The head of the movement, President Donald J. Trump, is a billionaire, and a proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. Before achieving notoriety as a media celebrity, he gained access to a lucrative career in real estate on the back of a large donation from his father. The upper echelons of his administration have been staffed by the well-to-do; key members of his cabinet are in receipt of Ivy League degrees. Trump’s own family has benefited from Presidential power, with close intimates occupying influential roles. In addition, prominent cheerleaders of the MAGA chief include leading tech tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Partisans of MAGA argue that all this misses the point. The movement may be led by affluence and entitlement, but the program (they say) embodies the values of “middle-class America” — a cohort which includes what Europeans call “the working class”. Hillary Clinton once revealingly derided MAGA enthusiasts as little more than a “basket of deplorables”. But the movement’s demographic makeup is altogether more complex than this offhand smear implies. In 2024, around half of the US electorate, both urban and rural, swung behind Trump, with his support among female, Latino, and African-American voters going up.

While MAGA has inspired loyalty among “ordinary Americans”, it has also garnered acceptance among commercial and financial elites. To hold these disparate elements together, Trump has assembled a broad ideological platform: staples of a “neoliberal” economic program, like deregulation and a low-tax agenda, have been married to restrictions on international trade and opposition to foreign migration into the labor market.

Among the most distinctive components of the MAGA program is its hostility to so-called progressive values, many of these identified as pillars of “woke” politics. A target here is the liberal approach to dealing with discrimination, a persistent theme in US politics since the early Sixties, which now centers on the demand for “equity”. Perhaps ironically, equity is similarly intended to dismantle the prestige enjoyed by presumptive elites. As a tool of reparation, it is supposed to deliver fairness by rectifying historic wrongs. Yet, according to its critics, this mission is blind to the real divisions afflicting contemporary society, not least the experience of economic decline across the American rust belt.

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This disagreement points to conflict over the meaning of elitism. Rival constituencies face one another in a state of mutual incomprehension. Their opposition has shaken standard perceptions of “Left” and “Right”, with MAGA occupying ground once held by sections of the old Left. This includes antagonism towards global capitalism, backing for some kind of industrial strategy, and a raft of protectionist policies. On the other side, self-appointed radicals among anti-MAGA activists organize around the remnants of new left aspirations — backing “diversity” and “inclusion” as antidotes to social hierarchy.

In this way, two factions have emerged in US politics exhibiting contempt for one another while sharing the goal of dismantling select structures of inequality. To advance their cause, both blocs place their trust in a political class, expecting to advance their sectional interests while punishing the undeserving few. In other words, both sides engage the services of political elites to bear down on the supposedly corrupt beneficiaries of the “system”. These elites employ favored rhetoric to fire their respective bases. Democrats opt for sermonizing appeals to hope and cosmopolitan justice while Trump promises to assuage resentments in blunt demotic tones.

With adversaries ranged across the aisles in this manner, it is generally recognized that the level of acrimony in US politics has steadily risen since the 2008 financial crisis, ratcheted up under the impact of social media. But wariness of elites in America has roots going back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the third decade of the 19th century. In Jacksonian parlance the “common man” was championed over northeastern “aristocrats”. The crusade against unmerited privilege took a new turn after the Second World War when governing minorities were branded the “elite”. This characterization was popularized by C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which appeared in 1956.

Mills’ thesis appealed to the popular imagination agitated by concentrations of power in areas that mattered most: in the military, the federal government, and large corporations. This depiction gave an impression of US society as directed by a concerted combination of bosses. Thereafter, “elites” were associated with excessive clout exercised by a narrow oligarchy. But from the start the book was seen as radically simplifying reality. With its stark portrayal of an all-powerful few, Mills rode roughshod over the layered complexity of social life by focusing on the barons at the top. Modern conditions can’t be crudely split into haves and have-nots. In capitalist societies, inequality is not binary but gradually stratified, organized around a continuous division of labor and an elaborately differentiated distribution of property. Between the super-privileged and the disenfranchised, the bulk of society is divided into a vast array of separate tasks, remunerated along an incrementally ascending scale.

Although Mills altered the terms of debate among the American public at large, his argument harks back to older diatribes against elites. As Hugo Drochon shows in his essential new book, Elites and Democracy, such harangues gained momentum at the turn of the 20th century when European thinkers examined the composition of society and its representation by elected elites.

The starting point for Drochon’s story is a troika of thinkers later dubbed “elite theorists of democracy”. Between 1890 and 1911, two Italians — Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto — as well as the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels, set out to analyze relations between rulers and ruled under conditions of mass democracy. Responding to the extension of the franchise in European states — in France, Italy, Germany, and Britain — these figures sought to take the measure of modern politics. Even so, neither Mosca, Pareto, nor Michels shared ideological common ground. Originally, Mosca was an exponent of gentrified liberalism, Pareto a qualified defender of market freedoms, and Michels a supporter of the German Social Democratic Party, at one point attracted to its anarcho-syndicalist wing.

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From these different angles of vision, all three figures worried about the monopolization of decision-making. It seemed that the rise of popular rule was matched by opportunities for charismatic authority. In launching their objections to the prospect of Caesarism, they rightly presupposed the need for a political division of labor. There must, they accepted, be some species of governing structure, staffed by rulers of a given character, and either rigidly persisting or being dynamically replaced.

Drochon recounts how this tradition of commentary impacted 20th-century political science. The American scene in particular split into partisans of elite practice and critics who favored popular participation. Like so many standoffs in academic culture, this tussle soon evolved into a dialogue of the deaf — with “elite theorists” fearing the irrationality of the crowd and “radical democrats” seeking to bypass the state in search of the voice of the people.

As Drochon observes, there is a doggedness about these divergent renditions which belies the changeability of the social arrangements they hope to represent. Instead of “control by elites”, modern capitalist democracy is defined by competition for office and fluctuating classes locked in dynamic struggle. This is not a recipe for egalitarian rule, but neither can it be dismissed as a static oligarchy. Society is divided into a multitude of interests periodically converging to advance a common cause, only to fragment again as the conditions for alignment recede. This leaves us living with the constant rise and fall of elites, partly driven by the shifting divisions churning within their electoral base. The constant remaking of electoral attitudes over the past two decades across the UK and Europe illustrates this fluidity. So too do the erratic fortunes of parties throughout the same period.

The contemporary cast of US politics vividly captures this process. Over a year into the second Trump administration, and cracks are already starting to appear among his loyal adherents. Held together by the forces of an aggrieved nationalism, MAGA shows signs of gradually splintering into camps, with potential clashes in the offing over the Epstein files, the future of AI, and foreign entanglements. Confused messaging around the war in Iran — from J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump — reflects dissensions over strategies and goals. An inward-looking “America First” posture finds itself hitched to a military machine focused on the wider world with supporters of both tendencies pulled in two directions. In due course, the leading enemy of liberal elites may be remembered as an oligarch-in-chief, with new victims and new culprits serving to mobilize fresh political collisions.

Maybe a Republican has a chance to become governor for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006. But probably not. Of the two Republicans battling for their party’s nomination, one is an unimpressive county sheriff who speaks in the dullest of Republican slogans, and the other is Steve Hilton, whose campaign tract Califailure is badly written, poorly argued, lazily researched, barely edited, and entirely uninspiring.

Hilton’s inability to write an inspiring political tract was an odd discovery, because his most prominent role in British politics was doing strategy and communications for David Cameron. Since then, he has remade himself as a Fox News commentator, and now has designs on the governorship. Califailure, then, has taken on new importance since its publication in March.

Not only is it totally unserious as an analysis of the Democrats’ bad policies, it also fails as political messaging. It’s a book written to exercise the emotions of Hilton’s Fox News audience, but a message designed for the geriatric ideologues and fantasists who watch Fox News is not going to break the Democratic Party’s death-grip on California politics. It will do little to help people truly understand the policy disasters that have befallen California, and it will persuade few California voters who aren’t already Republicans to vote against Democratic rule. What Califailure will mainly do is convince faithful Fox viewers in Tennessee and Colorado and Michigan that the cartoon portrait of California they get on Fox News is the truth. Don’t get me wrong. It’s closer to the truth than a cartoon portrait should be, but it’s still a cartoon portrait.

You can see Hilton’s role as a talking head taking over his duties as an author in the table of contents of Califailure. After a short chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton goes on a run of nine chapters whose titles are words that will resonate as incendiary insults with Fox News viewers: “Elitism”, “Narcissism”, “Maoism”, “Climatism”, “Socialism”, “Bureaucratism”, “Compassionism”, “Cronyism”, and “Incompetism”. For those words that aren’t already recognized “-isms” (unlike Maoism and Socialism), Hilton affixes “-ism” to them to indicate that these aren’t just governing tendencies or pathologies but full-blown “ideologies” of their own. For example, the Democrats who run California aren’t just incompetent. They have turned incompetence into a belief system. Thus “Incompetism”. Translating the stubborn pathologies of California’s Democratic governance into discrete and conscious systems of belief serves Hilton’s interest as a Fox News commentator, but it doesn’t help anyone understand the underlying forces of political idiocy that afflict the state.

Take “Elitism”. If you remember what happened in California during Covid, and you have a feel for Hilton’s way with a political message, you can guess where his “Elitism” chapter is heading: it’s heading out for an expensive dinner at the French Laundry. The French Laundry is the famous Wine Country restaurant (three Michelin stars) where, in November 2020, Gavin Newsom and his wife were joined by rich friends and powerful colleagues to celebrate Newsom’s 50th birthday. Even as he was demanding that California residents wear masks when they were inside stores and other public buildings, and limiting California restaurants to outdoor dining, Newsom and his party dined maskless and indoors.

I suppose this is an example of elitism, and the fancy-restaurant destination, as well as Newsom’s status as a pretty-boy scion of a rich and politically connected family, make it a satisfying reason to reach for your pitchfork. But the fact that powerful people think the rules they apply to others don’t apply to them is a fairly generic lesson of politics. Power corrupts, even when it’s attained by popular vote, even in places that aren’t California. Hilton is just rabble-rousing here, eliciting familiar tones from his bell, cueing readers to froth in the clinically predicted ways.

A more telling example — also dating from the lockdown era — appears near the end of the “Elitism” chapter. Hilton points out that expensive private schools, such as those attended by Newsom’s own children, were holding regular in-person instruction while “public”, government-run schools were still doing online instruction, holding classes via Zoom session. “So why didn’t he insist that public schools educating the majority of California’s students open for in-person instruction, and not just the schools attended by his children and the other children of the elite?” He doesn’t answer this question. He takes it to answer itself. And the answer is the title of the chapter in which it appears: “Elitism”. People in the elite like Gavin Newsom just take themselves to be better than the rest of us, and so they get to follow different rules. It’s an ideology.

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But a much better, much more concrete and parsimonious, explanation for why public schools persisted with phony video schooling, in which kids didn’t learn anything, is the strength of teachers’ unions. Teachers at public schools are unionized. Teachers at private schools generally aren’t unionized. Unions took a maximalist view of the Covid risk their members faced. This was not reasonable, from either an educational or a public health standpoint, but from the standpoint of the institutional game that teachers’ unions are always playing, it was totally comprehensible. It’s what you’d expect.

The challenge for a book about the many failures of California governance is not to find the best insult for teachers’ unions. It’s to understand why teachers’ unions have so much power that they can force a disastrous pandemic policy onto students and their families with no resistance, indeed with the full complicity of the other major powers in state politics. The answer is not mysterious. Local teachers’ unions are members of the California Education Association (CEA), and the CEA is one of the most powerful forces in California politics. Since the CEA basically sets its own agenda within the state Democratic party, and since that party has a monopoly of power in the state, the CEA can pursue its favored policies enviably free of electoral or institutional constraints. In other words, the so-called elitism in Hilton’s private school example is entirely downstream of the power of unionized public school teachers, which is entirely downstream of the fact that Democrats have total control of state government.

This line of causality — from the Democrats’ unopposed power to the state’s pathological governance — is pretty obvious and direct in the case of the CEA. In other areas Hilton covers, the connections are a touch more subtle, but they’re far from obscure. For instance, in his “Compassionism” chapter he describes some of the now-familiar examples of progressive officials in California seeming to favor chaos and crime over mundane public order maintained by police officers. Hilton uses “Compassionism” to describe a vague mental condition — an ideology, yes, but also a sort of mental illness, in his treatment — from which California progressives supposedly suffer that leads them to tolerate chaos and oppose measures to control it.

But the destructive and weirdly selective compassion expressed in the state’s Democratic policies — summoned for the criminal targets of police power but withheld from the victims of these criminals — reflects internal political dynamics predictable in one-party rule, in which the strongest pressures are applied from the ideological fringe. I’ve described this phenomenon as it affects my own city of Oakland — progressive politicians facing no electoral constraints from their Right, only the threat of shaming from activists to their Left for their lack of ideological purity. Both social status and political survival in this sort of one-party governance depend on submitting to puritanical ideologues. At some point in the moral bidding wars that drive progressive politics, it becomes socially and politically treacherous for even sensible officials to concede, for example, that the police should enforce the law.

The strange thing about Califailure is that, though it begins with a chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton doesn’t use this basic electoral fact to frame his treatment of California’s bad governance. For the sake of his TV audience, he treats his various pathologies — “Elitism”, “Compassionism”, and so on — as independent variables, freestanding causes that explain the bad governance. But he can’t decide how they explain it. He mostly seems to think that progressives just inherently have these “diseases”, as if one is drawn to Leftist politics as symptomatic expression of clinical Cronyism or whatever, but sometimes he suggests that they take on these mental illnesses willingly. “The pathology of Narcissism,” he writes, “is tailor-made for an elite class that believes its own utopian fantasies can replace… mundane reality….” Tailor-made? On one hand, this is terrible writing, another instance of the crude, sloganeering prose that makes up Califailure. On the other hand, it reveals the trick Hilton is trying and failing to pull off, using the polemical language of sickness but also wanting the sick people he’s talking about to be fully deserving of his scorn because they’ve somehow, consciously chosen their diseases, as a man chooses the cut of his suit. Narcissism is a mental illness and an ideology. Compassionism is an ideology and a mental illness.

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In either case, Hilton treats the excesses of progressivism — his nine silly “-isms” — as independent causes of California’s problems, which allows him to yell about them as he yells about things on TV. But, again, these excesses are better understood as effects of one-party rule. In this context, a party’s extremists hold a potent advantage in negotiation and persuasion precisely because of their extremism. When there’s serious inter-party competition, though, those extremists lose this structural advantage. Faced with electoral competition, party leaders are more likely to resist the influence of purists and ideologues whose favored policies alienate moderate voters.

We Californians don’t get to see this happen in state politics these days, but we have gotten recent glimpses of it as our Governor, who seems to be readying a 2028 run for President, reacts to the demands of national politics, where elections are competitive and moderate voters matter. Indeed, my city has enjoyed direct benefits from this altered political logic. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want national voters imagining rampant crime and homelessness when they hear his name, and so he’s made several high-profile moves in recent years that have angered the Left-wing of his party. Among these moves was dispatching a large contingent from state law enforcement to aid the Oakland Police Department — shrunken and “defunded” by extreme progressives on our city council – as it struggled to fight a devastating crime wave. This worked, and, in working, it showed electoral competition to be a healthy antidote to fanatic-driven policymaking in our one-party city.

But why is there no electoral competition? Why do Republican candidates no longer have a chance in statewide elections? If California’s absurd governance is an effect of Democratic control, shouldn’t a book about that absurdity direct a little curiosity at the other party’s performance through these years of dysfunction? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. Hilton assigns no blame to the Republicans for their own weakness. Instead, he blames the Democrats. His “One Party Rule” chapter briefly examines the effects of Democratic dominance on Republicans, and he makes a pretty good case that the Democrats have gamed the supposedly non-partisan system for drawing districts for the State Assembly, in the classic manner of partisan gerrymandering. If districts were drawn in a truly non-partisan manner, he points out, the Assembly should be around 40% Republican, reflecting the usual Republican vote in statewide elections. Instead, Republicans hold only 22% of Assembly seats.

This is a fair point. But why should the Republican share of the state electorate be capped at 40%, especially when Democratic rule has made the state into a national laughing stock? Why can’t the Republicans grab enough voters disgusted with the crime and the dysfunction and the overall idiocy to make statewide elections competitive again?

Hilton directs no criticism or even advice or encouragement towards his fellow Republicans on this matter. And these voters exist. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state’s Republican Party is more ideologically uniform than its Democratic Party. In other words, conservative Democrats are much more numerous than liberal Republicans. But there’s nothing in Califailure about winning over those ambivalent Democrats from their malfunctioning party.

He could have made his book a true provocation to Democratic voters frustrated with their party by focusing on the self-satirizing details of progressive governance and messaging, which are generally hidden from everyday people precisely because there’s no viable opposition party to broadcast these things. That is, instead of the few brief passages he devotes to the specifics of progressive policymaking (especially in his worthwhile “Bureaucratism” chapter), he could have filled his entire book with such things in their infuriating and irrational specifics — the petty, hostile, relentless regulation and taxation of small businesses; the rich payouts to Left-wing NGOs that work to perpetuate rather than to mitigate their pet disasters; the proud non-enforcement of basic criminal law; the unimaginable waste of environmentalist dreams like our bullet-train-to-nowhere, and progressives’ crippling efforts to make us the greenest country in the world when we’re not even a country.

Hilton touches on these things, but his research is lazy and haphazard. He’s easily distracted. He’s more interested in issues that agitate his national audience of Fox watchers than with the concrete troubles of us beleaguered Californians. He can’t help dredging up worked-over culture-war tropes, so that you can forget sometimes he’s even writing about California. His “Narcissism” chapter includes a long rant about the activist neologism “LatinX”, in which he rebuts the need for such a term with a hilariously earnest and misplaced digression on Spanish grammar. It’s as if he’s seeking relief from the shallowness of his own book through a fantasy of being a linguistics professor. His “Maoism” chapter is consumed with Stanford University and the authoritarian Leftism of its administrators. Stanford is technically located in California, but the maddening things happening there are happening at every elite university in the US. These campus issues are national issues. They illustrate nothing about California’s failed governance.

Indeed the focus on rarefied Stanford hints at a sort of elitism in Steve Hilton’s worldview, and in the ways of the state Republican Party he hopes to lead. This elitism, ironically, mirrors that of the state’s ruling Democrats. Just as the Democrats’ insulation from electoral competition allows them to indulge the elitist, utopian fantasies of their activist base, the Republicans’ impotence in this competition enables a similar dynamic, in which ideological purity and fidelity to elites in the national Republican party displace hard thinking and compromise about bread-and-butter issues that affect everyday Californians. Once you decide that statewide victory is off the table, you can let go of difficult, impure politicking and settle into the easier business of placating activists who vote in primaries, parroting the themes of Republican celebrities in Washington, and playing up abstract culture-war fights.

As Mike Madrid, former political director for the state Republican party, said in 2023, “The Republican Party is really not trying to be a viable political party anymore in California. It’s kind of content being this small, regional, marginalized social movement, and for the moment that’s what it is, and that’s probably what it’ll be for a very long time.” You can see how this arrangement would suit individuals at the core of the Republican party, as it suits those on Democratic side. Those people are already where they want to be, enjoying the quantum of reliable influence they’ve been given in our unhealthy equilibrium.

And, in the composition of his dashed-off book, you can see Steve Hilton bidding to secure his own place in this arrangement. Nothing in his book suggests he’s serious about actually winning the statewide election he’s made himself a side-character in. Despite the book’s title, Califailure doesn’t read like something addressed to California voters at all, who will find its fixations only occasionally and vaguely connected to the concrete problems of their state. He’s talking to nationwide consumers of partisan media, who relish their Schadenfreude about liberal California and like to have it reinforced periodically from their TV sets. He’ll still be talking to them after the next election, and still as someone who doesn’t hold political office, and, if his ridiculous book is any indication, he’s perfectly content with that.

One of them is individualism. In a society which lacks any strong bonds between its members, everyone is likely to have their own interpretation of the world, just as everyone is likely to have their own toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to borrow someone else’s version of the truth, any more than you would want to borrow their toothbrush. Truth becomes privatised. It’s a matter of my personal experience, and surely no one can challenge that. 

In fact, personal experience is as open to debate and dissent as the existence of God. There’s nothing absolute about it. One of the key insights of the late modern period, before the birth of postmodernism, is the recognition that human beings are constitutively opaque to themselves. “Constitutively”, because this lack of self-transparency is built into the kind of animals we are, not just some lamentable self-blindness which we could put right with a little more self-reflection.

When Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama finally comes to know who he is, he recognises that he is a stranger to himself. It has taken incest, parricide, pollution, self-blinding and self-exile to arrive at the conclusion that he has no certain grasp of his own identity, and that this is the condition of us all. There must be easier ways of learning this lesson. 

There was a time when we thought that we were transparent to ourselves and that it was others who were indecipherable to us. Nowadays, we tend to accept that we aren’t always in entire possession of our own experience, and that others can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Among other things, this is because other people are frequently well-placed to see what we do, and what we do is a surer guide to who we are than what we say or think we are. If someone insists that he’s a passionate lover of animals and spends his spare time dissecting live frogs, then he is self-deluded. It’s the beliefs implicit in our behaviour, not those recorded in our memoirs, that really count. If the truth is what we feel, there can be no place for self-deception in human affairs. It simply wouldn’t be possible for a prime minister to declare himself a pretty straight sort of guy, and probably believe it, yet seek to deceive the public about the invasion of Iraq. 

So I am no infallible guide to the meaning of my own experience. I thought at the time I was furious, but looking back I realise that I was afraid. It’s true that my experience is beyond doubt in the sense that I really am in agony, and no mistake; but to know that what I’m feeling is agony rather than ecstasy, I must have the concepts of agony and ecstasy, and this isn’t something I can achieve all by myself. I can know this only by belonging to a community whose language includes these notions.

In this sense, even the most private of experiences is public. Toddlers don’t spontaneously come up with the concept of unfairness. Rather, they take part in a form of social life in which the idea of unfairness has a function, they watch how their elders behave and listen to how words are used as forces in these contexts. If they have the misfortune to be brought up in Conservative Party headquarters, they will never get the hang of the idea.

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Another insight of late modernity is that experience and reality are in some ways out of sync. It looks as though the sun circles the earth, but this is because the Earth revolves on its axis. (“The sun’s coming up — or as the new theory has it, the Earth’s going down,” as a 17th-century character remarks in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead). One purpose of science is to close the gap between reality and our experience of it, as well as explaining how the gap comes about. 

Like all concepts, truth is inherently social. There must be public criteria by which we can determine what counts as true or false, and these criteria are nobody’s private possession. The philosopher Wittgenstein imagines someone exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. He hasn’t grasped the fact that tallness is a comparative notion, one that involves socially agreed modes of measurement. There must also be public criteria for conflicts over truth. Disagreement is only possible if you can agree on what you are disagreeing over. We aren’t conflicting over the value of the pound if you are thinking of sterling and I am thinking of the American poet of that name. 

A certain degree of consensus must underlie the most vehement of altercations. People who cry “Well, it’s true for me” (the #MeToo generation is also the “Me-Me-Me” generation) haven’t grasped this point, either. Rather than making the coldly impersonal idea of truth more warmly experiential, they end up abolishing it altogether. If truth is just what anyone happens to think is true, then the word drops out of use. It becomes impossible to distinguish between what I feel and the way the world actually is. There are people who insist that slavery is one of the most outrageous episodes in Western history, yet put the word “truth” in scare quotes. They tend to do the same with the word “fact”, while maintaining that it’s a fact that women are equal to men. 

Does all this mean that truth is beyond dispute? Certainly not for science. The fact that truth isn’t just subjective doesn’t mean that it must be absolute. The one is just the flipside of the other. Relativists and subjectivists fear that unless they are right, truth becomes dogmatic, infallible and authoritarian. But this is to be afraid of a bogeyman. To say that a proposition is scientific is to say among other things that it could be wrong. It’s the kind of thing that someone might always come along and falsify. It differs in this way from “Put that tiger down!” or “Sorry, make that two tuna sandwiches”.

Science is a never-ending argument, in which one’s conclusions are perpetually open to revision, and argument is fundamentally a political affair. You must make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the debate, that they do so on equal terms, that nobody is allowed to impose their own partisan interests on the discussion and so on. None of this guarantees the emergence of truth, but it’s an essential pre-condition of it. People who claim “It’s true for me” tend not to be interested in any of this. What is there to argue about? It is they who are the absolutists, since there would seem no way of disproving what they assert. Anyway, someone can always protest that the “it’s true for me” claim isn’t true for them.

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“It’s true for me” springs from a false egalitarianism. If everyone is to be included in political society, then everyone’s views must be respected as well. So what about the view that everyone isn’t to be included? Is that to be respected as well? And what of the so-called law of contradiction? If you think that reading Agatha Christie gives you prostate cancer and I disagree, then one of us has to be wrong. But postmodernists are reluctant to admit that anyone is wrong. It offends against the law of inclusivity, as well as making some people sound inferior to others. Anyway, from what Olympian vantage point can one make such a judgement? How can I possibly judge that there are some sexist police officers in Britain? Isn’t any such claim a sign of moral superiority or intellectual elitism on my part? 

Such is the addled thinking that passes for genuine argument in certain circles. A fear of sounding authoritarian, when all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, haunts contemporary culture. This is why it’s fashionable to qualify what one says with the word “necessarily” — as in “It’s not necessarily that people are passing themselves off as Tom Cruise, it’s just that there’s a crisis of identity”, where what you mean is that people aren’t passing themselves as Tom Cruise at all. But it sounds offensively dogmatic to say so. Similarly, to say “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly absolute, so it’s advisable to throw in a “like”. “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds far more agreeably uncertain. A pervasive sense of uncertainty is one reason why truth has come into disrepute. But there are other reasons, which i’ll return to in my next essay.  

We elect politicians to advance our interests. But to advance the interests of any group, one must first understand something of those interests. How many MPs have experienced poverty? How many have had their toilet breaks timed or their in-work benefits slashed?

At what point do we look for the root of Britain’s problems not in the lifestyle choices, attitudes, and behaviours of working people, and the poor and the vulnerable, but in the groundless assumptions, false beliefs, and prejudices of the apparently educated, cultured and sophisticated?

If the pandemic brought one thing into focus, it was surely that “social distancing” — that is, the vast ravine of social experience between those who hold power and influence and those on the receiving end of their decisions — brought Britain to its knees long before the pandemic.

The links between social deprivation and health problems are well understood. We’ve known for the best part of 40 years that rapid deindustrialisation was a public health time-bomb — we chose not to act.

In the Eighties, the publication of the infamous Black Report — commissioned in 1977 by the previous Labour government to investigate health inequalities — found significant differences in health outcomes between the social classes in both sexes and all age groups. The report’s introduction stated: “Social class differences and mortality begin at birth. In 1971, neonatal death rates (deaths within the first month of life) were twice as high for the children of low skilled workers as they were for the professional classes.”

The Thatcher government did all it could to suppress this report’s findings. Sir Douglas Black’s recommendations — that social inequalities around death and ill-health had to be confronted seriously by raising child benefit, improving housing, and agreeing minimum working conditions with unions — were dismissed before being kicked into the political long grass.

The trends already set in motion when the Black Report was published accelerated and became simply undeniable during the pandemic, demonstrated by the disproportionate impact of Covid on working people and the poor.

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In the post-industrial community of Possil, north-west Glasgow, the impact of this health gap is both ubiquitous and imperceptible, so adjusted have its residents become to falling ill and seeing loved ones taken before their time, while public officials scratch their heads, puzzled as to why these people can’t just get it together.

As dusk falls at around 5pm, the two local pubs are already busy. Some are keener to talk than others but every person I speak to is managing at least three concurrent and chronic health conditions — known as multimorbidity in the medical profession.

Previously associated with the elderly, multimorbidity is beginning to impact people at a much younger age. In the pub, half of the patrons enjoying an afternoon tipple are afflicted by mobility issues. Two have trouble speaking due to respiratory problems. One has a degenerative brain disorder and struggles to stay in the conversation, while his long-suffering son (and designated driver) brings him another half.

One man, Andy, tells me about his first health scare at the age of 29. Despite his healthy glow, he has suffered four subsequent heart attacks since the first. Once a keen marathon runner, Andy is now restricted in his lifestyle and stands out today because he is the only person in the pub who is not drinking. He is here to spend time with his friend, who sits adjacent, panting, his crutches rested against the table, sporting the haunted expression of a man who knows his next breath may be his last; Andy’s company, I’m positive, is most welcome.

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Andy shares a worrying (and hilarious) story about his fourth heart attack, which he had in his home around the corner from the pub. Given his relative experience of cardiac arrests and his disinterest in going to casualty — where he was convinced doctors wouldn’t believe him — he decided simply to wait it out in his home until morning, before going to see a GP whom he trusts.

That GP was Dr Lynsay Crawford, who has worked in areas like this for most of her career. “There’s a fatalistic attitude,” she said. She described an interaction with a patient who was weighing up the pros and cons of making a dramatic lifestyle choice to prevent an early death. “I remember chatting and they said, ‘My life’s rubbish, I know if I did all these things, I’d live longer but I really don’t want to live a longer rubbish life,’” she laughed. “You’ve got a fair point my friend, my work here is done,” she joked. “Another therapeutic success!”

This levity, which arose from the close proximity Lynsay had to her patients, contained a healing quality of its own. She took the time to get to know them, their conditions and idiosyncrasies so well that cracking a joke, or shooting from the hip when someone requires some tough love, was a matter of instinct. I was deeply moved by her devotion to this resilient but challenged community — and how loved she was by those under her care.

Sadly, Lynsay no longer works at the local practice. Due to the work-related stress and the effect on her home life, she moved on. After years of trying to communicate the impact of poor healthcare provision on both patients and the local practice, she became resigned to the fact nothing would change — much like her patients in the face of their ailments.

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What chance do communities like Possil have when resources are so scant that even doctors who love the areas in which they work, and understand them intimately, feel they have no choice but to practise medicine elsewhere or risk their own health and wellbeing?

“We can’t get doctors to come and work in deprived areas,” she explained, “so if you’re living here, you might have to wait weeks to see a GP — who’s got ten minutes to see you.” Lynsay identifies funding as the central issue. Specifically, the disproportionate levels of funding granted to affluent communities, where health problems are fewer.

It’s in these conditions that some people simply stop contacting the doctor’s surgery and instead self-medicate at one of the numerous local pharmacies, where codeine-infused, highly addictive painkillers, sleeping medications and potent cough mixtures are advertised prominently in the windows and are readily available without prescription. It is also in these conditions that toothaches become abscesses requiring emergency surgery; aches and pains become chronic mobility issues; strange lumps, put quickly out of mind, become stage four cancers and mental health problems and addictions become drug deaths and suicides.

“The disconnect is definitely with those who make policy,” Lynsay tells me. She believes the NHS alone cannot resolve health inequalities because they are caused by wider social issues, like education, unemployment, and housing, but that the lack of funding to the NHS over the last decade has exacerbated many of the long-term issues, leaving different factions within the NHS fighting over the same dwindling pot of money.

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Lynsay questions the wisdom of splitting resources equally among all practices regardless of need and believes this funding formula is why the gulf between social classes with respect to health is widening. “The overwhelming body of evidence shows those in poorer communities have worse health (at a younger age too) and have a greater need for funding to reduce health inequalities. It is clear that equal distribution of funding is leading to greater inequality.”

Despite people from poorer backgrounds requiring more healthcare than those in more affluent communities, they receive less. Wealthier patients’ health problems tend to be less complex — multimorbidity and poverty are synonymous — requiring less time to explain during a consultation, yet they may receive, on average, a minute or so longer with their physicians than someone from a poorer area. Analysis from the Health Foundation in 2020 found that patients in the richest areas receive 11.2 minutes on average while those in the most deprived communities get 10.7 minutes. This is not an anomaly. This imbalance is written into health systems and is known in the field as the “inverse care law”.

This is a community defined culturally by its poverty-induced health and social problems. For every heart attack, stroke, drug death, murder, and suicide there are countless family and friends on the periphery who must absorb the loss of a loved one while trudging on with their own challenging lives. Here, everyone is mourning a loss of some kind.

The lifestyle so often associated with people who live in post-industrial communities like this — overeating, excessive drink and drug use, gambling — provides temporary comfort and fleeting familiarity and continuity in what can be a chaotic, deeply disheartening, and tough existence. Many adopt fatalistic attitudes towards their own health because it’s a way of exerting control over external and internal circumstances they understandably feel are beyond them.

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In areas like Possil, across the UK, people in most need of care are simultaneously the most distant from the health services that could improve or save their lives. Life expectancy for men is 66 and for women is 73 — though both sexes have the lowest life expectancy of all neighbourhoods in this city. The number of people hobbling around on walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs, or mobility scooters is astounding.

Meanwhile, politicians in charge of the purse strings, keen to remain in the good graces of the middle classes, are far too attuned to their own short-term electoral interests, at the expense of longer-term health equality. And every time they act in those interests, thus postponing confrontation with the reality that wealthier citizens hoard too many resources, poorer people fall ill and die.

But perhaps the most shocking aspect in the ongoing public health debate, so often centred on notions of individual responsibility rather than systems which demonstrably favour wealthier citizens, is how distant most people remain from the ugly, irrefutable truth: poor health is absolutely a choice — a political one.

Extracted from The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain by Darren McGarvey, published by Ebury Press on 16th June at £20.00 Copyright © Darren McGarvey 2022

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”. 

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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.”

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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.

Now Boris – who was learning his Latin at a prep school just up the road from mine — has decided that everyone should know what the word pleb means. He has earmarked £4 million for Latin teaching in state schools. Levelling up, Boris calls it. Cynics, however, might question whether this is little more than some culture war distraction from a general asset stripping of the humanities, with university arts subjects, for instance, facing a devastating 50% cut in funding. A paltry £4 million hardly disguises the continual shift in education away from cultural subjects towards market-useful STEM subjects. Arachis hypogaea is the Latin for peanuts.

Now I really should be passionately against all this Latin revivalism, however modest. Not only was Latin the language of regular childhood thrashings, in adult life it has become for me a kind of shorthand for the crucifixion of Jesus. Christianity began life as a small offshoot of Judaism, persecuted by Roman imperialism. In first-century Palestine, Latin was the language of the oppressor. And it was the Romans that crucified Him. The whole logic of the Roman world order was to destroy everyone and everything that posed a threat to its totalising rule. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is not some clever compromise division of all that there is into the earthly and the heavenly.

All things belong to God, without remainder. And crucifixion was the Roman’s signature punishment, designed to terrorise those who defied their hegemony. With crucifixion, “the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of God’s naked love”, as NT Wright memorably put it. Amo, Amas, Amat meant something very different now.

Of course, all this came to be obscured when the Latin world hijacked His religion, making Rome itself the capital of Western Christianity. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin and so the language that may have been used by Roman soldiers as they poked him with their spears and taunted Him with insults — or, at least, the language they took their orders in — became the official language of the faith itself. The Roman Catholic church, otherwise known as the Latin church, buried all this. Originally, at least, Latin was the language of the enemy.

So, given that I harbour theological instincts that would make Ian Paisley blush, how come I think Boris is really onto something with this whole Latin experiment? Because, primarily, it represents a small move against the thoroughly depressing idea that education exists simply to serve the needs of employers. What I like about Latin is precisely its relative uselessness, the very thing that its opponents also point to as a reason not to like it. Shouldn’t we be learning Mandarin, or Spanish, they argue? Useful subjects, ones that will help us negotiate new trade deals and induct us into the up-and-coming language of global power.

I know that there are those who insist that Latin is, after all, terribly useful — being the root of so many other languages, useful for doctors etc. But that misses the point. As the Bishop of Worcester recently pointed out, education is like friendship, something that is valuable in and of itself, and not for what else can be gained by it. Education that is designed to meet some specific economic end is not education but training, the instrumentalisation of something that should be loved for its own sake. Latin is perfectly suited for this end.

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Even more surprising, I also find myself in some sympathy with those Roman Catholics who have recently been told that the use of the Latin Mass is to be restricted, with the present Pope seeking to bring what he takes to be dissident congregations more closely under the control of his Bishops. It seems that Latin worship has become a redoubt for all those who would stand against the progressive theology of the Second Vatican Council. And while I do not share this view — and it’s not really my fight — the church should be a broad enough tent to accommodate those who want to worship in the traditional language of the Latin church. Latin confers a kind of dignity to worship that that stands in sharp contrast to the whole direction of modern liturgy that too often just wants to get all chummy with the divine, talking to God in the same way one might talk to your mate. Latin sets God at a distance, which is no bad thing in an age that has consistently prized immanence over transcendence.

Yes, of course, good and brave men died to give us religion in the vernacular. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for daring to translate the Bible into English. I am delighted that within a few years of his martyrdom, the English Bible was officially sanctioned by church and state. But the culture war of the Reformation is over. No one is forcing us to worship in Latin anymore. That fight has been well and truly won.

Latin, then, has always been the location of culture wars and I have many reasons to hate it. But these days, I no longer feel the need to repeat that old schoolboy dictum: “Latin is a language as a dead as dead can be, it killed the ancient Romans and now is killing me.” Latin stands out in the modern curriculum not as a marker of social privilege, nor as the language of imperial authority, but as a refusal to allow education to be co-opted by market-obsessed philistinism. Some languages are all the better for being dead. Which is why, notwithstanding the memory of all those lines on the back of my legs, I too hope that my children will one day learn the language of what I used to call ‘the enemy’.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Daytime television has been a largely unexamined part of our cultural life for many decades. Now it’s being examined, and that’s bringing all kinds of interesting tensions and divides to the surface.

The ITV afternoon quiz Tipping Point has even been trending on Twitter recently, in a tone of irony and amusement that an only slightly higher tech version of a seaside arcade Shove Ha’penny machine has somehow become a nail-biting highlight of the day.

As long-time shut-ins such as freelance writers (ahem) have known for long years, daytime television obeys completely different rules to the TV seen by normal people, either before or after their working day. Let me, an old hand, guide you through the surprisingly deep waters of the mainstream.

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The first thing you’ll notice is that TV in the daytime is far more civil, and civic-minded. Occasionally at night a kindly announcer will follow up a challenging drama or a sensitive documentary with contact details to help anyone that’s been affected by the issues raised in that programme, but that happens now and again, as and when. The viewer notes it as unusual.

Daytime TV, however, is the land of helplines, factsheets and links to online advice. You’re never more than 10 minutes away from one of these, sometimes all three. Health advice, money advice, relationship advice — it never stops. Overdrafts, divorces, breasts, testicles — all are regularly brought out, checked, and then checked again. Cervixes and prostates are smeared and probed like there’s no tomorrow.

A word of warning to daytime newbies — while maintaining a commonsense awareness of these things, you must learn to shut out most of this. If you don’t, you will start to become neurotic (and then you’ll need the helpline for that too). Every twinge means you have an obscure and deadly medical condition, every unrecognised call to your mobile means your bank account is imminently to be cleaned out, any slight change in your partner’s behaviour means they’re having it away with your best friend and you’re going to have to get on the sofa to tell Holly and Phil the heart wrenching tale of this sordid betrayal.

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That’s because normal people are the bread and butter of daytime, and particularly so when something freakishly terrible has befallen them. These events will start to seem routine, even expected. Beware the availability heuristic!

Despite their reputation, the daytime magazine shows are anything but bland. They are hotbeds of sex and violence, but unlike the dramas and salacious reality shows of the evening they come in a gentler, more compassionate frame. Judgment, particularly moral judgment, is mostly withheld. No matter what someone’s concealed, or even blatantly lied about, they are empathised with, reassured, and often told they are ‘strong’, even when the exact opposite is the case.

The recent recursive spectacle of Philip Schofield himself being pushed front-and-centre onto the confessional couch is an object lesson in this. There were hugs, tears, encomiums to bravery, and not one single drop of doubt or cynicism. We all know a Philip is ‘nice’, so how could there be?

Of course, such revelations and ghastly tales wouldn’t have an impact if daytime didn’t work off a baseline of ordinary life as it ‘should’ be, what you need all this advice to get back to — the life of the ordinary woman (men take a definite back seat) in the street. This person is older, more conservative, more likely to have a nest-egg or to be accumulating one (hence the preponderance of shows about antiques and moving or renovating property, such as Homes Under the Hammer and Escape to the Country). They may not be retired yet but it’s something they’re thinking about. They are much more likely to be Somewheres than Anywheres — in fact, Anywhereism is often regarded with ‘and who do they think they are’ open suspicion.

Even the overtly contentious and political Jeremy Vine phone-in/panel show on Channel 5 has an affability and even-handedness that would be unthinkable at the dark heart of Question Time.

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Daytime dramas are similarly gentle and community-centred. Doctors has a large regular cast whose function is to cure the guest cast of each individual episode, who present at the Letherbridge NHS surgery with symptoms including Issues, Emotions and Acting. The remedy for a complaint more often than not is listening, understanding and dispensing advice rather than medicine.

Surreal juxtaposition is another feature of daytime that amuses the beginner. Erectile dysfunction crashes into granny makeovers, which crashes into putting your life back together after your husband was murdered, which crashes into a round-up of all the gossip from the soaps.

Over the years I’ve worked out that the ‘rules’ of television change very abruptly to daytime at 8.55am and revert back at about 7.30pm. There’s an intriguing twilight zone on BBC One as Pointless gives way to the news and you think the gears have shifted, only for daytime to rally back for a final gasp ahead of The One Show, before the rubicon is firmly crossed. The ghost of youth TV haunts the axis point on Channel 4, which follows 4 In A Bed or Coach Trip with a serving of The Simpsons and Hollyoaks before Jon Snow very firmly kills any trace of afterglow geniality at 7pm.

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By Various contributors

In an era where most of the television that’s talked about is niche-targeted, curated and demarcated by demographics, daytime remains resolutely mainstream. It still has the “here one moment, gone the next” ethos that all television used to have in the distant days before domestic video recorders. Very few people are streaming Loose Women on catch-up. These programmes are like buses. There’ll be another one along in a minute.

So it’s interesting to see the reaction of blue-ticked liberal Twitter, forced by the lockdown to face this wider realm, the unschooled culture of the Untermenschen who voted for Brexit and the Tory landslide. It’s no longer possible, for the duration, to mistake the counterculture for the culture, Twitter trends for real people’s opinions, ‘lived experience’ for life.

Even the BBC has been shocked out of its headbanging for race-baiting ‘inclusivity’, and is shortly to begin a lockdown season of Ealing comedies in the afternoon. It seems it’s taken an international emergency for them to acknowledge, after years of disparagement and open scolding, that we have a common heritage that bonds all of us.

For the first time since the 1940s we’re really all in this together. Whether we like it or not we’re all daytime viewers now.

This week, children across the country will be heading back to school; we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, our writers share some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.

I went to Eton. I am – here, he cringes in anticipation of a blow – an Old Etonian. Given the visibility of Old Etonians in our public life, and the widespread and understandable view that their influence has not been entirely for the good, I make this confession hesitantly when I make it at all.

Nobody wants to admit to “privilege” – but privileged we all, without any doubt, were. Had I not gone to Eton (I make, here, the disclaimer that I was a scholarship boy, in the hopes of claiming that I at least in part earned the privilege), I would not have had access to the cascade of educational wonderments I did enjoy.

You could not, not in a million years, claim plausibly that this was just another school – still less that it does not confer a vast and unfair advantage to its alumni, over the alumni of even the best schools in the state system. Yes, we all dressed like penguins and tourists pointed at us. But it was a small price to pay.

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What's the point of political fiction?

By Sam Leith

Existential doubts can force a renewal of quicker thinking and commitment. We can all get tired and lazy about what we do, what we think important, and how we pursue our principal enthusiasms, motivations and beliefs. I’m sure there are some people at that once-respected newspaper asking “What is the Guardian for?”

At least the writer had the intelligence to then quote the German philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno: “Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity.” Unfortunately, the article upheld the clear belief that pop culture has achieved this feat, whereas what is referred to as ‘serious music’ has not.

The writer completely missed the fact that the most interesting and controversial thing about the 20th century’s foremost thinker on aesthetics and philosophy was his trenchant criticism of popular culture – especially the mass-produced, American-influenced sort so repetitively, monotonously and unquestioningly championed by the Guardian.

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Adorno’s principal targets throughout his life were fascism and what he called “the culture industry” – a term also used by Max Horkheimer to describe how popular culture in capitalist society functions like an industry, producing standardised products which produce standardised people – and consequently standardised journalistic asininity.

Adorno argues that the culture industry (and its bride, the advertising industry) is a corrupt product of late capitalism in which all forms of culture (from literature, through films and all the way to elevator music) are all just part and parcel of the system of production. Capitalism has a deep cultural force as well as an economic one. The profit principal is paramount in contemporary pop culture, appealing to the lowest common denominator, with the aim of producing pliant consumers, adapted to the needs of the system.

I would expect to read in the Guardian – a Left-wing journal – constant probings of our ubiquitous pop industry and its umbilical link with the rich and powerful. But probings I find none. What I do find (which reminds me also of the BBC) is breathless, adoring praise for events such as the Glastonbury Festival and the elevation of the decidedly mediocre and banal to iconic genius status.

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Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

I also find criticisms, which baffle me, of the cost of classical concerts. As Richard Morrison explains in his counter-blasting response in The Times:

“You can get a standing-ticket for any of this summer’s 75 Proms for £6, and 70,000 punters will do so. Another 100,000 will buy seats costing £15 or less. Compare that with the £250 cost of attending the Glastonbury Festival. I’ve been promming for decades, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who owns a yacht. I did once meet someone who was off to his second home in Gloucestershire. He was the editor of The Guardian.”

The fact is that the pop-dominated, mass-produced culture industry and big business are inherently bound together to make a large-scale system of control and exploitation. In comparison to this behemoth, the experience of classical music for most of us is of a struggling, hard-pressed cottage industry. Those of us involved in it spend a lot of time fighting the political class (something the Guardian used to do) which is presiding over a state education system that marginalises music and the other arts.

I often come across people – sometimes on the Left but not always – who believe that complex, discursive music like classical and jazz isn’t what ordinary working-class kids should be doing, that these genres are too elitist and the preserve of “dead, white males” as the Guardian would have it. But if someone had told me and my parents this back in the day, we would have laughed in their faces.

I remember my Ayrshire home town of Cumnock as a very musical place, where ordinary men and women from humble homes would make music together. There wasn’t a lot of money around – a lot of people were genuinely poor – but it’s clear that this music making at an early age can transform lives – it certainly changed mine.

This was the beginning of a magical life in music for me. It’s a familiar path for many working-class Scottish kids who were given free music lessons and encouraged to be involved in school orchestras, bands and choirs back then in the Sixties and Seventies, where our teachers knew how to nurture our talents and enthusiasms into lifelong vocations and careers. This is now under threat – and youngsters from less well-off homes are being discouraged away from the world of music, sometimes by budget cuts, but also poisonously abetted by media pressure.

What needs to be said often and loudly – and in our press – is that discursive music, which is complicated and requires focus and concentrated skill (like learning to play an instrument or singing) can take a lifetime’s commitment, both for listeners and performers, as well as composers, of course. But it is a lifetime that is full of rewards, artistically, emotionally, socially and intellectually.

Active engagement with music brings benefits throughout people’s lives. Even very young children’s perceptual development is enhanced by musical engagement, affecting language development, improving literacy and rhythmic co-ordination; fine motor coordination is improved by learning to play an instrument.

What has The Guardian got against classical music?

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Participation in music is said to also improve spatial reasoning, an aspect of general intelligence which is related to some of the skills required in mathematics. While general attainment is clearly affected by literacy and numeracy skills, involvement in music appears to improve self-esteem, self-efficacy and aspirations – all such important factors in improving young people’s commitment to studying and perseverance in other subjects.

Why would the political class, with their media allies, conspire to create a situation which allows children, especially poorer ones, to miss out on such a vital ingredient of their education? It’s as if their sanctimonious mantras about inclusion, access and diversity get thrown straight out the window as soon as they are asked to do something about it.

If the Guardian were really interested in finding an answer to that smart-arsed opening question, it might consider acquainting itself with the grass-roots ecology of art music – something that is now under attack from philistines and ideologues of all political stripes. It should be trumpeting the expansion of horizons, not shutting them down for the sake of some small-minded dogma.