If it has any future at all it is being formed at the Reasoned Student Summit in the City of London’s Dutch Hall. Reasoned is the YouTube soapbox of the Brexit campaigner and pundit Darren Grimes. Today, Grimes has managed to gather around a hundred young conservatives — about 19% of 18- to 24-year olds voted Tory at the last election — to network, and to listen to Nigel Farage, Steve Baker and Daniel Hannan. The outlines of a new conservatism — despairing and angry — can be glimpsed here.

Trembling in his tweed blazer, John is 23, and worried, like many on the Right’s youthful fringes, about central bank digital currencies.

Soon, he believes, the Bank of England will track your movements, monitor your spending, and push electronic tentacles into every aspect of your life. John tells me that such currencies will be “China’s social credit system on steroids”. He has the luxury of believing that this depressing moment in British politics is something bigger and scarier — a totalitarian dawn. “If we could go back in time, you know, we would do something about Hitler.” He thinks the same of the Bank of England.

John’s talking points are paranoid and his outlook is bleak. He is representative, not of the young Tories who hole up in the Carlton Club or hand out leaflets for Blue Beyond, but those who form conservative opinion online. They are not yet a movement, like the National Conservatives or the “New Right” in America, though in their frank apocalypticism, stridency, and saturnine sense of embattlement, they are heavily influenced by both.

They remain, in organisation and physical appearance, embryonic. There are trad aesthetes and High Tory Anglicans, young fogeys and BNP haircuts, Turning Point UK influencers, Scrutonians and boys who just love Peter Hitchens. Among this hundred students and recent graduates, there are dozens of ideological tribes. But whether they are suited or slobbish, at Russell Group universities or without a job, what unites them is a sense that Britain is declining. This anger is what flourishes when a generation believes it will be far worse off than its parents.

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Like Hitchens, the young men in this room think Britain has been abolished, and that the Conservative Party is not conservative at all. Ambient British culture — whether it is Ru Paul’s Drag Race or footballers taking the knee — bristles with personalities and causes that unsettle them. They see “wokeness” as a virus, infecting every aspect of British culture.

This is why they love Nigel Farage. In 2016, he proved to them that conservatives — real conservatives — could beat the Left-wing establishment. They are anxious teenagers; Farage is their feckless uncle. As soon as he takes the stage he enters freewheeling bombardier mode. The theme of his speech, pockmarked with jokes, is Brexit: A Revolution Betrayed. “Theresa May”, he says, rolling his eyes, well her deal was the “closest thing to treachery I have ever seen. Maybe the Tower of London shouldn’t be a museum exhibit. Don’t quote me on that for God’s sake. I’m in enough trouble as it is…”

Farage is in trouble with all the right people. His enemies, listed at length — the Today programme, ESG, corporation tax, Jeremy Hunt, Tory wets, Westminster generally and the House of Lords specifically — are their enemies too. He describes listening to Radio 4 as “agony”. This is conservatism as hay-fever. Irritant Lefty spores are everywhere; they make you ill, angry, prickly.

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He tells his story about Brexit. He wanted Britain to become “a genuine global trading power again”. Now, after six years of political bloodletting, we have returned to 2010. Globalists in the treasury, Osbornomics in the ascendant, austerity back on the menu. “The great unwashed” and “the silent majority” are ignored once more. “We are back to where we were before the referendum”. The ancien régime has fluttered back in, deathless as a vampire. To whoops, Farage promises a “third coming” — a return to frontline politics — if the state of the nation keeps deteriorating. One better than Jesus.

Their love for him cannot be understated. “Nige, big, big fan” is the way they frame their questions to him. Yet Farage, beyond his Brexit boosterism, is so unmistakably Eighties. His agenda, where it rises above being a disgruntled mood, is not theirs. A global free trading power? At least half of the audience is protectionist, restrictionist, anti-globalist. Farage calls on them to be “happy warriors”, but they are pessimists. Do they want more unreconstructed libertarianism?

I doubt it. They are not like Farage: Thatcher’s children — they are his children. They like Farage’s positions on British identity and borders, not markets. They hoot their affection at Farage, not for what he says about free trade but for the way he says it. Farage gave them 2016, and that year was their political awakening. They would follow him into the deepest ditch if that was what he asked of them. His insurgent energy is undiminished, his pugnacity undiluted, his rhetoric undaunted in the face of all those enemies. More than any Tory in parliament, and though they do not agree with everything he says, Farage inspires this generation of conservatives.

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When an actual MP arrives — Steve Baker — the contrast with Farage is sharply apparent. A third of the audience goes outside to vape. His role during the Brexit years made Baker a liberal hate figure — recently called a “cunt” by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru Murthy. But in this room he is not Right-wing enough. He is accused of promoting, to loud and prolonged applause, “Marxist Identitarian politics” through school reading programmes in his constituency. “I don’t know why you’re applauding that,” Baker says, forlornly.

Baker’s crime is to be involved with the 2022 group of senior black conservatives. They are Tories who are trying to devise ways of shedding the perception among black people in Britain that conservative politics is “toxic”. Baker told the group at Conference this year that “footballers taking the knee isn’t a neo-Marxist act, it’s a statement of solidarity”.

Today, Baker attempts to extract the better sides of these young men from their blatant nihilism. “We have to think about our moral centres… some of the things I’ve heard today are dangerous.” It doesn’t work. The young conservatives are not interested in being nice.

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When I find him after his speech, Baker is close to despair. Youth politics, whether on the Left, or the Right, is wreathed in gloom. He understands that young people in Britain have the rawest deal. But Farage, who captivates them, only offers “easy answers… a populist shadow of libertarianism”. Baker broods about the room’s “radical aggression” on migration. (There are calls for the borders to be shut down completely from the crowd.) The young, unjustly treated, are “turning to radical ideologies”. Baker worries about them. He is right, but has no idea what to do. Baker cannot see that these young men are as much his responsibility as Farage’s. He is just as complicit in their radicalism. They are the Brexit generation, coming of age.

This generational divide that Baker senses and Farage seems unaware of, becomes ever more apparent. The speakers are less furious than the spoken to. The crowd are unimpressed with another Brexiteer, Dan Hannan. The libertarian boilerplate of his speech, a Trussian paean to enterprise culture and tax cuts, is shredded in the Q&A. “I come from a more tribal school of thought,” says one of the boys. To him, identity matters more than economics. “If everything is more globalist, then everything will move to London, and my community in East Bradford will become even more of a dump.”

Hannan has no convincing counter-argument. He just looks depressed. Like every successful revolutionary, Hannan was discovering that the people are not what he thought they would be once he had unlocked them from their cage.

Outside, the boys are smoking and giggling. “We need our own Nick Fuentes,” says one. British conservatives, he says with vehemence, whether they write for the Telegraph or are on the staff at CCHQ, are “spergs”. Like most of the summit, he looks to the American Right for a model. They are more splenetic, more successful, more based. The idea that Baker had been going on about — that it takes strength to be gentle and kind to strangers — is ludicrous to him. There is none of that “bullshit” in America.

These young Tories are stripping the American Right for parts. They believe that until the British Right comes out fighting, it will keep losing the culture. Hard-line positions on migration and identity must be found. Cultural enemies must be identified, then ridiculed. For them, politics is about figuring out who hates who, then sharpening those hatreds into flints. “Once the States are taken back,” one lad says, once Donald Trump wins again, “it will influence conservatives here. Then the Tories will stop being so shit.”

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Not all of these young conservatives will end up in politics. I suspect the one who stood up and asked, gesturing to the sub-Brideshead outfits sitting around him, “How do we make ourselves cool?”, won’t stay the course. But others here want to be journalists, or pundits like Darren Grimes, or to enter the Conservative Party. They want to shape it from within. Soon enough their foetal moods and ironic tweets will be coherent policies, newspaper editorials, and viral clickbait videos.

Do not expect them to sculpt a future of fair dealing, pragmatism, patience, moderation or high intelligence. Expect the restless opposite of these virtues. A generation in the image of Nigel Farage, not Jeremy Hunt. A recent poll found that 61% of 18- to 34-year-olds supported “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections” taking control of the UK. If the 2020s really are set to be the first decade of an “Age of Scarcity”, then expect a conservative politics harsher than whatever today’s cabinet ministers can come up with.

The macabre populist shadows Steve Baker fears will become solid one day. Only a fool would try to predict what happens then.

It was 2001. The writer and the monarch were standing in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, at an event to celebrate British publishing.

“Yes of course I remember,” the Queen said sharply.

“Well I was the person who brought the news back from Everest, so you got it on time.”

The Queen looked at Morris in silence. Before her stood a properly large lady — a 6ft 4” lady, with wispy white hair harassing a square head. A fascinating, but somewhat odd face. A correct Englishwoman’s voice, but sultry, with a male pitch. A laugh like a cat’s laugh, hissy and languid. And a lady. Were there ladies on Everest, in 1953?

Morris did not explain to the Queen that she had undergone gender reassignment surgery in the decades since the mountain was defeated. “How could I explain to her?” she later said. “Life is too short.”

How to explain Jan Morris? Who was she? What was she? Faced with a life like this, the Queen’s confusion is our own. Morris was a man, and then a woman. He had been a debonair foreign correspondent as the jet age dawned, who transformed into an apparently cheerful old dear wearing pearls in a damp corner of North Wales. He was a superb travel writer who yearned to compose novels, then wrote the Pax Britannica trilogy, the greatest — or at least the most entertaining — narrative history of the late 20th century instead.

She was a trickster who denied the existence of truth, then struggled to have her female identity accepted by her family, her profession, and her society. She wanted to be a raffish romancer, but was “happily married” for 70 years. She hymned British Imperialism, then became a Welsh Nationalist. She was described as an enigma, yet underwent the least enigmatic voluntary medical procedure possible. Her public persona was all bonhomie, but she lived alongside her own gravestone; it haunted the corner of her library for decades. Every time she said she had retired, she resurfaced scant months later with a new book — even after she died in 2020, there she was again, a little while later, with another one. There were 58 of them in the end. More than anything, she was a flirt, a tease. “My life is one long allegory,” Morris claimed. To which the reply, inevitably, is: for what?

Jan Morris was born James Morris in the Somerset seaside town of Clevedon in 1926. His father’s family was Welsh, his mother’s vaguely Norman — division was established as an early theme. The young boy wandered the hills overlooking the coast near his home, already isolated, already convinced “I had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl”, already yearning for the unobtainable. Then the miseries of school (Lancing College), where he was always in trouble, “beaten by prefects more than any other pupil” during the early months of the war. As the conflict wound down, Morris joined the 9th Lancers, serving in Venice, Trieste, and Cairo as an intelligence officer, undertaking what she called “squalid duties of repression and withdrawal”.

In 1953, Morris, at 27 the new foreign editor of The Times, became the official journalist on Edmund Hillary’s expedition to Everest. Breaking the news that Hillary had conquered the mountain made Morris’s career. He was a classic, frenzied overachiever. Celebrated books followed, such as Venice (1960), and the sex-change memoir, Conundrum (1974). These are the room temperature facts, diligently recorded by Paul Clements in his new biography, Jan Morris: Life from both sides. 

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You have to feel sorry for Clements. He was friendly with his subject, which is dangerous for a biographer. Morris destroyed her private papers, and lived, at times, as if existence itself was an inside joke. “Almost nothing in life is what it seems”, she wrote, and we would do well to apply this mantra to Morris’s own life. She claims she knew she was a woman when she was three or four years old — yet she pursued emphatically manly careers in the army and the press. She claimed an ambiguous sexuality — but when she met her wife, Elizabeth, Clements notes that “any questions about gender and sexuality were swept aside”. Five children, one of whom died, followed. The marriage was a perfect patriarchal model: Morris away obsessively working the globe; Elizabeth tending children, garden, accounts and house, alone. “Jan,” said her daughter Suki, “was a very complicated person, not in my view, the simple, lovely being that people see at all”. Nothing was what it seemed. All Clements will say is that she had a “contradictory nature”.

Morris began taking oestrogen pills in 1964, the first stage of an eight-year physical metamorphosis. She had been near-suicidal in the run up to this decision. And at the very moment her identity as a man was crumbling, her country was too. What did James Morris see when he looked around in 1964? He had been born at a time when Britain still decided world questions, and he had always approved of this. Now God was withdrawing His credit from the British. After Everest, Morris was a foreign correspondent for the Guardian. He filed from Cape Town and Bogota, from Cairo and Kabul, from Tel Aviv and Isfahan. He had followed Britain’s armies through the long, bleary rearguard action of imperialism. He had watched that “distasteful ignominy” at Suez. “We were living in a twilight time,” Morris wrote. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging. Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.”

Everywhere was retreat and evacuation. The Promethean spirit — “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life,” the spirit used to whisper — that executed Mughal princes without trial, that snaked railways underneath Rhodesian waterfalls, that doomed prisoners to silent wards on the frigid shores of the Tasman Sea, that Empire-building spirit, was gone. Things would never be the way they were again.

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Bereaved of their worldly footholds — “the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more,” he wrote — the British were all alone. Morris’s entire generation was left like Atlas, but relieved of his globe. They would have to find new burdens to carry. It was not enough for him. He wanted more.

So, approaching middle-age, Morris hurled himself into two vast concurrent projects, two escape plans from the wreckage of Britain and his own masculinity. One concerned the past, and the Empire. One concerned the future, and his identity.

Though Clements never makes the connection explicit, it’s clear that James’s decision to become Jan was a peculiarly original response to the end of the British Empire. Read the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968-1978), the first of those projects, written as she transitioned. It is thunderously problematic. Morris described her response to Empire as “sensuous”. She cherished British cruelty in a way no one would dare do today. Empire was was a “flare”, a “blaze”, and an “ambition for its own sake”. As the 19th century turned, the British “yearned to break out of their sad and prosaic realities, and live more brilliant lives in Xanadu”. Other lands, from Ireland to India, were collateral, and Morris could live with that.

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Gender shadows these books. Clearly, it made Morris’s hairs stand on end to think about the sheer effrontery of men like Robert Clive, or Admiral “Jackie” Fisher or Winston Churchill. She remembered the gentlemen of the East India Company as “showy, amoral… Plundering, fighting and trading in a spirit of uncensorious give and take”. She loved the men of peak Empire even more. They had everything the men in her generation lacked: constancy, surety, a granite bedrock of Christian faith. Here she is on John Nicholson, an Anglo-Irish Army officer who flew through British India like a tempest. He was “a fable in his own lifetime… He was a fighter… He was a big man… He looked utterly sure.”

By the third volume of the trilogy, Farewell The Trumpets (1978), composed after Morris had her gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca, it was not merely the British Empire that was coming apart. It was British masculinity itself. Suez was the empire’s tomb, and a finale for the British male. Looking back at the troops sent to occupy Port Said in 1955, she saw them as “self-conscious”, their half-hearted war-making “somehow fraudulent”, suffused with a “sham virility”. Around them the Egyptian city stood “shattered and appalled… a bitter memorial to the last display of imperial machismo.” All the certainty had vanished. The sad-sack farrago at Suez raised more than geopolitical questions for Morris. If, after centuries of vigorous domination, British masculinity was impotent and no longer plausible, then why be a British man at all?

Well, how about a woman? This was the second project. In Conundrum, Morris elaborated on her notion of womanhood. It was not designed to please feminists. It was designed to be the opposite of the Victorian imperialists Morris so admired. “My own notion of the female principle was one of gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading.” In post-Imperial Britain, if Morris could not be a wolf, she would be a lamb. She would escape into her own romantic idea of femininity. To be a woman rather than a man, she argued, was simply a matter of “good taste”.

Published in 1974, Conundrum became, in Clements’ imaginative phrase, a “media circus”. Morris, the handsome writer, was the highest-profile person to change gender in British history. Her persona was savaged in print and on television. “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman,” wrote Rebecca West, “and curiously enough, the idea of a woman not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be.” Germaine Greer accused a “self-indulgent” Morris of lacking frankness about what her “new body looks like and how it works”. Nora Ephron laughed at her: Morris was “perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is… A girl”. A particularly brutal drubbing in the Times Literary Supplement left Morris writing to the editor. “Your cruel review of Conundrum has reduced me to tears.”

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Every line of today’s battles over gender identity was scripted in the furore around Conundrum and Morris in the early Seventies. She appeared on a BBC talkshow and faced a 45-minute barrage of questions from an MP, a psychiatrist and a feminist. Morris was told that her book was “proselytising and immoral”. Her notion of womanhood was “ridiculous” and “limited”. Morris responded that it was “arrogant” to assume anyone could know what anyone else might feel like. The transexual experience was an “inner-music” and a quest towards a new reality. Gender, Morris told millions of TV viewers, “is the way people feel and the way they want other people to think about them — it is the spirit, the soul, and the innermost essence of what people feel they are.” Morris was saying that trans women are women. She may have been the first to do so in Britain. “I’m afraid you must take it or leave it”, she told the bewildered panel.

Overnight, Morris’s life was truly allegorical. Her life was a bridge between two worlds. The first was the old reality, where identity was confirmed in collective endeavours like the British Empire, inherited beliefs like Christianity and powerful institutions like the Armed Forces or Fleet Street. When she became a woman, Morris was clearing a path towards the second world we live in now. Identity is confirmed by the individual, through a series of deliberate choices rather than an inherited set of traditions, and based entirely on feelings. All she wanted, “was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love”.

Morris suspected that she was a prophet. “Is mine only a transient phenomenon” she wondered, “between the dogmatism of the last century, when men were men and women were ladies, and the eclecticism of the next, when citizens will be free to live in the gender roles they prefer?” Asked about the pushback against the trans movement in 2017, an increasingly ancient Morris said our “moment is messy, but I think more and more people will move to my condition”. She believed it was possible that “everyone has the potential to have both genders in them”.

Jan Morris was an early adopter of an ideology that has swept across the Western world in the past 30 years. Conundrum has never been out of print. Morris’s belief — born from the collapse of empire, engineered to replace her imperial faith — that gender is ineffable and innate, are becoming commonplace in institutional settings. When Morris died, one of the leading tributes came from the chief executive of the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service.

Is this simply fashion? Is this ideology “cronyistic” as Helen Joyce, and other gender-critical writers have suggested? Some feminists argue that gender-identity ideology will be abandoned “when it is no longer in the ascendent”, the politicians and tech billionaires will junk the pronouns in their emails, biology will reassert itself, and women will no longer have penises.

Morris prefigured our present, but perhaps she represented the future too. Our great-grandparents believed that masturbation caused insanity. Our great-grandchildren may come to view the idea that only natal women can bear children with a mixture of condescension, alarm, and laughter. A quaint and horrible belief, like phrenology.

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“The sexual attitudes of any given society”, Gore Vidal said, “are the result of political decisions.” He was right. Biological facts exist only up to a point. Power is more important. If power decides that fantasy and feeling take precedence over evolution and biology, then fantasy and feeling become fact. The distinction between the sexes can be socially engineered. The technology to make it so exists.

Whether such a shift will make people happier — which is surely the point of it — is difficult to answer. In her life as a woman, we can detect something quietly unwell about Morris. Nothing was as it seemed. She told interviewers how much she loved floral dresses and embraced a rather desperate frivolity. The hard-edges of James Morris were publicly sanded away. She would no longer take things that seriously — “far better in my opinion to regard the great world as a kind of show, a tragicomedy put on for my fascination”. Such an attitude of high unseriousness can only come from believing that there are no great causes left, that nothing really matters, so you may as well laugh. She  praised callowness. “Give me fizz, give me irresponsibility, and if I ever feel maturity creeping in, crack a bottle, put out more flags, and ring bells!”

It was a masquerade. “Many wondered,” writes Clements, “if there was an underlying melancholy behind this facade”. Seen as a whole, Morris’s entire life appears as a trick question, like the one she asked the Queen that day in Buckingham Palace. Could Britain get over the loss of Empire? And could a man be a woman? Morris was not the first, nor will she be the last, to discover that there are no simple answers to either question.

Then contrast with Parliament. In a political environment where wolfish libertinism still howls, we respect this teetotaller, this dignified religious conservative. In a party of culture warriors, we are calmed by his refusal to join the fracas for easy Telegraph headlines. And in a Commons jammed with fumbling innumerates, we are gratefully relieved that a true numbers guy holds the national purse.

Solely by standing near them in photographs, Sunak makes his boss and his colleagues look, to varying degrees, stupid, crass, cadaverous, and morally dubious. Is all this calculated? Perhaps at first these contrasts were an accident of juxtaposition. Now they look like the willed creation of many hands.

A decade before today’s budget, Sunak was just another bored, wealthy, socially ambitious banker, most notable for marrying very well to a woman who is richer than the Queen. Today he is the most popular politician in the country. The press amplifies these common feelings. From Left to Right Sunak is imaginatively described as “genial”, “genial”, “genial”, and “nice”. In Lord Ashcroft’s sunny, flaccid Sunak biography, our protagonist is a schoolboy who never received detentions, a hedge fund partner who never screwed anyone over (or even made a bad bet), and a politician without enemies. How is that possible?

Sunak benefits from the hatred the press feels for Boris Johnson. Journalists direct their ire at the personality most gratingly reminiscent of their own, not the financier who thinks in excel spreadsheets, rather than headlines. The median pundit does not really know too much about spreadsheets, or what to do with Sunak, so they call him “genial” instead. As a result, the Chancellor is the recipient of puff pieces rather than asperities. Even the London Review of Books ends up defending him from clumsy Labour Party attacks, on racial grounds.

But Sunak also lacks obvious wounds for journalists to poke around in. Great wealth smoothed out any neuroticisms he had. They have nothing to claw at — for what is “genial” if not a synonym for boring? He is clam-tight, physically and mentally compact; he gives so little away. The only genuine insecurity would seem to be his height (a pocketable 5’ 7”); hence the suits carefully tailored to elongate and broaden him, and the choreographed posts on his Instagram where he stands tall, and the persistent rumours that Team Rishi genially emails social media users to delete comments that draw attention to any of this. What are his views on crime? On prisons? On education? We don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t either. In interviews he ducks behind bromides (“Being a parent is… hard”; Being in an office as a young banker was “really beneficial to me”) and references to popular culture. When the inevitable leadership question is raised he goes all chummy, all village fête, and says Oh Golly, Oh Gosh! Rhetoric that makes Johnson’s 2013 blather of balls and scrums sound comparatively Churchillian.

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Race, potentially so explosive, is not really part of the conversation around the Chancellor. But the ghostly embarrassments, triumphs, and crimes of the Empire in both the subcontinent and Africa are bound up in his family story. Generations of dislocation and exile — with all their potential traumas — are repackaged, in Ashcroft’s book at least, into a saga of strivers and self-starters who walked in the Raj so Rishi could run in Westminster.

One early foray into politics, leading a Policy Exchange unit researching ethnic minority attitudes, was technically about race. The resulting report was thoughtful enough, though it reveals the ambition of an apparatchik more interested in the present and the future than the past. If Sunak’s research had a message for Conservatives, it was to emphasise a civic British identity that ethnic minority groups already felt comfortable with. (The party had been doing this since at least 1983.) In 2015, he laughed off the antique chit-chat of Wensleydale farmers who fretted about his “tan” when he was parachuted into William Hague’s old constituency of Richmond, North Yorks. The overall impression is of a man who has given approximately ten seconds of thought to questions of personal identity. And this in an era when identity is the inexhaustible social, political, and personal question among the over-educated. Sunak, comfortably warming his hands above the culture war inferno, will seem like a relief from it when he becomes Prime Minister.

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If Sunak were born ten years later, he may have been more agitated by these questions. As an elder millennial (b.1980), he moved into industry when ideological agonies appeared to belong to the past. Goldman, followed by Stanford, followed by hedge funds. In the noughties, Sunak was another footsoldier of the Davos consensus. Why weep over Frantz Fanon in the library when there is money to be made? Why be outraged and indignant when you can be charming and suave? That was the way the brightest and the best of Sunak’s generation saw things, as they rolled into financial services en masse, pre-Crash.

Aspiration, not victimhood, is what Sunak claims to have learned from his family. It was his grandmother who sold her wedding jewellery to come to Britain in the Sixties. It was by the tills in his mother’s pharmacy that he learned about National Insurance and VAT. It was his parents who economised enough to send him to storied Winchester College. There, in 1997 — the apotheosis of social democratic rebelliousness in modern Britain — Sunak was a teenage Tory lamenting Tony Blair’s landslide in the pages of the school magazine. And what irritated the young Sunak more than anything else about New Labour were its plans to enter the United Kingdom into an “eventual European Superstate.” Not only a teenage Tory; a committed teenage Eurosceptic too. Was there a smaller minority of feeling in 1997? It’s unlikely.

Here is the ideological core of Sunak. He was, is, and always will be a “people must look after themselves first” Thatcherite. A believer in common sense, not theory. Hard work, achievement, tax cuts. William Hague might describe him as a “modern non-ideological conservative”, but the modern party speaks the language of intervention; many of its new voters are suspicious of globalisation and the City. So Sunak is old fashioned. It was Nigel Lawson who he consulted first when he became Chancellor. And it is a portrait of Nigel Lawson that hangs behind Sunak’s desk in No.11.

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Here is the great irony of the Chancellor’s career to date. The Thatcherite who spewed £192bn on the public during the pandemic. He has the calculator-gambler soul of an axe man, and ends up with a public image close to Marcus Rashford’s. Scrooge is mistaken for Father Christmas. All the imagery — there is Rishi for the nerds, a Rishi for the boozers, a Rishi for the horny journalists, and a Rishi for the bumpkins — has been adroitly manipulated by his advisor and social media guru ‘Cass’ Horowitz. The Chancellor wouldn’t hurt a fly — unless it were relying on Universal Credit.

His horizon appears gorgeously cloudless. The joint No. 10-Treasury economic unit set up by Dominic Cummings to shackle the Chancellor in 2020 is now entirely at his command. His team expands all the time. The genuine Eurosceptic never bloodied his hands during the Theresa May years. He winked at lockdown sceptic MPs, flattering them without ever giving them public backing. Sunak has won several battles now without fighting. “Ascendancy” is the word used to describe No.11’s relationship with the Johnson team. It is easy to imagine him saying one day, as George Osborne did to friends after Cameron became leader in 2005, “I can’t believe how easily we have taken over the party.”

Today’s budget will disguise his instincts. His Thatcherism would go further, quicker, were he ever in charge. Tory donors would be delighted by it. Her Manchester liberalism was pliable, part-entertainment. His looks creedal, and well-practised from his years in business. Public opinion spurned her. It salutes Rishi. He is The Man Who Invented Furlough, The Eat Out to Help Out Bloke. £192bn disarms complaints present and future. 

This year, in Birmingham, it was more 28 Days Later. The list of absent MPs, led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, stretched back to London. “There’s nobody here,” one member who attended the last 12 conferences mourned. “It feels deserted.” Twelve long years. We have tasted every philosophical flavour of Conservatism: David Cameron’s bougie-patrician, nudge theory-driven paternalism. Theresa May’s fretful Home Counties authoritarianism. Boris Johnson’s giggly One Nation boosterism. All gone. 

We have watched iteration after iteration of big ideas guru try to stir the Tories’ heavy dough. We have seen Steve Hilton pad around Downing Street in his bare feet, intent on squeezing the entire civil service into Somerset House. We have seen Nick Timothy celebrated as an intellectual, for his beard as much as his brain. We have seen Dominic Cummings somersault from blogger, to Rasputin, to blogger again. How many of their plans — other than Cummings’s Brexit, which he was swiftly bereaved of after squabbling with Johnson’s wife — have actually stuck to anything? They’ve all gone. 

We are left with Liz Truss, and Kwasi Kwarteng, both anonymously described as “dead” before anyone even arrived at New Street station. The Prime Minister’s “growth plan” has to work, and quickly. Labour’s poll-lead is as large as 33 points. Young conservatives filled Birmingham’s bars, happily blabbing that they will vote for Keir Starmer in 2024. “A 1997 wipeout might be the best we can hope for,” said one spad. 

It really might be. For four days the Tories behaved like demons ambling across a tortured Hieronymus Bosch landscape. They squabbled and scourged and scratched at each other; so insular; entirely twisted up within their own canvas, seeming to forget that the rest of the country could see the black paint they were smearing everywhere. They fought over the Chancellor’s 45p tax cut U-turn; they fought over benefits; they fought over Suella Braverman and Michael Gove. 

“We are CONSERVATIVES,” boomed Kwasi Kwarteng during his Monday afternoon keynote. But the truth is, after 12 contorted years, none of them are sure what a conservative is anymore. Was Kwasi Kwarteng a conservative? Here was a man who was probably happiest picking through the back stacks of the London Library, cheerfully collecting obscure books on economic theory, shouting lines that could have been written for a dumbo libertarian congressman from Alabama. 

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Was Kemi Badenoch a conservative? Yes, said Conor Burns, MP for Bournemouth West. He suggested she was “the future of the party” and understands the need to “move beyond Instagram posts about free trade agreements”. Was Jacob Rees-Mogg a conservative? He floated around the fringe like a page torn from a Max Beerbohm essay, bantering about sending his children up chimneys, and thundering about a “return to common law principles”. The members loved him, they have always loved him, and as ever, they confused his impotent sarcasm for Wildean drollery. “What is my job?” he mused rhetorically at one event, and I was worried that someone might tell him: nobody knows anymore.

From the rubble, two conservative visions began to emerge. First, there was Michael Gove’s. He moved sprucely around the conference, making what political journalists call “interventions” and firing what the armaments industry describe as “missiles”. Watching Gove at an UnHerd event on Tuesday afternoon, you could sense how good it was to be out of this government. He looked relaxed; in his conversation he rippled widely over Michael Oakeshott and Malcolm X, Hamilton and Dad’s Army, Lord Salisbury and TS Eliot. He did not have to say Truss was shambolic — or as she was constantly referred to everywhere here by Tories, a “dud”. When he said the party could only win the next election if it returned to the “bedrock” 2019 manifesto, the point was made. The British people were “Boris Johnsonian”, said Gove. They wanted strong national institutions, strong borders, and “no flights of ideological fantasy”. There was his vision. It was coherent, though until Truss goes, it will be ignored.

The other vision was Suella Braverman’s. Unlike Gove, the Home Secretary spoke to the party, not the country. And she won this conference — the proof was in all the applause she was lavished with. On the fringe, Braverman performed a complex pirouette that managed to undermine both the 45p tax rebels and the Government. Gove and the rebels were “airing dirty laundry in public” — they had staged “a coup”. And Truss and Kwarteng, she implied, had been too weak to stand up to them. Braverman’s vision was Norman Tebbitism, rebooted for the culture wars, performed with jarring sweetness and enthusiasm. “My delight,” she said on Tuesday, “is annoying the Left”. “My dream,” she said, “is to see a front page of the Telegraph with a picture with a flight taking off for Rwanda… I’m proud of the British Empire.” “Good girl,” purred a pension-age man in mustard corduroys sat next to me.  

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Away from the pride, and delight, and dreams, Braverman’s outlook for Britain was bleak. Here was a country where the “PC Brigade” had infiltrated every institution of national life, the schools, the courts, the companies. Here was a country where drug use destroyed lives, where police took the knee, where pronouns proliferated all over emails, where migration was a flood, where men pretend to be women despite having penises, where nonces get more protection from the law than decent, hard working people. The liberal establishment hung over us all, a thickly overgrown canopy, and only Braverman had a machete sharp enough to hack it away. “We simply cannot go on like this.”

But as with every other whinge and complaint at this conference (and they were legion), the instant thought was: isn’t this your mess? Haven’t you been in charge for 12 years? Why should you be trusted to clean it up? Anyway, Braverman had a solution. Build a new Royal Yacht, and smash a bottle of champagne on its pristine hull. The members adored this, and they adored her, just as they had adored Truss last year in Manchester. 

And how was the members’ new Prime Minister working out? Well.“This is the Institute for Economic Affairs’ world now,” said one lobbyist. “You’re just living in it.” Rationalise taxation by cutting it. Shrink government budgets. Put a smile on the face of wealth creators. Economic growth at all costs. (“Yeah,” a CCHQ worker told me sarcastically one night, “because we never gave any attention to growth before Truss came in”.) 

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By Will Lloyd

By Wednesday morning, the situation felt terminal. When Truss brought the curtain down on conference, you could hear the ideological barrel being scraped, perhaps for the final time by this party. Truss described her ideas with simple, repeated words. Growth; delivery. She found her conservatism in the back of a cupboard in Tufton Street. When Truss said she would web Britain with superfast broadband, as Cameron, and May, and Johnson before her had promised, you were left wondering what any of these governments had actually achieved. The “new era” she heralded was making the same promises the others had. 

What Truss said hardly mattered. A consensus already enclosed her, as tall and bleak as prison walls. The Prime Minister was a dud and her plan would fail. Her colleagues said this, the press said this, even the members were saying this. The conference’s bitchy, scattergun in-fights were a series of ribbon-cuttings for the next leadership contest. 

One night I bumped into Gary Sambrook, MP for Birmingham Northfield. I asked him how he thought it was all going. He looked momentarily stunned. A colleague intervened. “Remember what you said earlier Gary?” He did not seem to remember. “That this is the best conference you’ve ever been to?” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he said. It would have been cruel to ask him to tell the truth, for it was all around us, and had been for days.

Leading Corbynites write books that question whether socialism can ever even exist in a country like Britain. Or they vaguely tell the Guardian that they will change what “common sense is in the country”, before they attempt to change the Labour Party again. Momentum, joked Blairite poster boy Wes Streeting on Saturday, should change its name to Inertia. Momentum was supposed to be the spearhead of a millennial revolution, one that would permanently alter British politics. Yesterday’s winners are today’s punch lines.

But they are still here, just. They incubate in a discoloured ex-church building that looks like an ossuary, 15 minutes’ walk from the official conference. This is the World Transformed, the hard Left’s political festival and refuge, taking place for the seventh time, wobbling on its last legs. “There was a real energy before,” says a man selling Stuart Hall essay collections, “and now…”

I’m told it used to be different. I’m told there was an energy at this festival in the ancient days when Corbyn was Labour leader. Soft Left MPs like Ed Miliband used to be drawn to The World Transformed. Moths flapping to the light. “This was the cool place to be,” a council worker tells me wistfully one night. “But Miliband and the rest were pretending to be more Left-wing than they actually were.” That energy peaked in 2018, he reckoned. Then came 2019, and the Left was shredded. Their failure was historical. Overnight, Corbyn became the new Michael Foot, the new George Lansbury.

So, those who remain are not pretend Left-wingers. They are the diehards, and they come to the festival to fantasise. Penny Grennan is not pretending. She stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Hexham in 2019 and lost by 10,000 votes to the Tories.

This afternoon she is selling raffle tickets (first prize: Jeremy Corbyn allotment jam) and t-shirts that call Keir Starmer a wet wipe in a room that smells like vegetable soup. She teaches protest songs to the next generation. There are several decades of fruitless canvassing written all over her face. “We are a family here,” she says. Up the road, “the Labour party machine is voracious. It is about control and obedience.” I feel like I am talking to a particularly sweet old nun. It’s an ignoble feeling: pity. Penny has wasted years on something that doesn’t exist.

Fantasy blots out everything. I read a pamphlet that says Corbyn failed because he was not… Left-wing enough. I go down to a studio where the “youth are rising for a green new deal” — a ropey American policy idea that is older than most of the youth. Rather than rising, the youth are sitting on metal fold-out chairs in circles, drawing lines on A3 paper with felt tip pens. I am back in school.

On a panel to discuss abolishing the monarchy, Mish Rahman, a member of Momentum’s National Coordinating Group, says: “Five white people, wearing black, with a Union Jack behind them — it’s intimidating, like a far-Right rally.” This is the only room in the country where that is an applause line. We are in a parallel reality.

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They discuss the myth of nationality, and the myth of social peace in Britain. “For a thousand years the English have been ruled by families that aren’t English,” one says. One headed by “a clan of parasites”. Well, it’s not Huw Edwards in a black tie. “The Queen was in the thick of imperialist violence,” says the Momentum guy.

The only revelation is that they don’t understand the country they live in at all. Like every event at this festival, they speak, cleverly, to themselves. This is utterly irrelevant to what they are supposed to be doing, which is making people vote for them.

Other countries, ones the British Left will never have to win votes in, are preferred. For a political tribe so diminished in Britain, all that remains is a fantasy of over there. An afternoon panel about South America. The auditorium is full, because Jeremy Corbyn has shown up. He is accompanied by a Bolivian Trade Unionist, a Brazilian journalist, a Colombian senator, and a documentary filmmaker from Chile.

“What can we learn from Colombia?” Bone-rattling stories are told. Unlike in Macclesfield, there is scope in Bogotá for heroic revolutionary action. The struggle there is so beautiful. The struggle here is so banal.

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Corbyn listens. He looks happy, and cocoon-safe in his happiness. He is introduced as a “revolutionary leader who shows solidarity with Latin America every single day”.

Corbyn tells the room about Allende. The room shivers. Corbyn tells the room about the torture chambers he visited in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. The room brrrrs. There is some glee in his description of these places. There, we can see, says Corbyn “that wonderful golden thread… the survival of the human spirit against all the odds.”

What kind of intellectual life is this? To look to Bolivia for patterns to mimic. To simplify the whole world into classes and struggles. To offer people, in a democracy, not straightforward, easily explained improvements to their lives, only the deus ex machina of a “more egalitarian socialist future”. It is the intellectual world of the fantasist.

This festival doesn’t care. It is either these fantasies, or the Westminster cynicism and business-as-usual politics being offered on the Albert Docks by Starmer. They choose the debilitating fantasy, and they choose Jeremy.

The future of Corbynism is supposed to be Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South. Sultana has more TikTok followers than anyone else in Westminster. On Monday night she hosts a pub quiz in the auditorium. She is late.

When Sultana arrives, she is deadpan and mock-surly with the audience, who treat her like she’s Jeremy Corbyn, or Taylor Swift. She announces that she is here to “chat shit and build socialism”. One is much easier than the other. I try to see what this audience sees in her. Sultana has a majority of just 401 in Coventry. The future of the Left is already endangered.

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They still sing for the past, as he walks up the stairs. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn touched them so closely. In his otherworldliness, any one of them, any Penny Grennan, so otherworldly themselves, might have been him.

It was not Brexit, or anti-Semitism that destroyed this movement. It was Corbyn, and the people who still flock to him this week, and their consuming fantasy of politics as a struggle, that the public rejected. In his very person — and he represented his followers so well — he exposed this movement’s flaws and showed them to be without remedy.

The image he created in the minds of the country was so different to the image in the minds of his supporters. The pictures never matched. “There is no such thing as Corbynism,” he said on the day he blew it in 2019. Corbyn was wrong then — of course there was — but he is right now.

I approach the “absolute boy”, who is sitting on a sofa. I ask him if he felt like he had been released from a burden he was never up to shouldering.

“No. No. Not at all,” says Corbyn. He seems sad. “I wanted to make changes in the Labour party, and the Labour movement. I wanted to see changes in this country. Economic policy that put food in children’s stomachs, that put them in schools, that gave them nurseries, that ended food banks…”

Corbyn talks in the past tense, and trails off. He knows he failed. All he and his movement have now is the past. The present belongs entirely to Starmer.

Marxism taught the people at this festival that this moment ought to be seized by revolutionaries. Instead, they are marooned on the far side of power, eating vegetable soup and singing songs to a faded messiah. When they call Keir Starmer a wet wipe, or say that they hate him, they are only expressing their own impotence.

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At the official conference Labour thinks it is back. There is not a soul anywhere in the ACC who thinks the party will lose the next election. Starmer finds himself with a 17-point lead over Truss, and he’s barely had to campaign. The confidence is expressed in sterile ways engineered to disgust the hard Left.

Blue chip lobbyists who avoided party gatherings when Corbyn was in charge are back. Big ticket donors are back. The canapés are better than they have been in years — and the better the canapés, the more electable the party is. Blathering on about Palestine is out, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal prudence is in. Goodbye John McDonnell, hello Peter Mandelson. The revenge of the centrist Dads is complete. Let’s party like it’s 1997.

“But,” a woman clutching a champagne flute asks me one night, “what about the Left? What are they even doing now?”

What are the Left doing? Nothing that relevant any more.

For a millennium there were Royal Sieges, Royal Weddings, and Royal Jubilees at Windsor. But nothing, in living memory, like this Royal Funeral; the Queen — a most revered and respected and beloved Queen — was to be buried within the King George VI memorial chapel. A million-strong crowd was expected. An invading wave of grief vaster than any the authorities had planned for, and more than Windsor could really take. A unique British Hajj.

It was standard for locals to see the Queen in Windsor. This is a Royal borough — the Firm owns 4,500 acres —  and the family took its name from the town. In return, the town received the Real Presence of Her Majesty, riding in horses in the park, or wheeling over asphalt in a Land Rover to her chapel. Windsor was charged with glamour by association.

After Elizabeth died, the town whirled into action: the paranoid iron railings, camera cranes and subcontracted stewards, whose hasty assembly marks every major public spectacle in the Kingdom, appeared. This was the heartland of the grieving process.

When the Queen was crowned, in 1953, a third of her subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God. There was no foreign travel, no wine, no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No real teeth in the mouths of half the adult population. Stalin ruled Russia and virtually the whole of Africa belonged to Europe. The British had just informed the UN that they did not see how it was possible to abolish flogging in their mandated territories, thank you very much.

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Yesterday, there were thousands of people everywhere. Then thousands more. Walking from Slough and Staines through the misty morning, along closed roads, past tent cities set up for stewards in the greens around the town. More streamed in for the funeral.

The crowds are candidly patriotic. Monarchy is something they feel in their bodies. It is a powerful internal force, not a theory, not an idea. It’s an obvious decision: take the pram, and the dogs, to Windsor. They say the Queen was theirs. They say the same things, over and over: we expected her to go on forever; we knew her all our lives; we wanted to pay our respects. Trails of flowers are left, under trees, under the hard glare of the castle walls.

I’m reminded of Walter Bagehot, Monarchy’s most supercilious theorist. For the Kingdom, he said, the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. The portraits of Queen Elizabeth, hung in every shop window across the town — including the Thai Massage parlour — are pure symbolism. She looks as exact and fictitious as the lines on a map. People are not always sure what to do when a symbol dies. I’m told they almost ran out of champagne in The Ivy Windsor on September 8. Hallowed British etiquette: if in doubt, drink.

Otherwise, a child walks up to one Elizabeth in an estate agent’s window, stops, pulls a handful of conkers from her pocket, and lays them there in a small line below the image. An offering. Walking around Windsor, Bagehot would have thought himself vindicated.

Yet he was too cynical. Being a fantasy does not make this unreal.When you speak to enough mourners, you realise Elizabeth was more than symbol. She was not abstract to Lee, a huge bull-thick slab of a man who is in charge of the catering in the Great Park. He cooked for the Queen twice when he was a chef in the Army. “She sat in the mess with 400 blokes, like anybody would.” The recollection cuts him somehow. “She remembered my name, three years after the first time we met.”

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Or David, a garrulous ex-guardsman, who is on his third wreath-laying trip to Windsor this week. Tourists are making him pose outside the castle gates with a corgi. He served in the household division. The Queen was as regular as post in his life for 18 months. What was she like? The memory enters his face and complicates his bonhomie. “She was… strict.” He always feared she would have him locked in a cell if he slouched on the parade ground.

Elizabeth was the people’s to make of her what they will. I begin to lose count of the number of mourners who compare her with their mothers, or grandmothers. “It’s like losing her all over again”, says one woman.

The mourning is not exclusively for the Queen then. It’s for them, and their families. They relate the Queen’s pain to their own; somehow this is the same pain their grandmothers felt. They saw them ground down by life and imagine that was the Queen’s fate too. All these grandmothers, never-ending in our heads, amen.

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A thick human hedgerow grows in two parallel lines up and down the Long Walk. We watch the funeral on jumbo screens. The silence here can straighten shoulders. When we sing God Save the King, the words feel curious in our mouths. Someone stumbles off to cry behind a portaloo.

Grace tugs the edge of her Union Jack shawl. She came to Britain from Ghana in 1985. “I am the Commonwealth”, she says. A producer from ITV keeps calling her, begging her to come to London to be interviewed. But Grace wants to be in Windsor. She turns her phone off.

“We have a saying in my country: when the frog dies you will know the length of the frog.” I ask her what sort of frog Elizabeth was. “A very good frog”, says Grace. “The best frog.”

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She tells me to wait under a tree, and returns with a cardboard cut-out, clearly well-used, of the Queen. “The moon and the stars will follow her,” Grace intones, posing for photos with machine-gun-bearing police officers.

After midday, we stand at the top of the Long Walk, waiting for the procession. There is static in the air. People say things out of nowhere. “Arlo, please stop, or I shall strap you in the pram.” Somebody says she will freeze her Bramley apples. “Once she’s in there, that’s it, it’s over — it’s over there, you can see the chapel.” Another, thinking ahead, wonders how long it will take to get back to Paddington.

A row of notables, in a dream of hierarchy, stands on the opposite side of the walk. They are wearing furs, white gloves, and spotless ruffs. On our side, there are no pearls, only Sandra handing rice crackers to perfect strangers. The first thing she did when the Queen died was post a poem on Facebook. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old… “Me and Paul watched it all on the telly, everything”, she says. “There was so much we never knew.” She talks about the Queen like a song she can’t remember the words to. The telly told her to come to Windsor, so now she is forcing a rice cracker into my hands.

All of us shaped by television and language and the jokes we share, have never had so much in common: we are waiting on this smooth baize runway, in the sun, to watch her go home. And we are sharing the same frustrations in this crowd, which is ten heads deep. The same elbows in our faces, the same children crying and rustling; the irritations and bathos and peevishness, all the subterranean currents that flow beneath the splendour. Time feels like it’s buffering. Sandra sighs. There will be no more rice cakes.

It begins with a soldierly bellow. Then, hush. Then the squashed pom-pom thud of cannon half a mile away. They scatter rooks from the elm-trees, who corkscrew overhead. People tell each other to look.

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Look: the procession glints in the far distance. It moves into clarity. Cavalry in outline, a haze of red wool, eerie piping. Everybody is filming the slow, square marchers. Everybody wraps chains around these minutes, to keep them alive, to keep her with them.

They are filming the old style, the British high idiom, bury the Queen. Pageantry separate in kind and scale to any they have seen before, or will ever see again. A precious echo of the country this used to be. All this power kept in reserve for today. There are flashing swords, gorgeous armour, and blazing uniforms, but gentleness is the overwhelming impression. Militarism to send off a Grandmother, not to project power. Grief, not anger. We are its witnesses.

When the crown is level with my face there is so much brass in the air you can taste the metal. People close their eyes to stretch the crowded seconds out. The music rings flawlessly in a dozen directions. Skin and bone absorb the moment. A key is turned. History has been released from reality.

The car wheezes forward for the last time, followed by four billion eyes, through the gates of Windsor Castle. The Queen is swept along and swept up into the cheerful English heaven she believed in. She takes her final seat in the stands, with Charles I and George III, Henry VIII and Victoria, and all the others, even poor King John.

As dusk fell, we sloped back down the Long Walk, and the thumping drums faded away. Screens showed the Queen alive, accepting some carnations from school children. Elizabeth had no grand idea. No message of hope and change. No calls to arms. Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.

Last night, at Wembley, Sunak was self-deprecating and valedictory. He said thank you nine times to 7,000 Tory activists. It was his final chance to say something meaningful. We had a rote stump speech, with a few extra notes of strangled emotion, from a campaigner who’d already lost.

Outside the arena, his supporters queued for warm white wine, clothed in various blues, and brave face grimaced when asked how Sunak lost to a panto-Thatcher act. “Rishi will fight to the end”, said Rohan Thandi, a perilously young Durham student. “The one candidate who will never give in.”

They believed he would linger on the backbenches after this maiming. But most backbenchers don’t have a deluxe Santa Monica escape hatch to drop through. After this disaster, will he still be milking constituents’ cows in North Yorkshire in ten years’ time?

For it was a disaster. Sunak’s undoubted work ethic, his ability to absorb data, and his uxoriousness have counted for nothing. Pitched as an antidote and a rebuke to the tribal giggling and fecklessness of the Johnson era, Sunak has been outmanoeuvred by the candidate in the field who most resembled Johnson. Restored sanity is less enjoyable than more cake.

Relaxed and winner confident on the arena stage, Truss cut more slices: she would never, ever introduce new taxes. By going full cake, Truss has forced Sunak to become the establishment candidate. Sunak was the teenage Brexiteer who gave off a Remain air; the creedal Thatcherite who sounded like Tony Blair; the unironic patriot who looked less loyal to old traditions than his opponent, who once wanted to put the monarchy on the chopping block. He was a conservative saint with a liberal halo.

Appropriately then, Wembley prefered Sunak to Truss — his welcome was louder, and longer than Truss’s was. The Conservative Party here in Wembley doesn’t look that much different from the people in the streets around the arena. Chuntering old colonels are thin on the ground. Despising net zero targets and believing a woman is a woman cuts across ethnicities.

But the support of London, like the endorsement of The Times, and the blessings of Michael Gove, were another sign that Sunak had the establishment on side. The party may be run and funded from London, but its spirit, and its insurgent energies gather outside the city. Sunak needed Stroud, Ludlow, and Stafford in the last six weeks, not London. He needed the Telegraph, not The Times.

Regional Tory members are small town car dealers, borough councillors, and third generation family butchers, but after Brexit, their politics are gloomy and radical. They feel disenfranchised by their party; they feel anxiously, down in their marrow, that something vague but critical is under siege. Like Roger Scruton, they feel the “old courtesies and decencies are disappearing”.

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Their answer to end this season of insanity, poll after poll showed, is simple. Given the choice, they would landslide Boris Johnson back to the top of the Conservative Party. The next best thing is Truss. Her gags are not as good as Boris’ were, but she tells them what they want to hear: I will shrink the state. I will cut taxes.

Sunak’s response was a one man show where he split himself apart several times over. He promised to “tell the truth” — then told Tory members what he thought they wanted to hear. In Belfast: Sunak condemned benefits scroungers, after posing with a missile launcher slightly taller than he was. In Manchester: Sunak claimed fantastically to be “the most Northern chancellor in seventy years” to a room of Red Wall Tories. In Perth: Sunak laughed off the idea he would scrap the transport-them-to-Rwanda migration plan that (in saner times) he had “hoped to block”.

At Wembley, he resorted to the same clichés and worn-out formulas. “Maxing out the credit card” was wrong; only he could “safely steer us through the storms ahead”. Meanwhile Truss vigorously slagged off Sadiq Khan; the members screamed, and punched the air in gratitude. There was the difference in miniature. She knew what they wanted. Sunak was still the man who betrayed Boris, and raised national insurance.

This oddly static contest began in July but ended three months before in April. That was when Sunak Hindenburged. The revelation: his wife was a non-dom; he held a green card. He came across as shifty and disloyal. Nationally, his polling slipped 26 points, below Johnson’s for the first time. Among party members, the revelations about Sunak’s tax affairs did more damage to him than anything else. Truss began the contest with a polling lead of 24 points. Sunak’s team ordered miniature #ReadyForRishi bottles of suncream for journalists and made him do unsteady culture war pirouettes. By late August Truss’s advantage over Sunak had widened to 38 points.

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Sunak is not a chest-beater. When he promised a “major crackdown” on grooming gangs yesterday, he was less at ease than when he talked about the Bank of England. Simply: he is not crass enough to convince as a culture warrior. St Crispin’s Day exhortations turn to ashes in his mouth. “What’s the point in stopping bulldozers in the green belt” Sunak yelled at one early campaign stop, “if we allow Left-wing agitators to take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values.” Do we think Sunak had anything to do with lines like that? All Sunak’s attempts to play this low enforced the impression that he was an establishment candidate, incapable of imagination, performing the stock idea of what an insurgent candidate should be.

If Sunak was what his supporters said he was — a brilliant, efficient, presiding mind — shouldn’t he have done better than this? Early in August, he told county Tories about his Californian dreams. Solid burghers and Ludlow retirees listened to Sunak lavish praise on Silicon Valley. Were his idols Churchill and Disraeli, or the podcasting investment gurus and austerely hoodied tech founders of San Francisco? The impression intensified at one early hustings in Eastbourne, where Sunak said the word “California” three times in ten minutes. “He kept talking about California and tech”, moaned one campaign source. They said Eastbourne, on August 5th, was the moment Sunak’s own team realised he was on Pacific, not Greenwich Standard time. Telling Britain-is-best audiences to slavishly follow foreign patterns was an avoidable self-own.

You began to wonder whether his reputation had always been a mirage. On Sunak world they had stressed his brow-furrowed, adult man competence. He promised he would tell the truth. Michael Gove, introducing Sunak, said that his man always told the truth. “I’m prepared to tell people”, Sunak said in July, “that you can’t have your cake and eat it”. It came back to “being honest with people about the challenges we face”.

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Unlike Truss, he had the power to face unpleasant facts. But unlike Truss he didn’t tell Wembley that he would never introduce new taxes. He was prepared to yarn on about political correctness, but he could never lie about the economic issues he really cared about.

After seven weeks of grinding, Sunak departs leaving one souvenir behind. His one flinty, Darwinian truth for the country. “Are we prepared to earn the success that we need in order to succeed in the world?”, he asked when the campaign began. Britain needed to compete, and its people needed “to be professional and ambitious and strive to be the best at what they do”. Could we be like him?

Though Sunak is young, last night he seemed old. He was an institution man in an era of discredited institutions; a millennial desperate to woo baby boomers; too conventionally serious for a politics now defined by tribal laughter. In the end, he failed his own Darwinian test. He did not have the depth, or like Truss, the ringing shamelessness, to adapt to the struggle.

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Charles’s guest of honour, on her birthday, was his long-suffering mistress. She was then the crossroads where all national snobberies meet: a tabloid had recently printed a picture of her next to a horse, then asked: “Which one would you rather go to bed with?” The party was widely interpreted as an insult, but it was more of an apology to Camilla Parker Bowles. No other Royal attended.

A quarter of a century on and Camilla’s 75th birthday presents are the guest editorship of Country Life magazine, and a television special on ITV. The documentary reveals that she has shared a fag with Jeremy Clarkson, and her approach to life is to “just get on with it”. Through the cameras, and on the pages, she appears unaffected. Is this Camilla an actual person? Or a spit-and-polish construct designed behind-the-scenes to fill a vacancy when the Queen dies? 

Suspicions about her have lasted. Only 13% of the public believe that Camilla should be Queen. (It will happen, regardless.) In the run up to her birthday next week, newspapers wonder how Camilla has “won everyone round”, but she remains, in tabloidese, a “controversial figure”. The public are persistent Diana partisans. They do not get on with it. Like some of our politicians, for them it is eternally 1997, and Diana’s car will always be heading towards a smash. Against this sentimental legend, Camilla has nothing to offer but her Jack Russell terriers, being “nice” to photographers, and that time she laughed at some Inuit throat singers. She becomes a mirror of her mother-in-law — a quiet enigma.

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Still, the essentials are not at all mysterious. War hero father becomes a wine merchant, and a mildly amusing writer. Mother: knitting, wealthy, and deb of the year 1939. School friends remember Camilla’s ability to stand in the cold for longer than normal. (This will prove useful later in her life.) There is nothing to suggest the formation of an unusual character.

She passes fewer O-levels than Jeremy Corbyn. (Similarly, Diana Spencer’s most notable academic achievement is to win a school prize for best-tended guinea pig.) She likes hunting, and blowing cones of smoke between tokes of her Marlboros. Camilla Shand is of her class but slightly before her times. She is tomboyish and funny, consequently perfect for the men in the Polo scene, with their frighteningly monosexual educations.

Camilla was brought up to be a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. Today Camilla, if the pages of Country Life are anything to go by, is a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. What Virginia Woolf called “tweed-wearing, sterling dull… with grim good sense”. Dog hairs deeply woven into clothes, the first G&T a little early; silly nicknames and beef on Sundays. Solid lives that have scarcely changed since the days of Pitt the Younger. In Country Life and Camilla’s vanishing England, it’s possible — even encouraged — to forget the passage of entire centuries.

The first marriage is described as a “major social event” by all the future biographies — because Princess Anne is there. Camilla Shand becomes a Parker Bowles. Her fast London days slow to a manor in Wiltshire, where she gardens and hunts. Her husband, known as Andrew “Poker Bowles”, is one of those libertine Catholics. He behaves badly, confesses, then throws his chips on the table again. He is prouder to be the inspiration for a character in a Jilly Cooper novel than of his marriage.

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This might have gone on until the grave. Camilla might have planted peonies in her garden for decades, might never have had to give up her pack a day, might have read the Sunday Telegraph next to Andrew at breakfast last weekend. But for Charles.

When they first met, he was not exactly Bond. In front of a white pavilion, amid billowing elms, across from a vividly green grass pitch. It was a civilised, convivial, and slightly alarming scene — polo at Smith’s Lawn. Camilla in 1972 was at the height of her sensuousness. Young Charles was the most magnificent job-seeker in a land filling up with them. He slept with his teddy bear. He believed the way to a woman’s heart was to play practical jokes on them — his favoured aphrodisiacs were exploding envelopes packed with rubber bands. Suavity was distant.

The relationship began. From the start, disdain wrapped itself around Camilla like a bag over a head. The Queen praised her for her lack of guile and ambition, without realising she was praising Camilla for what she most admired about herself. The sinister Lord Mountbatten (Charles’ male mentors are always sinister) called her a “good learning experience”. At this height, in this society, people and ponies are easily confused. Senior figures in Charles’s life believed, archaically, that she was not “pure” enough for him. He did nothing to challenge them.

Though he knew as early as 1972 that he loved Camilla, Charles married Diana. A binary emerged; one day the country would be invited to take sides. Where Camilla was unoriginal and unimaginative, Diana was theatrical and neurotic. Camilla was stage scenery, Diana was Othello. Camilla didn’t feel things; Diana would weep at the sight of a bracelet. Charles literally had one job: marry well. He blew it. “Is it possible to love two women at the same time,” he asked, the night before his blockbuster marriage. The answer, unhappily enough, will forever be: yes and no. By the late Eighties, pictures of the prince show smoke signals wafting from his eyes. His hours of happiness seemed burned through.

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Raised by a coterie of what Prince Philip delicately called “nannies, nurses, and poofs”, the Prince of Wales was not prepared for a constitutional position that demanded epic stoicism. He was dimly aware of this mismatch between role and temperament. Battered by alternating gusts of public hatred and public reverence, he forgot himself. Once asked by a boy in Malaysia, “Who are you?” He replied: “I wish I knew”.

His solution was Camilla. When the public discovered this, and his first marriage ended, Charles’s mistress became as fascinating to the world as a goat with four heads. Typically, the world then asked the wrong questions about the relationship. Philip had told Diana that he could not imagine anyone in “their right mind” leaving her for Camilla.

The Duke’s words echoed throughout the Nineties, and they still echo today. Camilla was called an old boiler and a trout, fat and gaunt, a witch and a vampire. Mohammed Al-Fayed nastily said she looked “like something from a Dracula film”. Against this, the press compared Diana’s generational beauty. Camilla became the most hated woman in England. Like Anne Boleyn, she was considered a schemer, an opportunist, and a sexual predator. If there were still chopping blocks, Camilla would have graced them as Boleyn did. Instead she faced the stocks. In an eccentric (and rather late) attempt to regulate the nation’s extinct moral verities, women pelted her with rolls in a supermarket car park. Camilla went into hiding and did what Elizabeth II would have done. She said nothing. Charles’s approval rating was lower than Prince Andrew’s is today.

The supposed mystery of Charles and Camilla invited speculation. What exactly did Charles see in her, demanded the British public. A backwards question. The better one was: what did Camilla see in Charles? He might have been heir to the throne, but the throne wasn’t what it had been a century before. That is the real enigma. The answer is the one word the British flee from fastest. Love.

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Admittedly, it was not the most straightforward kind. Camilla’s love for him has been compared to a mother’s — a love smothered by fear. Nicky Haslam told the New Yorker: “It’s like a rope attached to her. There’s something very, very strong from her to him — almost umbilical.” When Diana left Highgrove, Charles purged his estate of all traces of his wife. Gone were the pink sofas and soft toys in favour of red curtains and tapestry covers. The interior designer Dudley Poplak saw the new rooms, and said Charles was withdrawing into the womb. He was going back to Camilla.

​​Charles is technically related to a divinity. He is said to be descended, via Alfred the Great, from the Saxon god Woden. But being Prince of Wales invites stasis, and semi-permanent adolescence. The woman he ended up with was always going to be a mother, not a whirlwind. This is what the public has never understood, and why they are wrong about Camilla becoming Queen consort. The closest replacement available for Elizabeth II — sane, steady, consistent — is Camilla. It might be a bit unconventional on Charles’ part. But it is good for the country.

Contemplate a day in her life. Hours of public ceremonial. A voice in your ear telling you who you are meeting and what to say. Half a dozen fixed smiles in every freshly painted room. Speeches and remarks heavily rehearsed. You can’t even smoke anymore. Next Tuesday you will open a new hospital ward in Northampton. Prince Harry calls your husband a “tit” in a podcast interview. This trends on Twitter. He is suing another newspaper. It rains.

But like her mother-in-law she goes on. Old structures are resilient. It is hard to conceive that anyone as publicly wounded as Camilla could also retain a sense of humour. Even in the artificial world of guest editorships and documentaries, though, you can see it. She is the only Royal who doesn’t seem fantastically annoyed by The Crown — she’s had so much worse.

Wrapped in royal tinsel, Camilla might be the last hard kernel of an Englishwoman left. History would have made most people in her position a fool, or sent them mad. Instead it has given her a gift, albeit a rather tainted one: being our Queen. It’s the least she deserves.

“We’re worried about you,” said Amis. “I’m worried about me,” responded Rushdie. Sitting in the pew behind was Paul Theroux. “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he chuckled.

Rushdie remembered the moment, funny in the queasy-hysterical way narrowly not being hit by a car is funny, in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. After Friday’s attack on the author, which may cost him an eye and possibly more, the book is charged with new meaning.

Paparazzi and journalists began to follow Rushdie into the church. Hours before, Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa: “I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses… and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly.” Fleeing the press, Rushdie was spirited away by Alan Yentob in a BBC car.

Aged 40, Rushdie’s life was split into an unwanted second act. “How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him,” he recalled, “an overwhelming version, against which it was impossible to fight.” Several builders collaborated to construct the new Rushdie. There was the Ayatollah, a man who had used children as mine-sweepers in the Iran-Iraq war, and who marked the tenth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution with his fatwa. There were the Muslims who rallied and rioted against Rushdie in France, America, Norway, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sweden, Pakistan, Australia, Turkey, and the Netherlands. And there were the governments who banned The Satanic Verses in two dozen countries. As he watched all this in hiding, the author “imagined the Great Pyramid of Giza turned upside down with the apex resting on his neck”.

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The British builders were generally more subtle, though no less insidious. One of the very first calls Rushdie received after the fatwa was from Keith Vaz, the MP for Leicester East. Vaz described what was happening as “appalling, absolutely appalling”. He promised to support Rushdie. A few weeks later, Vaz was one of the main speakers at a demonstration against The Satanic Verses, describing the event as “one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain”.

But MPs need votes more than they need writers to have artistic freedom. Joseph Anton is full of moments when they let Rushdie down. Max Madden, the Labour MP for Bradford West — Bradford, the city where copies of The Satanic Verses were crucified and set alight — suggested that Rushdie add an insert into his book allowing Muslims to explain why they found it offensive.

Offensive. That was the main charge against Rushdie in Britain. The five years it took to make a novel sing could be reduced to one slander. On the political Right, Rushdie had already caused offence. In the Eighties he had denounced “the Augean filth of imperialism” and described the British police as representatives of “the colonising army”. And, yes, Rushdie had praised the Iranian revolution: “We may not approve of Khomeini’s Iran. But the revolution there was a genuine mass movement.”

Writers at the Telegraph and Spectator, as well as members of Margaret Thatcher’s government, were patriotically scandalised that a foreign power could order the death of a British citizen and try to get his book banned. Not in this blessed plot; not in our England, mate. But it was still a cause for tickily spite that Rushdie, as Charles Moore would later reflect, “used to attacking whitey with impunity” was “suddenly seeking whitey’s help”.

There was dark, malicious glee. Auberon Waugh wondered “just how much we should exert ourselves, as deeply stained white imperialists, to protect him from his own people”. Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper said he wouldn’t be bothered if British Muslims decided to “waylay” Rushdie in an alleyway and “improve” his manners. Sir Stephen Spender, whose youthful communism was a distant memory, wrote in the Spectator of Rushdie: “It is mass immigration that has got him into the trouble in which he now finds himself…” Wasn’t it ironic that an immigrant like Rushdie, born in the twilight of the Raj before coming to England for boarding school, had become the hate figure of immigrants himself? “The liberals made their multicultural bed,” crowed Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. “Now they must lie on it, along with the rest of us.” Norman Tebbit spoke for them all when he described the novelist as an “outstanding villain”.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie recounts this without much bitterness. Being cast as the “uppity foreigner” was something he expected. Neither is he particularly saddened to find successive Archbishops of Canterbury, and Prince Charles, respond tepidly to the fatwa. The Prince of Wales reportedly said he would not support a writer who had insulted the “deepest convictions” of Muslims. He was the defender of more than one faith now.

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More surprising, though, was the reaction on the Left. It was one thing for the Daily Mail to label Rushdie as “unattractive, small-minded, arrogant, and egocentric”. But what did it mean for George Steiner, the great Cambridge polymath, no roast beef of old England merchant, to launch sustained, remorseless attacks on The Satanic Verses, while suggesting that Rushdie was “looking for trouble”? Who could explain John Berger denouncing Rushdie in the Guardian? Or Germaine Greer describing him as a “megalomaniac”? Or for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent, seeking the fatwa’s positives for Britain’s Muslim community on its fifth birthday and claiming: “Had it not been for that fateful 14 February 1989, the world would be hurrying, unchallenged, towards the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald’s hamburgers.” Or the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy accusing him of “misjudging the people”? These were supposed to be his people.

Then there was John le Carré. The great author could hardly bring himself to condemn the USSR, but he was happy to give countless drubbings to Rushdie — by this point lying low in the Welsh Marches somewhere, under constant threat of death, as his publishers filled their offices with sniffer dogs and bomb-detection machinery. “Again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers,” wrote le Carré, “and with dignity, withdraw his book until a calmer time has come. It seems to me he has nothing to prove but his own insensitivity.” Rushdie, he thought, was “impertinent” to believe that those who wrote literature had special claims to free speech.

Unlike the Right, which preferred to giggle in the darkness, le Carré had located the actual terrain where the battle over The Satanic Verses was being contested. This was about writerly freedoms. To tell stories. Nothing was padlocked. Any material could be nicked; to be mocked, worshipped, shredded, then picked up again, whenever you wanted to. The writer had the special privilege, those on Rushdie’s side argued, to be a dogmatician or a doubter. The point was that nobody told them which one to be. “Man was a storytelling animal,” Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton. “The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.”

Well, actually they could. Before Friday, the fires around Rushdie appeared subdued. The year was 2022. He believed he was safe. His prophecies about the decline of free speech were indulged but ignored. He had become a designer handbag novelist, whose fiction critics could safely attack again. He was in the uneasy position of being an anti-fundamentalist who said there were fundamental intellectual values to uphold.

Once he was stabbed 15 times, a season of fine words began. There was Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Twitter, hoping to see Rushdie pull through. There was Iranian Press Television’s own Jeremy Corbyn, offering solidarity. A contest was held: who would be the last politician to wish Rushdie well? (It was nearly Keir Starmer.) Fearing his death, and perhaps fearing that anyone with an internet connection could look up their behaviour during the initial rages of the fatwa, the Anglosphere jangled with weighty tributes to Rushdie.

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But the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes that even his own defences of free speech had started to sound “stale in his own ears”. Something curdled in the 2010s. While he has escaped with his life long enough to become truly, especially bored of the fatwa, he begins to realise that the cause he is fighting for, the principle he embodies, is in decay. “Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know.” What was happening? A simple, popular idea: if the collective felt upset, it had the right to silence the individual. This is what countless controversies, from Charlie Hebdo to The Lady of Heaven, scratching away in the background, proved. Authors like Peter Carey, who defended Rushdie in the Nineties, would not defend Charlie Hebdo in 2015, not weeks after the cartoonists had been slaughtered in their offices.

The world had turned. The idea had been internalised. It had spread far and wide, beyond religion, beyond anything Khomeini could have imagined, freakishly stretching and reaching into every cultural nook. The principle had a language: “It isn’t worth the fuss; it’s not a good look; it won’t play well.” Easier to say, as the Associate Editor of the Independent did a few years ago, that Rushdie’s “silly, childish” book “should be banned under today’s anti-hate legislation”. Who wants a brick through the window, a death threat, a calumny, all that damage to your reputation? Write out of turn and you get what you deserve. People felt this was justice, not cowardice. This is what Gilroy, le Carré, and Berger were getting at. They realised first that poets were not “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Poets were fair game, like everyone else. They realised, in fact, that most people do not like freedom of speech very much. Most people — and that includes most writers — will not risk being banished to Siberia.

“Good men would give in to fear and call it respect,” Rushdie predicted in Joseph Anton. “Good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace.” He was right. Martin Amis had worried about Salman Rushdie. What wasn’t so clear that morning in 1989 was how much further than Rushdie the culture of his fatwa would extend.

***

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This buttery patriotism is one part of Mordaunt’s political make-up. There is also a Cameroonian social liberalism, pro-immigration, and pro-LGBT rights; she is a Brexiteer. Her breezy-sunny style is giggly and Johnsonian. Mordaunt appears to not take herself very seriously. She wants to smooth Tory edges, get the party back to basics, and embody a cuddly new One Nation synthesis.

Her battered country and her fratricidal party are not really in trouble. They just need to rediscover who they are. Like every centrist — for that is what Mordaunt is — she thinks all sensible people share the same values.

Political colleagues say they have no idea what she believes or thinks. Only 11% of the public, and 16% of Conservative voters, can correctly name Penny Mordaunt when shown a photo of her. But Tory members, though they are old, anti-immigration and disconcerted by social change, appear charmed by this young, pro-immigration, social change welcoming candidate. The heart wants what it wants. It helps that she is never less than vague. “We don’t need a new role in the world — just to be ourselves,” she said in her speech. For party members she is a bare wall. They can light her with their flickering projections. A (supposed) mystery might be welcomed by the public too. After the too graphic, pointillist detail Boris Johnson forced on Britain about his own life, being unknown looks like a political advantage.

Compared with her rivals, Mordaunt’s political career has been low-wattage. Her family’s military background, and her sideline as a naval reservist, made her appointment as Secretary of Defence in 2019 a realised dream. It lasted for two months. She backed Jeremy Hunt in that year’s leadership contest. For that Johnson removed her from the post.

Luckily for us, Mordaunt used the downtime that followed to write a book “to learn more about my country”. Intentionally, and unintentionally, Greater: Britain After The Storm is filled with useful disclosures. Though it is written with a co-author, the book feels more distinctly personal than anything else Mordaunt has done in public. Nothing is more revealing than a person’s prose, not even nudity.

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The bare bones: after the financial crash, Brexit, and Covid, Britain needs a “well-executed national plan”. We are a country longing for a “mission”. Though we are apparently “living longer, healthier, happier, wealthier lives than ever before”, the median Brit, like the nation at large, lacks self-esteem. Only Mordaunt’s plan-mission — a project outlined with no more specificity than the frequent use of the word “modernise” — can make Britain better.

Greater divides into two parts. The first is an attempt to capture Britain’s national character through historical analysis, amateur sociology, and hair-thin observations. The second purports to explain what this “national plan” will look like.

If Mordaunt’s plan-mission is to work, it must be grounded in an understanding of what contemporary Britain is truly about. Early doors she informs us that “the British live on an island”, which is indisputable. Afterwards she makes a cacophony with adjectives. Britain is: industrious, international, cautious, creative, caring, trusted, frugal, fair, selfless, and modest. Then more word confetti: Britain is defined by integrity, sacrifice, honesty, modesty, loyalty, humour, compassion, generosity, love, courage, and defiance. All of these nouns could be lobbed at Cambodia and hit something. They are general, banal. Her words are indiscriminate, not accurate. Without precision, observation shrivels and dies. We can admire her attempt to taxonimise an entire country, but not the outcome. Is her writing better than her diving? No.

Every cliché about this country is on parade. Before politics Mordaunt worked in Public Relations. She knows received wisdom, aimed low, communicated breathlessly. Play the hits Penny: tell us about how much the British love queuing and moaning about the weather. (She does, a lot.) Though Britain is an “ancient” civilisation — not compared with Iran, or China, or Egypt, or any world standard, but whatever, she’s rolling —  it is “surprisingly modern” and “outward looking”. Yet we are also “suspicious of change”. “Sometimes”, she writes, “being British is difficult to explain.” It’s a sentence where the author’s unintended admission of failure lurks between each word. When Mordaunt essays the national character over about 100 pages, she falls back on recapping Seventies TV shows, and odd little factoids — “the majority of Britons eat meat pie at least once a month” — the ultimate significance of which remain obscure. How meat pies affect Mordaunt’s plan-mission is never explained.

Though she lambasts Britain’s apparent tendency towards nostalgia several times in the book, she is imprisoned by outdated notions. Her Britain of queues, rain, and “Sunday rituals” was a stock image when George Orwell wrote about it during the Second World War. The actual Britain, a bewildering mixture of hypermodernity and feudalism, where personal identity is thin, beliefs are fluid, and people mobile, is richer and stranger than anything Mordaunt can conceive of. But she would rather think about breakfast. She ticks off a Full English’s ingredients, then writes: “Not surprisingly, after such breakfast bowel-bashing there blossoms a stool of biblical proportions. Exodus by Caesarean section.”

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It matters that Mordaunt cannot articulate a single original notion about the national character. Disraeli intuited that the working classes were patriotic friends, not revolutionary enemies, and reformed Britain accordingly. Churchill understood that pigheaded British stubbornness could save the nation in 1940, when many in the establishment around him were defeatist. Thatcher understood that baby boomers wished to eschew the clammy, paternalistic collectivism of the post-war period for greater individual autonomy. Their visions were underpinned by new understandings of old national qualities.

Mordaunt sounds like a folksy Hovis advert not a Prime Minister. The language and the ideas are pavements that have been walked over many times. Her belief that Scotland won’t leave the Union is grounded in the notion that Scots, like the English, and the Welsh, and the Northern Irish, “moan about the weather”. If this were funny it might excuse the observation’s total lack of seriousness. But if you care about Britain it’s tragically shallow. Typically, other than this empty cliché, Mordaunt does not have a positive case to make for the Union. She does not seem entirely convinced that it should carry on. “If the Union matters”, she claims “it needs to be clear why. If the UK is to survive, its existence can’t be taken for granted.” That’s just another truism in a book stuffed with them. It is impossible to imagine Disraeli, Churchill, or Thatcher — or yes, even Johnson! — thinking this flaccidly.

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The big idea in Greater is “modernisation”. Mordaunt’s plan-mission “must start with modernising democracy”, which means fiddling about (yet again) with the House of Lords. Is kicking a few aristos around really more important than dealing with the country’s appalling productivity rate, stagnant GDP, and demented planning regulations? Mordaunt seems to think so. Modernisation starts with parliament, then ripples out towards the BBC, the military, the monarchy, the sciences, and the universities. What modernisation means is never explained. It is taken for granted that reform is a synonym for good.

But more than anything else, Greater feels random. This is what happens when you try to be all things to all men in the Blair-Cameron way, but you are not rigorous or thoughtful about it. In no particular order, and with no particular reason, Mordaunt quotes from John Stuart Mill, Margaret Mead, Richard Rorty, Billy Connolly, Gloria Gaynor, Afua Hirsch, Clive James, Malcolm Gladwell, Jo Cox, George the Poet, and “Austrian boy wonder” Friedrich Hayek. The lack of unity here, the looseness of these associations, tells us that Mordaunt is not a structured thinker. She has no philosophy, aside from a lazy-Whiggish belief in Things Can Only Get Better. She would like much more immigration than the average Tory member probably realises.

Mordaunt tacks to the centre, but ends up on the managerial Left. What she writes sounds like it was dredged from a particularly poor speech given at Davos five years ago. Do Tory members want to hear that “change is the engine room of equality”, or that “minority achievement is the stuff of which our dreams, history, and culture are made”? To support this Mordaunt invokes the lives of Horatio Nelson, Marcus Rashford, and Barack Obama.

Mordaunt moves on to her plan-mission. “We must rethink our institutions if they are going to regain popular support,” she declares. “It has to be a top-down as well as bottom-up approach.” Ok then. Government must do more, but due to its inefficiency, many of its tasks can be devolved to private charities. Big corporations are thinning out the state, but growth requires lax regulations and lower taxes. Progress will come from protecting dissenting minority opinions, but censorship is fine if it is developed by “elected and accountable representatives”, otherwise “violent noises from the looneyverse” will wreck public discourse. People shouldn’t be cancelled for having different views, but she approves of Trump’s Twitter ban.

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These grating inconsistencies cannot be papered over by her chummy, punch-in-the-arm patriotism. No part of the plan feels like it was inspired by listening to the electorate, or trying to work out what they want. Again: being a centrist means that Mordaunt thinks the British all basically believe the same things. All our differences can be dissolved in the sugar water of loving Britain; all our problems can be fixed with a bit of joined-up thinking about House of Lords reform.

She wants to heal us. At her launch on Wednesday, Mordaunt claimed the public were “fed up with divisive politics”. We need to get back to a saner, kinder politics: miniature Union Jacks, tolerance, fair play, compromise… Britain, she said on Wednesday, with a characteristic pop culture reference, felt like the crowd watching Paul McCartney at Glastonbury last month. We have digressed from the classics. “He was playing new tunes but what we really wanted was the good old stuff.”

For Mordaunt, then, “playing the good old stuff” means regurgitating a tired centrism. At this point “modernisation” is the shadow of a shadow, the echo of an echo. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Current polling suggests Mordaunt will beat any other candidate if she makes the final round. Scrutiny, starting with this evening’s television debates, ought to see her big tent ideas from a previous age collapse in on themselves. What if they don’t? The conditions that made Cameron and Blair possible are not going to come back. Saying that Britain can “rediscover” itself does not make it so. Real life has not been amenable to ideas like Mordaunt’s for over a decade. If the torch is being passed to her, do not expect its light to carry very far.

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This is Project Propeller, today. Every year, since 1999, it has spirited Royal Air Force vets up in the sky again. Younger pilots come for the war stories, and to say thank you. The vets meet their old comrades.

But we are close to the end. This year is the final meeting of Project Propeller. The number of Second World War pilots is dwindling. The last veterans of the last good war are now in their farcically late nineties. Their trademark taciturnity is becoming tombstone silence. The few keep getting fewer.

This was the last time these pilots would be in the same room together. They would be thanked and saluted and coddled to the very end. Their story, the myth — the good war — is where modern Britain was founded. Now, their hair is mercury and silver. Their hands are curled and cubed. Their skin is translucent, tattooed with melodramatic blotches. A whole century laden on their faces. Some are negligibly less ancient than others. All of them wear uniform blazers, and rustle with medals.

People are exquisitely careful with them. Utterly decorous and graceful. They are so valuable, and there are so few of them left. It is as if we are in a room with Henry’s longbowmen, or Nelson’s sailors. Our scope for reverence, usually so limited, is much larger here. There are many quiet grandsons, and great-grandsons, wheeling around their relatives.

Most of the veterans served with Bomber Command. There are pilots and engineers and navigators and gunners and bomb aimers. They had to be bloodhounds; they dropped a boiling furnace down on Germany for years, and 55,000 of them were killed doing it. All of them volunteered.

Bomber Command’s role in the war is ambiguous. Watching footage of German cities obliterated by the RAF in 1943, Winston Churchill asked: “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” He preferred the underdog, classical heroism of 1940. But the campaign never relented. There was no memorial for Bomber Command until 2012.

I speak to Andy Andrews who was wireless operator in a Halifax, and John Bell, who was a bomb aimer in a Wellington. Andrews is 98, still standing, still driving. Bell is 100, in a wheelchair, but terrifyingly unsenile. He chews a ham sandwich, viciously, like it insulted his mother. Another vet toddles shakily over to Bell and asks him how he is getting on.

“About as well as you can be for a hundred not out”, says Bell. “Well, I am completely… buggered” says the other, with a spluttery laugh.

Bell and Andrews start telling me two quite insane stories about their bomber days.

Bell was 20 before he got in a plane. His legs were too long and prevented him from being a fighter pilot. The bombers were crewed by mostly teenage boys who all wanted to fly Spitfires.

“We lost an engine on the way to Hamburg”, he recalls. It was the end of July, 1943. They could not maintain their normal height of 20,000ft; the night air around them swam with flak. Turning back would look like cowardice, so they flew the raid at 10,000ft, underneath the other British bombers. German guns on the ground, and thick gusts of their friends’ bombs blowing above them.

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I don’t understand how he wasn’t scared, but Bell simply says he was “indifferent about his feelings”. He would not worry about what he could not control. “Courage comes over a city at night.”

Beneath his plane, Hamburg was being incinerated during Operation Gomorrah. They set the air alight. 37,000 civilians died. It sounded, said one survivor, “like an old church organ where someone is playing all the notes”. Bell was a vengeful God then, raining fire and brimstone down from the heavens.

He is a more peaceful deity now, a bit more New Testament. “All I did was bomb the targets I was given… I’m quite happy with what I did.” He returns to his sandwich. Andrews bombed Dresden. He does not feel guilty, but he is not comfortable about it either. “I think it was a mistake. It never should have happened.”

Andrews was flying over Denmark in 1945 when his plane was hit by a Junkers Ju 88. Everything was on fire; three of the crew bailed out, two were quickly dead. He woke up after the plane had exploded. “I came to, pulled a rip cord, and my life was saved.” When he tells the story he looks like he might burst into laughter at any moment.

“I ended up in a POW camp in Denmark.” The war would be over in weeks and they all knew it. No need to do any Great Escape stuff. “We were liberated by General Patton. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been to see an American.”

Andrews misses his friends. “I’m the only one left now.” All his close peers were dead, his enemies were dead, much of his family was dead. The world he grew up in had more in common with the Victorian era than the Britain he lived to see. Barely a generation back from Darwin and Dickens. But he flew in the stratosphere.

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These pilots and their machines figured in the stories we’ve been told all our lives. Velvety stories that roll between the spoken memories of relatives and old snapshots of uniformed men, between Where Eagles Dare and The Longest Day; stories that fold into the pewetery weight of a toy Spitfire in your hand. After the war Britain required myths. We were bankrupt, exhausted, confused. The myth we built around the RAF — that it was alone, that it muddled through, that it was uniquely courageous — was a form of compensation. It was the best we could do.

But these are men, not statues. Calling someone a hero is like comparing them to Casanova, or saying they’re a great dancer. From then on they are a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare. Always trying to catch up. If Bell and Andrews are heroes, then their whole existence after the war has been posthumous. Their unsurpassable status makes them less than human. All that mattered happened to them in the war.

Bell says that when the crew were trying to decide whether to turn their queasy bomber around 79 years ago, they thought: “Why not keep going to Hamburg.”

Why not? It was not about heroism — these men were fatalists. It was about fear and survival. To go on without stopping, never looking back, as the world below them cracked and collapsed. They were not destroying an enemy or defending their homes: they were fighting their own terrors. To overcome them was the only way to navigate a course towards life after the war.

When I ask them whether it was all worth it, Bell looks at me like I’ve asked him to describe the bottom of the ocean. An impossible question. “I don’t really want to go down that road.”

I cannot tell whether he means it was worth it, or it was not.

It’s one of those June days that cannot decide whether to be warm or cold, so we have both. There is blossom on the grass. All the vets have been brought in now, by light aircraft the same white colour as yachts. I am told that one of them hasn’t made it — he died yesterday afternoon.

A Spitfire sits outside a hangar. Men in deep middle age take selfies with it, as if they have met Kim Kardashian. It is a celebrity. The only Allied plane in service from the first day of the war until the last. So brilliant, so adaptable, so fast.

I speak to a selfie taker. There is a male glee in technical details. He knows the names of the parts. Words decorated with beads of numbers. Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 liquid-cooled 12-cylinder Vee piston engine, he says. Bellcrank hinge control. He smiles. Browning 0.303in (7.7mm) machine guns. He is talking in small prayers.

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A plane is an orchestra of parts, playing together, he says. The machine is the point for him. He tells me this Spitfire was bought privately for £3 million. He has spent many afternoons mulling the Spit. You can hold its parts, weigh them, pet them. Machines are more manageable than emotions. When I look at the fuselage of that plane, the metal rounded to a propellered nose, I see slightness and fragility. I look at the sky, fill it with Germans, and imagine the terror.

A tiny man is trundled towards the Spitfire. This is Bill Williams, he is one of the last people alive who flew them during the war. He is 101 years old, and he is my lift home. He contemplates the Spit. It is like seeing a snail come face-to-face with a past shell.

His war was not glamorous. Bill is not part of the myth. He missed the Battle of Britain by three years. After training he flew out to Cairo, then to Calcutta.

There he made reconnaissance missions over the Irrawaddy Delta, photographing Japanese railways lines and fuel depots. His real enemy was the weather in monsoon season, which made flying deadly, not the Japanese, whose planes were not fast enough to get near his Spitfire.

Bill remembers it so well that he can take a pencil and draw a map of Burma for me on a flyer. He sketches out hills, rivers, and weather patterns. (I checked it against Google’s satellites later. It is absurdly accurate.)

The only weapon Bill’s plane had was a revolver. “I realised it was for me, if the plane came down and it was a choice between that and being captured by the Japanese”.

In their memoirs, Spitfire pilots often compare the machine to a woman. They were slenderly experienced teenagers. She was a perfect lady. She had no vices. She was beautiful. Most of them only knew sisters, mothers, aunts. They were describing falling in love for the first time.

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“Oh the Spit was a lady in the air”, Bill says. “But a real bitch on the ground.” The undercarriage was narrow and weak. Landing it was never easy. “But it was very, very easy to fly. So light. You could literally fly it with this. With one finger.”

We have to get Bill back in the sky. He is cradled, with care and difficulty, into the cockpit of a Cessna 414. Graham, the pilot, does his checks. The plane begins to shudder and wobble.

Soon we are airborne, buffering and swaying, rapidly climbing over the East Midlands. Graham explains the controls to Bill. He is supposed to be flying three tonnes of metal in a minute. He has not flown anything bigger than a kite since the war. I am… somewhat concerned that Bill might accidentally kill all of us.

It is all in my head. Bill knows everything. He is taking us on a right turn, towards Nottingham, then levels the plane out. He checks the air speed. Altitude is perfectly maintained.

“It feels heavier than a Spitfire”, he mutters to himself in the headset. Suddenly he is attentive, composed, professional. Bill flew 1000 hours in the war. Suddenly a man who cannot walk has his wings back. I watch him closely, everyone in the plane does. Bill looks younger, visibly freshened. He is 20 again, avoiding purple-black monsoon clouds above a Burmese delta. He is not flying. He is travelling back in time.

The land below opens up. The yellow fields give way to rashes of red brick suburbs, ringed with motorways, and further out the south of England, and cities, and millions of people.

At this height everything is simplified and clarified. The problem with the myth around these men is that it makes them peaks. All the rest of us can do is dwell in their foothills. A beautiful, hobbling myth: Churchill as King Arthur, the RAF boys like Bill as his gleaming knights, Spitfire as Excalibur. “Nothing surpasses 1940” Churchill said. But how are you supposed to live if your greatest days are behind you?

All at once the stories seemed ridiculous and naive. Bill, Andy, John, and all the others were not myths or legends or heroes. They were survivors. They were skilled, they were dogged, and they were very lucky.

Up here there is only light, wind, and speed. Nothing else matters. England is streaming below us. I look at the list of questions, of the ‘what was it like back then’ variety, for Bill on my phone. They seem stupid now. There is only one thing it makes sense to ask him: how does it feel to be back?

“Oh.” He pauses, searching for the right word. “It is wonderful.”

When he made that announcement, his family was unravelling due to his father’s philandering. The boy’s response was to make himself “unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of life…”, according to his mother when she resurfaced after an eight month disappearance. His desires betrayed his insecurities. If he could not be loved, he would be powerful. 

The armour plate little Boris chose to cover these scars was Winston Churchill. It was always Churchill: Britain’s last world king. Absent a mother, he discovered a hero. Self-pity was sublimated into the desire for glory. 

Classical heroes conquer or bewitch their peers, they never compete with them. They are above the futile jostling of general life. They emulate backwards. Alexander the Great looked to Achilles; Julius Caesar looked to Alexander, and wept at his tomb; Napoleon looked to Caesar, and Churchill to Napoleon, whose glaring bust followed him around Westminster for decades.

Johnson decided to emulate Churchill — “the greatest statesman Britain had ever produced” — and stitch himself into this gold thread. Churchill was a holy presence in post-war childhoods. Boris memorised the captions of Churchill picture books. Fathers read selections from the Great Man’s speeches to their sons. Boys in the Sixties imagined themselves piloting Spitfires over green Sussex, as the sonorous, rousing, words of Churchill echoed in their heads. 

Boris never asked if he was emulating an illusion. By Eton his wish was Churchillian. Become Prime Minister. Win. The clown fez he wore for the next 40 years distracted his contemporaries from this ruthless fixity of purpose. 

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That’s not to say this ambition was ever hidden. “My silicon chip”, he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs, “has been programmed to try to scramble up this cursus honorum, this ladder of things”. Churchill proved indispensable to the climb.

Other Prime Ministers were haunted by Churchill (Thatcher), recklessly invoked him in wartime (Blair), or paid oily tributes to him (Cameron). On the fiftieth anniversary of Churchill’s death in 2014, Johnson one-upped them all when he wrote a bestselling biography of his hero, and the tribute act reached a new stage. 

The Churchill Factor was not about Winston Churchill. Faced with the man’s knotty and tragic life, Johnson turns away, blows raspberries with the material, and writes like P.G. Wodehouse. Churchill is the “beaver who damned the flow of events”; he is “like some burly and hungover butler from the set of Downton Abbey”; he is simultaneously a “crowbar of destiny” and a “hyper-gravitational astral body”. Johnson can doodle silly expressions on portraits of an icon — some of them are even snigger-worthy — but he cannot get close to the man. 

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To do so would be to look in a mirror. Johnson thinks he is attracted to Churchill because he was a hero, “the man who led my country to victory against all the odds”. More than a warlord, Churchill was the “best speaker, the best writer, the best joke-maker, the bravest, the boldest and most original” — all qualities Johnson would like us to associate with Johnson. He interposes himself into Churchill’s life, like a leaf pressed between the pages of a diary, then winks at his readers.  

Churchill, wrote Johnson, was the “inevitable” Prime Minister. By 1940 there was only one “man for the moment”. When Brexit was deadlocked in 2019 Johnson’s association with Churchill, the assiduously spade-worked notion that, give or take some hair, they were the same man, cashed out spectacularly. The mantle of inevitability passed to Johnson.  

His supporters believed that Boris was walking with destiny. Charles Moore used to tell anyone who would listen that Boris was a let down. Then the wastrel became Winston. Moore hailed the “controversial untrusted man who got it right, leads, unites the country, wins”. The “blond magnificence”, Tim Stanley wrote in October 2019, ought to be recognised for “the Churchillian figure he is.” (This week Tim was forced to concede that Johnson had become a more Chamberlainite “toast”.)

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This was the point of The Churchill Factor. To kick enough biographical sand in people’s eyes until, when they looked up, they could no longer see where Churchill started and Johnson ended. Churchill’s detractors are “snobbish” and a “teensy bit jealous” — like Johnson’s. Churchill’s writing was a way of “dramatising and publicising himself” — like Johnson’s. Churchill’s disloyalty to party colleagues was “magnificent” — like Johnson’s. It becomes absurd. “In habits”, Churchill — and I can’t find another biographer who has made this claim — “superficially resembled a Bertie Wooster figure”. Just… Like… Johnson.

It becomes clear that Johnson does not understand why Johnson is like Churchill. They are spookily alike, but not due to their maverick political careers, not for the doughy and obvious reasons. You have to go back to the beginning. Churchill suffered through his own version of Johnson’s youth of neglect and distress. “Famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood”, writes Churchill in Marlborough.

Unhappiness evoked the same ambitions in Churchill as it did in Johnson: the conscious decision to be a classical hero, with all the ruthlessness and coldness such a choice results in. “He is bound to emerge historically as a romantic and glamorous figure”, wrote one sympathetic observer of Churchill in the Thirties, “but he is surrounded by corpses.” Suicides close to Winston Churchill included a brother-in-law, a former stepfather, a daughter’s lover, a former daughter-in-law, a son-in-law and a daughter. Johnson leaves behind two cratered marriages, and anguished relations with his platoon of children. I can picture both men wondering if this is the cost of greatness.

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The callousness of Johnson and Churchill was leavened by self-mocking qualities. Their vanity was excused by humorousness. Their witticisms are collected in stocking-filler pamphlets, like Tory Wildes. Often, both are compared to babies. Johnson, one biographer reckoned, was defined by “neediness”. Neville Chamberlain believed that Churchill, to the agony of his colleagues, was a “wayward child”. The Financial Times thought Johnson was a “man-child politician”, always on the cusp of having his ambitions devoured by his own gross appetites. During the war, Stalin’s ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, noted that “something of a small boy” lived on in Churchill. They are half-omnipotent, half-helpless. They looked at all times like overgrown toddlers. Ultimately, everything was subordinate to the small boy’s dream of glory and prestige.

Now that half his party is trying to slaughter its chief, The Churchill Factor makes for weirdly poignant reading. If Johnson hadn’t chosen all this you could almost feel sorry for him. “I think he doesn’t really know what he wants,” wrote Johnson about Churchill, and himself. They both just wanted more of whatever it was — acclaim usually — whenever they could grasp it. Such behaviour in peacetime, notes Johnson eight years before Partygate, “can be disastrous”. 

You become what you pretend to be. Johnson never really thought beyond Churchill the world king, hero of the finest hour, the growl on the radio. By emulating Churchill’s optimism, patriotism, and hopefulness, Johnson could finish Brexit, and take his historical place next to the most famous Englishman of all. Once he became Prime Minister, his inner world of make believe appeared congruent with reality at last. Johnson fantasised about monuments to himself, says Dominic Cummings. Johnson bumbled around Number 10, musing that the people would remember him after his death, like a Roman Emperor. Or Churchill.

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The version of Winston remembered by Britain, and imitated by Johnson, is a false one. The picture is incomplete. In his last years Churchill said over and over again that he wished he had died in 1945. His beloved Empire was being dismantled. Communists dominated most of the Eurasian landmass. Socialism appeared to be the future of British politics.

Heroes are not supposed to go on. Either they die young, like Alexander did at 32, or their ludicrous self-image cannot be maintained in the face of the reality of the world. After a certain age, failure sets in like frost.  

Imagine, then, if Boris hadn’t survived Covid. A Prime Minister sacrificed for his people. All those early pandemic photos of Johnson bouncing unmasked through hospital wards suddenly charged with saintly light. Nothing beatifies, or erases error, quite like death. A romantic-cynical end, but then, as Johnson said: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.” 

Instead there is no romance. Only cynicism. He recovered, and received cake in a Tupperware. There will be no Downing Street booze ban, he says, because Churchill needed his brandies during the war. Johnson ends up resembling the post-war Churchill. Not heroic, but hamstrung. Confused and tortured. He can announce policies, make speeches, and sit on tiny chairs when he makes school visits. But the overall sense is of a man past his peak, his historic purpose fulfilled, limping on purposelessly, a hero out of time.

Every Thursday: eminent guests and student debaters meet in the hall. It has been a House of Commons for speechifying embryos since 1823. Points of order; references to honourable gentleman; rules-based pedantry; pomposity; ambition. “An incomparable school of politics”, Jan Morris called it.

The show is watched by the fish-cold marble faces of grown up to grandeur Union men: Gladstone, Asquith, Curzon, Macmillan, and Salisbury. To speak here is to join an exclusive club. To speak well here may be the first croaking syllables towards ultimate power. One day: you — yes, you boy! — can be a bust.

The Union is where Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg began their political ascents. But, as you may have gathered, Oxford has launched more than contemporary Tories. The university’s yellow-grey colleges educated Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Raleigh, the only English Pope, Earl Hague and Shelley, ten Viceroys of India, VS Naipaul and Bill Clinton. Oh, and the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper.

It was summer, 2019. People who read the FT were still unsure why Brexit happened, beyond knowing that whatever made it happen was not good. At that moment Kuper appeared, and wrote an article that was so delicious, and so put-all-the-dots-together, it immediately went viral. What machine spat out Brexit? Oxford. Which wackily irresponsible creche raised Boris Johnson? Oxford. The reason Kuper provided was not good. An old story (unearned privilege; naughty toffs) that has always chilled Britain’s fretful not quite upper-middle classes. It was just what Remainers wanted to read. Finally, an explanation that satisfied all their priors.

Now the viral article is a short and typical non-fiction book. Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Kuper’s story is simple. One afternoon he flicked through some old Cherwells, where he had been a student journalist in the late Eighties, and realised that the names there were the same ones bothering the pages of the Times in the late 2010s. Gove, Cameron, and Johnson; Hunt, Hannan, and Rees-Mogg. He had covered them back then, and here they were again, running Britain into the ground by levering it out of the EU. “Though we didn’t realise it, we were witnessing British power in the making,” Kuper writes of his time at Oxford.

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The Brexiteers were not just Brexiteers. They were Oxford Brexiteers. They belonged to a generation that faced no wars, no real poverty, no famines, and not a single earthquake. A generation “without tragedy” — if we ignore Edward St Aubyn, who drifted through Oxford in those years. Instead, la haute had Brideshead Revisited on ITV, champagne, strawberries, and the polished company of sloaney girls in floaty dresses. A dreamy epicurean garden world of velvet and lavender, where young men lofted Nigella Lawson through parties on a sedan chair, far from the Trade Unionists and Left-wing council officers who despised them all.

After Oxford they moved into opinion journalism, then to politics. Bored, nostalgic, and louche, they seized on Brexit as a Thing To Do, and for a game to play. Their dislike of Brussels was personal, not political. The EU might get in the way of their God-given, Oxford-inculcated right to rule. “Brexit was above all their generational grand project,” Kuper argues, “designed to protect the powers of their personal fiefdom of Westminster.”

Other than Dan Hannan, who is approvingly compared to the steely early Bolsheviks, Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers. Nevertheless, he is good on Boris. On the sad clown tensions; his “killer” cynicism; his studied Wooster-Waugh role-playing. Then again, no one left in London media should be in this game if they can’t file 1,000 classy words of Boris pop-psych at this point. As Kuper points out himself: “[Boris] possessed the political asset of being all too easy to write about.”

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As for Boris, so for Brexit. So easy to write about, if your aim is to titillate rather than explain. Did Brexit happen because Michael Gove, David Cameron and Boris Johnson learned that “the rules didn’t apply to them” in Oxford in the Eighties, as Kuper suggests? Did Brexit happen, as Fintan O’Toole argued in Heroic Failure, because England’s toffs ‘n’ plebs still harbour a sickly yearning to hear the sound of trumpets on the plains of Omdurman? And did Brexit happen, as every half-drunk Etonian I’ve met since June 2016 has insisted to me, because Boris Johnson got into Pop, and David Cameron didn’t? In a century, these tropes may be of sociological interest to historians, but they will not have much explanatory power.

Admit it: we all like a conspiracy theory. History becomes simpler that way. We can ignore material conditions, and argue that change comes about in the small rooms where men manufacture opinions. Chums is this kind of history. Kuper, like fellow Oxford man Cecil Rhodes before him, believes that ideas, not circumstances, ruthlessly organised and disseminated, are what move things.

Oxford can fool anyone there into thinking this way. Walk around cobbled Radcliffe Square at night, when it gets spooky and hushed, and you may believe that this private place is the inner sanctum of Britain. The centre of the centre, the bullseye, and the only place that really matters. The fact that none of this is true — there is no experience quite as shattering as sneaking into a high-altitude, Nobel Prize-winner stuffed seminar at All Soul’s and realising that half the room is as stupid as you are — doesn’t stop Kuper. “To understand power in today’s Britain,” he writes, “requires travelling back in time to the streets of Oxford, somewhere between 1983 and 1993.”

Oxford always loved a romantic tale like Chums, though Kuper would hate to think he’s written one. The university delights in being the mover behind massive historical events. Romantics say Oxford was responsible for the discovery of America, based on the fact that a paragraph from Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus gave Columbus the idea of a westward passage to India. When Roger Boyle devised his law of gas expansion in his grubby High Street lodgings in 1662, wasn’t he launching the Age of Steam? When Edmund Cartwright — Fellow of Magdalen — invented the power-loom in 1785, didn’t he make the Industrial Revolution inevitable? To this list Kuper adds Brexit. Another Oxford fantasy, like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and Carroll’s Wonderland. Made at the Union, delivered in Westminster.

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Kuper is far from romantic about Oxford though. As with the current Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, and many students there today, he seems embarrassed that it exists at all. Embarrassed — only after saying what a powerful and important and special place it is, even if it is powerful and important and special in negative ways.

Chums ends up baffled by Oxford. Kuper cannot see the point of the place in our supposed-to-be meritocratic age. Like Hooper walking through the Marchmain’s palatial house in Brideshead Revisited, Kuper is troubled. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense,” says Hooper, “one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

Kuper doesn’t trust the house to clean itself up. Outside forces must intervene, before young over-valeted men with long faces — he raises the ominous spectre of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nephew play-acting at the Union recently — get big ideas again. So make a use for it. Make it a postgraduate “Institute of Advanced Studies”, he says. Or go even more full FT: convert Oxford into a start-up hub, and make “even more money from corporate conferences and executive education”. He thinks this will make Britain a fairer place.

This is like cutting a man in half and telling him to dance. Kuper wants to maim Oxford — but why stop there? Once you have abolished the undergraduate system that has endured for eight centuries, you may as well bring it all down. Bulldoze it. Cull the Magdalen deer park. Pull down the Sheldonian, crater the Bodleian. Wouldn’t the Union make a wonderful bingo hall?

Don’t pretend Oxford can be fixed, or that it is more powerful than it actually is. Don’t pretend, as Kuper does, that countries can ever have justly selected ruling elites. Either shutter Oxford (and watch in horror as another elite arises from another elite forcing house) — or otherwise accept it for what it is, and always will be. A microcosm of British society: stratified, argumentative, semi-democratic, drunk. An artefact of cruel, cold beauty that will never be fair.

Neville was cunning, compact, obscurely dirty, always twitchily bothered by something, and vicious in small ways. And he was, like rats everywhere, derided. Neville, said Carlos Tevez, was a “sock-sucker”; less an enforcer of his manager’s wishes than a dogsbody, not a loyalist but a sycophant. Nobody, chuckled Jamie Carragher, wanted to grow up and be Gary Neville. His fellow players mocked him for travelling to away games with his own bowl, spoon, and box of Weetabix. The cereal, he touchingly remembered, “became my thing”.

A lack of imagination, doggedness, and blind loyalty are not bad qualities for a footballer to have. Neville might not “possess the natural talent of some of his team mates”, said his manager, but that just made him work harder. In an industry which rewards over-conditioning and astronaut dullness, Neville was both. In his playing days you could rely on Gary to be at home tucked up in bed every Friday night by 9pm. He retired widely regarded as the greatest English right-back of his generation, and widely despised outside of red Manchester.

Now the rat has found a sinking ship. In January Neville joined the Labour Party. By the turn of the year, he had already clashed with Edwina Currie on Good Morning Britain over Universal Credit, said many angry things about Brexit, and tweeted scathingly about Boris Johnson — essential requisites for a political career in England.

A few weeks ago Neville joined Keir Starmer for a dinner at Manchester’s fancy Vermillion restaurant. More than 700 people attended, which was the largest turnout for a Labour fundraiser in over a decade. He is being touted as a future MP, or Manchester Mayor. The prospect is being taken seriously in the city, where Neville owns a football club, businesses and a university. A Labour source told the press: “He’ll be a fantastic high-profile spokesperson for the party.”

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They are probably right. To understand why, you have to consider the public transformation he enjoyed in the last decade. After he retired, Neville joined Sky Sports as a pundit. Football punditry was a lazy towel-slapping, jowly blokes club back then, where the standard of analysis barely hovered above that offered by the drunkest bar-propper in your local.  

Neville smashed this decadent pundit aristocracy with Bolshevik ferocity. What made him so irritating to fans as a player — his spiky intensity — made him unmissable to them on television. Unlike so many other commentators, Neville treated punditry with the same control freakishness that fed his personal Weetabix approach to the game. When he signed for Sky he asked for a full-size replica of the Sky pundit’s jumbo touchscreen to be installed in his house — so he could practise during the close season. The only thing Andy Gray (Neville’s Sky predecessor) did in the close season was play golf. In a world where heard-it-a-million-times-before banter and indestructible clichés reigned, Neville was a revolution. He never did filler. Keira Knightley claimed Neville was her only reason for owning a television. “He is just amazing, absolutely fucking amazing!”

Television — the lights and mics, the producers and sets — acted on Neville like an addictive, galvanic drug. Its effects could be seen on a daily basis on Sky Sports. Four hours every Monday night, Saturday evenings, Sunday afternoons… He was, simply, wired. Clothed in sensible Dad-wear, Neville starts most shows controlled, armed with facts and statistics. He likes homely domestic metaphors — strikers compared to “burglars in the house” et cetera. He tells viewers that he is speaking in a “to be honest with you” capacity. We believe him. 

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By Will Lloyd

But it is only when things happen in the day’s game that he really hits his stride. And it is only when he gets angry about those things that he sprints. A violence creeps into his language: decisions are devastating, performances are shameful, substitutions are nonsensical, club boardrooms need cleansing, Dele Alli needs to sort himself out. The more he disagrees with other pundits the higher his voice, nasal at the best of times, climbs; the delivery is rat-tat-tat-tat, a squeaky machine gun hitting bullseye after bullseye. And then, when he is properly properly disgusted — as he was when six English clubs tried to join a breakaway European super league — he speaks less as Gary Neville than as a psychotic voodoo conduit for millions of properly properly disgusted fans.

So we have the pleasure of watching an immaculate machine threshing away. He had become something rare: a performer who defines a medium. But what makes Neville on Sky such perfect television is how utterly meaningless it all is. The stakes — this is football after all — are in the basement low, but Gary analyses the spectacle with the most unhinged Cromwellian zealotry.

But it’s not meaningless for Gary. He told Beth Rigby this year that he used to think sport should be above politics, but now he has changed his mind. Football — and this is the new standard view — is not entertainment, but a way of twisting social dials, of changing things for the better. To those, like Neville and other “activist super players” such as Marcus Rashford, this narrative makes sense. Football changed their lives. Why can’t it change others’?

Sadly, football has a well-defined role in England. It won’t be altered by good-intentions, or cynical PR campaigns, or cynical PR campaigns with good-intentions. We are a nation of voyeurs and fantasists, fond of gladiator entertainments. Most of us don’t play football, but we enjoy watching heavily-drilled millionaire athletes do it for us. Corporate billions have raised the standard of the game to a fluid, balletic excellence that makes it the ultimate artificial excitement. In the fattest country in Europe, this makes football not another branch of politics, but a hysterical distraction from the drabness of English life. 

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That is the context of Gary Neville, future politician. The divisive player who became a unifying pundit, deluded about the sport he watches, and the country he lives in. He only became interested in politics after Brexit. Neville had exactly the right age profile (middle-ish), employment (media), and number of Twitter followers (millions), to be freaked out by 2016. He started saying things like “silence isn’t good enough anymore”. Retweets, as in so many cases, made him think he was right.

When Neville talks about politics he sounds the way he does when he talks about football. The same homespun metaphors, the same insistence on leadership, teams, passion, honesty, and integrity. The government “socially engineers our minds”; Boris Johnson is a “bluffer” who he’d love to tear “to shreds” at the dispatch box. This is an understanding of politics that never rises above “my Dad could beat up your Dad” — though maybe that’s all politics really is. There are faint stirrings of a Left-nationalism, like Keir Starmer’s, in what Neville says, but this is a weirdly authoritarian strain.

Neville wants people to work as hard as he does, enjoy champagne if they can afford it, send the Tories out onto the training field to pick up the cones and bibs, and for every political leader to resemble Sir Alex Ferguson, arguably the most tyrannical manager English football has ever seen. He has never done an interview that touched on politics without mentioning how much he “hates division”. As if democracy can be conducted without disagreement. As if he thinks society can be as thoroughly organised as 11 men on a pitch were by Sir Alex. (“My politics is driven by what I saw in the changing room,” he says.) These do not feel like deeply thought through views. They are extrapolations from an unusual life, repackaged, simplistically, as vulgar common sense. For this reason, they may prove to be enormously appealing to the British public. Politics, like football punditry, rewards generalisation. 

He remains coy about his political future. “I’m not saying never,” he told Nick Robinson in January. But some outlines of success are there. There is the shadow of his enterprises across Manchester that give him a honed-on-the-grindstone businessman’s appeal. There is the broadcasting advantage that his Lancashire tones, with the appearance of frank outspokenness they generate on radio and television, endow him with. There is the tuck-in-your-shirt simplicity of his message — work hard and be fair — that a potted plant could understand. Neville could act as a bridge between the public sector upper middle class that runs Labour, and the working classes the party no longer understands. 

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Neville has already demonstrated that he can fundraise. And unlike Keir Starmer, who’s pinkly filigreed cheeks and blubbery mien usually make him look tearfully hungover whenever he’s on television, Neville can communicate plausibly. If he can sell Starmer with the same calculated mania he sells Monday night games between Burnley and Aston Villa, Neville will be an asset. 

But if Gary Neville is the answer for Labour, what exactly is the question? One asked from desperation. Neville is admired, competent, and successful — none of this applies to Starmer’s party. Up against a government that has one lonely area of competence (sending anti-tank rocket launchers to Ukraine) and nothing else going for it, they are about level in the polls. Against a shattered and despised Johnson, shouldn’t they be ten points clear?

Labour is shattered too. Millions of pounds a year in legal bills from anti-Semitism lawsuits are crippling the party. It continues to fry in the fat of its own confusion over women’s rights. And the sense that it is aloofly ruled by moral invigilators, high on sanctimony and traumatised by marginalia, hasn’t gone away. Like poor Dele Alli, Labour still needs to sort itself out. 

It’s a bigger redemption job than a celebrity, however respected, can manage. That’s no disgrace. From adulthood Neville only knew trophies in football and television. He had to struggle, but in gilded conditions, surrounded by generational talents — Ferguson, Giggs, Ronaldo. Labour is neither gilded, nor laden with talent. It is not primed for power. 

Flash forward a year. Prospective MP Gary Neville is doing the rounds on the breakfast shows, hating every minute of it. The sugar rush of novelty is over. This game is different to the one he played on the pitch. There he could be as rattish as he wanted; politics turns out to be more difficult than tweeting out opinions. Faced with ambush-happy journalists, not pundit colleagues, he has to field harder queries than: was Paul Scholes better than Frank Lampard? Questions like: “Can a woman have a penis?”

Labour can’t answer that question. Until it does, you suspect they will need more than Gary Neville to return to power. 

Long before SARS-CoV-2 was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat, Hancock worked on the student radio station at the University of Oxford.  A contemporary, Gina Coladangelo, reminisced that Matthew read the sport “because he wasn’t good enough to do the news.” Another remembered Hancock as the “butt of everyone’s humour”. He wanted to go to Westminster and be an MP.

He nearly blows himself up. Guildford, 2001. Young Matt does an election leaflet for the Tory candidate Nick St Aubyn. Instead of saying that St Aubyn wanted to “unite” the community, a 22-year-old Hancock writes: “I want to untie the community”. The leaflet lands in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn loses his seat by 538 votes.

Shortly after becoming a junior minister, Hancock compares himself to Pitt the Younger, Disraeli, and Churchill; their achievements are quite well known, but he will make history on his own terms in 2018 when he becomes the first MP to launch a personal app: The Matt Hancock App.

Its creation leads to the memorable onscreen prompt “Matt Hancock would like to access your photos”  — and he appears to get them even if users deny the ‘The Matt Hancock App’ access to their libraries. A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s office admits, “We are checking reports about the operation of The Matt Hancock App”.

In a party where the average age of a member is 57, Hancock appears young and bright. He is marked out by the early patronage of Osborne, who says of his protege: “In a political system that is full of Eeyores we could do with a few more Tiggers.”

That nickname fits well. Tigger Matt has the tamped energy of the short man, over-exercised. Enthusiastic; readily and sycophantically agreeable. His colleagues mock him — Matt Wankcock and Matt Handjob will be insider nicknames for him — but they are usually reluctant to fire him, even when it makes sense to do so.

***

As the Conservative Party tortures itself in 2019, Hancock decides he would like to be leader. Or raise his profile. So he attacks Boris Johnson and a hard Brexit: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”

He fuck fuck’s himself into sixth place in the first ballot of the party’s MPs. Then he withdraws; he spends a month on television and radio praising the new leader… Boris Johnson. Hancock expects a promotion for his breathy verbal parkour. He keeps his job as Health Secretary instead.

To run the NHS is no Conservative’s idea of a dream. Neville Chamberlain was the last Tory Health Secretary to become Prime Minister. The service itself is a patched-up patchwork, a tax sink, an organisation colossally vast and maddeningly confusing. Hancock’s real brief is to make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall apart when people are looking.

The pandemic is the greatest health crisis to face Britain since mad George III thought that an oak tree in Kew Gardens was Napoleon’s ambassador. Fate, or a lab-leak, means that soon everybody will look at the NHS.

***

A relaxed, Prime Minister-less COBRA meeting is held at the end of January 2020. After chairing it Hancock tells reporters the risk Covid posed to the public was “low”. On the same day a study published by Chinese doctors in The Lancet suggests SARS-CoV-2 is comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed around 50 million people.

The risk to the UK is deemed so low that on 24 February the Government supplies 1,800 pairs of goggles, 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China. Looking back at meetings that month, one senior Department for Health official remembers thinking “‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’”

***

A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.

Loo paper soon begins to disappear nationwide. Hancock is rolled out — he was always being rolled out, like a new carpet to be trodden on — into a breakfast TV studio to deny that the Government wanted to massacre the Grannys. “Our goal is to protect life and our policy is to fight the virus.”

Then Neil Ferguson releases his controversial paper. It claims hundreds of thousands will die if Britain is left to take the virus on the chin. Sage advises the Government to embark on a full lockdown that day.

It arrives on 26 March 2020, as Covid cases double every 72- hours. Between 89% and 94% of the public support lockdown. And the Grannys? Care home deaths accounted for 40% of Covid-19 deaths in England and Wales during the pandemic.

***

Like other ministers, after the passage of the Coronavirus Act, Hancock develops war fever. “Our generation has never been tested like this”, he writes to a nation frantically, pointlessly washing its hands. “Our grandparents were, during the Second World War, when our cities were bombed during the Blitz… they pulled together in one gigantic national effort.” The allegory is both ugly and lazy, but Britain is a country where poppies are made to wear poppies.

***

Prince Charles opens the first Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel centre in London. He says the Nightingale “will be a shining light”. The hospital is constructed in nine days, and holds 500 extra intensive care unit beds. (For every hundred thousand members of the population the UK has 7.3 intensive care beds — less than Spain, Greece, and Estonia. This lack of provision will mean more deaths.)

More Nightingales open across the country. They cost the taxpayer 500 million pounds. Only three of the seven hospitals end up treating patients. They are described by one MP as a “massive white elephant conjured up by Matt Hancock to create a good headline”.

***

It’s not really worth it, going outside. A family of five is sent home by the police in Conwy after being caught having a day at the seaside. They scuttle back to Merseyside. Police in Derbyshire “divide opinion” when they use drones to film people walking in the Peak District. A “major incident” is declared when thousands travel to Bournemouth beach, to swim, eat ice cream, and burn in the sun. (Belatedly, it is revealed that the “major incident” did not lead to a spike in Covid cases.)

Speaking to Andrew Marr, a concerned Hancock threatens to ban outdoor exercise. “Let’s not have a minority spoiling it for everybody.”

***

Nothing works properly. The Test and Trace App doesn’t work. PPE doesn’t work — because it’s all out of date. Protecting care homes doesn’t work. Dido Harding doesn’t work. The Civil Service literally doesn’t work. Big-hitter commentators start saying that the entire British state doesn’t work. It is described as “simultaneously overcentralised and weak at its centre”.

But ‘The Matt Hancock’ app still functions. In May 2020 the Telegraph reports that it is becoming a “virtual home for online pranksters and trolls”. Posts to the ‘Have Your Say’ section include drawings of cocks, general abuse, and a date invitation for the (then) married Health Secretary.

When ‘The Matt Hancock’ app is updated a year later, access to the ‘Have Your Say’ section is hidden. One of the last posts read: “Is there a portal on here where I can be awarded a Government contract for an area I have little experience of scale please?”

***

Hancock always looks caught between a giggle and a sob. A new round of Covid restrictions makes casual sex illegal. Or at least that’s how Sky News’ Kay Burley interprets the guidance when she interviews him about it. “You are saying that no social distancing is needed in established relationships,” she notes. “But what about people who are not in an established relationship?”

The Health Secretary, embracing his role as national sex cop, confirms that Government rules do ban shagging someone who is not your normal partner. Apropos of nothing, he adds that, fortunately “I’m in an established relationship”.

A few weeks later, the Times reveals that Gina Coladangelo was appointed to a £15,000-a-year advisory PR role in the Health Ministry. The appointment was never declared. Coladangelo and Hancock are described as “close friends”. A source tells the paper: “Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina. She knows everything.”

***

He appears to cry on television when the first Pfizer jabs are stuck into the arms of two pensioners: Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare. “It’s been a tough year for so many people,” he sobs, rubbing his waterless, unreddened eyes.

The Government spends £12 billion on vaccines. Total pandemic spending is estimated to reach £372 billion. Research finds that under-30s will be disproportionately forced to bear the brunt of these costs. They are described as the “packhorse generation”. The median age of death from Covid is 83 years old. There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.

William Shakespeare dies naturally within a few months of taking the vaccine.

***

In January 2021, a week after the virus death toll tops 100,000, a focus group asks some ordinary people questions about the Health Secretary. A man called Jason compares Hancock to Ian Beale from Eastenders — “He wants people to feel sorry for him.” Asked what sort of car he would be, mother of two Donna suggests that he would be “something that breaks down.”

***

During a committee hearing Dominic Cummings says that Hancock should “have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly”. Cummings then puts a WhatsApp screenshot on his blog that shows the Prime Minister describing Matt as both “hopeless” and “fucking hopeless”.  When he is interviewed about the message, Hancock says: “Boris has apologised for the way that came over.”

***

The story and the footage and the photo are exquisitely simple. After nearly 18 months of tiers, colour-codes, R-numbers, powerpoint slides, and graphs, here is something everyone could understand: a hand on an arse.

Yes, Hancock’s downfall was exquisitely simple. His affair with Gina Coladangelo was unambiguous. It made sense like fairy tales make sense. The Princess in the tower must let her hair down. The wolf is wearing sheep’s clothing. The apple offered by the witch is poisoned. The politician who spent the pandemic agitating for the harshest restrictions, who would describe Professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown sex fiasco as a “matter for the police”, who ensured that the public could be fined for sitting on park benches, who threatened them with 10-year prison sentences for breaking quarantines, this ogre of the new common sense, would — of course! — be breaking all his rules.

The press is devastating, and relentless. With a deep understanding of public humiliation, the Queen describes Matthew as a “poor man”. He resigns, his only consolation being one of the most Googled news stories of 2021.

***

Hancock keeps coming back, like Covid. His head pops out of the ground. Phillip Schofield asks him: “Was it your dyslexia that meant you misread the social distancing guidelines?” The nation laughs, bitterly. It is reported that, off air, Hancock “almost seemed euphoric… He didn’t seem to mind being the butt of the joke.” He has returned to his student days, but made them the business of the entire country. He buys stonewashed jeans, and new turtlenecks. He does podcast interviews, and goes to the BRIT awards. He says he is writing a book for Harper Collins. Harper Collins says he is not writing a book for Harper Collins, and Hancock never mentions it again. A role with the UN is torpedoed, and a comeback video — unanimously described as “cringe” — is swiftly deleted. It is impossible to tell, as with England’s experience of three lockdowns, whether he is enjoying all this, or if he is the saddest man in the world.

***

Everybody wanted a lesson from the last 24 months. Neat, comprehensible wisdom. An intelligible narrative. They wanted to say that it finally proved that Germany was a better country than England, or they wanted to say that our vaccine programme proved the EU was useless. They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character, the flaws in our state, or otherwise be used to justify every kind of pet project, ideological hang-up, or personal vendetta. There was no narrative line. All that the pandemic proved was that what happened a hundred times before in history could happen to us too.

***

The number of children referred for specialist mental health help rises above one million for the first time in 2021. Cases involving those 18 and under increase by 26% during the pandemic. The Royal College of Psychiatrists warns it is “becoming an impossible situation to manage”.

People, including Hancock, like to talk about learning the lessons of the pandemic. So we can prepare better for the next one. They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.

26 March 2020 — 26 March 2022

To impress the English you must be overly kind to dogs and horses, extremely wealthy, or gushingly enthusiastic about football. Abramovich was at least two of these. Previously unknown outside of Russia, his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003 made him England’s favourite oligarch.

He stood for all the others. Like them, Abramovich bought Francis Bacons, yachts, and football clubs. He was expensively divorced. He purchased a Kensington townhouse for 90 million pounds, then plotted grandiose subterranean extensions to it. His security detail were told they were not allowed to bring firearms into the West London private schools his shoal of children swam through. His weirdly thin background, like his face, was enigmatic. His trajectory — from penniless orphan, to middling rubber duck salesman, to billionaire tycoon — mirrored the unlikely CVs and fluke-strewn ascents of so many mega-wealthy products of Russia’s insane Nineties. Unlike Abramovich though, many of his old rivals and partners from that time met… abnormal ends.

But so what? Abramovich entered London high society when views of Putin’s Russia were charged with hopeless optimism. Putin, wrote Neal Acheson in 2004, was an “agent of sweeping change”. His reforms might one day make “a relatively law-abiding and governable Russia” a fact, rather than a dream. In the academy, favourable verdicts (grandly blessed by Perry Anderson in 2015) rained down on Russia. It was a vibrant, investor-friendly middle-income country; it was a respectable member of OECD; it was less statist in its control of energy markets than Brazil! Abramovich then, was an envoy from a developing country, not a one-man image-softening operation sent from an anguished, ramshackle, authoritarian state, still held together and animated by the most salient, deathless force in Russian political history — imperial ambition.

These wonky arguments added a watery academic gloss to London’s embrace of Russians like Abramovich. Ever since John Major’s Conservatives introduced ‘Golden Visas’ that fished for millionaire investors in the Nineties, every British government, and London Mayors Johnson and Livingstone, had courted Russian money. A butler class formed to enthusiastically count the cash.

Behind the biscuit tin version of London — Union Jacks on the Mall, Notting Hill selfies, and recumbent deer in Richmond Park — was a bleaker reality. To arrive here from Russia was to find networks of bankers, estate agents, accountants, wealth managers, PR flacks, politicians, and a legal system all eager to take your money, over-educate your children, Harley Street your wife, Isle of Man your taxes, gag journalists, and angelify your reputation.

None of them cared where the money came from. London could bury your secrets for you. “This country’s nothing but an off-shore laundry”, spits Logan Roy in Succession, “for turning evil into hard currency.”

That quiet part was rarely said out loud. The English are a discreet and sentimental people after all. In 2005, Ken Livingstone, at a Westminster address to 1,200 Russian political and business leaders, invoked the “warmth and sympathy” the English felt for their old wartime ally against Hitler. Sympathy was a sound basis for deal-making: “Russians,” he said, “are welcome in this city, both as individuals and for the business that they bring.” Since 1998, according to anti-money laundering groups, around a hundred billion pounds of Russian money has washed through London, and into property and commodities. The welcome was accepted.

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If Livingstone represented the grasping yet oddly dewy-eyed side of Londongrad’s rise, his successor articulated the jokey cynicism the English felt towards the oligarchs. Boris Johnson was just as enthusiastic about Russian money as Livingstone, but prepared to laugh — like so many other toff-adjacent Brits — at Russian vulgarity too. In 2012 he urged oligarchs to flood London’s courts with libel actions. “If one oligarch feels defamed by another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego,” he told the CBI’s annual conference that year. “I have no shame in saying to the injured spouses of the world’s billionaires: if you want to take him to the cleaners, take him to the cleaners in London…”

It was like a joke. Except the estranged wives and litigious oligarchs were components of Putin’s increasingly despotic regime. The key figures of Russian state capitalism, who were now building nests in London, had begun the 2000s calling the President Mr Putin. Then they called him Boss. Then — another joke, at least to begin with — Tsar. Abramovich found ways to deal with Putin. Against a backdrop where oligarchs were assassinated, exiled and imprisoned, the Chelsea owner did everything he could in order to keep himself safe.

The pair were close. Just how close was revealed by Abramovich’s successful defence of a landmark high court claim brought by his fellow oligarch and mentor Boris Berezovsky in 2012. “Mr Abramovich enjoyed very good relations with President Putin and others in power at the Kremlin,” the judgement recorded. “It was also clear that Mr Abramovich had privileged access to President Putin, in the sense that he could arrange meetings and discuss matters with him.”

That somebody who had folded so neatly into the scrim of English life — celebrated on Stamford Bridge’s terraces to the tune of the Only Fools And Horses theme, lunching on his yacht with Sir Paul McCartney — was so close to a despot ought to have caused alarm. The press preferred to write about his fleet of supercars, his record-breaking transfer deals, and a floated West End musical about Abramovich’s life. The Premier League’s attitude was summed up by its then chief executive, Richard Scudamore: “Football is not a business but a sport dependent on… speculation… there’ll always be rich men ready to pour more money into clubs just to be part of the game.”

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Abramovich was not on equal terms with Putin, even as he became lauded in London. He was a boyar to Putin’s Tsar. “I don’t think there is a percent of independence in him”, said one analyst who knew Abramovich in the Nineties. He was just like the others. The oligarchs’ power and privilege was theoretical, and utterly dependent on Putin. He could ruin them on a whim, as he did to Boris Berezovsky soon after he came to power. The truth was that the oligarchs were more like hostages than independent actors, more like courtiers than policy-makers, and more driven by venality than belief. Putin made them dependents, and walked them over a plank with a very deep drop.

Perhaps English politicians such as Johnson and Livingstone thought men like Abramovich could be moderated by the West, and could help to remake Russia in its image, as the academics thought was already happening. None chose to see the umbilical cords that ran back to the Kremlin. As the 2000s passed into the 2010s, it looked like the West was becoming as corrupt and irrational and nihilistic as Russia, rather than bringing Russia in line with its rules based system. “It was as if a virus,” wrote Catherine Belton in Putin’s People, “was being injected into it.”

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Now the virus is burning itself out. Two weeks of war have forced British politicians to shift 30 years of oligarch-tickling policy. They would no longer be able to take whatever they wanted. Abramovich has been hit with sanctions ranging from asset freezes to travel bans. Johnson says there will be no “safe havens” for Putin allies, not even in London’s courts. Yesterday’s West End final edition of the Evening Standard: “ROMAN’S EMPIRE IN RUINS.” Discarded copies, with crumpled Abramovich faces staring blankly out from them drifted through Berkeley Square.

Given his wealth and notoriety, Abramovich barely left a paw print on English life. Yes, he increased the bank balance of butler class functionaries; yes he will most probably leave Chelsea, his plaything and ornament, tarnished. But his wallflower shyness and refusal to be interviewed make him a ghost. Just as he reportedly moved through his A-List New Years Eve parties on St Barts barely saying anything, Abramovich’s time in England will be defined by his silences not his actions. He will not be ruined though. So much of his wealth is stored off-shore in secret bank accounts that there will always be a fallback for him.

Londongrad will be rebranded, and its lackeys will find new clients. Money from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and above all China will need to be laundered. Their tycoons will need crisis PR. Their powerful urges to litigate against each other will need to be satiated. Other Romans are here already. They keep buying football clubs. Not even war will break London’s filthy habits.

Making colleagues nod and bootlick when they have no desire to do so is the essence of power. But the despot feels the need for this sham acknowledgment not to demonstrate strength. At root he is irritable, morbid, totally oversensitive. Watching sycophants crawl along marble floors confirms his deep suspicion: human beings are low creatures. This confirmation makes him feel better.

Imagine we are allowed to send one writer into the Kremlin, with the intention of translating its walls and turrets and atavisms into literature. I’d choose Ryszard Kapuściński for the assignment. Nobody ever captured despotism with such vividness; no other witness, and no other stylist comes close. He would have seen the table, and known.

For much of his professional life Kapuściński was communist Poland’s lone foreign correspondent. He was always broke, being shot at, sneaking on to planes, and taking notes. Reporting for PAP, the Polish news agency, he made the brokenness of the world his subject. In Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and eventually with Imperium (1993), in the ashes of the USSR.

“I was an envoy,” he wrote, “engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate.” As envoy, Kapuściński witnessed 27 revolutions. Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin, Iran… Rulers changed; governments fell. Surfing the roar and the blood, the only thing Kapuściński thought constant was “helplessness”. A revolution like Iran’s “demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it annihilates the ideals that called it into being”. Experience taught him to fear desperate crowds chanting slogans.

Three elements combine frictionlessly in his work. There is Kapuściński the reporter, who hangs out everywhere with anyone, observing perpetually, a world-class noticer. Insanely brave and desperately lonely, he is nearly killed by snakes and bullets. He bypasses high politics and slums it in the places where maggots wriggle under people’s skin. This is the Kapuściński who said: “I don’t want to stop at observation. I want to take part.” Then there is Kapuściński the excursive essayist, the expert on anything, who can explain the tragedy of Shi’ism, or the history of the Iranian oil industry. Finally there is Kapuściński the poet, the imaginative genius, armed with metaphor, simile, and a subtle Aesopian language that can hold the universe in a rain drop.

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Wonderfully, vast areas of Kapuściński’s life and work turned out to be lies. The envoy was an occasional spy and willing informer for Poland’s communists. The supposedly journalistic accounts he rendered were exposed: tattered and hole-ridden. His transmissions were deceptions. Kapuściński, often described late in life as the “greatest war correspondent in the world” and “the reporter’s reporter”, had been spinning fantasies for decades. Serious journalists hated this. They were ashen, and felt cheated. They shouldn’t have been shocked. You only needed to read a sentence of Kapuściński to know he was more than a journalist: he was an artist. He had to allow himself more. His ultimate creation was himself.

The character was mottled with fictions. Had he really awaited execution by Belgian mercenaries at Usumba airfield in the Sixties? Did he genuinely witness a massacre in Mexico City in 1968? Was he actually in Santiago for the Pinochet Coup in 1973? Nope: lie, lie, lie. He did not meet Che Guevara before his death in a seething Bolivian jungle. Nor did he meet Patrice Lumumba, nor did he watch fish deflesh the corpses of Idi Amin’s opponents that bobbed on the waters of Lake Victoria. Did his father escape the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers, as Kapuściński said he did? Oh, you better believe it’s a lie.

When a friend confronted him with the truth that a Tanzanian riot he wrote about was, in fact, utterly different to his account of it, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter.” He maintained that formal objectivity was the real lie. Nobody was impartial. Trying to be was the fantasy.

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Adam Hochschild called Kapuściński’s work “magic journalism”. A genre all of his own. And like every good magician Kapuściński was a con artist. Since the full reveal of his lies in 2010 many have chosen to place the emphasis on the con, not the art. But I’d forgive almost anything to read a good paragraph. Kapuściński tuned more of those than most. Many truths are less profound — and frankly, less entertaining — than most of Kapuściński’s lies. The world suffers from a deficit of good paragraphs. It has more than enough facts.

And they’re not straightforward lies either. He liked to make wild literary images stand place for the facts of whole empires. In Imperium he states the simple data of the USSR’s size, twenty-two million square kilometres, with continental borders longer than the equator. So far, so factual. Then he goes further. Kapuściński says that he has never seen these borders without “thick coils of barbed wire.” In the constant snows, heats, and sand storms of the Imperium, the wire quickly deteriorates. The wire must be replaced — “one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.” (Can one assume?) But then he goes even further.

What about the prison camps? They must need wire too! What about the wiring for atomic ranges, barracks, warehouses!? Multiply, he demands, the amount of wire needed by the number of years the USSR existed for… That’s why nobody could buy a spoon or a hammer in Smolensk or Omsk in 1987! All the raw materials were “used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.” He imagines the most important telephone call one imperial official could make to another being: “Are you all properly wired in?” The whole flight of fancy is daft. Completely untrue. But does it express the “essence” of the USSR — that it was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, essentially an enormous open-air prison — yes. Like Tony Montana, Kapuściński always tells the truth, even when he lies.

So we parachute Kapuściński into the Kremlin to uncover the “essence” of the place, and of Putin. His credentials for the task, though faked, are peerless. Kapuściński planned, though did not complete, a trilogy on absolute power, its consequences, and its downfall. The two books he did produce, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982), describe the rule and overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Iran’s Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The third, clinching book would have been about Idi Amin; for some time Kapuściński kept a hand-drawn diagram of the Ugandan despot’s brain in his Warsaw flat. As soon as the USSR began to tremble during the Gorbachev era, Kapuściński realised he had other things to describe.

The Shah and the Emperor are different but the same. Kapuściński plays the surreal medievalism of the Ethiopian court for laughs. After the Emperor’s undoing he claims to have tracked down every flunkey: the pillow-bearer, who slipped the appropriate cushion under Selassie’s feet when he sat on thrones built for taller emperors; the servant who followed the Selassie’s dog around with a satin cloth, ready to wipe away the urine it habitually sprayed on visiting dignitaries; the Minister of the Pen, and the Keeper of the Third Door, and the Servants of the Bed Chamber… Like the Shah’s poets, generals, and economists, the Emperor’s lackeys cringe, push, and jostle.

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Despots seek abjectly loyal men. Their inner circles are composed of galley slaves, without any autonomy. Their property and their lives are always at risk. This is Putin’s world too. “The smart oligarchs get how things work here and the dumb ones aren’t oligarchs any more,” a senior Kremlin official told the Financial Times this week. “Everyone who doesn’t like it is out, or in prison.”

In Kapuściński’s imagination despotism is a guise. He depicts the Shah and the Emperor as actors, with Iran and Ethiopia as tragic stages. The Shah performed “a one character play, and the actor was also a director. Everyone else was an extra.” The aged Selassie weighs a mere fifty kilograms. His knees are stiff and he can barely walk. But he understands his role; he is a “theatrical paternalist”. When watched “he forced a certain elasticity into his muscles, with great effort, so that he moved with dignity”. Everyone, despot included, is forced to pretend. Think of Putin’s “gunslinger gait”. Farcical dissimulation flows from the top down.

Society under the despot is fatalistic and paranoid. Iran and Ethiopia are choked and immobile places. The people exist largely to be spied on. The Emperor’s courtiers are embarrassed that there even are Ethiopians. They lament “provinces where the people are depressingly savage, pagan and naked; without instructions from the police they might do something that might offend His Majesty’s dignity”.

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Iran’s difference with Ethiopia is oil. The Shah gets drunk on it. Like Putin, he confuses petro-billions for strength, wisdom and authority. Kapuściński sees oil as “a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts”. The filthy liquid, and all the billions, poison the Iranians who control it. Western operators scramble — as they have done in Russia for decades — to pick scraps from the table. They ignore the secret police, and the vanished journalists, because the pickings are so sweet.

The Westerners ingratiate themselves with a new class: “the petro-bourgeoisie”. They produce nothing but consume restlessly. The only thing Kapuściński’s Iranian oligarchs don’t buy are English football clubs. In the sight of cramped towns and the sullen majority, the new class “mounts an exhibition of the Iranian dolce vita, knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism.” Do the upper echelons realise their elegant lives are being played out on a volcano’s edge?

In both cases the mixture of ever more isolated courts and rulers with an ever more immiserated population, eventually produces the explosion that destroys the regime. Though never made explicit, that was Kapuściński’s lesson for the communists who ruled Poland for most his life, and for today’s despots: you will miscalculate in the end. The despot pursues unpopular military adventures, he promises too much, and he is no longer able to see himself from the outside. Their tables stretch longer, and longer still. His people become conscious of the “subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence”. The moment they snap — and Kapuściński calls the timing of such moments “the greatest riddle known to history” — it ends.

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The Shah tries everything. He shoots protestors, and promises democracy. His prisons overflow and they empty out. Repression and liberalisation do an ugly, jolting dance. The despot does not know which partner to choose. In Ethiopia, the Emperor begins to give up; “He was too old to stop the impending avalanche.” All is in vain. In Iran the people “simply did not want a Shah any more”. The performance ends, the lights go out, and the despot trudges off stage.

Despotisms, like great art, linger after they finish. Kapuściński lied about many things, but he was under no illusions about the fate of the despot’s audience. If life was a film they would achieve catharsis. They kill the despot. Their flags fly above the capitol’s square. Flowers are pushed down gun barrels. Kapuściński knew this was wrong. In the real world real damage cannot be undone.

His exiled Shah jets forlornly between five star ski resorts. His senile Emperor is left under house arrest. Endings that are minimal, not maximal. But the audience, their peoples? You can remove the despot, you can use his table for firewood, except he has already salted the earth. Psychologically and socially despotism lives on. What is left behind in Kapuściński’s fables of Ethiopia and Iran is “an empty sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly”.

His fable of today’s Kremlin would end this way if he were alive to write it. There are 144 million Russians. Putin may be assassinated by one of them during a palace coup. They may fill the streets until the pressure scuttles him. He will be removed somehow, one day. But if Kapuściński is right, Putin will live through what he’s done to his people for decades yet.

Stumblingly, young Nige is starting to live out the two contradictory impulses that will frame his life. One: a conservative’s respect for, and needy desire to be part of, institutions. Two: a libertarian’s outsider fantasy of bomb-tossing nonconformity. Yeah, the boy loves the club, but he quite fancies running a bulldozer through those front doors too. Luck will let him do both.

Nigel Farage, for all his talents, was lucky. He was time-and-place fortunate. His pampered enemies underestimated him, and thought him a punchline until the joke brought their house down. Many of them were no life experience professional political hermits like Danny Alexander or Ed Miliband. They raised no whirlwinds. Mostly, as David Foster Wallace put it, they weren’t “enough like human beings even to hate.” They were overpumped with focus-grouped shrewdness, not human instinct.

Farage was messily and chaotically human. He is, in that dreaded national formulation, a character. He has an anuran face, an aquatic aspect — the ideally fishy tribune of an island where the moss is still damp and the rain is still thin.

In the 2010s he smashed through the Overton Window like a breeze block. First with Ukip, then with the Brexit Party. And even as he did so, he was being very badly behaved — not that this ever made a scratch in his popular image as a plain-speaking common sense merchant. Fortune favours the charming miscreant sometimes. The rest was Britain’s exit from the European Union.

At least, that’s the life that emerges from Michael Crick’s new biography of Farage. One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage feels, quite simply, long. Five hundred beigely judicious pages read like 5,000. Crick’s annoyingly pokey reportorial style — a staple of Channel Four News for decades — is absent here. It’s a dull, reasonably objective attempt to tell the truth. There is voyeurism (we buy books like this to peep through the bedroom keyhole, don’t we?) but not a single nose-turning jab of biographical GBH.

Crick comes perilously close to making Farage… boring. He drowns him under mudslides of irrelevant detail. There are paceless accounts of infighting among Ukip’s National Executive Committee; a whole chapter about a dodgy party call centre in Kent; more information on Neil Hamilton’s time as an MEP than even the most deranged politico could be expected to digest. Still, sanding away the trivia reveals two major themes: alcohol and luck. In Farage’s life they combine and recombine like clouds on a windy day.

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His luck was personal and political. Ukip’s rise was only possible after the unexpected death of the wall-eyed billionaire tyrant James Goldsmith in 1997. His demise took his Referendum Party, Ukip’s lavishly financed rival, into the soil with him. Tony Blair’s decision to approve a new proportional voting system for the UK’s European parliamentary elections gave Ukip their first big breaks — and Farage’s first media appearances proper — in 1999.

Later on, Farage was sceptical about the need for a referendum. Ukip’s central policy was so outrageously unthinkable for most of Farage’s career that, in spite of his crashingly loud public idealism, it seems like he doubted whether it could ever happen. His electoral successes (not luck) eventually pushed David Cameron into promising a vote on exiting the EU in 2013 — but it was Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015 that made the referendum happen.

During the campaign, Farage had the lowest personal popularity rating of any of the major party leaders. Jeremy Corbyn was more popular. Farage did have political nous, though. Like Cummings, he understood that the old Left and Right labels were meaningless. “We don’t want to represent a wing,” he said in 2004, “but the heart and wishbone of the nation.” He didn’t think that English politics had changed since the 17th century. “You are either a cavalier, a democrat, and a libertarian, or you are a doctrinaire, morally intolerant roundhead.” He had identified one of the oldest, deepest, most durable divisions on the island. Spookily, the political map of the Brexit vote ended up resembling the regional distribution of support for the King, Court and Tories against Parliament, Merchants and Whigs in the Civil War. Except in 2016 the cavaliers won. Whoops.

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For years, Ukip suffered from the pandemonium of being a party staffed entirely by cavaliers. Crick (without any sense of humour) gives the impression that the whole trembling structure could come crashing down at any moment. But Farage’s luck holds. The early Ukip days are clogged with writs, squabbles, and changes to office locks. The dramatis personae are livestock auctioneers, umbrella makers, undertakers, investment brokers, hoteliers, Rowan Atkinson’s brother, and a barrister described, in a simile that is too fun to be Crick’s, as “an escapee from a Joanna Trollope novel”. Tiny factions of them argue obscurely in the bitter wilderness.

Like Shakespearean fools, they tell unspeakable truths and babblingly predict a future others cannot see. The first full-length account of the party, Mark Daniels’ Cranks and Gadflies, described the membership as “idiots, paranoiacs, and conspiracy theorists.” Daniels — real name Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker — was also Ukip’s press officer at the time. Farage admitted they were all “bumbling amateurs”.

Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane — “rather like a tractor” Farage thought — would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. “I just hope the plane doesn’t blow up and crash,” Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. “Oh, fuck!” said Farage.

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​​He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life he’d escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.

Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke “fluent human”.

​​He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a “shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best”. He was right. At times he seemed to hold England’s spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.

Anger wasn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: “Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that.’” He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.

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Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEP’s in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. “His ability to get by on a few hours’ sleep,” says Aaron Banks, “even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.”

It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farage’s gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was “not actually very confident. He’s quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.”

Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the public’s mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.

Crick’s biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesn’t tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesn’t have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? “Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union.” Well, duh.

Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; he’s now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.

Of all the 2010s populists — Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry — only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.

It was less than half an hour before Gina Miller was due to launch her new political party, True & Fair, in a Westminster conference centre. Other than the bald man, there was one person in the room — me. There is scaling back, and there are bloody massacres. Dutifully, I began eating one of the 50 croissants laid out for journalists. Someone had to.

He was a PR, and said that it was his job to handle the press. Handle: like a dog, or a problem. It promised to be a light day’s work. Man, it was quiet. I heard an empty crisp packet breeze across the road to Parliament Square.

Fifty mugs stayed eerily unfilled with coffee. Oh God I thought, if I’m the only person here I’ll have to ask Gina Miller a question. Only one made sense: Gina, where is everybody? The deserted room, big enough for several Greek weddings, gave me that bad party feeling. How could I escape?

The PR sensed my uncertainty, and attempted to handle it.

“It’s not just an in-person event,” he said. “We also have a livestream.” Phew. He shuffled off, and Quentin Letts shuffled in. Now there were two.

Gina Miller must hate Boris Johnson. This week, like every week, he is the only story in the postcode. When Miller was jihading against Brexit, Boris gave us all the pleasure of his final ascent to the top, recently he’s given us the even greater pleasure of his descent. The scenery crumbles, the set collapses, and a cloud of dust blocks the view of anything else.

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Many people think Gina Miller is an egotist. The millionaire lawyer who tried to stop Brexit; the Remainer activist who couldn’t get outside herself. Well, perhaps. There was always something daring and disobedient and adventurously rude about her. In another life she might have been the first contestant on Dragon’s Den to be arrested for punching Peter Jones in his smug face. 

Miller has the gift of not being a nice person. She has the rare courage to be unpleasant. To wreck things. Look at photos of her, triumphant, outside the Supreme Court in 2019. The small, witty mouth and bright, despising eyes. Her chin raised, proud as Benito Mussolini’s. Yes, an egotist. But a worthy player in the drama too. What exactly did she want, now that it was all over?

Quentin and I fought our way through the crowds to the auditorium. There, a few more hacks, heavily outnumbered by Miller’s aides, were finding seats.

Another, hairier, PR toddled up to me. We shook hands. Before I had time to ask him anything, he said: “Oh, no, we’re not worried about the in-person turn out. There’s also a livestream. This is all about introducing Gina — no, sorry — not introducing Gina, but, err…” And then he walked off, handling completed.

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But Miller was introduced anyway. First by a video montage of ordinary people reading scripts about how crap British politics is. Then by a PowerPoint — clicked through in a silence so fantastically profound it felt physical — full of slides from the pollsters Savanta ComRes. These revealed the extraordinary: British people do not trust the established political parties, nor do they like them. Politicians, like robbers, need an opportunity. True & Fair’s was the evidence provided by the montage and the slides. Everyone despises Westminster business as usual.

She arrived. White heels, white suit; as pristine as fresh A4 paper. As blank as a lost memory. Miller looked angry; whether at the state of British politics, or at the sad sight of this unfilled room was hard to say. She scowled. Her arched, fixed eyebrows glowed with a special incandescence. I hoped this would show up on the livestream.

Her speech was a blizzard of pointless adjectives, catastrophic predictions, and mangled metaphors. She talked about roadmaps that set out visions. She talked about “deafening silences” and creating a “government that works for everyone”. Miller wanted to “help real people in the real world”. Overworked words like these have a tainted character. They are hard to trust.

Miller chewed on them. Her tone drifted up nasally. Words were stuck in her sinuses. She tried a joke. “Status quo — Latin, some would say, for the mess we’re in.” It was a lawyer’s ventured joke. The product of a padlocked imagination.

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Moaning about Britain’s low productivity, Miller said we lagged behind the US, France, and Germany. “In fact,” she grimaced, “we only just beat Italy in productivity terms.” Italy! This was British xenophobia so classically proportioned she might have been Roy Chubby Brown. Italy!

The tiny group of hacks began to look at their phones. Online someone had described True & Fair’s colourful circular logo as a “buffering rainbow sphincter of doom”. The internet learned what the rest of us knew: attendance was poor. It was awkward.

Miller crashed on about the empty rhetoric of politicians, while contributing nothing more than that herself. There were no ideas, not a single policy. She would later say that they were available on True & Fair’s website. The more she tried to flesh her party out, the thinner it seemed.

Finally, she mentioned it. “Brexit — yes, I’m daring to use the word apparently banned in Whitehall — is on course to cause a 5% contraction of Britain’s economy over the long term.” After all Miller’s boilerplate, hearing the word was sweeter than the sound of mandolins: something she cared about at last.

Forgetfulness is an essential part of survival. In one sarcastic aside, Miller revealed that she couldn’t let it go. Normal people do. They age, they forgive each other. Brexit is gone. In the long-run, technical arrangements will be made between groups of civil servants, who, although on opposite negotiating tables, believe the same things. The economic impact of the pandemic will make it impossible to tell if Brexit was “good” or “bad”. Lord Frost will publish his autobiography. FPBE Dads will continue to simp Marina Hyde on Twitter. Nothing will change that much — unless you’re Irish, and therefore invisible to the rest of Britain. 

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Miller can’t forget. The deep, banging conflicts of Brexit still jangle in her mind. So she’s launched a doomed political party, for herself. If she had wanted a loser’s revenge, she would have been better off starting a Substack, like Dom.

Instead she was here, lobbing vague slogans — “real solutions rather than empty rhetoric” — to a centre ground that ceased to exist years ago.  “It’s time to demand change,” she said, caught in the delusion that the British voter crosses their ballot hopefully. The British voter usually turns out to release complex, resigned forms of disgust, not to change the country. If it were any different, new parties might be more successful. 

So, she is a tragic figure. A Brexit leftover, surrounded by uneaten croissants. In the Long 2016 period she offered Britain a narrative, a high concept. The woman who never finished law school turning over May and Boris in the Supreme Court. She abseiled into the hearts of Remainers like an SAS soldier into an endangered embassy. Or, she was the elitist, doggedly thwarting the will of the people with her fancy lawyers. These were false stories imposed on the random and ambiguous truths of the era.

Still, back then Miller took her opportunities for performance well, and the press found a use for her. Yesterday, outside of Brexit’s high dramas, facing rows of unfilled chairs, she floundered. Miller sounded exactly like what she was railing against — a Status Quo politician. She tried to present herself as a prophet of change, but she looked like a familiar symptom of the times she wanted to transform. Out of touch and toothless, mouthing the same old platitudes about education and the economy you’ve heard a hundred times before. Shouldn’t she just be a Liberal Democrat? 

The press were done with her now. Three journalists bothered to ask questions, before Gina Miller stormed off into a side room. Her speech was an end, not a beginning.

They’ll be sitting outside the school gates, or in the resort where they are doing holiday work, or on a bench at a summer camp. Head down in a book. They want to be singers, or anything to get away from home.

The approach is made by a couple, or by an older woman on her own. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: friendly, worldly, wealthy. Ghislaine is armoured with a classy accent, a Yorkshire terrier, and expensive clothes. She plunges into their lives. One of the accusers did not “have the reading ability” to say Maxwell’s first name. But forget that. Ghislaine wants to play the giggly older sister; pal and confidante.

The accusers’ testimony suggests that Ghislaine seemed young in herself. She offered wooing gifts: preppy shirts, loafers, Victoria’s Secret underwear, cashmere sweaters. They become friends with her in malls and cinemas. Their ages when Ghislaine allegedly facilitated, and occasionally participated in, Epstein’s sexual abuse of them, were: fourteen, fourteen, sixteen and seventeen. Jane, Carolyn, Annie, and Kate.

Ghislaine Maxwell was from a different universe. The question of her trial was whether she, like the girls, is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein too. Ghislaine, daughter of the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and variously described as Epstein’s girlfriend, madam, employee, best friend, pimp, and general, was arrested in 2020. She was accused by the US government of gathering up Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Anne over a decade, like a beachcomber, and delivering them to Epstein.

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For four weeks, the trial in lower Manhattan has been watched with awe. Outside the courthouse stand placards and protestors and paranoiacs. Three overflow rooms inside contain the world’s press, concerned private citizens, and podcasters. They are drawn there for irresistibly tabloid reasons: the downfall of rich people in heavenly places who did evil things.

Epstein and Maxwell were high society floaters, who bobbed unflushably in transatlantic streams, fishing for famous friends. (Taki says she was “not a bad girl” — I suppose we’ll have to take his word for it.) By the time Epstein earned his first conviction for sex crimes in 2008, the couple had collected an entire Met Gala of chintzy brilliancies: actors, publishers, royals, writers, scientists, academics, and politicians. That constellation has blinded many to the couple’s more gothic collection of broken young women. Why care about them, when they are landmines lying in wait for Prince Andrew, Ariana Huffington, Geordie Greig, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton?

These embarrassing links, the dozens of embarrassing photos that accompanied them, and the embarrassing circumstances surrounding his death, transformed Epstein. In the world’s imagination he was no longer a rich bullshit artist and an abuser. He became a popular demon, a supervillain, a Halloween costume. Writers polished their 24 Carat allusions: Epstein was Machiavelli, he was Mephistopheles. He was the ultraviolet scan that illuminated a rotten system of perversion and power. Maxwell’s trial was widely considered to be the last chance at justice for many of the women who claim to have been abused by Epstein.

But Epstein is dead. This was Ghislaine’s trial, and throughout she has been circumspect, almost dignified, and given nothing away. Videos outside the courthouse showed her old and arthritic and beaten down. She does not look like she will ever adjust to thinking of herself as a dangerous criminal. She appeared tired of being herself. Sooner or later, compassion was bound to be felt for the accused. It’s only natural. Old university acquaintances suggested they felt pity for her. Others wondered what went wrong, without ever probing the circumstances of Maxwell’s alleged crimes. Friends anonymously briefed glossy magazines, and said they could never imagine her scoring trailer trash by skulking around outside public schools. It just wasn’t her style, darling. None of them ever took the stand to defend her though. That just wasn’t their style.

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These disposable, costless emotions were a perfect echo of the defence put up by Maxwell’s attorneys. They said she had become a bullseye for the limitless greed, pointless anger, and false memories of the accusers. Maxwell was the real victim here. This was whiplash; an acidic backwash from Epstein’s death that mistakenly threatened to dissolve their client, because he could never stand trial. Eternal archetypes were invoked. “Ever since Eve was tempting Adam with the apple,” said one Maxwell lawyer, “women have been blamed for the bad behaviour of men”.

The men were Epstein, and at a more distant remove, Robert Maxwell. To believe in the defence, you had to believe that Ghislaine had been without a sense of her own interest for decades. That she was helplessly shaped by these amoral patriarchs. Her father and Epstein were eerily similar, if not the same man. Both escaped obscurity and exchanged it for wealth. Both courted ‘brilliant scientific minds’ with praise and parties. Both were talented at exploiting the weaknesses of rivals they destroyed on their way up. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Hoffenberg might have been describing Maxwell.

How much of their behaviour was for show, and how much was real, and whether they knew the difference, was unclear. A bewildering aura of fantasy surrounds them. They had a curious shared interest in the Marquis de Sade, and they inhabited airlessly Sadean worlds of selfishness, injustice, and misery. In de Sade’s pages nobody ever changes. His characters are glazed and flat; moral development is an impossibility. As one of the libertine monks in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) — a novel Epstein displayed in his home and proudly showed off to a journalist — rhetorically asks: “Can we become anything other than we are?”

Maxwell and Epstein answered that question with an emphatic no. They would forever be outsiders who shredded convention, determined to consume whatever and whoever they found once on the inside. Each was regarded with a mixture of dread, sarcasm, and awe. Their most credulous, generous supporters came from the top. Epstein, as Maxwell did the British establishment of his time, regarded them with contempt. He once told his brother that if the public knew how corrupt his Wall Street friends were, there would be a revolution.

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Prince Charles has finally won

By Will Lloyd

Above all these men lied, unstoppably and uncontrollably. They lied to business associates, mistresses, journalists, judges, creditors, and lawyers. They lied about money to make more money. Their skill was faking and lying uncommonly well enough to create new, unstable realities. Their lies became eight-storey yachts and the largest townhouse in Manhattan. Every new acquisition was honeycombed with surveillance equipment; recording devices and teeny tiny cameras. This is usually considered further evidence of these men’s perfidy. Blackmail gatherers, Epstein and Maxwell, working on another sick angle, preparing a new front in their war on everyone they ever met. But they were not spying on their guests.

The evidence that Epstein blackmailed his friends is thin, and has fallen apart before. Maxwell used his devices to track a secretary who didn’t love him around London, as she slept with one of his underlings. They surveilled their environments because all their lies made their environments, and themselves, insecure. Each was one or two discoveries away from the collapse of their entire world. The footage and the recordings were not made for blackmail. It was a form of consolation. It proved that for all their lies, they were still real. One of Epstein’s homes was lined with framed glass eyeballs made for injured English soldiers from a deadlier century. The display was a warning to his guests, and a reminder to himself: watch your every move.

Are we supposed to paint Ghislaine Maxwell on this bleak canvas as the feckless girl next door? A crass ingénue, an Eve who didn’t know any better? It is closer to the truth to say that both men needed her as much as she needed them.

Maxwell family legend has it that Ghislaine was anorexic as a very young child. She was probably abused by her father, as he was by his, when she was an adolescent, with riding crops and shoe horns. But by the time she arrived, fully formed and totally integrated, at Oxford during its woozy Brideshead revival years in the early Eighties, Ghislaine’s dramas of individuation were over.

She was ahead of the pack, imperious from the off. She spoke five languages and was the director of a football club. The beautiful “glamazon” rested a boot on Boris Johnson and parties with Gottfried von Bismarck. She was inadvertently to blame for the creation of George Monbiot. Her father kept one photo of his nine children on his desk — a portrait of Ghislaine. As his mania grew and his business empire fell apart in the later Eighties, she remained good, pure, true. His colleagues thought him “pre-moral”, disconcerting, disgusting, and frightening. And he was fond of saying “I have a beautiful daughter who is just like me.”

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Ghislaine was already in New York when her father died in 1991. Supposedly adrift, grieving, and broke, the conventional narrative has Epstein performing a bat-like swoop and winging Ghislaine off into his cave. “He saved her,” one Maxwell friend told Vanity Fair, “Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that, and never will.” In this telling Ghislaine is another picked-up, pitiable woman, ensnared by a master manipulator. Whatever crimes she involved herself in later could almost be excused. They were payments for a debt.

All you have to do to believe that is forget she was Robert Maxwell’s daughter. She had a glittering upbringing. She was skilled at getting what she wanted, at reeling people in, at throwing parties. Epstein was cash rich but class poor. Described in these early years so often as a “schlub”, he needed a charismatic partner to launch his conquest of Manhattan’s charity auction set. Otherwise he was just another nerdy dogsbody who helped plutocrats avoid paying tax. Every bank in the city had a thousand of those.

Ghislaine helped propel his somersault into the ranks of the super wealthy. He valued her as his equal: “Ghislaine is the best at what I need,” he said in 2002. “Ghislaine speaks five languages fluently… She’ll come to a meeting, and not only will she be able to translate what the person’s saying… but she can also give me a sense of is the person telling the truth.” All she received in return were private jets, lavish estates, and vast sums of money.

This world melted away, like her father’s did. The trial came long after the deluge. It was mind-numbing. There were endless examinations of flight logs, property portfolios, and financial transactions. The accusers were tortured on the stand by Maxwell’s lawyers. To save their Eve, they had to destroy the credibility of four others. The women sobbed; it sounded like the air around them was being eaten by the sadness they felt. We learned that post-Epstein, Carolyn went on to become a drug addict, prostitute, and single mother. Facing Maxwell a few weeks ago, she pointed at her and shouted: “You broke my soul.”

If Ghislaine still had a soul it was well hidden in the courtroom. You had to look for it elsewhere. The dozen pictures of her and Epstein released during the trial are a good place to start. She has the same face in every photo. A greying man and his partner, affluent and easy, sitting in a grass field with a dog; as perfectly self-possessed and unreal as a couple in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

This was the only reveal from the trial. There were no big prizes, no doomily grim revelations about paedophile rings operating at high altitude, among the jet set, that the placards outside the courthouse prayed for. The apocalypse never arrived because the apocalypse had already happened: it was the afterlife of the four accusers. There was no final answer to the mystery of Epstein’s death. Only the look Maxwell gives him in each image, taken over the span of their eleven-year relationship. Love. Nothing could be guiltier.

Once he’s gone, Dickens can focus on what really pops his toast — sexy, scarred, vicious murderers like Bill Sykes. Dickens can enter Sykes’s thoughts with ease. But when Oliver is around, pointlessly whimpering, Dickens can’t scale the orphan’s goodness. Dickens can never decide whether to torture him, or tease him, or have him chased through the streets of London by a mob. So he does it all.

The tone in the novel’s famous gruel begging scene is a masterpiece of cruelly vindictive comedy. When Dickens describes the suffering of the workhouse children, he is flippant, educated, and knowing. The mealtime soup is a “festive composition” of which the boys are given no more than one “porringer” except on “on occasions of great public rejoicing”. Boys, writes a winking Dickens, “have generally excellent appetites”. One of the lads is so hungry that he warns the others he will eat them, unless he has “another basin of gruel per diem”.

When Oliver rises from the table to get the “please sir, I want some more” over with, he is described as “somewhat alarmed at his own temerity”. This is amoral writing, ironically ornamental, a low moment given high treatment. These boys were the victims of a monstrously utilitarian system, of which Dickens was supposedly a savage critic. But any concern we might have for Oliver and his tiny starving colleagues is blotted out by Dickens’ sarcastic laughter — which is all the more infectious for being inappropriate.

Charles Dickens did not aim to disgust his audience. He wanted them lightly appalled, chuckling with him, and thoroughly entertained. That’s a far more lucrative emotional mix for an author to create in a reader.

Yet Oliver Twist is remembered either for the pious little boy who triumphed over adversity, or as a hit musical. And Dickens is, in popular culture, defanged, desexed and without a crackle of danger. Or he is, in Hollywood terms, “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” I would guess that most subscribe to George Orwell’s reckless judgment that Dickens was a man full of jolly, slightly angry laughter; a “free intelligence” who represented the best of 19th-century British.

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By Helen Thompson

Remove the gooey sentiment and false perceptions though, and who was Charles Dickens? For over 150 years we have received nothing but terrible news about him. It began in 1874, the year John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens appeared. Forster was a close intimate of his subject, and his biography was the 19th century’s answer to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Yet Boswell’s Johnson is a moral hero you’d happily swim in a vat of brandy with; Boswell’s goal was to make indestructible myths from their friendship, and he succeeded. Forster’s Dickens is not the man you might expect; not the generous paterfamilias, not the jovial inventor of Christmas, not the sentimental comic with a twinkle in his eye.

He is not heroic. Forster’s Dickens is typically, helplessly Victorian: hard-charging and aggressive, impetuous, overbearing, dynamic and absurdly productive, with enormous desire for activity. And like almost every Victorian I can think of, Forster’s Dickens is haunted. Full of overwhelming, difficultly buried fears. What shadowed him until the end was a childhood stint in a blacking warehouse, where he covered pots of boot polish “first with a piece of oil paper, and then with a piece of blue paper” for 10 hours a day, six shillings a week, while his father was in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison. The people closest to Dickens — his wife and children — first learned of this essential trauma in Forster’s pages. They had no idea who he was.

Oliver, like all Dickens’s child heroes, is a chip off the block of these memories. A self stuck in amber, that he can take off the shelf and dwell on. And if Twist is pathetic, it’s because Dickens felt he was pathetic too. If Dickens can’t hide his contempt for Oliver, it’s partly a reflection of his own deep self-loathing.

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There were more leaking pipes, stagnant ponds, and open sewers to be discovered under the national monument. Thomas Wright’s 1935 Life gave us Dickens’s queasily neurotic affair with the actress Ellen Ternan, a secret for decades. One 1952 biography has Dickens sanding down Ternan’s reluctance to sleep with him with all the grinding persistence of a competent professional novelist; “Dickens had won Ellen against her will, wearing down her resistance by sheer force of desperate determination.” Fred Kaplan’s 1988 Life opens with Dickens suspiciously bonfiring “every letter he owned not on a business matter” in his country house garden. What secrets were turned to ashes? Worst of all was Claire Tomalin’s speculation that Dickens slept with the ‘fallen women’ who were cared for at Urania Cottage, Angela Burdett Coutt’s home for reformed prostitutes. The evidence for this is thin (one letter; one cryptic remark) but the thought is so irresistible — another Victorian hypocrite caught with his pants down! — that I’ve never been able to shake it off.

According to taste, those of Dickens’s generation either shame us by being better than us, or shame us by being worse than us. We take a ladder up into the historical attic, and poke around the broken furniture and damp old papers, looking for clues in the rot. How could they be so prudish? So rigid, so dogmatic, so racist, so hypocritical? And why were they all so obsessed with crinoline?

If you spend any time with them, though, you soon realise that the Victorians exposed every failing of their own minds long before we did. Matthew Arnold described his contemporaries as “shutting their eyes and professing to believe what they do not… rushing blindly together in herds”. Dickens put revolting specimens on paper — Pecksniff, Bounderby, Squeers, Mrs Gamp — and his audience confirmed the truth of these satirical drive-bys when they made him the most famous author in the world. The Victorians knew they were hypocrites, just as I suspect Dickens knew, down in the gut, that the hollow plaster purity of characters like Oliver was the weakest expression of his talent.

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Why did Dickens contaminate his art with moral earnestness then? Simply: he was praised from it, right from the start. The anxieties of educated Victorians — generated by economic boom and bust; their grating fears of violent revolution from below; their slow realisation that Christianity was not literally true — demanded a procession of Oliver Twists to salve their jittery consciousnesses. Dickens (sensibly) put commerce ahead of art. Like every great showman he gave them what they wanted. The Edinburgh Review praised Oliver Twist in 1838 for its “comprehensive spirit of humanity”, and the tendency of Dickens’ writings “to make us practically benevolent”. They could not detect the other side of Dickens; the grey ambivalence born of his misanthropy, the black edge to his clownish humour.

Once Dickens’s combination of scornful merriment and soppy earnestness made him wealthy, he bought a big country house just off the old Dover Road. As a sad child, Dickens had walked past it and reflected that such wealth would be forever out of his reach. Now it was his. The road was still travelled by small tramping boys, little beggars, all as desperate as David Copperfield, all as famished as Oliver Twist.

Dickens did not have time for them. They were far too close to the bone, far too reminiscent of the bleakest chapters of his own youth. He had two large hounds chained to each of the entrance gates. He hated Oliver Twists, whether they were imagined or real. When they trudged up the road to his home, with hope in their hearts, they were not about to meet the creator of Little Nell and the father of Christmas. They were headed for the jaws of his dogs.

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

The Tories were here, last week, for Conference, at the height of their uncannily revived powers.

Priti and Michael, Rishi and Nadine, were spreading their wide wings in Manchester Central, the singed remnant of some 19th century NASDAQ, now a corporate events space. The place was choking with Conservative slogans and branding, and boosterisms; but were they anything more than fresh enamel licked on the same old Westminster banger?

I was here because I wanted to watch the political body get pressed by conspiring lobbyists and cringing public affairs officers. I wanted to understand the people who will rule over us for the next decade. Had they really become the “people’s party”? Were they really more Northern, more working class, more in touch with basic realities? Did “levelling up” Britain mean anything at all? And did they really know what to do with that sweet majority, with all that delicious power?

If they were the people’s party, then it was ostensibly for people like Greg. I found him palely loitering around the exhibits one morning in a three-piece tweed suit. Both he and the suit appeared new. “Personally,” Greg said, “I’m nineteen.” He was from Harlow, Essex. (The 20th most deprived area in England.) His mother was a teaching assistant. His father was a drug dealer. He had never been to one of these before.

Conservatism gave him an identity. A way of defining himself contrarily. He said he’d hated school. Hated his Left-wing teachers. Hated, he admitted, his Left-wing home. He was utterly sincere. The new Conservatism had offered him enough to make the journey to Manchester. There were probably more Gregs in the party than there had been for a generation.

Did the Gregs have a champion? It was supposed to be Michael Gove. But the Minister for Levelling Up had pitched his tent so large that he was lost in it. Gove’s levelling up agenda was too wide, too vague. What did it mean to say that he wanted to “ensure people live their best life”? Promising everything would be another way of doing nothing.

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But at least Gove sounded cheerful. All of them did. “Now”, Rishi Sunak posted on Instagram, “is the time to show them that our plan will deliver.” In their speeches and their digital branding the ministers rolled together many different optimisms. To be a ranking member of this government was to be present with vigour and joyfulness.

Let the other side talk about fuel shortages. Let Dom talk about trolleys. Let the Telegraph spit about taxes. After Covid, after Brexit, it was time for peace. It was the moment to say, as Nadine Dorries did — against all sense, all reason, and all justice — that No Time to Die was the “best Bond ever”. None of it needed to be true.

The only statesman-in-embryo for miles around Manchester was the Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen. A plausibly blue-collar, municipal Tory, reminiscent of Joe Chamberlain in the specificity of his vision, and in the way he embodied a sense of place.

He talked poetically and pointedly in a flat, steady Geordie voice at a fringe event one evening. Now was the time, he said; the Conservatives could rebuild and restore the North. He described a radiant future, where green tech brought the industrial revolution full circle, back to Teesside, back to Newcastle, Darlington, Stockton. Houchen’s revolution went backwards to reclaim the future. The superabundance, the rewarded greed, the hard materialism, and the worldly ambition of mid-19th century England would be born again. History could be forced. You had to push against it. Ben Houchen was doing this in Tees Valley. He had cajoled and eked away until industrial jobs were returned to Hartlepool and Redcar. But this time the revolution would not be iron squealing on iron, it would not turn country boys into broken factory hands, or pollute the rivers, or poison the sky black. These industries would be green, pure.

I was taken along by him, briefly. But he was only a mayor.

I met other Gregs. Four late teenage, working-class Tories from — rub your eyes — Liverpool. Owen Jones buzzed around them with a microphone, his mouth slack, bewildered, bitter. (The four did not make it into Jones’ “behind the scenes” conference video report.) Oh we hate him, we hate him, we hate him, the four boys said as they approached Jones. “But still,” one whispered, “we must get a selfie with him.” I asked them who their favourite Prime Minister was.

“Thatcher,” one said, “Thatcher forever.”

It stunned: Thatcher still burned above Conservative politics, charging her imitators with warmth and light. What else could explain Liz Truss? The new Foreign Secretary dressed like Thatcher, snubbed and blunted enemies like Thatcher, and started, whenever I watched her speak, to look like Thatcher too. Truss’s events were the most queued for. The members were pilgrims shuffling towards a splinter of the true Eighties cross. Truss offered them sacraments of fiscal rigour, delivered with leathery personal firmness. For in the pits of their hearts, the members didn’t want a big, caring, doing state — where levelling up was purportedly taking them. They didn’t want to go there. They certainly didn’t want to pay for it either. What they wanted was a dominatrix to lovingly roast the Government’s flab off with a blowtorch.

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These were the Tories who went, like Truss, longest into the night, after the daytime, orderly, brisk conference had been washed aside by the 6pm tide of expensed alcohol and gossip.

This conference happened in padded back rooms, invite-only suite parties, and long carpeted ballrooms in the bowels of the hotel. It was stranger, and darker, than the day was. Every night there was a sense of homecoming: after the election, which was never properly celebrated by the party; after the lockdowns, which made so many of them unhappy and uneasy.

The bar fizzed. Boys younger than tadpoles dragged their seats near to enthroned junior ministers; howlingly drunk princes screamed for the right kind of bread; dazed spads slid off chairs; rumours were exchanged: sexual escapades, job promotions, if Carrie was even allowed in her husband’s suite, more sexual escapades, and whether the Prime Minister will use his big speech to raise the minimum wage. (He will not.) And at every table, a suit lapel stuck with ironic lake blue badges that said “Tory Scum”.

A few knew how weird it was to be the “people’s party.” “I’d rather be the party of the working man than the party of the rich,” one of the princes had roared. “But I still want to be very well off.”

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By Will Lloyd

Would all those pristine first-time Conservative voters like what they saw at this conference, if they’d been here? They would have liked Houchen, maybe even voted for him. They would have put some chicken nuggets in the oven for Greg. Perhaps they would have spotted Liz Truss’s talons. Would they have noticed where real power in the party lay? Trollope writes somewhere that people who take an interest in politics should “not be desirous of peeping behind the scenes”. They wouldn’t like what they discovered.

At the top of the party was what a bad columnist would call the liberal metropolitan elite. The enduring sentimental stereotype of Toryism in England is utterly misleading. It’s still the rah-rah, port-sinking, organ music playing, red melton fabric, Oxbridge, Brideshead, “young fogey”. They are extinct. Kaputt. That Boris plays this character sometimes leads to confusion. The Left think they are fighting Simon Heffer, when they’re actually fighting Henry Newman.

The leading factions in the party are as distant from people in Redcar as the Blairites became. For now they are simply better at patting voters on the head than the Left is. Conservative power is wielded by spads who look like they were laying over in Manchester before a flight to LAX. An explosion in a Hugo Boss factory clothed them all in the same tieless blue suit. And the women strode by in dresses high in the neck and long to the floor. Headbands were mandatory. They are photocopies of Carrie.

Together the blue suits and the headbands formed a court, which squatted in government. They were the fluffers and pot-holders, the heralds and jugglers, the princes and flunkeys. Observing them did not make me feel confident about the power they had bedded so luxuriantly down in. The court only knew messaging and campaigning. Nobody knew how to govern. Not in the Labour Party either. “We’re not run by anybody,” Rory Stewart said in 2014. “The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.”

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Boris Johnson's speech was a joke

By Will Lloyd

But the Prime Minister still had power, of a sort. The other ministers gave their speeches in a squashed auditorium. He had a pharaonic hall to give the culminating barnstormer in. A big venue for the big boy.

It didn’t matter what he said. Nothing could move this government until the Labour Party woke up. Their power was a given. He could stand there and announce bread rationing next week and go up in the polls. They’d build a statue of him in Parliament Square. Everyone knew he had ten years by default. All that was required of him was a presence, to keep plates spinning in the air, to offer up punchlines.

Maybe though, after effete Boris, after this era of frothy giggling and wily manoeuvring, the party and the country would grow weary of clowns and sharpers. However ingenious they were at game-playing. Then Houchen — or a figure like him — might have a chance.

This is what the country needed. It is not what the party craves.

Ultimately the theme of conference was not whether the the Tories were changing. It was the glitter of this easy, empty power. The good ideas the Conservatives had, and all the good they could do, were at risk of being washed away by it.

Boris stepped up to the lectern, boyish and bashful, and started taking the piss out of Michael Gove. The Minister for Levelling Up turned jelly puce. The auditorium hummed, gagged, sputtered and groaned. Years ago, Julian Critchley said Michael Heseltine knew exactly where to find the clitoris of the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister is well within this subtle and sensitive tradition.

He likes jokes best of all. Boris is greedy for them. Today there were puns, put-downs, satirical flights, whimsical interludes, absurd images, and ribald allusions. The hall adored them. If Columbus had listened to Keir Starmer, he would have been famous for discovering Tenerife, Boris said (whoops, cheers, screams, hoots). Beavers sometimes build without local authority, Boris said (giggles, tee-hees). There are sixty six thousand sausages aboard HMS Elizabeth, Boris said (indulgent chuckles). They still love him here. The grins on the party members’ faces show it more than anything else could.

They would say “YES!” to him before he asked them a question. Even if the question was “Would you, errr, umm, rather mind sticking your hand in this oven?”, they’d unhesitatingly grill their fingers, melt their thumbs. He hasn’t let them down yet. So the relentless gaggery is pure fun, not needily insecure. Not yet.

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By Will Lloyd

Boris was ordered not to be funny, right from the start. In the Nineties, Michael Portillo told him that he would have to choose between politics and comedy. Max Hastings warned him that “a penchant for comedy is an almost insuperable obstacle for achieving political office”.

And where are they now? Hastings writes his door stopping histories about 20th-century wars that I suspect are much more bought than read. Portillo wears his silly jackets on television. Boris holds the Conservative Party in his hands.

And perhaps he knows the party is anxious. (What would Conservatism be without anxiety?) The weeks leading up to conference were full of ominous signs and dreadful headlines. Almost every day the Telegraph would decry the social care tax hike as the final death of Tory politics, proclaim the twilight of the West as China rises, fulminate about the “woke” takeover of the National Trust.

A few days earlier, I’d watched Boris speak to the Scottish Conservatives at their reception, and encountered this pessimistic mood. It was strange, even unsettling. He floundered around, but it wasn’t funny. His unbuttonedness just left him naked. The speech didn’t work. The party member stood beside me drunkenly complained that it was all: “Mwah mwah mwah, cripes, and oops.”

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By Mary Harrington

And you could see that the Prime Minister was disappointed. In that room the house was not brought down, the roof was unraised. I heard rumours that he’d gone back to his suite at the Midland to write jokes and nothing else. Even Carrie wouldn’t be allowed to visit him.

Didn’t the effort of it show, in every sense of the word effort? Boris was rewarded. When I spoke after the speech to party members like Alaistair, a retired bus driver in his 60s, they beamed and bounced. Their naughty, highly unserious boy had done it again. “He’s a genius,” Alaistair said. “His IQ must be off the scale.” “He’s a humanist,” someone else at our table chipped in. “Sorry, I mean a humorist. No, you know what?” He blinked slowly. “Boris is a humorist and a humanist.” The table was satisfied with this.

What would that speech have been without all the humanist-humorism? A Conservative Prime Minister praising wind farms and nurses. Infelicitous statements about the housing sector that would make every renter in the country vomit. Boasting about a defence pact that commits the Armed Forces to an unwinnable war in the South China Sea.

Boris bamboozles. He describes, and never analyses. Ultimately he de-clarifies, like fog. Above all, there was a sense here of problems avoided. And there’s nothing very funny about that.

Where exactly is home for Labour? The answer was decisively revealed this week by the leader’s conference speech: home is an Islington townhouse in the year 1996. What a time to be British! Hugh Grant is shagging Liz Hurley. Princess Diana is sparklingly alive. Football means Skinner and Baddiel, not Heysel and Hillsborough. Damon and Noel are the new Mick and John. Somehow, Ian Hislop is actually quite funny.

Bonkers, barmy, grotesque Tories in pin-stripe suits dusted with dandruff are going mental over Europe. But on the telly, inspiring Tony and pragmatic Gordon are preparing, as smoothly professional as stockbrokers, for power. Things can only get… better.

Starmer did not have to mention Blair on Wednesday. The spirit of Tone was lurking underneath every word, dressed in greasy overalls, wrenching every rhetorical bolt into place. Tough on crime? Absolutely. Education? Say it three times baby.

More important than anything Starmer said was Peter Mandelson’s remark to Seumas Milne: “We’re back in control.”

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Speaking of figures from the past who consistently ruin the breakfasts of Daily Mail readers, Gina Miller is back too. New New Labour was not the only centre party to stagger on to the scene in the last few days.

“The True & Fair Party” is her new political vehicle. Miller said: “This government needs to be held to account. Voters deserve better than the current politics of incompetence and self-interest.”

The party’s policies are yet to be announced, but they will be a homecoming for Miller as well. You have to imagine that they will be Rejoin-ishly pro-EU and described everywhere as “centrist”. Like every middle-aged product of British centrism, whether it is a political party, or a newspaper columnist, True & Fair would be better named: Let Down & Fed Up & Really Quite Tired.

Miller is, at least, about a thousand times more interesting than Sir Keir. In the long 2016 era, when the British middle-class were lost in a prolonged and anxious freak out, she was easily the most charismatic and exciting Remainer personality.

The others were lame. Elsewhere there was only terrible hair (A.C. Grayling), or needling over-familiarity (Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis), or sad, sullen machismo (Bob Geldof, James O’Brien, David Aaronovitch), or… Femi.

Miller was their antidote and foil. She intrigued in all senses. She was a cigar-smoking sports racer, and a parachutist. Her background was pure 1980s, pure Thatcherite graft. After her family lost its fortune, she chewed her way back through the class system, from hard-luck indigence to a £7 million Chelsea villa, by way of the City. She was serious and respected. A lawyerly battle axe. Joan of Arc to Remainers; the Terminator to Brexiteers.

She took flak, both of the legitimate and grimly racist sort. Her most intelligent profilers wondered whether her high-wire legal challenges to Brexit were motivated by “an extreme sense of civic duty” or the chance of another adrenaline rush.

The same question hovers over her new party. In a sense though the answer doesn’t matter. Like Starmer’s zombie centrism, True & Fair will fail, because there is no market for this politics anymore. Barely months have passed since the last attempts to rebuild the centre.

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During the Brexit years, centrist fever dreams rolled above the land like rain clouds. In 2017, a Twitter-famous tax lawyer called Jolyon Maugham wanted to launch a new party called “Spring”. His plans were big, massively big. According to the Guardian: “He would hold a 28-day festival at the football stadium in Maidenhead, [Theresa] May’s constituency. Each day would be dedicated to the national dress and cuisine of a different EU member state. For the finale, Maugham planned to announce that he was standing in Maidenhead as a Spring candidate.” That sounds like satire written after a long, drunken seance with the hooting spirit of Auberon Waugh, but apparently it’s true. In the end Maugham “decided he didn’t have enough time to go ahead with it”. A wise choice!

There were smaller, but no less Partridge-into-a-dictaphone visions that year. Former George Osborne aide James Chapman called for an anti-Brexit party called ‘The Democrats’ in a Twitter meltdown, which only ended after he’d demanded — sad machismo again — that Theresa May personally debate him outside parliament. Even PR Week (not exactly Guido Fawkes) was moved to call this “an extraordinary rant”. A few months later, the then Economist writer Jeremy Cliffe proposed setting up a party called “The Radicals” — pro-tech, pro-Europe, social-liberal — and ultimately, anti-ever amounting to anything.

The biggest centrist bubble blown and pricked was Change UK. Or was it The Independent Group for Change? Or the UK’s Independently Grouped Change? Or the UK Group’s Independent Change? Nobody — not even lead member Anna Soubry, who called the party “Change.org” in the Commons — was very sure. (The only Change UK question anybody really wanted to know the answer to was what moisturiser Chuka Umunna used. Sadly, he never told us.)

Formed by 11 MPs fleeing Labour and the Tories, and born in Nando’s, Change UK died in bathos when every single member lost their seat at the last general election. But for me, Change.Independence.UK only really expired for good when its former MEP candidate Gavin Esler was booted off Celebrity Masterchef this summer after serving a dessert condemned as “incomplete” by John Torrode. The judge’s cruel reception of this pudding, which was also compared to “soup”, exactly mirrored the British public’s reaction to Change UK, namely: “WTF is this supposed to be lads.”

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Anyway, by 2019 the public was done with soup. They wanted cake. At least Esler reached the Masterchef quarter finals — Change UK didn’t make it past two elections.

How many centrist parties have to get Hindenburged before this all stops? The strangest thing about Miller, and Starmer-Mandelson is that they can’t locate the centre ground at all. If there is a centre ground today in England, it is enormously unpalatable to those who self-identify as centrists. They would not vote for the “Hang the nonces, fund the NHS party”, but that’s where the centre is now.

The centre wants nationalised railways and birched criminals. It wants its borders closed and its healthcare free at the point of access. It is fear and loathing, and charity and kindliness; a truly mutant hybrid of Paul Dacre and Jeremy Corbyn. Pundits would love the English to be the stout and sensible strivers described in Orwell’s The Lion and The Unicorn; sadly, I fear the reality is that they are more like the suspicious and cruel folk described in Chesterton’s The Secret People.

And they’re getting stranger all the time. England is weirding. David Icke has never been so adored. Football fans descended on Nuneaton to defend a half-forgotten statue of George Eliot from BLM; no, they had not read Middlemarch. Parents style their children as Captain Tom. Sports mascots become ultra-large poppies every November. Jackie Weaver publishes books. There are candlelit vigils or protests on a seemingly daily basis.

The mood is jittery, not only in the petrol queues. The writer Clive Martin calls it “Radical Normal”. Gina Miller and Keir Starmer probably don’t know much about Radical Normal, but it has more to do with the future of British politics than they do.

Martin Amis literally loved “multiracialism”. In the late Sixties, whatever race prejudice teenage Mart was lumbered with had been pantingly released. “At the time I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim… The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernise. You would — I don’t know — just look at her and just feel eons between you.”

How had 1984’s best novelist pretzeled himself into this position? Forced to deal girlfriend receipts to a smarmy journalist, in order to prove he was not listing around the same weedy moral pond as a Klansman, or Nick Griffin?

Amis’s problem — like so many other problems — began at 9:03am on September 11 2001, when United Airlines Flight 175 was swallowed by the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the dust, debris, and people rained eerily down on New York City that day, the outlines of this grand tragedy, and many more tragedies to come, for America, and for everyone else, could be discerned.

But it may have been an even bigger tragedy for our novelists. Or it seemed to feel that way to them. What were they supposed to do now? Write craftily about unhappy marriages when the world was curling at its edges?

In the days, weeks, and months after the attack, they filled the pages of newspapers and magazines, scrounging around for the right words. Salman Rushdie wrote of a “dreadful blow”, and the war to come: “We must send our shadow warriors against theirs.” John Updike wondered whether America could afford “the openness that lets future Kamikaze pilots, say, enrol in Florida flying schools”. (He reckoned America could.) A sage Jonathan Franzen suggested that this dreadful new world would have to rediscover “the ordinary, the trivial, and even the ridiculous”. Ian McEwan — somewhat strangely given the widespread sense of shock that day — accused the hijackers of a “failure of the imagination”. Zadie Smith felt sick: “Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen.” David Foster Wallace wrote a melancholy (even for him) essay about flags. A weepy, angry, depressed Jay McInerney was probably the most honest. He admitted to being glad he didn’t have a book coming out that month. The collective tone was nervous, eschatological, distressed. Novelists sounded, just this once, like everyone else.

Apart from Martin Amis. He continued to sound like Martin Amis: flashy, forceful, in-your-face. 9/11 was the “apotheosis of the postmodern era.” The collapse of the towers was the “majestic abjection of that double surrender”; the second jet was “terror revealed — the terror doubled, or squared”. He even minted a neologism (a very old Amis tick): “worldflash”.

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In retrospect, nobody writing for a living seemed more affected, more thwarted, more plainly knocked off his rocker that day than Amis. He took 9/11 very personally indeed. And spookily, like W.B. Yeats describing his youthful hatred of progress, in Amis’s September palpitations you can sense that he “felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin”. He called it “the age of horrorism”. Then he called it “the age of vanished normalcy”. Which was it? He began to write for his entire profession: “After a couple of hours at their desks, on Sept. 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.”

It didn’t happen. Zadie Smith wrote her novels, so did Jonathan Franzen. John Updike wrote a terrible picaresque about terrorism (imaginatively called… Terrorist), then died shortly afterwards. Rushdie wrote creatively across genres. Ian McEwan would eventually seem far, far angrier about Brexit than he ever was about the attacks. There were few obvious changes in course; writers kept writing.

But Amis did change occupation, sort of. For an uneasy decade after 9/11, he transformed into a crusading polemicist, no longer a mere novelist. In lengthy essays for the Guardian and the Observer, eventually collected in The Second Plane (2008), Amis became the explainer-in-chief of “Islamism” to Britain’s liberal middle-classes. Given the trouble he would soon find himself in and the drubbings he would receive, it is difficult to work out why Amis thought this would be a good idea.

He was the best comic novelist in England, the hothouse of comic novelists. He accepted that his gift was for “banalities delivered with tremendous force”. Yet there was also a sense — one confirmed by the terrible reviews amassed by 2003’s Yellow Dog — that Amis was stuck with, and marooned in, his talent for macho-comedic wordplay. (Maybe this is why he had tried to change course once before in the Eighties, by writing plaintive non-fiction about nuclear weapons.) Shortly before 9/11, at Jonathan Cape’s launch party for Amis’s autobiography Experience (2000), his editor prophesied that this was “a book which would be read in 200 years time”. There is nothing wrong with hyperbole, and Experience is a good memoir, but even Amis might have suspected the difference between hype and truth here.

Political journalism about the fallout world that emerged after 9/11 would be different though. Here was a subject truly, finally big enough for his talent. Perhaps Amis saw a chance to write himself into History by writing about history — to write a book that really would be read in 200 years.

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The Second Plane, which is full of howlers, sweeping statements (“All religions are violent”; “Islam is totalist”), and ramblings, may well be read in 200 years’ time, but not in a way that would please Amis. His cavalier embrace of polemic — his decision to go out to bat, unasked, for the West in the 2000s — was a minor, yet telling, sideshow during the War on Terror era. In Amis we see the clumsy analysis of Islamism (born entirely of sexual frustration apparently) and Iran (the population there he thought, was “strongly if ambivalently pro-American”) that passed for commentary in that period. And Amis embraced pat comparisons of al-Qaeda with the Nazis, Stalinism, and the Khmer Rouge, which now look as if they were written to satisfy emotional, not intellectual needs.

In one essay Amis describes an abandoned novella, The Unknown Known. It imagined the story of Ayed, a “diminutive Islamist terrorist” who has the bright idea of ransacking “all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country”, and releasing them in a small town in Colorado. Ayed is a potential rapist too, sexually curdled, standing beneath elevated walkways so “he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants”. As a pervert of short-standing, whose icky yearnings are described in great detail, Ayed could have tumbled out of London Fields or any other Amis novel. The only difference is that Ayed is an Arab who has never seen the inside of a pub. Amis knew he was reissuing his old insights and insecurities like this, and he believed they reverberated even more strongly: “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is.” But was it helpful, as the battle lines were being drawn, to believe that the West’s new foes were so many Ayed’s — mentally deranged death cultists, whose lives turned on the problems they had with girls? These caricatures belonged in novels. They made sense in novels, but now they were being passed off as an accurate representation of of the world and the people in it — and these, looked at properly, would always be ambiguous.

Literary critics called Amis “chuckleheaded” and compared him with “a man who sounds increasingly like the embarrassing uncle screaming at the television”. But Amis was not really in literary mode at all. He was simply ventriloquizing, as his friend Christopher Hitchens did, the establishment consensus in Washington and London at the time — that this was a struggle between good and evil, between modern civilisation and medieval barbarism. It’s plain now that there is a direct line — a “worldflash” even — between these recklessly simple ideas and the disaster that unfolded in Kabul last month.

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In the end though, it was not The Second Plane that forced Amis to detail his liaisons with Muslim girls in Sixties London. It was a grenade tossed in an interview in 2006, more explosive than anything he wrote elsewhere in this phase: “There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.” Even Michel Houellebecq never went this far.

For this Terry Eagleton compared him to a “British National Party thug”. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said Amis was “with the beasts” and “the Muslim baiters and haters”, making him a “threat to society”. Amis defended himself by discussing his sex life (“I was the first man she had ever kissed” etc.) and then retreated back to safer territory in the 2010s — another novel about the Holocaust, another novel about London. He would admit in 2012 that he “said something stupid” when he talked about collective punishment.

His pose changed. Amis seemed sadly self-aware. “I’m like Hugh Hefner” he told the Times in 2017. “When he started out, he was the hero of liberalism and then the culture changed. And he became the villain of liberalism.”

In his latest book, Inside Story, (a tricksy meander around the contours of his own life) his tone is gentle and generous and grandfatherly. It’s like he wants us to forget all the things he wrote and said after 9/11 — like George W Bush showing off the oil paintings he made of injured veterans on late night shows, with his please-forgive-me eyes.

Who would forgive Martin Amis? In his writing life he had always insisted that critics didn’t matter. “As you get older you realise that all these things — prizes, reviews, advances, readers — it’s all showbiz, and the real action starts with your obituary.” Only posterity counted, only 200 years hence as his editor put it, and Amis wanted to be remembered then. When the real action of remembering Amis begins, you almost hope for his sake, that his small and silly contribution to these 20 years of hubris will be forgotten.

Ashraf, the father, was the country’s last president. A trained anthropologist, he believed in books, and the power of the ideas within them to move the world. His wife, Rula, a student in Paris in 1968, said she believed in women. Mariam, their daughter, became a filmmaker — she believed in Art. Their son, Tarek, believed in his father. His two-decade career in American academia and philanthropy is an echo of Ashraf’s own cloudless trajectory through blue-chip universities, the World Bank and think tanks. It was a tribute.

For half a century, Afghanistan was simultaneously obscure and at the centre of world events. It had swallowed the fading comet tail of the USSR and absorbed the late afternoon light of American Empire. It had been a hideaway for renegades and a bazaar of ideologies. From Hippie free love to political Islamism, from Marxist-Leninism to market democracy — all had been hawked and bartered over in Afghanistan.

Whether it was itself a “real” country at all, or simply a vast outdoor laboratory worked by imperial meddlers and narco-criminals was hard to say. But every force and idea that acted on Afghanistan acted on the Ghanis too. They were both the victims of events and the instigators of them. They had been exiles, then leaders; they had been scattered across the globe and enthroned in Kabul. The family was Pashtun, and prominent, with a history of political influence. The Ghanis first left in 1977, as the communists began their takeover.

Ashraf Ghani fled again this week. Mariam posted about it — “I’m pretty burned out” — on Instagram from her home in New York. Tarek and Rula have so far remained silent. This time it was widely reported that Ashraf had attempted to upholster four cars and a helicopter with millions of stolen dollars. This was surely — hopefully — untrue, and not because the source was a Russian news agency.

By Afghan standards the Ghanis were not that corrupt. It was for other politicians to mainline America’s billions into lavish compounds, or to be apprehended in Dubai’s airport with $52 million in cash. Ashraf did not believe in money. He believed in books.

When he became President, in 2014, after a fraught and nervous election, he indulged his obsession. Like all Afghan presidents, Ghani moved to the Arg — a labyrinth of palaces within a 19^th-century fortress in central Kabul. But unlike his predecessor, he immediately set about restoring the ruined royal library, with all its decaying antique volumes. His personal library was his most valuable asset, according to a New Yorker profile. He owned seven thousand books. Every day he woke up before the sun rose and read them under his favourite chinar tree. He would have taken his volumes, not cash, when he fled on Sunday, wouldn’t he?

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Ghani didn’t just read books — he wrote them. With his collaborator, the British human rights lawyer Claire Lockhart, he published Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (2008). “Novel strategies” were needed, they argued, to stabilise failed states that were contaminating “our fully globalised world” with anarchy.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these chaotic zones were spreading. Ghani believed he had the ideas — a “sovereignty index” to be annually published by the UN, and a “citizens-based approach” to state-building — that could mop away the disorder. Fixing Failed States offered, according to a small review in Foreign Affairs, “a surprisingly hopeful vision”.

The vision was delivered as a TED talk in 2007. Ghani’s manner is cerebral, candid, impish, shrilly excitable — theory excites him. His voice is as squeaky as an old floorboard being stepped on. The TED stage suited a pedagogue like Ghani. It was not so different from the lecture halls and seminar rooms of John Hopkins, where he’d spent the 1980s teaching. He never looks uncomfortable.

America was comfortable enough for the Ghanis. It was their main chance, as it was for other exiled Afghans. It gave Ashraf, Rula and Tarek the opportunity to collect the academic prizes that are today’s proof of intelligence and moral worth. It allowed Mariam to transform herself from the child of exiles to an artist; not merely an artist working in “installation, performance, photography, text and video”, but, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, an “activist, archivist, writer and lecturer”.

A 2015 New York Times profile found Mariam in her loft apartment in Clinton Hill, worrying about being “a Brooklyn cliche”. The Times sketched her “as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet”.

Mariam’s work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York. One exhibit, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon”, was made in collaboration with Ashraf over Skype. Over 72 panels of text and photos created by the Ghanis, the history of Afghanistan is shown to be cyclical — an endless rotation of invasion, revolt, reform, collapse and recovery. A country cruelly frozen in dynamism.

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She made films about the discovery of oil in Norway, and the melancholy difficulties of translation. She was born in New York, but identified “most with the border”. What Edward Said called the “essential sadness” of exile was there in Mariam, and in all her family. Perhaps that’s why the “Lexicon” had one telling absence from its story — the Ghanis themselves.

Ashraf had returned to the country with Rula in 2002 almost as soon as the Taliban were banished. First a finance minister under Hamid Karzai, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2009, and then the winner of that disputed election in 2014.

Afghanistan was a problem for the family in a way that America — where they had flourished — was not. America only needed Ashraf’s theories in the classroom. Afghanistan, Ashraf believed, could be saved by his theories. It was all in his book, and his TED talk. Opium farmers would make t-shirts. Embroiders in Kandahar would partner with Versace. Guns would become ploughshares. One day the daughters of Afghanistan would be like his own, free to study in America; free to make jam in Brooklyn; free to exhibit their work in Berlin.

Afghans were not fools. They only needed jobs. The people, Ghani said in 2005, were internationalist by temperament — “they’re much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans.” Well, perhaps.

Becoming President gave Ghani the chance to govern the country that shone in his mind. Afghans would learn about sheep raising from New Zealand, and hydroelectricity from the Swiss. Afghanistan was a blank slate. Ghani began to doodle his beautiful diagrams on it.

Sigmund Freud once said there were two “impossible professions”: education and government. Ghani was a wonderful educator. He proved to be an impossible President. He micromanaged his illusions and his staff. He took anger management classes.

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Why was he so angry? Was it the pressure — grinding and invidious — of watching his theories of the state become exposed as just another exile’s hopeless fictions?

Either way, he grew ever more solitary behind the blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints of the Arg. The library was his succour and support — one journalist described Ghani’s office, filled with open books on every surface, marked neatly with pencil annotations. This is what most intellectuals (quite rightly) do in a crisis. They retreat, like Michel de Montaigne did during the 16th century French wars of religion, to brood in their towers and libraries, hoping that solitude will yield new ideas. Montaigne, though, only advised the king of France, he had no pretensions to power itself; Ghani was supposed to be something like the king of Afghanistan.

At least, as everyone said, he was not corrupt. That was a blessing in a country where the MPs alone ritualistically stole over a billion dollars a year. But there was the rest of the family. Ashraf’s brother, Hashmat, and his nephew Sultan.

Hashmat will be remembered, not for driving a bulletproof Mercedes Limousine, or the 23,000 square feet of his Kabul home, but for the SOSi scandal. It was extraordinarily complicated; it involved hugely valuable rights to mineral deposits in Kunar province, illegal links between US special forces and militias — and the Ghani family. It was Hashmat who owned significant shares in the US company that wanted to buy the rights to the minerals, and it was President Ghani who signed off on the deal. Was it corrupt? “If there was a colour redder than red, that’s what colour this red flag would be,” said one American expert in procurement law.

Sultan, meanwhile, styled himself the President of ‘The Ghani Group’ on LinkedIn, and the co-founder of ‘The Institute for Afghan Women’ on his website.  As the country started to tremble a few weeks ago, he shared photos of himself on Instagram walking towards a Learjet 75 Liberty.

Ashraf had promised to clean up grift when he first ran for President, but if it flourished in his immediate family, what hope did Afghanistan have?

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When Ghani fled on Sunday he left behind half the population in poverty, a third of the population facing emergency levels of food insecurity, stagnant GDP, a massive trade deficit, a restive and furious countryside, and, in the words of one report, “a largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional state”. Now the Taliban control it, down to the very last bumper car.

A few days before, Mariam Ghani’s latest film had its theatrical release in the United States. It’s title? What We Left Unfinished. For Ashraf — intellectual and politician, then, at last, a corrupted idealist — it was all unfinished.

How shocked, how distressed he looked, when he surfaced this week in the UAE, exiled once more. When his security team extracted him, he said, he was “in a condition where I couldn’t even put on my shoes”. Did Ashraf Ghani realise that the things he put his faith in, the codes by which he lived his life — ideas and books, globalisation and rational governance — had been diminished? That if the reports were true, and he really had left the country, not with his library, but with $169 million dollars, that he had maimed his life’s work, as well as Afghanistan?

Maybe he knew. All year, until almost the very end, he had promised his army could hold out against the Taliban, “forever“. But there was lucidity amidst the delusion.

“The future will be determined by the people of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC in February, “not by somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming.”

He was wrong about the people of Afghanistan. Whether they stayed or fled, they would still be dragged into the conflicts of others. But he was right about the dreamer behind the desk. Ashraf Ghani, unable to determine Afghanistan’s future, was describing himself.

Nobody needed the reminder. Everyone knew it was England day. The Germans? Outmaneuvered. The Ukrainians? Thrashed. The Danes? Defeated by a purely accidental laser flash in the eyes of Kasper Schmeichel. England were in the final.

The Queen wrote the team a letter to mark the occasion, and so did the Prime Minister. Even poor Ed Davey released a statement ahead of what his PR flack called the “Euro Grand Final”. There was no room left on the bandwagon. It was possible to broach a conversation with a complete stranger — even in London — as long as you were talking about Harry Kane. The streets filled with flags and shirts.

When England were last in a final football, frankly, was not that important. Wembley was called the Empire Stadium, the fans wore ties and jackets to the game, and this was still a country where schoolboys understood what John Bunyan bangs on about in A Pilgrim’s Progress. Men with antique names like Bobby and Nobby pasted the Krauts in extra time, danced on the pitch, smoked a few fags in the showers, and went home.

Now, the England team is a genuine national institution, capable of generating socio-political talking points. The game stretches and envelopes in all directions. And England, like every national institution, like Greggs’ sausage rolls, or Prince Harry, are conscripted into our rabid debates about who we all really are.

Is Gareth Southgate’s team displaying a truly progressive patriotism by taking the knee before matches? Or is the manager actually a reactionary gammon for saying that “people have tried to invade us and we’ve had the courage to hold them back”. This is what people with master’s degrees have been arguing about on the internet over the past four weeks, while England supporters emptied pints over each other in fan zones up and down the land.

It will always be the fans, not the manager, not the players, and certainly not the FA, who define English football. The pictures and videos of them in Leicester Square began trickling out around midday. It was a Hogarthian free-for-all, already, and kick-off was hours away. “Get the lads away from this”, Robert Baden Powell wrote of the football terraces in his Scouting Book for Boys (1908), “and teach them to be manly.” For better, and occasionally for worse, England fans are lads, not men.

These aren’t the ones who watch football on television in their millions. Nor are they the “one-off experience” crew who go to the Emirates as a birthday treat. They aren’t season ticket holders at glamorous clubs. It’s not me, it’s probably not you. I’m thinking of the hardcore, kamikaze, death cult fans. The forgotten dreamers, the miserable drunkards, the national team obsessives. How many times has following England led them astray, embarrassed them, infuriated them? Too many times.

Financially, culturally, and spiritually, they are English football, even when they boo anthems, or sing “vile chants” about German bombers. They are not perfect, they’re not popular, and I’m pretty sure they never will be. Mainstream British culture could not be less interested in lads. And lads could not be less interested in mainstream British culture, if such a thing could even be said to exist anymore. Football, which money has made classless and popular, is one of the few places outside of ITV2 you might spot them. Beneath — only just beneath — the sponsorship and philanthropy and dazzle of the modern game, these lads are there watching England blow it.

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The English are earthbound, pedantic, stubborn, loud, wooden, and superstitious. We feel frustrations of a powerful and obscure nature here. Football is the imperfect outlet for them.

For we never win. Frustration is sublimated into yet more frustration, a state of affairs as mad and as pitilessly illogical as an Escher staircase. Losing at football is the national birthmark, part morality play, part musical hall joke. The rest of the world deliberately misunderstands its place in our national psyche, and calls it arrogance.

Arrogance? For English football fans, arrogance is 55 years of paying the money, boarding the replacement bus service, and flying to the Pristina City Stadium in Kosovo, deeply aware that whatever happens, the future is going out of the next tournament on penalties. Arrogant fans? England lost in recent memory to Iceland, a country with more volcanoes than professional footballers. And they still turn out, wrapped in their flags, singing their songs.

Beating Italy in the final would have been the ultimate moment of national catharsis. It might have resulted in most of the West End being cheerfully set ablaze by midnight. I took the Bakerloo Line towards Piccadilly Circus to see it for myself.

The carriage in front of mine was full of England fans. Every thirty seconds or so, a young lad with glassy eyes poked his head through the window, stared at us, and said “Waheyyy!” The third time he pushed his head through the window, I realised what was wrong. He was missing a front tooth. There are dry dark wine splashes down his tracksuit top. The tooth went earlier that day. His eyes glittered. “Waheyy!”

At each stop, more and more England fans entered that carriage. Older lads, at each platform, moved unsteadily towards the noise, like fat bees giddy with pollen, bumbling towards the next flower. More at Paddington. More at Marylebone. They banged the roof of the train. A tourist opposite me looked concerned.

On the street there were bodies in replica shirts everywhere. I saw a few Rashfords randomly strewn under bushes, a Maguire lying in the middle of the road, a Bobby Moore headfirst in a puddle, and Kanes slumped against railings, shop fronts, and walls. The sound of the word England echoed off buildings.

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We all found a place to watch the game. England tried, and they were not quite good enough.

Around Trafalgar Square, the grotesque comic energy of the earlier crowd had evaporated. The serious boozers, some Italians, those who are buying or selling drugs, and whoever was looking for a fight were the only ones left by 11.30pm. Many had vomited, or were about to. I was envious of them — this was a terrible night to be sober.

“It’s disgusting… mate,” said a squat man with a bucket hat on. His eyes were bloodshot. I asked him what was so disgusting. “It’s disgusting, disgusting… It is disgusting, mate.” He was waving around an empty bottle of Famous Grouse. He could have been talking about that, or the game, or the Francis Bacon painting unfolding around us, and he would have been right three times at once.

A band of Italians marched towards M&M world in Leicester Square. They did not burn it down, nor even ransack it. The Italian fans were happy, and brave. They moved, hands above their heads, bellowing, straight through hundreds of addled, angry England supporters. The floor was carpeted with thousands of potential projectiles — bottles, shards, horse shit, inflatable unicorn floats.

A gym bunny guy decided to have a go. He aimed his pint at the Italians. It sailed past them, and hit a English woman wearing a string bikini top flush in the face. He stumbled off down an alleyway. She shrieked.

It was chaotic in Piccadilly Circus. Lines of riot police tried to make rings around other groups of Italian fans. Five buses, each facing a different direction, were immobile. Fireworks zagged crazily into the sky and exploded.

We all stood around and watched the Italians, enviously, as they bounced up and down by the boarded-up fountain. We all waited. “It’s going to go off cuz,” someone said hopefully into a phone. Maybe that’s what we were waiting for. Violence.

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Wankers, wankers, wankers, chanted the England supporters at the Italians. The ground shook. The crowd felt like it was one signal away from a surge. A frightening English crowd. Maybe, I thought, losing would confirm what we knew all along. Half the fans were there because they wanted to punch someone in an out-group.

I spotted a bloke preparing to lob a traffic cone at the Italians. Here we go then. He threw it up in the air, where it seemed to hang for a few seconds. It floated down into the arms of a big boy who waved the useless English weapon above his head. The scenes repeated themselves, with less and less energy. The evening turned to black and white, then to the colour of the stuff inside a Hoover bag.

What would it have been like if England had won? I’m glad — and, yes, also devastated — that I didn’t find out. I doubt it would have changed the country very much, once the euphoria wore off. And it would take much more than footballing success to change our fans.

When Our Lord Jeremy extended his messianic balm over the fields of Glastonbury that June, the crowd was higher than ever — not just on the usuals — but on pure, uncut, top-shelf New Jerusalem. The torpor and apathy and cruelty of the 2010s were over at last. Salvation was at hand: Brexit would be reversed, affordable housing would be built, borders would be abolished. Every child would receive their own mega fast broadband router, and sex workers would be free to roam the land, maligned no more.

All over the country, roses shed their thorns; at Longleat, lions lay with lambs. No more either/or distinctions, from now on the British would embrace both/and. We were going to have it all, and so would the Palestinians. “That politics that got out of the box,” he roared from the Pyramid Stage, “is not going back in any box.”

And yet here we are, barely the length of a parliament later. Corbyn’s politics is not only boxed up — it is entombed, buried deep beneath the political firmament like nuclear waste. His replacement as Labour leader has less charisma than a long video of Iain Duncan Smith doing a jigsaw puzzle.

A few weeks ago, Keir Starmer appeared on television, watched by a trifling audience, and cried. (You would be crying too if you were the leader of the Labour party.) He seemed needy and awkward, like Labour’s losing, patronising, pints n’ flags n’ chip butties strategy in the Hartlepool by-election. Another by-election loss in Batley and Spen is about to follow.

What can save them? Well, when the going gets tough, the Party gets writing books. Labour luminaries are as prolix and as prolific as the most unhinged Victorian essayists. Labour tomes have fallen from the sky all year: John Cruddas’s The Dignity of Labour, will shortly be joined by Jess Philips’s Everything You Really Need to Know about Politics, and Lisa Nandy’s Finding Our Place in A World Falling Apart. And September will be shaken to its very core by Tristram Hunt’s book about Josiah Wedgewood, who he calls — sigh — “the Steve Jobs of the 18th century”. But the most revealing Labour books this year come from Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown, because they barely mention Labour at all.

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Miliband’s is called Go Big: How to Fix Our World. In 2015, unfortunate Ed looked as if he would be the first British politician to go down to posterity notable only for his association with a sandwich since… the actual Earl of Sandwich. Then he reinvented himself as a podcaster. Co-hosting Reasons to be Cheerful with the radio presenter Geoff Lloyd, Ed revealed that beneath the dorky, robotic exterior he possessed a more dorky, less robotic interior. The podcast was rampantly downloaded, and Miliband was profiled as if he were a cross between a sexier member of the pre-Raphaelites and a knight of the Algonquin Round Table. Miliband, the nearly man, had arrived.

Brown’s is called Seven Ways to Change the World, and is clearly the harvest of a long lockdown. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during his own plague-induced quarantine; Brown found not one, but seven whole ways to change the entire world. It reads like he bookmarked the Wikipedia page of the Marshall Plan, and googled “most inspiring quotes by dead African-Americans”. Like King Lear, Seven Ways is a tragedy, albeit for different reasons

Both Go Big and Seven Ways belong to the “everything can be fixed, trust us, we’re experts” genre of political treatise, which can be traced all the way back to Plato’s Republic. (Plato is a bit more honest about what technocratic governance means for liberty, democracy and the average person than Brown and Miliband are.) Both books believe the world is there to be hacked into betterness by enlightened politicians, inventive think-tankers, and dogged activists. Both see international cooperation as preferable to “populist nationalism”.

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Both books are optimistic, in the sense that they are poached in the mental and emotional atmosphere of 1997. Both Miliband and Brown have little useful or new to say about the Labour Party, Brexit, crime, defence, migration, China, or the spectacular failure of international bodies such as the WHO during the pandemic. Both books are exactly what you would expect them to be. Who is this for, other than the authors themselves?

Miliband is, I suppose, quite self-deprecating and almost aware of his ridiculousness. (He comes dangerously close to making a joke on page 9 of Go Big.) It is possible to imagine bantering with a fleece-wearing Ed while he tries to flog you overpriced organic honey at a Sunday morning farmer’s market in the Cotswolds. Brown on the other hand, remains crashingly, breathtakingly grand. Seven Ways is played in the major keys, and Brown is frozen in “We not only saved the world” mode here. Again and again he batters the reader with his motto: global problems require global solutions.

Seven Ways leaves you with the impression that if Brown found his house on fire, he would convene a summit of global thought leaders before he called the local firemen. On a panel with Fareed Zakaria, Yuval Noah Harari, and Tedros Adhanom, Brown would discuss the best ways to put out a housefire. What temperature should the dowsing water be? How long should the firehose be? Do we have the right balance of gender, sexual and racial diversity among the firemen coming to put out the blaze? His house would be a blackened hulk long before the discussion finished. In Gordon’s world there is nothing that can’t be solved by invoking the world. It’s the view from the sky, never the view from the street. This is a social democrat’s brain after 15 years of motorcades.

What Gordon will never do again is hold real power. Powerlessness shadows both texts. There is a reason why these two ex-Labour leaders don’t want to think about Britain. Brexit. So they dredge up their global solutions to global problems, straining for relevance and produce fantasies instead. If Labour stood on a manifesto cribbed from these books, they’d be lucky to get 500 votes outside the university towns.

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When they actually had power, what did they do with it? Miliband loved gimmicks as leader of the opposition, like unconvincing visits to Greggs and wearisome conversations with Russell Brand. (“The Tories should be worried,”wrote Owen Jones in May 2015, after Miliband met Brand on YouTube.) Meanwhile Brown is lauded as one of the last true intellects in British politics. A serious, big-brained, adult. And yet, as chancellor he could barely leave a room with Tony Blair in it without slamming the door so hard it lost its hinges. For a decade Brown stalked, sulked and screamed, all but consumed by tapeworms of envy that squirmed around inside him. Has there ever been a more emotionally delicate politician? “In the aftermath of 9/11, Tony rang Gordon to ask for his advice,” recalls Blair’s old advisor Jonathan Powell. “Instead of responding Gordon used the call to demand to know when Tony was going to resign. Tony slammed the phone down in a rage.”

These are men who could barely read the mood of their colleagues, let alone the country, let alone the global community. How to fix the world? How about you start by trying to fix a pothole lads? The problem for Labour is that its members may actually read these books and take them seriously. They would be much better off reading Edmund Burke, or V.S. Naipaul. Then they might understand Britain — which is currently reverting back to its spiky, crabby, nasty “fund the NHS, hang the nonces” conservative mean at the moment.

There is almost no chance that young Labourites will do that. They don’t want to understand their enemies, so they’ll be doomed to underestimate them. This is a party whose members, or the vocally online ones, spit teeth at the sight of a Union Jack. When they try to come up with a patriotism of the Left, as the talented Dan Jarvis did in a Fabian Society pamphlet this year, they fall back on platitudes. Left patriotism, Jarvis writes, should invoke the “Britain of the Tolpuddle martyrs, the Chartists, and the miners’ strike.” I can imagine this will be really appealing to all those people who actually care who the Tolpuddle martyrs and the Chartists were. The Tories, I suspect, will be happy to keep the flag, the Queen, and the Armed Forces.

Where is Labour now? In the same place they were in 1964, when Perry Anderson wrote of the party trapped in an “isolated, spot-lit enclave, surrounded on every side by hostile territory”. It’s an enclave in a land that speaks a language foreign to the party. None of the maps makes any sense. The only road out is very dark, cold and lonely. And if the party is asking Brown and Miliband for directions, they’ll be walking it for a long while yet.

At least in 1964 Labour were prepared to fight their way out of enemy territory. “If it’s the last thing I do,” said Anthony Crosland, “I’m going to destroy every fucking Grammar School in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.” And he actually did it! Nobody in Labour today looks capable of destroying anything, apart from the party itself. They prattle on about their values (without saying what they are) on the morning shows, or cry like X Factor contestants, or are given the run around by George Galloway in by-elections, while the country turns away in embarrassment. No wonder these old leaders don’t write books about the party today. Writing the obituary of something you put in the ground is not for everyone.

The cream of American journalism was not much interested in slathering itself over the Maxwell story last summer. They were more invested in tone-policing each other’s language, or playing the game of labelling their colleagues racist following the murder of George Floyd.

Star byline American hacks are so much grander than their British cousins. They are celebrated, and become celebrities. In Britain the successful journalist is the one who has enough money to (finally) fix their boiler next month. Maybe, after nearly losing their mind several times, and surrendering all their hair to a stress-related-disorder, they scratch together the words for a political thriller that nobody reads. If they’re really, truly successful they move to America. In the land of the bald eagle, the British accent — even if it’s a Welsh one — makes them sound attractive, funny and clever.

American journalists want to be liked. They think of themselves, in the good guys busting the corrupt guys Watergate tradition, as ethical. British journalists would certainly like to be more ethical, but deep down I suspect that many of them would still hack a grieving mother’s phone if you gave them a promise from an editor and the assurances of a lawyer.

Anyway, all those battles over racism in the US press in 2020 did have one major consequence: a flock of big American journalists fled their perches at the biggest papers and magazines. Famous old classical liberal journalists like Andrew Sullivan exchanged berths in the mainstream media for new homes at the subscription newsletter service Substack. And the consequence of that move is to make US journalism resemble British journalism — albeit the British journalism of the 18^th century.

Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie. Each is a parody of the Silicon Valley tech bro, a type that in my imagination eats cicada tacos for lunch and speculates on the impact of Bitcoin on developing economies after dinner. Ultramodern then. But Substack, an online platform that provides writers with the infrastructure to send newsletters to paying subscribers, isn’t modern at all. It’s a throwback. Best, Sethi and McKenzie’s use of new-ish technology is retrieving and reviving an old form of publishing: the 18^th century literary periodical.

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In the 18^th century there were no hard borders between philosophy, journalism, memoirs, confessions, sermons, travelogues, ephemera, satires, screeds, and squibs. London publishing was like one of those pictures of a murky pre-Cambrian swamp, swarming with colourful oddities and crudely formed clusters of life. There was little distinction between fiction and non-fiction; personal prejudice was indistinguishable from social critique. There was, thank God, not a data journalist in sight. Objectivity was less important than fantasy.

The most popular form of all in this period was the periodical literary essay, which survived well into the 19^th century. These short essays were driven by personalities. Like Substack’s top newsletters today, they were sold to the public on the reputational strength of superstar writers who were not above satirising each other.

There was Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709-11), a breezy gossip rag, and Joseph Addison’s Spectator (1711-12), which spied on politicians in coffee houses. Dr Johnson published The Rambler (1750-2) and The Idler (1758-60) as homes for his most meandering, self-conscious essays. The periodicals were about taste, war, history, manners, and fashion — the news in other words — but through a lens that was semi-fictional. The writers usually performed a character. So, Dr Johnson was not Dr Johnson, but “The Rambler” — a man with his own peculiar notions, his own unique, desultory angle on the world. The most successful periodicals, and this is the case with Substacks too, were defined by the character of the writer and the strength of their voice.

Whether any of it was true or not was beside the point. The 18^th century politician, diarist and letter writer Horace Walpole can be found moaning somewhere that journalism was full of “nothing but lies, every one of which fifty persons could contradict and disprove”.

As James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer and a periodical essayist himself with The Hypochondriak (1777-83) announced: “We may be in some degree whatever character we choose.” The periodical writers were offering more than information to their readers. They offered their public a fantasy persona to read about. If the Mail Online sidebar has taught us anything about human nature at all, it is that people enjoy feasting on the lives of others. The ups, the downs, the pratfalls, the implosions, the HR-bothering opinions. Objective news cannot compete with fleshy human drama, or splenetic POVs — the key insight shared by Substack, which is full of writers feuding with other writers, and the literary periodicals.

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One critic of Substack has described America’s digital media ecosystem as a “feudal structure”. Here “highly charismatic knights” — like say, Matt Taibbi, who has an enormous Substack following — are the winners who take it all. An interesting idea, but it would be difficult to find a time when this wasn’t;’t true. Public taste in the 21^st century is as unpredictable as it was in the 18^th century. Then, as now, those who invested in writing and publishing looked for safe returns and backed pedigreed racers. At the top of the industry, whichever century you choose to look at, you will always find a blessed, golden circle of proven champs.

For every Dr Johnson selling out his Rambler and Matthew Yglesias with his tens of thousands of Substack subscribers, there will always be a dozen writers sinking into penury, disgrace and madness. The age of the literary periodical was the age of Grub Street too. This semi-mythical area of London was immiserated and impoverished, garrisoned by a cast of indigent poets, semi-literate dead beats, half-professional plagiarists, their tarts and the bailiffs who were out to hunt them down. William Hogarth could have spent his entire career drawing endless versions of his The Distressed Poet (1737).

Ambition was the evil star that burned over Grub Street. The vast surplus pool of writerly labour drove wages down (a painful phenomenon that anyone who makes a living by their words will recognise immediately). One writer summed it up with true journalistic melodrama in 1758: “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines;… Both have their Tasks assigned to them alike: Both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance.”

Only the names have changed since then. Today’s starving journalists live in overpriced flats in London’s Hackney or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. They dream of topping the Substack leaderboard; they’ll be lucky to crank out five listicles a day for Buzzfeed. Even at The New Yorker — the journalistic equivalent of Mount Olympus — just the other day the junior staff were threatening to go on strike. Outside Anna Wintour’s house they chanted, “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!” Wintour could sack them all right now and replace each and every one of them before breakfast tomorrow.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the mental agony of journalism has always been something that journalism refers back to. (Here’s a Substack about that by Freddie de Boer, who is very much in the winner’s enclosure of the platform.) “We should not find it astonishing,” wrote Max Weber years ago, “that so many journalists have gone off the rails or have otherwise lost their value as human beings.”

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Journalists today — largely due to recency bias — imagine that they have it harder, and that their careers are that much tougher, due to the ruthless competition fostered by Substack, or other platforms like Twitter. They might feel like they need to talk about their mental health (fair enough), but they — I hope — have never been paid for their articles with loaves of bread, like their ancestors in Grub Street often were.

Johnson’s Rambler, just like the discussion around Substack across the American press, served as a meta-commentary on the struggles of journalism itself. The world is endlessly competitive writes Johnson, who rose from the depths of Grub Street to the top of his profession: “Every one wishes for the distinctions for which thousands are wishing at the same time.” There is only ever a scarce supply of fame, so success necessarily entails victory over others. Otherwise, all that remained for the failed writer was, as Johnson put it in a poem: “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”

Substack is taking American journalists — and inevitably, British ones — back to Johnson’s world. It is not very hard to imagine a scurrilous Rod Liddle newsletter, once he has finally nuked himself in the pages of The Sunday Times. Perhaps the most promising development for Substack on this side of the Atlantic is Joshi Herrmann’s Manchester Mill. Hermann is using Substack to create a thoughtful, ultra-local, story-driven paper that serves Manchester alone. Barely a year old, it’s already better than any local newspaper in Britain.

Still, if there’s any lesson in the similarities between Substack and the literary periodicals, it’s that trends run in cycles, not straight lines. Substack won’t last forever, even if it is generating a flurry of attacks on it from envious, non-Substack writers now. It will be lame eventually. That’s what happened to the periodicals.

In Barchester Towers (1857) Anthony Trollope pokes fun at a moth-eaten country squire who possesses a complete set of Dr Johnson’s periodicals. He yacks on about how The Idler is superior to anything produced before or since. In forty years there’ll be a hack talking about Substack like that, and another hack taking the piss out of them for it.