What is euphemistically termed the “cost of living crisis” is simply the first ripples of the historic shift of wealth and power from Europe and North America to the great Asian power blocs. The rising costs of energy and food resulting from the war in Ukraine will be dwarfed by the plummeting living standards that the great confrontation with China will usher in. The basic underpinnings of middle-class consumption in the West will go, and we will not see them again in our lifetimes. Britain is no more prepared for this cataclysmic correction of the global economy than Germany is: indeed, by many important metrics, our state capacity is already significantly worse.

As the sociologist and political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo observes, the result of the economic consensus of the past four decades is already such that “the remaining members of the middle class in the West, what we could refer to as the ‘middling class’ due to the precarity of their position, are facing the prospect of proletarianisation, or déclassement — being progressively stripped of the traditional tokens of middle-class status, such as home ownership, savings and a good salary following a good education.”

This has brought us the Right-wing populist upsurge of the past decade, and the parallel drive towards “millennial socialism” among newly-proletarianised university graduates, with all the cultural pathologies their distress carries with it. Yet in their “war on woke”, the Conservative party is campaigning against the morbid symptoms while refusing to treat the cause.

It is beyond dispiriting, then, that the candidates displaying themselves in the Conservative leadership contest not only have no meaningful solutions to offer for the hard years ahead, but do not even seem to discern the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Instead, all the potential successors scrabbling around their podiums for Johnson’s crown have retreated to the safe space of Thatcherite dogma, promising to shrink the state just when the state’s protective hand will be needed more than ever.

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How much state is even left to shrink? Try to get a GP appointment; try to get the police to attend an incident of crime, let alone provide justice. Crime is rampant, incomes are shrinking and education is worthless. Our external borders are now purely notional, and the union’s survival is doubtful. We already pay Scandinavian taxes for Mediterranean public services, and all the candidates are offering is a further diminution of state capacity. If Conservatives do not relearn how to run it, then the state will collapse, and deservedly so. As Hobbes wrote: “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.” To see Britain through the hard years ahead, we need a leader able to harness the protective power of Leviathan.

Yet instead, all we have seen from the hustings are the last dying rituals of Thatcher’s cargo cult, as the candidates rattle through the empty mantras of the old religion, desperately trying to placate the unquiet ghost of a woman born a century ago. Look at Truss, literally cosplaying Thatcher in Moscow; listen to Sunak promising a “grown up conversation”, when it’s the consensus of the sensible grownups that has given us decades of stagnation and decline. Where even the supposed “last neoliberal” Emmanuel Macron has nationalised France’s energy giant EDF to see his country securely through the near future, our own Penny Mordaunt signed away 5% of Britain’s electricity capacity to avoid ruining the view from just one affluent constituent’s seaside cottage. None of these people even understands the turbulent future ahead of us, let alone presents a plan to seize it for the nation’s good. No wonder None of the Above is still the best-polling candidate: the party’s future is still imprisoned by its recent past.

But the old gods have no power in the world ahead of us. We have entered a new era, in which only the strongest and most capable states will survive. As Gerbaudo notes, “many leaders have come to see the neoliberal state as a rudderless vessel, incapable of weathering coming global storms. The issue that divides them is what new course should be set by the ship of state.” If Conservatives do not meet this challenge, then their political enemies will, using the state to cement into law all the arcane and pernicious maladies of late-stage liberalism they already display.

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Boris Johnson's squandered chance

By Aris Roussinos

It didn’t have to come to this. There are other Tory traditions, other Conservative modernities which the party could draw on in an age of permanent crisis. Instead of its shrunken historical memory that goes no further back than the oldest millennials, the Conservative party has a strong culture of capable leadership fit to guide the nation through a period of crisis and decline, and to transmute the coming years of lead into gold. Instead of competing to dress up in Thatcher’s mothballed clothes, we need a candidate who can bring the vision and good governance of Britain’s postwar leadership: we need a new Harold Macmillan.

It was Macmillan, as his biographer D.R. Thorpe observes, who led Britain from the “immediate post-war world of deprivation to the years of plenty”, writing in his diary: “We must be bold; caution is no good. All our political future depends on whether we can combine prosperity with stability.” Drawing on his experience heading the Ministry of Supply during the darkest wartime years, Macmillan “understood the machinery of government and knew… how to crank it into action.” Deployed by Churchill as housing minister, with a mission to build 300,000 new houses every year, Macmillan exceeded his quota, crushing Labour in the process.

The party then understood, as it declared in its 1951 manifesto, that “Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by crowded houses. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.” Back then, the central plank of Conservative messaging, shown regularly in the newspapers and the cinema newsreels, was Macmillan “handing the key to a semi-detached house to a grateful married couple with young children”. A party that stood on this pledge today, and delivered, would win a landslide: it really is that simple. Yet instead, held captive by boomer NIMBY interests, the best offer that the most ambitious Conservative contenders are making today is the weak nudge of “street votes”, the chosen gimmick of thinktankers ideologically fearful of the state’s slumbering power.

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Compare this timidity and intellectual bankruptcy with the vigour and ambition of Britain’s postwar leadership. Ordered to provide homes, Macmillan built millions of them. As Thorpe records, “Macmillan reorganised his ministry on a war footing — Action This Day… Red tape was cut to the minimum and brick-making mobilised on a massive scale. Macmillan had no truck with excuses.” The result was a happy, prosperous and secure electorate, with the middle- and working-classes united in support for a Conservative government that gave them security and the opportunity for family formation, the basic building blocks of a conservative worldview.

The party, then, was led by giants: but more, it was led by conservatives, and not by Manchester Liberals in conservative clothing. Which candidate today would declare, as Anthony Eden did to a roaring crowd at the 1947 conference, that “We are not a Party of unbridled, brutal capitalism, and never have been. Although we believe in personal responsibility and personal initiative in business, we are not the political children of the ‘laissez-faire’ school. We opposed them decade after decade.” As Eden observed, “Conservatism regards the family as the basic social unit — and the sanctity of family life as vital to the health of the State.” The reverse was true then, as it is now: the state is integral to the health of the family, and without a capable state willing and able to nurture stable, prosperous and content family life, there is no future for either the party or the nation.

To achieve this requires the state’s intervention in the market, and not just fearful sacrifices to the fickle gods of free trade. As another giant of postwar Toryism, Rab Butler, declared in 1947: “the term ‘planning’ is a new word for coherent and positive policy. The conception of strong government policy in economic matters is, I believe, the very centre of the Conservative tradition. We have never been a party of laissez-faire. Conservatives were planning before the word entered the vocabulary of political jargon.”

Rooting Conservative interventionism in the deepest, paternalist origins of the Tory tradition, Butler noted that “Tories and others set about the task of dealing with the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution by calling upon the power of government to redress injustice… [The State] assumed the functions of protecting the common interest and safeguarding the interests of the weaker members of society.” In his 1971 memoirs, Butler observed that “I had derived from Bolingbroke an assurance that the majesty of the State might be used in the interests of the many, from Burke a belief in seeking patterns of improvement by balancing diverse interests, and from Disraeli an insistence that the two nations must become one.” That belief in the majesty of the state, and its unique capacity to improve the lives of the British people, is the very heart of the Tory tradition, and it is to that tradition the Conservatives must return.

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Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

On his triumphant accession to the Conservative leadership in 1957, Macmillan quoted Disraeli by saying: “We must be conservative to conserve all that is good and radical to uproot all that is bad.” Yet the party that now exists has conserved nothing of value: for it to survive now, Thatcher’s baneful legacy must finally be uprooted. Seeking to guide Britain’s threatened democracy between the twin hazards of Fascism and Communism, Macmillan — long MP for the mining town of Stockton, and the publisher of Keynes — observed, in 1936, that “Toryism has always been a form of paternal socialism”. The party of today cannot shy from this vision: better a protective father, stern in defence of his sacred duty, than Thatcher’s feckless mother, of whom Macmillan sadly observed in 1984 that “First the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go…’”

The roots of Britain’s precipitous decline lie in the chronic under-investment in scientific research, state capacity and basic living standards that Thatcher’s revolution brought in tow. The supposedly drab and dreary Britain of the postwar era was far more vigorous, creative and prosperous than the ruin we currently inhabit. Instead of shrinking the state, the state’s budgets have ballooned beneath the costs of PFI contracts and outsourcing to companies parasitic on the nation’s wealth, even as its capacity has withered to almost nothing.

This isn’t just a Tory failing. As the political theorists Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri observed in 2020, “even if the Labour Party had won the 2019 elections, it would have inherited a regulatory state apparatus that was both intensely bloated, in terms of sheer bureaucratic size and complexity, yet substantively weak, with the ostensible ‘levers of power’ in central government scarcely connected to hollowed-out front-line services. Moreover, this was a state that both main parties had a hand in creating, both under the Conservatives (1979–97, 2010–) and New Labour (1997–2010), reflecting their convergence around a neoliberal policy set.” The Thatcher revolution promised a path out of national decline, but the cure turned out far worse than the disease: the result is that my generation is poorer than my parents’, and my children will be poorer still.

Soon Britain will just be a gloomy Italy, halfway between museum and nursing home, with nothing to offer the young but emigration, helplessly buffeted by the storms ahead. For us to survive the coming trial, as dramatic and treacherous as the hard years of the Thirties, the ruling party must finally lay Thatcher’s spirit to rest, sealing her tomb beneath the foundations of a new era of security and, in time, prosperity which only a strong and capable state can nurture. The platforms Johnson’s aspiring successors have offered us so far are unfit for the pressures of today, let alone the trials of tomorrow. As the Conservative party proclaimed in 1947, “The world is topsy-turvy. Raw materials are scarce. Stormy weather must be foreseen. There must be a hand on the helm.” The era of the Thatchers, Blairs, Clintons and Merkels is already crumbling into dust: to lead us through a future whose first ripples are already causing crisis, the Tories must reclaim their strong, paternal role as the party of the state.

That’s not to say elitism wasn’t a problem back then. Working-class people, if they appeared at all in books, films or plays in the early fifties, were — as Listener magazine said in its review of Honey — “comic or loyal, or more frequently both”. But by 1958 that situation had slowly started to change. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, staged at London’s Royal Court in 1956, was the ripple that quickly turned into a “new wave” of stories about a restless generation of young working-class upstarts.

In the era of the post-war welfare state, journalists were also giving working-class life more attention. In 1957, Michael Young and Peter Wilmott published a study of life in the modern East End, Family and Kinship in East London. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, issued the same year, was based on his own working-class upbringing in Hunslet, Leeds. Both books became surprise bestsellers. Their authors were driven by a belief that working-class people possessed a rich culture, and by their concern that the communities from which that culture sprang were threatened by the well-meant intentions of post-war politicians — in particular the replacement of inner-city streets with out-of-town council estates.

But on the whole working-class people’s prospects were looking up. This was the era of a brand-new welfare state and near-full employment. Free secondary education meant Shelagh, who died exactly ten years ago, was the first person in her family to remain at school beyond the age of 14. In 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, claimed that the British people “had never had it so good”. There were more (though still very few) chances for working-class people to have their voices heard.

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A modicum of economic security and the political rhetoric of opportunity were the foundations on which Shelagh constructed her youthful dreams for a life different from her mother’s. She wanted fame and fortune — but failing that, she wanted and believed she could create a life focused on creative endeavour. She had no deference, no sense that the arts were not for the likes of her; the state told her she was worthy of education and investment.

Still, she was unsentimental about the welfare state, and even more so about the working-class community that Richard Hoggart lovingly described. Her debut focuses on Jo, a working-class teenager who lives in Salford with her single mother, Helen, and who becomes a single mother herself after a brief affair with a black sailor. As the pair barged onstage, carrying suitcases as they “flitted” from one rented room to another, they ripped through any romanticism about working-class life.

“What’s wrong with this place?” asks Helen ironically, as she and Jo survey their new home, a bare flat in a Manchester lodging house. She answers her own question: “Everything in it is falling apart, it’s true, and we’ve no heating — but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary. What more do you want?” In the fifties — a “selfish decade,” argued the Labour politician and architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan — “community” was too often a euphemism for overcrowded homes and enduring poverty.

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Shelagh knew that women in Salford were lucky if they got modern décor and good neighbours; that wasn’t, she suggested, enough. She was the first post-war playwright to suggest that women had minds and desires of their own: a radical proposal in the fifties. The anti-heroes of the so-called “kitchen sink” novels and plays that pre-dated Honey — Joe Lampton in John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957), or Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) — were all men.

Meanwhile, advertisers, educators, policymakers and psychologists told women that they were luckier than their mothers. Clad in New Look dresses, they could spend their lives making happy homes for their hard-working husbands and their healthy children — the citizens of Britain’s brave new future. But Honey showed that this life was beyond the means of thousands of women who, like Jo and Helen, continued to live in overcrowded slums.

Even more radically, Delaney suggested this was a life that women did not want. In Honey, Jo finds solace in her friendship with Geoff, a gay art student, who is keen to make a home for her and the baby. He voices the standard medical opinion of the time: “Motherhood is supposed to come natural to women.” Pregnancy was meant to render women docile, maternity to fulfil an innate femininity. But Jo rages against her fate. “My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it,” she says. “I’m an extraordinary person. There’s only one of me like there’s only one of you.”

More than a decade before the Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in Britain, Shelagh suggested that women were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. In the novels and plays written by male authors of the 1950s, women hold back ambitious young men. But in Honey, the male characters are keener on marriage and domesticity than Jo or Helen. The woman want love — but they want some freedom too. They know that the comforts men associate with domestic bliss are the result of women’s hard work. They refuse to be compliant; “we enjoy it!” Helen responds scornfully when Geoff tells her off for rowing with Jo. Resentment and anger at their shared dependency, the fallibility of their bodies, and their lack of choices are riven through their relationship; but from that shared experience also springs love.

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A Taste of Honey was championed by Joan Littlewood, who, with fellow communist Ewan MacColl, had established Theatre Workshop in Manchester in the 1930s. But Delaney’s assertion that working-class life wasn’t all affluence and happy housewives caused a furore. There was an attempt to suppress Honey before it was even staged. At a time when all plays were subject to censorship, Theatre Workshop was required to submit Delaney’s manuscript to the Lord Chamberlain for inspection. The official charged with reading it called the play “muck” and proposed banning it. “I think it’s revolting, quite apart from the homosexual bits,” he wrote. “To me it has no saving grace whatsoever. If we pass muck like this it does give our critics something to go on.”

“After some misgivings,” his office grudgingly passed Honey, but only “because it depicts such a sad collection of undesirables it will not do the public any harm.”

A Taste of Honey premiered at Theatre Workshop on 27 May 1958. Almost all the press dismissed the play as a flop, its content vulgar and its author untutored. The Spectator declared that Honey’s only redeeming feature was that “it is not scholarly anthropology observed from the outside through pince-nez, but the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal”. Most of the Right-wing press was more damning. “Once, authors wrote good plays set in drawing-rooms. Now, under the Welfare State, they write bad plays set in garrets,” sneered the Daily Mail. The depiction of women incensed many journalists. The Salford Reporter, in Delaney’s hometown, oscillated between denying the existence of single mothers and slums, and asserting that, even if they did exist, this “sordid tale of a prostitute’s daughter” certainly wasn’t suitable theatrical fare.

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But theatregoers from working-class Stratford did not agree. Builders, labourers and office workers told a BBC news crew that Honey was “about people like us, isn’t it? Real life”. And Shelagh’s appeal crossed class boundaries. Carol Dix and her friends were 13-year-old middle-class grammar schoolgirls in the Midlands when Honey was staged. They’d never have been allowed to see the play, but they were preoccupied with its author: “The women’s life-style we noticed, and wanted to copy, were bohemians like Sheelagh [sic] Delaney,’ they later recalled in a collective memoir.

Her youth and notoriety meant Shelagh regularly appeared in the press and on television throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. She liked to dress comfortably, attending interviews wearing, as the Daily Mail told its readers, fisherman’s sweaters and “paint spattered jeans” — very unlike the glamorous Hollywood icons of the cinema, or the lipsticked housewives of women’s magazines. This made her an icon for those girls who wanted more from the world than a wedding dress, but weren’t sure what, or how to get it. Some of them went on to create the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s.

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Meanwhile Honey became a box office hit, transferred to London’s West End in 1959, and enjoyed a Broadway run in 1960. It has been performed across the world ever since. In 2019, the play enjoyed a successful revival as a National Theatre touring production, sadly cut short by Covid. That the performances, including the premier in Salford, were sell-out shows that Honey still resonates today. We’re back in a world where government rhetoric is often at odds with the harsh reality of poverty, and women struggle to care for the vulnerable without proper material support.

But Honey speaks to a wider constituency than even the many who are directly affected by precarity. By placing women centre stage, it asserts both their commonality and diversity. Their commonality, because they are the sex that can reproduce — a fundamental fact that disrupts both Helen’s life and Jo’s, and which even today, in an era of freely available birth control and legal abortions, affects women on a daily basis. But as Shelagh shows, this doesn’t mean they can be reduced to their bodies, “cervix havers” or “chestfeeders”. They have diverse ambitions and dreams, the potential to do much more than the world often allows them by virtue of their sex.

Honey reminded us that those often considered marginal to political debate and artistic endeavour — working-class people, especially women and children — were the majority of the human race, and therefore worth listening to. “I write as people speak,” said Shelagh. Ten years after her death, allowing women to speak and to be heard is a struggle feminists are still waging.

When Parliament then refused to pass the deal the following spring, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser and ambassador to Paris, claimed that May’s last-ditch appeal to Brussels for more time was “perhaps the greatest humiliation for a British prime minister since the Suez crisis… When can a British Prime Minister have cut such a lamentable figure at an international meeting?” Good question.

While a few Brexiteers have also made the link (Boris Johnson once said that if May’s deal went through, it would be “the greatest national humiliation since Suez”), the parallel has mainly attracted Remainers. It’s not hard to see why. While some are old enough for it to have been the defining moment of their youth, for others, it is simply a sophisticated way to state their prejudice that Leavers ignorantly voted for some sort of splendid imperial isolation — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Robert Saunders.

That has not stopped the FT journalist Philip Stephens from arguing (in his recent book, Britain Alone) that “Brexit, like Suez, was an attempt to chart the future by reaching back into the halcyon days of history,” the triumph of “an appeal to nostalgia over reason”. And David Lammy, who has accused “hard Brexiteers” of:

“still mourning Suez, Britain’s last fling of the colonial dice. Back then, Anthony Eden failed to recognise that Britain was no longer capable of launching a solo imperial adventure. Let us not fall for the same hubris today.”

But contrary to this stereotype, the Suez Crisis was not a lonely, self-inflicted error brought on by nostalgia. The reality is more complex and far more interesting.

The Suez crisis began, perhaps, at the UN’s General Assembly of 1955, when the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, extolled “the immense benefit the British Empire had been and was” in a conversation at the UN with the British foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan. The two men were bemoaning the recent decision by Egypt’s Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to buy weapons off Russia, after balking at the conditions the United States would attach to such a sale. The Americans had supported Nasser’s coup, but as their client turned against them, Dulles asked Macmillan “if we had enough troops to reoccupy Egypt”. Macmillan thought Britain had.

Once, it would have seemed impertinent to ask such a question. But Britain had emerged from the war deeply in debt; since the sterling crisis six years earlier, the nation had been in dire financial straits, because of an unsustainable balance of payments. After the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Macmillan had privately compared the cabinet to the “directors of a rapidly deteriorating concern. They dare not tell the shareholders the facts”.

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A few months before Dulles and Macmillan spoke, Churchill — winged by a stroke in 1953 — had finally shuffled off into retirement. He was succeeded by his impatient understudy, Anthony Eden, who was also in no great shape: due to a bodged gastric operation, he was plagued by chronic pain. Macmillan’s report of Dulles’s sly enquiry as to whether Britain might intervene triggered a splenetic prime ministerial rant. “The big interest in the Middle East is ours, not America’s,” he said, annoyed by what he saw as the consequences of a cack-handed American intervention. “We are dependent on Middle East oil.”

The dependence was not just economic but financial: Eden was referring to the fact that the oil produced by Iraq and Kuwait was priced in sterling — a legacy of the fact that both countries, though never British colonies, had formed part of Britain’s informal empire. The Bank of England could always print currency to afford it, while sales to other countries provided a welcome boost to Britain’s holdings of foreign currency. The comparison of Suez and Brexit breaks down because in 1956 nostalgia played no part in British calculations. They were guided by fear of losing an ongoing advantage.

That fear had an important consequence. Based on another claim of Eden’s, that the “US has almost always been wrong about the Middle East”, the minutes of the meeting record an important decision: “We should not, therefore, allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support.” In mid-October, the British government made a crucial move. Without warning the Americans, it authorised military action to remove a Saudi force from a remote oasis, where it was preventing British oil exploration in Oman. The US had significant financial and strategic interests in Saudi Arabia, but the British found Dulles’s reaction, when he was belatedly told about the fait accompli, encouraging. He “did not like the news”, recalled one diplomat, “but he was not unpleasant about it.”

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The “Buraimi incident,” as this altercation was known, seemed so obscure as to be laughable at the time (it was the subject of a Goon Show sketch), but it set a precedent. Buoyed up by the ease with which they had routed the Saudis, the British now sought to press home their advantage by encouraging Saudi’s northern neighbour, Jordan, to join a regional military alliance with Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact. The heavy-handed British approach backfired and, barraged by incessant Egyptian radio propaganda, in March 1956 the king of Jordan sacked the British head of his armed forces, John Glubb, following rioting. Eden believed Nasser had engineered this coup. If Suez is a formative influence on today’s Remainers, then Eden had been scarred by Munich. Fearing the consequences of failure to deal with the Egyptian leader before he became too powerful, he told a close adviser: “It is him or us, don’t forget that”.

It was not just the British attitude to Nasser that was hardening: so was the United States’. In the spring of 1956, Dulles began talking of “ditching” Nasser; like FDR before him, and Donald Trump more recently, President Eisenhower was keen to swing his country’s support behind the Saudis, who had started to see the Egyptian’s republican ideas as a threat. The previous year the United States had promised to lend Nasser millions of dollars to enable him to build a new dam at Aswan. On 21 July, Dulles announced that the United States was pulling the loan. Nasser responded days later by announcing that he was nationalising the Suez Canal.

Eden felt his convictions about Nasser had been vindicated. The idea that he was alone in this — that Britain was isolated in its approach — is groundless. When news of Nasser’s move reached London, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Said, happened to be in Downing Street at a dinner and worried that Nasser would only be emboldened by the takeover. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit him hard and hit him now. … If he is left alone, he will finish all of us.” So worried was Nuri by the news of the canal’s takeover that he even suggested encouraging the Israelis to invade Egypt.

Since being forced out of Palestine by a Jewish insurgency eight years earlier, however, the British had only the most perfunctory relationship with Israel. It took an old rival, and old ally, of Britain to bring the crisis to a head. Not that anyone, in drawing parallels with Brexit, would admit that France had anything to do with Suez.

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Unlike the British, the French had a strong relationship with Israel, and a direct imperial interest, since Nasser was supporting the insurgency in French Algeria. They opened secret talks with the Israelis that autumn. In mid-October, French representatives presented their idea to Eden: Israel would invade Egypt, giving Britain and France grounds to go in and order both sides to retreat from the canal. Precisely because he was unwilling to go it alone, Eden leapt at the French proposal. To allay old Israeli suspicions of Britain, the secret protocol summarising the arrangement was signed by representatives of the three conspiring powers. Madcap plot it may have been, but Suez was never a solo British plan.

The Israelis invaded Sinai on 29 October. The following day Britain and France, as they had secretly agreed, issued ultimatums to both Israel and Egypt and landed troops in Port Said on 5 November. The collusion was not hard to see, and under immense international and — more importantly — financial market pressure, which threatened to drain Britain’s remaining reserves, the two European powers were soon forced to abandon their military operation. The truth is that Britain lacked the confidence in 1956 to act alone. But had she done so, she might well have got away with the deception: it was high-altitude photos of French jets on Israeli runways that alerted Washington to exactly what was going on.

A sense of vulnerability led Britain and France to lash out. Britain, which owed millions to Washington, looked towards its creditor. France, on the other hand, turned to Europe as a way to preserve her empire from American predation. These complexities — in particular the role of money — are lost in the comparison of Suez and Brexit. But then its chief purpose has not been honest, but to denigrate the intelligence of Leavers.

The demolition of Wrexham Police station, a distinctive and assertive 10-storey concrete tower dating from the mid-Seventies took place at 08:30am on Sunday 1 November. Online footage shows the building tumbling over as if swatted by a giant hand. The event will feature in next year’s season of Scrap Kings, a TV show in which “the nation’s kings and queens of destruction . . . bang, blow, smash and crunch their way around the UK.”

Let’s hope that together with local politicians everyone in the Welsh market town is happy when, after the crunching rubble is cleared, a new Lidl supermarket, a drive-through coffee shop and 151 car parking spaces emerge from the ashes.

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It's the end of the line for Britain's industrial heritage

By Jonathan Glancey

One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Although unlisted, the Wrexham Police headquarters was an interesting building. Designed by a team led by the Denbighshire County Architect Eric Langford Lewis and opened in 1975, it fitted into a canon of British civic buildings of its era labelled “Brutalist”, its offices spreading up and out from a central concrete pillar — the tower’s service core — to reach a height of 140ft. This was the tallest new building in Wrexham since the completion of the tower of St Giles, the town’s glorious Tudor parish church 500 years earlier. The police headquarters ought to have been fashionable by 2020, as such Seventies architecture can be, and converted, perhaps, into a hotel or workspaces and laboratories for hi-tech start-ups or whatever the collective local imagination might have in mind for Wrexham’s future.

A local petition hoped to protect the nine-acre building site from becoming the home of just another supermarket — Wrexham is brimful with them — but the prevailing official view was evidently Jenrickian. Will, though, the new Lidl supermarket be a better and more beautiful building than the smashed Seventies police headquarters?

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Aside from an unease about the lack of imagination shown in Wrexham, my wider concern here is with politicians and cultural commentators who find the architecture of the generation or two before them hard to understand, much less to like, and thus to protect and renovate for the future. Much the same is true, of course, of music, fashion, art and design.

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19^th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble.

When Jim Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, went to 10 Downing Street with fellow ‘Save the Euston Arch’ campaigners, “Macmillan listened, or I suppose he listened as he sat without moving and with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact he said nothing except that he would consider the matter.” With official apathy over the matter on the parts of the government, the London County Council and the British Transport Commission, Macmillan let the wrecking balls get to work.

What, though, could have been going through the Prime Minister’s mind? This, after all, was the same Harold Macmillan, who as a wounded young captain on the Somme waiting in a foxhole for rescue, read Aeschylus in Greek for comfort. Why the tragic gap between Aeschylus and the Greek Revival Euston Arch? Because, I think, Macmillan and those of his generation, especially following the destruction caused by two world wars, wanted to escape at least part of their Edwardian and, at root, Victorian hinterland.

It was Macmillan’s Conservative government that championed motorways, high-rise mass housing and tall commercial buildings on the London skyline alongside the destruction of unfashionable 19^th century architecture.

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It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

St Pancras station and that great Victorian dragon of a building, the Midland Grand Hotel that fronts it, only just escaped demolition after determined battles by conservationists resolute after their failure to protect the Euston Arch. However, even John Summerson, the distinguished architectural historian, refused to support St Pancras. Why? Because, I think, St Pancras was a reminder of what, in spirit, had been a coal-fired Victorian childhood. The old order needed to change yielding place to the crisp, rational, white and new.

While John Summerson was making his mark, at the same time as John Betjeman who helped lead the fight for the Euston Arch and St Pancras, Harold Clunn wrote The Face of London (1932) in which the author praised the ambitious new commercial architecture of the capital. As for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s early 18^th century Baroque church of St Mary Woolnoth this was little short of a modern scandal. How could such a building out of keeping with the style and scale of modern streets be allowed to occupy a City of London site worth a million pounds and ripe for redevelopment?

If, as Robert Jenrick argues, new buildings will have to comply with design codes “so that local people this time around can decide what they want these buildings to look like which are so central to their lives”, there will be no contemporary equivalent of daring Hawksmoor churches, much less soaring Gothic cathedrals nor, of course, police station’s like Wrexham’s.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

I wonder what if Wrexham had followed Preston’s path, realising that architectural fashions change but tend to return to favour. In the meantime, we should think much harder than politicians seem to have been able or willing to do in recent decades and not so much to demolish what we don’t like at one particular moment, but to build more intelligently and caringly than we tend to do in the first place.

The current Tory leadership contest is sheer agony – especially for those of us able to call to mind the calibre of some of those who have steered the party and the country in times gone by. There’s one man, in particular, whose influence on Britain and the wider word was – and continues to be – immense. And yet his name isn’t lauded like say, Churchill or de Gaulle. History seems rather to have written him off. But without him, our lives might have been very different. I’m thinking of Harold Macmillan.

Let’s begin with his more trivial achievements – well, relatively trivial. In 1956, Macmillan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was looking for ways to dampen down inflation by cutting consumption. In that year’s budget, he introduced a government-backed savings vehicle which paid out no interest but instead offered investors the chance to win a tax-free prize every month. Sixty or so years later, over 20 million people in the UK own well in excess of £30 billion worth of Premium Bonds.

A fair few of those people will also live in a house originally built in the years following the war. Some of those buildings, of course, went up during the pioneering Labour government that led Britain between 1945 and 1951. But even more of them were constructed under the Conservative government that followed it – and which ran the country for 13 years until 1964.

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Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

That government’s first Minister of Housing – the man to whom many believed Churchill had given a poisoned chalice by asking him to achieve the seemingly impossible target of 300,000 properties a year – was (yes, you’ve guessed it) Harold Macmillan. Via some judicious deregulation, he not only helped the construction sector reach the target but helped it do so far earlier than expected.

Before that success, many of his colleagues had written Macmillan off, regarding him, indeed, as something of a political oddity and a personal failure (his impressive military record in WWI and diplomatic role in WWII notwithstanding).

Westminster’s worst kept secret was that his wife had been conducting an affair with his Conservative colleague, Bob Boothby, since the 1930s. And during that decade, Macmillan himself had earned a reputation as a disturbingly unconventional thinker on economic and social policy, writing volumes such as The State and Industry (1932), Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Unity (1933), The Next Five Years (1935), and, perhaps most famously, The Middle Way (1938). All of them championed the idea that governments should take greater responsibility for the economy as well as, more generally, the welfare of the population as a whole.

Meanwhile, Macmillan’s family business, in which he played an active role, was publishing John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory – probably the most influential book on economics of the 20th century. It is credited with helping to convince post-war policy makers that, via the management of demand by fiscal and monetary means, they could prevent a return to the unemployment which blighted Britain (and other countries) in the thirties.

It became increasingly clear after 1945, that the Conservative Party was going to have to reconcile itself to the public’s demand for a more activist state – one that would provide both economic growth and increased social security. And so Macmillan’s long-held beliefs looked rather more prescient. So, too, did his opposition to appeasement, which, along with that of Churchill, Eden and others, later helped to avert the charge that the entire Conservative Party had effectively given Hitler what he wanted.

As a result, and given his successful ministerial record under Churchill, it came as no surprise that, in April 1955, Eden having finally managed to winkle the grand old man out of Number 10, Macmillan was named Foreign Secretary. Later that year, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Macmillan’s elevation to the Premiership just over a year later in January 1957, however, did come as something of a shock to those not in the know. It had a great deal to do with an event that is often quoted nowadays (in the same breath as Brexit) as one of the most disastrous and humiliating episodes for a British government in recent memory – the 1956 Suez crisis.

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How do you solve a problem like Theresa?

By Polly Mackenzie

It might be going too far to assert that, without Macmillan, Eden would never have gone with the idea that Israel should invade Egypt in order to provide a pretext for Britain and France to snatch back the Suez Canal. But Macmillan’s enthusiasm for the plan, and his misplaced confidence that US President Dwight Eisenhower (whom he had got to know well during the war) would tolerate the operation, certainly did nothing to dissuade his colleagues from going ahead with it.

It is undoubtedly true, though, that it was Macmillan’s rapid realisation that the otherwise relatively successful intervention would have to be called off, not least in order to prevent a diplomatic disaster turning into economic chaos, which convinced those same colleagues to stop it in its tracks.

It was also Macmillan who, unlike, his rival Rab Butler, was able to convince his furious fellow Conservative MPs that the government could recover from the affair – one of the main reasons the party turned to him rather than Butler when Eden resigned.

Supermac – as he came to be dubbed – turned out to be right. Not only did he manage to repair relations with the US, later striking up a friendship with the much younger Jack Kennedy, but at the 1959 election – one unusual for being fought in the autumn rather than the spring or summer – he increased the Conservative Party’s overall majority to over 100.

This he did by persuading voters (who he famously said “had never had it so good”) that it was the architect and guarantor of their burgeoning consumer affluence, establishing the template later used to similarly devastating electoral effect by Margaret Thatcher in the loadsamoney 1980s. But he also did it by refusing to countenance the public spending constraints demanded by his supposedly proto-Thatcherite Treasury team, whose resulting resignation in January 1958, Macmillan, with his characteristic ‘unflappability’, dismissed as “a little local difficulty”.

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Why we all need a share in capitalism

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In hindsight, this may have been unwise – though not nearly as unwise as his fateful decision in 1960 to commission Dr Beeching to write his report which resulted in the closure of a third of Britain’s rail network, cutting off hundreds of towns and villages from one of the most environmentally-friendly (if costly) forms of transport.

But it was surely in defence and foreign affairs that Macmillan made his biggest and most lasting contribution. He played a role in Cold War efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons but also secured the Polaris weapons system for the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. He effectively admitted that Britain’s imperial game was up and then set a course firmly for decolonisation with his ‘Winds of change’ speech in February 1960.

And, of course, after trying to establish the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as a counter to the EEC, Macmillan swiftly came to the realisation that the UK had no alternative but to join the bigger bloc, initiating its first of three eventually successful accession applications to what is now the EU.

Whether that 40-plus years of membership is about to end – and end in tears – who knows? What we do know, however, is that without Harold Macmillan, Britain and the world might well have looked very different.

Today, though, the New York Times would probably be only too happy to oblige Tweed.

The ‘Gray Lady‘ is looking rather yellow, having dismissed the two in-house cartoonists – Patrick Chapatte and Heng Kim Song – from its international edition, and announcing that it will no longer be publishing editorial cartoons. None. This brings the International New York Times into line with the domestic edition, which already eschews the art form. Tweed would have approved.

It was the result of a dust-up in April over a syndicated cartoon by Portugal’s Antonio Moreira Antunes, showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Donald Trump’s guide dog. The cartoon was deemed anti-Semitic in some circles, even likened to Nazi-era propaganda, although many cartoonists thought such assertions were exaggerated.

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How moral is mockery?

By Giles Fraser

If the cartoon was undeniably problematic, the reaction was uberkill. First, the New York Times apologised, disciplined the INYT editor who had selected it, and ceased doing business with the syndicate which had distributed it. It also published a column by Bret Stephens excoriating the paper while also charging it with a history of antagonism towards Israel.

I can’t speak for Israel, but the New York Times has definitely never been a friend to editorial cartoonists. It hasn’t employed one since Harold MacMillan was PM.

It did until a few years ago, publish a weekly cartoon roundup, but mostly shied away from the edgy stuff. Yes, they sometimes ran mine in that roundup, and I was proud and excited about that large and educated audience when they did. But then, over the howling objections of longtime readers and against the advice of Clark Hoyt, the then-Public Editor (the ombudsman who makes sure journalistic ethics are upheld), they dropped the feature altogether. No explanation was offered, but the decision coincided with a general softening of their Week in Review section.

They might as well have re-christened it ‘Weak in Review’ – you’re as likely to find lifestyle essays about sharing housework within marriage or the etiquette of texting as a serious analysis of, say, the long-term wisdom of leaving the European Union, or the impending climate crisis leading to mass extinctions.

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What's so blasphemous about free speech?

By Helen Dale

Several factors make this all exceedingly galling. First, as print journalism has struggled over the last decade or two, few US newspapers have felt they had the resources to keep a staff cartoonist. The ranks of full-time practitioners of this venerable art form dwindled from 300 or so in the Seventies to around 100 in 2000 to only a couple of dozen now. So many editors have never even encountered one of our endangered species, let alone worked alongside one of us or been schooled in how to handle the inevitable blowback from our admittedly provocative work. It’s the same at the NYT – even though it has the resources for us. Way to have our backs, paper of record!

The real kicker is that the paper actually won the Pulitzer prize last year for editorial cartoons. This naturally raised a lot of eyebrows. The NYT submitted a long-form series in something approaching a graphic novel format about Syrian refugees settling in the US. It was a collaborative work by writer Jake Halpern and illustrator Michael Sloan.

It didn’t really fit the editorial cartoon category, but was nevertheless a terrific and compelling piece of journalism. Most of us hoped that the award might reawaken the paper to the possibilities of editorial cartoons. It was not to be. And yet, in the midst of his explanation of the Chappatte and Heng firings, the paper’s opinion editor James Bennet, couldn’t resist crowing about the prize.

Our statement in response to ending daily political cartoons in the international edition of The New York Times. pic.twitter.com/FcagTxEZJ9

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 10, 2019

The New York Times’s institutional objection to the art form has long been a mystery to cartoonists. Could it be that they ultimately fear editorial cartoons? Editors have certainly always been nervous about the capacity of cartoons to instigate controversy.

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Why Titania is perfect for our times

By Douglas Murray

Most of us remember the 2005 Danish cartoon fiasco, when the Jyllands-Posten paid a nominal sum for, and then published a dozen caricatures of the prophet Muhammed, sparking riots in the Muslim world and a fatwah against the poor freelancers who had taken the bait. Then there was 2015’s bloody massacre at the irreverent French satirical publication, Charlie Hebdo, where 11 journalists were murdered. That’s enough to give any editor pause. It’s also true, as Chappatte posted after his dismissal, that:

“We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow.”

But the paper prints plenty of fearless journalism, even in spite of moralistic mobs. Could it be then that our crude scribbles lack the gravitas and nuance of the written word? Is our – admittedly sometimes juvenile – humour beneath them? Or are our leaps of logic and shorthand twists of the knife an affront to the cautious, equivocating approach of corporate managers and editorial page guardians?

Whatever their reasoning, it’s a damn shame about the “damn pictures”. A historic cornerstone of print journalism is dying, casting for a lifeline, and all the paper of record can do is throw it a pair of leaden boots.