Every 30 seconds or so, a minor Minister would emerge blinking through the familiar Downing Street doorway, only to be heckled by the chaotic bunch of hacks who sounded more like creditors demanding their money in small-claims court than esteemed veterans of Britain’s press. Most of the representatives of His Majesty’s Government managed to ignore the questions being shouted at them and scuttled off. But a few stopped to impart their wisdom. They did that British-politician thing, repeating the same line, over and over, no matter the query: “Our job is to carry on, as the public expects . . . to carry on . . . as the public expects.” Is there a God? Can historicism survive itself? Should young men take up balls-maxxing? “Our job is to carry on, as the public expects.”

Astonishingly, these scenes were playing out in real time on Sky News on Tuesday afternoon. For over in London, the British political and media class are staging a parody of themselves as the Labour Government totters and the Prime Minister is urged to commit Harikiri over a bad set of local election results.

Viewed from the other side of the Atlantic, Britain’s almost comedic political chaos can prompt smug self-satisfaction — based on our stronger American presidency and more stable party duopoly of Democrats and Republicans. But, really, it should inspire dismay in Washington — and not a little internal anxiety.

Britain is supposed to be a serious power. Its nuclear submarines prowl distant waters, carrying the threat of global mega-death. It’s the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy (depending on which measure you use). It is home to a world financial capital and a banking system whose stability has been the envy of the world going back to the 19th century. A seafaring island people with a preternatural knack for harmonizing hierarchy and liberty.

The special relationship is enduringly important for Americans for these reasons and more. But these, in turn, have rested upon the stability, state capacity, and political moderation that characterized Britain at its imperial zenith in the 19th century and survived the collapse of the Empire in the immediate postwar years.

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To take one example, in confronting the challenges of industrial modernity — the squalor and poverty of the working class, the chaos of market life — Britain succumbed to neither French-style radicalism nor German or southern European authoritarianism. Instead, social compromises were struck within the give-and-take politicking of Parliament; and one of the world’s most rigid class systems invited the full participation of a labour movement and its associated party; trade unionists could be, and would be, made lords (miraculous, if you think about it).

Yet in the early decades of the 21st century, stability, state capacity, and creative moderation are scarcely in evidence. No British prime minister, it seems, can be permitted to finish a full term: not if “the bond markets” disapprove or local elections go badly. The British public and political classes, it seems, have exempted themselves from H.L. Mencken’s democratic maxim: the people have voted, and now they should it get it good and hard. (Yes, yes, it’s parliamentary parties that win mandates; but something’s gone terribly when Italian premiers last longer in office, on average, than their British counterparts.)

The collapse in British state capacity is less cartoonishly visible, but no less serious. The upshot is a state bureaucracy that is at once bloated and increasingly incapable of coordinating economic activity and delivering on core functions. My colleague Tom Ough has described modern Britain as starved of the “agentic” initiative: both at the level of the state and of individual actors (compare this with the Foreign Office of old and its individual spies and diplomats who’d create new Mideast states by day and compose Arabic poetry by night). The upshot for America: a Britain that would struggle to field a single carrier — even if motivated to do so in a less foolish operation than President Trump’s Iran war.

As for moderation: taking a cue from Orwell, the American intelligentsia has long viewed Britons as somehow naturally immune to spittle-flecked political fanaticism of every stripe. British liberty rejected the yoke of every Nosey Parker, as Orwell observed (while getting bombed by the Luftwaffe), and arch British humor mocks every would-be Lord Haw-Haw.

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But I’m not sure I share this confidence anymore. More and more, one encounters in British political culture, Left and Right, some of that same unblinking earnestness which renders Americans all too susceptible to barmy visionaries. American culture is, after all, partly the work of Puritans who found Caroline England insufficiently miserable and sought a new land in which they could make each other even more miserable.

Now, owing to US material and cultural domination, the tendency has traveled in the reverse direction. Even as the racial and gender craze of 2020 came and went in America — we’re visionaries but also have short attention spans — the same seem to have greater staying power in Britain. The English Right, meanwhile, increasingly views its own country through the distorted lens of America’s online Right: “This is what they took from you” runs the caption to AI slop videos showing Victorian and Edwardian England with the industrial misery neatly cropped out. This trend, too, has grave foreign-policy implications for Washington. To wit, a Britain racked by severe cultural incohesion — if not “Balkanization” — is likely to be internally distracted, struggling to project power even in its own near abroad.

Which brings us to American internal anxiety prompted by the current Starmerpocalypse. The US-UK special relationship isn’t just about British troops joining Americans in the trenches (a comradeship the Trump administration has too often callously denigrated). It’s also about those “mystic chords of memory” that perhaps throb more sentimentally in too-earnest American hearts than in British ones. Even the Trump administration, after all, concedes that “our legal system, our culture, and values is very much an offshoot of what was going on the British Isles for hundreds of years”, as JD Vance told me in an interview last year.

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America has been exporting its recent anxieties and mad enthusiasms to its much older cultural predecessor. At the same time, we tell ourselves that the United States, for all its trigger-happy daily violence, has done a better job of overcoming the problems that wrack Britain and other European states in the wake of globalization and mass migration. But is that really true? Don’t some of America’s deeper crises of identity — those that go beyond the recent culture wars — resemble British crises?

Britain, as Enoch Powell observed in an encounter with William F. Buckley, never quite resolved what it meant to go from a globe-spanning empire to an ordinary country: what claims did the former subjects of the Empire have upon the home islands after decolonization? There’s a case to be made that America’s post-1965 immigration — the Asian, African, and Latin wave that made me an American by choice — was an equally momentous transformation, giving rise to a similar tangle of problems having to do with representation, cohesion, and belonging.

These are discomfiting questions. Get it together, Brits, so we can take comfort once more in our Churchill mugs and “Keep Calm” T-shirts.

* * * 

Over the five past decades, I have asked a series of ambitious political leaders the same question: “Do you have any doubts about your ability to fill the role of Prime Minister?”

All but one of them admitted to having qualms: David Cameron. It was exactly two decades ago, and the 39-year old had just been elected Tory Leader. “If I had any doubts,” said Cameron, “I wouldn’t have put myself forward to lead our party in the first place. You have to be absolutely ready to take the difficult and big decisions – including sending troops to war. And I decided I was ready for that.” 

Described by his wife, Samantha, as “the most glass-half-full person in the world”, Cameron will go down in history as the man who took Britain out of the EU. But there is much more to him than his role as the accidental Brexiteer. 

Like nearly half of Britain’s Prime Ministers, Cameron was educated at Eton — where he did not distinguish himself and might well have been expelled for smoking cannabis. But he slipped the noose. At Oxford he was elected to join the notorious Bullingdon Club. “When I look at the photograph of our group of appallingly over self-confident sons of privilege,” said Cameron later. “I cringe. It’s cripplingly embarrassing. The Bullingdon has haunted me for most of my political life.” 

Despite the hijinks, Cameron managed to get a First in PPE, much to the chagrin of his Eton and Oxford contemporary, Boris Johnson, who only achieved a 2:1 in classics. The two men were to have a prolonged love-hate relationship for years to come. As schoolboys, both had declared they wanted to become Prime Minister, although Johnson upped the ante by saying he also sought to be World King. 

When Cameron came down from Oxford, he joined the political finishing school of Conservative Central Office. He was snapped up to become a Spad, working to polish the image of top Tory Cabinet ministers, then left to take a job at the media company Carlton TV, where he became head of communications from 1994-2001.

After failing to win a Tory seat in the Blair landslide of 1997, Cameron watched with growing admiration the presentational skills of the New Labour troika of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. When he did finally become a Tory MP in 2001, he privately proclaimed he was “the Heir to Blair”. When elected Conservative leader four years later, Cameron sought to detoxify the Tory “Nasty Party” brand. He wanted to create a party in his own image. The New Conservatives would be modern, diverse, caring and environmentally aware. On his debut at PMQs as the new Leader of Opposition, he said to the Prime Minister Tony Blair: “I want to talk about the future, after all he was the future once.” A year later, he drove a sleigh in the Arctic pulled by snow-white huskies. His new slogan was: “Vote Blue, Get Green” — swiftly lampooned as “Hug a Husky”. 

When Cameron fought his first general election as Tory leader in 2010, he feared the result would be a hung parliament. He privately asked the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was accustomed to coalitions, how they worked. She summed it up succinctly: “Well, David, the way it works is that if things go well, then the big party gets the credit — and if they go badly, the small party gets the blame.” “Sounds a good idea to me,” responded Cameron. 

As PM, Cameron invited Merkel to Chequers. One summer evening they were watching the sun go down over the Chiltern Hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty, and Cameron joked: “Just think Angela, if things had turned out differently in the Forties all this could have been yours.” Merkel laughed out loud; the Germans do have a sense of humour. 

At that time, after years of trying, I had been given access to make a fly-on-the wall series, Inside the Commons, filming in areas where TV cameras were normally strictly verboten. In his grand wood-panelled Westminster office, I asked the PM how he rated the Commons as an institution. “You do feel a real sense of history in this place,” he said. “It’s half like a museum, half like a church and half like a school.” Clearly an unusual school where three halves make a whole. When I asked Cameron what he thought of Prime Minister’s Questions, he replied: “There isn’t a Wednesday where you don’t feel total fear and trepidation about what is going to happen. I am normally sitting here preparing for PMQs and about five minutes beforehand you think: ‘Oh no, have I got to do this again?’” 

He admitted that each week, one of his staff would email Tory backbenchers a list of questions that the PM would like to be asked. When I suggested that this made a mockery of PMQs, Cameron said: “If you’re saying it’s appalling, I would say that politics is about the team putting across team messages. So people shouldn’t be too worried about that happening in PMQs.” He saw himself, he said, as “a political decathlete, switching from one discipline to the next trying to give every single one of them my best”. 

But the subject the PM found the most problematic was Britain’s relationship with the EU. He had promised when he became leader that the Tories would: “Stop banging on about Europe.” But he was up against his own party becoming increasingly pro-Brexit — and he was also up against Nigel Farage, whose UKIP party was making dramatic gains at the ballot box. Seeking to pooh-pooh the pretenders, Cameron said: “UKIP is sort of a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists.” But Farage seized on Cameron’s words as proof that the political elite despised ordinary Britons who were concerned about the EU and immigration. In speeches, interviews and rallies, Farage sardonically used the PM’s description of Ukippers as a badge of honour. 

Cameron told me he saw himself as “a practical Eurosceptic” who wanted to stay in a reformed EU. He decided to hold an in-out Referendum which he was confident of winning. The two people he most wanted campaigning for the Remain side were his very close friend Michael Gove and his fellow Bullingdon man, Boris Johnson. But Gove was playing a slippery game and refusing to commit himself. Cameron sent Gove a text saying: “You must realise I divide the world into team players and wankers. You’ve always been a team player, please don’t become a wanker.” Gove admitted he was moving towards Leave, but he promised Cameron: “If I do decide to opt for Brexit, I will make one speech. That will be it. I will play no further part in the campaign.” 

This was the opposite of what Gove actually did when he became full-time leader of the Leavers. Failing to land Gove made Cameron all the more determined to bag Boris. The PM had long envied Johnson’s charisma and campaigning skills. But Johnson was keeping his powder dry. On 17 February 2016, as Cameron prepared to announce the date and details of the Referendum, Johnson went to see Cameron in his study at No. 10. The PM told Johnson that if he agreed to campaign for Remain: “You can have a senior role to play after the referendum. I am offering you any post you want in the government – except the top one.” Johnson said he would think about it and they should stay in touch. 

Ten days later, Johnson pinged Cameron a text saying: “I have been a tortured soul, but I have to go with my heart and support Leave.” But, then, barely two hours later, a fresh text from Johnson appeared on Cameron’s device saying “depression is setting in” — that he was “dithering” and might change his mind and back Remain after all. The following day, Johnson messaged the PM yet again, saying that he could not look at himself in the mirror if he campaigned to Remain. Cameron said publicly he was “disappointed” by Johnson’s decision. That was putting it mildly. The word I got from No. 10 was: “The fury here is uncontrollable.” 

The Referendum campaign coincided with a record number of illegal immigrants trekking across Europe and crossing the Channel in small boats to come to Britain. Film of their arrival on BBC, ITV and Sky inadvertently resembled a daily party political broadcast for the Leavers. It chimed with the simple message from Johnson and Gove: “Take Back Control”. 

Cameron accused the Leavers of “resorting to total untruths to con people into taking a leap in the dark”. He authorised a poster showing Johnson rolling the dice, Gove drinking whiskey and Nigel Farage smoking cigars in a casino together with the slogan: “Don’t let them gamble on your future.” Cameron later said: “The campaign turned into this terrible Tory psychodrama and I couldn’t seem to get through to people. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to shout but no sound is coming out.” And he continued: “Johnson and Gove have behaved appallingly — attacking their own government and the pair seemed to be different people by the end of the Referendum. Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully-considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come to Britain.” 

In the early morning of 24 June, the PM threw in the towel. The Leavers had won by 52 to 48%. On the steps of No. 10, a shell-shocked Cameron announced his resignation as Prime Minister saying: “The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered.” But he was not the man to do it. 

Johnson left it for a few hours after the resignation and then texted Cameron: “Dave, I am so sorry to have been out of touch but I couldn’t think of what to say and now I am absolutely miserable about your decision. You have been a superb PM and leader and your country owes you eternally.” Boris’s 18-year-old nephew, Oliver, felt different. He told his mother Rachel: “Uncle Boris has just stolen our future.” 

For many months after the Referendum result, Cameron would say: “not a day goes past without me feeling haunted by the demons of Brexit that were unleashed”. So does the ex-PM now wish he hadn’t called a Referendum? “If you are asking me do I have regrets — yes. Am I sorry about the state the country has got into — yes. Do I feel some responsibility for that — yes.” In another interview, he said: “It was my Referendum, my campaign, my decision to try and renegotiate with the EU. I accept all of those things and people will have to decide how much blame to put on me.”

Privately, however, Cameron was less self-culpatory. “Boris ruined my bloody career,” he told the former Europe Minister, Sir Alan Duncan, at a private breakfast. I watched Cameron at his final PMQs, in front of a packed House. He produced a bravura last hurrah: self-assured, witty and sometimes poignant. “I have done a bit of research, Mr Speaker,” said the PM. “I have addressed five thousand five hundred questions from this Despatch Box. I’ll leave it to others to work out how many I have actually answered.”

Riding the mixed cheers and jeers, the departing Prime Minister said: “I will miss the roar of the crowds — I will miss the barbs of the Opposition. And the last thing I’d say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics, you can get a lot of things done. Nothing is really impossible, if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said: ‘I was the future once.’” Twenty years on, Cameron and Britain are still deciding how much blame he deserves for the future he delivered.

When, three years ago, she put herself forward to be party leader, the impression was of someone callow — and, in person, she was surprisingly bashful — but she did have that vanishingly rare ability to make her followers cheer. There was an electricity in the room.

By the time of her second go, a year ago, things had changed. The atmosphere was staid. Tory journalists, who ought to have been animated, looked on nonplussed. The careerists were lined up on the front row; they, too, displayed little liveliness. Perhaps they were still in shock from the flagellation they had received from the electorate — even though certain Tories are given to that sort of thing. Badenoch tried to coddle them with the sorts of abstractions that usually make Conservative MPs salivate — personal responsibility, citizenship, equality under the law, the family, first principles. She struggled with the autocue. Had the public been listening in, they would have yawned.

Ever since, her polling has gone from bad to hideous. To Badenoch’s credit, she is unfailingly honest — perhaps to fault. She pleads she will get better, yet has slipped into the party’s reverie. Under her leadership, the Tories are displaying the worst instincts of an ancien régime: excessive self-regard and the unwillingness to understand the conditions which have given rise to their downfall.

This much was confirmed by one of her advisers, who reminded me, with remarks which could have been prefaced with “You know, dear boy”, that being leader of the Conservative Party is not like being leader of Reform, that the party has been around for 100 or however many years, that it encompasses local associations, the National Convention, councilors, parish councilors, and people who have been on the scene since the time of Thatcher. “It’s an enormous institution with a very grand history and we do have to look after it.”

Consequently, Badenoch has chosen a decadent strategy: first, reform internal party structures and set up internal policy commissions; then face the public when it is all complete. I know, because I was recently shown the strategy document itself, a management consultant’s breakfast entitled “The 3+5 Plan”. It lists three phases: 2025 is for “rebuilding trust”, 2026 for “demonstrating credibility”, and 2027 for “getting ready”.

The three phases have five objectives. “1. To win the election, 2. To re-build, 3. To compete, 4. To win the trust of the British people (disconnecting from Labour & winning people to us) 5. To jump ahead.” The party wishes “to become a best in class political organization”. With the replacement of a few words, this could be a strategy for any political party, in any country, in any universe; it does not take into account anything happening in politics now. It gives no indication of what the party stands for.

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Badenoch’s public appearances yield similarly little insight. It used to be convention that Leaders of the Opposition would put themselves up for ritual slaughter by the press, and ridicule by some quarters of the public, by taking stances on the main issues of the day. The convention had the obvious benefit of allowing the public to see who you are, who you speak for and how you think, even as it ran the risk of causing convulsions amongst the Adullamites of the party when they realized their policy darlings were going to be killed. Badenoch, however, is pursuing the politics of procrastination — while convincing herself that she is taking the harder road of coming up with policy quietly and methodically.

Meanwhile, politics continues around her. On the same day in June as Nigel Farage held a morning press conference to introduce a quirky policy on non-doms to benefit the poor, Badenoch was at the Policy Exchange think tank for a gentle midday tête-à-tête with Charles Moore about Margaret Thatcher. Throughout the summer, Reform ran a six-week law-and-order campaign, with weekly press conferences; Badenoch, perhaps responding to criticism that she has not been sufficiently visible, furnished us with the facts that she no longer identifies as Nigerian and was a snitch at school.

Behind closed doors, some in Badenoch’s team questioned her silence as far back as December. The Tories, they argued, were essentially allowing Reform to speak for the Right. Others now mutter darkly of her being in thrall to fawning deputies who have turned her into a politician who dutifully reads the lines she is given. (This is denied by her team, who say that “Anyone who knows her well would testify that she is the last sort of person who would just read out anything put in front of them.”) Someone who has worked with her previously describes her as unwilling to hear criticism; her allies, on the other hand, say it is myth she is cliquey, and instead, though being resolute, is open to challenge. The team, buoyed by Badenoch’s Commons performances before recess, is more upbeat than after the local elections catastrophe. At Wednesday’s PMQs, though, the first since the summer break, Badenoch failed to land a decisive blow on Angela Rayner, who has admitted to underpaying stamp duty. Lord Frost, a senior Tory, retweeted a claim that “Tories have their heads in their hands after that performance from Kemi Badenoch”.

Her camp is convinced that all the Tories need is time, and that memories of the Truss mini-budget, and other misadventures, will eventually fade. As one told me, “When the public start going, ‘I don’t like Labour but I’m not sure about Reform’, we need to be ready.” He insists that the public, at this point, will see “that Kemi has done the hard thinking to put the Conservative Party back in the right place”.

It is true, in the normal run of things, that the British people easily forgive; they do not regard political parties as continuous living persons in the way analysts do, and so it can be reasonably assumed a stay-at-home voter will go back to his flock.

However, a dyed-in-the wool voter who switches party is like a monk who decides to fornicate — he ceases to be a monk. Just as it was wrongly assumed that Labour voters who “lent” the Conservative Party support to get Brexit done in 2019 would return to their old habits, Tories who voted for other parties in 2024 are likely to keep indulging in pleasures of the flesh unless a substantially more attractive proposition is offered. Even projecting competence and offering a coherent set of policies is not going to do the trick unless they have already been shown a lot of leg. On all the issues of unique concern — law and order, immigration, deindustrialization of the British economy — to the 2019 coalition of voters, the only pool from which the Tories could conceivably win a parliamentary majority, Reform is practically tossing garters left right and center. As deindustrialization and dispossession deepens, this cohort grows only larger.

What next? The present predicament of the Tories increasingly resembles the fate of one of Britain’s great country houses — with a modern twist. Its occupants are too foolish to find new sources of income to maintain it, too proud to open it up to the public, and too blind to see that an aggressive developer under the name of Reform 2025 Ltd is about to demolish it and put up newbuilds. They crowd in the one room they can afford to heat, telling themselves comforting tales in denial of the changing world outside. “We understand government”, “It’s too early to say what will happen”, “The Reform lot are a rabble”.

Since the Reform barracks can have no titans of previous generations staring down from gilded portraits — one presumes they might have a few generic prints of the London skyline, as in a city slicker’s flat — the Tories think they are rootless. Yet they are born of a tradition; there is a line of men from Lord Randolph Churchill to Joseph Chamberlain to Enoch Powell who have attempted to dominate the Right by giving vigorous expression to the sentiments which command working-class support. Nigel Farage is but the next. As such, he has a strong whiff of vulgarity for many Tories — and indeed the middle classes.

But in the prevailing conditions, might they hold their noses? Conservatives love to believe that the natural mood of the country is always conservative. Now it is revolutionary. Though the British people may not be able to describe in detail the progressive web of constitutional innovations, human rights and equality legislation and regulatory compliance which is ensnaring all democratic action, they can sense that the practice of governing is characterized by stasis and inertia. They can also see the visible decay of their towns and on social media the sorts of horrors which inspire the most mild-mannered of folks to want to administer brutal punishment.

Farage’s appeal, therefore, cannot be explained alone by his campaigning on immigration. Not discounting fellow-feeling among compatriots, the issue is of little immediate relevance to the pockets of Scotland and the corners of Wales where Reform merrily marches on; pushing it appeals insofar as it marks him as being against the consensus of the other parties. In these Powellian conditions, it follows that Badenoch, however hard it may prove, will have to distinguish herself as being against the consensus in different ways from Farage if she is to have any prospect of power. But with all the careerists in her shadow cabinet, she is paralyzed by the perceived necessity for party unity from repudiating all the shibboleths she would like to. The truth-telling pugilist of 2022 is nowhere to be seen. Badenoch now wants to be the standard bearer of the Conservative Party, Farage of the Right itself.

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Up to this point, the apparatus has never existed for the British people, having grown exasperated with their politicians, to line up behind the one apparently honest man. Farage is putting it together. His genius lies in the recognition that the lifeblood of any political party is not its membership, campaigning machine, corporate structure, or policy formation process, but popular support in the country. All of these must follow, but are secondary. Having cannibalized the Conservatives’ heart and liver, he is making sure they stay down.

In direct contrast with Badenoch, as he builds his party, in a style wholly unusual to politicians, he gives intelligible progress updates as well as commentary on his foes. Policy is drip-fed, which gives confidence to supporters and keeps the media spotlight on the party. The impression is that while Reform work hard in public, the Tories waste time in private.

Meanwhile, in public, at the dispatch box, the Prime Minister has accused Badenoch of not being a serious politician. This criticism has some accuracy, for she lacks the quality which is necessary for political success above all others: guile.

Political guile can take the form of cunning, boldness, ruthlessness. Not without it could Margaret Thatcher have wrenched her party away from an economic consensus shared with Labour. Guile enabled David Cameron to turn the Tory party from something ossified into something skeletal. Guile enabled Boris Johnson to withdraw the whip from 21 of his MPs despite it leading to the loss of his majority. There is no more visible example that she lacks it than in her tolerance of Robert Jenrick. Gone are the days when the party regarded merely encroaching on another minister’s or spokesman’s brief as being as ungentlemanly as poaching the next man’s pheasants on a shoot. But even in these ungallant times, permitting a fellow shadow cabinet member to openly campaign for the leadership is extraordinary. She claims she wants to change everything “without destabilizing my party”. Can she not see that as stab follows back, one naturally follows the other?

For now, though, her position is safe; party rules do not allow a formal challenge until November, and next year’s local elections are likely to deliver further punishment. Knowing this, her rivals consider it too early to strike. But like the king who preceded Robert the Bruce, she has already been mercilessly rendered a Toom Tabard, another forgotten figure in the procession of the mediocre. All that remains to be seen is whether in 50 years’ time her name is the answer to the pub quiz question, “Who was the last leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party?”

Healey was no doubt a professional politician. He became an MP at the age of 35 after studying at Oxford and serving with the Royal Engineers during the North African campaign of the Second World War. But he was also a keen amateur photographer, painter and piano player. His view was, as he noted in his cultural anthology, My Secret Planet, that it is not possible to understand modern politics without knowing something of history; that it is not possible to command foreign affairs without knowing something of the culture of other peoples; and that poets and novelists can teach us more than so-called political scientists. Perhaps only Healey could, as he did, watch a four-hour production of Hamlet in the middle of a financial crisis.

Healey was such a larger-than-life character, full of quips and acerbic put-downs — he once described the performance of Geoffrey Howe in the Commons as “like being savaged by a dead sheep” — that it’s easy to imagine that he was a one-off, and that having such an extensive cultural life and a range of experiences beyond politics was quite rare even in those days. But other prominent politicians show an equally broad array of influences — in particular, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland.

It was Healey who took over from Roy Jenkins as shadow chancellor in 1972 when Jenkins resigned over the issue of — what else? — Britain’s position within Europe. Jenkins, who believed that membership of the Common Market was essential to Britain’s future prosperity, was incensed that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson was whipping his opposition MPs to vote against the government, led by Edward Heath, which was driving through the European Communities Bill. Like Healey, Jenkins studied at Oxford. Like Healey, he contributed to the war effort, and he entered politics at an even younger age. He had a deep knowledge of fine wines and he was a prolific biographer, writing accounts of the lives of Roosevelt, Gladstone, Balfour and countless others.

His early career in politics was nothing short of astonishing. As home secretary in the mid-Sixties, he pushed through a sweeping range of reforms which saw a huge upheaval in the structure of the police force, the ending of theatre censorship, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the legalization of abortion, and the end of the death penalty. Arguably no home secretary since then has transformed Britain to anything like the same extent.

Jenkins was also a man of prodigious appetites, said to have had an affair with Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, Lee Canfield, as well as with Caroline Gilmour, the wife of a fellow MP. And many people, including his biographer John Campbell, believe that Jenkins’s close friendship with Tony Crosland had a sexual dimension while the two were at Oxford together.

And it is Crosland who forms the third leg of our political tripod. He was 32 when he became MP for South Gloucestershire. A devoted football fan, he took American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to see Grimsby Town play at home while serving as foreign secretary. He was also seen as the intellectual leading light of the Labour moderates: his book, The Future of Socialism (1956), is considered a seminal work.

The professional and personal lives of these three men intersected in fascinating and provocative ways, defining the Labour Party to this day. After Wilson’s shock resignation, all three stood for the leadership, but none made a strong showing, and James Callaghan was the eventual winner. Eventually, hard-Left Michael Foot became leader, defeating Healey in a narrow contest. But he was unable to make a dent in the side of Mrs. Thatcher. After she had swept to power in 1979, it would be 18 years before another Labour leader became prime minister.

As playwrights, we were fascinated by how these three close friends, all aligned in their values, all such vibrant personalities, could have failed to prevent the party they loved from becoming so hopelessly unelectable. The result is our play The Gang of Three, currently playing to gratifyingly packed audiences at the King’s Head theatre in Islington.

While we’ve tried to follow the advice of Samuel Goldwyn to all writers — “All I want is a story, if you have a message, send it by Western Union” — we’re aware that a play like ours is going to reflect matters closer to home. When our version of Crosland berates Healey during a conversation about the IMF crisis, telling him “We can’t become the party of cuts”, an audience which has just read newspaper headlines about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party reducing benefits to disabled people chuckle ruefully or sometimes groan in despair. Life, maybe especially political life, is cyclical, and the same problems come up again and again. Can you have true friends in politics? Is politics an addictive drug? Do the ends justify the means? But perhaps the most enduring theme is that when sensible people fail to put aside their own self-interests and unite, extremists and idiots can triumph.

One question which might occur to those watching the play is: why doesn’t politics seem to make politicians like this any more? While on the one hand there is always a tendency for the human brain to imagine that the golden age of anything was about 50 years ago, usually consonant with one’s own childhood, it is hard to imagine that in 50 years’ time people will be creating theater about Robert Jenrick, Alistair Carmichael, Bridget Phillipson or Kemi Badenoch, to name a few. Do we find in these politicians an interest in the arts, a devotion to philosophy, a library of publications, or a previous career in some other field of endeavor? In every case, hardly.

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Where are the Jenkins, Healey and Crosland of our political generation? In some ways, the question is unfair: the motivations and actions of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for instance, will surely be pored over for decades to come. And yet ours is clearly a political generation in search of a hinterland.

Perhaps this is in part because earlier generations of politicians had been shaped by wartime service. Crosland was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, seeing combat in Italy and France, while Jenkins worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. Even more impressively, Healey was a beachmaster at Anzio in 1944. This period may have given them all a sense of perspective in later life — allowing Healey to stand muster with the admirals he later found advising him at the Ministry of Defense and giving him the self-assurance to fire Lord Mountbatten as Chief of the Defense Staff.

Or perhaps it’s because the frenetic nature of politics today, with its 24-hour cycle and the endless delights of social media, just doesn’t allow time to build an intellectual and cultural hinterland that can season political minds. And with any slip of the tongue, unfortunate juxtaposition or foolish remark flashed around the world in seconds, it’s maybe no surprise that many modern politicians try to stick to the very center of the road whenever they’re out of the house. After all, a bacon sandwich was all it took to depth charge Ed Miliband’s general election campaign.

And when one does consider politicians who use their extravagant personalities to connect with voters, one is drawn not to principled campaigners, but self-centered populists like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. All three of the characters in our play were motivated by passion and ambition, but the conflict between what they agreed on politically and their inherent rivalry led to all sorts of poor decisions. Not least their failure to combine forces, so that one of them could become Labour leader and form an election-winning alliance.

When he lost the Labour leadership, Jenkins decamped to Europe, becoming president of the European Commission. By the time he returned to British politics, Healey had completed his stint as chancellor and Crosland had died in office as foreign secretary. Unable to prevent the Labour Party’s lurch to the Left, Jenkins launched the SDP in 1982, while Healey remained on the Labour benches until his retirement in 1992.

How different might British politics have looked today if Crosland had lived and challenged Michael Foot for the Labour leadership? Or if Healey had joined Jenkins at the formation of the SDP? Or if Jenkins had continued his fight for moderation from within the Labour Party. These events shaped the political landscape as it is today, and we think there is much to be learned from this period in history, as well as great entertainment to be derived from it. So while we resurrect these giants of the past upon the stage, we still hold out some hope that the next generation of politicians might bring something to Westminster other than bureaucratic competence or an unseemly lust for power. After all, the pendulum always swings, so maybe we will yet see the return of the hinterland to British politics.

***

The Gang of Three is playing at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 1 June.

But even if the Tories possessed a record of passing legislation in, rather than directly against their own interests, the party has a vanishingly small prospect of winning the next election. The Conservatives turned a blitzkrieg electoral victory into a grinding war of attrition through their own incompetence, so that the enemy, whose capture of vast swathes of the country now looks fated, has already won the war by default. There are no electoral wunderwaffen on the horizon, as the leadership moves phantom armies across the map: but we must all endure a final grim winter of this ill-fated campaign before Labour’s red flag is planted on our ruinous parliament building.

Wartime analogies are not inapt: it is an odd characteristic of the national temperament that the best British novels of Second World War, and the immediate postwar period looking back to it, concern unsatisfying jobs in Whitehall, and frustrated engagement with the dysfunctional engine of the British state. Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the wartime sections of Powell’s Dance To the Music of Time sequence, the despondently cuckolded civil servants of both Greene’s End of the Affair and Nigel Balchin’s Darkness Falls From the Air, even the disenchanted civil servant of Nineteen-Eighty-Four: all convey a certain repulsion at British governance borne of sudden experience of how the sausage is actually made. For those outside the Westminster bubble, but away from the front, Europe’s great and bloody convulsion was experienced primarily as something akin to Houellebecq’s accurate prediction of the world after Covid: “the same, just a bit worse.”

There is something of our moment, also, in the writer Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, set in the grim midwar winter of 1943. For its spinster protagonist Miss Roach, the war is encountered “in its character of petty pilferer” first of all, making long accustomed goods increasingly unobtainable “while at the same time… gradually removing means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room from the trains.” For Miss Roach, “it was, actually, the gradualness and unobtrusiveness of this process which served to make it so hateful. The war, which had begun by making dramatic and drastic demands, which had held up the public in style like a highwayman, had now developed into a petty pilferer, incessantly pilfering. You never knew where you were with it, and you could not look round without finding something else gone or going.”

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Miss Roach is condemned to live in the shabby-genteel oppressiveness of a provincial boarding house, the Rosamund Tea Rooms, “this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town.” As the biographer Michael Holroyd observes, Hamilton’s “macabre imagination” and bitter lived experience converts the boarding house  “into something between an asylum and a torture chamber”. Beset by petty rules, the arbitrary dictatorship of the elderly and its debilitating “orgy of ennui”, the Rosamund Tea Rooms could be a stand in for modern Britain, and the downwardly mobile Miss Roach a British millennial: “She was only thirty-nine, but she might have been taken for forty-five. She had given up ‘hope’ years ago. She had never actually had any ‘hope’. Like so many of her kind — the hopeless — she was too amiable and tried too hard in company and conversation, and so sometimes gave an air, untrue to her character, of being genteel.”

It is surprising in our era of housing crisis, that the boarding house has not yet returned. Perhaps it will, or perhaps the HMO, its successor for today’s era of pinched and straitened middle-class circumstances, has taken up its purgatorial role. The HMO has not yet made its literary mark, but if material conditions as well as ideological currents influence our culture, perhaps it already shapes our times. Like our plummeting birthrates, could the inquisitorial suspicion, the nosy backbiting that defines millennial culture (around which an entire culture war has developed) derive as much from the enforced proximity gifted by inadequate housing as from indoctrination by progressive teachers? But it would not be in Conservative interests to highlight another of their own failures if so. Yet our current oppressive cultural atmosphere, characterised by dissident rightists as the culture of the “longhouse,” could just as well be termed, in Britain, the politics of the boarding house. We are all trapped together, by circumstances beyond our control and among people from whom we are increasingly estranged, in a stifling ennui seemingly impossible to shift.

Our state, after all, looks increasingly like Hamilton’s penny-pinching landlady, Mrs. Payne, “who had put a stop to electricity on the landings simply by taking all the bulbs out – thus succouring her hard-pressed country, the spirit of the black-out generally, and her own pecuniary resources.” Our political discourse, increasingly repellant in almost every aspect, is stuck at the level of the elderly tyrants, the pub bores and tiresome pontificators who dominate the shared living quarters in Hamilton’s fiction like “the president in Hell”: like poor Miss Roach, we are doomed to listen to their vapid self-regarding pronouncements every single day. With the simple pleasures of life vanishing, and puritanical new restrictions enforced, our public realm increasingly reflects Hamilton’s “endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions.” But then Hamilton’s literary intentions, for all that he aimed to capture the lived experience of his class, were always directed towards a portrait of the British state and character, parodied in his little-read 1939 satire Moribundia as a “stagnant society, one that is lacking vitality and possibly nearing its end,” ruled by the static ideology of “Unchange,” with “a deathly fear and hatred of innovation, of an overturning of their system, behind all their nauseatingly idealistic postures and utterances.”

There is something depressingly current in Hamilton’s depiction of his era, when world historical events, the rise and fall of empires, were experienced first and foremost as sharply declining living standards, a gnawing atmosphere of privation and neglect, and of being increasingly nagged by petty, seemingly arbitrary rules. We areourselves doomed to live in history: the 2008 financial crash, Covid, the war in Ukraine were each epoch-defining global events that beset us in short order, each of which demanded a grand response by the British state which either never came, or instead came in the most self-defeating and immiserating way.

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By choosing austerity over investment, the Cameron government weakened the British state ahead of the crises to come; when Covid came, Johnson promised the sacrifices demanded for the greater good necessitated a wartime response, which in the end came only in petty restrictions, growing debt and some expensive meal vouchers; the economic effects of the war in Ukraine, similarly, have sharply driven down living standards, without any meaningful government strategy or investment to alleviate them, let alone transmute crisis into opportunity. And there is more to come: both the international situation and Britain’s social and economic prospects are worsening. We are asked to endure ever more, without a path or plan to victory. New privations are announced like grand national projects, while grand national projects are cancelled, as unaffordable or simply beyond the nation’s capacity. The only laws the government can pass are for censorship; its only remaining talking points are to condemn the future rationing proposals, fictional or otherwise, of their successors. Promised a humming war economy, we got rationing and restrictions, with neither guns nor butter at the end.

How will this end? What was new about this year’s Conservative conference is the perception that none of it matters, at all. It was merely a ruling party unconvincingly going through the motions of governance, in a country going through the motions of democracy: all a provincial purgatory of sorts, the turbid backwash of world-historical events outside our control.

The Labour Party will enter government with a mandate for total change, and the future stability of the British political system will depend on its capacity to deliver it. On housing, Labour’s bold announced housebuilding commitments begin to address the scale of the problem, offering hope of major reform. Yet Starmer’s timid jettisoning of the grander prospects for reform risks settling for mere tinkering around the edges of dysfunction, and new petty rules with new state functionaries to enforce them. No longer the engine of grand national projects, much the same disenchantment could be applied to Parliament itself, whose restoration costs will apparently total £22bn: is it worth saving? Perhaps it would be better to let it crumble into the Thames, the breeding ground of crows, as a romantic monument to a lost civilisation. For any other purpose, without a bold commitment to reform, its time is running out. As polling for Onward shows, “six in ten Gen Z’ers support the idea of running the UK with a ‘strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections’, compared to only 29 per cent of over-55s. Focus groups suggest this is borne out of apathy: ‘what has democracy done for us?’, they ask with a shrug.” It is difficult to see that the events in store for us, or the state’s response to them, will re-enchant British voters with their decrepit political system.

No wonder that for the young, the talk is no longer of reform but escape. For the fictional Miss Roach, release from her purgatory came through an unexpected inheritance, allowing her to return to Blitz-ravaged London, where for all the risk, “You had to square up to the war. The horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms resided in just the fact that it was not squaring up to it [but was] in its petty boarding-house lassitude almost insensible of it.” The miserable conditions of ration Britain were likewise dispelled by the postwar economic boom, but without a concerted effort, without reformist ambition and grandeur, there will be no such unexpected prosperity in our future.

Today’s historic shift of global wealth and power will require a titanic effort to maintain our current lacklustre level of prosperity, let alone achieve the far greater wealth Britain should aspire to. As the rival parties’ regional pantomimes show, there is still no squaring up to reality in our grim national boarding house.

Britain’s waters are in a foul state. Official statistics show that there was an average of 825 sewage spills a day last year — including in the Environment Secretary’s own Suffolk constituency, where the water contains levels of e. coli more than 20 times the limit for bathing. In England, just 14% of rivers are rated ecologically “good”. In January, an NHS worker caught hepatitis while wild swimming, and last summer, dozens of beaches in England were closed due to toxic waste warnings.

The result is that the seemingly old-fashioned issue of sanitation — a problem most of us thought we’d solved around the same time as cholera — has once again become a political flashpoint. Half the British public now see protecting rivers as an important voting issue. In the May local elections, both the Liberal Democrats and Greens specifically targeted sewage as a swing issue — and saw their biggest gains in years. The Conservative seats newly up for by-elections should take note: Nadine Dorries’ former constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, for one, is currently in uproar at the sorry state of the river Ouse.

This is part of a wider trend: the environment is now regularly among the top four issues most important to the electorate — beating issues such as crime or childcare. It is even more of a focus in Conservative-held swing seats. And there’s a reason why sewage inspires such strong emotions — beyond the fact that it’s ruined the wild swimming trend. The scandal is in many ways a perfect microcosm of Britain’s political woes of the last decade: austerity, failed privatisation, corporate greed, climate apathy. After all, what good is a government if it can’t keep our shit out of our streams?

If you want to understand how this country’s waters got into such a mess, an obvious place to start is in 2010, with the coalition government. Its austerity policies slashed spending ringfenced for environmental protection by 80%, gutting the Environmental Agency’s ability to monitor our waters and, crucially, enforce punitive measures against polluters. It’s hardly surprising that, since then, sewage spill events into British rivers have doubled.

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But one could go back even further. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that, in 1989, privatised water utilities in England — making it the only country in the world to do so. The water companies were granted regional monopolies, debt-free, the argument being that they could run the system more competitively than the state could. In reality, many water companies have spent the decades since loading themselves with debt, deploying increasingly byzantine financial engineering to avoid corporation tax, and paying billions to shareholders and millions to their own executives — all the while under-investing in infrastructure and hiking prices for customers at rates considerably above inflation. Handed a money tap, they simply turned the spigot.

But if you want to get to the real heart of our sewage crisis, it makes sense to go back even further, to the summer of 1858, and the now infamous “Great Stink”. One of the things that period dramas never capture about Victorian England is the stench. It’s hard to imagine: tanneries filled the air with the scent of urine-soaked hides, and soap-makers with the smell of boiling bones. Carriages clogged the roads, leaving them caked in horse manure. But worst of all would have been the smell of human shit.

Before the widespread adoption of sewers, people used privies — holes that emptied into a cesspit. For centuries those cesspits were cleaned out by nightsoil men, who would come by and, for a small fee, dig out and cart your waste away to farms on the outskirts of the city to be used as fertiliser. In the 1840s, led by sanitary reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, the British government passed a series of measures to try to clean up the capital. Among their reforms: mandating the connection of cesspits to the city’s sewers.

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It was a deadly mistake. Rather than clear the air as Chadwick had hoped, the solution channelled an ever-greater deluge of foulness into the Thames. By the 1850s, the river was unimaginably polluted. Dickens called it a “deadly sewer”, Benjamin Disraeli a “stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”. In the summer of 1858, London boiled. The water levels in the river fell, leaving the waste within slathered up the banks. The smell fell foul across the city; there were reports of people feeling sick from miles away. Parliament ordered the curtains doused in lime chloride to mask the stench, with little effect.

The Great Stink led Westminster’s flailing political classes to finally act. They appointed the Joseph Bazalgette — one of the great British engineers of his time — to design a massive new sewage system for London. Bazalgette’s plan was astonishing in scope: it resulted in the laying of 720km of new sewer lines and the creation of the Victoria and Albert embankments, reshaping the city and its connection to the Thames. The resulting reduction in exposure to unclean water likely prevented millions of deaths; it’s thought that the introduction of sanitation in the 19th century added 20 years to the average human lifespan.

But Bazalgette’s design had a significant flaw; it was a combined sewer — that is, the main underground pipes were designed to carry both wastewater from buildings and rainwater collected by the city’s drains, to help dilute and flush out the system. During unusually heavy rainfall, they would flood; with such instances in mind, the sewers were designed with outlet valves called Combined Sewer Overflows, which would expel excess flow directly into waterways, untreated. Here is where our current sewage crisis stems from.

When Bazalgette designed London’s sewers, overflows were supposed to be a rare event. But various factors have conspired to make them commonplace. One is the all-engulfing expansion of concrete: new roads, pavements, and building developments block rainwater from entering natural soakaways — trees, soils, wetlands — that would otherwise absorb it. Another factor, inevitably, is climate change, which increased the occurrence and intensity of storms — and therefore flooding.

Today, there are around 100,000km of combined sewers in England alone, and around 15,000 overflows. Modern sanitary engineers hate them, but because so many of the central “hub” sewers are combined, introducing new models often doesn’t make a difference. To prevent spills, water utilities have periodically built storm overflow tanks, designed to hold excess sewage until it can be treated. But due to systemic under-investment by water companies, there is at present simply not enough capacity to store it all. For my book, Wasteland, I visited Mogden sewage works in London, which serves an estimated two million people: it has a series of storm tanks installed, and yet in 2020 alone it released enough sewage into the Thames to fill 2,768 Olympic swimming pools.

Water companies often use their ancient infrastructure as an excuse for not solving their pollution problem. It’s certainly true that replacing our combined system would be a Bazalgettian feat; a government-commissioned report, published in 2021, estimated that eliminating storm overflows in the UK would cost up to £600 billion, and increase household bills by up to £999 a year. (Not that we would have to replace the whole system to make the situation more bearable.) It would also do nothing to solve the other primary culprit behind our spoiled waters, the rampant phosphate pollution by industrial farms. The current plan, in London at least, is to divert the existing combined sewers into something even bigger: the £5 billion Tideway Tunnel currently being dug under the Thames. Thames Water estimates that when the “super sewer” is completed in 2024, 95% of raw sewage that pollutes the river today will no longer flow into it.

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But the fact is, just continuously expanding the old system isn’t going to work. This is one of the central dilemmas presented by climate change: do we press ahead with novel but potentially expensive technological solutions, or do we look back, and find inspiration in the natural world? China, for example, has met the sewage challenge by embracing so-called “sponge cities”, in which natural soakaways, permeable pavements, and wetlands are being built into city planning in order to soak up storm water and prevent flooding.

But swales and reed beds are not going to replace our traditional sewage infrastructure any time soon. Solving this problem can’t wait. With summer droughts becoming more common and storms more intense, protecting our water supply is only becoming more vital. Whoever wants to win the next election is going to need to convince the public they can turn the situation around, and fast.

Then his neighbour in the first-class carriage leaned over and tapped him on the knee. “You are Baldwin, aren’t you?” the man said. “You were at Harrow in ’84.”

The Prime Minister nodded. The man sat back, satisfied. Then, a minute or so later, the man leaned forward and tapped him on the knee again. “Tell me,” he said affably, “what are you doing now?”

Even if that story isn’t true — and if it is, it could only have come from one person — it tells you something about the modest man who first became Prime Minister on 22 May 1923, exactly 100 years ago.

In many ways, Stanley Baldwin dominated the first half of the 20th century. He was Prime Minister three times in the Twenties and Thirties, for a total of more than seven years, and co-ran the country alongside Ramsay MacDonald for four more. He was the first mass-media premier, with a grasp of radio unmatched by his contemporaries, and appealed to a new, genuinely democratic electorate, including women as well as men. He stood for democracy in the age of the dictators, and steered his country through the General Strike, the Depression and the Abdication. And he weathered the storms of office to step down in 1937 at a moment of his own choosing, admired and respected even by his opponents.

That Baldwin is barely remembered today, then, could hardly be more unjust. His reputation took a crippling blow when he was traduced as one of the so-called Guilty Men, savaged in a thoroughly mendacious short book for his supposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. Even now some writers, foolishly parroting the clichés of the past, accuse him of sending Britain defenceless into the Second World War, even though Baldwin actually commissioned almost 100 new RAF squadrons in the teeth of fierce opposition from a near-pacifist Labour Party. And when he appears on television or in films, it is only as a dithering foil for the dynamic Churchill, never as the brilliantly canny operator who effectively invented modern Conservatism.

Yet whenever people lament the passing of an age of decent, serious, public-spirited politicians, they could be talking about Stanley Baldwin. In almost every respect, he was a walking rebuke to his modern-day successors. And what’s more, he was a far more interesting character than almost all of our current MPs put together.

Born in 1867, the son of a paternalistic Worcestershire industrialist, he did indeed go to Harrow, where he got into trouble for writing his own pornography — this was, of course, an age before teenagers were spoon-fed — and sending it to his cousin at Eton. This cast a serious blight over his schooldays, and young Stan hoped to make a fresh start at Cambridge.

But then — disaster! His old headmaster, who despised him, was appointed as Master of Trinity, Stan’s college. More misery. In the end, he graduated with a Third in history, having made virtually no impression on his contemporaries at all.

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When he got back home to Worcestershire, his father Alfred — a stern and serious man — said grimly: “I hope you won’t get a Third in life.” Fortunately, he didn’t. Quite the opposite.

Baldwin didn’t inherit his father’s Bewdley constituency until he was nearly 41, having spent the intervening years working for the family iron-making firm. No doubt today he’d be mocked as a nepo baby. But like his father, Stanley was a deeply dutiful man, who prayed on his knees every night and took his Anglican faith enormously seriously.

Perhaps the best illustration of his sense of national responsibility was his letter to The Times on 24 June 1919. Baldwin, who was now Financial Secretary to the Treasury, noted that the country had run up colossal debts to pay for the Great War. This, he said, gave “the wealthy classes … an opportunity of service which can never recur … Let them impose upon themselves, each as he is able, a voluntary levy.”

For his part, he announced that he was giving up 20% of his fortune — a donation worth about £33 million today — to pay off the debt and relieve poor taxpayers of the burden. A nice gesture — but there was a twist. Baldwin didn’t sign his name: indeed, he made the editor of The Times promise not to tell anybody who had written the letter, because he didn’t want the attention. If you want to make your head ache, just try to imagine Matt Hancock doing that.

Even at that stage, nobody would have tipped Baldwin as a future PM. Compared with the man of the hour, the charismatic, flamboyant, monstrously priapic David Lloyd George, he seemed utterly ordinary. But Baldwin’s ordinariness — or his appearance of ordinariness, which isn’t the same thing at all — was his superpower. At the crucial meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922, when the Tories decided to ditch Lloyd George and break up the wartime coalition, it was Baldwin’s voice that carried the day.

In private, Baldwin thought “the Goat”, with his taste for flogging peerages and interfering with other people’s wives, a “corrupter of public life”. And so, calmly, devastatingly, he plunged in the knife. Lloyd George, he told his colleagues, had once been called a “dynamic force”. But, said Baldwin, “a dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you”.

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That was the end of Lloyd George — and the making of Baldwin. Less than a year later, after an election had smashed the Liberals and brought the Tories a crushing majority, George V invited him to become Prime Minister. Once again our hero stepped over the bleeding body of a flashier, louder rival — this time Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, the most arrogant man on the planet. Curzon thought Baldwin a man “of the utmost insignificance”. When the King told him that he was picking Baldwin anyway, he burst into tears.

So, armed with his religious faith, his boringness and his Cambridge Third, Baldwin ascended to the highest office in the land. In reality, of course, he wasn’t boring at all. Time magazine called him “a perfect John Bull in physical and mental makeup”; but as any lecturer in beauty therapy will tell you, makeup takes work.

Baldwin’s background was in industry, but he was brilliant at playing the country yeoman. In his most famous speech, a paean to romantic nostalgia, he evoked “the sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill”.

All this was pure fantasy. The sounds of Baldwin’s England were record players, radios, motorbikes and vacuum cleaners. They were motor cars chugging through suburban estates, builders hammering away at Tudorbethan semis. But as he realised, if only unconsciously, middle-class suburban modernity came with a deep longing for what had been lost.

Baldwin offered his voters stability, rootedness, a sense of tradition. Watch one of his YouTube clips — my favourite is this tremendously endearing speech at a retirement home for elderly actors — and it’s hard not to feel immediately reassured. He seems the very embodiment of old England. But of course the whole thing is a performance — and given the medium, a very modern one.

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To some of his better-remembered contemporaries, Baldwin’s success was utterly baffling. Churchill, when playing chess, would gesture at his opponent’s pawns with the words: “Bring out your Baldwins.” Orwell said that he was “simply a hole in the air”. They were both wrong. Voters in the Twenties and Thirties understandably shrank from the reckless, belligerent adventurism that had sacrificed so many lives at Gallipoli. Most voters were more like Bilbo Baggins, the very personification of Baldwin’s England, who made his first appearance during the great man’s final months in office. “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

As for being a hole in the air, that too was all part of the performance. Baldwin’s appeals to unflashy common sense were a brilliant way of presenting the Conservatives as the sensible, unthreatening, alternative to Labour’s supposed crypto-Bolshevism. And in reality, he was a much more nervous, restless figure than people realised. Colleagues watching him on the front bench noticed how he would twitch and fidget with nerves, exhibiting tics you can still detect on YouTube today. His oddest quirk was his habit of picking up books, lifting them to his face and sniffing them, which has never been properly explained. Some strange Harrovian fetish?

A century on, then, Baldwin ought to be much better known. To academic historians like his biographer Stuart Ball, his accomplishments are obvious. In an age of seething political turbulence, he turned the Tories into the dominant party of government, enlisting working-class and middle-class voters beneath the banners of common sense. His affable, consensual style meant Britain entered the late Thirties as a relatively contented, cohesive country — especially when compared with future allies such as France and the United States, let alone Germany and Italy. There will always be questions about the pace of rearmament. But Baldwin’s contribution to victory was arguably deeper and more important. Thanks to him, Britain entered the war united — perhaps the greatest asset of all.

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Today people love to judge our predecessors according to our own moral and cultural standards – and here Baldwin also comes out remarkably well. His eldest son Oliver, traumatised by his experiences in the trenches, became a Left-wing Labour MP, opposed to everything his father believed in. Stanley confessed to his daughter that he “nearly died” when he first saw Oliver glaring at him from the Opposition benches. But he was not a man to hold a grudge; father and son were reconciled eventually, and their letters make for deeply moving reading.

And there’s something more. Oliver wasn’t just a socialist; he was gay. Some Conservative MPs would have had a stroke at the very thought, and Stanley’s cousin Rudyard Kipling was so appalled by such “beastliness” that he severed all relations with his nephew. But Baldwin remained the ever-loving father. Whatever his personal convictions, he accepted his son’s partner, John Boyle, as part of the family, and would often drive over to visit them at their Oxfordshire farmhouse. If he ever murmured the slightest syllable of criticism, there’s no sign of it.

So perhaps the last word should go to Oliver, whose memoir of his father’s final days in December 1947 is reprinted in Philip Williamson’s wonderful collection of Baldwin’s letters. “He died as he would have wished,” Oliver wrote, “peacefully in bed. No bed-clothes were ruffled, no attempt made to ring a bell or turn on a light.”

That was entirely in character, and perhaps that’s why he’s barely remembered today. But Stanley Baldwin deserves better. He wasn’t just a great politician. He was a great man.

Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, spent the past week in the somewhat unlikely setting of Davos in Switzerland. Their reason for attending the World Economic Forum — that exclusive club of business magnates and like-minded politicos — was clear: to demonstrate that Labour had moved back to what is euphemistically described as the “centre ground” (the “centre” is wherever an exclusive set of pundits and politicians decide it to be). Clearly now in better, more refined company, Starmer, in an interview with Emily Maitlis, rather let the cat out of the bag: “Westminster is too constrained,” he said. “Once you get out of Westminster, whether it’s Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future. Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.”

I have known every Labour leader since James Callaghan (who gave me my first job interview and then thought better of making an offer), worked for one (Gordon Brown in his UN capacity), and for a number of years shared an office with another (Michael Foot). In that time, I have voted for every Labour leader who attained the office bar one, Tony Blair. I thought the latter was a phoney the moment I met him for a coffee in his Islington home shortly after he became leader. That feeling about Blair never escaped me in the years I spent on the party’s ruling National Executive Committee, before the disastrous Iraq war forced me to quit.

When running for the party leadership, Starmer was asked which former leader he most identified with. He settled on Harold Wilson, who still holds the record for winning four out of five General Elections for Labour. Wilson was, of course, the consummate party manager. On occasion he would do battle with the Left, but essentially took his cue from the inimitable Ian Mikardo, the Jewish Tribunite MP and the Commons’ resident unofficial “bookie”. The Mikardo maxim was that “in order to fly, Labour needed both a Left and a Right wing”. Sadly, few leaders have been able to free this old bird as Wilson once managed. But following the extraordinary toxicity that had characterised the relationship between the parliamentary Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer’s call for “unity” and his commitment to broadly social democratic policies was enough to persuade many, including me, to vote for him. Since then, however, he has picked his side and is ferociously pinioning the Left of the party.

“These are my principles,” Groucho Marx is said to have remarked. “If you don’t like them, I have others.” Starmer, after being reminded recently by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg of some of the pledges he had made when standing for leader (or which there were at least ten), looked her in the eye and said: “When I was running for leader, I made pledges reflecting my values. Since then, a lot has changed.”

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Indeed it has. Each of his pledges, let alone his values, has since been discarded, along with the party’s former leader and a significant portion of its fee-paying membership. Most political leaders U-turn to an extent, but few with such lack of guile and poor dexterity as Starmer. Take Brexit: first he accepted the referendum result, before demanding a second one, and now apparently accepting it (at least for the time being). His interview in March 2020 with Andrew Neil will doubtless be mined to exhaustion by his opponents for maximum effect ahead of the next election.

Neil: “You made 10 policy pledges — including that energy, rail, water, the Royal Mail will be taken into common ownership; so, will they all be in Labour’s next manifesto?”
Starmer: “I’ve made that commitment — the pledges I have made indicate the direction of travel.”
Neil: “So, those four industries will be in the Manifesto, for nationalisation, in 2024?”
Starmer: “They will. They are baseline indicators for where we are going. I think that we’ll need to think about how we will do it.”
Neil: “What about abolishing university tuition fees then?”
Starmer: “They are all pledges, Andrew, so the answer to these questions is ‘yes’.”

On the privatisation of the NHS (firmly ruled out), Starmer now looks to the private sector to remedy the crisis. Elsewhere in recent months, the shapeshifting has moved with some abandon. Having garnered union votes for his election, Starmer subsequently criticised Shadow Ministers joining picket lines. Someone could have shown him the pictures of Labour Ministers, Shirley Williams, Denis Howell and Fred Mulley, no militants they, on the Grunwick picket line in the late Seventies, or a photo of Harriet Harman and the sadly missed Jack Dromey, in matching duffle coats, doing the same.

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Can Starmer pull off his Jekyll and Hyde act? Here he is when he was questioned about his predecessor during the leadership contest: “I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, and who’s a friend as well as a colleague!” Fast forward a few years, and Corbyn has become the object of the now-obligatory “six minutes of hate”; doubtless we shall soon hear that he has been blocked from standing in his Islington constituency.

The Forde Report, commissioned under Starmer into allegations of bullying, racism and sexism during the Corbyn era, produced enough uncomfortable truths that the leader and his consiglieres want to see buried. For instance, after claims of antisemitism dogged the Labour Party, Starmer resolved to tackle the crisis. So, according to Jewish Voice for Labour, under Starmer, an entirely disproportionate number of Jewish members, some 59 in total, are currently suspended, have now resigned, been expelled or been auto-excluded. A few were “cleared” and others received a “reminder of conduct”. Most have been investigated for allegations of antisemitism, which often means that they have been critical of Israel. The party membership, as a whole, is under unprecedented surveillance.

Members seeking selection locally or nationally have always been vetted for the more obvious misdemeanours that could rebound on the party. But, as Michael Crick has observed, the process has taken a sinister turn, with a number of individuals being blocked from standing for seemingly minor infractions, such as wishing Nicola Sturgeon a swift recovery from a bout of ill-health, or for once liking a post from a proscribed organisation before it had actually become proscribed. This process of filtration has been remarkably successful. Crick recently observed that out of the more than 70 or so parliamentary selections so far, only one contender from the Left of the party has managed to get through.

Under Starmer, it is estimated that 137,000 fee-paying members have either left, been suspended or expelled. There may be more, since the party is slow to cancel direct debits and we have less of an idea of how many new members may have joined. Practically, with fewer members and unions issuing blank bank transfers, Labour is potentially being led down the Tory route of “dark money”, with all of the pitfalls. Look no further than the recent row involving Wes Streeting, Dan Jarvis and Yvette Cooper, who all denied they did anything wrong by accepting tens of thousands of pounds from a company, MPM Connect, which is part-owned by Peter Hearn, a Labour donor, but does not have any obvious line of business.Meanwhile, Starmer is insistent that all Front Benchers now contribute to fundraising efforts. He has also recently recalled the services of Blair’s former chief fundraiser, Lord Levy, who was the centre of a “cash-for-honours” investigation in 2006. What could possibly go wrong?

Starmer has wisely drawn from Gordon Brown’s work around further constitutional reforms, and he is coming under pressure from his MPs to offer a Green manifesto. But where are the meat and potatoes; the bold vision that was at least encapsulated in Wilson’s promise of the “white heat of the technological revolution”? There are still two years until a General Election, one that comes with boundary changes that do not work in Starmer’s favour, a Scotland that has stopped sending large numbers of Labour MPs to Westminster, and an economy that may be beginning to recover. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may be able to control the Labour Party, but that doesn’t mean they are certain to win an election.

But I’ve not seen anything in our new PM’s utterances or parliamentary career to date to suggest that he will respect this post-Brexit “realignment” in British politics. Not even a homeopathic echo of it.

It’s commonplace to mutter at this point about how this proves British democracy is a sham. This isn’t true; but it is true that if you expect policies to be implemented based on how the public votes at a general election, you’re looking at “democracy” backwards.

Election manifestos and associated political programmes take shape based on the mobilisation of political influence by competing interest groups. The willingness of politicians to take any given view into account in this process is less a principled stance, than a pragmatic reflection of how much real clout interest groups are perceived to have. If the median British political standpoint isn’t well represented in our national politics, this reflects a calculation across the board that leaders don’t need to pay much attention to what the masses want — because they no longer wield enough meaningful leverage to insist on it.

Whether or not this is conclusively true, enough leaders now act on this assumption that it forms the core of running political battles across the West. And all these battles turn on an increasingly open class war between two populations with radically conflicting worldviews and interests: the reality people, and the ideas people.

The structure of this conflict is easier to understand by comparison with an earlier one: the industrial-era battle for dominance of Britain, between aristocratic landowners and an emerging mercantile and industrial elite. This battle came to a head in 1815 with the Corn Laws, a punitive tariff on imported grain intended to shield British farmers from overseas competition.

This policy had obvious benefits for the aristocrats and gentry who owned much of the land, and was perhaps the last time the old agrarian ruling class was able blatantly to use the tax code to protect their own material interests. But they had a powerful and rising coalition ranged against them. The mercantile elite, whose wealth was bound up with trade beyond Britain’s borders, objected to tariffs that cramped their business style. And they were supported, for much more pragmatic reasons, by a swelling industrial working and lower-middle class, who couldn’t grow their own food and just wanted to be able to afford a loaf of bread.

I take this detour into British political history to illustrate three points. First, that contra pop-Marxism, contests for power aren’t always between social classes arranged hierarchically — crudely, oppressors and those they oppress. They can also represent competing interests within a class.

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Second, not having a vote didn’t stop the industrial poor making their views known. There was huge grassroots opposition to the Corn Laws, which fanned demands for an extended franchise, and prompted mass protests that were sometimes brutally suppressed.

But — and third — mass mobilisation doesn’t accomplish much without leadership. And the leaders of mass movements don’t always share the masses’ motivations, a fact that also has lessons for us today. Richard Cobden, the politician most central to repeal of the Corn Laws, was a textile manufacturer and trader. Understandably given this, he was in favour of trade and hostile to aristocratic protectionism. He wrote several pamphlets on British foreign policy, in which he argued against then-settled 19th-century consensus on multipolar “balance of power”, in favour of an early vision of the modern globalist vision of growth based on free international movement of goods, money, and people.

Cobden was a brilliant organiser, and his successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws serves to illustrate the way divergent elite and mass political interests can coincide in a single issue. The 1846 repeal signalled the decisive defeat of Britain’s Old Tory agrarian order. In its place, the new dominant order became an expansionist, mercantile Whig one, dedicated to Free Trade — the worldview, ironically, now most associated with the modern Tories.

Today, though, the main contest is no longer between the landed gentry and mercantile elite. The goalposts have moved again, and the battleground is now between those whose power and material interests are grounded in the material world, and those whose wealth comes from the world of ideas. The political analyst NS Lyons characterises this as a class and culture war between “Physicals” and “Virtuals”: two outlooks that broadly correspond to the distinction David Goodhart drew between Somewheres and Anywheres in the wake of Brexit.

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What’s key is that the moral outlook is downstream of concrete material interests. Physicals work in sectors such as farming, construction, manufacturing, haulage, mining, and so on: occupations inextricable from the material world. Virtuals, on the other hand, work at a layer of abstraction apart from the physical world: think finance, academia, education, media, tech, and so on.

And Virtuals dominate the elite. For as the West has de-industrialised, Western money and power have drained from Physical occupations toward Virtual ones such as finance and tech. And, as a consequence, Virtuals today hold a near-monopoly on institutional power. Westminster occupational data reflects this: barristers, teachers, solicitors, and journalists are well represented among MPs. Conversely, you can trace the waning power of the Physicals in the total number of MPs who were previously farmers, miners or manual workers. This total shrank by a factor of five between 1979 and 2015, from 142 to a scant 33.

This class-inflected contest between the virtual and the real economies is the core of the class and culture war now being fought across the West. It also helps to make sense of how apparently unrelated issues, such as trans rights and immigration, can become bitter battlefronts in the same war.

Trans rights make sense as a proxy for the Virtuals’ core moral claim: that ideas matter more than the material world. When we consider what a person is in legal terms, do we prioritise the material fact of their biological sex, or their inner, abstract idea of who they are? Understandably, the Virtuals prefer the answer that places their class of work, their worldview and by extension their political interests at the top of the moral pile.

High immigration, meanwhile, is a material positive to Virtuals: more people means more growth. This material upside is then moralised in terms of “openness”, “culture”, “freedom” and so on. For working-class Physicals, though, high immigration means stiffer competition for jobs. This, far more than racial animus, was the central driver of the working-class Brexit vote.

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The anti-Corn Law movement has further lessons for the Brexit battle between Virtuals and Physicals, in that it followed the Cobden pattern: it was a mass movement that succeeded with leadership from elites with their own reasons for pushing it. Two mutually exclusive Brexits were promised: an open and globalising one for those such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and an immigration-restrictionist one for the Red Wall. The impossibility of delivering both has paralysed the Tories ever since.

For what complicates this class war is that it’s not a simple contest between “elites” and physical-world proles. Overall, Physicals skew more working-class, and working-class Physical jobs are generally low-status and precarious. But farmers, tradesmen and oil executives can be relatively well-off while still sharing broad cultural sympathies with working-class Physicals. And yet the latter can’t always rely on Physical elites to defend their interests: on immigration restriction, for example, factory-owners and farmers will swap culture-war sides in a flash when they can’t get seasonal workers from overseas.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the Virtuals’ dominance really is as complete as it appears from their stranglehold on government and the media. At the last count, Virtuals remain materially dependent on the real economy: without farm workers, shop workers, bin men and drivers, the laptop class are as helpless and useless as a snail without its shell. This was visible in those groups for whom lockdown rules were most blithely waived: despite often-cramped living conditions, for example, even those seasonal agricultural workers coming to the UK from high-risk countries were exempted from the 14-day quarantine rule.

What happens if the Physicals start weaponising this dependence more methodically? As Lyons observes, the Vancouver truckers’ protest at the start of this year offers a glimmer of what it might look like when the simmering class conflict between Physicals and Virtuals erupts into open warfare. Arguably the Yellow Vest protests in France, and recent farmers’ protests in the Netherlands form part of the same picture. And with rising energy prices driven by US foreign policy in Ukraine pushing German manufacturers offshore or into shutdown, we may presently see more German Physicals in the dissident ranks.

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But mutinous Physicals may need to learn from the truckers: Trudeau eventually ended the protest by freezing protesters out of their own bank accounts. Even the most capable Physicals can’t easily get by in the modern world without access to Virtual finance and tech.

Another possibility is a more thoroughgoing push to turn what’s left of working-class Physicals into the “useless class“ some predict will emerge if AI and automation replace human-powered jobs. This would represent the final Virtual victory: for without even the option to withdraw their labour, it’s hard to see on what basis such a group could compel elites to consider their political interests. This condition of political weakness would be even more pronounced should UBI replace earned wages: few adolescents, however rebellious, will do more than pull faces at their parents if they’re afraid their pocket money will be stopped.

Whether or not this is the future we get, the likelihood is that we’re in for a period of class conflict on a scale not seen since the early days of trade unionism. If history is any guide, the eventual outcome will be some kind of settlement — but before we reach that point, we can expect a great deal more mobilisation by the Physicals as a class, and a great deal more moral denunciation of that class and its interests by their Virtual class enemies. And whatever the eventual settlement is, formal democracy won’t be the vehicle for bringing it about. It’ll be the rubber-stamp for an exercise of political leverage that forces Physical political interests back onto (or definitively off) the table.

To exercise such leverage, working-class Physicals will need to find allies among dissident segments of the elite, all of whom will (like Cobden) have their own motivations for the bargain. And if this seems an ugly compromise, the alternative is a political process that continues to elect Prime Ministers who ignore their interests. Simply because they can.

The only other person I see doing this is the local MP. I feel their pain, but showing face is an important part of our democracy. The best thing about our current electoral system is that it grounds our Members of Parliament in their local communities: one MP to, roughly, 60,000 voters. That’s why popular MPs do lots of vicar-like stuff. They need to be seen out in the community, attending local events — even rather boring ones.

It’s easier doing this as a vicar as our patches are smaller: there are 12,500 parishes in England compared to 543 constituencies. But the principle is similar. Just as the vicar seeks to connect the everyday and the sacred, so the MP links each region of the country back to the source of power in Westminster. Britain’s first-past-the-post system (FPTP) may not be the most democratically inclusive or politically efficient, but it connects the particular temper of everyday life to the larger perspective that is required in Parliament.

Proportional representation would sever this connection. Even the most local-friendly versions of PR involve considerably expanded constituencies and multiple MPs for one area. When parishes are combined into huge conglomerations, the vicar dies of exhaustion or retreats behind his computer screen. And MPs would face the same fate. To the parishioner or the constituent, authority begins to feel much more distant, more top-down than bottom-up. And levels of trust begin to decay. You may say that trust in politicians, and indeed in clergy, has long gone. And that’s partly true, but people do tend to trust their own MP more than they do politicians in general.

Yet PR would erode this unique bond between MPs and their constituents. Just as the role of the Church of England vicar is to be there for everyone, regardless of their denomination or faith, so too an MP is there for you, whether you voted for them or not. Why? Because there is only one of them. A constituency of multiple MPs would encourage constituents to gravitate towards the MP of their own political persuasion, thus introducing a political divisiveness all the way down to the local level.

As a communitarian, I have long hated PR. But how can we possibly avoid it? The sclerotic duopoly of two political parties created by FPTP has produced politicians and leaders of such mediocracy that many of us now have no one to vote for.

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A great many Brits lean Left on economics and Right on culture: a position not reflected by either political party. We want a fair redistribution of wealth, but we don’t want gender self-ID or woke culture wars. We are happy to pay more tax to help out those in need, but we don’t want our politicians presenting England as a country of racists or the Royal family as an unnecessary burden from a bygone age. And we are pleased that we left the European superstate project. Boris Johnson, for all his many personal failings, was the only recent politician to embody those values.

Yet Boris may have been an aberration, a blip in order of things. Because what FPTP does in practice is to offer politicians the sorting hat with two possible choices: Labour or Conservatives. Yes, they could decide to be Liberal or Green, but like Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, no one really cares about them. To get into power, you have to form a coalition with people whose views you may quite dislike. Not only that, but you will have to accept the discipline of the party structure, sometimes pressuring you to keep some views to yourself.

Politicians would still have to form coalitions under PR. But whereas FPTP encourages MPs to form coalitions before an election — by choosing one of two parties — crucially, PR creates its coalitions after elections, with lots of small parties jostling to form alliances so as to achieve the collective numbers to form a government. As a result, PR has no need of broad-tent political parties.

This is why the Labour Conference voting for PR, as they did recently, was a vote for their extinction. If we had an electoral system in which smaller parties could get a chance of power, the Left of Labour would split from the Right of Labour. Blairites, Blue Labour, and the Trots would all find their own distinctive voices. And similarly with the Tories. If we had PR, the “red wall” Tories and their country cousins would no longer need to remain in a forced marriage with all those strutting libertarians and City-types. The two big parties would fall apart. And good riddance, I say. In one stroke, I and millions of others would have someone they felt comfortable voting for.

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It feels more than slightly ironic that this communitarian is coming round to PR, which is highly toxic to local political communities, and to the MP’s ministry of presence. But it has been forced out of me. I believe voting to be the nearest thing to a sacred responsibility that you can have in a secular democracy. But when the next election comes round, I couldn’t vote for any of them. And while I could spoil my ballot paper, that would feed my inner cynic. Is it too much to ask for a political party that many of us could vote for without holding my nose? Only PR would give us all a longer list of credible options. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have outlasted their welcome. The way of getting rid of them would be to shake up the voting system.

Never watch how sausages are made, they say. It will put you off. PR would let you watch. After an election, we would see coalitions being formed, compromises being made, policies betrayed for power. That is how it works. We would need a strong stomach as PR can be a messy business. But anything has to be better than this.

Many of the fears of a “populist” or “Right-wing” drift appear to have been accelerated by a focus on identity politics, or what has become known as the “war on woke”. A piece in the Metro laments the missed opportunity for candidates to move away from the “shameless baiting” around “wedge issues” such as structural racism and trans rights. Suella Braverman said that the country needs to “get rid of all this woke rubbish”. Penny Mordaunt hit back at those who wish to “damage” her reputation by depicting her as “woke”. Even the frontrunner, Rishi Sunak, has taken a swipe at “clumsy, gender-neutral language”. According to the Metro, all of this represents “a notable swing to the Right”.

But is it really the case that “woke” politics are in any meaningful sense Left-wing? This movement’s cheerleaders are predominately middle class, and rarely seem to show any interest in the traditional leftist goal of redressing economic inequality. The overwhelming number of feminists who have been targeted for their gender-critical views in recent years have been staunchly on the Left. Yet issues such as free speech, and how the recognition of biological differences between men and women is necessary for the preservation of women’s rights, are now routinely dismissed as symptomatic of a “Right-wing culture war”.

This was particularly apparent to me at an event on Monday at the House of Lords in support of freedom of expression arranged by Riverside Advisory. I was the MC for a series of speeches which featured members of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and the SNP. Far from being a “Right-wing talking point”, the range of political affiliations represented on the bill demonstrated that free speech is, or at least should be, a non-partisan issue.

The first speaker I introduced to the platform was Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch. At one point, she directly addressed the common misapprehension that free speech is “a cover for bigoted middle-aged white men to spout politically incorrect nonsense”. When Badenoch pointed out that she was neither middle-aged, white, nor a man, a heckler shouted: “Are you sure?”

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Without missing a beat, Badenoch replied: “I’m sure. I am a woman and I know what a woman is.” This was greeted by cheers and applause, particularly from the strong contingent of Left-wing feminists who were present. The debates that have since raged online about the prospect of Badenoch as the next Tory leader have revealed that she has considerable support from traditional leftists by virtue of her stance on the culture wars. Can this really be described as “a notable swing to the right”?

The political designations of “Left” and “Right” date from the National Assembly established in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Members who felt that the power of the king ought to be restricted sat to the left of the assembly’s president, those who did not sat to the right. The historian Marcel Gauchet has outlined the subsequent “long drawn-out process that lasted more than three quarters of a century”, but by the beginning of the twentieth century the association of the “Right” with traditional values and the “Left” with progressive reform was firmly established.

The rise of the “woke” movement has destabilised these terms to the point of irrelevance. Many people whose socialist credentials could not be more well established have been dismissed as “Right-wing”, “far-Right” or “fascist” simply for insisting on the importance of evidence-led analysis and free speech. Queer theorist Judith Butler has claimed that the “anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our time”. Where there are no shared definitions of terms, discussion becomes impossible. Maybe that’s the whole point.

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The way in which culture warriors have taken control of our institutions — including, crucially, the civil service — has meant that their worldview will inform major policy decisions irrespective of whether a Labour or Conservative government is at the helm. We might be able to vote a particular party out of office, but we cannot do anything about the sundry quangos and publicly funded bodies who are in the grip of this ideology.

Take, for instance, the College of Policing, the body responsible for law enforcement training. In April 2021, the Home Secretary instructed the College of Policing to modify their guidance so that police no longer record “non-crime hate incidents”. In December 2021, the Court of Appeal ruled that the recording of non-crime hate incidents was unlawful. To this day, the College of Policing remains committed to this unlawful practice. With this public body seemingly so determined to ignore the Home Office and high courts, we can be certain that it has been ideologically captured.

The redrawing of the boundaries between Left and Right was escalated by the Brexit vote, another political matter that was co-opted by culture warriors. For many commentators the vote was reduced to a Manichean struggle of good versus evil, or racist versus not-racist. Few genuine socialists could have possibly countenanced our membership of a pro-corporate trading bloc with capitalism at the heart of its constitution, but to vote Leave was suddenly perceived as a vote for the “Right”. This made little sense, given that the Remain campaign was spearheaded by the Conservatives, and the most prominent politicians in Brussels at the time — Guy Verhofstadt, Donald Tusk, Jean-Paul Juncker, Michel Barnier — all hailed from centre-Right or neoliberal parties.

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The same binary thinking has been imposed onto all subsequent political disputes; even discussions about the efficacy of lockdowns during the pandemic became reduced to a question of whether one was on the “right” or “wrong” side of history. One’s position on gender self-identification, structural racism, free speech, or any of the other “culture war” topics, is now commonly deemed a marker of where one is situated on the Right/Left spectrum. This human tendency to reduce complex discussions to simple binaries is understandable, but it is a temptation to be resisted.

These circumstances have birthed some strange alliances. Many Left-wing feminists are now writing for Right-wing publications, and cross-party support for the principle of free speech is growing. That conflicts on these issues have arisen within both the Conservative Party and Labour should remind us that the culture wars cannot be understood as a battle between Left and Right. Whereas it was once possible to agree on how these terms were defined, such a consensus no longer exists. Perhaps we need to accept that the very concepts of “Left” and “Right” are now beyond the point of utility.

What was it about the final years of Blair’s premiership that ensured his political legacy? There’s the obvious point that when he became PM it was his first and only job in government and he had energy but no experience. By the time he left, he knew exactly how to get things done but was running out of road.

I was Blair’s Political Secretary between 2005 and 2007 and had a front row seat for the end of the “Blair Years”. They were rugged times. There were new opponents on the benches opposite with the election of David Cameron as Tory leader. And there were old enemies on manoeuvre on the Labour benches, as Brown’s attempts to dislodge Tony became increasingly obvious and frantic. Remember the rolling resignations of the Parliamentary Private Secretaries — Khalid Mahmood, Wayne David, Ian Lucas, Mark Tami, David Wright and Chris Mole? Probably not, but it was the “How many letters have been submitted?” moment of its day.

Eventually, Labour MPs were ground down by the relentless friendly-fire attacks and Blair stood down as PM in May 2007, a year earlier than he had planned. Yet he never became bitter. I remember a meeting in the Den, the PM’s room between the private office and the Cabinet Room, when a colleague exasperatedly said: “But Gordon just wants to be Prime Minister!” After a moment’s reflection, Tony replied: “It’s not an ignoble ambition.” Thoughtful and scrupulous.

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The Labour Party’s internal wrangling was an opportunity Cameron seized. He repeatedly found ways to create alliances with Labour rebels to oppose government policy — the core was the awkward squad which included Corbyn who voted with the Tories numerous times. But the number of rebels was growing. It is an iron law of politics that ministers who serve loyally when in the government suddenly find their consciences when they return to the backbench in a reshuffle. Where once they had demanded the whips push through their policies, they now found their personal and political integrity required them to question — and often oppose — government legislation.

By the third term, there had been many reshuffles and the number of former ministers outweighed our majority. In response to this, I ran a small group we called the “Non-embittered Former Ministers”. We also added Keith Hill as the Prime Minister’s PPS. A former union official, he added reach to our political networks among MPs, and every week allocated the precious hour after Prime Minister’s Questions when backbenchers got to meet with the PM to raise concerns, float policy ideas or introduce guests. On one memorable occasion, I brought Shakira in to meet the Prime Minister — she was in Westminster for a parliamentary event. Tony started to explain that he knew her music and admired the way it combined Colombian music traditions with modern American pop music. “Ah”, replied Shakira — silencing us all. “So you think I am some kind of allegory of globalisation?”

But it wasn’t all about party management. There was the pressure, too, of external inquiries. This was the first time the Metropolitan Police had ever investigated Number 10 — a complaint from an SNP backbencher that should have been dismissed immediately as party politics led instead to the “cash for honours” probe. In the absence of any evidence, the Met spent 18 months trying, and failing to find any. The PM’s behaviour was respectful: he let it be known that being interviewed under caution would be a resigning matter — a contrast with the attitude of the current Prime Minister. And he unreservedly backed the few of us, including myself, who were questioned by the police. His confidence that it would come to nothing was morale-boosting during a deeply stressful period.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the end, third terms should be critical for legacy. Margaret Thatcher’s third term, despite the disaster of the “poll tax”, embedded and made irreversible many of her changes. The task New Labour set itself was to leave most of the Tory reforms, but to rebalance some and to rebuild the public square which had been brutally neglected. So, mass picketing and car park show of hands strike ballots were left outlawed, but workers rights were extended, in particular with maternity rights and the statutory right to bank holidays on top of annual leave. The “right to buy” your council home was maintained, but two million social homes were renovated to Decent Homes standards. Choice in health and education was built on, and extended, while waiting lists were slashed — with a now nearly unimaginable guarantee of an 18-week wait for routine treatment.

In turn, most of Blair’s reforms became irreversible. The National Insurance increase to fund the NHS was kept, and has been mimicked by Boris Johnson’s government. Health performance has been hampered by persistent underfunding, the pandemic, and the ill-fated Lansley reforms which are now being abandoned — but the NHS was kept on the road by appointing former Blair adviser Sir Simon Stevens as Chief Executive of NHS England.

There were also significant moments. The G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2008 deciding to make poverty history by wiping out the debt of heavily indebted countries in the Global South. London winning the bid for the 2012 Olympics. And the tragedy of the 7/7 bombings which drew great compassion and leadership from Blair.

Of course, Blair’s leadership ended in resignation, and New Labour’s third term ended in defeat for Brown. Unfortunately, for a decade party members took the quixotic view that the only reason voters elected increasingly Right-wing Tory governments was that Labour was insufficiently Left-wing. And under Miliband and Corbyn the party moved further and further away from the centre and further and further towards destruction.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

Blair didn’t despair. He made the argument about how Labour could win again. And he has consistently continued to make critical policy interventions — such as driving the argument on vaccination rollout. This strategic patience has paid off. The true legacy of the 2005-2007 Blair government is finally becoming clear. Labour’s desire to win is back. Policy ideas are unashamedly Blairite. And Starmer’s mantra “Opportunity, Security, Respect” could come straight from a Tony Blair conference speech.

History will be the ultimate judge of Tony’s reputation. It will weigh the Iraq war against the Good Friday Agreement which ended the war in Northern Ireland. For Labour Party members and activists it has thankfully settled into the realisation that Labour’s electoral record in the last eleven elections is: Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Win, Win, Win, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose. And the only way to win is to build on Tony Blair’s record rather than spurn it.

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

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

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

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

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Twilight of the centrist dads

By Will Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The speech Starmer should have given

By Ian Martin

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

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

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

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

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The war on Martin Amis

By Will Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The man who destroyed Labour

By James Kirkup

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

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

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

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

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Does Sir Keir have the guts to rescue Labour?

By Paul Embery

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

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

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

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

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The speech Starmer should have given

By Ian Martin

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

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

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

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

Some will call this progress — in sanitation, diet, medicine — as if more is always better. But the cost of this “progress” is rarely factored in.

£12 billion every year is the latest pledge to fix health and social care, mostly for the elderly. But what are we doing with all these extra years?

It depends, of course. Some will work longer; some will have more time with their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Others will be warehoused in care homes, living out their twilight years amid the background smell of stale urine, bored ridged between monthly visits from their guilty children. Many are not like this, but a great deal of them still are. My mother has made us promise we will take her to Dignitas long before it comes to this — and that when we bring her ashes back from Switzerland it will be in a Harrods bag, not a Tesco one. This, apparently, is dignity in dying.

Social care has come a long way since it was conceived in alms houses provided by the church: through Victorian workhouses, state-funded provision in the twentieth century and, more recently, to profit-making private companies. As our population gets older, so the need for such services grows ever larger. It is commendable that the Government is seeking to address the growing cost of social care, albeit through a tax levy that falls disproportionately on the working poor and the young. But the one thing that we are not talking about — and our silence is becoming ruinously expensive — is what a good life, and indeed a good death, looks like.

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Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

To put it another way, without a sense of what human life is for, and what its basic natural or even theological rhythms might be, we fall back on the idea that more is always better. Without some sort of agreed understanding that human life exists within fundamental limits, society will inevitably find itself unsustainable.

The idea of growth, of always seeking more, is built into the very nature of capitalism, as it is within liberal progressivism. In a secular society, meaning tends to get replaced by the idea of more; or rather, more becomes the meaning.

It is not a coincidence that just as we are pouring billions into end-of-life care, the fantastically wealthy are seeking their own way of outwitting ageing and death. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now throwing his fortune at some comically ludicrous “eternal life” start-up that seeks to keep him alive forever. “Man plans, God laughs”, as the old Jewish proverb puts it. It’s not just that Bezos can’t succeed in this ridiculous vanity project, but that we shouldn’t want him too. Death, after all, gives life its purpose.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once asked why it was that the immortal Greek gods would often fall in love with mortal human beings; Calypso with Odysseus, for instance. Her insightful response was that those who can die are capable of things that immortals are not. They are, for example, capable of courage, of risking everything for others on the battlefield in a way that immortals cannot. Indeed, the very possibility of love itself is bound up with the ability to sacrifice oneself for another. A life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence — the unbearable lightness of being.

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Britain doesn't care about social care

By Ian Birrell

This means that there is no way of solving the social care crisis in purely economic terms. Because one cannot address a metaphysical question through economic policy. Indeed, the very basic question of what human life is for is one that politicians, still less economists, no longer feel they have any use for.

The first stage to recover a basic metaphysical scaffolding would be to reclaim something of that story in which death has some sort of wider significance, rather than being viewed as just some anticlimactic end. Because if having more — going on longer — is the meaning of life in a secular society, then death is inevitably and always some sort of failure. Whereas we would once have said of the dead that they have passed into glory, we now hear the medics apologise that “there was nothing that we could do”. Death was once — potentially, at least — an expression of some ultimate triumph. Now it is the bitter failure of our technology. And whatever we spend on it, no amount of money will overcome this gap.

Death, then, is the political issue we are not talking about. Even after the pandemic, when the daily death figures were broadcast on every news broadcast, we continue to say little about death other than making the uncritical assumption it is always to be avoided.

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Is the 'epidemic of loneliness' fake news?

By Tom Chivers

And so we are sleepwalking into a state of affairs in which the young will resent the elderly for the burden they place upon them. Of course, we should support the generous funding for social care. What we ought to be challenging is whether the medical technologies that are keeping us alive for ever longer complement our understanding of what human existence is for.

But I see little appetite for that. In a secular society, we have few intellectual or cultural resources to challenge the pervasiveness of more-ism. And to live deeper, more meaningful lives is not the same as living longer ones.

Suffice it to say, then, that Bercow’s brief re-emergence into public view this week hardly came as a surprise. It all started on Sunday, when he told the Observer that he had joined the Labour Party. The story made the newspaper’s front page, even though his transfer of allegiance was hardly a surprise. Personally, I had expected it to happen 14 years ago, in June 2007.

That was when the news broke that a Conservative MP had been so enamoured and enthused by the prospect of Gordon Brown’s move from Number 11 to Number 10 Downing Street that he had chosen to cross the floor of the House.

The minute I heard the news I assumed it must be the then MP for Buckingham, John Bercow — a man who had already adopted the most ingratiating manner imaginable whenever he spoke across the Commons floor from the government of Tony Blair. He oozed and schmoozed and exuded a pseudo-charm devoid of wit and without much discernible purpose.

On that occasion, however, the Conservative MP who crossed the floor was Quentin Davies. John Bercow had missed his chance. Or so it seemed.

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The politicians we didn't deserve

By Douglas Murray

Why would a former member of the Monday Club give it all up to join a beleaguered Labour Party? The most plausible reason is, as so often, a personal one.

In 2002 Bercow married a Labour Party activist called Sally, and it is clear from his memoirs that it was a transformative match. The unattractive, dwarfish Bercow could not believe his luck at bagging a tall, leggy blonde several times his height. He spent the ensuing period not just counting his luck but trying to make sure that he continued to dazzle her, principally by adapting his politics to fit hers: a strategy that turned out to be largely unsuccessful.

In any case, during his time as Speaker, Bercow’s political sympathies were clear. The famous side-eye that David Cameron frequently gave him was well-earned, as was the amused acceptance of his charms by successive Labour front-benchers who accepted the fealty and fawning of the man in the speaker’s chair with much the same good humour as an organ-grinder regarding his monkey.

But now the monkey in question has been caught in a lie. While giving an interview on Sunday to Sky News, Bercow presented his decision to join Labour as though it were solely a question of principle. “The real issue”, he insisted, “is who has the vision of a more equitable society, who thirsts to deliver social mobility, who wants to better the lot of people less fortunate? On that, Keir Starmer is vastly preferable to Boris Johnson.”

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It was classic Bercow, of course. Who honestly uses the word “thirsts” in relation to “social mobility”? The excellent Trevor Phillips, who was interviewing him, wasn’t convinced. Was this not all about something else entirely? Was his decision to switch to Labour simply a calculation to get around the Conservative Party’s clear refusal to put him in the House of Lords by throwing in his lot with Labour?

Bercow, however, was in high dudgeon at such a low motive being attributed to him.

“I’ve had absolutely no discussion whatsoever, either with Keir Starmer or any other member of the Labour leadership about that matter. There has been no barter, no trade, no deal whatsoever. And if I may very politely say so, and I do, the people who make what they think is that potent and coruscating criticism of me are operating according to their own rather low standards.”

Again, it was classic Bercow: grandiose, self-sanitising, pompous and untrue — as we were to discover not more than 24 hours later, when The Times published a letter which Bercow had written to Jeremy Corbyn while he was still Labour leader. It proved to be just one part of the former Speaker’s campaign to lobby Corbyn, having been preceded by a number of secret meetings with the Labour leader in the aftermath of the 2019 election.

It might have been possible for Bercow to present the Times emails as forgeries, were it not for their all-too-predictable style. For example, in his explanation for his suitability for the Upper House, Bercow boasted that he had held “no fewer than five shadow ministerial roles”. It was typical Bercow self-praise. All of these roles were performed in remarkably quick succession, during a tumultuous, talent-short period of Conservative opposition. And all were performed by Bercow without any distinction.

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The unspeakable life of John Bercow

By Douglas Murray

Then came the clincher — the absolute proof that this was not the creation of a Russian forgery operation or the like. Bercow, in his exhaustive account of his political career, went on to explain that not only had he once served as deputy leader of the Tory group on Lambeth council, but he is “a qualified lawn tennis coach”. Anyone who has read Unspeakable — and I appreciate that we are few — will immediately hear the clear ring of truth in this last boast.

Why should that preclude him from the House of Lords? It is true, of course, that the Upper Chamber contains some remarkably unimpressive figures. But only John Bercow, in the full flight of his seriousness, would imagine that what the Lords needs is an amateur tennis coach. No foreign agent could have inserted this detail. No critic of the former Speaker within the Conservative or Labour parties could have fabricated it. It is John Bercow through and through. A year later, he remains as unspeakable as ever.

It was a striking reversal. For many of its partisans, Brexit had been cast in terms of restoring freedoms — freedoms that had allegedly been lost to an overbearing European superstate, whose pettifogging bureaucrats had tied the nation up in red tape, and whose arrogant judges trampled over ancient liberties with new-fangled human rights. The winning slogan of the Vote Leave campaign — “Take back control” — spoke to this sense of political disempowerment and drift, and offered the tantalising prospect of granting people more sway over their own lives.

Yet within weeks of leaving the EU, Britain endured the most drastic restrictions on national freedoms seen in peacetime. How was it that the promise of greater freedoms was so quickly dashed? How was it that a democratic bid for greater popular power ended up so powerless? Could the cycle of lockdowns enacted since March 2020 snuff out the gains of Brexit?

Britain was, of course, far from being the only country to enter lockdown. For supporters of the EU, the global pandemic was a salutary reminder of the realities of global interdependence, puncturing the nationalistic conceit that a country could choose its own fate. Yet the cycle of lockdowns since March 2020, as well as the Government’s shambolic response to the pandemic, reveals more about the failures of British politics than it offers moral fables about global interdependence.

It wasn’t Remainer revanchists in the People’s Vote campaign and the Liberal Democrats who put the nation under house arrest, but a British government elected to enact Brexit. It was a Conservative government, widely castigated for its allegedly crude populism, that palmed off its authority on to a technocratic body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), to oversee lockdown. What this tells us is that the impulse to curb civil society and to rule through unelected institutions on the basis of technocratic authority is not an imported problem. The authority of Sage revealed that the EU was not a foreign imposition, but that it grew out of problems that were deeply embedded in the relations between British state and society.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Three national lockdowns later, it is easy to forget just how exceptional Brexit was. It represented the first secession from the EU, an organisation that had hitherto only ever expanded to absorb more states. It was the first major EU referendum that was neither ignored (as had happened with the French and Dutch referendums of 2005 and Greek referendum of 2015), nor put to another vote (as happened in Ireland in 2008). It was the first sustained democratic revolt against the new free trade blocs that were explicitly designed to make economic policy impervious to popular will. It was the only popular revolt that came in the wake of the great financial crash of 2008 that made any lasting impact.

All the great populist revolts between 2008 and 2020 have variously been defeated at the ballot box, surrendered to their opponents or battered themselves into oblivion: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Donald Trump in the US. Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral insurrection collapsed in less than two years — notably, after Corbyn conceded to the prospect of a second referendum. In France and Italy, the populist Right — Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini — have both retreated from talk of quitting the EU or abandoning the euro.

All this makes the fact of Britain’s successful secession from the EU the more remarkable. In Britain, Brexit was repeatedly vindicated at the ballot box over the course of the general election of 2017, the European parliamentary elections of 2019 and the general election of 2019. Yet by March 2020 Britain’s democratic exceptionalism appeared to have evaporated overnight.

Despite these putative democratic gains, the British government’s response to the pandemic clearly revealed a state that was unable to harness popular power or convert democratic legitimacy to effectively overcome the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Britain tumbled into the authoritarian pattern of lockdowns, the global precedent for which was set by the Chinese Communist Party: individual isolation, social distancing, rigid restrictions on public life and civil liberties.

Deeming itself as inessential as any other middle-class office job, parliament dissolved itself, even as it promulgated draconian legislation against its own citizens. Throughout the pandemic, the British state has consistently treated its citizens as a threat to each other, rather than as agents whose collective capacities could be mobilised against the virus.

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Is the EU about to crumble?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The immediate response of civil society early last year, which saw spontaneous neighbourhood and county networks springing up to organise services and food delivery to those who were isolating and vulnerable, indicated strong impulses to collective self-help and social solidarity. Yet the Government was unable to use such unifying impulses to mount a collective response to the pandemic, instead enacting restrictions on collective life more severe than those in wartime. The 600,000-strong NHS volunteer army that rapidly emerged in early 2020 petered out, as the state did not have the wherewithal to deploy it.

This ultimately revealed the incapacity of the Tory government and British state to convert popular will and social solidarity into enhanced state capacity to tackle the pandemic. This enhanced capacity could have been used not only to support the self-isolating and vulnerable with extra social services, but also to expand public health capacity — for instance, expanding support services, deploying extra cleaning staff in hospitals and expanding the administrative capacity of the NHS.

The more recent recruitment of vaccine volunteers this year provides an insight into what an effective mobilisation of the public may have looked like early on in the pandemic. But with furlough, lockdown and stay-at-home orders, national demobilisation and public passivity was the order of the day — and indeed, it turned out to be amenable to many of the middle classes.

Lockdown, then, was ultimately an artefact of a lack of state capacity. It was justified, after all, by the need to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed. This reflected the reality of an underfunded public health system and a state run on “lean” just-in-time principles, as if it were a supermarket serving customers rather than a public body serving its citizens. With the NHS having become dependent on sucking up medical professionals from abroad instead of expanding its training capacity, when the pandemic struck there were fewer medics that could be released from their training early to supplement front-line medical staff, while none could be absorbed. The British state was so market-efficient that it notoriously did not even have a surplus of functioning personal protective equipment.

Yet despite all this, state capacity is not a purely technical affair — to do with the number of public employees, their training, the efficiency of government procedures and institutions — but is also a question of legitimacy and authority. Indeed, without legitimacy and authority, public capacity is meaningless.

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By Giles Fraser

The EU is designed precisely to create this kind of hollowed-out state — not only as a result of ECJ rulings and its collective treaty commitments to neoliberalism and austerity, but more importantly because it is designed to make states impervious to popular will and democratic choice by embedding them in supranational institutions. The failures of the British state throughout the pandemic show that even as we have formally seceded from the EU, Britain remains to all intents and purposes a member-state.

That is to say, the British state remains not only authoritarian and brittle, it is also incapable of expanding state capacity by converting popular will into government action. The most important limits confronting the British state are not to be found in its borrowing capacity or fiscal rectitude, or its capacity to cut trade deals beyond Brussels, but in its relationship with its own citizens.

Five years since the Brexit referendum, and two years since the end of the transition period, Brexit remains in some fundamental ways, an unrealised vision — a promise of greater self-government, of national renewal, of popular autonomy. As the Government prolongs public restrictions and state technocrats pore over plans to normalise the bio-security state, the promise of taking back control seems as remote a prospect as ever.

Yet despite decades of atomisation, the early popular response to the pandemic — especially visible in the communal self-help networks — indicate that there is a deep impulse for social solidarity and collective empowerment. The only thing that’s lacking? Political vision.

Britain being a northwest European kingdom with a very different demographic and historical context to that of the US, the political effects of this were not what our local imitators of American fashions intended, a fact alluded to by the Labour frontbencher Khalid Mahmood when he deplored the loss of Hartlepool with the observation that “the loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world”. 

No wonder, then, that Sadiq Khan, like an arsonist complaining about the growing prevalence of fires in public life, pleaded after his unexpectedly slender victory in London’s mayoral race for an end to the culture war. By making history a political battleground in a fundamentally conservative country more obsessed with its past than any other nation in Western Europe, our America-aping intelligentsia have unwittingly handed the government a ready and easy source of endless political victories. 

Like other divided polities — think of Northern Ireland — we have entered the realm of symbolic politics, where historical memory looms large and where the state possesses a clear advantage. Observe how our newly-Gramscian Conservative government seems set on replacing museum staff to defend one narrative of the nation’s story from assault by another: this is more than an online  “culture war”. Instead, the British state, perceiving a threat to its legitimacy at a time of existential political disorder, is acting as any state would act: by culling challengers to its authority and reasserting the moral validity of its existence.

Yet underlying this war over historical memory, on both sides, is a simplistic understanding of what history actually is. On the one hand, the statue-topplers argue that they are uncovering the dark objective realities of Britain’s colonial or slave-trading past from within an obscuring shroud of national myth-making. On the other, the Government and its supporters assert that they are defending the truth of our island story from the nihilistic and destructive myth-making of race-obsessed radicals. 

Both are right, and both are wrong. All history has a mythic quality, as observed by Foucault in his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France when he noted that “we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of power… Like rituals, coronations, funerals, ceremonies and legendary stories, history is an operator of power, an intensifier of power.” What we are observing then, though still only dimly appreciated, is a battle over political power, in which Britain’s history is both the weapon and the field of contest.

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To understand this interpretation of the historian’s art — for art is what it is — we should turn to the work of the recently-deceased American historian Hayden White. In his 1973 work Metahistory, and later in the essays collected in the 1978 Tropics of Discourse, White took aim at the folk understanding of history as a simple record of events that happened in the past. Using his specialisation in medieval literature, White drew a contrast between the chronicle — a simple, chronological record of events more or less devoid of interpretation — with the historical narrative, encompassing history as we understand it, which is precisely how it sounds: a narrative, a literary construction which assembles an inherently moralising story or myth from the raw data of historical events, a process he termed emplotment.

As White observes: “The historian arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy of significance by assigning events different functions as story elements in such a way as to disclose the formal coherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible process with a discernible beginning, middle, and end.”

As a literary construct — a product of the personal aesthetic judgment and moral worldview of the subset of writers we term historians —and through the conscious or unconscious selection of raw events into an overarching narrative, “history” is  revealed as a literary genre analogous to fiction, which is not to say it is not “true.” As White suggests, historical narratives “succeed in endowing sets of past events with meanings,” as the tropes of fiction unconsciously shape the historian’s art when he sets down to write. The historical narratives he produces follow the form of these fictional narratives — indeed, they depend on them to work.

How does this apply, in practice, to our national culture war? White, deconstructing 19th century historiographies of the French Revolution, distinguishes between a politically “radical” understanding of history as analogous to the Romance, and a more or less conservative one drawing on the tropes of Tragedy. In the first understanding, which characterises the “woke” narrative of Britain’s urgent need to transcend a dark and morally disfigured past, history-as-Romance is “the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology. It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.”

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Is cosmopolitanism our destiny?

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In the conservative, tragic reading of history, by contrast, the historian is concerned with “the resignations of men to the conditions under which they must labor in the world… man cannot change them but must work within them. They set the limits on what may be aspired to and what may be legitimately aimed at” in an imperfect world of frail and fallible human beings.

In the former worldview, the past is a world of torment and oppression which must be erased in the construction of an imminent Utopia; in the latter, the past, though perhaps morally imperfect, simply reflects the bounds of human nature. Man is what he is, and the construction of Utopias is as dangerous as it is fruitless: all we can do is build upon our shared inheritance from the past. We can see this dynamic play out in the United States with the New York Times’s construction of the mythic “1619” narrative centred on America’s essential, founding sin of slavery in opposition to the previously dominant “1776” narrative of America as a promised land of liberty and moral renewal. Neither is true, exactly, just as neither is false: they are merely opposing narratives constructed from the same raw data in pursuit of opposing political projects, differing in emphasis, narrative style and moral worldview. All history is, in this reading, a moral fable about the present.

Viewed in this way, there is a liberating quality to this understanding of history. White claims in The Historical Text as Literary Artefact (1976) that “if historians were to recognise the fic­tive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda” but instead “would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognise as such but honour as the “correct” perception of “the way things really are.” Through this self-awareness, “we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive, element in our own discourse” just as “we are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree; we seldom perceive that element in our own prose.” Thus armed with self-awareness, he argues, the contentious work of History can proceed with a greater, more productive detachment. 

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Let’s consider this point further: “we are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree.” When we apply this insight, as conservatives of one kind or another, to such masterpieces of the modern historian’s craft as “52 Times Britain Was A Bellend,” or to the crop of Twitter academics who pronounce to the world with the now-customary appeal to authority of “Hi, Historian Here!” that actually St George was Turkish or that one or other government pronouncement is just like fascism in the 1930s or that actually Anglo-Saxon England was a multiracial utopia, we are freed from the need to engage these fantasies as historical truths but instead as political statements, new narratives or myths constructed as part of a political project centred on the present. 

It is not worthwhile to state that these claims are not true in a meaningful sense, because they are not meant to be. These are not “truthful” claims about what Britain was but modest literary fictions, political demands about what Britain should be now or in the future citing a mythicised past as a claim to authority.

The purest essence of this trend is the backwards projection of the tropes of late-stage liberalism through all time and space; though it sees itself as an urgent defence against nationalism , through constructing a mythicised past in pursuit of a present day, contested political project, such a worldview is nationalism’s child, not its negation. Indeed, anyone who has studied the starring role of history in the construction of nationalist projects will recognise the ironic parallels: like the classic nationalism of Europe’s 19th century, the anti-national cosmopolitanism of the modern Historian Here is a construct of liberal journalists, academics and schoolteachers, aiming to transcend what they see as a restrictive and oppressive near-past in pursuit of a glorious future, itself prefigured and justified by an idealised distant past. 

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For any modern European, ultimately, there is therefore no escaping the tropes of nationalism and the nation-state, even if the aim is to overthrow them: they shape our worldview just as the world of throne and altar shaped that of the medieval mind. Aiming to surpass nationalism, the 21st century cosmopolitan liberal, like the FBPE activist turned-EU nationalist, finds himself reproducing its tropes, entirely unconsciously: whether furiously hunting through ancient bones to find continuity with modern migrant populations like the Ahnenerbe hunting for Germanic ancestors in the steppes of Eastern Europe, or constructing modern political mythologies on the slender records of the dim and distant past.

Returning to the culture war over statues, the adoption of America’s new racialised mythic narrative came at a politically infelicitous time for its partisans, as Labour is now discovering. The British state is threatened by rival peripheral nationalisms, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it is not hard to discern the first glimmerings of a British nationalism in a manner that has never yet quite existed. Sturdily independent of foreign rule then distracted by imperial concerns, Britain never experienced the nationalist wave that swept the rest of our home continent in the 19th century — even the high jingoism of the Victorian era spent itself on preventing Russia’s conquest of the Ottoman Empire, rather than focusing on domestic rivals. 

In the nascent British nationalism being forged as a reaction to both separatism and the still-contested relationship with the European Union, many parallels with the classic nationalisms of 19th century Europe can be discerned. Instead of dismissing devolution as merely a failed constitutional experiment, we can perceive an almost irredentist quality, aiming to reunite a unitary people divided by artificial borders. The nationalisms of the periphery have thus birthed a new nationalism of the centre, and the consequent construction of a single British people defined against internal and external rivals in a way that we have never yet quite experienced.

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If this is the case, then as in other nations experiencing a nationalist wave we can expect symbolism and history to become the central matter of politics, in a way that hands great advantage to our current Conservative government. The new politicisation of history is just a taste of what is coming our way. The British state, in Tory hands, will find itself engaged in a war of historical narratives to ensure its own survival. All the affective tools of nationalism and nationhood — the symbolic politics that is the very stuff of nationalism — will be employed to this purpose. The funeral of Prince Philip, a sombre festival of Britishness, was merely an early glimpse of this symbolic realm: we can expect the Queen’s funeral, whenever it comes, and the coronation that follows it, to be profoundly political and fundamentally nationalist spectacles aimed at shoring up the state and the self-identification with it of the British people. 

In this, ironically, we can argue that the government will be more postmodernist than the alleged postmodernist deconstructors of British history: where our soi-disant radicals see themselves as uncovering an objective reality from within the myths of British nationhood, the government will have the need and capacity to construct new-old national myths with all the resources of the state behind it. As others have noted, a postmodernist worldview, whether adopted cynically, or playfully, could be productive territory for a Right-wing political project. We are all postmodernists now, the government as much as its critics: each has the power and will to consciously create mythic narratives for nakedly political ends, yet only one controls the levers of the central state.

Dismissing this dynamic as mere “flag-shagging” is a dangerous trap for Labour — nationalism remains the most powerful political force in Europe, as it has been since the dawn of modernity — still powerful enough, indeed, to break up our country from around us. Once historical narratives, and the emotional bonds of nationhood and solidarity they conjure up, become the central ground of politics, the realm of myth and symbol conquers all. If Labour wants to win power again, it will need to think up better stories for the country to gather around.

1. The Red Wall hasn’t finished falling down

At the last election the Conservatives won fifty seats from Labour across Wales, the Midlands and the North of England. These make up the famous “Red Wall” — or at least that section of it that turned blue.

For what’s less appreciated is just how much of it is still standing. We’re not talking the odd fragment here and there — but a significant proportion of Labour’s remaining MPs.

Up until last week, Hartlepool was number 44 on a list of likely Tory targets for the next general election (i.e. those requiring the smallest swings to turn blue). So, in theory, 43 seats are more winnable than Hartlepool was. Of those, 36 are held by Labour, 28 of them in the North and Midlands.

For what it’s worth, number 43 on the list is Rotherham. In last week’s local elections, the Tories went from zero seats on Rotherham Borough Council to twenty in a single bound. If that’s anything to go by, the fall of the Red Wall is only half-way through.

2. Millennials might not ride to the rescue

Labour’s first priority shouldn’t be to win back the Red Wall, but to save what’s left of it. And yet unbelievably they’re being distracted from this most basic of tasks by the prospect of gains along the “Blue Wall”: Conservative-held seats in the South where younger, university-educated voters are trending Left.

As Ed West wrote on UnHerd this week, long-term generational shifts should certainly worry the Tories. But Labour ought to worry too. The party’s extreme dependence on younger voters is not a strength, but a vulnerability. Not only do young people have a habit of growing up and changing their minds, there’s a lot the Conservatives could do to win them over.

3. The Green Party 

Even if the Tories persist in abandoning the young to the Left, there’s no guarantee that the Left means Labour.

Last week, the Green Party demonstrated that it is capable of taking seats off all the main parties. Its biggest breakthrough though came in Bristol, where the Greens took an astonishing thirteen seats from Labour. Sheffield produced another astonishing result, in which the Greens gained five seats and Labour lost its majority.

In a general election, this could mean the Greens breaking out of their Brighton bastion to give Caroline Lucas some company in Parliament. A more dangerous scenario is one in which English Greens follow the lead of their German counterparts to become the middle-class Left-wing party”. This would deny Labour the new “Blue Wall” voters they need to offset their losses elsewhere. A Green surge could prove fatal.

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4. Non-white voters can’t be taken for granted

Labour still dominates the ethnic minority vote. It’s a key reason why the party keeps on piling up massive majorities in the most urban constituencies — especially in London.

But no one likes to be taken for granted; Starmer can’t assume that this will continue.

It is, for instance, going to be increasingly hard to sustain the image of the Tories as an exclusively white party. The Cabinet already includes Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Alok Sharma and Kwasi Kwarteng. By the next election they could be joined by Sajid Javid, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch (who would be the first black female MP to achieve Cabinet rank).

An ethnically-diverse Cabinet is not in itself a reason why non-white voters should vote Conservative. But it does explode an “argument” for why they should not — i.e. the insinuation that the Tories are irredeemably racist.

5. The boundary review

After years of delay, the much-delayed review of constituency boundaries should be finished by July 2023 — after which, in the subsequent general election, the Conservatives will almost certainly gain seats, while Labour and the other opposition parties lose them.

It’s hard to tell how many until we get the new map — but it’s not unreasonable to suppose a Tory gain of ten seats and an opposition loss of about the same number.

That, of course, would increase the government’s notional majority from eighty to a hundred. Good luck overturning that in one go.

6. A post-Covid boost

Getting the boundary review done by summer 2023 would allow an autumn election in the same year.

And it is highly likely the Government will want to go to the country during a Goldilocks period for the British economy: early enough for the post-Covid boom still to be felt, but late enough to get strategic investments in Red Wall constituencies underway. The Tories, in effect, will only look stronger. Boris Johnson would love to spend the campaign posing in a hard hat, new infrastructure rising up behind him.

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7. A Labour Party civil war

And yet Labour’s real problem might be in the foreground.

The first shots in Labour’s impending civil war were fired over the weekend, as the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle descended into chaos.

But worse could be to come. Compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s first year as leader — in which most of the shadow Cabinet resigned and there was a second leadership contest — Starmer has had an easy ride.

Now, do you suppose that’s because the Corbynites have meekly accepted their fate — or because they’ve been waiting for their moment?

I suspect Starmer is about to find out.

8. A Labour stalemate

There is an alternative to civil war, but it’s worse.

The Corbynites never makes their move; the Starmerites never hit back. So nothing is resolved, nothing decided. Nothing of interest happens at all — or is even said for fear of provoking the other side.

There was talk of appointing Yvette Cooper and Hillary Benn to the shadow cabinet — not unbearably exciting, I’ll grant you — but Starmer couldn’t even make that happen. If nothing else, an Opposition should capture the imagination, but this lot just gather dust.

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9. The threat of Scottish independence

Another nightmare scenario for the Labour Party lurks north of the border: a second referendum on Scottish independence.

The 2014 referendum was a catastrophe for Labour — wiping out its most reliable stronghold. A second referendum would cause further damage. It’s not that there are many Scottish Labour MPs left to lose (it has just one). Rather the danger this time is of an English backlash, which is overwhelmingly likely to benefit the Conservatives. And there’s always the possibility that the Nats will win. Without Scotland’s MPs, the Tories could strengthen their grip on Westminster.

10. Don’t bank on a two-party system

Britain’s two-party system has been in place for so long, we’ve come to see it as a feature of our constitution. But it isn’t.

Just because we’re accustomed to alternating spells of centre-left and centre-right government it doesn’t mean that things have to be that way. In other democracies, one party can hold power, barely interrupted, for decades upon end. Consider Sweden, for instance, or Japan. Britain too could end with a permanent party of government — and it won’t be Labour.

The idea that “the world doesn’t owe you a living” is a Right-wing sentiment that the Left has always resisted. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.

But here’s a more colourful choice. Exactly forty years ago, Westminster’s specialists in failure were engulfed in what remains the most poisonous, shambolic, vitriolic and downright entertaining contest in my lifetime: the race for the Labour deputy leadership between Denis Healey and Tony Benn. Or, as the Daily Express called it, “the political showdown of the century”.

You read that right, by the way. This was merely the contest for the deputy leadership — though as Angela Rayner would be the first to point out, the deputy leadership sometimes matters more than you’d think. Yet as political battles go, it was an epic: the Marathon of the British left, the Stalingrad of the sociologists, the Gaugamela of the Guardian readers.

Incredibly, the Battle of Benn-Healey lasted for almost seven months, from April to October 1981. It had it all: “screaming mobs”, an “orgy of intolerance”, behaviour that “would not have been out of place at a Nuremberg rally” and a personality cult that would have Stalin turning “in his grave with envy”. This is all from a single article on the contest, by Labour’s own Roy Hattersley.

Another star of the future, Neil Kinnock, made a more dramatic cameo appearance, having a physical fight with a Benn supporter in the toilets in Blackpool’s Grand Hotel. As the future Labour leader put it: “I beat the shit out of him … there was blood and vomit all over the place.” His party was a kinder, gentler place in those days.

Let’s rewind a bit. Having lost office to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Labour had sought solace in its traditional hobby of tearing itself apart. Its last Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, the only man to have held all four great offices of state, had vacated the stage with accusations of treachery ringing in his ears. In a desperate attempt to protect themselves from their own activists, his fellow MPs elected the aged pamphleteer Michael Foot as his replacement.

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Even some of Foot’s own supporters conceded that he was a ridiculous person to submit to the voters as a possible Prime Minister. By the spring of 1981, with the party lurching to the Left, some 28 Labour MPs had walked out to found the new Social Democratic Party. And it was then, with his unerring instinct for controversy, that Tony Benn, former Viscount Stansgate, self-appointed tribune of the plebs, polite, articulate and charming, a “cool, calculated, deliberate, with-malice-aforethought liar” (Mirror) with the “mind of a ranter and the eyes of a fanatic” (Express), decided to challenge Denis Healey for the deputy leadership.

A veteran of the Allied landings at Anzio, the magnificently browed Healey had been Callaghan’s Chancellor. Firmly on the Right of the party, he had steered Britain through the disaster of a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. He stood for moderate social democracy, for the Atlantic alliance, for traditional politics and (in his admirers’ minds) for sanity. The voters liked him. Many of the activists utterly loathed him. To Benn, he was a Tory.

Benn’s appeal was very different. Having launched his challenge at the unconventional hour of 3.30 in the morning, he toured the land in an atmosphere of religious fervour. Never before had a candidate for the leadership, let alone the deputy leadership, taken his cause directly to the people. Yet for week after week, Benn addressed three, sometimes four meetings a day.

Thames Television filmed him in Wolverhampton, a preacher surrounded by his worshippers, his voice trembling with passion, his eyes blazing with enthusiasm. “What we are seeing is the rebirth of hope,” he told a rally on the steps of St Peter’s Church. “It is a march for human dignity, and against those forces which still try to persuade us that men and women should be crucified on a cross of gold in the name of monetarism and profit and loss.” Afterwards, as he sang along with the Spinners, a radical folk group, his eyes shone with tears.

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Perhaps never in Labour’s history had there yawned a greater gulf between ideals and reality. In the country, the inner cities were ablaze, unemployment was soaring and industry was in a state of collapse. Yet for Benn and his supporters, including the young Jeremy Corbyn, the Promised Land seemed tantalising close. A manifesto published by his former special advisers laid out his plans. Britain, they explained, had become a “subject nation, unaware of its own subjection” to the forces of global capital. So the Bennites’ first step would be to “impose emergency controls on the City and banking system”, followed by massive nationalisations, the abolition of private schools and private healthcare, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the EEC, the abolition of the House of Lords, the “social ownership of concentrations of wealth” and a statutory maximum wage set at £28,000 a year. Heaven on earth!

Neither side made the slightest concession to party unity. Healey kicked off by denouncing his rival’s “sour and intolerant sectarianism”, accusing the Bennites of telling “barefaced lies”, consorting with “Communists and Trotskyists” and pandering to the IRA. Meanwhile, Bennite activists trailed Healey wherever he went, interrupting his speeches with howls of “IMF!” and “Tory!” The former Chancellor was even barracked by a group called the Posadists, who believed that the revolution would be brought to Earth by Communist aliens in flying saucers. And all the time, the Conservative press revelled in the chaos. “Mr Benn – Is He Mad Or A Killer?” wondered the Sun. But the Guardian’s star columnist Jill Tweedie thought Benn was being grossly mistreated. “No one has been so misrepresented,” she insisted, “since Robert Mugabe.”

With Labour’s unerring instinct for suicidal spectacle, the climax came at the autumn’s party conference in Blackpool. As was usual in the early 1980s, the MPs were corralled like defendants at a show trial, surrounded by jeering activists. As the chief teller stepped to the microphone, somebody handed Benn a note telling him he had won. In fact the result could hardly have been closer. “Tony Benn … forty-nine point five seven four!” said the teller. ‘Denis Healey… fifty point four two six!” The camera cut to Benn, scribbling intently, his face caught between a smirk and a grimace. It was, he told the press afterwards, “an enormous victory for us, because we have won the argument”.

Ever since, most neutral observers have agreed that Labour had had a lucky escape. Had Benn won, he would probably have moved to take the leadership from Foot, triggering an even bloodier bout of factional infighting. In that case, there would undoubtedly have been more losses to the SDP, with MPs, councillors, party members and probably some trade unions defecting en masse. And had Benn been leader in time for the 1983 election, then Labour would almost certainly have come third in the popular vote, behind the SDP-Liberal Alliance.

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But perhaps there’s another way of looking at that story. By provoking a much greater and more enduring split, a Benn victory would have ensured a clear, unarguable divide between utopian socialists and pragmatic social democrats, their unhappy marriage brought to a richly deserved end. The SDP would have been left stronger, more plausible, a Centre-Left party of government. Today Sir Keir Starmer would be safe in the embrace of his fellow pragmatists, untroubled by stubborn working-class women from the north of England. Glancing along the SDP front bench, he might share a friendly nod with his party leader, a chaotic, mop-haired fellow who won the Oxford Union presidency as an SDP supporter, and never dreamed of abandoning his youthful faith. You know the man I mean.

By contrast, the Labour holdouts would have been left to luxuriate in the delights of socialist purity. Since they would never have had a hope of wielding power, there would be no risk of betrayal, no danger of dirtying their hands with the compromises of government. While the SDP went from strength to strength, Benn could have stayed as Labour leader for the next twenty years, preaching to an ever smaller and more exclusive flock. When the time came, he could have yielded the pulpit to his chief disciple, a true believer, a man whose faith burned as brightly as his own. And even now, untroubled by traitors, coups and centrist dads, Jeremy Corbyn might still be leading the Labour Party, with Angela Rayner as his loyal deputy…

Oh well. We can but dream.

1. Mobutu Sese Seko, African dictator, who embezzled at least $4 billion while leading one of the poorest countries on the planet?
2. Héshēn, the most corrupt official in Chinese imperial history, who amassed a vast fortune including 20 solid gold bedsteads and 600 concubines?
3. Benedict IX, who stands out among dodgy medieval popes as the only one who sold his position to his successor?
4. Boris Johnson, who tried to get some private donors to pay for improvements to a public building, before giving up on that idea and paying for the work himself?

Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson appears to be the exception. Clearly, sleaze ain’t what it used to be. Even by boring British standards, the current “scandal” — if that’s what you can call it — is underwhelming. There’s no comparison to, say, David Lloyd George who flogged-off peerages to the highest bidder or John Stonehouse who faked his own death.

And yet over the last week, we’ve had day-after-day of screaming front-page headlines — depicting Downing Street as a latter-day court of Caligula.

It’s absurd. Everyone knows it’s absurd. And yet “we” — by which I mean those in the media — pretend that this nonsense matters.

Take the allegation that the PM remarked that he’d rather see “bodies pile high” than take the country into another lockdown. I don’t care whether he said it or not. I do care if our leaders can’t use intemperate language or gallows humour to let off steam in private.

What next? Perhaps we could force our politicians to wear body-cams and microphones at all times in case they do or say something offensive. What was that, Prime Minister? An inappropriate smile? A muttered expletive? Will you apologise to the British people and resign immediately?

What is genuinely offensive is that while the media are engaged in fevered speculation as to what Boris Johnson did or didn’t say, actual bodies are piling up — in India. If you haven’t done so already, I’d urge you to read Tom Chivers’s sobering article on the issue. It’s not just the scale of tragedy that stands out, but the fact that the West could be helping with its supply of desperately needed vaccines.

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Britain — with its close ties to India and its influence on vaccine policy — could be playing a leading role in mobilising a global effort. But with Covid spiralling out of control in the world’s second most populous country, we’ve been arguing about interior decor instead. This twisted sense of priorities is the real scandal, but as it involves the journalistic establishment as well as the political one, don’t expect the mainstream media to complain.

Indeed, far from heralding the fall of the House of Boris, the story behind the non-stories of last week is in fact a reassertion of control. When the Covid pandemic washed over our shores last year, it disrupted the established order of Westminster politics. As the full gravity of situation became unignorable, things that had been seen as important — including things that actually were important, like Brexit — were suddenly overshadowed. That meant that the people who dealt in the normal currency of Westminster politics were overshadowed too. They could only look on helplessly from the wings as the likes of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van-Tam took centre stage.

In newsrooms, science and medical reporters had their stories promoted to the front page. Indeed, just about anyone with a basic grasp of statistics found themselves in demand — and a lot more relevant than the previously dominant Westminster gossipmongers.

Of course, the latter took every opportunity to claw their way back into the limelight. A prime example was last summer’s press conference with Dominic Cummings in the Downing Street garden. One after another, the big names of British political journalism puffed themselves up to express their moral indignation. But in doing so they only exposed their own powerlessness — Cummings lived to fight another day.

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More serious was what followed, which was a free pass for actual government policy. Decisions on which ministers should have found themselves under serious pressure — such as the reckless encouragement of international travel — were more celebrated than scrutinised. The trouble we were brewing for ourselves later in the year went largely unanticipated.

Luckily, the vaccine cavalry was on its way to rescue us. But don’t forget that last autumn, the media were more interested in attacking Kate Bingham for who she’s married to and who she went to school with, than understanding her vital work with the Vaccine Taskforce. Had politics-as-usual been in full force, the media witch-hunt may well have forced her out. Fortunately, the grown-ups were in charge and she was able to finish her job.

The irony is that it’s the success of the Vaccine Taskforce that’s allowing politics-as-usual to reassert itself. Half the population has been vaccinated, Covid deaths are heading down to zero and lockdown is lifting.

In celebrating with a festival of gossip our political journalists are signalling that nature has healed and they are back in charge of the news agenda. Indeed, no titbit from the last 12 months is too trivial not rake-up and present again to the public; for example, the alleged animosity between Dominic Cummings and, er, Dilyn — the Prime Minister’s canine companion.

The mystery is why our leaders are so keen to feed the beast, by which I don’t mean the dog. Even if they didn’t have events of world-historical importance to concentrate on, like India, ministers have enough to worry about at home. For instance, it’s just over a week to the Scottish Parliament elections, on which the fate of the Union hangs. There’s also the Welsh Senedd elections and a double set of local elections. And let’s not forget the crucial Hartlepool by-election — which could cement Tory control of the North or provide the first sign of a Labour comeback.

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It therefore seems an extraordinary time for Downing Street to start a briefing war with Dominic Cummings.

But then one has remember that No 10 isn’t just the victim of the Westminster gossip machine, but an active participant. From the Prime Minister downwards, they’re all devotees of a political culture which is all about mastery of the unimportant.

In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera explores whether it is better to live one’s life “heavily” — that is to deeply care about the situations one finds oneself living in and the people we share them with; or to live life “lightly” — without being weighed-down by any great burden of responsibility for anyone or anything.

Through the characters, he ultimately comes down on the side of heaviness — and, as such, he is writing against the philosophy of Friederich Nietzsche. It may seem strange to associate Nietzsche with lightness or levity, but that is the ultimate meaning of his ideal of the Übermensch. It isn’t actually any concept of racial superiority that makes the Nietzsche’s “super-man” über, but the fact that he rises above the things that weigh down ordinary people — especially Christian notions of morality and the distinction between right and wrong.

In its own shallow kind of way, there’s something distinctly Nietzchean about the British culture of politics. It too refuses to be weighed down. It is ruled by super-persons who consider themselves above the details of governance and are much more interested in fleeting moods and shifting narratives then anything concrete.

Covid, however, made politics heavy again. Suddenly it became impossible to prevail through rhetorical means alone. The politicians who tried, such as Donald Trump or Ursula von der Leyen, came badly unstuck. For the first time in years, politics fell into the hands of people who really know and care about things that actually matter.

In this country we now have a choice. It is whether to stay grounded in the real or to return full control to the PR spivs. I’ve got a horrible feeling that it going to be the latter – and that really is unbearable.

British politics is turning upside down. Conservative support is growing in the North and among working class voters, while Labour has made progress in parts of the South and among the middle class voters.

Unluckily for Sir Keir, the Labour gains aren’t enough to offset the Tory advance. The electoral map isn’t inverting completely. It’s getting bluer at the top, but, like a disappointed baboon, it’s not much redder at the bottom.

Except that from a ministerial desk in Whitehall, things might not seem that way. With younger, London-based graduates leaning evermore to the Left, then, for Tory ministers, enemy-held territory starts right outside the office door.

The Conservatives maybe the “natural party of government”, but things have been tense with the civil service ever since Margaret Thatcher proclaimed her intention to “roll back the frontiers of the state”.

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Though the Tories have been busy of late rolling those frontiers forward again, this hasn’t made the relationship with civil servants any easier. In fact, the relationship is acquiring paranoid undertones. Only last weekend, a story appeared in the Mail on Sunday alleging the existence of a Labour spy ring somewhere in Whitehall. That’s almost certainly nonsense, but one can see why ministers might be feeling a little jumpy.

In any workplace, it helps if you feel that you and your colleagues are on the same side. But in Whitehall, that’s rather in doubt. Certainly, the politicians are outnumbered. There are about a hundred ministers, but hundreds of thousands of civil servants.

Of course, the civil servants that matter most to ministerial life are only a small fraction of the overall number. Most immediately there are those who sit in the minister’s Private Office. This is a misleading name, because there’s nothing private about it. Apart from the occasional special advisor or speechwriter, a minister has very little control over the staff who literally surround him, or her. As soon as he walks out of his physical office, there they are waiting for him — people appointed by someone else to provide an all-enveloping interface with the outside world.

That “someone else”, by the way, is the department’s Permanent Secretary — whose own office and staff are never very far away.

These are the most politically-sensitive parts of the civil service and they take extreme care to be politically neutral — and to be seen as such. Nevertheless, civil servants are people too and people have opinions. So how many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing?

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Well, judging from my own experience of working in two government departments, I would say approximately all of them. Not that you need any special insight here. You only have to walk around a ministerial Private Office to get the picture. The staff are young — most of them in their twenties and thirties. They’re all university educated — largely in the humanities and social sciences — and thus have been wokishly catechised. To purchase this dubious privilege, they’ve had to take out hefty student loans, which they’re now paying back out of their modest salaries. Of their remaining money, most of it is paid to some landlord to rent a room in an overpriced London suburb. So, yes, of course they’re Lefties.

If the hyperactive fools who run Downing Street weren’t so concerned with backroom politics and conspiracy theories, then they might want do something about a system that churns out a hostile graduate workforce from which the civil service is recruited. But why engage in serious systemic reform when you can be briefing out cock-and-bull stories to the tabloid press?

Going to war with the civil service as it is now would be a terrible mistake for the Government. Whether or not Whitehall harbours hardcore Lefties leaking secrets to Labour is unimportant, because they’re not representative of the civil service as whole. Even among London-based public sector professionals there is more than one kind of Left-winger — and it’s important to distinguish between them.

It has become fashionable for pollsters to divide the country not just by party preference (which can change), but also by ‘political tribe’ which reflects underlying values. For instance, research conducted for More in Common identifies seven political tribes — from “Progressive Activists” to “Backbone Conservatives”.

It’s tempting to place our younger civil servants in the “Progressive Activist” category — which is the most Leftwing of the seven tribes. This grouping is notorious for its disproportionately gobby presence on social media. However, our civil servants — especially those working in Private Offices — are anything but outspoken in their opinions. If activism is your thing, then the civil service, (which is more into passivism) couldn’t be a worse career choice.

If there is a political tribe that our civil servants naturally belong to, it’s a group called the “Civic Pragmatists”. This tribe is also Left-leaning, but unlike the “Progressive Activists” they’re far from confrontational. More in Common describes them as “a group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics… they are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.”

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The civil service might not always attract the most adventurous of souls, but many of its recruits are looking for more than a regular pay check — they also want to do something meaningful and public spirited with their lives.

From a Conservative viewpoint, the real danger is not that these people are subversives. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Far from wanting to smash the system, they’re all too inclined to perpetuate well-meaning, but stagnant, public sector orthodoxies. As such, they become absorbed into the Whitehall ‘blobs’ that stand in the way of meaningful reform.

Is there anything that a reforming Conservative government can do about this? One way is for ministers and their special advisors to challenge the system, Cummings-style. But while I’m all for a spot of creative confrontation, true change comes from persistence of effort. And as long as ministers and their advisors are moved every few years (or months) that will be cut short. And don’t forget that any civil servants that fully get behind a particular reform effort will get moved too — and thus reabsorbed into the blob.

There is a way forward, however, which is to restructure bits of government around the delivery of strategic missions. This would allow the most entrepreneurial and idealistic civil servants to be recruited with the promise that their dedication to a reforming project will be properly recognised and rewarded over the long-term. Given the shining example of the vaccine development and procurement programme, there’s never been a better to promote a mission-led government.

Of course, that approach would require Conservative politicians to accept that the state can be a solution as well as a problem. Hopefully, that’s not too Leftwing an idea for them to swallow.

Last year, for instance, we had the diaries of Sasha Swire. She was the first member of the Cameron circle — her husband being former MP and Cameron chum Hugo Swire — to spill its secrets. The serial rights for her diaries were bought by the Sunday Times, and inevitably the newspaper was eager to make comparisons with leading diarists of the past. Indeed, the paper’s publicity shot for the first serial — printed on the cover of its magazine — showed Swire sitting in bed, surrounded by the day’s newspapers, pen in hand, glasses and diary at the ready, with a volume of Alan Clark’s memoirs on the bedside table.

Yet the comparison harmed more than it helped; it merely made the thinness of the material on offer look  thinner still. Swire’s revelations changed nothing and illuminated nothing. They showed the Cameron circle to be exactly what we thought they were: fairly entitled, noticeably cliquey and slightly lazy. Apart from a throw-away sexual reference that Cameron once made to Sasha Swire, all that was on offer was the startling revelation that Conservative party politics is replete with jostling, resentment and failure. Swire distinguished herself only in being the first of her tribe to betray the pack-leader.

Now, less than a year on, we have another contender for “great diarist of the decade”: Sir Alan Duncan. In a similar format to Swire’s, Duncan’s new book was bought for serialisation by the Daily Mail, which grandly described Duncan’s efforts as “the most explosive political diaries ever”. Inevitably, they also ran with “Alan Clark, eat your heart out”.

Poor Alan Clark. If anything, Duncan’s efforts are even more tedious and less revelatory than Sasha Swire’s. He “reveals”, for instance, that his old Oxford contemporary Theresa May was not a very good people-person; that the special advisors around her had rather too much influence and power. He also “reveals” that he has a great dislike for Boris Johnson, describing him as a “buffoon” and as a “selfish, ill-disciplined, shambolic, shameless clot”. Yes, it was quite the scoop.

Perhaps the situation would have been different had the shots come from someone who had hitherto displayed the discipline and restraint of a Trappist monk. But Duncan has never been quiet about his dislike of the Prime Minister: just two years ago, he could be found in every newspaper criticising Johnson for his “fly by the seats of his pants, haphazard” style. To be fair to Duncan, back then he could also be found telling the BBC that he felt no personal animosity towards Johnson, and indeed “wanted him to succeed”.

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But as his diaries make clear, Duncan never wanted Johnson — or, for that matter, any of his colleagues — to “succeed”. Indeed, it is hard to find a single politician who Duncan admires: Priti Patel is a “witch”, Andrea Leadsom “despicable”, Andrea Jenkyns “ghastly”, Steve Baker “useless” and so on.

But tedious as they are, his witless insults shed some valuable light on why diaries such as Duncan’s often fail. For in order for a diary to be great, it must first give the reader a window on to a world we would otherwise never have seen. Second, the diarist must be able to write with some degree of self-analysis or self-knowledge. Alan Clark, for instance, was extremely aware of his flaws: as a womaniser, a snob and an otherwise often unlikeable figure.

Duncan, like Swire before him, illuminates nothing, while his vanity makes self-reflection impossible. For example, in his book he is dismissive of those who he believes supported Brexit for opportunistic reasons — without any reference to his own opportunism. There is, for instance, no mention of reports that, at an early stage in the EU referendum, Duncan met with the heads of Vote Leave to discuss taking a leading role in the campaign. When it became clear that Vote Leave might have more senior politicians than Duncan to call upon, he went to the other side. What can be said of such behaviour? Is it principled or opportunistic? Duncan — unlike Clark — is unwilling to say.

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It is the same whenever Duncan seeks to find explanations for jobs he wanted but was not offered. During the 2016 reshuffle, he hoped to not only get the junior portfolio at the Foreign Office, which he was given, but also the job of Minister for the Middle East. His explanation? That the Conservative Friends of Israel went ”ballistic”; that people didn’t want him because “I believe in the rights of Palestinians and it’s quite clear that they don’t. They just want to belittle and subjugate the Palestinians.”

What Duncan does not seem to understand is that it is precisely for statements like that one that he was so unfit for the role he so desired. Put to one side the fact that he made his money in oil deals in the Middle East before entering politics. Or that his analysis of the landscape was even more unsubtle and unnuanced that his diaries portray them to be.

The main reason Duncan could never have been made Minister for the Middle East is that he had a history of sounding-off in unusually partisan terms against a country which is a major ally of the United Kingdom. It is because he spent years saying things that were undiplomatic that Duncan was never made the UK’s top diplomat. Not a surprise, really.

Somehow, the more we learn of the generation of politicians that has just left us, the less you want to know. At one point in his diaries, dated May 2019, Duncan confides that he has just had breakfast with David Cameron: “He is so glad not to be in the middle of everything that is going on at the moment.”

They are just as we thought: shallow, vainglorious, entitled and unremarkable. If they are glad not to be in the middle of “everything that is going on at the moment”, suffice it to say that the feeling is very much mutual.

Instead, the man gazing out is Brian Rose.

Rose, 49, would certainly make an unusual boss at City Hall. He is, after all, a former Wall Street stockbroker who has spent the past year hosting Covid-19 conspiracy grifters on his YouTube channel and website. He is also Britain’s first post-truth political candidate.

In Rose’s self-created fantasy world, his campaign is proving a roaring success: he is running in second place to be Mayor, he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history” and his raft of glossy films calling out Mayor Khan have racked up millions of views.

Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us, this version of Brian Rose doesn’t really exist. Why? Because all his metrics of success have been systematically distorted — and in the one that really matters, the polling for London mayor, he doesn’t even register, not even breaking 1%.

So how has Rose managed to craft such a fabricated narrative of success? The answer, I suspect, can be traced back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when San Diego-born Rose first made a name for himself after hosting the conspiracy theorist David Icke — most famous for claiming that world is controlled by a secret lizard Illuminati — on his show “London Real”.

In the frantic early days of the pandemic, the interview hit a nerve and went viral. Unchallenged by Rose, Icke spun a grand narrative, that the “Covid pandemic” was fake, was really caused by 5G and  was a cover for a murderous global cult who were determined to create a fascist state. He said that 5G was designed to cause a mass cull, and that if humanity didn’t “get off its knees” then “human life as we know it is over”.

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In an environment where 5G masts were already being destroyed, and engineers threatened, YouTube took the video down. All of which allowed Rose, never one to miss an opportunity, to turn himself into a free speech martyr; a victim of Big Tech censorship. Whether or not he knew it at the time, his Mayoral campaign had just begun.

In the following days, Rose went into overdrive, claiming that he had been censored by Big Tech and that he was determined to fight back. He launched a crowdfunder for what he called a “Digital Freedom Platform” to host another interview with Icke. It would, he said, be “of the people, by the people and for the people”. More importantly, it would be fully independent of London Real.

What he didn’t say, however, was that it would also be fully owned by Longstem Ltd, the company that owns London Real and has one shareholder: a Mr Brian Rose.

Still, in the early days of the pandemic the crowdfunder hit a nerve among those frustrated with Big Tech’s heavy-handed attempts at censorship. Rose hit the initial $100,000 target in less than a day — so, over the course of a few days, he added new features to the crowdfunding campaign to justify increasing the target, including unspecified “blockchain technology” for $200,000, and a promise to take YouTube and other tech companies to court for another $200,000. In the end, the crowdfunder maxed out at over a million dollars.

But it was unclear from the start what the point of the platform was, or even whether it was necessary. Several tech commentators have noted that he could have used any number of free video services, such as Bitchute, to host the videos, if YouTube took them down. Needless to say there have been no court cases brought against the big tech platforms — though Mr Rose’s spokesman assures us that they “plan to proceed” — or any introduction of “blockchain technology”. Instead, he seems to have dedicated all his energies to his Digital Freedom Platform, and hosted a slew of interviews with other controversial conspiracy figures, from Infowars‘s Alex Jones to anti-vaccine activists Judy Mikovits and Robert Kennedy Jr.

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In fact, at the time, the only tangible development was the sacking of nearly all of London Real’s video production staff, and the hiring of political advisors for his mayoral bid. Today, the homepage for the “Digital Freedom Platform” takes you through to a campaign site of “Brian For Mayor”. When I pointed this out to Rose’s campaign, his spokesman said that the Digital Freedom Platform “is in the process of being set up as an entirely separate commercial entity”. He also emphasised that none of the money raised through the “Digital Freedom Platform” fundraiser has been used to fund this mayoral bid.

After raising $1m, Rose was flying high, but then he managed to push his luck just a little too far. Shortly after the crowdfunder was completed, he announced that he needed to raise running costs for the platform to $250,000 per month. Within hours, the penny dropped for his supporters; the comment threads under his video turned into a bear-pit. Overnight, he became an online pariah, and finally got the media attention he craved — but not the headline he wanted: “The YouTuber Accused of Using Coronavirus to Scam His Followers”.

And yet in many ways, Rose’s fall from grace was a long time coming. Before he set up his Digital Freedom Platform, the main source of income for London Real was their expensive online courses. Indeed, at one point these courses were the business’s main source of income; eight-week courses titled “Business Accelerator” or “Podcast Yourself” were, for example, on offer for $3,000, while those who wanted to join his exclusive “Inner Circle” – for personal mentoring – could do so by coughing up $15,000.

Predictably, many of Rose’s “customers” felt they had been scammed: the website Scamguard has 28 scathing reviews of the courses, and a Google search for reviews shows up multiple unhappy customers. A Facebook group set up to advise unhappy customers on how to get their money back has nearly 300 members. In fact, many of those who signed up for London Real’s courses managed to get their money back from credit card companies, after they were able to prove that the courses were such poor quality that they were covered under the credit card company’s guarantee against mis-selling.

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The $15,000 “Inner Circle” fared even worse. A few months ago, a letter signed by nearly every single person from the “Inner Circle” was sent to Rose, asking for their money back and complaining about the lack of value from the course. One of the signatories told me: “We had no mentorship whatsoever, it was a joke, we would have three minutes with him every 15 days and he would just talk about himself. The whole course rebelled against him.” When they eventually complained, the member said, Rose lectured them about how lucky they were to speak to him, as “people queue just to shake my hand”.

“Like many businesses, we receive occasional complaints,” Rose’s spokesman admitted. But, he said, “the reality is that this is from a handful of people amongst the thousands of satisfied graduates of our academy”.

It’s a bold claim in the face of such criticism, yet such self-confidence informs much of Rose’s myth-making today. From the start of Rose’s mayoral bid, he has claimed to be the “second ranked candidate” in the mayoral race, because he was second favourite at the bookmakers. At one point, before any polling data was collected to burst Rose’s bubble, he was rated at only 3-1 to beat Sadiq Khan.

How did he achieve this? Well, a number of political pundits have questioned whether Rose may have bet heavily on himself to distort the odds. In a flattering interview with the Times last month, he confirmed that he has bet on himself. His spokesman told me: “Mr Rose has staked a small amount on himself in the mayoral race, which wouldn’t be enough to influence even a single bookmaker’s odd”. As it stands, he is still around 20-1 at many bookmakers, ahead of the Conservative Candidate Shaun Bailey.

One suspects, however, that those odds remain extremely generous. On the face of it, if you visit the London Real YouTube page, it looks like Rose’s recent films, including one criticising Sadiq Khan, are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Yet many of these videos show the tell tale signs of being paid posts, and the vast majority of his films released in the last few weeks are getting around two or three thousand views, a massive drop off from the heights of his conspiracy content during the pandemic.

As for his claim that he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history”, this also doesn’t appear to tally with reality. The non-profit group “Reform Political Advertising” identified this as one of multiple “false statements of fact, or blatant misrepresentations” in his advertising, in a letter they sent to his campaign.

Typically undeterred, Rose has since tried to repeat the trick of the Digital Freedom Platform, and generate controversy by claiming to be victimised by powerful forces. For months, he has been one of the only candidates to be campaigning heavily in person under lockdown, releasing stylised videos of him without a mask and shaking hands and mingling with assorted Londoners.

When the inevitable happened and he was stopped and fined by police while campaigning in February, he attempted once again to turn himself into a martyr, releasing a video claiming that he was being targeted for political reasons. He was given an on-the-spot fine, and tried hard to spin up some notoriety firstly claiming falsely to have been arrested, and then also falsely that he now had a criminal record as a result of the fine.

When I asked Rose’s campaign about this, his spokesman said: “Mr Rose was referring to the fact that he would ultimately be arrested if he refused to comply with the terms of the FPN he received. As he has chosen not to comply with these terms, he anticipates that the next phase of the legal process will commence in due course.”

That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, faced with the increased scrutiny that comes with any political campaign, his fantasy world could soon be about to come crumbling down. Only a couple of days ago, for example. Dorian Yates, a regular London Real guest, pulled out of an interview and released a statement claiming that Rose had refused to allow him to question on-air what had happened to the money donated to the Digital Freedom Platform.

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Rose is yet to respond to Yates’s claim, instead preferring to release films of him shadow-boxing the camera. But in truth, it is hard to see where he goes from here. The pivot from his glossy interviews via his Digital Freedom Platform to his mayoral bid has alienated his online fanbase, while more and more of his course “customers” are starting to speak out. He now has Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to calling him out and picking apart his claims.

Indeed, once London’s voters deliver their verdict, it is hard to see where Brian goes next. After all, the actual votes counted come May 6th are a somewhat purer metric of popularity. And so far London seems immune to Brian’s reality distortion field.

Starmer, in his defence, inherited a sinking ship from Jeremy Corbyn. He was handed the lowest number of seats since 1935, a bitterly divided party and a Labour brand that even today remains thoroughly discredited among a large swathe of the country. Corbyn did not cause all of these problems but he certainly entrenched them.

Labour’s fracture with the working class, its loss of credibility on crunch issues such as the economy and immigration and its growing dependency on social liberals who congregate in areas where the party no longer needs votes were all decades in the making. This is why any recovery — if such a recovery is even possible — will be generational rather than cyclical.

Starmer made a good start, or at least appeared to. Over the past year, Labour picked off low-hanging fruit, winning back voters who were repelled by Corbyn. In the polls, Labour’s average support jumped from below 29% to 35%. At the last election, Labour trailed the Conservatives by 12 points; today, they trail by 8.

How much of this improvement is due to Starmer remains unclear. While his supporters point to his strong leadership ratings relative to Corbyn, the fact remains that even today Starmer’s “net satisfaction” score still lags behind Boris Johnson — while 33% of voters are satisfied with him, 42% are not. Leaders only ever have a short period to make an impression. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Starmer, a year after becoming leader, has now blown his.

Ask someone on the street to describe Starmer and they’ll probably say he opposed Brexit, is a lawyer, took the knee for Black Lives Matter and is better than Jeremy Corbyn but still doesn’t represent “people like them”. This might explain why, when the country is asked who would make “best Prime Minister”, Johnson still leads on 37% while his nearest rival is not the leader of the opposition but ‘Not Sure’. Starmer trails in third, ten points adrift from the man who has been in power for a year and is criticised on a daily basis.

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There are, of course, many who argue that Covid-19 dealt Starmer an unlucky hand.  But it is during moments of crisis, when the glare of public attention is strongest, that leaders are made. Indeed, it won’t be lost on Starmer’s team that it is precisely at the same time as the entire country has been sat at home, watching the news and paying attention to politics, that Starmer’s ratings have fallen not risen. To put it simply, the more people have seen, the less impressed they have been.

Starmerites might respond that his ratings are better than Mr Corbyn’s. But that is like saying Michael Howard’s ratings were better than Iain Duncan Smith’s. In the end, neither saw power. And it appears that the British people can sense that, too. More than half of them told YouGov last week that they simply do not see Keir Starmer as a prime minister in waiting.

Even if you put the question of leadership aside, there remains little evidence that Labour is dealing with the deep-rooted structural problems that arguably make it impossible for the party to win the next election. To do so would require a swing close to what Tony Blair and New Labour achieved in 1997 – with a leader who is nowhere near as popular as Blair was and a party that is nowhere near as popular as it needs to be outside of London and the university towns.

As the 2019 election and today’s polls underline, amid the “realignment” of British politics Labour is stacking votes where it does not need them while failing to win votes where it desperately needs them. Labour will probably cheer Sadiq Khan’s easy victory in London next month, while struggling to hold its historic blue-collar fiefdom of Hartlepool. It is cruising in its stronghold of London with a 20-point lead, but across the rest of the south it is 25 points behind. No party can win power with these numbers.

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This reflects how Britain’s new political geography, the first-past-the-post system and earlier Labour leaders have made life harder than it ought to be for Starmer. Over the past two decades, the Left essentially walked into the casino of British politics and put all of its chips behind social liberals whose support is concentrated in liberal enclaves rather than spread across the country. Much of that was entrenched during Corbyn’s tenure and by the dismal reaction to Brexit, and now Starmer is paying the price. Ask the working class today who should lead Britain and Boris Johnson holds a 19-point lead. Starmer might win a few more seats around London, but he should remember that there are still many more Red Wall seats that could fall. The assault on the Red Wall might just be starting.

There is a broader point to be had, too. At the heart of recent political commentary has rested a fundamentally flawed assumption: that once Brexit was over and done with life would return to the traditional “Left versus Right” fault line that governed politics during the twentieth century. We would get back to debating the economic issues that play to Labour’s strengths and that would clear the path for the party to repair its relationship with workers and return to power.

But I was never convinced. For a start, this narrative completely ignores the extent to which the Conservatives have also leaned towards the Left, variously promising to “level-up” the most regionally imbalanced nation in the industrialised world while moving institutions, civil servants and banks north.

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It also underplays the extent to which culture, rather than economics, has come to dominate national life — as reflected in our intensifying debates over cancel culture, freedom of speech, the Royal Family and racism in British society. Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson.

But as Ronald Reagan reminded Jimmy Carter, nobody wants to be told over and over again what is wrong with their country and its people, especially when much of it is not true. Nobody wants to hear about the malaise. They want to be inspired and led to the sunlit uplands. They want their leaders to believe in the country as much as they do. Yet as much research over the past year has shown, it is precisely on these questions about culture, identity, race and history where Labour MPs and activists are completely detached from the rest of Britain.

Put all of this together and it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see how Starmer charts a path to No 10. While he might have steadied the ship, too many gaping holes remain. Labour’s broken bond with the working class, its perceived lack of economic competency, the cultural isolation of its MPs from the average voter and an increasingly radical “woke” Left that is cheered on in seats that the party already holds, but loathed in those that Labour actually needs to win — these are all major obstacles that Starmer has yet to tackle.

And unless he does, then he might find himself going down in the history books as the Labour Party’s Michael Howard  — the man who brought “stability” but ultimately failed to win power.

There is still a faded Friends of the Earth “Nuclear Power— No Thanks” logo painted on a property near my home, a slogan that exemplified this sentiment. I also struggled to share their concern with genetically modified crops, particularly if they could help feed impoverished people on our planet.

Now climate change has pushed Green issues firmly back up the political agenda. Yet a new poll has revealed a strange quirk: some people inspired by scientific evidence to fight against climate change do not seem to trust Covid-19 vaccines created by other scientists to save society in a pandemic.

This curio comes from a new Oxford University survey that found a sharp rise in the number of Britons saying they are “very likely” to be vaccinated, with about nine in ten willing to have the jab. There are, however, still some pockets of concern, driven by age, ethnicity, income — and political affiliation. It is hardly surprising there was most hesitancy among supporters of the antediluvian anti-lockdown Reform Party founded by Nigel Farage. But the study also detected significant scepticism among voters backing the Green Party, who are at least 14% less likely to accept the jab than people supporting the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats or Scottish National Party.

Such scepticism is another depressing indication of the breakdown in trust between citizens and the institutions that shape lives. And this matters since a successful vaccination policy — and escape from this dystopian nightmare — relies on mass inoculation to minimise the potential host bodies for the wretched virus to infect. So why would nearly one in four people identifying with Green politics be so mistrustful — and what does this mean for the environmental lobby?

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The WHO's Covid shame

By Ian Birrell

Perhaps the findings merely prove that there is some truth to that hoary old stereotype of hippy environmentalists, besotted with their healing crystals and hooked on the absurdity of homeopathy. Such folk clearly still lurk in the undergrowth of the Green movement. These are the sort of people fixated by “natural” remedies, forgetting that Mother Nature can be such a deadly force; bear in mind that measles was the biggest killer of children under five in Africa until the arrival of vaccinations. One Green MP in New Zealand even advocated use of homeopathic medicines in the 2014 West African ebola epidemic.

In Britain, the Green Party has long been dogged by anti-science views. Its solitary MP Caroline Lucas has admitted using homeopathy and once signed a parliamentary motion in support of such treatments, while Natalie Bennett, her successor as leader, insisted the bogus medicines had a place in the NHS. Meanwhile, its 2019 election manifesto argued rightly that the science is clear on climate change, yet dismissed nuclear power as a “distraction” from renewable energies. It also demanded a moratorium on production and import of GM foods. So while misguidedly saying Britain should ramp up aid spending under a “moral imperative” to “alleviate suffering”, they ignored how science ensures rising global populations have fed themselves through advances in farming.

Crucially, Green voters are more likely to be young — another group showing greater hesitancy over Covid injections since the virus is more lethal to older people — and sceptical of a capitalist system they see as destroying the planet.

Ben Ansell, the professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford who led the study, told me he found that Greens responded in a similar style to other opposition party voters in their verdicts on government performance, rollout of vaccines and in deference to scientists (unlike Farage’s fan club, who are suspicious of experts). But they had less faith in government scientific advisers and were more wary of the regulatory system. “This may be down to mistrust of Big Pharma rather than scientists in general,” he said.

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The toxic British worship of the NHS

By Ian Birrell

It is all too easy for lack of trust — in the authorities, in capitalism, in experts — to tip over into scepticism over vaccines. Jill Stein, the US Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2016, sparked worry over her ambivalent vaccine stance after saying people had “real questions” over side-effects. Michèle Rivasi, deputy leader of the French Greens and a former Greenpeace chief, attracted controversy after issuing an invitation to Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor struck off for his discredited paper linking the MMR jab to autism. She has called also for an end to the “quasi-religious” cult of vaccination.

During the pandemic, there have been concerns in Australia over anti-vaxxers infecting the Greens after data found an overlap between low immunisation rates and high levels of party support. “There certainly are people who hold concerning views about vaccination,” said Sarah Hanson-Young, a senator for the party. “To those people I say we are a party of science, we are a party of evidence, and we are a party of making sure the community is looked after. The public health response needs to be underscored by science.”

She is right. One leading British activist argued to me there is a generational divide between younger supporters — who have strong faith in science since it has informed their deep-held views on importance of climate issues — and the remaining vestiges of an old guard who were alarmed by issues such as GM crops and nuclear power. Yet both sides seem to coalesce around antipathy to capitalism, evidenced by their shock troops of Extinction Rebellion, despite its crucial importance in the climate change battle.

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Turning off the lights won't save the planet

By Tom Chivers

Behind these issues of scepticism over science and capitalism lies a profound question for the party, one which I first came across in my post-graduate study days. My journalism thesis pondered if Green politics might take off in Britain, which felt prescient when the Green Party surged to 15% vote share in the 1989 European elections. Yet my conclusion was negative. First, I thought the party unlikely to thrive in our two-party system, since mainstream rivals would simply shift positions if Green issues became embedded in the electorate. Second, behind the media-friendly face of Sir Jonathon Porritt, the Green Party’s best-known figure at the time, I saw too many hardliners and obsessives to permit the sort of compromises needed to gain or even influence power.

Sure enough, the impressive surge soon turned out to be a blip as the party slid back in polls. It still struggles with this internal conflict: is it serious about changing the world or content to remain a fringe force, stuffed with too many cranks, conspiracy theorists and loopy ideas to be taken very seriously? Only last week, one of the party’s two peers called for a curfew on men after 6pm in response to Sarah Everard’s death. Baroness Jenny Jones told the Lords that this “will make women much safer, and discrimination of all kinds would be lessened”. Perhaps she may be right. But her draconian solution is not likely to be an election-winning proposal with at least half the electorate, let alone underline their credentials as serious political players amid the soul-searching over women’s safety.

Ultimately this is a party divided between “watermelons” (green skins but red in the middle) and the more pragmatic “mangoes” (green exteriors but yellow, like Liberal Democrats, in the middle) — as seen so disastrously in the splits when it won its first big local authority in Brighton. This has long been the problem for Green politics, even in Europe where it has made more advances by capturing major cities and participating in governments. Charismatic German leaders claim to have reshaped politics by transcending the left-right divide. But Winnifred Kretschmann, branded the world’s most powerful green politician after running Baden-Württemberg for a decade, had to see off fresh challenge at the weekend from a new party founded by activists who deem him too cosy with big business.

It might feel a long way from an Oxford study on vaccination scepticism to ructions in the politics of a German powerhouse state, but they are linked by a common thread — the difficulty of reconciling people with conflicting outlooks who are united only by their concern for the environment. Climate change has become the third most important issue in this country after health and the economy as Brexit fades in importance, yet the Green Party remains a largely irrelevant force in Britain. Yes, its leading lights have stood firmly in favour of vaccination. But the level of hesitancy in their ranks shows the pressing need for a sharp injection of reality if they really want to shape our nation’s future.

This makes the goal of complete virus elimination — Zero Covid — look unrealistic, at least in the short term. But unfortunately for the Prime Minister, who is expected to announce Britain’s “roadmap” out of lockdown on Monday, it by no means answers the question of which route he should take.

When it took scientists less than a year from Covid’s outbreak to create a working vaccine, and not just one but several, relief was twofold. In one sense, the prospect of an end to both the disease’s merciless death toll and the atomised grimness of human life brought general euphoria to the darkness of November. But for politicians and others tasked with steering society between the Scylla of social destruction and the Charybdis of Covid itself, there was a different relief.

Without a workable vaccine, they faced the impossible task of extricating society from a cycle of lockdowns, knowing that doing so would probably mean a rise in deaths that could make the earlier stringent measures seem futile. With vaccines, though, normal life could return without sacrificing tens or hundreds of thousands more lives.

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By Freddie Sayers

But, as Number Ten is now discovering, the introduction of vaccines creates an entirely new set of dilemmas for governments across the developed world. For if it is possible, even in theory, to bring the infection rate so low that “test, trace, isolate” is a practical way to control the disease on its own, the current lockdown is probably the last chance to do that. Yet doing so would mean continuing the current stringent measures for months, long after the most vulnerable have been vaccinated; there are even rumours that the Government wants to maintain the current lockdown until cases (not hospitalisations) fall below one thousand a day — less than a tenth of the current figure.

But the first, and subsequent, lockdowns were justified as measures to keep deaths and serious cases at a level that wouldn’t overwhelm health services. If vaccinating the most vulnerable parts of the population breaks the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths — bringing the impact of Covid down to the level of a seasonal illness like flu — does it matter if infections remain as common as its cousin, the common cold, which infects the average adult two or three times per year?

This is the new dilemma facing policymakers and, though science can and must inform it, it is at heart a political question. Even government scientists are starting to express frustration about the UK government’s apparent unwillingness to grasp that nettle. As Professor Dame Angela McLean, Chief Scientific Advisor to the MoD and a member of SAGE, told a Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday: “It’s one of the things we have cried out for again and again. Could somebody in a position of political power tell us: what is an acceptable level of infections?”

She was answering a question about whether, as Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has suggested, we will have to live with Covid as we do with flu and other infectious diseases. And she agreed that “other infectious diseases that we put up with are probably a reasonable starting point”. But this in itself still doesn’t solve the political question, because, as Professor McLean pointed out, bad flu winters can still be remarkably deadly. It still comes down to a matter of judgement.

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The risk of eternal lockdown

By Adam Wagner

In recent UK history, the worst years for flu deaths were 1976 and 1999, when more than 60,000 people in England and Wales died from influenza or pneumonia. The best year in the last century was 1948, with under 20,000 deaths. That leaves a range of 20,000-60,000 deaths per year, up to half the Covid casualties so far, and up to 10% of the pre-Covid annual death toll.

After the last year, would that feel like an acceptable number of deaths? Conversely, would we accept another year of lockdowns to reduce the toll of Covid from 60,000 to 20,000? As Professor McLean said: “The question of what is acceptable is not a scientific question. That’s a question for the whole of society.”

It’s worth noting, however, one caveat provided by epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, who is also a member of SAGE: “Whatever the answer is, it’s not zero.” That is, he explained, because if you take the view that every Covid death is unacceptable, “you are writing a blank cheque to do any amount of harm by the measures you’ve implemented to try and control it.”

Yet this, unfortunately, is the implicit view behind the Government’s policy, which makes it hard to rationally weigh the harms of lockdown measures against the reductions in risk from Covid. Indeed, Downing Street appears to still be following the alarming scenarios modelled by Warwick University, which show that any relaxation of social distancing measures before late 2021 will lead to another wave of deaths. But the authors of the Warwick models themselves acknowledge their assumption that vaccine efficacy applies equally to infection, mild and severe illness. However, they add, “if the vaccine has differential protection against the most severe disease this will impact our predictions for hospital admissions and deaths.”

And this is exactly what early data from Israel and elsewhere is indicating: vaccines may not prevent 100% of infections, but they do seem to prevent over 90% of hospitalisations and deaths. In effect, the Warwick assumptions about vaccine uptake, speed and effectiveness in preventing death, serious illness, and transmission are already being superseded by data. In Professor Woolhouse’s words: “Right now you should be looking at earlier unlocking, because the data is so good.”

This all sounds very positive. But while the R number is below one, it remains that the absolute case numbers are still comparable to those in spring last year. Official positive test results are over 10,000 per day, and the ONS estimates that over 700,000 people in the UK are currently infected, around 1% of the population.

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The Government's Covid comms failure

By Stuart Ritchie

The question now is: what is the end goal of the current social restrictions? Is it to keep hospitalisations within a level that the exhausted NHS can handle? Is it to keep deaths on a downward trend while restoring society to normality as fast as possible? Or is it to bring the rate of infection down to a level that could realistically be tracked, traced and isolated?

Only the Government can answer that question. It’s the responsibility of politicians, not scientists, to balance the risks of Covid against the social, economic and political impacts of the measures taken against it. Scientists themselves say so, again and again.

Risk is too often treated as a purely mathematical problem, but it has other dimensions too: psychological, social and political. There is no mathematical formula to tell any of us whether to take a chance on starting a business, proposing marriage, or riding a bicycle on city streets. We weigh up the possible outcomes and then commit to a course of action, in the knowledge that the future is uncertain and unknown. And in the same way, our leaders are forced to choose a course of action for the country as a whole.

Let us, by all means, be led by data. But data is a sextant, not a destination. What are we being led towards? What level of risk from Covid are we prepared to accept, and what are we prepared to sacrifice to reduce that risk? These questions are not statistical, but political.

Thanks to vaccines, the extra risks introduced to all our lives by Covid will soon be reduced to more familiar levels. Yet, having abandoned a rational approach to risk in favour of the view that “no Covid death is acceptable,” our politicians seem to be struggling to re-establish a grown up conversation about what we value as a society.

Zero-risk life is not an option. When Johnson finally reveals his “roadmap” to freedom, he would do well to start by explaining what kind of risk he is willing to take, and for what purpose.

Or is it? Professor Philip Cowley doesn’t think so. In a letter to The Times he challenges Labour fatalism (and, by implication, Conservative complacency):

“It is difficult right now to predict a Labour victory at the next election. But it was difficult in 1992 and in 1959, and one of the lessons of recent general elections is that voters are becoming increasingly volatile and willing to change parties.”

In the 1959 general election the Tories won 365 seats — which is exactly the number they’ve got now. However, that wasn’t enough to save them in 1964, when Labour regained power after 13 years in opposition.

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Did this election change anything?

By Peter Franklin

Boris Johnson wouldn’t be the first Prime Minister to lose (or almost lose) a stonking majority in the space of just one parliament. For instance, in 2010, Gordon Brown lost 97 Labour seats, wiping out the 66 seat majority that Tony Blair won in 2005. In 1950, the party also suffered major losses — reducing the 1945 landslide majority of 146 to just 5 (which was lost altogether in 1951). But even that downfall was overshadowed by the 1929 general election, in which Stanley Baldwin managed to blow a Conservative majority of 210 (won in 1924). Oops!

Perhaps the most dramatic reversal of fortune came between 1900, when the Conservatives won a majority of 135, and 1906, when Liberals won a majority of 129. This is the precedent that should really give Boris the sweats. It may be a long time ago, but the parallels with the present are all-too-relevant.

The Conservative (or “Unionist”) leader in 1906 was Arthur Balfour, who had become Prime Minister in 1902. He owed his political career to the previous PM, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (a.k.a. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil) who happened to be Balfour’s uncle. The Marquess’s promotion of his nephew probably explains the phrase “Bob’s your uncle”; it certainly explains why such an unlikely character ended-up running the country. Balfour’s attitude can be summed-up in one word, “aloof” ; or in the ten words of his best-known quotation: “nothing matters very much and few things matter at all”.

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Where will Boris Johnson lead us?

By James Kirkup

Unlike Balfour, Boris radiates enthusiasm for the hurly-burly of politics — but beneath the bonhomie, one may detect a similar sense of ironic detachment. Reflecting on the fall of the Balfour government, Henry Campbell-Bannerman (the Liberal leader in 1906) put it down to “a rising indignation against their general spirit of flippancy, levity, cynicism and indifference to high principle”. If Johnson were to write out a list of tendencies to guard against, he’d do well to start with those.

*

Leaving personality to one side, what else went wrong for the Unionist government in the first years of the 20th century?

1900 was the original “khaki election” — a reference to the uniforms of the British army during the Second Boer War. However, as that conflict dragged on, the country’s patriotic fervour turned to discontent. That’s something for the current Prime Minister to bear in mind as tensions escalate with Iran: as well as destroying lives, messy open-ended military conflicts destroy governments.

Trade was another issue of the day that’s just as relevant in 2020. It was a cause of deep division within the government. Balfour was caught between the advocates of “tariff reform” (i.e. protectionism) and the defenders of free trade. He attempted to plot a course of compromise, but alienated both sides — with protectionists like Joseph Chamberlain and free traders like Winston Churchill quitting the government (indeed, Churchill crossed the floor and joined the Liberals).

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Boris Johnson will also find himself caught between two sides on trade policy — i.e. those who prioritise access to European markets and those who’d prefer to see the UK cosy-up to the Americans. Johnson must avoid Balfour’s mistake. Equidistance won’t work. As on Brexit itself, he must pick a side and make it his own — but which side?

Again history provides a guide. It wasn’t just the internal ruptures that sunk the Balfour government. Trade also became a weapon for the Liberals, who portrayed government policy as being against the interests of ordinary working people. 

So, as he faces his own set of crunch decisions, the key question Boris must answer is “who benefits?” For instance, if the big winner of a trade deal with the US is the City of London and the big loser of higher trade barriers with Europe is manufacturing in the North, then he can kiss his new seats goodbye.

*

It’s worth asking why the Balfour and Salisbury governments existed at all. This was an age before full male suffrage or any female suffrage, but it’s still extraordinary that a party of earls and marquesses could win the support of millions of working men — and not just in the countryside, but in the towns and cities too. How did a party rooted in the pre-industrial past make it through into modernity?

The answer is by adapting to reality. From Disraeli’s One Nation conservatism to Lord Randolph Churchill’s Tory Democracy, they made themselves relevant to the newly enfranchised masses (not least by giving them the vote in the first place). Even the crusty old Marquess of Salisbury managed to hold together a broad-based Tory coalition.

Under Balfour, though, it fell apart. He allowed his party to be seen as the class enemy of the common man. The Liberals portrayed tariffs as a tax on basic foodstuffs. The 1902 Education Act, though progressive in many ways, was seen as favouring Anglicans over non-conformists. And then there was the issue of indentured Chinese labourers in South Africa. Their atrocious working conditions were condemned as a form of slavery — and also as a means of undercutting British workers. “Is THIS what we fought for?” the Liberals asked.

On all these issues and others, the Conservatives were placed on the side of money and privilege — allowing the Opposition to pose as the champions of the people.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

Boris Johnson won in 2019 because he put together a broad-based coalition of his own — uniting the Tory shires with working-class supporters in what used to be Labour heartlands. It too will fall apart if the Government doesn’t side with the people against the forces of economic and social disruption. That means restraining the hyper-capitalists in the Conservative ranks — ministers like Liz Truss and all the other “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters.”

Sorry Liz, but that’s not what Brexit Britain fought for at all. The British people don’t want to be governed from Brussels, but we don’t want to be ruled from Silicon Valley either. Let the tech lords ply their trade in our markets, but only if they respect our privacy, pay their taxes and treat British workers with dignity.

Fairness and respect is what the Boris coalition expects from the government they elected. And it is what this government must deliver — or else.

*

Here’s one last thing about 1906 for Boris to think about: the Gladstone-MacDonald pact. This was a secret agreement between the Liberals and Labour not to split the anti-Conservative vote — and it worked. There was no such pact in 2019, but, under a new Labour leader, next time could be very different.

So cast your mind forward to 2024: The Tories have been in power for fourteen years, Corbyn is a distant memory and the opposition is united. Coming first for the fifth time in a row won’t be easy.

Labour may have a mountain to climb, but so does Boris Johnson. He’d better be ready.

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By Stephen Pollard

But this constituency is not just an intersection of the great tectonic plates of democracy and capitalism — it is also, and much more prosaically, a place where ordinary people live. Around Paddington and Pimlico, for example, there are areas of significant social need. But more than any other constituency, those who represent this place end up overlooking the everyday lives of the people who live there, and end up narrowly concentrating on the needs of the financial institutions. It is actually quite odd for an MP to be far more concerned about the needs of those who pour off the train at Cannon Street at 7am — who have their own MP somewhere else — than those who wake up and live in the constituency they actually represent. Even odder, for an MP to think of their role as the representative of institutions rather than people.

Ever since the 1950 election, when this constituency came into being, the MP has always been a Tory. The incumbent, Mark Field, himself a former City lawyer, takes a keen interest in the financial City, and is currently Chair of the of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Venture Capital and Private Equity. While complaining about MP’s pay in 2001 — “If you are earning several hundred thousand a year in the City, are you going to give it up for £47,000 a year in the Commons?” — he has also condemned homeless charities in his constituency as being “a magnet for undesirables”. Suspended from his job as a junior minister for grabbing a Greenpeace protester at the Mansion House dinner, Field’s safe seat may look a little less safe than one might expect.

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By Giles Fraser

Perfect, then, for that political chancer par excellence, Chuka Umunna, now abandoning the constituents of Streatham, a seat that he won as a Labour MP. Like Field, he is an ardent Remainer — the constituency having voted overwhelmingly to Remain (72%) — and like Field, very much keen to act as a cheerleader for the 1% of the 1% who work there. As he told City AM recently:

“The different service sectors that work in the City are very much the solution to the challenges that the real economy faces. The principle challenge we have is making globalisation work for more middle class families in Britain. If the City can do that, then however people feel about the background of people who work in it, they are more likely to be amenable.”

Once again, the prospective MP for 65,000 voters living in the centre of one of the world’s greatest cities is sounding as though his job was to be the spokesperson for global capital.

Part of the problem is with the City itself. It thinks of itself as different. Indeed, the independent power of the City is so well established it goes back to Magna Carta. The City has its own police force. Its own peculiar local municipality. And even the Queen has to announce her intention to enter the City ahead of a visit there. And while the Lord Mayor of London — the City Mayor, as it were — has by tradition to offer to surrender his pearl encrusted sword to the sovereign every time she or he visits, this little ceremony demonstrates as much the independence of the City as its incorporation into the wider state. The City of London has the feel of a state within a state — a bit like the Vatican. Except, (arguably) unlike the Vatican, its ultimate sovereign is mammon not God.

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There is no doubt the City is a weird and wonderful place. When lived there I once happened to meet someone in the pub who worked for the City’s Education Board. There are so few children living in the City that, when I told her my address, she was able to reel off the names of my children. But despite this very personalised service, the City of London, as a political entity, clearly exists to protect the needs of the financial sector as opposed to its residents. And this has long been the case.

City life is also dominated by the Livery Companies. Originally medieval guilds, the membership of which signalled to potential customers the trustworthiness of the trader concerned, these groups have evolved into charitable organisations/fancy dining clubs with considerable political clout. Before the 1832 Reform Act, the Livery Companies held the exclusive right to elect the City’s four MPs. And while this was done away with, the companies still hold great sway in the political fortification of the financial sector.

Not that many of the members of these companies have anything much to do with the areas of trade that their livery once represented. “Are you are fishmonger yourself?” I once rather cheekily inquired of the woman next to me at a dinner, dressed head to toe in Prada. She looked at me as though I had crawled from under a stone. “Of course not.” Later, she left to get the train back home to Haywards Heath.

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Will Chuka fit in with all this? I suspect it will be right up his street. His politics is a very liberal mash-up of right-wing thinking about economics with a topdressing of social progressivism. Like Field, he is keen on “outside interests” — earning more than £65,000 last year for some advisory work to an organisation called the Progressive Centre UK. Like Field, he too first worked as a City lawyer. And not unlike Field, he has described the West End as being full of people he disparaged as “trash”. And, of course, like Field — and most of the big City institutions — he is a massive fan of the European Union.

There is an ancient tradition in the church of what is called “beating the bounds” — historically, congregations going around their parish boundaries with sticks, marking out and symbolically defending their territory. And they still do this in the City. And the schoolchildren that take part in this ceremony come from St Dunston’s College, Catford — an independent school set up by the City church, St Dunston-in-the-East, and yes you guessed it, Chuka Umunna’s old school. If he becomes the MP, I expect him to keep doing the same. For all his shifting loyalties elsewhere, Umunna is very much a company man. And his company is the City.

So, will he become MP for the City? I doubt it. The one thing the Livery Companies existed to promote was trust. Trust is the very lifeblood of trade. “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …” is written on all our banknotes. And trust is a commodity the City is desperately short of right now. Chukka Umunna has been a member of three political parties already this year. “You can’t trust a word the Lib Dems say,” he once tweeted. Well Chuka, you said it.

In 2006, Francis Elliott of The Times and I wrote a biography of David Cameron. We spoke to more than 300 people, on and off the record, about the man who was to transform his party’s fortunes. We updated the book twice, and were gratified to be told weren’t a million miles from painting an accurate picture. But by and large, that was when the going was good.

Since 2016, Cameron has said little. The nation built a picture of a lonely, slightly bored figure grimly tapping away at the keyboard in his shepherd’s hut, emerging occasionally to cross the globe and collect a hefty cheque from a speaking engagement. But even then he was at the mercy of events. He didn’t want to be unhelpful to his successors and, as Brexit was delayed, so too was his version. But now the book is upon us.

And the biggest interest will be in that shattering referendum result. He had called the 2016 vote on Britain’s continued membership of the EU in the expectation that the Remain side would win. It was an expectation shared by most of the London media bubble. The story went that the “sensible”, centrist voters would do what they did in the 1975 referendum, namely take their cue on a hugely complicated issue from the sensible centrist MPs and support the status quo.

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What if Remain had won?

By James Kirkup

But Cameron, and many others, didn’t realise how few people outside London had a stake in the status quo. They felt omitted and disenfranchised. Migrants were taking people’s jobs, or so they felt. English wasn’t being spoken on the bus. Brussels was doing Westminster’s job. Why should they do what the Establishment wanted?

For Cameron, of course, the result was cataclysmic. Even someone of his extraordinary buoyancy and optimism would struggle. He had been in No 10 for six years, had made the Conservative Party electable again, and given it an aura of competence once more. He was within reach of being able to say he had won two elections, three referendums and that he had left office at a time of his own choosing. No Prime Minister for 40 years had been able to claim the last of those, let alone all three.

And I believe that that – leaving office soon after a referendum win – was his intention. Not only would Europe cease to be an issue for the Tories, but he was exhausted. Contrary to popular belief, he worked extremely hard. In our biography, we quoted a colleague as saying that he was brilliant at “chillaxing”. The term was intended in admiration of Cameron’s ability, no matter how grave the decisions he was having to make, to zone out, to switch off and give himself to his family. Yet it was seen as a mark of idleness.

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By David Goodhart

But, that said, being Prime Minister takes an enormous toll. “Dave is knackered,” I remember one of his friends telling me, “and I do worry for him.” In short, Cameron was running out of steam, and with that glowing legacy in prospect, why hang around and keep his friend and neighbour George Osborne waiting for the top job? He had young children and no desire for them to spend any more time than necessary in Downing Street’s gilded cage.

And, perhaps most importantly, his wife had had enough. She never enjoyed the accoutrements of power, and had put her career on hold for him. Already in 2015 she was designing clothes for the fashion line she planned to launch. The writing was on the wall. Those who accuse Cameron of cutting and running after losing the referendum will find further ammunition here – he was planning to go all along – but I think that is only because he believed, having won, there would be no shame in leaving. On the contrary. Besides, the attacks on him for “walking away” look wide of the mark, given how hard “the mess” has been to clear up. Would his critics really want him to still be there?

His feelings about that defeat will make riveting reading. He takes public service seriously, and the UK was leaving the EU by accident. Unsurprisingly, friends talk of him being “devastated” and of feeling a great sense of guilt. Those who accuse him of wantonly committing to holding the referendum without considering the consequences will claim vindication. That argument will go on for ever. As one close friend puts it: “It was not a reckless gamble, it was a calculated one: the trouble was, he got the calculation wrong.”

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Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

His critics will say that when the stakes are that high, you shouldn’t take any risks at all. And that would have meant not promising a referendum and probably losing the 2015 election. Was it worth it, for a man who says he loves his country more than his party? Would Ed Miliband really have been worse than what we have now? How thoroughly he answers that question will be a test of the book’s candour.

Cameron insists he does not regret calling the referendum, only its outcome. He believes the referendum was a necessity, rather than the hubristic punt that his opponents claim. In the interests of securing re-election in 2015, he wanted to buy off those tempted to vote Ukip. In that respect, he was more successful than he expected, winning an overall majority. (His book should answer Donald Tusk’s claim that he planned to rat on that pledge under pressure from his expected coalition partners, the Lib Dems.) It is generally forgotten, though, that – knowing what damage splits on Europe had done to successive Tory governments – he had first mooted a referendum on the EU as early as 2013.

Cameron’s view is echoed in a forthcoming book by Martin Westlake, which shows that not only was an In-Out vote being taken seriously in senior Tory circles nearly 20 years earlier, largely for reasons of party management, but that Cameron felt the referendum was a necessity for the country. In 2013, Cameron cited the main spur as neither migration nor sovereignty but problems in the eurozone, which were “driving fundamental change in Europe”. “Democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin,” he said, and needed strengthening.

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The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

Cameron has said that populism cost him his job. He also knew that the Remain campaign had been a shambles. The brilliance and cynicism of the Leave campaign left Cameron’s team horribly outgunned. He would be justified in crying foul, but is too knowing a  politician not to accept responsibility. His chief regret, surely, will be the failure over many years to advertise the merits of Europe. For a politician who benefitted so much from avoiding policy definition, in a divided Tory Party that would have been asking a lot. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

Just as Cameron’s record has been overshadowed by Brexit, his book will be too. But he takes politics seriously, and there will be plenty for the think tanks, constitutionalists and historians to chew on. There will doubtless be a good deal of explanation and self-justification – on austerity, the coalition, the failure to clean up party funding, the unseating of Gaddafi, the non-intervention in Syria, his frustrations with the Whitehall machine, the non-resolution of press regulation – and I hope he will say something about the 24-hour pressure placed on a PM, the resistance of his party to change and the burdens he placed on himself. For example, he felt he owed it to the victims and to the country to watch in full the videos of jihadist beheadings, at considerable personal discomfort and distress.

The saltier material will be about the personalities. A schoolfriend talks of his sweetness of nature – which essentially he has retained, despite everything – but clearly a number of former colleagues now lie several miles outside his affability zone.

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Is the Conservative Party brain dead?

By Peter Franklin

His former friend Steve Hilton is one. The brilliantly creative salesman of compassionate Conservatism let it be known he thought his former boss was too cautious in office. Don’t be surprised to read of Hilton’s increasingly unworldly schemes, high-handedness with colleagues and “eccentric” behaviour.

Lord Ashcroft, a Tory donor to whom William Hague was close, is another who caused Cameron headaches, and who ended up writing a critical biography, with Isabel Oakeshott, of the then PM. The former PM told friends he would have preferred not to mention Ashcroft at all, because almost anything he wrote might cause trouble. But of one thing we can be sure. There will be no admission of Ashcroft’s claim that at a university party Cameron had placed his penis in the mouth of a dead pig (a claim that caused Cameron’s mother to call him at Downing Street – “just checking, David”). The source of the tale has never been revealed. But we can live in hope.

Cameron has delayed publication of this book because he didn’t want to make Theresa May’s job any harder. He knows how difficult the job is, which is why, when she was at the Home Office, he didn’t think she was up to it. But she did replace him, prompting him to say to one friend: “At least it is not Boris.”

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Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

Oh dear, and now it is. The Johnson campaign was keen to present its candidate as the One Nation Tory, as the natural home for those who had supported Cameron. In a number of cases it succeeded, but few real Cameroons took the bait. On the other hand, the disdain that for a long time prevented Cameron endorsing Johnson for the London mayoralty has lessened. The two former rivals could now be useful to one another, so don’t expect this book to tell you the whole truth about Cameron’s opinion of Boris.

More likely to receive both barrels is Michael Gove, whose surprise decision to back Leave in the referendum was taken extraordinarily badly by Cameron, who, despite his removal of Gove from the Department of Education, had seen him as a last-ditch ally. The hostility is intensified by the former exceptional closeness between the men’s wives. Cameron is good at magnanimity and disdains small-mindedness, but he may think such generosity of spirit would be wasted on his former ally. He may think damning with little or no praise does the trick.

The people I would like to read most about, though, are Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. You will remember that it was Rebekah Brooks who persuaded her boss Murdoch to switch sides and support Cameron’s Tories in the 2010 election. She also persuaded George Osborne and Cameron that her clandestine lover, Coulson, though recently unseated (and later sent to prison) from the editorship of the scandal-hit News of the World, would be a suitable person to run Cameron’s communications.

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Do leaders bluff their way to the top?

By Peter Franklin

She would say that, wouldn’t she, you might think. But surely Cameron and his people were  savvy enough to do the due diligence? Not due enough, seemingly. In all Cameron’s six years in office, by far his most uncomfortable time in public was his session in front of the Leveson Inquiry, when a pink-faced Prime Minister protested to Sir Brian that he remembered very clearly how important it was to secure an assurance from Coulson. But of what? That he hadn’t known about the hacking, or that it was unlikely to resurface and cause embarrassment?

It would be good to have a fuller and franker account than Cameron has so far offered. Coulson – the tabloid counterweight employed to tell the posh boys what real people think – helped get Cameron into Downing Street. Does Cameron truly regret hiring him, or merely the bad publicity when he was finally exposed? How does Cameron regard Coulson now? And Rebekah Brooks? Are they in touch? She made Cameron look very good and then very stupid. He must have feelings about that.

We are unlikely to read about that, though. Because after slow bidding for the rights to Cameron’s memoirs, the deal was reportedly sealed with a hefty £800,000 offer from HarperCollins, owned by News Corp, whose UK division is News UK. Its chief executive, need I remind you, is Rebekah Brooks.

A version of this article appears in The Gentleman’s Journal. For the Record, by David Cameron, is published by William Collins on 19 September