It is an enigma that begets a paradox. On the one hand, trying to pinpoint the pivotal compromise is as futile as trying to seek the single hair that, once lost, admits one into the brotherhood of the bald. On the other hand, just as one glance at me confirms I lack enough hair to count as bald, one glance at Andy Burnham and the vast majority of Europe’s center-left leaders confirms they are compromised. It is a question that remains pertinent.

But at what point does compromise turn into defection? At what point does practicing the art of conceding judiciously lead one to betray one’s constituency — even to embrace villainy? Indeed, do the villains even know they are villains? Were they aware of a moment when their cascade of compromises finally pushed them beyond the moral pale? I doubt it. The human soul’s capacity for rationalizing the vilest of choices is boundless. There is almost no horror perpetrated by one human against another that has not been justified with the principle of the lesser evil.

Interrogate the ghosts of Vidkun Quisling, or his Greek counterpart Georgios Tsolakoglou, and ask them why they agreed to become the Nazis’ puppet premiers in Norway and Greece. They would surely answer that “someone was going to do it”, so it might as well have been them: their complicity was worth the price if it enabled them to shield even a handful of their countrymen from the Nazi menace. That these rationalizations seem laughable in retrospect returns us to the original question: at what point does a sequence of compromises render one compromised?

It was February 2015 when I encountered the sheer banality of Europe’s compromised center-left leaders. What brought it into sharp focus was the contrast between these hollow men and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s conservative finance minister and Europe’s high priest of stringent austerity. He was ruthless yet cogent; analytically weak yet intellectually honest; coarse yet comfortingly self-assured. He would say outrageous things, such as “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy in Europe”. But there was a candor in his delivery and the sense that he was describing the world as he truly saw it.

Then came the drudgery of the center-leftists.

First up was Michel Sapin, France’s finance minister and long-time Socialist Party hack. After embracing me like a brother-in-arms, waxing lyrical about my anti-austerity stance and promising that we would “walk together” to return Europe to the “path of growth”, he led me to the nearby press conference. There, in front of the gathered media, he underwent an instant metamorphosis. Gone was the bonhomie, the common purpose, the condemnation of austerity. Instead, wagging an accusatory finger at me, he out-Schäubled Schäuble with a paean to “discipline” and belt-tightening. Once we were alone, he turned all sweet and comradely again. I stopped him in his tracks, looked him in the eye and demanded to know: “Who are you and what have you done to the Michel I met an hour ago?”

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A series of depressingly similar meetings followed only days later, in Berlin. First with Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), then with a delegation of parliamentarians representing the German Greens. The worst part of those meetings was not what was said; it was that it was clear they did not mean a word they uttered. And along with the lack of conviction, their banal musings betrayed a complete absence of intellectual backbone — there was no real proposition to disagree with or argument to logically refute.

Leaving those meetings, I wondered how it had come to this. How had the SPD, a party with a history of transforming Germany into a functioning social democracy, ended up with a leader so banal and vacuous and ready to defer to someone like Schäuble? How had the Greens, who in the Seventies had shaken us out of our complicity with the ongoing ecocide, ended up parroting lines that were as boring as they were toxic?

My theory of the center-left’s long suicide begins in 1971, when Bretton Woods was killed off by the Nixon shock. Back then, Europe’s and Britain’s social democrats used to play the role of go-betweens. Once in government, they would gather the captains of industry and the trades-union leaders around a table where a deal would be struck: a chunk of industrial profits would fund the welfare state and another would be returned to workers in the form of better wages and conditions. However, when Bretton Woods died, money and power shifted from industry to finance.

By the late Seventies, it was pointless to sit the failing industrialists and the leaders of the dwindling trade unions’ around that table. In a world beholden to bankers and traders, the only meaningful bargain that could be struck was one between ministers and financiers. It was a Faustian bargain. Tony Blair in London, Jacques Delors in Paris and then Brussels, Gerhard Schröder in Berlin… all of them offered the bankers permission to go berserk in exchange for sizable crumbs from their table with which to fund the welfare state — and, lest we forget, their election campaigns. That’s how social democracy limped on until the crash of 2008.

When, in the autumn of that year, the banks went under, those social democrats in power didn’t know what had hit them. Lacking both the analytical capacity to understand the crash and a moral spine to stand up to the financiers, they bailed out not just the banks but the bankers too. The result was austerity for the masses and “socialism” for the bankers, a collapse in investment and a never-ending slump. From that moment onwards, social democracy was on a slippery slope to electoral, ethical and political oblivion.

I wrote about it all in my 2011 book, The Global Minotaur. But it was one thing to have formulated a theory, and quite another to see it written across the center-leftists’ faces in 2015: the defeat, the compromise, the banality. I remember the feeling as my airplane lifted off from Berlin, carrying me back to Athens and to a parliament in which a Nazi party was the third largest: the result of discontent engendered by years of mindless centrist austerity. And I remember how, suddenly, I thought of Fiona.

My first memory of her was when she heckled me, in 1980, during a boisterous students’ union meeting at Essex University. A graduate anthropology student, she believed that everyone, Left and Right, were at it: coveting unfettered power wherever we could get it. Fiona feared that Leftists, like her and me, folks who could not wield power in the City or in Whitehall, sought it instead in students’ unions, socialist groupings, feminist organizations even. Her intense disapproval of me was systemic, not personal. Which is why we became friends.

About a year after our first encounter, I found myself at one of the countless anti-Thatcher gatherings taking place around that time. By coincidence, Fiona was there too, billed to speak. After enduring two hours of tiresome speakers denouncing Thatcher’s social and industrial vandalism, Fiona rose to speak. She was magnificent:

“While listening to the previous speakers, I was thinking to myself: ‘Give me Maggie Thatcher any time! Unlike you, Maggie gets it. We live in a revolutionary moment. The postwar class-war armistice is over. If we want to defend the weak, we can’t be defensive. We need to advocate as she does: out with the old system, in with a brand new one. Not Maggie’s dystopic system, but a brand new one nevertheless. You lot are bandaging corpses while she is digging graves. If I had to choose between you and her, I would choose her every time. Monstrous as she is, Thatcher can at least be subverted. You wouldn’t recognize subversion if it came at you with a barge pole.”

Her words resounded in my head on that flight in 2015, reminding me why I found my meetings with Schäuble so much more rewarding than encounters with the center-leftists who were “bandaging corpses” while Schäuble was “digging graves”. Besides the relative joy of conversing with people who mean what they say, there are both short- and long-term reasons why I, as a proud Leftist, prefer self-confident Right-wingers in government to a band of defeated center-leftists.

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Rather than a bunch of compromised pseudo-progressives bandaging some of the walking wounded, I would far prefer to have a Norman Tebbit in power, callously instructing them to “get on your bike”. An unbowed, self-respecting Left would respond by telling the bankers, the spivs and the oligarchs to get on their bike. Alas, the compromised Left does not do this. Instead, it fans a false hope in the hearts of the suffering majority with their empty promises to look after them. That hope is bound to crash on the shoals of reality. And then? Having lost trust in both the center-right and the center-left, the electorate has nowhere to turn but the demagogues promising to make them “great again”, to weaponize the border fences, to prepare for war against non-existent enemies, to target the “other”; the Muslim, the Jew, the disabled, the brown people who “pollute” the gene pool.

Andy Burnham’s new government is a case in point. Having ridden into No. 10 on a wave of hopeful vibes, his unwillingness to clash with the fat cats responsible for Britain’s stagnation will deliver another Budget that taxes the overtaxed and punishes the weak. Thus, the road will have been paved for the fascists to further infect the majority’s broken hearts. Whether this will be Reform, Restore or some even more radicalized Tory party, only time will tell.

Naturally, center-leftists chastise my unwillingness to support them, painting me as a handmaiden of the Right. I would reply that the Left has a duty to remain in opposition until we get our act together; until we have a plan and a mandate for unseating the oligarchy and implementing a workable, progressive agenda. It is better to be in opposition keeping genuine hope alive, while the establishment Right rampages in government, than for the compromised Left to win power on false promises that are bound to extinguish hope and usher in postmodern varieties of fascism.

It was this thinking that led me, six months after being sworn in as Greece’s finance minister, to resign — knowing full well I would be demonized and confined to the margins of the political system. It was a no-brainer. Remember the question that was torturing me from the first day in office? Would I be able to recognize the lethal compromise that led me to the land of the co-opted?

In the end, it was not hard to recognize. It came when I was told I had a choice: my political career in exchange for signing on the dotted line of an application for a huge credit card (from which the Greek state would draw, to pretend it was repaying its debts); a credit card that would be issued on condition of another austerity package condemning 80% of our people to long-term debt-bondage. I did not sign. But most of my colleagues in that Leftist government did. The result? That party, Syriza, no longer exists, the recalcitrant Right is dominant, and the fascist Right is surging.

Ultimately, the compromised Left anesthetizes hope, paving the way for reactionaries of the worst kind. Better be an honest opposition to a Rightist government than a compromised Leftist whose policies breed monsters. This is not a resignation from the aspiration to govern. It is simply a clarification of one thought: the only compromise worth making is the willingness to give up power rather than sign away a people’s future.

Way back on day two of those negotiations, a photo opportunity was staged around the negotiating table: there was Barnier with his team, each holding a thick sheaf of briefing papers; opposite him was David Davis, literally empty-handed. The symbolism was painfully obvious. Even those of us who supported Brexit were appalled.

But they say if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by. Four years on, Brexit is done — and so is Barnier. After the Brexit gig, he had his eye on the Presidency of the European Commission, but was beaten to it by von der Leyen. Now, he is having to run for President of France, a regrettably democratic process. He’s already floundering.

One of many possible candidates for Les Républicains — the biggest French conservative party — Barnier is by no means the favourite. To stand out from the pack, he has tried to strike a Eurosceptic note. He has called for a three-to-five year freeze on immigration into the EU; changes to the Schengen Agreement on movement of people within the EU; an assertion of French national sovereignty against European courts; and, best of all, a referendum to provide a “constitutional shield” against EU interference.

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Of course, it won’t work. Mr Europe doesn’t get to play Eurosceptic and retain his credibility. And even if his flabbergasting hypocrisy were to win him his party’s nomination, what would it be for? No centre-Right candidate — from the frontrunners such as Xavier Bertrand to the also-rans such as Barnier — comes close to matching the first-round support of Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

The last Presidential election, in 2017, was the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a candidate of the centre-Right failed to make it through to the second round. In 2022, the best that the French conservatives can hope for is that Le Pen loses enough votes to a rival populist — most likely the polemicist Éric Zemmour — to let their candidate through. But not only is this a long shot, it’s a humiliation. The centre-Right — the inheritors of Charles de Gaulle — shouldn’t have to depend on the in-fighting of the radical Right.

Michel Barnier is not only an embarrassment to his party, then, but also a symbol of its impotence.

Yet British Tories shouldn’t take too pleasure from his downfall. What’s happening to the centre-Right in France is happening across the West. We have become so used to hearing about the decline of the traditional parties of the centre-Left that we have failed to notice the rot setting in on the centre-Right too. Conservatism is in crisis.

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On Monday, Norwegian voters went to polls — and kicked out the ruling centre-Right coalition after eight years. Later this month, German voters are likely to bid farewell to the Christian Democrats after 16 years. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia — the governing party as recently as 2011 — is now a mere appendage to the populist Right. In the Netherlands, the once dominant Christian Democrats are in deep trouble, their support bleeding away in all directions — including the Farmers’ Party which is now ahead of them in the polls. And finally, in the Republic of Ireland, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael — both vaguely conservative — once commanded over 80% of the vote between them. But their joint share is now only half that — and Sinn Fein is the largest party.

It’s not just Europe. In Australia, Labor have opened up a big lead over the Liberal-led coalition government. In New Zealand, the Nationals, who won 44% of the vote as recently as 2017, now languish in opposition on a poll rating of about 25%. And then there’s America — whose two-party system ought to mean that the main party of the Right can’t fall too far. And yet the Republicans have only won the popular vote once in the last eight Presidential elections.

Of course, there are exceptions to the general trend — Spain, for instance; and, until recently, England — but the bigger picture looks dire for the centre-Right.

It’s not that the centre-Left is back, exactly: in Norway the big winners were the parties of hard Left and the agrarian Centre Party. In Germany, the Social Democrats will enjoy gains — but only because their conservative and Green opponents made catastrophically bad leadership choices. In France, the socialists are even less likely to win the presidency than the conservatives. And in Canada, voters would dearly love to see the back of Justin Trudeau. But the Conservatives are unable to unite Canadians behind them. The latest polls show them stuck in the low thirties.

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Looking at the decline of the mainstream parties of the centre-Left, it’s easy to identify one over-riding cause: the demographic decline and political alienation of the traditional working class. But for the mainstream parties of the centre-Right, the causes are more complicated and country-specific — the sudden rise of Emmanuel Macron in France, for instance, or the rapid decline of religiosity in the Republic of Ireland. Still, beyond these local factors, there are two threads that are common to the international crisis of conservatism.

The first is reform — or rather the lack of it. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, many pundits expected electorates to turn sharply leftwards. That didn’t generally happen. Instead, the immediate demand was for security — and for that voters generally look to the conservative Right.

Something similar happened during the Seventies. A decade of constant crisis paved the way for the decade of Thatcher and Reagan. But there’s a crucial difference between the Eighties and the 2010s. For good or ill, the Eighties brought change — there was a new paradigm for economics (neoliberalism) and for international relations (the end of the Cold War).

The same can’t be said for the 2010s, during which very little changed. There was no new era of capitalism, just the same model of globalisation plus a few sticking plasters. The only real exception anywhere in the West was Brexit — which no government actually wanted to happen.

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The second thing that has gone wrong is that, in place of reform, conservative parties have offered something emptier: the politics of sensation. Instead of working quietly and cautiously towards change, conservatives now offer the feeling of change.

For instance, there’s never been a more performative presidency than that of Donald Trump. Even though he achieved very little in the way of concrete reform, he gave the impression that a revolution was underway — ably assisted by the outrage of his enemies. He even tried to perform his way to winning an election he had just lost.

Of course, Trump is proof that performance can only get you so far — if unsupported by underlying reality. And this is why Michel Barnier’s performative Euroscepticism won’t get him very far. Everyone knows that within the unreconstructed framework of the European Union, the policies he’s proposing are pointless.

There’s an obvious lesson here for Boris Johnson. Though he’s delivered Brexit, he now has to deliver all the other things he said would happen after Brexit. He can’t just promise to control our borders, our borders must be controlled. He can’t just talk about “building back better”, he must build better things. He can’t just sell the feeling of “levelling up”, he must actually narrow the gap between North and South.

If he doesn’t then he’ll find himself going the same way as poor Michel.