The very familiarity of the situation provides a harmless holiday from political reality. Every autumn, politicians, their staffers and SpAds all rock up at one of the handful of provincial, fully disability-accessible convention centers within tolerable distance of London. Appropriately appalled by what they discover upon arrival, they quickly decamp to a heavily fortified conference zone. (Birmingham’s ICC has the reassuring further feature of being protected by an extremely confusing warren of canals that doubles as a kind of moat.)

If you play your cards right, you need never leave the militarized perimeter again. “Are you going to the GB News party later?” I ask one Kemi aide in passing. “That’s outside the secure zone, isn’t it? Feels a little risky” was his well-reasoned reply.

It is from behind these layers of police protection, airport-style metal detectors and assorted buffer zones that the members of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition take up their annual opportunity to reflect on the question of how well they and their policies are being received by the public at large. In this task they are helped by perhaps the most unrepresentative sample of humanity imaginable: the Tory party delegates. If the ICC’s acoustics were less muffled, the building itself would be a physically-realized echo chamber of sorts. As an exercise in controlled, unbiased political thinking, it is a hopeless environment to work in. “I would rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference,” Arthur Balfour long ago complained. Little has changed. Political reality feels a long way off.

The job facing journalists is, if anything, more absurd. For many of the press pack, remember, this is the end of a long and desperate Odyssey: carried on a river of bad white wine from the Reform conference in early September, via the Lib Dems and Labour, they have finally washed up here in Birmingham. Pros that they are, they begrudgingly press their distended livers against yet another pre-fab countertop and clutch at the array of pre-poured drinks on offer.

The journalist’s job, as it is widely interpreted, is highly impressionistic: an art half-heartedly dressed up in the language of science. It is to “take the temperature” — or, in modern parlance, assess the “vibe” — of the party, using the motley self-selected crowd assembled as one’s meager evidential base. It doesn’t help that one is always in the process of recovering from, or contributing to, another day’s hangover. Nor is one’s sense of mental equilibrium much improved by the vaguely Lynchian tableaus that constantly meet the eye at Conference — the lurid confusions of props and personages that seem like stills from a nightmare. Turn the corner and you might see Michael Fabricant chowing down on a meat feast in the atrium of Pizza Express, while Nick Watt scampers around in your peripheral vision. Later, you walk into a Young Tory drinks and confront Kemi herself stiffly hitting the decks from behind pimped-out dark glasses as a handful of the more photogenic young Tories gyrate at her shoulders.

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The progressive mindset has won

By Ben Cobley

In this unsteadying environment, all kinds of mad theories and inferences are given an unwarranted free pass, many about the “Kemi bounce” the Tories are supposed to be enjoying. The “vibe” is said to be buoyant. Any positive development is alighted on as further confirmatory evidence. A flurry of distracted excitement meets the surprise arrival on day two of Jeremy Clarkson; but no sooner has he arrived than he punctures the mood. “A lot of people seem to have come dressed as seats,” he says, scanning the thinly populated upper echelons of the main hall.

In brazenly self-deceived mode, one CCHQ staffer speculates loudly that the visible improvement in the attractiveness of the young men in attendance, as compared with last year, is a surefire indicator of a coming recovery in the party’s electoral fortunes. I strain my eyes to see whether I can follow his reasoning. From what I see, I infer that the standalone mustache has finally made a fashion comeback (a long-awaited recovery, perhaps, in the face of the near-fatal countervailing influences on male grooming provided by AIDS and Adolf Hitler); but beyond that, little improvement is obvious.

Whether down on their luck or high on their own supply, when too many Tories gather in one place the behavioral default tends to be a kind of campy self-send-up that offers little opportunity for informative generalization to the country at large. In absurd homage to Jacob Rees-Mogg — who is in high demand following his triumphant YouTube confrontation with Tucker Carlson — young men scuttle about in oversized double-breasted suits and unflattering haircuts. They lark around next to a cardboard cutout of a warm-ale-swilling party chairman Kevin Hollinrake and his (presumably Right-wing) black Labrador. The widely-celebrated centerpiece of conference, and the cutting edge of CCHQ-inspired humor, is a mock British Museum exhibit that lampoons the previous two years of Labour government through the medium of tapestry.

Optimists remark that the “vibe” is more self-confident than last year’s. To others, the notable absence of the fractious troublemakers who now prefer to booze with Nigel at Reform conference is an unsettling sign that the Tories have become narrowly pedestrian, comfortably middle class and overwhelmingly Southern. That said, the Reform-coded fringe events seem notably fuller than their ploddingly centrist alternatives: turning up to one on the “Boriswave”, I find the venue full and operating a one-in-one-out policy much more discriminating than anything the Tories ever imposed at the country’s border.

The problem with trying to infer anything much on the basis of Tory conference is that for every pre-conceived theory, either exultant or pessimistic, there is an available metaphor. For the optimists, the bullishly pinstriped Thatcherite cosplay being indulged in and campily-named defense initiatives like the “Britannia shield” are taken as signs of renewed political vigor. For defeatists there is no shortage of equally potent material — for instance, the full-sized military drone that is suspended mid-tailspin from the ceiling of the main hall for “Defense day” and hangs there throughout the under-attended proceedings.

At one point, Sir John Curtice turns up to a fringe event (“Back in the Game?”) run by the cross-party think-tank Demos to remind the more extravagant vibe-detectorists in the audience that, their excitable theories notwithstanding, the Conservatives are currently averaging 20% in the polls. That is, they languish several points behind where they found themselves in 2024, when they suffered their worst defeat in history. 

There may be no alternative but for political party conference season to incubate these sorts of escapist political fantasies. In this context, the fantasies are probably also fairly harmless. The greater danger seems to be when comparable distortions creep into policy, where the specific method of flight from reality that comes easiest to both main parties is to seek refuge in in-house nostalgia. In his continued railing against the past “40 years of neo-liberalism”, and in his insistence that the political clock must be cranked back, Andy Burnham is in the most literal sense anti-progressive: a rhetorically talented Left-wing sentimentalist. His proven ability to make the Cabinet applaud and weep like North Korean news announcers conveniently conceals the fact that his existing policy platform is a piecemeal array of petty redistributionist interventions dressed up as something more visionary: a resuscitated Help-to-Buy housing scheme, £2 bus fares, VAT off electricity bills, and a fanciful pledge to end rough sleeping. Even if considered well-intentioned rather than time-wasting distractions, the parochial scope of these policies hardly seems well proportioned to the priorities of a modern, national government.

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The Tory death spiral

By George Owers

As Badenoch took to the stage on Wednesday, the overwhelming strategic temptation was to accept the terms of Burnhamism’s backward-looking framework in the expectation of a victory on the same nostalgic terms. With Burnham invoking the pre-Thatcherite Seventies, the obvious reaction is to advocate for a return to the Eighties and the free-market-fueled Thatcherite boom it brought with it. Many, after all, if they visualize this Burnhamite Britain for even a moment, can imagine or recall how drab it actually was. In anticipating a “battle for the soul of this nation” of a kind not seen “for more than half a century”, Badenoch seemed at times to welcome an ideological contest litigated along these broad historical lines. Over the course of the conference, depending on their tolerance for party political theorizing, Tory delegates skimmed or studied “The Right Way”, Badenoch’s 100-page pamphlet produced in self-conscious imitation of Mrs Thatcher’s own 1976 mission statement. 

It would be much better if the differences between Burnhamism and what, for the time being, is called “Kemistry” could be developed without so much recent historical allusion being projected onto the debate. Though there are real obstacles within her own party ranks to doing so — the eccentric shire traditionalists, veto-playing Nimbyists, and triple-lock-addicted pensioners — what Kemi Badenoch really needs to do is out herself in historically-unhedged terms as a genuine “progressive”. 

That needn’t mean favoring the kind of progress that Tories of 50 years ago imagined; nor should it mean “progressive” in the moribund woke sense of that term; but a progressive in the only sense that counts — in the sense of someone who actually promotes cultural, political and economic progress. The manipulations and errors of gender ideology, which Badenoch opposes, are, after all, just as much a part of broadly anti-progressive politics, as are the impositions of the over-regulated administrative state advocated by Burnhamite Lefties. In both cases, it is part of their deeper deception to present as advances what are actually catastrophic regressions. 

The phrase “Right-wing progressive” is of course incongruous enough to the modern ear that it strikes some as borderline infelicitous. Part of the rhetorical victory that the Left has won in recent decades is to establish an unearned but powerful monopoly on the very notion of progress. The act of reversing such a rhetorical power-grab is one Machiavelli famously argued might require an effort of “rhetorical redescription” on the part of a skillful leader. In the later chapters of The Prince — where he recalls the use of the Roman rhetoricians’ technique of paradiastole — Machiavelli alludes to the expedience of redescribing vices as virtues in the effort to take control of powerful concepts for one’s own advantage. 

Though the practice can clearly be deployed to, as it were, “Machiavellian” ends, it is one no leader intent on remaking the political weather, for either good or ill, can easily do without. With backward-looking political nostalgics to their Right and Left in the form of Reform UK and Labour, the Tories might find that claiming to be Westminster’s true future-oriented “progressives” might be their best shot at political survival. But that kind of reimagining is difficult to achieve over the course of a few days in a heavily fortified echo chamber in Birmingham. 

Their near-total annihilation in urban Britain now, however, seems like the least of their problems after their 2024 omni-battering. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the bizarre air of complacency that hangs over their conference, which apparently hasn’t been much dented by John Curtice telling them that they have made no progress since their 2024 hammering, and indeed are actually doing worse. The submerged theme of the conference is that even their natural heartlands are slipping away from them. Worse, neither Kemi Badenoch’s decent personal ratings nor MRP polls showing the Tories reaching the giddy heights of 130 MPs can really cover up this still-ongoing destruction.

Take where I live, a fairly affluent village in rural Cambridgeshire. Over the course of this year’s local elections, not a single leaflet or communication of any kind from the Tories materialized. Indeed, one would have had to have been a detective of considerable ability to uncover any evidence of a Conservative Party activist — a living one anyway — within many miles of my home. When the vote duly came, the Tories came a bad third in my ward, only beating the Greens by 60 votes.

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The death of the Young Conservative

By Alwyn Turner

Until perhaps a decade ago, places like this were rock solid for the Tories. Now, though, they’re pretty much a one-party Liberal Democrat state. There are now just two Conservative councillors left on the South Cambridgeshire district council, compared with 43 Lib Dems — who also comfortably won both of the local parliamentary seats in 2024. It wasn’t close, with Ed Davey’s party sweeping my constituency of St Neots and Mid-Cambridgeshire by over 5,000 votes. Since 2024, there has been almost no sign of a Tory recovery.

To be frank, if the Tories are still the political walking dead in St Neots, of all places — where there are more Green district councillors now than Tories — then anything they’ve said this week in Birmingham is probably a colossal waste of time. This is doubly true because the Tory collapse is not just a result of the short-term impact of Bojo’s travails, or even the Liz Truss debacle. Though 2024 represented a dramatic culmination of Conservative failure, it was not a sudden process.

Cambridgeshire is again a good example. As Cambridge became ever more expensive, the rest of the county has attracted more and more house-price refugees. Most are graduates; many are academics; and others work at tech start-ups in Cambridge Science Park, or at Addenbrookes Hospital. These educated, mostly socially liberal voters have transformed local politics. The farmers, the culturally conservative old rural middle class, the self-employed tradesmen and so on — they no longer dominate, and even many of them presumably couldn’t stomach voting Tory in 2024. Jeremy Clarkson may finally have shown up to their conference, but the people he speaks for are not those that the Tories need to win in their former seats. This new demographic intake is as likely to set up a local Orange Order and hold a “No Popery!” riot as they are to ever vote Tory.

So when I hear breathless online Tories talking up the “Kemi bounce” and the supposed Tory come-back, I can’t help but roll my eyes — and not just at her Timmy Mallett tribute act at the Young Tories’ disco. Yes, Badenoch has relatively good personal ratings; yes, Reform has clearly had a bad summer as Farage’s clown-car by-election backfired and his party’s backbiting intensified. One or two polls even suggest that the Tories may reach the lofty heights of second place.

Yet none of this can alter the underlying truth: that in large swaths of Britain, the Tories essentially no longer exist, because they have a small and contracting social base, which is itself vulnerable to Reform. They no longer retain a comfortable baseline of support anywhere, apart from places with very specific characteristics: non-urban; on average low educational attainment; elderly; white. The only one of these populations that is growing is pensioners, and even among them, polls often show Reform in the lead. That’s even as cohort effects — with whole generations that have no history of voting Tory soon coming of pensionable age — mean retirees are less likely to show loyalty to the party over the longer-term.

Meanwhile, across England’s affluent south, prosperous places that would previously have been Tory shoo-ins are now awash with graduates who can’t afford to live in big cities: Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire. These people will blanch at voting for any restrictions on immigration, or abolishing Net Zero, or withdrawing from the ECHR. How much future is there for a Tory Party that faces an uphill struggle to remain relevant in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, where they now have respectively one and two MPs?

Tory “moderates” such as Andy Street and Ruth Davidson like to claim that these places can be won back by changing tack on “culture war” commitments, and making a socially liberal, economically center-right pitch. But why the middle classes of Surrey, Cambridgeshire or Hertfordshire are going to favor nicey-nicey Cameroon redux politics rather than sticking with the more socially acceptable Lib Dems isn’t clear. Many of the upwardly mobile younger couples living in the affluent home counties who might in theory be attracted by the Tories’ promise on removing the £100,000 threshold on free childcare are those who have a rigid cultural taboo against voting Tory, even if such a policy would benefit them. They live in a world of ingrained cultural assumptions and status dynamics that make voting Tory an unthinkable solecism.

Even if struggling graduates in these places could be persuaded to vote Tory on a pro-growth platform, there is another obstacle. These same constituencies are also stuffed with older Nimbies, and if they do anything to annoy pensioners, the Tories might equally wave goodbye to their only remaining reliable voter bloc: the gray vote. This is why we have had to endure the contemptible spectacle of CCHQ attacking Burnham as some sort of granny-killing maniac for suggesting a tiny reform to a policy — the Triple Lock — that most senior Tories privately acknowledge is unaffordable. Perhaps such industrial-grade hypocrisy is the price of maintaining any activists at all: a Tory agent told me recently that their party membership is literally dying. Looking at the “deaths” column of a local newspaper is generally the most reliable way to keep their membership records up to date.

In short, it is still hard to see how the Tories can get out of their current dilemma, no matter how many infatuated young Tories write Katie Lam’s name on their pencil-box, and how sharp Badenoch may prove in PMQs. The underlying logic of polarization — between the left-behind provinces, and Home Counties progressivism — hasn’t gone away: and the Tories are still ill-positioned to capitalize on either side of this divide.

What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue-collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform. Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base. And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare “cliff edge” — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.

Much clearly depends on Andy Burnham. If he turns out to be Keir Starmer with a guitar — which is still possible, his fluent conference speech notwithstanding — then the main winners will be Reform. Certainly, it would take a singular collapse indeed to render Farage as unpopular in the Red Wall as the Tories are now; let’s not forget that the Conservatives lost their deposit in the Makerfield by-election. If, on the other hand, Burnham succeeds in sustaining a meaningful Labour revival and the Reform wave subsides, there will be only marginal benefit to the Tories.

Given all this, it still seems that even in the best-case scenario, all the Tories can hope for is holding onto their meager 2024 seat haul and perhaps slightly increasing their presence in the Commons. The only viable course for survival would probably be some sort of merger between the Tories and Reform, but even that is extremely hazardous for either side, bedeviled by personal resentments and the emotional fallout from recent defections. Bitterness means that such mergers tend to take a long time to happen: it took the Canadian Right a decade to unite after the main center-right party was near-annihilated in the 1993 election.

For now, the horrible truth for the Tories, irrespective of whatever optimism might be generated at their conference, is that their fate isn’t in their own hands. They have to hope that they can pick up enough scraps in forthcoming electoral scrambles to keep themselves alive. Their survival, let alone their existence as a major party, remains very much in the balance.

But if the nation’s eyes are fixed on Labour versus Reform, there is another story unfolding in this corner of Greater Manchester. It is ignored, because its roots stretch back much further, and its progress is more gradual. Yet it is no less significant. For amid the voters and canvassers and garden stakes I saw in Makerfield — cheering for Reform, Labour, Restore and the Greens — one name remained strikingly absent: the Conservatives. It’s not that voters in Makerfield despise the party. It’s just they don’t seem to care.

That might sound like a hackneyed observation, a contrarian effort to distract you from the main event. But it’s hard to emphasize just how non-existent the Tories feel in this patch of Lancashire. Especially so when you consider that, as recently as 2019, they came second in the seat, winning more than 14,000 votes. Pollsters now have them within the margin of error of zero.

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The Right-wing case for wealth tax

By Aaron Bastani

And things are getting worse. In the Gorton and Denton by-election, at the end of February, the Conservatives garnered less than 2%. In Makerfield, they are set for a similar fate, only this time slipping behind Restore Britain, whose candidate — Rebecca Shepherd — is a rare example of a populist candidate who doesn’t have much to say. For the first time in British politics, the most successful electoral vehicle in modern history, the party of Wellington, Churchill and Thatcher will finish third among parties of the Right.

That has no precedent. In 1922, the Liberals fragmented into two rival factions. It was a similar story with Labour after the emergence of the SDP in 1981. More recently, of course, there’s been the Tories facing off against UKIP, then the Brexit Party and now Reform. But Makerfield is new terrain. It’s akin to the Greens and Your Party outperforming Labour in what was, until as recently as seven years ago, a target seat. Under first-past-the-post, success often rests on persuading voters that going elsewhere is a wasted ballot, however alluring that might be. It’s a hard trick to pull when your most loyal voters have two credible alternatives.

Yet despite this looming watershed, you’re as likely to find that analysis in the media as you are to encounter a Tory voter on the high street in Ashton. In Daily Telegraph editorials, and BBC broadcasts, we are daily reminded what a formidable politician Kemi Badenoch is, and how impressively she’s performed given the circumstances. But each time I hear or read that assessment, I have to remind myself: her party is about to lose its deposit in two consecutive by-elections.

As I’m neither a national newspaper columnist, nor a panelist on Newsnight, I have the luxury of being honest. Whatever elements of the media might tell you, we are witnessing the slow, dull destruction of the Conservative and Unionist Party. While many regarded the last general election, when the Tories won just 24% of the popular vote, as a nadir — I suspect future historians will look on it with admiration.

Why could things get worse? Because, until 2024, there were no parties on the Right seeking to expose the gap between Conservative rhetoric and reality. Now, like billionaires starting commercial space companies, two have come at once. For all the critics of Keir Starmer — hardly an endangered species — I can count on one hand those I’ve met who claimed the solution was the Conservatives. Serious activists who remain in the party simply talk about survival.

The great Tory failure, and thus their most substantial vulnerability, is with immigration. In 2010, David Cameron promised to reduce numbers to the “tens of thousands”. Instead, immigration constantly increased over the subsequent decade. Then, in the aftermath of Covid, Britain experienced the “Boriswave”, with almost a million net arrivals in a single year. In years gone by, before Lowe and Farage grabbed the national megaphone, the Tories would have responded with cynical hand-wringing. They might have admitted that “mistakes were made” — but that things would have been even worse under Labour.

If nothing else, that highlights the modus operandi of the Westminster system, where your vote is about stopping what you don’t want rather than endorsing what you do. Such a politics of negation was the principal means by which the Tories disciplined and corralled their voters. The arrival of Reform, and Restore, has destroyed all that. The Greens have done something similar with Labour: which is why the party’s NEC allowed Burnham to run after the debacle of Gorton and Denton. Triumph for Hannah Spencer raised the stakes to an existential plane.

That FPTP allowed the major parties to mobilize large coalitions through negativity, rather than shared beliefs and policy objectives, also meant both Labour and the Conservatives were inherently unstable coalitions, especially in our post-ideological age. The media speaks about this positively, emphasizing the need to build a “broad tent” to win Westminster elections. But, in reality, this meant effective collective action always depended on people with wildly different views.

Understand that and you grasp why we have witnessed decades of dysfunction — and the inability of our political class to solve the most basic of problems. While Labour are generally regarded as the more erratic of the two parties, attempting to unite unabashed Marxists and senior partners at Magic Circle law firms, this criticism more readily applies to the Conservatives. They have long tried to be the party of free markets, and of the petit bourgeoisie; of a globally integrated economy, and of Brexit and reduced immigration; of low tax, and the generous triple lock on the state pension.

Indeed, this monstrous blend of interests, worldviews and priorities relied on some economic growth, as well as the country’s electoral system and the political habits it engendered. It also meant that, as soon as an alternative emerged, the party was essentially doomed. But what really did for the Tories wasn’t just the demise of a meaningful growth model — which one could argue evaporated before they returned to power in 2010 — but the end of cheap money. It’s no coincidence that the Bank of England started to raise interest rates at the end of 2021, around the same time that Labour surged in the polls. For all the supposed impact on the Tories of Partygate, or Keir Starmer’s sober style, neither came close to the end of cheap mortgages.

Most fundamental of all, though, is the fact that Britain’s economic model can no longer reproduce a sizable middle class. As a result, the Conservatives, supposedly a pro-market party on the center-right, are unable to reproduce themselves as an electoral constituency. This can be inferred from a litany of data points — from the rising cost of private schools; to declining rates of home ownership among young adults; to the proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents. Where qualifications in law or engineering were once a route to success, today they’re anything but. Machine learning will do something similar for professions like accountancy and consulting, while journalism has long been a pursuit for children of the elite, or those willing to embrace decades of precarity. Doctors and headmasters, those venerable burgher professions of yesteryear, now take industrial action over pay and conditions. It is often said that the rise of Reform and Restore is the function of an aging population, but they are also what happens when fertile conditions for a politics of the center-right collapses.

After 14 years of Conservative government, indeed, the situation is worse than ever. There’s the £100,000 tax trap, for one thing, which means you pay an effective tax rate of 60% over that threshold. Elsewhere, student loans have become a de-facto tax on the middle class, for everyone from millennials down. Loan repayments, combined with income tax and National Insurance contributions, now mean a young professional on a middling income can face a marginal tax rate of over 50%. This has obvious implications for those saving to buy a home, or who wish to start a family or launch a business — in other words basically anyone who might formerly have thought about voting Tory.

If these shaky economic foundations go a long way to explaining the Tory nadir, dramatic changes in the media matter too. This is most obvious with the emergence of GB News and X under Elon Musk. As with our often-asphyxiating electoral system, the big two parties relied on journalistic gatekeepers to retain authority and manufacture consent. While print, progressively so after Rupert Murdoch entered Britain’s news market, reflected a conservative worldview, broadcast media — particularly the BBC — offered a liberal counter-balance.

As I note above, you can still hear echoes of this in the traditional media today. But GB News scrambled journalism’s uneasy truce by taking the politics of the tabloid paper and sticking it onto our televisions. Looking back, it is clear that breaking the Westminster duopoly was always downstream of disturbing the ideologically cosy world of TV journalism. Suddenly, the talking heads of the Conservative and Labour parties, spouting their arguments as glibly as press officers, seem even more incurious and boring than before.

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Restore’s media operation, for its part, is overwhelmingly online. To that extent, it is closer to the Greens than Reform. Rupert Lowe has a highly active Facebook page with twice as many followers as the prime minister. Then there are the young men circling around him, a group whose digital footprint is matched by their ideological stridency. This cohort includes the Lotus Eaters channel on YouTube, as well as Charlie Downes and “Young Bob” (who recently provided reams of evidence to Hampshire police while livestreaming dozens of individuals engaging in violent disorder).

Impressive as that growing cluster is, however, it’s no match to having one of the country’s leading news channels (GB News features two Reform MPs, Farage and Lee Anderson, as well as former parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin). That helps explain the difference between the two parties in terms of exposure, and why Reform are contenders in Makerfield while Restore are not. Traditional stalwarts aside, the Tories are utterly lost in this new media world, and seem set to keep struggling as broadsheet circulations plummet.

Just as Jose Mourinho, twice a European champion, once mused that his greatest footballing achievement was to finish second with a Manchester United side replete with has-beens, Rishi Sunak might one day muse that winning 121 seats, despite the headwinds of history, was his political zenith. For Kemi the bar is lower still. If she slumps to 50 or 60 seats, even Times columnists will struggle to assert that lead is actually gold.

The biggest, Fabricant tells me, gesturing to a dark brown bear, is named “Howard” after an old friend of his. Fabricant tells me that he spotted “Howard” — Howard the Bear, that is — while shopping in the Milton Keynes branch of John Lewis. The store was managed at the time by Fabricant’s life partner, Andy Street, former managing director of the John Lewis Partnership, and Mayor for the West Midlands 2018-24. Anyway, Fabricant had to have Howard. And now Howard is reclining in an armchair, staring at a fireplace that’s obscured by dusty flowers. The flowers are artificial and yet they still seem to be wilting.

Like Pooh hunting his Heffalump, I had set out on the trail of a rare and possibly non-existent creature: the Tory of the Future. Fabricant was the VIP guest at an exclusive event hosted by the Young Conservatives (YC’s) in Birmingham, where my £25 ticket had promised the chance to spend “20.00-Late” with the party leadership of tomorrow. The event’s organizer was Hugo Rasenberg, 21, a protegé of Fabricant and Street, then campaigning for a seat on Birmingham City Council. When Rasenberg told Fabricant that I was a journalist, Fabricant immediately proposed the three of us go for a curry — and so we find ourselves dissecting the future of Conservatism over aperitifs in his sitting room.

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Kemi Badenoch has one last shot

By Richard Vinen

When I began my search, it wasn’t entirely clear to me that such a future exists. In 2024, after 14 years of Tory rule, the most successful electoral machine in the Western world abruptly collapsed in on itself: Fabricant and Street both lost their jobs; disenfranchised voters were seduced to either Reform, the Lib Dems, Labour, or the hypnotic Greens. Subsequently, party membership reached an all-time low: Conservative Home predicted in October that the numbers would soon fall below 100,000 – fewer than half the Green Party’s March 2026 figures. Somewhat overlooked amid Labour’s dire local election results last month were a still more hopeless set of results for Kemi Badenoch, notwithstanding a few isolated triumphs.

It’s therefore not difficult to see why the party would wish to chase a younger demographic. The difficulty is that the vast majority of young people absolutely detest the Conservative Party. Even in 2019, when Boris Johnson won the biggest majority since 1987, Ipsos Mori’s final poll estimated Labour to be 26 points more popular than the Tories among 18-to-34 year olds. Given that the Conservative Party appeared to be actively hostile to young people throughout its 14 years in power — imposing austerity, trebling tuition fees, presiding over a dysfunctional housing market, and orchestrating Brexit (which around 75% of young people voted against) — it is perhaps unsurprising that the party now struggles to articulate what it actually offers us.

The event where Rasenberg first introduced me to Fabricant did, however, offer a few clues. Once I had scanned my QR code and squeezed past two young men fervently kissing, I was surprised to see at least 100 young Tories in the main bar.

The first person I spoke to was a teenager with an accent I couldn’t quite place. “I have some views on immigration”, he spat into my ear. “Even if you need to put a gun to a foreign person’s head to get them to leave the country, then that’s just the way it is.” He then told me he was from Spain.

We were immediately approached by a man of about 19 in a tweed blazer. “I’ve got a story for you,” he said, before revealing that the Conservatives have the highest number of young members compared with other parties. This would not be the last time I heard this baseless claim as the night progressed. I did, though, speak to two teenage smokers who became party members owing to what one described as “current political instability”. The other saw the Tories as “a safe bet”. Another pair seemed to have inherited Toryism from their respective parents, in the same way one might inherit Tottenham Hotspur or a tendency for gout.

I quickly moved on to a crowd which included Jay Chan, 20. If social media numbers were currency in this room, Chan was coining it in with his 40,000 Instagram followers. Identifying as Chinese but a “Tory through and through”, he wore his everyday attire: an immaculate suit with braces and a blue plaid tie. He was only two sentences into a monologue when I realized I had seen this performance before: his mode of delivery was remarkably similar to Boris Johnson’s, a blustering enthusiasm punctuated with over-emphasized plosive phonics and jargon. On Chan’s Instagram is a photo of him in a blond wig, cosplaying as his political hero for school Leavers Day. Chan emigrated to the UK from Hong Kong aged 15, joined the Conservative Party less than a year later, and claims he perfected his English by watching Johnson’s televised Covid conferences.

A troop of supporters clustered around him as he charged a pint of Guinness in the air. “What do we say of Labour?” he bellowed. “Shit”, the group chorused. “What do we say of shit?” he asked. “Labour!” came the reply as Jay downed the pint in one to delighted cheers. He immediately did this again, this time to more muted acclamation, and a third time, by which time several of the onlookers had ebbed away.

When we came to discuss the present Tory leadership, Jay Chan had a clear point of difference with Badenoch on the issue of social media. Chan credited the internet with introducing young people to politics — a prospect particularly important when considering Labour’s People Bill, which will allow 16-year olds to vote. In a predominantly male Right-wing room, I was expecting an attempted indoctrination into the manosphere, but instead Chan was one of several young men who volunteered his homosexuality as a talking point. Politics, he suggested, is a natural domain for men who aren’t interested in the football and Formula 1 that their algorithms complacently serve them: “Gay men aren’t typically socialized by the media they consume,” he said. “When you don’t get along with your straight classmates you also don’t fully get along with girls talking about makeup, dating, fashion… you begin to find yourself into things like politics. That’s my theory.”

A study from March 2026 by King’s College, London revealed that social media does indeed play a “huge role” in promoting traditional gender views. Politics, Chan suggested, consequently function as the “center ground” for young gay men — a space they supposedly gravitate toward on account of being unable to fully inhabit either side of the divide. He notes how a fellow YC believes “everyone in politics is secretly bisexual”. While clarifying that he doesn’t necessarily agree, he then catalogs the identities of various colleagues: “Bisexual, gay, gay, bisexual, transgender” (he pronounced it trarns-gender), before referring to the Liberal Democrats as the “Liberal Femboy-crats”. After all: “The femboy is the essence of liberalism”.

By 9pm the room was packed, predominantly with young men. Their clean-shaven faces were crowned with modest hairstyles. Pastel-hued shirts and cerulean jumpers jostled against each other. Familiar hands wandered across shoulders and upper arms. A young civil servant carouselled around the dancefloor, propelling his tie above his head like a helicopter rotor as he failed to instigate a conga line. It was finally time for the star of the evening: a man who once filmed himself cycling nude around a public park, and whose YouTube channel shows him spanking a clothed man on the buttocks with a shoe horn. He also appeared on Channel 4’s Celebrity First Dates — where he came out as bisexual — and in April 2025, had a short stay in the Celebrity Big Brother house: Sir Michael Fabricant.

Fabricant entered with a small entourage, but by the time he reached the stage he was surrounded by swooning young Tories. Their role model grabbed the microphone amidst cheers and hollering. His opening gambit was to celebrate the (then-recent) killing of Iranian leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei. The crowd chanted “USA, USA, USA!” as their luminary punched the air.

Although the room was broadly pro-Trump, the crowd was decidedly less enamored with his British tribute act, Nigel Farage. Earlier in the night I’d detected a disgust for Reform UK and its leader, even from those who had been vocally anti-immigration. But Fabricant, surprisingly, encouraged the crowd to vote for Reform UK. This, he suggested, was the best course of action in constituencies where the Conservatives were destined to lose. In the crowd, there was an exchange of side-glances and murmurs.

As his 10-minute speech and subsequent audience questions — “on any subject except my hair” — drew to a close, someone interrupted the proceedings to call for those running in local elections to raise a hand. A Spartacist collective of arms surged above the crowd. The blazered young man from earlier materialized next to my ear: “Do you not feel roused?” he whispered. I informed him that I remain un-roused. “Would it be different if we were at war?”

Before the evening ended with slow dancing, mumbled apologies for drunkenness, and me having to assist in the rescue of a teenage Tory who was lying unconscious on the pavement, Rasenberg introduced me to Fabricant.

Subsequently, a fortnight later, I am in Fabricant’s living room with Rasenberg and Howard the Bear. We are drinking red wine — wine, Fabricant informs me, that he recently won in a raffle. For now, Fabricant is less keen on formulating a theory as to how the Conservative party can renew itself in an age of populism and soundbites — and more keen to spill the tea on various Tory colleagues and donors: who fancies whom, who is secretly gay, and who recently surprised him by marrying a woman. He refers to homosexual men as “gay boys”, and tells us that age-related hormone changes haven’t stopped him from “cranking away”.

I ask him why he thinks young people aren’t engaging with the Conservative party. Fabricant proposes it’s because they are incapable of looking beyond the immediate past. “And the immediate past to them is the handling of Covid.” It’s a convenient theory: that youth disaffection is a failure of perspective. Even if young people could see past Covid — including the 23,000 additional deaths resulting from Tory complacency — it would offer little comfort. Many of the policies that shaped young people’s lives were enacted when today’s teenagers were toddlers: the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance in 2010 (a weekly payment that supported 16-19 year olds to remain in education); the closure of Connexions (a £200m a year, government-funded agency that provided teenagers with career advice, training, and personal support); the denial of the chance to go and live and work abroad, thanks to Brexit. Fabricant “totally stands” by Brexit.

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Rasenberg offers an alternate theory. He says the Tories are a party for those who are “reading and thinking” as opposed to those who only have “vibes-based” political affiliations. “We’ve been robbed of what our parents and grandparents had,” he says with reference to the property ladder. He isn’t wrong — but I also ask whether the Conservative Party is to blame. Under the last Labour government, a household earning the median income could afford to buy an average priced home in England. According to the ONS, by 2022 only 10% of the property market was affordable to the same demographic.

Fabricant steers the conversation away before Rasenberg can reply. After some back and forth, he returns to the prevalence of “gays” in politics. Rasenberg says that, as a straight man in the Conservative Party, he does “sometimes feel like a minority” — and I get the impression he wants his sexuality on the record. Fabricant, a longstanding campaigner for gay rights, claims the Tory’s gay culture is nothing new: he recalls how a former Chief Whip once asked him if there was a “huge gay undercurrent in the Parliamentary party”. Fabricant claims that gay people “like Catholics” stick together. He then tells me how “flattered” he once was to have his “bottom” grabbed by a senior politician in the Strangers’ bar in the House of Commons.

Rasenberg leans into my dictaphone: “I’ll be honest. Sexual harassment culture I want to expunge, that needs to be gone”. In February, Birmingham Live reported claims that a Labour candidate sexually harassed Rasenberg at an election count. “Twink”, “eye-candy” and accusations that Mayor Andy Street only hired Rasenberg because he was “nice to look at’” are just a few examples of the “intentional, weaponized [and] aggressive” comments Rasenberg allegedly received.

Regarding sexual harassment between men, Fabricant proposes the preventative measure that “one bloke can always thump another bloke”, before clarifying that “of course [sexual harassment culture] is wrong. And I’ve never done that and nobody’s ever accused me of doing that”. In 2017, Fabricant’s name was redacted on a list of MPs accused of inappropriate sexual behavior — an accusation he staunchly denied. In 2022, he was accused of “making light” of rape allegations against a Commons colleague. Of Rasenberg’s experience, he declares that if “somebody had called me a twink, I’d have loved it.”

It’s time for our curry. Leaving via the garden gate (our host makes a back-passage joke) we venture to his Indian restaurant of choice. “What shall we do?” he asks with innocent delight as we settle into its cushioned benches. Fabricant speaks about his childhood with fondness, and at one disconcerting point, he and Rasenberg start conversing in German — giggling at something they have no intention of translating. Fabricant regales us (auf Englisch) with anecdotes: triumphs, scandals, sexcapades, famous politicians and near-misses of varying plausibility. Rasenberg seems impressed. I’m not sure how much I believe.

While on the last train back from Lichfield, it struck me that despite the eclectic conversation and his position of stewardship, Fabricant was unable to land on what the Conservative Party might offer the younger generation. Instead the former party Vice-Chairman blamed cognitive barriers, recalled anecdotes of sexual harassment, and endorsed a rival party to a room full of Tory youth. Edward Gibbon, chronicling the fall of Rome, observed that empires do not typically collapse from external assault but from a slow, self-administered erosion. The Tories, it seems, have been remarkably diligent in this regard.

Still, from what I’ve seen, the Conservative Party is not dying but metamorphosing into something previously inconceivable: a right-wing, queer social club. A Tory source recently informed the Independent that “Kemi [Badenoch] is urging people to be patient behind the scenes” and I get the impression Rasenberg believes he is buying the dip. But I didn’t see anything that convinced me this is indeed a “safe bet”.

Weeks later, Rasenberg will fail his bid to gain a seat on Birmingham City Council, losing out to a Green and an ex-Labour Independent. Others I met fare no better in their respective constituencies. “Que sera sera”, Rasenberg will write, responding to the defeat on Instagram. Whatever will be, will be.

* * * 

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.

The inaugural Thatcher Fest is not exactly an ancient Grantham tradition. “It’s just a way of getting people into the town,” one Conservative councillor soberly explained. The festival’s events apparently offered something for everyone: Edwina Currie, Giles Brandreth, a drag queen doing a bit about Section 28. “Are you worried about protestors?” the leader of the council was asked by local news. “No I’m not, I want to know are they bringing in money, and are they spending it in the pub and the hotels?”

There were no protestors, but something the town found even more uncomfortable: a quiet trickle of devotees from all over the world. At 2pm we gathered near her statue. A dozen in all: a corporate vice executive from Dusseldorf; a young Tory boy (“he’s furious about the rise of Reform,” explained his attendant mother); a squat, belligerent woman from Sichuan who had, as she was keen to show me on her phone, been working on an amateur translation of Carol Thatcher’s memoir into Mandarin.

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This was the most immersive of the festival events, a psychogeographic retracing of Thatcher’s childhood steps: fields where she might once have tobogganed in snow; the Methodist hall where her father once preached; the walk to school where she would spend the twice-a-day half-hour hike contemplating Grantham and its incarnation of England. Walking up the hill towards Thatcher’s old grammar, the market town was resplendent, triumphant in its autumnal color, offering us for a briefest of moments that crucible of nostalgia and memory that once informed her vision of the country.

The historian David Cannadine certainly believed this was the case. “Thatcher’s social vision for Britain,” he wrote, “was in many ways Grantham writ large.” It was only through this time and place that her seemingly contradictory vision of the country could be properly understood. Her father’s shop was squarely on the High Street, literally in the twilight zone between well-heeled aspiration of England’s provincial bourgeoisie and the degradation of a nearby slum. It birthed an almost revolutionary conception of class and society: both hierarchical, with its “Burkean reverence” for petty provincial officialdom, but also one enterprising and disruptive, through which the “Victorian values” of hardwork, thrift, self-reliance and independence still ruled. Altogether, Thatcherism represented a paradoxically modern expression of an old moral order, one that continues to shape the ethos of 21st-century capitalism.

Cynicism toward Thatcher’s fondness for Grantham has reigned supreme in recent years, alongside a fondness for Peregrine Worsthorne’s quip that in “setting out to recreate the country of her father” she ended up creating the country of her son: dodgy businessman and sometime coup-plotter Mark. “Reheated Thatcherism” is now the ultimate insult in British politics, used to prod at a dying Tory corpse and undermine Reform’s push for power. But what this ignores, amid the apparently revolutionary temper of British politics, is the extent to which Thatcher and Grantham, as they exist today, still articulate our desires and revealed preferences.

As the walking tour indulged in this Thatcherite mythos, there was a reverential mood — a sense that, in an era of looming upheaval, this was the last Prime Minister to seep out of the dour realm of scripted politics into the collective consciousness. In 50 years’ time, there will be no nosing around the streets of Durham in search of Blair’s youth, no life-size recreation of Keir Starmer’s bedroom, as the local museum once did for Thatcher. Our own politics, indeed our inner lives, are still entranced by the contradictions of her vision. In the end, most Britons still hope to live quiet lives in market towns like Grantham, with their historic centers and abundant suburban shopping centers. We want good schools and meritocracy. We want prosperity and security, enterprise and community, history and an enduring relevance to the outside world.

Behind the scenes of the Grantham festival, a struggle to represent these interests was taking place. “If we lose Grantham,” Gareth Knight of the local Conservative Chairmen’s Association tells me, “I’m not sure what we have left as a party.” During this year’s Lincolnshire County Council election, Reform took 44 out of 70 seats, part of a quiet realignment of defections and local contests taking place across provincial England. Then, in July, came yet more symbolic defections, including former town mayor Graham Jeal, the man who’d worked to bring the statue of Thatcher from Westminster to Grantham.

If Thatcher’s vision for life in Grantham remains, the methods have had to change. A statement issued by the local Reform Party regarding the festival, amid its recent triumph, is both celebratory and distancing. “Mrs Thatcher,” it read, “is now an important historical figure rather than one that informs the challenges of 2025.” A new “post-liberal conservatism” is apparently the cure for Britain’s malaise: “One that spends its money wisely, backs domestic industry, and rebuilds resilience — not the managerial state that meddles in every aspect of life.”

When I asked Jeal to expand, he talked only of the excitement of this new endeavor. “It’s like working for a startup,” he says during a 30-minute phone call in which he mentions the word growth 22 times. “I think that Reform is clearly attracting people who have never voted before, so there’s a whole new constituency coming forward.” In this, Jeal’s pitch is similar to one Farage has tried out from the Welsh Valleys to the Dorset shires: a blend between lowering corporation tax for small businesses and rebuilding state capacity. It is, as sociologist Dan Evans describes, the most important class divide of the 21st century — between global and family capital — expressed in the “frenzied fear of falling from the lower middle class”.

Despite this more statist pitch, Reform has nonetheless just dropped its £90 billion program of tax cuts, after stern criticism by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Despite this, the party’s supposed profligacy offers the Conservative its final, desperate line of attack. To old Tory voters, it’s seen as a “statist, Left-wing party”, says Gareth Knight, among the few aspirational burghers left in Grantham who still cling to the familiar brand of grocer-shop accounts. It’s the Labour areas of the town, he insists, that Reform is sweeping up — and for the Conservative Party to survive here, it’s about tying Reform to the statism, and indeed, the old snobbery, of Thatcher’s distinction between those in the town “who drew salaries from white-collar employment and those who did not”

What of Labour in Grantham? In the last election, they came second, despite Reform eating up most of the Tories’ losses with a 20% swing. Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about Grantham, and indeed Thatcher’s recollection of the town, is its industrial heritage, which Reform is now trying to court. Its munitions factory saw it targeted by the Luftwaffe, and full employment continued well into the Sixties. Today, light industry still exists in Grantham and the rest of South Lincolnshire. One notable example is the area’s niche in garden conservatories: typical, perhaps, of its provincial aspirations, yet one crippled by high energy costs. But symbolically, at least for Reform, its mix of entrepreneurism, state enterprise and market town aesthetics is a way of bridging a new divide between the old Tory establishment and the Grantham’s disenfranchised blue-collar workers.

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Confronted with this rising coalition, the local Labour Party shares one thing with its old rivals: if Thatcher is capable of uniting a Tory Party potentially entering its death throes, she’s even better at bringing together an increasingly irrelevant Labour. In the Grantham Railway Club, at the “alternative” Thatcher Fest, a rejected scene from a Ken Loach film unfolds. Billy Bragg’s “Thatcherites” is strummed out by a pair of greying folk-rockers. The audience is similarly frail and nostalgic for misery and hardship. A portly, bearded retiree presents me with poems of fastidious bleakness from his travels across the Midlands via buses and estates. “Could this be about Grantham?” I ask. “Yes, of course,” he says. The German corporate vice-president has turned up from the walking tour with a half pint of Madri, surveying the scene with the sort of morbid curiosity reserved for an amateur museum exhibit.

The local Labour Party chairman, Rob Shorrock, a teacher at the local college, offers a dose of realism on Farage’s hoped-for realignment. “At least one of the Reform defectors told me he voted for Blair in 1997. They get excited at anything.” The railway connection to London, he insists, is the real growth opportunity. “There’s also a shortage of skills,” he says, underpinned by the belief that a dose of pragmatic investment of infrastructure could yet breathe life back into an old Blairite instinct.

But Grantham seems to have moved beyond such trite solutions. When I asked one festival speaker about Thatcher’s legacy and her desire to “separate the person from the politics”, she sent back a ChatGPT response of nonsensical buzzwords. That seems appropriate not just for Labour in Grantham, but for the Government’s whole understanding of how to remember the Iron Lady and her legacy. Which begs the question you end up asking everyone at “Thatcher fest”: what would the grocer’s daughter herself make of her town now? The answers vary, from tour guide Dr John Manterfield (“lack of respect, a loss of independent shops”) to the Tory Party chairman (“the success of Right to Buy, the good grammar schools”). But Shorrock, outside the din of geriatric protest, likely gives the most fitting answer for the country at large: “It still doesn’t quite know what it wants to be yet.”

He’s not the only one for whom Thatcher’s looming face recalls a conservative adolescence of furtive, Freudian desires to kill Daddy and marry Maggie — of political vigor, economic brawn, Britannia unchained, and memories of happily selling England by the pound in the name of Austrian economists and market efficiency. But all that feels very distant now. For if opposition party conferences are meant to be about rallying the troops, raising spirits for the fight against a woefully unpopular government, the troops today feel demoralized. The atmosphere is of a wake soundtracked by a aging tribute band.

For the Prime Minister’s losses have not been Kemi Badenoch’s gains. The faithful are vanishingly thin on the ground. Conference is empty; any of the sparse activity seems palpably futile. The quintessential party of government is being out-flanked on the Right by a top-down, one-man start-up act with little-or-no governing pedigree, but possessed of an appeal which speaks directly to the public’s baser, zero-sum instincts.

Gawping at ladies’ dresses, meanwhile, the Tories have clearly left the usual party-political state of self-delusion and entered a collective hallucination. Rather than stage a fightback, the foot-soldiers of the modern Conservative Party have retreated into nostalgia, yearning for the last time they were an ascendant force, forging a new national character with brutal efficiency, and taking aim against socialist Britain and the statist blob.

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By Jonny Ball

Here, at Thatcher-fest, is a world in which 2008 never happened, in which the entire model upon which the Iron Lady and her party built post-1979 Britain hadn’t fallen apart under the weight of an over-leveraged, out of control financial services sector. What’s more, the conditions which allowed the economic offer of Thatcherism to develop are no longer apparent. We’re no longer an energy exporter, enjoying a steady flow of North Sea tax receipts, and we’re not experiencing buoyant growth off the back of Chinese market reforms and Reaganite deficit spending. Nor is there a cross-border trend which allows government to escape the analog economy of coal and steel, instead embracing the services and silicon chips of the late-20th century.

Taken together, the formula the Conservatives pursued for the past half-century has left us deeply vulnerable. We have an economy reliant on global trade flows and inward foreign investment with a yawning balance of payments; the UK recorded a trade in goods deficit of £226 billion last year, only partly offset by service exports. At the same time, we have privatized our assets, and left our infrastructure weak, and prioritized a growth model that concentrates wealth in London and the South East. In the regions, our industrial base withers. This was deemed to be a price worth paying, not only because manufacturing could be cheaply offshored, but also because the decline of industry tamed our once-mighty trade unions, an essential prerequisite of Thatcherite hegemony.

None of these prescriptions suits our era of geopolitical competition. Nor does the Thatcherite policy mix quell the populist backlash fermenting outside the metropolitan citadels. Even in urban areas, the primary beneficiaries of five decades of market liberalism, whereby the service industries and “knowledge economy” prospered, residents now balk at voting Conservative, turned off by the provincial “Little England” aesthetics that offend their more refined, liberal-cosmopolitan tastes. Former industrial powerhouses and factory-dominated monotowns have meanwhile morphed into something we now call “left behind” Britain, now rising in nationalist revolt. There was a brief period where a nascent red Toryism, with an agenda focused on regional investment and industrial revival, tied together a Leave-voting, post-industrial working-class with more affluent voters in the southern shires. But that Johnsonite experiment collapsed after Partygate, and, here, at Tory conference, there seems little interest in reviving a political strategy that conservative opinion writers chide as “neo-Brownite social democracy”.

The Tories, with few exceptions, have no alternative and no response to the questions of the age. Over breakfast, I overhear four delegates discussing their hangovers and fantasizing about abolishing the minimum wage. (It “has killed the service industry”, apparently.) One was giddy about Badenoch sitting behind him during one of Mel Stride’s appearances. Another was buzzing with excitement about the prospect of seeing Robert Jenrick. The shadow justice secretary is easily the most assured and media-savvy of the shadow cabinet. A former Remainer Cameroon, who now seems happier among the very online New Right, Jenrick is nakedly ambitious in a way that is unflattering.

But he is at least aligning himself with an emerging zeitgeist, aware of the scale of public discontent with a tired, failing political class, and the widespread disgust that defines the popular mood. His conference speech was full of Faragist sound and fury — “the collapse of the old order is in sight”, he told the hall, a vivid rebuke to the tradition of Burkean moderation and empiricist skepticism of continental-style ruptures that English conservatism embraced for four centuries.

In the end, though, Jenrick is no Thatcher: and not merely because he lacks her charisma as the political embodiment of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. Stuart Hall, the Marxist cultural theorist, was in awe of the magnetic power of Thatcherism in its heyday. He was fascinated by its achievements, its construction of a new social bloc, an electoral coalition around a new political and economic consensus. It turned an aspirational working-class, made homeowners under Right to Buy, away from socialism. It united them with anxious suburbanites worried about crime, along with petty bourgeois business owners sick of union militants. In tow came the City of London and the “yuppies”, ready to be unshackled from a regulatory state.

“As an ideology”, Hall wrote, “Thatcherism addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.” Its success lay in articulating grievances, exploiting crises, distilling a feeling, a mood, a collective (sub)consciousness into a political project, uniting disparate and sometimes contradictory strands of policy and political demographics into a unified, coherent whole. Thatcher’s Anglican traditionalism and old-fashioned family values sat awkwardly alongside breakneck industrial modernization that destroyed centuries-old communal bonds, replacing a culture of collectivism with a raucously selfish individualism epitomized by a new “Loadsamoney” social category. But her political skill lay in papering over these cracks.

There is nothing approaching this kind of hegemonic ambition in Jenrick, his fierce rhetoric and frenzied viral posting notwithstanding. He may be assured in his culture war comfort zones, in his diatribes on crime, migration and patriotic renaissance. But he ultimately has no answer to the 17-year economic funk in which Britain still finds itself. Thatcherism, for all its faults, was a renewal project that succeeded in transforming Britain, identifying losers as well as winners, and turning the country away from a spluttering postwar model.

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By Richard Vinen

Where the grocer’s daughter met a crisis of social democracy and the collapse of postwar Keynesianism with a return to Victorian morality and Whiggish, free-trading economic liberalism, the Conservatives look at our own period of secular decline and can only flog the dead horse of her Thatcherite first principles. A financial services boom and the lifting of capital controls won’t save us now. There are few public assets, few national industries left to sell to the highest bidder. The family silver is gone.

Somewhere in the wings, figures such as Nick Timothy pursue an agenda more congruent with the times. His blue-collar conservatism talks about reindustrialization; about productive, well-paid manufacturing work; about an active, interventionist state. Combined with an inclusive patriotism and restrictionist migration policy, that’s a fruitful political positioning for an electorate tired of a libertine Left and libertarian Right. But it’s not where the Conservative Party is as a whole, and certainly not where Badenoch is, nor where Jenrick has dared go before he makes his pitch to a membership of small-state true believers.

Reform is already beginning to pivot away from the politics of the “saloon-bar Thatcherite”, embracing public ownership, aspects of the welfare state, and attacking the banking sector. A Tory activist tells me that many of his comrades are treating this year’s conference as a goodbye party, a final hurrah with the True Blue crowd, before crossing no-man’s land to Nigel’s turquoise army. This is perhaps less down to ideology than personality. Like Thatcher, after all, Farage addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. His electoral coalition will constitute a rebuilt version of the short-lived 2019 realignment, uniting left-behind Britain with more affluent, more rural constituencies. Thatcher created her voter base. Who, in contrast, are Kemi Badenoch’s people? Smoking a cig, a senior party member tells me she’s “not a leader”, and siren voices in the party are growing increasingly vocal in favor of yet another change at the top.

But, then, who are Jenrick’s people? His preferred strategy seems to be that of the Farage tribute act, a bandwagon-jump, based on the calculation that if you can’t beat them, copy them. If the shadow justice secretary takes over, he’ll merely be the fifth leader the party has elected in five years, within an organization struggling with its own identity, grasping at the straws of long-past glories but campaigning against their own 14 years of failure. The Tories are left unsure of their purpose in a world that they created but that has moved on, sailed away, leaving them stranded, downing pints in Manchester’s Midlands Hotel, wondering if their best bet is to jump aboard the good ship Reform. The Iron Lady will only sink them.

For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial center. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalization would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.

But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalization was always just a superficial Americanization, from which America itself has now withdrawn. Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.

It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron: rightly, Reform’s new signing Danny Kruger has characterized the insurgent party’s domestic foe as simply “late-stage liberalism”. In Britain, at least, the result is likely to be the diminution of Labour and the Conservatives to minor regional parties centered on London, the last ideological stronghold of the old regime. A year ago Keir Starmer delivered the Conservative Party a historic defeat; today he is the most detested prime minister in modern British history. There is no prospect of Starmer winning the next election, and little prospect of him leading the Labour Party into it.

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Yet Starmer, devoid of an individual personality, ought not take any of this personally: he is simply a stand-in for the collapsing Nineties System, of which he is the robotic final avatar. Everything that Starmer represents, even if presented in human form, would be just as roundly detested. Blair himself has transitioned from the fantasy vision he imposed on British politics to the technocratic, enlightened despotism of his proposed Gaza Mandate, in which a combination of economic growth and digital surveillance will contain the volatile nationalism of the Palestinian people: in his plans for digital ID, it is not hard to see Starmer following suit, albeit without the growth.

Trapped between loyalty to a collapsing imperial ideology, and the upsurge in nationalist sentiment its implementation produced, the Labour front bench, disconsolately waving the various flags of the United Kingdom for the cameras, finds itself forced to spout incoherent slogans. The country is not broken, and to claim that it is is dangerous rhetoric: but the country also requires total renewal, indeed reforging into a “New Britain”. Reform stokes division, and yet the country is also at a “fork in the road”, from which Labour will conjure up unity from diversity. The Boriswave was a terrible mistake, but to undo it would be fascism; nativist sentiment is the preserve of a tiny internet minority, but also of the country’s most popular party; Reform is racist but its voters are not. The Home Secretary declares that “ethnonationalism” is a societal evil to be defeated, while Starmer endorses its basic principle in asserting that Israel and Palestine require two separate nation states to prevent their two peoples from slaughtering each other. If only they could have bonded over slicing half-time Jaffa oranges together, perhaps things would have been different.

The party’s messaging, as it enters full election mode just one year into its term, is entirely incoherent because it must triangulate between the roundly despised, and entirely illusory worldview of its leadership on the one hand, and the newly aggrieved mood of the country on the other. The central axis of British politics is now the basic, essential stuff of national identity, which is not a battleground favorable to Labour. Indeed, there is something late-stage Soviet in Wes Streeting vowing to defeat the combined forces of English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism through a “return to the spirit of 1945”, even as he waits to lose his seat to a “Gaza independent”. But then all British politics in 2025 has become the fantasy pronouncements of those waiting to lose their seats, in what is now merely a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government.

Through having implemented its worldview, and forcing the nation to live with the results, the Labour Party is doomed. But for the Conservative Party, the immediate outlook is just as grim. Having rid his party of conservatives, that self-described “Heir to Blair”, David Cameron, condemned the Tories to share Labour’s fate: the collapse of the two parties, viewed in narrow partisan terms by the Westminster lobby, is more accurately the collapse of the shared ideology they undertook, between them, to impose on Britain.

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Starmer’s assertion that the Conservatives are the less threatening rival is based on the perception that they are, if not technically the same party as Labour, the product of a shared worldview. There is no threat, for Blairism’s last disciple, of them rolling back New Labour’s constitutional and demographic vandalism. Indeed, considering the party’s governing record in deepening and accelerating New Labour’s cultural revolution, Starmer’s backhand compliment to the Tories could just as easily be a withering broadside by Farage. Such is the shifting popular mood, Labour now even feels free to attack the party’s governing record of excessive liberalism. In disparagingly deploying the online-Right term “Boriswave” to critique Tory governance, no doubt to the despair of his remaining supporters on Bluesky, Starmer has at least put paid to any lingering ideas of a Johnson comeback.

Like a nation, a party can survive many setbacks: but enough of them together and the result is fatal. While Kemi Badenoch was evidently the wrong choice for leader — as I warned at the time of her election — it is far from clear that a belated Jenrick coronation can now do much for the party’s near-term fortunes. A counterintuitive case, though not a strong one, could perhaps be made that Badenoch’s laissez-faire attitude to management has at least allowed the Jenrick wing to experiment with forging a harder-edged, more Right-wing faction within the party. The modernizing, developmentalist, even self-proclaimed Anglofuturist faction around him, now calling themselves the “New Centre Right”, present a compelling vision for 2020s Conservativism. Their greatest appeal is that they can present the same offer of radical reform as Reform itself, but with more competent implementation: but it is a difficult task to campaign on renouncing your own party’s record, and in any case Reform can now convincingly argue that a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote for continued Labour rule. Besides, whatever its strengths, on current polling trends many of the New Centre Right’s brightest stars cannot expect to keep their seats.

The options available to the party last year are no longer on the menu, and those that remain are unappetizing. A gamble could be made that Reform will rest British politics onto a plane more amenable to future Right-wing governance, and that the losses of the next election may in time be recouped by the rump party that survives. One plausible future, at least for Jenrick’s wing, by far the most energetic and convincing Conservative faction, is playing a similar role in relation to Farage to the one Farage himself once performed against the Tories: as a purist pressure group, punishing any deviation from Rightist principles from the luxury of the sidelines. Another is as a more successful SDP, a predominantly internet-based party, with more support from commentators than voters, producing high-quality policy documents to be plagiarized by their electorally successful rivals. Yet if it wishes to remain in Parliament, the New Centre Right faction also presents, for Reform, the only attractive set of potential Tory defectors, in a path already smoothed by their erstwhile ally Danny Kruger. Extinction or co-option? Neither prospect is attractive, yet both now seem more probable than renewal. Outpaced by history, the politics of the ancien régime has another four years to further discredit itself, with every grim daily headline passing verdict on its failure. Gathering in a city that, this week, bloodily displays the UK’s very worst dysfunctions, the Conservative Party’s only chance is that our current path of extreme political volatility may still, against all the odds, extract the party from the grave it so eagerly dug itself. The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.

The period between 1688 and the 1740s was roiled by culture wars and economic change as dramatic as our own. Long before today’s keyboard warriors stereotyped their enemies online — either as skinhead flag-shagging gammons or spittle-flecked blue-haired harpies — Grub Street partisans were doing much the same. Instead of mocking lager louts in England shirts, Whig propagandists attacked a target that was, in many ways, the 18th-century equivalent: the ruddy-cheeked fox-hunting squire who made up the backbone of the Tory Party.

Urbane Whig essayist Joseph Addison depicted the average Tory backwoodsman as being a savage boor with a passion chiefly for dogs, inebriation and xenophobia. He was depicted as a bluff, insular patriot hostile to travel (good only to teach a man how to “jabber French”) and foreigners, whom, he splutters, “will never be loved in England”. With Addison presenting the squire as a half-educated gout-ridden oaf, it’s not far off those online progressives sneering at the “Raise the Flag” movement today.

Such political caricatures, then as now, were rooted in the passionate hatreds inspired by both cultural divides and clashes of economic interests in a time of disorientating change.

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The Tories had, in the period following the Glorious Revolution, become classic provincial “populists”. Their base — the staunchly Anglican landed gentry and their rural dependents — not only despised the Whigs for being the defenders of their religious enemies, the more radical Protestant Dissenters outside the Church of England, but also for material reasons. The Whigs, partisans of the new Dutch King William III, supported their new master’s expensive wars with France, wars which gave rise to higher taxes, rising state debt, and a new web of corrupt state clients in the form of government contractors, “stock-jobbers” and army officers. The cost of all this fell disproportionately on the Tory squires while a new financial elite prospered.

As a result, in the 1690s there was a dramatic political realignment as the old party of state authority and monarchy — the Tories — became the “country” party, hostile to the depredations of the central state. All the while, the old libertarianism of the Whigs faded as they became the party of a new, courtly “progressive establishment”.

The parallel with now is obvious. Just as the triumph of post-revolutionary Whiggery created fresh culturally inflected classes of economic winners (financiers, speculators) and losers (the rural gentry and their tenants), globalization over the past 30 years has created urban-progressive economic beneficiaries and provincial small “c” conservative economic casualties. Back then, Tories and Whigs clashed on the status of the Church of England and religious toleration, whereas now we debate trans rights and Net Zero. But if these debates are separated by hundreds of years, both nonetheless pitted “rooted” cultural conservatism versus the radicalism of a new “Anywhere” class. Then as now, meanwhile, such bitter divisions also reflect the material resentment that economically “left-behind” groups — the Red Wall and angry farmers now, the gentry interest then — have for their urban, “sophisticated” rivals who benefit from both economic openness and state patronage.

Both periods saw a new division — put crudely, nation and tradition versus international economic entanglements and cosmopolitan openness — replace the old political binary. What matters now as then is a dichotomy between those championing national cohesion, rooted in the ways of the provinces, versus those championing new paths of global dynamism rooted in innovation and “progress”. It’s Tory versus Whig all the way down.

There is, however, one major contrast between the two eras. As the Whigs went from being libertarian opponents of state overreach to defenders of a new economic status quo, one dominated by financial interests, so Labour has gone from being the champions of the provincial working classes to the party of socially liberal cosmopolitan graduates. That political realignment has its limitations for Labour, given urban progressives are always in a minority. But the modern Conservative Party has an even bigger problem: they have not made the “populist” transition that their ancestors did. Married to a world of globalization and neoliberalism, thanks to their donor class and backbench Thatcherites, they missed their chance to exploit realignment under Boris Johnson.

This mantle has instead been grasped by Reform. Farage’s revolt against the Blairite state resembles the populist Tory rebellion against the post-Glorious Revolution Whig settlement. Starmer, for his part, looks like a Whig desperate to hold back the tide against the dangers of an insular reactionary neo-Tory backlash. These parallels, in their complexities, hold lessons for both Reform and Labour.

The strength of the appeal of the “country” Tories of the early 18th century was that they combined all the energies of a provincial populist insurgency with a deep sense of tradition. They wanted to dismantle what they saw as illegitimate and alien innovations that were distorting the traditional constitution and endangering liberty — the power of a new breed of financiers and a new class of parasitic state toadies that leeched off the bloated post-revolutionary state — without mostly abandoning the essentials of the post-1688 constitutional settlement. They were genuinely skeptical about the destabilizing implications of incipient financial capitalism, and prepared to countenance major “radical” reforms to ward off its ill effects, while still remaining the party of the church, constitution and squire. In other words, then, the Tories were both profoundly radical and profoundly conservative.

The contrast with Reform seems glaring. Firstly, there is every risk that Reform will be nobbled by the same donor class that rendered the Tories irrelevant, with the power of capital transforming Reform into another appendage of the uniparty. Secondly, elements within Reform appear to be ultra-liberals, albeit of a Right-leaning kind, who want to sweep away the Lords (or perhaps appoint their own cronies to it, Farage isn’t clear) and allow non-parliamentarians to sit in a US-style “cabinet”. They give the impression of skepticism towards a “woke” monarchy and of holding a desire to trash many of our institutions. Either or both of these tendencies may prove far from popular with precisely the marginalized provincial voters Reform is banking on, especially if they win power and the white-hot resentment of voters against the old two established parties fades with time.

This is why the defection of Danny Kruger seems surprising, but perhaps also hopeful. He is, after all, a Tory of the old school: a communitarian Christian and no “Right-Jacobin”. Given all this, he seems well-placed to help Reform negotiate these contradictions and channel the strengths of 18th-century Tory “country” radicalism. That there might also be more than an element of political calculation in the move as Kruger seeks to save his seat is probably true. Principle and pragmatism are, of course, not necessarily enemies, although he might find it a struggle to overcome the very different instincts of men like Richard Tice. We shall see how such a tension plays out.

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Meanwhile, Keir Starmer (or whoever succeeds him) will not avoid being swept away by a provincial populist backlash in the way that the original Whigs did: by the accession of George I, a king more than prepared to rig the political game in the Whigs’ favor. Nonetheless, Starmer might learn a lot from the man who helped secure Whig hegemony back in the early 18th century: Robert Walpole. Walpole wanted the Whig settlement to be truly secure, and he knew that the best way of doing that was to dampen down the deep economic and religious divisions that, when provoked, tended to work against the Whigs and in favor of the Tories.

So Walpole managed his new Whig economic and religious settlement very carefully. He gave the Tories much of what they wanted: he scrupulously avoided foreign wars and entanglements, kept taxes low and left the Church of England mostly alone. He reined in radical elements on his own side — defying his supporters from the ranks of Protestant Dissent who wished to curtail the privileges of the Church of England further — and compromised. In short, the economic and cultural wounds of the preceding generation were given time to heal. Political partisanship certainly didn’t disappear. But the temperature dropped, and Walpole remained in power for 20 relatively stable years.

The same principle could work today. There is no majority in the country for neo-Whig policies of open borders and neoliberal globalization. But Labour could — in theory — do what Walpole did and make his peace with the provincial patriots who otherwise look likely to power Reform to victory. He could give them what they want on immigration, just as Walpole gave the gentry what they wanted on peace. Starmer could also take real steps to assuage the economic pain of the hundreds of small cities and towns decimated by globalization, as Walpole reduced the land tax and bolstered domestic manufacturing. Starmer and Reeves could actually pull some of the economic levers available to the government: an industrial strategy with teeth and resources behind it, capitalizing regional investment banks, and a return to protective tariffs for key industries.

Alas, one fears that Reform will end up as a debased version of the current Tory Party and Labour will be unable to respond in any convincing way to the electoral tsunami that threatens to engulf them. The result could be a never-ending spiral of voter discontent and rising provincial fury. Let’s hope that Starmer and Kruger get mugging up on their 18th-century history, and soon.

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?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an age of omnipresent, profound cynicism. Few expect Nigel to deliver us from tepid decline. Nobody even quite expects him to fulfill the most basic of promises, to “stop the boats”, or to staunch the rot of long-running outsourcing scams atop of English local government. The financial woes of the 350-odd authorities in the country, many of them teetering on the precipice of fiscal oblivion, won’t be solved by cutting back on DEI or net zero.

Despite his threadbare plans for office, though, the results across the country demonstrate that following the embarrassments of the mainstream parties in office, we’re now running our British, majoritarian, first-past-the-post system at European levels of political multipolarization. The Tory party, the most successful in the history of Western democracies, has been supplanted by an agile, disruptive one-man band. And alongside the Faragists on the polling papers now jostle the standard continental panoply of Leftist ecologists, nationalist separatists, tentatively resurgent liberals, the diehard center-Leftists, traditional conservatives, as well as independent candidates swept in via South Asian Baradari voting blocs.

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Labour's politics of polite automatons

By Despotic Inroad

The polycentric politics mirrors a diffuse, collapsing sense of a shared national culture. Gone are the days when the BBC had a near-monopoly on political news, and when the horse meat scandal or the “pasty tax” could dominate headlines for weeks. Instead, we have a schizophrenic media landscape in which a Presidential assassination attempt, or an Islamist mass murder in a Christmas market, is forgotten as quickly as a passing TikTok reel, like tears in the rain. The postmodern breakdown of our collective consciousness reflects the mood of a despondent, fragmented electorate searching for any answers from any direction after almost two decades of wage stagnation and the visible deterioration of our public spaces and common life. This is a warm petri dish for all manner of mini-Caesars and political entrepreneurs. Something had to give.

While the momentum is now with the party, a fifth Reform MP won’t make much difference in immediate practical terms. It would have been six if Rupert Lowe hadn’t believed his own hype, sucked into the vortex of memetic half-truths that make up the Twitter rabbit holes of the Very Online Right, succumbing to his digitally illiterate boomerism after being flattered by Elon Musk. The more ballots that were counted last night, the more Farage’s decision to exorcise Lowe from his parliamentary grouping was roundly vindicated.

The identity of Reform’s new Runcorn MP, Sarah Pochin, a former Tory councillor, is largely irrelevant. She represents merely a strong-willed protest vote. Reform isn’t a set of productive public policy plans — it’s a final stab-in-the-dark, a “none of the above” two-fingers up to the lanyard class. It’s a rejection of the hectoring public-sector management professionals, the smug Oxbridge wonks, the former lobbyist carpetbaggers and cabal of bland political consultants that now passes for a complete ballot of mainstream candidates.

Reform will now have to prove themselves in local and regional centers of power. But Farage isn’t a competent administrator nor an effective great helmsman of state who will get things done. He is a signifier — the symbolic opposite of gray, stodgy Labour — and the vote is a rejection of the moribund Westminster system in its totality. And yet he now sits astride the Left and Right of British politics like the Colossus of Rhodes in Alan Partridge get-up. He embodies what an old, Gramscian Leftist such as Raymond Williams might call a national-popular “structure of feeling”. Trump is in the White House; progressive-liberal norms are breaking down. The world redivides into competing geopolitical power-blocs. And the demand from below isn’t for the kind of globalized openness and liberty provided by free markets, lax borders and limited government, but for a sovereigntist, neo-statist revival that is building national resilience, protective social policies, and domestic security. In this context, Farage is in harmony with the zeitgeist, while the rest of the political class seems hopelessly out of tune.

He stalks Labour and the Conservatives for the easy prey of their disaffected bases, and it hasn’t taken too hard a shake of the branch to cause many-an-apple to fall into his basket. All of the omens for the next general election point to a re-run of 2019 in which Labour’s Red Wall fell to Boris Johnson. Some commentators hopefully defined that election as a permanent realignment. While the project was eventually sacrificed on the altar of Johnson’s myriad personal failings, 2019 indicated that the working classes were tired of being told by radical liberals, and by a detached, effete, cultural-educational elite (whom they have had the misfortune of encountering in their day-to-day lives) that everything is the fault of a distant, kleptocratic financial-industrial elite (whom they have rarely, if ever, encountered).

But Johnson faced Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. At least it had a story to tell. Today’s Labour behemoth is run by a different wing of urban managerial progressives who have abandoned any semblance of narrative. They’re intensely relaxed about the nature of the beast, of capital, of “the 1%”. And the Faragists have stolen their clothes while they were bathing.

Reform has deliberately kept their platform broad and shifting: disruptive. And they seize opportunity where they see it. They demanded the steel industry be nationalized months before a hapless Prime Minister hurriedly recalled Parliament. They championed a “Buy British” policy in public procurement contracts. Their opposition to winter fuel and disability benefit cuts was more vociferous than most of Labour’s Bennite Socialist Campaign Group, who have been cowed into a terrified silence by the Stalinist disciplinary methods of the centrist leadership. Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, called for Thames Water to be brought into public ownership. And Farage himself has spent the last few months of campaigning calling for “reindustrialization”, comparing his own anti-corporate, anti-big business message with Corbyn’s, and explaining to journalists that he quite liked Arthur Scargill.

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This St George’s Day felt different

By Aris Roussinos

Bien pensant opinion might baulk at the apparent contradictions of a Left-ish approach to industrial policy and robust state interventionism, combined with a Right-wing approach to immigration and culture war traditionalism. But for huge numbers of ordinary voters, this positioning is just common sense, entirely coherent; its planned restrictions on the labor supply, its appeal to patriotism, and its communitarian ethos are even complementary to postwar, social-democratic nostalgia. This now is the center ground of British politics.

Dominic Cummings saw this when he told followers of a “crude heuristic” — that the average voter is “national socialist”, harboring an unconscious political syncretism that mixes redistributive economics way to the Left of many Labour MPs, with hard-edged stances on law and order, way to the Right of many Conservative MPs.

For now, Farageism is ascendant. Labour and the Conservatives have both lost. Bemused, buttoned-up local civil servants will soon be welcoming a new Reform cohort into Town Halls and regional corridors of power: an Olympic boxer; a former Tory Dame and Miss UK finalist; a cavalcade of political renegades. Whether a hodgepodge of inexperienced minor celebrities, former Thatcherite ultras and anti-migrant big statists can form a cohesive political whole remains to be seen. But today it hardly matters. What matters is that this unlikely bunch have upended the duopoly. The disrupters now are in charge. For our sick and tired country, Reform’s vague, big tent populism is just what the doctor ordered, and now everything has changed, changed utterly.

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

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

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

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Keir Starmer has no dream

By Tom McTague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rearmament is a noble lie

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kemi Badenoch's New Toryism

By Tom McTague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The village that made Nigel Farage

By Tom McTague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Tom McTague

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

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

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

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

The fact is that Churchill, who would have turned 150 this week, was no curmudgeonly conservative. His Right-wing fanboys and Left-wing haters today would both no doubt prefer to live down his reputation as the “grandfather of the welfare state”. Indeed, along with Lloyd George, he was the architect of the Liberal programme — a slate of pension, healthcare, insurance, and wage reforms. He was also viewed as a “class warrior” by his Tory contemporaries. In his handling of the 1910 miners’ strike in the Rhondda, for instance, he came under fire in the press and in parliament for his leniency. In his lax Lib-Lab ways, he had kept the army at arm’s length, hoping for a peace between labour and capital. This is the wet Churchill whose life-size portrait greets you as you walk into the National Liberal Club.

Here, then, is one of the unexpected ways in which Churchill’s England is now dead. From austerity Osborne to scrounger-baiter Starmer, the welfare state has now become something of an embarrassment across the spectrum. Churchill, perversely, is too lefty for our unforgiving age.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Churchill was on the Left. He was, after all, the same chap who, on returning to the Tory party in 1924, returned the pound to the gold standard as chancellor of the exchequer — a move that betrayed “jejune and intellectually sterile” thinking, thought Keynes. Churchill at a stroke caused an unemployment crisis, the upshot of which was the General Strike. This he put down with the help of blacklegs drawn from the constabulary and British Fascisti. His politics, in short, were clear as mud. Even Lord Beaverbrook, a crony of Churchill’s, recognised this, maintaining that he had held every opinion on every subject over the course of his life.

It was precisely Churchill’s chameleonic character that enabled him to clamber upwards despite chronic blundering. Having the right background helped: he was born at Blenheim Palace, birched at Harrow, and schooled at Sandhurst. So, too, did the derring-do: he fought as a mercenary in Cuba and the Soudan, and escaped his captors after a jailbreak in Pretoria. Politically, he proved a poor fit in the Tory party, calling for defence spending cuts practically until the eve of the First World War. Then, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he abruptly reversed his position by defending his department’s budget. Churchill likewise wasn’t exactly married to party fidelity in the prewar period, crossing the floor to join the Liberals in 1904; as MP for Oldham, a cotton town, he was committed to free trade, and therefore could have no truck with imperial preference, the creed of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. As it was, Churchill returned to the Tory party two decades later, closing ranks against Labour in 1924.

Churchill’s First World War record showed a man out of his depth. Disregarding the counsel of his generals by trying to “force the Dardanelles” and finish off the Ottomans, he ended up getting 50,000 of his men killed at Gallipoli. The Turkish victory was followed by Churchill’s demotion. After the war ensued another cack-handed operation was launched to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib”, as Churchill put it. Once again luck eluded him. The British soldiers dispatched to assist the Whites were sent packing. The Second World War saw him reprise his role as First Lord of the Admiralty. Disaster struck again with his botched handling of the Norwegian campaign. Still, strategic failure was one thing, personal advancement another. Chamberlain lost the premiership over the affair. So it was that when Lord Halifax, declined the top job, it fell to Churchill — some irony, given his mishandling had brought about his predecessor’s fall.

Churchill’s luck turned in his precarious prime ministership. Dunkirk proved to be a serendipitous success, if only thanks to the Wehrmacht. The blitzkrieg was halted 13 kilometres from the evacuation because the Germans had other fish to fry. Still, the final outcome of the war, decisively resolved by American money and Soviet manpower, nevertheless secured Churchill’s place in history. He was able to claim that he had been right all along about British strength, even if much of his understanding derived from questionable racist assumptions. Indeed, race was an all-consuming obsession for Churchill, which sets him apart from a great many of his contemporaries; generally speaking, Brits in the first half of the 20th century were more likely to think along class or developmental lines. Not Churchill, though. Small wonder he was struck dumb by the fall of Singapore: “How came 100,000 men (half of them of our own race) to hold up their hands to inferior numbers [35,000] of Japanese?” Elsewhere, he was blunter: “I hate people with slit eyes & pig-tails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them.”

Even Bolshevism was cast in ethnic terms: it was a “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews”. Ashkenazi Jews supplanting dark Palestinians in the Levant, on the other hand, was a positive development: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race has come in and taken their place.” As for black people, they were really not “as capable or as efficient as white people”, he said to a Kenyan settler in 1954. The following year, Eden noted in his diary as Caribbean migration picked up steam, “Churchill thinks ‘Keep England White’ is a good slogan.” Churchill, of course, wasn’t alone in expressing such views, though it must be said they weren’t exactly comme il faut even in his time. These days, moreover, ever-fewer Brits set store by racial thinking — we don’t really have a racial wage gap; nor are our cities as ethnically segregated as, say, American ones —  which is one of the reasons why Churchill has come in for a cool reassessment.

There was a time when he was seen as the arch-defender of democracy. We know better now. As it is, he was no antifascist to begin with. In 1935, he expressed his “admiration” for Hitler, applauding his “courage” and “perseverance”. Only after Munich did he drop the idea of cutting a deal with the Nazis, by which point Clement Attlee, too, had come out against appeasement.

Then again, the sore point was balance of power on the Continent, not fascism per se. On taking office in 1940, Churchill was not above trying to appeal to the better instincts of Franco and Mussolini. The latter he called “the greatest lawgiver among men”, endorsing his “triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism”. The former likewise was a bulwark against the red menace: “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.” In 1944, Churchill reacted violently to Allied plans to impose oil sanctions to foil Franco’s bid to reignite the civil war: “You begin with oil; you will quickly end in blood.” Worse, without Franco, the communists would “become master of Spain”.

Churchill also propped up the Greek monarch George II — discredited for supporting Ioannis Metaxas’s fascist dictatorship — who decamped to London once the Wehrmacht stormed Athens. Real resistance was left to the communist partisans of EAM and ELAS, which moved from strength to strength once Roosevelt ruled out Allied landings in August 1943. Aghast at the prospect of a red Greece, Churchill called for “bloodshed if necessary” to suppress EAM and ELAS. Accordingly, Nazi collaborators were brigaded into British-sponsored militias to massacre liberation fighters. Meanwhile, Greek soldiers in Egypt clamouring for the Resistance to be included in the government in exile were deported to African camps on Churchill’s orders.

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When the Germans abandoned Greece, thanks to the Red Army push into Bulgaria, Churchill had George Papandreou installed as a puppet ruler. With the help of the British military governor Ronald Scobie, Papandreou set about rehabilitating Nazi collaborators and disarming ELAS partisans at gunpoint. Protests ensued, and Churchill sent in some 75,000 troops to crush the Resistance. So it was that communism was stamped out of Greece by the White Terror unleashed by Churchill. It was one of his last achievements before he was kicked out of office, in part because of his lack of enthusiasm for the Beveridge Report and in part thanks to an 11-hour crass gaffe, likening Labour to the Gestapo, that repelled voters.

A desultory final term of little moment followed in 1951. Domestically, its biggest triumph was Harold Macmillan’s housebuilding programme. Internationally, it is remembered for the brutal violence inflicted on Kenyans and Malayans in a misguided attempt to cling to the British Empire, by then already seen as an anachronism by both parties. Churchill was one of its last cheerleaders. To this end, Agent Orange was deployed on the Malayans, many of whom were left with the kind of crippling deformities that would become commonplace in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the slaughter of the Kikuyu and the corralling of over 100,000 souls into detention camps without trial forced Churchill to recognise that the Kenyans were a proud people wronged by empire — not “savages” but “persons of considerable fibre and ability and steel… armed with ideas — much more difficult to deal with”. This was Churchill the liberal imperialist, the chap who once showed some consideration for the natives of Natal and Omdurman and condemned the Amritsar massacre.

Yet this was the same man who had deployed the paramilitary Black and Tans to dispatch Irish nationalists, and used chemical weapons against the Kurds: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… Gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would leave a lively terror.” In Bengal, three million had starved to death in 1943 as a result of wartime policies despite there being enough food supplies to go around. The anxious viceroy of India had demanded urgent wheat supplies, to no avail. Absurdly, London arm-twisted Delhi into exporting rice from famine-struck Bengal. Churchill’s own response had been to take a dig at “Indians breeding like rabbits”. As it was, Bengal went a long way in discrediting the colonial enterprise in the eyes of its already dwindling fan base of compradors. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Churchill had declared in 1942. Yet in the years that followed, he played an outsized part in begetting the world that buried his own tout court.

Now, evidently, we no longer live in Churchill’s world. Decolonisation has been achieved, and with the Chagos handover, even overshot. Denigration of the darker races, too, has lost its edginess; a third of Brits will be mixed by the end of our century. Deference to the ruling class likewise has slipped into quaint oblivion; “posh” these days has departed from the lexicon of the aspirational classes to become an adjective of disparagement, often preceding a ruder four-letter word. This is no country for Churchillians anymore.

Having inherited a party that has hemorrhaged voters to the Liberal Democrats on the Left, and Reform on the Right, and collapsed among the under-25s, Badenoch’s core challenge is to win them back. Ingeniously, despite facing an utterly unrepresentative electorate of die-hard Tories, she has won the leadership contest without committing herself to a specific program that would further alienate these three groups. She now needs to craft a strategy that attracts them back.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made this far easier than it ought to be. Their series of missteps continues, not only with Starmer’s active support for the Harris campaign making relations with our crucial ally more difficult than necessary. Closer to home, Labour has presented its opponents with more voter-sensitive gift-horses as the economy nose-dives into stagflation. Advancing the EV-only policy to 2030 from the EU-aligned 2035, and the prospective Trump date of Never, ranks the priorities of young metropolitans over the job losses that will be inflicted on the Northern working class — not to mention or the 1,300 workers just gone from Vauxhall vans. It’s no wonder that an astonishing 31% of Labour voters already rate Starmer “unfavorably”. Having won a huge parliamentary majority on only 32% of the vote, many of his new MPs are sitting on tiny majorities destined for defeat in 2029. But whether the beneficiaries are the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Reform, the SNP, or the Tories, depends heavily on Kemi Badenoch. As Leader of the Opposition, she is in pole position both to grab media attention, and to set out a credible alternative to the managed decline embodied by Labour.

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As an immigrant from Nigeria at its most dysfunctional, Badenoch sees Britain as a haven of order. She has already offered her immigrant’s perspective on the virtues and flaws of British society to good effect. In interviews, when asked about her moral values, she describes herself as “an agnostic who is culturally Christian”. Would any current Labour politician dare to make such a remark? To understand its full significance, I found myself re-reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, a landmark book in political philosophy. It traces the early Christian origins of the ideas and institutions on which our distinctive notion of rights and duties in European and North American societies still rests.

The Nigeria that the young Badenoch left in 1996 lacked common national values, being riven by bitter divisions. Its north was largely an Islamic culture recognizing a duty of submission to authority; its south was predominantly Christian fundamentalist; and around the country there were pockets of deference to pre-colonial kingship. Enabled by this lack of common moral foundations, a corrupt military dictator thrived, rewarding loyalty with commercial privileges.

Badenoch recognized that the Britain of 1996 was far more functional than the society she had left behind and was astonished to find her fellow students here denigrating it. They were taking for granted an inheritance that she realized must have been built by centuries of struggle and could easily be eroded. While such ideas have become deeply unfashionable within the liberal establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, the liberals are in the minority — as Kamala Harris disastrously discovered. Badenoch may have the same skin color as Harris, but her political philosophy and backstory edge closer to that of the Vice-President-Elect J.D. Vance. As a black immigrant, she can craft a credible and ethical Britain First agenda without taints of racism or imperialism.

Badenoch needs to start, though, by getting rid of the greedy stench of the Liz Truss package that still cloaks the party: the tax-cutting for the rich and public-service cutting for everyone else. This was widely recognised as morally repellent, alienating the many Conservative voters who fled to the Liberal Democrats. The worst news for Badenoch, according to YouGov, is that 59% of Liberal Democrat voters view her unfavourably, compared to only 13% favourably. She needs to use some of that hard-won flexibility to apologise for that greed-agenda and decisively renounce it. She must renounce, too, the financier vision of Singapore-on-Thames: such a programme would gift high-earners in the City and Canary Wharf rates of taxation comparable to the low level of Singapore. It’s an image that alienated many Tories. It dismissed the Britains beyond the Thames bubble — and sure enough, it was beyond the Thames that most Tory seats were lost. Many of those lost to the Liberal Democrats live in towns in the southwest; those lost in the Red Wall are on the east and west coasts. Here, there is further bad news for Badenoch: she is seen as Metropolitan — 23% of Londoners are favourable to her compared to only 18% of Northerners. It’s early days, but I have not detected any signs of this yet in her messaging.

With such negative ratings among Liberal Democrat voters, she should start by courting them. Historically, the NHS has been key to this cohort: David Cameron won the Tory leadership in 2007 by boldly stating that he was in politics to support the NHS — even during the ensuing austerity, the NHS’s budget was fully protected. Although Reeves has announced a huge increase in spending for the NHS, this will be a shocking waste of billions if it doesn’t come with reform. Gwyn Bevan’s How did Britain Come to This? sets out the coruscating evidence of how, over decades, the Treasury has repeatedly and grossly mismanaged the health sector. Powers and budgets should be torn from its incompetent maws and localized. But while she can gleefully use Bevan’s evidence to embarrass Starmer, the recent Tory record on health is so bad that I cannot see her outcompeting Ed Davey.

So what else could she do which would appeal to good-hearted Liberal Democrats, but also to the alienated voters of the Red Wall? She can prioritise healing the rift inherent in the two-tier country and the resulting “huge and persistent inequalities” which are such a block on growth. There was a flashpoint in Red Wall areas over the summer which perfectly illustrated the attitude of the Government to our divided country and pinpointed an opportunity for Badenoch: the riots.

What triggered this sudden outpouring of furious dissatisfaction? We can trace it back to Boris Johnson’s bragging incompetence that with Brexit we could “have our cake and eat it”; this ensured that the European Commission would not cooperate with continuing the Dublin Principle, which enabled us to return asylum seekers coming from mainland Europe. This casual disregard for the consequences of increasing immigration was compounded by a Whitehall decision to house these incomers in four-star hotels. Hell bent on value for money, the Treasury minimised the cost by choosing hotels in the poorest provincial towns. This penny-pinching reduced the cost per asylum seeker to the still staggering figure of £41,000.

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These towns, though, were at the heart of the empty Tory promise to “Level Up”. The Treasury hated the programme and had released only £400 million for it — that’s a measly £8 per person in provincial Britain, barely enough to give the High Street a lick of paint. The contrast between this insulting parsimony and largesse to the asylum-seekers housed in the same towns was explosive. Inevitably, the powder-keg of resentment did attract racists, mostly from outside the town. But overall, the Government’s reaction — relying on the criminal justice system to quell the immediate effect of violence, rather than considering a longer-term approach to the root causes of alienation — fuelled the impression that the working class, and those who lived outside London, were considered second-class citizens. Contrast Labour’s reaction with Margaret Thatcher’s after the Toxteth riots of 1981, when she immediately dispatched Michael Heseltine to lead a programme of urban regeneration. Reeves, meanwhile, has dismissed not just the phraseology of Levelling Up, but even the notion that the divergence between London and provincial England matters: “there are poor people in London.” YouGov finds that Starmer is seen as being as metropolitan as Badenoch, but her big advantage is that whereas only 10% of voters have yet to make up their minds about him, 39% remain uncertain about her..

And so, Labour has left a wide-open goal. If Kemi Badenoch does nothing, many of the Red Wall voters who supported Labour in the last election will abstain or defect to Reform. But she already has the advantage, leading the more powerful opposition; Nigel Farage has little chance of ever being in government. She must therefore directly appeal to the disenfranchised and hold out the promise that she will help those left-behind towns and cities to renew themselves.

The Levelling Up program, which as an unpaid advisor I saw from the inside, failed not just for lack of money. It failed, as the NHS is failing, through a lack of innovative vision. So here’s a thought for Badenoch. What provincial Britain needs, and wants, are jobs for those trained with vocational skills. By 2029, working class (CDE) under-25s will be approaching 30. Those in the North and Midlands will be worried about their lack of opportunities. Local governments will be bankrupt. Decent jobs can only come by helping the most innovative provincial SMEs to grow more rapidly. Such firms exist in their hundreds despite the hostile policy environment. But to grow fast, they need venture capital. Britain abounds in this, but two-thirds of it goes to London and its Oxbridge satellites. The other three-quarters of Britain’s population is a venture-capital desert. No wonder there’s no growth: the greater part of our island is a stagnation nation. The migration nation follows Kemi to London.

Back in the early days of those “wasted 14 years” dismissed by Labour, we created two valuable public investment agencies. The British Business Bank (2014) and the National Infrastructure Fund (2015) have the expertise to finance the public infrastructure and private-sector venture capital which will ultimately be the essential driver of growth. Rishi Sunak had no interest in them, and nor has Reeves, but they are a Tory solution to a national problem waiting to be harnessed. Kemi Badenoch could announce that their mandates would be to equalize economic opportunities around the country and commit to devolving decision-taking to them. Thereby, she would have in her holster a credible strategy that the rival opposition parties cannot offer, and that Reeves has opted to ignore. As she and the Prime Minister announced to the Board of BlackRock, her preferred solution to past short-termism is to set up a new unit within the Treasury. One of its tasks will be to craft an “industrial policy”. Yet the Treasury and the rest of Whitehall are so bereft of the necessary skills to formulate one that it can only lead to further embarrassments. To dig itself out of the comedy that HS2 ends at Royal Oak, the Treasury has just committed £6 billion to extend it to Euston: an “industrial policy” only for London.

Badenoch has the gumption to deride the pretensions of Whitehall and the wit to make it amusing. Keir Starmer is, it’s sad to say, the perfect foil for such barbs. By using her expertise in finance for a unifying public purpose, Badenoch would kill three birds with one stone. She would combine an inspiring backstory with an appealingly optimistic agenda to Britain’s youth: Cool Britannia Redux. She would test the moral mettle of those former Tories who switched to the Liberal Democrats repelled by the greed agenda. Equalizing economic opportunities around the nation is something that Ed Davey can neither deride nor deliver. And she can win the provincial working class — the Red Wall voters adrift, already disillusioned by Labour, tempted by Farage, but knowing in their hearts that regardless of his rhetoric, he will never have the power to improve their lives. In the process, she can reset the image of her party vis-à-vis its biggest problem. In 2007, it was that the Tories could not be trusted with the NHS. David Cameron courageously and successfully took that bull by the horns. In 2024, it is that the Tories cater to a finance industry dominated by greedy asset-strippers. Let BlackRock carouse with Labour. By repurposing Britain’s financial renown to heal the divide in our society, Badenoch can turn vice into virtue. Forget stagnation nation and migration nation: we could become innovation nation..

This, in its broad outlines, is now the unifying worldview of the Brics powers: a loose pact of frenemies  — currently assembled in the city of Kazan — with whom, according to General Sir Patrick Sanders, we are on the brink of war.

But 10 years ago, this was also nothing less than the official policy of the British government. Britain was the first country — not Russia — to follow multipolar world theory as a guiding principle: the term Brics was coined by the British economist Jim O’Neill, and the country would also produce When China Rules The World, the smash-hit prophecy of American decline. America may have started to “decouple” from China almost a decade ago, but Britain still looks to Beijing as its natural source of foreign investment, as David Lammy’s visit this week proves. To Britain’s governing classes, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was decisive proof that American hegemony was finished, and that Britain could no longer live off the fat of its dividends. This global system had now crashed, and it wasn’t at all certain that the country would now be able to maintain the lifestyle to which it had grown accustomed.

The times called for a new savvy. Concessions to changing global conditions would have to be made. Some scruples, such as the precise domestic arrangements of trading partners, or rules on foreign ownership, would have to be put aside.

This was the political economy of Cameronism. Everyone agreed that Britain, especially now, was a genteel legacy power; and it would have to traffic in this legacy to eke out first-world living standards.

It would mean selling off the last of the stored imperial wealth. It would mean, still more, the relentless merchandising of British heritage brands abroad. If Britain could not win the new Brics powers for liberal democracy, then it might yet win them for Dulwich College, the House of Windsor, and Macallan single malt. The new oligarchs would stash their wealth at British banks; British lawyers and law courts would handle their commercial disputes. They would hunt its fields, fish its rivers, buy its townhouses, and educate their young at its ancient schools — so many of them, in fact, that by 2016 St Paul’s School, George Osborne’s alma mater, would have to introduce a special bursary for the upper-middle classes as fees ballooned.

Few could see any alternative. Niall Ferguson, then something of a house historian to the Cameronite project, glibly predicted in 2011 that 10 years hence, Britain would be coasting off of Chinese foreign investment; Chinese purchases of Chelsea townhouses; and Chinese ownership of Scottish shooting estates.

But above all, this analysis was the making of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer between 2010 and 2016. Osborne lives in history as the austerity chancellor. Getting on for a decade after his fall, cuts to public expenditure are still held as an example of ‘Osbornomics’, and people like Rachel Reeves still feel the need to distance themselves from his legacy. But what really animated George Osborne was this diagnosis of Britain’s place in a post-Lehman world, of which David Lammy’s recent reset of relations with China is a faint echo.

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At every turn, Osborne sought to sharpen the lines that Cameron hoped would stay pleasingly blurred. As his early biographer, Janan Ganesh, notes, those Conservative colleagues who held to pre-1997 cultural views were for Osborne not merely old-fashioned but troglodytic. For someone such as David Cameron, for whom the Conservative Party is a kind of social forum, the eventual apostasy of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson over the European issue came as a genuine shock. It did not shock Osborne.

He, too, carried furthest the Cameronite idea of Britain’s place in a post-American age. When it came to business-like relations with China, it was the “Osborne Doctrine” that The Economist wrote of, not the Cameron Doctrine. For him, competition in a multipolar world demanded that Cameronism be carried to its logical conclusion: that Britain really become a svelte, socially liberal entrepôt, open for business with anyone and everyone. This was the conceit. And it forms part of an emerging folk history of the 2010s as a period of liberal oligarchy; a never-ending party for dodgy donors and Brics influence-peddlers in which nothing was sacred and all was for sale. This glittering world, as the narrative goes, was eventually brought to an end by Brexit, lockdown, and the de-globalisation that they imply.

It isn’t hard to see why. Osbornism, as a positive economic vision beyond the simple fiscal retrenchment known as austerity, quickly became associated with the fire sale of cherished national assets to overseas buyers. The beloved chocolatier Cadbury was bought by Kraft in 2010; the Chinese firm Geely acquired London’s fleet of black cabs in 2013. By 2016, up to a third of the student body of the ancient boarding schools was drawn from overseas. In a bid to attract further Chinese investment, Cameron and Osborne declined to support anti-dumping measures, sending British Steel into a tailspin that ended with its acquisition by a Shijiazhuang-based industrial concern in 2019.

Osbornism was also supposed to mean the economic dominance of London. Much was made of the idea that Osborne had enjoyed a metropolitan upbringing, and that the squirearch milieu of Chipping Norton meant little to him. For Osborne, it was said, London was Britain’s real proposition to the world: as a discreet provider of professional services, and as a global playground for Brics oligarchs. Osbornism had ostensibly created the tax and visa conditions for just this. Canary Wharf, the Shard, and a 20% stake in the London Stock Exchange were bought up by the Qataris, and the growth of a “Moscow-on-Thames” was watched with smiling equanimity. This was held to be an example of the new ruthless national accounting post-crash, funded at the expense of the luckless provinces in the country’s north.

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Capstone to the system of Osborne was the “Golden Era” of relations with China. Again, Osborne took this idea further than most. Engagement with China did not simply mean investment, but a full economic partnership. This had a logic. Before the decade was out, the European Union and the United States were once again making threatening noises about Britain’s position in Northern Ireland. In these circumstances, would it have been so bad to have in China an economic and diplomatic counterweight? The announcement, in March 2015, that Britain would be joining the Chinese-run Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was a real coup, one that shocked and angered Washington. As one of the first practitioners of “multipolar world” theory, George Osborne had — perhaps by accident — produced a twitch of something like real strategic independence. If nothing else, Osbornism on the world stage hinted, however briefly, that there might be some alternative for Britain to the thankless enforcement of a rules-based international order, an order which, in the 2020s, does not permit Britain to control its own sea border.

These were cultural events more than they were economic ones. According to the tropes of the time, they spoke to a nation adjusting to stately poverty, whose traditional patterns of life were now sustained only by foreign money. But for Osborne, this was only what the moment demanded. Britain required a brute lesson of its place in the new world — a lesson which Osborne would administer, and of which the sale of flagship national assets was a symbol.

But there was always more theatre than reality to Osbornism. His public image was one of ruthlessness and hard choices, and so went the black cabs, the public schools, the legacy steelworks, along with other marquee national real estate like the Old War Office and the Admiralty Arch, which were both flogged on the cheap. So too was the practice — recently revealed — of selling cheese-tasting courses, magic lessons, and tennis matches with Conservative ministers to wealthy investors like Mohamed Amersi. Fiscal trifles by themselves, but seen by all as a sign of the moral compromises that Britain would now have to make. The fixation on curios like a direct flight from Manchester to China or a special visa for Chinese businessmen furnish two more examples.

All this could be presented as a kind of necessary stooping to conquer in the new Brics world, but none of them even made much money in the first place. Needless to say, no new era of svelte globalism resulted. In 2015, at the height of Osborne’s political fortunes, foreign investment stood at 1.54% of GDP — less than in France, that economic clamshell, where the figure was 1.76%. For all the talk of a “global race”, Britain left the first half of the 2010s no more globalised than it had previously been.

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What Osbornism represented, in unconscious terms, was the anxiety felt by a governing class convinced of national decline after 2008, but which baulked at the possible solutions. By 2015, there was no entrepôt and no global playground, but there was much of the attendant seaminess. This was a system that had all the trappings of an oligarchy, but none of its possible enjoyments. And this pretend oligarchy began to decompose almost as soon as it was assembled. As the British economy flickered back to life, Osborne embarked on a reversal of course that would undo much of his own work. First to be walked back on was the idea of Britain as a bolthole for the global plutocrats of tomorrow. In 2015, Osborne levied an “oligarch tax” on sales of homes by non-UK residents, and called for action against the financial networks that had been exposed in the Panama Papers. Boris Johnson, then the Mayor of London, publicly opposed both of these ideas. Barely a year before the Brexit referendum, then, it was Johnson who was cast as the defender of liberal globalisation, and Osborne who criticised its excesses — the complete opposite of later alignments.

Osborne was also the first to call time on the dominance of London. As soon as the capital began once more to turn a surplus, George Osborne cast around for ways to cream it off and spread it elsewhere. Osborne was the great sponsor of northern devolution, and patronised the idea of a directly elected Manchester mayor. And it was Osborne, not Theresa May, who first played the card of the regions, of London against the “left-behind”. Years before anyone had heard of Levelling Up, George Osborne was the champion of a Northern Powerhouse — such a champion, indeed, that the idea began to dominate talks with the Chinese during his last year in power. These kinds of hang-ups are not usually the subjects of international trade and diplomacy. It was a strange kind of myopia, and it spoke much more to a Little England self-involvement than Brexit ever did.

Flushed with victory after the election of 2015, Osborne was already putting together an agenda for his own premiership, which, among other things, would have seen state expenditure further reduced to around 35% of GDP. This, after the previous five years of cuts, was justified again and again with reference to the international situation — the need for a leaner and possibly meaner Britain in a post-American world. Had this plan succeeded, something like real economic liberalism would have been created in Britain. To accomplish it, Osborne planned to strengthen the party’s ties with those former Liberal Democrats who had delivered the victory of 2015: asset-rich, rural, generally older, either retired or disproportionately employed in the public sector.

A strange choice. Such a group, flushed with assets and state pensions, were the current economy’s main beneficiaries, and had no interest in overturning it. Osborne was attempting to carry out a programme of economic liberalism through the agency of some of the most reactionary classes in England. But as an ideology, Osbornism became evermore reliant on these places so that, in 2024, the two — by a strange twist — are now treated as virtually synonymous. In practice, Osborne’s plan to slash the size of the state was a demagogic one, and it required a demagogic course. It would have meant a popular appeal to the lower-middle classes — the only reliable constituency for economic liberalism. As with so much else, Osborne shrank from the means, and he left it to rivals Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to make such an appeal.

Osbornism, as a distinct ideology, has left almost no material legacy. It was always a politics of phrase and image, and it vanished at a word. In 2024, London is manifestly not the global playground it was meant to be. It is shifty candy stores that now set the tone of its main streets, not the scions of sheiks and the CCP. With furlough in March 2020, the six years of budgetary austerity that compromised the domestic side of this agenda were undone at a stroke, and ideas of a leaner, more competitive Britain were all but forgotten. The Emirati bid for The Spectator and the Telegraph — for which Osborne acted as a consultant — failed, and the door is now to be closed on any future such acquisitions. The Chinese investment is now largely gone, and “Moscow-on-Thames” was quickly rolled up, with old Cameronite retainers like Evgeny Lebedev now figures of suspicion. Osborne is the only national figure on the centre-right who still makes the case for a ‘Northern Powerhouse’, his old party colleagues having now soured on devolution. In 2024, the sole physical marker of Osbornism is a folly: a fairly miserable English leg of the Chinese “One Belt One Road” initiative, a rail line that shudders to a halt in a field near Barking. Far from being a vein of commerce, it is only used once a week, to ship 34 wagons of tourist merchandise to the city of Yiwu. It’s a symbol of a future that never was; an oligarchy that never was; a strange personal affect dreamt up in a moment of panic, and soon dropped.

Instead, Osbornism’s true legacy lies in its phrases, which are still with us today. It can be found in the idea that there exists a popular force of Cameron Ultras in the shires: a “Blue Wall”, whose salient characteristic is social liberalism, rather than being very rich. Whenever we are told that this entirely hallucinated demographic would have no truck with action on illegal migration or a moderation on Net Zero, we are hearing the echo of Osbornism.

As an actual agenda, though, Osbornism was a phantasm; a devilish idea that flickered briefly across the national consciousness and disappeared. What if England really was run to make money? We have yet to find out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Shakespeare, with his practically clairvoyant ability to sympathetically channel vying perspectives, is a fox; Dante or Nietzsche, high-ranking hedgehogs. Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust are all, to varying degrees, hedgehogs, says Berlin; Erasmus, Montaigne and Aristotle, foxes.

It is a classic piece of high-table repartee from Berlin — often damned with faint-praise as the champion “talker” of his era at Oxford — which also owes something to the “ordinary language philosophy” of his day, which invested great importance in identifying subtle variations in meaning between apparent- or near-synonyms (if your dentist is readying his “instruments” you may rest easily, though somehow less so if he tells you he is fetching his “tools”).

The game of Berlinian binaries still has life in it. Tom Stoppard is a fox, Alan Bennett a hedgehog. Tarantino is a hedgehog, much as he might resist the label, Kubrick a fox. Part of the fun consists in casting people in ways that run counter to their own self-image.

Of course, Berlin’s game only works well if applied to people who are in some sense accountable for their own philosophic or aesthetic vision. Party politics calls for different instruments (or should that be tools?). At the Tory party conference I toyed with sorting the delegates into swivel-eyed loons, fruitcakes and closet racists, but ran into teething problems. The binary format turns out to be quite important: “closet racists” collapse too easily into “swivel-eyed loons”, leaving “fruitcakes” to pick out a more heterogenous residue than it really should. The tripartite structure was good for the cadence the Cameron became lumbered with allegedly making, but bad for heuristic purposes.

But how should we group the four remaining leadership contenders, who are to be whittled away to two this week? The great tribal binary of recent years, Brexiteer or Remainer, took on quasi-Berlinian contours after a few years of attrition in the public imagination: more dependent, in the end, on impressionistic assessment than how an individual actually campaigned or voted. Notoriously, Liz Truss, a remainer, came to be outlandishly Brexit-coded, while Rishi Sunak, who swung behind Leave much earlier than it made career-sense for him to do so, lost that credential. Today, the tired and too-contested binary does little to distinguish the four remaining aspirant leaders of the opposition.

Instead, it is tempting to frame the decision the Tories face as one between an everyman and an ideologue: pitting Badenoch and Jenrick, comfortably in the latter camp, against Cleverly and Tugendhat in the former. To give a quick lay of the land: in their different styles, Cameron, Johnson and Major were everymen; Gove, Osborne and Rory Stewart ideologues.

The ideologue is marked by his possession of a theory, the everyman by his possession of a disposition. At the conference last week, candidates were clearly marking their territory. James Cleverly used his big set piece speech to chastise his party for its lack of “normality”. Meanwhile, a series of increasingly incautious remarks by both Badenoch and Jenrick, far from being ordinary gaffes, seemed more likely part of a brinkmanship playoff in which the pair revealed the more daring consequences of their ideological priors.

The Tory party conference, though, is most probably an ecosystem in which the ideologue enjoys an inbuilt advantage. Within the safety of the conference centre, conventional standards of political sanity can be temporarily forgotten. The Conference is a place where Mark Francois is stopped for selfies with unironic enthusiasm by young men and women. It is a place where delegates queue up to have novelty tattoos of their preferred candidates’ faces inked onto their own. It is a place where Peter Bone is able to show his face (though, in the presence of so many Tory staffers, perhaps we should just be grateful he didn’t show more). In defeat, the Tories seem to have entered a decadent phase — excitable, speculative, drawn away from the sobering responsibilities of power toward less worldly styles of ideological reflection. One popular Centre for Policy Studies event was titled simply, “What would Maggie do?”.

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The ideologue’s challenges begin on the national stage, though, where their dogmatic allegiance to theory construction can alienate public feeling and be a liability in office. Truss was the ne plus ultra of the ideologue in living political memory. Of the current four, Kemi Badenoch seems most susceptible to being tripped up by her own ideological luggage. At the Conference, she pressed into my hands an inscribed copy of her 22,000 word pamphlet (“based on a forthcoming book”), Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class. It has four A4 pages of endnotes, and a runic pair of diagrams on page 16 involving triangular figures, with the words “right” and “left” written in them and bisected by lines at various angles. Such outward symptoms of crankishness are a gift to one’s political opponents. Ideologue-bashing is one of the shameful past-times of lazier elements of the media class. The flat-out dismissal that there might be any unifying diagnosis to be made of Britain’s long-term structural shortcomings is obvious and complacent anti-intellectualism. You can only discover the first-order merits, if any, of such diagnoses by actually looking.

The ideologue’s standing problem, then, is that he or she forgets that political success depends on appealing to people far less interested in ideas than they are. A more subtle obstacle is that sweeping political ideologies are not the sort of thing that should be perfected in advance, but instead evolve in tandem with the actual exercise of power. Many of the enduring tenets of Thatcherism were not established features of her political repertoire till her second term.

The everyman faces different challenges. He is famously discriminated against by the Conservative Party membership, who, like all party memberships, place a high premium on ideological purity. The more pressing danger this time round is that content-light normality can seem like an underpowered reaction to the scale of the electoral defeat the Conservatives suffered in July. These are activities better suited to the ideologue, but the everyman must engage the pretence as best he can.

The Tories are conflicted: torn between their interest in the diagnosis and their desperation for the cure. It has become a truism that electoral defeats are occasions for “soul searching” and radical course correction — as opposed to, say, brute manifestations of predictable cycles in electoral politics. While the ideologue wilfully indulges the urge for diagnosis, the everyman must artfully quell it by example. That is a hard role to play. Projecting a powerful sense of normality is not a normal thing to be able to do. It is a rare political gift; none of the remaining four possesses it. If the coming years are the Tories’ years in the ideological wilderness, it will be because the best way to avoid electing a weird ideologue is to elect someone weirder.

To stand any chance of survival, they will need to win over three groups of voters. In the South, they lost a whole swathe of seats to the Liberal Democrats. In the Midlands and North, huge numbers defected to Labour and there is stiff competition from Reform which lies second in nearly a hundred seats. And the third group, first-time voters, were never particularly interested in the first place; but if they don’t appeal to the young, demography will doom them. So any new leader must come up with an agenda sufficiently innovative to appeal to young voters, while also attracting back the two groups of defectors.

They’re not going to do this by promising tax cuts, which was the party’s message this summer. Those who defected to the Lib Dems were mostly on decent, middle-class incomes and were morally disgusted by the presumption that appealing to their greed would keep them onboard. They jumped. Conversely, the promise of tax cuts merely confirmed among Red Wall voters tempted by Labour, that although the Tories had talked about restoring jobs, skills and pride to their towns, they had been duped: what the Tories cared about all along, was the rich. As for first-time voters, when Corbyn offered to skin the rich, they attempted to sweep him into power. Few first-time voters pay much tax.

What, then, if not tax cuts? Certainly, the new leader shouldn’t ape Farage and talk about reducing immigration. Voters are unlikely to have forgotten that the party promised this as the main motif of “getting Brexit done”, whereupon immigration sky-rocketed. Hence, there would be what we might politely call a credibility problem. Equally, those defectors to the Lib Dems who were repelled by the base morality of tax cuts are overwhelmingly likely to react similarly to a message that scapegoats immigrants for Britain’s fiscal straight-jacket and associated difficulties. Besides, the killer reason not to copy Farage is because to do so would play directly into his agenda of absorbing the Tory party into his movement. He could not have expressed this any more clearly than he already has: “Kill the Tories.”

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Of course, the contenders could do what Labour did in opposition: say as little as possible and watch while the Government stumbles from one fiasco to another. Labour has not had the greatest start to its time in office, and so watching and sniping will indeed be tempting. But it should be resisted. For one thing, all the other opposition parties will be playing that game, and each has a different but highly focused audience more receptive to a fine-tuned message. Youth irritated by some new government decision will be drawn to the Greens who will have pounced on it. Scottish Labour voters angered by factory closures, will be inclined to drift back to the newly led SNP. Those Labour voters whose identity is bound up in the traditional priorities of care and compassion, already irritated by the cancelation of the winter fuel allowance, will be hoovered up by the Lib Dems positioning themselves as Labour’s conscience. Those Labour voters in Red Wall constituencies, already despondent that Keir Starmer has only noticed them in respect of their proclivity to riot, will be prime targets for Reform. In any case, hugely tempting as it is to join the chorus of derision at ministerial acceptance of smart clothing from Labour donors, this risks reviving memories of lavish wallpaper, duck ponds and Covid parties. Better not.

Fortunately, there is an obvious, tried and tested agenda which, astonishingly, the new Government has yet to embrace. Britain is being torn apart by regional inequalities far wider than anywhere else in Europe. We are no longer One Nation, as Wales, Northern Ireland, most of provincial England, and much of Scotland have diverged further and further from London and a few proximate gilded cities. We know it is an attractive policy since it is what Johnson was elected to do alongside Brexit: “levelling up”. The trouble is, he did nothing about it until 2022, when he delegated it to Michael Gove. Aided by Andy Haldane, Gove devised a detailed strategy which sat unimplemented because it was blocked by the Treasury. Like Andy Street, Gove bore the cost of Treasury dogmatism, but loyally refrained from resigning in frustration. Obviously, the new leader will need to apologise for some failure of the past government, but none of the candidates is personally tainted by this one.

This is an agenda which will be most attractive for the Red Wall. It competes with Farage, but will defeat him because, unlike his approach, it is strongly credible. The Farage solution to the woes of broken towns and cities is the wrong-headed scapegoating of immigrants. But what these places need is new futures, triggered by new jobs and new infrastructure. Currently, their future is so bleak that few immigrants other than a handful living on welfare are attracted there. And so the Tories should respond to Farage not by aping him but killing him.

Such a move would also appeal to the compassionate defectors to Lib Dems because it can be presented as morally uplifting. It would heal the rifts between those places which are thriving and those which have been left behind. The moral vote would be reinforced by a newly acquired empathy: many of the Southern Lib Dems who defected from the Tories are in towns such as Barnstaple and Portsmouth North that have themselves started to fall behind.

Doubtless it would outrage the imperturbably selfish activist cohort at conference — the Truss fan club who adored the package of tax-cuts for the rich and welfare-cuts for the poor. Luckily, though, it is a small minority: Truss provoked a record level of voter defection in her constituency, proving there just isn’t enough greed around for this sort of party to survive even one further election.

For the many Tories of integrity, the One Nation agenda would be appealing because it calls people to recognise the obligations of fellow-citizenship. Helmut Kohl successfully invoked that concept in his Solidarity Tax on West Germans to finance the reunification of Germany in 1992. At the time, East Germany was pitifully poor and unproductive in comparison with any British region. Today, East Germany has now overtaken many of those same regions. Recognising our fellow-citizenship is a morally compelling cri-de-coeur, long overdue.

Which brings me to that final, most essential and most difficult constituency, the young. We know that British teenagers are anxious: but ours are more anxious than teenagers anywhere else in Europe. They expect their futures to be worse than that of their parents. How, then, can we reawaken that sense of tingling exhilaration at being on the threshold of independent life?

Every cohort since the Fifties has been worse-off, age-for-age, than its predecessor. Those now retired have captured too large a share of past growth, and a new leader must acknowledge that. As the party of enterprise, the Tories could surely craft some scheme for start-ups explicitly aimed at ambitious youngsters who aren’t able to rely on the bank-of-mum-and-dad. Obviously this would require an act of supreme self-sacrifice by the retired — and something similar from the Conservative leader who might not want to risk losing the stalwart support of the elderly. But precisely because the Tories are currently seen as the party of the rich boomer, it might force first-time voters to completely reevaluate their understanding of what they know to be the “nasty party”.

Whether the candidate selected by the loyalist rump of Tories who remain voting members will have the wisdom to transform the party from its recent path to irrelevance, will not be revealed by what they say at this conference. That will merely be pitched to get chosen. The serious business will be to win back the three groups who have abandoned them. And wisdom has not been much in evidence in the party these past few years.

The most striking thing about the answers is how American they were, with half of the candidates naming US presidents. Former Lieutenant Colonel of the British Army Tom Tugendhat picked a fellow military man turned politician, Dwight Eisenhower. Mel Stride plumped for John F. Kennedy and invoked his call to do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. And James Cleverly opted for Margaret Thatcher’s transatlantic partner at the end of the Cold War, the sunny and optimistic Ronald Reagan.

Along with its Atlanticism, the other obvious feature of the honour roll was its recency. Politicians labelled “Tories” can be dated back to the 17th century, yet all of the named heroes were alive within living memory. Of those who offered British politicians, Priti Patel chose — without hesitation — Thatcher. Robert Jenrick said the same, adding her ideological guru, Keith Joseph, and most dynamic Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, for good measure. Only one candidate gave a British answer that caused eyebrows to rise (and Wikipedia pages to be searched), but it didn’t demur much from the theme. Kemi Badenoch plucked Airey Neave, the former leadership campaign manager for Thatcher and Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who was assassinated in 1979.

As aspiring leaders of the world’s most successful political party, the exaltation of so many American Presidents — more than British prime ministers, of which the Conservatives can claim 22 since the Great Reform Act — is a surprise. It’s also unlikely to be fruitful. Developments in the conservative traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have often interacted or been in one another’s slipstream, have led them to very different places. British and American conservatisms just don’t sound like songs from the same hymnbook anymore — and when they have, most recently in the libertarianism of Liz Truss, it hasn’t ended well for the Tories.

Harking back to the Thatcher years, as three of the candidates did, is a more promising path for the next Conservative leader. Britain’s first female prime minister won three elections on the bounce, two of them with three-figure majorities, and reshaped Britain more decisively than any prime minister since Clement Attlee. But the Tory tradition is much older than the 50 years since Thatcher became leader of the party — and much richer, too. If Conservatives limit themselves to drawing inspiration from the Thatcher years — or worse, the myths that have grown up around them — they will only be scratching the surface of their party’s history and its canon of “heroes”. Instead, they should look further back. But to whom?

After the worst election result in their history, the Tories need a hero of reinvention. And as such, the next party leader could do far worse than put Benjamin Disraeli on the hero’s pedestal. In so many senses an outsider (he was descended from Jewish immigrants from Italy), Disraeli climbed the greasy pole through a process of personal and political reinvention. He transformed himself into a beacon of Victorian Britain — an Anglican, friend of the Queen, and cheerleader for the Empire — and remade the Tory Party in his own design. By the time he died in 1881, Disraeli had set the Conservatives on the path to dominate the next century of British politics.

The test of any reinvention, though, will be success at the ballot box. Here, aspiring leaders could draw upon the record of another Tory icon, Winston Churchill. On the face of it, Churchill is an unlikely hero of electoral recovery. The man widely labelled the “Greatest Briton” for his wartime efforts never won the popular vote in a general election. But after the Conservatives were reduced to 197 seats in the 1945 election, he kept buggering on as leader of the opposition. Five years later the Tories gained 90 seats and were on the brink of returning to power. No other post-war Conservative leader would make as many gains in a single election until David Cameron in 2010.

Yet if the party is to have any hope of returning to power, the next Tory leader will need to double Churchill’s success and then some. Once again, then, they will need to build a strong shadow cabinet and give its members the chance to shine. Churchill’s top team represented a broad range of Tory thinking and talent, and featured two future election-winning prime ministers.

Few, in Churchill’s team, were as able as Rab Butler, whose efforts in the 1945-51 parliaments made him a hero of the party rebuild. As head of Conservative research and policy, Butler re-established the intellectual foundations of the Conservative offer. He set about attracting the best and brightest on the centre-right to engage with the party, educated the grassroots about political issues of the day and created a comprehensive new agenda to take the Conservative Party into the second half of the 20th century.

Butler’s great insight was to recognise that the new context in which the Tory Party would have to survive and thrive was wholly different from the country it had governed before the war. To follow his lead today would be to avoid redeploying the playbooks of the Eighties or the 2000s, but to look with fresh eyes at the challenges of the 2020s. This is a much harder task. It requires analysing the mistakes the party made in office and the challenges it failed to confront. But, as Butler knew, this tougher road is the one back to office.

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Then, as now, homebuilding and homeownership were high on the agenda. And here, the present crop of aspiring leaders could find inspiration from the largely forgotten Noel Skelton. A Scottish Unionist MP and icon to many young Tories in the early 20th century, Skelton pioneered the concept of “property-owning democracy” in conservative thought. In The Spectator in 1923, he called for Conservatives to set out a vision for the country as “master of its own life, made four-square and secure and able therefore to withstand the shrill and angry gales which, in the new era’s uneasy dawn, sweep across the world”. He was very much addressing the challenges of the interwar years, but his ideas have had a permanent resonance in Tory politics, especially in a country that today has too much precarity, too little home ownership, and too few people who feel they have something worth conserving.

What Skelton set out in the pages of a magazine, Conservative politicians refined and helped make a reality later in the century. Chief among the stars of this story is Harold Macmillan — a hero of delivery. In 1951, Churchill asked Macmillan to “build the houses for the people”, warning it would “make or mar” his political career. His job was, as many Conservative leadership candidates claim to recognise, to deliver on what the party said it would do. It said it would build 300,000 homes a year; and he did so. Even Thatcher, whose own views weren’t always aligned with her predecessor, praised his record: “He didn’t say ‘no, this can’t be done or this will be blocked by the civil service’. He did overcome. He dominated his civil servants — they didn’t dominate him.”

If the Conservative Party wants to dominate again, its next leader must dig deep within the conservative tradition — to Thatcher, yes, but on to Macmillan, Butler, Churchill, Skelton, Disraeli and scores more, as well. A party as old and successful as the Conservatives can find ample inspiration for its future in the heroes of its past. It just has to look for it.

It is easy to put the tumult down to the spectacular failings of individuals in the party and around it. Without Johnson’s pagan personality, the risks of imposing pandemic lockdowns while life in No.10 continued in its usual manner would not have proved so hazardous. Only a wild-card character such as Dominic Cummings could have managed a campaign to leave the European Union that had at its centre a promise to restore democracy, and then try to launch a coup days after. Rishi Sunak might be a poor politician, but his reputation would have been less shredded if he had appointed advisors who understood there were no ifs and buts about his simple duty on D-Day.

The party’s failings were also structural, though, originating in the hard political world of the 21st century. From the start, the personal weaknesses of individuals were exposed by the inability of those at the top to grasp how realities far beyond the party’s manoeuvring for advantage at Westminster could overwhelm them.

To succeed, the Conservatives have always needed a cross-class coalition held together by an aura of being more competent at governing than first the Liberals and then Labour, and also being more committed to the Union. Even in the Thirties, when the Labour Party split, and during the Cold War years, when Labour twice ceded competence on defence with promises of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Conservatives could never be the party only of capital and those who thrived under the economic status quo. During the interwar years and the Fifties they expanded their electoral coalition in part by getting more houses built.

But traditional centre-right parties will always struggle to construct such coalitions when growth prospects are poor and financial conditions inhibit younger generations  from acquiring property at the same rate as their parents and grand-parents. The unpopularity of large-scale immigration with the kinds of working- and lower-middle class voters who have historically eschewed the Left can only magnify the problem.

In this respect, the Conservatives have long required either relatively benign economic times in which to govern as in the Fifties, or the opportunity to make relatively easy to implement reforms as in the Eighties. But they came back to power in 2010 in an era marked by economic stagnation and political problems too big to confront.

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By Tom McTague

By the middle of the first decade of this century, what the ancient Greek historian Polybius thought of as “aristocratic excess” was rife across Western democracies. Being both democratic (in giving all citizens a vote) and aristocratic (in concentrating power in the hands of a few), representative democracy risks both democratic and aristocratic excess. But since it has historically co-existed with a form of economic organisation in capitalism that creates large-scale inequalities, and was from the, 20th century challenged by the rise of technocratic national and international institutions, it has long been vulnerable to the problem of aristocratic excess.

During the Nineties and early 2000s, the dangers arising from this lay largely buried under the democratic triumphalism let loose by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a reliance on finance-driven economic growth, and the EU’s moves to close down national democratic political contests over some economic issues, including pan-European migration, moved the problem of aristocratic excess centre-stage. In Europe, the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005 to the EU Constitutional Treaty shattered any presumption that European electorates were at ease with the drift of power away from elected representatives. Then, the 2007-8 Crash drew visceral lines between those who benefitted from 21st-century global capitalism, and those who paid the price. It also accelerated the already declining rate of home ownership.

From the moment he became party leader in December 2005, David Cameron appeared ill at ease with a political world in which the problem of aristocratic excess had to be contained. Indeed, his strong preference was to wish away any need for the Conservatives to reconstruct a cross-class coalition by rendering the social conservatism and Euroscepticism of working-class Conservative voters, rather than deindustrialisation, the toxic legacy of the Thatcher period. Certainly, the 2010 Conservative manifesto paid lip service to the idea that there should be no return to finance-led growth in the post-Crash world. But in practice, Cameron largely assumed the party could govern as if the relationship between the governing and the governed had not changed since Blair’s heyday. When he proposed changes to the planning laws, it was to make extensions easier not the construction of new homes. If there were a strategy to kick-start the economy, it was only his Chancellor George Osborne’s bid to secure Chinese investment to fix Britain’s infrastructural decay and make the City of London a financier for China’s Belt and Road project just a few years before Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 incentivised all western states to rediscover industrial policy.

It was a similar refusal to see how far consent to the Union had broken down that allowed Cameron to let the Scottish government campaign for independence for months on end in 2014 before the panic-driven Vow to deliver more devolution, as if Westminster was indifferent to the outcome. Saved by the fact that Alex Salmond couldn’t find a solution to the Nationalists’ currency problem in a post-eurozone crisis EU, Cameron then had the good fortune to find an SNP that was popular without being materially able to deliver independence. Now, with not that many more votes than were won in 2010, the Conservatives could take out the Liberal Democrats as soft on the prospect of Labour-SNP co-operation at Westminster without having to address the medium-term existential problem facing the party.

Only over the EU did Cameron appear fully cognisant from the start of what had changed since the Nineties. Judging that sooner or later, the UK’s semi-detached position would have been put to a democratic test, Cameron made several efforts to reset EU membership before his gamble on an early referendum. But Cameron, and indeed the whole British political class, had little idea how to act in the kind of politics where strategic predicaments were being directly confronted rather than evaded. Having made his wager on his own powers of persuasion, Cameron then surrendered any notion of prudence by banning contingency arrangements for a “Leave” vote while promising he would implement a decision he had no intention of seeing through. The climax of this botched reckoning saw Osborne try to terrify the voters with the threat of a punishment budget to appease the financial markets.

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Then came Theresa May, whose honeymoon period arose because she seemed able to subordinate her own personality to the new political reality. For a few fleeting weeks during the 2017 general election campaign, her promise to deliver Brexit as a Remainer appeared as if it could finally restore a broad cross-class coalition for the party. But once the spectacular failures during the second half of that campaign exposed the near complete absence of Conservative voters among not just millennials, but younger Generation-Xers, a spectre of medium-term demographic obliteration began to form.

Soon, May’s erroneous post-election assumption that, despite all evidence to the contrary, she could borrow Labour votes to get a weak Brexit through the House of Commons administered a more immediate near-death experience for the Conservatives. Johnson temporarily resurrected the party by his willingness to deliver a general election and put Brexit to a second democratic test. Yet it soon became apparent that many in the party assumed that, having pocketed the votes of the cross-class coalition of 2019 Conservative voters, they could govern as if nothing had changed.

Of course, the pandemic was an unprecedented derailment for any new government. But mostly what went politically wrong was born of a party that did not adapt to its good fortune. The “Levelling-up” agenda required an industrial strategy to have any chance of success, but the economic need for one seemed to Johnson’s Chancellors, especially Rishi Sunak, to cede too much political territory to Labour. Keeping both Red Wall and Blue Wall Conservative voters on side required reducing migration, but Johnson’s rule changes propelled it to record levels. Building new houses required planning legislation, but swathes of backbench Conservative MPs, including Theresa May, objected. When Johnson’s premiership then imploded on his character in the very year inflation returned, most Conservatives MPs were ready to grasp at any rhetorical promise of growth, however loftily conceived compared to the economic facts on the ground.

In crashing her premiership in a confrontation with the financial markets and the Bank of England, Liz Truss destroyed what little remained of the Conservatives’ claim to comparative economic competence over Labour, especially since the turmoil hit first-time house buyers. Crucially, by swiftly restoring the prospect of Labour winning a majority of English seats, she cost the Conservatives any chance of tactically falling back on the Union card. Sunak’s attempts to compensate elsewhere by shifting Rightwards on migration and Net Zero have failed because Boris Johnson had already sailed too hard in the opposite direction.

No other party has simply gifted power to the opposition simply by so repeatedly demonstrating what has become its essential narcissism. Not only has it offered no remedy for the problem of aristocratic excess, it has come to exemplify it, abandoning almost every kind of voter who gave it power and — from Partygate to Cameron’s lobbying for Greensill Capital to the election-date gambling scandal — visibly indulging in the notion that rules and restraint don’t apply to the powerful.

There is a scenario in which the Conservatives’ most self-defeating legacy is still to come. Labour appears to have learned the one thing that, for conservative reasons, must and can be done to stop the further descent of British politics into fragmentation: build houses. But when it is so hard to govern, the political furies are indiscriminate. Beyond housing, Labour is economically committed to the same blueprint of Net-Zero-led economic growth that Boris Johnson found could deliver neither levelling up nor a manufacturing renaissance.

There will be no repeat of the Liz Truss moment. But when it becomes clear that most of Britain’s problems these past 14 years were being presided over by the Conservatives, rather than caused by them, the implosion will quite probably overwhelm British democracy as we know it.

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause. After all, it won’t be there to hate it. I shan’t be there either. There will be no call for me.

The past few weeks have totally liberated me from a last and lingering temporal duty. I thought I had it, but it turns out to have been illusory. I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well. My problems arise from the fact that I missed the last train of the old life. But I saw it go. I arrived, out of breath, on the station platform just in time to see it depart.

I saw official London when it was still black and battered, a great imperial capital. I saw the Church of England when it still possessed majesty, dominion and power. I saw, on a sultry August day in 1960, the final astonishing relic of British global naval might, the Royal Navy’s last battleship, towed to the breakers, a modern version of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. The scene was made more melancholy when the colossal vessel, reluctant to die, grounded on the Portsmouth mud. A great lump rose to my throat, and I still feel a sense of deep half-understood loss when I recall it.

But the nation swiftly got over it, as it had got over the Suez failure in 1956 and our (still unrepaid) default on our First World War debt to the USA in 1934. I felt and heard and lived amid a completely different set of rules from the ones which now exist. British people of that time had been formed by a completely different set of morals, manners and standards. I remember how they spoke and carried themselves, how they expressed disapproval, how even in their hours of relaxation they filled each moment with purposeful activity.

And for many years I thought I might persuade others that it was a pity this rather admirable society had gone and that it might be worth rescuing, and even restoring. But life without these old restraints was much more fun, especially if you were reasonably well off, than it had been before. It would take many years before the social costs of our weakened morals would begin to show. It is fascinating that the Conservative Party never made any serious attempt to reverse or even moderate the social revolution of the Sixties. It turned out that easier divorce, feebler criminal justice, devalued examinations and the rest were actually quite popular.

The most successful song in the music charts in 1967, the supposed Summer of Love, was the appalling dirge “Please Release Me” by Engelbert Humperdinck. It kept the Beatles’ release of “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” (on the same disc) off the number one slot. It was inescapable. It was an anthem to divorce, which everyone knew was about to become vastly easier the following year. In a similar betrayal of the rules that had created it, the British middle class positively loved comprehensive schools, or thought they did, because they no longer had to worry about their children failing to win places at the much better grammar schools. Again, they found out later that many of the new schools were really not very good. A softer, more absent police force was also welcome in a world where illegal drugs were increasingly common in the schools and homes of the well-off. Easy abortion, likewise, was welcome if the alternative was a shotgun marriage. It was around this point that official Christianity, much like the Tory Party, began to make more and more compromises with the modern world — leaving first the Roman Catholic Church and then only its more determined core to defend principles which had been non-negotiable throughout Christian Britain 50 years before.

Until quite recently, this country boasted a kind of half-timbered theme-park nostalgia for some aspects of itself, but this was pretty shallow. Nobody really misses all those horse-brasses and toby jugs that used to clutter our pubs, and the hunting enthusiasts — when it came to it — could find little support when the Blairites spitefully banned their picturesque if bloody gallops across the countryside. Great aristocratic houses are all very well for a day out, and I still share Evelyn Waugh’s melancholy over their wanton destruction. But they are slipping out of the national consciousness, their original purpose a mystery, like most of our history.

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It is almost funny that conservative media protests against the political correcting of the National Trust and the destruction of statues for dogmatic reasons. Alas, most people under 30 have no idea what the fuss is about, as nobody has told them any history. The parish churches of England are an unmatched storehouse of beauty and I fear for their future as their congregations wither. For what does any young person make of them? They are written in a language as unreadable as Assyrian, and the stories they tell are of long ages of which most of us know nothing and, I fear, care less. Thus, the English countryside is a beautiful effigy of its former self, preserved by the last generation which understood it, but not at all guaranteed to survive much longer.

The man who strove hardest to preserve conservatism was the late Sir Roger Scruton. His experience is instructive, especially the way the Conservative Party turned savagely on him when he was falsely accused of some Wrongthink or other by a Left-wing magazine. This was typical of that party, happy to wear Sir Roger in its lapel as a trophy, but terrified that he might actually do something dangerous.

Sir Roger’s life perhaps provides us with a clue as to what will happen in the end to conservatism. For his greatest achievement was to go to the aid of Czechoslovak dissenters under icy Communist rule in the Eighties. He and a band of equally brave men and women travelled dangerously to Prague and other Czechoslovak cities, smuggling unobtainable books, giving tutorials in philosophy, and otherwise aiding the survival of free thought in those sad regions.

Nobody knew then that this great castle of lies would fall so soon. Oddly when it did, conservatism did not really prosper much. One of the successes of Communism was (with few exceptions) its systematic blocking and poisoning of the wells of Christianity from which true conservatism springs. The peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe did not want to be free in the old-fashioned English way espoused by Roger Scruton. They wanted to be free in an American Way. So, we had a double paradox. The collapse of the USSR freed the Western Left, which in Western Europe and North America could no longer be accused of sympathy with the enemy. But it did not liberate conservatism in the former Soviet Empire, a conservatism which now barely exists.

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The nearest thing to it, and it is not very near, is the populist nationalism now so strong in Poland and Hungary. And perhaps it will not be long before these countries are sending us civilising missions of philosophers, and parcels of books, to see if they can revive or sustain the sinking fires of Christian conservatism in England. I doubt it. For we too, in the form of Noisy Nigel and his raucous followers, have decided to prefer the populist and nationalist path to the conservative one.

Why wouldn’t we? Surely the foundation of our world, in the unchosen but indispensable alliance of the free world with Stalin in 1941, was the end of all serious hope of conservatism or of any kind of true principle. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy is the only serious work to have dealt with this, and even Waugh recoiled from taking it to its conclusion.

Its first volume, Men at Arms, begins with Guy Crouchback, last of a long line of Roman Catholic squires, deserted by his flighty, pleasure-seeking wife, exiled in Italy, too old for normal military service — but greatly moved to righteousness by the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939. Here at last, he feels, is the modern world in arms. He can honourably take up his sword against it. There is a touching scene in the church of the Italian town where he has been living, where he visits the tomb of an English knight, killed in some forgotten act of chivalry while on his way to the crusades. He never imagines, during his training and early service, that by the end of the war he will be Stalin’s ally.

Towards the end of the trilogy, in Unconditional Surrender, a Jewish refugee — who Guy is unsuccessfully trying to protect — reproaches him with his early illusions. She says to him that there had been a general will to war in 1939, a sort of death wish.  “Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war,” she says.  Guy, by this time utterly without illusions, replies: “God forgive me. I was one of them.”

I have always thought that the book should have ended there. But it plods on into a sort of happy ending with English middle-class life seemingly restored. So it seemed to be. But there was, as we now see, no substance to it. There was no call for it.

This is laconic Toryism, narcotic, incurious and swagged. Georgian mansions line the river and in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall, a medieval red-brick manor and museum, schoolchildren play by an ornamental lake and topiary. If there is decline here, it is hidden at the edges.

Off the market square, where the busker says Elvis is the favourite — he plays for people who had a lot of sex in the Seventies — I find a gun maker selling Barbour dress clothes and, nearby, a gypsy boy by his pony and trap. The horse is called Red Bull, he says, and he drove him from Peterborough for chips. Faced with this landscape — this majority — the Liberal Democrats are remote, and Labour is barely campaigning. The candidate didn’t appear at the hustings where the first question was: who is your favourite king? There are Union Jacks everywhere: on cushions, tablecloths and dogs. There is occasional bunting and a defibrillator on an exterior wall because Tories are old, and old people die. Typhoons from RAF Coningsby rip the sky.

It is Armed Forces Week, and a parade of local dignitaries muster with soldiers, banners and pipers: slowly. Sir John Hayes MP is photographed with the staff of Peacocks. I don’t think I have ever had a Tory MP on the record while reporting an election — they tend to flee — but Hayes is a secure Tory.  I ask him why this is the safest Tory seat. He doesn’t tell me about Spalding, but himself, as related to Spalding. He and the town are one — as in Arthurian legend.

“I’ve been here a very long time and over that time I’ve touched many people’s lives,” he says. “As I go round countless people say to me, ‘Oh thank you for what you did for my mother or my child or my neighbour or my friends.’” That, he says, “makes a huge difference. In a way,” — in a way! — “the national brand matters but that brand matters too.”

He campaigns like a lover, and it is amazing to watch. He darts down a line of women, pounces on one, and mutters into her hair: “Look after me on the 4th.” As he speaks, his voice takes on a distinctive London accent and he adds, “you will, I know you will” — like a spell. “I certainly will!” she giggles, a heroine of romance fiction in Spalding. We retreat. “That’s how it is, alright,” he says to me, comfortably. I have only ever seen Boris Johnson do this, but his eyes were dead.

“That intimacy,” he says, “is the heart of good democratic representation, and it’s particular to our system. They feel they own me. I’m a romantic High Tory: a Disraelian High Tory. I keep his picture with me all the time. I will show you.” He gets it out: it sits inside a tiny book of Keats’s poetry. Disraeli stares at us, and Hayes enacts a masterclass in the Disraelian creed: the Tory aristocracy and Tory working-class as one. That is, he speaks the theory into my Dictaphone, and runs into the crowd to demonstrate the practical. He shouts at a greengrocer: “I’m on it, Michael!” Then to another woman: “If I didn’t get your vote,” — he gazes into her welcoming face — “I’d be really worried.”  “I think the way you are really matters” he says, “your demeanour”.

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I believe in Hayes’s belief: later I meet a man on a mobility scooter. He has a Poppy keyring and a sticker that says: “Send Nudes”. (Spalding has the glossiest mobility scooters I have seen. They are Ferrari red and festooned with Union Jacks.) He says his mother wrote to Hayes — they live in the same village — and a few days later he received the two-bedroom bungalow he wanted.

Jack Braginton, 23, the Liberal Democrat candidate, has been alive for less time than Hayes has been MP. He did work experience in Hayes’s office as a schoolboy, because that is how Spalding works. (In 2019, the Lib Dems got 6.6%, almost half the Labour share.) We meet by Greggs. He says that Spalding’s Toryism is “perhaps rooted in the belief within a rural community that hard graft provides. And deep within this, is the duopoly of thought: personal responsibility for hard work, and a deep sense of community.”

I ask why they don’t talk about it? Why is Hayes the only Tory philosopher in a Tory town? Braginton, who is ruddy and genial, says: “It is not for us to consider larger questions of economy, society or politics.” Rather, “it is the role of a politician to just keep our way of life ticking over, it does not need change or bureaucracy, it just needs to be allowed to continue as it is. That is the genius of the Conservatives — balancing all interests by doing nothing and calling that consensus.”

Spalding is so Tory that the dangerous opposition is also Tory — a former Tory, now Independent — and I wonder if Hayes would smile on this and say: the system works! He is Mark Le Sage, a nurse and local councillor. We meet in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall by the lake. He is functional, aggrieved. The meaningful opposition is always independent here. If people are angry on polling day, they stay at home.

“I am a very annoyed, very upset, very frustrated, very disillusioned dad, granddad, nurse,” he says. “I’m so fed up with the system: the lies; the backstabbing; the scandals. I’ve had enough”. He stood, he says, because he was so frustrated, “with the fact that we just been lied to: over and over again. And then they brought David Cameron back — the guy who left us in the lurch after Brexit!”

Here, when you look behind the swag, people are “disconsolate”, though I think they aren’t used to naming it. The cost-of-living and public service crises don’t stampede in Spalding. They crawl. A former teacher tells me girls don’t feel safe in the town. A Bulgarian woman says eastern European immigrants bring crime to Spalding and “make life hard”. A homeless girl says she was attacked with a brick and shows me the scab. A young man tells me his mother died from cancer last winter. It shattered him. It was, he says, like television: “When it’s like, ‘the NHS is on its knees’. I sat with her at Christmas for three hours and nobody came. She deserved so much better.” That is: the outside world intruded on Spalding, and this is awful, and new.

Later I stand in the Spalding’s Gentlemen’s Society, and stare at the curiosities — its members measured a conch by drinking from it, the guide tells me — and the rows of unread books. Spalding had an Enlightenment: it was a progressive town 300 years ago, and that helped to make it rich. If it is in decline now, I think it doesn’t yet know it, and I wonder if that is the spell Hayes casts so well.

At the Red Lion, a group of ageing men in straw hats and women in bright dresses sit in the sun, drinking. They are the affluent, self-made Tories of Braginton’s analysis. Their fear of Labour is semi-religious, with inbuilt legends. “Keir Starmer is a paedophile-lover,” says a woman. “Exactly,” says a man. “I don’t trust him one little bit.” Tony Blair is a war criminal: “All those soldiers that lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan: that was down to him.” Jeremy Corbyn is, “the worst thing that ever happened to this country”.

“Poor Rishi Sunak,” says one, “He got fined for saying, ‘Happy birthday,’ to someone.” The table silences itself in sympathy: then someone moans that Sunak came home early from D-Day, “because he’s not an Englishman”. What is their main concern? “Too many foreigners,” says one, and he points at his friend. “He’s from Peterborough.” They cackle.

Reform is no threat to this kind of Toryism: it is dysfunctional, messy, a threat. “Nigel Farage is a complete cock,” says another. “What is he going to bring to the table?” Their main resentment, though, is towards the civil service. They think it stymied Brexit. They are grateful we left Europe, despite everything: they think it is doomed. But not Spalding in its sunlight, with defibrillator and swans: the last, gasping vestige of British exceptionalism.

To his audience of liberal Tories, Major clumsily evoked a microcosmic life of the nation that, piece-by-piece, constituted the Conservative Party. His party would survive, Major argued, because it was rooted, not in ideology or activism, but in the daily practices and associations of millions of people: attending church, organising clubs and conducting ordinary business.

Even at the time, Major’s vision of an intact civil society bolstering a centuries-old party was out of date. Indeed, a few years later, in the “invincible green suburbs” of Major’s speech, millions of Conservatives abandoned the party in 1997 for Blair’s Labour.

Yet, there was something concrete in his political elegy. The mediating associations of the Conservatives, although weak, survived 1997 and helped rebuild the party under David Cameron’s vague “Big Society” project. In contrast, the clubs and associations that kept Labour voters loyal — Miners’ Institutes, Workingman’s Associations, Labour Clubs, trade unions and the Methodist chapel — had already declined by the early Nineties. Without these structures, Labour’s core vote in the Red Wall happily turned blue in 2019.

However, from the vantage point of 2024, the Conservative Party’s 14-year revival now looks like a blip. In 1953, the Tories had more than 2.8 million members: almost twice that of Labour. Today, it claims only 172,437.

Historically, the Tory Party relied on “Conservative” or “Constitutional” clubs as auxiliaries, connecting MPs to their communities through cheap booze, snooker, music hall acts and darts. These clubs were once the “non-political” bedrock of the Conservative Party: expressing a paradoxically non-ideological vision of ideology and governance.

Indeed, many members of Conservative Clubs I spoke to refused to concede that their membership was in any way political. “We don’t talk about politics here,” was a common response to my inquiries. Few saw the irony of saying so while sitting beneath portraits of Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher.

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“In the Eighties, a friend of mine was visited by a Conservative Party worker in the Surrey stockbroker belt and was invited to a BBQ at the local Conservative Club,” Rupert Morris, author of The Tories: From Village Hall to Westminster, tells me. “When he said he would only come if they BBQed Mrs Thatcher, the grand Tory lady replied: ‘Oh, but we’re not political around here, anyone can come.’ There was an unquestioning sense that one would naturally be a Conservative in a place like Surrey.”

Such placid content has since disappeared. Over the last decade, these clubs have closed at a rapid rate: bludgeoned by rising energy costs, Covid-19, declining membership and the expense of entertainment. Some clubs are now trying to change their names, strategising that their political affiliations are putting off punters. When I phoned Charles Littlewood, the Deputy Chief Executive of the Associate of Conservative Clubs (ACC), to discuss closure rates, I was greeted with flat-out refusal and accusations of media bias.

And so, I travelled to the suburban south coast of West Sussex, to find out for myself. Here, the private Lancing College rises from the South Downs, while fishing cottages, council estates and vast rows of suburban semis crowd the shoreline. In many ways, it is an all too neat encapsulation of Major’s “invincible green suburbs”. It should be the perfect place for Conservative Clubs, if not the party, to thrive.

However, this coastline, once assumed to be representative of the average Tory safe seat, is rapidly changing. While Worthing and Shoreham still possess a few Conservative Clubs, both parliamentary seats are expected to fall to Labour this week. Many in the area understand this as a consequence of high house prices and the migration of young Labour-voting professionals and families away from the extortionate rents of London and Brighton.

Goring Conservative Club, the first venue I visited, is housed in a grand neoclassical building in the middle of an estate. A week before the general election, and there are no political posters or banners of any kind: only flags for the football. In the atrium of the building, I meet Simon Flack, the chairman of the club, and Catherine Lane, a committee member. Inside, there are no openly party-political features. Instead, English and Scottish flags for the Euros are draped over the bar.

“I don’t know necessarily, at the present moment, whether I want to invite him,” says Flack, when I ask him about the club’s connection to Sir Peter Bottomley, the local Conservative MP. “He’s never approached us. A year ago, I had a man turn up who was looking after Peter. He thought they would be meeting here, but they were actually meeting in the library down the road,” Flack adds. “Why he didn’t ask us to use the function room is beyond me.” (One of Bottomley’s staffers later tells me: “We’ve gone our separate ways, over the last nine years we’ve not had an email asking him to attend the club. I can’t believe they would invite Sir Peter.”)

Flack described how the club used to connect its members to the Tory high and mighty: “If you look at our honours board, it’s Colonel So-And-So, Sir Whomever, and several famous MPs, but this is going back to the 1940s and 1950s.” Lane adds that, today, politics is rarely discussed. “Politics is never spoken about here, it’s never seriously spoken about — people come here to socialise, the [Conservative] name is part of the deeds, we have to keep it.”

Indeed, the breakdown between the Goring Conservative Club and the Tory Party reached a tipping-point last year. “An ex-president of ours was as Conservative as they come, and he actually did a video for the Labour Party a couple of months ago,” Flack explains.

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Down the road in Shoreham, the local Conservative Club huddles beneath a huge glass development stretching along the river. Inside, the room is packed out for Saturday night’s entertainment. The average age is 70.

Shoreham’s  atmosphere immediately feels more politically charged. The local Tory candidate’s leaflets sit in a large pile at the door. Portraits of the late Queen and Winston Churchill watch over the bar. From the far side of the room, a series of photographs of Conservative prime ministers from Rishi Sunak to Thatcher line the wall. “We skipped Liz Truss,” a bartender jokes.

One table tells me they’re suspicious of the media and politicians. “They’re all the same… Farage is the only one saying what people think.” They tell me all their children will be voting Labour: “National service scared them off [the Conservatives] didn’t it?”

On another table, two women sip at gins. “I wouldn’t come in here if it wasn’t Conservative,” Carol tells me. Tim Loughton, the local MP, regularly attends the club’s AGMs and seems popular with them. “Have you seen him dancing?” Carol asks. “He swung me around like a bleeding cat.” She goes on to explain that she will vote Conservative: “If Labour gets in, everything will go up in price and my pension only stretches so far.”

Later on, I speak to David, an elderly ex-serviceman, who is having drinks with his family. He explains that he’s 72 and still working, largely to pay for dental treatment. “The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years and I can’t afford things.”

Does he believe that a Labour government will remedy this? “I used to have faith in politics. I’ve always been a working-class man,” he says. “Labour doesn’t support the working-class, so I became Conservative because I was self-employed. I’ll vote Reform now.” He looks around the room. “This is obsolete, these [Conservative Clubs] are dying out. But there’s respect here.”

One of David’s younger relatives, roughly in his early 20s, laughs and tells me he has a tattoo of Nigel Farage’s face. I ask where it’s located. “I couldn’t tell you that, mate.” He laughs again. For the few young people in the club, the pomp and circumstance of conservative ritual seem irrelevant in the face of populist provocation and a sense of looming crisis. For now, politics lies outside association: in the realm of the meme and the extended joke.

Outside, the spires of Lancing College frame mudflats where boats moor and fly fishermen reel in their catch. Numerous hedgerows hide thousands of houses sheltering under the South Downs. However, in these “invincible green suburbs” of Major’s accidental requiem, the Conservative Party is now an exhausted force, disconnected from those it claims to serve. The Labour Party looks likely to win these seats. Despite the vital role Conservative Clubs play for their elderly members, it looks likely that they, too, will soon be forgotten.

Asimov was inspired by CBS News’s Remington Rand UNIVAC I computer, which correctly predicted a landslide for Eisenhower on election night 1952 after only 3 million votes had been counted and Adlai Stevenson was ahead. It was the first instance of what has become a familiar feature of US elections, to the degree that most people treat the “calling” of the result early in the evening by the networks as the actual outcome of the election.

Asimov’s fantasy was a prophetic reductio ad absurdum of something which has played a steadily increasing role in modern politics: the idea that citizens can be represented by a carefully designed system in which they play no active role. The vogue for citizen juries is an illustration of this, while a number of theorists have gone even further and proposed that actual legislative assemblies should be chosen through some kind of lottery — what is technically termed “sortition”. The processes of voting and elections, on this account, are messy and corruptible: far better to have a system which is genuinely representative of public opinion. And a citizen jury will represent the population better than a committee of elected legislators scrutinising the same material.

It is also the case that politics since 1955 has come to be wholly dominated by opinion polling, to the extent that a great deal of policy is devised by governments to fit in with what the polls say. This is a practical form of daily representation, going far beyond what would have been conceivable to earlier generations. Imagine, for instance, what would be happening at the moment, were we still in the position we were in the 19th or early-20th centuries. Would our politicians be anything like as sure of victory or defeat as they currently seem to be? Would we even be having a general election at the moment, and might Boris Johnson still be Prime Minister?

In reality, however, today’s emphasis polling masks the fact that the general public has played no active part in these decisions; rather, a bloodless and abstract form of representation has replaced the old practices of mass action by citizens which once were used to bring about political change. People can lobby, demonstrate and be activists in other ways, but they cannot take part in the difficult business of decision-making — that is restricted to a small sample of the population.

So far has the assumption wormed its way into people’s heads that it now seems natural to give the vote to 16-year-olds even if they cannot be members of Parliament (allowing them to be members was proposed in Scotland, but nothing came of). Contrast this with what happened when women and working men were given the vote: they almost immediately became eligible themselves to be legislators, and it would have seemed ridiculous to those generations of politicians to have the one without the other. What’s different now is that our background assumptions about representation have shifted, such that elections now look like superior (or possibly inferior) opinion polls — and why shouldn’t everyone with opinions (which especially includes teenagers) have the vote?

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Schemes for proportional representation have the same character. PR is often presented as a better form of representation in a parliamentary system than first-past-the-post, but it shares with sortition and opinion polling the feature that an essential decision — the question of who shall form a government — is largely taken out of the hands of the voters and given to their representatives. This was precisely the objection to PR in what is still the most thorough examination of the subject, the report of a Royal Commission in 1910, at a time when many alternatives to the existing British constitution were being touted, including the use of referendums. The Report decided against introducing PR on the grounds that:

“A general election is in fact considered by a large portion of the electorate of this country as practically a referendum on the question which of two Governments shall be returned to power. The view may be right or wrong, but it has to be taken account of in any discussion which turns on the composition of the House of Commons.”

This was a profound observation, with many implications. One of them is that there is a responsibility on great parties to avoid becoming narrow factions, and to present themselves as plausible governments. Another is that there is also a responsibility on citizens who want to think of themselves as legislators to treat their vote as genuinely a contribution to the creation of a government, and not merely as the expression of their feelings. This was the distinction Max Weber made between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction. As he said, real politics requires the former, a willingness to make difficult choices: “the strong and slow boring of hard boards”. But if we have left those choices to other people, we can be politically irresponsible — with consequences which are all too visible today.

A third implication (though it has seldom been recognised) arises from the fact that in the conditions of modern politics — and arguably those of 1910 — the electorate above all votes for a prime minister. It is the prime minister who personally appoints the government, after all, and whose power rests on MPs who are whipped and committed to a party manifesto. In this respect, the referendum-like character of a general election has been wholly disregarded, and, as we have often seen, prime ministers can be replaced without any fresh recourse to the public.

But what is the point of asking people who they want to have as prime minister, and then disregarding the answer without putting the question to them again? It is clear why MPs and party managers like the ability to do so, but it can be seen as another and very important instance of passive representation: the voters stand idly by while a matter on which they had once given a great deal of thought is decided anew by their representatives.

Like the populists in America, the European Left used to demand that their populations should be allowed to take an active role in politics. The British Social Democrat Federation’s programme in 1884, for example, included “LEGISLATION by the PEOPLE, in such wise that no project of Law shall become legally binding till accepted by the Majority of the People”, while the German Social Democrats at Erfurt in 1891 called for “Authorities to be elected by the people; to be responsible and bound”.

Left Parliamentarians, such as the nascent Labour Party in Britain, were able to disregard these calls only because they believed (along with the 1910 Report) that general elections, at least in Britain, were already referendums of a kind, in which the voters were exercising a genuine power to choose a government, though with many reservations in practice. But they were in complete agreement with the more radical Left that citizens should be thought of as active participants in their politics, behaving like legislators themselves and not as the passive subjects of representative systems. The age of mass parties, which lasted more or less down to the Seventies, was testimony to this: the general population was arrayed on two sides, like the members in the House of Commons, and saw itself as taking a real part in the contests there.

This world has disappeared, killed by a variety of forces, including supranational institutions such as the EU and the disappearance of an old kind of solidarity among fellow citizens, as the circumstances of people’s lives and work have changed. With communities more atomised and removed from power, it is hard to imagine any familiar Left-wing party calling for an increase in active participation on the part of the population, rather than for increasingly elaborate forms of passive representation.

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The response to the Brexit vote in 2016 was a particularly stark illustration of this. The Heath government had pushed through the constitutionally far-reaching membership of the EEC on a slim majority (eight on the second reading of the Bill), and with a manifesto which had merely said that “our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more no less”. Partly for internal party reasons, but also for old-fashioned Left reasons of principle, Labour committed itself to a referendum on the issue, obliging any future government to extricate itself from the EEC through the same means. But as we saw in between 2016 and 2019, a large swathe of the governing classes could not stand the idea that they should be given specific instructions by the electorate.

In the end, Brexit was saved in 2019 by a very traditional (and democratic) means: a general election, understood as another referendum. But the politician most associated with this triumph was then removed without any appeal to the electorate — and largely because his colleagues quailed in the face of opinion polls. Citizen juries, votes for 16-years-olds and PR are all now high on the agenda of many political parties, and some of them are extremely likely to be implemented in the near future. Systems of passive representation seem, despite Brexit, to have won the struggle against active participation.

It is widely recognised that this general election is marked by an almost unprecedented degree of hostility to both major parties on the part of the electorate. But who can be surprised at this, given that they were offered the chance of real and active democracy only to have it snatched away from them — and this time, perhaps, for good?

This may sound like the current general election campaign in the United Kingdom but it is, in fact, an account of another campaign in another country and in another decade: Canada’s historic 1993 federal election. The Tory government in question was that of prime minister Kim Campbell and her Progressive Conservative Party (or PCs); the centre-left opposition was the Canadian Liberal Party; and the Reform insurgency belonged to Preston Manning, who went on to achieve his ambition of displacing the PCs as Canada’s Right-wing alternative.

The government was reduced from 156 seats to two (a “mating pair”), having been devoured on all sides. It is this aspect of the 1993 campaign, the spectacle of near-total annihilation for the Tory establishment, that so entices Farage and his supporters. 

Though the analogy is not exact by any means, Farage has repeatedly invoked the Canadian model of populist transformation in his campaign’s opening phase. As he told the Sunday Times: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here.”

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But what exactly does following this model entail? The answer would depend on which standard of success Farage holds: if he wishes to influence political discourse by moving the Overton Window in the direction of certain ideas, such as dramatically curbing migration, then he could reprise the role he played as the leader of Ukip: as an ideological trendsetter rather than a wielder of power.

At the launch of yesterday’s Reform manifesto — or glibly labelled “contract with the people” — we saw glimpses of this. Pledging to “stop the boats” in 100 days is clearly not a political possibility, but suggesting you can will inevitably draw in voters’ attention. Similarly, Farage claimed his party would massively cut taxes for people on all incomes — a proposal which, when faced with the reality of public finances, is a fantasy. But for Farage and Reform who will never actually have their hands on the treasury pursestrings, it is an easy way to shift the conversation to the Right on taxes.

If he truly wishes to take the path to political hegemony laid out by Canadian Reform, then it will require considerably more work and perseverance on the part of Farage; and it will be far from certain whether he will be the one to reap the spoils of such a strategy, or whether he will end up like Manning, who paved the way for the populist Right only to be displaced by the younger and more astute Stephen Harper. In other words, the Canadian model has its pluses and pitfalls. 

Canada in the early Nineties was a country — not unlike Britain in the 2020s — reeling from a bout of political post-traumatic stress disorder, having just gone through a highly divisive and exhausting period of existential debate over the nature of Canadian federalism and sovereignty, and in particular, the question of Quebec’s status. Just as with the post-Brexit years in the UK, Canada’s leaders promised grand schemes of constitutional renewal only to fall short each time while practical economic issues, like spiralling debt and declining business confidence, seemed to go unaddressed. In addition, the Western Canadian provinces felt as if metropolitan elites in places like Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal held a vision of national unity that came at their expense. The fact that the country had been ruled by Brian Mulroney’s Tories since 1984 seemed to make little difference, for they had appeared to be just as out-of-touch as Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals had been: this was the Canadian equivalent of what is today called the “Uniparty”.

The perceived lack of attention to the concerns of ordinary voters, especially those in hinterland regions, opened up space for a new option in Canadian politics, one which could reset the terms of debate in favour of those who felt left behind. This was the gap that Preston Manning aimed to fill when he founded Reform in 1987, his goal being a “New Canada” grounded in the “the common sense of the common people”. Even as he worked to build grassroots networks out of scratch, he was for all intents and purposes the lone face of the party; the son of an evangelical former premier of Alberta, he brought a preacher’s zeal to his quest to rein in the size of government, decentralise the federation and, as he saw it, end the privileges of the Ontario and Quebec-centric metropolitan elite. Manning and Reform also raised stringent criticisms of bilingualism, multiculturalism and what it regarded as lax immigration policy. Though Manning aspired to a universalist populism, Reform was largely seen as the vehicle of Western Canadian alienation. 

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And on election day, the West came out heavily for Manning’s message of revolt, trading in Tory seats for Reform en masse, just as Quebec voters lodged their protest vote with the new separatist Bloc Québecois, hollowing out the precarious Tory coalition and and handing power to the Liberals. From the opposition benches, Reform would galvanise Canadian politics Rightward, outshining the Tory rump and eventually mounting a reverse takeover of the Progressive Conservatives by merging with it a decade later in 2003.

This was the foundation of the reunified Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, a Manning lieutenant, who governed as prime minister from 2006 to 2015. Under Harper’s insistence, the new party dropped the “Progressive” moniker — and with good reason, for the post-2003 Tories are ideologically and temperamentally a different party: much more hard-edged, libertarian and rooted in prairie populism. (Its current leader and likely next Canadian prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, got his start as a young Reform activist in Calgary.)

In hindsight, it is easy to recount what happened with Canadian Reform, as Farage so often does, and imagine that its victory was preordained, with the implication being that Reform UK faces a comparably straightforward path to realigning the British Right. But Farage should take note: the opposition years were no cakewalk for either Reform or the old-line Tories.

As Canada’s Liberals governed for over a decade, it proved to be a gruelling stretch for the Canadian Right, wracked as it was by dissension, demoralisation and uncertainty. The tribal differences between the two parties were real enough that it prevented meaningful cooperation for years. Furthermore, as the Liberals won one majority after another, thanks in large part to conservative infighting, they appropriated parts of Manning’s agenda on fiscal retrenchment, debt reduction, and balanced budgets — and even dramatically tightened immigration requirements — taking the wind out of Reform’s sails and blunting its immediate appeal. It was not at all clear if Canadian conservatism would make it out of the Liberal epoch alive. Now faced with his own long odds, can Farage navigate his party through a similarly treacherous time in the wilderness? 

Much will depend on how the two camps of the British Right will regroup once the present general election campaign yields its expected result on 4 July: a Labour-majority government. Owing to the very different electoral and geographic dynamics in the UK, it is unlikely for Farage’s party to come close to anything like the clean sweep that Canadian Reform obtained when it stole the bulk of Tory seats west of Ontario. Yet it is also probable that defeat under Rishi Sunak will empower and elevate a new breed of hard-Right Tory leadership candidates who can potentially match Farage in their commitment to populist concerns around migration and law-and-order issues: the likes of Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch come to mind. In such a scenario, there is no guarantee that Farage will have a monopoly on populist energies and loyalties in the years of opposition that lie ahead.

And just as Manning’s Reform opened the political space for Canada’s Liberals to move Right on fiscal policy, so too could a highly vocal Reform presence in Westminster do the same with respect to the next Labour government’s approach to migration. For all the talk of Labour’s metropolitan base as being intractably liberal and maximalist on immigration, a restrictionist strain has arguably flowed in the party’s veins for much of the last decade, going back to Ed Miliband’s 2015 promise to restore “controls on immigration” (famously plastered on a red mug) to Keir Starmer’s current pledge to outflank Sunak and cut “sky-high” net migration. Indeed, this is generally how populist revolts work, by exerting pressure rather than exercising power directly. This was, after all, how a previous incarnation of Faragist populism got the Cameron government to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

So, where could it all end for Farage? By the 2000s, Manning was seen as tired and lost a leadership race, giving way to a generation of his protégés, including Harper, who went on to take the Conservatives to electoral victory. Manning was relegated to a respected but sidelined role as elder statesman. Perhaps Farage’s fate will play out in similar terms. The British Right is said to be undergoing a profound generational shift in ideas and outlook, which he helped to make happen: Farage’s contribution to history may well be in charting a course of political realignment that will ultimately be completed by someone younger, cleverer, and more disciplined than he could ever be.