The EU — the European Economic Community, as it was — is one of those institutions. In the years before the referendum, I made several arguments in favor of leaving. I said, if you look around, what do you see? You see a mix of stagnation, anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-future, bureaucracy — bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist bureaucratic centralism in Brussels, where everything will improve if everything is uniformly controlled by the Commission. But they’ve got low growth, high debt, nightmare pension systems, nightmare demographics, and immigration that is out of control and fueling the rise of extremist parties.

If you look at what’s happening technologically, increasingly it’s China and California which are dominating, and Europe is not in the game. Again, that was regarded as a very eccentric argument to make 10 years ago, but now it’s an obvious, very mainstream thing. 

I also argued that the regime in Britain is knackered and is failing, and the institutions are knackered, and they’re not going to be able to cope with the world that’s coming. That was an extremely niche view in 2015, regarded, generally speaking, as crazy. Now, of course, you can go on Twitter today, and you can see the vast majority of Westminster is now having to face up to the reality that the old parties are knackered, old Whitehall is knackered, the old media ecosystem is knackered, the universities have lost huge credibility, etc. etc. 

Also obvious is that Britain now has huge problems. In all sorts of ways we have not done what the Vote Leave plan was — and what we started doing in 2019 and 2020 — because the Tories stopped it all. But is the answer to that to say, “Oh yeah, we need the bureaucratic centralism of the European Commission, we need more EU AI acts, we need more of that kind of regulation, that’s the future”? Does anyone in their right mind really think that? 

So how does Westminster respond to this now? Westminster doesn’t want to face all the technology issues, never has done. Our political elites and Whitehall elites, for complicated reasons from the Sixties and Seventies, very deliberately and explicitly stepped back from thinking about frontier technology. 

So now people don’t want to look at those questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

Suggested Reading

Why Brexit is back

By Mary Harrington

Why? Because the old people from the old system are determined not to face reality, determined not to face the future. They just want to retreat to their comfort zone, which is having more stupid culture wars about Brexit, because that’s where they’re happy. They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market. Westminster doesn’t want to face any of those problems either.

Go back to the Eighties and look at the newspapers at the time and the news at the time. There’s obviously a lot of bitter arguments, but the political class is actually engaged with the real issues of the British economy. That is actually what dominates the news, and you have a whole set of people reading things and arguing about them and making complicated arguments in public about what we have to do on privatization, you name it. 

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterized by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. The Guardian, the Telegraph, Labour and the Tories were happier arguing about that and arguing about Brexit than they were about dealing with any of these other actual core problems.

And Whitehall doesn’t care about these problems. Whitehall cares about preserving existing power and existing institutions and existing budgets, and it cares, most importantly, about itself retaining control over its own personnel caste system. That is its actual priority, and everything will always be sacrificed to that, as you saw in Covid, as you could see in Ukraine, as you can see on everything.

So now you’ve got stagnant growth, you’ve got completely pathological institutions that actually need real-terms increases in money just to stand still, and you’ve got political parties and senior civil servants completely dedicated to not changing how anything works. 

If you put those three things together, you’ve got what we can see all around us, which is every part of the system now failing, and those failings interacting with each other in various ways. So you’ve got a shitshow in that you can’t deport people, and you’re scraping crazy Afghans off the street and putting them in prison, but then that means you’ve got to let all these people out, and then that means you’ve got X, and then that means you’ve got Y, and then that means the budgets for these things are all knackered as well. So all these things are now starting to ping into each other. You haven’t just got one defunct bureaucracy, with internal silos going haywire, you’ve also got, horizontally, them all smashing into each other and breaking — and no one has authority to deal with the interactions between all these different parts of the system.

But in all sorts of ways, Britain is actually the best-placed country in the West. In practical terms, it is much easier to do real regime change in Britain than it is in America or anywhere in Europe, because of our unwritten constitution and the weird way in which the powers of the Prime Minister actually work. So, unlike Trump, the Prime Minister can go in today and say, “Fired, fired, fired, fired, fired. This government department is closed, and I’m creating a new one.” The civil service has to do it, and the courts can’t stop it, or even judicially review these things. In no other Western country is that possible. 

That is why you see two things happening on the Left now: one, the plan to change the electoral system to PR (proportional representation), and then, secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the civil service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I’m talking about. What they’re thinking is — and it’s actually logical from their point of view — that if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system, and then you do PR, you make it extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do.

What they’re terrified of is Nigel Farage doing some kind of Doge-type thing and saying, “Right, I’m going to bring in 20 hotshots, fire all the permanent secretaries, put them in charge of this, use the actual powers of the PM, close departments, open them, fire people, and then pass a whole series of primary legislation, repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Equality Act, reform how judicial review works, bin the Climate Change Act.” You go through 15 things, you whack them all in year one with primary legislation.

If you have an actual serious list of these things, the right way to do it would be that you draft all this legislation in opposition, you make the case in the election, in the manifesto, you win on the Thursday, and on Monday morning, these bills start hammering through into parliament. And you also make clear to the House of Lords that if anyone thinks that they can fuck around, we’re going straight at the King, we’ll appoint 600 new peers, and it’ll be blitzkrieg on you guys.

You smash that through in primary legislation, so you have that combination of primary legislation changing fundamentals, and you actually use the constitutional powers of the PM, as I’ve discussed, and the whole thing starts to shift. That’s what they are terrified of — correctly from their point of view — in Whitehall, in Labour, in the Inner Temple, etc. etc. And that’s why you start to see this mix of “Rejoin the EU”, PR, censorship, and embedding legislation to protect the civil service. They’re thinking that if they can bring off some combination of those things, then they can get to the state they want to, which is that they don’t have to worry about elections anymore. And they’ve convinced themselves that everyone who doesn’t agree with them now is fascist. Go back to pre-referendum: mainstream people in the system in Westminster hated me, thought I was crazy, stupid, wrong, but they didn’t say I was actually a fascist who should be in jail. Now, their argument about people like me is that we’re actually fascists who should be in jail and shouldn’t be allowed to actually participate in democratic politics.

So almost all the positive things that we could have changed after Brexit, Westminster, the Tories and Labour have been adamant in refusing to do. But just because of inertia, we haven’t adopted various of the EU regulations, and therefore we haven’t shot ourselves in both feet the way that Brussels has. As the old system fails, something new is being born — but for the moment, it is unclear exactly what.

***

This essay was adapted from Dominic Cummings’ interview on the Anglofuturism podcast.

Instead, British politics over the last decade has seen the rise of the celebrity adviser — staff who have been visible shapers of the government agenda and essential to the party leader or Prime Minister. When I was in Downing Street working for Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Chief of Staff was the former mandarin Jonathan Powell, a calm, long-serving presence who focused on the critical issues of Northern Ireland and defense and security. Personalities vary, but the elevation of Chief of Staff started with Dominic Cummings, who worked for Boris Johnson as Chief Adviser. As a named and known figure, Cummings had his own reputation as a political player, having successfully led Vote Leave to victory in the Brexit referendum, and maintained his own links with the media when inside No 10. He continued to narrate his own theory of the case to selected journalists even through the national crisis of Covid, culminating in the infamous press conference held in the Downing Street garden.

Cummings established a set of behaviors and assumptions that have continued to define the Chief of Staff role. Blaming the civil service. Attempting to strengthen the center of government. Concentrating flows of information. Briefing journalists. Suspending the whip from MPs. This, sadly, became a model for Keir Starmer’s No 10 operation. 

The obvious flaw in the Cummings model is captured by that former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short’s description of special advisers as “people who live in the dark”. She meant it as an attack on spin doctors,  but it was also good advice. The iron law of staffing is that you must not become the story. And when you do — whether you are Alastair Campbell, Dominic Cummings, or Morgan McSweeney — you will have to go. Each fell in different ways: Alastair went to war with the media, finally turning up on screen; Dom lost an internal Downing Street power struggle; Morgan took responsibility for his closeness to Peter Mandelson. Yet each had become a household name — the very opposite of lurking in the shadows. 

The less obvious structural problem is that, over the past decade, the job of Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been held by 14 different people. This, too, is part of the Cummings legacy. The reason is Brexit. That was the ultimate project of change without a plan, and it has set the template for UK politics. A profound rejection of “things as they are” to which politicians repeatedly failed to respond. Theresa May — no plan, just a hard Brexit with a “dementia tax” and restoration of hunting. Boris Johnson — no plan, and he was not saved by his swift response to the global crisis of Covid. Rishi Sunak — no plan but some spreadsheets and some welcome but insufficient incremental changes. Keir Starmer — no plan, not even a plan to make a plan.

More from this author

John Prescott never pulled his punches

By John McTernan

For a decade, voters have demanded change, whether opting for Brexit, surging to Corbyn, or delivering landslides in turn to Johnson and Starmer. What to change from is obvious: the status quo. What to change to is far more opaque, not least because neoliberal governance, or the “Treasury view”, as it is commonly known, is the paradigm within which government politicians live and think. The bond vigilantes have been beseeched to attack Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to support the government’s Budget, and now to quell backbench Labour unease. Just look at how easily the current Labour leadership turns to the bond markets for support in party management. 

There is a desperate need for Labour to break with the current political frame, which for a decade has ensured virtually no growth in wages and living standards. Yet there is stasis within the Labour party at the moment — apart from the call by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who himself admitted he has no rule in changing the UK leader, for Starmer to resign. Sure, there is a structural problem: the possible candidates are waiting for the result of inquiries. Angela Rayner hasn’t had resolution of an HMRC inquiry; others await the full publication of correspondence between Peter Mandelson and ministers. Burnham, the single most popular figure in Labour politics, is marooned outside the House of Commons having been barred from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in McSweeney’s last backroom move to protect his boss. Burnham’s candidacy in that contest would have given a voice to voters and a potential vehicle for change for the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). So this is currently a Mexican stand-off in which no-one can pull a trigger.

Yet, as the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn used to say, what matters most are not personalities but issues. The real question for anyone who wants to replace Starmer is what policy platform would restore Labour’s popularity to 25% — which would make it competitive with Reform UK. In reality, there are two options: focus on delivery or focus on change. The first of these, currently being pursued by the Starmer government as the “cost-of-living agenda”, is a cul-de-sac. Sadly, it is the path and error of the technocrat. It is more a tactic than a strategy, and it rests on making a series of small, incremental changes in the hope that those will accumulate into a meaningful difference. 

Suggested Reading

Morgan McSweeney’s empty legacy

By Jonny Ball

The problem is that the cost of living never goes down, not least because, since the Thirties, politicians and economists have been conscious of the massive danger of deflation. So, if prices won’t go down, what to do? The Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has popularized the term “Affordability”. The concept brings increased spending power into the calculation — with more of that then things are more affordable. The record rise in the minimum wage is part of that, as is the reality of rent controls coming in through strengthening renters’ rights in England.

That’s why Labour’s second option — focusing on change, rather than delivery — is the real contest. Just look at the rise of insurgent parties in the UK. On the Left, there are the Greens, and on the Right there is Reform UK — both fueled by voters who distrust big business, believe the system isn’t working, and have lost trust in the traditional parties. 

Given these circumstances, the Labour Party needs a new political economy. Without a theory of how to allocate revenue and capital fairly, who the winners and losers are, and who their enemy is, changing leaders is pointless. That new political economy requires obeying the first law of politics — the voters are never wrong, so act on their worries. Yes, they complain about the cost of living, but the biggest element of that is housing — and housebuilding has fallen catastrophically. The only entity that can build at speed and scale is the government — so it is time for half a million council houses built on government land. The biggest existential fear for workers is the advance of AI, while for parents it’s the impact of Big Teach on their kids’ futures. For Labour, the natural party of intervention, that means swift and tough regulation.

Above all else, the party must apologize. Admit that Labour lost its way. None of its mistakes — the reasons it has lost support — were in the manifesto. Cutting winter fuel payments, attacking social security for people with disabilities, appointing the wrong ambassador — those were all done in government. Return to the manifesto and build a plan to implement big changes that will be visible and will be felt day by day, month by month, over the remaining years of the parliament. That landslide majority could still come in handy, if Labour can find a true social democratic purpose. Then there may be a Chief of Staff in Downing Street whose name we don’t need to know.

It took only 12 months, the life-span of a shrew, for a Labour landslide to transmute itself into a struggling government barely able to contain social cataclysm. If a country’s stability can be measured in the longevity of its leaders, then Britain remains in a period of near-revolutionary ferment. Who can say with confidence that Starmer, Britain’s sixth Prime Minister in a decade, will see out his full term, or even that his party will?

At the time of writing, with the Chancellor weeping on the front bench, and Starmer’s authority within his own party having followed his welfare reforms down the drain, the Labour government reeks of approaching death. Already almost as unpopular as the Conservative Party at its terminal nadir in government, Labour is in office without power, in helpless possession of a historic majority it cannot use and is unlikely ever to repeat.

Yet for all that Starmer is simply a dud, the Government’s root problem is structural rather than personal: any Labour replacement would suffer the same fate. All the recent character portraits released to mark his dismal anniversary, peering behind the hollow mask, are thus an exercise in futility. The reason Britain is cycling through prime ministers at an ever-increasing rate is due to a crisis of state legitimacy. Like later 19th-century Ireland, the effective governance of the country has now become impossible. The state’s legitimacy and reach are contested, neither oppression nor mollification are practicable, an amorphous nationalist revolt is brewing, and strategic shocks are appreciable on the horizon.

In an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of existential threat, the state warns darkly of an approaching war it is not equipped to fight, in defence of a political order no one would willingly fight for. The country is simply in no state to fight a war. According to Westminster’s own newly announced commission on social cohesion, the UK is now a “tinderbox” of “creeping balkanisation and extremism” in which “the basis of our democracy is at risk”. Yet as the commission itself laments, “We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle” to remake the faltering state. What we have, for now, is Keir Starmer.

One highly probable outcome of the current crisis, according to the New Statesman’s Tom McTague, is that Starmer “will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right”. Yet whatever the contours of the new state, the Westminster state, in its current ailing form, is also a very recent one: the proof of this is that even a return to the Britain of John Major would be experienced as a political revolution, condemned as fascism by clients of the Blairite state. Blair’s New Labour effectively erected a new UK polity on Britain’s territory, a “New Britain” in his own words, to entirely reshape what had by the Nineties become a normal European nation state for a new globalised world order. Yet now that global order has collapsed, and the British state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time.

The unintentional effect of Blair’s demographic and constitutional tinkering was to set in train a second, later counterrevolution on the Right, understood by its opponents as a Right-wing populism of base urges, rather than a logical and entirely predictable political reaction. The current political trends on the Right are most closely analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the essential stages of political modernity which Britain, through its possession of an early unified state and global empire, had previously sidestepped. Once you accept the analogy with classical nationalism, you see its hallmarks everywhere. The increasing co-option of the Conservative Party and its allied media and thinktanks by the New Right follows precisely the same process of “blocked mobility”, producing a revolutionary counter-elite among disaffected graduates that the scholar John Hutchinson traced in his works on cultural nationalism. In this regard, we may note that the current UK state’s proscription of “cultural nationalism” as a threat to its survival is entirely rational. Late 19th-century Ireland is one useful parallel, but others are available, as the relationship follows a well-worn historical path. In his 1994 book Modern Nationalism, Hutchinson summarised the process by which the ethnic Russians of the Soviet Union lost faith in their state, and by withdrawing its legitimacy, allowed it to collapse.

Like his contemporary Blair, Gorbachev aimed to reshape his ailing state for the brave new world of the Nineties. Instead, he accelerated its collapse. Following his failed reforms, ethnic Russians “came to believe themselves victims of a failed system… declining in world prestige and economically incompetent” in which the heterogenous state built around their ethnic core instead appeared to be the engine of their demographic decline. Relative birth rates, of ethnic Russians and minorities, assumed new political importance as “concerns were expressed about demographic trends which were transforming them into a minority in the Union”, while a new flowering of overt anti-Russian sentiment among minorities heightened their alienation from the Soviet state. The growing centrality of demographic and cultural anxieties in an atmosphere of economic decline and paralysed political leadership accelerated a Russian “ambivalence that made them prepared in the end to desert the USSR in order to build a better future in their homelands. Divisions paralysed the state, paving the way for full collapse.” In 1986, Hutchinson reminds us, the Soviet leadership had declared the “national question” to be finally resolved: five years later, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

How relevant is this scenario to the UK? Each day’s headlines now throw up correspondences, yet what is remarkable, and tragic, is how new these dynamics are. Writing in 1994, Hutchinson observed that there are a few “other multinational states where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification”, with Britain being the prime example. Yet the Britain of the Nineties differed from the Soviet Union in that “the core nationality is much more dominant than were the Russians in the USSR (who had declined to barely 50 per cent of the total population) and there are many fewer minority nationalities to control”. The takeaway lesson, for Hutchinson, is that “even universalistic ideologies such as communism, possessing all the machinery of a modern technological state to achieve its aims, have ultimately to operate through ethnic core populations.” Indeed, “for a state to achieve stability… these cores must be demographically dominant and strongly identified with the state and its territories.” This social-scientific truism is increasingly the pivot of British politics.

Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.

Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development. Almost every daily headline or “culture war” controversy strengthens this thesis, which requires a wilful blindness to ignore: indeed, it is now more vigorously heard in ordinary life, or seen in the comments of local news stories than it in the Westminster press. In rushing towards visions of civil war, social democrats such as Marr, just like his increasingly mainstream apocalyptic analogues on the Right, have skipped the more common and plausible political outcome of political pressures leading towards a reinvigorated, more tightly-defined nation state, as historically distinct in its own way as Eastern Europe’s transition from communism.

McTague’s portrait of Starmer as “the last leader of the old normal” may be better applied to Farage, a flawed politician seemingly destined to take on a daunting and unenviable historical role. When Farage can declare that “Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone. That’s why we say we believe that we are the last chance to restore confidence in the democratic system, to change things”, he is probably correct. Whether he is up to the challenge is doubtful. As its name suggests, the Reform Party can be understood as one of the last attempts of the old system — the UK state in its post-Blair form — to save itself. If the analogies with classical nationalism are valid, then the political horizon of interest is what comes after Reform’s likely failure in government, as some on the political Right increasingly make explicit. Rupert Lowe’s new cross-party venture, Restore Britain, is a more perfect summation of nationalist thinking.

As the most intellectually interesting politician on the Right, Robert Jenrick, declares, “The old order is collapsing — and its architects like Tony Blair are yesterday’s men and women… We live in a political interregnum” in which “we have no choice but to go advance, and embrace the new order that is coming.” Cynically or not, consciously or not, Jenrick is tapping into the ferment of nationalist ideas on the younger Right, as is a growing cohort of the Conservative Party under Badenoch’s hands-off leadership. We have entered a well-established and predictable historical process which is likely to reshape the British state entirely before it is done. Indeed, it is notable that one eyewitness observer of the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, Dominic Cummings, has already himself transitioned from reformer to accelerationist. Others will surely follow: adapting the old Irish nationalist maxim, we can say that the UK’s crisis is Britain’s opportunity.

Yet despite the weakness of lobby journalists for vapid gossip, the individual personalities of Westminster politicians thrown up by the moment are in a sense irrelevant, making Starmer, the empty cipher, the perfect figure of our time. Like Starmer, buffeted by winds he cannot control, their positions are structural, created by the logic of events. Like us mere voters, the politicians of today and of the near future have been dragged into the slipstream of history, in a process they may not fully perceive and cannot fully control. To accurately outline the contours of the current crisis is one thing: but where it all leads, no-one can yet say.

“Inside the intelligence services,” Cummings writes, “special forces, […] bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently.” As Cummings notes, the Government’s panicked response to last year’s ethnic riots, and its fear of their recurrence, derives from “incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs… The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence.” And yet instead, Cummings claims, “As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicization of white English nationalism.”

Much of this analysis I agree with. Certainly, the events that followed the parade crash in Liverpool this week provided a glimpse of a country, and government, on edge, waiting for an explosion it is either unwilling or unable to escape. Unlike after Southport, the perpetrator was swiftly revealed by the state to belong to Britain’s ethnic majority (or rather, Liverpool’s Irish one). This information was revealed so rapidly precisely to ward off another wave of riots, the prospect of which hangs over the Government like a deferred death sentence. Yet even still, simply revealing the facts of the case was not enough for many, who saw it as another instance of two-tier policing: we have, unfortunately, entered a situation where for many the police, and state, can do no right.

Fears of a second round of riots may have been overblown in this instance — the incident was, fortunately, not fatal, and the current inclement weather, as the Police Service of Northern Ireland well know, is an inhibitor to mass street violence — but the initial tension of the moment provided a vivid portrait of a country on edge. The Government is held hostage to factors outside of its control: the possibility of a mass casualty attack that can be linked to mass migration, as now commonly occurs throughout Europe, and a simultaneous extended spell of good weather in Britain, which is less common. One may, as I do, believe that sustained bouts of civil conflict are not the most probable outcome of Britain’s current unhappy circumstances, but the revealed actions of the British state suggest that they are highly possible.

The state’s official report on the policing of the summer riots observed that police forces were nearly overstretched by the scale and geographic dispersal of the events, characterized as “exceptional levels of violence” in which “offenders attacked police officers with missiles, including petrol bombs”, and which saw 54 police officers hospitalized. The report briefly considers the use of baton rounds in any repeat of the disorder, and suggests that “it may be timely to explore whether current and foreseeable circumstances might render the use of water cannon conceivable”. For the authorities, then, the retention of coercive power sufficient to suppress probable future disorder is a process still being refined. The question now is how to arrest the tailspin of the British state to render these refinements no more than a latent, unneeded capability.

More from this author

Searching for Britain's JD Vance

By Aris Roussinos

Starmer’s late-stage pivot on mass migration, using language that would have Hope Not Hate chasing him if he were an anonymous blogger rather than a center-left prime minister, is one such attempt to steer away from disaster. But Cummings too has evolved in this regard. Two years ago, that he was ultimately a reformer, aiming to save Westminster from itself, rather than a revolutionary. Yet now, for Cummings, the Westminster state is “the regime”, and a failing, pre-revolutionary one at that. As he observes in the Sky News interview, the attitude of British voters towards their political system is one of “hate, contempt and disgust”, adding that “it’s now very common to have discussions outside London with normal people where they talk about the coming civil war, about how their area is going to crack up, what they see around them, and how frightened they are for the future. That’s not an abnormal conversation to have now.”

Cummings’ newest musings on civil war are an elaboration of his February observation, glossed over by lobby journalists in favor of SW1 gossip, that the next election presents the last opportunity to install a reformist Right-wing government before 2032, “by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid”. For Cummings, as he says to Sky News, Britain’s current political system is already dead: “the old system can keep struggling and fighting, but it’s not going to win that battle in the end, it’s only a question of how destructive that transition is.”

In his follow-up this week to his now-viral essay and interview (referenced by Cummings) assessing the likelihood of civil war in Western nations, including Britain, David Betz, the King’s College London Professor of War in the Modern World, claimed that “At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France”, as “governments under increasing structural civilizational distress and having squandered their legitimacy are losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies that are terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics”. Cummings now claims that Betz “reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF [Special Forces] etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence”. Betz’s suggestion is that “Generals should be formulating strategies to respond to the reality of civil conflict now. At the very least, should they fear for their careers lest they begin to plan for the outbreak of civil war without a civilian political directive, they ought to seek such a directive.”

But is this actually true? It is certainly true that a sense of foreboding has settled over the country, that these conversations are now being had, from previously unexpected quarters. But there also remains the opposing feeling that much of this derives from the circular reasoning of the Right, a handful of people referencing each other, talking themselves into an unnecessary disaster. Would the Army leadership seeking a political directive to plan for civil war, as Betz suggests, ameliorate a looming disaster, or would it summon an avoidable one into being as the plans are leaked and the nation’s already fraying social fabric tatters even further?

Accepting their framing, how can disaster be averted? Cummings cites the existence of unnamed “Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change”, claiming that “There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.” Who are these “political entrepreneurs”? He surely does not mean Farage, who appears more like the last vestige of the old regime than its replacement. What are the “embryonic networks” and “very powerful forces”?

When Cummings claims that “deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence… have seeped through to few MPs or hacks”, is this the same “deep state” that fears seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organization?” Is it the same “deep state” as in his claim that “the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes”? Exactly what or who this “deep state” is is never revealed, but it sounds strikingly close to his own view.

Whitehall, Cummings implies, is divided between those that are preparing “to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system” and those, “particularly in security and intelligence”, who will respond to this disintegration. How do the repeated references to the SAS, which is, he claims, “under attack from its political bosses today” and “watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defense” fit in? Does this relate to his assertion in the Sky News interview that during Covid “we put the former commanding officer of 22 SAS in there… and then things actually worked, we sent his mates from the SAS around the country and they actually built stuff […] while all the other useless wankers in Westminster were just sharing powerpoints”? How does all this relate to his claim that dissatisfaction within the Army “is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place… bubbling out of control for Whitehall”? Does this fit into his previously expressed suggestion to place “Army heroes” into his reformist Right-wing government? If so, aside from anything else, this idea assumes a higher degree of competence in the Army’s leadership than its ongoing procurement woes (which Cummings unfairly places squarely on the MOD’s shoulders) would suggest.

Suggested reading

Is civil war coming for Britain?

By Alexander Poots

The suggestions Cummings makes here are far more interesting than gossip about the dying days of the Johnson government — and consequently, have been ignored by the Westminster lobby. The cumulative effect is like reading political fiction about the alleged plot against Harold Wilson, or, as noted above, a Right-wing conspirator in a David Peace novel: it reads, at times, like a Left-wing fever dream of Right-wing politics. Without Cummings’ access to the inner workings of the British state, it is impossible to form an opinion on the veracity, or otherwise, of these doom-laden “deep state” conversations. Betz, for his part, puts the likelihood of civil war in Britain at around 18% over the next five years, certainly much higher than one would like, but far from likely — and even Betz would agree that his stance is a minority opinion. Either way, both Betz and Cummings address themselves directly to security elites within the heart of the British state in an attempt to either avoid or ameliorate the effects of serious civil disorder they place on a sliding scale from possible to near-inevitable.

That these claims can be made seriously, by credible people, is testament to the failure of Britain’s political system over recent decades. Certainly, urgent reform is needed before the country descends further down a dark and slippery path. But we are not there yet, and disaster is very far from inevitable. Even should civil conflict occur, it would, I suggest, look more like the Northern Ireland of 2025 than that of the Seventies: Britain’s politics gummed up with the petty narcissism of unresolvable ethnic factionalism, with only sporadic and brief outbursts of violent disorder. This would be a mark of historic political failure, but is a far more palatable scenario than the refugee flows and Army-protected “secure zones” Betz envisages. The more likely scenario is the three main parties competitively outbidding each other on immigration, in a Rightward shift with no functional Left-wing opposition, the focus of which will eventually turn towards mass deportations, as now underway in the United States.

Cummings is probably correct that a Reform government, representing a last-ditch protest vote by Britain’s voters, would be the final gasp of Britain’s political system in its current ailing form. The stakes of British political reform are now uncomfortably high: if the system cannot reform itself, it will break. Cummings concludes his Sky News interview by saying that “the forces now in play will express themselves one way or another. The old system’s going to get much worse before it gets better, chaos is coming in all sorts of ways… But how that all works itself out, it could work itself out in different ways.” The lesson is either banal or profound: something will happen, unless something else better does. But in averting disaster, reformists on the Right should be careful not to talk themselves into one.

The article in question is an introduction to a much longer piece of work, a 393-page chronology of Bismarck’s career up to 1867. This chronology is a most impressive feat of scholarship, 20 years in the making. It occurred to me, while reading it — with Otto Pflanze’s three-volume biography of Bismarck to hand, as per the author’s instructions — that Cummings might have a stronger grasp over all things Bismarck than any professional historian currently active in Britain. There might yet be a handful of German eggheads who could give him a run for his money.

Cummings’s obsession with Germany’s first chancellor began as a teenager, and shaped his thinking while he was attempting to pilot our own ship of state through the stormy weather of Brexit and Covid. “I’ve recently read some of the media commentary about 2019 that I ignored at the time and it’s amazing how many hacks thought I was trying to use [von Neumann’s] game theory”, he complains. “I was not. I did pinch ideas from how Bismarck dealt with the Prussian constitutional crisis.” With the parliamentarians in 1862 refusing to comply with the government’s wish to increase military spending, and the Kaiser supposedly on the brink of resignation, Bismarck stared them down, brushed them aside, and ultimately got his way. There were indeed traces of “Blood and Iron” in Cummings’s and Boris Johnson’s resolve over parliamentary prorogation in his first days in Downing Street.

That the media is wrong about everything is an axiom of Cummings Thought. He felt it necessary to sketch his Bismarck-chronology partly because the 19th-century media was no better, and has deceived many historians. His inside knowledge of political life thoroughly disabused him of the reliability of “official stories”. He learned to recognize that the things people say about politics are seldom actually the case; and so it follows that the things people say about political history are seldom actually the case, either. The Bismarck chronology thus isolates those few things about Bismarck’s career which we can know more or less for certain, and around which we can then attempt to construct more robust narratives and theories.

More from this author

Jordan Peterson wrestles with meaning

By Samuel Rubinstein

That, in itself, is a lesson worth learning: the stark disconnect between “official stories” and what really happened. Nowhere was this clearer than in the spectacle of conspiracy theories (Russian misinformation, Cambridge Analytica) solidifying into “official stories” in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum: “the media is incapable of analyzing the intersection of politics and technology” and actively “disinforms the public”. The “official story”, moreover, tends to flatter decision-makers, giving them agency and control; and one thing Bismarck can teach us, as Cummings is keen to stress, is the importance of dumb luck. Bismarck, he notes, was only appointed in the first place because of a “meltdown in royal circles” over which he had no real control. And if the aim of one would-be assassin, Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, had been only slightly different in May 1866, “the German states would certainly have evolved in a different way” — no First World War, no Hitler.

But if Bismarck had been entirely at the mercy of fortune, what would be the point of encouraging aspiring leaders, as Cummings did in his “Essay on an ‘Odyssean’ Education”, to take heed of his example? One aspect of Bismarck’s genius — Cummings does not shy away from that word — is that he harnessed the randomness of the world to his advantage. He was a brilliant practitioner of what Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (another Cummings favorite) called “Cheng/Ch’i” operations, feigned unpredictability to throw off the enemy. One hears much about “grand strategy” in international affairs, but Bismarck’s example suggests that the best way for countries to ruthlessly pursue their interests is by not “picking a strategy” at all. It may be no coincidence that Cummings had these thoughts during the early phases of the first Trump administration, nor that he senses amid the chaos of Trump’s present term some opportunities for wholesale reform.

Cummings is ever eager to emphasize that his admiration for Bismarck is not of a moral kind; indeed, he often says that the world would be better off today had Bismarck never existed. Still, given the extent of his enthusiasm — and of his vanity — it is natural to wonder whether he sees something of himself in Bismarck. The historian Katja Hoyer thinks so, and even traces some vague points of parallel between Bismarck’s career in government and Cummings’s — although even in a rather hostile article, she is too polite to point out that it is difficult to imagine the Iron Chancellor getting outfoxed in the halls of power by Carrie Symonds (Bismarck excelled at freezing the Kaiser’s wife, Victoria, out of the Prussian court). Hoyer claims, meanwhile, that Bismarck would never have written an “itemized response to every rumor that his enemies spread about him in the press”, but this I don’t find too difficult to imagine. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen said in 1875 that Bismarck “nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered”; and who knows how these might have manifested had Bismarck been acquainted with Substack.

Some of Cummings’s political behavior has a Bismarckian flavor. He is proudly cynical and non-partisan, and, like Bismarck, partial to the “secret meeting”: Bismarck with the flamboyant socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle; Cummings with everyone from Jeremy Corbyn’s communications team in 2019 to, it recently transpired, Nigel Farage. Notwithstanding his occasional social media rantings, Cummings strikes me as less of a mess of a man than Bismarck, who was constantly in tears and threatening to kill himself; tantrums and high emotions are not to be underrated as blunt instruments in his “diabolical” toolkit.

Beyond all this, I am not so sure that Cummings does fancy himself as a latter-day Bismarck. The subtitle to his chronology is “A Case Study of the Unrecognized Simplicities of High Performance”, and Cummings, who hawks books such as Superforecasting and The Scout Mindset to anyone who will listen, strives to be an expert “recognizer” of things “unrecognized”. Cummings’s Bismarck, at least when seen from the outside, is more a phenomenon than a human of flesh and blood; he is, in fact, a “super-intelligence”.

Cummings has used this metaphor on multiple occasions, and he means it seriously. Watching Bismarck “play politics” is akin to watching the best computers play chess; they’re not just playing it better than the rest of us, but “so differently that it’s really a different game”. Elsewhere, Cummings writes that the question Bismarck forces us to ponder — a question “relevant” to debates over AI today — is “how much was the effectiveness bound up with the dangerousness”. Cummings’s chronology lingers on the bourgeois teetering that met Bismarck on his elevation to the chancellorship in 1862 by those who recognized neither his effectiveness nor his dangerousness; he draws for us an intellectually hollow world order utterly unprepared for what was about to hit it, incapable even of seeing it for what it was. And those few who did recognize Bismarck’s brilliance — Albrecht von Roon, for example, who summoned him to be chancellor with his famous telegram, Periculum in mora — made the other fatal error, of assuming that he would “align” with their interests rather than pursuing his own; they recognized his effectiveness but not his dangerousness. Bismarck was not predicted or understood by “professors” and “pundits”; “the odd ‘maverick’ warns ‘you’re making a fatal error, I beg you to reconsider’ but is dismissed by the experts”. Cummings clearly isn’t Bismarck in this story: he’s the “maverick”.

Sir Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, wrote that Cummings “resembles those Germans who, as Max Weber observed in 1917, admired [Bismarck] not for the ‘grandeur of his subtle, sovereign mind, but exclusively for the element of violence and cunning in his statesmanship, the real or imagined brutality in his methods’”. Perhaps there is some blind power-worship afoot; some of Cummings’s ramblings certainly give that impression. Yet Bismarck, for Cummings, isn’t just a character plucked from the past for shrewd leaders to emulate, but a phenomenon which shrewd leaders will have to learn to recognize: something that transcends the usual rules and orders, something that threatens to upend everything, something — like, perhaps, Artificial Intelligence — that leaders will have to see even when elite opinion or the “official story” does not. On that recognition, the future of humanity might well depend; yet, with enough Bismarckian initiative, those threats might even present opportunities. Some of Cummings’s earliest published thoughts on AI, composed back when he was a little-known minion to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, closed, much in this vein, with one of Bismarck’s most celebrated bons mots. “Technical changes such as genetic engineering and machine intelligence are bringing revolution. It would be better to undertake it than undergo it.”

In practice, however, the division of labour between policy and politics, architect and salesman, has never been quite so benign. Far from being shrinking violets doing what is best, the powers behind the throne have all too often been true believers — feverish sectarians for fanatical causes. Here lies the paradox of the political aide. As misfits, they possess a greater desire for domination than do the exnominated parroters of establishment opinion. It is this quality that endears them to rulers. Donald Trump surely believed that only a batty figure like Steve Bannon was capable of doing something as daunting as draining the Beltway swamp. And yet the zealous aide is his own worst enemy. With no real curbs on his shadowy authority, there is the all-too-real danger of enemies accruing and mistakes multiplying. Ultimately, his unsound decisions catch up with him. So it is that his downfall is just as dramatic as his rise.

Take that political aide par excellence, Thomas Cromwell, who supplied the template for the tragedy of the power-drunk maverick. Half a millennium on, our fascination with the Cromwell story is still going strong. The late, great Hilary Mantel bagged two Bookers retelling it in her Wolf Hall series, which was followed by a Beeb adaptation. Now, the TV series is back with a sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, another chiaroscuro romp through draughty Tudor piles enlivened by chiselled persiflage. The upshot of the renewed attention, no doubt aided by the taciturn brilliance of Mark Rylance’s sad-eyed performance, has been a reversal in Cromwell’s fortunes. Long vilified as an intemperate megalomaniac, he has been recast as one of history’s heroes.

What’s more, to contemporary sensibilities, Cromwell appears as a meritocrat. Here is the story of a plucky parvenu, a fellow of “base degree” as he himself put it, who rose to the very top through sheer skill.  It’s a rags-to-riches tale that has beguiled the very best. The German historian Geoffrey Elton’s mid-century view, now discarded but explosive at the time, was that Cromwell yanked England out of its mediaeval past by ushering in the “Tudor Revolution in Government”. Cromwell himself cultivated that image. This is the Cromwell of Holbein’s stern portrait, a mandarin hard at work with his quill and papers, unflecked by emotion, begetting England’s modern bureaucracy.

Truth be told, he did no such thing. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, his no-nonsense biographer shows, Cromwell was the quintessential mediaeval fixer, a hard-nosed, power-grubbing politico. There was nothing modern about the way he went about gobbling offices, hogging the king’s calendar, and staffing all echelons with loyalists. The rationalisation of the Privy Council as a modern cabinet of sorts, which Elton credited him for, in fact came in the way of Cromwell’s progress. He thrived in the cut and thrust of court life, its perils and possibilities, much as his descendants have done. The maverick political aides of our century — from Alastair Campbell to Dominic Cummings — really are a throwback to this Henrician world of old. Properly speaking, they are the Cromwells of today.

His modern heirs, of course, aren’t quite up there with the OG. Cromwell could be quite unsentimental in his handling of adversaries. For prophesying against the royal mésalliance with Anne Boleyn, for instance, the Catholic nun Elizabeth Barton was hung and beheaded, becoming, according to MacCulloch, “the only woman in English history to have her severed head placed among those spiked on London Bridge”. Then there was the fire and fury brought to bear on the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular uprising by conservatives protesting social change.

Such bestial blitheness pointed to a willingness to tear up the rulebook if the occasion demanded it. But while Cromwell was a disruptor, he was also a diplomat. During his teenage stint as a globetrotting merchant, he absorbed tongues like a sponge, and in due course became “the best Italian in all England” — a linguistic ability he turned to good account by becoming Cardinal Wolsey’s protégé and later Henry VIII’s advisor during his break with the Bishop of Rome. Cromwell’s savoir-faire extended to delicate situations as well. It was as a marriage broker that he got into the good graces of England’s ruler, dealing with his breakup with Katherine of Aragon; the marriage to Boleyn, and then her beheading; and finally his wedding to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. It was the latter foray into matchmaking that proved his undoing. The well-upholstered Henry, in that innocent age before Ozempic, couldn’t get it up with Anne. Poor Cromwell became the fall guy.

Suggested reading

Alastair Campbell won't stop spinning

By Alwyn Turner

Throughout his brief decade in power, what was never in doubt was Cromwell’s ruthlessness as Henry’s enforcer. He proved capable of accelerating the pace of history without losing his grip on power — no mean achievement. Many historians have typically explained away some of his more radical measures as the work of a manipulative Machiavelli, loyal to no calling but his career. We now know, however, that Cromwell was that rare thing, a true believer, something of a fanatic even. His Protestantism, or more accurately his evangelicalism, was serious business. The historian Dominic Selwood wasn’t too far off the mark when he described Cromwell’s creed as the “Islamic State of his day”.

The same fanaticism can be glimpsed in Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s enforcer and latterly has-been podcaster. In recent years, he has tried to present himself as no more than a ventriloquist for New Labour, but at the time, Campbell appeared to be a true believer. Blair certainly thought so, describing his first encounter with the former tabloid hack as some kind of coup de foudre. Campbell had “clanking great balls”, Blair wrote in his memoirs. A rather abrasive character, Campbell was prepared to bare them at the slightest provocation, as he did during his war of retribution against David Kelly, the weapons inspector who accused Campbell of “sexing up” the Iraq dossier that made the case for the invasion that New Labour was itching for. Soon after, Kelly committed suicide. Relations between the press and government continued to deteriorate in the runup to the war thanks to Campbell’s bullying and hectoring. As a result, Campbell was dropped as Downing Street director of communications in August 2003.

Campbell may not have “sexed up” the dossier, but it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact remains that Campbell not only joined in beating the drums of war, but did so with an amplitude that put many of his party mates to shame. Like the cocksure Cromwell, he had something of the fundamentalist about him. And like Cromwell, his actions exacted a toll on the world beyond. The Iraq war resulted in some 600,000 deaths according to Lancet. Blair himself paid a price: along with his weird pact with Gordon Brown, it was his plummeting popularity on account of the war that led to his resignation. Still, as late as 2010, Campbell could declare that the war was one that Britain ought to be “proud of”.

The bearded Brummie Nick Timothy, by contrast, was a lesser Rasputin, despite his appropriate mien. As unelected advisors go, his reign wasn’t in any way damaging to the national fabric. His sin was more of a peccadillo. But he seems to have shared the hubris of a Campbell or Cromwell, and like them, was ultimately responsible for the reckless gambit that led to his downfall. Along with his joint chief of staff Fiona Hill, Timothy had the bright idea of cajoling his ruler into calling a snap election in 2017, thus giving Corbynism a new lease of life and his English compatriots a lesson in Northern Irish politics when May inevitably lost her majority and needed to be shored up by the DUP. After an inevitable Tory revolt, Timothy and Hill were duly put out to pasture.

More from this author

The moral weakness of Britain's ruling class

By Pratinav Anil

Thomas Cromwell’s greatest modern heir, undoubtedly, is Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings. Their backgrounds, though, couldn’t have been more different. Cummings is no working-class lad from Putney. He may be an anti-establishment figure, but his credentials signal its deepest depths: Oxford via public school; father-in-law the baronet owner of Chillingham Castle; an Islington townhouse for a pied-à-terre. Also unlike Cromwell, who kept his cards close to his chest, Cummings likes to lay it on the line, as those subjected to his epithets know all too well: David Davis (“vain as Narcissus”), Nick Clegg (“revolting character”), Ed Llewellyn (“classic third-rate, suck-up-kick-down sycophant”) among others. Like Cromwell, however, Cummings was capable of being perfectly unforgiving when the occasion demanded it. Take his defence of herd immunity: the aim of the government, he declared early on in the pandemic, was to “protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. It’s a sentiment Cromwell might have approved of.

As Johnson’s unelected fixer, Cummings unleashed a “reign of terror”, according to Whitehall mandarins. He went over the head of Sajid Javid to fire one of the chancellor’s advisors, ordering “an armed police officer to escort her out of Downing Street”. Javid later resigned over Downing Street’s penchant for muscling in on Treasury appointments. Throughout his career, Cummings has cultivated the reputation of an iconoclast, by turns intrepid and independent. His Oxford tutor recalled that he was a bit of a Robespierre: “someone determined to bring down things that don’t work.” When he left his job as advisor to education secretary Michael Gove in 2014, Cummings explained his decision with a 237-page manifesto in which he argued that education ultimately didn’t really matter, since in the end it was genetics that determined ability.

The following year, he found himself in charge of Vote Leave, a perch from which he urged Leavers to “pick up a baseball bat and smash David Cameron and George Osborne over the head”. Cummings ran a slick show. “Take back control” was a clever empty signifier, throwing up a tent wide enough to encompass Left sovereigntists, Right xenophobes, and patriotic bien pensants. Less convincing was the downright dishonest claim that some 80 million Turks would descend on the Thames and Tyne. Cummings and his cronies would have surely known that Ankara’s accession was never a real prospect. The misrepresentation brings to mind the manner in which Boleyn was thrown under the bus by Cromwell, who maligned her for, inter alia, conducting incestuous relations with her brother.

Cummings’ next gig, his last real one, was his 16-month tenure as Johnson’s chief advisor. Early on, he set about courting “weirdos from William Gibson novels”, whose presence in the civil service would, he hoped, diminish the outsized influence of “Oxbridge English graduates”, the kind, apparently, “who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers”. At all events, unlike Cromwell, Cummings never really had a chance to shape the government in his image. His general disdain for “the rules” no doubt prompted him to break them by driving up to Durham despite reeling from Covid with his family, and then making a further sojourn to Barnard Castle despite a “weird” sensation in his eyes. His sorry-not-sorry mea culpa cut no ice. Not even Benedict Cumberbatch playing him in a biopic, nor for that matter BrewDog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test IPA, could save him from the Tory MPs clamouring for his ouster. Very simply, Cummings had made too many enemies.

These days, Campbell is a sterile podcaster, Cummings a logorrhoeic Substacker — forlorn advisors abandoned by their masters now adored only by a vanishing minority of diehards (Campbell) and blowhards (Cummings). They can thank their lucky stars that they don’t live in the age of Cromwell, when the ruling class tended to be rather literal-minded about the expression “heads will roll”. For all that, Cromwell’s age is closer to us than we might think. Shadowy figures of the likes of Morgan McSweeney, purger of the Left, and Waheed Alli, Santa to the front bench, continue to haunt Westminster, running the Labour show from behind the scenes. The throne may be gone, but the powers behind the throne remain.

This is the situation we are rapidly approaching. In the Nineties, their heads spun by the unexpected Soviet collapse and the unipolar empire America won by default, the architects of our current order sincerely believed that a golden age of peace and prosperity could be won by the free movement of goods, wealth and people across national borders. Millions of words were devoted to lauding this new transnational order, as politicians busied themselves with the dismantling of hard-won state capacity, whose sacrifice would bring about the earthly paradise. To stand against this was to stand against progress; the protests of those who doubted the wisdom of the new order were merely the death-rattle of history’s losers.

Yet it is this order that is already dead, and the old world of hard power and industrial capacity is writing the outlines of the coming century. The ideological fantasies of the Nineties have placed the collective West at a great structural disadvantage even before the true confrontation begins. Rightly, in his recent Sorbonne speech, Macron observed that “the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilisers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over”.

So, when Rishi Sunak professed to feel, as he did this week, “a profound sense of urgency, because more will change in the next five years than in the last 30”, and declared “the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet the most transformational our country has ever known”, he was entirely correct. Where he is mistaken is in his belief that “the United Kingdom is uniquely placed to benefit”. Instead, Britain is almost uniquely exposed to the dangers of this harsh new world, through the compounded errors of those who ruled us during our brief holiday from history — and whose worldview, barely altered, rules us still. The world order crumbling around us is, unfortunately for us, the one around which our entire economic and political systems still revolve.

Britain is on a war footing, we are now told, as Sunak announces a return to the 2.5% of GDP defence expenditure previously announced by Boris Johnson just two years earlier: our fleet may be shrinking, our Army cannot withstand two weeks of war, and we still sell off what remains of our industrial capacity, but we are preparing for conflict nevertheless. In all the many examples of the gulf between Westminster’s bombastic rhetoric and concrete action, there is little that could instil a greater sense of dread. No one sane would wish to be led into war by the current Conservative Party, but then Starmer’s front bench hardly inspires confidence either: it is hard, observing the international situation and then glancing towards Westminster, to avoid feeling like a passenger sitting in the backseat of a vehicle revving up at the edge of a cliff.

Yet there is at least one modest victory we can console ourselves with before we crash the barriers: the destruction of the Conservative Party, at whose door half the blame for our current state of crisis can be laid. The possible extinction of the world’s oldest political party would, in less tumultuous times, seem a historic event: right now, it is the barest minimum we can hope for. Though a Starmer government may well be more competent than the revolving carousel of dysfunction the Conservatives have given us over the past decade, this is a very low hurdle to clear. Labour’s timid, vacillatory leader gives little sense of understanding the scale of effort necessary for national survival, and that the grand rebalancing of British strategy, announced by David Lammy, offers only a continuation of a worldview already splintering into wreckage, gives us little confidence in a dawning era of national renewal.

The entire system requires change — as Dominic Cummings says, “every aspect is rotten and this exerts a collective paralysis” — yet it is manifestly incapable of reforming itself. Indeed, it is a sombre augury of Westminster’s future stability that both Labour’s path to power and the corresponding Tory decline rely not on a sudden wave of enthusiasm for Starmer, but instead on disengagement from the political process entirely. Cynical and disenchanted, the voters are “quiet quitting” from British democracy, even as the Westminster system’s cascading errors make them poorer and angrier.

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaroe

It is to arrest this volatile course of events that two new contenders are seemingly emerging to wrest control of the British Right from the Conservative Party’s skeletal grasp — Reform UK, already struggling for a populist party, can for now be written off. Both Cummings, whose “New Party” is apparently focus-grouping itself into being, and the academic analyst of populism-turned-aspiring-populist Matthew Goodwin, teasing the launch of a new Right-wing movement if enough people subscribe to his Substack, are seemingly readying themselves to “plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt”, as Cummings puts it, and birth new political movements. Though both have, to differing degrees, won the ire of the defenders of the current order, jealous to maintain control of the ship of state as they steer it towards the coming iceberg, their emerging platforms diverge in tactics even as they agree on the fundamentals.

First, the parallels: correctly, both see the crisis of British politics as systemic. For Goodwin: “We have two big parties… that were born to provide answers to questions from a different era and which are ill-equipped to address the questions that face us today.” For Cummings: “The old parties have failed for decades, they’re programmed to fail, they’ll carry on failing.” Both see Labour’s turn in office as a brief, doomed interlude. In Goodwin’s analysis, Labour “will likely become very unpopular, very quickly”, as “while the Tories are simply too strongly rooted in an old politics, in an old world, to be able to truly adapt to the new world that’s emerging around us today… So too are Labour.” For Cummings, equally, as outlined in an excellent recent interview: “Labour’s just a carbon copy of the Tories… the MP ranks are filled with obviously useless people who can’t do anything. And the party itself is dead. It’s intellectually dead, organisationally dead, same as the Tories.” The result, he predicts, is that “everything will keep failing and everyone will be even more miserable by 2026 than they are now”.

The opportunity, or in Cummings’s phrasing, “market share” for an insurgent reformist party therefore looks excellent: yet the British political system, with its Early Modern parliament clustered round by whispering courtiers, is almost expressly designed to prevent such a possibility (indeed, to imagine a different, functional political system may now even face legal sanction). Where the two differ is in their approach to this problem. For Goodwin, the new movement — it need not necessarily be a party — may find its greatest chance of success outside Parliament. After all, Brexit was, he notes, “perhaps the single most important thing achieved over the last decade and it had nothing to do with winning seats in Westminster… Indirect political pressure, from outside the system, can often be as consequential as direct pressure from the inside.” For Goodwin, the guiding principle behind the new movement, its overriding goal, is “popular sovereignty” as “the only way to hand power back to the people, where it belongs”, though the means to achieve this outcome is so far left unsketched.

More from this author

Will the English ever revolt?

By Aris Roussinos

Where Goodwin is then a genuine populist, Cummings, by contrast, leans towards elitism: the effective models he cites as examples are California tech CEOs, “the subset of elites who are a) most competent at building but also b) almost entirely disconnected from mainstream politics”, particularly Marc Andreessen and other Silicon Valley would-be philosopher kings. The Cummings solution is built around “the elite Insider network”, who “are overwhelmingly in hedge funds, banks, VCs, PE, tech startups, research labs, academia and so on — keeping their heads down and building walled gardens between themselves and political madness”. Yet even here, the Cummings model is more democratic, in practice, than our current sclerotic system.

As he told The i:

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Britain was the most powerful country in the world its domestic politics was extremely decentralised and now that so much is broken we are more centralised than we have ever been in terms of where there’s power and money. If you’d said to people in 1800 or 1900 that all sorts of decisions about what happens in Bolton or what happens in Birmingham and ‘Do we build this or not build that?’ will be decided by some 27-year-old PPE idiot in the Treasury they’d have just thought this is complete madness.”

Yet ironically, the two radical opponents of Westminster dysfunction depend, to a certain extent, on the ancién regime’s survival: but the greatest shock we face, with Starmer likely at the helm, is yet to come.

Like other European nations, only perhaps more so, Britain has committed itself to the war in Ukraine and the corresponding confrontation with Russia. Unfortunately, due to a combination of Western deindustrialisation and political dysfunction, and Ukrainian errors of military planning and organisation, that war is not going well. For all that Cummings’s dismissal of the Ukrainian state is too vicious for his analysis to gain much currency in Westminster, his assessment that Britain has found itself “getting into a war of attrition with Russia who we pushed into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power” is unfortunately correct. With even Ukraine’s leading commanders cautioning that military victory is unattainable and the best outcome is a negotiated peace settlement — a sentiment until recently taboo in Britain — the mismatch between Britain’s stated strategy in Ukraine and the war’s likely outcome is increasingly stark. A cynic would suggest that Europe’s actual strategy in Ukraine is to buy time, at Ukraine’s expense, for our continent’s own rearmament, while Biden’s aim is merely to palm final defeat onto Trump.

Yet with the war in Ukraine concluded, will an angry, more powerful Russia attack Nato itself? The answer is: we do not know, but fear the worst. Would a Trump administration go to war with Russia to defend the territorial integrity of Lithuania or Estonia? Again, we do not know, but the anxiety of Nato officials on this question is not reassuring. The United States, on whose military power our political settlement ultimately depends, has found itself on the back foot in Ukraine, humiliated in the Red Sea, and rushing to prepare itself for a war in the Pacific in which geography and industrial capacity weigh steeply against it. Living standards in Britain have been battered by the war in Ukraine, but the economic shock of America’s looming confrontation with China will vastly outweigh anything we have ever known. When, as seems likely, America withdraws its attention from Europe’s security to wrestle with its existential rival, our necessary expenditure on rearmament and perhaps mobilisation — even if we avoid open war with Russia — will vastly reduce available spending on the social welfare we have come to expect.

Indeed, the emphasis by both Cummings and Goodwin on “woke elites” and culture wars already seems outdated: it is hard to see such luxury beliefs long surviving a world where British voters, already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades. Yet of the two aspiring reformers, it is Cummings who seems most alive to the possibilities as well as threats posed by the great storm forming on the horizon. As he observes, overhauling a political system is “seemingly hard, but history shows it’s doable but it happens in response to huge system changes. Historically, wars and pandemics are things that reshape states, and financial clashes. So now we’ve got all of those things.”

But even the most radical reformer would find it hard to derive much optimism from the present international situation: Britain’s political system only survived the 20th century through American military intervention, kept on life support by the unmatchable industrial base of the rising superpower. Without this deus ex machina, and in a world where China fills America’s Forties role — only this time, on our opponent’s side — it would take unreasonable optimism to imagine that either Sunak or Starmer will muddle Britain’s ramshackle state through to victory. 

We are in a situation where everything around us is rapidly changing, to our detriment, and yet our leaders act as if at the end of it, everything will somehow stay the same. Macron’s recent warning, that “a civilisation can die” in a “brutal” way in which “things can happen much more quickly than we think” seems closer to the mark. If the crisis is pregnant with political opportunity, as it proved to be for Lee Kuan Yew, it is increasingly likely to come in the wake of defeat.

The preferred idiom was very sweary. According to Cummings’s communications from 2020, government ministers and civil servants dealing with the Covid crisis were “useless fuckpigs”, “morons”, and “cunts”. Everyone mentioned seemed to have a nickname, as if planning a heist: “Sonic” the Hedgehog Special Advisor; “Frosty” the Snowman Minister of State at the Cabinet Office; “Trolley” the Problem Prime Minister, and so on.

Sexist bravado also apparently abounded, with Cummings threatening, in one exchange with Trolley and Director of Communications Lee Cain, to “personally handcuff” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara and “escort her from the building”. In cadences reminiscent of a made man arranging concrete shoes for a troublesome foot soldier, Cummings continued: “We gotta get Helen out of [the Cabinet Office] She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case. She’s trying to get spads fired and cause trouble on multiple fronts. Can we get her in Monday for chat re her moving to [the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government] … we need her out ASAP. Building millions of lovely houses.”

Yet in the flesh at the Inquiry, Cummings was more penitent schoolboy than would-be gangster, apologising repeatedly for his previous “terrible” and “appalling” language. And the contrast was also stark with his written submission, in which, as others have also noted, he came across more like Adrian Mole than Harvey Keitel. (A characteristically mournful extract: “Although I was/am often described as ‘all powerful’ in No 10 in 2020 this is false and very misleading regarding Covid… For example, in January 2020 I could not even stop Chris Grayling being appointed by the PM to chair the Commons intelligence committee”.)

Equally, when the next day MacNamara herself appeared at the Inquiry, giving us first sight of Cummings’s much-maligned female nemesis, the deep histrionics running through his communications about her became even more discernible. For if his own fictional lodestar seems to be Nineties Tarantino films, MacNamara’s seems to be Bridget Jones Diary — even down to the fact of having once brought a karaoke machine to a lockdown party at Downing Street.

Though appearing calm and self-assured on the stand, MacNamara’s reported messages to fellow officials seemed almost parodically self-deprecating and tentative — perhaps partly due to the calibre of the individuals she was dealing with at the time. One email to the Cabinet Secretary from 2020 about the inadequate fit of most PPE with female bodies started with the words “Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me” and closed with “I didn’t know who to annoy with this so chose you”.  She signed off with a fist emoji but immediately felt the need to explain, quasi-humorously: “that’s a fist bump not a punch”.

And as the mostly male officials around her focused their attention on managing manly pursuits like “football, hunting, shooting and fishing” — ignoring trifling issues like women being locked down with no escape from violent partners, or having to give birth alone — with touching optimism MacNamara bought “multiple copies” of a book about male bias in policy for her colleagues to read. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that, when Cummings furiously said of MacNamara, “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt”, he was really trying to get out of reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez.

More from this author

Inside Britain's new trans clinics

By Kathleen Stock

Some dissatisfaction has been expressed among the commentariat about the extent to which the Inquiry’s KCs — often sounding like gently disappointed headmasters — have focused on the bad language of dramatis personae like Cummings. Writing in The Spectator, witness Professor Carl Heneghan complained of the Inquiry that he “had submitted a 74-page statement on what I thought it should discuss. Instead the main topic was rude words in old WhatsApp messages.” For many, understandably tired of endless trivial complaints about hurt feelings stemming from inappropriate word choices, it perhaps feels like a capitulation to focus less on what a person said or did and more upon how, exactly, he said it.

Still, I don’t think that focusing on the way Cummings and others expressed themselves at work is wholly tangential to the main business of the Inquiry. For a person’s words are one of the main sources of evidence we have in judging their character, understood as a relatively fine-grained collection of personality traits. And there is a definite public interest in knowing which characters, precisely, are supposed to be running the country.

It is why a public inquiry’s unusual access to an individual’s emails and private messages is often so potent — for we get to find out, relatively directly, what sort of people are behind the public actions that affected so many lives. When combined with witness statements, cross-examination transcripts and other material, onlookers can get genuine insight, not just into what a person said or did, but also into who they are: their intellectual obsessions, quirks, and blind spots; their talents and inadequacies; their vices and virtues; whether they are funny or charming, or pompous or boring, or patronising or evasive, or whatever. No wonder other public figures apparently get so worried about WhatsApp disclosure.

In Cummings’s case, there are also hundreds of blog posts over the years to add to the overall picture. To read one of them is to travel on a syntactically unexpected, invective-laced and often hysterical emotional journey — full of quotes from famous men, head-spinning new ideas (“It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding”); undecipherable technical jargon; and deep gloom about the future, assuming the world continues not to listen to him (“such is life in a country that increasingly resembles the trajectory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”).

More from this author

The Centrist Dads won't save Britain

By Kathleen Stock

Cummings’s musings existed in the public domain well before any of his high-profile public appointments. It still astonishes me that anyone reading them could excitedly call off the search for their next political adviser. It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers because, though they personally couldn’t understand what he was on about, they were still impressed by the superficial signs of cleverness and staggering self-belief and desperately hoped it all made sense to someone else.

We are, after all, in a strange place these days, in which we pretend we can understand everything relevant about another person’s motives and meaning from just a small, context-free snippet of their discourse. And yet we tend to pay little attention to the obvious warning signs embedded in much larger chunks of publicly available information (such as, for instance, the fact that Cummings reportedly used to sign himself into No. 10 as “Osama Bin Laden”). Perhaps it is partly just a matter of not having enough time or a long enough attention-span to do the reading. But perhaps another reason for myopia in higher Tory echelons about Cummings’s evident weak points was that they felt his swearing, scowling presence there was a comforting counter to a general atmosphere of stifling political correctness and conformity.

If so, I understand this impulse. The more that mindless progressive types try to micromanage language and instil irrational guilt in their traditional po-faced manner, the more tempting it is to stick two fingers up at the lot of them and to start striking deliberately offensive poses just for the hell of it. And if you can’t do that, perhaps the next best thing is to hire someone who will do it for you; someone whose socially transgressive interventions will act as satisfyingly irritating provocations to any mealy-mouthed, rule-quoting pencil-pushers in the vicinity.

In a microcosm, this is the dynamic that appears to be inhabiting large parts of the Right-leaning political spectrum at the moment. The unstated ethos seems to be that if my attitude-policing, finger-wagging political enemy is against something — in this case, using outrageously rude and bullying language at work — then I must be for it; and vice versa. And of course it doesn’t hurt that large swathes of the electorate are similarly fed up with being told off by self-righteous missionary-types.

Suggested reading

Will Dominic Cummings destroy Westminster?

By Aris Roussinos

But to base your current political sensibilities on what your opponents hate is to court destruction, whether on the Right or the Left. It gives the enemy effective control of the political agenda and can end with some deeply counterproductive, incoherent decision-making. Just as no Home Secretary supposedly interested in free expression should be talking about banning Palestinian flags just because some deeply revolting people currently want to wave them, no government minister should ever employ a loose cannon with an apparent case of oppositional defiance disorder, just because it tends to set the teeth of members of the Blob on edge. As the Trolley knows all too well by now, such initially tempting ideas tend to come back to haunt you.

We have yet to understand the full cost to Britain of having had such an anarchic crew at the heart of government during one of its worst crises in recent history; nor of the way that degraded norms in workplace communication enabled other forms of dysfunction to proliferate there. At the very least, it is already suggested from MacNamara’s testimony that the atmosphere resulted in some chaotic and damaging choices. As she said at the time, in an email to superiors about the lack of options for victims of domestic violence during the first lockdown: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”

Perhaps the Inquiry will eventually shed some light on this. But either way, Cummings doesn’t seem to have learnt much from the experience. The day after his Inquiry appearance, he was back on social media in his more familiar Lord of Misrule guise, responding to criticism by asking: “so is the problem a/ me calling Hancock ‘a lying cunt killing people’ or b/ Hancock actually being a lying cunt killing people?!” And it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the answer might be “both”.

It is, in truth, too early to say whether or not Brexit was a net good or evil for British politics: its real effects will not be known for some decades as they work their way through the system, and will be revealed in the state’s reactions to future crises as yet visible only in their barest outlines. Yet it is hard for its supporters not to intuit, already, that it was a Pyrrhic victory on a minor front of what will be a long and gruelling war of attrition. Like Trump’s election, rather than overturn a collapsing system, it allowed the system to consolidate itself in a more ruthless and vigorous form, merely a vaccine allowing the exhausted establishment to eke out another few years of feeble life. The political ferment that followed the Brexit vote has already birthed a handful of insurgent conservative-populist parties, none of which display the slightest possibility of gaining power. Whatever reformist energy Brexit unleashed has long since dissipated itself in draining and tiresome battles between the legions of culture war grifters it spawned. If anything, Brexit proved that the British state cannot reform itself: its decay may be too advanced to permit functioning governance, but the broader SW1 system is still just strong enough to see off any challengers to its rule.

For Cummings, rationalising the failure of his project, the “Insider SW1 network that lives on Twitter” and “revealed a powerful global conspiracy that invented a parallel world and conned voters into believing it” is a natural target. Yet the hard reality he must face is that it all worked: like the parallel Russia collusion fantasy in America, none of its elaborate parallel world-building needed to be true or even plausible to rally anxious liberals to the defence of their threatened hegemonic status, yet it established the still-thriving climate of hysteria which eventually led to his downfall. Ironically, his self-mythologising over the power of data and tech was not markedly different to that of the Cambridge Analytica hoaxers grifting on behalf of the opposition. If Brexit was the result of longstanding mass disenchantment with the country’s downward trajectory, Cummings’s hyping of his own dark data voodoo was just the flip side of Carole Cadwalladr’s elaborate fantasies, just as analytically dubious and ultimately just as politically deadening.

Indeed, Cummings is hampered by being part of the same SW1 bubble he rails against, an insider whose outsider status is only perceptible from a vantage point within the system. Is it true, as he claims, that “it became high status to believe in Cadwalladr?” One would fear for his reading of Britain’s social dynamics if he genuinely believes so. Cummings proposes to campaign against the ECHR to turn the power of the anti-Brexit Twitter commentariat, judo-like, against itself, so that “the pro-ECHR campaign would be the Insider-left-NPC Twitter network and they’d be working really hard for the anti-ECHR campaign every day,” but this itself is a dangerous case of Twitter Brain, and a policy proposal not helped by the unfortunate fact that his chosen adversary is precisely the same force that soundly defeated him last time round. It is difficult to see how a second Cummings-led project will fare any better against the same enemy.

More from this author

Why is Britain so depressed?

By Aris Roussinos

There lies Cummings’s tragedy, and our own: these people, our establishment, are manifestly incompetent, credulous, of middling intellectual capacity at their very best — he didn’t even try to disguise his contempt for them while he was working with them, as Laura Kuenssberg’s new documentary series shows — and yet they beat him. No wonder he wants a second try; and no wonder we should be sceptical. Reading Cummings’s long-teased pitch for party funding, the most striking thing is how modest and quietly conservative his vision is. He wants a functioning state, more receptive to voter demands, tough on crime, strong on growth: but so do we all. Yet the times have changed, the mood has darkened further, and the prospect of reform looks ever dimmer. Back in the 2010s, when history had ended, Cummings looked like a maverick visionary revealing the heretical truths that the British state was so inefficient as to barely function, and would fare disastrously when faced with a serious crisis. Yet these opinions are now so widely held as to be commonplace, and the warning lights are flashing red. As a recent poll revealed, barely half of British voters now believe that democracy is superior to the alternatives, and nearly a quarter would welcome military rule (perhaps this figure would be higher if the British defence establishment were more competent).

It is doubly unfortunate for a Cummings-led reform project that much of his target audience is now enraptured by elaborate conspiracy theories of their own, largely revolving around Covid, in which he was a hawkish voice for locking down longer and harder than anyone else in the party he now wishes to destroy. In the near-decade following Brexit, the general malaise has deepened, the level of political debate has if anything worsened, and the prospect of saving the British political system from its own dysfunction seems less achievable than ever before. Trust in the system has almost completely evaporated. Perhaps, beyond Cummings’s rage at the “Twitter NPCs” who wrecked his project, this is a problem shared by all late-stage democracies whose political discourse is driven by social media: yet no obvious solution is apparent to lead us away from disaster.

So the stakes are even higher now, while the rot is approaching terminal. Cummings, probably correctly, assumes that a Labour government will be at best no more disastrous than the Conservatives, with the result that “the next two years will see a hideous election showcasing the rot of the old parties” so that “Somebody will seize this huge opportunity, for good or ill”. One cannot fault his diagnosis, while remaining sceptical that he is the remedy.

Eager to refight the battles of Britain’s past, Cummings is difficult to place within today’s political context. It can be argued that there are now two strands within the nascent post-Brexit British Right. On the one hand, we have a reformist tendency that encompasses Yimby neoliberals, the online dissident Right who, whether you like it or not, will shape conservatism in the decades to come, and the quasi-Gaullist state-capacity builders who partly overlap with the National Conservative wing. On the other, we have a blackpilled defeatism most coherently expressed by Peter Hitchens, in which Britain is doomed by the compounding errors of previous decades and any attempt to wrest control of the levers of the state is a futile effort: collapse is certain, and only escape is possible. In his proposal for a new party, Cummings bridges both tendencies: perhaps, as he suggests, a data-driven, Midlands-based coalition of small business owners, “NHS heroes” and local headmasters can arrest the rot, or at the very least destroy the Conservative Party in the process; or perhaps it is already too late, and, as he states, “more likely than adaptation is slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, and disintegration à la Austro-Hungarian Empire”.

If there is any probability in the latter outcome, then the question arises: why is it worth trying to reform the SW1 system in the first place? Cummings is, unfortunately, probably correct in his perception that “SW1 thinks our political system is very resilient but it isn’t… It’s even more brittle now than a decade ago and [the] dangers are worse.” So why not let his opponents drink the dregs of their own policies? If the SW1 system is so resistant to reform, why bother with a new Westminster vehicle at all? The political beneficiaries of the Habsburg collapse were not found within the Ringstrasse after all: if the crisis is as dangerous as he warns, his solutions seem strangely timid; yet if his proposals are enough to stave off disaster, the danger cannot be as bad as he asserts.

More from this author

The Age of the Museum is over

By Aris Roussinos

What is striking, then, given all the partly self-inflicted opprobrium Cummings won as a dangerous radical seeking to overturn the system, is his fear that in the “short-term this [project] is unlikely to succeed… But somebody will do something like this. And if it happens in response to the next set of crises — when the financial system melts down, when we have large scale violence because of racial/immigration/terror conflicts, whatever — it will be ugly.” This is, perhaps, an unexpectedly small-c conservative vision from a man often framed as an accelerationist: that our current path is a dangerous one, and that enough of value remains within the Westminster system to make a last-ditch effort at reform worth attempting. For all Cummings made himself a scapegoat for liberals frustrated at Brexit, his project reveals him as less a revolutionary than a reformist, attempting to save an ailing system from itself: a Kerensky rather than a Lenin.

As he states, “the reason I tried so hard 2015-16 and 2019-20 was a feeling of doom about the current system. *I* don’t need to do this. But *SOMEBODY* needs to get us off the track we’re on.” In this, Cummings is entirely correct, and his goal of destroying the Conservative Party is entirely worthy of support. Whether or not the Westminster system can or should be reformed is an unanswerable question at this point; to live in a peaceable, orderly, prosperous, functional society ought to be a modest and easily achievable goal, yet our current political system somehow cannot achieve it. It would be reassuring to think that Cummings can succeed, but it would sadly be prudent to assume that he will not. Perhaps disaster can be averted; we can hope newer, more destructive actors are not waiting in our future. But however the current crisis resolves itself, future historians may interpret Cummings not as the system’s wrecking-ball, but as its last desperate defender.

It’s not true. Oppenheimer never even claimed to have said it. He said that, as the glow faded and the shockwave passed, “a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent”, but that he “remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita … ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” He did not say it out loud.

What he did say out loud may have been more prosaic. His brother Frank was there, and reported that Oppenheimer simply said: “It worked.”

Christopher Nolan has described Oppenheimer, the subject of his latest film, as “the most important man who ever lived”. The brilliant physicist directed the project that, for the first time, made humanity capable of destroying itself. But it is, frankly, remarkable that he was ever appointed.

The Manhattan Project was perhaps the greatest weapons project in history. At its peak, it employed 125,000 people; half a million people worked on it at one point or another. It spent $2.2 billion, equivalent to somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion today — six or 10 times the cost of the Large Hadron Collider. It was conducted in utmost secrecy: the German, Japanese and Soviet governments all knew that the US or Britain were themselves conducting nuclear research, as they all were, to a greater or lesser degree — the theoretical possibility had been known for years, and nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin.

It’s surprising, then, that the job of project director was given to Oppenheimer, a psychologically troubled, communist-sympathising attempted murderer with little managerial experience and an abrasive interpersonal style. And yet it was and he was brilliant. As a result of his genius and aptitude, the Manhattan Project was a huge success, not just at its stated goal but in driving fundamental science forward vast leaps in a very short time.

Could that happen today? Would we want it to? What if we were to spend $30 and $50 billion on something similar? The trouble is, we’re sceptical of genius, now. The “great man theory of history” is a phrase used dismissively. Consider the derision when Dominic Cummings called for “super-talented weirdos” to join the government. And even if Oppenheimer was a genius — which he was, and built a team of geniuses around him — someone of a comparable background would surely get nowhere near the top of any major government project.

Suggested reading

The beautiful world of heavy metal

By Tom Chivers

Look at the evidence. Oppenheimer was, if not a card-carrying communist, very close to one. He described himself as a “fellow traveller”, and, on the security questionnaire he filled out to join the Manhattan Project, wrote that he had been “a member of just about every Communist Front organisation on the West Coast”.

Later he would say that was a jokey overstatement, but his communist links were deep. His parents were German-Jewish immigrants to New York who had abandoned their faith but kept their cultural identity, joining a secular group called the Ethical Culture Society, whose founder was inspired by Marx. Oppenheimer’s first great relationship was with Jean Tatlock, a Communist Party member; his wife, Kitty Puening, was another communist. The Berkeley Radiation Laboratory where he worked as a young physicist was a hotbed of radical Leftist thought (it was known as the Rad Lab). A friend of his, Haakon Chevalier, had links to Soviet intelligence and may have even attempted to recruit Oppenheimer as a source. Imagine someone now, under investigation by the FBI for links to Chinese intelligence or some extremist political movement like the Proud Boys or radical Islamism, being put in charge of the development of a new stealth fighter jet — or, perhaps more analogously, an AI-based weapon system.

There were other reasons to think Oppenheimer was a strange choice for director. For one thing, he had no significant managerial experience, certainly not of big projects. For another, he was difficult, abrasive, socially awkward and — in modern terms, at least — deeply mentally unwell. He was sexually frustrated as a youth and angry at others’ happiness. One time, he saw an amorous couple on a train and, according to his school friend Francis Fergusson, when the man left the carriage, Oppenheimer moved to kiss the woman himself. Then he “was at once overcome with remorse, fell on his knees, his feet sprawling, and with many tears, begged her pardon”. But the remorse did not last long: He saw the woman beneath him on the stairs and, bitterly, “was inspired to drop his suitcase on her head. Fortunately, he missed.”

Suggested reading

DeepMind's superhuman intelligence

By Tom Chivers

That violent urge was not a one-off. Oppenheimer, as a youth, lacked control of his emotions, and seems to have twice attempted to kill people. That same friend, Fergusson, told Oppenheimer that he had got engaged to his girlfriend: “I leaned over to pick up a book, and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck.” Fergusson fought him off, but “was quite scared for a little while”. Oppenheimer then “fell on the ground weeping”, again.

And at Cambridge, where Oppenheimer studied as a postgrad, he seems to have left a poisoned apple on the desk of his supervisor, who had attempted to get him to do more experimental work. (Oppenheimer, though a brilliant theorist, had an amazing ability to ruin every experiment he came near.) He was very nearly expelled, and only avoided criminal charges after his father lobbied the university and Robert agreed to psychiatric counselling.

Oppenheimer himself would say much later that “I was on the point of bumping myself off”. He suffered from depression all his life; he was diagnosed after the poisoned-apple incident as a “hopeless case” of “dementia praecox”, a now defunct diagnosis which is usually now associated with schizophrenia. He probably didn’t have schizophrenia — depression can cause delusions — but he was certainly unstable. And it clearly started to grate: in Göttingen, his fellow students signed a petition saying they’d boycott the class if he didn’t shut up in seminars. At the Rad Lab he would interrupt guest speakers, saying impatiently: “Oh come on now! We all know that. Let’s get on with it.” He sounds, in short, like a bit of a dickhead: rude, self-centred, pushy.

All in all, as discussed, he was not an obvious choice to run a multi-billion-dollar top-secret superweapon project involving hundreds of thousands of people. But General Leslie Groves saw something in Oppenheimer which not everyone else could. Groves would say of him in his memoir that he had “two major disadvantages — he had had almost no administrative experience of any kind, and he was not a Nobel Prize winner”. He noted an “overweening ambition”, a breadth of knowledge, and a considerable genius.

But Oppenheimer wanted something more than scientific discoveries — he wanted glory, fame. His friend Freeman Dyson, another great physicist, would say later: “He always wanted to be at the centre. This quality is good for soldiers and politicians but bad for original thinkers.” He lacked, in Dyson’s phrase, Sitzfleisch. It means “sitting flesh”, backside, but metaphorically the ability to sit still and finish something. Instead, he was “driven by an irresistible ambition to play a leading part in historic events”.

Suggested reading

The genius of John von Neumann

By Tom Chivers

This made him a flawed scientist. Dyson tells how Oppenheimer invented the concept of black holes in 1939, decades before Stephen Hawking would make them famous. But having made the insight, he never returned to it. He got distracted by other, more fashionable things.

But it made him a peerless leader. “When he was present at the centre of action,” said Dyson, “he rose to the occasion and took charge of the situation with unexpected competence… He was astonishingly effective as leader of the [Manhattan] project.” His dilettante interests meant he could understand the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the metallurgists. His inability to focus on a topic was less of a problem if he could order an underling to focus on it for him.

Groves saw this. Under Oppenheimer’s guidance, the project took the American nuclear programme from essentially nowhere to completion within three years. When he joined, there was no nuclear programme to speak of. Scientists were imported from Europe, especially Britain and Hungary. Everything had to be developed from scratch, and it was: the Manhattan Project created thousands of inventions. The patents it processed were secret, of course, but if they had been filed, then by the end of the war they would have represented 1% of all existing patents. Nuclear science progressed leaps and bounds in the project’s laboratories, as did digital technology, materials science, and a hundred other disciplines.

Why did it work? Oppenheimer can surely take much of the credit. It was Oppenheimer who recognised that the firing mechanism used for a uranium bomb, one of the two models used, would not be as effective in a plutonium bomb, and called for another system, an “implosion” system which blasted two hemispheres of plutonium together with high explosive. It was also he who recruited John von Neumann, one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, who in turn developed the perfectly shaped lenses of high explosives required to slam the plutonium together with perfectly even pressure all around the sphere, a procedure one scientist compared to trying to crush a beer can without spilling any of the beer.

We can’t know the counterfactual. Perhaps other, less unstable, less communist-sympathising project leaders were available. Perhaps they would have done as good a job: after all, the project “brought together the greatest concentration of scientific luminaries working on a single project that the world had ever seen,” as Alex Wellerstein wrote. As well as Oppenheimer and von Neumann, the project had at its disposal Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Vannevar Bush, Richard Feynman, and many more.

It also had something like 1% of the entire US civilian labour force and 1% of the country’s electrical power at its disposal. Maybe you could have put anyone in charge of that and it would have done well, much as any idiot can probably manage Real Madrid sufficiently well to win most football matches: just tell all your stars to go out and play football. But Groves took a chance that perhaps not many others would, one that would leave him hanging in the wind if it went wrong.

Again, imagine it now: the government appointing someone with a known track record of violence and delusional mental illness, placed in charge of a vital defence project. It would be near-impossible: none of the “weirdos” Dominic Cummings wanted to appoint to government (and I’ve met a few of them) was remotely as weird as Robert Oppenheimer. No Communist Party-adjacent attempted murderers there. Of course, Groves had the dictatorial authority granted by war — the US was committed to the defeat of Germany and Japan and committing its entire industrial base to the task; the perfect situation for big, dramatic bets like Manhattan — but still it was bold and dangerous.

In a weird way, I’m reminded of the appointment of Kate Bingham to the UK’s Vaccine Task Force: She was well-qualified, and again the emergency situation gave the government leeway to make snap decisions that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. But her political connections — she is married to a then-minister, Jesse Norman — made her a target: the Good Law Project sued, calling her appointment “jobs for their mates”. The British vaccine procurement was a roaring success and Bingham’s appointment was vindicated, but if it had not been, then the decision would have looked dreadful. (Please do not take this to mean that I think Kate Bingham is the same as Robert Oppenheimer.)

There are plenty of big scientific projects around today. But nothing on the scale of Los Alamos: Artemis, the successor to the Apollo moon missions, has perhaps 30,000 employees. (Apollo itself, driven by Cold War anxiety and national willy-waving, was bigger even than Manhattan, with nearly half a million staff at its peak.) Perhaps the exciting work has moved into the private sector, but even the cutting-edge AI firms employ a few hundred or a few thousand people, some far fewer. Midjourney, the best of the art AIs, has a staff of a dozen or so. There are plenty of strange geniuses around — Demis Hassabis, the video-game-designing chess savant behind DeepMind, is my favourite — but nowhere has the kind of world monopoly on them that Oppenheimer established.

Nonetheless, there’s a parallel with modern AI. Oppenheimer seemed to want the responsibility of having created the bomb: he said that the physicists involved in the project had “known sin”. Von Neumann responded, pithily, that “Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.” When AI researchers now talk of the threat of AI, how it could destroy humanity, there is a hint of that – what we are doing is so amazing and powerful that it could destroy the world, aren’t you impressed? Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not true – I think there’s a decent chance AI could destroy the world, and developing nuclear weapons really was a morally ambiguous thing to do. But people who want to be great can scratch that itch by being great and terrible, as well as great and good.

Oppenheimer was not ashamed of his work, even if, for PR reasons,  he sometimes wanted to appear so. He “continued for the rest of his life to be proud of his achievement,” Dyson wrote. And when a German playwright depicted him as a tragic hero who regretted his actions, he protested bitterly. The line from the Bhagavad Gita about death was a later amendment. Years earlier, he had quoted a different one: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,” he said, “that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.” That does not sound like a man who feels remorse.

Given its distinctiveness, it’s hardly surprising that the region has a long history of being run as a separate political unit. By holding out against Viking invasion, the Northern Anglo-Saxons established an Earldom of Northumbria that reached from the Forth to the Tees (before pressure from the Scots pushed its northern boundary south to the Tweed). Not only was this territory topographically encapsulated — “between the brine and the high ground and the fresh stream water” — but it was also defined by its sheer distance from London and the centres of royal power. The armigerous families who then controlled the medieval North East, such as the Percys and the Nevilles, had an unusual degree of independence within an English polity that had centralised much earlier than its European neighbours.

To a historian, therefore, there is something very satisfying about the recent news that the Government has approved a “devolution deal” to create a new “North East Mayoral Combined Authority” with an elected Mayor. This is an important milestone in the evolution of what is arguably England’s most well-defined region, as the new entity will cover the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham — the land from the Tweed to the Tees — and the cities, within them, of Durham, Sunderland and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The hope is that the North East will thrive under a unified political leadership; and the region’s history suggests this optimism is not unfounded. In the Early Medieval period, the Prince Bishop of Durham presided over his Palatinate from his palace at Bishop Auckland like a Rhineland Fürstbischof. He had the powers of a king to hold courts, raise armies (to defend the border against the Scots) and even mint his own coinage — with silver Durham pennies issuing from Silver Street by the River Wear. This quasi-independence created a cadre of educated clerks to manage the county palatine’s legal, financial and administrative affairs. The presence of this proto-civil service contributed to both local economic development — the Prince Bishops were enthusiastic participants in the coal trade — and perhaps even the unusually high levels of literacy in the far North of England.

This was a sort of English devolution, avant la lettre, and meant that by the 17th century, County Durham was the only part of England which returned no members of parliament. The first MPs for Durham were elected in 1675, a full 410 years after a comparable cathedral city such as Lincoln; the Prince Bishop only returned his powers to the crown in 1836. So there is a sense that the governance of the North East was only settled around the same time as the United Kingdom itself was forming. Some excitable Northumbrian patriots (probably including me) might even consider us to be the fifth nation in the union.

But if the region’s political independence was dwindling, its economic independence was growing. The early modern period saw the temporal power of the Prince Bishops eclipsed by that of the coal barons who grew fantastically rich from the collieries of Northumberland and Durham. By the 18th century, control of the northern coal trade had fallen into the hands of a cartel of wealthy families known as the “Grand Allies”, whose price-setting so irritated the City of London that they nicknamed them “the Newcastle Parliament”.

This oligarchic and proto-corporatist approach to conducting business was typical of the North East, and would recur in the 19th century, when a handful of plutocratic industrialists dominated the civic life of the region, and wielded almost feudal power: men such as the armaments tycoon Lord Armstrong, the shipbuilder Sir Mark Palmer, or the great ironmaster Sir Lowthian Bell. Studying the region for his report on “Industrial Tyneside” in 1928, the sociologist Henry Mess observed that “the feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland”, “and there is not the sharp divorce between it and the new industrialism which is found in most areas”.

More from this author

Britain's forgotten King of the North

By Dan Jackson

In many respects the Trade Union barons who emerged in the 20th century to challenge the oligarchs could be similarly feudal — especially Durham miners’ leaders such as John Wilson, Peter Lee and Sam Watson. And yet the Trade Unions in the North East achieved much for their members — not just better pay and conditions, but in their pioneering work on housing, schools, sanitation and care for the elderly. Organisations such as the Durham Miners Association achieved something approaching a welfare state while William Beveridge was still in short trousers. For as John Tomaney has argued so cogently, “County Durham thrived when it had the power collectively to help itself”. History offers something of a blueprint to a region thinking anew about how to exercise local power to improve the lives of its people.

A word that was often depicted on miners’ banners in shimmering gold like the Name of God was “nationalisation”, and yet nationalisation turned out to be a mixed blessing. For as much as it delivered gains in living standards — which my grandparents from the Northumberland coalfield spoke about with wonder for the rest of their lives — it inevitably led to centralisation. It left the North East vulnerable to capricious and parsimonious Westminster governments. Not only that, it disempowered the civic and associational institutions that had once had the confidence to tackle the scourge of poverty in old age, or build something as beautiful as South Shields Town Hall, where the debates “had the importance of those in Cicero’s Senate or Pitt’s House of Commons“.

The North East has been hammered by austerity, with funding cuts to councils of 79% since 2010. These have come close to undermining the functioning of local government altogether. But municipal leaders themselves have come to recognise that the principle of devolving power matters almost as much as the funds that come with devolution.

Reading about the latest development, I was particularly delighted (and not a little surprised) that the seven North East councils have managed to overcome the parochialism and local rivalries that have stymied municipal coordination in the region. “They have a beef that goes back centuries”: what Tony Soprano once said of the Balkans could be said of Newcastle and Sunderland. From the English Civil War, during which they took different sides, to the previous attempt at regional governance — the short-lived Tyne and Wear County Council, which was perceived to favour Tyneside excessively — mistrust and bad feeling have for too long percolated from the football terrace and message board to the political sphere. Despite evidence that shows that people in the North East have the greatest sense of belonging to their region than anywhere else in England, we’ve memed ourselves into thinking that Tyneside and Wearside are so totally incompatible that we can’t present a united front — even as the North of England’s other great conurbations have surged ahead with their own elected mayors.

That’s not what the North East wants anyway, some would argue. The shadow of a 2004 referendum hangs over any debate over devolution in the region. Rejected by almost 78% of voters, it’s often held up as evidence that there is no appetite for devolved power. But it took place in a different time, when there was a Labour government in office that was spending big in the region. The cabinet was stuffed full of North Eastern MPs, including the PM himself. And the Yes campaign was vague and complacent, while the No campaign tapped into a burgeoning anti-politician rhetoric, as well as the fears in the south of the region that this would be an assembly run from, and in the interests of, Tyneside (fears exploited skilfully by a trainee political Svengali from County Durham called Dominic Cummings, a key figure in the No campaign).

Suggested reading

Dominic Cummings: "I don't like parties"

By Suzanne Moore

The question remains, then, as to whether this new mayoral authority will receive a public mandate. But the North East only ever thrived under local political leadership. As a distant outpost of the over-centralised British state — still reeling from the effects of the First World War, let alone the Second — it has been declining for over a century. For all the boosterism about being the only region with a positive balance of trade, the North East is now the poorest, unhealthiest and unhappiest region of England. It regularly tops the charts for “deaths of despair”, with a suicide rate twice that of London; 38% of local children live in poverty; and GDP per capita has plummeted in the North East from 93% of the national average in 1981 to 73% by 2017. No other English region has suffered such decay.

But something is stirring in the North. A phalanx of City Region “Metro Mayors” are establishing new centres of independent power and influence, while attempting to move beyond the belief that Westminster is both the cause of — and the solution to — all our problems. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that whatever the problem, it is always someone else’s fault. Especially in politics,” wrote Jamie Driscoll, one of the likely contenders for the North East mayoralty, recently. “What, though, if there are some genuinely difficult problems to solve?”

There certainly are. Labour Together’s recent “Plan for National Infrastructure” argued that Britain’s “urban hinterlands, small cities, towns, coastal and rural areas… are experiencing forms of economic ‘undevelopment’”. This would present a daunting prospect to any government, but could an elected mayor for the lands between the Tweed and the Tees catalyse a Northumbrian renaissance?

Maybe. Certainly, the nationalising and centralising tendencies of the British state over the past century have disenfranchised the regions of England that might look enviously at the thriving German Länder — with their networks of regional banks and vocational training centres — and wonder what went wrong. For there’s a prize to be seized in the North East. The region that arguably did more than most to carbonise the planet might lead the way in decarbonisation, and create meaningful work. It might even rediscover the traditions of bottom-up social and economic development, and become one of the great heartlands of technical innovation, associationism, self-help and co-operation. Never again, we must hope, will talented locals like Dr Fiona Hill — recently installed as Chancellor of Durham University — be told that “There’s Nothing for You Here”.

The writer-director Michael Winterbottom begs to differ. Sky Atlantic announced his six-part drama about the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020, towards the end of the period it covers. Winterbottom’s original title was This Sceptred Isle but Sky, fearing that the allusion was too niche, requested a more broadly legible phrase from John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: This England. It began filming in February 2021, when the first picture of Kenneth Branagh, buried in prosthetics as Boris Johnson, was released. At the last minute it was delayed for a week due to the death of the Queen but it’s still a good six months away from Orwell’s three-year red line.

“Here’s a chance to engage with something which has that certain uniqueness — but engage with it now, as soon as possible after it happened, as opposed to trying to recreate a war story from 70 years ago,” Winterbottom said in a defensive interview with the New Statesman. He co-wrote the series with Kieron Quirke but had to delegate directing duties to Julian Jarrold for health reasons. He added: “It’s very neutral. Almost a diary. A record of something we all lived through.” Perhaps he was trying to pre-empt early-bird hatchet jobs like the one in the Mail on Sunday, which called it “yet another sneerfest by the TV-land Lefties” and accusingly introduced Winterbottom as “a staunch supporter of the Labour Party and close friend of actor Steve Coogan”. Oh no, not a friend of Steve Coogan! Nadine Dorries, still Johnson’s most loyal attack dog though no longer responsible for the culture brief, slammed “a self-regarding, metropolitan, theatrical class whose favourite sport is trying to take pot-shots at the Johnsons”. The Mail claimed credit for the addition of a disclaimer, “This is a fiction based on real events,” but Sky told me that this is “standard practice”.

Looking at Winterbottom’s freewheeling filmography, it’s easy to spring to conclusions about which lane he would choose for this story. Perhaps it would be what you might call Coogan Mode: antic, postmodern portraits of charismatic narcissists from Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in 2002’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People to a fashion mogul rather like Philip Green in 2019’s misfiring Greed. Or maybe the sober, polemical style of documentaries such as The Shock Doctrine and Eleven Days in May. But This England, which tracks the six months from the 2019 election to Dominic Cummings’ rose garden press conference and the end of the first wave, is neither of those. Barring an incomprehensibly ill-advised recurring dream sequence, it is cautious in a way that Winterbottom rarely is, fully conscious of its responsibilities to history. In aspiring to neutrality, however, it winds up proving that neutrality is impossible.

We have to start with Branagh, who read every word and watched every second of Johnsonia he could lay his hands on, and pays Johnson the compliment of taking him seriously. I’m no fan of prosthetics but he captures the burly, bearish demeanour, the blustery charm, the cosplay gravitas, the constant air of improvising his way out of a tight spot. He compulsively rifles through a mental wardrobe of ready-made quips, comfy quotations from Shakespeare and the Classics, and self-flattering allusions to Churchill. Criticised for boasting about shaking people’s hands in the early days of the pandemic, he protests that not to do so “would be like Churchill hiding in the bunker”. But whereas one national crisis transformed Churchill from an erratic, divisive politician into a great leader, this one exposed Johnson’s fundamental shallowness and reluctance to make big decisions. His failure is framed as having less to do with specific choices than with the question of character. He was a people-pleasing booster thrust into a once-in-a-century cataclysm that he couldn’t bluff his way through.

Yet Branagh’s Johnson is unexpectedly sympathetic, unless you’re Nadine Dorries. He has some witty lines. “Not dead,” he says when he’s in bed with Covid. “Or if I am, nobody’s briefed me.” His hospitalisation, easily forgotten now, is genuinely traumatic. His relationship with Ophelia Lovibond’s Carrie Symonds is warm and playful. While each episode is frontloaded with evidence of his arrogance, infidelities and glib provocations, he does at least emerge as a palpable human being.

More from this author

Nick Cave's divine rebirth

By Dorian Lynskey

The other tentpole character is Dominic Cummings, played by Simon Paisley Day as a far more gaunt and sinister character than Benedict Cumberbatch’s flamboyant disruptor in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. (Confusingly, Paisley Day was Douglas Carswell in that earlier drama.) Cummings, in this telling, wanted to exploit the systemic failures of Covid policy to strengthen his case for a root-and-branch reform of Whitehall in his own image, pitting his fantasy team of hypercompetent mavericks against a caricature of the sclerotic establishment. “He wants everyone to be crap except him,” complains Matt Hancock. Of course, that would-be revolution stalled after Cummings’ road trip to Durham and died with his firing six months later but it was always less a coherent plan than the projection of a gigantic ego.

This England illuminates when it shows the tension between health strategy and political optics. We see Hancock’s obsession with hitting the testing target by the end of April driven primarily by concern for his own reputation. Shri Patel’s Rishi Sunak is a glib, headline-hungry lightweight and director of communications Lee Cain (played by Derek Barr) a petulant bully who stomps around yelling, “We need something to announce!” Focus groups appear to have been almost as important as SAGE. Government announcements, taken from real news footage, are met with a Greek chorus of unimpressed doctors, scientists and journalists. Winterbottom shows his hand in these scenes but who would now defend the handling of PPE procurement, or the decision to return elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them? Compared with Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s damning book Failures of State, This England might even be accused of being too generous. Matt Hancock, for one, should be pretty chuffed on balance, and not just because he’s played by the earnestly handsome Andrew Buchan.

The directors recreate the sense of how bewilderingly fast everything happened, especially in March, when the facts and calculations changed from day to day. Beyond the Johnsons and Cummings, most scenes are kept short, like shards in a collage of British life under Covid. The irony can be heavy-handed but no less true for that. Cutting from Johnson’s promise that “2020 will be a year of prosperity, growth and hope” to a tray of bats in Wuhan market? Well, that was the case. Juxtaposing the match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid on 11 March with a dying man? A report by MPs concluded that 37 people died as a result of that match, and 41 because of the Cheltenham festival on the same day. Cummings in Durham grimly watching Hancock on television reiterate the order to stay at home? The dates align. I remember all of that and you probably do, too, although there are some things we didn’t know at the time, like the rapidity with which the vaccine was designed in February 2020.

More from this author

The Sandman is coming for you

By Dorian Lynskey

For most of us, the first phase of the pandemic was an unprecedented blend of anxiety and boredom. The lucky ones can look back on it as a strange hiatus, enlivened by Joe Wicks, Tiger King and sourdough loaves, so there is value in forcing viewers to focus on the unlucky. The director’s cut briskly from the corridors of power (and the corridors of Zoom) to ICU wards, care homes and houses across the country, where NHS staff faced an overwhelming tide and tens of thousands people died who might have lived if things had been done differently. The regular sound of coughs and the beeping of monitors provides the drama with a kind of sickly drumbeat. With this panorama of pain and grief, This England does similarly vital work to the Covid memorial wall, commemorating those who paid the price for bad short-term decisions and inadequate long-term planning at a time when the country is keen to move on. Whether the bereaved will feel that their anger has been represented on screen as well as their loss, I’m not so sure.

I think that This England has a strong answer to the question of whether it is too soon for a drama like this. It passes Orwell’s test of seeing the events of the moment in perspective. In fact, I was shocked by how much I had forgotten, or was unable to piece together sequentially. Exhaustively researched through documents and interviews, the series is a gift to posterity. The effort to tell it true and tell it whole is undeniable, yet I still got the impression of conscientious people working extremely hard to do what could not be done: withhold judgement.

Suggested reading

American Gigolo wants to say sorry

By Ann Manov

“I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly, or incorrectly,” Winterbottom says in the press pack, but I can’t see how that could possibly be true, not least because he and Quirke have Johnson tell Cummings in the final episode: “I think we failed… We fucked up, Dom.” There is no such thing as neutral history, unless it is an unfiltered mountain of data. As soon as you begin to tell a story you have to make choices about what to include and how to frame it. There need not be partisan bias but there must always be judgement. While a historian can assemble evidence for competing accounts of an event, a dramatist must pick one version to show you and say, yes, this is how it was. In an effort to pretend that such decisions have not been made, the writers mute their impact.

If you tune in hoping for the clear assignment of blame, then you will be disappointed, whatever your priors may be, but perhaps that task should be left to the official inquiry. This England does what a drama can do, which is to convey how it felt across the country to live through that unreal period when the world seemed at once to stop and to unravel. Muttering Shakespeare to himself in the dark, Johnson sees himself as a tragic hero, but the tragedy was ours.

We talked about everything, from Partygate and his relationship with Boris Johnson, to the deep state and whether he needs a therapist. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Were you surprised by the Sue Gray report?

Some of it is a bit brazen: where she says she stopped investigating the party in the flat because the police got involved — even though the police didn’t then investigate it. So basically, they have sort of just said: “Fuck this. We’re not going to get involved with the after-party on the night of 13th.”

You mean the party in the Downing Street flat on 13th November 2020?

It was reported a few days after I’d gone, in Metro weirdly. Somehow the story got out but because we were in extreme lockdown it got no coverage. The media was so happy that I’d gone, no one wanted to talk about it.

Dozens of people downstairs could hear it, so all the police had to do was interview any one of them to find out. You don’t have a work meeting, at the top of Number 10, where the music is so loud that you can hear it in the fucking press office.

Why aren’t people angrier? Why is nothing happening?

The Tory party itself is quite rotten now and the sign of that is that they can’t think of anyone better than Boris, who’s clearly just completely shot. They are collectively saying, “if we get rid of him, we might get somebody worse”. It says a lot about the state of the Tory party. And they actually could get somebody worse: Liz Truss would be even worse than Boris. She’s about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament.

Do you ever feel bad that you helped him win the election?

I don’t know. I don’t feel bad about it. Because I think the reasoning at the time was pretty simple. Various people from Vote Leave were attracted to the idea of just staying out of it and letting the Tory party collapse.

When was this?

June 2019. But there were two basic problems. One was that if we didn’t go in and sort it out, Brexit wouldn’t happen, and there would be a second referendum, which we thought would be very bad for the country indeed. And the second was Corbyn. It’s one thing to stand back and let the horror of the Tory party blow up, it’s another thing to let Corbyn take over.

So we reluctantly thought: the downside is we save the Tory party, but the upside is we can crush a second referendum. Kick Corbyn off the stage. And there’s a chance, with Boris being as lazy as he is, that we’ll be able to set the country on a new path — hence me making various terrorist demands of him when he came round to the house — but even then, we thought: there’s a reasonable chance that this goes tits up.

More from this author

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Why?

Carrie.

We had worked with Boris during the referendum. Then, of course he was with Marina who was a stabilising force. She’s intelligent. She was good at calming him down. Carrie was obviously the opposite. She was sort of injecting more craziness into the whole situation. She basically supported us until 10pm on election night, simply because she thought, as she put it to me in July: “He has no clue how to get through this. He doesn’t have a clue how it all actually works.” Carrie was supportive of Vote Leave from the day we came in to help with the 2019 election. She personally called me and said “Please do this”.

And if we hadn’t, you’d have had that completely wrecked Parliament colliding with Covid in March 2020. God only knows what would have happened. Possibly with Corbyn as prime minister. Even more people killed. Fuck knows what.

You keep saying ‘we’: who do you mean?

My team from Vote Leave.

But what was going wrong?

The way that the Tories went about Brexit on every level was a total disaster. Starting the whole formal process before they even knew what the hell they were trying to do. Using EU citizens as negotiating chips, which we’d said should never happen. We should have passed unilateral legislation immediately to guarantee their rights.

They just fucked up, all the way down. People kept saying, “why does everything have to be so aggressive?” But it wasn’t Vote Leave that drove the country crazy. The Tory party and Whitehall spent three years cocking it up.

By summer 2019, something had to break: there’s no clean way of getting out of that situation. A second referendum would have been very bad. Smashing through things, the way that we did, had downsides, but staggering on just unable to resolve the issue would have been a disaster as well.

What did you think about a second referendum?

Back in 2015, I floated the idea of having two referendums, and said that maybe the way to do this is: you have a referendum on the principle and then you negotiate a new deal. Then you have a second referendum on the actual deal. Everybody said, “no way”: the Prime Minister, the Tory party, the Labour Party, the official Remain campaign, the CBI. Everybody said, “Absolutely not. One referendum, it’s got to resolve this for a generation.” And then they spent three years dicking around, only to say, “you know what? Fuck it, we actually can’t do this, because it’s unsolvable. You shouldn’t have voted like this.”

Do you still think it was right to leave Europe?

A lot of people, especially the centre-Left in London, thought joining the Euro would be a success. Now we know we are best off out of it. When the Euro came under pressure it completely wrecked the Greek economy.

That took the blinkers off for me.

Especially now, when you look at how history worked out, and knowing that Covid was coming, it’s very hard to make the case that things could have been different. We know that Whitehall was completely unprepared for Brexit; we know that the whole thing was a complete shitshow; we know the original plan had to be ditched. And we know a bunch of us had to steer it, while dealing with him. And on top of that, we had a non-functioning government with no parliamentary majority. I mean, my God, imagine how much worse the whole thing could have been.

Suggested reading

What Dominic Cummings got right

By Aris Roussinos

Was there a time when you did get on with Johnson personally?

We are both really odd characters. In the second half of 2019, he was just completely desperate. He knew that he had only been put in there because no one could think of anything else to do. He sort of did as we told him and at that point Carrie wasn’t causing chaos. She was basically saying: “Listen to what they say.” So as far as anything can be with him, it was reasonably stable, if chaotic for the country. He was reasonably focused because he knew he was not far from being booted out.

So, you got on with him on the basis that he took your advice. And then he stopped?

He trolleyed around a bit, obviously, but in terms of big things he mostly listened. But as soon as he came back in January from his holiday, you could see immediately that the whole thing was going to be a disaster.

That quickly?

Immediately after the election. The election happens; there’s five or so days and then he’s sauntered off to some sort of billionaire island; and then at the beginning of January she immediately was on at him about firing all of us, which obviously is not a great way of starting a new government.

Perhaps not.

But also, from the start we had completely different attitudes. My attitude was: okay, we’ve won the election, we’ve got a supermajority, now we have the chance to solve a whole load of fundamental problems. 2020 is the year to do the hard things: things like planning reform, which no one dares touch, decade after decade, because it’s so politically difficult. Fuck that. It’s time to do it. Ignore the press. Focus on this.

And he didn’t share this view?

His attitude was: I’ve done the hard thing, which was the election. Now it’s time to enjoy myself. And so very quickly, there was this clash of basic ideas.

Suggested reading

How powerful is Carrie Johnson?

By James Hanning

Because you want systemic change in almost every part of the state. You had been talking about planning for procurement, reforming the civil service, nuclear weapons, pandemics: is that because you are all doom and gloom?

Some people would say that. But in the last couple of years, I’ve thought: “What did I say about pandemics?” Now, we’re all talking about nuclear war and Putin. But with nukes, for example, it’s incredibly complicated. The timelines are very long. The budgets are huge. For any PM, it’s very tempting to continue the cycle of: “Keep everything extremely secret and punt the bills off to the next poor sucker.”

And then in 2019, I came along and started poking around, trying to get all the real figures. I was sitting down with the deep state saying: “Open the books.” And they’d say, “Can I just tell the truth?”

What do you mean by the “deep state”?

I mean the set of officials who actually control Whitehall — people like the Cabinet Secretary, those who run the intelligence services, certain crucial people in the Cabinet Office. These people who have a lot more power than basically any ministers — apart from, nominally, the Prime Minister.

Certain conspiracy theorists use the phrase “deep state” in America.

I think to some extent Trump does use the phrase as a conspiracy — but that doesn’t mean I do. I am talking about something entirely real. I’m not talking about any kind of conspiracy.

But to some extent, Trump had a point, right? In the sense that there was obviously a whole set of people, particularly around the intelligence community, who did hate Trump and would attempt to cause trouble. And I know people who were going to be appointed who were shut down, like scientists who were going to get jobs who were then frozen out. The FBI simply refused to vet them for 18 months.

Trump obviously talks a whole load of shit but as a lot of the Russia stuff showed, there actually was a conspiracy against him in parts of the system.

Do you mean the machinery of government then? I ask because it seems to me that you pitted yourself not just against Johnson but against that machinery.

The irony of the situation is that of all the different players in Westminster — the political parties, the media, Boris, the Tory MPs — the people who we, the Vote Leave team, got on with best was the deep state. There was a kind of alliance in a lot of ways. We both wanted to sort out some of these problems: the shitshow around nuclear weapons, procurement, bringing technology into Number 10.

The media presented us as Vote Leave psychopaths, at war with everyone, but that wasn’t true. Our relations with the Tory party were extremely bad. But our relations with the deep state were obviously variable, depending on exactly who you’re talking about.

When you say Vote Leave, you’re not talking about Nigel Farage?

No. That’s why there was the coup in January 2016. To try and get rid of me. Because Bernard Jenkin-type people wanted to merge the whole thing together with Farage. I refused. He’d always said to me “I’m a general but I shouldn’t be overall Commander. Everyone will have their role. I’ve got 15% — maybe 20% — of the country’s support and my job should be to mobilise them.” But around July 2015, suddenly his attitude changed. It was: “I’ve got to run the whole thing.” He’s a bit like Boris: he has some communication gifts but he’s also a total organisational shambles.

Suggested reading

How Farage had the last laugh

By Will Lloyd

You’ve written a lot about the kind of people who go into politics, and you’ve been criticised for your attitudes to work/life balance — and yet you’ve also been promoting women around you.

It’s not really contradictory.

Some people would say it is, because if you want people in the office 16 hours a day, and you want this buzzy start-up feel, how do people go home and put their kids to bed?

Number 10 is obviously big enough that you could have, say, some young woman who’s just had kids and only wants to work three days a week. But my basic point is that if you’re in Number 10, there are huge responsibilities. And it’s your job to be trying, all the time, for millions of people — a lot of whom have got fuck all and have very desperate lives. Your job is not to be thinking, “well, how do I have a nice life and get home for bath time?” There has to be a core of people who are there, demented, working extremely hard — because that’s the nature of it, this constant chaos.

When you put your call out for “weirdos and misfits”, people interpreted that as you wanting employees who would be totally dedicated to you.

Partly. But it was also a call to Whitehall and Westminster. They’re full of very similar people who did very similar degrees at very similar universities. My view is that you need different kinds of people around. I think the Covid inquiry will show that groupthink was a very serious problem.

I put out that blog about “weirdos and misfits” in January 2020 and it became the foundation for recruiting. It did bring in some excellent women. By summer, 29-year-old women were sitting at the Cabinet table, saying to Matt Hancock, “you just said that it’s not growing exponentially and you’re wrong. Here’s the actual graph. Here’s what’s happening.”

A lot of people didn’t like what I had done, but I thought: “this is now working as it should”. You’ve got smart people, who know what the fuck they’re talking about, telling either ministers or senior civil servants who don’t know exponential growth from a hole in the ground: “Here’s the actual facts.” So, I’ve radically improved how decisions are taken. The advice to the Prime Minister, though he could still trolley around and fuck things up —which he did, obviously — was at least much better.

Suggested reading

Why we need 'weirdos' like Dominic Cummings

By Graeme Archer

Have you ever had therapy?

I’m not interested in my own emotional state.

Why not?

Never have been.

But you’re interested in other people’s emotional states?

I’ve got no interest in my own emotional state. Or myself. I find my own emotional state the most boring subject I could think of.

Isn’t one of your gifts being able to interpret other people’s emotions? I’m surprised to hear you say that you’re not interested in your own. It sounds like denial to me, but a lot of people in politics are like this.

Most people in politics are recruited based on whether they can stand up and speak. I noticed that a long time ago, with Boris and Gove: we’d all be exhausted, arriving somewhere where one of them was speaking, and I would always think “my God, the idea of standing up and speaking right now is just completely horrific”, but they feel the exact opposite. They both love speaking and they’re both energised by it, whereas I would be driven catatonic at the thought of it. Then there are the 1,000-yard stares among the likes of Hancock and Truss. Rolling news and social media encourages more of the narcissists to get involved as a sort of low-grade alternative to being a celebrity.

Do you still have contact with people there? Is Johnson staying?

As far as we know. The fact that Rishi blew himself up makes it much more likely that Boris will somehow survive. I don’t want to say “no chance”, but I think Rishi is out of the running. They’re going to be thinking who can win the next election. Whatever you might think of Michael Gove’s abilities, he is not a loved character. There are some very junior people who I like, who I won’t curse by naming — if I name them then everyone will hate them. But it’s a very, very poor Cabinet.

You said you thought Labour should be led by a woman from the North like Lisa Nandy?

Yeah, because Starmer is pretty rubbish.

What about the trans stuff?

The  last thing we should be doing is giving a desperate Tory Party that has been a fiasco for years a wedge issue — the chance to say at the next election, you can’t define a woman. Labour is stupid. The more they try to fudge it, the worse the problem gets.

Suggested reading

Keir Starmer is gaslighting women

By Joan Smith

You’re not in the Tory party. Do you want to be in another party?

I’m not a joiner by nature. I don’t like parties. “Parties” or parties. I don’t like going to parties.

Were there journalists at the parties?

Carrie is friends with a lot of them and it was persistently stated that they were hanging out with her and him. But obviously the police and Sue Gray decided not to investigate that — or to investigate Chequers either.

Were there parties at Chequers?

So people say.

There are a lot of rumours about Carrie now.

Nothing would surprise me. She can’t be happy with the situation now. Obviously it’s all blowing up in her face. And then there’s all of his money stuff.

Did he talk about all this with you?

That was an important part of the whole disaster with Covid, because he was literally in the process of trying to finalise his divorce. He was broke. He was having to find money to pay Marina, and at the same time, he had Carrie doing this insane renovation of the flat with Lulu [Lytle, the interior designer] running up these huge bills. In January, he said: “You’ve got to help me get money to pay for this stuff. She’s upstairs, she has spent £100,000. All this gold wallpaper and stuff. And I’m fucked with my divorce. I can’t pay for it.”

I said: “Go to Coutts. Get one of your rich friends to take out a loan.”

“No, fuck that. I want to get donations in to do it. But obviously it’s bad PR so I have to keep it quiet.”

I said: “That’s illegal. What the fuck are you talking about? You idiots. The Prime Minister can’t get secret donations.” But his mindset was very much: “Fuck that. I’m going do what I want.” He’s always been like that: famously turns up at places and then just leaves and lets everyone else pay the bill.

Suggested reading

Why I'll never vote Tory again

By Giles Fraser

What do you do for fun?

I had a child three months before the referendum. So either I’ve been doing the referendum and then Number 10, or I’ve just been hanging out here reading and playing with him. That’s about it.

Do you like music? Do you like film? Do you watch telly?

I watch telly. I used to watch a lot of movies. Not much really. I just hang around, read, go for walks.

Do you like cooking?

Not really.

I know you like Russian literature. Do you speak Russian?

I could speak basic Russian, when I lived there 20 years ago.

Must have been a fascinating time to live there.

Russia is such a fucked-up place. It’s not Europe. It’s a dark place. There are some wonderful people there — some of the best-educated people you will ever, ever meet in your life.

Did you know about the Lebedev peerage?

I can’t remember when he got the peerage formally, but I was there when the decision was made. I was in the room when other people said, “Prime Minister, you shouldn’t do this.” And I said to him: “You shouldn’t do this.” One of the many, many battles after the election that I didn’t win. I suspect they’ll just keep all that quiet until Boris goes. Unless the deep state people decide to leak it, which they might do.

He always thinks he can get away with it. And now?

You never know. He goes through those funny moods. I suspect he’s thinking if they don’t put him out before August, he’s got a reasonable chance of swinging the election. And he’ll be thinking: “Oh, I’m still here. I was close to disaster but just escaped”. Also, he will be looking at Starmer and rightly thinking, “He’s rubbish”.

But remember, he doesn’t really want to be there very long. All he wants to do is not be a loser and not be put out in disgrace. He’s not actually interested in the job. Even in January 2020, he was saying to me, “God, you know these people who say they want to do this job and go on and on? Well I want to write my Shakespeare book.”

The election was on 12 December. By mid-January he was whinging about what a difficult job it is. I said: “You are Prime Minister and if you want to sit upstairs in the morning and do a bit of writing, that’s up to you, but I wouldn’t run around the building telling everyone that you are finding the job boring. Otherwise, you might find it hard to get people to do what you want”.

He must have trusted you to tell you that.

He’s very odd. He does overshare but also at the same time never trusts anybody. Also, part of the oversharing is to see what then turns up in the newspapers to see if you’re leaking.

You’ve been accused of leaking.

I have been accused of all sorts.

I don’t have any sort of personal relationship with someone like Laura Kuenssberg. It was just a professional relationship. And it was important particularly when Covid kicked off. The Mail started to report things like tanks on the streets, rumours that London was going to be locked down and people wouldn’t be allowed to leave. She would call me and I would be able to say to her: I guarantee you that is not true. The BBC is the national broadcaster. Do not put that on the news because you’ll cause chaos.

The BBC political editor is going to have a relationship with the Prime Minister’s main political adviser. That’s just a fact of life. To think I have been criticised for that: it’s just crazy. People thought there was “Dom’s dark web”. Johnson thought: “He wants to cut me and my friends off from dealing with the media, so that everything goes through his secret network”.

Suggested reading

Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

Okay, what’s your secret network?

The irony was that in 2020, I was barely speaking to the press. But he never believed it. I stopped speaking to the press in November, before the election. I talked to Laura, sometimes [Robert] Peston. That’s about it. I would tell Lee [Cain] what was happening.

12 March 2020 was the most insane day of the whole thing, and probably the most insane day in Number 10 since 1945. The day started with me trying to bounce the system towards much more radical action against Covid. Trump then tried to get us to engage with a bombing mission — to fly over and bomb a load of people in the Middle East. That was never revealed at the time — it only came out when I mentioned it to the MPs last year.

Bomb who?

I can’t say who — but okay, mostly people in Iraq.

So, I say to Boris: “Listen, this idea of us cancelling all these Covid meetings because we’re going to start bombing the Middle East with Trump, it’s fucking crackers. We’re going to have thousands of people dead here in the next few weeks. We’ve got to sort out Covid.”

And he says: “This fucking Times story about Dilyn. It says the whole place is chaos. And me and Carrie are living like students with Dilyn shitting everywhere and the staff, the cleaners, all going mad. I want a fucking inquiry. I want to know who briefed it. Carrie thinks it’s you.”

We’ve got meetings on bombing. We’ve got meetings on Covid. Everything is going down the fucking toilet. But he’s getting texts from her about whether he’s started the inquiry into the Dilyn leak.

That’s what we’re dealing with.

It feels like no one is in charge.

It definitely feels like the institutions are all kind of crumbling.

Suggested reading

We are hostages to Government fear

By Timandra Harkness

Is this what you wanted? This disruption?

There are a lot of people who think that. It’s partly why a lot of people voted for Brexit. It’s partly why a lot of people were happy at the thought of the Vote Leave guys going into Number 10. They thought, rightly, that we would shake that shit up and things would be very different. People like me say: all these things are rotten. They say: we are going to cause chaos.

Looking at what happened with Covid, our fears were vindicated, right? The whole fucking thing did fall apart like a deck of cards. And from our point of view, it vindicates our basic idea: that we should do Brexit.

But that’s the start. You then have to go through these institutions and they need to be ripped up and rebooted in all sorts of ways. It needs new people coming in, new ideas. It needs new incentives. Or we just keep going with the closed shop of the old lobby, the old parties, the old boys’ club in Whitehall. Then we’re going to get the same old results, which is a shitshow: stagnant economy, terrible public services, no fucking A&E. It’s totally imploded in large parts of the country. Unless some force actually starts to rejuvenate these things, then…

What do you think of people who don’t vote?

Most people just think: “What’s the point? They’re all a bunch of wankers.”

This interview is adapted from Suzanne Moore’s Substack, Letters from Suzanne.

Long before SARS-CoV-2 was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat, Hancock worked on the student radio station at the University of Oxford.  A contemporary, Gina Coladangelo, reminisced that Matthew read the sport “because he wasn’t good enough to do the news.” Another remembered Hancock as the “butt of everyone’s humour”. He wanted to go to Westminster and be an MP.

He nearly blows himself up. Guildford, 2001. Young Matt does an election leaflet for the Tory candidate Nick St Aubyn. Instead of saying that St Aubyn wanted to “unite” the community, a 22-year-old Hancock writes: “I want to untie the community”. The leaflet lands in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn loses his seat by 538 votes.

Shortly after becoming a junior minister, Hancock compares himself to Pitt the Younger, Disraeli, and Churchill; their achievements are quite well known, but he will make history on his own terms in 2018 when he becomes the first MP to launch a personal app: The Matt Hancock App.

Its creation leads to the memorable onscreen prompt “Matt Hancock would like to access your photos”  — and he appears to get them even if users deny the ‘The Matt Hancock App’ access to their libraries. A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s office admits, “We are checking reports about the operation of The Matt Hancock App”.

In a party where the average age of a member is 57, Hancock appears young and bright. He is marked out by the early patronage of Osborne, who says of his protege: “In a political system that is full of Eeyores we could do with a few more Tiggers.”

That nickname fits well. Tigger Matt has the tamped energy of the short man, over-exercised. Enthusiastic; readily and sycophantically agreeable. His colleagues mock him — Matt Wankcock and Matt Handjob will be insider nicknames for him — but they are usually reluctant to fire him, even when it makes sense to do so.

***

As the Conservative Party tortures itself in 2019, Hancock decides he would like to be leader. Or raise his profile. So he attacks Boris Johnson and a hard Brexit: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”

He fuck fuck’s himself into sixth place in the first ballot of the party’s MPs. Then he withdraws; he spends a month on television and radio praising the new leader… Boris Johnson. Hancock expects a promotion for his breathy verbal parkour. He keeps his job as Health Secretary instead.

To run the NHS is no Conservative’s idea of a dream. Neville Chamberlain was the last Tory Health Secretary to become Prime Minister. The service itself is a patched-up patchwork, a tax sink, an organisation colossally vast and maddeningly confusing. Hancock’s real brief is to make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall apart when people are looking.

The pandemic is the greatest health crisis to face Britain since mad George III thought that an oak tree in Kew Gardens was Napoleon’s ambassador. Fate, or a lab-leak, means that soon everybody will look at the NHS.

***

A relaxed, Prime Minister-less COBRA meeting is held at the end of January 2020. After chairing it Hancock tells reporters the risk Covid posed to the public was “low”. On the same day a study published by Chinese doctors in The Lancet suggests SARS-CoV-2 is comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed around 50 million people.

The risk to the UK is deemed so low that on 24 February the Government supplies 1,800 pairs of goggles, 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China. Looking back at meetings that month, one senior Department for Health official remembers thinking “‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’”

***

A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.

Loo paper soon begins to disappear nationwide. Hancock is rolled out — he was always being rolled out, like a new carpet to be trodden on — into a breakfast TV studio to deny that the Government wanted to massacre the Grannys. “Our goal is to protect life and our policy is to fight the virus.”

Then Neil Ferguson releases his controversial paper. It claims hundreds of thousands will die if Britain is left to take the virus on the chin. Sage advises the Government to embark on a full lockdown that day.

It arrives on 26 March 2020, as Covid cases double every 72- hours. Between 89% and 94% of the public support lockdown. And the Grannys? Care home deaths accounted for 40% of Covid-19 deaths in England and Wales during the pandemic.

***

Like other ministers, after the passage of the Coronavirus Act, Hancock develops war fever. “Our generation has never been tested like this”, he writes to a nation frantically, pointlessly washing its hands. “Our grandparents were, during the Second World War, when our cities were bombed during the Blitz… they pulled together in one gigantic national effort.” The allegory is both ugly and lazy, but Britain is a country where poppies are made to wear poppies.

***

Prince Charles opens the first Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel centre in London. He says the Nightingale “will be a shining light”. The hospital is constructed in nine days, and holds 500 extra intensive care unit beds. (For every hundred thousand members of the population the UK has 7.3 intensive care beds — less than Spain, Greece, and Estonia. This lack of provision will mean more deaths.)

More Nightingales open across the country. They cost the taxpayer 500 million pounds. Only three of the seven hospitals end up treating patients. They are described by one MP as a “massive white elephant conjured up by Matt Hancock to create a good headline”.

***

It’s not really worth it, going outside. A family of five is sent home by the police in Conwy after being caught having a day at the seaside. They scuttle back to Merseyside. Police in Derbyshire “divide opinion” when they use drones to film people walking in the Peak District. A “major incident” is declared when thousands travel to Bournemouth beach, to swim, eat ice cream, and burn in the sun. (Belatedly, it is revealed that the “major incident” did not lead to a spike in Covid cases.)

Speaking to Andrew Marr, a concerned Hancock threatens to ban outdoor exercise. “Let’s not have a minority spoiling it for everybody.”

***

Nothing works properly. The Test and Trace App doesn’t work. PPE doesn’t work — because it’s all out of date. Protecting care homes doesn’t work. Dido Harding doesn’t work. The Civil Service literally doesn’t work. Big-hitter commentators start saying that the entire British state doesn’t work. It is described as “simultaneously overcentralised and weak at its centre”.

But ‘The Matt Hancock’ app still functions. In May 2020 the Telegraph reports that it is becoming a “virtual home for online pranksters and trolls”. Posts to the ‘Have Your Say’ section include drawings of cocks, general abuse, and a date invitation for the (then) married Health Secretary.

When ‘The Matt Hancock’ app is updated a year later, access to the ‘Have Your Say’ section is hidden. One of the last posts read: “Is there a portal on here where I can be awarded a Government contract for an area I have little experience of scale please?”

***

Hancock always looks caught between a giggle and a sob. A new round of Covid restrictions makes casual sex illegal. Or at least that’s how Sky News’ Kay Burley interprets the guidance when she interviews him about it. “You are saying that no social distancing is needed in established relationships,” she notes. “But what about people who are not in an established relationship?”

The Health Secretary, embracing his role as national sex cop, confirms that Government rules do ban shagging someone who is not your normal partner. Apropos of nothing, he adds that, fortunately “I’m in an established relationship”.

A few weeks later, the Times reveals that Gina Coladangelo was appointed to a £15,000-a-year advisory PR role in the Health Ministry. The appointment was never declared. Coladangelo and Hancock are described as “close friends”. A source tells the paper: “Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina. She knows everything.”

***

He appears to cry on television when the first Pfizer jabs are stuck into the arms of two pensioners: Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare. “It’s been a tough year for so many people,” he sobs, rubbing his waterless, unreddened eyes.

The Government spends £12 billion on vaccines. Total pandemic spending is estimated to reach £372 billion. Research finds that under-30s will be disproportionately forced to bear the brunt of these costs. They are described as the “packhorse generation”. The median age of death from Covid is 83 years old. There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.

William Shakespeare dies naturally within a few months of taking the vaccine.

***

In January 2021, a week after the virus death toll tops 100,000, a focus group asks some ordinary people questions about the Health Secretary. A man called Jason compares Hancock to Ian Beale from Eastenders — “He wants people to feel sorry for him.” Asked what sort of car he would be, mother of two Donna suggests that he would be “something that breaks down.”

***

During a committee hearing Dominic Cummings says that Hancock should “have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly”. Cummings then puts a WhatsApp screenshot on his blog that shows the Prime Minister describing Matt as both “hopeless” and “fucking hopeless”.  When he is interviewed about the message, Hancock says: “Boris has apologised for the way that came over.”

***

The story and the footage and the photo are exquisitely simple. After nearly 18 months of tiers, colour-codes, R-numbers, powerpoint slides, and graphs, here is something everyone could understand: a hand on an arse.

Yes, Hancock’s downfall was exquisitely simple. His affair with Gina Coladangelo was unambiguous. It made sense like fairy tales make sense. The Princess in the tower must let her hair down. The wolf is wearing sheep’s clothing. The apple offered by the witch is poisoned. The politician who spent the pandemic agitating for the harshest restrictions, who would describe Professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown sex fiasco as a “matter for the police”, who ensured that the public could be fined for sitting on park benches, who threatened them with 10-year prison sentences for breaking quarantines, this ogre of the new common sense, would — of course! — be breaking all his rules.

The press is devastating, and relentless. With a deep understanding of public humiliation, the Queen describes Matthew as a “poor man”. He resigns, his only consolation being one of the most Googled news stories of 2021.

***

Hancock keeps coming back, like Covid. His head pops out of the ground. Phillip Schofield asks him: “Was it your dyslexia that meant you misread the social distancing guidelines?” The nation laughs, bitterly. It is reported that, off air, Hancock “almost seemed euphoric… He didn’t seem to mind being the butt of the joke.” He has returned to his student days, but made them the business of the entire country. He buys stonewashed jeans, and new turtlenecks. He does podcast interviews, and goes to the BRIT awards. He says he is writing a book for Harper Collins. Harper Collins says he is not writing a book for Harper Collins, and Hancock never mentions it again. A role with the UN is torpedoed, and a comeback video — unanimously described as “cringe” — is swiftly deleted. It is impossible to tell, as with England’s experience of three lockdowns, whether he is enjoying all this, or if he is the saddest man in the world.

***

Everybody wanted a lesson from the last 24 months. Neat, comprehensible wisdom. An intelligible narrative. They wanted to say that it finally proved that Germany was a better country than England, or they wanted to say that our vaccine programme proved the EU was useless. They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character, the flaws in our state, or otherwise be used to justify every kind of pet project, ideological hang-up, or personal vendetta. There was no narrative line. All that the pandemic proved was that what happened a hundred times before in history could happen to us too.

***

The number of children referred for specialist mental health help rises above one million for the first time in 2021. Cases involving those 18 and under increase by 26% during the pandemic. The Royal College of Psychiatrists warns it is “becoming an impossible situation to manage”.

People, including Hancock, like to talk about learning the lessons of the pandemic. So we can prepare better for the next one. They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.

26 March 2020 — 26 March 2022

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.

Suggested article

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.

Suggested article

Why we need 'weirdos' like Dominic Cummings

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.

Suggested article

Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Aris Roussinos

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.

Within 24 hours, Ukrainian soldiers were reporting bullets missing them and a housewife in Kyiv brought down a drone with a tin of tomatoes (not, as some sensationalist early accounts reported, a jar of pickles). Coincidence?

Michael Hughes has form: five years ago, he was behind the binding ritual against Donald Trump, which involved the burning of an unflattering photograph of the President (a visually appealing photograph, it was made clear, would not be suitable materium). This ceremony had the option, as the President turned to ash, to chant either “So mote it be” — a ritual phrase in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism or Wicca — or, if preferred, “You’re fired”.

And even this hocus-POTUS was not unprecedented: magic regularly plays a part in resistance. The English occultist Aleister Crowley, for example, claimed to have invented Churchill’s V-sign as a magical foil to the Nazis — in his Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram, V represents Apophis, the destroyer, whose slaying of Osiris is symbolised by the swastika — although the general consensus among historians is that the V stands for Victory.

Crowley repeatedly tried to offer his esoteric services for King and Country, but each time was told that “the Director of Naval Intelligence presents his compliments to Mr Aleister Crowley and regrets he is unable to avail himself of his offer”. It seems that the only person, apart from Crowley himself, who suggested that he should play an official role in the war effort was Lord Haw-Haw, who said that his celebrating a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey would be as effective as Britain’s National Day of Prayer. Crowley, of course, took this as a compliment.

Suggested reading

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Francis Young’s new book, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, sees Crowley as the last person to make a serious attempt to fill a role which has been a surprising constant in British history — magical advisor to the rulers of Britain. Merlin may have been a myth, but figures like John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astronomer, self-consciously placed themselves in his tradition. And even when belief in magic has disappeared from the body politic, the role has not: Dominic Cummings, that “wizard” known for practising the “dark arts”, is accused of bending people to his will through powers that no one really understands, or even can prove exist.

Cummings himself said he wanted to fill government with “weirdos” — “wyrd” means, of course, having the power to control the fates — and super-forecasters, albeit ones with a background in statistics rather than traditional methods of seeing the future. An adept told me that he knew Cummings had no interest in astrology when he didn’t capitalise on the fact that, when we left the European Union, Saturn and Pluto were conjoined in the sign of Capricorn. This was happening for the first time since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, making Brexit not just an echo of the Reformation but a rerun ordained by fate.

I’m not, of course, saying that Dominic Cummings is Merlin, only that people talk about him as if he were. To be fair, as Arthur C Clarke used to observe, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — which goes for the manipulation of big data as much as it does for “experiments” in previous reigns. Gunpowder, for example, was developed by alchemists, who had experience of sulphur and saltpetre; and the word for poisoning (veneficium) also meant witchcraft until the seventeenth century, when the ability of plants to kill was no longer believed to be an occult power.

And there has always been a political dimension to magic — especially in Scotland, where witch-hunting was one of the few ways in which the Scottish government could impose its authority on local magnates. Nicola Sturgeon’s apology for the witch trials last week omitted to mention their political role in legitimising the Scottish state. In England, it was much easier to prosecute someone for “compassing and imagining” the death of the king under the Statute of Treason than for actually committing treason.

Suggested reading

Why they burn witches in Scotland

By Diane Purkiss

But political magic was never just propaganda. Even in the twentieth century, the Anglican exorcist Gilbert Shaw was convinced that the General Strike was the result of Russian adepts projecting psychic forces at Britain to foment unrest and lead to Socialist revolution. Luckily, he was conveniently close to the ley line along which this psychic pressure travelled, and, by exorcising an ancient tumulus next to his church, was able to cut off this occult communication. A week later, the General Strike was over.

Father Shaw — like most Anglicans with an interest in the Occult, he was an Anglo-Catholic — quickly became the Church of England’s leading expert on combating black magic, and claimed, like Crowley and many others, that his preternatural assistance played its part in defeating Hitler. There was no officially approved magic resistance during the Second World War — and there hardly could be, the argument runs, since the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was not repealed until 1951 — but many modern Wiccans believe that there were unofficial rituals.

Gerald Gardner, the grandfather of modern Wicca, reports that he was initiated into a coven in the New Forest who performed a ritual on 1 August 1940 — Lammas Day — to prevent the Nazi high command invading. Or, rather, to prevent them wanting to invade: as he wrote, “The witches met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: ‘You cannot come across the sea, You cannot cross the sea, Not able to come, Not Able To Come’…  I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea in his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come”.

The account is corroborated by the occultist Louis Wilkinson, who claimed that some of the more elderly participants died as a result of the psychic energy they expended — while conducting the ritual naked, in the middle of the night, in England. Whatever the truth of the story, the New Forest coven is an important part of the founding myth of modern Wicca, and I have heard contemporary Wiccans vigorously maintain that it was this ceremony that foiled Operation Sealion.

More from this author

The importance of a midlife crisis

By Andrew Watts

The hex against Putin, then, like the binding of Trump, is part of a long but hidden tradition. But there are differences. The Cone of Power has, according to Gardner’s account, been raised on three occasions: to prevent the Armada invading in 1588, Bonaparte in 1800 and Hitler in 1940. These rituals, as recounted by Gardner, concentrated on changing Hitler’s mind, or telling Bonaparte to think again. Even the spell against the Armada was about persuading the Spanish (“Go On, Go On, Not Able to Land”), although, since they had already embarked by the time the ritual was carried out (by Sir Francis Drake himself, according to Devonian folklore), it appeared to take effect by creating the storm that scattered the fleet.

Modern magic has given up on the idea of changing anyone’s mind. Like modern politics, the aim is not to persuade your opponent, not to influence his thoughts, but to bring ruin and destruction upon him, breaking his bones and casting him down into dust and ashes.

Some magical practitioners question the wisdom of this, and not just because of the Law of Threefold Return, the Wiccan principle that the energy you put out into the world will be thrice returned to you. More worrisome is the idea that Putin has his own protections in place. Aleksandr Dugin, the nationalist philosopher known as “Putin’s Brain”, is known to have an interest in the occult, dating back to his days editing Elementy. On its second issue, the magazine’s cover star was the goat-god Baphomet, who has an important role in Aleister Crowley’s cosmology. The fact that Russian troops entered Donetsk and Luhansk on 22.02.2022 does suggest that Putin is receiving a certain kind of advice.

Perhaps the most profitable line of attack is not against Putin himself, but against his soldiers. When young Russian soldiers entered Konotop — known from stories as a place where old women have occult powers — they were told by an elderly Ukrainian woman: “Here every second woman is a witch. Tomorrow you’ll no longer be able to get your dick to stand”. As Nicola Sturgeon did point out, a fear of witches is often a fear of women; and their words were enough to terrify any Russian man.

Stumblingly, young Nige is starting to live out the two contradictory impulses that will frame his life. One: a conservative’s respect for, and needy desire to be part of, institutions. Two: a libertarian’s outsider fantasy of bomb-tossing nonconformity. Yeah, the boy loves the club, but he quite fancies running a bulldozer through those front doors too. Luck will let him do both.

Nigel Farage, for all his talents, was lucky. He was time-and-place fortunate. His pampered enemies underestimated him, and thought him a punchline until the joke brought their house down. Many of them were no life experience professional political hermits like Danny Alexander or Ed Miliband. They raised no whirlwinds. Mostly, as David Foster Wallace put it, they weren’t “enough like human beings even to hate.” They were overpumped with focus-grouped shrewdness, not human instinct.

Farage was messily and chaotically human. He is, in that dreaded national formulation, a character. He has an anuran face, an aquatic aspect — the ideally fishy tribune of an island where the moss is still damp and the rain is still thin.

In the 2010s he smashed through the Overton Window like a breeze block. First with Ukip, then with the Brexit Party. And even as he did so, he was being very badly behaved — not that this ever made a scratch in his popular image as a plain-speaking common sense merchant. Fortune favours the charming miscreant sometimes. The rest was Britain’s exit from the European Union.

At least, that’s the life that emerges from Michael Crick’s new biography of Farage. One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage feels, quite simply, long. Five hundred beigely judicious pages read like 5,000. Crick’s annoyingly pokey reportorial style — a staple of Channel Four News for decades — is absent here. It’s a dull, reasonably objective attempt to tell the truth. There is voyeurism (we buy books like this to peep through the bedroom keyhole, don’t we?) but not a single nose-turning jab of biographical GBH.

Crick comes perilously close to making Farage… boring. He drowns him under mudslides of irrelevant detail. There are paceless accounts of infighting among Ukip’s National Executive Committee; a whole chapter about a dodgy party call centre in Kent; more information on Neil Hamilton’s time as an MEP than even the most deranged politico could be expected to digest. Still, sanding away the trivia reveals two major themes: alcohol and luck. In Farage’s life they combine and recombine like clouds on a windy day.

More from this author

Farewell, then, Gina Miller

By Will Lloyd

His luck was personal and political. Ukip’s rise was only possible after the unexpected death of the wall-eyed billionaire tyrant James Goldsmith in 1997. His demise took his Referendum Party, Ukip’s lavishly financed rival, into the soil with him. Tony Blair’s decision to approve a new proportional voting system for the UK’s European parliamentary elections gave Ukip their first big breaks — and Farage’s first media appearances proper — in 1999.

Later on, Farage was sceptical about the need for a referendum. Ukip’s central policy was so outrageously unthinkable for most of Farage’s career that, in spite of his crashingly loud public idealism, it seems like he doubted whether it could ever happen. His electoral successes (not luck) eventually pushed David Cameron into promising a vote on exiting the EU in 2013 — but it was Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015 that made the referendum happen.

During the campaign, Farage had the lowest personal popularity rating of any of the major party leaders. Jeremy Corbyn was more popular. Farage did have political nous, though. Like Cummings, he understood that the old Left and Right labels were meaningless. “We don’t want to represent a wing,” he said in 2004, “but the heart and wishbone of the nation.” He didn’t think that English politics had changed since the 17th century. “You are either a cavalier, a democrat, and a libertarian, or you are a doctrinaire, morally intolerant roundhead.” He had identified one of the oldest, deepest, most durable divisions on the island. Spookily, the political map of the Brexit vote ended up resembling the regional distribution of support for the King, Court and Tories against Parliament, Merchants and Whigs in the Civil War. Except in 2016 the cavaliers won. Whoops.

More from this author

Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

For years, Ukip suffered from the pandemonium of being a party staffed entirely by cavaliers. Crick (without any sense of humour) gives the impression that the whole trembling structure could come crashing down at any moment. But Farage’s luck holds. The early Ukip days are clogged with writs, squabbles, and changes to office locks. The dramatis personae are livestock auctioneers, umbrella makers, undertakers, investment brokers, hoteliers, Rowan Atkinson’s brother, and a barrister described, in a simile that is too fun to be Crick’s, as “an escapee from a Joanna Trollope novel”. Tiny factions of them argue obscurely in the bitter wilderness.

Like Shakespearean fools, they tell unspeakable truths and babblingly predict a future others cannot see. The first full-length account of the party, Mark Daniels’ Cranks and Gadflies, described the membership as “idiots, paranoiacs, and conspiracy theorists.” Daniels — real name Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker — was also Ukip’s press officer at the time. Farage admitted they were all “bumbling amateurs”.

Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane — “rather like a tractor” Farage thought — would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. “I just hope the plane doesn’t blow up and crash,” Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. “Oh, fuck!” said Farage.

Suggested article

What can we learn from Southend West?

By Tanya Gold

​​He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life he’d escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.

Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke “fluent human”.

​​He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a “shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best”. He was right. At times he seemed to hold England’s spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.

Anger wasn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: “Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that.’” He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.

Suggested article

Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEP’s in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. “His ability to get by on a few hours’ sleep,” says Aaron Banks, “even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.”

It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farage’s gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was “not actually very confident. He’s quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.”

Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the public’s mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.

Crick’s biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesn’t tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesn’t have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? “Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union.” Well, duh.

Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; he’s now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.

Of all the 2010s populists — Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry — only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.

Dominic Cummings had a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, but he’s long gone. And now Gove’s white paper on the levelling-up agenda has been delayed. Two big speeches from the Prime Minister this year were supposed to flesh out the agenda, but the first was a let-down and the second a major embarrassment.

The only hint of a guiding principle came in a third — Boris Johnson’s crowdpleaser at the Conservative Party conference. Here’s the key passage: “If you insist on the economic theory behind levelling-up it is contained in the insight of Wilfredo Pareto… that there are all kinds of improvements you can make to people’s lives he said without diminishing anyone else… we call these Pareto improvements.”

Why was the PM referring to a 19th century Italian economist? He claimed at the time that Pareto had merely “floated from the cobwebbed attic of my memories”. But I’m not so sure. I suspect he is foundational to Johnson’s entire political outlook.

Vilfredo Pareto was born in 1848 to an Italian father and a French mother. He trained as a civil engineer, but in mid-life switched to an academic career — in which he shaped the modern disciplines of economics and sociology. His theories are complex and contradictory. But paradoxically they’re also accessible through bite-size concepts such as Pareto improvements (see above), Pareto efficiency and, most famously, the Pareto principle. 

This last one is also known as the 80-20 rule. It’s the idea that, in many situations, 80% of the consequences come from only 20% of the causes. This has been expressed in all sort of ways ever since — including the half-joke than in any organisation 20% of the people do 80% of the useful work. Pareto claimed that this basic pattern could be seen everywhere, which is why he thought that human society is naturally hierarchical. 

He also taught Benito Mussolini. Pareto was professor at Lausanne University when the future Italian dictator was a student there. The young Mussolini was a socialist, but after rejecting the principle of egalitarianism he gravitated towards fascism instead. And for that ideological metamorphosis, Pareto’s influence has been blamed.

The professor was not himself a fascist, but he did believe that inequalities — of wealth, power and achievement — were inevitable. While one might seek to order society for the benefit of “the many not the few”, hierarchy will always be the result if the few make most of the difference.

For Pareto, this didn’t have to be a problem. As long as the most capable individuals are in charge, then in theory everyone benefits. If this sounds like elitism — then that’s because it literally is. Pareto coined the word. He wanted an alternative to the Marxist concept of class, which he thought too restrictive, so chose the French word élite — which means “selected” or “chosen”. 

How strange, then, that Boris Johnson — supposedly to be a populist — should have taken the father of elitism as his inspiration. But, of course, Boris is an elitist himself. He made that clear when he delivered the 2013 Margaret Thatcher Lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies. Up against some pretty stiff competition, it’s the most controversial speech he’s ever given. 

At first sight it looks like a simplistic Rightwing defence of inequality. “I don’t believe that economic equality is possible”, he said, “indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.”

Johnson also compared the economy to a box of cereal: “the harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.” This alludes to a physical phenomenon called granular convection that explains why the largest particles in a granular material rise to the surface, while the smaller ones collect at the bottom. Like Pareto before him, Johnson was arguing that inevitable forces are at work in human society too — and that these produce inequality: “the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever”. 

More from this author

Boris Johnson's speech was a joke

By Will Lloyd

The speech was met with outrage. Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister at the time, described it as “unpleasant, careless elitism.”

However, it is worth pointing out that Boris wasn’t arguing for a static, unchanging hierarchy: “To get back to my cornflake packet, I worry that there are too many cornflakes who aren’t being given a good enough chance to rustle and hustle their way to the top.” It was time, he said, to give the packet another shake — just like in the Sixties or as Margaret Thatcher did in the Eighties. 

This appears to owe a lot to another one of Pareto’s theories: the “circulation of elites“. Instead of comparing society to a box of cereal, the Italian likened the governing elite to a river:  “What it is today is different from what it was yesterday. Every so often, there are sudden and violent disturbances. The river floods and breaks its banks. Then afterwards, the new governing elite resume again and slow process of self-transformation.”

More from this author

Serfs don't vote Tory

By Peter Franklin

Though Pareto believed in elites — he also recognised their tendency to stagnate over time. Their members come to owe the positions not to ability, but just because they are seen as superior. Furthermore, they use their position to put obstacles in the way of those who might compete with them. Social tensions build until the point at which outsiders of greater ability rise up to overthrow the old establishment — and thus become the new elite. And so the cycle starts again. “History is a graveyard of aristocracies,” is how he summed it up. 

The obvious parallels between Johnson’s cornflake packet and Pareto’s river might be a complete coincidence — but I doubt it. If Pareto’s ideas have a place in the attic of Johnson’s mind, it’s because he wants to keep hold of them. 

Certainly, the Prime Minister has lived out those ideas. He is both an elitist to his very finger tips, but also a populist overthrower of establishments. David Cameron and Theresa May can both attest to his cornflake shaking abilities — as can the European Union. 

But what now? Any further delay to the levelling-up strategy would suggest that the new elite — comprising Boris Johnson and his remaining allies — is also succumbing to a process of stagnation. To rescue his flagship policy, the Prime Minister must either force a lot more money out of Rishi Sunak or he must offer something just as valuable in its place: and that is power. 

There was a taste of what might be to come, when Michael Gove proposed the introduction of US-style governors to lead England’s counties. If this more than a gimmick, then we’re talking about an unprecedented devolution of power from Whitehall to local communities. 

Perhaps Boris Johnson hasn’t finished shaking things up.

What is it, you might wonder, that makes Mr Osborne the best qualified person to do this job? Does he spend his idle hours thinking about the best way to facilitate the curation of valuable collections and the ethics of repatriating plundered antiquities? Is he a scholar of archaeology and an expert on the way museums are run around the world? Does he have outstanding contacts in the arts world? Or is he, rather, The Right Sort Of Chap?

This appointment reminds us that the economy in this country is essentially divided in two. There’s a very big bit of it, involving most people, where you are expected to develop skills in a particular job. You train as a doctor or a lawyer, or you apprentice as a stacker of shelves or a maker of widgets. If things go well, you steadily ascend the ladder of your chosen career, becoming more senior and better paid. If things go badly — say, they invent a robot that can do the same job more cheaply, or people cease to want coal dug out of the ground — you are stuffed. You have to “retrain”, to move into another sector.

Then there’s this small other part of the economy — which is, incidentally, the part in charge — where you need no specific skills at all. It is about being, like George, The Right Sort Of Chap. You have ascended to a level of seniority by sucking up to the right people and getting in the right gang — and once you’ve made it, you’ve made it. Being The Right Sort Of Chap trumps any domain-specific knowledge or experience. You will swan into one board-level job or consulting gig after another. What they want is your contacts in the corridors of power and your name on the letterhead.

Suggested reading

Nero wasn't 'misunderstood'

By Boyd Tonkin

The Right Sort of Chap is a part of the nepotistic, private-school-dominated establishment, in which your path is eased by knowing the right people and projecting the right front (as a public-school educated brat myself I check my privilege in that department); but they’re what you might think of as the god-tier version. Public school chutzpah can help get you to the top of a profession; Right Sort Of Chapness, once you’ve got there, renders your specific profession irrelevant. You can run companies, newspapers, universities, cultural institutions or countries with equal confidence.

Sometimes people make it to this stage by toiling up through the first section of the economy and reaching escape velocity: they are at board level in their chosen industry and find themselves, in the silver back end of their career, accumulating seats in the Lords, directorships and chairs here there and everywhere. There’s the assumption, perhaps not always wrong, that corporate governance is a transferable skill. And there’s the agreeable sense that if you sit on each other’s remuneration committees everyone can be accommodated in a civilised way.

But some, like our George, get there with no very concrete sign of prior achievement at all. Having struggled to get anywhere in journalism (turned down for this trainee scheme; turned down for that job; reduced to freelance shifts on the Telegraph diary — and some of us know what that’s like) he plunged into Conservative Central Office as a young thing and ended up scooting up the political ladder with the Notting Hill Tory chumocracy. Right place, right time, right pals. He was now The Right Sort Of Chap.

More from this author

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

He had a golden few years in Cabinet and then, having bished up the Brexit campaign and seen his main patron throw in the towel, he started rampaging through the private sector, where former Chancellors of the Exchequer command a premium. Adviser to a handful of venture capital outfits; chair of a think-tank; honorary professor here; visiting fellow there. Why wouldn’t he end up editing the Evening Standard or chairing the BM as a sideline?

Propriety requires me to make a declaration of interest here: George fired me as a columnist from the Evening Standard. I don’t spend a lot of time plotting his downfall, but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t smirk if I read that he’d fallen down an open manhole. Still, the evidence that he was a poor editor of that paper is abundant even if, in firing me, he showed he was capable of making the odd sensible decision.

Having never been a proper journalist, he didn’t seem to get the idea that you’re not supposed to compromise editorial independence to suck up to friends, political allies and other employers of the editor. The coverage of Uber and Google and various other concerns was, we can say, suboptimal. But the Standard’s editorship, for George, was not so much a job as an influence-peddling sideline in any case; the main gig was a £650,000, three-day a week consultancy for the fund manager BlackRock, along with a by then uncountable number of other jobs whose highish salaries and lowish actual-work requirements were the main thing they had in common. And in this, he was not an outlier but a representative.

Suggested reading

Where is Boris Johnson?

By Howard Jacobson

The Right Sort Of Chap principle runs through British public life like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock. It starts early: once you’ve finagled your way into one of the great universities, you can often make a quick change of course. I remember watching contemporaries do so with something like awe. You got into Oxford to do, say, Theology against less than stiff competition — but now you’ve decided you’d prefer to study PPE, so you switch. Tough luck on the suckers who applied to that vastly oversubscribed course in the first place and didn’t get in.

At the end of it you get a milk-round job in a big five consultancy where — nice suit, middling degree from a good university — you’re sent out to advise professional businesspeople on how to run businesses. Consultancy, as a burgeoning profession in public and business life, more or less enshrines the principle that Right-Sort-Of-Chapness trumps actual knowledge or experience. By then, you’re on your way — set up for a sideways jump into politics.

After all, the principle continues at the most senior levels of governance — and is, on the face of it, an extremely odd one. Once you’re in the cabinet (and don’t let’s get started on the track records that gave us the likes of Gavin Williamson, Matt Hancock and Priti Patel in their current seniority), you can be reshuffled to any portfolio at all. The quite absurd assumption is that the skills that outfit you to get in with the right gang in politics will outfit you to take any role in government. There will be first-year undergraduates who have a better grasp of economics than you — but the PM owes you one and you didn’t shit the bed as minister for fun, so boom: you’re Chancellor of the Exchequer.

These moves are not made on the basis of the candidate’s suitability for a given role but for reasons of Prime Ministerial patronage (it was a happy accident that when he became Chancellor, Gordon Brown was the sort of fellow who read books about post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory). And it’s for the same reasons that, rather than keep cabinet ministers in one department for many years so they actually learn something, they’re often as not bounced into a new one after a couple of years. That’s why we get Welsh Secretaries who don’t know the Welsh national anthem, trade ministers who haven’t grasped the importance of the Dover to Calais route and Northern Ireland ministers who haven’t quite got round to reading the Good Friday Agreement.

More from this author

Harry, the Prince of PR

By Sam Leith

This government has been even keener than most on the Right Sort Of Chap principle, even extending it to the awarding of public contracts during the pandemic. Companies with no experience of making PPE, or in some cases no experience of making anything at all, were awarded multi-million pound contracts to have a bash at it on the apparent basis that they drank in the same pub as a cabinet minister, or were mates with Dominic Cummings, or had the PM’s mobile number. And failure — as everyone from Serco or G4S to Matt (“totally fucking hopeless”) Hancock knows — is no obstacle to continuing in post.

Dido Harding is perhaps the outstanding example of the Right Sort Of Chap. She, too, made the right friends at university. She did her apprenticeship in consultancy, and there followed a merry-go-round of board-level appointments at which she was, mostly, heroically useless (notoriously presiding over the TalkTalk data loss fiasco). She failed upwards to become a Tory peer and, again with no domain-specific experience, was put in charge of Test and Trace — which had the distinction of being one of the most spectacular failures in the long catalogue of governmental failures during the pandemic. Not, apparently, troubled by self-reflection, she’s now campaigning to be put in charge of the whole NHS. She’ll probably get the job. And if she doesn’t, perhaps George will see her right with a senior role at the British Museum.

After all, he is part of an establishment that operates on the blithe assumption that all skills are transferable, that an aptitude for political schmoozing magically confers any number of lesser competences on its owner — and that the Right Sort of Chap is the right person for the job, even if they’ve proved otherwise, time and again.

This is not the mainstream view, to say the least, which is that the pandemic was especially disastrous in the United States precisely because the president was an incompetent populist. The same narrative was central to the way much of the British media covered the pandemic, at least until vaccines saved the day and the prime minister. Even so, it was notable that the parts of Dominic Cummings testimony that attracted the most attention were his criticisms of Boris Johnson as “unfit for the job” of prime minister, “smashing from one side of the aisle to the other,” like a rogue shopping trolley. The New York Times summary was that Cummings had “accused the British prime minister of incompetence that caused tens of thousands of extra Covid deaths”.

For liberal journalists and editors who already had an aversion to populist leaders, the temptation to pin the blame on them for last year’s high excess mortality has been irresistible. We can see the same narrative in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro is the populist with blood on his hands, and in India, where Narendra Modi gets the same treatment from his political opponents.

An example of where this assumption of populist guilt can lead even the most experienced writer was James Fallows’s article “The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything,” published in The Atlantic last June. According to Fallows, the poor performance of the United States in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus had one, and only one, explanation: the incompetence of the “person at the top of the system”. He quoted an unnamed “veteran of the intelligence world”— one of “some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials” he spoke to — who summed up his argument neatly: “Our system has a single point of failure: an irrational president.”

Fallows at no point asked himself why so many scientists, experts and government officials might be so eager to pin the blame on Trump. He was too pleased with the analogy between Trump and the pilot of an aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died prematurely, he concluded, because the pilot was tweeting when he should have been responding to an approaching storm.

You can find versions of the same piece about most if not all of the populist leaders. “Jair Bolsonaro apparently intended to lead the country to herd immunity by natural infection, whatever the consequences,” meaning that he “effectively planned for at least 1.4 million deaths in Brazil,” according to Vanessa Barbara in the New York Times. “In a series of stunningly reckless decisions,” wrote Sumit Ganguly in the Washington Post, Narendra Modi “invited the second wave that is now crushing the country”. This “colossal failure of policymaking” reflected Modi’s “general callousness, crass electoral considerations, and sheer ineptitude.”

The generalisation follows easily: populism kills. “Strikingly,” noted the Christian Science Monitor in April, “the top five slots in [the] mortality rankings all belong to countries run by populists when the pandemic began — the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, India, and Britain.” In the words of Yascha Mounk of the Council on Foreign Relations: “If you look around the world today, it becomes painfully clear that those countries that are ruled by populists have paid an especially heavy toll in economic damage, case load, and mortality.” Not only the Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), fits the narrative; so too do the leaders of Bolivia, Ecuador and the Philippines.

The necessary counterargument is not that these populist leaders did a good job and need defending. They all did terribly, with Bolsonaro only just edging out Trump for the number of unbelievably stupid, wildly irresponsible things he did. (The redeeming feature of Trump’s response was Operation Warp Speed, which unquestionably laid the foundation for this year’s very successful vaccination campaign. Bolsonaro’s government managed to bungle vaccine procurement, too.)

Further reading

How America turned into the EU

By Joel Kotkin

Yet to conclude from the populists’ countless sins that the countries in question would have fared much better under different leaders is to draw a dangerously erroneous inference. It would lead you to conclude that, by replacing Trump with Joe Biden, American voters have solved the problem that caused so much illness and death last year; and that Brazilian, Indian and Mexican voters can solve their problems in the same manner when their populists come up for reelection.

There are three flaws to this reasoning, leaving aside the point (made by Brett Meyer in a smart paper for the Tony Blair Institute) that not all populist leaders downplayed the threat posed by the pandemic, while a significant number favoured stringency over laxity. The first is that it is not clear that the countries run by populists did fare decidedly worse than other countries, at least in terms of excess mortality — the best measure of how a country has fared in the Plague Year. The second flaw is that, on close inspection, the mistakes that caused the bulk of premature deaths during the pandemic cannot easily be attributed to presidential or prime ministerial decisions. More often than not, the mistakes were made further down the chain of command, by public health officials and scientific advisers who profoundly misjudged the problem they were facing. Thirdly, and finally, the counterfactuals of better outcomes with different leaders do not stand up to close scrutiny.

Let’s begin with excess mortality data. One study of 32 countries in 2020, which calculated excess age-standardised mortality, arrived at the following worst ten (in terms of mortality per 100,000: Bulgaria came first, followed by Poland, Chile, the United States, Slovenia, Belgium, Czechia, Spain, England and Wales, and Scotland. One might argue that the governments of Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland and Slovenia were led by populists, along with the U.S. and England; but Chile, Belgium, Spain and Scotland?

Or consider the latest excess mortality figures from the Financial Times, which go up to 5 May. The UK and the U.S. are in the middle of the table with excess mortality of, respectively, 17% and 18% above the baseline. Bolsonaro’s Brazil is worse (34%) and AMLO’s Mexico worse still (55%). But excess mortality has been even higher in Peru (123%), Ecuador (67%), Bolivia (56%), Armenia (43%) and Azerbaijan (42%). The problem in each of these countries was not a powerful populist leader.

In Peru, to give just one example, it is Congress that wields the power, so much so that it has brought down three of the country’s last four presidents, including Martín Vizcarra, who was impeached twice last year and finally forced to resign despite an approval rating above 60%. In the case of Ecuador, too, Lenín Moreno did not conform to the populist stereotype last year. In Bolivia, the pandemic struck after the populist Evo Morales had been ousted from power.

In any case, the idea that presidents are to pandemics what pilots are to severe turbulence or engine failure is, to the historian’s eye, deeply misleading. The reality is that the man or woman at the top is struggling to manage multiple government agencies with “stakes” in public health, to say nothing of state or provincial governments.

In practice, as any serious student of modern government knows, the critical decisions in a public health crisis are not made at the top: it is the scientific advisers and principals of the relevant agencies who must decide on the seriousness of the threat and the policy response to recommend. A president or prime minister becomes involved only if there is a fundamental disagreement within the relevant group of expert and officials, or between the Cabinet-level principals. If there is a consensus in favour of a “herd immunity” strategy, as appears to have been the case in London in the first two and half months of 2020, then a prime minister is highly unlikely to overrule that consensus, regardless of whether he is being distracted by a book deadline, a disgruntled girlfriend, or an outsized interior décor bill.

Further reading

The ideology that broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Anyone listening closely to Cummings’s testimony last month, or reading the long Twitter thread which preceded it, will understand that he was not in fact laying the blame for last year’s debacle on Boris Johnson. “Critical as I am of the PM in all sorts of ways,” Cummings wrote, “it’s vital to understand the disaster was not just his fault.” On the contrary, the entire system failed: not just the elected politicians, but the civil servants and the public health experts—all fell “disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect.”

In other words, Boris was a comorbidity. To some extent, the same may also be true of Bolsonaro, Modi and AMLO.

Perhaps the best way to show the weakness of the populist pandemic hypothesis is to contemplate the counterfactuals. If, thanks to some kink in the space-time continuum, Joe Biden had been inaugurated in January 2020, would U.S. excess mortality have been significantly lower? It is easy to claim, as an eminent TV anchor said to me the other day, that it would have been, because Biden and his administration would have “followed the science.”

Yet Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, acknowledged in 2019 that, if the swine flu that struck the U.S. in 2009 had been as deadly as COVID-19, President Barack Obama’s administration would not have done much better: “We did every possible thing wrong. And … 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time. And it’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. Had nothing to do with us doing anything right. Just had to do with luck.”

And how did the Obama administration do when faced with an opioid epidemic? More than 365,000 Americans died of drug overdoses between 2009 and 2016. Each year saw more deaths than the year before. The most affected age groups were those between 25 and 54, for whom the overdose rates in 2016 were between 34 and 35 per 100,000. For that reason, the total of life years lost may well have exceeded those lost to COVID, albeit over a longer period of time. Yet I have never read an article blaming the opioid epidemic on “pilot error.”

To repeat, I am not here to defend Boris, Trump et al. I am merely arguing that is too easy — and also downright misleading — to lay all the blame for the excess mortality of 2020-21 on populist leaders, though their erratic leadership undoubtedly added some percentage to the body count. What happened in most Western countries, regardless of whether they were led by a populist, a liberal or a technocrat, was a systemic failure of the public health bureaucracy. There were pandemic preparedness plans; they simply did not work. Testing capacity was not built swiftly enough; contact tracing was barely attempted; quarantines were not enforced; the vulnerable (especially in elderly care homes) were not protected but exposed.

Further reading

This is Britain's 9/11 moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

These were the costliest mistakes in terms of loss of life, and it is not plausible that presidents or prime ministers were personally to blame for any of them. The most parsimonious interpretation is that the public health systems in Taiwan and South Korean learned from the experience of SARS and MERS, while ours did not.

To conclude that getting rid of the populists at the top will ensure that we do better when the next disaster strikes is not merely a delusion. It guarantees that, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall fail to identify where the real points of failure have been and to do something about them, as soon as we possibly can, in every domain of our manifestly dysfunctional systems of government.

That, I think, was what Dominic Cummings was trying to tell us. “The official plan was disastrously misconceived,” he wrote, “DHSC/CABOFF did not understand this or why, & a PlanB had to be bodged amid total & utter chaos.”

This was because Plan A — to go for herd immunity rather than suppress the virus — “was supposed to be ‘world class’ but turned out to be part disaster, part non-existent. … If we’d had the right preparations + competent people in charge, we would probably have avoided lockdown1, *definitely* no need for lockdowns 2&3. Given the plan was AWOL/disaster + awful decisions delayed everything, lockdown1 became necessary.”

Further reading

Dominic Cummings is writing history

By Ed West

According to one poll, 75% of Britons do not trust what Cummings had to say about the government’s handling of the crisis. This is unfortunate, because what we were presented with last month was a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the reality of life in the corridors of power when a full-blown national emergency strikes. If you think it would have gone much better with David Cameron, Theresa May or (imagine it) Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10, then I have a pandemic preparedness plan to sell you.

In any case, the Cummings critique of the British state has never really been about the personality of the prime minister. His question for years has been: “How does the deep institutional wiring of the parties/civil service program destructive behaviour by putting the wrong ppl in wrong jobs with destructive incentives?” Why are “SW1 incentives … ~all about rewarding *process + fake signals*”? These are the right questions to ask, and a similar set of questions could and should be asked about the Washington Beltway.

The irony is that, back in 2016 and 2017, people voted in populist leaders in large measure because they felt frustrated by the dysfunctional inertia of the “deep state,” whether in Whitehall, Washington, Brasilia, or (for that matter) Brussels. The events of the past 16 months have proved that, as was obvious at the outset, the populists were not a real solution to that problem. But the pandemic has also shown us the deadly consequences of leaving the problem unsolved — which is precisely what we shall do if we conclude that the premature deaths were all the populists’ fault.

Niall Ferguson’s new book DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe has just been published by Penguin Press.

Something like a pandemic, for instance. A hundred years ago, in 2019, the idea that the world would soon be brought to a standstill by a virus would have seemed like a science fiction movie. Sure, a few Cassandras in the infectious disease community might have warned against it, but for most of us, it was just not a serious consideration.

But now we have had an obvious corrective to that attitude. Pandemics might be unlikely in any given year, but if there’s only a 1% chance per year of something terrible happening, it’ll probably happen in your lifetime.

Only preparing for another pandemic, however, would be getting ready to fight the last war. We need to think about what other horrible disasters we might expect in the coming decades. Luckily, last week, a think tank called the Centre for Long-Term Resilience released a report into the most likely extreme risks that humanity faces, and what Britain in particular can do to prepare for them.

Covid-19 has cost millions of lives and tens of trillions of dollars so far — but it could have been a lot worse. The extreme risks that the report is talking about range from those that kill 10% or more of the total human population, to those that kill every last one of us. And it suggests that the two most likely causes of a disaster of this magnitude are bioengineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence.

Even now, that might sound like science fiction, especially the idea of AI. We picture AI going wrong as being like The Terminator: an intelligence achieving consciousness and rebelling against its masters. But that’s not what we ought to worry about, and to illustrate that, I want to tell you about a marvellous little paper published in 2018. It described building AIs through digital evolution.

Digital evolution is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of machine-learning programs are asked to come up with solutions to some problem or other; then the ones that do best at solving that problem are “bred”, copied repeatedly with small, random variations. Then those new copies try to solve the problem, and the ones that do best are again bred, and so on, for thousands of generations. It’s exactly the same process, of replication, variation and competition, as biological, “real”, evolution.

The paper was basically a series of anecdotes about how that process had gone wrong in surprising ways. In each one, essentially, the AIs had learnt to game the system, often with disastrous results.

For instance, one task involved locomotion, featuring a 3D simulated world with little 3D avatars. The avatars were told to travel from point A to point B as quickly as possible, the programmers wanting the system to discover clever ways of travelling: would it breed snake-like belly-slithering? Hopping like a kangaroo?

But what actually happened was that, “instead of inventing clever limbs or snake-like motions that could push them along (as was hoped for), the creatures evolved to become tall and rigid. When simulated, they would fall over.” Essentially, it created a very tall tower with a weight on the end, standing on point A. When the simulation started, the tower fell over in the direction of point B. It had achieved the task, but … not exactly how its creators hoped.

There were other, rather scarier ones. One was given some text files, and told to create new text files as similar as possible to the originals. The various algorithms were trying, and doing moderately well, when suddenly lots of them started returning perfect scores all at once — because one algorithm had realised that if it deleted the target files, it (and any other algorithm) could just hand in a blank sheet for a 100% score.

And one was supposed to play a version of noughts and crosses on an infinitely large board. But it realised that if it played a move hundreds of billions of squares away from the centre, its opponents would have to try to represent a board billions of squares across in its memory: they couldn’t do that, and crashed, so the cheating algorithm was declared the winner.

More from this author

The science of bullshit

By Tom Chivers

The point is that when you give an AI a goal, it will try to achieve exactly that goal. Not what you wanted it to do; not what any halfwit would obviously understand you meant it to do. Just what you tell it to do.

When people worry about AI going wrong in disastrous ways, that’s what they’re worrying about. Not about The Terminator; not about AI “going rogue”. They worry about AI doing exactly what you told it to do, and being extremely good at doing what you told it to do, when “what you told it to do” is not what you actually wanted.

These AIs were just toys; when they go wrong, it’s funny. But if you have a much more powerful AI, with commensurately greater responsibilities — running a power grid, for instance,  driving vehicles or commanding military ordnance — it would be less comical. When you have a really, really powerful AI, it could be disastrous. In an illustrative but perhaps unrealistic example, if you gave an enormously powerful AI the goal of “ridding the world population of cancer”, it might come to realise that biochemistry is difficult but that hacking the nuclear codes of ex-Soviet states is quite easy, and a world without humans is a world without humans with cancer. You might think you could just switch them off, but since the AI would know it would be less likely to achieve its goal if it was switched off, you might find that it resisted your efforts to do so.

The Centre for Long-Term Resilience report, co-authored by Toby Ord, a professor at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the author of a marvellous book about existential risks, argues that right now we have a rare opportunity. After the Second World War, both the world and Britain took advantage of the disaster to build new institutions. In the UK, we created the NHS, and a comprehensive welfare state based around a system of national insurance. Worldwide, we helped build things like the World Bank, the UN, the International Monetary Fund. This was possible, they argue, because the scale of the recent tragedy was fresh in people’s minds, and there was a willingness to take drastic, difficult steps to preserve long-term peace and stability.

Now, they argue, we have the opportunity to build similarly vital new institutions in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. There will, Ord et al hope, be enough public will now to get ready for the next disaster, even though government and democracy in general is not brilliant at thinking about long-term risks. The risk, of course, is that we will prepare brilliantly for the thing that has already happened, getting ready to fight the last war, and Ord says “We need to look beyond the next coronavirus.”

A few years ago I wrote a book which was (partly) about existential risk. The people I spoke to said, just as Ord et al’s report does, that the two things  most likely to cause the human species to go extinct are 1) bioengineered pandemics and 2) artificial intelligence. (Climate change and nuclear weapons are very likely to cause awful disasters, but less so to literally drive us extinct.)

More from this author

Can Dominic Cummings read the room?

By Tom Chivers

The world shouldn’t need too much convincing of the possibility of a bioengineered pandemic, not least because there is growing support for the “lab leak” hypothesis. But even after Covid, it may be that AI seems too much like science fiction. People are happy to accept that it will cause near-term problems, like algorithmic bias, but the idea that it could go really, disastrously badly wrong in future is harder to swallow.

But we should have learnt from the pandemic that it is worth preparing for unlikely, but plausible, disasters, especially as AI researchers don’t think it’s that unlikely. Surveys in 2014 and 2016 asked AI researchers when they thought the first “human-level” AI — an AI capable of doing all the intellectual tasks that humans can do — will be built. The median guess was that there’s a 50% chance by 2050 and a 90% chance by 2075. And what was really interesting was that those same researchers thought there was about a one in six chance that when true AI does arrive, the outcome will be “extremely bad (existential catastrophe)”. That is: everybody dead.

I’m faintly sceptical of the surveys — only about a third of people responded to them, and they may not be representative of AI researchers in general — but even if the results are off by an order of magnitude, it means that AI experts think there’s a greater than 1% chance that the world will be devastated by AI in my children’s lifetimes. Certainly I spoke to several AI researchers who thought it was worth worrying about.

Ord et al have some simple prescriptions for how to be ready for the next disaster. On future pandemics, they suggest creating a national body dedicated to monitoring and preparing for biological threats; and they suggest improving “metagenomics”, sequencing technology which takes a sample from a patient and sequences the DNA of every organism in it, before comparing it to a database of known pathogens. If it detects a dangerous or unknown one, it will alert the medical staff. The UK’s world-dominant position in sequencing puts us in a powerful position here.

And for AI they make some relatively commonsense suggestions, like investing in AI safety R&D and monitoring, bringing more expertise into government, and (and I have to say this does seem very wise) keeping AI systems out of the nuclear “command, control and communication” chain.

Suggested reading

Why we should welcome the lab leak hypothesis

By Bret Weinstein

More generally, they suggest setting up bodies to consider long-term extreme risks to the UK and the world, such as a Chief Risk Officer and a National Extreme Risk Institute, to think about these things on a longer timescale than the democratic cycle allows. All their ideas add up to less than £50 million a year, while in contrast the pandemic has cost the UK about £300 billion so far; 6,000 times as much. If there’s even a small chance of reducing the impact of future disasters, it is a worthwhile bet to make.

My own feeling is that they could do more to bring in the UK’s almost unrivalled expertise on this into government. Ord and his colleagues at FHI, such as the philosopher and AI researcher Nick Bostrom, are just one of several groups here who focus on the long-term future of humanity. Only the US has access to anything like as much knowledge. Dominic Cummings, for all his many faults, seemed to realise this.

As Ord et al say: there’s a window of opportunity to do this stuff now, while it’s all fresh in our minds.

A noughts-and-crosses-playing AI that makes its opponents crash is, as I say, kind of funny. But at a fundamental level, a much more powerful AI that can command military theatres or civil engineering projects will be similar: it will only care about the things we explicitly tell it to care about. I don’t think it’s silly science fiction to worry about it, or about bioengineered pandemics. We have a chance, over the next year or so, to make those disasters a little bit less likely. We should take it.

For many foreign observers, meanwhile, the most fascinating thing was seeing British politicians and civil servants doing the very reverse of keeping calm and carrying on. As Cummings made clear, the decision-making process during the early months of Covid was not only frenzied but highly emotional and laden with expletives.

In particular, his account of one “crazy” day in March last year — when Number Ten discussed bombing the Middle East, whether to introduce a national lockdown and a newspaper story about the Prime Minister’s girlfriend’s dog — seemed more reminiscent of Fawlty Towers than Yes, Minister.

Yet the true significance of what we learned from Cummings’s remarks is the light they shed on how the modern state copes — or fails to cope — with a crisis. This is not the stuff of tabloids or sitcoms. It is not entertaining. But it is important. For Britain, whether it realises it or not, is facing its 9/11 moment.

When I went to university in the Netherlands, the most boring classes were on public administration. The coursework was filled with abbreviations of unpronounceable names of various government agencies with opaque missions and overlapping remits. There were bewildering “org charts” — diagrams that always seemed to swim before my eyes, precisely because they bore no conceivable relationship to political reality.

The exception to the tedium was the rare occasions we were able to analyse how advanced governments handled crises. The quality of senior leadership; budgets or lack thereof; the decision-making process; external factors — all were examined with the aim of determining what lessons could be drawn to prevent, or at least better handle, future emergencies.

More from this author

How influencers have legitimised anti-Semitism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In this context, Cummings’s testimony deserves to become an instant classic in the textbooks of public administration over the Western world.

Many of the facts were already clear before Cummings spoke: the emergence of Covid-19 in Wuhan; the Chinese government’s lack of transparency; the inadequacy of the World Health Organisation.

But amid all the entertaining titbits about whether Dilyn the Dog would “make it through the next reshuffle“, Cummings revealed one thing in particular that, despite being widely ignored, was more important than anything else: that Britain’s plans in place to deal with a major pandemic were either useless or non-existent.

This raises a disturbing question: how reliable are the plans for other kinds of emergency that the government may one day face? If Britain’s response to the pandemic is any guide, the answer is not encouraging.

Suggested reading

Dominic Cummings is writing history

By Ed West

Take the NHS, an organisation which even in the most normal of winters can still easily be overwhelmed. It is, to give it some credit, a system that has to cater to an ageing population. Still, almost as soon as the pandemic struck, the Government was forced to acknowledge that the NHS lacked the capacity to deal with Covid. So often a source of pride in Britain, it suddenly became symbolic of institutional malaise: a system that struggles during normality, and has no capacity to handle a national emergency.

There are lessons here not only for the UK but for all Western governments. Not a single country in the West, after all, can be said to have handled the pandemic well. The key question now is how well they will learn its lessons.

And this is where an analogy can be drawn with the way the US Government responded to the 9/11 catastrophe. In the wake of the devastating terror attack, a 9/11 Commission was set up — and, although there was controversy surrounding its makeup and the lengthy nature of its hearings, it ultimately produced an accurate and useful report on what had gone wrong.

It uncovered bureaucratic agencies with no shared goals; rivalries, distrust and turf-wars; a chronic failure to share information — in short, a dysfunctional and bloated bureaucracy. Sound familiar?

Suggested reading

What Cummings doesn't understand

By Freddie Sayers

Yet the administration of George W. Bush decided to add to the bureaucratic tangle by creating a brand-new institution, the Department of Homeland Security. It is far from clear whether this innovation has been a success. The subsequent lack of terrorist attacks on the same scale as 9/11 may testify to its effectiveness — although one might think that’s a low bar.

Perhaps the bigger mistake the Bush administration made after 9/11 was to think that occupying Afghanistan and Iraq would be effective counter-terrorism measures. These moves formed part of a broader “War on Terror”; a clear threat was identified and a solution, regardless of whether it was the right one, was settled on. But was it proof that the lessons of 9/11 were heeded? The rise of Isis, just thirteen years later, sadly suggests not.

Similarly, another parallel can be drawn with current debate over the origins of Covid-19. Following 9/11, the US and its allies in the West failed to thoroughly understand and develop a plan for countering radical Islam. There was never an urge of to tackle the root cause of Islamism: dawa — the propagation of radical Islamist ideology.

Just as efforts to determine the origins of Covid-19 have been stymied, to this day Homeland Security is still not paying enough attention to dawa, which, to me, has taken the form of a dormant virus. No doubt it will rear its ugly head in the near future, and while we have no excuse not to be prepared, I fear we will be surprised yet again.

Will we continue down a similar path following the pandemic? Will Britain succeed where America failed? It depends, of course, on what comes next. Cummings, to his credit, has said that “there is absolutely no excuse for delaying” a full-scale inquiry into the Covid debacle. Whether or not Boris Johnson takes notice remains unclear.

But what we do know is this: if, twenty years from now, we can look back on two decades without a comparable public health disaster, it will be because we bothered to treat the British response to Covid not as political soap opera but as a case study in public administration. Crafting a dependable plan may not sound like a vote-winner, but it is the only way that Britain, as well as the West, can expect to survive its 9/11 moment.

It’s the same with historical events, which are digested and then usually followed about five to ten years later by serious works of fiction and history offering an interpretation of what happened. The more traumatic events might take longer, and those “dreams” may change the collective view of what happened; the popular interpretation of the First World War was only really established in 1929 with three different plays damning the conflict, quite different from how it was viewed at the time. The Holocaust took even longer, and it was only from the late Seventies that it became a subject replayed over again in our minds.

We have yet to collectively dream about the awful events of 2020. The history of how Boris Johnson handled Covid is still to be written, and today’s opinion polls tell us little. For that reason, I’d be wary of dismissing too quickly the impact of Dominic Cummings’s testimony yesterday.

The Cummings narrative, of grotesque incompetence and a shambolic, lazy hack of a Prime Minister, will almost certainly have no impact on the Government’s commanding lead in the polls, and Boris Johnson will continue his satanic lucky streak.

Most people don’t seem to mind that the Prime Minister is lazy and dishonest, and none of yesterday’s revelations will “cut through” to ordinary voters, at least immediately. When it comes to Johnson’s performance the people have spoken. The people think he did a good job. And yet maybe the people are wrong. Maybe we ought to care more about what the elite think.

Five years ago we started hearing a lot more about “the people”; on one side some talked of the referendum being “the will of the people”, while others demanded a “people’s vote”, as if the first referendum had been decided by geese or ducks.

More from this author

Is it the Tories who are doomed?

By Ed West

It’s not encouraging. Pretty much everything in history with “the people” in it has tended to be either murderous, stupid, disingenuous or just incompetent, from the People’s Crusade (an orgy of religiously-fuelled mob murder of Jews followed by humiliating defeat by Muslims) to the various terrible regimes that have “people” in the name. (Or “the people’s vaccine”, for which read: no vaccine.)

Yet here were Tory politicians invoking “the people”, something far closer to populism than conservatism.

Conservatism is built around institutions, the framework of social organisation — monarchy, church, family, social organisations, legal and government bodies, even sports clubs. Robert Peel said in a famous 1838 speech: “By Conservative principles, I mean … the maintenance, defence and continuance of those laws, those institutions, that society, and those habits and manners, which have contributed to and mould and form the character of Englishmen.”

Populism, in contrast, is built around the sovereignty of “the people”. Populists tend to disregard institutions because they feel little connection with them, partly because they have become dominated by their political opponents and international elites. There is a particular danger with conservatives becoming disenchanted with shared institutions, because they are psychologically best suited to maintain them, being overall more conscientious and sticklers for rules.

In a world where shared institutions are crumbling, conservatism will morph into populism, which doesn’t base political legitimacy on such civic bodies but on “the people”. If Boris Johnson has the support of the people, if none of Cummings’s revelations makes any difference in the polls, then it doesn’t matter — the libs are owned.

Suggested article

What Cummings doesn't understand

By Freddie Sayers

The Johnson Government is not populist, it is what someone described as a Whig oligarchy with a populist vibe. Johnson is a right-wing liberal but he has the personal charisma usually associated with populists, as well as the dreadful record of consistently lying.

The voters don’t mind, because there is also a vague feeling that he supports “people like me” against remote elites, yet it is not spelled out. On another characteristic populist trait — the belittling of expert authority — Johnson’s government is hardly Trumpian, either. While political leaders in France and Germany have behaved appallingly with regards to vaccines, the British Government has always followed expert advice throughout the epidemic — it’s just a shame the experts got a lot of things wrong.

And yet, the Johnson Government’s raison d’etre seems to be that, so long as it has the support of the people, aka the median voter or Red Wall, that’s enough. Which is not the way we end up with good government.

Even if Cummings’s revelations don’t matter to the Red Wall voters, it’s still disastrous that the Government completely failed to respond to Covid. It’s still disastrous if, as Cummings alleges, the Prime Minister was distracted by a book he has to write to pay for a divorce caused by his philandering. It’s still disastrous that the Cabinet Office is “terrifyingly shit”.

Most voters have a view regarding how competently the country is run, but they don’t consider it their role to be the watchdog of political morals; that used to be the job of that dreaded word no one will admit to being part of — the elite. John Profumo spent four decades living a life of shame-induced public service not because it “cut through” with voters but because he’d disgraced himself in the eyes of his peers.

The norms of British public life stated that you didn’t lie and cheat, but once that norm was broken, it was impossible to put back together. Norms are far easier to destroy than to build.

Suggested article

Can Dominic Cummings read the room?

By Tom Chivers

Most people are not that interested in politics and are mostly apolitical, which in effect means small-c conservative. They don’t tend to notice the everyday rigmarole of Westminster, and what does “cut through” isn’t necessarily important. For example, Cummings driving to County Durham so that his family might care for his son if both he and his wife became ill did cut through with non-political voters; the fact that the Government incompetently shunted Covid patients into care homes and in doing so killed thousands of people hardly made an impact.

Does that mean that Conservatives are supposed to view the former as more important? Sometimes “the people” are wrong, sometimes we shouldn’t care so much whether an issue cuts through with the public because it is actually important in itself, to the country’s elites who are supposed to ensure good government. Conservatives have forgotten how to even articulate this point because, since June 2016 at least, their core self-justification is that the people is sovereign.

The politically apathetic or semi-interested often have sounder political instincts than the university-educated because they suffer less from biases and groupthink. The more people learn about a political subject, and become more vested in it, the more extreme they tend to become and the more tribal. It is the job of conservatives to protect the country from such people.

But the politically apathetic also don’t write the narrative, and while they might not be aware of the day-to-day political rigmarole, they are still subject to the same historical memory. Yesterday’s revelations might not affect the polls now or even next year, but if the Cummings narrative — of incompetence, laziness and callousness at the hands of a dishonest and disorganised prime minister — builds as a historical memory, then it will start to break through, not just into opinion polls but into the history books.

Even if yesterday’s revelations make no impact on the polls, it may well affect the longer cultural memory, the REM of British life. John Major’s government had given us 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth by the time of the 1997 election, but at that point, the memory of Black Wednesday had seared itself into the collective memory. The same might happen with Covid.

Few blame the Government right now for how they dealt with Covid, just as few in 1919 doubted the wisdom of fighting Germany. But history hasn’t been written yet, and when it is, historians won’t be as forgiving to Boris Johnson as “the people”.

Two of the “students” in each group were paid actors, told to ignore the smoke. The remaining, real students, presumably not wanting to look stupid or panicky in front of the others, ignored the smoke in 90% of cases. If students were on their own, however, they went to investigate the smoke 75% of the time.[1. A word of warning. This is a classic psychology experiment, and classic psychology experiments have had a bad time lately. A related concept, the “bystander effect”, is looking shaky. But I think this is one of the solid ones. Even if it isn’t, we’re only using it as an analogy.]

The point is that we don’t just care about whether there’s a real chance of danger – even apparently real, apparently obvious signs of very imminent danger, like smoke under a door. We also care, very much, about looking silly.

Seeing the Smoke drew an analogy with the coronavirus, which was then still mainly in Wuhan. “Human intuition is … very good at one thing: not looking weird in front of your peers,” wrote Jacob. “It’s so good at this, in fact, that the desire to not look weird will override most incentives.” The point of his blog was to give permission to worry. If you were the sort of person who would sit in a smoke-filled room until someone else stood up, he said, “I’m here to be that someone for you.” The point was to give you social permission to start making preparations, whatever those preparations were.

I read Seeing the Smoke, and shared it on Twitter, in an attempt to spread the permission. Dominic Cummings, at the time still the chief advisor to Boris Johnson, did as well, and said so in March this year. It, along with a Slate Star Codex blog post a few days later, “helped me and some others in no10 realise we were going terribly wrong”, Cummings tweeted. Put A Number On It is a key part of the rationalist blogosphere, and Cummings, like me, is a fan.

Cummings is going in front of a Commons select committee on Wednesday, to talk about the decisions the Government made as the pandemic spread to the UK. There will probably be mud-slinging and a lot of claims and counter-claims about who said what and when.

Certainly, the arguments over whether or not the Government was “pursuing a herd immunity strategy” seem extremely vulnerable to definitional problems – does that mean they planned to let the virus rip unchecked, or to slow and control its spread? But it’s definitely the case that in early March, the UK was talking about slowing, rather than stopping, the virus: its pandemic flu plan said “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.” Instead, they wanted to let the virus work its way through the population slowly, protecting the most vulnerable, while preventing it from ever overwhelming the NHS. You can call that a “herd immunity strategy” if you like, or not, but that was the goal.

And it does sound as though by 18 March, Cummings was pushing for faster lockdown. That was a few days after the publication of Seeing the Smoke, and around the same time as Tomas Pueyo published his influential post The Hammer and the Dance, calling for draconian, immediate lockdowns to crush the curve, which – if you acted early enough – could be reasonably brief, weeks rather than months.

Whatever one’s view of Cummings, an ability to see the smoke, despite the other people in the room apparently not seeing it, is an extremely useful skill. At the beginning of the year, the media didn’t want to look panicky, it didn’t want to look weird, so too many of us said things like “don’t worry about coronavirus, worry about the flu” or made fun of Silicon Valley types for refusing to shake hands.

There’s a phrase that is used a lot on social media, “read the room”. When people are angry about something, and someone else comes in and says “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that”, they are told to “read the room”. A classic example: when the political analyst David Shor tweeted, during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, that violent race riots in 1968 reduced the Democratic vote enough to tip the election to Nixon, he was told to “read the room” and that he was “tone deaf”. A few days later he was fired from his job.

More from this author

Will science survive politics?

By Tom Chivers

“Reading the room”, understanding what the social consensus around some issue is and not straying too far from that consensus, is an important thing. I’m not belittling it: we live in a social world, and we need to understand the mores and demands of that social world in order to prosper in it – and to make that social world bearable for everyone.

If we all ignored the strictures of society, it would be chaos. That includes rules of not saying things that are true but offensive: parents will know the exquisite agony of having their too-young-to-read-the-room child saying things like “Look daddy, that man’s really fat”. I’m not calling for a total free-for-all where you can say anything you like as long as it’s true. But reading the room isn’t always useful, and it won’t tell you if the room is filling up with smoke or not.

Back in March 2020, there was an elite consensus on certain things. Masks don’t work. We shouldn’t panic (37 days before lockdown, UK newspapers were mocking people who were scared of Covid and telling you you were more likely to be killed by a cow). Travel bans don’t work. (I got that one wrong.) If you locked down early, the population would get “behavioural fatigue” after a few weeks.

And if you had read the room, you would have agreed with all of it. I know I often did. That’s what the experts are telling us! It’s only Silicon Valley tech bros who want us to stop shaking hands, and Donald Trump who wants us to close our borders. The trouble is, the room was wrong, and reading it correctly didn’t help.

More from this author

When did we give up on persuasion?

By Tom Chivers

The rationalists, as Matt Yglesias wrote after the Slate Star Codex kerfuffle earlier this year, are really bad at reading the room, and much better at seeing the smoke. They talk about numbers and facts a lot, and come to conclusions like “actually, if you want to do good in the world, you should contribute to antimalarial charities rather than getting angry about the hot-button issues of the day”. That is the opposite of reading the room.

Cummings, for better or worse, is also terrible at reading the room. And he admires people who are similarly bad at it – the abovementioned David Shor, for instance. He promotes rationalist and rationalist-adjacent people like the podcaster Julia Galef and the superforecaster (and occasional UnHerd contributor) Michael Story. He wanted to hire “weirdos” as government advisers. (As an aside, I suspect that one’s ability to read the room is related to one’s tendency to “decouple”.)

These days, it’s wrong not to like masks, and we’re criticising the Government for not shutting borders quickly enough to counter the Indian variant. Behavioural fatigue turned out not to be a thing. I haven’t shaken hands in 14 months. But we’re still reading the room when we agree with those things. It’s just that the room’s opinion has changed.

An interesting game is trying to work out what the room’s opinions will shift on next. At the moment, it seems to be starting to change on the question: did the coronavirus escape from a lab?

Suggested reading

What Cummings doesn't understand

By Freddie Sayers

It’s funny, because the hypothesis “Covid escaped from a Chinese lab” sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory, but all its constituent parts, “there are labs working on gain-of-function research in viruses, including in Wuhan”, “major disease outbreaks have been started by viruses leaking from high-security labs”, and “the Chinese aren’t always super open and transparent about things”, are pretty uncontroversial. Whether it turns out to be true or not, the theory has gone from crackpot speculation to plausible hypothesis, but very few of the facts have changed; only the opinion of the room.

And interestingly, Put A Number On It borrowed the “smoke” metaphor from an earlier blog post by a different rationalist, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was talking about the dangers of human extinction caused by AI. Perhaps we ought to take that a bit more seriously too. (Although I should declare an interest, since my first book was on that topic.)

Seeing the smoke, not reading the room: these are difficult things to do. They involve putting yourself outside the consensus, outside the cosy circle where we all agree: they risk making you look ridiculous, or worse. In the Covid era, though, reading the room rather than seeing the smoke probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Dominic Cummings has many faults, but I suspect he is better at seeing smoke than he is at reading rooms.

He has drummed up media interest in his performance with meticulous care, timing his Twitter tirades precisely to hit the front pages of the Sunday papers and regularly slipping out teasing details to keep the story moving. With a hammy note of faux reluctance, like an ageing star deigning to do one last show, the onetime scourge of the political class is offering them a grand finale. Prepare the cameras and the lights — the Norma Desmond of SW1 is ready for her close-up.

I wonder if, somewhere in that big brain of his, he realises how useful he has become to his former enemies — or whether the red mist of bruised ego and defensiveness has blinded him entirely to that? When Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who made a career out of the fantasy conviction that the Brexit campaign was won through a vast conspiracy of foul play with Dom Cummings at the head of it, announces that “if Cummings successfully blows apart the political media industrial complex I am so very here for it”, it might be time to think again about the Covid narrative she and Dom now find themselves stitching together.

Theirs is a neat story that the pundit class has been determined to make fit since the start of Covid: Boris Johnson is a lockdown-shy Libertarian secretly pursuing a heartless “herd immunity” strategy in a cynical choice to sacrifice lives in favour of the economy. The trouble is, their thesis is transparently divorced from reality. Zoom out and the astonishing political fact of the Covid era, the thing that analysts will ponder for decades, is how a nominally libertarian Tory Prime Minister so easily confined his citizens to their homes for so long. Even today, when we have some of the lowest Covid rates in the world and more than 70% of adults have been vaccinated, it is still illegal for a family of four to have three friends over for tea.

The case we will hear on Wednesday, focusing on specific weeks in March and September 2020 when Boris Johnson supposedly dragged his feet before putting the UK into lockdowns, is a perfect example of the Westminster point-scoring Cummings has spent his career railing against. It will be cheered on by Left-wing media and politicians, as well as ambitious centrist technocrats such as Jeremy Hunt (who will be lobbing him softball questions at the hearing) and Cummings’s own phalanx of Right-wing fans on Twitter. All these groups, and even some people within government, are content for the political focus to remain on these days of apparent dithering and whether they caused delay and cost lives.

More from this author

The two faces of Boris Johnson

By Freddie Sayers

But I fear that, from the centre of the story, Mr Cummings has lost sight of the priorities of ordinary voters – which surely now consist of wanting to know when this will all be over and when lockdown will finally end. They don’t want to rake over the difference ten days might have made last March, (and besides, they have the correct intuition that people were locking down anyway during those days so their effect is exaggerated.) Equally, Cummings’s big accusation that the initial pandemic response plan, based on flu, included the goal of herd immunity is long-established, as is the fact that the Government initially considered it, then deviated from it rapidly when its implications became clear.

The same goes for the argument about last September: Cummings will tell us that he supported the SAGE calls for a “circuit-breaker lockdown” as cases began rising, and was disastrously overruled. But we now have evidence from Wales of a real-life circuit-breaker lockdown and how it failed spectacularly to change the trend. Most likely, had Cummings won that argument, England would (like Wales) have had a two-week slowdown and then the trend would have resumed. In any case, the UK rapidly started being locked down again after that point — initially via the local tiers system and eventually a full national lockdown, and then the Kent variant gave the epidemic a new lease of life after Christmas. This is all now established fact. So why does he think it is so explosive?

I wouldn’t be surprised if he brings up that Downing Street briefing with Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell again to add a little fuel to the conspiratorial imagination of Carole Cadwalladr and his other newfound allies against the Government. But Gupta’s advice to pursue the alternative approach of “focused protection” was comprehensively rejected by the PM, and the rapid descent back into national lockdowns is now a matter of history. It is hard to think of a group of scientists with less impact on UK government policy than these three.

Suggested reading

Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Freddie Sayers

In truth (and I say this as an admirer of Cummings) this last round of the Dom show has been sad to watch. The Downing Street wallpapergate allegation in his April blogpost was off-topic and failed to cut through — as the Tories’ historically successful elections in the Red Wall proved shortly after, achieved without any help from their talismanic former campaign manager. Teesside Mayor Ben Houchen told UnHerd, having won 73% of the vote: his voters “ridiculed the media for concentrating on [wallpapergate]… they just think it’s very London centric”. Certain details in the same blog, like referring to Carrie Symonds as Boris Johnson’s “girlfriend” instead of his fiancée, leapt out like flashes of menace, confirming that things had got pretty personal; and grand declarations that “I will not engage in media briefing regarding these issues” only looked absurd when followed up by 32-part Twitter threads.

As for his subsequent allegation, similarly designed to wound, that the PM at one point said “let the bodies pile high” in the privacy of his Downing Street office, a new poll suggests that most voters don’t think it is meaningful even if true and would just be an understandable expression of frustration. If the smooth operation of government is really his goal, what sort of effect does he think it has if a Prime Minister can’t even have a conversation with his closest aide without fear of public retribution in a few months’ time? As Mr Cummings takes such an interest in polling, he might want to consider YouGov’s other finding that only 14% of voters trust him to tell the truth anyway (the figure for Boris Johnson is 38%).

Dom Cummings prides himself on membership of the “rationalist” group of online thinkers. But the humility and careful presentation of evidence that is their hallmark is nowhere to be seen in his latest screeds. On Twitter, he resorts to repeating tropes about Sweden that a more rational look at the evidence quickly rebuts; and he is blind to his own involvement, saying that mass testing should have been developed much quicker last year — glossing over the fact that he was one of the key people in charge of delivering precisely those programmes.

Suggested reading

Why the future is Henry the hoover

By Graeme Archer

If anything, his jihad against the Government he was formerly a key part of reveals the crucial shortcoming in the wider political philosophy that we might call Cummingsism. His diagnosis of a sclerotic civil service and inefficient political class was spot on; but trying to excise the persuasive element from government, centralising power in order to bully through the bureaucracy and trying to run the country like a science project, isn’t such a great alternative. His fascination with characters such as General Groves (of the Manhattan Project) and hyperproductive small teams within DARPA, the Apollo mission and Big Tech don’t simply map onto running a country .

Consider the evidence of his own time in No 10. He correctly identified most political Special Advisors as being uppity neophites who have watched too much West Wing and get excited about all the wrong things, so he put himself in direct charge of all of them; but instead of winning them over, he summoned them to humiliating weekly meetings and they soon hated him right back. He was paranoid about leaks to the media, but assiduously briefed the media himself and inserted himself into the story. His famous invitation to “weirdos and misfits” to join him in Government, done outside the official system via a Gmail account, was a good idea but executed in the same Cummings-contra-mundum spirit. It unravelled shortly after — where are those expert recruits now?

Suggested reading

Are special advisers just gossiping grifters?

By Polly Mackenzie

The common deficiency here, and in Cummingsism more generally, is a missing note of humanity. You can dream of an ever-more muscular system of government, smashing through due process and gripping the country tightly like the East Asian nations he so admires; it’s a fashionable goal. But what would it actually be like to live under? In truth, wouldn’t it simply entail a replacement of clubby, ineffectual Whitehall politics with a more draconian politics of fear and rule from the centre, of which lockdowns are only the start?

In which case, brief though it was, wasn’t Boris Johnson’s hesitation before upturning the lives of his citizens eminently defensible? If his 18-point lead is anything to go by, people seem to think so: perhaps they would simply rather live in a country governed by a maddening but identifiably human leader than the likes of Dom Cummings with their visions of military efficiency.

The final irony, of course, is that this supposed high-priest of lockdowns, this Cassandra who all along called for harsher restrictions and more draconian action, couldn’t even manage to obey the lockdown rules himself. Thus (and this is surely the biggest source of his rageful energy) the fatal flaw in Cummingsism lies forever exposed by the actions of the man himself. Barnard Castle and the whole shaggy dog story for which he will always be best known perfectly encapsulate how human life doesn’t fit neatly into unrealistic schemes dreamed up in Westminster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

The Lefties at the heart of government

By Peter Franklin

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of David Cameron

By Peter Franklin

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

The politicians we didn't deserve

By Douglas Murray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This obviously wasn’t really about attitudes in 12^th century England and no one seriously believed it was; it was about Englishmen, or Britons, today, and it’s safe to say that on the eve of a Second World War the idea of a 20^th century “free-born Englishman” was a potent one.

It was believed to be as much a part of the national character as the repression of Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter, or the stoicism in all those roles played by Kenneth Moore. An Englishman was freedom-loving and would never submit to tyrants big or small, whether French-speaking sheriffs or Hitler, or indeed petty busybodies closer to home.

But that was 80 years ago, and if it was ever true, the idea of the freeborn Englishman has been quietly put to bed by the pandemic, exposed as nothing more than an empty myth.

Last February, with events in China giving us a grizzly image of our future and the full horror starting to dawn, that myth was often trotted out. We were repeatedly told that the British were too much of a freedom-loving race to tolerate similarly authoritarian measures. The ghosts of John Bull, John Wilkes and Robin Hood would rise up within us to resist this tyranny.

More from this author

The English have always been drunkards

By Ed West

Boris Johnson said as much, telling the House in Commons in September that “There is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world: our country is a freedom-loving country…. It is very difficult to ask the British population uniformly to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary.”

The experts had even hesitated to act last February because they feared that British people would not be able to tolerate lockdown for long. There would be riots, some thought.

Yet like the military experts of the 1930s who predicted that aerial bombing would shatter morale, they were completely wrong. While Italy and the Netherlands have had serious anti-lockdown disturbances, the British public have accepted it with remarkably little in the way of complaint. They may not have liked it, and some rules may have been bent a little, but compliance has generally been strong — with an inevitable decline during the summer.

Not only that but lockdown is popular as a policy. Wildly popular, you might say. The Prime Minister has been miles behind British public opinion in every restriction he has reluctantly imposed, out of touch with a population who, as a whole, don’t seem to especially love freedom.

Although Right-wingers were the early doomongers about Covid, the issue soon realigned along culture war lines, with progressives far keener to lock down. Yet there was a big difference. While Nigel Farage flirted with the idea of lockdown scepticism, it didn’t last long because, Farage, whatever else people say about him, has a very good sense of what the British public think.

The UKIP position on immigration was hugely popular during the Blair, Brown and Cameron eras; likewise crime, another area where Right-wing populist positions regularly poll 60 or even 70%. But lockdown scepticism? It barely made it into double figures.

Suggested article

Is Farage's Reform Party onto something?

By Gavin Haynes

On almost every question relating to lockdown and Covid, the British public are far less liberty-loving than the Government.

They’re happy with closing borders, and they’re keen on putting people in quarantine. Some 70% support GPS trackers for people entering the country.

Are vaccine passports a hugely controversial infringement on our liberties? Not really — most people want them used for hospitality, offices, and even social gatherings. And the public favours compulsory jabs for nurses, regardless of how nurses themselves feel about this. 

Over three quarters of the population can cheerfully contemplate social distancing measures remaining in place until autumn. There is widespread, even overwhelming support for police enforcing lockdown measures. 

A majority of Britons even think a 10-year jail sentence for lying about your country of departure is fair, while 13% think it’s not harsh enough! I wonder what proportion of that 13% would support actually hanging them.

All the predictions that the British public would not tolerate harsh lockdown measures are completely contradicted by the polls, which show the Chinese government to be more in tune with the great British public than Boris Johnson is.

Contrary to all the predictions that we would never tolerate surveillance in return for the end of Covid, I reckon the average Englishman would happily have a microchip in his arm if it meant he could go down the pub.

Sure, this is the home of Magna Carta and we can make a reasonable claim to being the birthplace of liberalism, but John Locke’s ideas were much more influential in the United States than in his home country.

Suggested article

The myth of ‘Anglo-America’

By Peter Franklin

Like much of our politics, our political-psychological idea of ourselves comes from the Civil War era. It was around that time that the phrase “free-born Englishman” was coined by Leveller John Lilburne, and they put him in prison.

Had YouGov been around in the 17^th century, a significant majority would probably have supported this, with another 13% wanting him burned to death, and the liberty-loving sect to which Lilburne belonged, the Quakers, were deeply unpopular for a long time. 

The Levellers believed that Englishmen had once been free, a natural liberty that had been crushed by the Norman Yoke; before that foreign occupation brought about the class system and privilege, free Saxons sat around in the forests of Olde England, presumably talking about cricket and the weather. It’s an appealing national myth and, of course, completely untrue; slavery was widespread in Anglo-Saxon England, before being abolished by the Normans.

Likewise, Lilburne thought that free-born Englishmen had their rights laid down by Magna Carta: “the ground of my freedom,” as he said, “I build upon the Grand charter of England”.

Magna Carta, although it had nothing to say about the ordinary peasant, did evolve to restrain royal authority — but even here it has been more influential in the United States, where its legacy can be read in the constitution (Clauses 39 and 40, for instance, influencing the 5^th Amendment).

Although three clauses are still on the statute books in England, attempts to make Magna Carta a sort of sacred English text of freedom have always been quite a fringe affair.

Among the wilder shores of the lockdown sceptic movement, there are modern-day sects of sort who cite Magna Carta Clause 61 to oppose Covid measures, claiming it allows “for lawful dissent and rebellion” and that businesses don’t have to close under Covid-19 regulations.

That Clause 61, which gave the leading barons the right to overthrow the king, did not appear in the approved 1225 version of Magna Carta makes no difference to their enthusiasm for this idea. It’s a myth, based on an idea of the English as being inherently free. Yet these groups are minuscule, and for most people our supposedly sacred freedom is not thought about much; Oliver Cromwell was probably onto something, public opinion-wise, when he referred to the document as Magna Farta.

Suggested article

England has always been two nations

By James Hawes

And whereas America has the First Amendment, the British have come to accept a huge number of hate speech laws down the years, with Blair’s government being particularly illiberal on this issue, to the extent that police are now investigating 120,000 “non-crime” hate incidents.

Indeed, so well-known are the Britons for being downtrodden by overzealous, interfering government authorities that there is a meme in other English-speaking countries called “have you got a licence for that, mate?” making fun of us.

We are now the most spied upon country outside of the People’s Republic of China, London being the only non-Chinese city in the top 10 of CCTV global hotspots. And despite this, CCTV is very popular among the British public.

Perhaps it’s because the British love spying on people, which certainly is a national characteristic dating back to Francis Walsingham. Or perhaps we like being spied on. We think the reduction in crime justifies the loss of liberty, just as the reduction in coronavirus deaths does.

In which case, which people are being referred to when we are told that “British people will never accept these sorts of restrictions”?

There is, it’s true, a strong liberal and Whig tradition in Britain, of which Boris Johnson is an inheritor, but they are certainly not the majority. On the political axis the median British voter sits somewhere in the top left quadrant, neither economically nor socially liberal, with culturally conservative and redistributive views.

The largest block after that are the progressives, who care most about equality and have barely-concealed authoritarian leanings. Then there are the genuine liberals, of which there are about 17 in Britain.

We tend to group like this because the major driving force in the British psyche is not liberty but fairness, and its step-brother spite. This is a country which hates benefit scroungers yet gets hugely sentimental about the issue of free school meals, because its people hate the idea of someone cheating the system. The one SW1 story that broke through with the public in recent years was the Dominic Cummings Barnard Castle saga — because it upset people’s sense of fairness.

The British are, in fact, quite conformist and placid. The French riot about literally anything, while after epic levels of political incompetence and 120,000 deaths, the worst that’s happened here is someone projecting “Boris is a wet wipe” on Parliament.

There’s a reason why an Englishman in the late 1930s might have seen himself as uniquely free-born and liberty-loving. Our political history and lucky geography has graced us with centuries of moderate politics, avoiding the ideological nightmares of our neighbours. But that doesn’t make us particularly freedom-living; indeed if it anything it makes us complacent about our good fortune.

Most of the British public still support Robin Hood against the Sheriff of Nottingham, but not because they care about freedom. It’s because they care about fairness. They don’t want a free England, they want a fair England.

It is painful to remember, one year after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, the early claims that the virus would prove to be China’s Chernobyl moment. One year on, while the virus runs rampant across Western societies, sending deaths climbing and economies plummeting, China’s brutally efficient state bureaucracy has more or less eradicated Covid from the Middle Kingdom. 

Nearly all liberal democracies have performed poorly, Britain’s rather more poorly than most. Perhaps the West’s model has been superior at developing vaccines; yet the Chinese model is clearly better at utilising the resources of the state to enable a swifter return to ordinary life. Is there a lesson in this dispiriting state of affairs about state capacity in liberal democracies, and if there is, how should our systems be reformed?

In any analysis of Western dysfunction, the political thought of Dominic Cummings deserves renewed attention, not least because he represents a fascinating, and unique figure. He was, essentially, a dissident, technofuturist, accelerationist blogger at the heart of British governance, as if Nick Land or Mencius Moldbug had somehow scored a seat at the cabinet table. His eventual, lobby-led defenestration removed from the heart of government surely the most acerbic critic of British state dysfunction to have reached No 10 in decades. Notwithstanding what he failed to get done while in government, his analysis of it should be taken seriously. 

Over the course of two Conservative governments, Cummings savaged in his blogposts the “broken system” of “Whitehall’s profound dysfunction”. We place “too much trust in people and institutions that are not fit to control so much,” he warned; “politicians thrash around with no priorities and fundamentally little idea about what to do other than try to stay a step ahead of the media with badly implemented gimmicks and avoid blame for our institutionalised dysfunction”.

More from this author

Who are Covid's guilty men?

By Aris Roussinos

In the event of a national crisis — Cummings explicitly cited a pandemic as an example of looming threat — “the current system is absolutely bound to respond with sloth/panic, chaos, and blunders”. This is the direct consequence of “our inability to develop political institutions able to think wisely about the biggest problems in order to pre-empt some crises”. Our system of governance is as dysfunctional in addressing and defusing urgent threats as it was in 1914 or 1939: when crisis hits, he warned, the disaster will be as total. 

The distilled insight of his writing is that bureaucracies stifle creativity and freedom of action, enervating governance; talented outsiders, left to their own devices, will inevitably produce better results than sclerotic state administrators.  There are, by his reckoning, two models of functioning systems superior to state bureaucracies: the hands-off, scientist-led innovation of the Apollo space program and of ARPA, and that of the free market, the Darwinian competition of which, he believes, outcompetes centralised state planning in a manner analogous to an organic system.

And yet, there is a certain ambivalence to his understanding of the bureaucratic state that is worth teasing out. He notes, correctly, that both the Apollo program and ARPA depended on the vast defence budgets of the American state, locked in competition with a statist rival, to function; behind the glamorous innovation of the scientists lay the unglamorous pen-pushing and paper-shuffling of countless tax-raising, policy-devising bureaucrats who made their work possible. 

He observes also that, at least in the field of mathematics, the Soviet Union produced higher quality theoretical work than the United States, as “the actual system in the US really discourages people who are truly original thinkers.” There is, perhaps, an unconscious extrapolation of the failures of Anglo-American bureaucracies or the British Civil Service to a general, dismissive theory of bureaucrats and centralised states in general: yet, sadly, Britain’s problems in this area may be uniquely our own. 

After all, technological innovation and competition only get you so far. The governance of Nazi Germany was typified by extreme, Darwinian competition in Hitler’s inner circle, and its record of scientific advance over the course of the war — the invention of the rocket, of advanced jet fighters and of the modern assault rifle — laid the groundwork for the postwar military and scientific innovation of the war’s victors. Yet Nazi Germany was crushed by the Soviet Union, which chose good, basic designs of tanks, artillery, aircraft and guns and devoted the full resources of the state towards producing them in vast numbers. The USSR was a system so bureaucratic it embedded ideological commissars in even the smallest fighting unit: and it won. There is a strong counter-argument to be made for the state, and even for bureaucracy, that Cummings does not squarely address.

It is with China that this tension becomes most clearly apparent. In early blogposts Cummings made the dramatic claim that the West’s rise in the Early Modern period was a result of free markets, and China’s decline the result of “the strong central control of the Chinese imperial bureaucracy”, which “imposed a rigid and static intellectual outlook” and strong system of state monopolies. Yet later posts showed a greater appreciation of the Chinese model, observing that “China erects skyscrapers in weeks while Parliament delays Heathrow expansion for over a decade. The EU discusses dumb rules made 60 years ago while China produces a Greece-sized economy every 16 weeks.” 

Moreover, “China already has an aggressive space program. It has demonstrated edge-of-the-art capabilities in developing a satellite-based quantum communication network, a revolutionary goal with even deeper effects than GPS. It will go to the moon.” Cummings’ admiration for China’s state capacity is as clearly apparent as his displeasure with our own system of governance: it is difficult to imagine that the events of the past year will have changed his mind.

Surely, then, this is a dramatic argument in favour of strong, state-directed planning? How does Cummings’ analysis account for this seeming discrepancy? After all, it is difficult to imagine that the Chinese Communist Party is a less bureaucratic organisation than the Department for Education. 

Citing Fukuyama’s The End of History, Cummings argues that China’s rise is a product of economic liberalisation, and that its relative decline, or a crisis of political legitimacy is fated — he predicts this with 80% probability within 20 years — due to the Chinese regime’s lack of “openness” to the rest of the world: “developing hi-tech businesses cannot be done without a degree of openness to the rest of the world that is politically risky for China.” China, he argues, will be forced to move closer to a Western political and economic model to continue to survive and thrive. 

More from this author

The rot at the heart of Westminster

By Aris Roussinos

Yet Fukuyama himself now takes a different tack: he cautions against emulating China due to its totalitarian nature, without suggesting that the arc of history will force its political system to liberalise. He notes that throughout  history, “Chinese regimes have been centralized, bureaucratic, and merit-based,” and observes that “there is no true private sector in China” and that “the state can reach into and control any one of its supposedly “private sector” firms like Tencent or Alibaba at any point” (as rumours of Alibaba’s imminent nationalisation indicate), clearly a powerful and surely now dominant countervailing tendency to any emulation of ARPA or the Apollo programme. 

The subordination of Western corporations and governments to the diktats of the Chinese government also highlight another powerful trend, under-analysed by Cummings: when forced to, the market kneels at the feet of the state; all the innovation of the Western world ends up in the armoury of the Chinese state through either purchase or subterfuge: in the grand battle between decentralised innovation and bureaucratic statism, it is far from clear that statism is losing. Perhaps the Western model may be superior, taking the long view: yet China looks on course to win this contest in the meantime.

For Fukuyama, the cautionary lesson from China is that “the world looks to Xi’s totalitarian model, rather than a broader East Asian model that combines strong state capacity with technocratic competence, as the winning formula”. Fukuyama does not, then, see a powerful state bureaucracy as an inherent weakness, but rather as a model worthy of emulation, if stripped of China’s uniquely authoritarian tendencies, which seems to contradict Cummings’ central assertion that state bureaucracies are inherently sclerotic and dysfunctional.

The free market states of the West are clearly being outcompeted by China, yet as the analyst Samo Burja notes, China’s growth is  “powered primarily not by advanced technology, but by party discipline and organization — paper-pushing not too dissimilar to that of the U.S. federal government of the 1940s.”

Suggested reading

Could the Cummings nerd army fix broken Britain?

By Tom Chivers

Is there a synthesis to be found between Cummings’s argument for “a complex mix of centralisation and decentralisation,” where “we replace many traditional centralised bureaucracies with institutions that mimic successful biological systems such as the immune system” and the Chinese model? Cummings argues that “while overall vision, goals, and strategy usually comes from the top, it is vital that extreme decentralisation dominates operationally so that decisions are fast and unbureaucratic” — so the essential question becomes, is this actually achievable within a state bureaucracy?

The China analyst Tanner Greer observes that “even now both the Party and the state bureaucracies that canvas the Chinese hinterland are highly decentralized; these government and Party units are given a great deal of room for experimentation and in many realms are practically independent from outside control. This causes endless frustration to centralizers in Beijing, but the benefits are clear: it is not wrong to think of these units as ‘labs of communism.’” 

This seems to hint at a solution: yet Cummings has insisted that the British Civil Service is essentially unreformable, leaving the free market and decentralised scientific innovation as the preferred alternative models. Perhaps, within the framework of liberal democracy and the inherited structures of the British state, he is right. 

Suggested reading

The 10 brains behind Dominic Cummings

By Peter Franklin

Beyond technological innovation, the great tension within Cummings’s wrestling with the essential nature of state bureaucracy is that between a Hayekian faith in the wisdom of the free market, and a scepticism of “‘Conservatives’’ and “‘The Right’” (the quotation marks are his) who ignore the vital role of state planning and resources in enabling scientific advance. Free market conservatives tend “to ignore that the high tech market ecosystem depends on government funded basic science. Politicians, think-tankers, pundits etc on ‘the Right’ tend to be ignorant of the contribution of government funding to the development of technologies that appear in markets years later.” He also notes, accurately, that the incentives of the market are structured to provide investors what they want, and not what they don’t yet realise they need. Behind everything, then, looms that wasteful, frustrating yet irreplaceable entity: the state, composed, like Hobbes’ Leviathan, of its indistinguishable multitude of functionaries.

The scale of Cummings’ ambition, the high modernist vitality and his penetrating critique, from an insider’s perspective, of Whitehall’s deathly torpor is both admirable and necessary. Brexit provided the opportunity for a “hard reboot” of the British state, an opportunity “to change the basic orientation of the country and to improve normal government bureaucracies and policies more radically than has happened since World War II”.

Yet perhaps he has over-engineered the solutions; perhaps the answers lie not with the tiny cognitive elite of scientists spurring technological advance, but with the unglamorous thousands of pen-pushers and administrators enabling their work.

There is, in the end, no way out but drastic reform of the state bureaucracy, perhaps on a decentralised model that severs the dead hand of Whitehall while simultaneously preserving the wealth, power and majesty of that awful and irreplaceable entity, Leviathan. Can we weaken Whitehall’s grip while simultaneously boosting the state’s capacity at the local level, constantly refreshing the state with new blood and new ideas, and allowing administrators far greater autonomy from central government? 

Imagine local government with far greater powers and responsibilities than currently allowed by our simultaneously over-centralised and incapable state: where each local authority functions as both an experiment in governance and a school for administration, selecting and training a class of competent administrators to replace the Whitehall mandarins. 

It surely cannot be the case that it is easier to build a base on the moon than reform the British civil service. Whatever the resistance from Whitehall, if we are to survive the coming decades as a nation, we have no option but to try, as urgently as possible.

“To grasp these facts we must patiently and clearly trace the origin and monstrous growth of this régime of little men,” Guilty Men’s authors wrote, whose “half-baked, uncoordinated scheme of economic mobilisation” was driving the country towards defeat. The hard truth was that “the dead bureaucratic hand of the Civil Service, coupled with the complacent willingness of some of our Ministers to relax their exertions so long as they could keep the public quiet by pouring the soft and soothing oil of optimism over their heads, was putting us in peril”.

The analogy with today is painfully clear. Our Government has indeed mounted a wartime response to Covid, in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead due to a series of catastrophic errors. The lack of foresight, the inability to plan effectively or marshal the full resources of the state, the incompetent governance and series of defeats snatched from the jaws of victory, all call to mind the series of disasters which characterised Britain’s first three years of the war. So who are the Guilty Men of the Covid crisis?

As the Atlantic journalist Tom McTague observed back in August, the entire British state has been found wanting, as this country “has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its centre”. The problem is not just the Conservative Government, though that has failed entirely: it is the entire superstructure around it, the Civil Service, Public Health England, the media. The British state and its parasitic para-state are both entirely unfit for purpose.

It is the very malaise identified by the pantomime villain of our expert class, Dominic Cummings, when he said, back in 2014: “We do not have a problem with ‘too much cynicism’ — we have a problem with too much trust in people and institutions that are not fit to control so much. When faced with the ‘fog of war’ in nonlinear systems such as the financial system, disease outbreaks, or terrorism, the current system is absolutely bound to respond with sloth/panic, chaos, and blunders.” Working within the heart of the British state, Cummings identified its fatal flaws long ago — so it is no wonder that the para-state’s immune system, the Westminster lobby, spat him out as a threat to its continued survival.

It is unfortunate that his suggestions for its reform suffer from what the writer Paul Kingsnorth identified in his essay on the scythe as an ingrained tendency to hope for technological quick fixes instead of simple, timeworn solutions. Surrounded by hapless administrators, Cummings identified the over-powerful yet ineffective state bureaucracy as the problem, and markets and Big Tech as the solution. Yet the global response to Covid reveals the opposite: surely the state is the solution. The market is as parasitic on the state for its survival as steppe nomads are on settled farmers: not the freebooting corsairs of neoliberal mythology, but entirely reliant on the state to pump taxpayer’s money into correcting their errors.

Back in the spring, distracted by the global crisis of liberalism, the pandemic was presented as a test between liberalism and authoritarianism. The success of East Asian democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea, however, shows that the crucial distinction is in fact simply that between functioning state bureaucracies and inept ones. 

It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Taiwan and South Korea, as well as the also-successful Israel, are neighboured by enemies, and have experience in military mass mobilisation as a result; tucked away on our island at the most pacific corner of the European continent, we have lost a necessary appreciation of threat, like the flightless birds on previously undiscovered islands which waddled heedlessly into hungry sailors’ outstretched arms.

Surely an island nation with few entry points could easily have sealed the borders back in the spring, or at the very least instituted a system of health checks and quarantine for travellers from the outside world — something which, incredibly, has not been attempted nearly a year into the pandemic. Like the prewar government shrugging that “the bomber will always get through”, the British state decided that the virus will always get through, and that there was no point trying to limit its spread. Tens of thousands of people are dead, and thousands more will soon die as a direct result.

More from this author

The rot at the heart of Westminster

By Aris Roussinos

This defeat has many fathers, and among them is the enfeebling culture war that derived from the Brexit vote. Had the Government taken this simple, achievable step back in the spring, the cries of “rainy fascist island Brexit Britain” from our witless comment class would doubtless have caused Johnson some discomfort: his greatest failure is failing to appreciate that the opinions of these people simply do not matter, as the past series of election results show. With a strong majority in parliament, the Government could have taken decisive action swiftly, and been rewarded for it afterwards by a grateful nation. 

The primary function, and duty, of the state is to keep the people safe; all authority flows from this compact with the nation. Yet instead of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the modern British state resembles a giant tutting HR administrator looming over the country, cautioning that decisive action is impossible: borders can’t be policed; volunteers can’t administer vaccines to those at risk, without an official certificate of correct opinions; the Army can’t be brought in; even if they can do it in other countries, we couldn’t possibly adopt such radical solutions here.

It is ironic, then, that the Government is engaged in a simultaneous struggle to defend the British state from Scottish separatism. On the basis of its current performance, there is little evidence that the British state even exists. What we are ruled by is only a negative state, that can pass laws in ever greater numbers to prevent people doing things, but is incapable of actively performing even the simplest and most important acts of governance itself. Who can blame so many Scottish or Welsh voters for wanting rid of this useless system inhabiting the hollow carapace of the British state? The temptation is to allow the Union’s dissolution, in the hope that some better system of governance might arise from the wreckage. But there is no reason to be confident that what replaces it will not be the same broken system in a shrunken form or, as in Scotland, something even worse.

There is a tragic quality — in its Classical sense, of protagonists brought low by an intrinsic character flaw — in observing prominent neoliberal thinktankers correctly diagnosing the British state’s total absence of capacity and pleading for action. The neoliberal logic of eroding the state was to make us freer — but trapped in our homes, nearly a year after the beginning of this crisis, by an incompetent and incapable state, it is clear these alleged freedoms are purely notional. We are now imprisoned by them. 

More from this author

Only nationalism can stop climate change

By Aris Roussinos

Certain organs of British conservatism have been so captured by libertarian thought that their commentators disgrace themselves with Covid conspiracy theories in support of age-old British freedoms. Meanwhile, their brains addled by Right-liberalism, Conservative ministers view the state like a recovering alcoholic views an ice-cold glass of gin and tonic: afraid to give in to temptation, lest it take control and ruin them utterly.

This disaster has gone on too long, and Labour has been too meek not only in holding the Government to account but in proposing radical solutions. Surely the solution is this: to rebuild the capacity of the British state as quickly as possible, through a vast new programme of public infrastructure projects, and an immediate program of nationalisation of key industries and utilities, just as in the Second World War, while carrying out a root and branch reform of the Civil Service to remove the dross. The primary aim would not be to bring public goods back into public ownership, as they were a mere generation ago — that would just be a side benefit. The goal would be to rebuild a class of bureaucrats who are competent at actually administering the state and running major infrastructure projects, instead of merely handing out emergency contracts at inflated prices to friends and randomly-chosen private sector profiteers. 

Starmer’s mooted proposals for radical reform of British governance along radically devolved lines sound promising, and it will be good to examine the details carefully when they are finally presented. What about a form of Tory Anarchism — in truth, a system of radically more localised governance across the country — which is not, paradoxical though it may seem, incompatible with a stronger state. Instead of being simultaneously too centralised and too weak, as Tom McTague noted, the British state ought to be both more decentralised and stronger: strengthened local governance with deeper and wider responsibilities ought to be seen as a real-world school of administration, identifying and promoting talent from the wider populace and incorporating their skills within the greater British state.

In France, suffering from its own Covid failures, Macron has suggested choosing 35 citizens by lottery to advise on rolling out the vaccine, and why not? Literally any 35 people plucked at random from the street would have closed the borders back in March, and exhibited greater urgency rolling out the vaccine than our own sclerotic state functionaries. Britain’s governance is simply too important to be left to its current political class. 

Britain’s essential problem, revealed by the pandemic, is that the state simply does not function. To rebuild capacity, the state needs practice. The French and Chinese build our power stations and run our transport infrastructure not because they have inherited some unique genetic capacity for administration, but because they have preserved their states, which are, as a result, well-practised at actually doing things. Like a developing nation, we rely on others to do things we ought to be able to do ourselves — and perhaps, like a developing nation, we should invite bureaucrats from Taiwan or South Korea to audit our civil service and suggest improvements, like benevolent colonial administrators liberating us from our own ignorance and ideological superstition. 

Suggested reading

How the experts messed up on Covid

By Michael Story and Stuart Ritchie

But first of all, we need a clear-out of government, which has failed this country at a moment of crisis. Johnson has fulfilled the role granted to him by history, of delivering Brexit. The time has surely come for him to leave the stage, along with those around him, and the incompetent civil servants beneath him. As the authors of Guilty Men wrote in 1940, “the men who are now repairing the breaches in our walls should not carry along with them those who let the walls fall into ruin. The nation is united to a man in its desire to prosecute the war in total form: there must be a similar unity in the national confidence. Let the guilty men retire, then, of their own volition, and so make an essential contribution to the victory upon which all are implacably resolved.” 

The failures of Dunkirk, of Norway, of Malaya and Singapore led, once the battle was finally won, to the total reorganisation of the British state: if the British state of 2021 cannot reform itself after its failures in this crisis, surely it does not deserve to survive the aftermath.

“I  now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

CP Snow, of course; his famous Two Cultures essay. Snow’s view — that the world of the humanities (which dominates the British Civil Service) and the world of the physical sciences (which defined the era in which he wrote) had come asunder, and that this was to the disadvantage of mankind in general and British society in particular — is so well understood that we’re in danger of just accepting it as “That’s the way things are”. That tangible lack of interest in science is the background hum of the Establishment.

I say “we accept it”. Thank God that Dominic Cummings doesn’t. His advert for new advisers to join No.10 will be received with derision from the commentariat — almost none of whom are qualified to discuss its substance — because of his entirely sensible sideswipes at the grotesque horror of HR departments obsessed with the baleful dead-end of “[anything but cognitive] diversity” identity politics. But they are sideswipes. It’s the substance that matters: the possibility to disrupt the civil service with data science, to elevate policy-making, and govern the country better.

Snow’s best novels, in my opinion, are those that deal with the human-shaped fall-out from atomic research, like The New Men. Perhaps the mathematical rather than the physical sciences are more relevant to the 21st Century — I would say that, wouldn’t I — but we are beginning to perceive the human-shaped fall-out from a lack of ability in quantitative reasoning among that caste who set the rules for How Things Are. I described my own clash with an algorithm (over whether or not I should be prescribed a statin) some time ago at UnHerd. Do you qualify for a mortgage, will you get parole, is that a tumour in your spleen – increasingly guidance on these questions will come from algorithms embedded into software.

Suggested reading

The increasing power of computer programs to determine how we live (and die)

By Graeme Archer

Are you happy with that? (I think you should be.) But are you happy that the laws relating to that type of activity are being devised and voted on by people who couldn’t tell you the meaning of “prediction model” or “classification algorithm” any more than their predecessors could have answered Snow’s questions about mass and acceleration?

And if you accept my premise — that data science could power the next British industrial revolution — do you want the policies about (for example) which universities should be expanded, and where they should focus their research – do you want that left in the hands of the innumerate?

I’m not exaggerating. Remember the 2012 survey of members of Parliament that showed how few of them could reason statistically? Remember it, and shudder. Nearly a hundred MPs were asked “If you spin a fair coin twice, what’s the probability of two heads?”. Of Conservative MPs, 47% gave the wrong answer. Among Labour, that figure rose to 77%. (The answer, of course, is 25%, since the coin, on its second toss, doesn’t care on which side it landed the first time.)

So when Google’s chief economist said in 2009: “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians,” I didn’t join in the laughter; I was cautiously optimistic. In 2016, I spent a sabbatical year in the civil service, writing speeches for a cabinet minister, as part of his extended private office. It gave me first-hand experience of our political class, the elected and the ‘Rolls Royce’ civil service, which I cautiously (I am not as brave as Cummings) described in an article in 2017. It’s worth quoting a bit of it, because it remains relevant to what Cummings is trying to achieve:

A  few years ago, the then prime minister, David Cameron, wanted to improve facility with English among Britain’s immigrant communities. He was chastised by his Left-wing opponents for focusing efforts on women with (mainly) Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds.

In my teabreak one day, I looked up the official statistics which broke down English ability by ethnicity and geography-of-origin, and calculated the odds of lacking English in each of those categories, and compared these between women and men.

It did indeed appear that women with Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds were between four and five times as likely to lack any English ability, as compared to their menfolk. But I listened in vain to hear mention of such statistics in any political or journalistic commentary.

Government statisticians would have calculated any of those odds ratios for ministers, had the ministers asked for them. But my unofficial calculations took a few minutes prodding with an excel spreadsheet […]. The point is that such a basic facility with numbers should be taken for granted amongst the people who rule us.

Elsewhere in his blogs, Cummings has set out a vision — with references to real-world examples — whereby models to predict policy outcomes are embedded into ministerial ways of working. Thus “Implementing this policy will improve stakeholder outcomes with regard to fairness” — a pretty standard form of civil service submission to a minister — would be replaced by a live screen showing that “Implementing this policy is predicted with 95% probability to make X citizens better off by an average of £Y, plus or minus Z%.” The minister could adjust the policy and in real-time see the impact. Proper cost-benefit analysis could underpin major decisions.

Suggested reading

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

I trained as a statistician and run teams of data scientists, so I have skin in this game. “We need more universities!” shout ministers. “Why? To do what?” aren’t questions they seem disposed to answer. But anyone trying to recruit data scientists into British industry could tell them what we need more of. Even though the universities have expanded like balloons at a children’s party, there aren’t enough young British people with the qualifications we need to find new biological targets to cure diseases, develop new medical tech to diagnose cancer quicker, continue to dominate the financial markets — you name it; China will be opening a university department devoted to it.

There are brilliant places, such as Bristol, whose Centre for Computationally-intensive Statistics and Data Science is investing in the methods the age requires, producing exactly the sort of doctorally-trained data scientists that British companies need. Three cheers to them — they’re not alone (Newcastle comes to mind too, as well as Health Data Research UK). That is the sort of work that government should be curating, expanding, investing in.

Left to its devices, will the civil service comply? Remember that question, when you read a snotty piece about Cummings in the Guardian. More power to his elbow: a data-centric civil service could enable better governance and underpin the industrial strategy the whole country needs. Data science really is as important as Shakespeare, and I’d rather a civil servant was master of the first, than well-read in the second (I’d rather she was both, of course). To build One Nation, dismantle that Establishment indifference to one of our Two Cultures.