of understanding.

In the late summer of 1966, after returning from Saigon, Holbrooke found himself at the White House with President Lyndon Johnson. “The belief that America could do whatever it wanted remained strong as iron,” Packer writes. But Holbrooke dared to question. “Mr President, I’ve just come back from Vietnam and, you know, I’m a little worried about this… there are some limitations to what the Americans can do in the civilian field in Vietnam.” Johnson then stared at Holbrooke and replied: “Well, son, your job is to get rid of those limitations.”

The wise men of the American establishment were wrong in 1966 and Holbrooke was right. But it was the wise men who would be summoned to the White House, as Packer writes, “to assure Johnson, on the basis of nothing except heavily slanted briefings, an unexamined attachment to the domino theory, and their own code of resoluteness, that this distant country they didn’t understand was a necessary battlefield of the Cold War, before returning to their stately offices and sterling reputations”.

It is an irony — though perhaps a revealing one — that Holbrooke ended his career as such a wise man convinced of his and America’s ability to overcome their limitations in another faraway country, Afghanistan. Today, in his place, we have new wise men, clinging to their unexamined theories and codes of resoluteness convinced of their own fantastical tales of recent history. The truth is that both Ed Miliband and David Cameron are losing their battle for history — and deservedly so. The vote in 2013 and the fall of Assad 11 years later are just two crises in an epoch of Western failure that has given us the world of Donald Trump and Abu Mohammed al-Julani in which we live today. If Britain and its new Foreign Secretary really wants to learn from its recent past, they will need more young Holbrookes and fewer wise men clinging to their unexamined faiths which have long since lost credibility.

What is so striking about this second coming of Trump is not just that the world appears to have accepted his victory this time, but to have actively embraced him as the harbinger of a new age, no longer seeking to protect the old one that has been discredited. The visual proof of this diplomatic embrace was captured in the image of Europe’s leaders in Paris, one after the other, moving to submit themselves at the feet of the new imperator.

Yet it was not the symbolism of the ceremony in Notre-Dame on Saturday which came closest to capturing the revolutionary spirit of Trump’s coming presidency, but the events unfolding at the same time thousands of miles away in Syria. While in one sense the collapse of the Assad regime in Damascus has little to do with Trump, it is impossible to understand the speed and timing of the revolution without considering the impact that his impending presidency is already having on world affairs.

Think about the events that have already happened since Trump’s election victory in November. First, there was the collapse of the German government and the sacking of Israel’s defence secretary, Yoav Gallant, on the day of the American election. Then came Netanyahu’s ceasefire-deal with a dazed and confused Hezbollah, followed by the authorisation of the firing of long-range American missiles into Russia, the publication of Zelensky’s peace plan, the collapse in the value of the Russian rouble under fresh American sanctions and, finally, the sudden implosion of the Syrian regime. The French government also collapsed.

“Everyone has taken his mantra that all is transactional and is positioning themselves to open the way for a bargain with Trump,” explained one French official reflecting on this extraordinary cascade of events. Even before taking power, then, Trump is the catalyst for a new age.

In Syria, he sparked a revolution. Frustrated with a diplomatic impasse as the clock ticked down to Trump’s inauguration and the ambitions of the American-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria’s north east, Turkey’s President Erdogan appears to have authorised the advance of his own client rebels first. Erdogan, it seems, wanted to ensure the Turkish-backed militias were in the strongest possible position to deal with Trump after January 20, only to have triggered the sudden and complete collapse of the Assad regime. Russia, meanwhile, bogged down in Ukraine and already having paid a large price for little reward in Syria, was also caught off guard and now faces the loss of key military bases on the Arab-Mediterranean coast, further entrenching Erdogan’s power in the region.

Across the Middle East, all the major powers are jockeying for position. Already, Benjamin Netanyahu has taken advantage of the vacuum of power in Syria and in Washington to grab new territory in the Golan Heights and try to impose a new political dominance at home. Saudi Arabia, too, sees opportunities under Trump. Even Iran, the great loser in world affairs since October 7 last year, may feel it now has no choice but to sue for peace and reach a deal.

For Ukraine, meanwhile, it is President Biden (or his officials) who is accelerating events by rushing to do all he can before Trump’s inauguration, with new weapons transfers and sanctions that are causing Russia fresh economic pain. Yet, once again, it is Trump who stands to gain as each side plays out their cards in expectation of his attempt to impose a new order on the world once in power.

It is striking how open so many diplomats and officials are to Trump’s approach, telling me that they see in it a degree of brutal honesty if not morality. During his first term there was a hope that his Hobbesian outlook on life would not, in the end, last. Today, there is no such hope — or even desire. Meanwhile, the comprehensive nature of Trump’s victory coupled with European rolling political and economic crises, seems to have robbed the continent’s leaders of any last delusion of superiority. Only Emmanuel Macron’s departing Prime Minister, Michael Barnier, showed any real distaste at Trump’s presence at Notre Dame, which is itself rather telling. If there was a figure who appeared out of touch in this scene, it was not Trump; Barnier’s instinct is that of an older age, revealing his own anachronism. In today’s world, Trump no longer represents good or bad, but simply power. He has it and Europe does not.

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It is for this reason that in many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence, forcing leaders to address the fundamentals of their position. Europe is weak — economically and militarily — and made weaker by the leaders it has chosen. In Paris, Macron has destroyed his presidency in his desperate and doomed attempts to save the country from the Le Pennist fate he seems only to succeed in making more likely. In Berlin, Olaf Scholz is drifting towards defeat, a listless chancellor atop a listless Germany at the heart of a listless continent. In London, meanwhile, there is the odd spectacle of an all-powerful government that already feels adrift. Can these three powers really find it in them to step into a void left by Trump in Ukraine? And if they can, at what cost to an electorate already raging against the deteriorating state of their public services?

None of this means Trump’s clarifying presence will be either good, bad or in any sense successful at finding solutions to problems that have defeated his predecessors. In an important sense, in fact, Trump represents the end to all such teleological notions of progress or decline. Power is the point.

In Syria, the fall of Assad cannot be squeezed into any such narrative of progress or decline. It is a story of order and who has the power to impose it. Trump doesn’t want it. Iran has lost it. And Turkey may find it is no more successful in its attempts to control its foreign clients than Pakistan was in controlling the Taliban. And just like Afghanistan, in Syria a gruesome regime has evaporated after being abandoned by its foreign protectors. What comes next may be just as dangerous — and far closer to home.

Syria’s new warlord Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was 20 when he joined the jihad in Iraq. Perhaps he has mellowed and forgiven — but it would be a brave analyst after the past 20 years to believe that Syria has reached its nadir: modernity may yet have some new horrors for it to endure. What comes in its place may be no better or worse than what it replaced, merely a new epoch symbolised not by the beauty of Notre-Dame but the hellish anarchy of America’s Iraq.

Today, it is hard not to be spooked by the sense that once again we are entering one of these eras that will overwhelm our rotting old order. Waves of Chinese industrial might threaten to overwhelm the last of our competitive industry, while the alarming approach of AI and unpredictable rise of Donald Trump risk upending everything else. And as Keir Starmer prepares to set out his long-awaited “Programme for Change” even his close advisors sense the ground shifting beneath their feet. They have the feeling that they are representatives of both the emerging new world as well as place holders in an interregnum before something else entirely.

It is a striking image — of regents rather than monarchs — and surprisingly self-aware from a Government that in many other respects gives every indication of not appearing to understand the scale of the challenge it faces.

A sense of unease has settled over the country, too, barely five months into its new Government. The Prime Minister’s goal is to lift this ennui with the most important speech of his premiership. Yet he will almost certainly fail. Not because what he says will be unreasonable or the targets he sets wrong — they will be neither — but because we are entering one of those periods of change which requires a form of leadership that is beyond him. Perhaps even beyond any of our leading politicians today.

Charles de Gaulle governed France through two great moments of upheaval. Having created the “necessary myth” of a country united in resistance during the war, his second great achievement, according to his biographer Julian Jackson, was to turn France’s defeat in Algeria in 1962 into a sort of victory. He told the French that, “although militarily victorious, [they] had granted Algeria independence in accordance with her historic commitment to human rights”. The story was not true, of course, but after years of turmoil and shame, the French were happy to believe it. De Gaulle later reflected in his War Memoirs that however difficult the reality might have been during his time in power, he had always felt able to master it, “by leading the French there through dreams”.

It is this sort of leadership that is required in moments of great tumult, when a collapsing old order must be refashioned into a moral story of political will. It was, in essence, Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, killing the failing post-war consensus and ushering in something new with a story of industrial revival that did not come to pass, but which nevertheless provided a sense of purpose.

The problem with Starmer’s attempted reset is that he is moving in the opposite direction; lowering the nation’s sights, leading not through dreams but powerpoints. We know that in his speech, Starmer will attach at least one specific target to each of his five “missions”, along with an extra promise to reduce immigration. This is all part of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s belief that this government needs to kill the “fiction” that politicians can fix everything, because this in itself damages public trust. Instead of trying to do too much, McSweeney argues that Labour governments must remain focused on practical policies which improve people’s lives.

For those around Starmer there is no alternative. “Of course delivery is not enough,” one senior figure told me. “But if we don’t get waiting lists down and don’t get immigration down there is no story we can tell.” The purpose of Starmer’s speech today, then, is to make his “missions” more tangible, creating that sense of progress — if not achievement — that is currently so obviously lacking. Targets, not dreams. It is striking that those advising Rishi Sunak had the same idea. Such was the lack of faith among voters at the time, his advisers argued, that only a set of specific and deliverable objectives had any chance of convincing people he was serious. Yet by the end of his time in power Sunak appeared lost, unable to cope with the scale of the challenge, finding solace merely in the performance of power, completing his paperwork to give him a sense of progress and purpose if nobody else.

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The Sunak and Starmer approach to government is not without merit, of course. The danger of governing through dreams is that dreams are not real. As Gladwyn Jebb remarked of de Gaulle, his legacy was “to cast his country into a role which was beyond her power”. As a result, de Gaulle’s successors are doomed to live up to an impossible myth — just look at Emmanuel Macron.

So the danger of McSweeney’s approach is that as Britain’s challenges grow, the Government’s ambitions fall and public frustration increases. Because the health service is in such a bad state, for example, the new target is simply to get back to the kind of waiting times that we once took for granted. And meanwhile people’s everyday experiences of the NHS deteriorate. We can order Christmas presents to our doors at the click of a button, but to attempt to see a doctor is to do battle against an unresponsive, maddening and seemingly unreformable bureaucracy. It is pretty obtuse not to realize that public anger at this basic failure is bound to grow; the decreasing length of the waiting lists for routine operations will only infuriate those who can’t get through a GP’s door.

Politics, as the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, is ultimately the navigation of “a boundless and bottomless sea” where there is neither a starting place or an appointed destination. Yet it is impossible to steer your course without looking up to the horizon.

Those close to Starmer understand the dangers of appearing to fixate on a set of arbitrary targets as the world transforms around them; the boundless and bottomless sea suddenly raging while the captain merely stares at the map. As one senior aide reflected, the ultimate challenge is not just convincing Starmer of the importance of storytelling, but fashioning a specifically Labour story appropriate to the challenges facing the country. Because from immigration to energy transition and shifting social norms, changes are coming which threaten to overwhelm many of Labour’s most sacred shibboleths.

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“Something new is happening,” one aide told me, “and so many of the old beliefs are falling away.” This is taking place at such speed, he said, that the party has begun doubting itself. Labour today is no longer defending the benefits of immigration but attacking “the one-nation experiment in open borders” inflicted on Britain by the Conservatives. Facing its first motor plant closure, the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds declared he was not prepared to accept deindustrialization. What will happen when the flood of cheap Chinese-made electric vehicles sweeps through the country, and further plants begin to close? What then?

In previous eras of momentous change, new parties or ideologies rose in response: the Labour Party in the Twenties and Thirties, and Powellism followed by Thatcherism in the Sixties and Seventies. It has not gone unnoticed that Nigel Farage’s Reform lies in second place in 98 constituencies today — 89 of which are held by Labour, including 60 in the north of England and 13 in Wales. On each of the great challenges now facing Britain — immigration, net-zero, China and Trump — Farage is now well-placed to take advantage. He has his dream. He is also said to be ruthlessly focused on the “Waitrose moms” he needs to make his next great leap in the polls as part of his now public ambition not simply to win more seats, but to “win” the next election outright.

To succeed in government, then, Starmer must do more than deliver on the targets he sets today. He needs to lead the British there through the dreams they already have, not by fiddling with taxes and targets. It is a cliché that political leaders campaign in poetry but govern in prose, but in times of upheaval only those who retain a poetic imagination can write their own reality. Starmer, though, is no bard..

Now, unlike in Larkin’s time, and contrary to the popular imagination, there is almost no discernible anti-Irish sentiment in Britain. Gone is the time when a respectable figure such as J.B. Priestley could openly fantasise about exiling Ireland’s huddled masses from England’s western ports. “What a grand clearance there will be,” he wrote. “What a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease.” Priestley’s respectable heirs today, if anything, see the English in such light and Ireland as a model of solid sober government.

It is difficult to see Ireland in any other light as it goes to the polls to elect a new government. Whatever problems it has, and it has many, the great structural question dividing Irish politics is now, essentially, how much of its enormous fiscal surplus to set aside to cope with the potential shock of a Trump presidency. Of all the problems to have, this, it is fair to say, is not the worst.

No matter how often British observers try to dismiss Ireland’s wealth as some kind of tax dodge, the reality is that most of Ireland really is richer than most of England — as anyone who spends even the briefest amount of time there can attest. This fact alone stands as a painful rebuke to the British state which does not provoke anywhere near as much self-reflection as it should. Ireland fought a war to leave the UK when it was the poorest part of these islands. It is now richer than the country it left behind. It is not only the Scots who should be angry about this.

Nevertheless, there is something fraudulent about Ireland’s success today that, like the country itself, is eerily familiar to the English observer. In 1997, fresh from his landslide election victory, Tony Blair wowed the Labour Party conference in Brighton with a vision of a future Britain would lead. In the great globalised economy that had emerged from the ashes of the Cold War, Blair argued, Britain would become a “beacon” for the rest of the world to follow, combining the best of America’s economic dynamism with Europe’s social conscience. With the City of London as its beating heart, so the story went, Britain had all the ingredients for success in the 21st century: an open and flexible economy supported by a well-educated, liberal and tolerant people happy in their own multicultural skin. While this fantasy has long since crumbled in Britain, it remains modern Ireland’s comforting mythos.

When observing Ireland from afar, then, the temptation is to see it as the last citadel of a lost Fukuyaman world: Byzantine Constantinople just before the fall, naively getting on with its life behind the walls that will soon be breached. Perhaps this is why Ireland’s political class is so admired by Britain’s lonely podcast centrists who spend their time lamenting the loss of the civilised pre-crash world in which they felt comfortable. Ireland, to these characters, remains recognisable: living proof that their world view is not out of date as they wander lonely in an England that is no longer home.

Yet, the fragility of the Irish settlement is there for all to see. As Silicon Valley’s tax-avoiding bridgehead into the European Union, Ireland is particularly exposed to the geopolitical world now coming into being. Indeed, it is noticeable how clearly this has been understood and expressed during the campaign this year.

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On immigration, too, there are obvious parallels with Britain. The flip side of Ireland’s position as a great floodplain for global capital, is that it must also be a place for people to arrive too. A country of just 5 million, Ireland’s net migration is now running at around 80,000 — far lower than the 600,000-1 million that have come to Britain in most recent years, but proportionately higher. With a housing crisis that is, if anything, even more acute than in Britain, the conditions for popular revolt are clearly visible, even if you discount the riots that gripped Dublin after a naturalised immigrant attacked primary school children with a knife.

None of this means Ireland will fall or even necessarily falter. There’s every chance the second Trump term will be as insubstantial as the first, tinkering at the edges of global trade without changing its fundamentals. Perhaps Ireland will not reveal the emptiness of Blair’s prophecy but become its ultimate realisation, Britain’s inheritance transferred to Ireland in some cosmic display of imperial karma.

Beyond mere economics, Ireland’s politics offers plenty of other notes of caution for those in the Starmer government who will be keeping a close eye on developments today. The first is that no matter how impressive Ireland’s economic performance has been in recent years, there remains a deep malaise in the country that is entirely recognisable. On questions of housing, immigration and public services, the anger of the Irish public is as tangible and acute as it is in the UK, while also being gripped by the same intuitive sense that its political class have become so distant they no longer appear to like the opinions of its own citizens.

Perhaps this, too, is the price of wealth. I have been struck in the past by how approachable its political class seemed. Attending the Irish Derby in the late 2000s, I was able to walk up to the then Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to ask him a question — largely unthinkable in Britain. Cowen was, of course, deeply unpopular for his role in the financial crash, the unlucky figure left standing when the music stopped. Still, looking back, he was a recognisable Fianna Fáiler. Simon Harris, today’s Fine Gael Taoiseach, represents Ireland’s new generation of leaders, tetchy and unpopular, seemingly unable to cope with direct contact with the people.

The defining moment of the election campaign was a toe-curling encounter in a Cork supermarket when a tearful care worker accused Harris of ignoring those, like her, who worked for low wages looking after the disabled. “No you weren’t,” Harris replied, only for the lady to persist. “You’ve done nothing for us, our people are suffering,” she continued, voice quavering. “That’s not true to say that,” Harris replied, now getting frustrated. At that point, as the lady continued to complain, Harris simply offered his hand and turned away from her, only to then double back as if he realised he’d made a terrible mistake. “You’re not a good man,” the lady said, now beginning to sob. “Okay, well if you think I’m not a good man”, Harris then muttered before walking away for good leaving onlookers to shake their heads, shame. This remarkable exchange, captured on video, has torpedoed Harris’s campaign, with his party slumping in the polls as a result.

To English eyes, this is all so remarkably familiar. In 2010, Gordon Brown’s election campaign exploded after he was recorded dismissing a voter as a “bigoted woman”, while earlier this year, Rishi Sunak sunk his attempt to remain Prime Minister by abandoning the D-Day celebrations. On each occasion — Brown, Sunak and now Harris — offered grovelling apologies to stem the loss of support. And on each occasion in Britain at least, they failed.

The power of each of these moments was not just that they were personally embarrassing, but that they seemed to capture something essential about the country itself: the disdain for the common assumptions and prejudices of the ordinary voter, whether over immigration, healthcare or patriotism itself. Dipping into Irish social media these past few months certainly gives the impression that the view of an out-of-touch elite holding ordinary voters in contempt is now as common in Ireland as it is in England. Even Sinn Féin is now being accused of treachery among some of the more fringe nationalists for their attitude to immigration. This is not a good road to go down.

To me, Ireland always seemed to offer yet more proof of George Orwell’s caustic observation that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”. Over there, it seemed, there was a deeper and entirely unironic reverence for the myths and symbols of its nationhood in a way that has long since been lost in England. The energy that existed among revisionist Irish historians during the Troubles seems to have petered out. Such is the strength of the reverence towards the official Irish narrative, in fact, that to the Unionist northerners the land of the Republic remains as foreign as ever — its customs are not theirs.

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As such, I have always thought it ironic that while Ireland is held up by those who know little about its history as a beacon of civilised internationalism, it is just as easily definable as a place of successful conservative nationalism of the sort dismissed in Britain. Indeed, for the former to be sustainable you could argue that a country must first have the latter. An Irish diplomatic friend once joked with me that the most jarring Englishman of all was not the bumptious ruling class toff of lore, but the self-hating liberal who adores everyone else’s quaint nationalism but his own. Perhaps the reverse is also true: the most jarring modern Irishman is the one who believes his own nationalism is merely an expression of some kind of modern, enlightened internationalism.

Ireland, then, remains a foreign land that is homely in its familiarity, even as it changes to adapt to the modern world. Going to the polls today, there is a three-way tie between Harris’s Fine Gael, the former Taiseach Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil and Mary Lou McDonald’s Sinn Féin, each on around 20% of the vote and destined, it seems, for another grand coalition of its traditional centre.

For the average Englishman used to first-past-the-post, such a scenario might appear foreign — and yet remarkably familiar at the same time. There is now a growing realisation within Westminster’s political class that Reform UK may yet do to British politics what Sinn Féin has done in Ireland, not simply dying off but establishing themselves as a new, viable third (or fourth) party, stabilising at around 20-25% in the polls. If this were to happen, there would be a plausible scenario in which Labour, the Conservatives and Reform each go into the next election neck-and-neck in the polls, with the position of Prime Minister available to the leader of the party able to eke out the slenderest of leads. There are now senior political analysts speculating about a realignment in British politics in which Farage’s Reform leads a merger-acquisition of the Conservative Party after the next election to secure the premiership.

Ireland was once destined to follow Britain, its big brother across the water. Perhaps now it is showing us our future in more ways than one. We remain in touch, London, Belfast and Dublin.

Donald Trump is no Napoleon, but he has captured the spirit of our age: America’s soul riding forth on X. It is hard to open any social media app today — pace Bluesky— and not be struck by the sense that something has shifted in the zeitgeist. The Right is winning and it’s becoming cool. A new epoch has begun. Where NFL players once took the knee, now they are doing the “Trump dance”, while UFC fighters bow to their great Caesar as he strides in the modern, fighting colosseums of today. Animal spirits have been released into the popular culture that are as powerful as they are unpredictable.

But what about those of us living outside America? There is no obvious British Joe Rogan or British Elon Musk today — the Horace and Crassus of our age. Perhaps that is because these men are just as powerful here as they are in the States. In fact, just as we have entered something of an economic depression these past 15 years, so too are we stuck in a cultural and ideological rut. To look at Britain today is to be struck by an overwhelming sense of quaint, platitudinous predictability: more poor Vienna than booming Austin. There is no British Musk because there is no British Silicon Valley; and there is no British Rogan, because there is almost no popular, home grown counter-cultural energy — not yet at least.

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But down at the farmers’ protest an intriguing presence strides into view: Jeremy Clarkson. “Why are you here Mr Clarkson?” the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire demanded as he joined those protesting the Government’s decision to impose inheritance tax on family farms worth over £1 million. “Well, I’m here to support farmers,” he replied, without obvious hostility. Derbyshire, though, persisted. “This is not about you and your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?”

As Derbyshire pointed out, Clarkson had written as much in The Sunday Times. “Classic BBC,” Clarkson replied, with seemingly genuine exasperation. “You people.”

Clarkson then proceeded to deliver a message of clean popular fury more in tune with the spirit of the day than anything I have heard out of Westminster in years — not since Take Back Control anyway. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Clarkson began. “I wanted to shoot… which came with the benefit of not paying inheritance tax. Now I do. But people like me will put it in a trust and as long as I live for seven years that’s fine. But why should all these people do that?”

It was hard not to hear the distant sounds of the great populist panjandrum across the water in those remarks. “A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular,” Dave Chapelle explained on Saturday Night Live. “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio had never seen someone like him. He’s what I call an honest liar. That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never seen a white, male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs: This whole system is rigged.”

Chapelle is referring to the scene when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of using a loophole to avoid paying taxes. Asked by the moderator whether this was true, Trump replied that of course it was. “I absolutely used it and so did Warren Buffet and George Soros and many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from,” he went on before delivering the killer line: “She complains that Donald Trump is taking advantage of the tax code, so why didn’t you change it when you were senator? The reason is because all your friends take the same advantage that I do.” The fact that Clarkson was attracted to buying a farm because it came with the benefit of avoiding inheritance tax will also, I suspect, be of little interest to most people in Britain who do not like this government. The fact that he said he bought a farm to go shooting and avoid inheritance tax will, in fact, be seen as welcome honesty.

Just as Trump hit on a central truth with his admission of tax avoidance — an honest lie as Chapelle put it — Clarkson alighted on a number of burning questions in British politics today which do not neatly map onto our traditional political system. When he asked why farmers should pay inheritance tax, Derbyshire replied with the obvious counter that if not farmers, then how else will the government fund public services? “I tell you,” Clarkson answered, pointing up at the government offices surrounding him. “Walk into any of the offices around here and if you don’t understand their job, fire them.” In other words: don’t tax; cut.

And here, not only do we have a British expression of the Trump zeitgeist, but a British incantation of the Musk agenda. The power of Musk’s prospective Department of Government Efficiency is that even in defeat, it opens up the prospect of something new in Western politics, much as Thatcher changed the nature of British politics even as she abandoned some core tenets of her agenda.

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Clarkson, though, represents something more interesting — and more distinctly British — than mere government efficiency. To watch even a few episodes of his hit show Clarkson’s Farm is to immediately realise that while it contains much of the energy of Top Gear, at heart it carries a far more profound message than the populist caricature he usually does little to disavow. Essentially, Clarkson’s Farm tells us that farming must be protected in a collective national endeavour because it provides our life source: food. It is elemental: an expression of an old, almost forgotten Toryism — not free-trade but protectionist, national, territorial and utterly opposed to centralising notions of uniformity.

The programme overlaps with other expressions of Toryism too: inheritance, obviously, but also questions of conservation and an instinctive opposition to a distant, bureaucratic state. Occasionally, as a viewer, you are suddenly struck by the sensation that Clarkson is quietly delivering a sermon on rural life, smuggled into your living room under the guise of an entertaining countryside farce, a Tractor Top Gear.

Clarkson pulled the same trick on the podium at the march, complaining not just about Starmer’s “infernal government” and the BBC being its mouthpiece, but also about the ordinary consumer who will buy imported chickens to save money. “Yeah, you can, but it’s so full of chlorine, it tastes like a swimming pool with a beak.”

Farming, Clarkson reminds us, remains a great touchstone issue of Brexit, shaping its eventual form. Liz Truss, remember, is held in open disdain by farmers — not for the insanity of her “mini budget”, but for the content of her free trade deals with New Zealand and Australia.

In Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, he captures the old Tory icon’s politics as that of “genuine hatred of centralisation, bureaucracy and every manifestation of the Benthamite state”. This, Disraeli believed, was what Gladstone represented. “[Disraeli] felt the sort of reverence that Burke had had for the many independent corporations and institutions which, however odd and anomalous, however contrary to the abstract symmetry, to what Burke called the ‘geometrical theories’, were the true bulwarks of English liberty,” Burke wrote. This, I think, remains the essence of the Tory instinct, still alive even as the party veers off towards libertarianism or social democracy.

“In a progressive country change is constant,” Disraeli once warned. “The great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles.” To Disraeli, the former was a “national system” and the latter a “philosophic system”.

Clarkson represents the national system; Starmer and Reeves the philosophical one. If I were Starmer, I would be worried that this is the wrong side to be on today, especially in this era of Trump. Clarkson’s politics, it seems to me, are like T.E. Utley’s self-professed brand of Toryism: “at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment”. Just because Clarkson’s politics do not map onto the prejudices of the two main parties today — being neither pro-European nor pro-global free trade — does not invalidate them, but rather, potentially, elevates them.

Clarkson, like Trump, is not a new phenomenon in any sense. He is old, rich, famous and good on TV. He has been expressing the same kind of thoughts for as long as I have been alive. And yet he has become new by remaining still. And that is why this Labour government shouldn’t mock his appearance at yesterday’s farmers’ protest. “I don’t think farmers will go on strike,” Clarkson said. “I think farmers can do better than that. And I’ve got some ideas.”

This should give Keir Starmer pause. Rather than ignoring this protest as another squeal of special interests from the old Britain he intends to put out of its misery, he should take seriously the prospect that it is actually a first expression of the new Britain coming into being: not riding on a horse, but a tractor.  Starmer needs to do everything he can to ensure Clarkson’s ideas do not involve the words: “Reform UK”, “Start Up Party” or worst of all “the Tories”.

Despite the inevitable hand wringing in Westminster, however, Trump’s election provides a political opportunity for Starmer that, intriguingly, has not gone unnoticed inside No.10. From a purely partisan perspective, those close to Starmer see Kamala Harris’s crushing defeat not only as a personal rejection, but also as an ideological repudiation of the kind of progressivism she came to represent. In their view, Harris’s brand of “be more woke” liberalism is just as antithetical to the voters Labour needs here as it was to the voters the Democrats needed across the Atlantic.

To understand the tensions at the heart of the Starmer government over its response to Trump’s victory, it is important to distinguish between the historical, organisational and emotional ties between Labour and the Democrats, which sparked Trump’s ire during the presidential campaign, and the divergent political projects taking shape in London and Washington. Those close to Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s influential chief of staff, simply do not look to San Francisco, Washington or Ottawa for inspiration as Tony Blair might have done in the Nineties. Instead, they look to the solid and rather staid social democracies of northern Europe. To understand Starmerism, in other words, look to Copenhagen not California.

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The interesting question at the heart of this Labour government, however, is not so much what McSweeney’s vision of a successful Labour strategy looks like — for that much is clear — but how widely it is shared within the wider Labour movement. Beyond a few figures in No.10, who else shares McSweeney’s instinctive eye-rolling alienation with the obsessions and prejudices of North American liberalism and, somewhere in their soul, saw Harris’s defeat as deserved?

Fundamentally, many in Starmer’s No.10 believe that their “project” to remake the Labour Party, which started in opposition, is only half finished. To complete it, the party needs to develop far less instinctive sympathy with the kind of progressivism Harris represented — and far more sympathy with the ordinary concerns of Middle England. If the Labour Party is to be more than a Biden-style interregnum between periods of conservative rule, they believe, the party needs to be shaken out of its comfort zone on many of the issues which cost Harris in the election, from immigration to the wider “woke” wars dominating the post-mortems now being written about why her campaign failed.

Harris’s defeat, in short, is both a portent of what could happen to the Labour Party at the next election and a tool Starmer can use to stop that from happening, though only if he has the political skill to do so. Put bluntly, while President Trump will test Starmer’s diplomatic skills to the limit, his victory could help persuade a reluctant Labour Party that it needs to do far more to reassure voters that it shares their instincts. That, at least, is the theory.

None of that is to deny that on day-to-day issues, a Trump presidency will present Starmer with endless problems, which could sap energy from his premiership. When the deportations of undocumented migrants begin, Starmer will come under enormous pressure from his own party to condemn them. Imagine the moment it is discovered that a dual British citizen has been rounded up and separated from his children. Like Tony Blair, forced out of office because of his failure to condemn Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006, Starmer cannot run too far from the core instincts of the Labour Party. And yet, who knows what ramifications there will be for Starmer should he go to war against Trump on any particular issue.

All this makes Britain’s choice for the next ambassador to Washington vitally important. Right now, Peter Mandelson is being touted for the position. Appointing him would be a show of power from McSweeney — a close ally of Mandelson — putting the Foreign Office in the shade and raising questions about David Lammy’s influence, given his remarks about Trump as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”. Mandelson is a commercially-minded politician-cum-businessman — a mould well understood in Washington — with an expertise in global trade rules from his time as European Commissioner. It would be some irony, however, if Mandelson’s latest political reincarnation was to negotiate a new trading relationship for Britain that would not have been possible in the EU.

Trump’s victory is clarifying in more ways than one, however, challenging British politics to reveal its hand on a whole raft of issues beyond Brexit, trade and security. When the President-elect moves to reinforce his southern border, in what sense can Britain plausibly claim to hold a different policy given the emphasis Starmer has placed on the creation of a new “Border Force”? As Starmer put it in his conference speech earlier this year: “It is — as point of fact — the policy of this Government to reduce both net migration and our economic dependency upon it.” The difference between Starmer and Trump, then, is not one of ambition, but delivery. Similarly, when Trump moves to ban the surgical transition of trans children, as he has promised, how will a Labour government react given that Health Secretary Wes Streeting has already kept the previous government’s ban on the use of puberty blockers for children?

On more structural questions, Starmer will face a choice all British prime ministers have tried to avoid: does he align Britain with the US in its struggle for global supremacy with China, or try to carve out a European third way? Britain, France and Germany tried this when Trump pulled the plug on the Iranian nuclear deal in his first term, only to find that they were powerless to escape the economic power of the US. When Britain attempted to continue using Huawei to build its 5G network, despite Trump’s warnings, Boris Johnson was forced into line because Trump simply imposed technological sanctions that Britain could not escape. Expect a similar pattern to play out all over again, even on the thorny issue of Ukraine, where Europe is unlikely to be able to make up the shortfall should Trump decide to pull the plug on US support for Kyiv next year.

If anything, Trump is far more powerful today than he was in 2016, and we in Europe are far weaker. Trump won an undisputed electoral mandate, backed by a likely Congressional trifecta and a more radical, coherent and thought-through ideology developed by organisations such as the Heritage Foundation. Europe, in contrast, looks lost and leaderless, weakened by war and geopolitical competition, and no longer comforted by the idea that Trump is just a passing threat. In Germany, the government is broken and likely to be replaced within months, its economic model ruined by the loss of reliable energy from Russia and high-end manufacturing competition from China. In France, Emmanuel Macron is a shadow of the self-appointed Trump whisperer who bestrode the world stage in 2016. And in Britain, Starmer already looks weakened after the struggles of his first 100 days in office.

The question at the heart of all this, then, is whether there will be an emergence of Trumpism here in the UK, much as Thatcherism went hand in hand with Reaganism. The conditions that gave rise to Trump are, if anything, more pronounced here than in the US: with record levels of immigration, years of economic failure and a growing sense that the British state is in some fundamental sense broken beyond repair.

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Such a view, ironically, is already shared by many of those inside No.10 who have already come to see the creaking, mice-infested building of No.10 Downing Street as a symbol of Britain’s failed state. There are a number of senior figures close to Starmer who have even concluded that the building is not suitable as the hub of a 21st-century government and needs to be closed down, and turned into a ceremonial museum. The day-to-day running of government, for its part, would be moved to the Treasury, Foreign Office or even the Home Office. The question is not whether this would be a good idea in practice but whether the government can afford the upheaval.

The central irony of Starmer’s project, then, is not simply that it is trying to address many of the same concerns as Trump — from immigration to gender and globalisation — but that it is also beginning to share the same instinct that something has fundamentally broken in “the system” which needs fixing, or, perhaps, “draining”. For Starmer, and those around him, the question is not how to distance themselves from Trump over the next four years, but how to prove to voters that they don’t need to vote for a British version of him to address their concerns here. Biden, Harris, Scholz and Macron have all tried to do the same and failed. It would be a brave man to bet Starmer will be any different. It didn’t end well for Cleopatra either.

This captures so much of today’s strangeness. A great jolting reality check has once again been delivered to all those who convinced themselves that something else was in store because their gut — or their centrist prophets — had told them so.

Many of us have spent the past few months watching the great American drama play out on our screens, wondering what it was that we were missing in this supposedly transformative figure of Kamala Harris, destined to prosecute Donald Trump out of history — even potentially with a “blowout” victory for the ages.

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Harris was deeply impressive, we were told. She spoke to the soccer moms of America. The suburbs were rallying behind her. Her choice of Tim Walz was inspired. She was brat. The Republicans were weird. Nancy Pelosi was a genius for getting rid of Joe Biden. Biden was a giant who had saved American democracy. Abortion was the issue which would crush Trump. And yet, here we are. Fox has called the election. Donald Trump will be president again — only this time with a new electoral coalition behind him that has the potential to transform American politics not just for a term, but for a generation.

And here’s where I depart from McCarthy. While there certainly seems to have been very little to the story of Kamala Harris, the climax of the Trump show does tell us something about what the world is becoming.

This is not 2016, it is something more seismic. That first Trump election was but a tremor it seems, the disaffected white working class merely the first group to break from the old order before the stampede to come. This time, Latinos, African Americans and the young appear to have followed suit, with as many as one in three minority voters backing Trump. For so long we have been told that demography is destiny and that the Democratic Party was en route to an unbeatable rainbow coalition, as if the policies they were offering did not matter. That narrative should now be put out of its misery, Canadian style.

Harris was a poor candidate with almost no discernable message, parachuted in to save an unpopular administration on the unbelievable basis that she did not offer continuity but, apparently, change. It was a fundamentally bogus offer.

It seems remarkable to say it, but Trump was the substantive candidate in this election offering a critique of the incumbent’s record. What was the Harris message of this election? What was the substance of her trade, immigration or foreign policy? What was it that she offered other than the fact she was not Donald Trump? She was an actor, a cypher. By the end, her offer amounted to a single issue: abortion. It wasn’t enough.

For much of the past decade, Trump stalked his former party with messages about the border, trade and “woke”. The Democrats knew the threat and nominated Joe Biden as a holding figure in 2020 who would see off Trump before passing on the baton to the next generation. And then, it turned out, there was not a new Biden able to assemble the old Democratic coalition. Now an entirely new one needs to be assembled.

Trump is currently on course not just to win the electoral college (a plus 95% chance according to The New York Times) but the popular vote itself, a scenario deemed implausible only yesterday. It looks like he will sweep all the battleground states and more besides. Though this is no Reagan landslide, Trump is making inroads far beyond his 2016 base. He is winning in the New York suburbs and among conservative immigrants.

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Ultimately, Joe Biden was right that his vice president was a weaker candidate than he had been and Obama was before him. Harris was weaker than Hillary Clinton, too. The Democratic Party’s presidential nominees are getting progressively worse. Some Democratic analysts were arguing overnight that Harrris had been denied the time to introduce herself to the American public. But this only reveals the depth of their denial. Biden was no longer fit for the presidency and would surely have lost by an even greater margin, yes. But Harris was only as plausible as she was because she was parachuted in at the last moment. It is surely the case that the emptiness of the drama she offered could only be sustained for the mini-series we got.

Trump on the other hand seems to have improved as a candidate. He has honed his message without abandoning its essential themes. He was no longer promising to ban all Muslims arriving in the US or promising to get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Yet everyone knew that voting Trump meant tighter immigration restrictions, protectionism, anti-wokery and opposition to foreign entanglements: a potent combination in any democracy. It may not be true, but that was the message.

This is important because America means something in the world beyond its borders — and not just because of its power. It acts as a great distorting mirror, offering an image of humanity that can appear grotesque in its violence and inequality and churning, revolutionary individualism. But like any good caricature, it captures something about humanity in its endless, anarchic strife. Trump horrifies many outside the United States, but like Tony Soprano or Walter White, all the more so because they see something in him that they recognise. He is a portent. Harris is little more than her caricature on SNL.

For years, it has been the European Left which has been taking its politics from America, adopting the manners and assumptions of the imperial hegemon, seeking its respect. Now, surely, it will be the Right which is empowered, much as happened in the Eighties. The European Union is already following Trump’s protectionism and immigration instincts. With Giorgia Meloni in power in Italy and Kemi Badenoch stalking Keir Starmer in Britain, expect a coalescing of Western conservatism.

What now for the homeless centrists? What of the podcast kings for the liberal left-behinds who were predicting a Harris sweep — or even for the polling chiefs running 80,000 simulations showing Harris marginally winning in some implausibly precise number? My prediction: they will remain and they will continue to herd.

Even before the results started coming in, Nate Silver was accusing pollsters of “backfitting their data to match the polling averages, regardless of what the survey actually said”. And yet, this is what we all pored over before the election, instead of concentrating on the policies of each candidate and how they will affect the lives of those inside and outside the United States. For the false prophets, there is, of course, the consolation of decline, the idea of history still moving in an ordered direction — with them being on the right side, of course.

For the next four years, though, the great American drama is back with a dark new series. A new story is unfolding. We are back in Trump’s world and we don’t yet know what he is going to do with it.

Yet the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that while there is something of the lost Britain about Badenoch — I can’t think of another politician who has spoken to me of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em and Mind Your Language — what she really represents is a distinctive modern Britain that is not so much pre-Blair as post-Blair. She is the embodiment of the modern migration nation that is Britain in 2024.

The most interesting thing about Badenoch, then, is not that she is the Conservative Party’s first black leader, but that she is its first immigrant leader. While Rishi Sunak was the first ethnic minority prime minister, he was not an immigrant. Another way to tell the Sunak story is that of the Winchester boy who went to the City via Oxford — living proof of George Orwell’s observation in The Lion and the Unicorn that England is “an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus”. Our aristocrats might appear more diverse today, but the basic settlement has not changed.

Badenoch, though, is different. She is the first Conservative Party leader to be raised in an entirely different country: Nigeria. And this is not because she was an expat or the child of diplomats, but because she was Nigerian. Though Britain was the land of her birth, it was principally the land that Badenoch chose to escape to as a teenager when her home country descended into chaos in 1996.

She thus represents something unique: a leader raised in post-colonial West Africa but who came of age in anti-colonial modern Britain. The result is a strikingly contemporary form of modern conservatism: a New Toryism, perhaps — a global Little Englandism. Badenoch’s politics are those of a middle-class Nigerian anglophile refracted through a world of alien English progressivism.

Speaking to her, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Roger Scruton was on to something when he came up with his theory about expats. The expat is destined to hold a candle for an idea of home that has, without him realising it, vanished long ago. Only upon returning to the motherland does the fantasy reveal itself, leaving the old expat homeless and yearning to resurrect the lost land of his imagination. Though Badenoch is not an expat, she seems to have carried with her an illusion of Britain that must have shattered quite quickly upon her arrival at the fag end of John Major’s government at the age of 16.

The legacy of Empire is “complicated” for Badenoch — not a source of humiliation for her, it seems, but a distant world whose shadow gently fell over her life. Her family, the Adegokes, were upper-class Nigerians doing just fine in post-colonial Africa, with a comfortable home in a well-to-do suburb of Lagos. That Kemi was even born in Britain is testament to this: her parents chose to have her in the safety of a private London hospital after a referral in Nigeria. Her childhood is not the story of struggle. And yet the reality of post-imperial Nigeria remained one of political and economic instability.

The Britain Badenoch arrived in in 1996 was not one of easy prosperity and wealth, even if it offered the kind of stability Nigeria lacked. On her arrival, Badenoch worked in McDonald’s, stayed with family friends and went to Sussex University. Her British story begins just as Tony Blair is about to become prime minister, riding on a wave of optimism about a new, outward-looking Britain, not only open to Europe but the entire world. She arrived during the first great wave of migration, between 1994 and 2004, mostly from outside Europe. The second wave, from 2004, would be indelibly linked to Europe. It was around this time, in 2005, that Badenoch joined the Tories.

“My personal experience has shaped me as a politician, because I grew up somewhere that was very different, and I left just as childhood was coming to an end, becoming an adult when I came here,” Badenoch tells me in an interview earlier this week. “I am very much shaped by what I saw growing up in Nigeria and by my experiences in those formative years, 16 to 21, and the profound observation that I have is that people in the UK take so much for granted and assume that, because things have been good, they’re always going to be good.”

Her politics, in other words, are founded on a sense of fragility born in Africa that she feels is too often missing in the minds of comfortable Europeans. Another instinct from her experience growing up outside the progressive West is a deep scepticism about the emphasis on racism and imperial guilt — and the lack of focus on what she sees as gentle English orderliness and meritocracy.

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“When people say that the police treat you differently because of the colour of your skin and so on, I’m sure that there will be cases where that has happened, but I grew up in a place where the police looked exactly like me and they were not nice.” The contrast with Nigerian policing, not the racism, is what struck Badenoch the most about British policing, and with it the fear that what is good about British policing could be lost. “The concept of policing by consent is so special. The concept of being innocent until you’re proven guilty is actually very rare. We are losing this.” This is the instinct at the core of conservatism, which is concerned less by perfecting what exists than conserving what might be lost. The same is true of her politics more broadly.

When Badenoch looks at Britain, she does not see a cesspit of racism, inequality and backwardness — a benighted Brexit Isle cut off from the world — but a place with relatively mild faults that needs protecting, perhaps even from itself, before it loses what it has.

Badenoch’s muses provide further evidence of her unique post-colonial conservatism. In recent weeks, I have asked various Conservative MPs and leadership contenders to name their intellectual inspirations, and I’ve been struck by how quickly they have reached back to Margaret Thatcher and her milieu as if lost for contemporary ideas. Badenoch, by contrast, offers four influences, all of whom are concerned with loss. At least three of them are notable for their prominence in today’s America rather than Britain: Thomas Sowell, the voice of black conservatism in the United States; Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist; and Why Nations Fail by the Nobel prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Her fourth muse is the English conservative Roger Scruton.

Her analysis of modern Britain is a combination of these influences. The thesis of Why Nations Fail, in Badenoch’s telling, is that the countries that succeed are built on trust — a trust that is being broken in Britain, as both Scruton and Bedenoch would have it, because the political class has, for too long failed to stand up for the nation and to affirm what its members see as their inherited rights.

She offers two examples of why trust in Britain is breaking down, both of which are distinctly modern and distinctly conservative. First: immigration; second: social media. “If you bring people to a country en masse with very different attitudes, and you don’t have a muscular emphasis on what is special about this country, what is different, why that’s important, it will erode,” she tells me. “You can’t just take it for granted. You can’t just assume that everybody understands these things.”

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Badenoch is the immigrant who believes she can see more clearly than the home-born English the real dangers of immigration. This is not, in her view, racism in a multiracial Britain, but the loss of a unifying sense of nation. When it comes to diagnosing Britain’s problems, the fact that she is an immigrant can be an advantage. “It means that I am very, very crystal clear on what things can look like if they go wrong,” she tells me.

The language she uses to speak about nationalism is more strident than any other politician I have interviewed. When I ask her if she agrees with Scruton that the disquiet over immigration, as he put it, was the result not of racism, but “the disruption of an old experience of home”, she says she agrees “very much so — and I can say that because I also know how people react in other countries when things don’t look familiar”. She argues in this regard that nostalgia is not simply a negative emotion, but provides an “anchor on what used to be helps people stay rooted in a community”.

This runs into a central theme of her leadership pitch: the duty of patriotism. “Citizenship is not about having a passport,” she tells me. “Citizenship, to me, means being rooted in a place, wanting it to succeed. It’s not about what you look like… you don’t just want yourself to succeed. You want your neighbourhood to do well. You want your neighbours to do well. You want the success of your country for the next generation, and you’re not obsessed about what’s happening thousands of miles away, either out of, you know, prurient interest, or because of some ancestral history that you might have.”

She is dismissive of citizenship tests, believing instead that patriotism must be promoted organically by everyone in society. Above all, it has to be felt. “[Britain] is not a dormitory. It is not a hotel, for people who are just passing by who want to make some money — and yes, there is a place for that, but we should want people who want the success of the UK.” For a Tory free marketeer, it is striking that she feels able to attack the global super-rich for using Britain as a “hotel” just as much as she attacks some of the poorer arrivals who she claims see the country as a dormitory.

She goes as far as to say she is “horrified” by the videos on TikTok of people saying they wouldn’t fight for the country, believing it’s “cool” to say they’re not from Britain. “All this nonsense we get every St George’s Day of, oh, well, St George wasn’t English. He was Turkish and so on. And there’s no such thing as English culture. This is nonsense, trying to pretend that culture is always something that comes from elsewhere, and what we have here is not real. I think that these are actually very destructive ideas that undermine a lot of the fabric of society that binds people together. And I’m not afraid to say that.”

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That she is not afraid to say things is a core part of both Badenoch’s appeal — and her unpopularity. To some, she is crass, reactionary and even rude — all of which was said of Thatcher. She is certainly strident. Badenoch tells me she backed Brexit in part because of Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to help cope with the flow of migration in the early 2010s — “a fundamental violation of my view of citizenship”, as she puts it. “She created… lots of EU citizens without anybody else’s consent. I thought that was wrong.”

Speaking to some of her critics within the Tory party, there are hints — usually whispered — that Badenoch’s immigrant background does not mean she has a deeper understanding of England, but a shallower one ultimately influenced by the usual American obsessions. In this, her love of Sowell and Haidt is just a mirror of the Left’s obsession with critical race theory and decolonisation. We are all just poor reflections of an American political divide. Perhaps, but there is more than a whiff of xenophobia in such analysis. If Badenoch is not British enough for some, it is hard to see how any immigrant could ever be.

As Badenoch herself puts it, her background confers both advantages and disadvantages. It allows her, for example, to voice an opinion that I think is the closest to Enoch Powell’s analysis of the Commonwealth that I have heard, criticising the preferential treatment given to those migrants from former colonies compared to European citizens. Powell was the original Commonwealth sceptic in British politics, dismissing it as a charade to pretend Britain still had an empire. There will be some deep ironies at play if it falls to an immigrant — who Powell would not have welcomed — to finally sever the final connections with the Commonwealth based on a similar instinct.

“There is a whole new set of issues that our generation has to deal with,” Badenoch tells me. For her, these are migration, the rise of the authoritarian powers “hacking industrialisation”, the progressives “hacking” liberalism, all aided and the rise of social media. “Knowing who we can trust now is getting harder and harder, not just because we are becoming more diverse and that creates, you know, some complexity, but also because of social media and the removal of supposedly trusted voices who everyone would listen to and say, well, yes, they are the authorities, and if they said it, it must be true — now everyone has equivalence.”

For Badenoch, of course, there is no equivalence in life — that is the point. Not everyone’s opinions are equally valid, just as not every culture is equally valid. And as she says, she is not afraid to say it — a phrase I suspect we are going to grow tired of hearing. Badenoch has opinions on everything and we will hear them.

To protect Britain from the forces of modernity, Badenoch suggests what she calls “muscular liberalism” both at home and abroad. This is the Badenoch promise: unrepentant and even, at times, abrasive conservative-liberalism. Call it Badenochism — an immigrant’s vision of Roger Scruton’s England.

“Mr President, you’ve said before that torture works, you’ve praised Russia, you’ve said you want to ban some Muslims from coming to America, you’ve suggested there should be punishment for abortion,” began the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?” Smiling, Trump turned to May and asked: “This was your choice of a question? There goes that relationship.”

It was a joke, of course — and a funny one. The press pack loved it. I remember, because I was part of it. As so often with Trump, however, it was the humour of power: the glint of steel visible, even when sheathed inside a joke. What made it so funny, though, was the fact that everyone knew the special relationship was in his control, not May’s — and he was the type of man who could perfectly well jettison it because of some personal grudge. May had done everything she could to secure a good relationship but she was weak and he was strong. For the rest of her miserable time in power, Trump would remind her of this fundamental imbalance.

Eight years later, and the new PM is in exactly the same position. Keir Starmer has done everything in his power to ensure a smooth relationship with Trump. Through his foreign secretary, David Lammy, the Labour Party has formed close links to Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Starmer was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after he came within inches of being assassinated in July. The pair even had dinner in New York during Starmer’s visit to the UN General Assembly in September.

And yet, here we are, the British Prime Minister once again caught in a Trump storm, battered from one side by allegations of election interference and from another by claims that the Starmer operation is involved in a shadowy censorship war against Elon Musk.

The furore began on Wednesday when it emerged that the Trump campaign team had filed an extraordinary legal challenge against the Labour Party’s “blatant foreign interference” after Starmer’s head of operations revealed that 100 current and former party staffers were headed to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris. The letter also refers to a report in The Washington Post claiming that Labour has been advising the Harris campaign on how to win, including Starmer’s most important aide, Morgan McSweeney — an allegation Labour denies.

The importance of this story, however, does not lie in the technicalities of the allegations themselves — whether the Labour Party officials who travelled to the US to campaign for Harris broke US federal laws by doing so, or whether McSweeney has formally offered advice to the Democratic Party. Such details do matter. But what it really shows is that Starmer and Lammy have not learnt from May’s experience and are therefore doomed to the same fate. For as long as they are chasing after Trump’s approval, he will not respect them. Unless they have something of value for him, no amount of schmoozing will alter his fundamental assessment of British weakness.

There’s a salient lesson for Starmer in Trump’s 2015 book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. In it he explains how at military school he had to deal with a particularly intimidating teacher called Theodore Dobias. “​​What I did, basically, was to convey that I respected his authority, but that he didn’t intimidate me,” Trump writes. “It was a delicate balance. Like so many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the jugular if he smelled weakness. On the other hand, if he sensed strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man.”

Trump, of course, is not really talking about Dobias, but himself. The only people he respects are the strong or the slavishly loyal. And in the British Prime Minister, Trump sees only the weakness of a supplicant. He also knows that Starmer abhors his politics and wants Harris to win.

Like some kind of strange journalistic Russian Doll, however, the story of Starmer’s election “interference” comes with an even odder tale buried within. According to the American journalist Matt Taibbi, the real story is not just that Starmer sits atop a party which is actively campaigning to elect Trump’s rival, but one that also has shadowy connections to an organisation in Washington which is locked in a “disinformation” war with Elon Musk’s X.

Central to this allegation is the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH), an organisation founded in 2018 by McSweeney and another Labour Party official called Imran Ahmed. While McSweeney is no longer involved in the CCDH, under Ahmed’s leadership it has become one of the more controversial campaigning organisations in Washington, leading the charge against what it calls “online harms” but which is seen by Musk and many Republicans as little more than a front in a wider ideological struggle for free speech online. Starmer, then, stands accused of not only election interference, but cultural interference.

The online harms the CCDH highlights certainly reflect the concerns of Liberal America, including issues such as “anti-vax misinformation”, “climate change misinformation” and the dangers of the “manosphere”. On the CCDH’s website it accuses social media companies of using algorithms with a “systematic bias towards hate and misinformation” which pose “real-life harms to marginalized communities, minors and democracy more broadly”. In July 2023, Elon Musk also tried to sue Ahmed’s CCDH for “tens of millions of dollars” in lost advertising revenue, but the case was thrown out earlier this year. Bad blood clearly remains.

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Much like the attempt to portray the Labour Party as a “foreign interferer”, the attempt to tie Starmer’s government to the CCDH’s ongoing war with Musk is pretty thin. McSweeney left the CCDH in 2020, two days after Starmer was elected Labour leader. What’s more, Trump’s campaign team has described Starmer’s Labour party as “far-Left” when McSweeney’s early involvement in the CCDH grew out of his battle to defeat the far-Left, which, at the time, was in control of the party and mired in allegations of antisemitism.

To the actual “far-Left” in Britain, McSweeney is a malign conservative presence. Indeed, in many ways this is closer to the truth. McSweeney’s operation in No. 10 has little time for American progressive politics, which many of those closest to Starmer in Downing Street see as dangerously out of touch with ordinary voters.

But, as with the furore over Labour activists campaigning for Harris, the real importance of Taibbi’s “British invasion” story lies less in how close the connections really are between Starmer and Harris — tentative at best — and more in the wider allegation that the misinformation movement is structurally set up to advance a Liberal world view at the expense of those who dare to question its most fundamental tenets. And on this score, there is clearly some truth.

Earlier this year, UnHerd discovered that an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index had placed us on what is called a “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers. Our crime? “Anti-LGBTQI+ narratives”. The evidence for this assertion was the fact that we had published the academic Kathleen Stock who it said was “acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist”. Stock’s crime was to assert that biological sex differences exist — a belief specifically protected in British law. While misinformation exists, this clearly isn’t it. Much remains in the eye of the censor — or, indeed, the algorithm.

The moral of this strange modern fable, then, is ultimately one of power. Keir Starmer is learning that no matter how nicely he plays, his government will be buffeted by the wider struggle for dominance currently playing out in the US — not just between Trump and Harris, but between the titans of Silicon Valley and the party establishments in Washington. These are battles with huge stakes, financially and politically, the winners of which will control the world’s most powerful country and the world’s most powerful industry. Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney are mere straws blowing in the wind. The Brits aren’t coming for America. The Americans have already taken Britain.

Many others piled in. “My mother was born in Nazi Germany and had to flee for her life,” wrote David Baddiel. “I’m OK with it. So fuck off.” Much was aimed at the Daily Mail. One comment which captured the spirit of anti-Daily Mailers simply said: “Ha ha ha ha!.. I’m loving this appointment, if only for how much it triggers the little englander gammons.” A Labour councillor had the same thought: “It’s exactly the kind of pathetic Little Englander comment expected from the Mail.”

The reaction to Tuchel’s appointment certainly reveals much about Britain today. One obvious conclusion is that to be a “Little Englander” remains the ultimate faux pas in polite society, universally understood as a bad thing combining all that is wrong and embarrassing about our country: small-minded, parochial, uncouth and, well, embarrassing.

Rather than being a distinctive set of views, Little Englandism is more of a sensibility marking out the stupid in the eyes of their betters. See, for instance, how the former Sun editor turned anti-Brexit commentator, David Yelland, described the recent brouhaha about Taylor Swift’s security as “utterly ridiculous, Little Englander, pathetic and damaging to the reputation of the country”. What will the neighbours think remains the most powerful instinct in English life and a core tenet of anti-Little Englandism. A large dose of the shame many felt, and feel, about Brexit is reputational.

To admit to being in any way uncomfortable with Tuchel’s appointment is, then, to reveal a characteristic that automatically makes you suspect, perhaps even a little conservative — or worst of all, Brexity. The historian Linda Colley has described Little Englandism as the reaction to the loss of Empire, or “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, as she put it: “A cleaving to the small and the relatively known in the face of alarm or fatigue or disgust at the prospect of the very large and very strange.”

“Cleaving to the known” is not a respectable look any more. What is prized is a sense of well-travelled ease and gentle sophistication: to understand what everything means on the menu and to abhor the kind of English nationalism that is the preserve of the “skinheads, lager louts, and soccer hooligans”, as the New Yorker put it in an essay on Brexit. This was the essential analysis of the Irish historian Fintan O’Toole, too, who believed such Little Englandism had been largely suppressed “until David Cameron blithely gave it a vast stage in June 2016”.

But it did not always carry this connotation. It was originally adopted in the late 19th century to criticise those who opposed the British empire. The term was adopted by Britain’s most enthusiastic imperialists whose poet and prophet was Rudyard Kipling, and who had used his “Recessional”, first printed in the Times in 1897, to warn Britain that it must take up imperial duties, lest:

If drunk with the sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law.

As J.B. Priestley wrote in The Edwardians, not everyone shared that view. “I remain a ‘Little Englander’,” he wrote, irrespective of the label, “believing that no people are good enough to rule other people thousands of miles away.” But this understanding of Little Englandism has almost entirely vanished.

It was during post-war Britain that it changed subtly from meaning small-minded socialist opposition to empire, to small-minded socialist opposition to Europe. In the parliamentary debates over the Schuman declaration of 1950 — proposing a new supranational entity called the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to today’s EU — Winston Churchill was mocked from the Labour benches for his “champagne” continentalism, which was contrasted with their “honest draft” of British socialism that they represented. At the time, most Conservative Eurosceptics were “empire loyalists” who could not be defined as Little Englanders because they were concerned primarily with maintaining British power overseas.

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As the winds of change blew through the British empire, the instinct to attack Little Englanders passed from the old imperialists to the new pro-Europeans who saw the EEC as a vehicle to protect British influence in the world. Just as Colley identified Little Englandism as “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, so too is British pro-Europeanism.

For Ted Heath, the first — and last — genuinely federalist prime minister to hold office, Europe was always the means to make Britain great again. From the beginning, then, the animating spirit of Britain’s pro-European movement has been tied up with a desire for greatness — or at least relevance. A good example of this tendency came in an interview with the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, who described how he came back from a recent trip around Europe “profoundly depressed… nobody mentions the UK”.

Worse even than the neighbours sniggering at us, then, is the neighbours forgetting that we’re here. Do the Little Englanders not understand this? “What should they know of England who only England know?” Kipling asked. Priestley’s response was simple enough: “A great deal Imperialism chose to ignore.” “While it was busy painting so much of the world map a bright red, hundreds of thousands of houses down England’s mean streets could have done with a lick of paint.” It is an argument that has never really changed.

What is so striking about the evolution of the idea of Little Englandism in post-war Britain is that it managed to retain its negative connotation while completely changing who it applied to. And as with the reaction to Tuchel, it is possible to catch glimpses of this evolution through football.

As Dominic Sandbrook points out in his account of the early Seventies, State of Emergency, when Heath signed the Treaty of Accession taking Britain into the EEC, the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, chose to display his patriotic disinterest by not only staying in Britain to avoid giving his blessing, but going to a football match. He was an ordinary Englishmen.

Attempting to counteract this, Heath tried to sell Britain’s entry into Europe by staging an international friendly football match at Wembley in which a combined eleven from the six original EEC members took on a team from Britain, Denmark and Ireland, the bloc’s three new members. Pat Jennings, Bobby Charlton, Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer turned out for the “Three”, while Dino Zoff, Franz Beckenbauer, Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens played for the “Six”. Yet the public reacted with a notable lack of interest, with only 36,000 turning up for the occasion.

Back in the Seventies, English football was far more parochial, with almost all the managers and players either English, British or Irish. Ironically, however, this was also the time of English dominance in Europe. In the 12 years between British entry into the EEC, in 1973, and the Heysel stadium disaster of 1985, after which all English teams were banned from European competition, English club sides reached the final of the European Cup nine times and won the competition seven times — including six times in a row between 1977 and 1982. For all the financial dominion of the Premier League today, and its access to the best foreign talent and managers, it has never come close to the success it knew when it was run by the Little England gammons of old.

Curiously, English football has almost entirely managed to swerve the Little Englandism stigma that has attached itself to other mass entertainments. In fact, so successfully has football adapted to the post-war growth of the educated middle class, that to be a fan today still offers the kind of everyman credibility that it did for Wilson in the Seventies, without any hint of disreputability that might come from, say, a visit to a UFC fight. Today, the Prime Minister is expected to understand and comment about football and even welcome the appointment of the new England manager.

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Just as Britain is much more middle class than it was, so too is football. Our pundits are expected to adhere to the social expectations of its fans, avoiding any hint of parochial backwardness. A host of football podcasts now describe the sophistication and quality of continental football, mocking the provincialism of pundits such as Richard Keys and Andy Gray who dominated in the Nineties before being sacked for “prehistoric banter”. Today, the pair are the highly paid frontmen of the Qatar-based BeIN Sports where they talk about the English game with what today’s generation see as similarly prehistoric views. The stain of “Little Englandism” is now as toxic in football as it is in most other aspects of middle-class life. To be critical of Thomas Tuchel’s appointment is to emit a whiff of that small-minded parochialism.

Such instincts are not new. Even George Orwell, who admired what he saw as the gentle patriotism of the English, remarked upon the “insularity” of his countrymen and their “refusal to take foreigners seriously”. Perhaps this was true in the Forties, but it’s hard to argue that today despite the reaction of some former players and pundits to Tuchel’s appointment.

There is not another football league in the world which is as global in its reach or talent as the Premier League. Where there were hardly any foreign managers in the league in the Seventies, today 80% of Premier League managers are foreign. In fact, since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, not a single English manager has guided a team to the league. Tuchel is the third foreign manager to take on the England job after Sven Goren Erikson and Fabio Capello, neither of whom did as well as Gareth Southgate.

In contrast, not one of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil or Argentina have appointed a foreign manager to take on their national team. For all the knee-jerk reaction to the Little Englander gammons who criticised the appointment of a GERMAN, English football, much like its economy, is not marked by its insularity but the opposite — its distinctive openness. While the French rule yoghurt manufacturers to be of strategic national interest unable to be bought by overseas investors, we let the French build our core energy infrastructure. The irony of the Little England charge, in other words, is that the real marker of European sophistication would be to be less open to the world — and less English.

The appointment of Thomas Tuchel, then, is not a departure in any sense, but another example of globalised England. We don’t just get the Germans to manage our football team, we have the French running our power stations, the Emirates running our ports and the Chinese buying up pretty much anything they want — provided the Americans don’t notice. George Osborne got a Canadian to run Britain’s monetary policy and wanted an American to head up the police. Perhaps we should put the premiership and Treasury out to tender too. We know what the neighbours think, they are right here. Those complaining about Little Englanders holding the country back have not been paying attention. Little England died a long time ago.

Each of these moments is pretty revealing, but taken together, they create a stark portrait of Britain’s predicament today.

Take P&O Ferries. It was recently labelled a “rogue operator” by the Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, for its conduct two years ago, when it sacked 786 staff and replaced them with foreign agency workers. At the time, Boris Johnson — then prime minister — insisted P&O would not “get away with it”.

Not only did the company get away with it, but when P&O’s Dubai-based parent company, “DP World”, appeared to threaten to withhold a £1bn investment in Britain as a result of Haigh’s remarks, ministers began furiously back-pedalling. They offered “clarifications” to the company that the Transport Secretary did not actually speak for the Government. And so, DP World proceeded with its investment, taking a further stake in Britain’s infrastructure.

I happened to travel on P&O Ferries to France this summer, and found it a desperately soul-sapping experience. Gone are the canteens of old, staffed with actual visible people. In their place are giant vending-machine-style cafes, in which you order, collect, scan and pay for your food without ever having to interact with another human being.

The experience, like so much of our daily life today is entirely impersonal and transactional: the ferry turned into a giant service station on the sea, where the middle classes of England can be fed and watered en route to their Eurocamp holidays by a quiet army of foreigner workers largely kept from view. If you’re still struggling to imagine the scene, picture a Pret a Manger ferry.

The year before, in contrast, we travelled with Brittany Ferries to Spain, where all the staff appeared to be middle-aged Frenchmen and women. Brittany Ferries, it turns out, is owned by a series of Breton farming collectives who, you can only imagine, are rather better at ensuring the company’s bosses are unable to “get away with it”.

Like so much about Britain today, the ferry fable adds to the nagging sense that the country is not so much fiscally broke, as spiritually so. It is extraordinary that a country surrounded by the sea is unable to muster a single British ferry company in Dover employing British workers on wages that can sustain a decent family life in Britain. It’s pretty shameful.

The second revealing moment came courtesy of Jenrick attempting to rally supporters to his cause by, once again, celebrating the legacy of Thatcher. This is not to sneer at his stunt. The appeal of Thatcher should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia even if her record is not what many of her supporters assume it to be. Though Karl Marx observed that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, his point was that when a country faces a crisis, its leaders naturally turn to precedents to make the current situation understandable, “anxiously conjur[ing] up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language”. This is what we are seeing today. Aware of the daunting scale of the challenges we face, the country is anxiously looking back to its recent history for reassurance that they can be overcome.

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The fact that the challenges Thatcher faced are entirely different from today’s — and therefore require entirely different solutions — does not undermine the residual sense that, however flawed and incoherent her actual record in government was, at least she had an idea of what she was trying to achieve and why.

What also marks out Thatcher’s premiership is that whatever its practical reality, it was the product of an ideological movement that had been decades in the making, combining Hayekian economics with Cold Warrior idealism. Domestically, Thatcherism was, in effect, Powellism without Enoch Powell — a programme of privatisation, monetarism and spending restraint which he had been championing for much of the Sixties and Seventies, supported by Ralph Harris and Anthony Seldon at the Economic Affairs and the “St Andrew’s Set” at the Adam Smith Institute.

By the late Seventies, the IEA and ASI had been joined by Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies, as well as those older high-Tory thinkers such as Maurice Cowling, Roger Scruton and John Casey who added a certain academic depth to the Thatcherite counter-revolution, combined with an emerging cadre of radical libertarian students about to enter the political fold. As Casey himself pointed out “the early Thatcher years marked a very odd moment in the history of the Tory party when it decided to lie back and enjoy ideas”.

Perhaps the word “enjoy” here is doing a little too much work. This was a period of ideological ferment and not just between Left and Right, but within the Conservative Party itself, pitting the self-styled libertarian Thatcherites on one side against their “Wet” opponents on the other. Yet to have an ideological dispute, you need clashing ideologies, which in that period were in abundance.

Back then, ideas and intellect certainly seemed to matter. The other day I came across an entry from Thatcher’s engagement diary in October 1982 regarding a dinner organised by her think tank, the CPS.

Among those who attended were V.S. Pritchett, Anthony Quinton, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard and Phillip Larkin. A briefing note sent to Thatcher contains descriptions of each of the guests. “Anthon Quinton: President of Trinity Oxford. Conservative philosopher. You liked his ‘Politics of Imperfection’ and quoted it in the Airey Neave lecture”. “VS Naipaul: Very successful, sharp, angular novelist. Trinidad origin. Passionately opposed to the Left and of course ‘Liberation movements’.” “Tom Stoppard: Brilliantly successful and entertaining, rather Shavian, playwright. Czech origin. I expect you will have seen several of his plays e.g. Professional Foul, Night & Day.”

It is hard to imagine today’s political class ever receiving such a briefing with that degree of assumed knowledge — or any of the leading figures taking an evening off to enjoy their equivalent company. And Jenrick’s stunt only served to remind us of that. Starmer, despite declaring that he does not have a favourite book or poem, is not an uneducated man — far from it. In his speech to Labour conference he spoke of the value of the arts and his own love of classical music. Yet, we all know, implicitly, that this is an age not of great ideas, but of Zoom calls, spreadsheets and box sets.

As a result there is a shallowness to today’s politics. Starmerism is clearly not the product of an ideological movement years in the making boasting a cadre of political ground troops ready to go into battle for its principles. This government is, rather, a reaction to two distinct failures: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and the Conservative Party under five different prime ministers. Beyond that, its roots are so shallow it risks being blown away at the first storm that comes along.

Which brings us to that final, inescapable, economic reality. Money. While there has been much focus on the French fiscal crisis and the growing spread between its bond yields and those of the Germany, it has been less remarked upon that British borrowing costs are now higher than both countries — and rising as investors begin to price in the likelihood that Rachel Reeves will increase borrowing in her statement on 30 October.

For much of Labour’s first 100 days, it has argued that its first priority is to put the Government’s books in order  following an apparently reckless Tory splurge under Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. “Never again” has been Starmer’s motto, a reference to the crisis which followed the Truss mini-budget of 2022. And yet, without much fanfare, the yield on 10 year gilts is now almost back to where it was in 2022 at over 4% — a whole percentage point higher than in France.

The reality for Britain, then, is that its economic challenges have not gone away because it replaced Truss with Sunak and then Sunak with Starmer. The fundamentals remain difficult and clearly no one in Government has a clue how we might escape this trap. And it is a brutal trap: how can we, as an ageing, indebted and energy-poor country that is dependent on inward investment, possibly find a way to prosper in an increasingly protectionist world dominated by Chinese exports, American technology and a booming Middle East? Right now, no one seems to have a clue.

At Starmer’s investment conference in London, the boss of the US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, David Ricks, set out the challenge as he sees it. “I think the difference in the UK is, separate from Europe, it’s a relatively small market for most multinationals and certainly for Americans, so something needs to be quite different to make it interesting.” For many Remainers, it was a gotcha moment: had we stayed in the EU, we would not have to be so different, and so would not be chasing businessmen like him. But the reality is that Britain has been desperately searching for inward investment for decades — and has even succeeded at it: last year the UK actually saw its its foreign investment grow, as Europe’s fell. The reason we are dependent on foreign finance is not because we left the EU, but because we run such a large trade deficit. As David Edgerton put it in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, the dream of Thatcherism was to resurrect British capitalism, but what we really did was to open Britain up to the world’s capital.

I’m not sure Britain does need to make itself “interesting” in the way Ricks and his friends describe. But we clearly need to do something different. And in the meantime, we are prostrating ourselves before rogue operators who know how desperate we are.

From a shortlist of four candidates, two of whom came from the solid, “sensible” Left of the party — Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly — and two from the more radical Right — Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch — Conservative MPs have whittled down the choice to the two Tory ultras proposing a more fundamental break from the past. By making this choice, the contours of the next four years in British politics have been shaped, regardless of who is ultimately chosen.

For most of the Conservative Party’s post-war history, it should be remembered, the desire for a quiet life has been the pre-eminent instinct, especially among Tory MPs. In 1955, the party replaced Winston Churchill with his reassuring deputy, Anthony Eden. In 1957, Eden was replaced by his reassuring Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, who in turn was replaced by his reassuring Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home. From Douglas-Home the crown was then passed to Edward Heath, the candidate best suited to continue Macmillan’s “Middle Way” politics.

The one candidate who broke with this, of course, was Margaret Thatcher, though it is largely forgotten now that she was not the most Right-wing of the candidates in the 1975 leadership election, challenged from the Tory Right by the aristocratic romantic Hugh Fraser who saw in Thatcher just another shade of Heathite grey. Since Thatcher’s defenestration in 1990, the desire for solid conservatism has once again largely held sway — at least among Tory MPs.

In every Tory leadership election from 2001 until Boris Johnson’s victory over Jeremy Hunt in 2019, Conservative MPs as a whole have chosen candidates from the solid Left of the party over the radical Right: Ken Clarke over Iain Duncan Smith in 2001; David Cameron over David Davis in 2005; and, finally, Theresa May over Andrea Leadsom in 2016. Even in the two leadership elections between Thatcher’s victory in 1975 and Boris Johnson’s in 2019, when the candidate of the Left was not backed by a majority of MPs, the winner still offered a form of reassuring continuity: John Major in 1990 and William Hague in 1997. Even after Boris Johnson, the instinct returned with Rishi Sunak beating Liz Truss among MPs in 2022.

There are two crucial lessons to draw from this record. The first is that since William Hague carried out his ill-conceived “modernisation” of the Conservative election rules to give members the final say in the leadership, the party has been beset by a fundamental structural problem. This may fatally undermine the victory in this election.

British parliamentary democracy is governed by the simple rule that whoever controls a majority in parliament is prime minister. In his wisdom, however, William Hague changed the rules so that the Conservative leader can theoretically be someone who does not even command a majority of support among their own MPs. On both occasions when this possibility came to pass, the result was disastrous: Duncan Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022. This is now a real possibility once again.

The final tally of votes for the three remaining candidates saw Kemi Badenoch receive 42 votes, Robert Jenrick 41 and James Cleverly 37. In effect, each candidate had the support of just a third of the parliamentary party, with two thirds opposed to them — often viscerally. No matter how Cleverly’s supporters break over the coming days and weeks, the decision is no longer theirs, but the membership’s. Based on the conversations I have had with pollsters, Tory MPs and party aides over the past few weeks, there is every chance that Jenrick will now secure enough of Cleverly’s supporters to declare himself the choice of the parliamentary party, only for Badenoch to claim the crown regardless.

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Should this happen, irrespective of her attributes, Badenoch will be forced to build her leadership on fundamentally unsafe foundations, a Tory tribune on top of an uneasy parliamentary party. This would be disastrous.

The second lesson is yet more crucial. The only two instances when MPs opted for a Right-wing ultra over a moderate opponent came in moments of perceived national crisis, when the desire for a quiet life was no longer tenable. In 1975, Thatcher was chosen as a counter-revolutionary candidate to put the post-war social-democratic state out of its misery — at least as she and her supporters saw it. The failures of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, IMF crisis of 1976 and Winter of Discontent of 1978/79 had created a sense of national emergency, requiring a different response from what had come before. In 2019, something similar was true after three years of parliamentary stasis following the EU referendum of 2016. When presented with the choice, the Conservative Party concluded — reluctantly — that radicalism was its only option for survival.

What is so striking about the ballot today is that it appears the Conservative Parliamentary Party has once again concluded that the crisis it and the country faces requires revolution. And so, the two candidates who will now go before members offer different forms of radicalism: Badenoch offers an instinctive form of modern Toryism which rails against the spread of Left-legalism and its catch all partner “wokeism”, whether in the form of equalities legislation, trans-laws or DEI requirements. Jenrick, in contrast, offers a more traditional critique of Britain’s immigration policies with promises of returning sovereignty, though with a contemporary analysis of the failure of the British state. Both are promising forms of counter-revolution, Jenrick’s of the Blairite state and Badenoch’s of the progressive zeitgeist itself.

If either is going to succeed as a truly counter-revolutionary Tory in the image of Thatcher, they will need a good dose of what their opponent is offering and more. Jenrick lacks the Jacobite dash of the true Tory radicals: Bolingbroke, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher; Badenoch the broader analytical frame that made Thatcher successful. And what both still lack is the ideological army committed to a cause that any upheaval needs. In 1975, Thatcher had her own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, plus the trailblazers that came before, including most notably the Institute for Economic Affairs. Today, it is hard to see the same kind of intellectual energy anywhere in Westminster.

That Conservative MPs have chosen this moment to gamble the party’s future on their harder instinct for counter-revolution has already raised the stakes of British politics for the remainder of this parliament. The exact form of Tory radicalism the Conservative Party membership chooses in three weeks’ time may define British politics for much longer than that.

The Prime Minister’s decision to replace Gray so soon into his — and her— time in government is part of a ruthless reordering of his inner circle intended to create a tighter and fundamentally more political team than the one that has overseen the calamity of his first 100 days in charge.

Gray has some reasons to feel hard-done by. She is not the first chief of staff to find the job impossible, accused of hoarding power and blocking access. But the level of animosity towards her from within Downing Street is unique at this stage in a new government. She has fallen out with aides, become the centre of a political storm and failed to protect the Prime Minister from the fall out. “It has been the worst start to any government in recent history with the exception of Liz Truss,” as one senior Labour figure put it to me with exasperation.

Most important of all, however, is the fact that she went for McSweeney and missed — and now he has her job. Instead of ensuring McSweeney was at the centre of everything, as he was in opposition, Gray attempted to sideline his entire political operation in favour of a more technocratic administration that she was in charge of. In doing so, however, she lost control of No.10 and the Government appeared devoid of any purpose or direction. It was a disaster.

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As a result, Gray finds herself dramatically demoted to “the Prime Minister’s envoy for the regions and nations”. McSweeney, meanwhile, has been promoted, with two new deputy chiefs of staff reporting to him — the former political director, Vidhya Alakeson, and director of government relations, Jill Cuthbertson. In another significant move, the former Daily Mirror and Sunday Times journalist, James Lyons, will join to lead a new “strategic communications team”, in what is effectively a demotion for the current director of communications, Matthew Doyle. This is now McSweeney’s No.10.

But this can only be the start of the internal revolution. Starmer must follow it up with a cascade of other appointments, starting with a new cabinet secretary alongside McSweeney, as well as a new principal private secretary, national security adviser and ambassador to Washington. But for this to work, they all need to know what he wants — and this is where McSweeney comes in.

While Starmer claimed yesterday’s changes were made to “strengthen his Downing Street operation ahead of marking his first 100 days in office”, they are an implicit admission that a reset was needed. There cannot be two rival centres of power within Downing Street, working in separate parts of the building, with separate instincts and ideas. Starmer finally realised this.

It may seem trite but the fact that Gray and McSweeney were not even working in the same room is important. Since moving into No.10, Starmer has taken the same office used by most recent prime ministers, a relatively small office at the back of the building accessible through a larger room where all the Prime Minister’s most important officials tend to sit. This in turn is on a corridor which connects Downing Street to the Cabinet Office via something called “the link door”. The reason most prime ministers have worked here is because they can have all their most trusted aides at hand and the cabinet secretary is just a short walk away. But until now, McSweeney sat somewhere else entirely.

Unlike Gray, who did sit directly outside Starmer’s office, McSweeney and his team worked out of a room at the front of No. 10 near to the front door. To reach McSweeney — Starmer’s longest serving and most important aide — the PM had to walk out of his office, past Gray and her team, down the main corridor of the building and into McSweeney’s office. Such small details matter. As anyone who has ever worked in No.10 understands: proximity is power.

Those inside Starmer’s No.10 liked to argue that proximity mattered less under him because of how he worked. Every week, time was set aside for him and McSweeney to see each other. And besides, Starmer had developed a habit of taking his work upstairs into the Thatcher room, where he would read through Government papers on the sofa. Starmer, then, was a roving Prime Minister who liked to use more of the building than his predecessors, which meant it wasn’t quite so easy to ensure proximity. This was the argument until yesterday; and it was bogus.

It was always clear that the physical incoherence of this operation reflected its wider strategic incoherence. The Starmer government has yet to find its animating purpose; its all-encompassing mission to which all other priorities must, in the end, be subordinated. It has missions — plural — and they are all perfectly reasonable, but they don’t have one organising principle.

The best way to understand the extraordinary disharmony within Starmer’s government, then, is to know that it wasn’t a battle for personalities, but a proxy war for control of the Starmer project; a battle to define what it was that they were elected to do. That job now falls to McSweeney.

To some of his critics, he is a ruthless Machiavelli who conned the Labour Party into electing a leader far to the Right of the one they thought they were getting. To others, he is a genius puppeteer who guided his uncharismatic frontman to a landslide election victory by pulling all the right strings. The fact that he has clearly won his Cold War with Gray will add further colour to the McSweeney myth. It is certainly true that without ever having a cross word with her, he has ensured that he has emerged on top and not her. To achieve this, he bided his time and consulted those he could trust to understand how he could ensure his influence was felt. In the end, though, it is his personal relationship with Starmer which has ensured he triumphed. He has the Prime Minister’s trust..

The truth is McSweeney is not Thomas Cromwell reincarnate. He has obvious weaknesses, especially for someone who must now manage the Whitehall machine. He remains new to national political power and naive to some of Whitehall’s eccentricities (though, evidently, not that naive). Some of his biggest supporters also worry that his quiet, unassuming nature and lack of “natural authority” — read public school bravado — puts him at a disadvantage in a system which still expects such traits. He will need to learn quickly how to impose his authority.

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What McSweeney really offers is a hard-headed, unromantic clarity about Labour’s purpose that is more reminiscent of the party’s tougher social democratic past than its softer liberal present. He — more than Starmer — is someone who would be instantly recognisable to any figure from the old Labour Right, from Ernest Bevin to John Reid but is a rarer sight in Westminster of late. He did not learn his politics at Oxford and the bar, but on council estates working for local government. This experience has given him an instinctive loathing for the kind of badge-wearing politics of virtue the Labour Right has long associated with the middle-class Left.

McSweeney sees the purpose of Labour in straightforward, class terms: to represent in government the interests of ordinary people who are not otherwise looked after by their employers, landlords — or, indeed, politicians. He holds those officials who failed to protect the working-class girls of Rochdale in particular contempt. Unlike many in the party, this idea of purpose also combines with an instinctive sympathy for the attitudes and instincts of their voters and those McSweeney believes should be Labour voters.

The upshot of all this is a naturally blue Labour instinct that borrows the language and feelings of conservatism to pursue an older class-based politics. Rather than being some kind of re-run of Blairism, this is a politics more deeply rooted in Labour’s past. In the run up to the 1979 election, before the Winter of Discontent blew James Callaghan off course, that grand figure of the Tory Right, Maurice Cowling, complained that Margaret Thatcher was losing the political battle against the Labour prime minister because he appeared and sounded in every respect a more reassuring conservative presence than her. The challenge for McSweeney is to convince the Labour Party to follow his lead when it does not feel his politics in the way that he does.

There are two areas in particular where McSweeney and his team’s instinctively conservative understanding of Britain has shone through and will define much of this Government’s record: welfare and immigration. The Labour Party is united in its opposition to the two-child benefit cap based on the straightforwardly moral argument that it increases child poverty. But McSweeney’s team also know that this is the one area where the Labour Party is most at odds with the country overall: there is overwhelming support among every cohort and group based on the entirely different moral principle that you shouldn’t have children if you can’t afford them. It is an important early marker of this government that, when forced to choose, it has decided not to argue with the public.

On the second issue, immigration, there is a clear understanding within the group close to McSweeney in government that only by making the argument for reducing the numbers and being seen to have achieved a significant reduction can they hope to be reelected. That Starmer chose to adopt the language of “love of home”, rather than “hatred of neighbour”, when defending his commitment to reducing migration in his party conference speech is another important signal of the possible future direction of this government should it, over time, start to become more “McSweenyite” in flavour.

Until now, however, the reality is that this government has lacked any real coherent narrative about its purpose, intent, mandate or strategy. It has not been blue Labour in the way Blair’s government remained distinctly new in its opening few years. Fast-tracking assisted dying, freeing prisoners early from their sentences and closing down blast furnaces as part of a green revolution are not the instincts of conservative social democracy — it’s soft Left Fabianism.

Instead, the country has been treated to a mush of different policies and declarations. One day Rachel Reeves declares the Government’s central purpose to balance the books, as if she were George Osborne, while at the same time handing out pay rises across the public sector. But nobody thinks the purpose of the Labour Party is to control public spending. This may be something that has to be done, but only as part of a longer term aspiration to achieve something else.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s central purpose was to save the British economy. This was part of a wider struggle for free markets and liberty — against socialism at home and communism abroad. In 1997, Blair’s central purpose was to save public services by increasing investment and opening them up to the kind of choice he believed would permanently lock in the middle classes. Like Thatcher, this domestic purpose was also tied into a wider “third way” internationalism, in which Britain would lead Europe into its future.

A cynic might point out — reasonably — that neither government was particularly successful in its missions. Thatcher’s economic record is one of solid, if not spectacular, economic growth bookended by two deep recessions. Blair, meanwhile, saw a marked improvement in public services, but one that was ultimately dependent on an economy that, it turned out, was fundamentally broken. Internationally, meanwhile, Thatcher left office as one of the victors of Cold War, but also one who had become an “ineffective brake” trying to stop German unification and the European single currency which flowed from that. Blair, in contrast, left office with two of his wars still raging, the British army effectively beaten in both Basra and Helmand.

Politics, though, is hard and ultimately ends in failure. The point about the premierships of Blair and Thatcher — and, to a certain extent, David Cameron’s — was that they were successful in taking control of the political narrative, offering a diagnosis of what was wrong with the country and showing how they would put it right. In each case, there was a clarity of purpose. Today, there is no such thing, but there needs to be. By sacking Sue Gray Starmer has made the necessary first step. Now he needs to let McSweeney take control. And this time it has to work.

Eden’s fate is a reminder of the challenge currently facing the Conservative Party. Policies, experience and ideology matter, but not as much as character and, above all, luck. William Hague was a formidable politician who had spent most of his life gliding effortlessly towards the premiership, only to become leader of the opposition at the wrong time, unable to do anything about the extraordinary popularity of Tony Blair.

The task today is even harder. The Conservative Party’s defeat earlier this year was not only worse than John Major’s in 1997, but the worst the Tory party has seen in its entire 190-year history. And yet, the scale of the Labour Party’s early difficulties in office has given the party’s leadership candidates hope that the situation might actually be salvageable. After all, if Keir Starmer can turn a calamitous defeat into a landslide victory in the space of five years, why can’t they?

What has struck me, in conversations with the current leadership candidates, MPs and aides, is how often they turn to Margaret Thatcher as their source of inspiration — a figure who won the premiership 45 years ago in entirely different circumstances to those that exist today. Yet Thatcher has gained an almost mythological status in British politics today, bearing little resemblance to the politician herself.

Her myth takes on a different aspect for each of the candidates. For James Cleverly, she was the leader who brought back aspiration; for Tom Tugendhat, she was the leader who brought back British power, at home and abroad. For Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, it is the provincial Toryism that she represented which most appeals, while for Kemi Bedenoch it is her status as a “global icon” of free markets.

All these accounts contain elements of truth, of course, but as the conservative commentator, T.E. Utley, frustratedly pointed out at the height of her power in the 1980s, almost all popular accounts of Thatcher underestimate the extent to which she was also, fundamentally, a far more pragmatic and skilful politician than she is usually given credit for, willing to dodge, weave and compromise to win power and then keep it. “It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal,” Utley observed.

It is largely forgotten that when Thatcher replaced Ted Heath in 1975, she was also seen as a lightweight who would be Labour’s “secret weapon”. The former chancellor and her leadership rival, Reginald Maudling, described her victory as the “darkest day in the history of the Tory party”. And polls in 1978 suggested the Tories would enjoy a significant increase in support if it were to return the leadership to Heath. What actually won her power in 1979 was not her radicalism or iron will, but Labour’s total failure in government. “We lost the Election because people didn’t get their dustbins emptied, because commuters were angry about train disruption and because of too much union power,” James Callaghan argued, lamenting the Winter of Discontent which upended his premiership. Rishi Sunak could well say the same of his own time in government.

What won her the Conservative leadership in 1975, however, was her clarity of purpose and analysis of what had gone wrong. As the Spectator observed at the time, she was the only serious candidate who was clear that “Mr Heath’s leadership of the Conservative party has been a very bad one”. For the Spectator this was enough — everything else, the magazine contended, rested on this central analysis.

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Something similar is required today. James Cleverly’s diagnosis that the party needs “unity” is insufficient given the scale of the Conservative failure between 2010 and 2024 — a period of government that was, inarguable, “very bad”. Cleverly’s focus on party unity is also insufficient given the scale of Britain’s wider social and economic failure over the past two decades, which has brought with it a sense of fatalism as public services have deteriorated along with the unquantifiable feel of the country.

Likewise, Theresa May’s machine-like incantation that “elections in the UK are won in the centre ground” simply ignores the obvious fact that she failed to win her election against the most Left-wing candidate in post-war British history, while Boris Johnson secured a majority of 80 against the same opponent. May’s analysis also ignores the even more obvious example of Margaret Thatcher, the most instinctively right wing Tory leader since 1945 and also the most successful. If there is such a thing as the centre ground in British politics, it is not how it is usually defined. Today, the centre ground combines full-fledged authoritarianism on most questions to do with criminal justice and immigration, a drain-the-swamp outrage at the political, economic and public sector establishment and a general sense of social democratic justice on issues of tax and spend.

Rather than cliches about the centre ground, like 1975 the first question is who today, of the Tory leaders, has the clear conviction that the past 14 years of Conservative rule have been “very bad”? And who offers the clearest answer as to why? From here we can begin to judge which one presents the greatest threat to Labour.

Those close to Starmer believe that Robert Jenrick has come closest to having the kind of political analysis that could be most problematic for Labour. The 14 years of Tory government were very bad, Jenrick states, because the government showed itself incapable of delivering the systemic reforms that would allow it to deliver what it promised. Only by clearing away the bureaucratic and legal obstacles binding the government’s hands can voters’ wishes be delivered — from reducing immigration and bogus asylum claims to improving economic growth and the performance of public services. This is the message Labour fears — but not the messenger. The words they used to describe him included “weird” and “extreme”. They also believe he reaches too quickly for old Thatcherite solutions to today’s problems. Jenrick has alighted on the systemic nature of Britain’s ills, but has yet to really embrace the new world to which Britain belongs — a world that requires more than reheated Thatcherism if Britain is to prosper. To those close to Starmer, Jenrick looks more like a second William Hague — or even Iain Duncan Smith — than a David Cameron, let alone a Margaret Thatcher.

By contrast, Tugendhat and Cleverly are seen as more effective messengers, but with ineffective messages. Tugendhat does not share Jenrick’s belief in the systemic failure of the British state — arguing that Britain has simply lost its dynamism because it has allowed itself to be run by the “rule of lawyers” rather than the rule of law. Cleverly, in contrast, says Britain just needs some of Ronald Reagan’s optimistic spirit. Neither troubles Labour — yet.

The candidate that Starmer’s team is least sure about is Badenoch. The size of her personality and willingness to speak her mind makes her a dangerous opponent. Her instinctive, confident conservatism also appears fresh in a way Jenrick’s does not. And yet she is also seen as potentially self-destructive in a way the others are not. She has the self-confidence of Thatcher, but does she have the discipline and political skill to navigate the challenges of opposition? After going on Times Radio to declare current rates of maternity pay “excessive” the question raised by T.E. Utley becomes pertinent once again: Is she willing to put aside her devotion to doctrine to avoid the plainly politically suicidal? If she wants to win, the answer must be yes.

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What gives the Conservative Party hope is that even as its leading figures grapple with the question of what went wrong and why, the Labour party has yet to come up with its own response.

Keir Starmer’s most compelling diagnosis is that the period of Tory rule which ended earlier this year was marked, principally, by its “populism”. This, in his account, amounts to offering easy answers to the public instead of delivering hard truths, which is why the government ultimately lost control of the public finances. Every Tory leader, in Starmer’s telling, preferred populist slogans to real reform, the apotheosis of which was the Rwanda refugee scheme.

Yet, this is not a sufficient account of the past 14 years. Of all the criticisms that can be levelled at David Cameron and George Osborne, among the weakest is that they took easy decisions and were insufficiently concerned about spending constraints. The years of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, meanwhile, contain much of Starmer’s agenda today: from its faith in the green energy transition and infrastructure spending, to levelling up, taking back control and immigration restrictions. All featured in Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference. It is incoherent to dismiss as populist a set of policies you intend to steal for yourself.

This failure of the current Government to nail down a diagnosis of Britain’s illness — and therefore also its cure — provides an opportunity for the Tories that they cannot afford to miss. The trouble is, none of the current candidates for the Tory leadership has yet come up with a good enough answer either.

Before that act of appalling barbarism, the world was strangely optimistic about the future of the Middle East — despite the catastrophic scale of human suffering, millenarian fanaticism and economic collapse that was already evident across the region. The root of the hopefulness could be found in the Abraham Accords, that potentially transformative set of Trump initiatives, the aim of which was — somewhat euphemistically — to “normalise” relations between Israel and some of its Arab enemies. Last September, the great glittering prize of Middle East peace seemed to be in touching distance: Saudi rapprochement with Israel.

The radical idea at the heart of Trump’s plan was that regional peace did not need to wait for “the Palestinian question” to be solved. Instead, that could be put to one side while other grand strategic moves played out. As Mohammed bin Salman “modernised” Saudi with his combination of political repression and social liberalisation, the two great anti-Iranian powers in the region could finally be brought together. A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.

The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.

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Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel. 

By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered. 

Israel, of course, has not let Hezbollah’s missile attacks go unpunished, replying with raids on Southern Lebanon which have forced 100,000 to flee their homes for the apparent safety of Beirut and its surroundings. But as Israel escalates the war, the Lebanese population — already impoverished and abandoned — are having to flee again. This fight to the death leaves the 5 million people of Lebanon with nowhere to go, trapped on all sides by anarchy and war. The only escape is by sea — which is controlled by the West.

Any worries that Western forces are once again being “drawn in” are moot — we are already involved. In the days following 7 October, Washington redeployed an aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean to cover Israel’s northern flank which would allow Netenyahu to wage his war in Gaza. Since then, Iran itself has launched a direct rocket attack at Israel, prompting an armada of Western forces to intervene. And in the event of a humanitarian disaster, prompted by an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon, it would fall to Britain, France and the United States to organise the mass evacuation of Lebanese civilians that would be required to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe.

Such is the scale of that impending catastrophe that I am told that David Lammy, our new Foreign Secretary, has spent around a third of his time dealing with an operation so complex that it resembles a full-scale war plan. Because Lebanon borders Syria to its north and east and Israel to its south, the only option for a mass evacuation would be by sea. And the only powers capable of delivering such a mission are the United States, France and Britain — each of whom is currently distracted by its own domestic political dramas. And in each case, the rise of the nationalist Right makes any mass refugee scheme a political nightmare. 

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The French government is locked in a particularly acute fiscal crisis; the Biden administration is limping towards its end; and our Starmer government is only just coming to terms with the anti-refugee riots which gripped the country over the summer. No country could easily cope with a mass influx from another war-torn country in the Middle East.

Hence the extraordinary diplomatic push now underway to avert a full scale war. Yesterday, a joint declaration from Britain, France, the United States and Saudi Arabia called for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel, though, quickly rejected its terms: a ceasefire would only leave Hezbollah in place, free to continue growing in strength, armed by Iran, capable of making much of northern Israel uninhabitable. With Gaza lying in ruins and Hamas devastated but not defeated, Israel has concluded that it is now strong enough to wage war on Hezbollah, and that any delay only serves the interests of its enemies, principally Iran. 

The stakes today are far higher for Israel than the war it has been waging in Gaza for the past 12 months. This war against Hezbollah is one that must reestablish the ability of Israel to be able to shelter its citizens within its own borders. It is, then, a battle for the very purpose Israel was founded.

In its ignorance and arrogance, the West believed it could contain the appalling disorder of the Middle East. But it has simply allowed Iran to grow in strength. Not only did 7 October shatter the failing assumptions of Benjamin Netenyahu’s grand strategy, it also revealed the Western world’s myopic passivity too. Today, the world is reaping the whirlwind.

While there is an understandable instinct to downplay the accounts of Downing Street infighting over who gets paid what and who sits where, on this occasion, the reality is worse than the briefings. Inside No.10 the atmosphere is grim: factious, paranoid and — crucially — un-led. The briefings pouring out are not merely froth, but the scum on the surface caused by the panicked churn of an unprepared government underneath. The scale of the disharmony is unprecedented so soon.

Some of the unhappiness is residual from opposition, when a sense of distrust seeped into Labour HQ as Gray attempted to assert more control in preparation for government. The smallest hint of a negative briefing would throw the operation into panic: fingers would be pointed, information withheld and the circle around Starmer tightened. Loyal Labour aides suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of an invisible divide. They resented it — and the person they blamed for building it. Yet there was still a collective mission binding them together: victory.

Since entering government, the situation has deteriorated with extraordinary speed. And rather than dreaming big thoughts about how it will succeed where others failed, No.10 is already drifting acrimoniously into the kind of cynical weariness usually associated with a second term government.

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Part of the story is certainly political: Labour’s grim inheritance has forced it to face the kind of “difficult decisions” few in the party want to impose. And the smell of cronyism following the huge donations from the millionaire peer, Waheed Alli, has also been dispiriting. But speaking to those who have witnessed the disorder within No.10, even this account glosses over the scale of the problems affecting the Starmer operation.

Whether Sue Gray is paid a few thousand pounds more than the Prime Minister or a few thousand pounds less does not change the structural challenges facing Britain, which remain extraordinary in their scale and depth. Tackling these requires a government united behind a coherent strategy with capable individuals supported by a system that can deliver what is necessary. Little of that exists at the moment. Those I spoke to told me there was a startling lack of togetherness in the team around Starmer. Each of the main figures close to him — Sue Gray, Chief of Staff; Matthew Doyle, communications director; Morgan McSweeney, campaign director; and Vidhya Alakeson, political director — are impressive, but they are not a band of brothers who have each other’s back. Instead, they reflect a group of individuals, united by their personal loyalty to the Prime Minister more than the coherence of their politics.

In this respect, Starmer’s Downing Street operation has an uncanny resemblance to Boris Johnson’s, which operated more as a court, in which the inhabitants jostled for position in front of the king. It should be a political project with a burning mission. The nagging worry today is that there is a similarly gaping ideological hole in the centre of the Labour project as there was with Johnsons. 

True, the party was disciplined in opposition, pursuing its mission to move away from the Left with remarkable success. But such was the extent of this challenge, that it dominated the Starmer project. It was the Starmer project. To win power, the party had to show the electorate it had changed; to do so, it had to make the difficult decisions it made on spending, welfare, antisemitism and candidate selection. But did they ever come up with a coherent project for government itself? If so, it has not yet emerged.

“There’s more than an element of ‘catastrophic success’ about it all,” as one official put it to me, a reference to the calamitous consequences of America’s victory in the 2003 Iraq war. Before the invasion it was widely expected that the Iraqi Republican Guard would put up a dogged fight in defence of their leader. But when the battle came, much like the Tories at the last general election, they deserted the field. In the initial euphoria of the American advance, a corporal clambered upon the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in the middle of Baghdad and hung the Stars and Stripes. It was “mission accomplished”. The statue was toppled and with it, the old regime. But then came the looting, anarchy and, eventually, civil war as the country was sucked into a vacuum of authority that had been opened up by the invasion. The Americans had won, but did not know what to do.

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Similarly, Labour were not supposed to win this big, this quickly. But they did and now they have to figure out what they are in government to do, and who will do it.

“The problem is that you’ve got a whole lot of people without a leader,” one senior party figure told me. “No-one is in charge.” Stories are leaking out of meetings packed with the smartest brains in the operation but no decisions being taken because there is no leader. Morgan McSweeney, the man who masterminded Starmer’s rise to the premiership, is not as powerful inside the government as he was outside. There are now rival centres of power: Sue Gray, the gatekeeper of the system; the government machine itself; and, of course, the departments.

Much of the blame for the dysfunction in No.10 has, so far, focused on Gray. She has been compared by various people to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, dominating through proximity to power and her reputation as a Whitehall fixer. She is, one senior Labour figure told me, “the  last person to whisper in Keir’s ear”. Another said she was “the most political person I’ve ever met”. Among McSweeney’s supporters, there is a concern that he is losing a quiet battle for supremacy with Gray who is using her decades of experience at the heart of government to assert control. McSweeney in contrast is having to learn on the job.

Gray has certainly become the most important cog in the Downing Street machine: Starmer’s eyes and ears, translating his instructions to the system, and the system’s recommendations to him. With Simon Case sidelined, she is acting as more than simply a chief of staff. Many I spoke to said she simply cannot do everything she is trying to do. The system is buckling under her attempt to try. Yet those people also said it was too easy to blame Gray. “There are problems with Sue, of course,” one figure told me, “but the central problem is that people don’t really know what Keir wants.” 

And here is the real problem at the heart of the government chaos. A prime minister’s chief of staff is only as powerful as they are allowed to be. Starmer is unusual as a Prime Minister in his lack of political experience, and therefore has tended to rely and follow his advisers in a way Blair or Brown did not. In opposition, McSweeney was central to every major strategic decision. In government he must share this with Gray. Yet, it is far from clear that Gray shares McSweeney’s deepest instincts, which are far more attuned to the conservative feelings of the country on questions of migration, welfare, criminal justice and patriotism than any member of the Government — and, indeed, the Prime Minister.

The nagging worry from those sympathetic to McSweeney’s attempts to refashion Labour as a more provincial, national party of government — as opposed to the liberal wing of middle-class England — is that he is battling forces too powerful for him to overcome: the instincts of the parliamentary party, Whitehall and Starmer himself. So far, the Labour Party has authorised a mass release of prisoners, cut pensioner benefits and accepted the closure of Scotland’s last oil refinery. None of these evidence points suggests a strategic shift to a new, “blue” Labourism intent on ending decades of stale consensus. 

All of this makes this week’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool particularly important. No longer a great celebration of victory, as Tony Blair’s first conference as prime minister was seen in 1997, but a gathering to define the purpose of the government and with it, finally, impose some order and authority over the warring operation that is supposed to be in charge. 

There is a concerning warning for what happens when such briefing wars run out of control: Boris Johnson. When the briefings started against Dominic Cummings, it was long before they spread throughout the government. Labour has been warned.

This government is drifting and those inside the engine room know it. It is absurd that after two months we should be talking about a reset, but that is what is required. A government must pull in the same direction, bound together in the belief that the pain of the voyage will be worth it. Right now they just seem lost and mutinous.

The old system was far from ideal, of course. Successive Prime Ministers came to depend on Heywood’s personal authority in a way that now seems unhealthy. He may have been a skilled courtier, but a perception has grown since his death that Heywood had built a machine that only he could manipulate.

As a result, Keir Starmer has inherited a system that is broken; the state can no longer corral the government machine into action. Everyone in Whitehall says the same thing: the authority of the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, is shot, and with it his department. And this matters. Without an organising authority, the state stands inert, propelled only by its own momentum.

In its place, No. 10 has become even more important — the last institution able to impose its authority on the patchwork of governmental principalities that make up the British state. And yet, No 10 itself is not fit for purpose either — a creaking Georgian terrace without institutional knowledge or technological wherewithal. As such, the Treasury dominates Britain’s remaining source of institutional power and strength.

Starmer’s first two months as Prime Minister are testament to this depressing reality. Devoid of any organising narrative, it has allowed itself to be defined instead by the ongoing winter fuel fiasco. And to peer behind the front door of No 10 is to glimpse a situation that is even worse than it might seem.

Since winning power, it has been striking how quickly a sense of factionalism and distrust seems to have taken hold of a team that, before the election, was defined by its sense of collective mission. Back then, everyone was pulling in the same direction. Today, briefings find their way into the press with an alarming regularity: tales of unhappiness, fall outs, power grabs and hierarchical squabbling. Far from being the experienced steady hand who would be able to grip the Whitehall machine with immediate effect, Starmer today looks more like an early Tony Blair who had never worked in government before becoming Prime Minister.

One reason for the briefing wars, according to those involved, is that there were simply not enough jobs in government to go around. As a result, noses have been put out of joint. This, though, is the most benign explanation. Those I spoke to said the briefings were not just from embittered former aides, but reflected a genuinely uneasy atmosphere in No. 10, with a clique forming around Sue Gray on the soft-Left wing of the party and another around “the boys” who have tended to push a more “blue Labour” agenda, focused on the priorities of the working class. Rumours of a division between Gray and Morgan McSweeney, however, are overdone, according to those I spoke with. At the heart of the briefings, therefore, lies a battle to shape the nature of the government — a battle which should have been settled long before the assumption of power.

In Jonathan Powell’s memoir of his time as Blair’s chief of staff, The New Machiavelli, he quotes the observation that new leaders must learn quickly on the job to “defend what Fortune has placed in their lap”. He warns that in modern democratic societies there is no choice but to move quickly and boldly in the first 100 days, for this will define much of the rest of their time in office. “A new leader,” he writes, “has to have prepared in Opposition for that sprint in government.”

As Leader of the Opposition, Starmer seemed to know what he was doing. He had hired Gray directly from the Cabinet Office so that he could hit the ground running. Gray knew Whitehall intimately, warts and all, and surely would have formulated a plan to deal with the gaping hole of authority now sitting at the centre of the British state. So why, two months in, has nothing changed? Long-talked-about plans to create a beefed-up “Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet” have — so far — failed to materialise.

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Part of the reason for this is the hangover from the Truss catastrophe. Having seen what happened following her sudden removal of officials such as the Treasury’s Tom Scholar, Starmer and his team are determined to avoid any such mistakes. However, the danger is now one of overcorrection. Decisions must be made, the centre gripped and the government’s central purpose explained.

There was a widespread expectation across Whitehall that the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, would be summarily dispatched by Starmer. Boris Johnson had plucked Case from obscurity in the hope that he would become “his Jeremy Heywood” back when he anticipated serving a decade as Prime Minister. Yet Case remains: an eerie reminder of a disgraced former regime, shorn of the authority or respect necessary to do the job.

A new National Security Adviser was also expected to be appointed, the unlucky Tim Barrow having been ill-served by Rishi Sunak’s attempts to make him ambassador to the US just months before the election, to Labour’s fury who wanted to make the decision themselves. The Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Elizabeth Perelman, is also expected to move on, having moved over to No. 10 from the Treasury with Rishi Sunak.

Taken together, then, Starmer has not only inherited a dysfunctional system in desperate need of reform, but a set of lame duck individuals charged with managing that system. And it is these figures who Starmer is now relying upon to steer him through these crucial opening stages of his premiership. Over the next few weeks, Starmer must oversee his first address to the Labour party conference, and then his Government’s first budget on October 30 — two moments of high political drama that will shape the remainder of the Parliament.

While most of the great reforming governments, such as Blair’s and Thatcher’s, took years before they found their stride, they had a clear strategy right from the beginning. For Thatcher it was to make Britain great again by ending the post war economic consensus; for Blair it was to drag the country into modernity through constitutional reforms and European levels of public sector investment. Starmer’s government has no equivalent purpose. Any of his five “missions” could be adopted by the Conservative Party without any controversy: “Kickstarting economic growth,” “Making Britain a clean energy superpower; “Halving serious violent crime; “Breaking down barriers to opportunity”; and “building an NHS fit for the future.” Is anyone opposed to these ambitions? Are they even political?

Starmer has created “mission boards” which will bring together leading experts from outside government with the relevant ministers from across Whitehall in order to bring a collective focus to the task. The idea is a reasonable one, though real reform will require a functioning government machine that is able to put each board’s decisions into action.

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“My experience is that there is no reform of the system that is going to deliver you big change,” Tony Blair has warned. What was needed, he concluded, was something more simple: grip. “Unless you’re driving from the top it won’t happen,” Blair warned. “It won’t happen because the system won’t have a clear enough direction if it doesn’t get it from the very top…. in the end, the authority, the leader, is the thing that makes things happen.”

So who is driving at the top? So far, Starmer has suffered the fate of almost all prime ministers, so buffeted by events that the banal acts of government must be left to someone else. First, there was the crisis in the prisons, then in the budget, and then on the streets themselves with the riots that broke out over the summer. That is before we consider the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which have already taken up much of Starmer’s time — including yesterday’s meeting with Joe Biden in the US.

With Starmer distracted by the realities of power, the most important man in the government that few have heard of outside Westminster is the man he has tasked with coordinating the central missions of his government: the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden. Freshly installed as a member of the “quad”, through which all decisions must go — along with the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor — it is McFadden’s job to reinvigorate the Cabinet Office; the man with armed with the authority of the Prime Minister to get things done. Without a Jeremy Heywood to corral the state, much of the burden will fall on McFadden. Yet, McFadden can only do so much.

Blair — the man McFadden once worked for — is clear what the overriding task of any prime minister must be: “Make the centre STRONG.” And yet, it was not strong when Blair left office — and it is in an even worse place today. As Powell himself put it in 2010 “the little secret of the British constitution is that the centre of government is not too powerful but too weak”. Britain is today an over centralised country with a weak centre.

The British state today is in desperate need of reform. The country is taxed more than ever, but receives less in return. The economy is stagnant, living standards only just emerging from their worst squeeze in living memory and the NHS no longer seemingly able to cope with the demands placed upon it. To succeed, however, Starmer must channel his inner Ferdinand Foch: “My centre is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. J’attaque!”

This lesson from history is not one currently being heeded by Keir Starmer. He needs to get his people in place, get a grip  and get on the front foot — quickly. The system is broken, but it will be Starmer who is to blame if he cannot fix it.

Henry Kissinger, the late sage of power, offered the best explanation for why, in politics, instincts matter more than policy. In most democratic societies, he observed, power is little more than the obligation to make decisions that are deemed too important or finely balanced to be taken by anyone else. Easy or unimportant decisions do not reach the prime minister, because they have already been taken further down the chain of command. Only the most difficult ones — those where the evidence is inconclusive and the consequences profound — land at the leader’s desk.

When such verdicts are required, a leader often does not have the luxury of time to wait before making the call. The decision needs to be taken in an instant: to shoot down a plane, respond to a provocation, stop a war, ban arms exports before the arms are used. Instead, leaders must rely on judgement, a quality defined less by intelligence than character — that great mishmash of moral assumptions, prejudices and instincts formed in early life. Margaret Thatcher was driven by the patriotic, self-reliant methodism of her father. For Tony Blair, it was the missionary zeal of the Christian progressivism he found at university. But what is it for Starmer?

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I was recently told by someone close to the Prime Minister that he is hard to read, but at heart is just a simple social democrat. But something about this doesn’t ring quite true. Starmer is not driven by the kind of deep commitment to socialism that fueled the post-war Labour giants from Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson. That much is clear from his time as leader of the opposition. Rather, at the heart of Starmer’s deepest instincts and assumptions is something more banal: “Left-legal liberalism,” as another senior figure put it to me with obvious disappointment. “That’s the instinct — and I’m not sure he even knows it.”

In the absence of god and socialism, Left-legal liberalism is the Starmerite code. Faced with a choice to withdraw export licences to Israel at the risk of undermining Britain’s diplomatic standing or to maintain them but potentially be forced to revoke them later by the courts, Starmer chose to follow the legalistic process. He hoped it would signal a compromise, both maintaining Britain’s legal obligations and its diplomatic standing, by removing only a small percentage of the overall number of export licences already in place. This was not driven by morality or realpolitik, but legalism. The risk, though, is that it is a compromise which does the exact opposite of what it was intended, annoying everyone and assuaging no-one.

This is the danger Starmer faces on all fronts. If Left-legal liberalism is the Starmerite code, it is one that seems uniquely ill-suited to our world in which the mythical “rules-based order” of old has been replaced by the hard realities of power politics: a world in which Houthi rebels control the Red Sea, the United States has all but abandoned the pretence of global free trade, Vladimir Putin mockingly dismisses the international warrant that has been issued for his arrest, and China continues to do everything in its power to extend its global influence. Even the US’s prospective prosecutor-in-general Kamala Harris, who on the face of it shares many of Starmer’s Left-legal instincts, will be forced to act with far more hard-nosed realism if she wins the presidency.

A little over a year into Donald Trump’s first term, Kissinger speculated that “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. Not that Trump was necessarily aware of this. But is Starmer?

In a post-Trump world buffeted by the power politics playing out between Russia, Iran, China and the US, where Europe is scrabbling around to defend itself and its energy needs, in what way can Left-legalism any longer be said to be suitable? Would such instincts have dared to negotiate with Australia and America, and bypass France, to produce the Aukus agreement now at the heart of British foreign policy?

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The Starmerite instinct also has potentially troublesome domestic policy implications. At the heart of Morgan McSweeney’s project for government is a distinctly conservative vision of social democracy, whereby an active state meets the demands of Labour’s traditional voters by improving public services, defending the national interest, reducing immigration and generally, as Starmer once put it, “treading lighter on people’s lives”. In McSweeney’s words, the Labour Party must meet the voters where they are. And yet, in the early months of his premiership, all the notable announcements have been in the opposite direction: towards the kinds of paternalistic interventionism of the “preventative state” from banning smoking outdoors to imposing weight tests at work or mandatory tooth-brushing at school.

The instincts of other modern prime ministers were clear from their early decisions: Margaret Thatcher to remove capital controls in 1979; John Major to negotiate the opt out of the single currency in 1991; Tony Blair to accept Gordon Brown’s decision to not join the single currency; and Gordon Brown’s failure to call a snap election in 2007.

Only in hindsight can we appreciate the importance of such moments, but in each case these early decisions were among the most important of their entire time in office, binding them into political straitjackets they did not realise at the time. The same could be said of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, each of whom made early decisions which revealed the characters which would destroy their premierships: from breezy overconfidence to indecisiveness, unseriousness, arrogance and eventually political naivety.

Here lies the danger for Keir Starmer: the instincts nurtured over a lifetime of success which could suffocate his premiership before it has even began. The nature of power is to expose these instincts to the judgement of events and is why it is often described as “lonely” — it’s a game of chance that all eventually lose. Keir Starmer will be no different.

Until McSweeney arrived, the council had been fighting the problem by publishing “rebuttal” books for the residents. Facts and figures were being churned out to debunk the idea that the estates of Barking were getting dirtier and dangerous. In fact, according to the pamphlets, they were actually clean and tidy. The trouble was, no one took any notice. The leaflets were binned; the facts and figures disregarded. The BNP, meanwhile, was loudly blaming the state of the place on immigrants and their accusations had a receptive audience.

McSweeney knew the political response needed to change. The residents were right that their estates had deteriorated, but they were wrong about the immigrants — the council was to blame. The only way to defeat the BNP’s racism, therefore, was to change the leadership. It wasn’t just a question of what was being said but who was saying it, McSweeney concluded.

Influential in McSweeney’s strategy about how to tackle the BNP was the book by American behavioural economist Cass Sunstein, On Rumours: How falsehoods spread, Why we believe them, What can be done. “Terrible events produce outrage,” Sunstein writes, “and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumours that justify their emotional states.”

It’s unsettling reading the book in the wake of the riots, which were inflamed by false rumours about the horrific murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class. Shortly after the attack, social media accounts began spreading speculation that the murder was a muslim immigrant who arrived illegally. As Sunstein spells out, some rumours are particularly powerful because they both rationalise the incomprehensible and relieve our “primary emotional urges” of horror and fury by offering an explanation for why we feel as we do.

The inexplicable horror of the knifing of those children as they danced with their friends is so hard to reckon with that the urge to find something to explain it is understandably overwhelming. It is not only the far Right who are susceptible to rumours at such a moment, we all are. It’s just that different groups believe different rumours.

We are particularly vulnerable today because rumours now “cascade” through our social media networks at vast speed, building momentum as they circulate. Sunstein’s book describes the danger of such cascading rumours, which turn private rage into public violence. “When we are individually inclined to believe that unfairness has occurred, our discussion will intensify our beliefs and make us very angry,” he writes.

But the problem for those in power right now is that, as Sunstein points out, there are few obvious lessons for what to do. Simply denying a rumour, for example, often has the effect of making people believe the rumour even more intensely. Imagine a politician calling a press conference to say there is no need to worry about the safety of pork sausages. Most people’s natural reaction would be to assume there must in fact be a problem — otherwise why the fuss?

The important point that Sunstein stresses throughout, however, is that false rumours only tend to take hold when they align with “prior convictions”. This means that the lie circulating about the Southport murderer’s background was not actually the most important trigger for these riots — that would be the rioters’ prior beliefs.

The irony here, then, is that the understandable desire to blame Elon Musk or Tommy Robinson for fanning the flames comes from an emotional place located close to that original desire to find a wider explanation for the knife attack. To blame Musk or even Vladimir Putin “rationalises and relieves” the fears many of us now feel about the scenes of disorder we’ve witnessed. For the majority of Britons who are appalled at the violence, the story that it is somebody else’s fault is an attractive explanation, especially if the strings are being pulled from abroad. This also helps explain why there are ever more instances of people not only blaming bad billionaires and thuggish individuals but also “the Zionists”. For these antisemites, no amount of explanation, fact-checks or lectures will convince them that the riots are not part of some wider sinister plot.

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And people will do almost anything not to change their already-held beliefs. “A great deal of work demonstrates that people try to reduce cognitive dissonance by denying claims that contradict their deepest beliefs,” as Sunstein puts it. This is just as true for those he calls “the sensibles” as “the unreasonables”. For the unreasonables, the extraordinary turnout for the anti-fascist marches on Wednesday will not disabuse them of their core belief that they are in the silent majority. For the sensibles, meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance lies in dealing with what my colleague Aris Roussinos called the “ethnic conflict” evident in some of the rioting.

Similarly, the prior beliefs of the rioters help to explain why the discredited initial rumour about the attacker’s background has been so quickly replaced by a second grievance: the apparent “two-tier” justice in the UK. As this accusation has risen in prominence, Keir Starmer has sought to head it off. And yet, just as Sunstein describes, the fact that Starmer has denied the charge has only served to confirm it for many people.

The danger for the Government today is that it repeats the mistakes of Barking and Dagenham Borough Council by doubling down in its attempt to disprove people’s beliefs with facts and figures. Sunstein shows that even exposing people to “balanced information” doesn’t work and in fact only makes people more committed to their original belief.

To illustrate his point, he cites a study involving opinions on the death penalty. “After reading the opposing studies, both sides reported that their beliefs had shifted toward a stronger commitment to what they thought before they had done so.” In other words, we are now likely to see a hardening of attitudes in the UK among on the one side, those who believe multiculturalism is some kind of threat and on the other those who believe it is those who oppose multiculturalism who are the threat.

As McSweeney understood back when he was in Barking, the key thing is not what is being said, but who is saying it. The fact that Starmer has already been labelled “two-tier Keir” and — according to polls — is not thought to have handled this crisis well, should alarm the Government. The danger is not that the rioters have stopped listening to him — after all, they are criminals and should be in jail. The danger is that a much wider cohort of people stops listening to him.

The most important lesson McSweeney took away from Barking, though, and the most difficult for Starmer, is to prove that the state works for everyone, even when there’s no money. It’s a far bigger task than defeating the BNP in Barking.