This, then, is what a parish council meeting in prosperous Oxfordshire looks like in 2026. A Westminster state that has lost its heartland of Southern England is simply living on borrowed time: and that’s exactly what I’d come to Piddington to see. It is not, now, a daring observation to remark that many of the institutions of the British state — the police, Westminster, democracy itself — have sacrificed their basic legitimacy on the inability of successive governments to visibly control migration, protect the populace from its harmful effects, or square their legal obligations on asylum with the increasingly hostile demands of their people. When even South Coast harbourmasters refuse berths to RNLI boats escorting unwanted migrants, or the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner can angrily claim that the Government has lost control of its borders, we see the mood of revolt has spread deeply into Britain’s otherwise unflappably centrist middle classes. It is now the Times, and not the avowedly Right-wing press, that forensically dissects the state’s failures on asylum, exposing its practices to public horror and ridicule. The asylum system is already politically dead in this country, just as it is in the rest of Europe. What is now at stake is how much more damage this government is willing to take to itself, to public order, and to the entire legitimacy of the political system, before it signs off power to a new regime willing to publicly recognize this fact.

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Britain's paramilitary nightmare

By Wessie du Toit

With its almost parodically bucolic name, Piddington, a quiet village of 360 people, where the cooing of doves in the leafy lanes is disturbed only by the trundle of Ocado vans, has now attracted coverage from across the world for its planned independence referendum, a project set in train by the Government’s plan to house 1,250 single male asylum seekers in a disused MoD facility on its boundary. In his kitchen, on the other edge of the village, I asked McNally, the brains behind Piddington’s unlikely independence bid, whether locals would accept smaller numbers. “If you want to have a house or [HMO] in here, we’d tolerate it, we’d manage it,” he told me. “But when you’ve got 1,250, we’re going to have to assimilate into their society. And that’s not on and that’s not what we’re going to do.” In fact, subsequent reporting has alleged, the site may house up to 3,500 asylum seekers, outnumbering the villagers 10 to one.

The people of Piddington are right to say that this is an unreasonable demand to make of them. Yet the Government’s logic is, in its own way, hard to fault. The policy of housing boat migrants in hotels has proved wildly unpopular, and has led to mass protests across the country, typically in the wake of sex crimes or other atrocities. Yet the response of dispersing migrants into social housing, typically in poorer areas of the country, has precipitated rioting, as in Belfast or Middlesbrough, as well as a bad-tempered popular mobilization, as in Glasgow, that looks set to fruit into open disorder in the near future. All Whitehall has left, trapped by its legal obligations to asylum seekers, is to corral the constantly accumulating new arrivals into government-owned facilities, ideally near as few voters as possible, and hope for the best. The people of Piddington, and places like it, may not be happy, but they are at least unlikely to riot. For a Labour government in 2026, that’s about the best outcome that can be hoped for.

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves here of the road not taken. In 2015, at a point when the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders was merely a moral panic for Middle East correspondents rather than the death-knell for the Continent’s postwar order, David Cameron proposed a reasonable and practical solution that would have offered a route to defanging the current crisis before it fully developed. Britain would take in 20,000 Syrian refugees over the course of the Parliament, carefully selecting and vetting deserving families from refugee camps in countries neighboring Syria. That way, the United Kingdom would take responsibility for a modest refugee flow it could reasonably expect to integrate, dispersing them across the country. It would focus its attention on Syrians — whose plight gave the demands to throw open Europe’s borders much of their moral force, even though they transpired to be a minority of those who actually arrived — and evade as far as possible the obvious security risks associated with what was effectively an open European border with the Islamic State. Even more importantly, Cameron’s plan, and its associated proposal of using European coast guards to turn back migrant boats in the Mediterranean, far from British shores, would have sidestepped the destabilization of domestic politics that would result from voters, to say nothing of aspiring migrants, rightly concluding that European leaders had entirely lost control of their countries’ borders.

But in the real world, the open-border activists won out, for too long, over cautious conservatism, and the results were precisely what any reasonable observer could have predicted. As the European architect of all the subsequent disorder (Turkey’s President Erdogan has still largely escaped the popular blame he deserves for overseeing the 2015 flow), Angela Merkel’s reputation has, in the decade since, sunk to its deserved level, for this and her many other sins against our Continent’s security and prosperity. The AfD, in 2015 a minor libertarian party, is yet to find its ceiling. While it is now a given that there is no longer an appetite for open borders, among all but the most marginal zealots, the full effects of the center’s experimentation with their demands have yet to reveal themselves, on either side of the Channel.

In polite and prosperous Piddington, the local reaction to the village’s proposed secession has been a media blitz. But in Dover and Portsmouth, last week saw the first stirrings of a new working-class form of direct action, blockading ports while eschewing uncontrolled violence. It is significant, for adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British politics, that the organizer of the coastal protests, Tommy Robinson collaborator Danny Tommo, hit upon the idea for his new Patriot Platform movement after travelling to Belfast during this summer’s riots. Returning home enthused at the concept of black-clad Loyalists working in a disciplined manner to achieve concrete goals, the new approach has taken the place of the mass flag-waving jamborees previously characterizing the English anti-immigration right. But it is also worth noting that the muscle of his new group derives from the already-existing and organically formed local “patriot” anti-immigration groups of southern and eastern England. A militant, working-class mobilization against mass immigration is now a factor in British politics, whether or not Tommo can consolidate his attempt to direct it.

But back in Piddington, villagers expressed open distaste for such forms of street action and open manifestations of anti-migrant politics, indicating divisions of class and political temperament the Government’s electoral rivals may struggle to navigate. “That would perhaps be more of a Bicester thing,” one resident told me, expressing a world of class feeling in terse English cultural shorthand. Middle-class villagers, expressing their fears, spoke in semi-veiled terms, women saying they worry about walking their dogs alone, fathers about letting their children roam free. These stronger statements against immigration itself, rather than the specific site on their doorstep, were uniformly delivered in Oxfordshire accents, though even still, elderly residents with thick burrs worried about skinheads coming down “from Birmingham” to wreak havoc.

For the anti-immigration parties competing to dominate the British Right, consolidating these different class mores into an electoral coalition will therefore prove difficult. To win the country, Reform will have to win over leafy shire heartlands like Piddington, whose voters, like Farage himself, are uncomfortable at the sight of men in black balaclavas taking to the streets. But faced with a gadfly challenger on his Right, in the shape of Rupert Lowe’s Restore, openly supportive of Tommo’s activism, Farage needs to keep an increasingly assertive and rebellious working-class street within his coalition too. The linchpin in holding the two groups together seems to be Zia Yusuf, recently deployed to both Piddington and Portsmouth to express his support for the two opposing forms of rebellion. Perhaps, indeed, Yusuf is more personally comfortable with the more kinetic forms of revolt than his boss: his rhetoric suggests that his role is to say, and do, what Farage does not himself feel comfortable publicly aligning himself with.

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By Aris Roussinos

The Piddington independence movement is careful to maintain a public stance of political neutrality, though its adherents, perhaps stung by the schadenfreude their plight has earned from the online Right, were keen to assure me they were not Liberal Democrats. We can assume they will not be voting for Burnham either, or the Greens. The remaining realistic options are then Reform and the Conservatives, and in this Piddington represents a microcosm of the southern English middle classes: unhappy with a dysfunctional immigration system, particularly when its consequences land upon their doorstep, but also uncomfortable with open or overly assertive displays of anti-migration politics.

Rather than the once seeming-inevitability of a Reform government, the impression left by Piddington was that the growing shift against asylum dysfunction in middle-class England may instead revive the fortunes of the Conservatives, increasingly strident against the ECHR, but instinctively closer to the class mores of the centrist political establishment. Reform may have won over the younger online Right, but it may struggle to persuade their true-blue parents. Rather than fomenting anti-immigration feeling, as its opponents imagine, Reform’s success has been in riding a wave of organic dissatisfaction that has, as shown in Portsmouth and Dover, often outpaced Farage’s personal appetite for rebellion.

If Burnham has shown a realistic understanding of class politics in shifting the consequences of asylum dysfunction onto middle-class rural constituencies which will never vote for him, to win back working-class constituencies which still plausibly might, the opening this leaves for the broader British Right in winning over the shires presents more of a challenge than an opportunity for Reform. Piddington offers a glimpse of a country exhausted by Britain’s dysfunctional asylum system, but also of a Right divided on how far it is willing to go to overturn it, a division more expressive of political temperaments, or class tensions, than of desired political ends.

Reform’s analysis of the solutions required, demanding a cultural revolution within the British state as a whole, is deeper and broader than that of the Conservatives, content merely to leave the ECHR they, rightly or not, see as the root of the problem. But Reform has to win over the suspicious middle classes as well as maintaining its shaky hold on the working class; whereas all the Tories are required to do is present a harder edge on immigration while maintaining a public commitment to law-and-order conservatism — a stance made easier for them by Restore forcing Farage to more activist positions than he feels comfortable with, and which are unpopular in the shires. After all, a Cameron government, left in power, might have mitigated the problem before we ever reached this stage of political fragmentation and disorder, in what is surely the least discussed “what might have been” of modern British politics. On paper, the growing mood of middle-class revolt should be a comfort for Reform: in practice, it is likely to be the Conservatives who will use it to win back Middle England. If Burnham is gambling that no single challenger can win both Piddington and Portsmouth, he may yet prove entirely correct.

Much though this angered veterans and political opponents in Argentina, it also allowed him to become a Right-wing icon in Britain. Gone were the days of “Gotcha!” and “Argie bastards”: now Thatcher’s heirs had a friend in Buenos Aires. The sideburns, the chainsaw, the herd of cloned (English) mastiffs: he was the perfect maverick. ¡Afuera! became a well-known meme and entered the lexicon: could it not be just as well applied to the ECHR, the BBC, Net Zero, and however many quangos? Soon enough, Kemi Badenoch, who would never call herself “Britain’s Trump”, began describing herself as “Britain’s Milei”: here was a figure a divided party could rally round. Nigel Farage praised Milei’s politics as “Thatcherism on steroids” and said he was thinking about buying Argentine bonds (probably not the wisest use of his £5 million). Liz Truss said Milei was her favorite conservative; he confessed not to know who she was.

But it wasn’t going to last forever. Milei was always going to get less popular, and so he was always going to make a fuss over the Falklands. As the next Argentine election gets closer, and as his approval ratings languish somewhere in the 30s, he needs something to match the chest-thumping of his estranged vice president, for whom we British remain “pirate usurpers”. So, in a speech to the nation on 4 September, he declared that Argentina must “act swiftly” and “show a united front to the world”. The pirates will be vanquished, Argentina redeemed.

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Is Britain still fighting the Falklands War?

By Alwyn Turner

It is an occupational hazard of governing Britain that sometimes Argentines will rattle their sabers. Prime ministers have learned to deal with it from time to time since 1982, usually by rolling their eyes. But this time it might be different. What makes the present Falklands flare-up unusually alarming, from the British point of view, is a sinister allusion in Milei’s speech to “winds of change in the world that are favorable to our claim”. “Winds of change”: it is an evocative phrase, famously deployed by Harold Macmillan in Africa in 1960 to describe the inevitability of decolonization. There was no escaping or denying our decline; we could only try to manage it. The Wretched of the Earth were about to have their day, and it would be futile to resist them. Even Right-wingers like Milei — and, for that matter, General Galtieri — cast their struggle for “las Malvinas” as a noble work of anti-colonialism.

That still leaves the timing of Milei’s intervention: and here it’s tempting to imagine that he can smell British weakness. That, anyway, is an appealing explanation of his conduct for critics of Britain’s Labour government at home, many of whom are feeling understandably compromised for having previously lavished Milei with praise. After all, critics of the shambolic Chagos deal can reasonably contend that it might have planted in hostile heads the idea that Britain is no longer able or willing to defend its far-flung possessions. Starmer and Burnham certainly seem to be made of weaker stuff than Mrs Thatcher.

Yet the British Right itself also bears much of the blame. They spent years sucking up to Milei — and to MAGA and to Israel, some elements of which now seem to be most receptive to Argentine revanchism. More to the point, they have done much to play up Britain’s weaknesses, as though trying to make the country seem like an enticing target. While railing against the Chagos deal, for instance, plenty of Right-wing voices prophesied that “the Falklands will be next”. Never mind that the idea that Britain’s dealings with Mauritius would set a precedent for how it would handle another Argentine attack on the Falklands was far-fetched. Most people in Britain had never heard of the Chagos Islands; and given that their main purpose is to host an American base, it is anyway questionable how sovereign we are there. The Falklands, on the other hand, have a British population, and, at least since 1982, have been part of our national identity. British blood was spilled there in living memory; Starmer’s own uncle was almost killed. A Labour government, even a weak one, wouldn’t give them up without a fight.

Likewise, in the early phase of the Iran war, Nigel Farage tried to backtrack from his initial bout of jingoism by saying that Britain anyway lacks the “capability to offer anything of any value to the Americans or the Israelis”. Our country, in other words, is too weak even to be helpfully subservient. Milei would reasonably conclude from this that Britain is spent, and that the Falklands would be easy pickings. And, more pertinently, the White House might think that there is nothing to gain from keeping up friendly relations with Britain — so that they might as well throw their lot in with the Argentines.

A decade ago, an Argentine leader playing domestic politics with the Falklands may not have mattered much. But where Macmillan’s winds of change were blowing in Africa, these days they’re more American in nature. For it is in Washington, DC that the new “political facts” are emerging. A few months ago it was reported that the Pentagon was reviewing its position on the Falklands — until now a studied neutrality — setting off fears that it might move in a pro-Argentine direction. More recently, President Trump suggested that he would be reluctant to help us, as Ronald Reagan did in 1982, in the event of an Argentine invasion. He brings to bear his typically transactional theory of foreign affairs: we didn’t scratch his back in Iran, so why should he scratch ours in the South Atlantic?

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How the Euro elite helps Trump

By Samuel Rubinstein

There’s a broader point here too. Where Milei’s Argentina could prove to be a good local ally to America, complementing Trump’s vision of a “Donroe Doctrine”, Britain is regarded as a sad old has-been, running on fumes. As one American diplomat remarked, “keeping South American countries on side” could be “more strategically important than pleasing the Brits out of a ‘sense of nostalgia’”. All of MAGA knows that Britain is in terminal decline: it is practically axiomatic that soon enough it will, in JD Vance’s infamous jibe, be an “Islamist” state. This being so, Trump and those around him might well reason, why shouldn’t they take the side of Argentina versus Britain — Right versus Left, Christianity versus Islam, the vitality of the New World versus the shabby decadence of the Old?

Shortly before Milei’s speech on the Falklands, Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, posted a photo of herself grinning next to him, captioned “Exciting things are happening in the Western Hemisphere”. It could scarcely be any clearer that she is not a friend to Britain. But at ARC in London a few months ago, as she waxed lyrical about Anglo-American friendship, a mainly British audience lapped up her every word. “Sarah Rogers is a political superstar and Britain’s New Right should be grateful for the undisguised passion she expresses in this speech for our national renewal”, effused James Orr, then still in post at Reform UK. When she promises to unleash the “full range of tools” against Britain’s speech restrictions, when she declares that “nothing is off the table”, even the free-speech liberals among us should hope that this would not cover inducing a hostile foreign power to invade Britain’s sovereign territory. It was always naïve to think she was invested in our “national renewal”. She appears to be much more interested in Argentina’s.

Britain is used to pinning its foreign policy ambitions on a vague and slippery notion of “soft power”. We hope to get into the good graces of other nations, and punch above our weight, by keeping everyone fed on a diet of Harry Potter and the Premier League. Our best soft-power weapon against Trump is, of course, the Royal Family; and we have been able to deploy it quite effectively. Certainly, he responds to it better than any hard power lever we might be able to pull — for example, refusing to let him use bases on our sovereign territory. The image we project to the world matters, and can have real geopolitical consequences.

But there is also such a thing as negative soft power. Sometimes it can suit certain purposes to make the country, at least under the present government, seem as degraded as possible. When Farage goes on American TV, or speaks at the Capitol, one gets the impression of Britain as an authoritarian police state, disfigured by mass immigration. Why should a crime-ridden hell-hole deserve to keep the Falklands? Milei understands this; he knows better than most what makes the MAGA movement tick. In his speech, he dwells on Britain’s pitiful state: “the UK is facing multiple migration, demographic, and economic crises with no clear solution”. These words are a product of Britain’s negative soft power. So too, and worse, is the fact that Trump might listen to them with open ears.

Thatcher was less naïve about the “Special Relationship” than plenty of today’s conservatives: she rejected out of hand Reagan’s efforts toward a negotiated settlement. The opposition, for its part, was patriotic to a fault. Michael Foot, speaking both as Labour leader and “Cato”, the pseudonymous author of the anti-appeasement polemic Guilty Men, said he “knew a fascist when he sees one” — he didn’t try to undermine Britain’s position to bolster his own.

Today, though, a dangerous game is being played. Its main effect might be a damaging one: to convince MAGA that Britain is a lost cause. That is the purpose Britain is usually brought to serve across the Atlantic: a vision of apocalypse, a cautionary tale. That, rather than any real desire to make Britain great again, is what sustains MAGA’s interest in British affairs. Britain’s decisive victory in the last Falklands War was much-needed proof of life after decades of decline on the global stage. Today, therefore, there could be no punishment more fitting, no better proof of Britain’s death, than Milei’s Argentina seizing the Falklands.

Every day is the same: clear blue, suffocatingly hot, uncannily still. No one can remember what rain feels like. The parks are brown, and gardens turning to dust. Stressed trees are suddenly dropping huge boughs. At night, you see foxes all over the place, thirstily hunting water.

It used to be fun to indulge in pathetic fallacy, and project hyperbolic human sentiments onto harmless old British weather systems: brooding skies, raging storms, and so forth. But right now, in some places, the implacable heat is in charge, in a very-much-not-metaphorical sense. The feelings it produces in bodies are pretty basic: sweatiness, exhaustion, a mind as vacant as the eerily cloudless sky overhead. But assuming we can find the mental energy, it is worth asking: how do we feel about the new kind of summer, rather than simply because of it? Enthused and leaning into the piña coladas? Scared? Sad?

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The twilight of the ladyboss

By Kathleen Stock

I feel discombobulated — though that could be because of the screaming sirens that have accompanied the writing of this piece, as dozens of fire engines and ambulances rushed to a derailed train nearby. Four carriages went over; two passengers were seriously injured. Though not confirmed, observers say it looks like the rails buckled in the heat. In other news, the brambles around here are out far too early. The pond at the end of my road is silting up, and I worry about the fish and the ducks.

Inevitably, the usuals are using the fifth heatwave of the English summer to hammer home their preferred theories about the origins of about climate change. But I can’t be bothered to attend, and it isn’t just because of the brain fog. I find it impossible to navigate such large-scale intellectual terrain, where the very nature of the problem is radically contested, let alone the solutions.

Whether apocalyptic or deflationary, every point in this area seems to be delivered with identical confidence, in equally technical language. So who do you trust? A popular way to negotiate the thicket seems to be to pick the political side you hate most, then lampoon everything its representatives say on the matter, and conclude the opposite must be right. Unfortunately, though, I dislike Right and Left equally for different reasons, so that doesn’t much help.

Apparently unconcerned about the extra energy pull on data centers, this week the ever prolix Will Self took on Jordan Peterson about climate catastrophism. Peterson, himself no stranger to verbosity, had published a piece in the Telegraph, also full of contemptuous mockery for the other side. Peterson thinks that, when measuring trends, we should include the Medieval Warm Period. Self thinks this is daft, since nobody could measure warmth reliably in the medieval period and it wasn’t a global effect anyway. Peterson says that rising carbon dioxide produces increased greening and agricultural yields, not desertification; Self says this is true, but ignores the fact that biodiversity is still being reduced. You might assume that tapping the biodiversity sign would nail the argument; then again, others argue it is measured too heterogeneously to be a useful concept at all. Back and forth, the argument rages through each heatwave, a mix of uncertain predictions, categories at cross-purposes, and differently ranked values. It is not surprising that even some Green party members seem to be zoning out.

Something went wrong with the high-level discourse a while ago. Attempting to use words as behavioral prompts rather than accurate descriptions, ecologically-minded types made their desire to frighten or guilt-trip the masses a little too obvious, and neutral listeners started to switch off. Meanwhile some on the Right offered lots of stubborn skepticism, but not much else: little acknowledgment of local social and environmental losses, whatever their cause; no nuanced plan of action, except to keep buggering on as before. These days, the discussion about renewables in this country is absurdly polarized, with one side talking mainly of benefits, and the other talking mainly of harms.

I suggest, then, that we detach consideration of the local situation from the bigger picture, at least for a bit. First, whatever the causes and consequences of global warming, a small country like ours can’t do anything about it alone. Second, clashing over the wider context seems to be hampering useful consensus-building across party lines about how to manage regional problems — the atrocious working conditions, sweltering hospital wards, failing water supplies, buckling railway lines, and so on — and that’s all pretty urgent. Banning disposable barbecues is not going to be enough.

Relatedly, ignoring the global discourse might allow us to better notice what we, in particular, are losing. Our landscapes, industries, and living conditions are changing before our eyes. The least we can do is pay it attention, mourn what is vanishing, and help mitigate the impacts; not change the subject to dramatic losses elsewhere (Left) or deny reality altogether (Right). Jordan Peterson lives in Arizona. Maybe he’s right that the planet is getting greener overall, but yesterday it was 38 degrees in Kew Gardens. The Corsican Pine probably liked it; the ancient yews and oaks definitely did not.

And it is okay to be sad and unsettled by this new normal, in ways it is impossible to rationally explain or defend. Just as grief for people or pets doesn’t require a defense, nor should this. It is indeed strange and distressing that parts of the New Forest are now blackened and ruined, and others still on fire; that the cider apple harvest is failing, and the harebell disappearing; that there are hardly any wasps. I think with anxiety about the elderly people round about me wilting in their oven-like flats; about the two fires reported in surrounding fields only today; about local farmers agonizing about stunted wheat and barley yields. It is obviously possible to worry about such problems, and for politicians to form plans to address them, without espousing any grand theory about the role of carbon dioxide.

I anticipate defensive reactions. How can I claim to feel alarm over such small-scale problems when I’m unwilling to look the man-made source squarely in the face, to translate such feelings into action at a global level? But as I say, I don’t see how any action of mine — or even that of the British government — could really help. What we have is a near-impossible coordination problem for major world leaders, who would first have to agree on the nature of the issue and its solutions, then get huge numbers of companies and citizens to toe the line, or else impose authoritarian constraints. Self himself says that to deal effectively with climate change, among other things we would have to “control markets, impose rationing and civic obligation, [and] enact… particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name”. He thinks humanity can and should do this. I think he sounds mad.

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The sun gods are punishing Britain

By Martin Shaw

Admittedly, if you take my line, you have to lose the comforting illusion that there is some global fix available, if only we could find it. That may be a reality too far for some. Yet there are people firmly within the environmental movement who argue for some form of localism on similar grounds; and it seems to me that even the most contrarian conservative skeptics should do the same. Indeed, I don’t see how they can properly call themselves conservatives if they do not. It’s not good enough to sit around poking holes in the Left’s preferred climate theories and saying nothing else, as if you were an obstreperous audience member at a conference. Whatever the explanation, our bit of the world is still heating up, and flooding more often; there are valuable things here to be treasured and saved, suffering to be alleviated.

It is now 30 degrees in my room. I scroll idly for a minute or two, and learn that part of Stratford-upon-Avon is on fire. Now is the summer of our discontent, and it seems unlikely to be the last. Once the heat breaks, there’s a lot of work to be done.

Chance would give you a correct result 50% of the time. Humans, when they’re asked to say whether a face is conservative or liberal, do slightly better and get it right 55% of the time. The software Kosinski used was able to accurately guess the political orientation of the people represented 73% of the time. In statistical parlance, that represents a “large” effect size. Nor were the results country-specific: when the algorithm was trained on US faces, it could still distinguish between liberal and conservative faces in Canada with 68% accuracy, and in the UK with 67% accuracy. Some demographic markers are pretty obvious — in the US, white people, older people and males all lean slightly more conservative. But even when Kosinski excluded that data, the accuracy only dropped a fraction. Working off tiny visual cues like head pose (the roll, pitch and yaw of the head) or facial expressions such as surprise or happiness, the algorithm could still tell a person’s politics from their profile picture with 71% accuracy.

Our minds influence our faces. There are obvious ways in which our make-up choices, or our hairstyles, or our particular style of facial hair or jewelry also reflect our values. The assumptions we make about the politics or aesthetic preferences of someone in goth or emo make-up, or the clean-shaven young man with a perfect Fifties side-parting, are probably fairly accurate. But our faces also affect our minds.

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The revenge of the Conservative Hot Girl

By Kathleen Stock

When I was in my early twenties, an old friend invited me to a political meet-up for young Eurosceptics organized by some friends of his in the Conservative Party. I had already been to lots of similar gatherings, but for the much poorer and smaller, centrist Liberal Democrats: fundraisers, policy events, even a couple of party conferences at second-rate hotels in down-at-heel seaside towns. My expectations of a political meet-up were bad lighting, the kind of snacks you’d find at a gas station, and cheap white wine in a box.

Not this political meet-up. The young Conservatives had commandeered a 15th-century cloister in Westminster Abbey. Beneath the medieval fluted arches and ornate coats of arms, they entertained each other with tales of European corruption and technocratic overreach. There were canapés on trays served by waiters in uniform, and wine that came in bottles. And the women were beautiful — lucid complexions, advert-ready hair, a sense of poise, and elegance, each cloaked in a halo of perfume. A pretty strong incentive to switch political allegiances.

I reasoned with myself. These young people were just polished. They were just rich. They could afford good clothes and decent hairdressers. They could afford healthy food and expensive skincare and smart cologne. But the thing is, they were beautiful — at least by my standards. Their faces did seem more symmetrical, their bodies looked like they adhered to some golden rule of aesthetics. They were just more handsome than the political types I was used to over on the other side of the political spectrum.

I filed that slightly galling experience under “Conservative Honeytrap” and didn’t think about it again until I read an article in the Guardian in 2018 that triggered the memory. Rather bravely, it informed its Left-leaning readership that a large scientific study proved that attractive people tend be Right-wing.

The researchers Rolfe Peterson and Carl Palmer analyzed two large surveys from the Fifties and Seventies in the US which, apart from testing for personality and political and social attitudes, had also rated each of the 15,000 participants on a five-point scale for attractiveness: from 0 — which they euphemistically described as “homely” — to the “strikingly handsome or beautiful” at 5. They found that the dreamboats and the heartthrobs were more likely to identify as conservatives and Republicans than their less attractive counterparts. It wasn’t a one-off: lots of other studies have shown that people with traditionally desirable physical traits — tall men and women, men with high natural upper-body strength and women with symmetrical faces — tend more conservative. Conventionally attractive people tend to gravitate towards conservatism, and there’s a very simple explanation why.

Beautiful people live in a slightly different world from the rest of us. It’s a kinder world; people assume better of them and strive to make things easier for them. Beautiful people are less concerned with inequality — perhaps the central issue of Left-leaning politics — because they have experienced less of it, have felt it working against them less. On the contrary, it tends to work in their favor.

Strangers are kinder to people who are good-looking. At birth, babies with symmetrical features receive more direct eye contact and warmer treatment from their parents than their plainer siblings. It’s even at work amongst people we know aren’t models of probity — attractive criminals get lower sentences. Being good-looking also means people attribute other nice qualities to you. From their earliest years, attractive people are seen, without evidence, as more intelligent, more honest and more competent. Teachers pay more attention and give better grades to attractive students. Employers pay attractive people more and promote them faster: there is a “plainness penalty” on salaries of between 10 and 15%.

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The war for Sydney Sweeney's breasts

By Kat Rosenfield

Teenagers call this “pretty privilege”. Winners of the physiological lottery spend their lives surrounded by people who treat them nicely, assume the best of them, and have confidence in their ability to achieve great things. Their looks help them do better at school and at work, as well as on the social and dating scene. All of which can lead attractive people to see the world as a wonderful place that provides opportunity and rewards those who work to deserve it. Just like them.

Some beautiful people are riddled with anxiety and self-doubt regardless of their beauty, and some are doubtless riddled with anxiety and self-doubt because of it. There are lots of extremely attractive Left-wingers and liberals all over the world, not least many of the stars of Hollywood, who are predominantly Democrats. But, on average, beautiful people tend to the Right because they are the winners of a certain type of inequality — they start the game of life with a superpower they don’t even recognize themselves having.

All body types are beautiful

Because they live in a world that has offered them opportunity and success, attractive people can easily assume that the experiences of others have been the same. It makes them stronger believers in meritocracy (even if a big part of their “merit” is just being good-looking), more individualistic, less understanding of the underprivileged, and less likely to support government redistribution to address inequality. We can see from Parlia’s data (above) that their relative attractiveness also, perhaps unsurprisingly, correlates with being more interested in beauty standards.

We are, of course, talking averages and generalities, but the principle remains. Beautiful people vote differently in part because their politics are responding to a lived experience of the world that is simply different. They inhabit different realities from the rest of us, all because of the particular arrangement of their facial features.

Extracted from Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins Of Our Deepest Beliefs by Turi Munthe (Hutchinson Heinemann; £22).

Citing her proven record of “fighting against identity politics on the Left” during the madness of the George Floyd era, the Conservative leader vowed that her party would do the same again against racialized messages from Farage, or those to the Right of him. “The answer to Black Lives Matter is not a White Lives Matter born of the same racial grievance,” she argued. “We will not defeat identity politics by building a mirror-image of it.”

Even as she said this, news was starting to circulate about the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast, by Sudanese migrant Hadi Alodid, with a wave of anti-immigrant violence quickly following. The unfolding of this awful situation has only made Badenoch’s proposed Hegelian maneuver — from “Black Lives Matter”  to “White Lives Matter” to the comfortingly non-specific synthesis “Everyone Matters” — look more attractive, and especially to those of us keen to avoid a civil war in the near future.

Meanwhile, her suggested method for rooting out identity politics from the public sphere is a further example of a channel run — in the Old Trafford sense, rather than the Calais one. The colorless legalese of the 2010 Equality Act remains, for Keir Starmer, a sacred text, offering the closest thing to a positive articulation of British values he is willing to provide. Reform has said it would get rid of the Act altogether, claiming it causes unfair discrimination against white people. No doubt anticipating voter unease at wholesale destruction of anti-discrimination law without a clear sense of what would replace it, Badenoch says she wants to ditch only a single part: the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). She therefore gets to look impressively decisive relative to Starmer, and reassuringly humane relative to Farage.

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In overview, the PSED forces public bodies to have proactive, anticipatory “due regard” to three areas: ending unlawful discrimination, advancing equal opportunities for those with protected characteristics, and fostering good relations between protected and non-protected groups. As was drily pointed out in the legal opinion accompanying Badenoch’s speech, there is a tension between these last two objectives that perhaps should have been anticipated at the time of drafting. Artificially boosting the chances of some groups over others, it turns out, tends not to be conducive to close social harmony, and perhaps especially not when it is done in the name of equality.

But according to Badenoch, the biggest problem with the duty is that it distracts public bodies from their core functions, sometimes with deadly results. With the horrific image of Henry Nowak’s dying moments in handcuffs weighing heavily on many minds, she reminded her audience of other high-profile cases where the threat of perceived racism had probably or definitely got in the way of effective action. These included the Manchester arena bombing; the Stockport and Nottingham murders; and rape-gang activity up and down the country. Whether or not the PSED was a direct causal factor in these failures is difficult to establish, but Badenoch is surely right that that its presence on the scene didn’t help.

Though, in theory, the duty doesn’t mandate any particular outcome, in practice it has allowed DEI professionals and external bodies to run amok in the public sector, feeding managers legally illiterate lines while making it punitive for wiser employees to dissent. When the National Police Chief’s Council offers a training session which confidently announces that an anti-racist stance “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind’”, you can be sure that serving officers didn’t come up with that stuff on their own. The result of the embedding of such context-free platitudes seems to be enhanced opportunities for minority stabbers, rapers, and bombers, and an end to all opportunities for their unfortunate victims.

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Feminists, beware the omnicrisis

By Kathleen Stock

Something has obviously gone very wrong. Badenoch, writing in The Sunday Times, has lamented the loss of “common sense” from institutions, replaced by “box-ticking” and “bad frameworks” from outside, adding that “you can’t write common sense down in a policy manual, it is about judgment”. Assuming she is talking about specialist skills, honed on the job through repeated experience, she is absolutely right, echoing a venerable philosophical distinction between “knowing-how” (which can’t be got through book learning alone) and “knowing-that” (which can). Incredibly, a lot of DEI professionals these days appear to lack both. Still, it is interesting to note that in the early days of the Equality Act, various optimists imagined that the PSED would be a boon to good judgment and common sense at the local level, rather than an obstacle.

When first introduced, the duty was framed by some academics as an example of an admirably “reflexive” law, contrasted with heavy-handed regulatory approaches that specify certain outcomes as mandatory. With its vague requirement that bodies show “due regard” to equality considerations, but not that actions be determined in a particular direction, the PSED was supposed — as one commentator put it in 2012 — to defer “to the expertise and local knowledge of the decision-maker rather than imposing prescribed solutions”. Roughly, the idea was that, in making an important decision, a public body would first have to gather a lot of information about how something called “equality” might be affected — detailed data, predictions about possible outcomes, views of stakeholders, and so on — and then seriously consider all of this material in deciding how to proceed. The consideration process would also have to be documented.

If this is the most the PSED had ever amounted to, then though it would have been cumbersome, it would also have been quite useful, encouraging organizations to notice the consequences of their choices for certain local groups. But since cold, hard facts don’t determine values or actions, it seems that those in charge could not leave matters there. Additionally, a top-down layer of pressure was introduced, to prioritize certain progressive values wherever possible. While it remained true that no particular outcomes were mandated at a fine-grained level, it was clear that bodies were supposed to favor a certain kind of decision. And quite bizarrely, the kind of decision in question was defined by being directed at social injustices writ large.

This is evident from the EHRC’s description of the purpose of the PSED as “to make sure that public authorities and organizations… think about how they can improve society and promote equality in every aspect of their day-to-day business”. Improving society is obviously quite a big task. It is even more obvious from the Conservative government’s 2023 guidance, including its advice about how organizations might formulate their equality objectives; namely, to “try not to rely on basic, internal goals like diversity training instead of ambitious, customer-facing goals like closing the educational disadvantage gap in schools or fixing big imbalances in participation in technical industries”.

In other words: alongside the usual, already highly demanding day jobs, managers in the NHS, social services, police, judiciary, and education (etc) now had to work out what that elusive philosophical value, “equality”, looked like — not just nearby, but also at a national level — and then pursue that too, wherever practicable. Suddenly faced with the sort of intellectual problem that frequently makes its way onto philosophy exam papers at university, it is scarcely surprising most organizations felt the need to bring in some kind of outside help.

And nor is it surprising that so many public servants ended up treating evidence of different outcomes as evidence of disadvantage, presumed to be the result of background discrimination. For it is an extremely complicated matter to reconstruct the causal routes that explain differences in outcome between sexes, races, or sexual orientations, for instance — not to mention reputationally dangerous to discuss in polite society. It is so much easier to assume prejudice as the uniform cause, then make some clumsy adjustment, supposedly in the name of a fairer society overall.

So Badenoch is correct that the PSED has resulted in distraction from core institutional functions, despite — or perhaps even because of — its non-committal and vague wording. Thanks to the implied demand to think about addressing society-wide problems, spelled out in various bits of guidance, the traditional direction of focus for crucial public services has been altered, moving away from the present and the local toward the absent and the abstract. Instead of just concentrating on what is best for the people in front of you here and now, applying the specialist expertise you have gained as a professional, you are simultaneously supposed to treat these people as units in a much bigger national calculation. Quite apart from the ludicrously hubristic idea that — for instance — failing to section this particular black man in Nottingham will do something meaningful to shift country-wide patterns — the extra mental effort and attentional split is bound to result in misjudgments and blindspots. And that’s presumably how you get a police officer chummily saying, “I don’t think you have, mate”, in response to a young white man dying in front of him, describing how he’s just been stabbed by a Sikh.

International affairs might also play to the Conservative advantage. Farage has benefitted from being Donald Trump’s favorite Englishman, but Trump will not last forever and anyone who cares about British interests will be in despair about an American president who threatens to invade a Nato country and punish those who get in his way.

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Will the Tories go extinct?

By Richard Vinen

In the next few months, the future of the Tory party will likely be decided. Farage has said that Tory defectors will no longer be welcome in his party after the local government elections of May of this year — not, incidentally, a remark that suggests that he has great respect for the motives of those Tories who jump ship. If significant numbers of senior Tories defect, Reform may become the new force on the Right and the terrified remnants on the Tory benches might force Badenoch out so that they can do a deal with Reform that would save some of their seats.

It is fairly certain that the local government elections will see a big vote for Reform (because voters use these occasions to protest against established parties); it is also fairly certain that this victory will be a pyrrhic one, because nothing is more calculated to reveal the weakness of the party than having lots of its ill-tempered and inexperienced activists installed in local councils.

Things will start to get easier for Badenoch, though, if she makes it through the spring. Her position will be stronger because her most dangerous rival in her own party has gone and also because she has begun to show the ferrous qualities of her character. Like Margaret Thatcher, she is beginning to look like someone who is at her best when the going gets tough.

There are other things in her favor. Farage and his Tory admirers may talk about “uniting the Right”, but the truth is that the struggle between Reform and the Conservatives is a civil war within a fairly extreme part of the Right — one that is obsessed with nationalism and, increasingly, with race. One wonders what Edward Boyle, the Conservative MP for Birmingham Handsworth until 1970, would have said about Jenrick’s remark that one does not see a white face in the area.

Reform now seems to be abandoning free-market principles, at the very moment when Rachel Reeves has made even the most socialistically inclined voters think that perhaps entrepreneurs might understand the economy better than politicians and civil servants. This opens up the possibility that the Conservatives might spend a little less time hanging union flags on lampposts and return to their natural territory as a party that exists to defend capitalism. Badenoch might even think of bringing economic liberals such as Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak back to the center of power in her party.

If Reform supplants the Conservative Party or takes it over, then, in a strange way, the British political party system will stay the same. There will be a single party of the Right confronting a single party of the Left. In fact, having Farage as the effective leader of the official opposition is probably the only thing that could save Keir Starmer’s political career. A significant minority of British voters would vote for Farage but a majority would vote for anyone but Farage. In 2002, the French Left rallied behind Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election under the slogan “vote for the crook not the fascist”. One can imagine a variety of similarly unappealing slogans under which the anti-Farage electorate might grudgingly vote for Starmer’s Labour Party.

The tectonic plates of British politics will really move if the Tories survive as a significant force. If this happens, Reform will not go away. Rather there will be two parties on the Right. There will also be fragmentation on the Left — partly because it will be harder to rally the Left-wing vote behind a single party if there is no single party on the Right to oppose. To an extent, this is already happening: there are already more than 120 Members of Parliament who do not belong to either Labour or the Conservatives (in 1951 there were just six) and the great majority of these identify as Left-wing. Badenoch’s survival would, in itself, damage Starmer — because her decisiveness highlights his weaknesses: the more she looks like a pitbull on speed, the more he looks like a robot with a flat battery.

In Britain, we have taken the two-party system for granted. Third parties have either been absorbed into an established party (as Joseph Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists were absorbed into the Tories before the First World War) or have replaced an established party (as Labour replaced the Liberals after the First World War). But there is no reason why the two-party system is bound to survive. Most European countries are governed by multiple parties (sometimes fairly ephemeral ones) that move in and out of alliance with each other in a perpetual Brownian motion.

Tories who are nostalgic for the huge Thatcher majority of 1983 do not find multi-party politics appealing. But, in fact, Conservatives have often done well from allying with other parties — they were the dominant element in a succession of coalition governments that ruled from 1931 to 1945.

Coalitions do have their advantages. Politicians can do things that they know to be necessary, but which would be unpalatable to their own party, by explaining that they need to please their coalition partners. This might be particularly useful to the Tories now — because the party has given rank-and-file members the final decision in leadership elections. It is said that David Cameron promised the Brexit referendum because he assumed that his coalition with the Liberal Democrats would endure after the 2015 election and that his political partners would save him from having to honor his promise.

A multi-party system and the resultant coalitions might, in fact, allow a re-alignment of British politics. Once the two major parties reflected a real social division that pitted the cloth cap against the bowler hat. But the old maps of politics are less reliable now. The working class is much reduced and a large part of the middle class now works in the public sector.

This might simply mean a coalition of Lefts confronting an alliance of Reform and the Conservatives, but it might allow for more complicated alliances. Blairites in the Labour Party and those in the Liberal Democrats who remember Gladstone (or even just David Laws) might be willing to support a free-market government. There must be Tories who privately dream of reversing Brexit. Some important Conservatives — including Boris Johnson — took climate change more seriously than Starmer does.

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By Jonny Ball

There is one politician who has, effectively, been operating in a European political system for many years: Farage. His only real experience of elected office was gained in the European parliament. He has long understood that having a majority in parliament may not be the key to getting what you want — he has, after all, placed himself at the center of the political system when he still has only half a dozen MPs in parliament. He has no institutional attachment to a particular party, beginning life as a Conservative (though he much admired Enoch Powell who had left the Conservative Party) before joining UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform. His parties have always been built around him and his freedom of maneuver is greatly enhanced by the fact that he has not had to worry about votes by the rank and file. His political language derives from business: he talks of Reform as a “startup” and once suggested that he might engineer a “reverse takeover” of the Conservative Party. All this suggests a view of politics that revolves around deals and opportunism — there is no one who feels more at home in the smoke-filled room than Farage. His political style would be familiar to, say, a Radical in the French Third Republic or an Italian Christian Democrat in the Seventies.

Perhaps it is time that the defenders of political convention at Westminster began to study the skills that Farage picked up in Brussels and Strasbourg. As for the objection that multi-party systems produce weak governments, has Britain ever had a weaker government than it has now at a time when the ruling party has a huge majority?

No longer. Its classic business model does not work any more because the various elements of this package have come into conflict. Pro-EU these days means being in favor of regulation that imposes costs and burdens on small businesses and farmers, while freedom of movement brought too many immigrants.

In the UK, the center-right is represented by the Conservatives, who suffered an electoral bloodbath at the local elections last week at the hands of Nigel Farage’s Right-wing Reform party.

In Germany, the far-Right AfD has, for the first time, overtaken the CDU/CSU in some national opinion polls. Remember Forza Italia, Italy’s answer to the British Conservatives? Today, they are merely the junior partner in a coalition government headed by Giorgia Meloni and her Rightist Brothers of Italy. The French Gaullists are a small party nowadays, with ever-changing names that are difficult to remember. The Netherlands, often a bellwether of European politics, also ditched the traditional Christian Democrats for a collection of far-Right and libertarian parties.

What one might call the far Right is therefore taking over. We could invoke the image of Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each different in their own way, as a metaphor to describe this rump. But that does not quite capture it. The movements of this Right have their own national characteristics — the German version is protectionist; the French is socialist; the American libertarian. What matters more is what they have in common. Clearly, they are all anti-immigration. But they share something even more important: the desire to destroy the multilateralist liberal global order. On this, I expect them to succeed.

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Trump has Europe in check

By Wolfgang Munchau

The mainstream media, and talking heads from the think tanks and the universities, are in denial that we are already moving in that direction. But optimism bias is the defining characteristic of the liberal establishment. The idea that the far-Right might win this epic battle offends them. It also threatens them personally. Donald Trump just cut the funds for the Voice of America, for National Public Radio and for the Public Broadcasting Service. The first action taken by Elon Musk’s DOGE was to cut funding for civil society projects in the US and abroad. Hungary and Georgia have passed laws to restrict foreign funding of think tanks and other non-governmental organizations. And, in Europe, most NGOs are at least partially state funded.

But it is this liberal blob of media, social and political action groups, and universities that pushes a country’s political narratives. It was their story-telling about national interest that lead countries, like the UK, to enter the EU, or indeed to exit it. It was their story-telling that encouraged Germany to rely on Russian gas, and not to see Vladimir Putin for who he really was. And they all keep on insisting that Ukraine will win the war against Russia — even though it has been clear for two years that this is not going to happen.

But stories serve a purpose. And the Western, bone-headed response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, as I see it, the last hooray of the vacuous multilateralist construction called the West. Nobody supported this idea of the West more than the center-right parties. Their fates are intertwined.

Much of what describes the center-right also applies to the center-left. But the center-left has its own unique problems, like the loss of industrial workers as its traditional voters. The European center-left has lost voters to the Green Party, or radical parties of the Left, like Germany’s Die Linke. In France and Germany, the decline of the center-left preceded that of the center-right. But they are both victims of the crisis of globalization.

The end of hyper-globalization was triggered by the financial crisis. It was not the crisis itself that did the damage, but the way governments reacted to it. They did everything they could to protect the financial sector. Central banks adopted policies of quantitative easing to protect sovereign debt markets. Governments imposed austerity to stop an otherwise inevitable rise in inflation. All the while, western companies drummed up another story: they needed to invest in China. Each was a monumental misjudgement.

But the unraveling of hyper-globalization proceeds slowly. Five years after Brexit, the UK has still not disentangled from the EU. It still has the EU’s 10% car tariff. And it retains the General Data Protection Directive, one of the main reasons why Europe — including the UK — is falling behind the US and China in AI. Trump has just found out quite how difficult it is in practice to decouple from Chinese-dominated manufacturing supply chains. But the globalization fanboys are quite wrong to think that it cannot happen, just because it is more difficult than Trump thinks.

The European policy establishment has persuaded itself that it can counter the rise of the anti-globalists. The Romanian constitutional court just banned a Right-wing politician who was leading in the polls; a French court banned Marine Le Pen from running for the presidency. In Germany, last week, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic secret service, declared the AfD to be a Right-wing extremist party. This declaration could trigger legal proceedings that might end with a ban. In the US, meanwhile, the establishment went after Trump through the legal system. But doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is Einstein’s definition of insanity. Not only are these ploys unlikely to succeed, they won’t solve the problem of providing voters with the economic security and the social stability they crave.

Equally idiotic are the political firewalls the German CDU and CSU erected against the AfD. This story pretends that if you never form a coalition with the AfD, they will never get into power. If the democratic parties in Weimar Germany only had firewalls in place, Hitler would not have been able to take control. Germans like to think of the rise of the Nazis as a technical accident, rather than as a consequence of a failed democracy: one that did not provide economic security for its citizens.

Each country has its technical-constitutional obsessions. The Italians are obsessed with electoral systems and have kept changing them. They tried virtually every system, but voters always found a way to vote for the parties or coalition they wanted. That’s because voting systems can at best only postpone the inevitable. First-past-the-post elections, such as those in the UK or the US, generally favor establishment parties: but this is only true until it is not. Reform UK had 14.3% of the votes in the UK general election last year, but only 0.8% of the MPs. The maths flipped in the local elections last week, when Reform took the lion share of the seats. Labour won a landslide victory in the general election last year, with only 33.7% of the vote. That was also the approximate vote share Marine Le Pen’s party got at the French parliamentary election last year, yet they are not in power.

While the US system favors the two-party duopoly, Trump managed to confound it by infiltrating the Republican Party and changing it from within. If he were European, he would have had to form his own party. The route would have been different, the result would have been the same. Ultimately, electoral systems, constitutional safeguards, and devices like political firewalls cannot protect an unpopular center. But instead of solving the problem of dysfunctional globalization, the centrists are still doubling down with the same old policies. I just read a report from Germany where 130 refugees are about to descend on a Bavarian village of 280 inhabitants. That’s another 280 voters for the AfD.

The far-Right has identified the center-right as its main political target — and the latter has responded as any offended monopolist might. In the UK local elections, the losses of the Conservatives were almost identical to the gains of Reform, while Labour’s losses matched the gains of the Lib Dems and the Greens. Actual voter movements are more complex. In German industrial areas, we have seen the AfD picking up votes from the center-left. But the AfD’s essential rival remains the center-right.

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Europe's reckless bid for victory

By Wolfgang Munchau

Probably the single biggest big mistake made by the center-right was the failure to address the downsides of globalization when voters stopped believing in that win-win fairy tale.

The current system works well for those working in the service sectors of global cities, or in Silicon Valley. It also works for people who work in lithium mines or have manual skills that are currently high in demand. But it does not work for Ohio or Michigan; for Yorkshire or Lincolnshire; or Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

Britain attempted to disconnect itself from the current system with Brexit. But to work, that would have required a different economic model. The Conservatives did not deliver a new model. Labour isn’t either. The difference between the center-left and the center-right in the UK boils down to relatively minor shifts between spending and taxation, but there is no fundamental disagreement about the model.

It’s the same in Germany, which hasn’t reinvented its dying industrial model. France has gone way past the limit of what the state can and should do for its citizens. In all of these countries, what happened is that stable sources of income have become less stable. The German car industry, for example, was the cash cow of the economy — but now it struggles to compete.

The decline of the center-right, and to an extent the center-left, mirrors these dying economic models.

None of this is new. We saw it in 2016, when Americans first voted for Trump, and when the UK voted for Brexit. Terminally complacent liberals mischaracterized these events as electoral accidents, the result of biased media reporting, or worse, of Russian intervention. There is always a story that politicians can tell themselves to avoid having to solve the problem. The surest sign of political decline is an obsession with who is to blame: as opposed to what needs to be done. The center-right was once the natural party of government. Today, it is the party of excuses.

Avatars of the genre include film star Sydney Sweeney making jokes about her boobs on Saturday Night Live, or Haliey Welch — aka the viral “Hawk Tuah” girl — joyfully simulating expectoration during oral sex in a vox pop on the streets of Nashville. The actual political commitments of these women remain unclear, but either way it turns out that the enemy of your enemy can be your friend with benefits. Or at least, that’s the fervent hope.

Commentators are understandably taking the popularity of old-school heroines like Sweeney and Welsh as a delicious provocation for those who have sapped the fun out of relations between the sexes, with their chilly scolding about the impropriety of people’s actual desires. Though on the face of it, this resembles the sort of complaint a Midwestern teenager might have made about his Republican parents in 1965, we all know who the new morality police are. They are the ones treating “intimacy” as a commodity that should be redistributed for the sake of fairness; putting up posters on trains telling you that staring might be a criminal offence; and writing policies governing adult sexual relations that equate an absence of consent with a lack of constant anxious checking that everything is fine.

And true to form, the progressive media is taking the bait. Earlier this month, Vox’s sneery take on the phenomenon of the sexy MAGA-coded female contains compensatory ego-mending about how it’s the Left that is the true “sex-positive” side, insofar as it is “the home for politicians and activists who agitate for access to birth control and abortions” and “who support LGBTQ rights” (smokin’ hot, amirite?). Newsweek, meanwhile, wheels in “an associate professor at the University of East Anglia”, no less, to inform us from a great height that the conservative hot girl “isn’t a particularly new phenomenon… Women have been positioned through the lens of the masculinist imagery in conservative, populist politics for a very long time.”

This much is true. But then again, I’m not sure how red-bloodedly “masculinist” it is for a Trump-loving young man’s pupils to dilate at the sight of an unabashedly sexy female, almost entirely based on the thought that she must really be pissing off the libs. Last time I checked in with the Zoomer manosphere online — the source of material for this story, presumably to be distinguished from the average Republican voter — they seemed busy rating various women well out of their league as “mid”, and arguing over whether Daniela Melchior from Suicide Squad has Western Hunter-Gatherer genetics, hardly thereby cementing an impression of unalloyed sexual vigour. On this basis then, it seems a bit early to announce that Dionysus has returned. One swallow — or indeed, one spit — doesn’t make a summer.

Though you shouldn’t expect people to tell the truth about sex, there is in fact even more unreality in this particular bit of tarted-up X/Twitter discourse than is usual. For just over the virtual wall at Instagram there are literally millions of women, of both celebrity and civilian varieties and all political persuasions, doggedly adopting come-hither expressions and showing off fleshy parts to good advantage. Glorious as Sweeney is, neither her décolletage nor her righteous pride in it seem like much of a departure from the norm here.

But more importantly: as every sex therapist knows, resentment kills the libido. Progressives arguably started this dance of anger, willing to celebrate objectively dysfunctional body shapes for women — breasts chopped off, morbidly obese, testosterone-poisoned or Ozempic-thin — as long as they constituted a satisfying revenge upon the low-status fecund archetypes beloved of political opponents. In the process, they were perfectly happy to drive a wedge between what Lefty men actually wanted in the privacy of their own psyches, and what they felt they ought to be seen to want in public.

In this matter, they were not helped by the radical Left’s rejection of the existence of something called “nature”, seeing the very idea as a sinister plot with patriarchal and capitalist overtones. Since, as Schiller once told us, “beauty is a playful mediation between nature and freedom”, this gave them only freedom to play with, as they tried to construct a sexually attractive woman out of various cultural bits and pieces left lying around: lipstick, a sassy attitude, a big glass of wine that engulfs your face, a PhD. In the end, of course, they had to cheat, which is why their preferred female commentators are often classically gorgeous though nobody is allowed to mention it.

But with online elements of the Right now lured into the same game, validating buxom country girls like Sweeney and Walsh only because their enemies officially revile them, there has been no improvement in the direction of healthy and uncomplicated eroticism. We still can’t tell what these men really want, rather than what they think they ought to be seen to want. Though superficially speaking, the championing of blonde bombshells may resemble a throwback to some prelapsarian unwoke past where we didn’t have to get so hung up on the politics of sexual desire, in fact we are not in Kansas anymore, and we can’t pretend we only just clapped eyes on Pamela Anderson in Baywatch. Porn has exploded in the interim, and the average user’s real turn-ons lie strictly between him and his incognito search engine.

Another difference between now and then is that there is no single hegemonic story about female sexiness or beauty anymore, nor even only a few. The discourse has fractured into a thousand niches, corresponding in almost every case to some million-pound money-making opportunity for someone else. Young women are using surgical and pharmaceutical alteration on an epic scale, and older film stars’ faces are becoming hallucinatorily uncanny as a matter of course — just look at 69-year old Isabelle Adjani in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple. In this context the “natural look” is just one more artificial construction competing with all the others, and none of them seem particularly connected to anyone’s nether regions.

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While the Left pretend nothing is natural, the Right prefer to naturalise what is culturally flexible — think of trad wife discourse about honouring “the natural order”, or Charles Moore writing that actress Olivia Colman has a “Left-wing face”. And this is presumably why some are treating the arrival of Sweeney et al as if heralding a long-awaited return to the garden of Eden. But should the stock of the sex bomb continue to rise in the Zeitgeist, rest assured it will only be temporary. Pendulum swings never do make themselves known at the time.

For comparison, a telling moment in the Vogue documentary about the Nineties currently showing on Disney+ recounts how, after a relatively brief period of intense interest from the fashion industry in their extraordinarily symmetrical faces, models such as Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell were suddenly dropped by model bookers. Even the Golden Mean in fleshly form became boring to look at after a while. The hot new thing involved grunge and heroin chic, skeletal body types à la Kate Moss, and faces that were, in the words of Amber Valletta, “a little off”. Evangelista’s solution was to cut her fringe squint, which apparently worked for a while to keep her relevant. Later on she signed up for a catastrophic “fat-freezing” procedure, which famously didn’t.

Unlike changing hemlines, trying to keep up with passing ideological trends in faces and bodies can easily involve wrecking yourself. Those you were trying to please in the first place won’t care — they’ll just move seamlessly on to the new upvoted fantasy object. Sensible women on the Right should avoid trying to fit in with whatever sort of physicality is currently in favour among terminally online political comrades — whether that involves little platoons, or big ones — for the chances are it won’t be the truth in any case. Instead, I suggest they demand that any male counterparts truly committed to traditional gender roles join the army, or start feeding alligators pieces of raw chicken by hand like the new husband of Lana Del Rey. That should shut them up.

Eden’s fate is a reminder of the challenge currently facing the Conservative Party. Policies, experience and ideology matter, but not as much as character and, above all, luck. William Hague was a formidable politician who had spent most of his life gliding effortlessly towards the premiership, only to become leader of the opposition at the wrong time, unable to do anything about the extraordinary popularity of Tony Blair.

The task today is even harder. The Conservative Party’s defeat earlier this year was not only worse than John Major’s in 1997, but the worst the Tory party has seen in its entire 190-year history. And yet, the scale of the Labour Party’s early difficulties in office has given the party’s leadership candidates hope that the situation might actually be salvageable. After all, if Keir Starmer can turn a calamitous defeat into a landslide victory in the space of five years, why can’t they?

What has struck me, in conversations with the current leadership candidates, MPs and aides, is how often they turn to Margaret Thatcher as their source of inspiration — a figure who won the premiership 45 years ago in entirely different circumstances to those that exist today. Yet Thatcher has gained an almost mythological status in British politics today, bearing little resemblance to the politician herself.

Her myth takes on a different aspect for each of the candidates. For James Cleverly, she was the leader who brought back aspiration; for Tom Tugendhat, she was the leader who brought back British power, at home and abroad. For Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, it is the provincial Toryism that she represented which most appeals, while for Kemi Bedenoch it is her status as a “global icon” of free markets.

All these accounts contain elements of truth, of course, but as the conservative commentator, T.E. Utley, frustratedly pointed out at the height of her power in the 1980s, almost all popular accounts of Thatcher underestimate the extent to which she was also, fundamentally, a far more pragmatic and skilful politician than she is usually given credit for, willing to dodge, weave and compromise to win power and then keep it. “It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal,” Utley observed.

It is largely forgotten that when Thatcher replaced Ted Heath in 1975, she was also seen as a lightweight who would be Labour’s “secret weapon”. The former chancellor and her leadership rival, Reginald Maudling, described her victory as the “darkest day in the history of the Tory party”. And polls in 1978 suggested the Tories would enjoy a significant increase in support if it were to return the leadership to Heath. What actually won her power in 1979 was not her radicalism or iron will, but Labour’s total failure in government. “We lost the Election because people didn’t get their dustbins emptied, because commuters were angry about train disruption and because of too much union power,” James Callaghan argued, lamenting the Winter of Discontent which upended his premiership. Rishi Sunak could well say the same of his own time in government.

What won her the Conservative leadership in 1975, however, was her clarity of purpose and analysis of what had gone wrong. As the Spectator observed at the time, she was the only serious candidate who was clear that “Mr Heath’s leadership of the Conservative party has been a very bad one”. For the Spectator this was enough — everything else, the magazine contended, rested on this central analysis.

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Something similar is required today. James Cleverly’s diagnosis that the party needs “unity” is insufficient given the scale of the Conservative failure between 2010 and 2024 — a period of government that was, inarguable, “very bad”. Cleverly’s focus on party unity is also insufficient given the scale of Britain’s wider social and economic failure over the past two decades, which has brought with it a sense of fatalism as public services have deteriorated along with the unquantifiable feel of the country.

Likewise, Theresa May’s machine-like incantation that “elections in the UK are won in the centre ground” simply ignores the obvious fact that she failed to win her election against the most Left-wing candidate in post-war British history, while Boris Johnson secured a majority of 80 against the same opponent. May’s analysis also ignores the even more obvious example of Margaret Thatcher, the most instinctively right wing Tory leader since 1945 and also the most successful. If there is such a thing as the centre ground in British politics, it is not how it is usually defined. Today, the centre ground combines full-fledged authoritarianism on most questions to do with criminal justice and immigration, a drain-the-swamp outrage at the political, economic and public sector establishment and a general sense of social democratic justice on issues of tax and spend.

Rather than cliches about the centre ground, like 1975 the first question is who today, of the Tory leaders, has the clear conviction that the past 14 years of Conservative rule have been “very bad”? And who offers the clearest answer as to why? From here we can begin to judge which one presents the greatest threat to Labour.

Those close to Starmer believe that Robert Jenrick has come closest to having the kind of political analysis that could be most problematic for Labour. The 14 years of Tory government were very bad, Jenrick states, because the government showed itself incapable of delivering the systemic reforms that would allow it to deliver what it promised. Only by clearing away the bureaucratic and legal obstacles binding the government’s hands can voters’ wishes be delivered — from reducing immigration and bogus asylum claims to improving economic growth and the performance of public services. This is the message Labour fears — but not the messenger. The words they used to describe him included “weird” and “extreme”. They also believe he reaches too quickly for old Thatcherite solutions to today’s problems. Jenrick has alighted on the systemic nature of Britain’s ills, but has yet to really embrace the new world to which Britain belongs — a world that requires more than reheated Thatcherism if Britain is to prosper. To those close to Starmer, Jenrick looks more like a second William Hague — or even Iain Duncan Smith — than a David Cameron, let alone a Margaret Thatcher.

By contrast, Tugendhat and Cleverly are seen as more effective messengers, but with ineffective messages. Tugendhat does not share Jenrick’s belief in the systemic failure of the British state — arguing that Britain has simply lost its dynamism because it has allowed itself to be run by the “rule of lawyers” rather than the rule of law. Cleverly, in contrast, says Britain just needs some of Ronald Reagan’s optimistic spirit. Neither troubles Labour — yet.

The candidate that Starmer’s team is least sure about is Badenoch. The size of her personality and willingness to speak her mind makes her a dangerous opponent. Her instinctive, confident conservatism also appears fresh in a way Jenrick’s does not. And yet she is also seen as potentially self-destructive in a way the others are not. She has the self-confidence of Thatcher, but does she have the discipline and political skill to navigate the challenges of opposition? After going on Times Radio to declare current rates of maternity pay “excessive” the question raised by T.E. Utley becomes pertinent once again: Is she willing to put aside her devotion to doctrine to avoid the plainly politically suicidal? If she wants to win, the answer must be yes.

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What gives the Conservative Party hope is that even as its leading figures grapple with the question of what went wrong and why, the Labour party has yet to come up with its own response.

Keir Starmer’s most compelling diagnosis is that the period of Tory rule which ended earlier this year was marked, principally, by its “populism”. This, in his account, amounts to offering easy answers to the public instead of delivering hard truths, which is why the government ultimately lost control of the public finances. Every Tory leader, in Starmer’s telling, preferred populist slogans to real reform, the apotheosis of which was the Rwanda refugee scheme.

Yet, this is not a sufficient account of the past 14 years. Of all the criticisms that can be levelled at David Cameron and George Osborne, among the weakest is that they took easy decisions and were insufficiently concerned about spending constraints. The years of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, meanwhile, contain much of Starmer’s agenda today: from its faith in the green energy transition and infrastructure spending, to levelling up, taking back control and immigration restrictions. All featured in Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference. It is incoherent to dismiss as populist a set of policies you intend to steal for yourself.

This failure of the current Government to nail down a diagnosis of Britain’s illness — and therefore also its cure — provides an opportunity for the Tories that they cannot afford to miss. The trouble is, none of the current candidates for the Tory leadership has yet come up with a good enough answer either.

The chances are that Rishi Sunak won’t end up trading punches in the toilets with hostile MPs, but the atmosphere in the Conservative Party is taking on a familiar hue. Where once Labour was a byword for factionalism — with a dizzying array of Bennites, Tribunites and other “tendencies” — so the Tories today present a kaleidoscope of “New Conservatives”, “National Conservatives”, “Common Sense” Conservatives and self-styled “research groups”, all battling for control of the leadership. And where once a Social Democratic Party fought to “break the mould” of British politics, today the Right-wing Reform party proclaims a “realignment” intended to sweep the Conservatives from the electoral landscape. Over all this hangs the stench of electoral death, as the party contemplates defeat on the scale of 1983 or 1997.

But the Conservatives can still learn from Labour’s agonies in the Eighties. Then, Labour faced three interlocking crises. The first was electoral: from 1979 to 1992, Labour lost four general elections in a row — something that had never happened before in the democratic era. The fear was not simply that Labour was losing, but that its traditional electorate was disappearing. Deindustrialisation was shrinking the manual working class, trade-union membership was in freefall, while non-unionised workers seemed increasingly drawn to Thatcherism. The challenge for Labour was both to reclaim its old electorate and to build a new one, at a time of disruptive sociological change.

The second crisis was political, with the formation of a breakaway party by former Labour grandees. In David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins, the SDP could boast the youngest foreign secretary in history, one of the most popular female politicians in the country, a skilled party organiser, and a former Chancellor, Home Secretary and President of the European Commission. Even under the pressures of First Past the Post, the SDP-Liberal Alliance won more than a quarter of the vote in 1983, coming only 2% behind Labour. In his first term, at least, the challenge for Kinnock was not to defeat the Conservatives. It was to stave off the threat from the Alliance.

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The third problem was intellectual. Parties do not often rethink their core principles, but the questions being asked of Labour during this period were genuinely existential. Was socialism still relevant, in a world where workers were buying their own homes and filling them with consumer goods? Could one talk meaningfully about “working-class solidarity” when the long-term unemployed were so distanced from those in work? Was parliamentary socialism still possible, given the cultural and media power of the Right, or did industrial action pose a surer route to victory? From the hard-Left to the old-Right, there was universal agreement that Labour must change. What was so disruptive was the direction of change, and the principles on which it should be based.

For the Conservative Party today, the challenges are slightly different. Unlike Labour, modern Conservatives are accustomed to winning elections, but that makes the prospect of defeat all the more terrifying. Three-quarters of the parliamentary party, including all but six of the Cabinet, have no experience of opposition, yet the party has now trailed in the polls for more than two years. Those voters who remain loyal are heavily concentrated among the elderly. Labour leads in every cohort below the age of 65; and even the next oldest cohort, from 55-64, has the Conservatives at just 20%.

As for party competition, Reform cannot match the polling figures of the early Alliance, which peaked at more than 40%. Nor has it drawn heavyweight defections of the stature of Jenkins, Owen or Williams. But if Nigel Farage were to return to the leadership, it would boast a consummate campaigner with strong support among Conservative voters: Farage now polls more strongly among 2019 Conservatives than the current prime minister.

Underpinning both these problems is an intellectual dilemma. What is the Conservative Party for? And what, if anything, does it seek to conserve? Under First Past the Post, parties have to construct broad coalitions to be electorally competitive. At its best, that is a source of strength, expanding the range of ideas on which a party can draw and bringing different interests into partnership. At its worst, it generates unstable compounds that can explode at any moment. While Labour struggles to hold together Fabians, Left liberals, ethical socialists, trade unionists and social democrats, those jostling within the Conservative coalition have ranged from free traders to protectionists, libertarians to moral conservatives, Atlanticists to Empire loyalists, and institutionalists to radical populists. The surprise, perhaps, is not that such fissile materials sometimes combust, but that they do not do so more often.

For most of the 20th century, Conservatives could rely on two gravitational forces to keep their centrifugal tendencies in check. The first was a shared hostility to socialism. At a time when the Cold War dominated political alignment, fear of a common enemy was a potent unifying force. The party was also anchored in a set of common institutions: the Church of England, the professions and the institutions of the party itself, which boasted more than two million members at its peak. It was no accident that the party lost coherence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as its own institutions shrivelled, and as it became either detached from or hostile to the institutions of state and civil society. The effect was to leave the party both socially and intellectually unmoored.

More recently, in 2019, the party could deploy two unifying forces: the desire to “Get Brexit Done”; and a determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of office. Neither exerts much power today. Britain has left the EU, and Labour is almost neurotically averse to reopening the question. Those Brexit questions which remain live are as likely to divide Conservatives as to unite them: notably, the status of retained EU law; the future of immigration policy; and the Northern Ireland border. As for Corbyn, he is no longer even a Labour MP. The current Labour leadership defines itself as much against Corbyn as against the Conservatives, and attempts to present Keir Starmer as a secret revolutionary have gained little traction with the public.

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As its unifying elements weaken, other forces are driving the party apart. A tradition that once prided itself on its suspicion of “ideology” increasingly demands “true Conservatism” from its leaders, while disagreeing furiously on what that might be. Loyal newspapers that once catered to millions have become more sectarian as their readerships have shrunk, while new TV stations offer rich rewards for rebels and mavericks. The moderate, pragmatic MP who votes loyally with her party is unlikely to follow Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey into the presenter’s chair at GB News or Talk TV.

All this puts a premium on skilled party management, yet there is little in Sunak’s past that has prepared him for this task. Jim Callaghan, who led a government with no majority at all for two years, had spent 30 years in Parliament, including 20 years on Labour’s national executive and a period as party chair. He had held four great offices of state and began his career as a trade-union official. By contrast, Sunak only entered Parliament in 2015, spent his short ministerial career at the Treasury and previously worked at a hedge fund. In a party that has disposed of four prime ministers in six years, even a majority of 60 has strained his powers of party management. Nor have the party’s strategists served him well, for the fashion for seeking “wedge issues” and “dividing lines” has inflamed divisions within the party, rather than establishing clear blue water with the opposition.

Yet as Labour’s experience demonstrates, division need not be terminal; and the Conservatives enjoy a number of structural advantages that were denied to Labour in the Eighties. That includes a largely sympathetic press and a donor base that can outspend their opponents even at the nadir of the party’s fortunes. The Right is in the ascendant across much of the West, and may soon take back the presidency of the United States. And in an age of short political careers, the Tory factions have no equivalent to Benn, Jenkins or Healey — household names with careers stretching back decades. The heavens do not tremble at the thunder of Sir Simon Clarke; nor do the mountains smoke at the voice of Robert Jenrick. That makes the party’s factions more volatile, but also less deeply entrenched.

Moreover, for a party accustomed to government, opposition may also have a galvanising effect. A Labour government would confront a grim inheritance: a public sector on fire, a financial crisis in local government, a stagnant economy and a perilous international situation — perhaps made more difficult by the return of Donald Trump. If there are good elections for the Conservatives to lose, 2024 may be one of them.

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But if the party wishes to restore its intellectual vitality, it will need to face some uncomfortable truths. If the tax bill has risen under five Conservative leaders drawn from across the party spectrum, that is not because they lacked conviction or were secret socialists. A party that wishes to cut taxation must wrestle honestly with the dilemmas of an ageing population, a stagnant economy, a surging bill for social care and pensions, and growing pressure on the defence budget. If younger voters are abandoning the Conservative Party, that is not because they have been brainwashed by their teachers or indoctrinated on TikTok. It is because Conservatism has offered them little but mockery at a time of decaying wages and an impossible housing market.

As the once-great Liberal Party could affirm, parties do not have a divine right to survive. Those that cannot contain their divisions, that look inwards rather than out, and that blame the electorate for their own misfortunes are rarely rewarded at the polls. Like Labour in 1979, the Conservatives may soon be out of office. Unless they learn the lessons of the Eighties, it could be some time before they return.

So much of our political commentary is spent speculating about how these absurdist battles will play out. Will Keir Starmer’s judgement over Gaza be vindicated come election day? Will Rishi Sunak prove us all wrong? Is the Prime Minister showing courage or weakness in sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron? What we all seem to agree is that history will be the judge, that when the general election comes around we will have our answers. Somebody will win and somebody will lose; one will have ridden the tide of history and the other will end up as mere flotsam. But there are currents in politics pulling at events far below the surface, often more powerful than those we obsess about in our day-to-day coverage.

“The success of… movements of protest cannot be measured by their immediate political failure,” wrote Lord Blake, the great biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, who in his earlier career led the rebel alliance of romantic Tory ultras called Young England who worshipped the old aristocratic order. By any metric, Disraeli’s Young England failed politically. And yet, for Blake, these movements cannot be understood solely by their parliamentary success, but must be regarded “as symbols and examples that lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation”. The same is true today.

We must shake ourselves from the notion that victory and defeat are the only things that matter. There are other ways in which the course of a nation is affected, often with more profound consequences than what a leader says or does.

Britain’s relationship with Europe is the perfect such example. Between the Schuman declaration of 1950 — the foundational moment of today’s Europe — and Brexit, there were any number of apparently decisive moments which turned out to be less decisive than they first appeared. In 1971, the House of Commons finally voted to join the Common Market and that was that: a long-running drama came to a conclusion. Harold Macmillan, who had failed to lead Britain into the EEC the previous decade, waited in Dover to hear the news and lit a beacon to announce the historic turning point, which was then answered across the water in Calais. Four years later, the British public ratified the decision by a crushing margin in the country’s first ever referendum. The end.

As Robert Saunders captures in Yes To Europe, a triumphant Harold Wilson was hailed a political giant for his skilful handling of events. A cartoon in The Daily Express portrayed him parading in triumph through the streets of London, a Roman emperor in a chariot drawn by Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins with Margaret Thatcher throwing flowers from the sidelines. Behind him were the poor, huddled masses of Labour eurosceptics dragged along in chains. The Sunday Times summed up the wisdom of the day: “If politicians are to be judged by their ability in the end to get what they want, Harold Wilson is a great politician.” But politics has to be about more than this. While Harold Wilson got what he wanted, within a year he was gone, a broken man.

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We never seem to learn this lesson. In 1977, Professor Anthony King published the first history of the referendum campaign, painting the “Yes” victory as a triumph for the moderate political centre against what would now be called the populists. King speculated what might have happened had there been a No vote: it would have undermined Wilson and Callaghan while strengthening the Labour Left. As Saunders says of King’s argument: “Benn or Foot might have become leader, opening a fissure between ‘the moderate centre’ and the ‘extreme Left’. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams might have left to form a new party, carrying many of their most popular colleagues with them, all of which could have had the cumulative effect of banishing Labour from power ‘for at least a generation’.” But as Saunders puts it: “This, of course, was almost exactly what happened a few years later.”

By 1980, Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party and Thatcher had become prime minister. By 1990, Thatcher — who had campaigned for a Yes vote — had become euroscepticism’s first martyr. By 2000, the Conservative Party was preparing a “Save the Pound” election campaign and by 2010 its leader was vowing to veto the new European treaty if elected. And we all know what happened in 2020. The great current of history can move in the opposite direction from how it looks on the surface; a political riptide difficult to spot from the shore, but powerful nonetheless.

Sometimes political decisions move in one direction but the mood of a party or country moves in another. In retrospect, the Labour Right won their struggle with the Left in 1975, but were seen to have betrayed the soul of the party. Something similar happened for the Blairites after the Iraq war and for unionists after the Scottish referendum in 2014. Perhaps we are also seeing that play out now after the Brexit referendum of 2016.

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While this week in Westminster was extraordinary, perhaps that’s not for the obvious reasons. Suella Braverman was sacked, the Tory right had the wind taken out of its sails by the Supreme Court, David Cameron returned and Keir Starmer saw off the Left of his Party. The centre is back in charge of both political parties and, by extension, the country. Whatever happens at the next election, there will be no great changes. Our relationship with Europe, Ireland, the Middle East, China and the United States will largely remain as is. We will maintain our nuclear deterrent, the rough balance of tax and spending, education and health policies. All will be well for those who prize macro stability.

But what is happening under the surface? Who is winning the battle for the soul of each party? First, let’s take the Labour Party. The obvious point is that Starmer has emerged from this week with his authority intact and his chances of becoming prime minister enhanced. His party is now even further ahead in the polls than it was before. As things stand, he stands a very good chance of not only being elected, but serving as prime minister well into the 2030s. All this can be true and important — and for it to also be true that having a third of your parliamentary party rebel on an issue of core judgement before you’ve even become prime minister is a warning of problems to come.

Should Starmer become prime minister, foreign policy will quickly intrude on his premiership. Donald Trump might well have already won the presidency or could do so soon afterwards. It goes without saying that a Trump presidency will present particular challenges for a Labour prime minister leading a pro-European, pro-Palestinian movement. Let’s remember that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza may still be raging in a year’s time — or even in five year’s time. The humanitarian crisis may be even more acute, the pro-Palestinian Left even more angry. Looking at the Labour party today, its foreign policy remains remarkably similar to what it might have been under Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair — and yet culturally the Left has become more more anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-European. These are not things Starmer can simply lead in another direction, only manage.

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On the Conservative side, it is hard to know where to start. There is more than a passing resemblance to John Major in the mid Nineties who, like Sunak, was more in line with establishment thinking than his own supporters’ instincts, and was forced into pathetic shows of nationalism to compensate for his overall failures of policy.

This week, Sunakism took control of the Tory party, with Cameron and other centrist figures brought into the cabinet. The prime minister’s Rwanda policy was then thrown out by the Supreme Court, who said it breached a whole array of international treaties that Britain had signed up to. In response, rather like Major’s doomed beef war with Europe, Sunak has gone to war to defend the policy, with the absurd notion that he will pass a law to simply declare the country safe. Like Major in the late Nineties, the likely result is that this will do little to ameliorate unhappiness within the Conservative Party or increase his chances of holding back the tide of support for Labour, which has declared its opposition to the scheme.

Perhaps the most important thing here is not whether Sunak will succeed or fail with his approach, but what will happen to the mood in the Conservative Party. From 1997 onwards, Britain’s place in the European Union seemed to grow ever more secure as Tony Blair triumphed signing up to one treaty after another, only for the Conservative parliamentary party to grow ever more sceptical until, eventually, the sceptics won.

Today, you have to wonder what is going to happen to Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. Suella Braverman has been kicked out of the cabinet, but will Suellaism eventually take hold of the Conservative soul? This will not be decided in a single election, or even multiple elections, but by trends working away under the surface, buffeted by events, stories, scandals and political groupings operating beyond the remit of mere leaders, lending Blake’s “imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics”.

Braverman may never become Tory leader. She may end up leading a faction in parliament that suffers defeat after defeat, like Bill Cash in the Nineties or Tony Benn in the Eighties. But that doesn’t mean her politics will die or Britain’s membership of the ECHR will remain secure. The same is true of the Labour Left, which will not disappear simply because Keir Starmer triumphs in 2024 or does not.

Politics is not some placid, obedient sea able to be parted by whichever Moses is in charge at that moment. It is tidal and choppy, issues, constantly being shaped not just by leaders and calculation, but by events, scandals, ideas and, yes, the losers of politics.

As the writer Philip Pullman puts it in his 2005 introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s sonorous and digressive 17th century masterwork, “those readers who have some experience of the disorder of the mind we now call depression will know that the opposite of that dire state is not happiness but energy”.

By this definition, we could say the British state is, if not depressed, consumed by melancholy. Doom is sensed lying on the horizon but the exertion of will necessary to avert it is no longer seen as possible, or even desirable. The British state lies in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for death. It cannot build houses, it cannot build railways; it cannot dig a hole in the ground and fill it with water; it cannot fix schools that are falling down. The simplest task is too difficult, and anyway, why even bother? There are always reasons to be found for why any exertion is pointless, why helplessness is sensible policy. No wonder, like children of a depressed parent, young Britons now yearn to flee the oppressive atmosphere of home. Yet Burton’s text, reissued for its 400th anniversary, reminds us that we have been here before.

Anatomy is most often read today as a pre-modern self-help book. Yet it contains within it, rarely-discussed, an astute reading of the nation’s political dysfunction that uncannily echoes the present. “Kingdoms, provinces and Politickal Bodies are subject in like manner to this disease,” says Burton, with the body politic exhibiting the same symptoms of what later writers would term “the English malady”. For where “you shall see many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty… cities decayed, base and poor towns… the people squalid, ugly, uncivil; that kingdom, that country, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body, and had need to be reformed.”

Burton’s diagnosis is distressingly apt for modern Britain. According to ONS statistics, around one in six British adults suffered moderate to severe symptoms of depression last autumn, while 17% of British adults are taking antidepressants; but among those aged between 16 and 29, depression rates reach 28%, and for those under 24, up to 46%. Depression and anxiety are now the greatest drivers of long-term unemployment, and suicide is the single most common cause of death in young British men. Whatever the psychic wounds of postmodernity or social media, the most obvious cause is material: the insecurity built into Britain’s faltering economic model. Renters suffer depression at twice the rate of homeowners, while dwindling savings and growing debt strongly correspond with increased rates of mental distress, and homelessness is on the rise. The body politic and personal health are intertwined: Britain’s economic dysfunction is making people depressed, and deteriorating mental health is weighing down productivity. But how to reform such an unhappy polity?

As the historian William Mueller noted in his forgotten 1952 book on Burton as a political theorist, “A distressed state and a diseased individual, macrocosm and microcosm, can look to similar cures.” Burton regarded the economic instability of England as one of the principal causes of the melancholy of his day, so “the emphasis on economic reform runs throughout Burton’s Utopia, underlining his contention that one effective antidote to England’s melancholy lay in economic advance”.

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Mueller situates Burton in a social context not so different from ours, where, as he puts it, the replacement of the stable economic regime of the agricultural order by the birth of modern capitalism led to unstable employment in industrial and commercial labor markets which fluctuated with world conditions: international squabbles would deprive English industry of its foreign markets, while an influx of foreign capital, with wildly uneven domestic distribution, “caused an inflation of land values, rents, and commodities, which affected not only the unemployed but also the employed, whose wages did not rise commensurately with prices”.

Like a 17th-century Yimby, comparing the prosperous and orderly cities of the near continent with our own urban wastelands, Burton contrasted “those rich, united Provinces of Holland, Zeeland, &c., over against us; those neat cities and populous towns” with “our cities thin, and those vile, poor, and ugly to behold in respect of theirs, our trades decayed”, our “beneficial use of transportation, wholly neglected”. A levelling-up advocate of his day, Burton deplored that “amongst our Towns, there is only London that bears the face of a City… and yet in my slender judgement, defective in many things. The rest (some few excepted) are in mean estate, ruinous most part, poor and full of beggars, by reason of their decayed trades, neglected or bad policy, idleness of their Inhabitants.” As in any provincial town today, or even London’s depressing main shopping thoroughfare, the nation’s melancholy was written in the dismal vista of its streets.

Why did England suffer this sad torpor? Fundamentally, the question was one of “ill government, which proceeds from unskilful, slothful, griping, covetous, unjust, rash, or tyrannizing magistrates… not able or unfit to manage such offices” — an immediately recognisable modern sentiment in rolling 17th-century prose. Like modern-day attempts at reform, from Thatcher to Truss, their flailing attempts to cure the malady had only worsened it, so that “the State was like a sick body which had lately taken physick…and weakened so much by purging, that nothing was left but melancholy.”

But England’s sad state derived from more than just inept politicians. A melancholic himself, who wrote to both cure and wallow in his own unhappiness, Burton was wearied of what we would today call “the discourse,” the “vast confusion of… new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion” which distracted from good governance. As historians of melancholia note, the Calvinist milieu in which Burton wrote was a “suspicious and inquisitorial society, constantly on the watch to spy out the sins of others and to suppress all deviations from the true way” — no doubt the modern reader will empathise.

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An advocate of “few laws, but those severely kept”, Burton condemned the accretion of legalistic intrigue and self-promoting lawyers which, then as now, hampered strong executive government: “they will make more work for themselves, and that body politic diseased, which was otherwise sound”. Instead, as Mueller observes, “politically, he would have a highly centralized state ruled by a wise and kindly monarch, a sort of philosopher-king.” Socially, Burton proposed a proto-welfare state for the deserving poor, and enforced labour for the wilfully idle. Burton proposed to ban costly offensive wars, while maintaining a strong navy and army for national defence.

Economically, Burton was a mercantilist, who believed that the route to English prosperity, and thus happiness, was in a favourable balance of trade with a strong export economy and secure and well-paid employment for English workers. “Industry is a Loadstone to draw all good things; that alone makes countries flourish, cities populous, and will enforce by reason of much manure, which necessarily follows, a barren soil to be fertile and good, as Sheep… mend a bad pasture.” China’s rise, and the panicked reactive counter-tendency towards industrial policy almost everywhere in the West but listless Britain, makes this position, until recently considered quaintly archaic, seem strikingly relevant.

Torn between affection for the lost and stable social order of feudalism and a desire for economic growth and prosperity derived from well-planned industry and rapidly expanding cities, it is possible to read Burton as the antecedent of modern political tendencies, a sort of postliberal before liberalism had been invented. This interpretation of Burton, as a dissident political and economic theorist with lessons for today, is not as quixotic as it may at first appear. Modern historians of both melancholy and depression have long placed both unhappy conditions in political and economic context, notably the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies, who, as the philosopher Jennifer Radden observes, argues that “melancholy, or at least an enervating nostalgia and ennui, has been the fate of whole classes of people made idle by social, political, and economic arrangements”.

For the historian Matthew Bell, melancholia — “ the spectral absence of meaningful politics”— finds expression in the phenomenon of “retreatism” whose adherents “are not rebels; they do not attempt to disrupt or undo society. Nor are they outsiders who set themselves beyond social norms. Retreatists withdraw from society while remaining within it. They form a silent and disengaged opposition.” Such a position surely describes the viewpoint of British voters, hostile to the dysfunctions of the Westminster system, while increasingly certain it is so resistant to reform there is no point in voting. Why, says melancholy’s seductive inner voice, even bother? Freud credited the depressive with “a keener eye for the truth,” and which British voter today, surveying the options permitted him by Westminster, would not feel melancholic?

Yet it need not be this way. “Our land is fertile we may not deny, full of all good things, and why doth it not then abound with cities, as well as Italy, France, Germany, the Low countries?” asks Burton. “Because their policy hath been otherwise, and we are not so thrifty, circumspect, industrious; idleness is the malus Genius [evil genius] of our nation.” His closing advice to shake off the enervating grip of melancholy, to “be not idle” has become famous as a self-help axiom, yet it is also a political doctrine. It was no good for Burton himself, or for the England of his day– he died, perhaps by his own hand, in 1640, two years before the nation plunged itself into civil war — but perhaps it is not yet too late for Britain.  Doom may yet be averted, the torpor defeated, if only the effort is finally made. The bonds of dysfunction can still, perhaps, be shaken off through vigorous, reformist exertion.

It is difficult, perhaps, viewing the revolving carousel of nonentities returning to parliament this week, to believe that the cloud will ever lift, but it is not yet too late, Burton reminds us: for “Hope refresheth, as much as misery depresseth; hard beginnings have many times prosperous events, and that may happen at last which never was yet.”

All this happened 100 years ago, of course, in 1923, when Stalin’s erasure of factionalism was in full putsch. Poor old Trotsky had been banished, and members of The Workers’ Truth — think Momentum blokes with similar beards but sturdier clothes — were expelled from the party, if they were lucky. Of course, nobody for a second is suggesting Keir Starmer is anything like Joseph Stalin. He’s several inches taller and supports an independent Ukraine, for a start. However, the current Purification of Labour certainly has a Stalinist echo, doesn’t it?

So, why does paranoid android Starmer feel the urge to purge? As Marx didn’t say: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, secondly on Twitter.” There is something both tragic and farcical about Starmer’s war on dissent. All those solemn little Komsomol interns wearing I’m here for Keir! lapel badges, bog-snorkelling through the tides of human effluent on social media, trawling for indiscretions, missteps, wrongthink. He did WHAT? Shared a platform with Ken Loach? Expressed support for the idea of a progressive alliance? “Liked” a “problematic tweet”? Oh, here’s a good one — a Labour MP with a Punjabi Sikh dad tweeted saying Rishi Sunak being prime minister, “isn’t a win for Asian representation. He’s a multi-millionaire who, as chancellor, cut taxes on bank profits while overseeing the biggest drop in living standards since 1956”. No, we can’t have that, Keir’s just been on Sky News telling everyone how he congratulated Rishi “for being a prime minister of British Asian descent, and it’s really, really important that I did that”. Say what you like about Starmer. He really, really admires his own probity.

Yeah, it’s a tough time to be a socialist in the Labour Party. No surprise that the brightest meteor in the sky at the moment is shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, who is clearly being positioned as a man for all factions, in the sense that he’s cheerfully drawing fire from all of them and apparently not giving a shit. His dull but likable memoir has been doing the rounds to generally favourable reviews despite its excruciating title — One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up — and prose that’s been ironed flat. It offers an origin story that used to be commonplace among Labour MPs in the days before politicians started going straight into parliament from law, journalism or their gap year.

The Streeting autobiography, like those of Frank Field and Alan Johnson before it, charts a long march from working class poverty to political power. More importantly, here is a young Labour government minister-in-waiting — he’s still only 40 — who understands the acute problems faced by the contemporary poor, not what he calls the imaginary “Hovis working class” beloved of such social scientists as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries. The only thing his Ilford North constituency has plenty of is deprivation. Streeting knows himself well enough to recognise what he’s lost and gained in the transition to middle-class life. His sense of injustice over the plight of the working poor — a class of people very much associated with the last 13 years of Tory government — is raw, his anger real. We’re a world away from the days of Blair’s public sector spendathon, when John Prescott told everyone, we were “all middle class now”. He might just as well have told us we were all millionaires.

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Streeting is certainly showing flair as a self-publicist, and it’s fun to see the fallout. He and his book have been everywhere in the past fortnight, as he relives a Stepney childhood full of stoical women and decent men and a grandfather who was a little bit whee, a little bit whurr, a little bit repeatedly in prison. His media knees-up has already prompted anonymous grumblings among some of his shadow cabinet colleagues, allegedly pissed off that Labour’s policy agenda has been eclipsed by what Trotsky might have called a “cult of personality”. Streeting’s an engaging interviewee. In common with Labour deputy Angela Rayner, he has an ordinary voice. He can be disarmingly frank. He told the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone: “A great night out is going out with friends and getting absolutely plastered … I’m a bad binge drinker. That’s terrible messaging for the shadow health secretary, but I am a binge drinker.”

The Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, the Sun will all keep that in their back pockets of course, but Streeting’s flawed-Christian everyman candour is at the moment playing very much to his advantage. George W. Bush’s home truth that voters essentially want a candidate they could imagine having a beer with is still a useful guide. I and many party members would much rather have a beer with Streeting than with Starmer. Two beers, tops. If it’s binge drinking, I’d go for vodka jellies with Angela in a heartbeat.

Streeting has made no secret of his ambition to one day be leader of the Labour Party, chiefly by unequivocally denying it, and also by pledging total support for Sir Keir. With his solid reputation as a Labour Right-winger, Streeting even gives notice of how he’d launch a leadership bid: “I’d tack Left. You win the Labour leadership from the Left, as I reminded Tony Blair from time to time. His pitch of 1994 was not the Tony Blair of 2007.” Streeting is clearly an ambitious pragmatist, like Starmer. An infuriated membership beseeches Labour leaders to be bolder. In fact, a huge, roiling majority of the public want to renationalise water, rail and energy, and think nurses and teachers shouldn’t have to use food banks. But Team Starmer simply taps the latest polling screenshot and tells them to calm down. Promising nothing is a strategy now. If you could map the level of fury among fellow Labour members at the perceived inertia of His Majesty’s Opposition, it would look like one of those “hottest day on record” charts.

Starmer’s hero is Harold Wilson and on one hand you can understand why. After all, he was head of a Labour government when the Beatles were in power, when the country was redefining itself for a new, optimistic world. We had a roaring economy, equal rights legislation, BBC2 commissioning Monty Python and Kenneth Clark in colour. The Open University. The World Cup. It was the best of times; it was the best of times. But at least Wilson acknowledged the broad church that the party had always been. He was fond of quoting Ian Mikardo’s clunky maxim: “Every bird needs a Left wing and a Right wing and it can’t fly on its Right wing alone.” Perhaps this is why Starmer appears to be in a holding pattern above the political landscape, Labour circling with its single, flapping wing.

One vociferous faction Starmer’s keen to ignore is the young, energised, progressive wing of the party. The Pink News and Canary crowd. The Just Stop Oil, keeping up with the Owen Joneses guys. It’s one thing to dismiss them as smug idealists, out of touch with ordinary people, luxuriating in their bubbly purity whirlpool. It’s quite another to argue against them. This is why Streeting rather than Starmer is emerging as Podcast Left’s bogeyman. Members of the Streeting Tendency share socially conservative views rooted in a traditional, working-class Old Labour, where middle-class issues are treated with some scepticism, and where it’s acceptable to approve of getting on, “bettering” yourself.

While Starmer blanks the party dissenters, Streeting runs straight towards them. His strength as a man for all factions is not that he wants to please everyone but that he’s prepared to be shot by both sides. He upset NHS absolutists by saying he’d use private healthcare to clear waiting lists — a strong echo of Blair’s “whatever works”. He’s also on record recalling with glee how private care turnover “fell off a cliff” under the last Labour administration because the NHS functioned really well, and how he’d love an NHS so strong it would all but kill off the private sector. His views on abortion upset a broad spectrum of people, including secularists (he has sympathy for those opposed on faith grounds) the religious (he votes “in a secular way” because he believes in the diversity of a liberal democracy) and parents of children with Down’s Syndrome — along with Richard Dawkins, he supports late termination of a foetus with Down’s. Sidenote: as the grandparent of a child with DS I am happy to invite him to shove that one right up his moral vacuum. Reinforcing the belief that a child will be a burden to the parents and a drain on society’s resources? Imagine if we had a society that felt an honourable duty to support children with disabilities. Imagine if that was a Labour Party aspiration.

Oh, talking of “existence debating”, Streeting’s even taken multi-faction fire by wading into the Debate That Needn’t Even Speak Its Name. Even more recklessly, he wants to take a centrist position that, according to the rules of social media trench warfare, doesn’t exist. As the former head of education for Stonewall, he has impeccable credentials as a trans ally. Except he insists on recognising and protecting sex-based rights and seems to have no problem with biological framing. In one interview, he subscribed to that framing, before launching an excoriating attack on the gender-critical feminists using ugly, demeaning language to monster trans people. Right after, he got his 15 minutes of hate from both ends, the public forums ablaze.

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And while Starmer is content to allow people to infer that he was always in a way slightly allergic to Corbynism, Streeting smacks his empty lager glass down on the table and calls the 2019 Labour Party “a shipwreck”. Starmer’s personality is still at the printer’s; Streeting meanwhile watches his political stock rise as more and more people in the party see him as the enemy within. Very Blair.

And let’s be frank, a plausible answer to the question “why get tough on Labour factionalism now?” is “have you seen the absolute state of the Tory party?” Stalin — him again, what can I say, he’s quotable — said his two greatest generals on the Eastern Front were January and February. Within living memory, the Tory Party boasted that its two greatest political weapons were loyalty and unity. I mean, look at it now. Its last year has been like Game of Thrones Season Nine. Brutal, tribal, full of awful characters. Boris Johnson trashed the Conservative Party, then half-pulled the scenery down with him when he lurched off-stage. Having effectively created several splinter groups through his presence, he caused several more through his absence. Maybe Starmer took one look at what happens when you don’t ruthlessly suppress factionalism and decided to go the other way. The Tory factions have been getting more desperate and less interesting with each incarnation: “Trussite” was actually a word for at least 36 hours last year. The “New Conservatives”: what do they want?

Rishi Sunak is fading from public view by the day. He’s getting asked the same question as Starmer — what do you stand for? Anything? — but it’s hurting him more. At this stage, Sunak is just vapour in a slim-fit shirt, and Starmer can afford to worry less about being upstaged by his tribal enemy. Perhaps his calculation is that now is the time to quash internal opposition, not in the middle of a general election campaign. At the moment, he seems quite content to make every angry brigade on the Left even angrier, and allow his champion to block the backlash of vengeance. It’s Streeting who faces every beating, and he seems to be thriving. Every purge, after all, needs an anti-hero. Especially one who may lead the party in a few years’ time.

But all these arguments have now been decisively won, so swiftly and totally that it is apparently difficult for liberals to remember that they ever held different views, let alone denounced the ones they now profess.

Yet while the world has moved beyond economic liberalism, leftover liberals still run the West. Like a post-Communist state where the old nomenklatura, having hurriedly adopted the mantle of liberal capitalists, still run the show, a great, historic revolution has occurred but the same people remain in charge, having suffered no retribution for the catastrophic mistakes their failed idealism brought in tow. A massive clear-out is long overdue: and no more absurd an illustration can be found of the immovable fatberg blocking our political future, the sheer ideological inertia preventing reform, than Britain’s failing water companies.

The failed status quo our politicians contort themselves to defend, like some ancient pillar of our constitution, was itself a bold act of political change. Thatcher’s privatisation of the national water supply was a course of action so daringly radical, so intuitively wrongheaded that only one other nation on earth, Pinochet’s Chile, took the same path. As in so many other aspects of national life, Britain carried out a reckless experiment on itself which failed. Like so much else of Westminster’s tinkering with a country which in retrospect seems to have functioned perfectly well, the failure was so disastrous that the error cannot be admitted, let alone rectified.

The results fulfilled none of the stated aims of privatisation: competition among providers did not lower costs or improve services, as instead the spoils were portioned out among regional monopolies; no new infrastructure was built, as profits were extracted as dividends, with crippling new debt added on top; precious national resources, whether the public’s wealth or Britain’s famously over-abundant supply of water, were squandered. Yet if the water supply systems of every other country in the world provide insufficient comparison, we possess a control group within our own borders, studiously ignored by London commentators. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland, water remained under state control: bills are lower (in Northern Ireland, non-existent for domestic users), infrastructure is not notably worse, and taxpayers have not been saddled with extravagant debt purely to pay out dividends.

In this sense, the oft-made liberal claim that Britain urgently needs to decolonise itself may be correct, though not in the way its adherents think. Exploiting a country’s resources and extracting the wealth of its people solely for the purpose of enriching foreign shareholders is how you run an unloved colony, not a nation. It is striking that it is only England, the submerged nation where Westminster’s writ runs unchallenged, with no viable nationalist independence movement to force the central government to keep voters relatively happy, that has been forced to submit itself to looting by the water companies. That it is Thames Water, whose turbid assets flow past the Palace of Westminster itself, which appears closest to collapse is surely no accident: it is the richest portion of the colony that was latched onto first and most tightly, and was thus the first to be sucked dry. In Britain, just as all distances are measured from Charing Cross, dysfunction radiates out from the centre. The aim of any form of radical politics must surely be, while preserving the Union, to find a way to liberate Britain from Westminster, and from the reliably servile comprador class that scurries along its endless corridors, looking for unguarded family silver to sell.

After all, no voter would actively choose the economic model we have. But as Thames Water’s looming collapse reminds us, we are not governed according to our political desires, instead we are ruled through absolute and open disregard for the popular will. As a recent YouGov poll shows, 69% of the British public, including 66% of Conservative voters, believe the water supply should be run as a public utility, while just 8% believe that things should remain as they are. Like renationalising the railways, a policy which 67% support, bringing water back into public ownership would be wildly popular, yet is viewed with as much distaste by our ruling caste as public hanging (which would, it must be said, also be fairly popular). Yet as the urgent attempt to find some last-ditch alternative to renationalisation shows, both parties still cower in fear from granting the electorate its desires. Viewed objectively, the function of Westminster politicians is not to deliver the policies that voters want, but to frustrate them. A Britain that reflected the majority politics, both Right and Left, of its people, would be a very different and far more liveable country: this should be the postliberal horizon.

Even as British postliberals flirt with a poorly-defined national conservatism, it is the Labour Left pushing tangible improvements to the common good, even if its experimental progressivism makes it an enemy in the cultural sphere. If the Conservatives are unable to conserve anything of value, Labour may at least, through recalibrating the nation’s economy around the now-atrophied power of the state, achieve conservative ends. Family life would be better served by increasing pay, by building houses, and by widening access to childcare than by mocking the latest progressive culture war innovation on Twitter. On home ownership, fearful of the state they were elected to manage, conservative intellectuals provide timid, stuttering suggestions, tinkering at the edges of policy: what if we built nicer-looking houses, or devised a complicated system of street votes so local planning committees wouldn’t object to new development? Instead, Labour proposes to cut this self-imposed Gordian knot through the simple expedient of the state buying land cheaply, relaxing planning restrictions and building houses, just as a Conservative party that knew how to win elections used to do.

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Effectively a conservative variant of socialism, postliberalism has always struggled to reconcile the two halves of its worldview: the post-industrial working class is, in truth, significantly less socially conservative than the tweedy intellectuals professing to speak for them. Equally, the Left’s suspicion that postliberals will always be distracted from pursuing the economics of the common good by shallow nods at social conservatism is often more accurate than we would prefer to think. Yet by fundamentally rejecting the narrow parameters of the liberal worldview, it is afforded a welcome degree of detachment from the rounds of partisan politics: with no particular loyalty to either viable party, postliberals can flit between whichever promises to implement the greater part of its ideal programme. Yet while its synthesis of economic radicalism and social conservatism may double the chance of at least some of its demands being implemented by one of the two Westminster factions, it also offers twice the opportunity for disappointment.

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A few years ago, I declared that the Conservative party represented the best hope for postliberal governance: back in 2021, it really did seem that “the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged”, a party “already making postliberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial North”, so that “whether we like it or not, postliberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did 40 years ago”. As events proved, I was profoundly mistaken.

Since 2019, postliberal intellectuals have been given to loudly claiming that it is easier for the Right to move Left on economics than for the Left to move Right on culture: but the Conservative party’s public suicide has dramatically revealed the flaw at the heart of this analysis. Just because a particular course of action is the easiest to follow, the one that will be most warmly rewarded by voters, does not mean that our politicians will do it, even in our notional democracy. Through its destructive decades-long love affair with economic liberalism, the Conservative party entirely burned through the foundations of conservatism, rooting up its future voting base like noxious weeds. Sometimes the dead hand of ideology is just too strong, strangling even the most basic instinct for self-preservation as it pulls a party, and a nation into the grave.

The Conservative party can be safely written off for now as a spent force: the current overriding danger is that Labour will fail in turn, and for the same reasons: its leadership also still in thrall to the same dead ideology and the tiny minority of voters who still adhere to it. If anything can rival the uselessness of a Conservative party that conserves nothing, it is a Labour party too timid on the economy to save Britain from its downward, perhaps terminal spiral.

A Labour party already watering down its most ambitious economic pledges serves no purpose at all: the party’s sole appeal is its willingness to harness the power of the state to productive ends. Labour’s cautious retreat from offering free childcare, its delicate dance to avoid renationalising rail and energy at the time of greatest political opportunity in decades does not bode well for Starmer’s prospects as a bold reformer. Who is he trying to win over? When even the Times, the nation’s arbiter of boring status quo centrism, can run leaders lambasting the failure of privatised water, when, even the Reform party can offer a more convincing path towards renationalisation than Labour, something is going terribly wrong with Starmer’s vision. The political stars have aligned, the nation is in agreement: for him to squander this opportunity casts doubt on Starmer’s fitness for leadership, and on the idea of Labour providing a meaningful alternative to Tory dysfunction at all. As Labour’s exiled king Jeremy Corbyn observes with all the piercing clarity of the simple-minded, “It’s really not that complicated: stop bailing out private companies and bring our water into public ownership instead.”

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Indeed, through bringing about the wave of renationalisation voters from both parties desire, a Corbyn government in 2019 would perhaps have achieved a greater postliberal synthesis than the futile Johnson show delivered. A Corbyn government that invested in state capacity a whole parliament ago may perhaps have arrested the decline sooner, and stolen a march on the new world economic consensus. Through ramping up state direction of the economy to compete in a world whose economic order has been reshaped by China, and by the looming need to replace fossil fuels and the infrastructure grid underwriting modern life which depends on them, the rest of the world is already moving towards something approaching war economies: only Britain remains the last holdout, the unchanging hermit kingdom of extractive, borderless neoliberalism.

No other developed country would permit its wealth and resources to be looted by foreign investors, or its utilities to be run by foreign states. Britain’s future is not bright: as the global situation deteriorates, the decisions made in the next few parliaments may be all that staves off collapse. Like Chekhov’s gun, in Britain the power of the state is an unused weapon waiting to be wielded: the only question is who will seize it first, and to what ends. With the Conservatives eliminated as an option by their own record of governance, it is the decisions made now by Labour that will determine the nation’s course in the decades to come.

We might wish Labour were led by someone bolder, but for now Starmer is there all there is: his stance on how to handle Thames Water is thus the first great test of our inevitable government-in-waiting. The pressure from the Labour Left to commit the party to renationalising water should therefore be actively supported by those of our political tribe: not only is it desirable in itself, and supported by the vast majority of voters, but it will finally mark the symbolic death of Britain’s old, failed order. And if Labour should fail too, following the Conservatives into political oblivion, at least then may come the time of real politics. Like the shifting establishment stance towards globalisation, when the change comes, it will be swift and total: in the coming waves of crisis lie political opportunities just waiting to be seized.

What images define the British countryside in 2023? Closed pubs; a new estate of boxy, pricey houses; the packed waiting room at the one doctor’s surgery within 20 miles; farmers at kitchen tables reading trolling tweets by vegans and rewilders; polluted rivers; empty beer cans beside bus stops where the bus now longer stops; the red-brick cottage which working people once rented, but which has now been turned into an Airbnb; the Ocado van delivering supplies to the second-homers; and, if you look closely, the shadowy figures breaking into farmyards before roaring off into the night in a Merc Sprinter van.

Crime in the countryside often sounds like a bit of a laugh: too much underage cider with Rosie down The Crown, or ruddy-faced rogues off The Archers rustling a few sheep. But there’s a truth behind the clichés. Livestock theft has always been a problem in the sticks, although it isn’t just rural rascals nicking cows and sheep these days — it’s organised crime. An estimated £2.4 million worth of livestock was stolen in 2021, and this figure is increasing as the cost-of-living crisis bites, with the stolen animals going to back-street butchers. It is believed that the meat is then sold door to door by criminals posing as ethical organic meat suppliers.

Then there is the killing of sheep by pet-illiterate pandemic dog buyers (cost to farmers: £1.5 million in 2021), industrial fly-tipping, trespassing, fuel siphoning, and the nicking of £2.6 million worth of Land Rover Defenders for parts in 2021. There’s the hare coursing, the “liberation” of lambs by vegan activists, and the theft of farm quad bikes, tractors, machinery and technical equipment by roving overseas gangs. Especially sought-after are the pricey Global Positioning Units (GPS) on modern tractors and combine harvesters, which can cost up to £20,000 each.

There has long been a black market in agricultural kit destined for Eastern Europe, but according to the National Rural Crime Unit (NRCU), the main outlet for the burgled goods is now Russia. Western sanctions following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have left the Russian bread-basket thirsty for stolen farm machinery. The National Farmers Union, the main rural insurer, believes that the cost of GPS theft doubled to more than £500,000 in the first four months of 2023, compared with the same period last year. While gangs have targeted the arable farms of eastern England for several years, they now operate up and down the country; in the last week of May, GPS units were stolen from farms from Wiltshire up to the Scottish Borders. In many instances, the farms were “cased” or surveilled by drones.

The problem is only getting worse. In the decade up to 2021, crime rates rose nearly three times faster in rural towns and villages across England and Wales than in the rest of the country. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, the cost of rural crime rose 40%. And yet, despite all this, the Countryside Alliance Rural Survey for Wales reported in February that 56% of respondents believed that the police were failing to take countryside crime seriously.

All of which hints at the real crime perpetrated on the countryside: it’s been abandoned. For what seems like forever, the shires have belonged to the Conservative Party, but the crime wave and the endless neglect are offering opposition parties sniffs of victory. The Green Party is surging; in the May local elections, the Greens even won Mid Suffolk district council from the Conservatives, taking 24 of the 34 seats and securing their first ever majority-held council in the UK. Overall, the Greens doubled their councillors nationally from 240 to 481. In the Sussex market town of Lewes, the Tories, once the largest party, were wiped off the electoral map.

Even Labour, usually as popular in the countryside as foot-and-mouth disease, feels victory in the air. Responding to the Countryside Alliance’s survey on rural crime, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “These figures show just how concerned people are about crime, including in rural communities across the country.” She went on to make her pitch in true-blue, law-and-order political territory: “Labour is the party of law and order. The next Labour government will deliver a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, with 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs, and proper action to tackle antisocial behaviour.”

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More coppers in the countryside? That’s exactly what rural communities want to hear. At the Future Countryside Conference last week, Labour peer Peter Mandelson set out his party’s rural stall with some gusto, reminding the audience that, despite lacklustre rural returns in recent years, the Labour Party had historically taken a decidedly pro-countryside approach. The “countryside was, is and will be a great Labour cause”, he said. He also warned the progressive wing of his party against “picking a fight” with rural people and their traditions, before taking aim at the Conservatives’ rural record in government for the past 13 years, declaring that he saw “a Conservative party that has taken rural Britain for granted” and that country people are “feeling let down and angry”.

Mandy, nobody’s fool, is sensitive to rural discontent. He was, as a player in Tony Blair’s government, on the wrong side of the 2002 Liberty and Livelihood march, the biggest rural demonstration ever. But he’s correct to note that this rebellious Us (the country people) vs. Them (the townies) mentality is boiling over once again. I’ve spent the last fortnight travelling around the West Country, including visiting the agricultural Three Counties Show at Malvern, where one young woman farmer said to me: “If the fucking crime is what pronoun to use, then they [city types] need a fucking sense of priorities.” She then went on to list various Tory deficiencies regarding the countryside, from “confusion” on agricultural policies to failure to “deliver anything from Brexit”.

She, like many other farmers, won’t be voting Conservative at the next election. That number has plunged since 2020, according to a December 2022 survey by Farmer’s Weekly. Just 42% said they would vote Conservative in a general election, down from 71% in 2020. The countryside is seeing red. Mandelson is hoping it will vote red. That might happen here and there; more likely, I suspect, is that at the next election, the countryside will stick two fingers up at the lot of them at the next election. 

One of the UK’s poultry producers’ associations reported last autumn that between bird flu and persistently low margins, up to a third of its members either reduced production or closed down altogether. One former egg farm near me now rents storage units; another has been on the market for months, unable to find a buyer. As a result, there aren’t enough eggs to stock the shelves — and supermarkets are importing them from Italy. “So what?” you might ask. This is the market at work. But around this time three years ago, egg politics looked for a moment as though they might be on a different course.

Covid lockdowns scrambled many of the food supply chains we’d grown accustomed to — and as the country reeled, it seemed briefly as though more local networks might begin to re-emerge. (This was the point we first got our birds, albeit less with profit in mind than our own kitchen.) On my street, neighbours with back-garden poultry did a roaring trade.

Early 2020 brought a wider sense, too, that Covid might signal the end for free-trade absolutism more generally, and prompt a return to more bounded and local networks. But three years on, although my street still has several poultry-keepers, most have reverted to buying eggs from the shops. The turn away from free trade, if the Italian egg suppliers are anything to go by, has yet to occur.

Why, then, do we seem unable to imagine any other way of doing things? This seemingly inexorable drift back to the impersonal market epitomises Britain’s approach to food. This system, which we embraced in earnest nearly two centuries ago, maps a belief in the impersonal logic of “the market” onto a terrain whose most important attributes are simply not visible to market logic. And egg politics shows, in microcosm, just how poorly this ideology meshes with food production — to the extent that it now threatens our capacity to produce food at all.

Our trajectory toward the current situation was set out by Karl Polanyi, in the influential 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Humans, Polanyi argues, have always bought, sold, and exchanged things. But for the most part, across time and cultures, the market has been ordered to the needs of social institutions, and regulated accordingly. What’s unique about the modern world, he suggests, is that it works the other way round: our social institutions are ordered to the market.

For Polanyi, it was the enclosure of the commons that set England on this trajectory, by displacing England’s subsistence peasants, and creating the industrial proletariat, who were obliged to work for a wage. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin for that older, landowning order was the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws: tariffs that aimed to protect domestic grain prices from the influence of cheaper foreign imports, and were vigorously opposed by the mercantile class and industrial proletariat.

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It was, in effect, a contest between Britain’s food producers and an emerging population of food consumers. And in 1846, the food producers lost their protection from competition. The change accelerated Britain’s shift from a farming-first to an industrial economy, and set agriculture — once the largest employer in England — on the trajectory it’s followed ever since: dwindling opportunities for youth, relentless demands for efficiency, and with these a bitter tension between land stewardship, and market-driven pressure to lower standards. The historian Robert Ensor writes that after repeal, “the only chance for any young or enterprising person on the countryside was to get out of it”. Many smaller farmers gave up, and emigrated to America.

As populations urbanised, this also pushed Britons to abandon domestic poultry-keeping — or rather, to centralise it. Today, most egg farming (where it survives at all) is highly industrialised, with 48% of British birds in battery cages. Despite more recent regulations banning the cruellest intensive farming practices, bird welfare often suffers. And their waste, though an excellent nutrient for our domestic veg beds, is a major source of river pollution at scale.

Perhaps the gains in efficiency warrant the loss of chicken-keeping culture. But chicken centralisation also illustrates how, when market pressures collide with food production, it’s not so much that costs are driven down. Rather, they’re externalised into areas that don’t appear on the balance sheet, such as animal cruelty, river pollution, distressed producers — or, more subtly, disappearing cultures.

We’re middle-class chicken hobbyists, not farmers, but even amateur poultry-keeping has left me wondering what else is lost in cultural terms when chickens are centralised, from realism about animal behaviour, to poultry-based metaphors — or seasonal rituals. Absent modern, artificial housing conditions, many hens stop laying over the winter. If your birds are free-range, when they start again in the spring, you have to figure out where they’re hiding their eggs. When I learned this, it left me wondering whether this insight survives for most modern families only in the other egg glut we’re eating our way through: the chocolate one. Modern chocolate was, after all, invented the year after the Corn Laws were repealed. So Britain’s urbanisation began in earnest just as chocolate became a mass-market treat. Did a trace of the older form of “spring egg hunt” —  for real eggs — urbanise, too, in chocolate form, among now-henless households?

The nineteenth-century Tories were ambivalent about such losses: the Corn Law debate split the Tory Party down the middle, and eventually forced Robert Peel’s resignation as Prime Minister. But despite their residual association in the public mind with the interests of landowners, today’s Tory Party seems closer in spirit to the old Whigs: mercantilist to the core, and deeply reluctant to look too closely at how well “markets” manage the complex mesh of social, environmental and economic issues bound up in domestic food production.

When, for example, Johnson struck a “free trade deal” with Australia around two years ago, it was hailed as a benefit of Brexit. At the time, the National Farmers’ Union warned that the proposed deal would be disastrous for British farmers; Johnson shrugged it off with a merrily Whiggish nod to market ideology, declaring: “This is a country that grew successful and prosperous on free trade, on exporting around the world.”

Last year, British farmers warned again that, applied to farming, these free-market policies are “sleepwalking” Britain into a food crisis. In January, shop shelves across the country stood empty. The government shrugged, this time blaming supermarkets for “market failure”. More recently, food tsar Henry Dimbleby quit his post, condemning ministers’s “ultra-free-market ideology” as a threat to Britain’s food security.

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But the ideology seems as tenacious as ever, and our leaders as convinced at ever that where the dictates of the market require that something be dissolved — even if that turns out to be Britain’s capacity to produce eggs at all — then it will be dissolved. We don’t need poultry producers in Britain. The market will provide: we’ll just import eggs.

But this is premised on a belief that nothing can stand in the way of international trade, now or in the future. And even leaving aside energy prices, just based on news headlines over the last 20 years, this strikes me as — to put it mildly — a risky bet. What if we grind domestic food security to nothing in the name of the “free market”, only for the wheels to come off global trade again?

And yet nor am I sure that this is just a matter of ideology-blinded mercantilist leaders. For all proposed solutions to food security — whether free-market ones from the Right, or regulatory or veganism-based ones from the Left — share the same implicit certainty that whatever the solution is, it will still involve centralisation. And yet we could surely make a dent in the nested (sorry) poultry problems of food security, pricing, pollution, welfare, and carbon-intensive supply chains — not to mention improve domestic food waste management — by going the opposite way, toward chicken decentralisation.

Yes, some people live in apartments. But 87% of British homes have a back garden. And regulations on intensive poultry farming permit an insane density of birds — 17 hens per square metre — meaning even a tiny back garden could easily keep a few hens in many times this space, while enabling the recycling of kitchen scraps and supplying the garden with high-quality fertiliser.

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So why aren’t we doing this? I don’t think it’s just that Tories are wicked mercantilists, or that the farmers are almost gone already. The only explanation I can see is simple, and dispiriting: that however excited some got in 2020 about re-localising and de-marketising food production, the vast majority of people just don’t want to.

The fault, in truth, lies with all of us: for market “efficiency” and “convenience” isn’t just about price and choice. It’s also about lack of obligation. As I’ve learned when buying (and, occasionally, selling) eggs among neighbours, the moment you make trade more local — which is to say, more personal — you swiftly become caught in additional layers of obligation, whether to the birds that depend on you for food and safety, or to the neighbours whose subsistence is now (in however tiny a way) more bound up in yours.

And while communitarians often idealise such networks, we’ve grown accustomed to being able to buy eggs without this layer of complexity. No one who views taking the neighbour’s bin round as a huge favour will be keen on re-creating this complexity unless they absolutely have to. Most are still more than happy to look away from the uncounted welfare, ecological and food-security costs of this freedom from obligation. And I suspect it’s this, more than anything, that explains our Titanic-like drift toward the iceberg of food supply disaster.

Changing course would not just mean kicking out the Tories, or fiddling with regulations, embracing synthetic foods, or even re-building forgotten practices in domestic food production. It would mean re-evaluating every basic assumption about how we relate to one another, and why. The food crisis will have to get a great deal more severe — and fresh eggs a great deal more expensive than mass-produced chocolate ones — before many are willing to do that.

Music hall grew out of pubs in the mid-19th century and reached its peak in the 1890s, the most popular form of entertainment in the country. It provided a full evening’s show of short unrelated acts, including singers, comics, acrobats, jugglers, dancers, eccentric dancers, trick cyclists, drag performers, animal acts, and any permutations of the above. It was like Britain’s Got Talent. With talent.

Older viewers may also remember The Good Old Days, a stalwart of BBC television for 30 years, up to 1983, with contemporary TV stars reviving old material in front of an audience dressed up in Edwardian outfits. That was a heavily sanitised version. The original halls were raucous, boozy venues, with crowds who weren’t reticent in expressing their opinion of the performers verbally and even physically. These stages were no place for the faint-hearted. Nor for the understated: there was no amplification to help in projecting across the pit-band, through a dense fog of pipe and cigar smoke, to a couple of thousand drunken patrons. Towards the back of the hall, prostitutes plied — and sometimes practised — their trade. And then, right at the back, was the bar, from where the waiters emerged to provide table service, sometimes with the bottles chained to the trays, to prevent them being seized and used as weapons. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, all this met with extreme disfavour in polite society. It was coarse, vulgar and degrading. First, the entertainment onstage was disgraceful. When the can-can arrived from Paris in the late 1860s, it was so scandalous that the Alhambra in Leicester Square and the Highbury Barn in North London both had their licences suspended for staging what The Times called “this daring outrage on public decency”.

The behaviour offstage was equally reprehensible. In 1894 the London County Council (LCC) insisted that screens be erected at the back of the hall in the Empire in Leicester Square so that decent-minded punters might be shielded from the prostitution. That didn’t work, though; on the first night, the screens were torn down by a group of young hearties, led by a Sandhurst cadet. “Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!” declared Winston Churchill (for it was he), in what he described as his “maiden speech”.

The fact that it was the Empire that was being targeted by moral campaigners was revealing. There were working-class halls in the East End of London where immorality, and even obscenity, was far more prevalent, but the great fear was that the corruption was seeping out, infecting those places frequented by wealthy young men — in the same way that, a century later, the moral panic over gangsta rap was prompted by its spread beyond the black ghettos where it had originated.

It wasn’t just the Right-wing moralists who objected to the music hall. In 1907 the LCC voted to ban from London stages the tableau vivant. This was an act in which a woman wearing a sheer, close-fit bodystocking (“so nearly naked that you can’t tell the difference”, according to the papers) struck poses based on classical statues. And it was noticeable that most of those voting for the ban were sober-minded Liberals, while all but two of the 43 who voted against were fun-loving Conservatives.

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Liberals objected to music hall partly on moral grounds and partly on cultural: all that drinking didn’t go down well with the nonconformist rank and file, who had a leaning towards teetotalism. But there were also political problems. Particularly suspect was the intense patriotism of the halls, shading into jingoism. Indeed the word “jingoism” itself came from music hall, from a bellicose song performed by the Great MacDermott in 1878, when conflict with Russia seemed imminent: “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!”

The Boer War brought that tendency to the fore. The message coming from the stage was encapsulated in the song “Stand by Your Country, Stand by Your Queen”, while the Boers were promised there’d be “A Hot Time in the Transvaal Tonight”. Decent-minded folk were quick to condemn politicians who exploited such “music-hall jingoism”, and chief among the alleged offenders was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Formerly on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, now serving under a Conservative prime minister, he was a populist figure for whom politics was a question of drawing dividing lines. “A seat lost to the government is a seat won by the Boers,” he declared during the Khaki Election of 1900.

Three years later, Chamberlain left the Cabinet to campaign for the policy of imposing tariffs on goods imported into the Empire — imperial preference, as it was called, one of the regular occasions on which the Conservatives have torn themselves apart over the question of free trade. In that campaign, he allocated a substantial budget to getting the issue raised in music halls and related arenas. It was said that at the Christmas of 1903, more than 200 pantomimes featured a pro-tariff song such as “The John Bull Store” and “Good Old Joe”, the majority of them paid for by Chamberlain. He was the first British politician to recognise the power of popular culture, and his patriotic arguments — as broad-brush as any comic of the time — got a good reception. Possibly, though, he was too far ahead of the game: barely half of adult males had the vote, and the predominantly working-class audiences in the halls were disproportionately disenfranchised.

They remained, though, stubbornly patriotic. And stubbornly attached to the Tory cause. There were songs that grudgingly gave Asquith and Lloyd George credit for introducing pensions, but the latter’s supposed weakening of ale during the First World War couldn’t be countenanced. “At the brewery, there’s nothing doing; all the water works are brewing Lloyd George’s Beer,” sang Ernie Mayne mournfully, and he concluded: “The worst thing that ever happened in this war is Lloyd George’s Beer.” Come the National Government of the early Thirties, when ex-Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald fronted a Tory-led coalition, it was Stanley Holloway, king of the music-hall monologue, who provided the most vocal endorsement: “No government ever was perfect, but the National’s the best in the land, so let them as thinks they’d do better, stop grousing and lend them a hand.”

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By then, though, the music hall was on its last legs. The rise of cinema, radio and paperback fiction had already dismantled its cultural dominance, and television and rock ‘n’ roll were shortly to deliver the final blow. Though it survived in the working men’s clubs, those were far from the centres of media power and consequently attracted little attention.

Beyond that, the cultural memory began to fragment. Yet there were occasional sightings, even in the world of politics, and especially in the Labour Party. When James Callaghan, born in 1912, wanted to address media speculation about an early election in the autumn of 1978, he choose to do so by singing Vesta Victoria’s music-hall classic “Waiting at the Church” to the TUC Congress. (He misattributed it to Marie Lloyd, whose song “A Little of What You Fancy” had been used by Harold Macmillan 20 years earlier to sell the introduction of Premium Bonds.)

And when Michael Foot, born in 1913, wanted to mock the Conservative government in 1980, he told a long, rambling story about visiting the Palace Theatre of Varieties in Plymouth as a child. One of his favourite acts, he said, was a stage magician, who would take a watch from an audience member, “enfold it in a beautiful red handkerchief, place it on the table in front of us, take out his mallet, hit the watch and smash it to smithereens”. Then a look of utter bewilderment would descend on his face, as he was obliged to admit: “I am very sorry. I have forgotten the rest of the trick.” And this, Foot suggested, was precisely the same look that could be seen on the face of Keith Joseph, the Industry Secretary, as he surveyed the wreckage of the British economy in the midst of the first Thatcherite recession.

Then the Labour Party decided to skip a generation, and elected as leader Neil Kinnock, an honorary member, and sometime Vice President, of the Gene Vincent Appreciation Society. As in real life, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to have displaced music hall. In both cases, though, that wasn’t the whole story. “Bryan [Ferry] and I always joked about the fact that rock and roll was basically music hall,” said Andy Mackay of glam-rock group Roxy Music, and that trio of figures with whom we started suggest that the same is true of politics.

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The ability to play a crowd at a rally, or in the bearpit that used to be the Labour conference, has become much less important, but the House of Commons remains a tough gig. “Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire,” observed John Major. And even though he himself wasn’t particularly good at PMQs, nor at delivering big speeches, it was striking that his finest moment came in the 1992 general election; standing on a soapbox in town squares and market-places, facing down hostile crowds and demonstrators, he looked surprisingly at home. “I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business,” he wrote in his (rather good) history of the music hall.

His successor, Tony Blair — born more than four decades after the previous Labour Prime Minister — was the grandson of Charles Parsons, better known as Jimmy Lynton and described in the press as a “comedian, illusionist, conjuror, thought-reader, lightning cartoonist, paper-tearer and anything else common to the music hall”. Blair’s middle names, Charles Lynton, honour his memory, though his own performing career was less impressive, singing in a band named Ugly Rumours while a student at Oxford. “We were rather tragic, and had precisely zero presence on stage,” remembered the future music journalist Mark Ellen, who played bass. As a politician, on the other hand, Blair could play the role of entertainer better than any of his contemporaries, especially in the pre-Iraq years, when he could deliver jokes and put-downs like a pro. And no one was better at wrapping himself in the Union Jack.

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But the one who really seemed in touch with his roots was Ken Livingstone, whose mother had been a dancer with a trio called the Kenleigh Sisters (maybe his name pays tribute, as well). When Livingstone became leader of the Greater London Council in 1981, he was cast as the pantomime villain of politics. “The IRA-loving, poof-loving, Marxist leader of the GLC” (to use the words of the Sunday Express) was, said The Sun, “the most odious man in Britain”. But he rode out the barracking like a trouper and re-emerged with a new act as cheeky cockney chappie, thumbing his nose at the government. In this role, he became, said the Daily Mail, through gritted teeth: “The man running rings round Maggie.”

Much of his new-found popularity in the mid-Eighties was achieved through a use of popular culture that echoed Joe Chamberlain. Livingstone’s GLC staged a long string of concerts, festivals and comedy gigs, attracting huge crowds, and then slipping in the political messages amid the entertainment. This time, it wasn’t even his campaign funds footing the bill, but the public purse.

And, like Joe, he found himself feted in song. “I know one thing,” declared Kevin Rowland on a Dexys Midnight Runners track; “Ken Livingstone’s a folk hero.” Or, as Kate Bush sang: “Ken is the man we all need, Ken is the leader of the GLC.” Admittedly, that was tongue-in-cheek, recorded for an episode of The Comic Strip, but still: he got namechecked by Kate Bush. When The Smiths played a GLC show, he posed for a publicity photo with Morrissey, an artist greatly indebted to music hall. And when Billy Bragg and Paul Weller toured under the banner of Red Wedge to campaign for Labour, the only politician allowed to travel on the musicians’ coach was Livingstone. His mum would’ve been proud. Not of his politics, though: she was a Tory, like so much of the music hall.

Recollections of an earlier Conservative government’s failed effort to take on the unions are a bit foggier, however. Yet the failure of Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act 1971 might provide some caution to the Conservative’s anti-union bullishness. They might also set out an alternative path to Keir Starmer’s non-committal timidity towards industrial action.

On 14 June 1970, the reigning World Cup champions England squandered a 2-0 lead over West Germany to lose 3-2 in extra time. Four days later, the Labour Party saw its 98-seat majority vanish before its eyes. For both England and Labour, the glow of their 1966 victories had finally been extinguished.

The Labour prime minister Harold Wilson spent the following day packing away his personal belongings in 10 Downing Street. His wife Mary described the exit as “barbarous”. Crowds had gathered outside Downing Street shouting “Out! Out! Out!”, but Wilson could not go immediately to Buckingham Palace to resign because the Queen was enjoying a day at Ascot. To drown out the jeers, Wilson played The Seekers’ “The Carnival Is Over” again and again on his record player.

When the new Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, entered Downing Street, he had two overriding missions. One was to bring Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC); the other was to crush the trade unions. The picture of trade union strength in 1970 was quite different from today. About half of British workers were in unions, compared to under a quarter now. In 1970, nearly 11 million working days in Britain were lost to strikes, more than any time since the General Strike of 1926. In contrast, less than a quarter of a million days were lost to strikes in 2019, the final full year of data before the pandemic.

Nor were those in the past solely aimed at Conservative government; strike action plagued. The final years of Wilson’s reign. The vast majority of these strikes were “unofficial” — that is to say, they were called without a ballot of members. Instead, a show of hands at a union meeting or the branch executive committee would be used as the mandate for a walk out.

The Employment Secretary Barbara Castle had tried to curb these actions. A trade unionist herself, Castle also wanted to update trade union rights, which were still relying on legal protections passed in 1906. Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, was intended to provide a charter of rights for unions, while also imposing certain legal responsibilities. When she presented the proposals in a secret meeting to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), however, she was met with stony silence. She later compared her efforts to win support for her reforms as “like trying to win the votes of undertakers for a recipe for immortality”.

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Once in office, Edward Heath was convinced that he could achieve what Labour failed to do. He would not only propose many of the punitive provisions outlined in In Place of Strife, but he would go further. He would establish a National Industrial Relations Court, which would have the power to grant injunctions to block strikes deemed to be injurious. It also banned the closed union shop, which had been a key Labour Party conviction (later abandoned by the Labour Party to align with European law, which forbids them).

When the Industrial Relations Bill was announced to the House of Commons in December 1970, Heath sat on the frontbenches grinning like “a Cheshire cat on a hot tin roof”, as Simon Jenkins put it. Heath thought he had forced the Labour Party into a corner. Labour would be forced either to repudiate its previous reforms and look hypocritical, or to oppose the legislation and look like it was in the pocket of the unions.

Heath’s clever scheme would backfire massively. The first thing Heath had not properly anticipated was both the skill and the scale of the opposition to the bill. It took seven months for the Government to push the bill through Parliament. In that time, it was met by ferocious resistance from Labour MPs, with the normally avuncular Willie Whitelaw being denounced as a “fascist” by Labour MPs in the House of Commons. Union activists took to the streets in enormous displays of solidarity.

To the surprise of many, Harold Wilson asked Barbara Castle to lead the charge against Heath’s trade union bill. While constantly subject to the charge of hypocrisy, Castle outlined the differences between her failed proposals and the Conservatives’. To add credibility to her arguments, Harold Wilson brought Michael Foot — doyen of the party’s Left — onto the frontbenches. Ever since his election in 1945, Foot had studiously avoided frontbench work, preferring to see himself as a principled outsider. When Foot first appeared at the despatch box, one journalist wrote in amazement: “It was as if Mary Whitehouse had turned up in the cast of Oh, Calcutta!”

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The second miscalculation Heath had made was about the Labour Party’s relationship with the unions. Rather than drive a wedge, the Industrial Relations Bill helped to reunify the Labour Party and the unions, as they vowed to work together to oppose the legislation. In February 1971, the Labour Liaison Committee was formed, with six members each from the Shadow Cabinet, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), and the TUC. It would become a crucial policy arm for the Labour Party during those years in opposition.

Out of the Liaison Committee emerged the Social Contract — a “great compact”, as Wilson called it — between the Labour Party and the unions. Labour vowed that it would repeal the Industrial Relation Act in the first session of the new Parliament. It would accompany this repeal with a raft of social welfare legislation and redistribution. Unions, in turn, would work to keep down wage demands through voluntary wage restraint.

In contrast, Heath continued to promote the image that he was in a great battle against the unions. This was his third miscalculation. Once he finally passed the Industrial Relations Act in June 1971, Heath had in effect taken ownership for subsequent industrial strife. He had passed a bill which was meant to end strikes, yet strikes only increased after the bill’s passage. In 1972, there were nearly 24 million working days lost to strike action, unseen since the General Strike.

Heath’s National Industrial Relations Court began imprisoning trade unionists who had gone on strike, contrary to the court’s injunctions. These arrests, like the famous Pentonville Five case, only provoked a further storm of industrial fury and unrest. In December 1970, when the legislation was first proposed, Heath had anticipated some backlash. “It is the storm before the calm,” he warned. But, he vowed: “Your government will not bow before the storm.”

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Yet, as Heath’s government trundled on, the storm got worse. The oil price spike in 1973, combined with domestic industrial unrest in the energy sector, led to the government imposing a highly unpopular three-day week and the rationing of electricity usage. The Government was struggling to survive, and the whiff of an early election hung in the air.

In a December 1973 meeting of the Liaison Committee, it was agreed that even if the Government tried to frame an upcoming general election as a battle between Britain and the unions, Labour must stand by the unions. Labour’s January 1974 party political broadcast emphasised its productive relationship with the unions, where they would be “working together” in the “national interest”, not seeking to prolong the fight.

The Labour Party saw an opportunity to use its union connections for its own political benefit. The Social Contract, agreed by the Liaison Committee, became a clever political ploy for Wilson. He was able to promote the image that he and the unions were equals and on the kinds of terms that could forge an agreement. A vote for Labour in the February 1974 election became a vote to end the industrial strife by supporting the party that had a good working relationship with the unions. On 4 March 1974, Harold Wilson strolled through the steps of Downing Street once more.

While the strength of the trade union movement today is not what it was in the Seventies, there are important lessons for Sunak and Starmer. First, for Sunak: Heath overplayed his hand. He thought he could “take on” the unions and promised that his legislation would do just that. He was caught off-guard by the strength of the solidarity of the union movement and its ability to adapt. Rather than quell industrial strife, he only provoked more conflict.

The second lesson, for Starmer, is that Wilson refused to play into Tory hands. He knew that Labour’s relationship with the unions was a sensitive topic, particularly after In Place of Strife. Yet rather than think he could make political gains by bashing the unions and trying to “out-Heath Heath”, he opted for a co-operative relationship with the union leadership. The Liaison Committee between the party and unions proved to be a great success, helping to develop a set of policy proposals and a working relationship that would stabilise Wilson’s tenure. In the February 1974 election, Wilson could credibly argue he had the relationship with the unions that could settle the industrial dispute.

Rather than see unions as the embarrassing relative at the party, a proper working relationship of mutual respect, support, and solidarity might just be the winning formula for Labour — especially when contrasted with Tory division and disarray. There are already some signs that Labour is adopting this approach, with recent communications condemning the Conservatives for threatening to fire striking nurses.

Sunak, on the other hand, seems to be repeating Heath’s mistakes. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill will not end industrial disruption, but in claiming that it will, Sunak is setting himself up for failure. If Sunak repeats Heath’s famous question of 1974, “Who governs?”, the answer after the next general election may well not be him.

“New Year should be a time of optimism and excitement,” he said. “Yet I know many of you look ahead to 2023 with apprehension.” Sunak cheerily called for a rejection of pessimism and fatalism, and refused to limit aspirations. Narrated like an adult reading a storybook to a child before bed, the speech’s sunny tone felt misjudged. And delivered with such cloying earnestness and saccharine enthusiasm, it had the subtlety and grace of a clown in a morgue.

Optimism is a powerful, unifying force, and Sunak is right to identify it as an important political goal. But there was something missing in his message — a reason to feel optimistic. Platitudes don’t pay for heating bills or get you seen by a GP faster — people need concrete, tangible reasons to believe that things are getting better, or at the very least, will do soon. The future of Sunak’s party depends on it.

When people are scared, they want realism — they to be levelled with. “I don’t expect you to like my message, but I hope you will understand and agree with my justifications for it,” he could have said. But the speech contained no comprehensive policy shift — no reason for people to buy-in to changes that might improve their lives with commitment and patience. It was just more of the same motherhood and apple pie that has been promised before, but delivered in an even more cheerful manner.

An ill mood grips the country, not just because of frustration at temporary factors like strike disruption or winter pressures on health services — our political economy is convulsing under chronic polycrisis. The annual NHS winter struggle began last summer, and continues to metastasise through record A&E delays, growing waiting lists and an overstretched ambulance service. Our sea border is, in practice, an open door with a criminal gang empire attached. Inflation stands at a 40-year high. Every train journey now requires strike planning. Nothing seems to be working. I sat with the foreign-born head of a large business recently who asked me, “Why do the British put up with so much? In France, Italy, or Spain, they would be rioting in the streets at half of this.” They are right to be perplexed by our passivity to mediocrity and relative national decline. Said to be one of our great and admirable national character strengths, the British stiff upper lip is proving our undoing.

But instead of introspection about economic growth and government competence — and where it isn’t coming from — ruling Conservative politicians are often wallowing in pessimism and giving up the fight: rising stars such as Dehenna Davison, and established parliamentarians such Sajid Javid and William Wragg have all announced their intention to stand down at the next election. And those who remain can be overheard moaning to journalists about how difficult being in charge is. Sympathy, as they say, is in the dictionary.

Tories, far from selling Sunak’s intended optimistic vision of betterment and progress to the electorate, are now shadowboxing an imagined liberal-Remain establishment that, after over a decade of holding the levers of power in No 10, prevents them from improving things. Far better to play fight with a pretend, ever-shifting and invisible enemy, than to properly look yourself in the mirror, and be haunted by the mundane reality of your own serial incompetence. It is no longer enough, or even credible in the eyes of voters, to say that Labour would be worse than this rabble.

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Government frontbenchers such as Andrew Griffith will not be taken seriously by voters if they actively celebrate the fact that the agencies they run work better under emergency army management, than they did under the previous staff of 12 years. Criticising the failure of national institutions is what oppositions do, not His Majesty’s ministers. Meanwhile, other senior Conservatives cosplay being poor in this season of squeezed incomes, as they spout tone-deaf frugality porn of ironing gift wrap from the comfort of their middle-class cottage, complete with wood-beam ceiling. At best this saves pennies, while offering the environmental benefit of perhaps a gram of sirloin steak. It is bread and circuses, without the bread, and without a circus.

Enough with this Stakhanovite Oympics of suffering in which the individuals engage in performative parsimony for the good of the nation. Instead of Tory MPs judging marginally above average-earning firefighters for using food banks, they should be asking themselves why food bank usage is surged under their watch, and why someone on an above-average income would turn to such a facility. They should be asking themselves if austerity actually achieved anything at all.

The Conservative Party has, recently, burned through as many ideologies as it has leaders, realising in turn that each are electoral dead-ends. First it gave up on Cameronite liberal conservatism. Then, under Theresa May, it gave up on austerity. Now, it has given up on optimistic Johnsonian boosterism. It’s all but given up on Brexit, electing to ignore the lack of delivery to date. And it’s in the process of giving up its one remaining ideology: power for its own sake.

It is not the leadership nor the senior parliamentarians of the party that are keeping the pilot light of conservatism lit. It is what remains of the scorched grassroots. Take the recently launched Next Gen Tories campaign group. Led by 27-year-old James Cowling, chair of the Greenwich Conservative constituency association, the group has a far more optimistic and comprehensive ideological vision for what the country needs to sail out of the economic and political doldrums than any government minister.

The group rightly identifies the modern Conservative curse — that by chasing its own electoral advantage by enfranchising and enriching elderly homeowners, it has yielded a highly unequal, low-growth society in which the young have no incentive to become conservatives themselves. This is not inevitable — as John Burn Murdoch recently put it, “Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics.” It could be a Greek tragedy: by mindlessly and greedily chasing power over policy outcomes, the vainglorious fool destroyed itself — and nobody cared.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

We should all be particularly worried by Sunak’s obsession with “innovation” — mentioned 11 times in his speech. Not because it isn’t a laudable aim, but because it is clearly his grand vision of where economic growth will come from. Certainly, we should increase capital investment tax breaks to incentivise businesses to invest in new technologies, as Sunak himself has acknowledged. But innovation in a modern economy requires not proximity to coal and iron ore and investment in new machinery; it requires great minds to meet in cities to discuss their ideas, and the larger the city the better.

This matters when the British planning system prevents the growth of cities and even the densification of already-urban areas. In a world where the basic tenets of 20th-century capitalism, such as homeownership, are not granted to the young as they mature into middle age, why bother moving to a city to better yourself? Sunak’s Tory electoral coalition of elderly homeowners have no interest in homebuilding to reduce the cost of living for their children and grandchildren. Nor do they care about innovation, now they have left the workforce.

Without growing cities, we can give up on productivity growth. And without productivity growth, we can give up on the money to solve our polycrisis society. “I pledge that I will be honest about the challenges we face. And I will take the tough but necessary decisions to ensure our great country achieves its enormous potential.” Sorry, Mr Sunak. You’ve fallen at the first hurdle.

The “housing crisis” has been with us for at least a decade, and house prices an obsession for the best part of two more. Today, the demand for housing so radically outstrips supply that young people can’t afford to buy. Rough sleeping has increased by 165% since 2010. One in ten British families now lives in overcrowded housing. Already by 2016, four in 10 British houses were reported to be below an acceptable standard. Last year, 2,300 people died while languishing on the waiting list for social housing, which, once you get through the door, is often profoundly grim.

Given the scale and disastrous social consequences of this crisis, then, it should beggar belief that the latest Tory Prime Minister has already balked at addressing it. Rishi Sunak pulled a vote this week on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, after around 50 Tory MPs tabled an amendment scrapping Liz Truss’s compulsory house-building targets.

But Sunak’s central, intractable problem is that the great leap forward in living standards was never going to continue indefinitely — because it was, in fact, a great economic Ponzi scheme, powered by an extractive approach to human populations, that is now running up against multiple structural limits. And the reigning political consensus on how to keep that scam running is itself contributing to the housing crisis, as well as worsening squalor and social conflict at the bottom of the social ladder, while leaving the Tories unable to effect change without also attacking the interests of their core electoral base.

But it’s easy to see how Britain mistook that Ponzi scheme for a permanent achievement, when you consider how radically living conditions improved from the 19th to the 20th centuries. In the 19th century, peasants displaced by the Enclosure Acts flocked to the rapidly-industrialising cities in search of work, living cheek by jowl in crowded, filthy slums, where families jammed in five or seven to a single room with no facilities for cooking or sanitation. This is the grimy, heartless, crime-ridden backdrop to Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838), a world that soon prompted concern and middle-class efforts at social reform.

Over time, this concern spurred the government to action, and in 1875, the first Bill was passed aimed at slum clearance and redevelopment. By the early 20th century some 80 towns had borrowed £4.5 million (around £432 million in today’s money) to demolish and redevelop slum areas. The American writer Jack London gives a sense of the atmosphere still prevalent in turn-of-the-century Whitechapel in The People of the Abyss (1903). Here, slum-dwellers were still living one family to a room, often sub-letting floor space to a “lodger”: the book recounts fights, pollution, grime, malnutrition and hand-to-mouth life amid a relentless pull down to the condition of degraded underclass hopelessness.

A concerted programme of slum clearances in the run-up to the two World Wars sought to tackle such misery, and replace the slums with cleaner and less crowded accommodation. In the interwar period this provided the impetus for Lloyd George’s “Homes fit for heroes” speech, and again for Beveridge’s famous report in 1942. And, for a while, as living standards continued to rise throughout the mid-century, it seemed as though the battle might be winnable.

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The workers were never ignorant

By Terry Eagleton

But there’s a hitch – and we find a clue to it in Jack London’s description of how cities work. As he describes it, the metropolis is “a huge man-killing machine”, which sucks in healthy rural workers, who are then worked to exhaustion and degradation by the squalor of urban life.

When Jack London was writing, this supply still mostly came from the English countryside. But by the 20th century England’s urbanisation was largely complete and the supply was dwindling. Shortly after, to make matters worse, the two World Wars decimated the nation’s working-age men: 880,000 soldiers died in the First World War: a full 6% of the working-age male population, and a further 384,000 soldiers in the Second World War. This posed a problem for an urban profit machine that depended on new influxes of fresh-faced, ambitious or simply poor people to jostle for opportunities on the bottom rung.

Faced with a choice between halting the engine of growth, or finding a new supply of fodder for the prosperity machine, Britain opted for the latter. After the Second World War, Commonwealth citizens were invited to Britain to rebuild the “mother country”. These new arrivals played the role formerly filled by displaced rural workers: crammed into slum-like conditions, and exploited in menial jobs. In turn, the visible difference between these new workers and those already there added a new and ugly twist to the struggle for survival in the urban meat-grinder: racism. By 1958 tensions between white working-class youth and Caribbean immigrant workers spilled over into vicious race riots in Nottingham; a few weeks later, the violence spread to Notting Hill in London with full-blown riots.

Not long after, legislation sought to put a lid on these simmering tensions. The 1965 Race Relations Act prohibited public discrimination against people on grounds of race, nationality or ethnicity. And along with rightly and justly shielding innocent people from violence and hostility, this political shift had a secondary effect: underwriting the interests of the urban growth machine, by taking a step toward globalising the working class. Now, anyone who questioned the right of immigrants to work in Britain could be condemned as motivated not by resource competition but thuggish racial animus.

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When will the Grenfell betrayal end?

By Peter Apps

Fast-forward a few decades, into a Britain stripped by Thatcher of the factory jobs that sustained a (now ineluctably more multi-ethnic) working class, and the Blairite decision to accelerate growth again via another wave of immigration prompted murmurs of working-class dissent. The New Labour dismissal of this discontent as mere atavistic racism, for example in Gordon Brown’s famous encounter with Gillian Duffy, is well-travelled Brexit territory.

But if part of the motivation for less well-off Brexiters was a desire to reduce resource competition at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile, the Conservative Party is also under pressure to keep the economy growing. And for some decades now, the main way of doing that has been “supply-side reform”, a euphemism for keeping competition at the bottom of the meat-grinder sufficiently brutal that workers don’t get too demanding.

Unsurprisingly then, notwithstanding Brexit, under the Tories immigration is higher than ever. And still it’s not enough for the business lobby: just this week, CBI boss Tony Danker called on PM Rishi Sunak to “solve” Britain’s “labour shortages” (which is usually to say mismatch between the pay and rations on offer and the jobs existing workers can afford to take) by loosening immigration policy still further.

As well as deepening squalor and fomenting often-racialised resource competition on the bottom social rungs, growing the economy by growing the population also runs up against an immovable limit: building land, especially in popular parts of the country. Increasingly, this means that housing pressure can only be eased in these locations by concreting over the still relatively green and pleasant lands currently inhabited by the group that now forms the Tories’ core electoral base: older home-owners.

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A sex war is coming

By Mary Harrington

No wonder, then, that a Commons report earlier this year shows the Tories are nowhere near their own manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new homes every year. And no wonder Sunak has opted to kick the can down the road yet again. The trouble, though, is that both sides are right: the economic liberals are right to point out that in its current form, the “growth” engine structurally requires ever more human bodies. And, the conservatives are also right that over time, if you keep adding people to a smallish island, eventually it will create tensions over how to allocate finite resources – especially in-demand land.

Beveridge’s dream was to abolish squalor, along with the other Giants, by dint of rising prosperity and improved social conditions. But even as this promise was made, post-imperial decline and industrial competition from overseas began to undermine the material underpinnings of that prosperity. And since Beveridge, sustaining a sense of ongoing improvement has been bankrolled by cannibalising the postwar infrastructure created to shield its own citizens from squalor, whether via selling off council houses, breaking the unions, privatising utilities, or financialising everything.

The ensuing loss of real, widespread prosperity has been papered over via a synthetic “growth”, largely powered by population increase from elsewhere, and whose benefits have been (to say the least) unevenly distributed: a property boom for some, and for others new forms of squalor. And this fact has been obscured variously by ignoring the plight of Britain’s low-wage peripheries, by ignoring mounting protests from the young, and by mystifying the bums-on-seats growth strategy as “diversity”.

Our political settlement depends on growth, but the policies required for that growth to continue are now chipping away at that political settlement. Something will have to give. And whether that’s social cohesion, living standards, or growth, its political fruit will be bitter.

This is a changed party. Starmer no longer needs to insist that his party is patriotic; he has shown it. The Union Jack has displaced the Palestinian flags brandished by conference delegates in the dark days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But it is a critical time for Starmer and his party. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have set out their government’s brutally simple approach to economics: the UK needs growth, and that can only be achieved through tax cuts and deregulation. The markets are already delivering their verdict, with the pound on the slide and inflation on the rise.

What is Labour’s answer? This is their week – the only one in the year when they can, and must, dominate the headlines with new ideas, policies and soundbites. As far as they go, this year’s slogans are passable: “A fresh start with Labour”; “A fairer, greener future”. They are well-meaning, but woolly. What the voters need to know is what’s in it for them — what is the Labour offer? How does it deliver for individuals, their families and their businesses?

The critique is clear. The Government’s “mini-budget” last week wasn’t fair; it amounts to merely throwing cash at the 1% of top earners. Labour should punch that bruise and relish the irony of a government committed to free markets being schooled by those same markets. The Party should also avoid the language of class warfare. It delights conference delegates when speakers attack Tories for supporting the rich, but this doesn’t answer the question of what Labour would do differently.

Yesterday, in her speech on the economy, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves made a decent effort of doing just that. She reclaimed the mantle of “sound money” from the Tories, attacking them for rising borrowing — including the largest single increase in government borrowing since 1972. She outlined a “green prosperity plan” that would prioritise renewable and nuclear power and free the UK from dependence on imported fossil fuels. Perhaps more strikingly, Reeves had Labour conference on its feet with her statement that Labour was now the party of economic responsibility.

But in the end, the Labour case has to be made by its Leader. More than 200 opinion polls in a row have given Labour a lead over the Conservatives; the most recent have been so commanding that they would reverse the 2019 Tory landslide and give Labour a majority. But there’s still a question mark over whether Labour’s lead is really secure. This is where Starmer must step in.

His challenge? In focus group after focus group, swing voters say they don’t know enough about him or what he stands for. His opportunity? Voters’ ignorance about Starmer means he still has time to define himself — though that is fast running out. With the Conservative government attempting a reset with their new leader, and with the mini-budget unravelling, there is the chance for him to say: “Take a second look at me, and a long hard look at her.” His conference speech has to win the attention, and then the hearts and minds of voters.

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How Labour can beat Truss

By John McTernan

As any football fan knows, the first question Starmer has to answer is: “Who are you?” There’s a simple formula political campaigners use: voters only need to know three things about a politician to understand them. Here’s what Starmer’s should be: first, he loves the NHS, which his mother devoted her working life to, and which in turn cared for her so well when she fell ill. Second, he loves football, supports Arsenal and is a nifty five-a-side player himself. And third, he likes a beer. Get that across. And repeat it. The best answer to the accusation that he is dull isn’t some worthy line about “serious times need serious people”: it’s far better to simply say: “No-one who’s been to the pub with Keir thinks he’s boring!”

These three things would colour in Starmer’s character and reassure voters. But they also need to believe in his judgement. This is harder to demonstrate in opposition, except during fights with your own party — which he has done well by suspending his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.

To be truly seen as the alternative Prime Minister, Starmer needs to show what he stands for, and what difference he’d make in Number 10. This is the retail offer and it has to be stark and personal. Not just about how a greener future will save the planet, but how it will save you money tomorrow. Not just what the industrial plan will invest in, but what jobs you will be able to get. Not just an end to Tory tax giveaways, but what Labour’s fair taxes will mean for families.

This is the last chance Starmer has before the next General Election to showcase who Labour is, what it has to offer, and how it has changed. Last year’s post-pandemic conference dealt with his internal dilemmas, stamping Starmer’s authority on the party with rule changes. Next year’s will be the pre-election gathering, given Truss is expected to go to the country during 2024.

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Starmer can't afford to be Blair

By John McTernan

Just look how far Starmer has brought his party. In 2019, Labour suffered its worst defeat since the Thirties, yet the party is now electorally competitive. It took him just two years to achieve what it took Neil Kinnock two elections. And all this in opposition to Boris Johnson, who was the most electorally successful Tory leader for nearly 30 years and who appeared to have remade the electoral landscape by capturing Labour seats and voters. This conference — and his conference speech — has to be another turning point. The race is on. And it will not be won by being slow and steady; it will be won by flair and momentum.

Labour has shown both at conference this week, but Liz Truss has changed to Tories too. She has shown a willingness to roll the dice from her very first days in office. Sir Humphrey would have called the mini-budget “bold, very bold”. There will be more where that came from when she unveils the deregulatory side of her agenda. When that happens, Labour will also need to be bold. No opposition can afford to wait and hope for the next election to fall into their laps.

The death of the Queen might eventually invite more sceptical and wide-ranging reflection. Georges Clemenceau said of the French Revolution that it was a bloc — to be accepted or rejected as a whole; the same is true of the British royal family. Any individual monarch is the product of an institution that revolves around the hereditary principle. Real monarchists must ask themselves whether they believe in this system enough to accept all its potential consequences. Remember that if Prince Charles had broken his neck playing polo in 1976, we would now be awaiting the coronation of King Andrew.

Curiously, a “successful” monarch and, especially, a long reign weakens the monarchy as an institution. During such a reign, loyalty comes to focus on a person, rather than on the Crown as an institution. Note how frequently, in recent years, politicians have answered questions about their views on monarchy with some anodyne remark about their admiration for the Queen. The cult of an individual sovereign increasingly overshadows all other members of their family, including their eventual successor.

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The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

That heir, waiting in the wings, will have accumulated a great deal of baggage by the time that they get to the throne — whether that baggage means actresses and obesity (as in the case of Edward VII) or an unsuccessful marriage and a history of publicly expressing political views (the case of Charles III). The problems of a long reign are exacerbated when the monarch is a woman. Partly because they were comparatively rare in British public life until recently, Queens lend themselves to mythologisation.

There are two striking and worrying precedents for what happens when a long-serving monarch dies. The first is Elizabeth I. Her death was followed by an unsuccessful king (James I), a catastrophic king (Charles I), civil war, regicide and, for a time, republic. The second is Victoria, whose death was also followed by a period of turbulence for the monarchy, culminating in the abdication crisis of 1936. I am not being entirely flippant when I say that the First World War was, in some ways, a civil war within Victoria’s own family — in which the English branch came off much better than the German or Russian ones.

Their long reigns served to occlude problems that then came back to haunt the next monarch. Elizabeth I — who refused to “open a window into men’s souls” — was careful to cultivate a useful ambiguity over religion. But that ambiguity was linked to her personal idiosyncrasies — her refusal to marry, for instance, avoided the question of whether she would take a Protestant or Catholic husband — so that it was hard for the monarchy to sustain after her death.

The ambiguity of Victoria’s reign was less deliberate. Her long period on the throne and, particularly, her partial withdrawal from public life after the death of her husband, helped to conceal the extent to which (much to Victoria’s own distaste) the monarchy had lost its political power during her reign. It was significant that politicians did not consider it necessary to call a general election when she died: they had done so as a matter of course after the previous monarch’s death. Still, the monarchs that came after her did not really reconcile themselves to the institution’s loss of political power until the accession of George VI in 1936.

The central ambiguity of Elizabeth II’s long reign revolves around Britain’s relations with the wider world. Before her accession, she pledged herself to serve “our imperial family”. But the empire went in the early years of her reign and was replaced by the Commonwealth — Enoch Powell, always attentive to the precise meaning of constitutional terms, believed that the most important speech he ever made concerned the addition of the letter “s” after “realm” in the Royal Titles Bill of 1952. Elizabeth’s death has now raised awkward questions, long suppressed, about what the Commonwealth itself means and, in particular, whether the British monarch will remain its head.

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The moment the monarchy nearly toppled

By Mary Harrington

In some ways, the personalisation of the monarchy is more marked now than it was in 1901 or 1603. This is partly because of other changes in the British state. It is often suggested that every aspect of the constitution hinges on the monarchy. But in some ways, the reverse is true: the institutions of the British can get along perfectly well without a monarch — as was shown during the interregnum of 1649-1660 — though the monarchy has, in the past, been sustained by its relations with an infrastructure of ancien regime institutions.

In 1953, I suspect the Queen herself would have said that being head of the Church of England was the most important of her duties. Now the idea of a state church seems peculiar — most vicars would give you a blank look if you point out that parliament has not sanctioned the prayer book used in most churches. As for the House of Lords, it is now, for the most part, an assembly of retired, middle-ranking politicians — not a single one of the six surviving former prime ministers has bothered to take a peerage. The institutions that have long propped up the monarchy are ailing.

She was also always held to be above politics and often presented as representing an integrity that elected politicians lack. Yet the briefest glance at the register of members’ interests or parliamentary expense claims reveals that MPs most interested in personal enrichment tend to be fervent admirers of the Queen — and keen collectors of honours. One might also point out that two of the most important figures at the court of King Boris (the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, and Lord Geidt, advisor on ministerial standards) had previously worked in the royal household.

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The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the monarchy being “apolitical”, no serious observer doubts that the monarchy serves the interests of the Conservative Party — often, as when George V promoted “National Government” in 1931, serving those interests by going along with the Conservative claim that their own policies were “apolitical”. A group of MPs closely associated with Thatcherism, including Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, wrote an interesting document in 1978. They were struck by the show of affection for the Queen during her Silver Jubilee; they recognised that it might reflect “a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past”, suggesting that they needed to be careful with calls for radical change. All the same, they concluded that the spirit of the Jubilee would work to their advantage: “People will be more attracted by a promise … to restore some of the valued things they have lost than by promise of a vague, bright tomorrow.”

But Conservatives are not quite the royalists they sometimes make out. They are heirs to a political tradition that looks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when James II was abruptly ejected from the throne) and emphasises the pre-eminence of the parliament — especially the House of Commons. Churchill paid ostentatious deference to the young Queen Elizabeth and took the side of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. All the same, Churchill was blunt to the latter: “When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.” He also, as First Lord of the Admiralty, once tried to name a ship HMS Oliver Cromwell.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

Conservatives found it easy to be loyal to Elizabeth II because her public statements — in favour of family, nation and the armed forces, and prone, in recent years, to evoke a certain memory of the Second World War — fitted with their own political vision. It will be interesting to see how they get on with a monarch who recently, albeit unintentionally, let it be known that he disapproves of their asylum policy and who has devoted much of his life to drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

King Charles will, I suspect, not have an easy time. His reign will be relatively short and he will spend much of it in the shadow of his mother. The historian Peter Hennessy recently wrote that his generation (he is more or the less the same age as the King) found it hard to imagine any monarch other than Elizabeth II. Like many remarks that sound conservative, this is, when you think of it, profoundly subversive. Saying a monarch other than the present one if unthinkable is, in effect, saying that the continuation of monarchy is unthinkable.

And, while we are on the subject of unthinkable things, consider the dramatic constitutional rethinking likely to be brought about by, say, the break-up of the union, an attempt to re-enter the European Union, or the creation of a written constitution — all things desired by a significant minority of the population and all things that might raise questions about who should be head of state. For all the talk about centuries of continuity, I doubt if any realistic observer is sure the monarchy will survive for another 70 years. If it is to do so, it needs to get away from an emphasis on the supposed personal qualities of any individual King or Queen and rest once again on the abstract quality of the Crown. Perhaps one day historians will recognise that the most important constitutional commentator of the period was not Sir Simon Schama or Lord Hennessy but Johnny Rotten, who marked the Silver Jubilee of 1977 with the words: “She ain’t no human being.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Penny Mordaunt is hard to read

By Will Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Will Lloyd

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

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

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

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How to fly a Spitfire

By Will Lloyd

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

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

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

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Starmer’s grand idea is to freeze the energy price cap at its current rate of £1,971, preventing further rises to an estimated £3,500 in October and over £4,200 in January. This will, he says, save households around £1,000. Now, when calculated on the back of a cigarette packet, this all seems to add up. The only problem is that households which use the most energy will be the biggest winners — and these tend to be richer households, with larger homes to heat.

The proposal, then, is classic Starmer: another sweeping gesture in a policy area that should be Labour’s for the taking. Consider the political context. The economy is flailing, the Conservative Party has moved on from an unedifying defenestration to an even more unedifying leadership election, and Corbyn and his outriders have largely been silenced. And yet, Labour’s lead in the polls has fallen from 11% in the week after Johnson’s resignation to around 5% since the start of August. On current boundaries, it leaves Labour 18 seats short of a majority.

The blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Keir Starmer and his economic timidity. As has been frequently noted, the British public sits largely to the Left on economic affairs and to the Right on social affairs (or on the authoritarian side of the authoritarian-libertarian divide). Research by Paula Surridge suggests the average position of 2019 Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Brexit Party voters can all be found in a Left-authoritarian quadrant. Even more encouraging for proponents of Left-wing economics is YouGov’s finding that, among people who consider themselves Right-wing, 57% say the government should have a significant or dominant role in managing the economy, while 48% think the minimum wage is too low. Starmer should be pushing against an open door.

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Is this the end of levelling up?

By David Jeffery

The Conservatives are clearly aware of this. It was, after all, George Osborne who introduced the “national living wage”, Theresa May who introduced the energy cap, and Boris Johnson who centred his premiership on levelling up. But we have seen no similar recognition from Starmer. Rather, despite standing on a largely continuity-Corbyn platform (in policy terms, at least) in the 2020 Labour leadership contest, he has tried to shift to the Right economically. “The role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it,” he wrote last year in a 14,000-word pamphlet which sounded more like a TaxPayers’ Alliance press release than Marx.

It also demonstrated that Starmer has learned the wrong lesson from Labour’s 2019 general election defeat. Corbyn’s personal unpopularity was an obvious cause of Labour’s drubbing, but his economic policies were popular — until people realised they were linked to him, or the Labour Party. (The same happened with Conservative policies under William Hague.) For all his flaws, Tony Blair was right to warn that progressivism was an electoral vote-loser; it’s that part of the Corbynite agenda Starmer needs to ditch, not the economics.

In this, Starmer shares the root of his faults with Rishi Sunak: both had been MPs for less than five years when they were put forward as party leaders; their promotions were rapid. And both are now floundering because they have no instinct for where their respective party bases sit.

But Starmer suffers, even more than Sunak, from a lack of political imagination. When the energy price cap was increased to £1,971, Starmer described the new level as “a very, very big problem”. And yet his new position is to keep the cap at this very level — by spending more than £30 billion. This is a politician who reacts to events, rather than shaping them; a politician who has no sense of what a better tomorrow looks like. By this point in the cycle, voters should be sick of hearing Labour’s next election slogan. Instead, Starmer’s only discernible pitch seems to be: “At least we’re not the Conservatives.”

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Who would be a young Tory?

By James Sean Dickson

Perhaps that will be enough to win in 2024. But perhaps it won’t. Liz Truss, the clear frontrunner in the Conservative leadership contest, has a three-point lead over Starmer — and that’s amid a toxic internal battle with Sunak. Placing Starmer against a Conservative leader without the personal baggage of Johnson and with a clear vision of what she believes in will only make his own ideological vacuity more apparent. Yes, Twitter might titter at Truss. But when voters see on the news that Starmer can’t even decide whether to let his frontbench attend a picket line, that hardly seems important.

So what should Starmer do? Well, the most obvious step would be to recognise that things in the UK are just a bit shit at the moment, and a lot of this is down to short-termism. Starmer’s original leadership campaign slogan, “Another future is possible”, is probably the right one. But coupled with this optimism is the need to be as ruthless as the Conservatives, who are happy to reward their voters (the wealthy, the elderly, homeowners) at the expense of other groups who are less likely to vote for them (students and welfare recipients).

Starmer should also follow the “housing theory of everything”, which argues that a lot of problems in the UK are at least partially driven by a lack of homes being built in areas where people want to live. In the UK, that’s often due to the greenbelt, especially around London. Happily for Labour, a lot of those areas are Conservative or Conservative-Liberal Democrat seats. The party should explain how they will fast-track more houses in these places (a good starting place would be within 800m of all commuter stations). These people were never going to return a Labour MP anyway, but the policy could be deployed to show Labour can take tough decisions. Similarly, rich pensioners (who will not vote Labour) get a lot of money from the state which they don’t need and which would be better spent elsewhere, either on poorer pensioners (who will vote Labour) on the NHS or on social care.

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By John McTernan

As for the cost-of-living crisis, if Starmer really wants to make energy more affordable, he needs to recognise that a price-cap freeze won’t help those who can’t afford to heat their homes now. Instead, he should take the £30 billion-odd this policy would cost and pump it into Universal Credit and council tax rebates for the working poor. For a long-term policy, Starmer should back large-scale, state-owned nuclear power and massive investment in battery technology, both tied to new apprenticeships and a green jobs revolution.

Finally, he shouldn’t be shy about what Labour councils are doing right. Under Corbyn, you couldn’t move without hearing about the Preston model, but since 2019 and the Conservative focus on levelling up, Labour seems to have completely vacated the pitch on local urban renewal. If Labour can’t do anything in opposition, it could at least tell people what they’re doing in local government.

Ultimately, however, a bold, economically Left-wing but socially-centrist policy platform is unlikely to emerge at the next election. As the saying goes, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them. And in the more than two years since he was elected leader, Starmer has shown very little sign of doing anything bold — let alone returning Labour to power.

Starmer’s face gets fixed with a faintly creepy spray on grin. His line is that, as he tours the country, no one is saying to him “we need a few more jokes, we need a bit of entertainment”. This feels like a very boring person’s view of what an interesting person is. It is also a Boris reference. Starmer’s calling card is that he is the anti-Boris: safe, steady, reliable, moral. Steve “interesting” Davis with a few more policies — though not that many more, it has to be said.

So is the “boring” jibe anything more than optics? Starmer clearly thinks it’s a lightweight criticism, almost beneath him to answer. He prides himself on being a grown up, serious. He thinks boring is a frivolous line of attack. But it is not.

The trouble with boring people is not that they don’t keep us entertained, but that they don’t engage us on a recognisably human level. They feel flat, two-dimensional  — even when they try to smile. Perhaps especially when they smile. Where is their shame, or hurt, or embarrassment? Where is the joy, the anger, the passion? To call someone boring is to say that, instinctively, we don’t understand what is going on with them; we don’t have any sort of access to their inner world, so they leave us deflated. Somehow, they are absent even when they are there before us. So when Keir Starmer answers the “boring” question with the apparently interesting fact that he once played the violin with Fat Boy Slim, we are even more convinced that he doesn’t get it. This is not what we are looking for.

Take Milton’s Paradise Lost. Why is it that Satan is typically understood as exciting and charismatic while God — the redeemer of the world no less — somehow seems deathly dull? Probably because the bad boy feels more fully engaged with the human condition whereas the divine archetype is distant and unknown. The former is hot, the latter is cold. It is, in metaphysical form, the Keir Starmer problem. Indeed, it’s the same problem that novelists have in trying to write compelling characters that are good people. We often identify so much more with the messily and morally compromised because most of us think of ourselves this way. Saints don’t engage us because they seem to float above the human realm, unaffected by the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence. Starmer doesn’t feel real.

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How Labour became the nasty party

By Giles Fraser

Simone Weil wrote: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Here, she gives us a clue as to the conundrum: how do we make virtue interesting, compelling? The answer is first to show how real evil is empty and flat — ultimately life-denying. That it creates a wasteland of human flourishing. This is the place where nothing grows. This, Starmer could argue, is Boris Johnson’s Britain. In contrast, virtue really is much more exciting and deeply human – ultimately life-giving. It is the basis for human flourishing. This is how being good connects up with being more fully human.

But Starmer doesn’t give us anything like that. Like the Dementors in Harry Potter, he seems to suck all the hope from the room. He makes virtue feel as life-giving as a traffic warden. Take his reaction to having been exonerated by the Durham police over beergate. “For me, this was always a matter of principle. Honesty and integrity matter. You will always get that from me.” It is such a bad answer. Bad, because it’s way too confident in its own righteousness. “You will always get that from me” lacks humility and, even more importantly, any sense that as human being we get things wrong every single day. There is no openness and honesty in this sentence, no vulnerability to getting things wrong. And — worse still in electoral terms — it says: I am not like you.

Not having any access to Starmer’s hidden inner world, we begin to wonder whether his outer and inner life match up. Whether he’s wearing a mask. And the problem with wearing masks is that we inevitably begin to worry about what is being concealed. Does the reassuringly non-flashy Keir Starmer exist to disguise the persecutory instincts of his “never kissed a Tory” colleagues, the ones who will cancel us for any petty infringements of contemporary metropolitan standards? Is Starmer the safe frontman of the Manichean morality police who divide the country up into those with politically correct and incorrect views, sheep and goats, darkness and light? There never has been a one nation Labour Party, no sense of us all being in this together. Behind Sir Keir lurk the sharks of culture wars ready to feast on our sins.

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Privilege is the new original sin

By Costica Bradatan

Of late, the vices of the Conservative Party have been on display for all to see. They are generally the hot sins of lust and greed. I am not trying to defend them, but you know where you stand with these moral failures. Just as you did when John Prescott lamped a protestor after being egged. But Labour’s virtues I find altogether more sinister. I think they are out to get me. To find me out and bring me down, without forgiveness, without compromise. I find Labour’s virtues so much more frightening than Conservative vices.

Boring is not about the absence of gladhands. It is about not being present to others, not seeming to be on the same journey of messy human experience. The cardboard cut out Starmer will get some short-term benefit from being the not-Boris. But it won’t last long. Boris was popular for a long time and for a reason. Starmer still can’t work our why. The mystery will always drive him mad. 

Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest is likely to compound this issue. Faced with, say, Kemi Badenoch across the dispatch box, Starmer will look uncomfortably like every jibe that the culture warriors have thrown at the Right over the last few years: male, pale, and stale.

The candidate was Carrie Symonds. Unknown to his advisers, Johnson had become close to her, and around this time, one friendly MP walked in on the pair in “a compromising situation” in his House of Commons office. Undaunted and unembarrassed, Johnson persisted with the idea of making Carrie head of staff, calling in Zac Goldsmith to offer support. Only after a (named) aide threatened to resign did Johnson drop it.

If ever a book invited lazy thinking from journalists, then First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson is it. We know what 76-year-old Ashcroft thinks about a lot of things, so it is easy to assume that the billionaire won’t be a fan of Carrie, who is very much a modern, liberal, green Tory (though they share an interest in animal welfare). The book on David Cameron that appeared under his and Isabel Oakeshott’s name, though very readable, was a piece of score-settling by a man who felt his beneficence to the Party had gone under-appreciated.

He remains something of an outsider so, one might think, this new title is presumably another piece of axe-grinding. Plus, given that many of the juicy bits have already appeared in the newspaper serialisation, why bother with the book itself? And evidently some will object to the imbalance of an idiosyncratic rich man examining the life of a woman half his age. One reviewer became “absolutely furious” at Ashcroft referring to Carrie, then 31, as a “young lady” in the introduction; for her, the narrative never recovered.

There are parts that made me squeamish, and certainly some of the anecdotes from her early years feel slightly invasive, inevitably in a biography of this type. But to disqualify Ashcroft because of an imputed attitude to women is short-sighted. And to say his book is a misogynistic hit job just isn’t good enough.

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The fake feminism of Carrie Johnson

By Tanya Gold

The days when he would use his wealth to elevate him above libel laws and ventilate nonsense about David Cameron putting his penis in a dead pig’s mouth, or his wife having an affair with one of her security people, seem to be behind him. (Francis Elliott and I checked the latter rumour when co-writing the first biography of Cameron and established it was untrue, but it was still doing the rounds seven years later and Ashcroft and Oakeshott reported it as gossip.)

And the result of Ashcroft’s, shall we say, maturing as a political biographer should not be ignored.[1.  I helped in an indirect and minor way with research for his book on Jacob Rees-Mogg.] Can anyone seriously claim that the story of a Foreign Secretary trying to sign up his new girlfriend for a job for which she is not qualified is not in the public interest? Or that the story is made up? There are too many sources for the book to be dismissed as a hatchet job. True, many remain unnamed, but that should deter no one. It would be naïve to expect otherwise with so fevered a government still in power. So unless Ashcroft has invented them, which is pretty much inconceivable, there is plenty in this volume that deserves to be taken seriously.

The picture that emerges is of someone with more strong opinions than her husband, but no less unhappiness in early life or, later, determination to achieve her goals. Her commitment to green issues, admirable to my mind, is a constant thread. Ashcroft applauds her bravery in waiving anonymity in the case of sex criminal John Worboys, who drugged her in the back of a taxi, her campaign against his release from prison and her willingness to discuss her 2021 miscarriage. He cites her charm, what fun she can be and ability to get on with influential journalists, which is indispensable in PR.

Her early life, financially comfortable rather than lavish, makes for sad reading. She is distant from her father, a journalist called Matthew Symonds, who had another family. The product of an extra-marital affair, she attended two top private schools in London and was brought up as an only child by her mother, Josephine McAfee. She studied drama at Warwick University, spent time in PR and then, after meeting Zac Goldsmith’s cousin at a party, began working for Zac and subsequently for the Conservative Party. She became a special adviser to John Whittingdale and then Sajid Javid before, at 29, becoming the Tories’ communications director.

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By Graeme Archer

But in Westminster she is not universally liked. We know something of this from Dominic Cummings, never one for deft understatement, but the evidence compiled here goes well beyond any campaign he could have organised. Her shortcomings as a colleague are rehearsed at some length (one colleague on the campaign trail called her “utterly, utterly useless”), as is her lack of interest in policy and her enthusiasm for holidays and smart restaurants. She once described the job of being Tatler’s political editor as her dream job.

There are numerous stories of Carrie being hard to work with and of her desire to get on (no more a crime in a woman than a man, of course). She even has her very own expenses scandal, in which she used the names of junior colleagues when claiming taxis. One source said: “She’s lucky she didn’t end up in more serious trouble… It was misuse of CCHQ funds. She used the names of those just starting out on their careers. That was unforgivable”. Whether the cabs were for her private use, or to meet one of the two married Tory MPs (one was Johnson, the other for some reason remains unnamed) with whom she had a relationship, we may never know.

Normally personality traits in a Prime Minister’s spouse would matter only to the PM, but according to Ashcroft this one seeks to involve herself in areas where she is under-qualified and insert her allies into positions of influence. She appears to have been largely responsible for Allegra Stratton’s ill-fated hiring, for instance. Carrie is also portrayed as remarkably thin-skinned where media criticism is concerned, especially for someone so familiar with the transience of the news trade; the PM apparently spends inordinate amounts of time smoothing her ruffled feathers.

Carrie’s defenders will point to the sacking of John Whittingdale and Henry Newman, two of her supporters, as evidence of her lack of influence. But that seems to have been the result of one of the PM’s knee-jerk responses to criticism, following Lord Frost’s public suggestion that he refresh things by removing the woke crowd. Clearly, there is a body of opinion that disdains the greenery-by-stealth approach that she embodies (and which a braver PM would embrace). Either way, Carrie is scarcely the “private individual who plays no role in Government” that her spokesperson claims.

And there is plenty of evidence that Johnson, who hates confrontation, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid rousing his wife’s temper. He would beg aides to help him keep her happy, at one point asking if someone could be given a job title without actually doing the job, just so it looked as if that person performed that role. Was this another Boris joke? Conceivably, but that can’t excuse everything.

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Those who know Johnson well know him to be an organisational disaster. (I’m told his diplomatic protection team often have to remind him to do up his flies.) The expert in mitigating his chaos used to be his former wife Marina. Carrie, perhaps because she is of a more recent generation than Marina, apparently sees no reason why she should mother her husband. As one of Ashcroft’s sources says: “When the marriage [with Marina] ended, he lost his domestic support, the steadying influence, and he traded that in for a demanding girlfriend and strong disapproval from his children”. Even Prime Ministers are entitled to private lives, but are we really to believe these details have no effect on how the country is run?

Without the research that went into First Lady, we would be guessing — trying to join the dots between Cummings blogs, drip-drip news of Covid parties, flat refurbishments and Johnson’s pinball machine decision-making. What the book lacks, though, is the case for the defence. There are few voices supporting her, beyond that of her former boss John Whittingdale. Carrie refused to cooperate with the book, sticking to the “not a public person” line, when even her much-admired Tatler calls her “the most powerful woman in Britain”. Perhaps if she had engaged, or encouraged friends to engage, she could have neutralised the accusations and conveyed a more favourable impression of herself.

Nevertheless, this book offers an account of where Carrie came from, what she wants, what makes her tick and, most important, the influence she has on our PM.

The sheer scale of the disillusionment with Johnson’s premiership struck me last week as I gave various talks in Westminster and listened to MPs voicing their frustration with the direction of travel. On the surface, their demands are clear and specific. Those among the new intake — the 2019ers and Red Wallers — want Johnson’s advisors gone and No. 10 shaken up. They want the volume on Net Zero turned down and the volume on illegal migration turned up. They want Levelling-Up transformed from a narrow, hollow slogan into a serious, unifying and coherent project. And they want it done yesterday.

They also want Boris Johnson to govern as he campaigned; to spend more time outside of London, speaking on behalf of working people, taking on The Blob and offering policies that will resonate among the new Conservative voters, who not only gave him the Red Wall but lie at the heart of the realignment sweeping through the country. They complain about a Prime Minister whose talents as a campaigner and communicator are being squandered by advisors who neither understand this new conservatism nor the realignment on which it stands. This is compounded, they continue, by a Prime Minister who is simply too worried about being liked by the chattering classes and too reluctant to embrace the messaging and policies which would reinforce and retain his new electorate.

This disillusionment is reinforced by what many see as a deep generational and ideological rift inside the Conservative parliamentary party, a rift symbolised this week by one minister deriding Red Wallers as “a load of fucking nobodies”. One obvious question after the 2019 general election was how traditional True Blue free-traders would sit alongside a more blue-collar, one-nation conservatism. Fast forward to today and this rift is now on full display, reflected in the more than a few 2019ers who simply do not believe their southern, affluent and typically Oxbridge-educated colleagues are seriously invested in levelling-up the Red Wall, who they say resent the new focus on the north, who look at their party’s new blue-collar voters with a combination of bemusement and snobbery and who, they say, remain much too wedded to the old conservatism of the Eighties, failing to grasp that the rules of engagement amid the new, post-2016 politics are very different.

There are certainly Thatcherites among the Red Wallers, who look back rather than forward. But there are just as many who complain that the new, post-2016 conservatism cannot answer the questions thrown up by the realignment by turning the clock back 40 years. Thatcherism, one MP points out, represented a genuine, radical and counter-cultural pushback to the dominant zeitgeist at the time. Anchored in a specific philosophy, it offered one answer to a set of questions thrown up by the chaos, gridlock and failure of the Seventies. Today, both the questions and the answers are very different and require a different approach. We have transitioned into a politics where providing people with cultural freedom has become just as important as providing them with economic freedom — only the Conservative Party has failed to keep up.

This also finds its expression in an instinctive suspicion of whether Johnson’s leadership rivals really could maintain and continue the realignment. You do not have to travel far in Conservative circles to find people who will tell you that anybody can lead a realignment. Just put a Sunak or a Truss on top and throw the working-class northerners a bit of Red Meat. But this is a fundamental misread.

Realignments are both bottom-up and top-down. They depend on underlying demographic trends which are pushing non-graduates and workers Right-wards and graduates and professionals Left-wards; but they also depend on the leaders who pull them into politics and turn them into votes. The realignment in Scotland would simply not have been possible without Nicola Sturgeon, in the same way that the realignment in America would not have been possible without Trump.

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Will Boris survive a revolt on the Right?

By Matthew Goodwin

Boris Johnson is a greatly weakened figure but he has at least demonstrated proof of concept, driving the realignment by campaigning for Brexit (liking Johnson was a significant driver of public support for leaving the EU) and then tearing through the Red Wall (liking Johnson was a significant driver of Labour to Conservative defectors). While many of the new intake loathe what has become of Johnson’s premiership, they can still sense his lingering appeal in parts of the country where, they say, other Conservatives would simply struggle if not fail to reach.

Some fear that a Prime Minister Sunak or Prime Minister Truss — neither of whom are really known outside of the Westminster village — would be unable to hold the coalition together, a coalition which Johnson himself did not simply mobilise in 2019 but over much of the last decade. While this relationship is damaged, it is also one which, like a long and difficult marriage, still has deep roots. It was shaped by Johnson’s decision to campaign for Brexit, then against Theresa May’s Soft Brexit, and then to Get Brexit Done in 2019. In many respects, in the eyes of many voters, Boris Johnson is the realignment: he is the one politician who had the courage to go against the grain and offer the country a break from the dreary, narrow orthodoxy which had dominated their lives for decades.

People have swiftly forgotten that only eight months ago, Johnson won the Labour heartland of Hartlepool for the first time in decades. He has also enjoyed major gains at local elections across Labour strongholds; it’s all strong evidence that the realignment continues and is by no means in reverse. Twelve weeks ago, the party was averaging 40% in the polls.

Could Sunak, Truss or anyone else manage to hold and extend this coalition in the two years before the next general election? Some MPs describe Sunak as George Osborne 2.0: metropolitan, slick, London, competent — but also disconnected from the blue-collar conservatives, the previously apathetic, cultural conservatives who now represent a major flank of the party’s electorate. Sunak, they worry, seems more a relic from the Osborne days, than a counter-cultural general who can rally the masses. There is a counter argument to this, of course, which is that in recent polls Sunak performs strongly across northern England, even eclipsing Johnson’s own ratings. But Sunak’s critics reply that it is easy to be popular when you have given people £70 billion of furlough and much of the country still does not know who you are or what you really believe.

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How Boris can still win

By Matthew Goodwin

The questions are obvious and difficult to answer. How would Sunak, the partner of a billionaire, a graduate of Oxford and Stanford who wears £1,300 suits and starts his days spinning on a £2,000 bicycle while eating blueberries hold the Red Wall? We hear much about his support for traditional fiscal conservatism and the picture of Nigel Lawson which hangs over his desk, but is this really what the new conservative voters want? Is politics not in a state of realignment precisely because the managerial, technocratic and polished fiscal conservatism of the Cameroon and Osborne era, along with an acceptance of progressive politics, alienated so many? And given that friends of Sunak say he routinely prioritises avoiding disagreement over pinning his own political stripes to the mast, would such an approach really work in a politics that is far more polarised, cross-cutting and rooted more strongly in values than appeals to economic competence?

These doubts, these questions, are what have so far prevented more MPs from rebelling against Johnson. But how long will that hold? So weak is the Prime Minister, that he is now only one error, one leak, one policy blunder away from losing his grip on power altogether. Furthermore, MPs worry that even a Johnson reboot — a Boris Johnson 2.0 — is pointless unless it is anchored in a guiding philosophy which can reconnect him with his new voters.

“One week it’s Net Zero and animal sentience”, complained one MP, “the next it’s tax rises.” A political project which began life by promising the British people that it would be genuinely revolutionary — that it would springboard from Brexit into far-reaching reforms which would overturn the orthodoxy and push the country in a completely new course — has instead become glaringly conventional.

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Sleaze won't bring down Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

Boris Johnson was never going to be an ism. But in the early days of his counter-cultural premiership there was at least a small hope that he might at least surround himself with thinkers who genuinely grasp the realignment and can feed it with a radical new offer which cuts across Left and Right in the same way Brexit disrupted the old loyalties five years earlier. Today, though, they see a Prime Minister who is bobbing on the surface, trying to be all things to all voters with no clear sense of direction or underlying purpose.

And now his core voters, the ones who really matter, have noticed too. It is the Leavers, the workers, the Greggs Guys who are abandoning him in droves, running not to Labour, but into apathy, giving up on the one person who, in 2019, like Mrs Thatcher 40 years earlier, promised them that he would shatter the consensus and radically reshape the country. The difference between Thatcher and Johnson is that only one of them followed through. “Where is that Boris?”, asked one MP.

They have a point.

Governing parties have suffered even heavier defeats and have still gone on to win a majority at the next election (as David Cameron can testify after losing Clacton to the UK Independence Party before going on to win his surprise majority in 2015). But this defeat has already become symbolic of a much deeper crisis engulfing Johnson.

Beyond the leafy lanes of Shropshire, the symptoms of this crisis are not hard to find. Amid chaos in Downing Street and rebellions in parliament, Johnson and his party are now consistently trailing the Labour Party in the polls. Labour has surpassed 40% of the vote, a barrier it has not breached since the start of the year. And the Conservatives have just slumped to 32%, a low they have not encountered since the very depths of the Brexit crisis in October 2019, since before Johnson’s election victory.

Even without the polls, we can all see and sense that Johnson is on the ropes; that what began with the largest majority for any Conservative for more than 30 years now looks bizarrely, perilously fragile. This was further reflected this week when a visibly exhausted Johnson suddenly found himself confronted with one of the most significant parliamentary rebellions in history, when almost 100 of his own MPs revolted against his decision to introduce yet more Covid restrictions.

This revolt was bigger than the one David Cameron faced in 2011, when his MPs rebelled to push a referendum on Britain’s EU membership; it was bigger than the one John Major faced in 1997, when his MPs rebelled over gun control measures in the aftermath of Dunblane. It was almost as big as the rebellion Theresa May faced over Brexit, in 2019, which with the notable exception of Labour’s rebellion over the war in Iraq was the biggest since the revolt over Corn Laws in the 19th century. This, in short, does not bode well.

In just 24 months, Johnson has gone from appearing as the political equivalent of Logan Roy in Succession, fully in command of his Conservative family while surveying the landscape with a clear sense of purpose, to appearing more like Connor Roy, the hapless, politically naïve eldest son who is not entirely sure where he sits within his family or what his purpose is.

And so Mr Johnson finds himself under fire from all sides. On the Right, they say he is not the Prime Minister they hoped he could become; on the Left, they say he is everything they predicted. Either way, amid all the frustration his leadership ratings have crashed to the lowest level on record: this week, Survation put Johnson’s net favourability on minus 29, a new low.

Remarkably, ask the British people today who would make the best prime minister and for the first time for more than a year, Starmer leads the pack. Were an election held tomorrow, Labour would emerge as the largest party, albeit one short of an overall majority. Starmer would be PM. Rachel Reeves would be in charge of the economy. David Lammy, Angela Rayner and perhaps Nicola Sturgeon would be sitting alongside them around the Cabinet table. Johnson would go down in history as a busted flush.

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The battle for North Shropshire

By Tanya Gold

What lies at the root of the crisis? It is impossible to answer this without considering how Johnson won power in the first place. The reason he won the largest Conservative victory since Margaret Thatcher’s final majority in 1987 is because he grasped what so few others did: the unfolding realignment of British politics, a structural correction that has made available an entirely new and formidable coalition of voters.

Forget what people say. The realignment was never just about Brexit or the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn, even if these elements helped it along. It was always rooted for far more strongly in a deep and profound disillusionment with the political consensus that has dominated Britain for half a century. EU membership. Mass immigration. Hyper-globalisation. Radical cultural liberalism. And a politics built by middle-class graduates for middle-class graduates.

Johnson’s electoral dynamite always came from the fact that he was the first mainstream politician to offer a genuine break from that consensus: to leave the EU, strengthen the country’s borders and level-up a forgotten blue-collar Britain. And this is why he was able to completely transform the Conservative Party’s electorate along the way.

It is why he won three-quarters of the Leave vote. It is why he demolished one flank of the Red Wall and left another vulnerable. It is why he mobilised a new coalition of voters who are spread across the country far more efficiently than Labour’s voters who are concentrated too heavily in big cities and university towns. And it is why he had an almost 20-point lead over Labour among the Greggs Guys — Britain’s plumbers, mechanics and factory workers who, like the True-Blue Tories in the south, rallied behind Johnson because they believed he offered a genuine alternative to our dreary politics.

But what Shropshire and the polls tell us, clearly, is that today, though, many of these voters are reaching a very different conclusion: their gamble on Johnson simply has not paid off. Between all the talk about net zero, tax rises and trying to be all things to all voters, he is adrift from the coalition that propelled him to power. Since the aftermath of his victory in 2019, the share of Johnson’s voters who plan to vote for him again has crashed from 95% to 73%.

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The Leavers are leaving him: the disgruntled and the disillusioned— his core voters — are off. By failing to make the most out of Brexit, by failing to robustly defend British history and heritage, by failing to get his arms around illegal migration, by failing to take on the radical progressive Left, by failing to define and deliver a serious strategy for levelling-up, by transforming the Conservatives from an aspirational party of low-tax to a government that is introducing the highest tax burden since the Fifties and by putting the state on steroids, he has given the new Conservative voters more than a few good reasons to walk.

And walk they will. Over the past two years, the percentage of Leavers who say they are loyal to Johnson has collapsed from 76 to 55%. As a result, the big leads the Conservatives once enjoyed among the working-class are also dwindling, with the party’s support in blue-collar Britain sliding from 51 to 38%. His coalition is falling apart.

Yet they are certainly not going to Labour. These voters have little time for Keir Starmer and a Labour front bench which, with the help of Ed Miliband, David Lammy and Emily Thornberry, appears determined to remind voters why they rejected Labour at the last three general election and the Brexit referendum. On the economy and immigration, similarly, the Labour brand remains toxic in the eyes of so many. The fact that its vote declined by 12-points in Shropshire, while nationally is at the same level that it was a year ago speaks volumes.

Some of Johnson’s voters are certainly defecting to Reform, a new revolt on the Right which is attracting a far from insignificant 11% of Johnson’s 2019 voters. Put Nigel Farage on top of Reform for a month and in the current climate, that figure could quite easily double, not least because Johnson appears determined to reignite the radical Right bonfire his party spent years trying to put out. But much larger numbers are simply giving up on politics altogether, drifting into apathy. In recent weeks, the percentage of 2019 Conservative voters who say they will not vote at the next election, who do not know who they will vote for or who refuse to say either way has more than doubled, surging from 18 to 38%.

Johnson’s voters are giving up on politics because he is giving up on the realignment, no longer sure what he should say or who he should be saying it to. So many of his voters are returning to what they did in the 2010s: sitting it out, waiting, watching and looking for an alternative. They thought Johnson was that alternative. Now, they are not so sure.

It is the defection of these Leavers which poses the biggest problem to Johnson. He reshaped his entire premiership and political party around them. If his core voters go, then the realignment collapses and the Conservatives will be finished. The party will haemorrhage middle-class graduate votes to the Liberal Democrats in the south and pro-Brexit, working-class votes to apathy in the north. They will come under attack from all sides and no longer have a viable coalition.

The only way forward for Johnson now, for his increasingly rebellious party too, is to reconnect with the very people who put them in power to begin with, to double down on the realignment and forget about everybody else. It’s not popular but it is politics. Brexit may be fading into the distance but there are many other issues that could just as powerfully unite the new Conservative electorate particularly ahead of a general election at which a Labour-SNP coalition is a serious prospect. Immigration is one. Crime is another. Defining and delivering a serious levelling-up strategy is another. And so too is robustly defending British identity, history and culture from an increasingly radical progressive left (just ask Republicans in Virgina).

There simply is no alternative. If you think that after everything we have witnessed in the past two years — Brexit, Cummings, Covid, Johnson’s personal failings and the utter chaos in No. 10 — that the Conservative Party can win back the Londoners, Remainers and professional middle-classes in time for the next election, then I have a bridge to sell you. No, the only way forward for him now is to start ditching advisors and doubling down on where he began.

If Johnson reconnects with his core voters hie will extend his premiership until the end of this decade. If he loses them he will lose his premiership and party. This core vote strategy would not be popular in SW1 but it is now the only thing that will keep him, the Conservative Party and those Red Wall MPs in power. Two years ago, Johnson was swept into power because he challenged the consensus on Europe. Whether he is willing to keep challenging that consensus will now determine whether he stays there.

But I wasn’t there to gossip, plot and gripe with my mates; I was on a mission. Would I be able to work out what the Prime Minister really thought about religion? I have long found this a puzzle, not knowing what to make of the multitude of signals that he gives out. Earlier this year he described himself as a “very, very bad Christian”. Asked by Robert Peston whether he was now a Roman Catholic, after his marriage in a Roman Catholic cathedral, he declined to answer. “I don’t discuss these deep issues,” he blustered. Then, spotting an opportunity to have a swipe at the openly atheist Keir Starmer, he added a quote from Psalm 14: “the foolish man has said in his heart there is no God.” Peston played along and simply chuckled.

There was lots of chuckling going on at No.10. Introduced by fellow Etonian, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Boris stood up and threw out some amusing anecdotes. He and Justin Welby go running together round Lambeth Palace gardens. Sometimes they run in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. It was a metaphor for the relationship between church and state. He then thanked the Church for its Covid response, which delivered on “the clear teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ to ‘be a good neighbour’”. Oh, I thought. Now there is a phrase: “our Lord Jesus Christ”. “Our” is such a strong word of belonging. The evangelicals smiled. It is an “I am one of you” word. Or maybe it was just something he said — something people say.

The problem I have with Boris is that all that Etonian bluster and bullshit is so wall-to-wall you never get the feeling you are seeing the real thing, whatever that is. I long for a flicker of sincerity — something Mrs May did in spades at her Christmas parties — some sense of what he really thinks about things. Yes, what he really believes. But there is a kind of dandyish public-school raconteur for whom the admission of sincerity is some sort of failure, a sign that the great game has broken down, a depressing admission that charm can only go so far. So everything is deflection and misdirection, smiling and ducking, making other people laugh as a strategy of tactical evasion. And as with Peston, it works. Our laughter gives him time to make for the exit. Only then do you feel just a little short-changed.

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Now this sort of dandyish bullshitter has to be very careful with religion. Because at some point religion demands precisely the kind of moral seriousness — sincerity of heart — that Boris despises, or is at a loss to know what to do with. Yes, I too avoid the man who will come up to me on Oxford Street, look me straight in the eye and ask me if I believe in Jesus. Everything inside me screams “none of your bloody business”. But this sort of evangelical directness has no time for the social conventions which we often hide behind, and which allow Boris Johnson to be the master of illusion.

But there is a story about Boris being put on the spot like this. And it is quite extraordinary.

Back in 2019, at the time of the September Equinox, a group of new-age religious pilgrims — Extinction Rebellion supporters — were walking the Ridgeway, part of an ancient trail from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia, a route well-known for its springs and holy places. Their plan was to travel barefoot and sing to the Great Spirit Mother as they went. They wanted their prayers to “open the hearts and minds of those in power”.

As they passed Chequers, the weekend retreat of the Prime Minister, they stopped off to visit a nearby farm shop. And — how extraordinary — there he was: Boris Johnson getting his groceries. Just Boris and the cashier in this tiny, enclosed space. And not knowing what to say, this group of women decided to stand around and just sing: “Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you.”

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Now I find what happened next really hard to square with what I know of the Prime Minister. The way Tori Lewis, one of the women, describes the scene, Boris Johnson was strangely moved by the experience. “His mouth is just open, he has his hand on his heart, he has tears in his eyes.” Of course, Boris had no idea how to react to this cringey intrusion into his personal space. “I, err, don’t know what…” he apparently blurted out.

Tori goes on: “Annabel intuitively — she’s a beautiful mother — puts her hand on his shoulder and sees him like a little boy that he is and we keep singing.” Regaining his composure, Boris asks the group where they are from, makes polite conversation, and looks for the exit. “We are healing the world one heart at a time” they sing as he leaves.

If this wasn’t strange enough, one of the group then overheard him talking to his then-girlfriend, Carrie, who was waiting outside: “Where have they come from, it’s like they have emerged from the Earth?” he asked. “Yes” she replied, “and they have a message for you.” And he said, “listen to your heart”.

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This, by the way, is the reason evangelical Christians used to get such good results in posh public schools. Here is a group of emotionally damaged children, who have suffered a kind of privileged abandonment, who have learnt to manage the absence of necessary motherly love — though this management is inevitably unstable and difficult to maintain. Suddenly, they are offered a kind of love — a “hand on the shoulder” — that is as emotionally direct and all-embracing as they might imagine motherly love to be. It is a religion of the heart, so to speak, for those whose hearts are a source of pain. Some retreat from this offer, appalled. Others embrace it with huge transformative joy, and it marks them for the rest of their lives. “Why do you need a God if you have a good mother?” my friend, the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, asked me the other day. It’s a very challenging question.

Justin Welby didn’t get converted at Eton. His conversion was at Cambridge, on the evening of 12 October 1975. There is often a single date, for evangelicals, because what happens is a kind of immediate breakthrough. A friend invited Welby to his rooms at Trinity College. Nearing midnight, Nicky Hills pressed Welby, “Jesus died on the cross for you, Justin”. At that moment, Welby says that the penny dropped and, as he later put it, “I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life”. Were Welby on Adam Phillips’ couch, this experience would no doubt be brought into some sort of conversation about his highly dysfunctional parents — both alcoholics, his father turning out not to have been his father after all.

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Boris had a dysfunctional home life, too. His mother and father divorced when he was 15. There are stories that his father was abusive towards her. But where Welby embraced the emotional hyper-sincerity of evangelical Christianity, Boris rejects it with every fibre of his being, terrified that it is the one thing that can bring down the “pyramid of piffle” on which the whole Boris act is founded.

In effect, Boris is a polytheist: he worships a great many gods. That’s what allows him to be all things to all people. Yes, he refers to “our Lord Jesus Christ” in front of the Christians, but he’d flirt in the same way with other gods too — as promiscuous with divinity as he is elsewhere in his life.

Boris has a lot in common with his schoolmate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can see why they got on. They have similar demons. But they react to them in totally opposite ways, running in different directions.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.