Then, on 25 September, residents along 50 miles of that coastline found that their beaches had become a charnel house. Thousands of dead and dying shellfish, their bodies twitching and convulsing, were piled thick on the sand. It was the first of several “die-offs” that left these seas barren and annihilated a centuries-old fishing industry. “Ecosystem wipeout,” Rennie calls it. 

To this day, despite two government inquiries, there is no official explanation for what caused this marine apocalypse. Finlay’s documentary, currently on release in selected cinemas, follows the region’s fishermen as they come to terms with their loss. This tragedy, it turns out, is about much more than crustaceans and lost livelihoods. It is intertwined with themes which have haunted Britain for a decade: the legacy of deindustrialization, the anger of the country’s left behind, and the false hopes offered by the political class. The North East has more neighborhoods classed as highly deprived than any other region in England, with Hartlepool and Middlesbrough ranking among the three most deprived local authorities in the country. 

Hartlepool sits by the mouth of the River Tees, an area that was until the Eighties one of Britain’s industrial heartlands. Teesside had a vast steelmaking industry, as well as power stations, chemical plants and shipbuilding facilities. Steel alone employed 40,000 workers. The rusted hulks of those factories loomed along the coastline where Rennie caught shellfish, painfully obvious symbols of a community in decline. 

Then, in 2021, the demolitions began. The Conservative government had earmarked the Tees estuary for a major redevelopment, to be overseen by the newly created Tees Valley Combined Authority and its Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen. It was to be the country’s first “Freeport”, a launchpad for Brexit Britain that would attract global investors with preferential tax and customs arrangements. By 2023, the government had committed more than £250 million of public funds for the redevelopment. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seeking to appeal to traditional Labour voters who had supported Brexit and then swung behind the Tories to deliver it. In the 2016 referendum, Leave won every borough in Teesside with at least 60% of the vote, and three years later, first-time Conservative voters (including Rennie, his wife and his daughter) had delivered Johnson half of the six Teesside seats.

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The plan was to clear Teesmouth, Europe’s largest brownfield site, to make way for the new development. The board responsible boasted that 10 years’ worth of clean-up work would take place in just two to three years. What the prospectus did not mention was that the old industries had for decades dumped their poisonous by-products into the landscape and the river itself. This symbol of regional rebirth was being built on something akin to the edge of a volcano. 

Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of Finlay’s film. The first government inquiry into the crustacean die-off suggested that the culprit was an algal bloom, an explanation that the fishermen regarded as absurd. They had their own ideas about what caused the disaster. In the days preceding it, a dredging vessel clearing up after a landslip had removed 150,000 tonnes of sediment from the riverbed at Teesmouth, depositing it three miles out at sea. The river estuary is regularly dredged — albeit not on this scale — and the ports authority maintains that the landslip was not caused by the demolitions then taking place. Nonetheless, the fishermen were convinced that dredged material had poisoned the waters, and raised funds to hire their own scientific researchers. 

According to these researchers, the evidence pointed toward pyridine, a chemical which had historically been used by industry at Teesside. They claimed that crabs exposed to pyridine respond similarly to those observed on the beaches; that samples collected by the Environment Agency contained high levels of the substance; and that computer simulations showed a spillage from Teesmouth spreading down the coast much as the die-off had. 

To the fishermen who suddenly found themselves unable to support their families, and the locals whose dogs became sick after walking along the beaches, it appeared that the truth behind their ordeal was being suppressed. Nothing could stand in the way of the totemic Teesside regeneration, a project that would, after all, involve a lot more dredging. Suspicions mounted throughout 2022 as a stench of malfeasance gathered around Houchen’s scheme. Reporting by Richard Brooks at Private Eye and local newspapers pointed to financial irregularities, misuse of public funds, and extraordinary benefits granted to a coterie of private developers around the mayor. In time, these would become allegations of staggering duplicity and graft, leaving the development corporation heavily indebted.

The resentment toward a distant establishment which the Brexit project had harnessed so effectively was now turned against it. “Anywhere else in the country, the government would’ve thrown every resource at this,” Rennie says. “Because we’re the North East, the back hole of the country, we’re just forgotten about.”

The remarkable thing, though, is that while the fishermen’s sense of abandonment is understandable, they were not forgotten about at all. They became an emblem of the government’s betrayal of the people it claimed to represent, eagerly seized upon by critics of Johnson and Brexit. The populists had become the establishment, so their opponents could become populists in turn. In June 2022, the Guardian’s George Monbiot wrote that “with every passing week, it looks more like a cover-up”. He condemned the government inquiry for failing to publish its data and promoted the pyridine hypothesis. Channel 4 took the same course. That autumn, parliament’s environment select committee invited Rennie and the researchers working with the fishermen to make their case. The committee demanded a second, independent inquiry to address the conflicting accounts, but that too was called into question before it had even reported its findings. Critics noted that it was appointed and overseen by government advisors, that some of its members were kept anonymous — to protect their independence — and that it refused to cooperate with the scientists behind the pyridine hypothesis. 

The experts assembled by that second government inquiry later complained that the idea that they — “politically independent scientists from universities, research laboratories and consultancies” — had “colluded on a fictitious report” was “preposterous”. This narrative was, they suggested, being fed by “mistrust in government” and “inaccurate media coverage”. Unfortunately, their reasons for rejecting the pyridine hypothesis were never likely to cut through this atmosphere of suspicion, as they involved technical issues such as the validity of the samples and methods used for testing, and the chemical properties of the pyridine molecule itself. Likewise, though they dismissed the first inquiry’s theory about the algal bloom, their own preferred explanation — that a novel and unique pathogen had killed the crustaceans — did not satisfy anyone as it was entirely hypothetical. 

There are still many question marks around the government’s response to the die-offs, and plenty of reason to think that, as Rennie puts it: “They don’t want to find the truth. They want to do the Freeport the cheapest option they can.” Despite the persistence of the shellfish deaths, the work at Teesmouth was not paused nor were proper samples taken of the riverbed. The government consistently hid behind a lack of evidence without making much effort to gather it. After the second inquiry, Conservative environment minister Thérèse Coffey announced that no further investigation would take place concerning the pathogen mooted as the possible cause. She also insisted that government agencies had received no further reports of die-offs following the initial incident in 2021, which came as news to the Teesside locals who had been submitting such reports regularly.

Nonetheless, the pyridine hypothesis is, in effect, a conspiracy theory. Its popularity probably tells us less about the cause of the disaster than about the paranoia that has penetrated to the heart of British politics in the decade since the Brexit vote. This is the most revealing aspect of All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea: try as you might to keep an open mind about the facts of the case, you cannot escape the conviction that these fishermen have been wronged, that they are victims of a system which cares nothing for them. This impression stems from their brutal lack of political agency. Even as the machinery of democracy swings into action behind them, carrying them into parliament itself, their status seems to be little better than that of feudal subjects bringing a petition to their lord’s manor. They cannot navigate the state’s bureaucratic defenses, pause the Teesmouth development, or prevent Houchen being re-elected. They are hostages to historical and ecological forces beyond their control, and ultimately become just another set of protesters waving their placards. 

The image of paralyzed crabs washing ashore symbolizes the impotence of these communities, and their impotence, in turn, has become emblematic of a whole nation’s frustration that nothing, and least of all government, seems to work as it should. Hence the strange situation whereby these left-behind places have, on account of their powerlessness, become the most powerful source of moral legitimacy in British politics. Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Andy Burnham have all presented themselves as answers to the anger of Stan Rennie’s Britain — and their opponents have attacked them, above all, for betraying it. 

Teesside gives a sense of why the promises of politicians have so often turned to disappointment. Burnham’s big idea is to devolve power to local areas, but he is not the first to try this; the Tees Valley Combined Authority was created by the Tories in 2016. The allegations surrounding Houchen’s regime — prompting the government to announce a statutory investigation this month — suggest that far from bringing accountable authority closer to communities, devolution creates opportunities for charismatic local figures to indulge in cronyism far from the spotlight of the Westminster-centric media. None are better placed to play on local grievances than local politicians who can blame their failures on others, as when Houchen claimed that opposition to dredging in the Tees came from “local activists and Labour politicians” attempting a “stitch-up”, because “they’d rather see the area fail than us succeed”.

The crustacean die-offs also raise awkward questions for those who say that the key to British prosperity lies in less regulation and greater executive powers to force through developments opposed by pesky locals. Teesmouth offers a glimpse of what a more Chinese approach to “delivering” actually looks like: even when there is an unexplained ecological catastrophe unfolding, developers will simply plow ahead and vilify critics as the enemies of progress. Much criticism of excessive regulation is justified, but we must acknowledge that Britain’s ecosystems are in a state of extreme fragility and depletion, not least thanks to the effects of historic pollution and mismanagement like that seen at Teesmouth. Putting aside the pyridine hypothesis, the government inquiries into the disaster revealed that numerous toxic substances are entering the sea in alarming quantities. A tragic subplot of Finlay’s film concerns a local seal colony that is sick and emaciated, its pups dying in droves, due to a contaminated food chain. 

Environmentalists are always trying to demonstrate our dependence on the natural world, but nothing I have seen conveys the message more powerfully than the image of fishermen forlornly pulling up one empty net after another. “The pots are barren,” Rennie announces in disgust, wishing they were still full of “all the bonnie stuff we should be seeing all our lives”. Suffering from heart problems and non-alcoholic liver disease, he continues working for the sake of physical activity, burning through his savings in the process. The other fishermen are struggling to sell their boats and telling their sons to find a different trade. More than half of the Hartlepool fleet has gone since 2021.

The existence of this film offers some small consolation for the fishermen’s plight; Finlay says they feel “a huge relief in being seen”. For all the promises directed at places like Teesside in the last decade and more, it seems that this remains a rare feeling.

For a joke to fall flat may be a calamity, as in the old Bob Monkhouse quip: “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now.” People and things falling flat, however, can be a source of high comedy. A good deal of humor is based on deflation and debunkery. A cohort of legendary British comedians (Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams) trade on sudden swoops from the sublime to the mundane — from the civilized tones of the cultivated middle classes to the blunter idiom of the populace. With their bathetic descent from posh to profane, these performers are a kind of class conflict in their own person. One thinks also of Monty Python’s “Summarise Proust” contest, a television game in which competitors were given two minutes to summarize Proust’s 3,000-odd page novel, first in evening dress and then in a bathing costume.

There’s a rich English tradition of savage debunkery, from Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. The sudden puncturing of grandiose rhetoric, the urge to demolish and disfigure, are familiar features of English writing, as they are in the literary culture of Ireland. Flann O’Brien’s superb fiction plays off abstruse metaphysical speculation against the threadbare platitudes of pub talk, while James Joyce’s prosaic Leopold Bloom is a counterweight to his philosophically-minded Stephen Dedalus. The United States, a nation which likes to affirm and is nervous of negativity, has a less impressive history of satire.

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The transgressions of Tom Stoppard

By Terry Eagleton

Speaking of Irish writers may remind us of just how little English stage comedy there would be without Irish émigrés. From Congreve, Steele, Macklin and Goldsmith to Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde and Brendan Behan, the London theatre has been dominated by Irishmen who washed up in the metropolis with little but their wits to hawk. Treading a thin line between insiders and outsiders, they could turn this hybrid status to fruitful comic use. They were insiders enough to grasp the manners and conventions of English society, yet distanced enough to have a quick eye for their absurdities. Wilde was an Irish Republican but also a parody of the English gentleman, while Richard Sheridan was a Whig Member of Parliament who secretly fellow-travelled with the revolutionary United Irishmen. Brendan Behan, who once remarked that he was a drinker with a writing problem, used to be hauled on to BBC television after the pubs had closed in order to demonstrate what lovable drunks the Paddies were. Shaw, a less inebriated exile, warned his fellow Irish writers against becoming court jesters to the British. It was, in fact, far too late: the Anglo-Irish Oliver Goldsmith performed precisely this role in 18th-century London literary circles.

Why does swooping from the sublime to the ridiculous make us laugh? The answer for Sigmund Freud in his deeply unfunny study of jokes is that we invest a high amount of unconscious energy in sustaining our noble ideals or social inhibitions. When these are suddenly deflated, we economize on that energy and release it in the form of laughter. Jokes liberate us momentarily from the reality principle, allowing us to indulge the pleasure principle instead. This is one reason why sexuality is a fertile source of humor, involving as it does both high romantic feeling and the lowly genitals. Few human activities are at once so exotic and so banal. How can the question of who copulates with whom lead to such murder and mayhem? Human beings are pitched between flesh and spirit, and humor reminds us of the double act that we are.

Most humor involves some sort of incongruity. We laugh when something seems out of place, when things go off the rails or are thrown out of kilter. Which is to say that a lot of humor springs from the baffling of expectations. Humor returns the kind of response we don’t anticipate, as with: “What do you call the useless bit at the end of the penis? The man.” We invest psychical energy in keeping the world orderly and predictable, and any sudden dissonance allows us to relax the unconscious strain which this involves. Even Charles Darwin, not a man given to giggling, thought that laughter was caused by the incongruous or unaccountable. “You’ve got to stop masturbating,” a doctor tells a patient. “Why?” asks the patient. “Because I’m trying to conduct a medical examination,” replies the doctor testily. This involves slipping from one frame of reference (masturbation in general) to another (masturbation here and now), which is a form of incongruity.

A quick slide of meaning or shift of perspective may be enough to be comic, as with Oscar Wilde’s “I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood”, or Dorothy Parker’s response to being told that people at Halloween duck for apples: “There, but for a single consonant, is the story of my life.” She also remarked that “the transatlantic crossing was so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the First Mate.” The decadent fin-de-siècle poet Ernest Dowson once declared that “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”. With such deft changes of single words we are in the realm of wit, as with Wilde’s “The young people of today have no respect for dyed hair”. Even punctuation can make a difference. “The batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willey,” announced a cricket commentator, a phrase in which everything turns on a comma. Sexual jokes are funny because they allow us for a moment to lift our repressions and indulge in the unspeakable, while knowing that no real harm is likely to result from this.

“I’ve got them down to ten,” bawls Moses to his people as he descends Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, “but adultery’s still in.” A lot of humor depends on laws and prohibitions, since without them we would have nothing to transgress, and transgression is usually pleasurable. Deviating from a norm can take the form of eccentricity, especially in England. The English love what they call “a character”, like the Oxford don I once knew who used to stand in a pub with a cavalier air and a parrot on his shoulder. (His cavalier air was shaken only by his obvious fear that the bird might crap on his shoulder.) People who stick ferrets down their trousers or ride to work on a baby rhino are likely to be honored by Buckingham Palace. The upper class in particular are transgressive, since they regard themselves as superior to codes and conventions, even though they often set them themselves. Brian Howard, one of the louche Evelyn Waugh set, was once arrested by the police in an illicit drinking den in Soho. When asked for his name and address, he replied: “My name is Brian Howard, I live in Berkeley Square, and you, Inspector, I suppose, come from some dreary little suburb.”

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While the middle classes cling timorously to the rules, the upper classes proclaim their privilege by kicking over the traces, combining the glamour of rank with the effrontery of not giving a damn. In this sense they have something in common with the criminal, as we have recently witnessed. The British admire devil-may-care aristocrats, which is why they’re so fond of the second-rate poet Lord Byron; but they also champion those curmudgeonly types who thwart the government’s plans for a new airport by clinging stubbornly to their two acres of land. Individualism in the United States means the boldly enterprising spirit; in Britain it’s more a matter of idiosyncrasy.

It’s surprising that politicians don’t use humor more often, given that it’s one of the most superbly effective means of communication. Not many comedians are politicians, though Eddie Izzard has revealed ambitions in that respect. Some politicians are comedians, however — not in the sense of inspiring laughter but in being the object of it. Keir Starmer wouldn’t even make a decent straight man, let alone a comic. Harold Macmillan could throw off the odd witticism, as when he remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope. Those of us who remember the Labour MP Denis Healey know that he was good for a knees-up. Boris Johnson, by contrast, is that rare member of the human species, a man who is fundamentally frivolous. Most frivolity is skin-deep, but Johnson’s is a massively serious affair which goes all the way down. There’s nothing more profound about him than his superficiality.

Jokes are political in the sense that they prefigure an alternative form of life. Like art but unlike capitalism, they aren’t primarily concerned with profit and power. Instead, they represent a sharing of life purely for its own sake. It’s true that some of them can be more functional — breaking the ice, mocking an adversary, abusing an immigrant, showing what a clever guy you are — but the finest jokes have no more point than a kiss or a wave. They represent a small piece of utopia in a darkening world.

Boris Johnson was the first major politician to successfully harness the chaos. Back in 2019, as the Conservatives faced electoral collapse and the rise of insurgent populism, he posed as a maverick outsider and — despite leading a party that had been in power for almost a decade — turned government into a vehicle for revolt. He went on to win the largest Tory majority since 1987 and Got Brexit Done.

Labour is now facing a moment of similar peril. It has lost Wales and vast swathes of urban Britain, as well as towns and suburbs to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Much like the Tories before Johnson, Labour seems done for; remote and detached from the people it claims to represent.

So, as chaos consumes Westminster, the party is frantically searching for a political redeemer. Wes Streeting, resigning as Health Secretary yesterday, offered a diagnosis: “where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.” But besides his impressive alliteration, the now former Health Secretary didn’t offer much by way of solutions. Indeed, at the time of writing, no senior MP has mounted a leadership challenge to Starmer. In fact, the party would seem paralyzed but for one man: Andy Burnham. And late yesterday, Josh Simons forsook his Makerfield constituency to allow the Manchester Mayor to contest the seat in a by-election which, should he win, will mean he can stand for the leadership.

Burnham probably doesn’t think he has much to learn from the tousle-haired Tory. But if he does win the seat, and later replaces Starmer, he will have to learn what Johnson instinctively understood: to build a coalition strong enough to stop Farage’s populist cavalcade, he must rescue Labour from elements killing it from within.

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Starmer has turned Labour into a party of cautious, insipid managers — adding credence to the caricature of centrist politics. Even on Monday, when he had to give the speech of a lifetime, the Prime Minister pledged to nationalize British Steel, but only “pending review”. Those two words sum up everything that has gone wrong during his premiership.

So Labour needs an insurgent — against the status quo yet, like Johnson, from inside the corridors of power. But does Burnham have it in him? To an extent, his uncontentious manner reflects the broader culture of much of Labour. There is a longstanding instinct, particularly on the “soft Left”, to reconcile factions and bring people together.  Gordon Brown, as his premiership took a turn for the worse, memorably welcomed Peter Mandelson back as Business Secretary. A few years later, after upsetting the odds, Ed Miliband offered an olive branch to the Blairites by making Alan Johnson — who later admitted to buying a copy of Economics for Dummies — his shadow Chancellor. Even Blair had Robin Cook, John Prescott and Clare Short.

Recent history suggests there’s not much evidence that such emollience, by itself, is a strategy. Mandelson’s prodigal return didn’t make the slightest difference for Labour in the general election that followed. Picking Alan Johnson, and later Ed Balls, as his shadow chancellors stopped Miliband from crafting a distinctive political brand. And right now, with Labour already in power, Burnham can’t afford to prioritize uniting several hundred MPs over uniting the country. The former, after all, might soon depend on him to save their jobs.

Instead, Burnham must concede that his own party is just as dysfunctional as the Conservatives were, and accept Labour’s shared culpability for decades of bad decisions: from PFI and privatizing utilities to the Iraq War; an economic model built on cheap migrant labor and, latterly, trying to thwart Brexit. That, after all, is at the core of Nigel Farage’s message: decades of failure are the result of a rotten consensus, overseen by the uniparty as it squatted in the “center ground”. This smug dogmatism insulated politicians from the needs and opinions of the public. It’s precisely why the potential Hail Mary presently being pitched by some Starmer supporters, re-joining the EU, will appall so many. And yet, Labour still doesn’t get it.

Burnham, then, must accept the accuracy of Reform’s diagnosis — before outlining his own alternative — a policy platform increasingly known as Manchesterism. At the heart of this agenda is a vision based on sovereignty, common ownership and a productive national economy: themes that aren’t offputting to the majority of Reform voters. It has the feel of a Left-wing, British version of MAGA, a prospectus that could attract a large bloc of voters.

Manchesterism, as detailed in a report this week, identifies the root of Britain’s permanent slide in living standards as the extractive nature of rentierism, be it buy-to-let landlords, private equity or foreign sovereign-wealth funds. Yet besides this critique, which unsurprisingly calls for public ownership of things such as water and energy, is a pro-enterprise agenda embedded in a state that protects. If you have £80,000 of student debt you are less likely to start a business, or begin a family — a self-evident truth somehow lost on the policy wonks of SW1.

In other words, Burnham should attack the prime movers of precarious Britain — from the architects of tuition fees to those who pushed outsourcing into every corner of local government. Successfully selling this platform must therefore be accompanied by upbraiding the likes of the Tony Blair Institute, ditching ID cards and asking questions about the wisdom of various constitutional reforms since 1997. I’m yet to hear a socialist argument for the Supreme Court, or Osborne’s even more idiotic OBR. And while I don’t favor a hereditary system, it’s hard to argue that the “reformed” House of Lords, built on cronyism and party patronage, is any better. For decades, Burnham should say, the Party lost its way. A vital connection with the toiling classes was lost. Implicating a government within which he served — that of Tony Blair — would only serve to underscore the extent of his critique, while blunting attacks from Reform.

Among all the figures currently being discussed as successors to Starmer, Burnham stands apart because he alone appears capable of building a coalition to stop Reform. Wes Streeting is simply the continuity candidate for the uniparty, associated with all those figures the voters distrust. Ed Miliband was rejected by the electorate once before, and would struggle to present himself as a figure of renewal. While Angela Rayner remains the preferred candidate of several trade unions, doubts about her authority within the party persist — and she has seemed increasingly lightweight since Labour entered office. Others floated — such as Al Cairns and Shabana Mahmood — have no hope with the Labour membership. Cairns has only been an MP for two years, and has no policy agenda or base within the party. Meanwhile Mahmood’s tenure as Home Secretary has arguably angered Labour members more than anyone.

Burnham, though, has that rare advantage. He alone among these purported rivals can command support from both his party’s parliamentarians and its members — as well as the general public. Such a convergence matters deeply as the party enters what looks like to be an existential crisis.

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To succeed, though, will take more than calling for a new comms strategy, “re-framing” the national debate or nebulous calls for unity. Labour’s most popular national figure will need to convince voters he understands why they have lost trust in the system — and that he has a plan for two decades of decline. This doesn’t mean he should overcook his radical credentials, and spook the bond markets. Rather he must start by conveying a sense of urgency and action, while re-connecting with the constituencies Starmer alienated in recent years — from those who support the cause of a Palestinian state to small business and the Labour Left. At the same time, he could do worse than purge, or at the very least alienate, a few Bluesky liberals. From the start, he’ll need to demonstrate what he’s against.

After all, that’s what Johnson did in 2019, when he dispensed with the pro-European awkward squad — a prologue to turning around the electoral fortunes of a Tory party in meltdown. Like Johnson, Burnham needs to show he’s on the side of the people against the Brahmin elite. What’s more, establishing political consent in the 2020s means governing as an insurgent, a fact that the spin doctors and ideologues of the long Nineties — who generally populate the opinion columns of this country’s broadsheets — are bewildered by. Listen to such voices for much longer, and Labour might well vanish for good.

Of course, there remain some ubiquitous animal behaviors whose fitness-enhancing value remains a true mystery. Why, for instance, do creatures ever panic? That is, why do they fail to respond in a well-controlled way to environmental threats; why do they muddle important considerations and unimportant ones; why do they sometimes “act-out” or fail to act at all when the stakes are at their very highest?

One has only to look at the two mesmerizing examples of political panic put before us by the Labour Party this week to see how vividly dysfunctional a reaction it is. Politicians rarely face such a clear-cut test of their survival instincts as Keir Starmer did on Tuesday — a reckoning, moreover, largely of his own orchestration. No. 10 strategists apparently toiled long through the weekend to ensure his latest reset speech — his 10th? his 20th? — would see off his challengers.

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Surely, faced with the political equivalent of a fight-or-flight threat to his life, Starmer’s reaction would not be the familiar rehearsal, adenoidal in sound and spirit, of a few pre-announced policies and coma-inducing oratorical leitmotifs (“I’ve learned a lot in the first two years in the job. In terms of the policy challenges our country faces…”)? As it happened, like a creature paralyzed by the overwhelming odds against it, Starmer didn’t even attempt to deviate from his tried-and-tested soporific style, whose only appeal at this stage must be its sheer familiarity: a flat, dull, self-derivative piece of oratory. In a truly courageous piece of spin, a listening Labour party apparatchik ventured that he had never heard Starmer speak so “personally” about his background. Ah, yes, Keir Starmer: famously unwilling to use his working-class background as a rhetorical crutch and positively cagey about his father’s mystery profession.

Alongside panic manifesting as overthought underreaction, we have witnessed panic as mindless overreaction. By her own admission, the backbench MP Catherine West hadn’t even looked up her own party’s internal rules before initiating her assault on the Starmer premiership. Still 100 or so of her colleagues signed onto her aimless plan — apparently insensitive to the consideration that whoever replaces Starmer is highly likely to be worse, not least in some of the very same respects that he is already bad. To panic is often to regard action — any action at all, even those that make things worse — as better than failing to act at all.

Philosophers have recently become interested in the idea that groups, as well as individuals, might have mental states — and, therefore, that actions and behaviors might be attributed to them too. In Westminster’s strange ecosystem, one such creature is the lobby: the political media itself. Its unusual, apparently counter-adaptive trait is to thrive on panic. The combination of rolling news coverage, diabolically amplified by the restless Sauron’s eye of X, may as well have been designed to initiate the equivalent of speculative runs on politicians’ political capital. Always on the alert for the first tremors of chaos or collapse, its standing inclination is to direct its disordered attention to every fresh twist of the news cycle. To the chronically online, there is a special sense attached to a “good day” on X: it is one in which, by a kind of dispersed psychological alchemy, the site seems to act as a single collective intelligence — achieving a kind of flow state in which a steady stream of breaking news and claxon emojis melds seamlessly with parody, self-reference, and a commentary providing an instantaneously memeified parallel reality. Has two-tier Keir become two-year Kier? Is No. 10’s sexy lectern man getting a good night’s sleep before his next big outing? Has the prime minister appointed Myra Hindley as children and safe-guarding minister as part of is latest ingenious reset? Wouldn’t it be oh-so-funny if Samantha Niblett, champion of Labour’s ill-conceived “summer of sex” campaign, becomes the “69th” MP to disown her prime minister? The chains of mutual-reference and random association are akin to the thoughts of a disordered mind: the significant and insignificant competing for shared space. When the Johnson government was brought to its brink, ministers were resigning faster than they could be feasibly replaced: the speed and publicity of social-media announcements creating a sense of uncontained, perhaps uncontainable, chaos.

Johnson was correct when, delivering his resignation speech from outside No. 10, he bitterly noted that “at Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves”. What he didn’t mention is that such speculative runs would be near impossible to achieve without the coordination mechanism now provided by modern media. Under previous regimes, politicians found room for maneuver amid the comparatively slow speed of information. Just consider the astonishingly quaint recollection Ken Clarke gives of Black Wednesday, when Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Having “pottered around” at the Home Office a bit, Clarke joined Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd who were “cooped up” in Admiralty House, “drinking tea [and] hoping against hope that a second-interest rate rise would work” to avert a sterling crisis. Only some hours into the afternoon did it occur to any of them that, in their splendid isolation from the flow of information, they “were probably less well informed than perhaps anybody else in the United Kingdom about exactly what was going on”. “We began to search for a transistor radio.”

However counterintuitive, in political crises too much information can be as destabilizing as too little. The reasons Britain has recently surpassed Italian levels of prime-ministerial replacement are probably overdetermined. But one important accelerant to the many underlying problems is the dysfunctional epistemic environment, one which offers a surfeit of opportunities to overreact to new information. Recently, Daniel Kodsi and I have argued that there is a distinctive kind of intellectual pathology associated with the temptation towards “presentism”, and more generally the temptation to attach outsize significance to incoming data simply because it is novel or striking. Of course, “presentism” might as well be the in-house motto of rolling news: with its stunted attention span and breathless inability to differentiate between what is significant and what is merely novel.

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Of course, the harried reporters of rolling news and locked-in situation-monitors of social media might with some justification claim that their business is a short-term market in novel information. But it is telling that when the hive mind of the modern press is thrown into overdrive, even the criterion of novelty is relaxed: the more basic objective being a manic exercise in pattern recognition for whatever will stoke controversy, and keep the perpetual motion-machine of the news cycle humming at full speed. For that purpose, old news repurposed as revelation will do just as well — aided and abetted by the kind of collective amnesia that comes naturally to a mind that lives in a permanent present. The news that Peter Mandelson had “failed to pass” security vetting in the run up to being posted to Washington as ambassador had been prominently reported in the Independent months before being resurrected as chaos-inducing scoop when its political valence changed. Likewise, clearly not recognizing the moralistic potential of what they had unearthed, the Mail on Sunday reported in gossipy style on early events in the scandal that would become “Partygate” a year before the press adopted the cause with monomaniacal fervor. As was so clear with Partygate, the media’s characteristic priority — to prosecute every fresh detail of a rolling saga under the crudest moral lens to hand — can often actively inhibit the effort to collectively confront harder questions, about, say, the justification and efficacy of lockdowns themselves.

Now it is Starmer’s turn to be the subject of the modern media environment’s special ability to speculate a crisis into being. Pathologically dull and terminally unimaginative, Starmer hasn’t changed a bit since being elected. That the local elections would result in catastrophic Labour losses was not only eminently predictable, but widely predicted, not least by journalists who lusted for months over the political instability that might result. The deeper, underlying difficulty — that Labour’s existing policy program is unequal to alleviating any of the country’s long-term structural or cultural ills — should not come as a surprise to anyone so close to Starmer as to actually be one of his sitting MPs. Why panic now, then, when the evidence of political malaise has been so clear for so long? In an environment dominated by noise, perhaps they can no longer pick out a long-run signal.

More to the point, why think for even a moment that any successor to Starmer would be able to resist the modern media’s predation? The hankering after instability and hunger for panic that moves the news cycle is constitutive to its operation, and not so much — as commentators used to speculate about successive Conservative leaders — something that results from an individual leader’s ability to project “vision” or competence. Britain, as many of the media’s commentators like to observe, seems to have become “ungovernable”: a verdict that should be delivered as much in a spirit of self-congratulation as impartial observation.

Today, all of that is gone. Now, the only families who have homes and space in London are the ones who are very rich, and an ever-decreasing subset of the poor who have managed to cling on in social housing. Everyone else, especially the children, are overcrowded. Their families rent rooms in houses, they don’t have gardens and one in every 20 doesn’t have a home at all. Instead, they bounce from one temporary homelessness accommodation to another, a miserable, distressing journey through badly maintained rented rooms and hotels. Down the street I grew up on, it costs £1,000 to rent a single room. 

In three and a half decades, then, we have undone a century of progress on housing. Yet if this process began in the Eighties, with Margaret Thatcher’s planned destruction of council housing and deregulation of the private rented sector, every politician who has had responsibility for housing and for London in the years since shares some of the blame — with vast consequences for the city’s skyline, school system and even its broad culture.

Even before she came to power, Thatcher had a vision: we would no longer rely on the public sector to house people who couldn’t afford to buy, by offering council homes at local rents. Instead, we would let these people choose a private rented home and allow people to claim benefits to make up the difference. We shifted, essentially, from a welfare system based on bricks to one based on benefits, with “Right to Buy” the jewel in the monetarist crown. 

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At the same time, Thatcher made changes to the private rented sector: abolishing both rent control and security of tenure, which guaranteed tenants a new lease once the old one expired. Now, private landlords could raise rents as quickly as they liked and evict their charges at the end of a short-term tenancy for no reason at all. This was the beginning of the end: the security and community working class Londoners had built up was based on council housing. Thatcher’s moves would destroy those communities. 

The Conservative reforms came at the worst possible economic time for two reasons. First, the rapid deindustrialization of the economy, and the construction of a new financial sector in London, meant that the capital had become the center of the country’s wealth and employment. After enduring a steady decline in population for decades, the city’s population started to rise, and rapidly too, as people moved here for work. The number of Londoners has increased every year since 1988, neatly chiming with the financial Big Bang.

Then there was the global fall in interest rates, which occurred in the Nineties after Thatcher had moved on. This did several things. The first was to wreck people’s pension plans. No longer would their savings pay out enough for retirement. So they looked for another, secure destination for their money instead. And thanks to low rates, and a new financial product called the “buy-to-let mortgage”, created with the knowledge and blessing of government, there was an easy option: property in London. Millions began flowing into buying up homes in the capital: not to live in, but to rent out to the city’s growing population. I remember watching the numbers in the property section in the local paper rise to almost silly-sounding amounts: £100,000, £200,000, £300,000. How could anyone possibly afford these sums, just to live in? 

Then Tony Blair arrived, with a big Labour majority, in 1997. Things might have changed. We could have moved away from the Thatcherite focus on benefits and private landlords, back to the tradition of the 20th century: the construction of social housing on a large scale. But we didn’t. Tony Blair oversaw some of the lowest rates of council building since the “Addison Act” created the model of local authority-owned housing in 1919. New Labour did, to be fair, pump money into upgrading some social homes: but this came with strings attached. 

For one thing, councils had to transfer their homes to private social housing providers, or set up private management bodies to get hold of it. And though the money might have offered nice new kitchens and bathrooms, it didn’t address the fundamental problems with the fabric of aging housing estates. Strapped for cash, councils turned to another option: knocking them down and selling the sites to private builders to pay for a rebuild at higher density, with higher rents and more private housing. South London’s Aylesbury Estate — where Blair gave his first speech as leader — was slated for demolition in 2005. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the city was also changing. The arrival of a London mayoralty led to the elevation of Ken Livingstone. A veteran of local politics, Livingstone had been leader of the Greater London Council, until its abolition in 1986. This time around, Ken’s biggest idea was to build upwards. On his watch, dozens of new skyscrapers were signed off: The Gherkin, The Cheesegrater, The Shard — all these icons of capitalism started their journey under the auspices of Red Ken. 

But this caused a problem. As skyscrapers became increasingly common in London, the value of land on which they could be built exploded, jumping by 30% since the financial crisis alone. No longer would developers build rows of family-sized housing, as they had well into the 20th century. The land was just too expensive to make this model work any more. And with planning laws preventing the city from expanding outwards — the Green Belt has become a kind of religion for politicians of all parties — it would instead densify: with gargantuan office and apartment blocks popping up from Victoria to Croydon. The cost of building these towers, and indeed buying the land, meant they were never going to be affordable for families: even those who didn’t mind living in the clouds. 

All the while, London’s population was growing at an even faster rate. Blair, his confidence in free market absolutism, opted against a transition period for the “free movement of people”, when the EU expanded in 2004. Now, workers from all around Europe could come to what was one of the continent’s foremost economic centers. But there would not be housing for them when they arrived. So, instead, they piled into the private rented sector, driving the value up even higher for landlords and encouraging them not to rent out houses. Rather, they split them up into rooms to maximize their income. A house in London was now an extraordinarily valuable asset, with millions of cheaply-priced loans chasing every new “opportunity”. How could normal families, who just wanted somewhere to live and school for their kids, hope to compete? 

Then came the financial crisis and another opportunity to reset. The model we had followed to this point was plainly broken: wasn’t it time to try a new one? Instead, we would double down on our mistakes. The Bank of England responded to the crisis by cutting interest rates to historic lows and pumping money into the economy via quantitative easing. This meant that money rushed to safe assets, and property investors could borrow cheaply. Property in a Western capital with high demand for housing was the new gold. Speculative developments began to pull in billions from investors all around the world. A wall of investment money crashed into London’s market, sending the value of prices soaring yet higher. Suddenly, it was very easy to get stinking rich from building private housing in London and selling it off-plan in Hong Kong. 

But what these investors did not want was “affordable housing” — which cut their profits and lowered the attractiveness of the asset to investors. David Cameron’s coalition government obliged, introducing a system of “viability” which gave property developers a way to avoid their legal commitments to building affordable housing. Residential tower blocks piled up in the London skyline with hardly a unit of social flat in sight. Boris Johnson, as Livingstone’s successor as mayor, enthusiastically encouraged this trend: signing off projects boroughs had refused for containing too little affordable housing, selling off public land to private developers, and turning over government cash to help private developers build on new sites. 

At the same time, Cameron went further than Thatcher had in dismantling social housing. Grants for new social homes were cut to a third of even the historically low post-Thatcher rates. Budget cuts were also forced through ,which pushed social landlords to junk much-needed capital investment. Property increasingly fell into disrepair. A revitalization of Right to Buy saw the remaining decent stock sold off, and new build housing was let under a new “affordable rents” regime — which was still too high for the poorest to afford. Social housing, in the traditional sense, was completely residualized, while waiting times for a council home in London boroughs stretched into decades. 

And where Thatcher had elected to move from bricks to benefits, Cameron went a step further: cutting benefits as well. He prevented claimants from receiving anything more than the lowest third of the local market rate, and then froze that rate. This meant that as rents rose, the number of properties someone on benefits could afford rapidly shrank, even as many claimants were also holding down jobs. More and more families were duly evicted, and found they had no options for somewhere else to live. 

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The city started to sink into a permanent crisis, as young families escaped elsewhere. And if the London they left behind was physically unrecognizable from that of their parents — a cityscape of ugly prefab towers, built from plastic and steel — the capital’s housing crisis is now having a broader societal impact. So few young families can afford to live here, for instance, that the school system is collapsing. According to one recent study, London accounted for nine out of the ten areas nationally with the biggest drop in primary-age students, with Westminster Council closing three schools over the last five years. 

And even for those working-class Londoners clinging on, the situation is grim. These days, residents typically spend a stonking 41% of their incomes on rent. And if that inevitably has a stark economic impact, London’s culture has arguably been harmed too. Long gone are the days when struggling artists could find cheap digs in the city center — leaving plenty of time for music or writing or whatever else they had set their sights on. 

Over recent years, meanwhile, Covid has piled on even more pressure. In its aftermath, rents soared yet further, as a sudden surge in immigration due to post-Brexit reforms, a rise in international students, and an uptick affluent families seeking more space converged at the same moment — all while landlords were less willing to put their properties on the market. Sadiq Khan has done more than Boris to reverse the decline, starting off the first genuine program of council housing construction in the city since Thatcher. But he too has faltered, his build numbers dropping and his electoral promise of 50% affordable housing in new developments long forgotten. 

As for Khan’s colleagues in Whitehall, Labour has few answers either. New rental reforms will offer longer term security, but do little to help those who simply can’t pay the rent anymore. Extra money for social housing construction is welcome, but given the size of the challenge, it is too little and too late. The larger chunk of funding won’t be available until after 2030, which in practice means new homes are a decade away. That speaks to a broader failure: notwithstanding Keir Starmer’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes nationwide by the end of this Parliament, planning approvals lately dropped to a record low. And so we have the London of today: unaffordable, atomized, sterile. Its communities dead or dying, the keys handed over to private landlords and property developers, my parents’ dream a distant memory. 

***

Peter Apps is the author of Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, published on 25 September

Despite his association with the Victorian era, Disraeli came of age during the Regency period. Born in 1804, he was steeped in Blake and Beethoven and all the other Romantics. Later, of course, he created the modern Conservative Party, yet he is arguably most famous now for being the only Jewish prime minister this country has had. Metaphorically, then, Disraeli did remove, or at least move, mountains. And as a Romantic, and a novelist to boot, he did so by using his imagination to self-fashion an identity that gave him the confidence, the “firm persuasion”, that a middle-class Jew needed to lead a resolutely Christian Tory party.

No book is better on this aspect of Disraeli than Adam Kirsch’s 2008 biography, which taught me two things. First, that a degree of self-mythologization is probably necessary for most worldly success, and unequivocally fundamental to political success. Second, that this process is primarily an imaginative undertaking, which is why a contemporary American literary critic could write so illuminatingly about a 19th-century British prime minister.

Early on, Kirsch notes how formative the exotic, Romantic figure of Lord Byron was for the young Disraeli. After leaving his unremarkable London school, Disraeli tried out a career in law, but gave it up for reasons articulated by the protagonist of his first novel Vivian Grey, who muses (probably correctly) that “to be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.” He then embarked on a Grand Tour, following Byron’s footsteps to Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece. His path was set: a Byronic life of Romantic action over bourgeois stability.

From the beginning, Disraeli’s imagination powered both his literary and political career. And it soon became obvious that letters alone would never satisfy him. As he wrote in his novel Contarini Fleming, “Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Caesar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts.”

These words are spoken by Contarini’s father, but Disraeli was making the argument for himself. And this is the point. More than literary endeavors, his novels were the arena in which he worked his as yet incoherent theories — often contradictory and occasionally nonsensical — into a worldview that gave him the psychological basis for action. It is no coincidence that his greatest contribution to political thought, the development of One-Nation Conservatism, was articulated not in a political tract but in his novel Sybil.

The young Disraeli dabbled in get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably resulted in catastrophic debts that dogged him for decades. He also suffered a nervous breakdown that laid him up for two years. This period of Disraeli’s life again recalls Byron, who once wrote of “the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” To make matters worse, Disraeli also suffered public humiliation when it was revealed that the anonymous “man of fashion” who authored Vivian Grey, supposedly an insider’s account of high society, was in fact 21 years old, middle-class and — perhaps worst of all for Victorian England — a Jew.

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Through all of this, Disraeli still lacked a goal toward which he could channel his vast abilities, especially his imagination. Whether through books or politics, its lava had to erupt, or else he would continue to suffer earthquakes of the mind. Most powerfully cathartic for Disraeli, Kirsch argues, was confronting his Jewishness, which was both “the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine”. The adult Disraeli was technically not a Jew: following a minor row with Bevis Marks Synagogue, his father, the gentle and scholarly Isaac Disraeli, had Benjamin baptized into the Church of England at the age of 12. It was a fit of pique that changed history. The right to sit in Parliament still required an MP to take an oath “upon the true faith of a Christian” (and would until the 1858 Jews Relief Act some 20 years after Disraeli first became an MP).

Despite his baptism, Disraeli’s Jewishness remained the central, unignorable fact about him. With his “olive complexion and coal-black eyes, and the mighty dome of his forehead (no Christian temple, be sure),” one contemporary remarked, “I would as soon have thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet, or Lear, or the Wandering Jew.” (And when people weren’t remarking on his Jewishness, it was his Mediterranean background). It didn’t matter that Disraeli had been converted, his very name screamed Jew — and it would anyway have been unthinkable to deny what he was. As Kirsch observes, “self-contempt was alien to his nature.” Disraeli’s preferred formulation was to claim that while his religion was Christian, his race was Jewish.

Nonetheless, he remained caught between two models of Jewishness in the English mind: the bloodthirsty, avaricious Shylock, and the grubby street peddler. These quasi-medieval tropes persisted because most British people at this time would never even meet a Jew. The community numbered around only about 25,000, concentrated mainly in London, as well as in provincial cities like Liverpool and Manchester. It was dominated by a mostly Sephardic elite descended from families who had fled Iberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, alongside a smaller Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern European origin. The Sephardic community into which Disraeli was born was privileged. Largely middle-class, it engaged in trade, finance, and the professions, and was socially integrated to a degree uncommon for Jews elsewhere in Europe.

But legal disabilities and social prejudice persisted. Disraeli’s response, with characteristic chutzpah, was to create a third model. He simply claimed that his Sephardic Jewish family traced its roots back to ancient Phoenician settlers in Iberia who predated even the Norman barons of 1066. No mere merchants, Spanish Jews were landowners, as proven by a decree from the Emperor Constantine. This founding myth of Jewish noble lineage would justify Disraeli’s eventual adoption of a heraldic coat of arms complete with “Tower of Castille” crest.

It was, of course, a pile of old hogwash. There is no evidence that the Disraelis even came from Spain. Kirsch notes that as far as is traceable, the family came from the town of Cento in the Papal States; further back, they likely hailed from the Middle East. But it didn’t matter. What mattered is that this fiction provided Disraeli with the psychological armor to withstand a life of ceaseless antisemitic attacks. In 1835, when the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell attacked Disraeli for his Jewish heritage in the House of Commons, Disraeli’s response was unhesitating. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he replied, “and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

All the while, Disraeli the outsider became an acute observer of the British class system. So completely did he understand how ancestral pride drove the aristocratic establishment running the Tory Party that he was eventually able to lead it. Not that anyone could really begrudge him inventing a pedigree when everyone else was at it too. Disraeli described the process simply: make a pile in banking, buy a peerage and throw a “halo of imagination” over “a humble or obscure origin.” Like Orwell, he understood that the English aristocracy was never a purely hereditary class but one constantly replenished by parvenus.

Disraeli’s own “halo of imagination” was able to transmute his Jewishness from a potential source of shame into a source first of pride and then of nobility. So powerful were Disraeli’s dreams of Jewish prestige and power that, at one point, they included fictionalized fantasies of restoring Jewish sovereignty to Palestine. Kirsch places two of his novels, Alroy and Tancred, alongside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the proto-Zionist canon. But these ideas remained fantasies. For Disraeli, as for Alroy, to become the “patriarch of a pastoral horde” in an Ottoman province was no substitute for leading the world’s great power. Like Blake, Disraeli would build Jerusalem here at home.

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Disraeli characteristically outlined his fantasies of Jewish success through his fiction — personified in the form of Sidonia. An international eminence grise who moves between parliaments and royal courts, Sidonia knows everyone and makes everything happen, albeit behind the scenes. Impossibly intelligent, sophisticated, and, in true Romantic style, jaded, Sidonia appears as a secondary character in Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred.

As Kirsch observes, Disraeli intended Sidonia to be a “figure of great power and glamour.” But Disraeli’s wish fulfillment about domestic Jewish success was ultimately incontinent. As magnetic as he is, Sidonia is also an antisemitic stereotype: the unseen, controlling Jew whose tentacles are everywhere.

Great power and glamour were, though, what Disraeli wanted for his own life, and for this he had to reconcile his Jewishness with being a practicing Christian, which required yet more imaginative sophistry. As ever, he worked it out first in his fiction. As an Anglican priest argues in the novel Sybil, “the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement… Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing”. The meaning, here, was clear. “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New,” Disraeli later asserted. Theologically suspect it may have been, but Kirsch explains how “psychologically necessary” it was for Disraeli to “pull off the delicate balancing act required of a Jew seeking to lead a Christian nation.”

And lead it he did. Serving as Prime Minister from February to December 1868, and again from 1874 to 1880, Disraeli was always willing to refashion himself for political purposes. In the 1840s, he made his name as the champion of the Tory landed interest against Sir Robert Peel’s repealing of the Corn Laws. Yet when he gained real power, in the 1850s, he quietly accepted free trade as irreversible, shelving attempts to restore tariffs in the name of political survival. In 1867, after years of warning that extending the vote would endanger the social order, he piloted the Second Reform Act through Parliament, dramatically expanding the electorate to working-class men. In this, he understood what Karl Marx never did: emancipate the working classes and they will often vote for conservatives.

And the engine for so much of this achievement? A pre-eminent Romantic passion: love of glory. As Disraeli told his constituents in an 1844 speech, “I love fame; I love public reputation; I love to live in the eyes of the country.”

Yet if Kirsch’s biography is partly compelling because Disraeli was an extraordinary man, his story also illuminates our national character. After all, this country has long bred Romantics. Consider Boris Johnson, the middle-class, Etonian scholarship boy and surely the most overt example of Disraelian self-creation in recent times. Where Disraeli had his novels to work out his politics, Johnson relied on the Classics, climbing his very own Cursus Honorum all the way to the top. If he seemed anachronistic, he knew it. He understood that this is not the 19th century. Britain is no longer the global hegemon, and the ambitions of a Disraeli would sound ridiculous today. So, instead, Johnson took his Romantic temperament, his pathological ambition, and subverted them through a P.G. Wodehouse-style schtick that made everyone laugh.

Conversely, Rory Stewart is a politician who took Disraelian self-fashioning too literally for contemporary tastes. Publicly fashioning himself through books — a solo walk across Afghanistan; governing an Iraqi province — Stewart explicitly used his writing as the imaginative ballast for his political career. “I had once dreamt,” he writes in his memoir, “of modeling myself on a classical hero.” Stewart told the world what a Romantic figure he was: and that was his undoing. Stewart did not, I suspect could not, leaven his self-image with self-deprecation. So while Johnson became PM, Stewart now spends his days getting patronized on a podcast.

The real problem, though, is when self-deception becomes unmoored from morality — and indeed reality. Just over eight years after I read Kirsch’s book, Donald Trump took office, and I saw that one, albeit extreme, conclusion of Disraeli’s self-fashioning had emerged in the near-pathological dishonesty and self-delusion of a man who credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power Of Positive Thinking with much of his success. “Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” What’s striking about this (banal) quotation from Disraeli’s Coningsby is how much it sounds like the self-help guff that Trump imbibed, and which spurred him to become the world’s most powerful man.

How, in the end, do you reconcile “firm persuasion” with reality? Stewart’s problem wasn’t that he was deluded; both Trump and Disraeli illustrate that egregious self-delusion can drive colossal success. It’s rather that he couldn’t tailor this self-mythologization, or self-delusion, to his circumstances, so different from the snobby, class-obsessed world of the Pax Britannica, where personal belief in individual greatness and destiny found its concomitant in Britain’s global primacy. For Kirsch, then, Disraeli was one of those rare humans “who imagine a life for themselves, and then actually bring it into being”. His statesmanship and his novelistic output are finally impossible to separate because both grew out of the profoundly Romantic conviction that the most important thing a man can create is himself. And that is why almost 200 years later history remembers him, just as it does Byron and Blake.

They endured crushing electoral defeat at the hands of the Liberals in 1906, and then again by Labor in 1945 and 1997. In the early years of Thatcher’s term of office, a public opinion poll suggested that the party might have won just one seat (and not Thatcher’s) if an election had been held on that day.

Some Conservatives now derive comfort from the fact that the party was not destroyed by these travails. I have heard senior Tories in private suggest that their party is the cockroach of the political world — not an appealing creature, but one that is able to survive any catastrophe and outlive its competitors. They talk of the “will for power” and capacity to adapt. They point to the “secret weapon” of loyalty, but also to the ruthlessness with which failed leaders are deposed.

There is something to be said for these arguments. The party reinvented itself to deal with a widening suffrage in the late 19th century and the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century. It endured 13 years of opposition, two electoral defeats and four changes of leader after 1997, but still came back to dominate — indeed, for better or worse, to transform — British politics in the 14 years after 2010.

Should they panic now? Is it possible that the oldest major party in the world will cease to exist? Polls show that it has been pushed into third place by Reform UK — a party that has existed only for a few years and currently has just four MPs in parliament. The British electoral system is hard on third parties, and this tendency has, for the past hundred years, benefited Labor and the Tories.

But if another party overtakes the Tories by even a small margin, the advantage could be reversed. Tough-minded will for power has saved the Conservatives in the past, but it will have the opposite effect once the political cockroaches decide that they stand a better chance of re-election with Nigel Farage’s face on their leaflets. It is too soon to write the obituary, but it is worth examining the history of the Conservative Party if we want to understand its current dilemma.

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The Tories were in power, on their own or as members of a coalition, for almost three quarters of the 20th century. Their success depended above all on the fact that they wanted to win elections and they wanted to govern once they had done so. This is not as obvious as it might sound. There are politicians who prefer opposition to government; after 1968, the Tories were fortunate that Enoch Powell was such a person. Others refuse to make the compromises that go with holding power. Charles de Gaulle resigned twice, first as Prime Minister, then as President. He had not been defeated in an election, but he preferred the gloomy solitude of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to the prospect of remaining in office without being sure of getting what he wanted.

Tories, though, have liked being in government. The late Lord Carrington first held junior office in the government of Winston Churchill in 1951, then served in the cabinet of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974 and that of Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1982. For men such as this, the Tories were, above all, the party of government. They sometimes talked of resisting the “state”, by which they meant trying to restrict its spending or interference in private business, but they took for granted that their purpose in life was to defend the state insofar as it incarnated the continuity of British institutions and the assertion of British power abroad. Tory prime ministers worked closely with civil servants — especially those from the Treasury and, revealingly, the Foreign Office. Winston Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, hugely influential from 1951 to 1955, was from the Foreign Office, as was Philip de Zulueta, who served the same function for Harold Macmillan. For all the jokes about Sir Humphrey, civil servants were vital instruments of the Thatcher project. John Kerr, seconded from the Foreign Office to the Treasury, helped implement monetarism in the early Eighties. Robert Wade-Gery, seconded from the Foreign Office to the Cabinet Office, planned how the government would crush the National Union of Mineworkers.

Tory interest in government always involved a certain tension. The things they said to win elections did not always match the things that they did once they were in government. Margaret Thatcher had a particularly sophisticated understanding of this political game. In the run up to 1979, she talked the talk of Right-wing populism about race and the death penalty, but she rarely walked the walk of policy on these issues. In government, she was a model of balance. She was willing to risk an economic policy that was, in the short term, unpopular. However, when her more literal-minded ministers pointed out that the logic of their position required them, for example, to abolish the $10 Christmas bonus to pensioners, she overruled them for electoral reasons.

Being the party of government gave the Tories three advantages. First, they communicated a sense of experience and competence that attracted many voters. Second, the prospect of ministerial office could be dangled to keep rebellious back benchers in order. Third, the mystique of the prime minister’s office conferred a special prestige on the party leader in the eyes of ordinary party members. Constituency parties were ferociously loyal to party leaders.

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Things have changed. The dizzying pace with which the Conservative party has switched leaders has, in itself, undermined the mystique that the office once conferred. Psychologists used to test for senility by asking their patients who Mrs Thatcher was. Now even young Conservatives might have trouble naming every Conservative leader between 2016 and 2024. Once people who might have considered themselves well qualified as Prime Minister would serve loyally in cabinets led by other people — think of Hurd and Heseltine in the government of John Major. Now every senior Tory has their eye on the next leadership election. I suspect that some ministers of the last government spent more time thinking about such matters than they did about the mundane business of running their own departments. Nothing weakens Kemi Badenoch more than the sense that she is weak. Her powers of patronage count for nothing because few of her colleagues believe she will be in place at the time of the next election.

The quality of Conservative politicians has certainly declined, but the most damaging Tory leaders of recent years were both, in their very different ways, able. Boris Johnson was the most impressive Conservative electoral campaigner since Stanley Baldwin. He was also lazy, indecisive and terrified of unpopularity. These qualities made him catastrophic as a minister — let alone as Prime Minister. It is significant that he quarrelled with civil servants and was, in the end, destroyed partly by the intervention of Simon McDonald, formerly the senior official at the Foreign Office. Rishi Sunak, by contrast, was an outstandingly able minister but a disaster as a campaigner. It is as though the two great strengths of the modern Conservative party — the ability to win elections and the ability to govern — have become divorced from each other.

None of this would matter if we still lived in a two-party system. The Tories would have been sure of getting back into power sooner or later and, given the ineptitude of the current government, it would probably have been sooner. As it is, the very weakness of Labour is also a threat to the Tories because it opens space for new parties and, particularly, for Reform, which looks as though it might be the asteroid that will finally consign the Tory dinosaur to extinction.

It may yet be that the Tories will pull themselves out of their death spiral. Getting rid of Badenoch may help — not because she is a bad leader, but simply because the drama of bloodletting might be cathartic and because her successor is bound to be stronger (Conservative MPs will hesitate before disposing of two leaders in quick succession).

It might even serve Tory purposes if Reform were to win the next election. It is hard to believe that Farage — who had never held office or, indeed, done very much in his whole life except make speeches and appear on television — would be a successful prime minister. Could Reform assemble 20 potential cabinet ministers without scraping a barrel that contains some disturbing eccentricity? Plenty of Tories will join Reform if it looks like winning an election, but Suella Braverman and Liz Truss might not add to its appeal.

A more likely prospect is that Reform will get more votes than the Tories but not win enough seats to form a government. Most likely of all is some kind of deal between Reform and the Tories. In the past, Conservatives have benefited from political alliances. Only too late did other members of the National Government in the Thirties, or the Liberal Democrats after 2010, appreciate that Tory flexibility is that of a python, which squeezes its prey tight or swallows it whole.

Talk of snakes puts one in mind of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Of all prominent Conservatives, he is the one who has most consistently suggested an alliance with Reform. Being, for now, out of parliament, he has a useful freedom of maneuver. He personally would be well suited to thrive in a coalition because he combines the style of the most old-fashioned Conservative with a willingness to countenance constitutional innovation that makes the late Tony Benn sound like Walter Bagehot. He solemnly declared that MPs could not eject Boris Johnson as Prime Minister without triggering a general election because we now live in a “presidential system” — a remark that would once have earned one of the Queen’s ministers a stern letter from an official at Buckingham Palace.

Rees-Mogg has always been ostentatiously nice about Farage, on whom he confers the Wodehousian compliment “good egg”. Before they sign up to an informal pact over lunch at the Drones club, however, Farage might be wise to remember that Rees-Mogg also once pledged loyalty to David Cameron and Theresa May, and to ask himself whether is likely to be Wooster or Jeeves in any future cohabitation.

I am sure that some prominent members of the Conservative Party will hold office in future governments. It is possible that they will do so as members of a party that continues to call itself Conservative. But the virtues that even opponents of the party would once have recognised as being represented by the Conservatives — skepticism about rapid change and a willingness to take the hard choices required by holding office — seem to have gone for ever.

But what’s the alternative? Robert Jenrick, who was runner-up to Badenoch in last year’s Tory leadership election, is busy on social media, sometimes even — gasp — with policy ideas. Recently he added his voice to those urging Badenoch to get a move on with developing her own. The suspicion lingers, though, that he’d actually rather she got a move on out of the LOTO role altogether, so he can have a bash.

Jenrick could hardly be worse than Badenoch. Under her lackluster leadership, the Tories have slid to a humiliating fourth place, behind Labour, Reform, and the Lib Dems, leading anonymous knife-sharpeners to float the most preposterous idea of all: bringing back Boris Johnson.

But this absurdity is surely emblematic of the Conservative Party’s, well, conservatism, in the small-c sense of preferring to stick to known quantities. The same goes for Badenoch. It’s just that the worldview she represents has purchase only with an obviously rapidly shrinking subset of the British electorate. And the fact that a high proportion of this subset happens to be Tory members able to vote in leadership contests is, under the circumstances, unfortunate for the party’s long-term viability.

So are the Tories doomed? It’s worse than that. The danger is that it’s not just our oldest political party which is stumbling toward irrelevance, but the entire system of government within which it formed and flourished.

The Tory Party coalesced during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, shortly after the Civil War and Restoration, and while England was still an absolute monarchy. Originally the party of the landed interest, in opposition to the mercantilist Whigs, in the 19th century came to embrace mercantilism themselves after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Later still, these Tories found a new opponent: Labour, the party of the industrial working class.

A century on, Britain is no longer an empire, and is largely de-industrialized. Most elites are not so much landed as post-geographic, enjoying rarefied existences as ultra-mobile transnational tax-exiles. The Blair era saw Labour, too, devoured by Whiggery. And now the postwar welfare system — premised on an ever-rising working-age population and perpetual economic growth — is staring down the barrel of demographic collapse, as its dwindling working-age tax base grows ever more overburdened and resentful.

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And regardless of which party forms a government, we find the same policy is both keeping the fiscal show on the road, and greasing the national slide toward crisis: indeed, according to a recent report from David Betz, Professor of War Studies at King’s College, perhaps even civil conflict. This policy is the core of Reform’s challenge to Badenoch, and to the policy of every government of the past quarter-century: the Gordian knot the Tories spent 13 years pretending to pick at, before giving up and just making it bigger. That is, replenishing Britain’s declining workforce through large-scale inward migration.

The problem is an existential one for our settlement. Britain is a democracy; the voting public likes the welfare state, and doesn’t like immigration; but people aren’t having enough kids to keep the population stable, let alone growing. This has resulted in a wicked problem to which there’s no obvious solution that would both be effective and sufficiently popular to win a democratic majority. You can’t rebalance the books without welfare cuts so brutal you will immiserate millions, most of them voters, or tax rises that kill prosperity and enrage the better-off. And you can’t grow the workforce in the short term without importing workers; but while Britain is by any sane measure, one of the least racist places in the world, mass immigration is now so unpopular with those already here that even Keir Starmer is trying to sound like he wants to reduce it.

But no one expects him to deliver, any more than Boris did. For despite the electorate asking for lower immigration for literally decades, every government that gets voted in having pledged to deliver this has promptly seen the Gordian knot and sheepishly reverse-ferreted. After a quarter of a century of “talking Right and governing Left” on this issue, both main parties have forfeited the public trust.

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The age of nihilism is over

By Mary Harrington

As politicians flail fruitlessly around the “moderate” Overton window in search of a solution, a mood of angry despair has taken hold of the country. Everything is interpreted as yet another emblem of the same paralysis. Signs of social fraying are everywhere you look. Birmingham’s bin strike has now been ongoing for 11 weeks and counting. Petty crime has risen everywhere, especially in urban public spaces, including robbery and sexual harassment. Just 3% of Britain’s roads received any kind of maintenance last year. And this has all happened as the cost of living has continued to climb, and the mood to sour.

How far you believe any of the issues above is directly caused by immigration will depend on your political priors. Bin collection and road maintenance may seem a reach, but trust me: you can find disaffected Brits making the link — in the case of potholes, Farage himself. Others, meanwhile, grumble about foreigners accessing — implicitly, undeservedly — the British welfare state, especially desirable London social housing. The discourse makes little distinction between legal and illegal migration: Channel migrants have become a visually potent symbol for this mood of defensive scarcity, and corresponding anger at the seeming inability of governments to respond to rising scarcity by prioritizing their own citizens.

Notwithstanding the pleas of center-right “moderates”, Reform’s insurgent rise demonstrates the appeal of this harder-edged scarcity Right. Beyond the Tory party base, it’s already largely displaced the civic-nationalist Cameroon worldview. As the IPPR recently warned, it also threatens the Left. The shift is structural: and wherever you stand on these issues, their widening salience reflects the way immigration has become an explosive proxy for more general dissatisfaction with the current settlement.

So what to do? The problem is especially acute for the Tories, because their only remaining charismatic figure — Boris — is irreparably tainted by failure to untie the central Gordian knot: a betrayal so egregious it bears his name, the so-called “Boriswave”. Meanwhile, Badenoch embodies the very civic-nationalist Right now rapidly losing ground to the insurgent scarcity kind.

All of this was supposed to have been resolved in the great Borisquake of 2019, in which he promised to “get Brexit done” — along with, or so voters hoped, a corresponding drop in low-skilled immigration. He made (empty, as it turned out) gestures at “leveling up” poorer bits of the UK, moving left on economics and right on culture, and breaking us out of the stale double-liberal consensus everyone agreed was driving polarization across the country. And yet, six whole years on, the same stale double-liberal consensus has the country in a tighter stranglehold than ever. It’s just that now, thanks to Boris’ lockdowns and subsequent attempt to jump-start the economy with mass immigration, this comes with a burgeoning and unpleasant side order of ethnopolitics; and — because the jump-start didn’t work — also looming fiscal crisis. And the only way to keep a lid on this volatile mix seems, increasingly, to be repressive controls on speech.

This, then, has been the medium-term consequence of so-called “moderate” governance. So no one should be surprised to see Reform sailing urbanely into the socially conservative, economically Left political territory that sat there, empty and unloved, the whole time Boris was supposed to be claiming it for the Tories. Promising to protect social welfare while radically slowing immigration is consistently popular. And yet neither the Tories nor Labour have claimed this open political goal for their teams.

Why? Competing economic interests is one factor: today’s post-geographic elites usually stand to gain more, economically speaking, from keeping the borders open. And as the “collapsologist” Peter Turchin has argued, where the wishes of elites and the masses diverge, even in a democracy, it’s always the elites who get their way.

But it’s also possible that no one has seriously tried this policy offer because there’s no way to deliver it with a shrinking native tax base. Farage is now promising the impossible: generous welfare and zero immigration. Trying to square this circle with a declining native population has scuppered both the other parties, and it’s not clear how Farage will succeed where all before him failed. At least, not short of radically altering the frame itself. For, as Turchin also notes, when elites turn away from the interests of the polity as a whole, in favor of simply diverting resources toward themselves, historically the resulting is eventually serious political unrest: the unhappy prognosis of Professor Betz.

Turchin suggests the best-case scenario under such conditions is takeover by a counter-elite more willing to accommodate the broader public interest. He notes the remarkable stability of Britain, relative to other European polities, in meeting and resolving moments of crisis such as the Corn Law riots, with an adjusted settlement. So who knows: perhaps Reform, or some version of the Tory Party that has had a complete personnel, personality, and history transplant, might be that counter-elite. Stranger things have happened.

But absent radical change, the Gordian knot would still be uncut. And if Boris taught us anything, it’s that simply saying “Why not both?” won’t do. Cakeism has been comprehensively discredited. Johnson, is in fact, not just the wrong answer but the answer to the wrong question. What’s needed isn’t just a more appealing leader to deliver the existing formula, but a different formula. Or, perhaps, an even more profound change. It’s not impossible that eventually some sufficiently radical counter-elite will conclude that giving the American public what they need will require sharply limiting the same public’s ability to have a say in what they want.

The last time we were shaken by political questions as profound as today’s, the turmoil produced civil war, then Tories and Whigs, and, eventually, parliamentary democracy to mediate between public desires and political power. Now, a long way down that arc, that public wants two irreconcilable things — and keeps destroying parties that fail to deliver one or the other.

The only way this can change is either via a shift in public sentiment radical enough to permit the necessary trade-offs — or, alternatively, the unhappy outcome predicted by Professor Betz. That is: political chaos on the level of the era just before the Tory Party formed, out of which some new settlement is able to emerge. Perhaps, even, so transformative a change as that earlier one from absolute to constitutional monarchy. So-called “moderates” might reflect that, however slender Reform’s chance of success, in this context Farage is the conservative choice.

There was, beforehand, a limp kind of excitement. It felt closely held, protected. Johnson appealed to people who wanted to live through him. Too scared to drive supercars or flirt with strangers or prorogue parliament, they chose someone who would. They still speak fondly of him, because he is still the only politician they have ever liked, and I can’t think of a better measure of our failure. They still talk about his “charisma” because they don’t know him. They just think they do. He has what Kemi Badenoch’s supporters call an ability to “cut through” in the age of attention deficit disorder: in the leadership election she will depend on it. They “hope he will be back” but he “probably won’t be because MPs don’t like him”. The current Tory Party is, “individualist” and “too weakly led”. “I don’t think anyone led the party like he did.”

His entrance is downbeat. He shuffles in, hair shining and dishevelled. He looks, for an instant, mock terrified, and then does the nodding dog with his head. The downbeat entrance is deliberate: his small penance. He can’t say it in words because he doesn’t really feel it. Unleashed is not an apology for how he promised hope and set it on fire, nor is it a fair assessment of what he really unleashed, which is a more toxic populism that even he gave us. It is propaganda, written in the fake intimate style of the lifestyle columnist. I searched in the book for passages on his failure, and how he felt about it. They aren’t there.

He says he’s sorry he’s late, but it’s not his fault this time: “I understand everyone was being frisked for handguns”. They laugh: that’s not their England. The interviewer offers a trivial question first, for the fans. It’s about the zipwire at the London Olympics 2012, when he dangled with a Union Flag: the Johnson stunt by which all others are judged. “Although I was held to global ridicule,” he says, “it had exactly the effect I wanted: not for the first time!” The next day, he says, Britain “began to win medals”. This is Johnson the magician who expresses, entirely unconsciously, a universal boredom with conventional politics. It is also Johnson the Fisher King. His wounds mirror ours — that is his peculiar power — but neither are healed.

He is asked about the Brexit bus and its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS. “It’s the bus of truth!” he cries, even now. This is not a place to analyse the rotting political discourse, and what part he may have played in it. Such agonies are for Leftists. “It’s a significant sum,” he says, “people were right to ask what they were getting for it.” He adds, “Being unleashed from the EU gave us the freedom to do things differently,” and if they weren’t better, that is not his fault. Brexit saved lives during pandemic, he says. She asks about other “concrete dividends”. He looks nervous, cites giving lethal weaponry to Ukraine, makes a joke about William Hague’s baldness, and I remember that there are at least five different people inside him.

Johnson is happiest on diversions: Nicola Sturgeon, for instance. “Princess Twinkle-toes investigated by the fuzz for possession of a campervan. The Nationalist dog barked while the campervan moved on”.  It’s a mash-up of metaphor and slang: and it’s meaningless. His serious point, when he gets there, is this: Reform polled low when he was prime minister. He kept us “bubble-gummed together”. But he didn’t.  Rather, he opened the doors to them.

He is asked about his Covid. “A lot of people say I was shamming,” he says. But he was ill, he insists. And he realised, “I’ve done some pretty worthwhile things. I need to keep going. I thought I had a lot to live for and I had a country to look after”. Now I think: if he’s telling us he loves us, he wants to come back. He’s waiting for the party to fall so low they take him back.

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The audience is restless. It wants Johnson the avatar of joy, and he’s talking about the nearness of Death, and defending his government. “We acted as vigilantly as we could, given what we knew”. He thinks Covid-19 came from a laboratory: “Do you really believe that this was the result of the love that flowered accidentally between a small slice of pangolin and a bat?” He doesn’t despair about a Trump presidency, even if he hated the Capitol riots: “He is not going to spend the first few months of his presidency trying to make the Soviet Union great again”. He says this last part in an accent thieved from Paint Your Wagon.

But then he reveals something. Being mayor of London was “great” because “I was a monarch”. And that’s it. Johnson was always more suited to absolute monarchy than parliamentary democracy, and, like an absolute monarch, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, because an absolute monarch is the law. To Tory voters who hated him because he betrayed them, and, worse, made them betray themselves, he offers nothing. To the Tory romanticism he destroyed while pretending to share it he says nothing. The wine in the suitcase was a Downing Street ritual that long preceded him. His defenestration was all, “a bit of a put-up job”.  His advice to the audience – a response audience question, they still think he has something to offer, is: “there’s no earthly point in being too self-deprecating”. Is that what he thinks he was?

At Cheltenham, Johnson offers us, as ever, a mirror, because that is what he is. He mirrored our hope. Now he mirrors our confusion. The Tory Party is in ruins — he essentially endorsed Truss, his closest allies voted for her — and it had nothing to do with him. He doesn’t talk about the leadership contest. He talks about himself.

At the end, there are no cheers, as if he has disappointed them, but the disappointment should be with themselves. Johnson was our first modern populist politician and his danger was always in his precedent: now there will be other, less charming populists walking the paths he made. His damage to the polity was incalculable — the prime minister who lied to parliament — and they don’t even mind. Nor, it seems, does he. Out they go, holding copies of Unleashed. It wasn’t what we — or even he — thought it would be. It is something infinitely sadder, and that, of his legacies, will endure.

Unleashed. Grr, like some gnarly XL Bully about to go mental in a shopping centre. Or as it turns out — unbothered? A well-fed Labrador wanting a tummy rub. Low-impact bombshells detonated ahead of publication included a “manly chat” with Prince Harry that…may have happened? A “daring plan” to raid a vaccine warehouse in the Netherlands, i.e. the prime minister airily floating the idea and military chiefs dismissing it as balls, an account of which appeared a year ago anyway. Netanyahu improbably-maybe bugging a bog. Cackling enemies, with their “grid of grossly exaggerated stories” to leak to the media. Cameron saying he’d “fuck you up forever” if Johnson backed Leave. Sunak promising loyalty then scuttling off with the other 50-odd members of staff who’d had enough by the summer of 2022.

Criticism so far has been largely negative: the book’s boring, it’s whiny, it’s 770 pages of tedious summing-up by a tetchy counsel for the self-defence. As rough guides go, that’s not not fair. You do wonder how Ed Balls was persuaded to call it “absolutely, totally, mind-blowingly explosive…” Perhaps he hadn’t read it, or he was off his tits on psilocybin, or there was an Ed Balls anecdote Johnson chose to leave out.

Will anyone though spare a thought for satirists? When this masterpiece by the Bullingdon Pericles was announced, I agreed to do a parody called Unhinged. Without a copy of Johnson’s book I thought I’d better go big, he’s larger than life, I’ll anticipate his crazy retelling of the Covid and Brexit years. After all, he’s certain to reframe everything as a tragedy with him as heroic victim.

I mean I was right, everyone was, but his account is oddly enervating. Say what you like about Johnson, he was always showbiz, always clever, always funny. Wasn’t he? So many of the similes, metaphors and gags just don’t land. His recent media round has seen him repeat this skein of bollocks from the book: “I used to claim that my chances of becoming PM were about the same as my being reincarnated as an olive or decapitated by a frisbee.” It just doesn’t work. On the basis of this magnum opus, satirists who’d pointed their lances at some imaginary political giant were in fact tilting at a windbag.

The idea was that my parody would be a pretend self-improvement book: you know, Be More Boris. Life lessons from the master of what we might call Kintsugi Politics. “What’s that?”, you ask. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Something broken and repaired in this way becomes more precious than something that’s never been broken. And that’s what he did, didn’t he? He smashed all the protocols he could find, especially those concerning public trust, and then fixed them again with government contracts for party donors. Let’s be honest, has trust in politicians ever been higher?

The most spectacular application of Kintsugi Politics came at the start of his long, long three years in Downing Street: if it ain’t broke, Brexit. He smashed the concept of an orderly separation from the EU and the promise of what Brexit would bring us all, ably assisted by his chief smashing adviser Dominic Cummings — remember him? Five-feet-seven-inches of unquenchable wrath in a hoodie. How all these Brexit fragments will finally be glued together to create a better Britain remains to be seen. Trust yourself. The important thing is to channel your inner Borisivity. Keep going, concentrate on the really good stuff and simply ignore the rest, as one might ignore a discarded girlfriend.

The other part of my book is a timeline of imagined diary extracts. If you’ve ever been tempted to spend weeks trying to inhabit Boris Johnson’s mind, don’t. It’s quite taxing. In the end though it was simply a question of taking what actually happened — let’s say a pile-up of Partygate revelations — and calling that a Discredited Narrative. You’re free then to invent your own self-pitying, distracted Boris version, one in which he wishes that some of those raking over the ashes of the past would remember the bloody vaccine roll-out. He was King Jab, wasn’t he? He was Antidote Father Christmas, eheu, life goes on, etc. Then at any moment his mind might wander to consider what does give him the horn and it turns out to be meeting Meghan Markle at a formal event, ideally a funeral. “When you get close up, she smells of gardenias…”

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Meanwhile, back in the fictionalised real world, I was pleased to see in Unleashed the return of Johnson’s great hero — the reckless mayor from the film Jaws who keeps the beaches open despite the (as it turns out very real) prospect of the shark eating its way through his constituents. Here, at the end of 2019, our other hero, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, considers the threat of a coronavirus rolling westward from China. “After more than 30 years of writing about or dealing with new zoonotic diseases…” writes Professor Johnson, “I had concluded two things: first, that these novel zoonotic plagues tended to sort themselves out…and second, that the greater risk of destruction was from the attempts by politicians to contain the disease.”

OK, he concedes, the Jaws mayor was wrong in the end, “but if you leave aside the requirements of the drama and you look at the cold, hard statistics — you can see that the mayor had a point”. Yes, that’s right. Johnson’s saying that of course it’s unfortunate that the Covid shark ate your nan, but we all thought it would sort itself out, don’t blame me for the dithering hokey-cokey of lockdowns delayed, imposed, lifted, hastily re-imposed and lifted again, let’s instead remember how brilliant Brexit was.

Much has been made of Johnson’s lack of contrition for the lockdown bacchanalia at Downing Street. And yes, he has issued an apology of sorts, admirable for its chutzpah. He’s sorry that he gave a heartfelt apology when the scandal broke, as it unfairly hemmed him into the guilty corner for the duration. He’s sorry for saying sorry. Brilliant. But his account of Partygate, such as it is, goes further, and has an odd accusatory tone of such bitter melancholy, it’s clear that an apology is finally due — to him. Two, actually.

First, he’d like an apology from us for thinking him so inept, so dissembling, so morally vacuous. He’s just a decent guy, with a big heart and a nimble mind, standing in front of us, trying to do the right thing and blow me down if the dark forces of a hostile media and ruthless political opponents haven’t given us entirely the wrong idea. He hopes his version of events will encourage us to see how harshly we misjudged him.

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Second, he’d clearly like an apology from the Conservative Party for their betrayal, for their ghosting him as the revelations piled up and the resignations multiplied, until he was finally tick-tweezered out. His last Commons speech ended with a quote from Terminator: “I’ll be back”. His farewell speech to the nation outside No. 10 was marbled with dark mutterings about “the herd” that turned on him. Only weeks ago he told Mail readers: “When we get back in, don’t be too hasty to get rid of successful election-winning leaders…some polls put us only two or three points behind in the days before I was forced to resign, in what was really a media-driven hoo-ha.”

The gaslighting in Unleashed is relentless. The Covid task force infuriated him: “the gall, the audacity of the government in trying to micromanage humanity…” Mate, wait until you remember who was literally prime minister! Oh, ha ha, a few pages on he does, and invites sympathy for being both a libertarian and “the first prime minister in history to cancel Christmas…” Yeah, that was a tough break, hug it out big guy. There’s an apparent moment of clarity when he tells us “I don’t think you should underestimate the many goofs I made”, which then subsides into the confession that he made “too many duff appointments”, some of whom turned out to be “homicidal maniacs”. Those psychopaths I mistakenly invited into the Cabinet, shake my damn head.

He has a conviction that history will exonerate him. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps the fury we all spent on the Downing Street pandemic piss-ups was misplaced. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, we will come to understand that Partygate was actually a morale booster for the whole nation, a defiant light in the gloom, a glow of Blitz spirit, wheeled clanking into HQ in a Samsonite travel case.

The book itself is — at two and a half pounds, 1.2 kilos — quite daunting and as one of a series of displacement activities before having to trudge through it, I searched the index hoping to find the “real story” behind certain rumours. Alas, nothing between “Bloomberg, Michael” and “Blyton, Enid”. No “Blow job, embarrassment at being discovered during receipt of…” Likewise, it skips from “Arab Spring” to “Argentina”, finding no room for “Jennifer Arcuri”. I was hoping, too, for a solution to the puzzle of Gavin Williamson, a Grayling-level political dimwit who was knighted for services to God-knows-what.

Is Boris planning a return to politics? He’s coquettishly teased us on the subject for months. “As for whether I will ever stand in the Commons again, to call the speaker ‘baby’ or anything else, I have no idea,” he tells us. Elsewhere, he fondly remembers the Queen, unironically praising her “ethic of service, and patience, and leadership”. He goes on to say that “you need someone kind and wise, and above politics, to personify what is good about our country”. Perhaps he’s eyeing up a future ambassadorship.

There’s certainly an elegiac feel about Unleashed. The scores having been settled, the narrative corrected in his favour, does he really want to be back in the Commons? He must know that the Falstaff he was before 2019 — the bumbling wit, the charming cad — has been obliterated by his tarnished reputation in office and his removal from power in disgrace. Or as a result of a “media-driven hoo-ha”, you decide.

If he, like Falstaff, seeks to ingratiate himself, he may find that we, like Henry, have a very changed opinion of him. He’s 60 now and not the Big Booming Boosterist Boris he once was. “I know thee not, old man,” says the king. “Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester, good luck on GB News, yeah?”

‘Unhinged: A Parody’ by Ian Martin is published by Bloomsbury

Yet having lost sight, like so many Mrs Jellybees, of the principle that the foremost duty of a national government is safeguarding the security and prosperity of its own people, and not in maximising the sum total of global happiness, governments across Europe and the wider Western world are duly being punished by their voters. France has no functioning government as a downstream consequence of the rise of the National Rally, an explicit reaction to mass immigration and its results. Macron’s current prime ministerial pick, Michel Barnier, it is worth noting, advocates a years-long halt to non-European immigration and a referendum on acceptable migration levels. In Germany, the AfD’s success in Thuringia, and the unstable and unnatural coalitions that will be attempted to maintain the cordon sanitaire against the party, surely presage the collapse of its weak and unpopular coalition government, perhaps before next year’s election. Rather than the immediate installation of anti-immigration Right-wing governments, the short-term trend is for the politics of mass immigration to make Europe’s largest and most powerful nations ungovernable.

For Keir Starmer’s government, whose first weeks in office were marked by a wave of anti-migrant pogroms across northern English towns, the risks are clear. Britain is already in an unusual situation where the Conservatives lost an election but Labour didn’t really win one, being merely a vehicle to remove the Tories in a markedly anti-systemic contest. Already strikingly unpopular for a new government, Labour have five years to magic up prosperity from nothing — which they cannot do — and shield Britain from geopolitical turbulence — which they are temperamentally disinclined to do. Starmer is perhaps best understood as a 2010s political figure — a Merkel, Ardern, or Trudeau — marooned in the even more polarised landscape of the 2020s by Britain’s distorting Brexit interlude. Constrained by decades of bad choices by preceding governments, Labour have so far displayed no better response to the perils of the moment than austerity, petty authoritarianism and kneejerk populist gestures — at the time of writing, over concert ticket pricing. In this context, it is hard to imagine the Starmer era entering history as anything other than a grim, but short interregnum before Britain re-enters the world of European politics, in which mass immigration is the central crisis around which political systems revolve and then disintegrate.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Looking at Europe, we see three plausible scenarios for how the politics of immigration may shape Britain’s future. It is not hard to see Germany’s coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals being replicated here: the results, in Germany, are as we see. Every terror attack, or random act of violence carried out by migrants discredits the liberal consensus further, while well-meaning but poorly-planned energy policies collapse the economy, driving further discontent and radicalisation. Björn Höcke’s Flügel faction, long controversial within the AfD itself, has achieved the party’s greatest success not by moderating its discourse but by radicalising, toying with National Socialist allusions and adopting an Identitarian platform of mass deportations, which — should the party eventually gain power — may reach far beyond Merkel’s history-altering demographic wave. The greatest degree of support for the AfD in Thuringia and across Germany is shown by the young. Observing the tenor of discourse among the younger British Right, who may be expected to enter politics within a decade or so, there is currently little, beyond an expanded and intrusive security state, to prevent similar dynamics emerging here.

Paralysed, a politically moribund Scholz has ceded the discourse on migration to the opposition CDU, who present us with the second potential outcome, of mainstream conservatives adopting a significantly harder line on migration, either to keep the radical Right out of power, or to form mainstream governments in which the radical Right is the kingmaker, as in impeccably liberal Sweden and the Netherlands. As a response to the latest terrorist atrocity, CDU leader Friedrich Merz has proposed declaring a national emergency over migration, enabling the state to turn migrants back at the border, with a blanket ban on admissions from Syria and Afghanistan. None of this is currently within the Overton Window of British politics, but then neither is the new policy from Scholz, Starmer’s German analogue, of deporting dangerous migrant criminals to Afghanistan and the Taliban justice system, unapologetically placing the safety of the German public over the interests of those who have been granted — and then abused — the German state’s hospitality. Depending on the outcome of the Conservative leadership contest, it is not difficult to imagine a Tory party, pressed by a Reform insurgency, either fending off the challenge from its right through a wholesale rejection of its own recent, disastrous record on migration, or pursuing some form of collaboration with Reform, should the new party continue its upward trend.

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It is to stave off either of the above scenarios that Labour is presented with the third path, as shown by Denmark. Having, through its adoption of a harder line on migration, disentangled the ostensible task of social democratic government from the pursuit of mass immigration as a moral good in itself — a tendency which has, in recent decades, consumed the Western Left — Denmark has sidestepped the political turmoil overtaking other European democracies. Asylum, in Denmark, is now framed as a temporary measure, rather than a route to permanent settlement, drastically limiting the numbers of those who see asylum claims as an effective legal hack to improve their economic prospects. Those who require a place of refuge are granted one, for as long as their homes remain unsafe: those who do not, and merely exploit the humanitarianism of the Danish public, are rejected. With migration increasingly depoliticised through its overwhelmingly popular new policies, the Danish centre-left is freed to get on with the business of normal governance, a luxury Starmer will soon envy.

If we work on the basis that Labour intends to win the next election, then there are many relatively simple and perfectly humane solutions Starmer can adopt to drain British politics of the poisoned well left to him by previous governments. Indeed, Labour’s promising early start on deportations suggests the former human rights lawyer understands Britain’s tolerant asylum system can only be preserved through aggressive reform. But first he must purge the extremists within his ranks. A decade ago, at the height of Merkel’s grand experiment with opening Europe’s borders to, inter alia, the Islamic State, British liberals found it easy to frame Poland and Hungary’s rejectionist stance as the regrettable policies of mere Central Europeans with tenuous attachments to liberal democracy. For all their parochial solipsism, it will be harder for the British liberal commentariat spawned by Conservative rule and Brexit to condemn Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany as illiberal authoritarian countries lost to enlightened governance.

Harmonising with our closest European neighbours against Britain’s increasingly anomalous immigration maximalism would mark a clear fresh start from decades of Tory failure. During the election, Starmer’s Labour actively and rightly campaigned against the Conservative Party’s bizarre and unnecessary liberalisation of legal immigration, the result of which was nearly 4% of Britain’s population arriving within the last two years. As highlighted by Tony Blair’s intervention last week, observing that Boris Johnson’s government exchanged economically productive European workers for low-waged extended families from the developing world, this is a Tory policy error of catastrophic proportions. Yet errors are better rectified than lamented: all that need be done is allow the visas granted to low-wage migrant workers to expire without renewal. No long-settled populations would be uprooted, no long-standing human rights norms breached. Similarly, why should taxpayers maintain nearly 1.7 million unemployed migrant workers — a uniquely British oxymoron — at an annual cost of £8 billion, while suffering austerity themselves? There is no reason for migrants in the UK not to reside under the same rules that apply to British expats in the EU. What is the defensible case for hosting, rather than deporting, foreign criminals, while releasing dangerous offenders of our own?

Indeed, our European neighbours would welcome an outbreak of sensible centrism among the British governing class. When the French foreign minister Gérald Darmanin claimed that the root of the Channel migrant crisis was Britain’s poorly-regulated, low-wage grey economy, acting as a magnet for the lower-middle classes of the developing world, he was entirely correct. The French government already blames British pro-migration activists for impeding their border control, and now has to deal with migrants making the journey across the Channel from Britain to France. As with the Irish government, blaming Britain’s lax visa rules for their own migration crisis, (and redesignating Britain as a “safe country” to allow pushbacks), our migration woes are a burden on our European neighbours, already grappling with migration crises of their own. Arguing against sensible reform is a genuinely marginal position: even FBPE influencers complaining about post-Brexit passport queues will surely not welcome the increased scrutiny that will follow Britain’s new role as the weak point in the developing EU border regime.

What can be done? British harmonisation with the EU Migration and Asylum Pact would be an obvious, perfectly liberal and humane solution. Not least of its advantages would be a firm acceptance of the principle that migrants should apply for asylum in the first safe EU country they reach, and that unilateral onward movement to Britain should be automatically rejected. Needless tragedies such as the murder of a pensioner in Hartlepool by a Moroccan jihadist, whose baseless asylum claims were rejected by multiple other EU countries before arriving here, would be avoided (as perhaps would have been Hartlepool’s subsequent riots).

As the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has already declared: “It is not unreasonable to treat as inadmissible [an asylum claim] from an individual who has already had [it] considered, accepted or rejected in another safe country.” What can the argument be against such an obviously sensible and moderate reform? That Britain, uniquely in Europe, has the competence to judge such claims afresh, or that the asylum procedures of our European neighbours are too harsh and illiberal to countenance? These are not serious arguments, while harmonisation with the EU would sidestep the activist-led tendency of the British legal system to consider asylum applications from countries such as, until recently Albania or as Starmer himself observed, Bangladesh, almost uniformly recognised by other European countries as safe.

Observing developments in Europe, and the anti-migration riots that marred his first weeks in office, Starmer must recognise he possesses a narrow window to reform Britain’s failing system before it destroys his government. The most likely outcome of its systemic failure is not an endless upward trajectory of mass migration, but no asylum system at all, punishing the genuinely deserving for the excesses of pro-migration activists and the abuses they have brought in tow.

Instead of settling on a policy of mass immigration, and working backwards to find increasingly specious reasons to justify it, British policy should be moderate and evidence-based. If the arguments made are economic, then immigration must be limited to only the economically productive, using data on the economic costs and benefits of different countries of origin as the Danes do (and our state refuses to); if the arguments made are humanitarian, then only those truly deserving international protection should be afforded it, lest abuse of the system demolish it in its entirety. For people who derive their legitimacy from the eternal vigilance against fascism, our liberal governing class has done everything in its power to ensure its return in some postmodern form. To avoid this outcome, Starmer’s Labour must reject the extremism of both sides, following the moderate, middle path of our liberal European neighbours.

There’s much in common between the two periods: a longstanding Conservative government disintegrating after a protracted fight over Europe, lacking ideas, direction and the will to govern, and facing a media-polished Labour opposition that’s fixated on winning. And then there’s the abiding impression of sleaze and snouts-in-troughs.

Major’s problems were generally dated to his conference speech in the autumn of 1993, when he urged the nation to celebrate “the old values: neighbourliness, decency, courtesy”. It was, he said, “time to get back to basics”. His director of communications briefed that the Prime Minister “was intent on rolling back the permissive society”. Elsewhere, cabinet ministers were denouncing absent fathers, single mothers and children born out of wedlock.

The newspapers saw all this as a challenge to seek out hypocrisy, and — under the mocking banner of “Back to Basics” — began publishing stories of Conservative MPs who might be failing in their moral duties, particularly in terms of sexual fidelity. There was no shortage of sinners, even if most were deeply obscure names: Robert Hughes, Rod Richards, Gary Waller, Tim Yeo. 

There was nothing illegal going on here. But then illegality wasn’t the measure of newsworthiness when it came to sexual misbehaviour. Far more important was the pleasure that people take in seeing the high and mighty brought low by human failings. So what mattered was whether it made politicians look foolish. Richard Spring’s “three-in-a-bed romp” did. So too did Hartley Booth writing love poems to a woman less than half his age (and him a Methodist lay preacher, as well). And David Ashby’s libel action against The Sunday Times, in which he testified that he was impotent, and said his wife used to assault him and call him a “poofter”. 

The story that really stuck was that of heritage secretary David Mellor having an affair with an actress, and wearing a Chelsea strip during sex. That latter detail was — as no one then said — fake news, invented by the (yet to be disgraced) publicist Max Clifford, but it elevated the story to tabloid greatness. And it was readily believed, if only because it deflected one’s attention from the image of the “minister for fun” having sex.

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The sorry string of sex scandals left the headline-writers a little blasé. “Another Back to Basics Bombshell,” shrugged The Sunday Mirror. “How Much Worse Can It Get?” wondered The Independent. The answer to that came with the death in 1994 of Stephen Milligan MP. His body was found dressed in women’s underwear, with a satsuma in his mouth and a bin liner over his head. He had died from strangulation with a length of flex, the apparent victim of a session of autoerotic asphyxiation that had gone wrong.

Beyond sex, there were also tales of financial impropriety by MPs. Again it helped if there was an element of ridicule involved — and a killer phrase, as when Mohamed Al-Fayed, the media-loving owner of Harrods, claimed that one could “rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi”. He also said he’d had a couple of MPs, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, on his payroll. Smith admitted it, but Hamilton and his wife, Christine, wouldn’t let it lie, and loudly protested his innocence.

All of this got mixed up with the observation that industries that had only recently been privatised under the Conservatives now seemed to be employing rather a lot of Conservative ex-ministers. It made for an explosive equation: Back to Basics plus Fat Cats equalled Tory Sleaze. An opinion poll in October 1994 found 61% agreeing with the statement that “the Tories these days give the impression of being very sleazy and disreputable”. As Robin Cook said, this looked like “an arrogant government that has been around too long to remember it is accountable to the people”. It’s as true today as it was then.

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The attention given to the Mellor story bewildered some people. An affair with an actress, puzzled his French counterpart Jack Lang: “Why else does one become minister of culture?” It seemed a very British scandal. In other words, it didn’t actually scandalise anyone. People didn’t really care about the immorality. Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown discovered this when news of his adulterous affair was published under the headline “Paddy Pantsdown” (“dreadful, but brilliant,” he acknowledged), and he enjoyed an opinion-poll bounce. It was just gossip, adding to the gaiety of the nation. At a time when Cool Britannia was trying to replicate the Swinging Sixties, David Mellor was to John Profumo what Oasis were to the Beatles.

And that was largely the impact of Back to Basics. These stories embarrassed the MPs, and they embarrassed the prime minister — which made them even more entertaining because he seemed so incongruous a figure in the midst of such shenanigans. (Major’s earlier affair with Edwina Currie was not revealed until 2002.) Others got hurt in the process, but there was little public sympathy. Even the death of Stephen Milligan was largely greeted with giggles. And it all added to the image of a decadent government in its dying days.

The era came to an end with the 1997 general election, when Neil Hamilton — very much the poster boy of Tory sleaze — lost his seat to the white-suited journalist Martin Bell, standing as an independent. Thereafter, things got dull. 

Tony Blair’s government had its own image problems, and the cash-for-honours investigation meant Blair himself became the first prime minister to be questioned by police. But none of it was much fun. And New Labour was lucky. The biggest scandal on its watch was MPs expenses, and all the most colourful examples came from the Conservatives: the servicing of the boiler for Michael Ancram’s swimming pool, the cleaning of Douglas Hogg’s moat, Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house. John Prescott did his best, with mock-Tudor beams and having a toilet seat mended not once but twice, but despite that, and despite six Labour MPs being found guilty on various charges of fraud and false accountancy — five were jailed — the most the Tories could hope for was a public attitude of a plague on both their duck houses.

So how did the most recent Conservative Parliament match up to its less-than-illustrious predecessor? Not very well really. It all got a bit too serious.

Financial and other misdemeanours continued. MPs still fall, with depressing ease, for the undercover journalist offering money. But somehow the political consequences weren’t as severe as before. Under New Labour, Peter Mandelson had come back from two resignations, which seemed outrageous, but now it was scarcely worth clearing your desk: Suella Braverman resigned as home secretary, and was back in the same job a week later, courtesy of the next prime minister off the rank. 

There have been happy moments, of course. There was William Wragg, honeytrapped via the dating app Grindr — and then giving the scammer the contact numbers of his colleagues. There was Neil Parish watching pornography on his phone in the Commons, and explaining that “it was tractors I was looking at”. There was Mark Menzies, the last of the Parliament to lose the whip, following allegations of him having been locked in a flat by “some bad people” and needing money. And then there was health secretary Matt Hancock. In 2021 footage from CCTV emerged of him adulterously embracing his aide in his office, and he was obliged to resign, “because I fell in love with somebody”.

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But that wasn’t true. He actually had to go because he’d broken government rules on social distancing during the Covid pandemic. The same reason that Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings had to go, after he’d taken his family from London to Durham, and then had a test-drive to Barnard Castle “because my eyesight seemed to have been affected by the disease”. And the same reason that Johnson’s poll ratings plummeted, when stories of Partygate refused to go away, and he was fined by the police for celebrating his birthday, the first prime minister found to have committed a criminal offence while in office.

Coinciding with Partygate was the Owen Paterson affair that badly damaged Johnson’s standing. The prime minister tried to stop the parliamentary suspension of Paterson, who had broken lobbying rules, representing a healthcare company that won two lucrative government contracts during the pandemic.

Even so, it was a sex scandal that finally did for Johnson, and perhaps that was appropriate for a prime minister whose sexual history would have impressed Lloyd George. The story went back to 2017, when the #MeToo moment cost the jobs of cabinet ministers Michael Fallon and Damian Green for inappropriate behaviour in the past. Also leaving office was assistant whip Chris Pincher, alleged to have behaved improperly towards a former Olympic rower, though he was cleared by the party and was back in government within weeks. 

In February 2022, Pincher’s career took him back to the whips’ office, and four months later he resigned again, this time after a drunken incident at the Carlton Club, where he was alleged to have groped a couple of men. Further allegations followed of unwanted sexual advances, and questions were asked about whether Johnson knew of the stories before making Pincher a whip. Initially the government denied any pre-knowledge, but then the prime minister had to admit that actually he had been informed. It was also suggested that he didn’t take any of it too seriously: “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature,” was said (by Dominic Cummings) to have been his comment.

Johnson’s duplicity came as a revelation to his colleagues. For years — decades, even — people had accused Johnson of playing fast and loose with facts, but it was not until Pinchergate that the scales fell from the eyes of chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid. So shocked were they that they resigned from cabinet on a matter of principle, followed by dozens of other ministers, who made up in numbers what they lacked in public recognition. Michael Gove also wanted to resign, but he made the mistake of telling the prime minister in advance, and was promptly sacked. That was a final gesture by Johnson, who then resigned himself.

Obviously, Johnson’s defenestration wasn’t about Pincher at all. It was about those poll ratings and Covid. The Conservatives feared they might lose the next election if they didn’t replace Johnson with a plausible leader. Someone like Liz Truss (who’d survived revelations about her affair more than a decade ago). And for some, it was also about revenge for Brexit; Europe had brought down the last four Tory prime ministers, and played a part this time as well.

The removal of a prime minister was much more dramatic than anything the Nineties had offered, though essentially it was the same issue of hypocrisy, the gap between politicians telling others how to behave and then not doing so themselves. 

On one level, it was still as trivial as it ever was, politicians and commentators arguing earnestly about birthday cake. But it was so much more serious now, played out against a backdrop of all those deaths in the pandemic. And bubbling under the surface was the dark suspicion that those who imposed the lockdown regime knew it was pointless, which was why they were happy to ignore it. 

Partygate provoked genuine anger, in a way that David Mellor and Neil Hamilton never did. The mood of the country is different these days; much more despairing than when the economy was growing in the mid-Nineties. There’s less appetite for amusement. In a sign of dour times, we’re just about to vote a former Director of Public Prosecutions into Downing Street. Keir Starmer is not going to come a cropper like Johnson did; despite the press’s best efforts, Beergate didn’t take off, because no one could really picture Starmer at a party in the first place. There will be sexual misbehaviour and MPs on the take — there always are — but they tend not to hurt Labour so much.

On the other hand, we’re living in a time of proper scandals: institutional abuse and corruption, with cover-ups so common as to seem like this is simply how things are done. There’s public hostility to an establishment that seems more concerned with protecting itself than serving the people, and Sir Keir can look very establishment indeed. But that’s a while off yet, because incoming parties get a bit of leeway; not even the Bernie Ecclestone affair damaged Tony Blair in his first year as prime minister. Meanwhile we’re left with the bitter aftertaste of the outgoing Parliament.

The image of a decadent government — Robin Cook’s “arrogant government” — was there all right under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, but it had a harder, nastier edge. I don’t think it’s merely nostalgia that makes me think the Nineties will remain the Golden Age of Sleaze. The negative publicity then led to the creation of the Ministerial Code and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, overseen by the Standards and Privileges Committee, all in pursuit of better behaviour. It would be hard to argue that this goal has been achieved.

Donald Trump’s embrace of Argentina’s new President, Javier Milei, shows how empty of ideological consistency populism can be. If Trump in his first run for the White House and his presidency stood for anything, it was for the rejection of economic libertarianism in favour of tariffs, immigration restriction and a refusal to cut the middle-class entitlements on which his voters depended. Milei, however, is a free-market radical whose programme is the exact opposite of “Trumpism”. And yet, hours after Milei was elected president of Argentina, Trump posted on social media: “Congratulations… you will turn your country around and truly make Argentina great again!”

This might seem like a contradiction, but only if Right-wing populism is considered a coherent public policy programme. And that is far from the case. Today, populism is little more than a shared campaign style — like the weird hair Trump shares with Milei, Johnson, and Geert Wilders.

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Further evidence that populism has become a gimmick, rather than a serious programme, comes from the record of populists in office. Silvio Berlusconi, the original Right-wing populist, a plutocrat and media celebrity before Trump, was prime minister in four Italian governments. Despite all the commotion, it is hard to see what, if anything, changed as a result. Under Georgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-Right has reconciled itself to the EU and softened its tone. In the UK, Johnson came and went, securing Brexit but otherwise leaving no trace on public policy. And like a bad-tempered, orange-haired Cheshire Cat, Trump in his first term left nothing but a scowl.

Populist voters in all Western democracies, whatever their other differences, want current high levels of immigration to be reduced. Trump made this central to his campaign in 2016, and it was inextricably wrapped up with Brexit under Johnson. But once in office, Trump betrayed his voters by refusing to press for the only effective way to reduce demand for immigration — requiring American employers to certify that their workers are all US citizens or legal immigrants. Instead, Trump avoided clashing with the business wing of the Republican Party, which is keen on cheap illegal immigrant labour, and diverted attention to a “big, beautiful wall” along the US-Mexican border which his own party failed to fund.

For his part, Johnson as prime minister proved to be as ineffectual in stemming mass migration to the UK as King Canute was in stopping the tide. In 2021, Johnson promised not to return to “the old failed model of… uncontrolled immigration”. And yet, more immigrants arrived in the UK in 2022 than all those who arrived between 1945 and 2022.

The problem here is structural: the very feature of modern Western democracies that creates the demand for populist politicians also ensures their failure. In the north Atlantic, this structure has been transformed in the last generation by two phenomena. The first is the transfer of decision-making power away from democratically elected legislatures and executives to entities that are highly insulated from election results: national and transnational judiciaries, central banks, international institutions, and corporations such as the social media giants that function as de facto public utilities but with no democratic oversight or control. The second is the disintegration of political parties as mass membership organisations, in which ordinary citizens in local chapters can participate and exert influence outside of elections.

The first transformation — the loss of power to technocrats, both public and private — is in itself sufficient to explain the rage and alienation of much of the electorate in the West. In many countries, voters have learned that, no matter what party or candidate they select come election time, nothing will change in terms of policy. After they put in a lot of coins and press a lot of buttons, with no drink rolling out, they start to kick the vending machine.

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This fury, particularly when it comes to immigration, is then exploited by populist candidates. But here another transformation comes into play — the capture of powerful, hierarchical organisations by outsiders such as Trump, Johnson or, for that matter, Jeremy Corbyn. With the collapse of organised parties as gatekeepers, competition among protest candidates tends to produce theatrical mavericks who take pride in their independence, even if they happen to run for office as a candidate of one or another legacy party.

Here, then, is the challenge. It took a generation or more for authority to be drained from the political branches in the West to these technocrats. And it will take at least as long for the political branches of government to regain decision-making power that they never should have ceded.

For this to happen, it will require a prolonged campaign of legislative reform and “lawfare” by disciplined parties and coalitions in national legislatures. This, in turn, will require skilful and patient leaders who are institutionalists and party-builders devoted to creating organisations that will outlast their time in office — the very opposite of the wild-haired maverick who campaigns on a slogan such as “build the wall” or waves chainsaws around. On being elected to office, the populist can try to rule by decree, but will lack an organised party to work through, and will find that many policy reforms are impossible to implement.

In the US, those who say that they vote for a particular candidate on the basis of their likely nominations to the Supreme Court or the Federal Reserve show that they actually understand where genuine power lies in modern democracies. Under the unwritten constitution of contemporary America, activist judges make the most important laws; the role of the President is to appoint them, and the role of the Senate is to confirm or reject them. Instead of a big, beautiful wall, Trump’s only lasting legacy, for instance, may indeed be his judicial appointments, which produced the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that returned the power to regulate abortion from the federal government to the states.

For structural reasons, then, popular frustration with the thwarting of voter preferences will continue to create demand among angry, disempowered voters for outsider candidates with big, striking promises, if not always big, striking hair. And, once they are elected, populist demagogues will press the buttons on their desk that are supposed to make their government or party spring into action — only to discover that, in reality, the vending machine is broken and nothing happens.

Dorries was MP for Mid Bedfordshire for 18 years, rising to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport under Johnson. She was the ultimate loyalist and when he fell, her grief was real.

She presents herself as an ingénue — Tinkerbell with a Range Rover at the age of 66. When invited to the Wolseley restaurant, she frets that she will not understand the menu. Perhaps she thinks this makes her sound relatable. But nothing could. While she simpers and flirts with older politicians, there’s another perhaps truer side to Dorries: a raging one. When a journalist enquired about employing her daughter during the expenses scandal, she threatened to nail his balls to the floor using his own front teeth.

The Plot reads like a Facebook conspiracy theory: the Tory Party has a parasite within. It is called “the Movement” and it consists of Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Lee Cain, Dougie Smith from Central Office and someone called “Dr No” that a lawyer wouldn’t let her name. The movement is connected to CCHQ and the Spectator magazine: some of them came from the Confederation of Conservative Students and wanted to kill Nelson Mandela; some of them went to Fever sex parties. They destroyed Boris Johnson by surrounding him with traitors and leaking against him. The Movement wanted to keep us in the EU by taking us out of the EU. I don’t follow either, but she insists it is true.

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Dorries’s prose is deranged for a former Secretary of State. She says the Movement is like an elephant, but it is also like a mouse. They eat rats. (I think this is a metaphor.) She believes in “small state, big people” and talks to portraits of dead politicians: “Was it different in your day, Walpole?” He doesn’t reply. Croissants smile up at her and villains step out of fantasy fiction. Dominic Cummings is the Dark Lord, but he is also Sauron. Both have eyes, she notes carefully, in what may be the oddest paragraph. Even Cummings would admit to that.

One part is heartfelt, though: her portrait of Boris Johnson. She is so clearly in love with him, there is almost nothing left to say, except it’s piteous. She visits him, marvels at him, flatters him, and she wrote this junk to place at his feet. She is awed by him: or, rather, by her invention of him — she paints him as credulous, sweet-natured, a saint. She says Johnson’s flaw is thinking too well of people. Perhaps that is true. If he thinks well of them, they might think well of him. If he forgives them, they might forgive him.

He is the hero, a man just out of reach. “Never be bitter,” is his advice to her, “no good will ever come from it.” Since they cannot make love, she admires his bookshelf (some ancient Greek, a Robert Harris novel) and repeats rumours about Michael Gove to him. She is attracted, above all, by his gilded class: Dorries loves private clubs and servants; cucumber water and roaring fires. She interviews Iain Duncan Smith, who calls Gove: “The poor boy on a wet night in the cold outside looking through the brightly lit window into an opulent room with shining tableware and a roaring fire at this exotic, privileged life.” Gove, c’est moi. No wonder she loathes him.

When Gove and Johnson were at Oxford, Gove hung around, “like a love-sick school-boy just waiting to be in the company of Boris”.  She tells Johnson, “He was hanging around for you. That he was bedazzled by you because you were what he could never be, as he was with Cameron, only you were first.” To his credit, Johnson merely says, as anyone would: “Really?”

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There is no politics in this book because Dorries is, at heart, a bad artist, all (self) sensibility and no skill: I think that is why she is drawn to Johnson, who is the same. She lost the whip in 2013 for appearing in I’m a Celebrity, the house of masochism. Her most intense political position is: the No. 10 coffee was poor.

Her constituents knew it. She left parliament after Johnson’s attempt to give her a peerage was ruined: for a time, Mid Beds had no functioning MP. When I went there to cover the by-election, I heard no good word about her. She didn’t live in the constituency; she employed family members. Mid Beds must have disappointed her, and it was mutual: it went Labour.

But now she has this, a glutinous piece of self-deception that tells a kind of truth: the Tory Party is riven with dreams, hatred, and, above all, thwarted sex. She is like the protagonist in The Little Stranger, who, seeking the murderer in the mirror, fails to recognise her own reflection. She doesn’t accept that Johnson had no judgment; that he isn’t an epoch-defining genius (Robert Harris novels?); that she is as addicted to intrigue as anyone; that they are both symptoms of that same decay. “He had zero remorse or self-awareness. Zero regret,” she says of Cummings. It’s projection.

The Plot has one real aim, I think, and it is cynical and daring: it makes Boris Johnson look serious enough to be prime minister again. Placed beside Dorries, who wouldn’t? Perhaps that was the plot all along: the redemption of Boris with Dorries as ecstatic suicide in his service. She knows this book will destroy the remains of her reputation. I suspect she revels in it. Romance fiction has triumphed over reality: Gotterdammerung.

Albutt blasted their populist gimmicks, short-term stunts, botched spending cuts and the revolving door of 11 justice secretaries since the Tories took office in 2010, who “achieved nothing but decline” in the functioning of her sector. Her conclusion to the all-party group on penal affairs was stark: that politicians are failing inmates, staff and the wider public as they cram more and more people into “warehouses of despair, danger and degradation”.

It was a startlingly honest appraisal of how inadequate politicians played tribal games at the expense of a public service. As she ran through the failures of individual ministers, the Tories were, inevitably, at the receiving end. Yet she was scathing, too, about the Imprisonment for Public Protection regime, a callous legacy of New Labour that has left people with comparatively short sentences still behind bars 20 years later, despite the ditching of the policy more than a decade ago.

The core issue behind Albutt’s outburst is the soaring prison population, which has doubled since she was born 56 years ago. Our incarceration rates became the highest in Western Europe before the turn of the century, then kept on rising. Now we have 87,063 prisoners in England and Wales — and are predicted to hit 100,000 by the end of this decade. Each inmate costs an average of £47,000 a year, slightly more than the fees for Eton. Yet Albutt accused politicians of deceiving the public by promoting a myth that locking up more and more people for steadily longer terms makes society safer. “It’s a lie,” she said bluntly. “Prison does not work.”

Few voters really care about prisons, of course, nor will they shed any tears for convicts crammed into squalid cells. But we should heed Albutt’s warning as crime rises up the political agenda, both parties viewing it as an issue that could sway key voters in swing seats. The Government just delivered a raft of law and order pledges in its ‘crime week’, the latest in a series of dismal themed policy drives in a bid to win back support. Labour responded that ministers have lost control — a point underlined by the home secretary’s suggestion that police might like to tackle offences such as bike thefts and burglaries.

Yet while these politicians tussle to look tough, prisons expose how our democracy is floundering.  Sir Winston Churchill, who spent time in captivity during the Boer War, said treatment of criminals “is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. He argued forcefully against excessive use of sentencing, warning that it was hard to rehabilitate jailed convicts. He told the Commons during his brief time as home secretary “the first real principle which should guide anyone trying to establish a good system of prisons should be to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all”.

Westminster has failed to heed this advice. New Labour passed 28 criminal justice bills and put one new offence on the statute book for every day they were in office over 13 years. Then the Tories ramped up sentencing so that the average length of a prison sentence increased by 55% over the past decade. Austerity forced the police to spend more time picking up pieces of other crumbling public services such as mental health and social care, while the percentage of crimes leading to a charge crashed. Only days after Albutt spoke to parliament, the Met Police chief Mark Rowley said his officers would no longer attend mental health emergencies.

But these problems run deep in our society. We know, for instance, that many prisoners come from broken families or chaotic backgrounds. We know they often struggle with issues such as addiction, autism, illiteracy, mental illness or learning disabilities. The House of Commons Justice Committee found seven in 10 prisoners may have mental health needs and that these can worsen behind bars: these MPs admitted prison can be “inappropriate” and “inhumane” for those with most severe psychological problems.

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Nor does this swamped, unloved system curb reoffending. Short sentences are especially damaging with 55% of those locked up for less than 12 months reoffending. During his stint as prisons minister, Rory Stewart dared to admit: “The best way of protecting the public is to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the under 12-month prison population, because people on community sentences are less likely to re-offend than people put in prison.” Yet only Scotland has introduced a presumption against use of such sentences.

If rehabilitation doesn’t work, how about deterrence? This was exposed as another myth by the Sentencing Council of England and Wales, which published a landmark review last year. The authors pointed out that few offenders knew much about sentencing policies while criminal acts tend to be spontaneous, often driven by anger, drink, drugs, or mental health episodes. “We note that some have argued it is time to accept that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society,” the study concludes drily.

These findings reinforce those of the Transform Justice think tank, which looked at assaults on health workers and police officers. Despite the penalty for these nasty crimes quadrupling over four years,, the number of recorded offences actually rose. “Most victims want the person who harmed them not to harm them or other people again,” said director Penelope Gibbs. “They don’t necessarily want their day in court or retribution. Unfortunately, more prison is unlikely to meet the needs of victims or reduce crime. A government that really cared about cutting crime, rather than simply winning headlines would reduce imprisonment.”

In the United States, even many conservatives have come to see that it makes no sense to keep locking up damaged citizens, whether on fiscal, redemptive, or simply criminal justice terms.  The “Right-on-Crime” movement, placing an emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment, started out in Texas before sweeping the Republican Party after both main parties agreed that locking up more and more people was a costly failure. This goes to show that even in such a divided country politicians can reach across the tribal chasm and shift the terms of public debate, leading to a dramatic 25% decline in prison populations since 2009.

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As US advocates of reform have pointed out to me, it is far tougher to force people to change errant behaviour than simply to slam them into crowded cells. But Labour — driven again by Blairites — senses Tory vulnerability on crime and has stolen a lead on this issue in polls. The Tories by contrast think voters can be persuaded Labour is “soft” on crime under a former director of public prosecutions while latching onto an issue that unites both traditional Tories and new Red Wall recruits .

What makes this even more depressing is that an alternative approach has been proven to work in a nearby nation. Norway had even worse recidivism rates than Britain three decades ago, with seven in 10 prisoners reoffending within two years of release. It had a justice system like our own: built on the concept of deterrence with offenders given long sentences in grim institutions. But instead of blundering on with failure, their leaders boldly switched course. They were rewarded with the world’s lowest recidivism rate, which sees only one in five prisoners reoffending.

The key was to focus less on revenge and more on rehabilitation. Offenders lose their liberty but are given the chance to change their lives. Prisons tend to be small to break up violent cultures and dotted around the country to keep inmates close to their families. Cells are basic but have televisions, computers, fridges, and showers. They offer facilities such as yoga, saunas, music studios, tanning beds, fitness rooms, car workshops and cooking classes. Guards and prisoners enjoy barbecues and play sport together — and in some units, up to half the officers are women. Above all, there is an emphasis on study and work to develop skills in preparation for freedom — not abandonment in overcrowded cells.

Halden Prison, set in a forest 60 miles south of Oslo, has been labelled the most humane prison in the world although it is a maximum-security institution holding 250 men convicted of the worst crimes. It cost £138 million to build, winning a design award for its minimalist style and efforts to minimise stress. Inmates have appeared on reality television shows and released music under the label Criminal Records. There are no guns or barbed wire on display — although prisoners are still locked up in their rooms at night.

The legacy of such intense focus on rehabilitation is that Norway now has fewer than half the number of prisoners per capita as Britain. But Norway’s strategy is not just about treating prisoners well: it is about keeping people out of prison as far as possible. During its period of reform, prison sentences were reduced. Life sentences were abandoned with a 21 year maximum — although this can be extended in five-year increments if there is perceived danger.

Although the average cost per head of such prisons is significantly higher than our own, it is estimated that rehabilitated offenders save the state about £110,000 per person in terms of law enforcement costs and lower benefits. Crime comparisons are hard given differences in data collection, but the European Crime Index puts Norway comfortably in the top half of safest nations while the UK comes close to the bottom, just above Italy, Sweden and Belarus. Yet our leaders refuse to shift path, spending an immense £3.8bn to push another 20,000 people into more of these “warehouses of despair, danger and degredation”.

This failure by Westminster has a catastrophic impact on the rest of society. Politicians need to display some courage and admit that our prison system does not work, does not deter crime and does not provide value for money. “It’s really very simple,” said one prison warden in Norway. “Treat people like dirt and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings and they’ll act like human beings.”

Uxbridge and South Ruislip is part of the tongue-shaped Tory stronghold in northwest London. It is a land of highly skilled, self-employed non-graduates. It has a Conservative council, was immune to Blairism, and is so Conservative in spirit it still has a Conservative Club whose carpet is the colour of Margaret Thatcher’s suits. It was Boris Johnson’s constituency (a 7,210 majority on 68.5% turnout in 2019) until he resigned from Parliament, rather than face a by-election as punishment for misleading it.

Johnson may be a coward and a fool, but he is still liked here by the people he mirrors: white, semi-affluent, late middle-aged. I think he might have won if he had stood, and it was as good an opportunity for a personal redemption as any. Uxbridge Woman is close to Essex Man: they forgive him Partygate because they would have done the same. “We love Boris,” a woman says, adding: “He just didn’t care.” She laughs. “He’s down to earth. He’s human.” But he baulked, and into the vacuum he made in Uxbridge and South Ruislip — the vacuum that is his legacy, and his mirror — all the oddities floated in.

The numbers are on a whiteboard outside the Underground station courtesy of Star Sports betting. They have sent a political analyst for the day. He says Labour will win this seat, and, in homage, their activists sweep through the high street with their candidate, Danny Beales, 29, a local councillor who grew up in Ruislip, the child of a single parent. They avoid journalists, and then retire to Wagamama. I see the deputy leader of the Welsh Labour Party browsing a charity shop in a straw hat. I am not so sure about Labour: the only certainty is that voters are volatile and emotional, and Uxbridge Person has a problem with Keir Starmer. Voting is a consumer act now — something generated in the subconscious — and they don’t trust him. He doesn’t have Johnson’s fake authenticity and will to drama: a powerful drug when you are trying to avoid reality. The most common responses to questions about Starmer are “I don’t like him” or “I don’t know”. Johnson, one woman says, “doesn’t bother to bury the bodies”.

The analyst is so sure Labour will win, he is now wondering which of the novelty candidates will do best: there are 17 in all, so many that “mainstream” candidates avoid hustings, for fear of looking like attendees at a politicised fancy dress party. There used to be one or two novelty candidates in any by-election: now there is a glut. Now he is calculating Laurence Fox (Reclaim) versus Count Binface (Count Binface Party). Fox is slightly ahead because he did nine series of Lewis and Binface is mostly on Twitter. Novelty candidates fish in the same pool. The main battle is happening off-scene. I do see the Tory candidate Steve Tuckwell — a former postman, a fact that is presented like a jewel on a velvet cushion — in the Three Tuns Pub, but his press man won’t let me approach him. I stare at him as if he is a flamingo while he holds his pint.

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The most devoted novelty candidate is Piers Corbyn of Let London Live. He is Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, and he looks like Albert Einstein made homeless. He parks his blue Vauxhall opposite the station. It has a loudhailer on the roof from which plays a song to the tune of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas”. It substitutes the word Christmas with Genocide (“with every jab you take”). Later, he plays conspiracy-theory rap. I can only think: what happened at a Corbyn childhood Christmas? He is accompanied by a press officer who says he is banned from sleeping rough in Westminster. “I am the candidate the Establishment fear,” Corbyn says, which is not true.

He is opposed to Covid lockdowns and Ulez (ultra-low emission zones, a tax of £12.50 a day for non-compliant cars that Sadiq Khan is extending here next month). Corbyn reminds me that he was arrested 16 times for protesting lockdown. He says the Underground is 40 times more polluting than roads. He says that if Sadiq Khan cares about pollution he would shut down the Underground, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant: we need more of it. Corbyn is a constant by Uxbridge station, performing his dark carnival, and the council have their revenge at teatime. They give him a parking ticket.

It is obvious that conspiracism, incubated under Covid, has mainlined in British politics, walking from Facebook to life. This is the first by-election where working-class Tory-leaning women tell me it doesn’t really matter who is in charge. If this is Johnson’s legacy, they don’t yet know it. “Rishi is trying,” says one, “but it’s hard to do a job with your hands tied behind your back. Somebody kicks him down. They’ve already got their person to put in.”

A retired bricklayer tells me the Tories have done nothing wrong; that people are greedy for benefits; that the state can’t do everything for people. I meet another who doesn’t know why he votes Tory but will anyway, like a contraction. Another is sorry that Johnson left: “Who’d have a pandemic?” I find no Tory who is happy he has gone.

I meet raging Labour voters. “They [the Conservatives] are for the little people, not the big people,” says one: he can’t afford to go out after he has paid his rent, and is aghast at Sunak’s wealth. Another thinks the Tories “are idiots”; yet another calls Sunak “Fishy Rishi”, but as a former Liberal Democrat alienated by the coalition government of 2010-15, his main complaint seems to be against Jo Swinson’s wardrobe. He has a resentment against her cardigan: “You do have to look the part. And then she just disappeared like a house of cards collapsed. She just vanished into thin air like AI. Like she never was.” Two young men say they will vote Labour when they can vote — they are 16 — as “we are falling apart now”. They are sophisticated, and despondent. “Everything is going downhill. Every year it just gets worse and worse. Imagine what it be like in ten years. Everything has doubled in price. It’s not very safe. Somebody gets stabbed every day.” They never saw Johnson in the constituency. Then one says what I think is the most profound thing anyone has ever said about him, and he says it with great seriousness: Johnson was a meme.

Then there are the apolitical, the non-voters. One calls himself “helpless. It’s all a game. There is no change. It just rolls on and rolls on. The top people stay at the top.” He is functional, but sounds despairing, as if he carries his sorrow in his pocket. A woman in a Little Miss Trouble T-shirt tells me Starmer “is much of the same thing [to Sunak]. Labour and the Conservatives seem to have meshed together.” Inevitably, I meet someone who thinks Johnson is still prime minister.

In the D2o Boardgame Cafe, the man behind the counter says his clientele “are completely disengaged. This is a Conservative constituency, and we are an LGBTQ+ board game cafe. The younger people are red-leaning, but I don’t know if they are even going to vote.” Like many in the constituency, he is against Ulez; it is cross-party anger that the Tories hope to exploit. “I think anything that uses a fine as a method of discouragement is classist,” he says. “If you can afford a flat in central London, you can afford to pay the Ulez charge. All it is going to do is affect the people who need to work in London but can’t afford to live there.”

I walk the high street with the Rejoin EU candidate Richard Hewison; Uxbridge voted Leave, alongside four other London boroughs and the whole of Essex. We meet two repentant Brexit voters in 30 yards. “I got caught up in the narrative, and me and my whole family voted to leave the EU,” says one man, “in hindsight, a terrible mistake.”

David Simmonds, the MP for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, is “the candidate’s friend”. He sits in the bar of the Conservative Club, which has a quasi-Italian stone garden: wet, aesthetic Toryism. He looks phlegmatic, calm. The Conservative Council is very popular here, he says and voters are proud that Uxbridge is different from the centre of London (“there are deer in the woods, there are rivers, there are lakes”). Tory voters, he says, are most worried about the tax burden.

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I meet Leo Phaure, a business analyst and independent candidate, on the square. His campaign is gaudy. His children are leafleting. “Vote for no-Ulez-Leo,” he tells a man who looks like him. “We send a strong message to the Labour Party that they potentially lose Labour voters in next year’s election. We have got a unique opportunity in this town — no one else has got this opportunity — to send a message to Keir Starmer that we reject Mayor Khan and Ulez.  We send a message that if you still support him in next year’s General Election, you are going to lose London boroughs. You can’t have any policy where you [are] persecuting the pockets of the working man.”

He turns to a bystander and says: “I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m not Danny Beales.” (Beales didn’t turn up at the Brunel University hustings on Thursday). They hate Ulez because they think it is unfair: one couple say their daughter had to sell her car and buy a BMW. “And the buses are rubbish,” says a woman. “My seven-year-old grandson says to me: ‘That’s the bus that lies, Nanny.’” Even public transport is deceitful, and in homage to this fear, Beales now says that Ulez should be delayed.

The thing that unites Uxbridge voters is mistrust. If by-elections are a weathervane, this one points to disconnection, to ennui. Five years ago, a car singing about genocide would be an outlier: something bizarre. Now it feels common. Johnson’s danger was always in his precedent. His unseriousness — his sense of carnival — is toxic. Novelty candidates are all his children.

At dusk, the Star Sports betting white board has changed. It is now wondering which minor candidate will get 5%. As I leave, police surround a woman in pink. She has written “Army and Police Traitors” on a pillar under a cross. She starts to shout, holding her Bible in the air: “I am a homeless with a Bible! In London! Hallelujah!” They handcuff her. Corbyn takes his loud-hailer — it seems attached to him — and accuses them of torture as they take her to the van. He identifies with her sorrow: “I have been arrested…”

I ask a policeman: what is happening? “We didn’t arrest her. She is threatening to kill herself. We can’t just leave her.” He indicated his iPad: “I am telephoning her Mum.” This is Metroland. Anything can happen.

Worksop is the largest town in Bassetlaw — the constituency that saw the greatest Labour-to-Conservative migration at the last general election. It’s the heart of Borisland. And now, exactly one year on from his ignominious resignation, many people here remain steadfastly loyal to their populist tribune. This was where the Boris majority was won: where miners, pensioners, Brexiteers and lifelong Labour voters united to stick it to their old party. Other than the brief blip of Malcolm MacDonald (son of the first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald) defecting to National Labour in 1929, Labour had held the town since 1929. Brendan Clarke-Smith is the MP who, in 2019, smashed that red record with a stonking 18.4% swing, the greatest, he later assures me, at any general election since the Second World War. (“I think it’s on Wikipedia.”)

When Johnson took the seat, it heralded a new era of Tory politics. A new coalition, forged from the fires of Brexit, stretched from Hampshire to Hartlepool. Like Columbus, he seemed to have landed upon virgin territory ripe for the taking. Labour — cosmopolitan, effete and out of touch — looked sunk. But four years on, the shaggy conqueror is gone, and a string of by-elections threatens to chip away at his majority he built. In Selby, Uxbridge, Mid Bedfordshire, Somerton and now Chris Pincher’s seat of Tamworth, the prognosis is gloomy. So far, the bookies believe every single one will be lost. And Bassetlaw itself, the clearest expression of that much-heralded post-Brexit realignment, is now a harbinger of doom. In March, one poll suggested it, and all the other 44 Red Wall seats won from Labour, will be lost at next year’s general election. What went wrong?

“He’s still hugely popular,” Clarke-Smith tells me. “A lot of people voted for Boris. It wasn’t the only thing — it had been trending our way anyway — but those Brexit Party voters and so on came across, and he was a big part of that.” The big man, he says, has an “aura” about him that helped draw in converts. “You still get voters saying: ‘Oh, I voted for Boris…’”

When I meet the MP, he is wearing a checked suit and has a small ketchup stain at the corner of his mouth. A self-described “libertarian Thatcherite”, he was raised on a Nottingham council estate, trained as a teacher, and worked at a school in Romania before entering politics. He is also, on the day I visit, on the cover of the Worksop Guardian, delivering a sly grin alongside the headline: “MP slammed for ‘vile’ Twitter attack.” It is the outcome of Clarke-Smith’s engagement in the culture wars — he is at the fore of a group of working-class Tories keen to give as good as they get online. A member of the New Conservatives, a collective currently lobbying for tougher action on immigration, he is also part of the Common Sense Group, which has attacked “the woke agenda”.

He says this posture is what the Red Wall wants. “Apart from the obvious stuff about the economy and NHS, what would you guess the main issue is here?” he asks me. “The number one thing I get emailed about, more than Dominic Cummings, more than anything, is small boats. There is very little immigration here — but it’s the number one issue because they linked it to taking back control.”

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If true, this harks back to the political energy Boris personified, and which this squad of Red Wall MPs were elected to enact. The highest-profile member of the Nottinghamshire Tory contingent is Lee Anderson, the spiky-haired former miner and ex-Labour councillor who now serves as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In a recent segment on his GB News show, which captured much of the banal absurdity of politics in 2023, Anderson fed Clarke-Smith baked beans in a blind taste test to prove that bargain hunting is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis. “Here comes the aeroplane,” he said as he raised the spoon, firmly back in single-dad mode.

It’s perhaps not the most traditionalist-Tory publicity stunt. But, “we’re not in London — there’s no liberal elite here”, his campaign manager assures me. In Bassetlaw now, “the bigger the house and the bigger the gravel driveway, the less chance there is they’ll vote for us”, Clarke-Smith boasts. They claim the realignment is still working.

Worse-off voters were crucial to the Tory success in 2019. In that election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Labour lost nearly one in three low-income voters who had turned out to vote for them in 2017, while the Conservatives retained 90%. In the Red Wall now, however, the picture is shifting. The same March polling that foresees the Tories losing 45 seats in the North and Midlands shows the party behind in all social groups, from managers to unskilled manual labourers. That 19th-century notion of “working-class Toryism” has proven more elusive than first claimed.

And, away from the bustling high street, signs of discontent lurk. The cabbie who drove me from Retford, the handsome market town that makes up Bassetlaw’s other major population centre, tells me Boris was popular among his clientele in 2019. Now passengers young and old tell him they want a change of government. “My grandad was a well-known cab driver around Retford — he died during Covid. My gran couldn’t get out of her care home to attend the funeral.” It was, he adds dryly, “a bit crap”. He now works part time at Rampton Hospital, on a secure ward, where he helps transport imprisoned psychopaths. “There are cutbacks just like the rest of the NHS,” he says. “It’s much harder to transport patients now we have less staff.”

In Worksop itself, Wallace’s gleaming pate is plastered across town to advertise the food festival. I watch him deliver his own populist punchlines while cooking, laying into “clickbait” news and telling his audience not to trust headlines in the papers. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures the distrustful mood. Lindsay Martin, a Retford resident manning a friend’s market stall nearby, tells me she never fell for Johnson’s charm offensive. “Boris made a lot of false promises that were never delivered on. The country got worse under his leadership.” Asked about levelling-up, that chimera of social transformation, she merely laughs.

This region has always been sceptical of received opinion. The local council’s website grandly claims that “many regard Bassetlaw as the birthplace of the United States of America”. And, while that “many” is doing some heavy lifting, a sizeable chunk of the separatist-nonconformists who could no longer stand the Church of England did hail from the flat fields around here. At the local museum, a study resembling that of Plymouth Colony leader William Brewster is now preserved in aspic. And political dissidence, including to the benefit of the Right, is part of its history, too. During the miners’ strike, Nottinghamshire stuck out when the majority of its miners kept working and thus helped Margaret Thatcher’s government survive the winter of 1984.

Today, though, like much of the rest of the country, dissent has sublimated into a kind of jaded desolation. Others walking up and down the high street are less cynical. Janet, a pensioner in a purple windbreaker, tells me she voted Conservative for the first time in her life because of Boris. “It was his principles,” she says. “He got stuff done. Then he was brought down by other people.” What about the parties? Didn’t he break Covid rules? “It wasn’t his fault,” she tells me, without elaborating. “Rishi turned on him.” She will vote Tory again at the next election.

A middle-aged couple tell me that they, too, voted Conservative for the first time because of Johnson. “I liked Boris at the time,” says the wife. “The slur against him now smells a little of a smear campaign.” Her husband agrees: “I think I’d vote for the Tories again if Boris returned as leader.” “Cameron” will “sell us out” with Europe, he claims, before his wife hurriedly reminds him that the Labour leader is called Keir.

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As the food festival winds down, the high street becomes deserted. I walk past Clarke-Smith’s high street office where one window has taken a hit but remains just about intact, bearing a spiralling network of cracks. Retford is similarly quiet. People aren’t interested in talking: a densely bearded man bringing down the shutters on his vape shop tells me he “doesn’t do politics”. I pass the empty headquarters of Jo White, Labour’s chosen candidate and the wife of John Mann, the constituency’s former MP. A sign proclaims that she supports “Traditional Values in a Modern Bassetlaw”. I do not quite understand what this means, but when I email her campaign to ask I do not receive a response.

Johnson, meanwhile, has got his trotters up in Oxfordshire. Throughout his career, the former PM cultivated a set of allies before discarding them and Clark-Smith now faces a potential suspension from Parliament after falling foul of the privileges committee — was it worth it to defend Johnson? “Part of me thinks I owe my position as a member of parliament to Boris,” he says. “Winning that election, and getting Brexit done and everything else. I thought he was doing a good job in difficult circumstances. It wasn’t just loyalty — I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do.”

His words are laced with unwitting irony. Four years ago, victory here seemed to herald the start of a new age. Levelling-up money might reverse economic decline; an end to Brexit psychodrama might let old wounds heal. Perhaps it was hope more than expectation when Bassetlaw, the Red Wall and Brendan Clarke-Smith all tied their fortunes to a New-York-born columnist with a history of disappointing those who trusted him. While some still keep the faith, that realignment seems to have delivered little change to their lives in return. And, beyond tribal loyalties, that was the promise of 2019, broken utterly when Boris resigned last year.

I asked Boris-loyalist Janet if the town had got any better since the election, and I received a simple answer: “No.”

At a time when the global order is undergoing a period of total, historic change, the effects of which have struck every household in the country, the Conservatives have committed themselves to conserving only yesterday’s orthodoxies. They are overseeing the withdrawal of the state from policing anything other than online discourse, presiding over the most unsustainably liberal immigration regime in British history and doubling down on an economic model the rest of the world is competing to supersede. As a result, wage growth has stagnated for a generation, the longest period without increasing affluence since the Napoleonic Wars, while rocketing mortgage rates and inflation make even the decently paid feel a new pang of anxiety at the end of each month. Homeownership and family formation, the basic building blocks of a conservative worldview, have both been made needlessly difficult by 13 wasted years of Tory governance. In Tory Britain, nothing works any longer, least of all the government.

That Johnson fell foul of the excessive Covid regulations he himself introduced is the perfect encapsulation of the party’s impeccable record of failure. Seemingly proud of their inability to govern a country, Conservative ministers grandly announce policies they will never deliver on Twitter, complain that their governance is frustrated by state functionaries they were elected to control, and give fringe conference speeches complaining about the pernicious effects of legislation they themselves introduced.

Johnson’s latest self-exculpatory missive is thus the perfect distillation of Conservative governance, where failure is always someone else’s fault. Endlessly railing against the blob, the Conservative Party is surely the blob’s purest and most baleful incarnation — a self-defeating cabal of WhatsApp gossipers whose horizons extend no further than the Westminster Lobby. Yet it really did seem, just two years ago, that the Conservative Party’s hold on power might last unchallenged for a generation. The Tory self-implosion since then must count as one of the most spectacular failures in British political history: presented with an open goal, the party dribbled unopposed to the victory line before ritually disembowelling itself in front of a horrified crowd.

In retrospect, Johnson’s squandering of a historic opportunity to reshape Britain may have been inevitable. All his personal failings, the lying and unfaithfulness that inspire such liberal outrage, are just subcategories of his greatest flaw: the pathological craving to over-promise without ever delivering. The nation was only another dalliance which, having won, his flawed nature compelled him to neglect. The much-mythologised new Red Wall voter base he seduced has now returned, shame-faced, to its longstanding partner: the only legacy of Johnson’s 2019 victory is a short-lived crop of northern MPs of staggering awfulness. Instead of ushering in a new era of mass prosperity and revitalised industry, we are compelled to witness, in the dying days of this government, Red Wall MPs of the party of social aspiration commanding their voters to eat value baked beans and stop complaining. But if the party could be forgiven Johnson, who at least delivered one brief moment of electoral glory, its subsequent coronation of Liz Truss, the Lady Jane Grey of zombie neoliberalism, alone deserves annihilation.

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At precisely the moment the world firmly rejected neoliberalism, the Conservative Party chose, through an opaque and arrogantly self-absorbed internal conclave, its last true zealot to intensify Britain’s commitment to the failed ideology. Foiled at achieving her set-piece open borders deal with India only by her demolition of the British economy, Truss’s only lasting achievement has been to drive the party’s dependable middle class Blue Wall voter base towards Labour.

Even at the best of times, that the party could be so absorbed by its own internal drama to unleash a figure as simultaneously vapid and dangerous as Truss anywhere near the highest office of state would be just cause to forfeit power. But that it could do so at such a moment of grave national crisis is simply inexcusable, a dereliction of duty so severe that even the Conservative Party’s continued existence now seems of dubious merit. At this point, the furore over Truss and Johnson’s doling out of honours to their cronies seems misplaced: they have gone already this far in discrediting the government and party, why should they not bring the whole thing crashing down?

After all this, the broadly competent managerialism of the Sunak government, now rocked by the vengeful blond revenant, seemed to at least provide us with some breathing space before the inevitable Labour victory. Sunak’s foreign policy, aligning with Europe by rejecting open confrontation with China while maintaining sufficient distance from the rising economic hegemon, is unexpectedly modest and sensible: in different circumstances, he could have been a great Foreign Secretary. His economic policy is essentially that of running the country on autopilot, following a route programmed back in the 2010s. While he has no convincing answers to Britain’s accumulating dysfunction, he is at least unlikely to dramatically worsen the situation in the limited time history has allotted him. Ironically more conservative than either Johnson or Truss, perhaps the last two true liberals of a dying era, Sunak is nevertheless fated to lead the party towards its electoral doom, a steady pair of hands driving the nation safely towards Starmer, while Johnson loudly smears his mess across the back seat.

At this point, a more convincing conservative case can surely be made for Labour than for the Conservative Party. A period of Labour rule, resetting Britain’s economic model on a more resilient and sustainable path, may ironically provide a more secure basis for some future, more competent Tory government: in the long-term, indeed, the Conservative Party’s very survival may depend on a Labour victory. But if it is to survive — and the desirability of this outcome, given its performance, is far from obvious — then the Tories require a period out of office to define their worldview and devise a convincing path to achieving it.

Yet, instead of showcasing the exciting new frontiers of conservatism, the recent Natcon conference — in which a chaotically-assembled mixture of economic liberals, social conservatives and inane culture war loudmouths argued for directly opposing things — only highlighted the lack of intellectual heft within the modern British Right. Simply, the conservative movement in Britain does not have a deep bench of talent from which to draw future inspiration, much less to govern now. If Johnson’s return can still be pined for by frontbench loyalists, if he is the best they can hope for, then the rot is surely terminal.

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The outlook, for conservatives, must now be one of weary resignation. In our constricted party system, the space that is in continental Europe filled by competent Right-wing parties is in Britain taken up by conspiracy theorists and Trussonomics advocates moonlighting as talkshow hosts. Filling this gap, Starmer’s Labour has already outflanked the Conservative Party from the Right on law and order and immigration, purging the party of the remnants of the Corbynite Left whose professed adherence to socialism was always outweighed by their more passionate commitment to social liberalism.

To the chagrin of Left-liberals, whose enthusiasm for the normalisation of crime is only matched by that of the Conservative Party, Starmer can convincingly point to his record as Director of Public Prosecutions in claiming that a Labour victory will lead to the return of robust policing. On immigration, while the Labour benches still contain free-movement zealots, it’s difficult to see, short of dispatching press gangs around the world to abduct random passersby, how Labour can surpass either Truss’s enthusiasm for open borders or the unprecedented visa liberalisation regime Johnson intentionally introduced.

But it is on economic questions, those bread-and-butter material circumstances that define a nation’s political character, that Labour has now superseded the Conservative Party’s fossilised orthodoxies, pledging a revived industrial strategy based on national resilience, a massive program of housebuilding, and expansion of affordable childcare to ease the burden of family formation. Just as the Biden administration has transpired, on foreign policy and the economy, to be simply the competent version of Trumpism, it may take the Labour Party to bring about the Johnsonian economic settlement its creator was too lazy and disorganised to achieve.

After 13 years in power, the Conservative Party has achieved nothing, conserving only an ideological attachment to an economic model that has evaporated, and a rhetorical commitment to a social order its own policies have destroyed. Clamouring for the Lobby’s attention once again, Boris eloquently makes the case, if anyone is still wavering, for a Labour government as soon as possible. After enduring another year of drift and managed decline, a period of Labour governance may yet achieve some traditionally conservative ends, in home ownership and family formation, in the rebirth of a British industrial strategy and the fostering of economic resilience in a contested, multipolar world. The return of Johnson’s unquiet ghost, waving his mouldering rags of failure at all around him, may therefore do the nation some good: if he drags the Conservative Party into the political grave with him, Boris may finally make his mark on history.

Outside Italy, meanwhile, the Romeo who told one biographer “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it”, and reportedly called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”, is immortalised in Bunga-Bunga, a Covent Garden restaurant serving metre-long pizzas.

It is an achievement, I suppose, to have been the epicentre of a sex scandal so epoch-defining and internationally notorious as to have provided the name for a restaurant that isn’t even in your own country. The term “bunga bunga” was reportedly introduced to the world by Ruby Ruacori, real name Karima El Mahroug. Berlusconi was accused of paying El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was just 17; El Mahroug claimed it was a lap-dancing game, in which the winner got to have sex with Berlusconi.

The events mesmerised the press, nationally and internationally. The details were juicy, the settings opulent, the men powerful, and the girls pretty. The tabloids feasted. But could this larger-than-life figure reach such prominence today? Though Peak Bunga was barely more than a decade ago, the stories feel sepia-toned, as though they belong to a different age.

We’ve been through the looking-glass at least twice since then: first, the Great Populist Earthquake of 2016, then Covid, and all their respective derangement syndromes. Along the way, we seemingly abandoned the sinking ship of tolerance and shared values altogether, in a flotilla of quarrelsome social-media lifeboats.

Somewhere in there was #MeToo. There was Epstein. We swapped headlines for clickbait. Politics now comes pre-marinaded in competitive victimhood. An out-of-context video clip can trigger international social media meltdown. And in this dyspeptic climate, there probably is less political bandwidth for uncritically lionising the priapic, piratical, rule-bending alpha-male mafioso type than there was in the Age of Bunga.

Officially at least, modern politics runs on rules, procedures, and meticulous attention to everyone’s feelings. So is his death, as one internet mourner put it, “the end of an era”?

Well. Public mores have, perhaps, shifted somewhat. But have the underlying patterns that shape how sex, money, and power interact shifted too? While we may have declared, officially at least, that we are no longer at home to Mr Toxic Masculinity, it’s far from obvious that men have stopped wanting to be around attractive young women. Nor is there much evidence that male power and status are any less magnetic to women than they have been at any other point in the long history of hypergamy. And nor has the inevitable resulting confluence between high-status men and young, nubile women grown any less asymmetrical in terms of raw power. So whatever we may wish to tell ourselves about how #MeToo changed everything on this front, the reality is: #MeToo changed very little.

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It’s true that there is a Berlusconi type: men (they are always men) of prodigious energy and appetite, boundless and infuriating charisma, and a cheerful indifference to the rules. The type, perhaps mercifully for the rest of us, is relatively rare – but Berlusconi is far from unique. Back in 1998, there was Bill Clinton: wildly charismatic, ferociously on the make, awash in rumours of perjury and nepotism — and, famously, lying about sexual doings with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Britain’s foremost contemporary exemplar of the type is the also charismatic and priapic Boris Johnson, who survived his own sex scandal only to leave No. 10 over that of Chris Pincher. In a 2003 Spectator interview with Berlusconi, Johnson betrays the wide-eyed admiration of a senpai for his sensei: marvelling at the energy, hospitality and sheer opulent extra-ness of this “balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire”, whom he describes as “the fizziest old dog you have ever seen”. Game, we might say, recognises game.

In turn, when such men become game themselves, their hunters usually lead with sexual wrong-doing. The accusations didn’t stick to Clinton, and only partially stuck to Johnson. But another of the same type, the epicentre of many post-Bunga political derangement syndromes, is now wrangling his own intensely politicised sex scandal: Donald Trump. In 2018, rumours emerged that Stephanie Clifford, real name Stormy Daniels, had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair. (There were also rumours of a “pee tape”, of which the less said the better.) The allegations have since cross-pollinated with a flurry of others, all of which add up to a miasmic impression of general dodginess and yet another indictment (or, to Trump supporters, banana-republic-style persecution of a feared political enemy).

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But as these big beasts age, we might be tempted to think their time is past. Berlusconi is on his way to his “fascistic” (according to Vanity Fair) mausoleum. The Orange Man is in the mire. Even Britain’s own pound-shop Alpha, Boris Johnson, has left Parliament. And the times really have changed: in 2018, Monica Lewinsky resurfaced, reframing her previous statements about a “consensual” affair in the #MeToo language of “authority, station, and privilege”.

But it doesn’t follow from this that young, pretty women are any safer today. It hardly seems likely that the corridors of power are any less stuffed with rich, entitled, horny men than they ever were, just because Harvey Weinstein got a punishment beating. Nor does it seem much more likely than before #MeToo that a woman will automatically get redress, should they find themselves in a sticky situation with such a man. Consider, for example, the recent fall from grace of Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Cohen is, to be clear, not a classic Berlusconi type; he was, however, the subject of numerous complaints, over a great many years, from female colleagues about sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing was ever done – until campaigning barrister Jolyon Maugham identified Cohen as an enemy on Maugham’s pet issue of transgender rights, and set out to collate the rumours about Cohen. The paper apologised, following his departure, for ignoring the allegations so long.

The lesson is bleak. If a lower status woman accuses a higher status man of sexual impropriety, few will pay much attention – except that man’s political enemies. And the greater the power differential (as, for example, that of children trafficked to Epstein Island, seeking redress against billionaires and politicos), the more likely a horny plutocrat’s horniness will go unjudged and un-criticised.

Silvio Berlusconi left behind two ex-wives, five children, and a 33-year-old girlfriend. It seems implausible that such a rampantly oversexed man got all the way to his seventies before suddenly developing a taste for “bunga-bunga”. So why did his appetites take so long to cause a scandal? Well, Berlusconi was, by his own lights, someone whose modus operandi turned less on rules and procedures than on webs of friendship, loyalty, power-broking and obligation. He was upfront about this, saying of his convoluted business interests “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

We can perhaps catch a glimpse of this network of interests, via the relationship between Berlusconi and the half-English, one-time showgirl Nicole Minetti, another central figure in Bunga-gate. After appearing on Berlusconi’s TV show ‘Scorie’ in 2007, Minetti trained as a dental assistant, later helping to repair two of Berlusconi’s teeth after someone threw a marble statuette of Milan cathedral at him in 2009. The following year, Minetti was picked, age 25, as a Lombardy candidate for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, despite having no political experience, and was placed on Lombardy’s regional council a few months later. A couple of years after that, in 2013, Minetti was convicted of procuring minors for sex at Berlusconi’s notorious parties. During the trial, wire-tapped tapes appeared to show Berlusconi promising Minetti a seat in Parliament.

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The most likely explanation of Berlusconi’s evading the Bunga Police for so long, then, is that despite decades of efforts to catch him breaking rules against (among others) drug trafficking, tax fraud, mafia links, bribery, and abuse of office, his carefully-crafted network of interests preferred to keep him in situ. We can only speculate as to what changed circa 2010, to inspire his enemies to turn bunga-bunga against him, but one thing should be clear: the exploitation of a prostituted child was the least of anyone’s concerns.

Some cases don’t even get as far as the one against Berlusconi. Clinton emerged largely untouched from the Lewinsky scandal. And when, in 2019, seven women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of sexually inappropriate behaviour, precisely nothing happened – #MeToo notwithstanding – except that supporters went in to bat for him. We can of course make no inferences about the truth or otherwise of the allegations. But it should be clear enough that “Believe Women” has a great many qualifiers, of which the foremost is “when it’s politically expedient to do so”.

What is the lesson, then, for those women young and beautiful enough to find themselves courted by (or attracted to) charismatic and powerful men? It’s a bleak one: nobody cares if you get hurt. Even those women who avoid being treated as wholly disposable, but build careers and their own power-bases in the shadow of such men, may find themselves pitilessly exposed once inconvenient. Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years. And while Berlusconi contested every allegation, receiving a final acquittal last February, Nicole Minetti was jailed for five years in 2013. No equivalent efforts were made to appeal her sentence.

And should you find yourself used and discarded by a man with more power than you, the only way you will find redress is in being used again, most likely by another man with more power than you. Only this time it’ll be as a weapon. And #MeToo counts for nothing, in this mix, unless you were groped by a Republican. I wish I had a more upbeat message, but the cold truth is this: if you attract the attention of men with big appetites and bigger bank balances, and you don’t want to be used either as a sex toy or political weapon, heed the medieval proverb. “She who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.”

Luckily, one of his aides had brought a spare and handed it over. “Ah, sorry,” he mumbled apologetically before disembarking. As I followed him down the steps, I noticed the straps of that unwanted blue mask hanging out of his jacket pocket, flapping in the wind.

I often think back to this moment when reflecting on everything that has happened since: the scandal and resignation, the attempted comeback and, finally, his angry, conspiratorial departure from parliament last week. For me, the Belfast airport mask has become a kind of metaphor, representing both Johnson’s own chaotic nature and that of his premiership. It has become the scene I return to as I consider those strange months in 2021, when the country was in various states of lockdown and I was spending my time going in and out of Downing Street to profile the prime minister.

Never during this time did I witness any overt rule breaking — no parties nor secret gatherings, no bottles of wine, no abandoned slices of cake. But what I did see was a strange performative obedience to the rules that differed inside and outside No 10, as typified by this moment in Belfast, and which, I think, helps to explain the extraordinary rise and fall of Boris Johnson.

It is worth pausing, though, to reflect on the extraordinary arc of his story. Three and a half years ago, Johnson won the biggest Conservative majority for 40 years. A month later, he took Britain out of the European Union. And a few months after that, almost died of Covid-19. By March 2021, when we arrived in Northern Ireland, Johnson seemed unassailable: here was a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority, leading Labour in the polls, and seemingly on course for a decade in power.

Johnson talked openly to me about needing a long time in power to deliver his agenda. And yet, today, he is not only not Prime Minister, but he is no longer a Member of Parliament. His political career seems dead.

There has never been a fall from power quite as spectacular. Perhaps Anthony Eden is the most obvious parallel; he left office after the disaster of Suez but upon the order of his doctors. A better example, I think, might be David Lloyd George, the “dynamic force” of his age who could not grow old gracefully. In truth, though, neither Eden nor Lloyd George’s downfall were quite as absurd, complete or sudden as Johnson’s.

My trip to Northern Ireland came at a time when fairly draconian restrictions about what you could and could not do were still in place. Only a few weeks earlier, the prime minister had announced a “roadmap” out of lockdown: for the first time, it was possible to meet one other person outside your household for “coffee on a bench or a picnic in a park”. Looking back, what strikes me is just how all-consuming these rules had become — and yet, when I crossed the threshold into No 10, or joined the prime minister on a visit, a sense of normality reasserted itself.

I still remember the feeling of unease as I sat on the flight to Belfast maskless; a feeling that disappeared remarkably quickly as normality reimposed itself. To join the trip, everyone had been tested in a room set aside in some discreet corner of Downing Street: none of us had Covid on the flight. Yet even though we had been travelling maskless inside a flying metal tube, once we arrived, Johnson had had to put on his mask to go outside. This was the theatre of the absurd we were all inhabiting at the time.

I don’t offer this memory as an excuse for the revelations about Johnson’s behaviour which would eventually cost him his job, though perhaps I do offer it as some kind of atmospheric mitigation. The truth is, once you crossed the threshold of No 10 during the pandemic, you really did feel as though you were entering a different world. This is not just because of a failure of leadership, though of course that existed. It is because during this time, when the rest of us were sat at home figuring out how to escape our houses within the rules, in Downing Street, a large group of people were working together in close proximity every day, catching Covid, taking tests, travelling on public transport. Evidently, this bred a degree of complacency — and, I would argue, quiet contempt — for the rules they themselves were setting. The fact is, Johnson was plainly imposing rules on others that he himself did not believe in. He saw their absurdity and could not bring himself to play along convincingly.

This, I think, lies at the centre of what would become known as “Partygate”, the scandal which would cost him everything. The irony of Johnson’s fall is that it can be explained, in part, because he failed in the performance of the job as much as anything. On the plane in Northern Ireland, Johnson was only doing what he had always done: a daily, performative mockery of authority. Only this time, he was the authority — they were his rules.

The thing is, a central part of the job of any prime minister is performative: projecting qualities such as empathy and bravery, understanding and control. Being prime minister is about much more than bureaucratic management or efficient decision-making. In moments of national crisis, a prime minister has to shape people’s understanding of what is happening to them and to show them how things will improve.

During the Manchester terror attacks in 2017, Theresa May remained behind closed doors, working as hard as she could to keep people safe. In many ways, it was admirable. Yet, by staying in London rather than joining mourners in Manchester, she failed in her job. She was still acting as Home Secretary, not Prime Minister. What is odd, reflecting on Johnson’s premiership, is that so did he, albeit for very different reasons.

The philosopher John Gray told me that the key to understanding Johnson was that the “mask has moulded to the face”.  Just as we all have our public and private personas, so does Johnson. But with him, the chaos and mockery, jokes and shallowness, are both real and performative. This is the key to understanding Johnson. He uses chaos to distract; but he is also chaotic to the point at which he undermined his entire premiership.

Johnson once described Benjamin Disraeli as “the greatest of all Tory magicians”, the heir to what he saw as his conservative tradition — and with some justification. Disraeli’s greatest biographer, Lord Blake, described him as “a slightly mocking observer surveying with sceptical amusement the very stage upon which he himself played a principal part”. It is hard to think of a better description of Johnson himself. For Disraeli, this performance “aroused an inextinguishable repugnance among those moderate, serious, high-minded middle-of-the-road men” who dominated British politics. The same is true for Johnson. As Disraeli himself wrote: “The British People being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful Middle Class require grave statesmen.” The problem for Johnson was that he was never a grave statesman.

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For a long time, the times were not grave, and Johnson’s mocking observations worked for him. I remember the moments after he bounded down the stairs in Belfast, straight into the meet and greets that are a prime minister’s daily life, offering almost clownishly over-performed elbow bumps, making everyone laugh. I noticed that whenever he left a group of people, they would immediately begin laughing with each other as they chatted, spirits lifted by their brief encounter with celebrity buffoonery.

Johnson’s mocking cynicism was both his superpower and his shield. Writing in the LRB a decade ago, the novelist Jonathan Coe spotted that Johnson was the inevitable product of decades of cynical satirical humour in which politicians were treated as nothing better than absurd blowhards. “These days, every politician is a laughing-stock,” Coe wrote, “and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly.” Johnson’s skill was to understand this and to get in on the act, becoming his own satirist, safe in the knowledge that “the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself”. But as the late Barry Humphries put it, when everyone is being satirical and everything is a send-up, “there’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness” to life. And into this vacuousness came Johnson.

While Coe gets close as to the source of Johnson’s power, I think he misses a wider point. Poking fun at the hommes sérieux of our world was particularly attractive because of the failures of these serious men (and women). Johnson rose to prominence in the world that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, when ideological disputes seemed to have been settled and political battles were apparently being fought along managerial lines: about what worked and who was most competent to manage the system. It was a time of great hope and great projects: letting China into the WTO, expanding the EU, using Western military might to change the world — all apparently un-ideological and “evidence-based” but in fact just as faith-based as any other project in history.

Yet this world gave us the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, the implosion of the Arab world, mass, unexpected immigration, austerity and eventually Brexit. After 2016, Johnson rose to prominence mocking the egos of the establishment that presided over this mess, eventually grabbing power at the height of its failure. His opportunity came because of the failures of the political class at home and abroad.

One of Johnson’s problems — perhaps his inescapable problem — is that he then became part of that failed political class. Only for so long can a prime minister wink at voters with wry, sceptical amusement at the unseriousness of his own government.

His brand of wry, mocking humour no longer suits the age. The world has moved on, but Johnson has not. Take a look at his resignation statement on Friday — a document that sounded far more like it was written by Donald Trump, full of conspiratorial anger and recrimination, than the old Boris Johnson. But Johnson without the humour is not so potent. And besides, Johnson himself no longer seems to represent the kind of insurgent populism he is now positioning himself to embody — his message neither populist nor popular.

Trump, that other populist who uses humour as a political weapon, in contrast, rails against China and puberty blockers, far-away wars and the Washington elite. His message and his humour has not changed. Johnson, however, talks as if the conservatism he stood for was some kind of conservatism of old: free-trade deals and tax cuts. This is the message many in his party want to hear, but not what won him power. Where is the Johnson who put up taxes and demanded a more interventionist Treasury to “level up” the country?

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Oddly, Trump’s humour has aged better than Johnson’s — that of the playground bully, not the wry observer. Trump’s is brutal, crude, powerful, effective and as potent as ever. Johnson, on the other hand, seems to have lost his, at least for now. He is too angry to maintain the performance.

It would be unwise to rule out Johnson completely. Like Lloyd George, Johnson is a “dynamic force” who remains popular among Conservative party members. And as Stanley Baldwin put it, dynamic forces are terrible things. Should Labour make good on its poll lead today and win the next election, there will no doubt be a clamour for Johnson to return among some members of the Tory party

Johnson’s great skill was to be able to harness the populist revolt without losing his old “middle-of-the-road men” of England who the Conservative Party had long relied on. In this he was helped enormously by the figure of Jeremy Corbyn and the failures of parliament to enact the result of the referendum. Yet this trick looks impossible for him to pull off again. Johnson without humour is a different beast altogether; Johnson without humour and populism is even more so. We sank giggling into the sea; I’m not sure you can do so twice.

Now, the Financial Times, Private Eye, The Yorkshire Post and many in Westminster have joined Dave in expressing concern about the character, business dealings and ability of a man once deemed the “rising star” of levelling up. Last week, their scepticism appeared vindicated when Michael Gove ordered a review into corruption allegations around one of the set pieces of post-Brexit Britain: the Teesworks development containing the country’s largest freeport.

Levelling up, like so many of the political visions of the last decade, appears to be dead. Once upon a time, before the ravages of inflation, pandemic and his own fall, Boris Johnson dreamt of a post-Brexit healing period driven by an era of high spending and devolution — a social transformation on the scale of the reunification of Germany. The rhetoric was always ambitious. But estimated costs ranged from £30 billion to £2 trillion — figures that never quite matched the Government’s own levelling-up budget of £11 billion, of which Labour claim 90% has not been spent, and from which seven in ten Conservative councillors say they have not seen any “tangible benefits”. And with this week’s revelation of another controversial “secret deal”, concerning Houchen and the transfer of public assets in Hartlepool, the events on Teesside now resemble a tragicomic final act for a British political era defined by exhausted ideas.

As in Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s great saga of failed political idealism centring around a South American silver mine, the goal was to “bring this corner of the world into the new”. And Houchen’s vision is on a similar scale: to create a hub for global trade and the green energy revolution within one of Britain’s most neglected regions. In similarly Conradian fashion, the first sign of trouble on Teesside came in the form of epic metaphor. Two years ago, overnight like a biblical reckoning, a “Lobstercaust” of dead crustaceans washed up on its beaches. Immediately, this midden of rotting shell and claw was connected with Houchen’s project, rumoured to be the result of the poisonous chemical pyridine dredged up from the old steelworks. Concerns were waved away by Defra who judged the link “exceptionally unlikely”. Despite the portent, work on the site would go on.

The freeport, having replaced the second-largest blast furnace in Europe, is expected to make amends for decades of deindustrialisation, as well as provide up to 18,000 jobs. But further development on the old steelworks — now Europe’s largest brownfield site — has been suspiciously slow, and contains a toxic wasteland the size of Gibraltar. Until the £500 million clean-up costs are paid for, the development is worthless. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the deal that placed most of the site in the hands of two local businessmen — Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney — has become mired in controversy.

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So far, they have made a profit of £45 million over the past three years, and there appears to be no evidence that they have invested back into the project. One green steel investor told the FT he had already walked away from the “amateur hour” project. And speak to enough people on Teesside and you can sense the frustration of a place seduced and betrayed by a decade of failed political visions. Brexit, on the terms of its chief visionaries, has failed. Levelling up has, too. Now the last outlet of hope gifted to the area in this strange era of failed politics is the freeport.

“People up here still love Boris,” insists Andy Hixon as he takes me on a tour around the construction site. The former Tory councillor was swept to power on Johnson mania until he lost his seat in the recent local elections. We drive past the surreal icons of Britain’s post-industrial landscape: a drive-thru Taco Bell, a Victorian clock tower that tells no one the time. Speaking to locals in the town, there are plenty of reasons to doubt his optimism. The Mayor Ben Houchen is a “provincial, parochial solicitor from Stockton” who is “completely out of his depth”. Or, as one man told me, he’s a “poundshop Trump” who has “delivered no jobs” and helped “swindle the people of Teesside”.

But Hixon, calm and measured, is the archetype of a new breed of Tory stoicism in the face of doom. The men he drinks with are back in much-needed work after the pandemic. The myth of Johnson — ice cream cone in hand, windswept tie — that once toured these parts persists because it was the antithesis to the old politics of anger that haunted Teesside and never seemed to get anything done. Beyond the legacy of Boris, Hixon agrees that it boils down to a matter of reimagining the area. “Everyone’s continuously reinventing themselves,” he says. He has retrained three times and now owns his own petrochemical business. Teesside must do the same, he thinks, and arguably it already is. Redcar College has opened a Clean Energy Education Hub. SeAH wind, a Korean wind farm manufacturer, will open a turbine factory in 2026. If you believe in the freeport, then in time the freeport might believe in you, too.

Beyond the old industrial skyline and back in the centre of Middlesbrough, there is the opportunity to test out this vision. Joe, a sound and lighting engineer sunning himself in a redbrick street, has been “more or less out of work since Covid”. When I mention Houchen’s vision he responds with a description of Sunak as “a clueless rich wanker”. He doesn’t have an opinion on Labour and he doesn’t know what a freeport is. He will not vote. It’s not hard to find others who share a similar sentiment. “Look at the high street,” sighs one jaded-looking woman when I ask her about levelling up. And what about the freeport? “I don’t know what that is.” Inside a pub blasting karaoke onto the empty high street, a former RAF engineer is similarly bemused. Rather than empty promises of regeneration, he speaks of a “train and get out” model for the “Teesside diaspora”.

In Steelies, a social club whose existence reaches back into Teesside’s industrial past, a decades-old resentment still lingers. Concerns about the freeport, corruption and the future of the town are dismissed as “bloody pointless”. Guinness in hand, one retired electrician says he’s still furious about a “useless and corrupt”’ Labour council who did nothing for the area. “At least Houchen is trying to get something done.”

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Poundbury and the English apocalypse

By Fred Skulthorp

When I repeat this to a local Labour activist, the man is dismissed as living in a “fantasy land”. But what will Labour do with this grumpy, unresolved energy once courted by the Tories? The answer seems to be: try to move beyond it. Canvassing in the wake of local election success, he claims freeport allegations have brought a national narrative about Tory sleaze and incompetence home to Teesside. Now, as the activist puts it, there is a coalition of voters that exists beyond the ghosts of Brexit and Johnson: people under-40, female voters, those who have realised they’ve been “conned by the last decade of Tory rule”. But a vision for Labour here isn’t clear either. They want to echo Blair with talk of a new teacher training college, and sound like Starmer with their “laser focus on building local businesses”. But beneath that, they too lament the loss of the Steelworks in 2015, and are disquieted by the knowledge that they will once more come to inherit the blank canvas of toxic land around the freeport.

Conrad never knew how to finish Nostromo. Having spun a tale wagered on the cruelty of political idealism, he drove his characters to madness or suicide. Despite all this, the silver mine endured as a paradoxical symbol of hope. On Teesside, I suspect the freeport will, too. If it can weather the storm of allegations, and the new age of Global Britain in an uncertain world, it may yet save the region from the malaise and resentment that come after betrayal. Or — more likely now, as the clouds of corruption and incompetence draw in — the freeport dream will fail, too. This is the outcome this part of the country has become accustomed to. As with Teesside over the last decade, so much has changed politically, yet also so little.

Elsie’s tragic tale cut through to the public in a way that statistics could not, despite some of the numbers pointing to a resurgence of almost-Victorian aspects of want. Rough sleeping, for example, has shot up by a quarter in a single year. There has been a “significant decrease” in the average age of death in deprived neighbourhoods. The government’s annual poverty figures have just recorded a million more sinking below the breadline and in the same data, released within 24 hours of the fastest food inflation since 1977, officials for the first time ever deemed it important to tally foodbank use.

And yet even the best-intentioned people can simply glaze over at figure-heavy headlines about Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. But if numbers are prone to being ignored, anecdotes can be unrepresentative. To paint a credible portrait of Britain’s new penury, therefore, we need to grapple with statistical tables and personal stories alike — with the quantity and the quality of poverty. I’ve dedicated the last few months to that, working with reporters who are lending an ear to the communities that many politicians would rather ignore.

They have heard tales of bitter hardship that wouldn’t be out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, or in the reporting of George Orwell and J.B. Priestley. In many ways, Britain’s new poverty is much like the old. The street urchins in Dickens’s London and the impoverished mill workers in Engels’s Manchester would be familiar with many of the experiences described by the testimony collated in Broke. The brute privation some describe — the bite of the cold, the gnawing of hunger, the terror of ending up without a roof over their head — would have been shared by many Victorian Londoners. The shock is to find such conditions resurgent in a post-industrial society incomparably richer than that chronicled by Dickens.

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Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

Our society may have grown too wealthy to fear mass undernourishment on a 19th-century scale, but our decade could still, like the 1840s and 1930s, earn the unhappy moniker “the hungry” Twenties. A hundred and fifty years after George Eliot likened poverty to leprosy in Middlemarch, on the basis that “it divides us from what we most care for”, a trip to a Tottenham foodbank reveals how poverty can alienate people from those dearest to them. Yvonne, a 63-year-old former social worker with a degenerative spinal condition, still refuses to let her four adult children know that she is struggling, and so cuts herself off from what should be her support network.

Such hardship gets under an individual’s skin and sometimes breaks the spirit. Staff at a GP practice in a run-down part of Glasgow which features in the book affirm how often such thoughts turn into deeds in their part of the world: overdoses and suicides routinely cut grotesquely short the lives lodged in their books.

Despite continuity with the past in the nature of poverty, a lot of the numbers concerning Britain’s current poverty crisis today are decidedly novel. From the Victorian “poor house” through to the Beveridge report, the problem of poverty in the past was — overwhelmingly — a problem of old age. No longer. Pick a pensioner at random and they are markedly less likely to be in poverty than someone plucked from the general population. In her hardship, Elsie has become the exception, not the rule.

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The flipside of ameliorating conditions for older Britons has been tanking fortunes for others. The total number of children growing up under the poverty line, which was falling around the turn of the century after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown vowed to eradicate the problem, is rocketing back to its Nineties peaks. The official tally is now just 100,000 short of the 4.3 million record, and once the rear-view-mirror data catches up with the energy crunch, it could scale shameful new heights. The link to specific cuts is getting starker, too. Take the “two-child policy”, a crude attempt to discourage cash-strapped parents from having kids, driven through soon after the Conservatives won single-party power in 2015, which ends up punishing third and fourth children by denying them support. Sure enough, according to Whitehall’s latest numbers, families with three or more children are now twice as likely to have resorted to foodbanks as their smaller counterparts.

Children aren’t the only ones affected. Disabled people, thanks to cross-party reforms from the Seventies, were rarely doomed to destitution. That is, until recently. Following a series of restrictions and freezes, a colleague and I calculated that single disabled people were roughly four times more likely than the non-disabled to be falling behind with their bills, six times more likely to be growing cold, and nine times more likely to be going hungry.

Given the drift of Britain’s demographics, the “new poverty” is inevitably somewhat more diverse than the old — but it is, perhaps, surprising to learn quite how far it skews. A lot of the political discussion, and a lot of very good reporting, has concentrated on England’s “left behind” coastal towns and ageing industrial towns, both of which tend to be white. But if we just concentrate on the hard finances, rather than a vaguer sense of malaise, all of the country’s main ethnic minority groups still suffer from consistently higher poverty rates than the white majority. For some, like British Indians, the gap is these days small; for others — like Bangladeshis and Black Caribbeans — the excess risk of poverty remains double or more. Meanwhile, for a large and growing band of migrants, the “no recourse to public funds” rule frequently spells automatic destitution.

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Another break from the past concerns work. There is a particular irony here, given the way the austerity assault on the welfare state was sold as necessary to safeguard the toiling taxpayer. But the rhetorical binaries between “grafters” and “grifters” are ever-less plausible. Over the 2010s, there was a remorseless rise in the relative weight of working poverty: setting pensioners aside, less than half of poor adults lived in a “working household” back in the mid-Nineties; that same proportion steadily rose to 68% by 2019-20.

Can the poverty tide be reversed? We could learn from past success. Pulling the elderly out of poverty did not happen by accident: the change was the result of both successful social policy choices (including controversial means-tested support) and supportive private institutions (notably workplace pensions). There are questions about how sustainable the settlement is, and indeed pensioner poverty is just starting to creep back up. It’s also true that special political factors — a large and growing electorate of pensioners who reliably turn out to vote — helped unlock higher public spending in this field after the Turner Commission reported in 2005.

But these caveats should not distract us from remains an almighty, historic triumph. We should pore over the progress on pensioner poverty, and figure out how to replicate it. Many activists exhibit a weakness: the “despondency problem” sharply defined by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond as being “fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair”. To shrug off the ancient belief that poverty is inevitable, and build faith in change, we must shout about success where we can point to it.

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At the same time, the average voter needs to care about poverty. This isn’t always a given. The uncomfortable truth, as Desmond heavily underlines, is that it flows from a system which in some respects serves the majority’s self-interests: the flipside of gnawing insecurity for gig economy workers is, for example, convenience for the consumers.

But one feature of 21st-century hardship may help the cause: namely, a disturbing sense of the boundary between the supporters and the supplicants of life getting blurred as the big squeeze goes up the income ladder.

UnHerd’s own polling underlines this point, with 62% of Brits now agreeing with the statement: “I worry about affording the necessities, such as food and energy.” When those findings are projected across the political map, every constituency across the land registers at least a modest majority in this position. This is the backdrop to the stories of two women we uncovered in Manchester: Phoebe, an increasingly indebted debt advice worker, who admits she’s too scared to commit her own finances to paper; and Sophie, a foodbank volunteer, who one day found she had no choice but to become a foodbank user.

Such tales are palpably disturbing. But they could also provide a chance to reset the debate. The missing ingredient in Britain’s conversation about poverty has been empathy — the poor are talked of as a different species, away on Benefits Street. As ever-more voters feel the pinch, the mood could change. Newly exposed, the majority might be persuaded to repair the holes that austerity has cut in the safety net. Then perhaps we might make progress towards fixing what is currently broke.

Here we have a real sentence in a real dossier handed over to a real committee of MPs sitting in judgement of a real former prime minister of the United Kingdom. This, we should remind ourselves, is the most significant political scandal in recent British history; our very own Watergate. Welcome to this great stage of fools that we call British politics.

As easy as it is to mock this farcical episode, there are serious issues at stake. It is important, and reassuring, that there are consequences for MPs — even former prime ministers — when they lie to the House of Commons. Whether Johnson realised he was breaking his own rules or not, he clearly did break them — and now admits as such. “It is now clear that over a number of days, there were gatherings at No. 10 that, however they began, went past the point where they could be said to have been reasonably necessary for work purposes,” Johnson writes, admitting his guilt.

The issue now is whether Johnson knowingly misled parliament about his rule breaking. His hopes of a political comeback are said to rest on the answer. If the committee of MPs conclude Johnson misled the House “recklessly” or “intentionally”, they will recommend he be sanctioned. This could come in the form of an apology: embarrassing, but hardly fatal. Or he could be suspended from parliament. If this is for more than 10 days, it will trigger a recall petition in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency, which could lead to a by-election. This is what Johnson is fighting to avoid.

It’s the sheer idiocy of Johnson’s fall that is most striking. Less than two years ago, it was Labour, not the Tories, who were in disarray and Keir Starmer, not Johnson, was fighting for his political life. Starmer had lost a by-election to Johnson’s Tories in Hartlepool and was facing defeat in Batley and Spen. Had he done so, Starmer faced the real prospect of a leadership challenge. This, remember, was barely 18 months after Johnson had redrawn the electoral map with a landslide victory, winning an 80-seat majority and a new coalition of voters which should have kept him in power for at least another decade.

But Johnson blew it. And for what? It wasn’t for drawing a trade border down the middle of his own country or for his handling of the pandemic. It wasn’t for some mishandled foreign intervention or government failure, policy difference or act of sleaze. Johnson was dragged from power by a rebellion of his own party because they had become so exasperated by his dishonesty and chaotic inability to do the job. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Even Johnson must know this deep down.

And yet, his return to the spotlight today shouldn’t just be a reminder of the farcical final months of his premiership, but also of the precarious instability of British politics today. Barely six weeks after leaving office, Johnson came close to regaining power. After Liz Truss caused a financial crisis in her first act as prime minister and was forced to resign 44 days after taking charge, Johnson staged an extraordinary attempt to claw back the crown. Flying back from holiday in the Caribbean, he somehow secured enough nominations from Conservative MPs to make it onto a ballot of party members who would probably have chosen him over Sunak had they been given the chance. Having failed to persuade Sunak to stand aside, only then did Johnson drop out of the race, rather than inherit a parliamentary party still largely opposed to his return. This was five months ago.

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Larkin's lesson for Northern Ireland

By Tom McTague

On the surface, British politics has calmed down since Johnson’s defeat to Sunak in October. There have been no self-inflicted financial crises or dramatic bust-ups with Brussels. A budget has come and gone. The polls are once again closing between Labour and the Tories, prompting speculation that the next election might, in fact, be closer than many had imagined. Sunak is safe and secure — for now.

But let’s be honest. There is every chance that the Tory party will be looking for a new leader within the next two years. That choice will ultimately fall to party members — most of whom still like Johnson. And Johnson will certainly not give up. As the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini, a contemporary of Macchiavelli, warned, people who say they are happy out of power should never be believed. “As soon as they are offered the chance to return to their previous position, they will seize it with the intensity that a fire seizes dry wood.” Johnson will today desperately try to keep the flame of his political career alive. If he didn’t have that in mind, he would care a lot less about his defence.

Meanwhile, the riptides which took Britain out of the EU and swept Johnson into power have not disappeared either. Britain is stuck. Its economy is poor. The country is divided. Almost half of Scottish voters want to secede. Northern Ireland is in a mess. It takes decades to build anything of any importance — and when it happens, the project is inevitably overtime and over-budget. People’s living standards are falling, public services are getting worse and neither of the main political parties seems to have any good ideas about how to fix any of it. Populist anger at this status quo remains real — and, what’s more, reasonable.

Reflecting on the fall of the Roman Empire, Montesquieu wrote that “if the chance of one battle — that is, a particular cause — has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle”. This observation also applies to the British state. If Johnson’s battle highlights its ruin, this is only because some general cause had weakened it in the first place.

As two of the key preliminary hearings in the UK Covid Inquiry take place this week — two years after Boris Johnson said “we owe it to the country to produce answers in a reasonable timescale” — bereaved families and policy sceptics could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is an excuse to kick controversies and failings into the long grass. Will this inquiry follow the pattern of previous ones and avoid the difficult questions?

There are already concerns. With the World Health Organization refusing to provide a statement of evidence, not all the relevant stakeholders are engaging with the process, while bereaved families already feel marginalised. But the Inquiry’s broad Terms Of Reference (TOR) are encouraging: decision-making, the availability and use of data, “legislative and regulatory control and enforcement”, “the use of lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions (NPIs)”, the impact on mental health of the whole population, the specific impacts on young people and education, and the safeguarding of public funds are all included. As are questions of the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes, and “the development, delivery and impact of therapeutics and vaccines”, alongside the consequences of the pandemic on provision of non-Covid treatments.

But how will the Inquiry address these issues? Will it simply reinforce the mainstream public and Government messaging — or will it provide a meaningful examination of this peacetime catastrophe? Given the current narrative regarding the most controversial of pandemic measures, “the use of lockdowns and other [NPIs]”, one might perhaps be allowed a little scepticism. That the UK failed to lock down soon enough is pretty much orthodoxy in policy circles. This was the conclusion in October 2021 of the Health and Social Affairs Select Committee, soon repeated by luminaries such as Jeremy Hunt — and trumpeted by Keir Starmer as early as April 2020.

A serious inquiry shouldn’t simply repeat the mantra — it should consider the novelty of the lockdown model (the WHO’s November 2019 pandemic preparedness report into NPIs did not mention the word “lockdown” once), as well as its long-term effectiveness. The TOR encourage the “reasonable regard of relevant international comparisons”, and it’s to be hoped that this is taken seriously. Italy’s national lockdown was the first in world history —  and yet it has one of Western Europe’s highest Covid death rates. South Africa’s was the strictest lockdown in Africa, and yet it has far and away the highest Covid death rate on the continent. Peru had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in 2020, and now has the world’s highest Covid fatality rate.

So this inquiry should seek to understand how and why the world’s political and scientific establishment cohered around a completely untried and untested model for dealing with the Covid outbreak. It should attempt to connect this to some of the other themes in the TOR, especially the question of political decision-making, such as how and why did the UK’s scientific establishment depart from the previous consensus that, as the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on March 13, 2020, “If you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus… but when you do that and then you release it, it all comes back again.”

And it should seek to interrogate how and why the lockdown approach became unchallengeable, leading to a situation in which 40% of the deaths from Covid-19 in the Western world took place in the most vulnerable of all settings — care homes. Why did the Imperial College modellers’ predictions that the lockdown measures would see fewer than 6,000 people dying from Covid in the UK overestimate the effectiveness of these measures by something like 3,000%? And why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs and benefits of all interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday social and economic life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?

This core question should be connected to the broader impact on healthcare. Instead of protecting the NHS, did lockdowns produce the crisis we now see flooding the health service? Should more care have been focused on the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of society to continue as normal? Would this have then mitigated the damaging effects of lockdown on young people and societal mental health, as well as avoiding the immensely regressive consequences of school closures?

Although the effects of lockdown should lie at the heart of the Inquiry, there are other aspects of the pandemic which deserve scrutiny.

Why, for example, did the Government ignore the potential benefits of natural immunity, when evidence suggested early on that prior infection confers durable protective immunity in the case of SARS-CoV2, as confirmed by a study just published in The Lancet? The idea of letting the virus spread through those who were at low risk from it (the overwhelming majority of the population), allowing them to generate antibodies, while protecting high-risk groups, was a well-established epidemiological concept, and yet it was dismissed as outlandish, despite being initially advocated by Patrick Vallance.

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Why, too, was compulsory universal masking adopted, despite the fact that no existing data supported the use of face-masking in the general population as a protective measure against respiratory viruses? Even the WHO had originally stated that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks” — including lulling elderly and at-risk people into a false sense of security by making them mistakenly believe they will be safe while wearing them. This has now been confirmed by meta-analysis published in January by Cochrane, widely considered the gold standard of healthcare data review. And what was the point in the use of mass testing for the general population, including in very low-risk children, at a massive cost, without evidence of individual or community-wide benefit from doing so?

The question of treatment is often ignored in the heated exchanges around Covid, but it also deserves serious examination. Why was so little research conducted into early at-home treatments for Covid? Based on existing drugs, these had apparently early benefits in reducing hospitalisations and deaths — which were subsequently confirmed in peer-reviewed studies (see here and here) — as early as March 2020. They were ignored, though, even after the publication of a first early treatment protocol based on efficacy and safety in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine in July 2020.

The potential of a number of early treatments was relatively unexplored, even though they might have worked well to prevent infection and illness. Instead, how many people ended up in hospital because all they were told, at the onset of the first symptoms, was to stay at home, rest, and in the case of a high fever to take paracetamol? And then, once they were in hospital, how many of those who developed serious respiratory issues perished because they were placed on mechanical ventilators? During the first wave, this became the mainstay of treatment for severe and critical cases of Covid-19; however, it soon become clear that a shockingly high number of patients put on ventilators ended up dying. It would later emerge that the use of pressurised oxygen was literally destroying patients’ lung sacs that were inflamed and damaged by the virus, and therefore unable to withstand the high pressure of mechanical ventilators. Why was the ventilation protocol maintained for months despite such appalling results?

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Finally, why were fast-tracked, experimental, and, ultimately, little-known “next-generation” mRNA technology-based vaccines offered to everyone, including those at little risk from Covid, even though it was known that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, and were associated with serious side effects? Wouldn’t a focused, risk-based approach to vaccination have been more advisable?

There are serious questions to be asked about the management of this catastrophe. The scope of the inquiry is necessarily huge. But the politicisation of the debate around Covid is fraught. There are strong headwinds, built up during the initial years when the lockdown consensus was so powerful. But as the failings of the Covid policy response become ever clearer, let’s hope the the British public isn’t lumbered with yet another meaningless inquiry.

And yet, where there is discord, there is at least a degree of harmony. Speak to almost anyone in London, Washington, Brussels or the great capitals of Europe and you can be sure to hear the same diagnosis: Northern Ireland’s unionists only have themselves to blame. It was they, after all, who campaigned for Brexit; they who rejected Theresa May’s “all UK” backstop; and they who then championed Boris Johnson. Now that they have found themselves locked behind an Irish Sea border, they can hardly complain, let alone be allowed to blackmail their way out of trouble. As such, according to conventional wisdom, Rishi Sunak must finally get tough with the DUP and, if necessary, simply impose whatever deal he reaches with Brussels for the good of the nation, for Europe, and even for Western unity itself.

If you believe this is somehow an answer, however, I’m afraid you too are part of the problem. Of course, the DUP has made serious mistakes along the way, but the political crisis in Northern Ireland is not some desperate stunt by embarrassed unionists seeking a technocratic fix. Far from it. It is one of substance, principle and politics — and, if anything, it is not the DUP whose judgement has been shown to be lacking throughout this whole sorry affair, but that of its many critics intent on trying the same essential solution no matter how many times it runs into the same problem.

At heart, the DUP is both correct in its central analysis of the Protocol, and also correct to be sceptical about the prospect of the EU changing its position sufficiently to address its concerns. Strip away the fluff and the DUP’s central concern is — and always has been — reasonable. Under the current arrangements, Northern Ireland will inexorably diverge from the rest of the UK without unionist consent, challenging the basic political settlement of the Good Friday Agreement.

From the beginning of this crisis, far more attention has been given to ensuring there is no physical infrastructure on the land border than on protecting the power-sharing political settlement at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement. While these two objectives are connected, they are not the same thing — as we are now discovering. After six years of negotiations, there is every chance we will end up with the former but not the latter.

In essence, the Good Friday Agreement is a grand political compromise in which Irish nationalism accepts the continued existence of Northern Ireland as a sovereign part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of the population consent to it. In return, unionism accepts the end of majoritarian rule in favour of permanent power-sharing. The reason Brexit has proved so difficult is because there is no obvious way for the UK to leave the EU that is politically acceptable in Westminster and both communities in Northern Ireland. Constitutionally, however, the starting point for the negotiations should have been for Northern Ireland to leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK — unless a specific set of arrangements could be agreed by both communities.

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The problem is that the exact opposite of this happened, as London and Brussels flipped the problem on its head. In December 2017, Theresa May agreed a deal which meant that whatever happened in the future, Northern Ireland would remain permanently anchored to EU law to ensure there was never any need for a land border. From this moment, the challenge became not how to ease the land border to make it acceptable to nationalism, but how to ease the sea border to make it acceptable to unionism.

This was never some mere practical tweak, but a significant constitutional change which unionism understandably rejected but has never been able to reverse.

Unless Sunak is able to negotiate a different outcome, Northern Ireland will remain permanently locked to certain EU laws. These laws can change without Northern Ireland’s consent and will only apply in Great Britain if the UK government decides to follow suit. For as long as this is the case, Britain and the EU can agree as many clever ways of managing the border as they like, but the ratchet will remain, pulling Northern Ireland away from the rest of the UK to keep it tied to the Republic.

By pointing this out, Northern Ireland’s unionists are not being unreasonable or reactionary, though there are certainly many within the party who are both. They are simply describing the reality of the arrangements that have been agreed without their consent. And what is more, just as they have long warned, and the Irish government has long known, the effect will almost certainly be the permanent collapse of power sharing in Northern Ireland.

The blame for the current political crisis in Northern Ireland, therefore, rests far less with its unionists, and far more with those who laid the intellectual foundations for what is currently in place. Yet we continue to look away from this basic reality.

It was Theresa May who made the commitment — not required by the Good Friday Agreement — that there could be no physical infrastructure on the land border under any circumstances.The Irish government also pushed for this settlement, knowing full well the strain it would place on power-sharing. May’s commitment was unprecedented and constitutionally transformative. Originally, she had promised only to avoid a “return to the borders of the past”, which was a perfectly reasonable commitment well within the confines of the Good Friday Agreement. By going further, May placed Britain on an inexorable path either to a soft “high alignment” relationship with the EU, in order to rub out the regulatory border she had agreed within the UK, or to a sea border to ensure Britain would not become a rule-taker from Brussels. In truth, she could deliver neither.

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Even when May negotiated a “whole-UK” customs union with the EU, Northern Ireland’s unionists were correct in their observation that this original regulatory sea border lay underneath. Under May’s deal, Northern Ireland would remain tied to single market regulations in perpetuity, without any input from the Stormont assembly or executive. It was only when May was defeated in parliament — three times — that she gave up and resigned. Boris Johnson then emerged and tried to unpick the basic logic of her backstop — and failed. He did, however, at least insert an element of democratic consent into his eventual deal. Under the terms of Johnson’s Protocol, the Northern Irish assembly has the power to reject it — but only by a majority vote. The Good Friday Agreement had introduced government by parallel consent; the Protocol ignored this. Given the very raison d’être of the DUP is to protect the union with Great Britain, why should they have accepted this?

Of course the DUP has also made large strategic miscalculations. Principally, they were far too slow to point out the challenges to the basic functioning of the Good Friday Agreement inherent in both May’s backstop and Johnson’s protocol. They were slow to this in large part because of their ambivalence to the agreement in the first place. It is reasonable to argue that the DUP is guilty of opportunism, using the provisions of an agreement it once opposed to defeat the new thing it now opposes. For this they deserve harsh criticism. They must also now ask themselves how long they can keep saying “no” without undermining the long-term support for the union in Northern Ireland itself — particularly among the professional middle classes for whom the permanent loss of devolved government may be worse than the slow ratchet of divergence from Britain.

Still, let us state clearly the reality of the situation. The Protocol that exists in theory has never existed in practice because it was never fit for purpose. In as much as it functions today, it does so because the UK government unilaterally refused to apply great chunks of it. And yet the people who say the DUP should give way now are the same people who said they should give way then, accepting a deal which has proved unimplementable; one which first of all gave Northern Ireland no democratic input and then only managed to do so on a majority basis. It is not good enough to conclude that the people to blame for this mess are those who were opposed to it from the beginning, rather than those who designed it.

As things stand, the UK and EU are nearing the terms of a deal to soften the reality of the Protocol in order to make it more acceptable to unionists. Inside Number 10, there are hopes that significant compromises have been squeezed out of the EU which could be enough to assuage the DUP’s concerns. Much of the focus has been on the prospect of a “lane” system, which will allow goods to move from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and back without any checks, as well as a compromise on the role of the European Court of Justice interpreting the EU law that applies in Northern Ireland. Alongside other technical fixes, there is hope that such changes should allow the sea border to be as close-to frictionless for internal UK trade as is possible.

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Yet the unionist concern is not just one of practicality, but principle. The fundamental problem is that Northern Ireland is not only subject to the current EU regulations, but to future ones as well. This means that over time, even if Britain does not revoke a single piece of EU law or pass any new laws of its own, Northern Ireland will still slowly drift from the UK regulatory orbit by the simple process of being subject to EU democracy unlike the rest of the UK. This process, in fact, has already begun. Take one small example. Since Brexit, the EU has banned the food additive titanium dioxide used in a whole array of sweets, chocolates, icing and the like. This may or may not be a sensible move, but the additive is now legal in Britain and illegal in Northern Ireland.

It is for this kind of reason that much of the internal focus in Number 10 has been to find a way to give the Northern Irish assembly some kind of say on future EU rules, while also providing guarantees about divergence from Britain. While there is some confidence in Downing Street, pessimism abounds among those I have spoken to in the DUP. The DUP has demanded a guarantee that “no new regulatory barriers [will] develop between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom unless agreed by the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly”. The key point here is that any executive must, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, include both unionists and nationalists. This demand, in other words, is for what is known as a “unionist veto” over either EU laws or British laws. It is hard to see how this could be agreed, other than in the form of a unilateral guarantee by the British government, which would be tantamount to the UK promising to align itself with any EU laws that apply in Northern Ireland. We would, in effect, be back in the realm of Theresa May’s Chequers deal. It’s hard to see Boris Johnson or Liz Truss accepting such an outcome quietly.

Few unionists I have spoken with are hopeful that the deal eventually agreed will be acceptable. The DUP is likely to calculate it will lose more votes by accepting it than by rejecting it, even if that means rejecting power-sharing indefinitely. One unionist optimist I spoke to put the chances of agreement at 60-40 against.

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By Tom McTague

Should this happen, only the narrowest of paths will remain for power-sharing to return to Northern Ireland. First, the UK government would have to call fresh elections to the assembly, which would be fought over the new terms of the Protocol. It is theoretically possible that the moderate Ulster Unionist Party could emerge victorious on a pledge to go back into government to make the best of a bad situation. It is also possible that an electoral revolution could sweep the anti-sectarian Alliance party into power, overturning the nationalist and unionist duopoly.

The truth, however, is that such prospects are thin. It is far more likely that the DUP will be correct in its calculation that its best chance of avoiding a split and remaining the leading party of unionism lies in rejecting the renegotiated Protocol (should it not meet their demands) and, with it, power-sharing itself. If so, we will be back to where we have always been, the constitutional wound at the heart of Brexit still raw and untreated — perhaps untreatable. Northern Ireland will be governed by direct rule from London and Brussels, the political settlement at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement dead.

Those who profess to support the Good Friday Agreement should not be calling for the DUP to be ignored, but the opposite. The deal now being negotiated between Britain and the EU may be the last best hope of saving power-sharing in Northern Ireland this side of a Labour government, but unless it can win the consent of both communities it will not end the crisis because, in the end, it is a political crisis of consent, not a technocratic one of management. No-one can say they weren’t warned.

Just kidding. What we French are mostly up to these days — when we’ve managed to jam ourselves onto a Métro train that’s neither on strike nor been literally de-platformed by the hapless Paris Region President Valérie Pécresse’s recent cuts (or a bus replacing those provincial lines SNCF finds too expensive to run) — is bask in unholy glee over Bregret. “C’est la Gueule de bois!” (It’s the worst hangover!), the headlines popped after the latest UnHerd polling showed that more than half of Britons felt Brexit was a mistake. “L’Anniversaire morose” (Gloomy Brexitversary), they went; “Étrange Bregret” (That strange regret); “Après le Brexit, le Bregret” (After Brexit, Bregret — an elegant riff on the Comtesse de Ségur classic books). On and on and on.

For the past seven years, I have been trying not so much to defend the Brexit vote, which I’ve always thought is a bit of an own goal, as to explain the issues of sovereignty involved. This has always gone down like un ballon en plomb here: after something like 50 of those debates, I am still considered a rabid Brexiteer, because Brexit, obviously, is such a mad decision in French eyes that even trying to explain it means you’ve gulped down the Kool Aid and begged for seconds.

Our own ambassador during the Brexit campaign, Sylvie Bermann, wrote a rather undiplomatic book about it called “Goodbye Britannia”, which was amusingly translated into English as “Au Revoir Britannia”. What her book mostly showed was that even when she invited the likes of Boris and the Spectator staff to Embassy dos, it was mostly as entertainment: her heart was firmly in N1 Remainer territory, the only ones quoted as “reliable sources”.

The National Assembly held dozens of committee meetings over Brexit, all coming to the same pre-ordained conclusion. The French Upper House, Le Sénat, sent half a dozen official missions to the strange land of the Britons, tasked to understand La Catastrophe du Brexit: their invariable, self-reinforcing verdicts over the years were variations on the “Tous Perdants” (Everyone’s a loser) theme. To give an idea of the method favoured by the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Senator Jean Bizet for his 111-page 2019 report, the first subheading of which was “Un bilan perdant-perdant” (A Lose-Lose Balance Sheet), the only British stakeholder he and his small group managed to interview during their fact-finding trip to London was Remainer activist Gina Miller. She is quoted at length in four different places of the final document. (“She is so sympathique, and it was very difficult to get to meet the others”, Bizet told me in the green room of the parliamentary channel talk show where we discussed his report.)

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Is this payback for decades of “Up Yours, Delors” and sundry other French-bashing British tabloid headlines over the years? Well, partly. But we’ve always been less conscious of Britain than you’ve been of France. Part of this is geography (ours is usually the country you first cross when venturing abroad), part of it is our universaliste doctrine as well as centuries of soft power when all of Europe wrote its correspondence and waged its diplomacy en Français. (Hence our fury when small dollops of English learned in our better schools are introduced into the public discourse. This has been one of Emmanuel Macron’s blunders: his fluent technocratese includes a lot of not-always-relevant English words that mostly underline his firm place on the bourgeois side of the class divide.)

There’s a lot of bad history between our two countries, which we enjoy bringing up at awkward moments. There’s also, genuinely, a canyon-deep gap when it comes to our respective notions of what sovereignty means. To us French, it refers to a barely veiled domination of French views, culture and influence far beyond our actual borders. There are French fingerprints all over the creation of the UN in 1945 (and before that the League of Nations in 1920); over the Bretton Woods System; the GATT and the WTO; and of course the Common Market. The official language of the international Postal Service is French. We have our own Commonwealth of sorts, l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, with 88 full or associate member-states: any country with a significant number of French speakers is eligible, and many of them, not always the same one, account for French-supporting votes at the UN. We fork out €11 billion for culture out of the French Budget (where the UK spends about €700 million). A great deal of this has international political outreach.

We call this le rayonnement de la France, a phrase better translated into German (Ausstrahlung). It implies that French ideas radiate their beneficent influence over the rest of the world — or at least congenial parts of it, such as the EU — like the sun (or possibly a made-in-France nuclear device). This links the Sun King, Louis XIV, whose magnificence led to emulative budgetary sinkholes from Potsdam to Petersburg and Caserta to Schönbrunn; to Napoleon, who gave the Code Civil to grateful places as far apart as Louisiana, Nuremberg and Phnom Penh; to Charles de Gaulle’s heroic 1940 stance, and deeply annoying Sixties non-aligned posturing. To this day, being deemed of having somehow contribué au rayonnement de la France will get you a Légion d’Honneur, Officer class.

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Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

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This also explains how Macron got away with all the EU flag-waving of his two victorious presidential campaigns. Heavily implied was “more leverage for France”, not “let’s be Europeans first and French second”. Whenever EU member states start pushing policies that Paris disapproves of, down comes the birch switch over their knuckles, sharply. In 2003, Jacques Chirac called Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria “infantile” and “reckless” because they had dared to co-sign a letter in support of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. “As new members of a club, they’ve lost a good occasion to shut up.” Last September, reports that Poland was placing a $14 billion order for planes, tanks and cannons from South Korea, not France, led to a flurry of recriminations. Worse, the Poles, like the Germans, buy American! “La Pologne se passe de la France!” the moan-a-thon went.

That is why Brexit has felt so personal to the French. Having finally been admitted into the European Communities (EC) in 1973, after years of Le Général’s veto, you ought to have been humbly grateful for our generous gift. In fact, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or thereabouts, you seemed to be. Italy was a cheerful shambles. Germany was rich and barely squeaked in dissent about anything. We liked having you around, except when Margaret Thatcher, an early pro-EC campaigner, started handbagging Chirac over the British Rebate. (François Mitterrand, the “cohabitation” president at the time, who’d been at the receiving end of many of Chirac’s political volleys, was delighted. He said of Thatcher that she had “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. Coming from him, it was a great compliment. During the Falklands War, he had quietly sent her the schematics of the Exocet missiles France had sold to Argentina, after all.)

So how dare you want to leave and destroy the self-image we’d constructed for Europe as, well, a largely French-inspired paradise? We saw this as a personal insult. We felt we were being jilted for aventurisme, lies, and deeply suspect financial practices.

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By John Lewis-Stempel

I happened to be in Brussels on the day of David Cameron’s fateful February 2016 visit, in which, depending on who tells the story, he never managed to get further concessions amending the Lisbon Treaty to prevent Brexit from European council president Donald Tusk (the British version), or “He got absolutely everything! It was highway robbery! And still the bloody Brits wanted more!”, which was the version several incandescent German and French bureaucrats told me moments after Cameron had boarded his flight back to RAF Northolt. The relationship never improved with time, with EU negotiator Michel Barnier’s office leaking at every stage how dissatisfied they were with the unpreparedness of the British negotiating party. It was obvious that the dispute was bitter, and touched on something quasi-religious.

And so the latest polls have, in one word, delighted the French. Try to recall the bitterest Remainer arguments: the “lies”, the “fake figures” on the flank of That Bus; Boris at his most shambolic; every fishing skiff in the Channel Island being threatened, in a kind of reverse Dunkirk operation, by flotillas of French marins-pêcheurs; the long and disheartening queues at Border Control in airports and Eurostar stations; the ridiculous postal delays and customs levies on mail between France and Britain. None of these are bugs; they’re all features in the Sacred Mission to make the British miserable over Brexit. (Macron’s previous PM Jean Castex said as much in an open letter to Ursula von der Leyen in October 2021: “It must be made obvious that it is more painful to leave the EU than to remain within it,” he concluded.)

Would France one day make a British return to Brussels easy? I fear our attitude is of that of a more inflexible religious order. Sinners must experience purgatory. It wouldn’t be fun, and it’s the best you can expect from us.

Over the past few months, researching a book on Britain’s long, troubled relationship with Europe, I have found a strange solace in the almost seasonal nature of our national life, with its endless wintery crises (usually involving the weakness of the pound and our ability to pay our way) that eventually give way to spring-like calms. Ben Pimlott’s biography of Harold Wilson, for example, is like a thunderstorm of charm and disorder, short fixes and political escapism. There was, of course, plenty of honour and achievement along the way, but as you turn the final page, you cannot help but wonder what it all amounted to. Here was a magical politician who dominated British politics for more than a decade, only to fade from national consciousness with alarming speed, his ghost barely even troubling the minds of his successors let alone haunting them. Today, Wilson is back in vogue as the man who finally ended 13 years of Tory rule, a favourite of Keir Starmer and some Sixties nostalgics, but this was a man almost broken by his own decline — and his country’s.

Wilson, though, is the rule in this regard, not the exception. A similar air of despondency hangs over almost all of Britain’s post war leaders up until 1979, each of whom fixated on the notion of British decline but were unable to escape its clutches.

And yet, here is the strange reality: despite it all, the country continued its slow, steady trudge over the fells, never veering much from the path it had been on before, the economy growing at much the same rate, only more slowly with each passing decade. Britain’s decline was largely relative, the living standards of people in Britain improving year on year.

Anyone scanning the record of British economic growth from 1949 to 2022 would be hard-pressed to spot any transformative moment. From our entry into the Common Market in 1973 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, or, indeed, the referendum to leave the EU in 2016, we continued plodding along largely as before, however transformative we convinced ourselves one set of leaders or another was at the time. To the casual observer, it is the recessions which catch the eye more than the booms, most of which blew in from abroad, largely beyond the control of our leaders, the pandemic just the latest example. For Britain, the truth is that our crises are never quite as important as we imagine — and nor are our leaders.

To illustrate the point, here’s a challenge: when was the last time a British government or prime minister pro-actively achieved something of lasting importance, addressing some great strategic threat before it became an existential challenge? The disasters are far easier to list, but not the lasting achievements. Did any of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss leave us with any lasting monument to progress? It is hard to think of one. They largely managed crises — or, more often, caused them.

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By John Maier

Johnson took Britain out of the European Union, of course, but that hardly passes the test. The best that can be said for his Brexit negotiation is that it acted as a kind of emergency stent, unblocking the arteries of British democracy at a time when they had become fatally obstructed by the political failure to enact the result of the referendum. In itself this was no small thing, perhaps even a service to democracy, but it was an operation to deal with an emergency health crisis — not to stop one from happening in the first place. It also came at the obvious cost of creating a whole series of other crises that we are still living with today. Besides this, what else does Johnson have to show for his time in office that would not have happened without him? Ukraine has benefited from his instinctive, full-throated and continuing support, but let’s be honest, it is not British support which makes the difference in the Donbas — but American.

Johnson’s one strategic offer was his promise to use Brexit as a spur for a great national reset: “levelling up”. But what has happened since? Less than a year after he left office this policy already seems dead. Again, though, Johnson’s failure is not exceptional. In politics, turning the tide is almost impossible. Anthony Eden tried to protect Britain’s global status from the post-war reality only to reveal its decline at Suez; Harold Macmillan attempted something similar by trying to join Europe, only to be rejected by de Gaulle. Wilson’s grand plan to revolutionise the British economy with planning and science was then mugged by reality, while Ted Heath’s great corporatist alternative was similarly ended by events. All failed.

Even Margaret Thatcher, who is widely thought to have succeeded in her mission to radically reform Britain, is flattered by the narrative. A quick glance at Britain’s economic growth before and after she became prime minister suggests a far less revolutionary reality than we often imagine. Overall, Mrs Thatcher spent 11 years in power, her time defined by a period of decent but by no means extraordinary growth bookended by two deep recessions. In reality, her great success was relative. Britain grew faster than its European counterparts during her time in office, which had not been the case beforehand.

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By Chris Clarke

Today it is hard to look back at the premierships of those who came next and think of a single lasting endowment. Perhaps Cameron can put gay marriage on his ledger, but once again, it is hard to believe that had he not existed, gay marriage would be illegal today. As brave and principled as it was, the reform was largely a reflection of the great social change happening across the Western world. The banal truth is that our prime ministers spend most of their time surfing the zeitgeist, not making it.

I remember challenging Boris Johnson about this very point after travelling with him to Northern Ireland a couple of years ago. He’d told me he was reading James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year In The Life Of William Shakespeare (I later realised this must have been research for his biography). The book spends much of its early pages detailing the trouble Queen Elizabeth was facing that year in Ulster. And there we were, I thought, four centuries on, and the British prime minister travelling back and forward to Northern Ireland still unsure how to handle events there. “It’s very, very hard to change the fundamentals,” Johnson told me. Yet he was confident that he could. Quaint, really, and yet he is still trying to bend history to his will.

Blair is closest to Thatcher in leaving relics which continue to shape our world. And yet even his greatest legacies are now either crumbling or ambiguous. The Good Friday Agreement remains a source of almost mystic reverence — despite (or largely because of) the reality that few seem to know what it contains. But even this great covenant of peace is now barely functioning as a result of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol (though the peace it helped bring about still holds). Devolution, meanwhile, that other lasting legacy of Blairite reform, has lost its halo, no longer the stabilising constitutional act it was once supposed to be, but something closer to the opposite. Regardless, however profoundly important these two achievements were — and are — they were only parts of a wider strategy to turn Britain into what he saw as a modern European state. And if we judge him on this score, he failed just like the rest of them.

When surveying our political past, then, it’s hard to avoid the sense of an undercurrent pulling us along slowly, whatever frothy chaos we endure on the surface. When we are outperforming our European counterparts, we mistake the swell for normality, only to sink back down in time. Then, when we are being outperformed, we fret about permanent submersion. Over the long term, though, we bob along, like Poohsticks in a stream, change happening to us more often than not.

All of this might seem reason enough for despondency. But in a sense, it is evidence for hope. Britain might be in a tough spot right now, but the current flows on. Prime Ministers are never quite as transformative as they seem — for good or bad. In Westminster, managerial normality is already reasserting itself after the years of Johnson. What many hoped would be a great reset in national political and economic life has proved anything but. There has been no revolution in the country’s social and economic model, no great reduction in migration, or taxation, regulation or trade — so far only the old system, but with worse trading conditions.

To my mind, Britain should fear less calamitous, irreversible decline than soul-sapping unchangeable continuity. Leaders are rarely successful in diverting the great global currents that shape our world, but they must at least offer hope that they can be managed and used to the national advantage. Right now there is a dispiriting paucity of ideas about how Britain is supposed to do this today, or even a story for us to make sense of it all. Neither Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak has yet to show a way through the fog ahead.

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Liz Truss still haunts the Tories

By Robert Saunders

The tragi-comic figure of Liz Truss briefly tried something radical — and was quickly removed under pressure from the international markets. She may console herself that she is this country’s Barry Goldwater, the hero of the American right who lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 only to inspire the conservative revolution that eventually swept all before it. All defeated leaders turn themselves into prophets in this way. Such a fate is unlikely to be Truss’s however. But still, another lesson from Britain’s post war history is that the ideas which grow to define our national story often begin their lives on the fringes, dismissed and rejected until eventually they are adapted and then adopted. This was the case with pro-Europeanism once upon a time and then much later on anti-Europeanism.

In Robert Blake’s masterful biography of Benjamin Disraeli, he tells the story of Disraeli’s early radicalism in a group of like-minded Tory ultras known as Young England who opposed free trade and the erosion of the old order. “The history of Young England has all the charm and nostalgia which attend tales of forlorn hopes and lost causes,” Blake writes. “[But] the success of such movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure. They must, rather, be regarded as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation; showing that a gesture, however absurd it may seem to contemporaries, may sometimes live longer.” Is there a more uplifting message? Young England lost — and won. Disraeli became prime minister, created a new Toryism that continues to shape our political world but also accepted defeat in his opposition to free trade.

The search is on for the Young England radicals of today, the forlorn dreamers and romantics who will shape our future, alongside the diligent conformers who will manage it. The eurosceptics were once this band, but are no more — having secured almost complete victory after their years of seemingly hopeless retreat. But who will take their place today? Who will offer the country an imaginative glow to light the journey ahead? Right now, it is hard to see them emerging from either Labour or the Conservatives. But they will come. They always do.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, this makes it even harder to establish his programme for government. Sunak’s place as leader is weak in an unprecedented way. Not only are there three former prime ministers on his backbenches, but two of them, (Truss and Johnson) never had their falling popularity confirmed by a bad election. This makes them, and their ideas, more potent than any former leader roundly ousted by the public. Moreover, neither seems willing to slide quietly into the obscurity of the speaking circuit.

Truss sees herself as the party’s Cassandra. She thinks her prophecies of the need for deregulation and growth were right, but wrongly ignored. She has a group of supporters who think the chaos of implementation should not hamper the salience of her suggestions. The so-called “ginger group” are trying to seize the intellectual levers of the party, ready for another go at the top, and want to chart a course of economic liberalism, deregulation and growth.

On Sunak’s other flank sit the continuity-Johnsonites. What they believe is a little hard to ascertain. Boris made his way through the party by promising every faction he was, deep down, one of them. He was, oddly enough, like the errant husband who tells his wife he is staying and his mistress he is divorcing for her — with both believing the other is the fool. The Johnsonites show little intellectual purity but are bound in personal loyalty to their man. A few dozen are even plotting his return.

For them, only Boris can arrest the party’s polling nosedive; only Boris can hold onto the Red Wall and the Tory seats of the south-east. The fall in polling in the first half of 2022 is ignored, and so, too, the by-election defeats that triggered the vote of confidence in the then PM, or even the contradictory threat that Johnson, the one-man electoral magic, will give up his challenge to Sunak if he’s allowed to chicken-run to a safer seat than his current Uxbridge. It’s more about faith than facts.

Taken together, these tribes present a problem for Sunak, but not a fatal one. Both his predecessors were popular with the membership and both have a parliamentary faction that is big enough to disrupt but not destroy his premiership. In any case, it’s unclear if either has the appetite to bring him down: Truss blew her shot and lacks an obvious successor, and Johnson pulled up at the first fence of the recent leadership contest. What they can do is snipe and plot.

Tory leaders have always faced grumbling. Heath was barracked by the Right-wing Monday Club and the development of the economically liberal faction that would become the Thatcherites. A decade later, Mrs Thatcher had to face down her Wets, whose spiritual leader became the ageing Earl of Stockton, Harold Macmillan, who fired softly-spoken broadsides against her embrace of “the Manchester School” and rejection of old Tory patrician ideals. Yet in these eras, there was sufficient deference to the leader, and the prime minister had sufficient strength, to lead an alternative narrative. Sunak seems to lack this.

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Will conservatism survive 2023?

By John Oxley

Where Boris could be a chimaera that every faction could see themselves in, Sunak is the opposite. He is a Brexiteer, a true, pre-2016 believer, who has the air of Remain about him. He’s an MBA touting hedge-fundie and Goldman Sachs man who is attacked as a socialist. He was Boris’ side-kick in the Treasury for the high-spending, minimum wage boosting, pre-Covid budget, yet is seen as an austerity-monger. His Covid spending was hugely popular inside and outside the party at the time, but now no one seems to praise him for it. Even his popularity in parliament seems to be by default rather than dedication. He has ascended to the top of politics despite an incongruent lack of political appeal.

The steady managerialism which won him the job makes it hard to pull together a narrative. Boris won the party over with his showmanship, Truss courted the members with a steely determination to implement her beliefs. Both largely fell for the same reasons. With Sunak, everything seems neatly totted up, but it’s a whole that is lesser than the sum of its parts. There is nothing irresistible about his leadership — and so you can see how it will be resisted. Probably not directly, but he will have to work hard for the party to steer his programme through the Commons with these factions in play.

He’ll probably get the chance to do this. The rabble-rousers will make the water choppy, but not prevent him from steering through it. Their minds are on what comes after. The smarter, less party-line-taking MPs are accepting that the game is up and opposition beckons. They know this will be followed by a leadership election and a period of party soul-searching, so they are getting their ideas formed early. Both the Trussketeers and the Johnsonians seem to have this period as their real target.

The problem is that the triumph of ideas in the next term might simply be decided by the rate of decline in the Tories in this one. Few on the Right seem to understand how catastrophic the next election could be. On current polling trends, the party could be reduced to fewer than 150 MPs. While such a rout instinctively feels impossible, so too did the collapse of the Lib Dems and Scottish Labour in 2015 — even when all the data pointed to it.

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By Robert Saunders

Just because something is unprecedented does not mean it is impossible. Mid-term polling tends to narrow as governments approach general elections, but it is not an automatic process. With the economic outlook for this year looking gloomy, industrial relations worsening, and another bad winter for the NHS between now and polling day, there’s as much chance of a Tory rout as a revival.

Should this come, it adds an interesting gloss to all this infighting and positioning. The next leadership election will be largely decided by the Tories in Parliament after the next polling day. If a wipe-out hits, that caucus looks very different. Many of the frontbench could be gone, Truss’ protégé Simon Clarke could be handed his electoral P45, and even Boris could be kicked out without a new seat. Even if they spend the next 18 months floating ideas and launching papers, the new direction of the Tory Party will largely be decided by who is left clinging to the wreckage when the electoral tsunami has swept through.

At that point, the factions will seek to differentiate themselves from Sunak’s programme. Whether it is continuity Truss or the Johnsonian cabal, they are likely to be noisy. Other factions will also emerge — Priti Patel is reportedly working with the members, and is allied with the new Conservative Democracy Organisation that seeks to empower them.

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Westminster isn't that corrupt

By John Oxley

There are two ways of looking at the current turbulence. Either discipline is collapsing into fractiousness, or the party is genuinely trying to figure out its next direction. Some MPs will be pure of heart, others entirely self-centred. Many will be in the middle, anxiously looking at their constituency prospects. For Sunak the motives matter little. His agenda will be disrupted by each flexing their brains and their numbers in parliamentary rebellions, even if his premiership endures.

It’s arguable that the Tory Party malaise has its ultimate roots in the failure to find a footing after 1997. It groped around for ideas until the financial crisis gave it the opportunity to return to government. The party’s most distinct theme for that era, its euroscepticism, was something leaders largely tolerated rather than embraced. The result was a party which seemed to stand for little beyond winning elections. There is a risk that soon it won’t even have that.

This does all point to a broader problem for the Right. The Conservative Party has maintained conservatism in one form or another for two centuries. If it is not able to put together a convincing and coherent platform that is both principled and popular, it is unlikely anyone else will be able to do it. When both the affluent and the left-behind feel comfortable voting Labour, it becomes questionable whether conservatism itself can survive.

Meanwhile, at Merton, where Liz Truss read PPE in the Nineties, undergraduates still perform “The Time Ceremony” every autumn when the clocks go back. Between 2am British Summer Time and 2am Greenwich Mean Time, students dressed in full sub fusc (black tie and gowns) walk backwards around the Fellows’ Quad in order “to maintain the space-time continuum”. According to her biographers Harry Cole and James Heale, Liz Truss delighted in Merton’s eccentric ceremony. I wonder whether her thoughts turned to it at any point during her own liminal 44-day premiership, before it too collapsed into an extensionless point in political space-time.

The tricks being played on us by the accelerated pace of political upheaval are well in evidence in both Cole and Heale’s Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and Sebastian Payne’s The Fall of Boris Johnson, both of which enter a kind of warp-speed as their protagonists’ regimes spiral and crash. Great offices of state change hands like debased currency; in the last three years, we have practically doubled the stock of living ex-Chancellors. And remember when Grant Shapps was Home Secretary for six days? At times, it looked as if Andy Warhol’s prediction may become true of politics, if not elsewhere: in the future we shall all be Cabinet Ministers for 15 minutes.

What explains this unusual volatility in the political system? One widespread attitude expresses itself in the form of an exceptionalist view about the present: our politicians are peculiarly crap and ill-suited to govern. The watchword of this theory is “unprecedented”, and its characteristic mood is one of ahistorical sanctimony about contemporary political life. It is often difficult for these theories to rise above the flippant register of the sketch-writer’s caricature: Boris Johnson is a Machiavellian clown, psychologically incapable of telling the truth; Liz Truss is a Thatcherite human-GIF who loves pork markets. That is, the account struggles to actually explain the data in place of merely describing them.

Another more jaded mode of explanation is ahistorical in a different way. This outlook regards today’s problems as nothing special. Disaster and tumult are more or less eternally constitutive of political life. On the subject of Johnson and Truss’s downfalls there is little to add to Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. While offering a useful correction to the former account, this view is also too complacent. It is, for one thing, often a little unclear what content there is supposed to be to the claim that all political careers end in failure beyond the banal truth that all political careers simply end.

In fact, there are several, somewhat novel, destabilising political phenomena described in the work of Cole, Heale, and Payne. Foremost among them is the manner in which the 24-hour online news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for a worsening situation, encourages a form of speculation on political confidence and capital. The combined desiderata of round-the-clock media scrutiny — a demand that officials be publicly accountable, and the lightning movement of news data — is an inherently unsteadying mixture. It is, after all, well-observed that social media can help to precipitate bandwagon-effects of popular resentment under repressive regimes; it would be curious if analogous effects were not also in play under settled liberal governments. Of course, the demand for accountability and a merciless attitude toward failure in public office are good things in their way. But almost no good thing arises without loss in some other dimension.

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Don't make me Prime Minister

By John Maier

At pivotal moments of collapse in both books, events outpace the ability of political actors to effectively manage them. The lumbering anatomy of Whitehall is not built for acceleration. It is difficult to imagine how, in a previous technological era, a spectacle as engrossing, damaging and chaotic as the cascade of resignations from Boris Johnson’s government could have been similarly achieved. In the age of paper and post, it took a bit of time to resign. In one revealing anecdote of Payne’s, the spectral figure of Charles Moore sidles casually up to Treasury Minister Simon Hart who is sitting on a park bench on Twitter. “Oh Simon, what are you up to this evening?” Moore asks. Hart responds: “If you wait 15 seconds, I’m literally resigning.”

There are, thankfully, some reliable frictions left in the political process. Professional vanity, for instance, provides some residual robustness in the face of even the most vividly disintegrating political fortunes. Brandon Lewis, for instance, “breezed into” Johnson’s strategy room, at a moment of high calamity, and surveyed the reshuffle whiteboard. “Sensing the weakness of the team that was being assembled, Lewis argued he should get a grander job and was offered Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.” He left, apparently pretty pleased with himself — much in the spirit of a passenger who’s just successfully upgraded their cabin on the Titanic — before resigning a few hours later.

The relation between Johnson’s administration in its final months and the media placed him in a posture of increasingly hopeless damage-control. According to Payne: “from October 2021 onwards, [Johnson’s] administration was… entirely focused on firefighting.” At moments when instantaneous response was needed, aides found the Prime Minister “was always away”. Channels of communication stalled. The chief problem, as Payne tells it, was not so much that Johnson’s Number 10 team were mendacious and corrupt, but that they couldn’t stay ahead of the story — whether it was Paterson, Pincher or Partygate — for sufficiently long to counteract it. One unwelcome effect of the emergence of these intense, and no doubt irreversible, political pressures is to increase the appeal of a certain virtue of bloody-mindedness in public life. It might be, however counter-intuitively, that increasingly stringent demands for transparency and integrity in public life end up favouring not the squeaky-clean class of politician, but those who are able to cultivate a calculated indifference to the rules in play.

Suggested reading

The Tories were destined for civil war

By John Oxley

Needless to say, politicians who possess these qualities won’t just exercise them when they’re useful; they’ll do so too when their effects are destructive or straightforwardly unhinged. Mere hours before his resignation, Johnson remained “determined to carry on through sheer effort of will”. “All my life,” he is reported to have said, “people have been telling me ‘you can’t do that’. And I’ve always proved them wrong.” The same morning, Michael Gove made his fateful visit to Downing Street, by that stage a bunker of panicked activity, and urged Johnson to stand down. The Prime Minister responded by relating a story, apparently in admiration, of an uncle of his “who had ‘failed to take his meds one day’… [and] so barricaded himself into the town hall with a shotgun. The uncle was eventually bundled out by the police. ‘That is going to be me,’ the prime minister said.” Returning to his Ministry from the meeting, Gove informed his staff that the Prime Minister had unfortunately “gone mad”.

As with Johnson, the portrait developed of Truss by Cole and Heale, is one of a political agent almost pathologically insensitive to the influence of other minds. Aides noticed how “very thick-skinned” she was, with this “delightful Terminator-like quality”. But, on closer acquaintance, her steady hand could be unnerving, even to allies. At the height of the income tax U-turn, with the pound crashing, allies “were struck by her ‘worryingly zen-like’ demeanour”. As David Laws recalled of Truss at her first department, Education: “I like Liz but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather ‘deaf’ way.” This quality of political “deafness” can of course be useful, allowing one to wilfully resist the demands of external opposition and public scrutiny that might move a less headstrong individual to self-doubt or compromise.

But as Laws’s description implies, there is a constructive ambiguity in Truss’s case as to how far her obstinately “deaf” temperament is actually under her control, or about how far it is a part of a more general strategy of calculated madness. Rory Stewart recalls his years under Truss at Defra as “traumatic”. There, watching her civil servants “you could see the panic in their eyes and them thinking ‘does she really want to do this?’” And according to Dominic Cummings, Truss is “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament”.

To her credit, Truss occasionally reveals a degree of pragmatic awareness of the manner in which her political strengths entwine with her personal incapacities. Addressing close allies in the early stages of her leadership bid, “she was blunt and to the point, telling one visitor: ‘I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends. How can you help me fix that?’” Presented with the consequences of the mini-Budget, and the possibility of simply throwing the old steamroller into gear and ploughing on, Truss at last recorded a final and uncharacteristic twinge of self-doubt: “the problem is the last time I ignored all these people they were right.”

More from this author

The Tory Party belongs to Alan Clark

By John Maier

Some years after his own short premiership (366 days), Alec Douglas Home is said to have encountered an elderly woman at a train station who admiringly told him that she’d always thought he would have made rather a good Prime Minister. He reportedly responded, with good grace, that he actually had been, though admittedly only “for a short time”. Liz Truss can for the moment only dream of comparative levels of anonymity. As her short administration collapsed around her, though, I wonder whether her temperamental deafness proved something of a solace — as Truss addressed the nation outside Downing Street she seemed almost to be smiling. (“Don’t worry, I’m relieved it’s over,” she is reported to have told those on the inside of the black door, “at least I’ve been Prime Minister.”)

But the lessons from Johnson’s demise and Truss’s implosion, so far as I can see, are not as commiserative. Today’s political environment makes remarkable demands on the modern politician — demands of exertion, openness, imagination, resilience to criticism, and speed of response. It is sometimes difficult to see how any decent politician could be equal to meeting them, though it is increasingly clear how a bad one could be wilful enough to resist them.

Amid this chaos, Rishi Sunak — former Goldman Sachs banker — has become Britain’s new prime minister. Has the technocratic order of the 2010s returned? Or has the modern world moved beyond its reach? Read Gray’s diagnosis, as well as his interview with Freddie Sayers, below.

The revenge of the technocrats

The point about these people is they’ve learned nothing. There’s no practical way of going back to before 2016. Already in 2016, the world hadn’t fully recovered from a near catastrophic financial crisis which these adults in the room, these extremely intelligent men and women, had given us. The halcyon period of technocratic competence included, going back to the start, long-term capital management melting down in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its debt. That was patched up but it also began what later was called quantitative easing … You then had the 2007-2008 crash. And you also had gruesome sideshows like 20 years in Afghanistan. This is what the adults in the room, this is what the technocrats, the people who are now coming back as safe hands, as competent administrators, this is what they did. So their record is not at all one of competence. It’s one of repeated near-disaster.

They think of themselves as the way of the future. But the future has melted down. It’s not there anymore; their future’s gone. Their future was one in which the whole world would marketise, in which geopolitics would surrender to geoeconomics, global markets. All the states that were emerging, China, Russia and others, would see that their advantage lay with integrating into the global market. Geopolitical struggles would attenuate. They would still be there, but would become less important over time. The opposite has happened. The global market doesn’t exist the way it seemed to exist then and it’s certainly not evolving towards this global market stability that they expected. So, the fundamental problem in this nostalgia, this Osbornist technocratic project, is that they’re adapting to a world that no longer exists, and isn’t coming back. It is a hopeless nostalgia.

What the Tories get wrong about Brexit

Insofar as Brexit’s a Tory project, it is: Global Britain, supply-side reforms, free market, open the British economy even more to the buffeting of the world. Whereas what people wanted in the North and the Midlands, and other parts of the country, from Brexit, I think, was some shelter from those storms. They wanted not a smaller state, a state that had retreated even further. They wanted actually, maybe not a bigger state, although most of them I think probably did, but one which was more protective of them and more concerned with their wellbeing and more active. So the majority of those who voted for Brexit did not vote — perhaps the overwhelming majority — for the reasons that the Tory Brexiteers thought. And that, of course, introduced a contradiction in the whole Tory Brexit project, which meant it couldn’t work.

Why the technocrats don’t get populism

The only way they could understand these movements, what they called populism, was to say that these are stupid, ignorant people. If they merit any sympathy, it’s that they’re being misled by demagogues. But there can be no real merit, no logic, no justice to their claims. And so that itself was a failure of intelligence. I think populism is a term liberals apply to the political blowback of their policies that they fail to comprehend. It was caused by them…

But I think apart from anything else, apart from the morally, profoundly repellent and even abhorrent attitude these technocrats, these liberals, these progressives, technocratic and otherwise, had for their fellow citizens — apart from that — it’s a failure of understanding. Where did it come from? The devil? Where did this strange sort of diabolical combination of demagoguery and mass stupidity suddenly emerge from? It’s a tremendous failure of intelligence and it’s being repeated.

The technocrats now believe they’ve got a second chance and they’re back in the seats of power. They haven’t got the conceptual equipment to understand that forces other than those that fit into their largely economic view of the world — and of human beings themselves and of human action, it’s an economic view of human action — isn’t realistic and doesn’t really work and they can’t acquire the skills without taking too much out of their worldview.

Why Rishi will fail

Anyone who thinks Rishi Sunak is going to be able to stabilise the boat of the British economy to the point at which growth can resume in a few years — they’ve only got two years more in office — is completely delusional. Because the recessionary forces — put aside even war — in the world economy are very, very strong. And the combination of tightening monetary policies with tightening fiscal policies, with higher taxes, lower spending, and cutting back on quantitative easing, can only exacerbate all kinds of painful trends for the general population. So it’s not going to be politically stable. I’m not convinced that the internal cannibalism of the Conservative Party will permit Rishi to even last to January 2025. There could be another cycle of regicide and folly. But then Labour come in, and then what do they do? Because they are actually also committed to Osborne’s vision.

Why Labour will fail 

They’ve joined the critique that the Tories were being fiscally irresponsible, and that the responsible thing is to obey the markets… But where’s the money going to come from? If they do shut down remaining forms of energy production, which they regard as damaging, where are the workers going to go? What will happen to Labour when it stops working, when the mixture of Osbornism and green utopianism breaks down, is that the party will internally fracture. I don’t necessarily mean a revival of the Corbynites but there are lots of people within Labour who are prepared to accept the bland neo-technocratic ideology of Starmerism because they think it’s a winning one. And it is a winning one, if only because the Conservatives have made such a mess of things.

Why the far-Right might rise

Mosley didn’t get very far in the Thirties. There wasn’t a single fascist MP in the Commons. We’ve remained, actually, relatively untouched by that. But one of the reasons we’ve remained, not untouched, but where we’ve been able to fend off those dangerously anti-liberal movements, is that the Conservative Party actually was able to moderate them and incorporate them within a broader political project that included social democracy, that included a paternalistic High Toryism, which included various strands. If the Conservative Party is going to melt down, which I think it’s in the process of doing now, then there are obviously risks, even in Britain, of something like that. I don’t know if people really, 10 or 15 years ago, thought that in Sweden there would be a government which depended for its support on having more or less a de facto coalition with the far-Right. But that’s the case now, is it not?

Why we need Proportional Representation 

The best outcome would be a change in the electoral system. I’ve not always accepted first-past-the-post. I used to support, 20 or 30 years ago, changes like the Alternative Vote. I think the only way that we’re going to get fresh thinking and a way through the intractable conjunctions that we face — the failure of the Global Britain Brexit, and the almost non-attempt at the more protective and state-centred Brexit that people really wanted — is by breaking up the existing party system and having a wider variety of parties and ideas.