In her valedictory piece for the New Statesman, former deputy editor Helen Lewis mentions David Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015, the Corbyn takeover of the Labour Party, the result of the Brexit referendum, the rise of Donald Trump, and the shock outcome of the 2017 UK general election.

Why did the punditocracy not see any of that coming? Why did they leave us so fundamentally unprepared?

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It’s not their failure to prophesy events with unerring accuracy that’s at issue here, because that’s not their job. What is their job, however, is to investigate and report upon the world in its true and fundamentally unpredictable complexity, which might at least prime the rest of us to expect the unexpected. It might also leave behind a thicker trail of useful evidence, by which I mean reportage that asks the relevant questions before, not after, each shock event.

Sadly, the mainstream media has a habit of missing early warning signs, indeed of deliberately ignoring anything that doesn’t fit with standard narratives. Lewis puts the blame for this on what she calls the “teleological view of politics”:

“Historians warn about ‘the teleological view of history’ – assuming a fixed endpoint and then telling the story as if it was always heading for that end point. Something similar has happened, over and over again, in political journalism.”

I’d offer a slightly different interpretation. Teleology suggests a deeply ideological view of the nature and destiny of the world – of the kind that might be held by a Marxist or millenarian sect. Nothing so grand enters the mind of the bog standard political hack. As journalists, what they and their editors care about is the story – an account of what’s going on that’s compelling enough to get clicks, sell newspapers, hold the viewers’ attention.

There’s little room for doubt, nuance and complication if it gets in the way of the plot. And yet, unlike a truly teleological worldview, there’s no enduring commitment. As soon as a story doesn’t serve its purpose anymore,  the script is rewritten, sub-plots brought to the fore, new characters introduced. It’s therefore storification, not teleology, that drives contemporary journalism.

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Still, either way, the outcome is the same: a hopelessly simplistic version of events leaves the news-consuming public worse off than if they hadn’t bothered with the news at all.

The solution is the same either way too, which Lewis gets spot on:

“Ask questions even if they seem odd or niche. Pin down politicians on under-considered scenarios. We must try to tune out what everyone else is obsessed with, and ask ourselves: what could happen that no one is talking about?”

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It’s not often that a journalist of Lewis’s prominence and calibre offers such a deep and penetrating critique of her own profession. However, I do have some quibbles with it.

The first is over the nature of what the media fails to do when it assumes that something won’t happen. For Lewis, it is a failure to analyse the consequences of an unexpected outcome – the Brexit referendum, for instance:

“In the course of the campaign, I can remember hardly any consideration being given to what form Brexit would take: there was no appetite for discussions of the merits of ‘Norway plus’ against a Canada-style trade deal. Leaving the EU was deemed unlikely to happen, and therefore not sufficiently interrogated. That has had enormous repercussions ever since.”

This is to overplay what such an interrogation would have achieved. The precise form that Brexit might take was always contingent on the subsequent negotiation with the EU and so any insight the journalists could have given us would have required them to get some useful information out of Brussels too – and that was never going to happen.

In any case, the form of Brexit is somewhat irrelevant given a Parliament that has voted down every option put before it. Perhaps the media should have done more to interrogate the Remain politicians who assured us the result of the referendum would be respected and there wouldn’t be a second vote.

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The unlikely rise of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, is cited by Lewis as another example of the media’s failure to ask the right questions at the right time:

“There aren’t many things that Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn have in common, but here is one. Both were treated as joke candidates at the start of their campaigns. And joke candidates don’t face the same level of scrutiny as front-runners – which is a problem when they turn out to be serious contenders.”

Sure enough, there weren’t many pundits who gave Trump and Corbyn any chance at the outset of their respective party contests. However, they both went on to fight general elections in which they received a relentless media battering. It’s difficult to see what more could have been done to alert the public. In any case, both men have been in the public eye for decades and neither has made much attempt to hide their eccentricities.

In short, it cannot have escaped the public’s attention that the liberal establishment did not want them to vote for Trump, Corbyn or Brexit. And yet a game-changing number of them did.

If one were to apply Occam’s razor to these strange events, one might conclude that the real problem isn’t one of the elites not having their voice heard, but large numbers of people hearing it loud and clear and deliberately voting the other way.

Of course, it would have been good had the media taken these outcomes seriously enough to ask timely questions about the consequences, but there’s no evidence this would have changed the course of events.

Indeed, the most important question that went unasked is why so many people were so determined to vote against the established order come what may – a question about the causes not the consequences of a political earthquake.

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Helen Lewis is a centre-Left progressive and thus, unsurprisingly, situates the failings of political journalism within a context of backwardness and privilege. The UK-specific setting of the Houses of Parliament, and the wider ‘Westminster bubble’ gives her plenty to work with.

She says the place is full of “Confident Posh Men” who thrive in its Olde Worlde environment:

“The Commons is extremely formal, insisting on men wearing ties in the chamber, and is an intimidating place to work. Stella Creasy, the Labour MP, calls it ‘Hogwarts’. The strange quirks – prayer cards, Pugin carpets, tearooms serving spotted dick – are less disorienting if you already attended a public school.”

To help conjure up the fusty atmosphere she also mentions that the Palace of Westminster is “full of mice”.

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None of this is wrong. There are a lot of confident posh men (and women) in Westminster. According to the recent report from the Sutton Trust, only 7% of the population had a private education as opposed to 29% of MPs and 43% of the news media (and 44% of newspaper columnists). Figures aren’t available for Westminster’s mice, but they don’t lack confidence either. I’ve never seen such brazen rodents in all my days.

But while Lewis’s description of Westminster life is true, it’s not the whole truth. To see the other side of the 21st-century establishment you need to walk to the north end of the Palace, where you’ll find a tunnel that takes you beneath Bridge Street and up, via an escalator, into the ultra-modern surroundings of Portcullis House, which opened in 2001.

Portcullis House (or ‘PCH’ as the insiders call it) is part of the Parliamentary estate and arguably where the real business of politics is done. Its various offices and facilities are built around the bright and airy space of the main atrium. There are restaurants, a coffee bar and trees stretching up to a beautifully engineered glass canopy. And it’s full of people babbling away non-stop, quite unlike the hushed and gloomy corridors of the Palace.

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At first sight, the new building may seem to embody the principles of open access and transparency. Don’t be fooled, though. The public are allowed up to the first floor committee rooms, but the rest of PCH is closed off behind electronically controlled doors. That includes the atrium, which for all its village square hustle-and-bustle is the exclusive preserve of passholders and their guests. MPs, journalists and lobbyists sit around in relaxed conversation, but they do so from a position of privilege.

They’re certainly not all men – and even those who are tend not to wear ties. Yet, despite their superficial diversity, those who staff the party HQs, ministerial offices, think tanks, public affairs companies and media operations of Westminster are remarkably alike. These days, they’re dominated by the millennial generation and look the same, dress the same, sound the same. Most will come from middle or upper middle class homes. And if they didn’t go a private school, it will have been a ‘good’ state school followed by a Russell Group university (in many cases Oxford or Cambridge). With a few exceptions, their politics will be some shade of liberal.

Though they’d recoil at the description, they are the establishment now – or at least what the establishment is becoming. And make no mistake, political journalism is absolutely part of it – a cultural elite whose values and actions have an outsize influence on public life.

A prime example is what happened to Sir Roger Scruton earlier this year, when he was interviewed by the New Statesman (as it happens). I don’t intend to disinter the controversy, but it does serve as an illustration of the strength of the new establishment against the old. All it took to force Scruton from his position as chair of a government commission was one journalist (not Helen Lewis), a few decontextualised quotes, and the internet. His long and distinguished career as one of our foremost philosophers counted for nothing, nor did his history of helping dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. A few hours of heat on social media and he disappeared in a puff of woke.

That’s what I call power.

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Lewis does recognise the ancient and modern sides of the media establishment when she observes that “political journalists are stuck in the Commons and on Twitter – real world and digital versions of Versailles”.

She goes on to argue that in attempting to represent the voices of “real people” they present a distorted view of the nation:

“…who gets depicted as the authentic voice of unheard Britain is governed by implicit assumptions that are grim when exposed to the light. Why are the views of a retired steelworker in Grimsby about ‘where the country has gone wrong’ more important than those of a second-generation Nigerian-British nurse in Plaistow?”

Obviously, both are important. But if the views of the Nigerian-British nurse are being ignored, it’s not because the retired steelworker is receiving blanket coverage in the papers. It’s because the voices and faces seen and heard in the media are overwhelmingly those of the educated, privileged and fashionable.

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Lewis argues that there’s been an overemphasis on the populist surge in flyover communities, and not enough attention paid to the younger, university educated, urban voters responsible for the recent wave of support for Green parties across Europe. These are “real people” too, Lewis correctly reminds us.

But they are not being ignored. As the cultural ‘in-group’, they have never been ignored – not by politicians, advertisers, businesses, recruiters or the media: everyone wants to keep up to speed with the trend-setting knowledge class. One only has to look at the extensive coverage of events like Glastonbury, the People’s Vote marches and the Extinction Rebellion protests to see that the people who make up our media and political establishments are especially interested in people like themselves.

It’s always the people unlike ourselves that we need to make a special effort to keep in focus.

After all, it’s what you don’t keep an eye on that’s most likely to surprise you.

Two examples are commonly cited to illustrate Johnson’s doomed romance with grands projets: the Emirates cable car and the aborted Garden Bridge across the Thames, both initiated when he was Mayor of London.

The cable car has indeed proved a largely unnecessary and expensive addition to the capital’s transport system (though it was, miraculously, completed in time for the 2012 Olympics).

How far the Garden Bridge can be classed as a BoJo folly is more questionable. It was the brainchild of Joanna Lumley, the actor and celebrity whose considerable powers of persuasion also convinced a hard-hearted government to allow several thousand former Gurkha soldiers and their families to resettle in the UK – an expensive undertaking that has not always ended well. 

Of course, a wiser mayor than Boris might not have been seduced. But it is worth remembering that there was a time when the idea of an eco-friendly bridge wreathed in greenery was well received by Londoners – before the restricted access and the size of the future maintenance bill hit home.

And anyway, to describe either the cable car or the unbuilt Garden Bridge as a grand projet is quite wrong. They were at best minor vanity projects for an attention-seeking mayor. 

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A grand projet is very different in its scale and ambition. It requires imagination, even vision – and yes, a wad of taxpayers’ money. But also a sense of both elevated purpose and the value of something that inspires.

The list of Mitterrand’s legacy includes the Pyramid at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Opera-Bastille, the Grande Arche de la Defense, and the National (now Mitterrand) Library. The last, especially, has its critics – it ran late and vastly over-budget and used to be hard to reach, but it now takes its proud place in the Paris landscape. 

In general, though, the finished products offer something impressive to show for the time and money expended – something that might hark back, in a way, to the great civic building projects of the past, or to the era of the great international exhibitions. The political will behind them also gives them the great advantage that they are seen through to completion, not abandoned half-way. 

In fact, while much British scorn is reserved for other people’s grandiose schemes, it is not true that “we” can’t do them. How would you classify London’s Docklands, or the regeneration of Liverpool? Or the “new” universities of the 1960s and 1970s? Or Tate Modern, or the London 2012 Olympics?

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This last was a grand endeavour that – eventually and despite much national pessimism – won huge public support and left a legacy now revitalising a once-depressed area of east London. Political will, space for imagination (that opening ceremony) and the focus forced by a deadline all contributed to its success. It bust the original budget, yes – but, how many would now say that it was not worth it, to have a nation feel better about itself? 

In fact, far from dismissing grands projets, the UK would do well to consider a lot more of them. And not just them, but grands travaux – the more utilitarian, but no less inspiring, infrastructure projects at which the French in particular excel: the high-speed train network; the motorways, the Alpine tunnels, the bridges.

It is worth mentioning that two of these were the result of UK-French collaboration: the spectacular and supremely elegant motorway bridge across the Tarn at Millau (completed ahead of schedule in 2004), and the Channel Tunnel, which speeds more than 10 million people and 1.5 million lorries between the UK and France every year. Announced by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand in 1984, the Eurostar was whisking its first passengers under La Manche 10 years later in a feat of engineering completed on time and rarely even remarked upon today. 

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Which is a good point to return to Boris Johnson and the potential there might be for whoever becomes the next Prime Minister to embark on some serious 21^st century nation-building in the form of major new national infrastructure projects. 

Johnson himself is reported to have broached the possibility of the Channel Tunnel being supplemented by a bridge during a Franco-British summit last year, only to be slapped down by the famously unimaginative Theresa May. Yet a bridge providing a road link was part of the original Channel Tunnel discussion. It is technically feasible; it would help loosen the pinch-points at either end of the Tunnel and send a forceful message about how the UK might be “leaving the EU, but not leaving Europe”, as the politicians like to say. It could also appeal to the French President, Emmanuel Macron – himself no slouch in the ideas department. 

Johnson also highlighted the possibility of another bridge during the hustings this week in Belfast. There has been talk of a fixed link between Scotland and Northern Ireland for a while, with varying assessments of its feasibility. But what better way to send a message about the next Government’s determination both to preserve the Union and to look beyond the south-east than to initiate such a project?

Back to the south-east, and “Boris Island” airport is another Johnson project whose time may yet come. The new runway at Heathrow may now have parliamentary approval, but there are more consultations and more hurdles – especially ecological – to jump. With concern about climate change rising rapidly up the political agenda, and air and noise pollution increasingly recognised as harmful to health and quality of life, the marshes and birds of the Thames estuary may yet be sacrificed.

Another eco-friendly idea – also Johnson’s, as it happens – was to put the capital’s haphazard and congestion-prone North and South circular roads underground – as their equivalents mostly are in, say, Brussels and Paris. The idea was warmly received by local residents where plans were mooted, with the land freed above earmarked for housing and recreational space. But nothing came of it. Too difficult, too disruptive – and by then there was a new mayor. 

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Contrast the travails of Crossrail, designed to ease journeys into and across London – now running way over budget and more than two years (if we are lucky) over time. And then there’s the controversial north-south high-speed railway, HS2, which may never be built. The difficulties have been not only with the planning and implementation, but with the “selling”.

Where is the vision of what a more direct, faster, north-south railway could provide? Why was the chance to transform travel around the north of England, or the currently parlous east-west routes, not highlighted? Why has it all been so London-centric?

And why has no one picked up on the opportunity, since the Houses of Parliament need to be vacated for refurbishment, to look seriously at the possibilities of a new building – or even a capital – elsewhere? Or even an imaginative temporary structure, such as the Serpentine Gallery manages to construct on a small scale every year? Current plans are for an extraordinarily expensive adaptation of an existing building on Whitehall. Where is the imagination? 

It is beyond time for the UK to drop its supercilious and defeatist attitude to grands projets, and recognise that they can have multiple benefits.

At best, they can inspire, they can add aesthetic and cultural value, they can improve public facilities on a scale that is beyond the capacity of many local authorities. With political will behind them, they do come to fruition.

The next Prime Minister and his government should take a lead, but also invite ideas from around the country. They might be surprised at the vision and practical ambition that is out there, just waiting to be freed.

Though many democracies around the world have adopted elements of the Westminster system, there’s been little enthusiasm for one of its most prominent features – the House of Lords.

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The ‘Upper House’ of the British Parliament is an anomaly – the product not so much of a long and illustrious history, but of a series of half-finished reforms. It is a botch-job and everyone knows it.

This doesn’t appear to be a problem for other countries. Almost without exception, the mature democracies of the world manage perfectly well with either an elected or no second chamber – and yet the British balk at both options.

We may not love the House of Lords, but we’ve had it for so long that its abolition would feel like an amputation. As for the other option, the creation of hundreds more elected, paid politicians would not be welcomed by a country heartily sick of politics.

The underlying failure on the part of House of Lords reformers is that they don’t have a credible answer to a basic question: What would be the point?

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To find a way forward, it is sometimes necessary to look backwards. For most of its history, the purpose of the House of Lords was to represent the nobility – not out of any sense of democratic legitimacy, of course, but because they were powerful. From the point of view of the king and the country, it was preferable to have the barons throwing their weight around in Parliament than on the battlefield.

Perhaps, this should also be the purpose of the House of Lords today. Instead of a glorified quango of the great and the good (or at least people a party leader owed a favour to), the Upper Chamber should be used to formally recognise and safely channel the true powers in the land.

In theory, it is democracy that legitimates authority and confers it upon the elected representatives of the people. In practice, politicians are subject to the influence of lobbyists – the unelected representatives of money and power. So here, offered not entirely without irony, is a modest proposal: let us turn the House of Lords into a House of Lobbyists.

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The reformed House would operate on the basis of proportional representation – i.e. the seats allocated to each corporation would be proportional to the amount of tax it paid to the British state. The most efficient tax avoiders – and I’m especially thinking of you here, tech giants – would therefore pay a very direct political price. If a corporation or industry wanted more seats in the chamber, they’d have to pay more tax. In short, no representation without taxation – and you can’t say fairer than that.

(By the way, while the biggest companies would have one or more seats to their name, smaller enterprises would be allowed to secure seals through their chosen umbrella bodies.)

The allocation of seats would also take into account state aid: various subsidies, grants etc from the state being subtracted from the taxes paid by the recipients to the state. This might require some industries to suffer negative representation – i.e. the appointment of members of the new House to act against their interests.

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Every few years, the allocations would be recalculated – with membership of the chamber shifting over time to reflect the changing fortunes of the business world. If, however, a business went bankrupt between recalculations then there would have to be a by-election. Well, more of an auction really: the seat being sold off to the highest bidder.

For every seat allocated to it, a corporation would be entitled to ennoble a lobbyist of its choice – whose title would have to reveal his or her allegiance. Imagine, if you will, an entirely notional scenario in which Barry Scott of TV advertising fame were elevated to the peerage. He would sit in the House of Lobbyists as Lord Scott of Cillit Bang or, perhaps, as Lord Reckitt Benckiser Plc. Thus, if his lordship were to speak in, say, a debate on, say, the regulation of household cleaning products, his interest in the matter would be clear to all concerned. This would be a much more transparent system than the actual House of Lords, where one has to keep track of non-executive directorships and various other interests to understand where lordly loyalties currently lie.

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The reformed upper chamber would have no more powers than the existing of Lords – except one: only members of the House of Lobbyists would be allowed to lobby elected politicians and civil servants. Lobbying by a non-member would be a criminal offence. Naturally, members would be allowed a limited number of ‘parliamentary aides’ to assist them in their lobbying duties, but these would be registered and, of course, paid for by the corporations they represent.

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As for meetings between ennobled lobbyists and ministers / senior officials, these would be registered as being either open-door or closed-door. All open-door meetings would be streamed on the internet and a transcript published in Hansard. Closed-door meetings on the other hand would be entirely private; however, the ministers and officials participating in them would be forbidden from subsequently taking a job with the organisations represented on the other side of the table.

As with the by-elections mentioned above, time for meetings in ministerial diaries would be auctioned-off – a much fairer and above board way of allocating this precious resource. The proceeds would, of course, go to straight to the public purse, more than recouping the cost of the complementary tea and biscuits. An officially sanctioned system of ‘cash for questions’ would be another money spinner.

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By now you may be asking yourself whether I’m serious about any of this. The answer, of course, is not very.

The proposals I’ve outlined above would amount to a system of institutionalised influence-peddling at the very heart of our democracy. But how much worse would it be than what we’ve got now?

While Theresa May was swift to respond after the EU Referendum with her powerful first speech on the steps of Number 10, it was Jeremy Corbyn who seized the policy initiative in the General Election. The consensus in this rising tide of support for old-time socialism (which sounds fresh and new to those who’ve never experienced it and who don’t feel much like winners from the system in place right now), is that capitalism needs to adapt to survive and the Conservative Party needs to get an urgent grip. I don’t disagree.

However, in the long term, changing policies (or even party leader) won’t be enough. Because the underlying problem isn’t limited to any one political party – it’s the way we do politics that’s wrong.

As a former Leader of one House of Parliament (albeit the unelected House of Lords), I am particularly interested in the way we behave in Parliament when we legislate to bring about change, and the challenges of doing that in a polarised world. To me, it’s inconceivable that the 52% who voted to ‘take back control’ and the voters who tried to force radical change at this year’s General Election want both Houses of Parliament to carry on as if, to coin a phrase, nothing has changed.

We know that the arrogance of governments and the petulance of oppositions frustrates voters. Our failure to collaborate to get things done in their interest is probably the single biggest thing which unites all of them against all of us. It marks us out as different. Anybody with an ounce of common sense faced with a big problem will work with whoever they need to get it fixed. Why can’t politicians do the same?

And it’s not just a complaint you’ll hear in the UK. US politics has become so partisan that Trump’s recent collaboration with the Democrats on the Hill was big news. (Though given his campaign promise to shake things up, the media shouldn’t have been so surprised).

Whichever party or President the people vote for, once elected, voters expect governments to get on with the job. In this modern era of transparency and accountability, they want clarity from those seeking high office: this is why we want to govern, here’s what we’ll do, and when we’ll do it by.

The excuse for not providing such clarity is that ‘events’ might get in the way and that being so upfront with the voters about what is – and isn’t – possible could prove electorally unpopular. And yet the ongoing preference for political fudge is counter-productive. It hampers the construction of good policy, diminishes the quality of legislation, and reduces a government’s ability to ‘level’ with the voters and get through difficult but necessary measures.

As a result of this attitude, governments dodge the biggest challenges and people lose confidence in the political system and its ability to deliver change. If this isn’t a recipe for extremism I don’t know what is.

It would also help if the executive had more respect for the legislature – and saw it as an extension of its relationship with the electorate. All too often those in government see legislators as a hindrance to be endured or sidelined. Good governance – in politics just as in business – means having enough confidence in your own product to sell it well. It also means understanding the people you are seeking to persuade and listening to constructive challenge whether from your own side or the opposition.  If politicians can’t treat each other respectfully, why should voters believe that their views will be taken seriously?  A wise government should be accommodating of changes that improve its legislation.

And it works the other way too. If a party in opposition does nothing but block a democratically elected government for the sake of it (when the government is effective in making its case and is prepared to listen to reasonable argument), then the only side it appears to be on is its own.  There’s something in a changed approach for everyone, and it’s the sort of bold step that a government with a clear programme could take and an effective opposition would have no good reason to shy away from.

We must never forget that voters don’t hear much of what we say, but they notice what we do and the manner in which we do it. At election time, one of the reasons they don’t know who to believe is because of the way we behave. They are looking for recognisable human traits to help judge motive and, at the moment, we make it hard for them to find any. People like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn have attracted voters as much for their perceived difference in style as for the policies they advocate. President Trump’s short-lived communications chief, Anthony Scaramucci, clearly had to go after his expletive-ridden rant, but he was on to something when he identified a preference for ‘front-stabbing’ over the back-stabbing that is common on Capitol Hill.

Whether or not all MPs can change their ways (and I think they have little choice), it is necessary for unelected peers in the Upper House to think hard about how they need to change too.  The House of Lords is meant to be less partisan, not least because a quarter of its members are independent cross-bench peers. I would love to be able to say that MPs should take a leaf out of its book. But too often these days it displays the same vices as the Commons (without the virtues of being elected) and so undermines public confidence in performing its greatest strength: scrutinising contentious legislation in a thoughtful way. In our divided world we need more of that, not less, and can’t afford for the House of Lords to jeopardise what it’s most valued for.

The political class doesn’t like the results the voters keep delivering, but the voters aren’t the ones who need to change.  Yes, we need to identify their concerns correctly and come up with sound solutions.  But it’s not just what we do or promise that needs to change, it’s also the way we do it that needs to be different.  The political system needs to work better so voters can be sure it’s operating in their interests.  If we make it possible for them to judge us better, that will build confidence and makes challenging solutions easier to accept.  But if we don’t do all these things, we should not be surprised if voters turn away from the established system and keep looking for buttons marked ‘disrupt’ to press.

As Peter Hitchens (another gothic masterpiece) explains in First Things, the Palace isn’t that old – not even by American standards:

“…the Houses of Parliament, all pinnacles, leaded windows, Gothic courtyards and cloisters… look to the uninitiated as if they are a medieval survival. In fact they were completed in 1860, and are newer than the Capitol in Washington, D.C.”

But despite its relative youth, the building is in a dreadful state. As Members of Parliament return after the party conference season, they know that they have a difficult decision to make regarding the renovation of their workplace. It’s not just the multi-billion pound cost, but the prospect of having to relocate for several years.

You might think that Hitchens would lament the evacuation of this great symbol of Britishness, but no:

“My nastier, more vindictive side rather hopes that it will take so long to renovate the British Houses of Parliament, and the unmistakable clock tower of Big Ben, that MPs have to move out of the building for good, and are rehoused in a hideous modern shed in the suburbs. This may seem spiteful. It is spiteful. Even so, there is a good case for it.”

Hitchens loves the building but believes that Parliament as an institution is no longer “distinguished enough to occupy it”:

“I had hoped for a kingdom of the mind and found a squalid pantry in which greasy, unprincipled deals were made by people who were no better than they ought to be.”

Jeremy Cliffe of the Economist isn’t exactly on the same ideological wavelength as Peter Hitchens, but he too wants Parliament to quit Westminster (and London) for good:

“Draw a circle with a 60-mile radius centred on Charing Cross. Within that circle the vast majority of public spending is administered… That circle contains all the major banks, most of the major theatres, the media and arts worlds, the five best universities (according to the Times Higher Education rankings for 2017), the hubs of all the country’s major industries, 70% of the FTSE 100, most of Britain’s airport capacity. The divide between Britain inside the circle and Britain outside it concentrates too much power within too few city districts, centred on too few restaurants, bars and social circles. It poisons the country’s politics.”

The poison isn’t just political:

“…it weakens the country’s economy. Economists agree that one of the major reasons for Britian’s dismally low productivity is that it has too few big cities: London sucks investment and talent away from regional hubs that might one day develop into conurbations of its size.”

Cliffe’s solution is to move the UK’s capital (and therefore its Parliament) to the North of England – specifically, Manchester.

Bold thinking, but symbols still matter. The Palace of Westminster is one of the world’s greatest buildings in the world’s greatest city. And it does not stand alone, but within walking distance of other remarkable buildings from which our history breathes: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Treasury, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and, of course, Number 10 Downing Street.

To close the door on all of that would symbolise decline, a collapse of faith in our institutions, a civilisation in flight from its former greatness.

And yet both Hitchens and Cliffe make powerful points. Our institutions are in need of renewal. The fight for our future prosperity will be won or lost in the cities of the North.

So here’s what we do: Scotland and Wales already have devolved governments with responsibility for health and education, local economic growth, housing and infrastructure. The UK could rebalance its lopsided constitution if England had the same – together with an English Parliament. Those could be situated in the North (not in Manchester, but York – England’s second capital and a small and beautiful city with room to grow into a great city, free from the planning mistakes of the post-war era).

That would allow a smaller, more focused, UK Government and Parliament to reform itself back in London. With many fewer MPs, Peers, Ministers and Civil Servants, we could finance the regeneration of Westminster by selling-off surplus parts of the sprawling Parliamentary Estate (which extends well beyond the Palace) and by dispensing with various undistinguished government buildings.

When you’ve got a bloated establishment sitting on some of the most valuable land on the planet, it’s an opportunity, not a problem.