Only days later, another of these creatures from Arthurian legend wandered into the post-industrial landscape of suburban Liverpool. Having failed to capture it, police shot it.

Their actions were couched in the language of safety, procedure and reason. “There was no option to let the deer wander as it could be a danger to motorists and members of the public,” said a Merseyside Police spokesperson. “As a result a decision was made in the early evening to euthanise the deer.”

All very reasonable and understandable, from the perspective of a body of public servants whose task is acting as the “thin blue line” that maintains our rational public order. The general public, though, was outraged. Responses were clearly powered by a sense that a crime had been committed at some symbolic level. A creature of legend had been destroyed by “health and safety”. Liverpool-based writer Nina Antonia called it “a very bad omen”.

In folklore, the white hart often appears to signal the presence of the uncanny. And the death of this white hart lent a note of deep weirdness to an already-brittle mood at this year’s party conference season, which kicked off the same day. The combined effect was of a political class determinedly bickering over trivia while dangling over a howling pit of monsters.

First, we witnessed the hijacking of Keir Starmer’s sublimely bland 14,000-word effort to reboot the Labour Party by a bitter religious dispute. Forget the future of public services, is it blasphemous to say only women have cervices? This argument, at heart a metaphysical one concerning the true relation between material and spiritual planes, almost entirely drowned out the usual business of shouting about neoliberalism and insulting the Tories.

For the party of government, meanwhile, it has been less metaphysics, more apocalypse. A conference crowd less than half the size of 2019’s applauded the launch of this or that paper, to widespread indifference save among politics junkies. Meanwhile, outside, the country devolved into fist fights and knife threats at petrol stations, and British farmers faced the prospect of a million-pig sacrifice to the god of self-correcting labour markets.

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By Mary Harrington

The Remainer class lurched out of their sarcophagi to say they told us so, and that leaving the single market was an irrational thing to do. This is of course true, but rather misses the point that a core question in the Brexit debate was whether or not, from a holistic perspective, the “rational” policy is always the right one. And sometimes “rational” and “right” are as incommensurable as police safety procedures and a beast out of legend. Do we want higher wages or cheaper goods? Are pig culls and lorry driver shortages an acceptable short-term price of correction or evidence of terminal decline?

Further back, the “rational” arguments for offshoring industry had political tradeoffs, as did the “rational” arguments that took us into the EU. Those social classes who didn’t win out used Brexit to make their protest known at the concatenating political effects of our supposedly technocratic, post-political regime.

Today, though, as the technocratic mode of politics limps on, it seems an ever feebler vehicle for stark political choices made against a backdrop of increasingly existential dread. And whether thanks to the pandemic, climate change or the global fracturing of supply chains that once seemed seamless, such decisions are now everywhere: cancer victims or flattening the curve? Young people’s need for affordable homes and a fair tax burden, or social care funding and the preferences of Green Belt Tory voters? And no one wants to think about the prospects for the welfare state if (or when) growth stalls permanently, or if birth rates continue to crater.

And if climate catastrophe looks grim, so does climate mitigation. It was rising fuel prices which triggered France’s “gilets jaunes” riots in 2018; they’re still ongoing. And the global tilt toward “clean power” has prompted what Bloomberg predicts will be the first of many energy crises, plunging many UK families unexpectedly into fuel poverty.

To compound the mood of apocalypse, an offshoot of the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, sought to raise awareness of such thorny questions by glueing themselves to the M25. As a result, an elderly woman suffering a stroke was delayed for six hours on the way to hospital, and is now permanently paralysed. In a sense, the group’s fanatical willingness to risk literal paralysis in elderly women, in order to make a point about political paralysis in climate policy, serves as an eloquent metaphor for the ugly reality of climate-policy tradeoffs.

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And we continue to not talk about who will bear the brunt. As George Monbiot pointed out, the only real way to reduce our carbon footprint is less of everything. Who takes the hit? There will never be enough batteries to make electric cars as widely-available as the internal combustion variety. Who goes back to walking? There will never be enough renewable energy for us all to leave the lights on: who has to sit in the dark? No one has yet worked out how to power an aeroplane on electricity; who, then, still gets to fly? Our meat consumption is unsustainable; who makes the swap to bugs?

Greens usually gesture vaguely at “redistributing wealth” while also curbing it. But those with the greatest power to coordinate international climate policy are the world’s 2,000-odd billionaires – who are also the ones sitting on most of that wealth. This rarefied group may be as motivated as the rest of us to avoid climate catastrophe, but if doing so means someone has to take a financial hit, they’re unlikely to volunteer themselves.

Instead, among the rarefied echelons of bodies such as the WEF, papers and videos are published by more technocrats who discuss the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bed in permanent changes in the name of climate mitigation. Perhaps the masses can be persuaded to buy and travel less; to own nothing and be happy. Perhaps one more Economist article about eating insects will persuade someone other than Sam Bowman to give these crunchy delicacies a try.

Further down the food chain, despite omens and outbreaks of gender theology, our political class is still grimly reluctant to set down the comfort blankets of data, technocracy and “growth”. Nor are they keen to talk frankly about political choices; even about how on earth “net zero” squares with waving through expansion plans at every major UK airport.

The exasperated result has been a growing minority of Britons abandoning reason altogether as a viable register in which to debate anything, instead forming what Clive Martin recently called “Radical Normal”. This increasingly vocal protest cohort coalesces into placard-waving flash-mobs, with grievances ranging from masks to Pfizer, 5G masts, adrenochrome and the New World Order.

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From a technocratic perspective it’s easy to dismiss such people as crazies. But while people as a whole may be largely uninterested in politics, that’s not the same thing as being stupid. And having lived through all the rational arguments for de-industrialisation, and the “rational” case for EU membership, the public is now seeing the same woefully inadequate “rational” mindset being turned to climate policy. Meanwhile the painful political trade-offs involved both in doing something and in not doing something become increasingly evident.

In a sense, reverting to the language of omens is a perfectly sane thing to do, when the world has become so complicatedly unpredictable that an everyday person might as well read the auguries as try and master it through data.

Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan wrote that “Our New World of chaos and complexity is too volatile, too precarious, too important to be left in the hands of the merely practical administrator.” The uncanny white deer often warns of change and danger — or perhaps now, of a future running too menacingly wild for mere technical management. In seeing this message clearly, the people of Britain have been quicker than their rulers to read the omens.

Live on an average Londoner’s wage
James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

He announced his intention to run as an independent candidate only a few days ago, but Conservative MP Rory Stewart has already been dismissed by some commentators as not being enough of a Londoner to win the contest.

In this age of identity politics, out-of-towner is not an appellation that Mr Stewart is going to wish to find attached to his name during a mayoral contest. Indeed, Sadiq Khan appeared to win the last contest merely by repeating to Londoners that he was the local son of a bus driver.

So Rory needs some kind of policy gimmick to draw media attention away from any focus on his origins beyond the M25. Fortunately, I have just the plan. Following in the footsteps of former Labour MP Dave Nellist, Rory should pledge if elected to live on the average London worker’s wage.

It’s a gimmick — but it might be just enough of a gimmick to set Stewart’s campaign alight.

As well as being paid an average worker’s wage, Stewart would also have to dispose of his comfy house in South Kensington and live among London’s army of penurious renters. However, his descent into England’s proletariat would be softened by the knowledge that it would only be temporary while he served out his term.

We live in anti-establishment times, and such sacrifice and ascetism would surely be rewarded by the electorate, in whose eyes Rory would be transformed from an effete liberal raconteur to a stolid man of the people. This is a winning formula in today’s political climate.

Let Londoners drink on public transport
Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP and founder of the Battle of Ideas festival

Rory could do with a bit of an image makeover after that Pret a Manger joke, which makes him look like a healthy-eating stick-in-the-mud. One way he could do it would be to reverse the ban on drinking on public transport.

Firstly, it would be a liberal thing to do, in the classical sense, trusting that the vast majority of people can enjoy a tipple without harassing others.

Secondly, it would be a nice vote of confidence in London’s night-time economy, which has faced many pressures in recent years, yet is vital for anywhere with ambitions to be a “world city”. Let partygoers and clubbers enjoy a drink on their big night out and mark out London as a place that likes to let its hair down.

Last, but by no means least, it would be a poke in the eye to Boris Johnson, who likes to claim he’s a libertarian, but whose first move as mayor was to introduce the drinking ban in the first place.

Make the capital a hedgehog haven
Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Just because Rory is moving from Cumbria to London doesn’t mean that he has to leave behind Mrs Tiggywinkle. Despite all its concrete and tarmac, London can be a surprisingly hospitable place for wildlife, and alongside the foxes nosing around our rubbish bins and the migratory birds who flock to nature reserves like the London Wetland Centre, hedgehogs too provide the capital with a touch of the countryside. Even in the very heart of the city, in Regent’s Park, a tiny population of the animals consistently voted Britain’s best loved wild mammal clings on.

Londoners who want our hedgehogs to be saved from extinction cannot leave the task to conservationists beyond the M25. There is a job to be done in the capital as well. The sheer scale of London means that hedgehogs are unlikely to flourish here without a co-ordinated attempt to link their habitats together.

Councils need to be encouraged to allow herbaceous vegetation and shrubs to grow along the edges of parks; public utilities to sink tunnels under roads; householders to open gaps in their garden fences. As a candidate to be mayor, Rory should back the provision across the capital of what the London Wildlife Trust has called “hedgehog superhighways”. The ambition must be to ensure that no hedgehog habitat in the city is an island entire of itself.

A capital that neglects to save its last remaining populations of these enchanting, iconic and authentically wild creatures, at very little cost and inconvenience, will be a capital that has lost something of its soul. I would love to see Rory put this in his manifesto.

Rethink the green belt
Jonn Elledge, editor of CityMetric

The case for rethinking London’s Green Belt will, by now, be familiar to anyone who’s given a thought to the capital’s housing crisis. Short version: we need more homes; we’re not willing to demolish existing streets so we can squeeze them in there; large chunks of the Green Belt are ugly and next to stations, so let’s have at it.

What is sometimes missing from this debate, though, is that a Green Belt with more houses on it might actually be more green. The farmland which fringes the suburbs, after all, tends to be drenched in chemicals which do untold damage to nature. It’s also far less accessible to the public than, say, Victoria Park.

As perverse as it sounds, redeveloping some of that green belt as homes with carefully planned parkland in between might actually increase both biodiversity and suburban Londoners’ access to green space. By reducing the need to commute from far-flung towns like Luton or Southend, it might be more environmentally friendly, too.

This is a hard case to make, of course, but if there’s any higher purpose to an insurgent campaign like Rory Stewart’s, surely it’s to make the case for important but unpopular measures. And if he wants to play on the easy setting — well, he could always restrict himself to promising to build homes on golf courses.

Get Londoners walking and talking
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos think tank

Rory Stewart’s main problem is that his brand — walking about and talking to strangers — is about as un-London as you can get. What works on the fells of Cumbria starts to feel weird when hemmed into a Tube carriage with 120 other sweaty souls.

But he has no choice. A brand is a brand, and his policy platform should be to remake London in his image: the best place in the world to walk, and the best place in the world to make a new friend.

#LondonWalks is the easier proposition. Pedestrianise our high streets. Convert our disused railway lines into strip parks, like New York’s high line. Reward families who walk the kids to school. Ban lorries from the roads between 6am and midnight. Allow people to close off any residential streets on Sundays for children to play outside. We’d be calmer, and healthier, if we all got our 10,000 steps a day.

#LondonTalks will challenge us sceptical city dwellers. But we’d be a stronger city if we made more effort to speak, and listen, to each other. Let’s start with a single day, when every Londoner can pledge to say hello to a stranger. Then a day when everyone who doesn’t know their neighbour pops round to say hello. From there, who knows?

The Mayor doesn’t have to just be a technocrat, pulling policy levers. They can also be a leader of social change. London, Rory-style, might prove a refreshing change.

Introduce an annual London census
Jon Cruddas, Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham

The speed at which people migrate into and within the capital is extraordinary, yet it is barely recognised by the state. This is a critical issue for those living in the poorest parts of the city — those with the cheapest rents and house values. It places extraordinary pressures on public services in these areas of greatest need.

The state is totally ill-equipped to track in real time such movement, remaining captive to a ten-year census cycle. The data is outdated before it is even published, given the velocity of change in a city such as London. The best tracker is the school roll — which is inadequate for effective public policy making.

A new baseline for distributing public resources is desperately required, not least because the poorest communities are disproportionately taking the strain in terms of the escalating city headcount. Such a resource would also be invaluable in lobbying central government over all aspects of public policy from health to education, council allocations and policing.

The Mayor should urgently engage the Leverhulme Centre on Demographic Science at Nuffield College to build a new census model for the capital as an innovative, transparent metric to underscore public policymaking for London.

Take on the absentee landlords
Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

Rory Stewart won’t win on the strength of his awesome Roriness alone — it just gets him a hearing for his ideas. Luckily, as an independent, he can propose whatever policies he likes — so they’d better be bold and brilliant.

To deal with the charge that he’s too privileged to be Mayor, Rory should take aim at London’s most privileged interest group: the city’s private landlords, in particular its absentee landlords. Our capital is a magnet for the world’s money, but if it’s just used to buy into a restricted land supply, it does nothing for Londoners apart from putting up the rent.

Our capital should be a welcoming and dynamic destination for the world’s most talented people, not a series of empty apartments for idle speculators to put their cash into. If they want to use London bricks-and-mortar as a safety deposit box while making no other contribution, then it’s a service that should be charged for.

So here’s the policy: levy a hefty annual fee on every dwelling above a given value. This would be reduced in proportion to UK taxes paid by the owner — or money invested into a qualifying enterprise. Genuine entrepreneurs would pay nothing, absentee landlords and tax avoiders would pay full whack.

Oh and the proceeds would go to the regeneration of London’s rundown housing estates.

Reform political lobbying
Tanya Gold, journalist

I am bored with personality politics, saviours-of-the-day and people who claim to be different but go on to be the same. Ennui and the willingness to close your eyes on television is not enough; nor is obvious cleverness, nor unusual sensitivity. I suggest this, if Stewart wants to be taken seriously as a political reformer: reform political funding and political lobbying.

People beyond the bubble, which is growing larger each day, think Westminster is a closed shop, and, even if it were only a belief — I’d say it’s only moderately corrupt for now — it would be dangerous enough. You should not be able to buy privileged political access in Britain, but you can; and if it isn’t useful why would you do it?

At an event at Tory Conference — run by a PR firm posing as a think tank — I sat next to a monied man who heckled the very idea of taxing capital. In his hand was an itinerary including a private dinner with a senior Secretary of State. He didn’t pay for it, you say? Don’t be stupid.

Stewart should start with this – it would be worth it.

Build some decent social housing
Jenny McCartney, journalist

The most obvious policy that Rory Stewart should vigorously espouse in his London mayoralty bid is the one that so many politicians before him have fudged or failed at: a highly ambitious campaign of building good-quality social housing.

Stewart sounds receptive to the idea, having said earlier this month in a letter to Londoners that “It is obvious that we need to build far more houses and flats — not just gimcrack boxes, but homes we can be proud of.” But others have said similar things before, only for their promises to get tied up in complicated contracts with developers and elastic definitions; during Boris Johnson’s term as mayor, “affordable” was redefined to mean up to 80% of market rents, terminology that has not exactly proved accurate.

The current gross disparity between social housing supply and demand has helped create an expanding category of “working poor” in London — a throwback to the Victorian era — comprising people who are squeezed economically by high private rents but unable to access social housing. The implied contract between the individual and the state — that of work for basic security — has been eroded.

Potential pledges could be to end “right to buy” on London council properties; create a consumer regulator to enforce standards for social housing tenants; campaign for more central government money to reach new annual targets for building social housing; restrict the purchase of London investment properties by foreign buyers and encourage high-quality, imaginative constructions.

Aneurin Bevan — who, post-war, steered the UK’s biggest ever building programme for social housing — would have wept to see the housing difficulties of many families today. Some very radical, or very old-fashioned, thinking is required. Come on, Rory.

Good schools, not gangs
Ralph Leonard, Nigerian-British writer

London is one of Britain’s “hotspots” for the knife crime “epidemic” that regularly crops up in the news. At the moment politicians are frantically searching for quick, short-term solutions, such as increasing police numbers, cracking down on drill music and expanding stop and search. Arrest and convict may be the cheaper strategy, but it isn’t effective and doesn’t even begin to address the long-term social causes of knife crime.

No single policy will instantly “solve” London’t knife crisis totally, but a radical overhaul of the education system will help significantly and begin the long process of addressing this problem. Making education more attractive would be central to all this.

Education needs to be better and be seen to lead to better things; instead many of London’s schools are overcrowded, increasingly dilapidated and deprived of resources. The best chances are only for the rich.

Rory should pledge to raise the quality and standards of both middling and struggling schools, and demonstrate how being in school and learning makes a difference — and leads to greater material and psychological wellbeing than getting involved with gangs and knife crime. In doing so, Rory must recognise the damaging effects of the austerity cuts brought about by his spurned party, and commit to reversing them, through an ambitious long-term plan to providing the capital’s schools with adequate resources, teachers and renovated facilities.

Don’t just preach feminism — practise it
Julie Bindel, journalist and campaigner

During the Tory Party leadership contest most of the candidates, including Rory Stewart, declared that they were feminists (after Dominic Raab said he was “probably not” one). Quite frankly, I doubt very much that is the case, but if Rory Stewart wishes to truly set himself apart from the Tories, including former leader Theresa May, he could put his heart and soul into developing and maintaining services for women and girls who have experienced male violence in London.

The housing crisis in the capital means that if a woman escapes domestic violence with her children, then unless she is seriously rich, she is going to end up either sofa-surfing or in grotty bed-and-breakfast temporary accommodation. It’s no wonder so many women return to violent men, risking their own lives, when that is the alternative.

Similarly, sexual violence and rape in London is at an all-time high; the conviction rate at an all-time low. And yet at the same time, rape crisis services are being squeezed into nonexistence.

And then there is the issue of women being trafficked into London to be abused in the sex trade. There are barely any services available to these women if they do manage to escape, which means they face deportation. Surely we can do better than that? If Rory Stewart wants to make his mark, he could stand proud as the first ever Tory that took the pandemic of violence against women seriously.