Nigel Farage, the most influential British politician never to have served as MP, is the controversial star turn on this year’s I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!: an appearance that will, reportedly, net him £1.5m. Albeit somewhat muffled by Suella-related screeching, the press is already excitedly feasting: fans will reportedly “boycott” the series, friends worry it will “haunt” him, and haters grumble that the opposite might happen. After all, in the wake of his appearance in the last series, there are now people with a celebrity crush on Matt Hancock.

What may be less obvious, though, is that the latest round of Westminster court drama and reality-TV drama are the same story. And what they reveal is that far from being a failure, the much-hailed post-Brexit realignment has been a roaring success. It’s just not the realignment we wanted.

Since its advent with Big Brother in 2000, modern competitive reality TV has (perhaps unintentionally) existed as ironic comment on the official political process. Just like politics junkies (and in far greater numbers), reality TV enthusiasts follow the contestants’ ups and downs with the utmost devotion, argue over their merits, and cast votes with enthusiasm. The results are watched and debated. Reality TV is now even as dynastic as politics: Bobby Brazier, son of Big Brother’s most notorious superstar, the late Jade Goody, is riding as high in this year’s Strictly as Stephen Kinnock briefly was when elected in 2015.

The other comparison, as has grown increasingly apparent since Big Brother, is less cheerful. The net impact on audience lives of voting for or against Nigel Farage on I’m A Celebrity will be nil, beyond a measure of entertainment and something to discuss with colleagues at work. By contrast, what was the net impact of voting for Brexit, seven years later? Two dominant themes in Brexiteers’ arguments for leaving were: first, a desire to reclaim democratic self-governance from the stultifying effect of EU treaties and the unelected Commission; and second, lower immigration. Did it work? The judges’ scores, as they say on Strictly, are in — no, it didn’t.

After a brief post-Brexit dip, immigration is at its highest level ever. And after a landslide Tory majority in 2019, won for an expressed willingness to follow through on a decision made by British voters, today the second unelected Tory Prime Minister since that Johnson victory now enjoys an EU Commission-like appointee status without even his party’s mandate. This man has, in turn, appointed to his Cabinet an even less-elected Foreign Secretary: a man who isn’t even an MP. I can see how some would conclude that the main difference between voting in an election, and voting for your favourite couple on Strictly, is that the latter will cost you 15p from a BT landline.

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Meanwhile, if voting is now largely unrelated to the terrain in which politics happens, what exactly is the nature of that terrain? It’s not a new observation that — with considerable historic help from the Tory Party — what is considered acceptable material for electoral politics is shaped some way upstream of voting, by an insider network of “statutory bodies”, watchdogs, czars, courts and the like. This blends seamlessly into a professionalised, often murkily-funded archipelago of NGOs that propagates guidelines, lobbies for pet causes, and either provides or withholds the moral imprimatur for official electoral politics. And the political outlook of this cadre, which exists in symbiotic relationship with official state institutions, is hostile to every form of Toryism except (at a pinch) the Cameroon variety.

It’s possible, up to a point, to intervene in this ecosystem by forming and funding your own NGOs. But in underwhelming contrast with the American Republican Party, whose institutional artillery is now laser-focused on preparing for a future programme of attack on the US version of this perceived hostile hegemony, the Tory-led “realignment” left its British analogue almost entirely intact. The clear inference is that a majority prefer it that way.  And even accepting that this is now the key battlefield has a grim corollary: that contra optimists’ hopes, especially after 2019, the real political realignment has not been toward democratic accountability, but decisively in the other direction.

Meanwhile, for those without the social or financial table-stakes required to help shape the field of acceptable Westminster discourse — which is to say, ordinary voters — this leaves few avenues for expressing views discordant with the acceptable range of politics, as defined by this unelected consensus-formation machine. But here, too, the realignment we got isn’t the one we hoped for. Some imagined Brexit might usher in a new politics of belonging, with people brought together by love of locality, the givens of our life in common, and a shared effort to improve our social fabric together. Such hopes were, however briefly, raised by Johnson’s promised “levelling-up” agenda.

What we got instead, especially since Covid has tipped us decisively from a print-first to a digital-first culture, has been a radically unequal, deracinated, dematerialised, transnational public discourse of politics as overlapping fandoms. In digital form, such fandoms manifest as political firestorms, “dogpiling” opponents, or pushing pet causes via clicktivism and online petitions. Offline, it coalesces as “phatic protest”: street demonstrations oriented less toward actual policy, than a form of self-expression and group identity-formation.

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The results are often jarringly transcultural: for example the protesters mimicking American ones by calling “hands up don’t shoot” at Britain’s police officers during the (transnational) BLM riots, despite the fact that only around 5% of British officers carry guns. The recent, global “Palestine” protests also fit this template, bringing together assorted far-Left and Islamist fandoms in a coalition that seems to presage previously unimaginable forms of transnational neo-polity.

How such pressure groups and seemingly decentralised memetic tides interact with real-world power and money is ambiguous. But one thing these phenomena resoundingly are not is a newly resurgent politics of place. Quite the opposite: if the globalisation of meme-driven street protest signals anything, it’s the ascendancy of a new politics of placelessness: the very phenomenon the Tories’ abortive “realignment” promised to end.

None of this is to say that elected politicians have no power, or that we’re all governed in perpetuity by a shadowy conspiracy. The truth is, as ever, more banal than the conspiracies. The actually existing realignment may be post-democratic, but it is far from being a closed shop. The tendency shown by the now-deposed Suella Braverman to speak and tweet as though already in Opposition implied that the position of Home Secretary did not, in fact, command the level of power over home affairs a naïve outsider might imagine it to afford. Even so, were the role completely toothless it would hardly have been worth anyone’s while to sack her for proposing (or so she argues) to enact actual policies in line with the wishes of Conservative voters.

Nonetheless, her expulsion, as with that of Liz Truss before her, illustrates the fate that awaits those who batter too noisily against the boundaries imposed by the symbiotic civil service and NGO-cracy, the combustible online rent-a-mob, or who knows what other extra-political interests. Where such actors align against a policy, however well-supported it nominally is electorally or by polling, that policy will be strangled at birth. In turn, this leaves no avenues for high-profile dissidents save abandoning “reality” altogether, and leaning into “TV”. That is: embracing a new status as influencers within the digital domain of politics fandom.

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We might call this “politainment”, and its stars wield non-trivial levels of power over their political fandoms, much as online influencers in any other type of fandom. Here, too, you can flourish (after a fashion) whether or not you’re an insider. And being obnoxious or notorious is often an advantage. Consider the iconic “Q Shaman”, Jacob Chansley, who made photo headlines across the world after the January 6 Capitol riot. After a stint in jail, he is now, reportedly, running for Congress. This makes sense: the logic of internet celebrity is such that it doesn’t really matter whether the clout you acquire is generated by love or hate — a click is a click.

While Farage has played at the edges of politics since Brexit with his chat show on GB News and Reform party, could he now be garnering the energy needed for a comeback by re-inserting himself into the national consciousness via reality TV? His legions of haters will love watching him eat insects; meanwhile he’ll be on every tabloid front page for weeks on end. Who knows where a re-injection of publicity (not to mention hard cash) will take him. No surprise, then, to find him leaning hard into the collapse of dissident politics into entertainment, by hijacking the Reform Party mailing list to shill for I’m A Celeb votes.

But the flip side of this eruption of influencer politainment is its bleak corollary: the only way to be an insider, with access to real power, is by hewing to an increasingly narrowly defined consensus. The Overton window has been nailed shut.

Instead of rescuing 20th-century style democracy, the realignment buried it. Farage’s move simply attests that what is reported in the press as the political process is more accurately understood as a subset of reality TV, with at best an oblique relation to how decisions are actually taken.

Where Brexiteers dreamed of greater democratic accountability, the tumult their victory set in motion has entrenched financiers and insiders, even as it has made the views of voters ever more obviously irrelevant. And shifts that some hoped would widen the Overton window have produced, instead, a politics in which the only outlet for dissidents is as defanged internet celebrities.

So we got the realignment. It just wasn’t the one we ordered. The urgent project for every disappointed optimist of 2016 and 2019 is now to stop complaining about promises betrayed, drag our eyes from the TV, and lean into post-democratic reality.

Worksop is the largest town in Bassetlaw — the constituency that saw the greatest Labour-to-Conservative migration at the last general election. It’s the heart of Borisland. And now, exactly one year on from his ignominious resignation, many people here remain steadfastly loyal to their populist tribune. This was where the Boris majority was won: where miners, pensioners, Brexiteers and lifelong Labour voters united to stick it to their old party. Other than the brief blip of Malcolm MacDonald (son of the first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald) defecting to National Labour in 1929, Labour had held the town since 1929. Brendan Clarke-Smith is the MP who, in 2019, smashed that red record with a stonking 18.4% swing, the greatest, he later assures me, at any general election since the Second World War. (“I think it’s on Wikipedia.”)

When Johnson took the seat, it heralded a new era of Tory politics. A new coalition, forged from the fires of Brexit, stretched from Hampshire to Hartlepool. Like Columbus, he seemed to have landed upon virgin territory ripe for the taking. Labour — cosmopolitan, effete and out of touch — looked sunk. But four years on, the shaggy conqueror is gone, and a string of by-elections threatens to chip away at his majority he built. In Selby, Uxbridge, Mid Bedfordshire, Somerton and now Chris Pincher’s seat of Tamworth, the prognosis is gloomy. So far, the bookies believe every single one will be lost. And Bassetlaw itself, the clearest expression of that much-heralded post-Brexit realignment, is now a harbinger of doom. In March, one poll suggested it, and all the other 44 Red Wall seats won from Labour, will be lost at next year’s general election. What went wrong?

“He’s still hugely popular,” Clarke-Smith tells me. “A lot of people voted for Boris. It wasn’t the only thing — it had been trending our way anyway — but those Brexit Party voters and so on came across, and he was a big part of that.” The big man, he says, has an “aura” about him that helped draw in converts. “You still get voters saying: ‘Oh, I voted for Boris…’”

When I meet the MP, he is wearing a checked suit and has a small ketchup stain at the corner of his mouth. A self-described “libertarian Thatcherite”, he was raised on a Nottingham council estate, trained as a teacher, and worked at a school in Romania before entering politics. He is also, on the day I visit, on the cover of the Worksop Guardian, delivering a sly grin alongside the headline: “MP slammed for ‘vile’ Twitter attack.” It is the outcome of Clarke-Smith’s engagement in the culture wars — he is at the fore of a group of working-class Tories keen to give as good as they get online. A member of the New Conservatives, a collective currently lobbying for tougher action on immigration, he is also part of the Common Sense Group, which has attacked “the woke agenda”.

He says this posture is what the Red Wall wants. “Apart from the obvious stuff about the economy and NHS, what would you guess the main issue is here?” he asks me. “The number one thing I get emailed about, more than Dominic Cummings, more than anything, is small boats. There is very little immigration here — but it’s the number one issue because they linked it to taking back control.”

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If true, this harks back to the political energy Boris personified, and which this squad of Red Wall MPs were elected to enact. The highest-profile member of the Nottinghamshire Tory contingent is Lee Anderson, the spiky-haired former miner and ex-Labour councillor who now serves as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In a recent segment on his GB News show, which captured much of the banal absurdity of politics in 2023, Anderson fed Clarke-Smith baked beans in a blind taste test to prove that bargain hunting is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis. “Here comes the aeroplane,” he said as he raised the spoon, firmly back in single-dad mode.

It’s perhaps not the most traditionalist-Tory publicity stunt. But, “we’re not in London — there’s no liberal elite here”, his campaign manager assures me. In Bassetlaw now, “the bigger the house and the bigger the gravel driveway, the less chance there is they’ll vote for us”, Clarke-Smith boasts. They claim the realignment is still working.

Worse-off voters were crucial to the Tory success in 2019. In that election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Labour lost nearly one in three low-income voters who had turned out to vote for them in 2017, while the Conservatives retained 90%. In the Red Wall now, however, the picture is shifting. The same March polling that foresees the Tories losing 45 seats in the North and Midlands shows the party behind in all social groups, from managers to unskilled manual labourers. That 19th-century notion of “working-class Toryism” has proven more elusive than first claimed.

And, away from the bustling high street, signs of discontent lurk. The cabbie who drove me from Retford, the handsome market town that makes up Bassetlaw’s other major population centre, tells me Boris was popular among his clientele in 2019. Now passengers young and old tell him they want a change of government. “My grandad was a well-known cab driver around Retford — he died during Covid. My gran couldn’t get out of her care home to attend the funeral.” It was, he adds dryly, “a bit crap”. He now works part time at Rampton Hospital, on a secure ward, where he helps transport imprisoned psychopaths. “There are cutbacks just like the rest of the NHS,” he says. “It’s much harder to transport patients now we have less staff.”

In Worksop itself, Wallace’s gleaming pate is plastered across town to advertise the food festival. I watch him deliver his own populist punchlines while cooking, laying into “clickbait” news and telling his audience not to trust headlines in the papers. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures the distrustful mood. Lindsay Martin, a Retford resident manning a friend’s market stall nearby, tells me she never fell for Johnson’s charm offensive. “Boris made a lot of false promises that were never delivered on. The country got worse under his leadership.” Asked about levelling-up, that chimera of social transformation, she merely laughs.

This region has always been sceptical of received opinion. The local council’s website grandly claims that “many regard Bassetlaw as the birthplace of the United States of America”. And, while that “many” is doing some heavy lifting, a sizeable chunk of the separatist-nonconformists who could no longer stand the Church of England did hail from the flat fields around here. At the local museum, a study resembling that of Plymouth Colony leader William Brewster is now preserved in aspic. And political dissidence, including to the benefit of the Right, is part of its history, too. During the miners’ strike, Nottinghamshire stuck out when the majority of its miners kept working and thus helped Margaret Thatcher’s government survive the winter of 1984.

Today, though, like much of the rest of the country, dissent has sublimated into a kind of jaded desolation. Others walking up and down the high street are less cynical. Janet, a pensioner in a purple windbreaker, tells me she voted Conservative for the first time in her life because of Boris. “It was his principles,” she says. “He got stuff done. Then he was brought down by other people.” What about the parties? Didn’t he break Covid rules? “It wasn’t his fault,” she tells me, without elaborating. “Rishi turned on him.” She will vote Tory again at the next election.

A middle-aged couple tell me that they, too, voted Conservative for the first time because of Johnson. “I liked Boris at the time,” says the wife. “The slur against him now smells a little of a smear campaign.” Her husband agrees: “I think I’d vote for the Tories again if Boris returned as leader.” “Cameron” will “sell us out” with Europe, he claims, before his wife hurriedly reminds him that the Labour leader is called Keir.

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As the food festival winds down, the high street becomes deserted. I walk past Clarke-Smith’s high street office where one window has taken a hit but remains just about intact, bearing a spiralling network of cracks. Retford is similarly quiet. People aren’t interested in talking: a densely bearded man bringing down the shutters on his vape shop tells me he “doesn’t do politics”. I pass the empty headquarters of Jo White, Labour’s chosen candidate and the wife of John Mann, the constituency’s former MP. A sign proclaims that she supports “Traditional Values in a Modern Bassetlaw”. I do not quite understand what this means, but when I email her campaign to ask I do not receive a response.

Johnson, meanwhile, has got his trotters up in Oxfordshire. Throughout his career, the former PM cultivated a set of allies before discarding them and Clark-Smith now faces a potential suspension from Parliament after falling foul of the privileges committee — was it worth it to defend Johnson? “Part of me thinks I owe my position as a member of parliament to Boris,” he says. “Winning that election, and getting Brexit done and everything else. I thought he was doing a good job in difficult circumstances. It wasn’t just loyalty — I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do.”

His words are laced with unwitting irony. Four years ago, victory here seemed to herald the start of a new age. Levelling-up money might reverse economic decline; an end to Brexit psychodrama might let old wounds heal. Perhaps it was hope more than expectation when Bassetlaw, the Red Wall and Brendan Clarke-Smith all tied their fortunes to a New-York-born columnist with a history of disappointing those who trusted him. While some still keep the faith, that realignment seems to have delivered little change to their lives in return. And, beyond tribal loyalties, that was the promise of 2019, broken utterly when Boris resigned last year.

I asked Boris-loyalist Janet if the town had got any better since the election, and I received a simple answer: “No.”

So wrote the Mongol leader Hulagu Khan to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt in 1260. Two years earlier, the nomadic horsemen had sacked Baghdad, the river Tigris running black with ink as its libraries were destroyed, ending the city’s golden age with pyramids of skulls built from the slaughter.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Mongols have rather got a bad press from historians, so it seems counterintuitive that a newly published book praised in the Economist cites them as potential role models for the 21^st century. Yet it also says something about our time.

Johan Norberg’s Open: The Story of Human Progress makes the argument that many empires were forces for openness, encouraging the spread of ideas and people, along with a certain amount of social mobility. As well as the Roman Empire, which unarguably brought many benefits, Norberg praises Genghis Khan for domestic policies that “would today open him up to accusations of being a politically correct, latte-drinking virtue signaller”. So, when people tell me “I’m just right of Genghis Khan” they actually mean it as a comment on my moderation.

“The Mongols practised ethnic and religious tolerance,” as an Economist review puts it sympathetically: “which is one reason why they were so effective. They promoted skilled fighters, engineers and administrators of all backgrounds. Of the 150,000-strong horde that invaded Europe in 1241, only around a third were ethnic Mongols. Habsburg soldiers were surprised to find that one captured officer was a middle-aged literate Englishman, who had fled persecution for heresy at home and sought refuge among the more open-minded Mongols.”

This line of argument is an interesting indication of where current thinking is moving, since over the course of the 21^st century there has been growing sympathy for imperialism among sections of the intelligentsia — and with good reason.

This might seem an odd claim, since on one level empire has never been more controversial. Less than three years ago, some 170 academics signed a letter condemning Oxford University even for presenting a “balance sheet” on the British Empire, stating that they were “alarmed” by such an exercise which lacked “scholarly legitimacy”.

Then there was the case of Bruce Gilley, a political science professor who was published in the peer reviewed journal The World Quarterly arguing that there were many advantages and benefits to colonialism. The article was swiftly retracted, after 16,000 people signed a petition led by fellow academics.

Yet these controversies are not about empires as such, but race and racial supremacy, the most offensive idea to 21^st century westerners. Non-European empires often receive quite sympathetic hearings, including two relatively recent BBC documentaries on the Ottomans — and that is because the values of the 21^st century global elite align far closer with pre-modern imperial rulers than with the 19^th and 20^th century rulers of nation-states.

The modern era proper, which we might approximately date from the Battle of Waterloo or the first railways, was the age of the nation. During this period, politics aligned largely on class lines, with a working-class Left pushing for redistribution and equality, and a largely upper and middle-class Right favouring order.

Over the course of the past couple of decades, that has decisively shifted — a process known as the “great realignment” — so that politics is more about values. The leading Right-wing party is now more working-class than the leading Left-wing party, which would have been an absurd idea 20 years ago, but not 200 years ago when the wealthy were less conservative than the masses — as has been the case throughout much of history.

This new divide is sometimes characterised as being between “open” and “closed” societies, the one favouring more freedom of ideas, trade and immigration, the latter opposing outside influences like the proverbial castle raising the drawbridge. It’s an imperfect distinction because of the pejorative undertones of the term — no one thinks of themselves as “closed-minded” — and that is partly why it is so favoured by advocates of globalisation and liberalisation.

Yet there is something to it, and liberals — as opposed to socialists or progressives — are more likely to favour free exchange of ideas, free movement of capital and goods, and especially free movement of people.

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And historically, there has been one form of government above all that has done this — empire, the most effective form of globalisation and cultural cross-pollination. The author Laurence Bergreen described the Mongols as “early practitioners of globalisation, seeking to connect the entire world. They were conquerors and marauders, but more than that, they were unifiers.” And because empires are defined by diversity, their mix of languages, cultures and religions, so it is natural that supporters of globalisation might seem more sympathetic. Genghis Khan today would most certainly have read the Economist, even if their solutions might have appeared a bit technocratic for his tastes.

Empires have always been cosmopolitan. Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt describes the country in the centuries after Christ as a mixture of influences, a place “where people married across the religious and cultural divide; where reliefs in Egyptian temples could depict strange, winged creatures from Zoroastrian mythology; and where second-generation Persian immigrants could adopt Egyptian nicknames… a dynamic melting pot of peoples and traditions.”

Or there was Spain under the Umayyad Caliphate, where “the emir was served by a well-run cadre led by Umayyad relatives and staffed by Syrians, muwalladun, [Muslims of Spanish descent] Jews, and Mozarabs [Arab-speaking Catholics]”. And yet, as David Levering Lewis of Moorish Spain, its people “coexisted in a flammable symbiosis”.

The Ottoman Empire is perhaps the most cancel-proof: open to racial mixing, with little sense of ethnic supremacy compared to later European empires, and even with powerful people of colour, women and even intersex people right at the top: among the most important figures at the Topkapi Palace were the Chief White Eunuch and the Chief Black Eunuch, and the latter was more powerful (claps).

And yet, like all such empires, it was authoritarian and conservative. People could practise their religion and indeed minority religious leaders were given quasi-official status — so long as they accepted the status quo. Like empires before it, it was a society terrified of changes that might throw the whole delicately-weaved network of peoples into imbalance. With good reason.

It was the very diverse nature of these imperial societies that made them unpromising ground for the political ideas that appeared in the West — liberalism, representative democracy and freedom of religion (and freedom from religion). That these novelties emerged in the far more ethnically-homogenous societies of England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia is not a coincidence, since the nations adjoining the North Sea were characterised by strong institutions, high levels of trust and little fear of competing nationalisms, or what we would now call “identity politics”.

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The correlation between diversity and low trust is well-established, and trust is crucial in the formation of civil society and of capitalism, which require strangers to share risks outside of their extended families. Over the 18^th century, 130 types of society were created in the British Isles, and some 25,000 clubs sprang up in the English-speaking world. A German resident of London wrote: “Everyone may choose his company according to his liking” and there was nowhere “where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London”.

The imperial age would begin its decline with the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, which was originally a modernising and liberal force; as Krishnan Kumar wrote in Visions of Empire, nationalism was allied “with the noble causes of spreading freedom and enlightenment in the world”. Nationalists wished to counter the rule of clerics and princes, who had always seen themselves being above such petty concerns as national identity. As Count-duke Olivares of imperial Spain wrote: “I am not nacional; that is something for children”. This, as Kumar put it, was an “expression typical of the imperial mentality”. The old aristocracy were beyond such low-status beliefs as nationalism — just like their 21^st century successors.

Most of all the age of nationalism was tied to the rise of the middle class, just as today nationalism’s fall is linked to its decline, and with the rise of a new globalised tech and finance aristocracy.

Though once aligned with liberalism, nationalism would become intolerant and violent, and its legacy was disastrous for minorities in particular. Today the cities of Eurasia are littered with the ghosts of long-established communities wiped out in the 20^th century, in Jewish Krakow, Orthodox Constantinople, Christian Baghdad and elsewhere.

On the treatment of minorities, empires can certainly claim to have a better record than nation-states. European Jews enjoyed great freedom and tolerance under the Habsburgs but when that empire fell, the results were catastrophic. Tragedy also afflicted the Greeks in Alexandria and the Arabs and Persians in Zanzibar, all of whom had to flee when the age of empires came to an end (among the latter was a young Farrokh Bulsara, whose family home in Middlesex had a picture of their former protector, the Queen of England, on the wall).

Today, while national identity is in steep retreat in the west, it has come to be replaced by a form of patriotism for an idea, the “British values” coined by New Labour and repeated by Keir Starmer last week.

As Tony Blair said in 1997: “I am a British patriot…The Britain in my vision is not Britain turning its back on the world. We are a leader of nations or nothing.” Yet what he is patriotic for is a set of values, an imperial, not a nationalist, idea. As Krishnan Kumar put it: “Imperialist ideologies are universalistic, not particularistic. That difference has to be borne in mind. Imperial peoples do not, unlike nationalists, celebrate themselves; they celebrate the causes of which they are the agents or carriers.”

Likewise if America is defined by a creed — “it is who we are”, as Barack Obama said of diversity — then that makes it less recognisable as the nation of the founding fathers and more what Rashid Dar called “a progressive caliphate”, a polity arranged around a belief system.

Nations don’t have “values”. In Nationalism and the History of Ideas, John Breuilly observed that “Nationalists are highly inward-looking. They tend to celebrate themselves — ‘we English,’ ‘we Germans,’ ‘we French’ — simply for their good fortune in being who they are, rather than for any cause or purpose in the world that might justify their existence.”

So as western societies become multicultural, they have also come to resurrect imperial models of government, with officials working among the “community” performing a similar role to that of the Ottoman millet system — repressing ethnic conflict and injustice while also imposing ideological conformity and loyalty to the empire. Faith leaders are not just tolerated but given sway over their self-appointed communities, but anyone who offends the values of the state — by, say, expressing opposition to homosexuality too openly — is deemed beyond the pale.

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Because of their vulnerability, multicultural empires must also become less hospitable towards dissenting ideas. As the United States has become more imperial, so Americans have become much less tolerant of opposing beliefs because majority ethnic nationalism, usually described as racism or “white supremacy”, threatens the fabric of society just as it haunted past empires.

That today empire is such a controversial issue is not because the rule of sultans or khans offends our principles, but because of the same ethnic politics that once plagued multicultural empires and now play a large part in American and European political life.

Everywhere, as western nation-states have evolved into modern empires, so liberalism and democracy have begun to diverge, with populist movements arising to defend “the people”, the ethnic majority, against elites who resemble imperial governors trying to protect social peace (and their own interests).

As Kumar wrote: “In the case of empires, one of the most important is to recognize the danger of nationalism, not just of the subject peoples but, perhaps even more, of the ruling people themselves. The moment the ruling people start stressing their own national identity, whether as Turks, Austrians, Russians, English, or French, that is the moment empire begins to decline… The national principle denies the imperial principle.”

And it is this question, between the new imperialism and the old nationalism, that now defines western political life in the 21^st century.

“And naturally,” he replied, “the Catholics are the royalists and the Protestants are the republicans?” Hailing from a Swiss-French background, Jaccottet had understood “loyalists” as “royalists” — correctly — and made a logical inference, based on his understanding of Catholicism and its traditional association with the crown.

It’s an example of how our tribal alliances sometimes defy logic, at least to outsiders, and for odd historical reasons. Similarly, imagine explaining to a stranger that in Britain there are two tribes, one nationalist and one globalist, and they are aligned with a European civilisation-state on the one hand and with more liberal multiracial federations on the other?

This is not to make the fatuous point that “Remainers are the real racists”, which is not true, only to point out that political-tribal loyalties are often irrational, and can change for equally irrational reasons. We’ve only just come to the end of what was supposed to be David Cameron’s second term, but the world of politics has changed immeasurably since his departure, and it continues to change still. In five or ten years’ time, when Brexit has been and gone, will the two parties of Left and Right have evolved into the parties of rejoin and stay out? Considering the events of 2020 so far, and the way geopolitics is changing, it might not be so simple.

Britain only left the EU on 31 January, and has already moved noticeably closer to Australia and Canada in foreign policy matters, the three countries issuing joint statements on Hong Kong.

This was entirely as some Leave campaigners imagined, fulfilling the dream of “CANZUK”, an association of free trade and free movement between the four English-speaking Commonwealth countries. The idea was viewed with suspicion by some on the Left as being about kith and kin, or part of some deluded imperial nostalgia, yet one of Global Britain’s first acts in this new alliance was to offer British citizenship to the people of Hong Kong, potentially increasing immigration by hundreds of thousands.

Elsewhere, Britain has been busily securing a trade agreement with Turkey, a deal worth £20billion that will make it easier for Turks entering Britain.

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France, in contrast, is sending gun boats to the eastern Mediterranean to support Greece against a Turkish regime that appears increasingly aggressive and chauvinistic, a perception not helped by Erdogan’s decision to turn the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque (which France protested, but Britain remained silent over). France and Turkey are at odds over Libya, but to say that this is just about power, money or resources would be wrong, since the post-Brexit world appears to see the two western European powers embarking on their own historic world missions.

France has traditionally seen its role as protecting Christians in the east, and the current French president is aware of his historical position as the secular leader of Christendom, the heir of Charlemagne. Macron was once a hero to Britain’s centrists, but he is no Blairite; indeed it has been observed that while Boris Johnson poses as a populist he is a technocrat at heart, while the outwardly technocrat Macro is in reality a Gaullist.

France is not alone, and a recent meeting of MEPs discussing Turkish aggression was described as like “seeing the reappearance of Pope Pius V calling on the Holy Alliance against Turkey and mobilizing the fleets of Christendom to face the Ottoman invasion.”

The EU has prided itself on being post-historic, universalist and liberal, but in an increasingly hostile world during a troubled decade, and facing two revanchist powers to its east, it may be forced into becoming more of a “civilization-state”.

Ths is not entirely impossible; most of continental Europe is nothing like as progressive as British Remainers imagine, and Britain has always been one of the most liberal members, both socially and economically. From the start of the European project Britain was heavily involved in framing ideas of “human rights” into the European legal system, even if this became a widely disliked phrase in the British conservative press.

So while France’s world role appears to be defending the frontiers of Christendom, Britain’s post-Brexit leaders see their mission as reviving the 19^th-century gospel of free trade. That was always a core part of the Vote Leave ideal, and it is certainly not a populist or nationalistic idea — although it is to some extent a nostalgic one.

Indeed, while the “Anglosphere” is a term with strong centre-Right Atlanticist undertones, by any real measurement the English-speaking nations are the most liberal on earth.

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In continental Europe, only the small Scandinavian countries are comparable and Germany — and even more so France — are further to the Right on core progressive issues like race relations, gender equality and gay rights. (They may be more socially democratic, but that is another matter). Compare Macron’s firm opposition to the BLM iconoclasm with the British Government’s response.

If Joe Biden wins in November, the continual liberal direction of the US will accelerate, bringing the Anglosphere with it, since we have almost no immunity to American cultural trends. It is true that almost all western countries are becoming more liberal — even in Poland, where conservatives just sneaked the recent election, time may be against them — but the English-speaking world is moving at a more rapid rate. In the US, the youngest generation are way, way to the Left of their elders, while their peers in France are among the biggest supporters of the radical Right.

In Britain, despite the anguish that followed the referendum and dire warnings that foreign-born residents would flee, immigration has remained at record highs, with no signs of decline. Meanwhile attitudes to immigration and race have continued to become far more liberal since 2016. It’s strange to think that while this was happening the BBC broadcast an Agatha Christie adaptation un-subtly comparing Brexit Britain to the 1930s, a reflection of how utterly deluded a large section of the commentariat and cultural elite have become since 2016, engaged in collective political hypochondria in which every flag is a swastika just as every lump is cancer.

While Brexit and Boris Johnson have taken the wind out of national populism in Britain, it remains a much stronger force on the continent; it’s not improbable that a member of the Le Pen family will become France’s first female head of state in the coming years, while in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands populism has far from gone away.

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One-third of ethnic minority Britons supported Brexit, and while people voted in that referendum for a number of reasons, some were certainly attracted to a global Britain in which Indians, Nigerians and other Commonwealth citizens might have as much of a place here as continental Europeans. The Brexit coalition played up this historical link in order to deflect accusations of racism (but then they could do so, knowing that people with strongly racist views were unlikely to vote for their opponents). The edgiest the official Vote Leave campaign ever got were the notorious adverts warning about Turks coming here, ironically, as it turns out, since the new trade deal will almost certainly mean more Turkish immigration than would have been allowed if we were in the EU. It seems unlikely that any deal with India or other substantial world economies won’t contain similar clauses.

Yet Leave voters, like Remainers, are more favourable to EU compared with non-EU immigration, and Ukip’s rise in the polls began before the post-2004 influx of eastern Europeans, during when most migration was from outside the continent. The increase in Polish immigration just made the subject more respectable to discuss.

The typical English conservative sympathetic to national populism has more in common with the values of the European Union than with the Anglosphere — both socially and, increasingly, economically. Similarly, British progressives are far more interested in the United States and its ongoing political drama than they are with what happens 22 miles across the Channel; many could name numerous black American victims of police brutality, but wouldn’t be able to pick out the Dutch prime minister in a line-up of other random tall people riding a bicycle. The US is not just more progressive than Europe, but its progressivism is more aggressive and far more proselytising. Many voters are, indeed, in the wrong camp.

From the vantage point of 2020, this thought experiment in which Leave and Remain switch sides might all seem improbable, since Brexit and Remain identities are extremely pronounced — far more so than Labour or Tory self-identification before the referendum. Indeed, Remainerism is probably the most passionate tribal identity that has emerged in England since the days when people fought over Holy Communion and transubstantiation.

Yet group identity can transform swiftly, as can tribal policy positions. Republican voters went from being pro-free trade to anti in rapid time, following the leadership of Donald Trump, and reflecting the fact that political views often follow social cues and party identity, not any particularly logical reasoning.

Back in 1997 it would have seemed ridiculous that the Conservatives would become the party of the working class, especially in the north, so it’s not inconceivable that there might be a “great realignment” on Europe, with internationalist Remainers embracing Global Britain and nationalists finding common cause with allies on the continent. Stranger things have happened, and in the 2020s, stranger things will.