In a sense, that’s unsurprising. It may have been the brainchild of former prime minister Liz Truss, but the Conservative Political Action Conference is a fundamentally American import, and this week’s gathering in central London borrowed its presentation and language from MAGA and the US Christian Right. Thursday morning began with a prayer session led by Judd Saul, introduced over tannoy as “the founder of persecuted.com”, who bellowed at attendees still bleary-eyed from the previous night’s World Cup heartbreak that “the West has turned away from God.”

Subsequent speakers entered to booming beach-club music and flashing overhead lights. Former Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin started his speech by thanking Donald Trump and JD Vance “for calling out what is really happening in this country”. Jack Posobiec, an American Right-wing activist, claimed from the stage that “God has a plan for Donald Trump”, exhorting supporters to “restore God to the very core of Western civilization”. While “GB” might have been tacked on to the end, this was, in spirit if not in scale, CPAC for an American crowd. Attendees were as likely to have come from Palm Beach as Paddington, with US lobbyists enthusiastically discussing how they’d save Britain from destruction.

Amid it all was Truss herself who, having lost her seat at the general election two years ago, has reinvented herself as an American-style culture warrior, appearing at CPACs from Maryland to Texas. Yet whatever her own enthusiasms — she recently claimed Trump was “right about everything” — it’s safe to say that the former PM doesn’t command Don-level support. Among most Britons on the Right, she inspires not adulation but a kind of morbid curiosity, like a Victorian circus act which, in place of physical contortions, finds novel ways to blame the “deep state”.

At CPAC GB, Truss giddily addressed near-empty rooms in a hotel next to the O2 Arena, taking aim at the “socialists, Marxists, communists, whatever you want to call them, [who] want to destroy our country”. “It used to be honorable to love your country,” she continued. “Now it’s honorable to love illegal migrants.” Never quite shaking off her much-clipped 2014 “pork markets” speech, Truss still has a habit of shouting the wrong parts of her sentences and grinning at otherwise serious moments. After the “illegal migrants” quip, she took a moment to let the joke land, with the audience remaining largely uncooperative.

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That indifference is partly a function of how quickly politics now moves. Truss had already been replaced twice in Downing Street, and with a third new prime minister arriving on Monday, CPAC felt more and more like a sideshow, whatever her claims that Andy Burnham would be turfed out of office before 2029, another victim of “40 years of massive state failure”.

Of course, for 25 of those 40 failed years, including Truss’s 50-day tenure, the UK has been governed by the Conservative Party. This isn’t a chink in her argument but a central part of it. The party of which Truss is still a member has, she claimed, been “ideologically captured” by “DEI”. Other speakers agreed. According to CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp — the husband of the gloriously-named Mercedes Schlapp, a one-time Trump official who also spoke at the conference — the party “doesn’t deserve the label of ‘conservative’”. Given all this, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith appeared hopelessly out of place when he spoke about “post-Brexit regulatory reform”, his earnest suggestions mere filler before the juicy stuff on radical Leftist takeovers.

The Conservatives, then, had no place at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In fact, contempt for the Tories stretched almost as far as hatred of Keir Starmer, and warmer receptions were reserved for Reform UK politicians including Goodwin and Suella Braverman. Kemi Badenoch’s platform, in this telling, is part of the “uniparty”; Nigel Farage and crew are the insurgents who can reverse Britain’s decline. If there was one dominant theme of CPAC GB, it was the pitting of the Right against the liberal-progressive establishment.

This antagonism extended beyond the established political parties to the mainstream press. Truss described the BBC as “basically state-controlled media, churning out propaganda 24/7”. She called for a “parallel media” to battle the institutions, given that “a lot of the truth about what’s going on in Britain is suppressed.” Anyone liable to be brainwashed by Adolescence should instead “go on X” and “watch independent podcasts”. Truss suggested, cadging a phrase from the identitarian Left, that “they need to educate themselves.”

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In the event, her media enemies were largely absent. Reporters from national papers were in short supply, and the BBC nowhere to be seen. In their place was a new class of correspondent, the “citizen journalist” or “newsfluencer” — young, enterprising content creators on the political Right with names like BasednBougie. They stood a few feet apart from one another in a foyer outside the auditorium, armed with selfie sticks and mini tripod stands and portable lights, speaking into their phones as the remnants of a dying trade looked on. Young Bob, a rising online activist who turned 18 earlier this week, observed that the CPAC attendees “are quite old, and they’re the same old people who would consume anything the Right-wing gives.” He described himself not as an influencer but as “a random geezer on the internet”. The parallel media envisioned by Truss has already arrived.

Yet if CPAC GB is so in tune with this new information landscape, the question remained: where was everyone? In a conference room with roughly 500 seats, most sessions were well under half-full. Pricey tickets might have been a factor — the priciest ran at £10,000 —  giving proceedings the feel of a corporate function rather than a grassroots rally. Ditto the fact that the bulk of the conference took place during the working week. One attendee complained that it “felt more like an elitist Westminster networking event with flashing lights” and “very few ‘normal’ people”. A faultlessly polite American man in his twenties handed me a magazine whose cover piece was titled “Conspiracy for global control”. Other articles intriguingly pointed to the “Deep state behind the deep state” and “The conspiracy against God”.

There’s also the possibility that British conservatives are simply spoiled for choice on the jamboree front. CPAC is just one of a constellation of Right-leaning, acronymed conferences to emerge in Britain in recent years, from NatCon to PopCon to ARC — or, with its own blend of deafening entrance tracks and high camp, there’s always Reform’s annual party conference.

As the event progressed, Farage increasingly felt like the ghost of CPAC future. Each speaker, including ex-Cabinet ministers and former European presidents, felt small compared to him. Truss, too, seemed less stateswoman than compere, engaging foreign delegates in the intricacies of the Westminster swamp. As for attendees, they seemed bound by admiration for the man they universally called “Nigel”. He was booked to appear at 4:30 on Friday afternoon, almost exactly coinciding with the closure for nominations in next month’s Clacton by-election.

When the British Trump finally arrived, the auditorium, sparsely populated until that point, filled almost to capacity. Around two dozen Reform staffers patrolled the edges of the room, as mainstream journalists who’d studiously avoided covering the rest of Truss’s festival descended on Greenwich. An announcer welcomed the man who found himself on the wrong end of “a kangaroo court in Parliament” to a standing ovation several times the volume of anything Truss received.

Scrutiny over his finances has already produced a darker Nigel than the chirpy showman we’re used to; during a tense confrontation earlier this month, he accused Sky News of “harassing” his family, later posting online that its reporters were “liars”. Just as Truss did at CPAC, Farage has drawn a dividing line between the political establishment and pliant press on one side, and his own populist revolt on the other. Tensions have risen further following the killing of Reform spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe last week, with some CPAC speakers preparing for battle in response. “This,” Truss stated bluntly, “is a war”.

And, to an extent, Farage’s speech echoed the uncompromising tone that preceded him. Rather than a call for unity on the Right, or a broader celebration of conservative values, Farage delivered what could fairly be described as a Reform party political broadcast. “We are the dominant force on the Right of British politics,” he announced. “I don’t believe the last Conservative government can ever be forgiven.” More cheers from the crowd. Farage’s speech also came with a New World twang. Comparing his recent financial travails to the US President’s treatment by his political opponents, he claimed he had been “demonized” by the British establishment.

Yet where Truss and the visiting Americans had positioned the coming fight as rooted in Christianity and “Western values”, Farage’s focus was ultimately on Britain itself. He was angry that the UK was “a decade away from turning into a third-world country”, and insisted that “we are engaged in a battle for the very soul of our nation.” Burnham, for his part, was “utterly vacuous” — the “great chameleon of British politics”. Tonally, too, Farage was different. After two days of MAGA playacting, his speech was serious and statesmanlike. He set out a clearer vision of British conservative values than any of the America-brained attempts that came before, praising those “who actually believe in family, community and country, and decency and democracy and free speech, and putting the national interest first”. The rapturous response only drew greater contrast between his popularity and Truss’s.

When I emerged from the scrum which followed Farage’s speech, I saw representatives from the Conservative Party and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain in the crowd, as well as Ukip leader Nick Tenconi. The British Right had stayed away for most of CPAC GB, only to gather together for the leader whose celebrity has blocked out all other ideological challengers.

The foyer was almost deserted the next morning, the exhibition stalls for Christian charities and interventionist think tanks untroubled by visitors. We sat through more of Judd Saul’s prayers, and a fireside chat with the Schlapps — in which Mercedes said she’d cut her daughters out of her will if they “become crazy Leftists” — before Truss closed off the show. “Our country has been taken over by the progressive Blob,” she declared, in case we’d missed it. “And we’re only going to be able to fight back by building a movement.” The hall, though, remained largely empty, the real movement on the British Right having left with its leader the previous night. The British fightback may have begun, but Truss’s conservatism is stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

The ex-Prime Minister has tried to put renewed shine on her political career, culminating in a reappraisal of decisions that almost crashed the economy and foreshortened her premiership. But a bit like The Wizard of Oz, the book also invites readers to consider some intriguing counterfactuals, at least inadvertently: would the eventual political outcome have been any different, had our protagonist only had more brain or more heart?

As far as the former goes, Truss seems unable to defend the Reaganite values she espouses by giving intellectually persuasive reasons for them. Her favourite word is “instinctively” — as in “I see myself as an instinctively anti-establishment figure” and “I am someone who instinctively wants to shake things up”. There’s little attempt to put rational flesh on the basic neoliberal bones. At one point it looks like she might try — “politics has to be about… the conservative values of patriotism, freedom, and family” — but then immediately retreats into gut feeling again: “We know instinctively why they are better than those of our opponents.”

Throughout her career, colleagues are always gently taking her aside to suggest she should approach issues in a less pugnacious, more collegiate spirit, but she flatly refuses (“they are never going to agree, so it is pointless to try to persuade them”). In place of thrashing out complex ideas, she prefers “ideology”; without which politics “is like trying to navigate a hazardous mountain range in the dark without a compass”. Translation: she has found a few simplistic mantras that appeal to her, and by God, she is going to stick to them. Again, there is no attempt to argue with sceptics: “you either believe in big government running everything or you don’t; you either believe in low taxes stimulating economic growth or you don’t”.

And just as she has no interest in arguing about why she is correct, when it comes to her ideological opponents — Leftists, educationalists, environmentalists, Tory wets, the legal establishment, the Westminster blob — she is equally uninterested in explaining why they are wrong. Everything she disagrees with is basically the fault of Michel Foucault, who she “discovered while taking a course in political sociology”.

In place of rational justification comes a deluge of contemptuous invective. Left-wingers are lily-livered do-gooders, wracked with liberal guilt and self-loathing; educationalists advocating for child-centred play in nurseries are “so-called experts”; environmental campaigners are “watermelons” (green on the outside, red in the middle); world leaders “pontificate” at “jamborees” and “shindigs”; the media is essentially trivial and personality-obsessed; Tory dissenters to the Truss doctrine have forgotten what real Conservatism is; and so on.

She is just as scathing about former senior colleagues. Cameron indulged in “too much wishy-washy flannel about ‘the big society’ and ‘general well-being’”; while Gove and Cummings are both guilty of one of the worst possible offences in Truss’s eyes — having “anti-growth instincts”. Only ordinary party members are as far-sighted and clear-minded as she is, acting as a kind of reassuring mirror whenever she loses faith: “On everything from solar farms (I hate them) to women not having penises to quangos being too powerful to taxes being too high, we were on the same page.”

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All in all, then, the former PM does not seem the most obvious candidate for a proposed revamp of The Brains Trust; but nor, unfortunately, would she be much good on The One Show. Warm expressions of empathy appear profoundly alien to her. When, after a demotion from Theresa May, Sue Gray tries to give her an “unsolicited embrace”, she is frosty: “I am not a hugger”.

As Boris Johnson lies in hospital nearly dying of Covid, she seizes the moment as Trade Minister, and gets him “to sign off on starting trade talks with the US… I knew he would have his mobile phone on him and be free of nefarious Downing Street influences.” At another point, she chases him down a fire escape to get him to agree to her meeting Trump.

By her own confession, she is not “a great people manager”. Fellow human beings seem to baffle her; she can’t understand why they don’t see what she does, as she gazes lovingly into the eyes of her twin obsessions, freedom and economic growth (“I hadn’t gone into politics to deal with floods or fix prisons”). She isn’t worried about any of the familiar critiques of neoliberalism, in terms of its causing obscene wealth gaps, community deracination, or cultural homogenisation, for instance; indeed, she doesn’t appear to have heard of them. Technology is good if it leads to growth, and bad if it inhibits it; so fracking and genetic modification of crops are in, and “bat bridges” across motorways — which she seems to think are designed for bats to scurry across on folded wings — are out. One reason we need to stand up to China is that if we don’t, they are going to beat us on growth; and we should copy the brutally draconian Chinese methods of teaching children in order to keep up with them.

At least in the political arena, she seems to dislike groups of all kinds, from trade unions to some large corporations; and is unable to muster any positivity about things like community or solidarity between fellow tribe members. All she sees are “vested interests” constantly thwarting her bold schemes for freedom and growth — as when, for instance, plans as a junior minister to lift limits on the number of children per childcare worker were foiled by “vested interests in the nursery industry”.

Thatcher thought there was no such thing as society; chastened by her eventual humiliation as leader, Truss goes one better and tells readers there is no such thing as “the market”: instead “there are groups of influential individuals in the financial establishment, all of whom know and speak to one another in a closed feedback loop.” It turns out that, even among capitalists and self-described free marketeers, there was cronyism and corruption all along, a result which seems to surprise and sadden her.

It is easy enough to see what Truss hates, then, but what does she love? What is all the hard-won freedom for, as far as she is concerned? She likes getting out in the open air, and staying in budget hotels. Musically speaking, she confesses to pumping herself up before leadership debates to “a soundtrack of Queen and Whitney Houston hits”. There is little affectionate talk of times spent with friends, and she doesn’t seem much of a foodie. Where others might see the EU’s “504 different classifications of biscuit” as a sign of an advanced gastronomic culture, she emphatically does not. She doesn’t seem to have enjoyed her childhood with Left-wing, environmentalist parents much either — “it seemed all about beetroot tarts, composting toilets and talking about the dangers of overpopulation”.

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There is a similar lack of enthusiasm for the progressive education she received at her Leeds comprehensive school; for some reason she seems particularly offended at having been asked, aged 13, to stand on her desk and pretend she was on “Sir Francis Drake’s ship, The Golden Hind”. She does seem quite enthusiastic about Australia — “like Britain but without the hand-wringing and declinism” — and also professes herself “a long-standing fan” of the Baltic states and Poland, because of their “visceral love of freedom and democracy after having spent so many years under communist terror”.

Truss’s much vaunted political instincts are not always wrong. There are a few wise attempts at self-deprecation in the book, even if they don’t quite convince. She has embraced several good causes in her career, including making the legal system more meritocratic, extending the use of video evidence for rape victims in court, trenchantly rejecting transactivist nonsense in institutions, and arguing against Chinese slavery practices. Still, having read her book, I couldn’t swear with confidence she didn’t hit upon these commendable attitudes accidentally.

But still, being charitable — as Truss is not — perhaps the book was not written to win over opponents like me. Rather it might have been intended as a stentorian call to fellow-travellers; roughly, saying she’s the biggest, hardest, most tax-cutting freedom-loving neocon in the room. There are also signs that she might have a US audience in mind: for instance, in her introduction, where she dramatically recounts the death of the Queen and crams in some backstory that insular yanks might not know (who Truss is; who Boris Johnson is; who the Queen is). But if this is right, then once again the famed Trussian people skills have let her down — for in the service of winning over supporters abroad, she has irredeemably alienated a far larger number of potential converts at home. Keir Starmer should ship copies to every teetering Tory constituency in the land.

The unintended moral of this book is that if we can’t have high intelligence in a politician, we should at least insist on empathy and good understanding of others; and vice versa. It would be nice if we could have both but beggars can’t be choosers. Without either, we might again end up with a leader who, without any warning, takes a wrecking ball to the status quo at an already profoundly anxious financial moment, in the pursuit of goals relatively few people accept as desirable — and who, two years later, thinks it was mostly the fault of everyone else for not grasping that it was really a precious gift all along.

***

Liz Truss will be discussing her book at the UnHerd Club on 3 June. Buy tickets here.

As the writer Philip Pullman puts it in his 2005 introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s sonorous and digressive 17th century masterwork, “those readers who have some experience of the disorder of the mind we now call depression will know that the opposite of that dire state is not happiness but energy”.

By this definition, we could say the British state is, if not depressed, consumed by melancholy. Doom is sensed lying on the horizon but the exertion of will necessary to avert it is no longer seen as possible, or even desirable. The British state lies in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for death. It cannot build houses, it cannot build railways; it cannot dig a hole in the ground and fill it with water; it cannot fix schools that are falling down. The simplest task is too difficult, and anyway, why even bother? There are always reasons to be found for why any exertion is pointless, why helplessness is sensible policy. No wonder, like children of a depressed parent, young Britons now yearn to flee the oppressive atmosphere of home. Yet Burton’s text, reissued for its 400th anniversary, reminds us that we have been here before.

Anatomy is most often read today as a pre-modern self-help book. Yet it contains within it, rarely-discussed, an astute reading of the nation’s political dysfunction that uncannily echoes the present. “Kingdoms, provinces and Politickal Bodies are subject in like manner to this disease,” says Burton, with the body politic exhibiting the same symptoms of what later writers would term “the English malady”. For where “you shall see many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty… cities decayed, base and poor towns… the people squalid, ugly, uncivil; that kingdom, that country, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body, and had need to be reformed.”

Burton’s diagnosis is distressingly apt for modern Britain. According to ONS statistics, around one in six British adults suffered moderate to severe symptoms of depression last autumn, while 17% of British adults are taking antidepressants; but among those aged between 16 and 29, depression rates reach 28%, and for those under 24, up to 46%. Depression and anxiety are now the greatest drivers of long-term unemployment, and suicide is the single most common cause of death in young British men. Whatever the psychic wounds of postmodernity or social media, the most obvious cause is material: the insecurity built into Britain’s faltering economic model. Renters suffer depression at twice the rate of homeowners, while dwindling savings and growing debt strongly correspond with increased rates of mental distress, and homelessness is on the rise. The body politic and personal health are intertwined: Britain’s economic dysfunction is making people depressed, and deteriorating mental health is weighing down productivity. But how to reform such an unhappy polity?

As the historian William Mueller noted in his forgotten 1952 book on Burton as a political theorist, “A distressed state and a diseased individual, macrocosm and microcosm, can look to similar cures.” Burton regarded the economic instability of England as one of the principal causes of the melancholy of his day, so “the emphasis on economic reform runs throughout Burton’s Utopia, underlining his contention that one effective antidote to England’s melancholy lay in economic advance”.

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Mueller situates Burton in a social context not so different from ours, where, as he puts it, the replacement of the stable economic regime of the agricultural order by the birth of modern capitalism led to unstable employment in industrial and commercial labor markets which fluctuated with world conditions: international squabbles would deprive English industry of its foreign markets, while an influx of foreign capital, with wildly uneven domestic distribution, “caused an inflation of land values, rents, and commodities, which affected not only the unemployed but also the employed, whose wages did not rise commensurately with prices”.

Like a 17th-century Yimby, comparing the prosperous and orderly cities of the near continent with our own urban wastelands, Burton contrasted “those rich, united Provinces of Holland, Zeeland, &c., over against us; those neat cities and populous towns” with “our cities thin, and those vile, poor, and ugly to behold in respect of theirs, our trades decayed”, our “beneficial use of transportation, wholly neglected”. A levelling-up advocate of his day, Burton deplored that “amongst our Towns, there is only London that bears the face of a City… and yet in my slender judgement, defective in many things. The rest (some few excepted) are in mean estate, ruinous most part, poor and full of beggars, by reason of their decayed trades, neglected or bad policy, idleness of their Inhabitants.” As in any provincial town today, or even London’s depressing main shopping thoroughfare, the nation’s melancholy was written in the dismal vista of its streets.

Why did England suffer this sad torpor? Fundamentally, the question was one of “ill government, which proceeds from unskilful, slothful, griping, covetous, unjust, rash, or tyrannizing magistrates… not able or unfit to manage such offices” — an immediately recognisable modern sentiment in rolling 17th-century prose. Like modern-day attempts at reform, from Thatcher to Truss, their flailing attempts to cure the malady had only worsened it, so that “the State was like a sick body which had lately taken physick…and weakened so much by purging, that nothing was left but melancholy.”

But England’s sad state derived from more than just inept politicians. A melancholic himself, who wrote to both cure and wallow in his own unhappiness, Burton was wearied of what we would today call “the discourse,” the “vast confusion of… new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion” which distracted from good governance. As historians of melancholia note, the Calvinist milieu in which Burton wrote was a “suspicious and inquisitorial society, constantly on the watch to spy out the sins of others and to suppress all deviations from the true way” — no doubt the modern reader will empathise.

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An advocate of “few laws, but those severely kept”, Burton condemned the accretion of legalistic intrigue and self-promoting lawyers which, then as now, hampered strong executive government: “they will make more work for themselves, and that body politic diseased, which was otherwise sound”. Instead, as Mueller observes, “politically, he would have a highly centralized state ruled by a wise and kindly monarch, a sort of philosopher-king.” Socially, Burton proposed a proto-welfare state for the deserving poor, and enforced labour for the wilfully idle. Burton proposed to ban costly offensive wars, while maintaining a strong navy and army for national defence.

Economically, Burton was a mercantilist, who believed that the route to English prosperity, and thus happiness, was in a favourable balance of trade with a strong export economy and secure and well-paid employment for English workers. “Industry is a Loadstone to draw all good things; that alone makes countries flourish, cities populous, and will enforce by reason of much manure, which necessarily follows, a barren soil to be fertile and good, as Sheep… mend a bad pasture.” China’s rise, and the panicked reactive counter-tendency towards industrial policy almost everywhere in the West but listless Britain, makes this position, until recently considered quaintly archaic, seem strikingly relevant.

Torn between affection for the lost and stable social order of feudalism and a desire for economic growth and prosperity derived from well-planned industry and rapidly expanding cities, it is possible to read Burton as the antecedent of modern political tendencies, a sort of postliberal before liberalism had been invented. This interpretation of Burton, as a dissident political and economic theorist with lessons for today, is not as quixotic as it may at first appear. Modern historians of both melancholy and depression have long placed both unhappy conditions in political and economic context, notably the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies, who, as the philosopher Jennifer Radden observes, argues that “melancholy, or at least an enervating nostalgia and ennui, has been the fate of whole classes of people made idle by social, political, and economic arrangements”.

For the historian Matthew Bell, melancholia — “ the spectral absence of meaningful politics”— finds expression in the phenomenon of “retreatism” whose adherents “are not rebels; they do not attempt to disrupt or undo society. Nor are they outsiders who set themselves beyond social norms. Retreatists withdraw from society while remaining within it. They form a silent and disengaged opposition.” Such a position surely describes the viewpoint of British voters, hostile to the dysfunctions of the Westminster system, while increasingly certain it is so resistant to reform there is no point in voting. Why, says melancholy’s seductive inner voice, even bother? Freud credited the depressive with “a keener eye for the truth,” and which British voter today, surveying the options permitted him by Westminster, would not feel melancholic?

Yet it need not be this way. “Our land is fertile we may not deny, full of all good things, and why doth it not then abound with cities, as well as Italy, France, Germany, the Low countries?” asks Burton. “Because their policy hath been otherwise, and we are not so thrifty, circumspect, industrious; idleness is the malus Genius [evil genius] of our nation.” His closing advice to shake off the enervating grip of melancholy, to “be not idle” has become famous as a self-help axiom, yet it is also a political doctrine. It was no good for Burton himself, or for the England of his day– he died, perhaps by his own hand, in 1640, two years before the nation plunged itself into civil war — but perhaps it is not yet too late for Britain.  Doom may yet be averted, the torpor defeated, if only the effort is finally made. The bonds of dysfunction can still, perhaps, be shaken off through vigorous, reformist exertion.

It is difficult, perhaps, viewing the revolving carousel of nonentities returning to parliament this week, to believe that the cloud will ever lift, but it is not yet too late, Burton reminds us: for “Hope refresheth, as much as misery depresseth; hard beginnings have many times prosperous events, and that may happen at last which never was yet.”

What we need, then, is something that both binds us and shines to the world: a new Cool Britannia to resurrect the “swaggering sense of national self-belief” we have lost. The problem here is that our former bluster was powered by the fundamental belief that Things Can Only Get Better. Today, most of us simply hope that Things Can’t Get Any Worse. Liz Truss’s short-lived Big Bang 2.0 and Rishi Sunak’s Californian techno-utopian dreams of a start-up Britannia have failed to provide any sense of collective belief in a better future.

Cool Britannia’s optimism was turbocharged by an onslaught of aspirational cultural production that gave Britain a joyous vibe of buzzy creativity and irreverence. We had Blur, Oasis, The Spice Girls, Suede, Massive Attack and Pulp. Our fashion industry was trailblazing with Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith, Ozwald Boateng, and John Galliano. The YBAs made British art the talk of the planet. Hugh Grant looked fabulous.

We still have star power. The problem is that so many of our icons — consider Harry Styles, Adele and Daniel Kaluuya — have a British-accented charisma that feels more Hollywood than Blighty. They are too geographically and thematically distant and mainstream to build a new national myth around.

So, what do we do? The answer can perhaps be found in Tara Isabella Burton’s latest book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Here, Burton explores how figures through history have mastered the art of self-creation to fulfil their wildest dreams. From Renaissance Italy to Instagram, Burton reveals the dark arts of building a hypnotic brand that bends an audience to its will. From narcissist painter Albrecht Dürer and Regency dandy Beau Brummell to the proto-fascist Giovanni D’Annunzio and Paris Hilton, each character offers a playbook for how Britain can build a brand that delicately synthesises a new inspirational self-image.

Burton’s theory is simpler than you might expect: concoct a cocktail of mesmerising vibes and fake it until you make it. Quoting Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 handbook The Courtier, she explains that the best brand-building comes from going “about selecting this thing from one and that thing from another. And as the bee in the green meadows is ever wont to rob the flowers among the grass, so our Courtier must steal this grace from all who seem to possess it”. Castiglione’s methodology is captured in the mysterious concept of sprezzatura — translated as nonchalance or lightness. Sprezzatura, Castiglione explains, “conceals design and shows that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”.

Burton says that this can be achieved by “lying, at least the delicately artful ‘little white lie’ kind, is integral to self-making”. To become who we want to be, “we first have to convince other people that we are what we are not”. In other words, modern Britain might be far from a fountain of relentless creativity, but if we take on the sprezzatura mindset of Castiglione’s honeybee, perhaps we can begin to give the impression that we are. After all, it is also the case that everything was not fine in the Nineties — no matter how much Blair wandered around pretending to be Jesus in chinos.

One bee who is already busily buzzing about is Daniel Lee, Burberry’s new Chief Creative Officer. Lee, a 37-year-old working-class Bradford-born designer, has been working in the shadows cultivating a Cool Britannia 2.0 that is both scintillatingly hot and British. Only five years ago, his predecessor Riccardo Tisci torched Burberry’s classic crusader knight logo and replaced it with an Instagram-friendly orange monogram. Trampling over a century of heritage, he turned Burberry into yet another bland cosmopolitan luxury brand. Yet, this year, Lee launched a whipsaw reversal. Not only has he restored the knight, but he has revived an even more ornate version of the logo from 1901 that emphasises the Latin prorsum slogan, meaning “progress”.

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But Lee’s new Burberry is far from jingoistic heritage maximalism. With adverts that feature foxes, corgis, swans, rabbits, Vanessa Redgrave, Raheem Sterling and Skepta, his rebrand captures the timeless equities that Britain has leveraged in our greatest moments. Lee recognises the dynamic contradictions that underlie the nation’s soul: the heritage and the zest for innovation, the aristocratic and the punk, the local and the global. Harmoniously resolving these tensions is the key to driving modern Britain forward — and making it sexy.

Of course, the quiet revolution triggered by Lee must not solely be led by a fashion brand; Burberry’s Britannia is not a substitute for a whole nation’s hopes and dreams. A national mythology cannot be driven by adverts alone, it should be accompanied by a wave of art and culture that transmits something new.

Moreover, if Cool Britannia 2.0 is to thrive, it needs a conductor. In the Nineties, that role was partly filled by Tony Blair. And he was desperate to make sure everybody knew it, constantly orchestrating photo opportunities that placed him in the thick of it. Comparably, despite an equivalent lead in the polls, Keir Starmer is the antonym of Cool Britannia. Not even a photoshoot in a Stone Island polo shirt next to a graffitied wall in Berlin would convince Britain that we are entering a new dawn of cool. Nor will his faux-nostalgia for football, the smell of hamburgers and horse shit.

This leaves a vacuum, a gaping hole awaiting a Arch-Sprezzatura Honeybee who will come out of the shadows and deliver us this hallowed new Cool Britannia. They must have the stature of a statesman, the respect of the masses, and the nonchalance that makes the nation gush and gasp. With Starmer and Sunak ill-equipped for the role, and King Charles now 74, the throne lies empty.

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Princess Kate, Britain’s most popular royal, may stake a claim with her Vampire’s Wife dresses, misspent youth, and ketamine-fuelled-rave attendance, but ultimately she is too above culture to really drive it. Stormzy, the rap phenomenon and emerging national treasure, has signalled a willingness to wear the weight of the crown. In his Banksy-designed Union Jack stab-proof vest, he has demonstrated pedigree in wrestling with Britain complex modern identity. Perhaps more importantly, he is also on Burberry’s roster. However, as an already iconic creative powerhouse, he seems better suited as the first violin.

Noticeably lurking is Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. The bookies’ favourite to succeed Starmer has already signalled his honeybee credentials. After two failed leadership bids, Burnham has rebranded from strait-laced Blairite Westminster drone to a laid-back-but-serious, 24-hour-partying King of the North. In October, he will launch his new SXSW-inspired Beyond The Music festival and conference in Manchester — the originator of so much of Britain’s cool. The event, Burnham claims, will be about building “a creative alliance for the future” that brings together music, tech, gaming, brands and more.

Amid the pessimism, however, the prospects of a Cool Britannia resurgence feel dim. Yet consider this: in the age of self-making, the currency of vibes trumps stark realities. The ultimate heroine of Burton’s book is Caroline Calloway, the audacious Scammer Priestess. Despite squandering a half-million-dollar book advance and selling Snake Oil, Calloway has thrived by distorting reality. From faking exam results to get into Cambridge to selling fake workshops and proudly buying Instagram followers, every lie she tells sees her soar to new heights. Her audacious approach, an intoxicating dance with risk is the brand-building equivalent of Bazball. She throws everything at the wall and does not care what sticks. She’s the master of fucking around and finding out. Perhaps Britain’s path to rediscovering its swagger lies in harnessing the spirit of Calloway, simply ignoring the gloomy reality and playing without fear.

And then came her time in office, all 44 days of it, which saw her grand plans swept into the dustbin of history, along, it seemed, with her reputation. Yet now — with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph and an interview with Spectator TV yesterday — we discover she is mounting something of a comeback, or, at least, a defence of her legacy. Her premiership might not have survived, so the argument seems to go, but her ideas will live on. And she is not Nixon or Reagan, but Barry Goldwater, the Arizonian senator who lost to Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide in 1964, only to spark an ideological transformation of American politics.

As it happens, the first in Rick Perlstein’s series of books tells this exact story. In Before the Storm, Perlstein describes what came before Nixon and Reagan. Up until 1964, the party political divide in the US was not as simple as it is today. Back then, both parties contained distinctly conservative and liberal wings: southern segregationists and northern liberals in the Democratic Party, for example; Waspish liberals and mid-western conservatives in the Republican. After 1964, the two parties began to divide into more obvious ideological camps, sparked in large part by Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation.

In 1964, it looked very much as though the future would be Democratic. Goldwater had been crushed. Johnson won more than 60% of the vote, the highest share in history, collecting 486 electoral college votes to Goldwater’s 52. Still licking its wounds, the conventional wisdom within the Republican Party was that it needed to avoid Goldwater’s brand of ideological conservatism if it were to stand any chance of winning again. By choosing someone like him, the Republicans might have won the South, but they had lost almost everywhere else. In a stroke, Johnson’s Democrats were the party of civil rights and moderation.

And yet, the conventional wisdom was wrong. Over the following years, Goldwater’s acolytes began to win governorship after governorship before eventually sweeping into the White House in 1980 under Reagan. So complete was the conservative victory that in 1992 Bill Clinton and the Democrats had to sue for peace, accepting much of the conservative agenda just to stand a chance of winning.

No wonder Liz Truss is reportedly comforting herself with the belief that she is the Goldwater of Britain, rather than just a humiliated former prime minister. If only it were that simple.

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To begin with, the bridge from Goldwater to Reagan is quite a long one which, as Perlstein’s books show, starts with that distinctly problematic figure in American politics, Richard Nixon, before ending with Reagan. In other words, even if Truss were the Goldwater of Britain, if the American experience is anything to go by, it could be decades before the conditions are right for a Trussite agenda to triumph. And if it did, it would not be copy-and-paste Trussism, just as Reagan was not delayed Goldwaterism. Even Nixon, remember, was not a conservative Goldwater acolyte but very much his own man, who had already been vice president to the moderate Dwight Eisenhower for eight years before 1964. The idea of Truss being a second Goldwater is based less on the reality of the Nixon presidency that came next and more on the idea of the Reagan one that followed much later on.

Truss’s latest cosplay is made all the more peculiar given that Goldwater’s legacy is hardly blemish-free. Outside his own state of Arizona, Goldwater’s only endorsements had come from the segregationist south which supported his opposition to Johnson’s Civil Rights Act — a defining piece of legislation in favour of states’ rights. Prophets of our political future are rarely quite as all-seeing as they seem when re-examined. And Goldwater was no different: he is not some simple conservative hero, but a complicated figure whose policies were not even adopted wholesale by his ideological fellow-travellers who came next.

What, then, is it about her agenda that Truss believes will come to dominate the Conservative Party and British politics? Unfunded tax cuts which spark financial crises and a collapse in public support? I am being facetious, of course, but it is a reasonable question. Goldwater was an electoral failure but he didn’t cause a pensions and debt crisis after promising a sweep of giveaways without a fiat currency to depend on.

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The strongest argument in favour of the Truss-as-Goldwater idea, is that she was right to challenge the sense of inevitability about Britain’s poor economic performance, anaemic growth and high taxes. Outside the EU, there is a reasonable argument to say that Britain needs to work harder to carve out a competitive edge — and that regulation and taxes will play a big role in this. Other than Johnson’s big-state “levelling up” Toryism, Truss’s Reaganite dash for growth is the obvious alternative, more in tune with the ordinary Conservative member than Johnsonism. It is far from impossible that Rishi Sunak leads the party to defeat and a form of Trussism emerges, once again, to claim the leadership.

Yet, even if this were true, the other moral of the Goldwater story is that it is not just ideas which matter, but the people to sell and deliver them in a way that works. The practical application of Trussism sparked a financial crisis which forced her from office. The art of politics is to win power and wield it effectively. Truss only managed the former. For the Conservative Party the more interesting question is not whether Truss is Goldwater, but where on earth they are going to find their Reagan.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, this makes it even harder to establish his programme for government. Sunak’s place as leader is weak in an unprecedented way. Not only are there three former prime ministers on his backbenches, but two of them, (Truss and Johnson) never had their falling popularity confirmed by a bad election. This makes them, and their ideas, more potent than any former leader roundly ousted by the public. Moreover, neither seems willing to slide quietly into the obscurity of the speaking circuit.

Truss sees herself as the party’s Cassandra. She thinks her prophecies of the need for deregulation and growth were right, but wrongly ignored. She has a group of supporters who think the chaos of implementation should not hamper the salience of her suggestions. The so-called “ginger group” are trying to seize the intellectual levers of the party, ready for another go at the top, and want to chart a course of economic liberalism, deregulation and growth.

On Sunak’s other flank sit the continuity-Johnsonites. What they believe is a little hard to ascertain. Boris made his way through the party by promising every faction he was, deep down, one of them. He was, oddly enough, like the errant husband who tells his wife he is staying and his mistress he is divorcing for her — with both believing the other is the fool. The Johnsonites show little intellectual purity but are bound in personal loyalty to their man. A few dozen are even plotting his return.

For them, only Boris can arrest the party’s polling nosedive; only Boris can hold onto the Red Wall and the Tory seats of the south-east. The fall in polling in the first half of 2022 is ignored, and so, too, the by-election defeats that triggered the vote of confidence in the then PM, or even the contradictory threat that Johnson, the one-man electoral magic, will give up his challenge to Sunak if he’s allowed to chicken-run to a safer seat than his current Uxbridge. It’s more about faith than facts.

Taken together, these tribes present a problem for Sunak, but not a fatal one. Both his predecessors were popular with the membership and both have a parliamentary faction that is big enough to disrupt but not destroy his premiership. In any case, it’s unclear if either has the appetite to bring him down: Truss blew her shot and lacks an obvious successor, and Johnson pulled up at the first fence of the recent leadership contest. What they can do is snipe and plot.

Tory leaders have always faced grumbling. Heath was barracked by the Right-wing Monday Club and the development of the economically liberal faction that would become the Thatcherites. A decade later, Mrs Thatcher had to face down her Wets, whose spiritual leader became the ageing Earl of Stockton, Harold Macmillan, who fired softly-spoken broadsides against her embrace of “the Manchester School” and rejection of old Tory patrician ideals. Yet in these eras, there was sufficient deference to the leader, and the prime minister had sufficient strength, to lead an alternative narrative. Sunak seems to lack this.

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Where Boris could be a chimaera that every faction could see themselves in, Sunak is the opposite. He is a Brexiteer, a true, pre-2016 believer, who has the air of Remain about him. He’s an MBA touting hedge-fundie and Goldman Sachs man who is attacked as a socialist. He was Boris’ side-kick in the Treasury for the high-spending, minimum wage boosting, pre-Covid budget, yet is seen as an austerity-monger. His Covid spending was hugely popular inside and outside the party at the time, but now no one seems to praise him for it. Even his popularity in parliament seems to be by default rather than dedication. He has ascended to the top of politics despite an incongruent lack of political appeal.

The steady managerialism which won him the job makes it hard to pull together a narrative. Boris won the party over with his showmanship, Truss courted the members with a steely determination to implement her beliefs. Both largely fell for the same reasons. With Sunak, everything seems neatly totted up, but it’s a whole that is lesser than the sum of its parts. There is nothing irresistible about his leadership — and so you can see how it will be resisted. Probably not directly, but he will have to work hard for the party to steer his programme through the Commons with these factions in play.

He’ll probably get the chance to do this. The rabble-rousers will make the water choppy, but not prevent him from steering through it. Their minds are on what comes after. The smarter, less party-line-taking MPs are accepting that the game is up and opposition beckons. They know this will be followed by a leadership election and a period of party soul-searching, so they are getting their ideas formed early. Both the Trussketeers and the Johnsonians seem to have this period as their real target.

The problem is that the triumph of ideas in the next term might simply be decided by the rate of decline in the Tories in this one. Few on the Right seem to understand how catastrophic the next election could be. On current polling trends, the party could be reduced to fewer than 150 MPs. While such a rout instinctively feels impossible, so too did the collapse of the Lib Dems and Scottish Labour in 2015 — even when all the data pointed to it.

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Just because something is unprecedented does not mean it is impossible. Mid-term polling tends to narrow as governments approach general elections, but it is not an automatic process. With the economic outlook for this year looking gloomy, industrial relations worsening, and another bad winter for the NHS between now and polling day, there’s as much chance of a Tory rout as a revival.

Should this come, it adds an interesting gloss to all this infighting and positioning. The next leadership election will be largely decided by the Tories in Parliament after the next polling day. If a wipe-out hits, that caucus looks very different. Many of the frontbench could be gone, Truss’ protégé Simon Clarke could be handed his electoral P45, and even Boris could be kicked out without a new seat. Even if they spend the next 18 months floating ideas and launching papers, the new direction of the Tory Party will largely be decided by who is left clinging to the wreckage when the electoral tsunami has swept through.

At that point, the factions will seek to differentiate themselves from Sunak’s programme. Whether it is continuity Truss or the Johnsonian cabal, they are likely to be noisy. Other factions will also emerge — Priti Patel is reportedly working with the members, and is allied with the new Conservative Democracy Organisation that seeks to empower them.

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Westminster isn't that corrupt

By John Oxley

There are two ways of looking at the current turbulence. Either discipline is collapsing into fractiousness, or the party is genuinely trying to figure out its next direction. Some MPs will be pure of heart, others entirely self-centred. Many will be in the middle, anxiously looking at their constituency prospects. For Sunak the motives matter little. His agenda will be disrupted by each flexing their brains and their numbers in parliamentary rebellions, even if his premiership endures.

It’s arguable that the Tory Party malaise has its ultimate roots in the failure to find a footing after 1997. It groped around for ideas until the financial crisis gave it the opportunity to return to government. The party’s most distinct theme for that era, its euroscepticism, was something leaders largely tolerated rather than embraced. The result was a party which seemed to stand for little beyond winning elections. There is a risk that soon it won’t even have that.

This does all point to a broader problem for the Right. The Conservative Party has maintained conservatism in one form or another for two centuries. If it is not able to put together a convincing and coherent platform that is both principled and popular, it is unlikely anyone else will be able to do it. When both the affluent and the left-behind feel comfortable voting Labour, it becomes questionable whether conservatism itself can survive.

The Truss premiership crowned perhaps the most chaotic year in Conservative history: a year of three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors of the Exchequer, three Home Secretaries, four Health Secretaries and five Education Secretaries. Ministers cascaded through government like some dystopian vision of the Twelve Days of Christmas. That some of them were the same people, winking in and out of office like a faulty dash light, added to the sense of drawing-room farce. It was the year of Partygate, Pinchergate and Tractorporn, in which one prime minister was “ambushed by a cake” and another mugged by the financial markets; a year in which, as a Victorian Home Secretary lamented, “the crisis of one day is obliterated by the catastrophe of the next”.

Like a former government advisor, furtively editing his Wikipedia page, it would be understandable if Conservatives preferred simply to erase 2022 from the historical record. Yet if the Conservative Party is to dig itself out of the hole in which it is currently floundering, it needs a better understanding of the mistakes that landed it there. In particular, it needs to recognise that the Truss debacle was not some aberration from the party’s recent history, but the culmination of its most destructive tendencies.

Truss did not fall into No. 10 from a spaceship, like some twin-set Mr Bean. She won the leadership because she best expressed what Conservatism has become. The attributes that broke her premiership were also those that carried her into power, making her the favoured candidate of the party membership, the Right-wing think-tanks that supplied so much of her programme, and what the political scientist Tim Bale calls “the party in the press”: the network of sympathetic newspapers that works to maintain the party in office. Sold as the heir to Margaret Thatcher, Truss was to prove more Tin Lizzie than Iron Lady; but her ill-fated premiership was more a symptom of her party’s problems than their cause.

Truss was cheered into office by the party’s most loyal newspapers, which trashed her critics, lauded her tax cuts and only turned on her when it became obvious she could not survive. Headlines proclaimed “In Liz We Trust”. “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman”; and “Liz Puts Her Foot on the Gas”. The reaction to the mini-budget was equally effusive. “At Last”, gushed the Daily Mail, “a True Tory Budget”. A Daily Telegraph front page called it “the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver”. For the Express, part of Truss’s allure was “her long involvement with centre-right think tanks”. Responding to the mini-budget, a representative of the Centre for Policy Studies told the IEA podcast that it as “exactly what we would have hoped for”. The Taxpayers’ Alliance called it “the most taxpayer-friendly budget in recent memory”.

Newspapers and think-tanks could provide the mood music, but only MPs and party members could put Truss in No. 10. Her comments on the campaign trail may have alarmed the commentariat — whether dismissing the First Minister of Scotland as an “attention-seeker” to be “ignored”, or refusing to say whether the President of France was “a friend or foe” — but they drew cheers from the party audiences to whom they were delivered. As an aide to the Truss campaign told her biographers, “we went straight for the membership and gave them what they wanted to hear”.

Add in the endorsement of figures such as Daniel Hannan, David Frost, Sajid Javid and Ben Wallace, or the money that cascaded in from party donors, and the Truss premiership begins to look less like the personal failure of a flawed individual, and more like a systemic disaster for which the party bears collective responsibility. The Conservative Party turned to Liz Truss, not in some temporary spasm of irrationality, but because she embraced the ideas and courted the institutions that had become dominant in its make-up. The forces that destroyed her premiership were those that secured it for her in the first place.

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Take, for example, Truss’s enthusiasm for “moving fast and breaking things”. Not so long ago, a politician who boasted of being the “disruptor in chief” — who told a journalist that “I embrace the chaos. I’m a thrill-seeker” — might have been thought an unlikely candidate for a “Conservative” party. Her contempt for “orthodoxy” might have puzzled a party that prized tradition, while her conviction that sheer willpower could bulldoze all difficulties would have sat uneasily with a Burkean sense of human fallibility, girding its suspicion of grand visions for change.

Yet these were exactly the attributes that had enthused Truss’s supporters. For her cheerleaders in the media, the case for Truss was precisely that “she gets the need for radical change“; that she was an enthusiast for “elbowing to one side the Treasury’s fiscal conservatism“; that she persistently “knocked aside her critics” and was “ready to take on all opponents”. For the Daily Mail, it was Truss’s “boosterism” that “puts her in the driving seat”. Ignoring civil servants, economists and forecasters came naturally to a party that, in Michael Gove’s famous words, had decided years earlier that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Why consult the Office for Budget Responsibility, when it had been dismissed by Conservative columnists as “a waste of money” and a “vehicle for establishment groupthink”?

A party that had spent years urging its supporters to “believe in Brexit”; that decried warning voices as “doomsters” and “gloomsters”, guilty of “talking down Britain”; and that blamed setbacks on “saboteurs” and “enemies of the people”, could not have been surprised at a leader who embraced boosterish economics, ignored warning voices and blamed setbacks on a mythical “anti-growth coalition”. Having burned out Remainers and moderates under Johnson, the party could hardly complain when Sunak supporters were informed that “their careers are over. If you’re on the stage you’re in a grave”.

The danger for the Conservative Party is that it turns to one of two comforting myths to explain the Truss debacle. One loads the blame entirely onto Truss, insisting that “the notes were right. It’s just that they were in the wrong order”. The same think-tanks who had hailed Truss’s rise to power now likened her to a “hubristic, or crazy, or incompetent” chef, who had bungled their “perfect and delicious” “recipe“. A second myth blames a “Remainer coup”, driven by the “anti-growth coalition” and “the Remainer elite”; a “very British coup” propelled by a “pushback against democracy”.

The reality is more prosaic. Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected. Truss’s crime was to carry that Molotov Cocktail into government, holding it aloft like a torch; but it was others who mixed the ingredients and lit the fuse. The paradox is that this combustible mix was so often described as “real” or “true” Conservatism; yet that aspiration may offer the beginnings of a road to recovery.

If the Conservative Party is to rebuild itself, it might find inspiration in its own best traditions. It might recognise that institutions are fragile and easily damaged: that the problem with “moving fast and breaking things” is that things of value get broken. It might revive its sense of human fallibility, requiring grand ideological visions to be tested carefully against evidence and experience. It might recognise, as Margaret Thatcher did, that caution is not the enemy of change, but a crucial component of its success.

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That will require it to reconsider its taste for disruption, and to wean itself off the influence of what Truss herself famously called “vested interests dressed up as think-tanks”. Like the Labour Party, it may also need to rethink the case for treating the choice of prime minister as a subscriber benefit for its dwindling pool of members. Temperamentally, Sunak seems less inclined to play the “disruptor”; whether he can defy the forces in his party that crave such a role remains to be seen.

In her final speech as Prime Minister, Truss offered a mangled quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult”. It was a bizarre choice for a politician who had just crashed the public finances and destroyed her own premiership, as a result — in her own words — of going “too far and too fast“. If the Conservative Party is to take Seneca as its inspiration, it might be wiser to look to his reflections on Epicurus, who remarked that “A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation”. This, Seneca concluded, was a “very good” maxim. “For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right. You have to catch yourself doing it before you can reform”.

Meanwhile, at Merton, where Liz Truss read PPE in the Nineties, undergraduates still perform “The Time Ceremony” every autumn when the clocks go back. Between 2am British Summer Time and 2am Greenwich Mean Time, students dressed in full sub fusc (black tie and gowns) walk backwards around the Fellows’ Quad in order “to maintain the space-time continuum”. According to her biographers Harry Cole and James Heale, Liz Truss delighted in Merton’s eccentric ceremony. I wonder whether her thoughts turned to it at any point during her own liminal 44-day premiership, before it too collapsed into an extensionless point in political space-time.

The tricks being played on us by the accelerated pace of political upheaval are well in evidence in both Cole and Heale’s Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and Sebastian Payne’s The Fall of Boris Johnson, both of which enter a kind of warp-speed as their protagonists’ regimes spiral and crash. Great offices of state change hands like debased currency; in the last three years, we have practically doubled the stock of living ex-Chancellors. And remember when Grant Shapps was Home Secretary for six days? At times, it looked as if Andy Warhol’s prediction may become true of politics, if not elsewhere: in the future we shall all be Cabinet Ministers for 15 minutes.

What explains this unusual volatility in the political system? One widespread attitude expresses itself in the form of an exceptionalist view about the present: our politicians are peculiarly crap and ill-suited to govern. The watchword of this theory is “unprecedented”, and its characteristic mood is one of ahistorical sanctimony about contemporary political life. It is often difficult for these theories to rise above the flippant register of the sketch-writer’s caricature: Boris Johnson is a Machiavellian clown, psychologically incapable of telling the truth; Liz Truss is a Thatcherite human-GIF who loves pork markets. That is, the account struggles to actually explain the data in place of merely describing them.

Another more jaded mode of explanation is ahistorical in a different way. This outlook regards today’s problems as nothing special. Disaster and tumult are more or less eternally constitutive of political life. On the subject of Johnson and Truss’s downfalls there is little to add to Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. While offering a useful correction to the former account, this view is also too complacent. It is, for one thing, often a little unclear what content there is supposed to be to the claim that all political careers end in failure beyond the banal truth that all political careers simply end.

In fact, there are several, somewhat novel, destabilising political phenomena described in the work of Cole, Heale, and Payne. Foremost among them is the manner in which the 24-hour online news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for a worsening situation, encourages a form of speculation on political confidence and capital. The combined desiderata of round-the-clock media scrutiny — a demand that officials be publicly accountable, and the lightning movement of news data — is an inherently unsteadying mixture. It is, after all, well-observed that social media can help to precipitate bandwagon-effects of popular resentment under repressive regimes; it would be curious if analogous effects were not also in play under settled liberal governments. Of course, the demand for accountability and a merciless attitude toward failure in public office are good things in their way. But almost no good thing arises without loss in some other dimension.

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By John Maier

At pivotal moments of collapse in both books, events outpace the ability of political actors to effectively manage them. The lumbering anatomy of Whitehall is not built for acceleration. It is difficult to imagine how, in a previous technological era, a spectacle as engrossing, damaging and chaotic as the cascade of resignations from Boris Johnson’s government could have been similarly achieved. In the age of paper and post, it took a bit of time to resign. In one revealing anecdote of Payne’s, the spectral figure of Charles Moore sidles casually up to Treasury Minister Simon Hart who is sitting on a park bench on Twitter. “Oh Simon, what are you up to this evening?” Moore asks. Hart responds: “If you wait 15 seconds, I’m literally resigning.”

There are, thankfully, some reliable frictions left in the political process. Professional vanity, for instance, provides some residual robustness in the face of even the most vividly disintegrating political fortunes. Brandon Lewis, for instance, “breezed into” Johnson’s strategy room, at a moment of high calamity, and surveyed the reshuffle whiteboard. “Sensing the weakness of the team that was being assembled, Lewis argued he should get a grander job and was offered Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.” He left, apparently pretty pleased with himself — much in the spirit of a passenger who’s just successfully upgraded their cabin on the Titanic — before resigning a few hours later.

The relation between Johnson’s administration in its final months and the media placed him in a posture of increasingly hopeless damage-control. According to Payne: “from October 2021 onwards, [Johnson’s] administration was… entirely focused on firefighting.” At moments when instantaneous response was needed, aides found the Prime Minister “was always away”. Channels of communication stalled. The chief problem, as Payne tells it, was not so much that Johnson’s Number 10 team were mendacious and corrupt, but that they couldn’t stay ahead of the story — whether it was Paterson, Pincher or Partygate — for sufficiently long to counteract it. One unwelcome effect of the emergence of these intense, and no doubt irreversible, political pressures is to increase the appeal of a certain virtue of bloody-mindedness in public life. It might be, however counter-intuitively, that increasingly stringent demands for transparency and integrity in public life end up favouring not the squeaky-clean class of politician, but those who are able to cultivate a calculated indifference to the rules in play.

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Needless to say, politicians who possess these qualities won’t just exercise them when they’re useful; they’ll do so too when their effects are destructive or straightforwardly unhinged. Mere hours before his resignation, Johnson remained “determined to carry on through sheer effort of will”. “All my life,” he is reported to have said, “people have been telling me ‘you can’t do that’. And I’ve always proved them wrong.” The same morning, Michael Gove made his fateful visit to Downing Street, by that stage a bunker of panicked activity, and urged Johnson to stand down. The Prime Minister responded by relating a story, apparently in admiration, of an uncle of his “who had ‘failed to take his meds one day’… [and] so barricaded himself into the town hall with a shotgun. The uncle was eventually bundled out by the police. ‘That is going to be me,’ the prime minister said.” Returning to his Ministry from the meeting, Gove informed his staff that the Prime Minister had unfortunately “gone mad”.

As with Johnson, the portrait developed of Truss by Cole and Heale, is one of a political agent almost pathologically insensitive to the influence of other minds. Aides noticed how “very thick-skinned” she was, with this “delightful Terminator-like quality”. But, on closer acquaintance, her steady hand could be unnerving, even to allies. At the height of the income tax U-turn, with the pound crashing, allies “were struck by her ‘worryingly zen-like’ demeanour”. As David Laws recalled of Truss at her first department, Education: “I like Liz but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather ‘deaf’ way.” This quality of political “deafness” can of course be useful, allowing one to wilfully resist the demands of external opposition and public scrutiny that might move a less headstrong individual to self-doubt or compromise.

But as Laws’s description implies, there is a constructive ambiguity in Truss’s case as to how far her obstinately “deaf” temperament is actually under her control, or about how far it is a part of a more general strategy of calculated madness. Rory Stewart recalls his years under Truss at Defra as “traumatic”. There, watching her civil servants “you could see the panic in their eyes and them thinking ‘does she really want to do this?’” And according to Dominic Cummings, Truss is “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament”.

To her credit, Truss occasionally reveals a degree of pragmatic awareness of the manner in which her political strengths entwine with her personal incapacities. Addressing close allies in the early stages of her leadership bid, “she was blunt and to the point, telling one visitor: ‘I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends. How can you help me fix that?’” Presented with the consequences of the mini-Budget, and the possibility of simply throwing the old steamroller into gear and ploughing on, Truss at last recorded a final and uncharacteristic twinge of self-doubt: “the problem is the last time I ignored all these people they were right.”

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The Tory Party belongs to Alan Clark

By John Maier

Some years after his own short premiership (366 days), Alec Douglas Home is said to have encountered an elderly woman at a train station who admiringly told him that she’d always thought he would have made rather a good Prime Minister. He reportedly responded, with good grace, that he actually had been, though admittedly only “for a short time”. Liz Truss can for the moment only dream of comparative levels of anonymity. As her short administration collapsed around her, though, I wonder whether her temperamental deafness proved something of a solace — as Truss addressed the nation outside Downing Street she seemed almost to be smiling. (“Don’t worry, I’m relieved it’s over,” she is reported to have told those on the inside of the black door, “at least I’ve been Prime Minister.”)

But the lessons from Johnson’s demise and Truss’s implosion, so far as I can see, are not as commiserative. Today’s political environment makes remarkable demands on the modern politician — demands of exertion, openness, imagination, resilience to criticism, and speed of response. It is sometimes difficult to see how any decent politician could be equal to meeting them, though it is increasingly clear how a bad one could be wilful enough to resist them.

“You do not need to choose either a strong economy or good public services. With the Conservatives, and only with the Conservatives, you get both,” Hunt told the Commons, with a straight face. As he well knows, public services are buckling under the strain of a decade of austerity. Meanwhile, the OBR expects our weak economic growth to facilitate the cratering of household disposable incomes by the largest amount since records began in the mid-Fifties, yanking them back to where they were nearly 10 years ago.

In another life, Hunt was the longest-serving Health Secretary in history, who hung on in post against Theresa May’s wishes until he received a £20 billion additional “birthday present” spending commitment for the NHS. Now that Hunt is on the other side of the negotiating table, holding the purse strings, there will be no such profligate gift-giving.

“This government has forced our economy into a doom loop where low growth leads to higher taxes, lower investment and squeezed wages, with a running down of public services — all of which hits economic growth again,” Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves replied. Her diagnosis is absolutely correct — atrophy of growth has led to necrosis of public services. Hunt may claim that the Tories offer both a strong economy and public services, but they self-evidently offer neither.

For a statement that mentioned the word “growth” 28 times, Hunt’s plan to achieve it was remarkably unambitious and involved little self-reflection, citing energy, infrastructure and innovation as his three priorities. This is a huge red flag. While these matter, they pale in comparison to the economic damage wrought by a planning system that prevents the building of homes in our most productive regions, thereby strangling the supply of ambitious, productive workers to productive jobs and businesses.

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What Hunt can learn from Truss

By John Oxley

Not that this should be a surprise; this outlook mirrors that of his boss, Rishi Sunak, who said earlier this year, in a lecture on growth, that growth required merely “a new culture of enterprise”, leaving supply-side reforms to planning and housing unmentioned. Those reforms might be worth upwards of 30% of GDP — but why trouble yourself with that? While Hunt paid lip service to the motivations of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous September mini-budget, if he is not prepared to take on what Truss rightly identified as the anti-growth coalition, he will surely fail in his mission to make Britain a better country. The supply-side baby must not be thrown out with the unfunded tax cuts bathwater.

It’s easy to blame our economic and fiscal headwinds on the mini-budget. But the seeds of this crisis were sown long before Truss and Kwarteng drove a truckload of fertiliser to the farm to encourage growth, only to accidentally blow it up before it reached the fields.

Reputation for economic competence is built over decades, but can be lost in minutes. And the Conservative Party is now finding out how it feels to have an economic narrative set up by their opponents. Much as Labour was blamed for the financial crisis by the Tories, despite its global nature, the Conservatives are being painted by their opponents as being responsible for rising interest rates, the increase in the cost of living ,and the impact of the recession we’ve just entered.

“At the very least, he could have offered an apology but, no, instead he says his predecessor was correct in his analysis at the mini-Budget that put our economy into free fall,” Reeves taunted from the Opposition despatch box. But none of the pain we are going through has its origin in Kwarteng’s mini-budget. While it certainly didn’t help things, as soaring government gilt yields showed, most of Kwarteng’s economic, if not political, impact was essentially wiped clean by Hunt’s scrapping of almost all the mini-budget measures. The cost of government borrowing is back to where it was before that touchpaper was lit.

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How to lose a leadership election

By Dominic Sandbrook

Rather, the war in Ukraine and the resultant sanctions and European diversification from Russian gas are a far larger source of inflation than those now-reversed spending commitments. We are also still wading through the backwash of the inflationary monetary and fiscal stimuli introduced to combat Covid-19, which unleashed unintended inflation. Supply chains are also still being disrupted by the pandemic, increasing the cost of services and manufactured goods — goods which are even harder to source given the ongoing lockdowns in China that are holding back the Chinese economy.

Sailors famously do not choose the weather, but they can choose not to sail straight into the storm. And this is precisely what the Conservative Party has done. By building a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners, it finds itself unable to reform the economy to deliver either growth or public servicesit finds itself unable to reform the economy to deliver either growth or public services — public services that same coalition of elderly voters is becoming increasingly reliant on as health and social care needs rise with age, leaving them ever more disgruntled.

These increasingly bitter choices, worsening living standards and dilapidated public services are the price we pay for actively choosing to reject economic growth. “Anyone who says there are easy answers is not being straight with the British people,” Hunt said yesterday. Economically, the answer is very easy — take your foot off the brake by building. But politically, Hunt is right: the challenge is totemic.

William Hague said of the euro that it represented a “burning building with no exit”. Well, our burning building has exits. We could choose to build more, and stop placating the anti-growth coalition — but we would have to walk through the fire to do so. Does the Conservative party have the stomach for it? Of course not. If you needed an indication of how likely the party is to face down its elderly voters, the triple lock on pensions was maintained in this Autumn Statement. Pensions will grow with inflation, while workers suffer real-terms pay cuts. And we wonder why there’s no growth. ‘Twas ever thus.

If Hunt fails to address these, he knows what will happen. The fate of his immediate predecessor still looms large; it’s not even two months since Kwasi Kwarteng made his September statement, a moment that will go down as one of the biggest political calamities in history. The fallout showed clearly that the country’s creditors will not support unbalanced books — and this makes Hunt’s job infinitely trickier.

For all the failings of Truss and Kwarteng’s short reign, their fundamental diagnosis was right: the British economy had been too lethargic for too long. It is an inescapable fact that GDP and real-term wage growth have never recovered their pre-Financial Crisis trajectory. Both as a nation and as individuals, we are much poorer than we could have been, especially compared to some of our European neighbours. Without borrowing, this creates a particular crunch around public spending.

In simple terms, as the economy grows, more money becomes available for public services even if the proportion of tax remains the same. As Liz Truss delighted in putting it, if you increase the size of the pie, the slices get bigger. The problem for Britain is that we have failed to do this, meaning that even to keep services at the same level requires a greater proportion of spending, which must come either from borrowing or taxation.

But with the price of borrowing increasing and the markets averse to unfunded promises, the government is unwilling to commit to more debt-led spending. Hunt, then, faces a stark choice: between protecting services by raising taxes and protecting households by cutting spending. Hunt is likely to chart a course through the middle of both, with a sober budget that both increases personal taxation and reduces public spending. Neither of these is likely to be popular.

It is unclear where any new austerity will come from. “Efficiency savings” have largely failed to materialise and an air of dereliction now hangs about the public realm: NHS appointments are oversubscribed, the police overstretched, and councils cutting back, while staff are demoralised and likely to turn militant if faced with further pay attrition. This has an economic effect but is also a political problem for the Chancellor.

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The Tories will never be united

By Terry Eagleton

Austerity was never a popular platform beyond a few evangelists for the small state. It worked to win elections when contrasted with perceived Labour profligacy and an immediate emergency (the 2008 crash), and was focused on those who would rarely vote Tory anyway. Households in the shires can stomach slashing Universal Credit and foreign aid, but do not like it when things they value are cut. A Conservative Chancellor could slice away benefits but would face electoral wrath if they force councils to abandon weekly bin collections. The biggest test of this is, of course, the triple-lock pensions increase, where the beneficiaries are most likely to vote Tory.

The temptation for a Chancellor is therefore to cut the things people cannot really see — long-term expenditure. Proposed infrastructure spending is easier to reduce or cancel because the public do not feel its impact for a decade or so, but this is a false economy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted the folly of failing to build nuclear power or maintain gas storage, while many British cities find their growth stymied by a lack of transport investment. Underinvesting now will only preserve those problems.

In the Eighties, Harold Macmillan lamented that Thatcher’s government saw no difference between income and capital when it came to money coming in, viewing receipts from privatisation as much the same as taxation income. He saw the government as like an old aristocratic family, selling the family assets and living on the receipts day-to-day. Now the party must avoid making the same mistake with expenditure and discriminate between the things which will fuel growth, and which will not — as “Supermac” might put it, you cannot keep buying champagne while cancelling the restoration of the Caravaggio that brings the day-trippers in.

Part of the strength of the Sunak campaign to replace Truss was that he was at home in the world of finance — that he could speak the language and understand the fears of those who lend Britain money. His years in the City should have taught him something else: the difference between streamlining and hamstringing. Cutting spending and restructuring borrowing only adds value if growth is unimpeded.

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Why the Left shouldn't be celebrating

By Thomas Fazi

And yet, chastened by the mini-budget, Hunt seems poised to revert to the austerity of the first half of the decade. The issue he faces is that without something to stimulate further growth, he is just making a rod for his own, and the country’s back. Like any Tory, he will also find it difficult to navigate around the economic costs of Brexit. At the same time, borrowing more to spend cedes political ground to Labour, who can then outbid the Tories and trap them in their own hypocrisy.

There is, however, one aspect in which the Chancellor can be liberated this Thursday. If he’s smart, he will understand the party has already lost the next election. The drop in polling established by a year of Johnson and accelerated by the Truss debacle offers little chance of resurrection. There should be fewer giveaways for favourite groups, more governing in the national interest. Where normally budgets are padded with electoral quid pro quos, such as nudging up tax allowances or funding for towns in marginal seats, the Tories are on to such a loser this can probably be avoided.

When Hunt comes to the despatch box on Thursday, he will be constricted by the realities of a complex economic crisis and the political decisions that brought us there. Though leaks from Downing Street suggest all manner of changes are on the table, the path to success is narrow. His decisions are fettered, and there’s no shouting “I’m a Chancellor get me out of here”. The question is whether he finds the catalyst for growth, or simply tightens the vice.

The obvious answer — that he has never shrunk from a challenge, feels a keen sense of responsibility to the country and wishes to serve its people — is the kind of thing that politicians read off autocues. It is like declaring that there are brighter days ahead, that actions speak louder than words, or that we should stop brooding over the past (including what happened 10 days ago) and look to the future. If Sunak could best serve the nation by working as an anonymous official in a dingy back room in Basildon, would he do so? I’m not convinced.

Our new Prime Minister is in Downing Street chiefly because he is hungry for power, like most of the place’s previous inhabitants. It’s not that Sunak is power-mad, but that power can itself be a form of madness. What sane human being would prefer supervising the decline of an increasingly inconsiderable offshore island to permanently sunbathing in the Cayman Islands? Boris Johnson’s cronies spouted similar guff when they claimed that in withdrawing from the contest he was putting the country before himself. They were talking about our most resplendent example of a Hobbesian man, powered purely by self-interest. Johnson is no more likely to put the nation before himself than he is to glue himself to the M6.

Perhaps Sunak believes that he can unify the country. Almost everyone is in favour of unity, just as almost everyone is in favour of freedom, happiness, nurses, chocolate truffles and Billy Connolly. Nobody casts a vote for the Disunity Party. But one should be wary of what almost everybody approves of. Unity is not a virtue in itself, as the German people learnt to their cost when the Nazis came to power. Plato disapproved of tragedy because it enhanced our sense of the individual’s apartness, thus undermining the cohesion of the state. Unity means trying to weld conflicting interests together — but in whose interests?

There is something fundamentally dishonest about the call to drop your differences and rally around a leader. Either the differences are real, in which case they won’t just disappear; or if they can be dropped as easily as that, they probably weren’t worth much in the first place. It’s not as though one is dealing simply with minor shades of difference. If politics is to be more than a game, it must engage interests which go all the way down, to the point where they form part of one’s identity. And you can’t abandon these just because you’re doing badly in the polls. You can say you do, of course, but that’s different. It’s a matter of biting your tongue, not changing your heart.

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How powerful is Liz Truss?

By Terry Eagleton

Behind the idea of discarding your interests overnight lies a particular view of human beings. On this theory, interests are really external to the self. You can shop around among them as in a boutique, trying on one after another. There’s the little red Marxist number, the sky-blue Tory one, the saffron Buddhist robe, the scruffy black leather existentialist jacket and so on. You don’t have to commit yourself to any of them for good. Sinéad O’Connor tried on the Catholic priest outfit for a few weeks before throwing it out, while Madonna has been through the entire shop more times than anyone can count. A few weeks ago, there were Tory politicians who were fervent Trussites in the morning, ardent Johnsonians around lunchtime and devout Sunakians in the evening.

There is, however, a problem with all this. If you survey a range of commitments like a rack of shirts, what motivates you to choose one rather than the other? On a classical liberal view, the self is an impartial, disinterested entity; but if this is so, then there is no reason why you should go for the sky-blue Tory outfit than the Buddhist robe. You would simply be paralysed, incapable of choosing, unless you already had interests which inclined you towards certain interests. It is in this sense that interests go all the way down. They are not like a row of hats; they are matters for which people will occasionally fight and die.

Is all we have, then, a Darwinian clash of competing interests? Not quite. Fortunately, we have rationality as well. In fact, we need rationality to discover what our interests are, as well as to promote them. You can’t acquire your beliefs without reasoning about how things stand with the world, and you can’t put them into practice without reasoning either. There’s no point in cutting taxes if everyone has been wiped out by nuclear war and you simply haven’t noticed. Reason, however, can question our interests and desires as well as advance them. It isn’t rational to wish to return to a past society in which life was entirely free of antagonism, since there wasn’t one.

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Rishi has set himself up to fail

By Thomas Fazi

People sometimes ask why politicians can’t stop squabbling among themselves and get together. A lot of Conservative MPs are asking this right now, less because they find squabbling distasteful than because they fear it might lose them the next election. But conflict is inevitable. Some Tories are going to be centrist or pragmatic, while others will be more doctrinaire. “Doctrinaire” or “ideological” are words one uses of other people’s beliefs, not of one’s own. My views are moderate, while his are extreme.

But it isn’t just that political types are temperamentally given to in-fighting. Nor is it true, as liberals tend to suspect, that conflict should always be seen negatively. How can women vanquish sexism without arguing and taking action against it, and why is it usually men who find their talk a little too strident? Not only are conflicts here to stay, but in a number of cases one party is going to have to win and the other is going to have to lose. This, too, is hardly music to liberal ears. But the fact is that either the racists triumph or their adversaries do. Otherwise, we will have to settle for a moderate, pragmatic, commonsensical brand of racism.

The great organ of unity is supposed to be the state. Yet there are those who have suspected that this togetherness is a little lopsided, suiting the interests of some more than others. There are even thinkers who have claimed that the state exists to protect private property (I have in mind Cicero, who argued just this, as well of course as Karl Marx). There are also forms of solidarity which flourish only because everyone has an enemy in common. In any case, it’s hard to reconcile unity with diversity. One image of this resolution has been, of all things, the work of art. From Aristotle to our own day, one of the most entrenched aesthetic dogmas has been that the work of art forms an integral whole, with no spare parts or loose ends. For centuries, nobody thought of questioning this assumption. Then, in the early 20th century, a revolutionary new form of art broke out with the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists and others, which saw no reason why the art-work shouldn’t be marked by dissonance, asymmetry and contradiction.  Such an art, after all, was truer to the experience of the bloodiest century on record than unity and harmony, terms which were increasingly the stock-in-trade of despots standing on balconies haranguing the masses.

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Boris Johnson was too Dickensian

By Terry Eagleton

All the same, we have a horror of fragmentation. We have only to see something in pieces — a vase, a social order, a piece of fiction — to feel an overpowering desire to put it together again. It is an impulse which probably runs deeper than politics. For the Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, it stems from the relationship between mother and infant. The infant, in Klein’s view, has a murderous desire to pound the mother’s breast to pieces, but then, stricken by guilt, tries to reassemble it in imaginary form.

This kind of stuff doesn’t go down well with the English, who prefer common sense to the unconscious. Austrian babies may behave like this, but English ones certainly don’t. It’s also hard to see Rishi Sunak appealing to it any time soon. But psychoanalysis has much to say about how the idea of the unified, autonomous self is a myth, and the same might be said about the unified, autonomous state. In recent times, the name for the latter in Britain has been Brexit. It took the surreal farce of Liz Truss’s brief reign to remind us that there is no such thing as an independent nation-state other than in the fantasises of Farage — that the sovereign power on this planet is not the state but the market, and that in the end it is the market which decides who sits in No. 10, who will grow fat and who will go hungry.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng took what they believed were good decisions. Their massive energy price subsidy would protect people from the cost of living crisis. They thought that cutting taxes would boost growth and prosperity for everyone. It is easy for people to sneer at the latter after the event. But the plain fact is that no-one has discovered a sure fire plan to deliver economic growth. If they had, running the economy would be easy.

As we now know, the markets took fright at the further proposed increases in government debt. Interest rates on the debt soared and the pound collapsed. The Truss government was wrecked. This had always been a risk, ever since in 2019 the government piled up massive amounts of public debt with the furlough scheme. At some point as government debt rises, confidence really drops and interest rates really do double, or even more. But this point is inherently unknowable in advance. It bears little connection with the objective facts.

For example, interest rates were in the 6-8% range in several Mediterranean Eurozone countries in the mid-2010s. But the amount of government debt relative to the size of the economy in, say, Spain, was lower than it is now in the UK. Even now, the UK’s debt position is much better than that, say, of Italy. But it was the UK which the markets attacked and not Italy.

Many commentators on the Left maintain that all this was obvious in advance, that the Truss-Kwarteng policy was bound to end in rapid and ignominious failure. But we might reasonably ask, if this is the case, why these same commentators are not now enormously rich, having used their insight to short UK government bonds.

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Why Liz Truss lost control

By John McTernan

All this was anticipated by Keynes, a much more subtle economist than many of his followers grasp. In his magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, he championed the idea that extra government spending could help keep an economy out of recession. But he qualified this with two key points. When government deficits rise as a result of increased spending, Keynes wrote that: “The method of financing the policy may have the effect of increasing the rate of interest and so retarding investment in other areas.” He went on to suggest that the psychological effect on “confidence” might also depress private sector spending. The psychology, he asserted, was often “confused”, by which he meant it could move in ways entirely contrary to what a rational assessment of the evidence would suggest.

The second example is much less grand, but all the more telling. Intentions and outcomes can differ even on a small scale. To great fanfare, in 2018 Nicola Sturgeon announced a policy of a minimum price on a unit of alcohol. Scotland has a serious alcohol problem, and this seemed a good idea. The policy was praised by the World Health Organisation. Yet the hard-core older drinkers who were the real targets of the policy seemed to have continued drinking. They paid for it by cutting back the amounts their families spent on food and heating — even before the cost of living became the issue which it is now.

Young people in particular do seem to have cut back on high alcohol drinks. They switched to cheap street drugs instead. These are often unreliable and dangerous products, and the drug-related death rate in Scotland is now four times higher than in England. Sturgeon and the SNP intended to do good with their policy, but the outcome seems to have worsened the situation.

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Why Truss's gamble failed

By Aris Roussinos

If detailed planning really worked, the Soviet Union would have been a great success and not a catastrophic failure. Of course, both governments and firms have to set a vision, a view of where they want to be. But they must never fall into the trap of thinking that the plan is reality. Most of the time, outcomes are different to the intent in the plan. The main risk is that focusing too much on the plan might lead a government or firm to reduce its flexibility, its capacity to respond to surprises, both good and bad. In the old Soviet Union, everything was planned with great precision. No individual enterprise was allowed to fail. But, eventually, the whole system collapsed in catastrophic failure. In the West, individual firms fail all the time, but the system as a whole delivers the goods.

There are worrying signs that, as a result of the furlough scheme, the same Soviet-type mentality is starting to pervade Britain. If a company is in difficulty, some scheme should be contacted so that it is kept alive by taxpayers’ money. The industrial structure should be pickled in aspic. The intention of any such policy would be to do good. The risk is that it simply leads to an economy populated by zombie, low productivity firms.

Sometimes outcomes can be much better than expected. A classic example is Windows. The first releases basically tanked. Microsoft announced that development would stop after the release of version 3.0. In the meantime, they had partnered to develop OS/2 with IBM, the “operating system of the future”. Windows 3.0 sold millions of copies in the first few months and the rest is history.

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How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

Coca-Cola spent vast amounts of research testing how people would feel about New Coke, which they launched in the mid-Eighties. The plan said it would be a great success. But it met with a disastrous reception in the real world. Coca-Cola abandoned the product within a few weeks despite the huge sums spent on it. Their actions show the value of flexibility and willingness to discard plans in the face of new evidence. The UK government’s reaction to the emergence of Covid in early 2020 shows the danger of inflexibility. The early data from China suggested that the death rate might be of the order of 3-4%. So it was reasonable to have an initial lockdown to try and assess the situation.

But it rapidly became clear that the death rate was in fact much lower. More importantly, at least 95% of all deaths were in two groups which were small compared to the size of the overall population: the over 85s and those with chronic conditions such as heart disease caused by obesity. For the bulk of the population, there was little serious risk to health. Despite this new information emerging quickly, the government seemed to double down on its plan of lockdown and its message of fear.

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Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

The complexity of the world does not mean that nothing can be done, that outcomes are random. But it does mean that governments and firms must be flexible. A further implication is that, as far as possible, decisions should be devolved. The closer to a problem you are, the more likely there is to be local, tacit knowledge which is hard to capture in formal documentation and rules.

In fact, successful institutions evolve organically, indicating that excessive government intervention may be both unnecessary and counterproductive. Consider Greater Manchester. The Mayor and the GM combined authority have relatively few legal powers. These in general still reside with the ten individual boroughs. But the combined authority has evolved “convening powers”. This is soft, informal power. A complex system of interconnected organisations and committees has developed and is continuing to develop. And it seems to work. A genuine, connected city-region is coming into being.

The economy and society are essentially more like a biological system than a complicated machine. No matter how complex, a machine can be programmed and controlled. The economy evolves, often in unpredictable ways. Policy-makers, including the new Prime Minister, need to shed the tick-box mentality and recognise this fundamental feature of reality.

Yet we should be wary of resorting to the simplistic narrative of events which would have us believe that Truss and Kwarteng’s attempts to push through a “fiscally irresponsible” tax-cutting free-market agenda spooked financial markets, “crashed the economy”, and ultimately forced them to admit defeat and back down. Things are a little more complicated.

On one level, this is a story about the influence of neo-Thatcherite think tanks. The Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) have both found fertile ground for their ideas among certain Tories in recent years, after being relegated for so long to the fringes of political discourse.

A number of these organisations provided much of the inspiration for Truss and Kwarteng’s agenda — especially with regard to their proposed cuts to high-income and corporation taxes. Mark Littlewood, director general of the IEA, has described how he worked “hand in glove” with Truss to help her set up in 2011 the Free Enterprise Group, a faction of Tory MPs committed to radical free-market economics. Kwarteng was an early member. According to Littlewood, Truss has spoken at more IEA events than “any other politician over the past 12 years”, while her economic advisor and senior special advisor both have ties to the organisation.

But their influence isn’t the whole story. The truth is that Conservative MPs and party members, who are disproportionately middle or upper-class men from the wealthier postcodes in the south of England, tend to hold rather liberal views when it comes to the economy. They’re the ones who voted for Truss over the more interventionist Rishi Sunak.

The problem for the party is that this refurbished brand of free-market economics — or “Trussonomics” — was unpopular among all voters, and especially among the working-class, low-income and northern constituencies that three years ago voted Conservative. These are the ones who voted Tory for the first time in 2019: to get Brexit done, take back control of Britain’s borders, and level-up the country — not to roll back the state, slash taxes on the rich, and cut back public services.

The more controversial measures in Truss’s mini-budget were deeply unpopular: only 12% of voters supported scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses; only 11% supported abolishing the top rate of income tax for high-earners; and only 19% thought it was a good idea to cancel the planned increase in the corporation tax.

It suggests the Tory leadership completely underestimated the extent to which their voter base has shifted to the “Left” on economics. One recent poll, for example, shows that a majority of Conservative voters support public ownership of key services and utilities — including water, energy, rail, Royal Mail, and the NHS. Hoping to compensate for unpopular economic policies with a bit of faux nationalism and cultural conservatism isn’t going to cut it.

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The Tories were destined for civil war

By John Oxley

So aside from all the conjectures about who really influenced Truss, her downfall highlights a much more fundamental problem: the disconnect between the party’s membership and the sensibilities of the majority of their voters, especially in light of the Brexit realignment. In many ways, the party has become the victim of its own internal logic, much as Labour’s own contradictions — the overwhelmingly cosmopolitan outlook of its members — ultimately prevented Corbyn from adopting a coherent Brexit strategy.

But the sighs of relief and the smug commentaries, especially on the Left, about Truss’s attempted and failed “free-market coup” ignore an equally important development: that Truss’s political project, as unpopular as it may have been, wasn’t defeated by the people — but by the establishment.

The truth is that Truss and Kwarteng, and their free-market ideologues, were also waging their personal battle against economic orthodoxy and its technocratic gatekeepers — the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office of Budget Responsibility. These hugely powerful and largely unaccountable institutions have always been the guardians of fiscal orthodoxy. First, they helped successive Conservative governments enforce a decade of devastating austerity. And then, ever since the end of the pandemic, they have been calling for a return to austerity in order for the UK to “balance the books”.

Truss and Kwarteng, for all their faults, dared to challenge the orthodox austerity narrative. Echoing Keynes of all people, they hit out at “Treasury thinking” — that is, the obsessions for balanced budgets and fiscal discipline — and spoke of the need to review the Bank of England’s remit. When asked about how the government was going to tackle the growing debt, shortly after Truss’s election, Julian Jessop, an IEA fellow and one of Truss’s economic advisors, explained: “The Treasury has been too quick to believe you need to start paying the debt down by raising taxes, both personal and corporate taxes,” he said. “Far better to let the deficit take the strain. If tax cuts do mean more borrowing in the short term, I’m completely relaxed about that.”

This approach was made clear as soon as Kwarteng arrived at the Treasury: his first decision was to sack its top official, Tom Scholar, who was considered to be too fiscally conservative and deferential towards the Bank of England. The message was clear: the new government expected civil servants — and indeed the Bank of England itself — to work for the executive, not against it.

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Presumably, our free-marketeers Truss and Kwarteng railed against the orthodoxy so that they could cut taxes for the wealthy without having to worry about a rising deficit. And, in principle — and even though morally it’s contemptible — they were absolutely right: an advanced country such as the UK that issues its own currency should have no reason to worry about a rising deficit or debt.

They were also absolutely right, in principle, in reaffirming the primacy of politics over technocracy. Indeed, these are preconditions for the pursuit of truly democratic and economically progressive policies, especially when they threaten powerful vested interests in society. After all, it’s Truss and Kwarteng’s relaxed approach to deficit-spending that allowed them to approve a two-year energy price guarantee worth £60 billion, by far the biggest commitment in the mini-budget.

Challenging the economic orthodoxy, and the technocratic apparatuses that wield the true power in our societies, was the real Truss/Kwarteng sin. This — not the tax cuts, which were trivial from a macroeconomic perspective — is ultimately what brought down the wrath of the entire Transatlantic establishment: not only the Bank of England, the media and legions of orthodox economists, but also, and highly unusually, the IMF and even the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. There’s nothing more anathema to the establishment than the idea that democratically elected governments should have the final say over economic policy, not unaccountable institutions where decisions are taken behind closed doors.

But despite all the hysteria, the reality is that the British economy never “crashed”; there was a small drop in the value of the pound and rise in bond yields — the result of financial markets attempting to profit from the chaos — that was rapidly reversed to pre-panic levels by the Bank of England’s intervention. If anything, the problem was the Bank of England’s announcement that the intervention would be short-lived — possibly to put pressure on the Government.

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Ultimately, the government wasn’t taken down by “the markets”, but by its own weakness, since neither Truss nor Kwarteng possessed the intellectual and political tools, nor the popular support, to ignore the hysteria and stick to their guns. While their political project might have seemed cruel, especially from an economically progressive perspective, there’s no reason to rejoice in its defeat, insofar as it has led to a complete restoration of the economic orthodoxy and technocratic rule, symbolised by Kwarteng’s replacement by Jeremy Hunt — or “Jeremy Draghi”, as his admirers have already dubbed him in honour of Mario Draghi — and then by the Second Coming of Sunak.

The fact that Hunt’s first decision was to completely overhaul the mini-budget’s main proposal — the energy price freeze — by reducing the measure’s duration from two years to six months, while announcing more budget cuts in the near future, which will cause millions to suffer even more than they would have under the previous plan, should cause everyone on the Left to reflect on the wisdom of joining in on the Kwarteng-bashing.

The consequences will be felt for a long time to come, in the form of an established wisdom that democracy ultimately has to conform to what the markets say — or else. We are already seeing this narrative crystallising in claims that the Tories should vote for Sunak because he’s “the man the markets trust”. This line of thinking is the death of democracy. Which is why the decision to support this bloodless coup will come back to haunt Labour: even if they win the next election (which seems likely), it’ll be the markets and technocratic establishment calling the shots. Not because they’re omnipotent, but because Labour has helped convince everyone that they are.

Outside Downing Street yesterday, it took Liz Truss just a few minutes to call time on her condensed premiership. But the Conservative Party’s spasm of anger had already erupted. On Wednesday, decades of brewing feuds, petty grievances and polite disagreements exploded into a contraction of chaos. In a few short hours, the Government saw the Home Secretary depart office, scuffles erupt in the lobby, and confusion reign over whether the Chief Whip had resigned or not. Tory MPs began to openly lament the state of the party. Within 24 hours the Prime Minister would fall, the shortest tenure in British history.

It was a dramatic spectacle for the Lobby to feed on and a day and a half of despair for Liz Truss. It was not, however, an unheralded implosion, but rather the culmination of shifting party dynamics over the last few decades. Cameron’s attempt at detoxification, the gamble of the referendum, and the squabbles over Brexit each played a role in pushing to this moment — as did a thousand snubs, slights and overpromotions. This mess took only a few hours to unfold, but it was years in the making.

The Conservative Party has always been an uneasy alliance of unlikely figures. Driven more by the desire to govern than ideology, the party attracts confused and conflicting views and rebrands the resulting contradictions as a “broad church”. Passing electoral trends add new layers onto this, embedding fault lines. The party rubs along reasonably well by focusing on its one shared goal: winning elections. When the possibility of this diminishes, as with a precipitous dip in the polls, the fault lines start to crack. In a land of first-past-the-post, the Right’s broad coalition works. Until it doesn’t.

The current party is perhaps more riven by these divisions than ever in its history. They have been compounded by recent political divisions and the polarisation which occurred within the House and the public at large. With a weak prime minister and the prospect of electoral oblivion, the scene was set for a quake.

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It is tempting to see the split in the Tory party as binary — a matter of Wet vs Dry, of economic liberalism versus a more mid-century paternalism. Yet very few in the party neatly fit this spectrum. In fact, the various Westminster tribes are often a bizarre and competing mix of each. The Thatcherites would usually happily throw state money at their pet projects and would rarely abandon their staunchest supporters to the whims of the market. There’s no real movement in the party to expose farmers to cheaper imports from abroad, for example, and there are many who would free every market but the movement of people.

In the same vein, the Left of the party did little to reject austerity and now pushes for its return, at least where it didn’t impinge on their voters. Benefits and schools seem easier for them to cut than pensions and bin collections. For most, the real north star is whatever motivates the voters and principles often come second to vibe.

Part of the reason for the party’s multi-decade battles over Europe is that it was the only issue that forced them into a binary choice. There was no real nuance when it came to Remain or Leave: it was a simple question with a single answer. This challenged the ability to be all things to all men and forced them to nail their colours to the mast. It also served to cut every faction in two.

Brexit applied a new lens to every internal debate. Leave MPs who pushed for protectionism and an anti-immigration stance suddenly became Dries, while the One Nation tag seemed to stick to Cameroons who had no issues with austerity but largely voted Remain. Moreover, this dividing line became baked into the party machine. While some MPs, most notably Truss, wore their affiliation lightly and skipped from one side to the other, the rest decided to dig in. It no longer mattered if you were a Singapore-on-Thames libertarian or a faith-and-flag protectionist, you shared an enemy. Outside of parliament, too, the members generally saw their new identity and took to it as partisans.

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The conduct of the parliamentary party and respective governments in the aftermath of the referendum made this worse. Theresa May’s ministry failed to either placate or nullify the hard-line Brexiteers, giving them enough space to undermine her attempts to reach a settlement with the EU. Repeated cabinet resignations, rebellions, and plots to oust her aggravated those who supported Remain, while her compromises with the EU angered the ERG and allies.

Seeing the difficulties May had fallen into, Johnson had a direct plan of confrontation with his internal opponents. In an early act of his premiership, he withdrew the whip from those who defied him on Brexit. These were Remainers, but there was also an implicit threat to those on the Right, which ultimately got his deal across the line. From then on, he rewarded loyalty with promotions and treason with political exile — there was no room for conciliation or meritocracy. This, naturally, angered his internal opponents, but he held one trump card, his popularity with the electorate. When that wobbled, there was no shortage of volunteers to act against him.

Whoever became leader after him was due to inherit a soured atmosphere. That Truss edged through with only a third of MPs supporting her did not bode well. In appointing a Cabinet of loyalists, she exacerbated this anger and put a huge wager on things going well. It didn’t. When her mini-budget imploded, and took Tory poll ratings to new lows, her authority sank. The one thing that brought Tories together and kept them civil, winning elections, was gone.

This set the scene for a rapid unravelling. When your polling goes that low, there is a swathe of people who know they have nothing to lose. Their seat will be gone whether they have the whip or not. Equally, all sides think that tacking their way is the solution, and ambitious seniors see it as their chance to audition for the top seat. The clouds gather, and every issue becomes a lightning rod.

When the party is at peace, the nebulous nature of factions makes it easier to manage. People can be nudged into line because they aren’t that wedded to one ideological strain. When it is in free-fall, it makes everyone a potential enemy. That’s why the government picking an argument over fracking was such a terrible idea. The enviro-wets might be already against you, but so too are the MPs who don’t want hydraulic drilling under their constituency. There aren’t enough diehard growthers who will put ugly scenes in their backyard into second place, and seeing you are weak gives other malcontents an opportunity.

In these times you need iron parliamentary discipline, and with a weak leader that is almost impossible to maintain. You end up daring people to defy you, and, on finding they do, you end up in the confusion of whipping and unwhipping a vote. This is embarrassing and intolerable for the people you ask to do it, so you end up losing them too.

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At a Cabinet level too, things become impossible to manage. With the arrival of Hunt, the people who were excluded under Boris found their way back to the table. This brought on both a personal and political fight against those they see as the under-talented beneficiaries of largesse. Suella Braverman was the standard bearer — unashamedly populist on immigration (an issue that socially liberal Tories feel relaxed on, economic liberals are enthusiastically in favour of, but others are firmly against), and widely regarded by the “sensibles” as swivel-eyed. An errant email gave the chance to boot her out, but it was fractious politics that motivated taking it.

Truss had become despised by almost everyone, for betraying her Cameroon origins to embrace a hard Brexit, and then acquiescing to a quiet coup from the other side. She tried and she failed with her own mandate, and then became unable to maintain authority after she abandoned it. In doing so she reaped the outcome of the divisions and slights that had bubbled under the surface for decades. A deft politician with a gift for deal-making and communication might have steered through these waters. Liz Truss was not that person. She flipped and flopped on her main policies, but failed to offer the one thing every Tory craves most: the prospect of continuing in government.

Now, there is no clear pretender, because the other factions are so riven and built on shaky ground. It is hard to see someone who can unite the parliamentary party, let alone the membership. In a week we will see who emerges, then question whether they can make the most of it or not. Each of the major names is tainted by some association or another, each unwelcome in certain corners of the party and with their own personal challenges. There will be seven days of deal-making, but they will inherit the burden of a party happy to fight itself.

The only question now is whether the ugly infighting continues in public. Some relationships blow up once and come to a swift and dignified end, others paper over the cracks and rumble on a while longer. But the worst become toxic in their daily antagonisms. The Tories may try to pull themselves together, to have a quiet Christmas for the sake of the nation, but with authority and cohesion broken, it is unclear how this will happen, even now Truss has gone.

Which means the jumpiness from No. 10 wasn’t necessary; if the numbers had been done properly, so much panic and disarray could have been avoided. No chaos over whether it was a confidence vote. No shouting and manhandling of MPs being hustled and hassled through the lobby. No resignation and “unresignation” of the Chief Whip and the Deputy Chief Whip. And no panicked press office clarification messaged at WhatsApp at 1:30am.

It was this whirling vortex of panic that finally sank Liz Truss. And it was avoidable. As in so many crises it was a lack of accurate information that fed the ill-judged and ultimately disastrous decisions. The final 48 hours of Liz Truss’s leadership of the Conservative party are a lesson for everyone in politics.

The wiring of politics was exposed. The whips are meant to be anonymous. Going about quietly, as one great Labour whip described it to me when I was Tony Blair’s Political Secretary: “Just doing the Lord’s work, John, just doing the Lord’s work!” So, when Craig Whittaker, the Deputy Chief whip was quoted as resigning shouting: “I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck anymore”, there was something transgressive about not just the language but the glimpse into the machinery.

There’s a lot of mystique about the Whip’s office — headed by the “Chief”, as the Chief Whip is familiarly known. There’s talk of little “black books” and dark secrets held over recalcitrant backbenchers. But as with the spycraft of recruiting informers and double agents, blackmail is a very inefficient way of gaining control over people. To start with, they will always deeply resent you. Far better to align your disciplinary strictures with MPs’ needs and wants. For instance, one of the most powerful things whips do is allocate accommodation. The best offices are in short supply and in the past even offices were scarce — in the Eighties, a newly elected Ken Livingstone found himself working for months on a desk crammed into a corridor. There are carrots as well as sticks — one is foreign travel. Permission from the whips is needed for going on select committee fact-finding missions. Holding that over the colleagues is one of the forms of soft power used by the Chief.

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But the authority the whips have to impose discipline derives ultimately from the power and the credibility of the Prime Minister they serve. Right until the very end of a PM’s tenure, the whips will deliver for them. But there’s a law of diminishing returns, as has been made clear this week.

The next Prime Minister will have to impose their authority through the machine they inherit. Whether it’s Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, or even Boris Johnson redux, they face a fundamental challenge: rebellion can become addictive. As the fifth PM in just over six years, they will no doubt have a reshuffle. While patronage is initially a huge power for No. 10 — both the actual appointments and the promise of future preferment — it suffers from diminishing returns. Every new Cabinet and ministerial team creates losers as well as winners. When there have been a lot of reshuffles, it can easily come to the point where the number of former ministers is larger than the government’s majority. And the most frustrating thing about former ministers is that when they are on the backbenches, they suddenly discover the virtue of freedom of conscience. When I was Tony Blair’s Political Secretary we had only a small group of former ministers we called the “non-embittered former ministers” who we could rely on to support the government through thick and thin. The others were listening to Gordon Brown’s promises. As one of my colleagues quipped: “There will be six Chancellors in Gordon’s first Cabinet judging by what he’s promised.”

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The new No. 10 operation will need to learn from the failures over the past 45 days, as well as the final 48 hours. Almost lost among so many stories this week was the suspension of Liz Truss’s Acting Head of Communications Jason Stein. Allegedly authorised by the then Prime Minister, Stein called Michael Gove a “sadist” and described Sajid Javid as “shit”. Good advisers accurately reflect their politicians, and do their bidding. Great advisers know they are paid to say no to their bosses, and to leave the personal politics to the politicians.

The new administration will have a short window in which to get it right. The police talk about the golden hour in investigations when vital evidence can be located or lost. Similarly, there’s a brief golden period when a new Prime Minister can have a reset. A broad-based Cabinet that unifies the party. A clear and straightforward discussion of the hard choices and trade-offs required for budget-repair, and no shrinking from accepting from the Conservative party’s responsibility for the economic and financial challenges. For this is no longer about winning a historic fifth term; it is about trying to keep the country in the best possible shape until the next election. When facing defeat, political parties often talk about “saving the furniture”. It’s time for the Conservative party to salvage some dignity.

Instead, Truss’s dash for growth spooked the markets, which disbelieved her tax cuts could ever create enough growth to pay for her massive borrowing, and in a desperate attempt to mollify them we’ve been suddenly plunged back to the grim economics of austerity. Learning nothing from the last time, public spending will be slashed, along with investment in research and development, hobbling prospects of future growth. At this stage, and in such a deteriorating international climate, a return to stagnation would seem almost like a blessed relief. But there’s another way of looking at the problem, as the MP wondered out loud: “do normal people even care about growth anyway?”

It’s a good question. As the authors of The Future is Degrowth remind us, despite being taken for granted by economists and ordinary people alike, GDP growth as a measure of economic health is a very recent phenomenon, the product of the need to measure the success of investment and to track industrial capacity during the Second World War. As they observe: “Before 1950, there was almost no interest at all in economic growth as a policy goal in political statements or economic literature.” Rather, full employment, stability and reconstruction were the government’s priorities.

The one-off conjunction of spectacular growth rates and rising living standards following the Second World War led, they argue, to a folk association of GDP growth and personal prosperity. As they argue: “The fact that key democratic, social, and cultural rights were… fought for in the context of expansive modernity, and that within the growth paradigm societal progress became conflated with GDP growth, has laid the foundation for a powerful common sense, based on lived experience, that social improvements do indeed require economic growth and the development of the productive forces.”

It’s not an unreasonable deduction: of course, post-war “high growth rates did translate to a certain democratisation of prosperity”. Yet the relationship between GDP growth and prosperity is far from exact. Britain’s economy grew 7.5% last year as we came out of lockdown, dwarfing the post-war boom, though few would claim we’ve never had it so good as in the halcyon days of 2021. The highest ever upward GDP swing came in 1939 as Britain pivoted to a war economy, though the Second World War was hardly a golden era of mass prosperity. At the peak of Britain’s industrial, economic and political might in the 19th century, growth rates averaged 1.1% — significantly below GDP growth during the 2010s, commonly experienced as an era of stagnation and falling living standards. The unsettling prospect of an imminent nuclear exchange would, after what would admittedly be a sharp fall in GDP, surely unlock a great deal of potential for long-term economic growth as the survivors rebuilt Europe’s irradiated ruins. Most people would, nevertheless, prefer it not to happen. There are, simply, many more aspects to prosperity than abstract GDP growth: the map is not the territory.

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So much for the abstract: in the real world, living standards are dropping sharply, as public spending cuts have led to a collapsing health service, creaking transport infrastructure and the police’s withdrawal from their basic functions of providing law and order. The stratospheric upward rise in housing costs functions, on paper, as GDP growth, even as it erodes actual prosperity. Desperate attempts to make the line go up on the chart — whether through Thatcher’s sell-off of public assets, the shifting of industrial production to the Far East, or the conversion of Western economies to debt-fueled speculative bubbles — have all brought temporary bursts of GDP growth even as they made the economy’s fundamentals weaker and brought lower living standards in their wake. We need a different way. The problem is, no-one agrees what that way is.

It is reasonable to assume, as has now swiftly become common opinion, that just as the economic crash of the Seventies swung the pendulum of economic orthodoxy away from Keynesianism towards free-market capitalism, so is the pendulum now swinging violently back away from what it is politically useful to term “libertarianism”. But to what?

The Labour Party, after some prevarication, seems to have settled on a modest version of the Green New Deal, an attempt to revive economic growth through massive investment in sustainable technologies. In doing so, it has emulated Biden’s Green Neo-Keynesianism, emphasising that once again, where American politics leads, economic orthodoxy eventually follows. Whether or not such a course of action will save the planet — and the reality is that there is no obvious replacement for fossil fuels without massive expansion of nuclear energy — the Green New Deal can be understood as an attempt to restart the stuttering engine of GDP growth through a second industrial revolution, this time undoing the unintended consequences of the first.

Will it work? Whether or not the markets will look as favourably on a Starmer government’s push for green industrial investment as it does those of America remains to be seen. There is a great danger that Truss’s botched push for growth has queered the pitch for any future radical attempt to escape stagnation. But then, if we disentangle the quest for prosperity from that for GDP growth, the answer is that it almost doesn’t matter.

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If the country has a reliable energy supply, has the industrial capacity to sustain the levels of technological sophistication to which we are accustomed, and can provide secure food and housing to its population, the hard years we are entering may still be experienced as an era of basic comfort. As a number of economists have declared, the age of growth may, in any case, have already gone for good, with all the advanced economies following Japan into a long cycle of secular stagnation, at best a broadly comfortable steady state economy with no dramatic peaks or troughs. As the “post-growth” economist Tim Jackson observes: “Low (and declining) rates of economic growth may well be the ‘new normal’.”

Such a vision accords with the vision of the sociologist Michael Mann, who, in the 2013 book Does Capitalism Have a Future?, breaks sharply with the predictions of his co-authors that global capitalism will collapse some time between 2030 and 2050. Instead, he argues: “Why should a growth rate of 1% be a capitalist crisis? Why cannot capitalism continue as a low-growth global system, which it was for much of its history? The 20th century — more precisely, the period 1945 to 1970 in the West and the end of the 20th century in the East — would then be seen as exceptional.” Even China’s spectacular growth rate “might be reduced down to the 1% level of the historic British success story” so that “all of humanity might live in an almost steady-state economy”. The future of capitalism, he suggests, “might not be tumultuous, but boring”.

But in the current international climate, steady and boring would look like an almost unattainable win. In general terms, despite every desperate attempt for a quick fix, the global economy has never recovered the sustained growth rates of the post-war era, and probably never will. Battered by the Seventies’ oil crisis, the global financial crash of 2008, the response to Covid and now by the war in Ukraine, the world economy still has the effects of the looming conflict between the US and China to prepare for, along with the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change.

It is just as possible, indeed probably more likely, that we have entered an age of growing, compound crisis. Almost a decade ago, the authors of Does Capitalism Have a Future? warned that “something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession”. As we await the blackouts and disorder of the coming winter, and try not to think about the prospects of nuclear war, it would be reasonable to act on the assumption this crisis has already begun.

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In these bleak circumstances, a focus on shoring up near-term national resilience ought to take precedence over the prioritising of long-term growth. When the confrontation between the United States and China begins — and the US government is now briefing that the invasion of Taiwan can be expected sooner than we thought — none of the current market orthodoxies will still apply. Whatever economic plans are laid now, no matter how palatable they are to the markets, will not survive.

In planning his invasion of Ukraine, Putin evidently priced in Western sanctions and Russia’s ejection from the international banking sector, gambling that its vast mineral resources and energy resources would count for more in the world today than the economic commonsense of yesterday. As winter approaches, it is not yet clear that Putin has lost this bet: like the First World War, the conflict in Ukraine makes no conventional economic sense, but has created its own new reality. Similarly, to win a protracted Pacific war against the greatest industrial power in human history, the United States would have to reorient its entire economy around the war effort. The panicked reactions of the market to Truss’s mini-budget no more reflect the approaching colossal reordering of the global economy than Westminster lobby gossip and Downing Street psychodrama reflect the great geopolitical trends already reshaping the world around us.

At times like this, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the End of History. Like youth, it will not come again. It would have been far better if the decades of bad decisions that brought us here had not been made. But they were, and now we must suffer the consequences as best we can. Even the years of austerity following the 2008 crash now seem a lost hinterland of wasted opportunity: we could have invested in state capacity to see us through the hard years we have now entered. We could have expanded gas storage facilities, instead of shutting them down. We could have built nuclear power plants, high-speed rail, and all the infrastructure on which modern life in a developed nation depends, at a time when borrowing costs were practically non-existent.

Instead, we feel the absence of investment just when we need state capacity the most, and are least able to afford it. Like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, we frittered away the summer without providing for the winter to come, and now we shudder as the first cold winds begin to whip around us. But at least the line on the chart went up, a little, as the government of the day reassured the markets.

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Just as we now perceive that we should have used better times to prepare for today, so it will swiftly become clear that we should be using the time we have now to prepare for the worse ones fast approaching. What we perceive as crisis is still a period of relative normality. At a time when the international situation is as menacing as it is, it would be comforting to have, at the barest minimum, a functioning government. Instead, we have Liz Truss, sitting on the front bench staring blankly into space as her party and country crumble around her.

Is she in charge? Is anyone? It ought to be impossible for Truss to blame the deteriorating international situation for her political woes without also proposing some measures to mitigate Britain’s exposure to the global crisis. But instead she broke her premiership and the country’s government chasing GDP growth it may never have been in her power to attain.

When Starmer wins the next election, he will be required to spend vast sums of money in rebuilding Britain’s decayed infrastructure, fixing the roof while the rains lash down. Given the international situation, Labour is correct in framing its proposed investment in infrastructure as much as a question of national security as a path to economic growth. Debt will grow, and it will have to: survival comes first, and abstract economic growth must be subordinated to this very basic goal. When even Europe’s economic giant, Germany, is trying to stave off industrial collapse, the idea that growth can be attained in the current circumstances seems entirely divorced from reality.

As eminent American economists now emphasise, near-wartime situations such as ours are not won with peacetime economies: the old rules do not apply. In any case, the feeble growth we experienced in recent years accumulated at the top, without bringing mass prosperity: voters are unlikely to punish a government that offers them higher living standards through redistribution, even without GDP growth. In the absence of growth, Labour must provide the basics of common comfort: if people can still eat, heat their homes and shelter themselves from the weather, they will count themselves prosperous, even if the GDP charts say otherwise.

Other people’s dreams are rarely very interesting, so I’ll keep this brief. I had a towering pile of columns to file, but had failed to start work on any of them. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, now working as a kind of journalistic bailiff, was pursuing me through a series of oddly blank rooms. In a twist not unfamiliar in dreams, he was not merely himself, he was also the Judge, the gigantic and terrifying personification of evil in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. There is no escaping the Judge; and in my dream, there was no escaping Kwarteng.

That was bad enough. But the following night, Kwarteng visited me again. This time, in a surprising new departure, he had organised a mano a mano poetry competition in Leeds, in which he and I were due to read our own verses. Disastrously, I had forgotten all about it, and only remembered when it was far too late to catch the train. In desperation, I scribbled a few lines and posted them on Twitter, hoping they would mollify the poetry-fanciers of West Yorkshire. But then — another disaster! The ex-Chancellor immediately retweeted them, mocking my slapdash efforts and pointing out that the first two lines ended with the same word. Shame and ignominy engulfed me; I knew I could never show my face again.

Nightmares about public failure are very common. There can be few readers who haven’t dreamed about turning up to an exam entirely unprepared, or about walking onstage having neglected to learn the lines. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the more you care about such things, the more likely they are to haunt you, which is why they’re so common among academic high-achievers. So perhaps Kwarteng himself, whose academic credentials are second to none, has had such dreams. And if he did, here’s the twist. His nightmares came true.

What happened to Kwarteng on Friday — and again yesterday, when Jeremy Hunt ripped up his mini-budget, poured petrol on the debris and set the whole thing alight — was more than your standard political sacking. It was a humiliation on the grandest possible scale, as the Chancellor was forced to fly back early from Washington, with some 6,000 people gleefully tracking his flight, before Liz Truss delivered the inevitable bullet. He had been in command at the Treasury for just 38 days, saved only from a post-war record by Iain Macleod’s heart attack in July 1970.

It’s hard to think of many British political figures with such a catastrophic trajectory. Kwarteng had been Boris Johnson’s Business Secretary since January 2021, but it’s a safe bet most ordinary punters had never heard of him. Then, suddenly, he was Chancellor, with a breathtakingly radical plan to defy the markets and turbo-charge a new era of growth. Then, equally suddenly, he became the most unpopular Chancellor in the history of the Ipsos-Mori poll, with even less public support than Denis Healey after the International Monetary Fund bailout in 1976 or Norman Lamont after Black Wednesday in 1992. And then he was gone, and it was all over. What a career!

You might assume from all this that Kwarteng is a fool. But he really isn’t a fool. Giving school talks, I’ve twice come across people who taught him, and both told me he was the cleverest boy they’d ever known. Were they wrong? Obviously not, for when you look at his biography, it’s a proud parent’s dream. At prep school he won a national history prize; at Eton he was a King’s Scholar and won the Newcastle Scholarship for philosophy, a competition examined by Stephen Sykes, Bishop of Ely and former Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

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Is Truss the worst PM in history?

By Dominic Sandbrook

Kwarteng himself went to Cambridge, where he got a double first, twice won the Browne Medal for Latin and Greek poetry and even won University Challenge. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. He did a PhD on William III’s attempt to reform the coinage in the 1690s. And he’s written history books — two of which I reviewed at the time. “Well-researched and crisply written, Kwarteng’s book is a lot better than most MPs’ efforts,” I wrote of Ghosts of Empire, which examined the legacy of Britain’s rule overseas. “A politician with a sense of nuance: whatever next?”

For much of his gilded life, then, Kwarteng knew only success. And when he looked forward, he could reasonably expect more in the future. When he daydreamed, he surely imagined himself as a titanic reforming Chancellor to rank alongside William Gladstone or Sir Geoffrey Howe — and perhaps even as Prime Minister. And now? He’s the answer to a quiz question, the 38-day Chancellor whose tax bombshell exploded in his own face. To put that another way, if he were an England football manager, he’d be the love child of Steve McClaren and Sam Allardyce.

Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset. “All would have agreed that he was capable of being emperor, if only he had never been it.” So wrote Tacitus of the short-lived Roman emperor Galba — who, in fairness, lasted almost seven times longer in his top job than Kwarteng did at the Treasury. It’s a line that often recurs in British political commentary. I’ve seen it applied to Prime Ministers as diverse as Lord Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, Sir Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson, Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson. Perhaps that tells you something about the job — an office in which, one way or another, failure is almost guaranteed. But it’s also very revealing about a quality those men had in common. Like Kwarteng, they were all very clever.

Wilson, for example, was described by his Oxford tutor as the brightest student he had ever taught, and reputedly got one of the highest economics marks in the university’s history. There’s a gloriously bleak irony here, since Wilson presided over the devaluation of sterling in 1967 and retired nine years later with the pound in freefall, inflation in double digits and the humiliating IMF bailout only months away. His government was arguably the cleverest in Britain’s modern history, boasting former Oxford dons such as Richard Crossman and Anthony Crosland as well as self-consciously intelligent, civilised men such as Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. Yet they left office exhausted by endless fiascos and disappointments, with Britain’s international standing at what was then an all-time low. So much, then, for cleverness.

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Liz Truss can still survive

By John McTernan

But the Wilson government wasn’t an aberration, for political history is littered with examples of people being found out, often in the most embarrassing possible circumstances. Now that he’s remembered as a byword for complacent failure, it’s easy to forget that David Cameron was a straight-A student who won an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford and was described by his tutor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” students he’d ever taught. (By now you should have spotted a theme.)  An even more glaring example, however, comes from across the Atlantic.

Google “Michael Ignatieff” and you wonder if it was really legal for one man to have enjoyed so many blessings. Everything the Canadian intellectual touched turned to gold. At boarding school in Toronto in the Sixties he was captain of the soccer team and editor of the yearbook. He taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He presented The Late Show for the BBC and wrote columns for the Observer. His documentaries won awards; his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for some of the world’s most prestigious non-fiction prizes; his novel was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a professorial chair at Harvard, then another at Toronto. And when his friends in the Canadian Liberal Party invited him to make a bid for the leadership, further glory seemed inevitable.

What happened next, however, makes Kwarteng’s stewardship of the Treasury look like a triumph. In 2011 Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, finishing third with just 34 seats. What was worse, he even lost his own seat in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the first Canadian opposition leader to do so since 1900. His staff were in tears, the world was watching, and all those book prizes must have seemed an awfully long way away. In the cruellest twist imaginable, the man who always came top in exams had failed the most public exam of all.

So is the lesson that clever people shouldn’t go into politics? Obviously not. We need clever politicians; it’s no coincidence that probably the two least impressive pre-Truss party leaders in my lifetime, Iain Duncan Smith and Jeremy Corbyn, were titanically stupid. But there are different kinds of cleverness, and cleverness is just one asset among others. Above all, it has to be leavened by humility: a recognition that nobody knows everything, that we all make mistakes and that clever, self-confident people often make the worst mistakes of all. In profiles of Kwarteng, the word “arrogant” comes up again and again. He’s paid a high price for it now.

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The Tories are the anti-growth coalition

By James Sean Dickson

But aren’t we all terrified, deep down, of becoming Kwasi Kwarteng? Isn’t there a little bit of us that dreads the inevitable day when, on the grandest stage, our boastful pretensions are stripped away, and our ignorance and incompetence laid bare for all to see? Isn’t that the nightmare that haunts all vaguely accomplished people — the Naomi Wolf moment, when the BBC radio presenter gently points out that your entire doctoral thesis is based on a colossally sloppy misunderstanding?

In his excellent book The Death of Consensus, the journalist Phil Tinline argues that nightmares are a good way of understanding British politics since the war — nightmarish memories of the Depression or a fascist dictatorship giving way to equally terrifying fears of trade unions or runaway inflation. But perhaps the ultimate personal nightmare, the dread of catastrophic public humiliation, is a good way to understand why some politicians succeed, and some don’t.

We’re told that Liz Truss is a very confident person, and that she models herself on Margaret Thatcher. But Thatcher wasn’t a very confident person; in private she sometimes wept when the pressure became too much, and her staff often noticed that she became jittery before big international summits or major speeches. “Do you get nervous sometimes?” asked an interviewer from the News of the World in 1980. “Oh yes,” said Thatcher. “Of course you do, you never get rid of it.” She sometimes struggled to sleep, she admitted, because she worried so much.

That’s not the fantasy Thatcher, the Iron Lady of Truss and Kwarteng’s imaginings. But perhaps that’s the difference. Somewhere, deep down, she knew what she didn’t know. She was frightened of being found out, and that meant she wasn’t. But they slept too soundly. And now, in a twist of cosmic proportions, they’re living the worst professional nightmare of all.

That moment is upon No 10 now — with a brutal twist. Normally it is possible to blame external circumstances, often a political rival ruthlessly splitting the party to seize the crown, reckless of the damage caused.

This time it is entirely a situation of the Prime Minister’s making. It is her policies, the ones she set out in her leadership campaign, which have been fully implemented and more. It is her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, who spooked the markets by sacking his Permanent Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the Treasury; preventing the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, a Tory creation, from publishing forecasts of the Government’s “mini-budget”; and wanting to abolish the top rate of income tax, on top of ending the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Three strikes and Kwarteng was out.

Is there a way through? Very possibly. Truss is facing the ultimate gang who couldn’t shoot straight. The parliamentary Conservative party is often called the most sophisticated electorate in the world — a phrase which is only true if you construe “sophisticated” according to the Elizabethan meaning of the word. These are the MPs who chose Theresa May, who lost a 20-point lead and a majority in an election against Jeremy Corbyn. They then plumped for Boris Johnson who governed as he has lived — as a Lord of Misrule. He became the only prime minister to have been found guilty of breaking the law — rules for which he had legislated, but in character had clearly failed to read.

This most “sophisticated” electorate has surpassed itself with a free market leader who has now been judged freely by those very markets. As a great Strathclyde Regional Council leader once said to me, speaking of his hundred strong Labour group of councillors: “Ah wouldnae let them walk my dog round the block. And I don’t have a dog.”

If, now, the appointment of Jeremy Hunt, a former Cabinet minister with no Treasury experience who fell out of the Tory leadership in the first round, is being hailed as a stroke of Machiavellian genius, perhaps it is possible to discern a faint and very narrow path to victory for the Prime Minister — or at least to survival, which feels like the same thing.

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Liz Truss makes the case for Labour

By John McTernan

Time, as Sheryl Sandberg says, to lean in. Own the pivot; it is not, emphatically, a U-turn. Double down. Declare that you are governing in the national interest. Show it. Raise VAT at the same time as raising benefits in line with inflation. Throw in a new Deficit Repayment levy of 5% for earners over £100,000. Dare Labour to oppose such compassionate conservatism. Tighten belts by moving capital spending to the Right rather than cancelling any projects. Day by day, get to the end of the week, the end of the month, then Christmas. Then the energy package starts to kick in and reduce the rate of inflation.

Of course, politics doesn’t take place only in a government. Already, like “Snakes on a Plane”, letter writers are coiling into view. And plotters are briefing the lobby. There are so many schemes swirling around but they all amount to one proposition: replacing the Prime Minister without an election. The number of names being floated suggests one single problem — when you are looking for a unity candidate it is the unity which is necessary not the candidate. And Tory plotters face not only an immovable object — Prime Minister Truss — but also an irresistible force — the ambition of Suella Braverman. Such ideologically divided parties heal only slowly, and over a long period in opposition.

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Is Truss the worst PM in history?

By Dominic Sandbrook

But what about the Opposition? Says no one. Ever. The bitter truth of the UK’s first-past-the-post system is that while the Government looks rudderless, the Tory party has a working majority of 69 and can do what it likes until it no longer has that majority. Which could be as far off as 2025, given the maximum permissible time this parliament could run. And everyone, including the Opposition, knows this. The action is with the Government and even if it is a car crash everyone driving past is slowing down and gazing in a mixture of awe and horror.

To get any cut through, Labour needs to change gear and get edgier. This is a tough ask. Not just because being showy is something that neither Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves, his Shadow Chancellor, are comfortable with. But also because as the alternative government, they too have to be careful not to spook the markets or the voters. Because while more than 50% in a dozen polls does suggest a settled will, it also means that Labour’s support is so broad it goes deeply into voters who are far from the unionised, statist, tax and spend heart of the party. This is a fragile coalition that should be nurtured — not confronted.

Time, then, for some creative campaigning. Labour needs to show, not tell; it must demonstrate it is a new broad coalition by co-opting public figures like Jamie Oliver. His passionate campaign for extending free school meals is making waves — appoint him to head a Food and Healthy Eating Commission. Oppositions can be fleet-footed, after all, they aren’t running anything. Starmer should capitalise on that to exploit slips by the Government where they can become symbols of how Labour occupies the middle ground.

If the Government spurns plans for an information campaign, the Labour should bring the TUC and Age UK together to run one. When the Government abandons smoking cessation programmes, Labour should bring its digital campaigners together with all the medical unions and volunteers from the creative industries to generate an innovative campaign. Don’t just look like the alternative government, act like it too.

High-minded campaigns should be matched by low politics too. Find every opportunity to use parliamentary votes to defeat the government — or use the threat of defeat to paralyse them. Too scared to lose votes, the Government will try not to legislate and create a Zombie parliament. But Labour should be chipping away at the Tory majority, looking for people to cross the floor. All its MPs should be on Defection Watch — and any Tory MPs who switch sides should be promised and given a safe seat. (Though with Labour on current polling, just being allowed to be the Labour candidate in your own seat would probably work for many.)

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How powerful is Liz Truss?

By Terry Eagleton

Everything has to be about image, change and momentum. Most of all for Keir Starmer, who must spend almost all of his time on the road — selling his policies and himself. It’s important that the whole country understands “green growth” means reindustrialisation and jobs, jobs, jobs. And they also need to see that Keir likes a beer, loves football and will actually listen to them.

Time is always the most precious commodity in politics — you need it to change perceptions, or to heal wounds. And time is moving very differently for Starmer and Truss right now. The Opposition leader needs events to speed up, the Prime Minister needs them to slow down.

The news is mixed for Liz Truss this morning. The actions of the Government are decisive and calming: more tax cuts from the mini-budget reversed and a statement from the new Chancellor in the House. This will calm the markets, but not the parliamentary Conservative Party. The backbenches are restless and getting more febrile, and WhatsApp makes spreading rumours to each other and to journalists so much easier and faster. This is why it is reported that Tory MPs believe the Prime Minister has to go — “it’s when not if” — but remain unclear what mechanism can be used.

Government is often described as a marathon not a sprint; for Liz Truss this week is a marathon of sprints to stay ahead of the mob.

A few weeks ago, a police officer tried to arrest a man carrying a blank placard who might have written something offensive to the King on it. Perhaps this heralds a whole new category of crime, namely those which you haven’t committed and don’t even intend to, but always might. People going for a quiet run in the park might suddenly dash into a bank and rob it. We’re going to need a lot more prisons.

Most liberals and leftists look on power with suspicion. But this is because when they hear the word they instinctively think of dominant power, and look for some kind of resistance to it. But resistance is itself a form of power; not all power is oppressive. There are productive forms of it as well as despotic ones. It all depends on who has it for what purposes in which circumstances. Only those with enough power already can afford to be sniffy about it, just as there are millionaires who fix their thoughts on spiritual matters and despise the rest of us for our crass materialism.

The only thing worse than having too much power is having too little. Democracy isn’t the opposite of power but a particular form of it. You need power to free yourself from slavery or Vladimir Putin. The same is true of authority, not all of which is to be derided.

The Met police, for instance, are in trouble partly because becoming a police officer is an attractive prospect to a lot of natural-born bullies and rednecks, who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to kick other people around or make obscenely sexist remarks in the knowledge that their mates would be alarmed if they didn’t. Trying to root out police bigotry thus has its limits, like trying to root out aspiring entertainers who enjoy being applauded.

But there is also the authority of a Nelson Mandela, which is a question not of rank but of wisdom and experience. Knowledge without wisdom is impoverished. So is knowledge without knowing how to apply it. There is such a thing as tacit knowledge, meaning something you know but can’t formulate. Try teaching someone how to whistle “Hey Jude”.

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Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

Noam Chomsky once made an interesting comment on the flyblown old cliché “speaking truth to power”. He pointed out that power (of the dominant kind) knows the truth already. Only the excessively charitable see it as a clumsy but well-intentioned giant, blundering witlessly around the place and trampling on people like a rogue elephant without even noticing. On this theory, power is born of ignorance. If only it were aware of the havoc it wreaks, it would change its ways. If only the tobacco companies had known long ago about the lethal effects of smoking, they would have shifted over into producing cheese-and-onion crisps. If the logging companies are deaf to the danger of destroying the rainforests, let’s just tell them again, and then again. While we’re at it, let’s draw the attention of the gambling industry to the suicides whose blood they have on their hands.

Power, however, is far from witless. On the contrary, it makes use of highly specialised forms of knowledge all the time. Knowledge is itself a mode of power, rather as universities have become service stations for the capitalist economy. Power knows what’s going on in the most literal of senses, given its global networks of surveillance. It is perfectly conscious of its own darker machinations, but either doesn’t care or believes that they are unavoidable. What sustains it is not ignorance but self-interest. It isn’t schooling it needs, but restraining. This is also true at the individual level. There are people to whom one should no more give power than one would give a bowie knife to a toddler. The problem is that one usually finds out who they are when it’s too late.

It isn’t power, then, that needs the truth, which means that intellectuals will have to find some other high-minded justification for their salaries. It’s those whose lives power makes miserable. To be free, you need what is traditionally known as emancipatory knowledge — a grasp of your situation as a whole, one which involves not just a new view of the world but a new self-understanding. And this transformed self-understanding is itself an active force for change. If a process of political liberation is to be judged successful, those who emerge at the end of it aren’t quite the people they were when they started out.

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The Tories are the anti-growth coalition

By James Sean Dickson

David Hume, perhaps the greatest of British philosophers, writes rather surprisingly that power always lies with the governed. He’s not speaking of democracy, which hardly existed at the time, but of the fact that sovereignty ultimately rests on popular agreement. You can imprison some of the people all of the time, but you can’t imprison all of the people all of the time. Any form of rule which doesn’t engage the partial consent of the masses is unlikely to endure.

Without that consent, as Sigmund Freud remarks, it would be impossible to understand how so many civilisations have survived for so long despite the justifiable hostility of the common people. There must be enough people who are complicit in their own subjection — enough people on benefits, for example, who are rather taken with that nice Mr Kwarteng and think he is doing a great job. It’s true that consent needn’t mean affection: most governments have been tolerated rather than admired. Power is what we have to put up with. But people, being properly self-interested, will only submit to it as long as there is something in it for them.

What that is, of course, may be pathetically meagre. It may mean having the secret police search your flat only once a month rather than twice a week. Those who are subject to power are usually reluctant to revolt against it — not necessarily because they have any particular relish for it, but because of the dangers involved in confronting its violence, the lack of any obvious alternative, and the fact that they have too much to do without chaining themselves to each other for days on end. On the other hand, the moment citizens realise that there simply isn’t enough in it for them anymore, they will rebel as surely as night follows day. It is rational to do so, and human beings are somewhat rational creatures. When any alternative becomes better than what you have, the days of your rulers are numbered. This may be partly because there is no longer much in it for them either.

The great theorist of political consent is Edmund Burke. In his treatise on aesthetics, Burke tries to square the fact that the law must be feared with the need for it to be loved. If the former evokes the image of the father, the latter has a more maternal flavour. The authority of the father, Burke argues, “hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence”. The problem is that only love will bind us to the law, but this love is likely to weaken its force and inspire in us a benign contempt. Desperate to resolve this contradiction, Burke offers us the figure of the grandfather — male, to be sure, but tempered by old age with a certain gentleness of spirit. It is unlikely that this will provide much guidance for Liz Truss.

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By Richard Bourke

Freud, by contrast, sees no final solution to this dilemma. In his language, the law becomes the superego or source of punitive discipline; and since it is installed inside us all, its power is all the more draconian. To transgress it feels like violating ourselves. The law works as well as it does because we reap an obscene delight from being oppressed by it; and this is because being punished relieves us of our guilt. Yet we then feel guilty about our delight, which leads us to want more punishment. We revere the law, then, but our reverence is ambivalent: we never entirely submit to its coercion, and rejoice in seeing it brought low. No Tory government is going to work that one out.

The most authentic form of power, so we learn from King Lear, is one which maintains a pact with weakness and failure. The most elusive aspect of power is the exercise of it for its own sake. There is something excessive about this faculty, which tends to outstrip its practical goals and revel in itself. It wasn’t a burning desire to spread social sweetness and light which kept Boris Johnson hanging on to office like a burr to the seat of one’s pants. In this respect, power is as irrational as love.

Such power is not likely to disappear anytime soon, and this is good news for those who need to fight injustice. But we will know that genuine change has happened when the word no longer means quite what it means at present — when not only the power-situation, but the very concept of power, has been transformed almost out of recognition.

“I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth,” Truss said, pressing her foot on the accelerator. “Our community wants this rapid growth to slow down,” said Miller, stamping on the brake. “We will make it easier to build homes,” Truss said, bearing down on the great furnace bellows of British growth. “The next local plan must cut new house-building levels in half,” Miller countered, pouring cold water on the few weak, fading embers that remain. Truss might as well have slapped on the rouge, minced onto the conference hall stage as a pantomime dame and invited the audience to proclaim “It’s behind you!” to identify members of the anti-growth coalition.

In her speech, Truss listed opposition parties, militant unions, think tanks with vested interests, talking heads, “Brexit deniers” and environmental activists as constituent parts of the anti-growth coalition. If that’s what makes up the anti-growth coalition, all of these interests are certainly very powerful; our economic growth rate has been woeful for the last decade and a half. But one might note these groups — also the stock bogeymen of the Tory faithful — haven’t held the keys to Downing Street for the last 12 years. They certainly play a role, but it’s easy to paint a target on your political enemies. It’s far harder to paint a target on your friends and allies.

The awkward truth left unsaid is that the anti-growth coalition contains more than just members from the “the other side”. Truss failed to mention that some of its most powerful members were in that very conference hall: the Conservative activist base, voter coalition and, yes, even Tory MPs. Miller is just a timely and particularly diametric example, but a quick search will find example, after example, after example, after example, after example, after example of Tory MPs opposing growth — from houses to solar panel installations to new supermarkets — in the face of local opposition from prospective Conservative voters.

They pose in front of derelict industrial wastelands saved from “inappropriate development” with elderly, homeowning activists holding Conservative campaign signs, all grinning like Alsatians. And the Tory councillors are no better. If anything, it’s even easier to find councillor, after councillor, after councillor, after councillor proudly claiming ownership of blocking developments. The so-called talking heads from think tanks that Truss identified often ponder on panels why Britain’s growth rate has been anaemic for so long, all pensively stating “it’s a complex, multifaceted issue” relating to obscure legislative frameworks or some other skills policy minutiae.

But there’s no great mystery. We haven’t grown because we refuse to build infrastructure and housing in our most productive regions and cities, strangling the supply of workers to well-paying, productive jobs, and increasing operational costs. The nation that once produced great Victorian engineers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s calibre has lost its nerve and taste for economic progress.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

It’s easy to assume that big, dark, and powerful forces are behind our economic malaise. It’s far harder to imagine that the cause is perfectly normal, average and decent fellow countrymen and women — motivated by only good intentions — objecting to planning proposals just because they want to stop some construction dust for a few months, or prevent something as nebulous as the “character” of their local area changing. These small-c conservatives represent millions of grains of sand in the national gears of growth — and they’re courted by politicians of all flavours seeking votes at the intersection of our political incentive structures. But courted most successfully, if Truss were to look in the mirror, by the Conservative Party.

One of the great unsolved problems in politics is the natural conflict between wealth, political power and economic dynamism. Wealth building is a fundamentally good thing for society, for it provides security, stability and facilitates increases in living standards. But with growth in wealth inevitably comes political power, which is then invariably used to moat and defend the ownership of wealth, even if that means strangling off economic growth through barriers to entry, oligopolistic profits and economic rents.

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By Will Lloyd

These will all be quietly introduced under the well-meaning guise of protecting consumers and the environment, or ensuring product quality (protecting the “unique character of the local area”). In the housebuilding sector, only large players with an army of planning system navigators and the capital to weather cost of operation can survive. A 2016 House of Lords report concluded that the sector “has all the characteristics of an oligopoly”, because of the barriers to entry erected by the wealth and power structures of middle Britain. “It is rational for private enterprise to optimise profits rather than volume, limiting their uncertainty in a market characterised by constant Government intervention and cyclical risk,” the report added. There’s your anti-growth coalition right there, Prime Minister.

It’s not that Truss has no allies. Save for the party leader’s speech, the main stage is never where the best ideas are found at party conferences. Scrubbed of interesting content and commentary that might accidentally “commit news”, cabinet minister speeches are best avoided. The few conference events that did have a “buzz” were all on the subject of planning reform — for everything from housing to new reservoirs. Veterans of many failed campaigns, the movement for change is becoming much wiser and more targeted. It doesn’t matter how big your porcelain hammer is when you hit it against the concrete wall of reform, the thinkers now realise — the hammer will always shatter.

Key to reform — and the defeat of the real anti-growth coalition — is a complete rewiring of incentive structures. A crusade against the largest, most influential voter block in the country will never win. So instead of playing tug-of-war with them, tug the rope sideways. Buy them into reform with beautifully designed buildings, and include their often legitimate concerns from day one in consultations. And — just as Nye Bevan joked was necessary when pushing through the creation of the NHS against stiff opposition from doctors — stuff their mouths with gold.

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Who would be a young Tory?

By James Sean Dickson

Let them enrich themselves by voting for densification with policies such as Street Votes, giving them the value of planning uplift to their own properties. Simplify the structure of Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy — initiatives that try to get funding for schools, hospitals, roads and local amenities from new developments, but that fail through their complexity and lack of scale and ambition. Make people believe that by backing a development, they will benefit personally. And for heaven’s sake, follow through with that promise. Yes, it’s offensive to offer these privileged, wealthy people even more carrots — but it will be worth it for the transformative benefits of structural reform.

Finally, realise that some incentive structures are already there for you to exploit. The Secretary of State could get building started in Labour-dominated cities tomorrow. There would be no primary or secondary legislation requirements. All the powers to do this exist today. If the Conservative Party is worried about losing the city suburbs — and it should be — one way to slow the tide of Labour-inclined, priced-out city-dwelling families into the suburbs is to enable them to live in Labour-held, city constituencies by building more.

Going up against the anti-growth coalition will be “difficult, but it is necessary”, Truss said. “We cannot give in to the voices of decline. We cannot give in to those who say Britain can’t grow faster. We cannot give in to those who say we can’t do better.” The only problem is, she was saying it to everyone else, not her own party.

The winter energy crisis won’t be as bad as everybody fears. Inflation will start to come down. By the spring, that enormous Labour poll lead will be a fading memory. And as the next election approaches, ordinary people across the land will throw their caps in the air and cheer the name of Good Queen Liz…

No. No, I can’t do it. Tempting as it is to tilt against the conventional wisdom, sometimes you just have to face facts. The conference was awful. The speech was awful. This has been the worst start to any premiership, I think, in recent history — perhaps even in all British history.

Perhaps some readers will think this very harsh. But one close Truss ally, speaking off-the-record to the Financial Times, didn’t seem to think so. “I just went back to my hotel room and cried,” he said. “It’s a total disaster.” That’s pretty much what the general public think, too. In focus groups this week, the words that came up again and again were “incompetent”, “useless”, “untrustworthy”, “dangerous” and “clueless”. The punters aren’t always right, of course. But this time they are right, aren’t they?

“Our policy is great,” Penny Mordaunt told a fringe conference audience a couple of days ago, “but our comms is shit.” But if your comms really is shit, then who cares about the policy? Who even knows about it? Communicating your policy is the very essence of politics. If you can’t do it, you’ll never win another election.

I watched Truss’s speech through my fingers, embarrassed not just by the sheer lack of content, but the comically wooden and childlike delivery. It speaks volumes that in their desperation to find something, anything, nice to say about it, sympathetic papers applauded her for staying calm after she was interrupted by hecklers. Only somebody who had never heard of Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair — all of whom were brilliant at dealing with interruptions — could have possibly thought this worth applauding.

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Liz Truss makes the case for Labour

By John McTernan

For although academics and activists often prefer to talk about the abstractions of ideology or the nuts and bolts of policy, performance really, really matters in politics. To some extent, in fact, performance is politics. Even in a parliamentary system, you need a messenger who embodies the message, a leader who can charm and explain. Watch Thatcher talking to Robin Day in 1984, or Jim Callaghan being interviewed by Thames TV’s This Week in 1978, and it’s like entering a different world. Whatever their ideological differences, Thatcher and Callaghan are seasoned, accomplished performers, at the top of their respective games. They think about the questions. They talk in complete sentences, even complete paragraphs. They give long, considered, serious answers. They seem like impressive, well-informed, formidable people. Then watch Truss again, and try not to weep.

The Tories’ problems run deeper than Truss, of course, but since she’s such a colossal part of them, we can’t let her off the hook. I made a real effort this week to think of a Prime Minister who got off to a worse start, and the truth is, I can’t. Even Theresa May had a pretty long honeymoon until she blew it in the election catastrophe of 2017. Gordon Brown had a decent honeymoon, too, until he blew it by not calling an election. (Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.)

Perhaps the only vaguely relevant parallel is Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who succeeded Harold Macmillan at the end of 1963 after a very murky leadership fix by his Old Etonian Cabinet pals. As an unelected earl with, by his own admission, a poor television manner and a “face like a skull”, Douglas-Home was a ridiculous choice in the age of the Beatles and James Bond. But he wasn’t completely terrible. He had been a solid Foreign Secretary for three years, and to many people he represented a reassuringly tweedy kind of stability. In the Gallup polls, satisfaction with him never fell below 40%, which wasn’t bad for somebody at the end of a 13-year Tory regime. And Douglas-Home actually came pretty close to winning in 1964, with 304 seats to Labour’s 317. Does anybody seriously think Truss can win 304 seats? At the current rate, she’ll be lucky to make it into three figures.

Putting aside the structural, institutional and external issues, where does Truss stand in the pantheon of PMs? These are terribly early days, of course, but I think the answer’s pretty clear. Even if you admire what she represents — a kind of supercharged mock-Thatcherite free-market libertarianism — I think she’s comfortably the least impressive person to have become Prime Minister in my lifetime, since the advent of universal suffrage and perhaps even since the creation of the office under George I, or Queen Anne if you’re feeling eccentric.

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Welcome to the Tory apocalypse

By Will Lloyd

If you think that’s a bit harsh, imagine you’re playing a prime ministerial game of Top Trumps. You draw your cards. Some are better than others. Walpole is great at parliamentary management, but gets poor marks for probity. Gladstone is streets ahead in the hotly contested “redeeming prostitutes” category, but scores zero for sense of humour. Churchill beats all comers for courage. Then there are the weaker cards. Somebody has to draw Lord Rosebery; somebody else gets Arthur Balfour. Theresa May, I’m sorry to say, is not a good card.

And then there’s our Liz. I know she’s supposed to be Tiggerishly optimistic, but so what? So is Peter André, but I wouldn’t invite him to become First Lord of the Treasury. In private, it’s said, she’s a tremendous laugh. So what? She’s supposed to be running the country, not performing in the circus — not that she’d be any good at that either, because she has such a weird stage presence.

She can’t give interviews, because she can’t think on her feet and can’t deal with difficult questions. She can’t give speeches, because she seems incapable of reading lucidly from an autocue. In fact, she can’t even write speeches: her tribute to the Queen outside Number 10 — where she reportedly cast aside her officials’ prepared text and wrote her own — was an embarrassment, utterly failing to match the moment in its blandness and banality.

What can she do? What’s the point of her? In some ways the point is obvious. She’s not Rishi Sunak. As Janan Ganesh wrote in an acutely observed piece earlier this summer, Truss won because she had the right “vibes” for the Tory membership, presenting herself as “regional” and “no-nonsense”, not a smooth, rich “metro-snob”. But I’d go further. To me she seems the Tory equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn, a palpably unfit choice for leader elevated simply because she pandered to the prejudices of her own activists. (See also: Iain Duncan Smith.) The parallel isn’t entirely exact, of course, because Corbyn’s risible and ridiculous views have always been remarkably consistent, whereas Truss used to be a pro-European, anti-monarchy Liberal Democrat. So she’s ambitious. Maybe that, then, is her superpower, but that’s not saying much.

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Liz Truss has betrayed conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

Oddly enough for such a fundamentally uninteresting person, Truss embodies all kinds of interesting things. She’s the personification of the factiousness and decadence that almost always afflict governing parties after they’ve been in office too long. But she also represents a political culture in which parties are no longer mass-membership organisations, enabling small groups of activists to choose our national leaders. She’s the product of a world in which the lines between student politics and Westminster politics have become disastrously blurred, of a media landscape that trades in cheap soundbites, and of a working environment in which senior politicians don’t have the time to read or to think.

Still, it could have been different. Politics often turns on little things, and so it was in this case. Truss only scraped into the final round of the Tory leadership, and didn’t even win a third of her fellow MPs’ votes. I thought at the time that, putting my own ideological predilections aside, she was the single worst candidate in the contest, and nothing I’ve seen since has made me revise my opinion. In the MPs’ final ballot, only eight votes separated her from Penny Mordaunt, who would probably have won the whole thing if she’d reached the members’ round.

A few weeks ago, I watched the two of them at the King’s televised Accession Council. Mordaunt, as Lord President of the Council, was in charge, and was generally thought to have been very — well, prime ministerial. Truss, meanwhile, was lurking darkly in the background, like a weird combination of Dracula’s sister and Uriah Heep. I wondered then if some Tory MPs wished they had voted differently. Too late now, though. They’ve made their beds, and now they’ll have to lie in them.

What I didn’t expect was a local food bank, which last year gave out more than 5,000 emergency supplies to hungry people. Statistically, Richmond has some of the lowest rates of poverty of any London borough. If there is a food bank here, the Tories are toast.

Last Sunday was our Harvest Festival. We brought hoop spaghetti, toothpaste, and health care products to the altar. At lunchtime, 60 of us sat down in the church hall for shepherd’s pie and trifle, raising several hundred pounds for the food bank. Every spud peeled, every carrot scraped was another reminder of the failure of trickle-down economics. If people are going hungry in an area as posh as this, I don’t give the Tories a sniff of winning the next election.

Not that the food was that appealing at the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham, judging by the looks of those who laboured through their tasteless Starbucks sandwiches. The tone was funereal. They have lost their appetite, not just for bread and cheese, but for government too apparently.

Pacing about those gloomy halls, it was good to see the friendly face of Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes, and, not unrelated to the purpose of my trip, the son of restaurateur and food critic Prue Leith. I told him I was at conference to argue for restoring Britain’s 0.7% aid target: once an international standard of generosity for rich countries. He smiled at me, sympathetically: “Good luck with that.” The Tories had other things on their minds. Much more pressing issues, apparently.

But what could be more pressing than this? “Do we care, do we act, and do we lead? The promise of 0.7% meant that we — Global Britain — answered ‘yes’ to all three,” said David Cameron in 2020. But the current Tory party seems to have forgotten all this precisely at a time when it is most important.

“Growth, growth, growth” intoned the Prime Minister at her conference speech, obviously pleased with herself at presenting so succinctly the holy trinity of Trussian economics. With harvest hymns still ringing in my ears — “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” — I wondered how her philosophy of growth related to the growth of real living things — being rooted, being fed and watered, being tended. For her, growth seems to be the thing that happens when the gardener, aka the state, stops interfering. But the state of my garden tells me that when you do this, the weeds will always win. It is not insignificant that the people most upset by the bright idea of “economic development zones”, which means tax breaks and planning liberalisation, are those who point out the environmental impact. There is good growth and bad growth.

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How the Tories were radicalised

By Richard Bourke

To be fair, the Tories can’t be blamed entirely for the current crisis of food insecurity. Putin’s wicked invasion of Ukraine has devastated the breadbasket of Europe. Russians have been deliberately shelling agricultural lands with incendiary shells, burning down crops, using food and hunger as a weapon of war. Because of this — and yes, for other reasons too — 40 million people in the horn of Africa are on the edge of starvation. In many places, fertiliser has become too expensive for the poor to buy, leading to low crop yields. Farmers in Somalia are surrounded by the white bones of their dead cattle. Many have abandoned their fields looking for more fertile lands. But despite their arduous travels, they find the famine wherever they go.

I sat on a panel with Vicky Ford, the new Development Minister and Emma Revie, the CEO of the Trussell Trust, which runs the Richmond Foodbank along with 1,300 others in the UK. A handful of people attended our event. Outside the meeting, groups of young men in the ubiquitous Tory uniform of blue suits and open-neck white shirts walked past at West Wing pace, obviously going somewhere terribly important. But they weren’t coming in here.

I do believe Vicky Ford gets it. She was off to Ethiopia on Tuesday. But there were few answers to the challenges that now face the poorest people in the world. New technology could be leveraged to help, she explained. And the Qatari’s are being very generous too. The Tories have promised that they will return to the 0.7% target once the economy is back on track. “Good luck with that,” I said, perhaps a little too sharply. “Be nice,” replied the Minister. But I am not in the mood for being nice about this. We should be far angrier.

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Liz Truss makes the case for Labour

By John McTernan

In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, which aimed to eliminate hunger by 2030. But we are nowhere near hitting that goal: in fact, global hunger levels have risen since 2015. Today, nearly 9% of the world’s population are hungry.

The Harvest Festival looks very different in church these days. Instead of giant leeks and corn dollies, we pile up baked beans in front of the altar. And when we pray “give us this day our daily bread”, we think of combine harvesters in Ukraine dodging enemy tank fire and desperate families trekking across the Sudan, with a child in one hand and a packet of seeds in another.

But we also think of families in Britain struggling to afford their weekly food shop. Hunger has never just been an issue for the developing world, and now that it’s found its way to the door of places like Richmond, the tin-eared Conservative party will finally have to take note. It may be politically convenient to ignore starving children in Sudan, but it’s foolhardy for politicians to turn their backs on a hungry electorate. If the party has any hope of winning the next election, it will have to find itself a moral compass.

This year, in Birmingham, it was more 28 Days Later. The list of absent MPs, led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, stretched back to London. “There’s nobody here,” one member who attended the last 12 conferences mourned. “It feels deserted.” Twelve long years. We have tasted every philosophical flavour of Conservatism: David Cameron’s bougie-patrician, nudge theory-driven paternalism. Theresa May’s fretful Home Counties authoritarianism. Boris Johnson’s giggly One Nation boosterism. All gone. 

We have watched iteration after iteration of big ideas guru try to stir the Tories’ heavy dough. We have seen Steve Hilton pad around Downing Street in his bare feet, intent on squeezing the entire civil service into Somerset House. We have seen Nick Timothy celebrated as an intellectual, for his beard as much as his brain. We have seen Dominic Cummings somersault from blogger, to Rasputin, to blogger again. How many of their plans — other than Cummings’s Brexit, which he was swiftly bereaved of after squabbling with Johnson’s wife — have actually stuck to anything? They’ve all gone. 

We are left with Liz Truss, and Kwasi Kwarteng, both anonymously described as “dead” before anyone even arrived at New Street station. The Prime Minister’s “growth plan” has to work, and quickly. Labour’s poll-lead is as large as 33 points. Young conservatives filled Birmingham’s bars, happily blabbing that they will vote for Keir Starmer in 2024. “A 1997 wipeout might be the best we can hope for,” said one spad. 

It really might be. For four days the Tories behaved like demons ambling across a tortured Hieronymus Bosch landscape. They squabbled and scourged and scratched at each other; so insular; entirely twisted up within their own canvas, seeming to forget that the rest of the country could see the black paint they were smearing everywhere. They fought over the Chancellor’s 45p tax cut U-turn; they fought over benefits; they fought over Suella Braverman and Michael Gove. 

“We are CONSERVATIVES,” boomed Kwasi Kwarteng during his Monday afternoon keynote. But the truth is, after 12 contorted years, none of them are sure what a conservative is anymore. Was Kwasi Kwarteng a conservative? Here was a man who was probably happiest picking through the back stacks of the London Library, cheerfully collecting obscure books on economic theory, shouting lines that could have been written for a dumbo libertarian congressman from Alabama. 

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The last days of Jeremy Corbyn

By Will Lloyd

Was Kemi Badenoch a conservative? Yes, said Conor Burns, MP for Bournemouth West. He suggested she was “the future of the party” and understands the need to “move beyond Instagram posts about free trade agreements”. Was Jacob Rees-Mogg a conservative? He floated around the fringe like a page torn from a Max Beerbohm essay, bantering about sending his children up chimneys, and thundering about a “return to common law principles”. The members loved him, they have always loved him, and as ever, they confused his impotent sarcasm for Wildean drollery. “What is my job?” he mused rhetorically at one event, and I was worried that someone might tell him: nobody knows anymore.

From the rubble, two conservative visions began to emerge. First, there was Michael Gove’s. He moved sprucely around the conference, making what political journalists call “interventions” and firing what the armaments industry describe as “missiles”. Watching Gove at an UnHerd event on Tuesday afternoon, you could sense how good it was to be out of this government. He looked relaxed; in his conversation he rippled widely over Michael Oakeshott and Malcolm X, Hamilton and Dad’s Army, Lord Salisbury and TS Eliot. He did not have to say Truss was shambolic — or as she was constantly referred to everywhere here by Tories, a “dud”. When he said the party could only win the next election if it returned to the “bedrock” 2019 manifesto, the point was made. The British people were “Boris Johnsonian”, said Gove. They wanted strong national institutions, strong borders, and “no flights of ideological fantasy”. There was his vision. It was coherent, though until Truss goes, it will be ignored.

The other vision was Suella Braverman’s. Unlike Gove, the Home Secretary spoke to the party, not the country. And she won this conference — the proof was in all the applause she was lavished with. On the fringe, Braverman performed a complex pirouette that managed to undermine both the 45p tax rebels and the Government. Gove and the rebels were “airing dirty laundry in public” — they had staged “a coup”. And Truss and Kwarteng, she implied, had been too weak to stand up to them. Braverman’s vision was Norman Tebbitism, rebooted for the culture wars, performed with jarring sweetness and enthusiasm. “My delight,” she said on Tuesday, “is annoying the Left”. “My dream,” she said, “is to see a front page of the Telegraph with a picture with a flight taking off for Rwanda… I’m proud of the British Empire.” “Good girl,” purred a pension-age man in mustard corduroys sat next to me.  

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Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

By John Oxley

Away from the pride, and delight, and dreams, Braverman’s outlook for Britain was bleak. Here was a country where the “PC Brigade” had infiltrated every institution of national life, the schools, the courts, the companies. Here was a country where drug use destroyed lives, where police took the knee, where pronouns proliferated all over emails, where migration was a flood, where men pretend to be women despite having penises, where nonces get more protection from the law than decent, hard working people. The liberal establishment hung over us all, a thickly overgrown canopy, and only Braverman had a machete sharp enough to hack it away. “We simply cannot go on like this.”

But as with every other whinge and complaint at this conference (and they were legion), the instant thought was: isn’t this your mess? Haven’t you been in charge for 12 years? Why should you be trusted to clean it up? Anyway, Braverman had a solution. Build a new Royal Yacht, and smash a bottle of champagne on its pristine hull. The members adored this, and they adored her, just as they had adored Truss last year in Manchester. 

And how was the members’ new Prime Minister working out? Well.“This is the Institute for Economic Affairs’ world now,” said one lobbyist. “You’re just living in it.” Rationalise taxation by cutting it. Shrink government budgets. Put a smile on the face of wealth creators. Economic growth at all costs. (“Yeah,” a CCHQ worker told me sarcastically one night, “because we never gave any attention to growth before Truss came in”.) 

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Why the Tories turned on Rishi

By Will Lloyd

By Wednesday morning, the situation felt terminal. When Truss brought the curtain down on conference, you could hear the ideological barrel being scraped, perhaps for the final time by this party. Truss described her ideas with simple, repeated words. Growth; delivery. She found her conservatism in the back of a cupboard in Tufton Street. When Truss said she would web Britain with superfast broadband, as Cameron, and May, and Johnson before her had promised, you were left wondering what any of these governments had actually achieved. The “new era” she heralded was making the same promises the others had. 

What Truss said hardly mattered. A consensus already enclosed her, as tall and bleak as prison walls. The Prime Minister was a dud and her plan would fail. Her colleagues said this, the press said this, even the members were saying this. The conference’s bitchy, scattergun in-fights were a series of ribbon-cuttings for the next leadership contest. 

One night I bumped into Gary Sambrook, MP for Birmingham Northfield. I asked him how he thought it was all going. He looked momentarily stunned. A colleague intervened. “Remember what you said earlier Gary?” He did not seem to remember. “That this is the best conference you’ve ever been to?” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he said. It would have been cruel to ask him to tell the truth, for it was all around us, and had been for days.

It was Mario Cuomo who said that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose”. Truss’s speech was confirmation that while she campaigned in prose, she is committed to governing in boilerplate. All the political clichés were there: “hard choices”; “the status quo is not an option”; “grow the pie”; “I get it”; “tough times”, and the hoary old favourite “on your side”, clunkily delivered as “on their side”. The last was the giveaway: this wasn’t a speech aimed at the country but at the conference hall. The audience, even though it was bulked out with passing randoms because of the rail strike, was willing Truss on.

And she gave the hall what they wanted — her greatest hits. Deregulation. Lower taxes. Higher defence spending. An attack on Putin. An attack on the enemies within: “They taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo. From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers.” But there was no substance. None of the “hard choices” were specified or stepped out. Why haven’t houses “been built where they are needed and wanted”? What are the “barriers to growth” that will be lifted?

It was a short speech, lacking the tour d’horizon that is normally central to a leader’s address. It was one which raised questions without answering them. It plagiarised Keir Starmer – when the Prime Minister said “I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth”, she was shamelessly lifting from the Labour leader who, in July, had said “We need three things: growth, growth, growth”.

More substantially, she trebled down on her Chancellor’s “mini-Budget” — justifying it as a response to the “drift and delay” she had inherited, though failing to mention that the Tories have run Britain for the last 12 years, and that she had been in the Cabinet for three-quarters of that time. Truss left her audience in no doubt that she was appalled by her government having to levy the “highest tax burden that our country had had for 70 years”, but was apparently unable to name who was responsible for these punitive levels of taxation.

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Is this the end for Liz Truss?

By James Sean Dickson

The classic illustration of the Yiddish word “chutzpah” used to be the man who murdered his mother and father and then threw himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan. The Prime Minister, a self-avowed fan of Margaret Thatcher, surely supplanted him when she talked about the effects of a failed economy: “I know what it is like to live somewhere that isn’t feeling the benefits of economic growth. I grew up in Paisley and in Leeds in the Eighties and Nineties. I have seen the boarded-up shops. I have seen people left with no hope turning to drugs. I have seen families struggling to put food on the table.” Never has an attack on Thatcherism been so roundly supported by Tory conference.

Yet in a sense, Truss has learned the crucial lessons of Boris Johnson’s leadership: that not only has there been an integration of politics and celebrity, but that the narrative forms of soap opera also now frame politics. Politicians can, like the stars of daytime soaps, live in a perpetual present; what they said yesterday has no relevance to what they said today and what they will say tomorrow. Character isn’t fate — it’s reinvented daily.

The difficulty is that the bond markets don’t take such a post-modern view. They price uncertainty though long-term gilts, and it trickles down to wallets and handbags across the UK through mortgage payments. In her conference round of interviews, the Prime Minister responded by saying that interest rates are rising globally and, anyway, they are a matter for the Bank of England rather than the government.

It’s a view. But it seems unlikely that Andrew Bailey will be cursed over breakfast tables rather than Liz Truss. If, as is likely, the increases in mortgage repayments are at least £200 a month, then those costs will dwarf the financial support given to households by the energy price cap. “Black Tuesday” — when so many mortgages were simply withdrawn from the market — may come to loom as large in 21st-century UK politics as “Black Wednesday” did at the end of the last century. And with the same effect.

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Has Liz Truss trapped Labour?

By John McTernan

It is often said, not least on the Left, that the Labour Party is used to spending long periods in opposition. There were four election defeats before New Labour were elected in 1997; there have been four election defeats since David Cameron ousted Gordon Brown. Less frequently observed is that when the Tories lose, they also stay out of power for a while. Harold Wilson beat Ted Heath in four of the five general elections they fought. Tony Blair won three terms in a row. Tory defeats, though less frequent, are no less devastating. With Labour poll leads ranging from 33% across the country to 38% in the battleground “Red Wall” seats, the question is not whether Starmer will be the next Labour Prime Minister, but how big his majority will be.

The longer the general election is delayed, the worse the defeat is likely to be, particularly amid the drumbeat of rising mortgages. Yet, with a working majority of 71, the Tories cannot be thrown out of office. The dream scenario whispered about at Tory conference was about a change of rules that would allow a vote of no confidence in Truss and a new leader by acclamation. Yet, with Suella Braverman describing the ditching of the higher rate tax cut as a “coup”, who can envisage a one-candidate election? And what about Boris Johnson who surely hopes for a Churchillian return?

There is a lot of ruin in a party. And it is beginning to look as though the Tories are determined to find out exactly how much there is.

Each conversion has been accompanied by a heartfelt dedication to the integrity of the new cause. Having campaigned for Remain in 2016, Truss later affirmed the ardour of her devotion to the Brexit agenda. She now shares with prominent members of her Cabinet a zealous belief in the benefits of economic independence. But plain Brexit is clearly not enough. By now, only the most radical forms of separation count.

The problem here is not a show of allegiance to principle, but the stubborn adherence to principle come what may. This trait is not a feature of the Prime Minister’s personality alone. It also characterises the behaviour of Kwasi Kwarteng, her current Chancellor, as well as the mindset of senior members of the front bench — including ministers like Suella Braverman, Brandon Lewis and Jacob Rees-Mogg. As the conduct of these stalwarts of the Brexit debate makes clear, intransigence has become a mark of virtue.

In this climate, unflinching rectitude is perceived as an asset in British politics. But this stance has not been cultivated out of deference to the national good. Rather, it is a product of the Government’s antipathy towards its opponents. Along with the culture of ideological purity, a spirit of factionalism has taken hold. This state of affairs is hardly without historical precedent. It is often the case that self-belief is driven by contempt for real or imagined adversaries. According to a familiar trajectory, conflict breeds righteousness, righteousness fosters confidence, and confidence increases animosity. Take the worsening relations during the English Civil War, for instance, when what began as an attempt to impose limitations on the crown soon descended into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Looking back on the disturbances of the 17th century, the great Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume argued that the bitter contests of the period had sacrificed both “the repose and safety of the people”. From the reign of Charles I to the restoration of Charles II, politics had repeatedly been unhinged. Correspondingly, public opinion grew progressively deranged. However, Hume’s purpose was not to question the legitimacy of a particular party, but to observe the deterioration that came with seismic shocks to the body politic.

First, in the 1630s, the monarchy had sought to overawe parliament and tamper with the religious establishment. Then, in the 1640s, the House of Commons battled with the ailing fortunes of Charles I, and religious fundamentalism thrived. With the execution of the king in 1649, a republic was proclaimed as a solution to the prevailing mayhem, but tranquillity was scarcely restored. While crisis enveloped proceedings at Westminster, volatility beset affairs in Scotland and Ireland. Each new emergency sparked yet another. Over time, parliament was purged, an “assembly of saints” appointed, and a protectorate instituted to manage the state and the Empire.

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Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher

By Aris Roussinos

As events progressed, successive governments declared the purity of their virtue. At the same time, incumbents strained to outbid the principles of their predecessors. As the search for accommodation was abandoned, compromise became a sign of weakness. The Restoration of 1660 failed to resolve outstanding quarrels. Even the Revolution of 1688 proved controversial for a generation. Viewing these changes in the round, it was again Hume who challenged the wisdom of sudden experimentation in the unpredictable medium of politics. Under conditions of upheaval, he contended, even an honest bid for improvement risked proving counterproductive: with routine shattered, extremes prospered. At that point, there was no route back to a moderate course of action.

There is nothing peculiar about British politics that disposes radical shifts in policy to lead to disruptive outcomes. The same inclination toward divisive partisanship overwhelmed the course of the French Revolution. Between 1789 and 1793, angry factions rapidly succeeded one another — the Monarchiens, the Feuillants, the Girondins, and the Jacobins. As divisions deepened, caution was discarded, institutional restraints were dismantled, and fundamentalist programmes succeeded one another.

Of course, historical analogies are of limited utility. To begin with, British politics is not facing imminent implosion. Nonetheless, there are medium-term threats to the equilibrium of the state. Most obviously, the Union is under increasing strain in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Yet, despite the existential danger, successive governments since 2016 have been haplessly careering towards a dissolution of the United Kingdom.

The explanation for this anomalous course is not difficult to find: a radical brand of conservatism is now prepared to gamble with the future. This reckless spirit has been sustained by a libertarian vision of Brexit. For the champions of this outlook, Britain’s departure from the European Union was never an end in itself. The goal has been securing the “opportunities” of Brexit. With that end in view, circumspection and moderation have been systematically discounted. In relentless pursuit of a low-tax, low-regulation economy, the costs of this journey have rarely been computed. This has long been a feature of self-appointed national liberation movements. Freedom from an unloved structure of authority is sought at any price.

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Thatcher won't save the Tories

By Richard Bourke

For instance, while Irish opinion has stood flabbergasted at the recent course of British affairs, the truth is that Ireland itself followed a similar path. The British Union from which it struggled to escape was hardly the apotheosis of tyranny, although subjection to unaccountable power obviously rankled. At the beginning of the 20th century, a measure of autonomy, packaged as “Home Rule”, seemed attractive to most citizens. But soon partisans of a more robust version of independence appeared. First, dominion status was pursued; then a free state; and, finally, a republic. In the meantime, British and Irish relations deteriorated. Partition was introduced, and a trade war ensued. The Irish economy did not recover until the Sixties.

None of this is intended to suggest that complete autonomy is not worth the effort. Interestingly, after joining the European Economic Community in 1973, Southern Ireland to some extent revised its earlier judgment. Fresh “opportunities” were anticipated under a new dispensation. But the important point is that constitutional upheaval inevitably comes at a cost. Opposing constituencies will differently evaluate what they are prepared to pay. But, either way, it is a basic duty of clear-sighted accounting to weigh up the calculus of benefits.

The fiasco surrounding Kwarteng’s recent “mini-budget” is just the latest in a line of collisions between expectation and reality. In its rush to make the world as it would like it to be, the government disregarded the facts on the ground. This arrogance is a consequence of a doggedly partisan spirit. The mentality is hitched to a neo-Thatcherite ambition to secure the imagined dividends of Britannia Unchained. But the approach has its roots in the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

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How Churchill ruined Boris

By Will Lloyd

First, beginning in 2016, “experts” were disparaged. While it is true that the record of economic expertise is wanting, ignorance is hardly an adequate substitute. Since then, inconvenient orthodoxies have been dismissed by the Conservative Party. An array of institutions have been disdained. The Civil Service has been scorned, and the Treasury derided. Leading public servants have been whimsically dismissed. Parliament was summarily and unlawfully prorogued, and suspicion has been cast on various aspects of the judicial system.

At the same time, the BBC has been under attack, and the competence of the Bank of England questioned. Dissenting opinion in the governing party has been audaciously purged, with the threat of a repeat performance having been trailed at least one more time. Diplomacy has also suffered. An international agreement has been set aside under cover of the most spurious pretexts. Under Boris Johnson, the government was prepared to deny accepted facts. Since his departure, Liz Truss has felt at liberty to select her own preferred truths.

It is a venerable myth in public discourse that Conservatism aims to conserve. But the current government is exploding that myth with unprecedented alacrity. In this it is a fitting successor to its immediate forebear. It handles itself with the same unapologetic swagger. It is similarly determined to advance its doctrines without regard to consequences. Today’s Conservative Party is the child of a crisis which it helped to foment. There is little sign that it has any desire to return to a path of consensus. It is often the case with political upheavals that leaders corrupt their supporters. But in the current straits the government has run ahead of the public — and there is little evidence that it has any idea of how to change its course.

Lord Hailsham famously wrote that Toryism was about fox hunting and religion (by which he meant the Anglican religion of the Book of Common Prayer). More generally, Conservatives were united by a moral belief that people had the right to dispose of their property and a practical sense that capitalism was likely to provide people with the most property to dispose of. Most of all, Conservatives believed in inequality. They thought that some people deserved to be richer, more powerful and more respected than others.

Well, fox hunting and the prayer book have both gone and no Conservative government is going to bring them back. The positions of capitalism and property are more complicated. Boris Johnson must have been the first Conservative prime minister who would not have been mortified to see it reported that he had said “fuck business”. This is partly because the Conservative Party has changed. Its leaders are relatively young, and if they pursued any career outside politics, it is likely to have been journalism.

It is also because capitalism has changed. Once it could be taken for granted that captains of industry were Right-wing in ways that bore no direct relation to their business interests. In 1977, when the CBI was asked to canvas opinions from its members about what a Conservative government should do, suggestions included restoring national service, controlling immigration and deterring couples from “living in sin”. Such opinions would be unimaginable now.

Toryism and capitalism were once joined together in institutional terms. The heads of large companies who funded the party took it for granted that their opinions would be sought and that they would count for more than rank-and-file party members. Today, however, the whole nature of business has changed. The very notion of a British company seems quaint. Note the studied vagueness of BP about what the “B” stands for and remember Margaret Thatcher’s fury when British Airways replaced the Union Jack on the tailfins of its planes with an abstract design.

Most of all, though, the Tories have lost contact with the central core of their beliefs, from which everything else springs: inequality. Just before the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the historian Maurice Cowling edited a collection of conservative essays in which he dismissed the idea, which had become widespread during the Cold War, that Conservatism was about the defence of freedom. Conservatives, he insisted, only believed in freedom as a means to create inequality or defend existing inequalities.

I doubt if the smooth young men in Conservative Central Office would have put it in such blunt terms, but they (especially those who had recently been taught by Cowling) would have understood what he was driving at. Conservatives are less likely to defend inequality now. This is partly because nothing makes rich people more uncomfortable than the discovery that some people are even richer than themselves. Globalisation has created, and made visible, a class of super-rich people who make a Chancery QC feel like a pauper. Rishi Sunak must surely be the first Conservative politician whose career has been damaged by the fact that he is, in the eyes of many party members, too wealthy.

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The myth of Tory Birmingham

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Real Tories believed in inequality for reasons that went beyond economics. They lived in a world of hierarchy and authority. It was a world in which tough-minded magistrates gave stiff sentences to poachers. It was underwritten, for much of the 20th century, by military experience. No institution in England reflects the class system more faithfully than the army and no social distinction is more ruthlessly policed than that between “officers” and “other ranks”. The two World Wars and the retention of conscription until the early Sixties meant there was a time when most British men had military experience. This did not make them all Conservatives — servicemen gave the Labour Party a large majority in 1945. What it did mean was that those people who were already Conservative had their belief in hierarchy reinforced.

Conservative leaders — captain Macmillan, lieutenant colonel Heath — derived much of their prestige from military rank, as did the local notables who organised the party at local level. Yet only a tiny fraction of the population has military experience now. In spite, or because, of this, Conservative fantasies focus ever more on a certain image of the military — but it is an image that is, in its odd way, democratic rather than hierarchical. For instance, one of the strongest themes in Conservative thinking now involves not the imposition of authority but the defence of relatively low-ranking soldiers who have infringed criminal law or military regulations — hence the campaign against soldiers being prosecuted for their actions in Northern Ireland or Afghanistan.

The decline in military experience goes with a more general change. Grassroots supporters of the Conservative Party have always been relatively old but the party used to have complicated relations with this group. An internal document from the early years of the Thatcher government suggested that the party’s support among the retired was a source of problems: “The Government’s economic policy is a long-term policy and the elderly do not think long term.” Of course, real Tories used to think long-term because they saw themselves as part of institutions that would continue beyond their death or simply because they spent a great deal of energy devising trust funds to benefit their grandchildren.

But this kind of long-term thinking is rarer now. Almost the defining feature of Conservative policy — with regards to everything from public debt to fossil fuel — is a slash-and-burn attitude that focuses on material gains to be made in the short term. I sometimes think that the only real Tories are the dreadlocked activists of Extinction Rebellion: people who understand that politics is about debts that might be owed to generations yet unborn and who display a commendable indifference to the short-term vagaries of electoral politics.

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In any case, old age is not what it used to be. Life expectancy and early retirement have both increased — so a disconcertingly large proportion of Conservatives have not worked for many years. A person born in 1926 could claim, with some justification, that they had had a harder life than their own children and might, therefore, have been exposed to harsh realities. This is conspicuously not true of someone born, in, say 1948. These are people who were born into peace and the welfare state. They bear a disconcerting resemblance to their contemporaries who joined student protests in 1968. A part of the press serves the same function for Tory activists that hallucinogenic drugs served for the soixante-huitards: the Mail and the Express are now so removed from reality that their readers might as well be getting their information from the website of David Icke. In fact, the most notable feature of Conservative supporters is often their reluctance to grow up — which may explain why they have, in the past few years, been prone to identify with young or, in the case of Johnson, ostentatiously juvenile, leaders.

A belief in inequality co-existed awkwardly with the extension of democracy. The third Marquess of Salisbury once wrote that it would be absurd if the votes of “two day-labourers” counted for more than that of the Baron de Rothschild. What made the Tories successful in the age of universal suffrage was deference. A political scientist working in the Sixties found that many working-class Tories believed that an Etonian would make a better prime minister than a grammar schoolboy.

The problem for Conservatives now is that democracy has become far too egalitarian. Social media has encouraged the idea that everyone who can hit a keyboard has a right to have their opinion respected. Class divisions count for less as everyone affects a plebeian air — Boris Johnson seems to have been popular with working-class voters not because he is an Etonian but because they think he is “like them”. Worst of all, democracy has infected the Conservative Party itself. It seemed like a revolution when, in 1965, Tory MPs were first given the chance to elect their leader (rather than having him — it always was a him — imposed by a “magic circle” of party elders). Now, power has passed from MPs to party members, and this summer the party members imposed a leader that the majority of MPs did not want.

In easier times, Liz Truss might have been the leader to restore Conservatism. Her own origins are on the Left and her beliefs are probably those of a classical liberal, but, perhaps for that reason, she sometimes seems to understand the traditions and style of Toryism better than people who were born into Conservatism. Most of all, Truss believes in the one thing that has most embarrassed Tories in recent years: inequality. Cutting taxes for the rich would have been as Conservative as cutting benefits for the poor.

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Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

By John Oxley

As it is, things do not look good for the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects but those of us who feel nostalgic for real Conservatism should not despair. Winning elections is over-rated. Toryism was, for much of its early history, a movement of opposition. True conservatism has, of necessity, a pessimistic, almost Sisyphean, quality: its practitioners know that they cannot really hold back change and that they will always be fighting a doomed rear-guard action.

Pessimism can produce two different forms of Conservatism. One emphasises the need to keep things going with as little damage as possible and therefore to hold on to power at all costs; the other appreciates the symbolic value of the hopeless fight. The conflict between the two approaches was incarnated in the bitter rivalry between the managerial Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, who could not see a three-line whip without voting against it or a ministerial office without resigning from it. Margaret Thatcher managed, at least when she was most successful, to combine pragmatic action with principled rhetoric — so that she sometimes seemed like the leader of an opposition to her own government.

If the most dramatic opinion polls of the last few days are correct, the Tories might not just cease to be party of government; they might not even be the Official Opposition. This would be no bad thing. Fifty or sixty Tory MPs would be just the right number. They could make their voices heard without any serious chance of controlling the commanding heights of policy. If they concentrated their efforts, they might even succeed in bringing back fox hunting.

In King Charles, we have a post-liberal monarch who furiously rejects the marketisation of ever more aspects of human life. There are, in his writings, elements of the “Tietjens Toryism” of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, whereby the paternalistic concern of the central character, the “last surviving Tory”, for social harmony and widespread prosperity delineate the point at which “the High Toryism of Tietjens [meets] the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left”.

Yet on the other, baleful side of the ledger, we have been foisted with a career politician who seems to view the laziest Left-wing caricatures of Toryism as a political roadmap: a pure zealot of unrestrained capital with no vision of the good beyond libertarian think tank pamphlets and a burning faith in the might and power of the market’s invisible hand. Alas, Truss’s faith in the markets is not rewarded by the markets’ faith in her: the invisible hand has already reached down to flick her from the history books.

Her plan for massive borrowing relied on the faith of international opinion that it would be amply repaid by her simultaneous tax cuts for Britain’s very richest, and an economic boom occasioned by vague promises of future reforms. To pay for her budget, and for its unintended consequences, the Government now looks set to slash spending on the infrastructure and research and development projects on which long-term prosperity depends. Unfortunately for Truss and for the country, the international markets, the IMF, the Bank of England, and those notorious Left-wing radicals the Financial Times and the Economist recoiled in horror. When even the Telegraph warns that the ”Peronist policies” of a “a careless, ideological government” set on “a course of sheer madness” put “this country in serious jeopardy”, we can be certain that we are in a new era. There are fashions in economics as in all things; outside the Conservative party, the rest of the world has firmly rejected the Seventies dogmas that brought Britain decades of stagnation and underinvestment — even in a far rosier international climate than the one we currently inhabit.

It is like the story of The Monkey’s Paw: after so long demanding a Conservative leader committed to bold and decisive action, the one the party chose was a suicide bomber. The only questions now, surely, are how much harm she can cause the country in the time remaining, and whether she will bring down the Conservative party with her. Because Truss forgot that the British public also has a vote. Dreading an economic winter harder than anyone has previously experienced, the voting public looks to have decisively rejected Trussonomics, and will deliver Labour the greatest parliamentary majority in British political history. The story of the past few years, from Brexit to the 2019 Conservative landslide, and now Labour’s coming victory, is of a British public desirous of radical change, and of a political class struggling to comprehend what this means, let alone how to deliver it. The Conservatives were elected on a simple mandate to reform Britain’s failing economic model and slash our current, record-high levels of immigration; instead, Truss is doubling down on both.

It is a matter of great, cosmic irony that in the same week Truss lost the Red Wall with a platform encapsulating everything the Brexit vote was against, Keir Starmer won it back with a postliberal message, centred on direct investment in state capacity, public services and home ownership through the simplest supply side reform, housebuilding. The libertarian think tanks who so gleefully rushed to take ownership of her budget when it was announced, must now take ownership of the results: they have destroyed the party they have hollowed out and stripped of any vestiges of Tory thinking.

Though a disaster for the Conservative party, the mini-budget was, apparently, a triumph for the IEA, the free-market think tank which has long advanced this ideology — as well as having groomed Truss and Kwarteng. And as the party has been warned time and time again, what they have cooked up is as repellent to ordinary voters as it is to traditionalist Tories.

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The ideologues have crashed Britain, and the Conservative party, into a cliff, and the party now requires time out of office to relearn Toryism from first principles, shorn of the libertarian accretions that have driven it to chaos and the edge of extinction. The wreckers must be entirely driven out from British conservatism, in whose stolen clothes they have made mischief for far too long. But until then, there is no Tory case for voting for the Conservative party. A party that puts its own short-term survival above the national interest has no business running a country.

It is the tragic irony of British conservatism in 2022 that just as the only reason to now vote Tory is to own the Cons (like the IEA’s Julian Jessop and Kristian Niemitz welcoming Truss’s push for massively increased immigration), so does the only means of restraining the self-destructive zealotry of the economic liberals now seem to lie within the Labour Party. Some of the warmest responses to Starmer’s conference speech, in which he warned that “decline is not inevitable” and promised that the Labour Party is now the party of reindustrialisation, national self-reliance, home ownership and support for ordinary people came from Tory commentators aghast at Truss’s radical liberal vision.

It is those Tories representing the party’s paternalist social conscience who have been most struck by the contrast between Truss’s wrecking ball and Starmer’s softly postliberal vision. For as Gavin Rice of the Conservative Centre for Social Justice think tank observes, “Starmer just laid out a postliberal Brexit: controlled immigration, pride in community, democratic control, buying, making and selling more in Britain and the potential of active government. Tories shouldn’t be allowing them to control this turf.” But this is the path they chose, and when the voters punish for them for it, the party only has itself to blame.

It is remarkable to observe that Truss’s mentors in the IEA still found time to release a paper — Taking Liberties: Why postliberals are wrong about personal freedom, by Jamie Whyte — denouncing the rival postliberal trend in conservative thought: the very same political philosophy whose faintest echoes have rewarded Labour with the prospect of a historic landslide. The paper did not gain much traction, true: it was a poorly argued mishmash of philosophical sophistry against an amalgamated strawman version of very distinct political tendencies. But that they thought it necessary to release is in itself indicative of where the intellectual energy now lies within conservatism, on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Yet the paper presents a fascinating insight into the worldview of a crankish doctrine the British public so visibly and overwhelmingly rejects. Throughout, the author rejects any notion of a common good, the essential building block of both modern postliberalism and traditional Toryism, associating the idea with compulsion at the hands of the state. So, the author writes, postliberals “believe politicians should take a view about the good life – specifically, the postliberals’ traditionalist view – and use the powers of the state to make sure that people live it”, in what he describes as a “proposed way-of life authoritarianism”, and a “regime in which politicians use state power to make them live ‘the good life’”.

To reach this conclusion, the author conflates the two very different American and British postliberal strands of thought, currently at war with each other through a heated exchange of open letters in the American Conservative. He adopts the framing of the harder-edged, American postliberalism’s vision of the Catholic-administrative state to condemn British postliberalism, which is in truth a conservative variant of socialism, infused with a traditionalist Tory discomfort with modernity, and drawn from our nation’s distinct historical path. British Postliberals, like other social democrats, do indeed believe that the nation’s good as well as prosperity would be enhanced if everyone were to be given support by the state to settle down, form families and own their own homes: this is, or was, a very basic tenet of Toryism, too. But this is quite a different thing from state compulsion: there will be no roaming squads of tweed-jacketed postliberals forcing otherwise happy singletons to marry, and frogmarching them into suburban semis.

But then, even this very basic expression of the common good is a vision of hell to the radical IEA liberal, who warns that “policies that cause more people to marry, perhaps by way of tax incentives, can still harm them. For being in a good and sound marriage involves forgoing other sources of happiness. John might also gain happiness from travelling the world alone” or “from seducing strangers at nightclubs”. Indeed he might. Yet reordering the British economy, and the lives and prosperity of the British people, around our hypothetical John’s mission of global seduction is simply not conservatism in any form, and a party that can prioritise this philosophy over the national good fully deserves the disaster coming its way.

But even as the paper asserts that the postliberal claim that liberalism leads to social atomisation and the construction of obstacles to the formation of family life is false, it argues against state support for those who wish to do so, in the seeming belief that helping those who wish for a secure and settled domesticity to attain it will somehow impinge on John’s absolute freedom. We should be clear: a postliberal government would not prevent John, or other liberals, doing as they wished with their own lives; it would instead simply support those who wished for the very basic goods of home ownership and domestic comfort and security to attain them. Yet even this is apparently anathema to the IEA, and we must now sadly assume, to our own notionally conservative government.

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By Aris Roussinos

Coercion by global market forces is, simply, no liberation. It is this exact vision, of the entirety of social life from the family to the nation being subject to and torn apart by the destructive power of the unrestrained market, that postliberals as well as British voters reject; and it is precisely this outcome which liberals in their purest form, like Truss and the think tanks which formed her worldview, try to summon into being through ever more painful rites of destruction and self-sacrifice. If earthly salvation has not yet been attained, then ever more of what society holds good must be hurled onto the flames: this is neither politics nor economics, but the frustrated religious impulse that drives all liberalism.

Like communists, who wave away the misery and destruction every attempt to apply their vision in practice has so far entailed, free market fundamentalists like Truss and the think tanks around her assert that the only problem with their failed vision is that it has never yet been properly applied. Instead, guided by Tory pragmatism, postliberalism rejects fantastical visions of the future in favour of a future partly shaped by the forms of social and economic life that existed before capitalism: a world which was far from perfect, but whose failings are known and therefore capable of being effectively ameliorated.

But as it stands, there is no home for postliberal Tories, always wary of the free market as a force destructive to tradition and social order, in the Conservative party that now exists: instead, we must be grateful that when given free rein, the libertarians have discredited their doctrine as electoral poison in a few short and tumultuous days. Just like the state funeral, Truss’s accession was itself a great symbolic moment. It marked the nadir of Tietjens Toryism as a philosophical tradition within the Conservative party, and the total victory of a radical form of economic liberalism which, like an alchemist turning gold into lead, has transmuted 2019’s electoral landslide into disaster. If any Tory case can be made for Truss, it is a purely accelerationist one: that the catastrophe she has brought in tow may finally exorcise Thatcher’s unquiet ghost, and allow the party — or whatever form of conservative politics succeeds the party that put her into power against so many warnings — to reflect upon what Toryism actually means.

But until then, it is Starmer’s Labour, which learned the lessons of Brexit and 2019, that has rejected radical economic liberalism and pledged to deliver the common good. Certainly, there is still space for him to lose: just as the Conservatives failed to restrain their economic liberal extremists, so must Starmer restrain the extremist social liberals in Labour’s ranks whose views the ordinary voter deems equally strange and repulsive. But on basic bread and butter policy, the contrast between a Labour party pledging to build more homes, and a Conservative government about to lose many Britons the homes they already own is absolute.

If they achieve just this one aim, let alone their promises to deliver a Brexit that works for the entire country, or to return manufacturing capacity to British shores through state investment, then Labour deserves to win the landslide victory the Conservatives chose to squander. In choosing Truss, the Conservative party chose to make the Tory case for Labour.

“The tax cuts and reforms I’ve announced today — the biggest package in generations — send a clear signal that growth is our priority,” Kwarteng said, shining a bright light on Britain’s anaemic economic record. It would appear, however, that investors do not hold the same breezy confidence in their plans to achieve 2.5% growth per annum. The market has made its mind up: this is Liz Truss’s equivalent of Theresa May’s 2017 election gamble.

And it certainly is a gamble. Should the roulette ball fall on black, Liz Truss will go down in the history books as the swashbuckling, visionary prime minister who broke Britain free from its post-financial crash shackles. Should it fall on red, Britain’s youth will be lumped with yet more debt, and Kwarteng will see his name added to the inauspicious list of chancellors who engineered huge booms, only to later be stung by the bust that followed.

Kwarteng will be only too aware of the fate of fellow Tory chancellor Anthony Barber, who, under weak growth and, with an election only a few years away and Labour breathing down his neck, engineered the “dash for growth” with his hugely expansionary 1972 budget. After Barber turned on all the taps, inflation ran riot, peaking at 24.5%, which ultimately precipitated the February 1974 election loss for the Conservatives. Barber chose not to stand in the subsequent election and retired from frontline politics.

But scary as the Barber comparison and the financial market grumblings are, don’t take them as evidence Kwarteng’s approach is certain to fail. If we were to follow the advice of the markets and the technocrats, we wouldn’t change course from nearly two decades of abject failure. And if market prices were always right, there would be no such thing as a hedge fund — fair value would always be known and exploited, closing any arbitrage gap.

Likewise, economists, for all their preening certainty, are a fickle, quarrelsome bunch. Geoffrey Howe famously had his anti-inflationary 1981 budget excoriated by 346 economists in a letter to The Times. Each was then forced to dine on a healthy portion of humble pie as the reforms of the Thatcher government began to bear fruit, stabilising inflation and building a firm foundation for sustained economic growth.

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More importantly, despite its nervous reception, there is much to be praised in this budget. Even stating that economic growth should be the top priority of government is a welcome change from the status quo — where the deficit, Brexit, and then Covid-19 took centre stage, distracting the country from its slow-motion growth crisis. With the next election looming, growth is finally being given the attention it duly deserves.

Among the measures intended to boost growth is a doubling of the stamp duty threshold from £125,000 to £250,000. First time buyers, meanwhile, will pay no stamp duty until £425,000, up from £300,000. Plenty will write this off as yet another distraction from the desperate need to actually build some houses. But in a housing supply crisis, with a limited stock of homes, the distribution of existing stock becomes even more important. As a transaction tax, stamp duty is an active impediment to older people in large family homes downsizing, and passing on a larger house with spare bedrooms to young couples with children that need them.

Other positive measures include permanently setting the rate of Annual Investment Allowance for businesses at £1 million, rather than reverting it back to £200,000 in April 2023 as had been planned. Britain’s total investment as a percentage of GDP lags well behind comparable rich nations, and encouraging growth-spurring research and development through the tax system — including suspending the planned hike in corporation tax — should be welcomed.

But perhaps the biggest danger of all with this budget is that the country simply spins its wheels in the mud. Howe’s controversial 1981 programme was not a “Thatcherite” tax-cutting budget — in fact, it substantially increased taxation to counter inflation. The economic reforms that defined the Thatcher governments and led to a stable footing for expansion were not yet complete. You cannot have your dessert until you have finished your vegetables. And yet here we are, teeth sticky with sugary tax cuts.

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By John Oxley

If growth were easy and it isn’t we would have already solved the problem. The good news is that we are not at the “growth frontier”, where more productivity can only come from cutting edge technological, medical or scientific innovation. We can steal productivity and technological improvements and catch up with economies host to greater productivity than our own. Taking best practice from abroad and implementing it at home is a tried-and-tested method for easy, cheap growth, for everything from tax structure to pedagogy.

The bad news is that much of Britain is perfectly prepared not to borrow these productivity gains and to make choices that run counter to economic growth and resultant improvements in living standards, and Truss will have to do battle with this instinct. For example, the country voted to leave the EU in 2016, leading to us departing the single market and customs union, increasing the costs of trade with our neighbours — and yet Britain now chooses to suppress net migration, running counter to the needs of sectors with worker shortages.

Happily settled baby boomers in their fully paid-off detached houses still vote in great numbers against anyone in favour of local “overdevelopment”. National infrastructure projects like new water reservoirs, airport expansions and new train lines are delayed, cut back and cancelled. It might not matter if the burden of these choices was shared equally by all, but the impact is highly unequally distributed — in favour of baby boomers. Those self-same boomers’ sons, daughters and grandchildren pay the price of these decisions in higher living costs, and lower growth.

But so does the country — high housing costs in our most productive regions and cities prevent people from moving to more productive jobs, and shovels good money into stationary and unproductive bricks and mortar. Too often this turns into an attack on the idea of London: why do you feel entitled to have affordable housing in the most productive city in the country? The only thing such pettiness leads to is lower productivity in Britain’s growth engine and therefore less tax income to spend on the regions. In effect, the government is not proud of its international financial, legal, technology and consultancy services capital. It finds its crown jewels oversized, vulgar and embarrassing.

You can’t do Thatcherism twice, we’re often told. There is nothing left to deregulate. Labour markets are reformed. Public utilities and businesses are fully privatised. Unproductive industries were shuttered for good. But planning was the one big area of state regulation Thatcher never touched.

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“Later this autumn, the government will set out its vision to unlock homeownership for a new generation by building more homes in the places people want to live and work and by getting our housing market moving,” the government’s growth plan, published alongside the budget, said. “This will boost growth across the UK helping more people afford to live near good jobs.”

Yes, this is a positive sign; these are the bitter vegetables that need to be eaten for growth to flourish. But forgive a millennial who has seen it all before: under a Tory party allergic to planning reform, will these reforms actually happen? I’m not holding my breath; already there are signs of disquiet from former ministers over the high-stakes approach being taken.

And yet, Truss and Kwarteng have shown they are prepared to be deeply ideological and challenge the fragile status quo. Their economic plan may have taken a battering by the markets, but they defiantly stand by it, daring the markets to back down before they do. All they need to do is match words with deeds, and make this clear at Party Conference next week. It all seems so wonderfully straightforward — until you remember that we’ve been here before.

This is a changed party. Starmer no longer needs to insist that his party is patriotic; he has shown it. The Union Jack has displaced the Palestinian flags brandished by conference delegates in the dark days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But it is a critical time for Starmer and his party. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have set out their government’s brutally simple approach to economics: the UK needs growth, and that can only be achieved through tax cuts and deregulation. The markets are already delivering their verdict, with the pound on the slide and inflation on the rise.

What is Labour’s answer? This is their week – the only one in the year when they can, and must, dominate the headlines with new ideas, policies and soundbites. As far as they go, this year’s slogans are passable: “A fresh start with Labour”; “A fairer, greener future”. They are well-meaning, but woolly. What the voters need to know is what’s in it for them — what is the Labour offer? How does it deliver for individuals, their families and their businesses?

The critique is clear. The Government’s “mini-budget” last week wasn’t fair; it amounts to merely throwing cash at the 1% of top earners. Labour should punch that bruise and relish the irony of a government committed to free markets being schooled by those same markets. The Party should also avoid the language of class warfare. It delights conference delegates when speakers attack Tories for supporting the rich, but this doesn’t answer the question of what Labour would do differently.

Yesterday, in her speech on the economy, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves made a decent effort of doing just that. She reclaimed the mantle of “sound money” from the Tories, attacking them for rising borrowing — including the largest single increase in government borrowing since 1972. She outlined a “green prosperity plan” that would prioritise renewable and nuclear power and free the UK from dependence on imported fossil fuels. Perhaps more strikingly, Reeves had Labour conference on its feet with her statement that Labour was now the party of economic responsibility.

But in the end, the Labour case has to be made by its Leader. More than 200 opinion polls in a row have given Labour a lead over the Conservatives; the most recent have been so commanding that they would reverse the 2019 Tory landslide and give Labour a majority. But there’s still a question mark over whether Labour’s lead is really secure. This is where Starmer must step in.

His challenge? In focus group after focus group, swing voters say they don’t know enough about him or what he stands for. His opportunity? Voters’ ignorance about Starmer means he still has time to define himself — though that is fast running out. With the Conservative government attempting a reset with their new leader, and with the mini-budget unravelling, there is the chance for him to say: “Take a second look at me, and a long hard look at her.” His conference speech has to win the attention, and then the hearts and minds of voters.

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As any football fan knows, the first question Starmer has to answer is: “Who are you?” There’s a simple formula political campaigners use: voters only need to know three things about a politician to understand them. Here’s what Starmer’s should be: first, he loves the NHS, which his mother devoted her working life to, and which in turn cared for her so well when she fell ill. Second, he loves football, supports Arsenal and is a nifty five-a-side player himself. And third, he likes a beer. Get that across. And repeat it. The best answer to the accusation that he is dull isn’t some worthy line about “serious times need serious people”: it’s far better to simply say: “No-one who’s been to the pub with Keir thinks he’s boring!”

These three things would colour in Starmer’s character and reassure voters. But they also need to believe in his judgement. This is harder to demonstrate in opposition, except during fights with your own party — which he has done well by suspending his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.

To be truly seen as the alternative Prime Minister, Starmer needs to show what he stands for, and what difference he’d make in Number 10. This is the retail offer and it has to be stark and personal. Not just about how a greener future will save the planet, but how it will save you money tomorrow. Not just what the industrial plan will invest in, but what jobs you will be able to get. Not just an end to Tory tax giveaways, but what Labour’s fair taxes will mean for families.

This is the last chance Starmer has before the next General Election to showcase who Labour is, what it has to offer, and how it has changed. Last year’s post-pandemic conference dealt with his internal dilemmas, stamping Starmer’s authority on the party with rule changes. Next year’s will be the pre-election gathering, given Truss is expected to go to the country during 2024.

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By John McTernan

Just look how far Starmer has brought his party. In 2019, Labour suffered its worst defeat since the Thirties, yet the party is now electorally competitive. It took him just two years to achieve what it took Neil Kinnock two elections. And all this in opposition to Boris Johnson, who was the most electorally successful Tory leader for nearly 30 years and who appeared to have remade the electoral landscape by capturing Labour seats and voters. This conference — and his conference speech — has to be another turning point. The race is on. And it will not be won by being slow and steady; it will be won by flair and momentum.

Labour has shown both at conference this week, but Liz Truss has changed to Tories too. She has shown a willingness to roll the dice from her very first days in office. Sir Humphrey would have called the mini-budget “bold, very bold”. There will be more where that came from when she unveils the deregulatory side of her agenda. When that happens, Labour will also need to be bold. No opposition can afford to wait and hope for the next election to fall into their laps.

The result — Britannia Unchained — was a call to look to the most dynamic economies around the world for inspiration: to cut spending like Canada, teach children like Japan, and build businesses like Silicon Valley. It didn’t oppose the austerity measures of the early Cameron government, but saw that as a precondition, rather than an endgame. The Gang of Five no doubt hoped to be the heirs of Cameron, and with the budget balanced, this global smorgasbord could be their agenda. 

At the time, the approach of the Unchainers was criticised for its inaccuracies and drew ire for eye-catching comments on productivity. But beyond that, it made little impact. The authors were promising politicians but did not have a mainline to Downing Street, and their cures for the nation’s ills were unlikely to fly with the Government dependent on the Lib Dems. Even when the Tories held an outright majority, attention quickly moved to Brexit and then Covid, leaving little time for the long-term considerations that the book sought to address.  

Through this period, however, the five authors rose through the ranks of the party. Just one week short of the book’s tenth anniversary, they made their final breakthrough when Liz Truss became Prime Minister, with Kwarteng at her side as Chancellor. Today, Trussonomics will move from campaign mode to implementation with the unveiling of the Government’s mini-budget. Will this be the moment Britannia is finally unchained?  

Together, Truss and Kwarteng have pitched their changes as an agenda for growth, prioritising expanding the economy over redistribution. Early policy leaks have suggested the moment will also be used to deregulate, confirming the reversal of the fracking ban and removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses. This is likely to be accompanied by the removal of the national insurance rise and reductions on corporation taxes.  

Yet the full realisation of the Unchained agenda has been derailed by reality. Today, the priority in the Treasury is the response to rising energy prices. The Government was half-way through detailing this when parliament was interrupted by the death of the Queen, and businesses and individuals remain desperate to see what help they will be given through the winter crisis. Tax cuts alone will not be enough to achieve this, as those most affected simply don’t pay enough tax. 

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The Government’s preferred option appears to be a per-unit price cap. The costs of this remain unclear and will be determined by the fluctuation of wholesale prices, with the government bound to make up the difference. It’s not the low-tax, low-borrowing idealism of Britannia Unchained, but rather debt-fuelled cakeism, pushing taxes down while keeping spending up. It’s a clear sign of a disconnect between the words and actions of Truss’s top table. Beyond that, despite Truss and Kwarteng’s proud boasts of doing the unpopular to secure growth, it’s noticeable they don’t appear ready to grasp the nettles that might alienate their own support. Uncapping bankers’ bonuses might not win over floating voters, but plays well with the Tory base, either among those who benefit or feel an ideological allegiance against the Government setting wages. It is also a measure that only fiddles at the edge of growth, slightly altering incentives in the already massive speculation economy. 

Even the Unchainers will not turn against the vested interests of the Tory Party. When it comes to the growth-sapping shortage of houses, Truss and Kwarteng are unwilling to deregulate planning, knowing that it will sting them in the shires. Throughout the leadership campaign, Truss equivocated on this subject, frequently attacking her own government’s approach to housing targets. Instead, her government now offers a cut to stamp-duty — not a bad idea in itself, though it will just juice the market without more building.  

At the moment, the only push towards planning reform appears to be in “full-fat freeports”: enterprise zones with reduced restrictions and lower taxes designed to spread the growth around. But this is nothing more than a distraction from the inability to build houses where the jobs, productivity and people currently are. It is unlikely to do anything to defuse the acute crisis of housing in the southeast of England, where short-term electoral interests push against new housebuilding.  Truss’s liberalisation of fracking will doutbless hit a similar stumbling block. Ministers have been at pains to stress that exploitation of shale gas will only go ahead with the consent of local communities. This is an almost impossible bar. Fracking developments generally meet with deep local opposition, the major barrier to development before the 2019 ban was in place. If this is the plan, it is a non-starter. 

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Meanwhile, there seems to be no solution for liberalisation where businesses want to build. The Oxford-Cambridge Arc, for instance, which was designed to accelerate Britain’s science and tech sectors around world-leading universities, remains cancelled due to local objections. Instead of backing what is working, the Government looks to create magic in underperforming areas.  Agglomeration and acceleration around strategic advantages cannot easily be replicated by liberalising around left behind towns. The green belt and the planning regime are likely to remain some of the most burdensome regulations afflicting British growth.  

Other policy announcements show a lack of seriousness in the Truss reforms. In 2012, the Unchainers talked a lot about raising educational standards, citing Britain’s uncompetitive PISA scores as a sign of future stagnation. So far, the main policy hinted at is the ending of the ban on new grammar schools. It is a favoured policy of a certain type of Tory, but unproven at best in its outcomes. The grammar school had certain positive impacts at a certain time, but it’s slowly become clear that they tend to favour the rich and have a minimal impact on overall attainment. It’s less of a global lesson than an expired policy gathering dust in the back of the Conservative cupboard. 

The same is true of measures such as abandoning the sugar tax, squeezing the margins on benefits, or Johnson’s proposed ban on the importation of foie gras and furs. These are things which please the ideological Right and anti-regulation small-staters such as the authors of Britannia Unchained. They are, however, small fry in the scale of the British economy. Quite literally all fur coat and no knickers. 

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And yet, in the decade since Britain Unchained was published, its diagnosis has largely been vindicated. Britain has struggled with sluggish growth and flatlining wages. The fundamental premise remains obviously true: Britain’s economy can grow and doing so will benefit the whole country. Even the practice of cherry-picking the best policies from around the globe remains sound, though often there’s valid local reasons why we’ve ended up where we are and why change is difficult.  

Much else has shifted though. The Tories sit atop an entirely different political coalition. The fiscal impact of austerity has been wiped out by Brexit, Covid and Johnsonian high spending. The low-borrowing economy has never emerged, and debt will only increase as they seek to graft a low-tax economy on it. In response, instead of turning to a World XI of global policies, Truss and Kwarteng seem keener to play the Thatcherite B team. Tax cuts will come in the face of short-term spending crises and long-term rising service costs meaning a decline in income and more borrowing, at a time when rates are rising, if the growth doesn’t come. It is, in effect, a gamble which could come up short, padded around the edges with policies such introducing grammar schools which invigorate the Tory base but are neither groundbreakingly innovative or proven to work.  

If this happens, all the authors of Britannia Unchained will have brought are more diminished public services, which have neither seen major investment nor the reform to make them more effective. Early on, they correctly identified critical issues facing Britain — and as they rose through the ranks, they saw the need for change become more urgent. Yet now they’re in power, their agenda looks more underwhelming than unchained. Rather than a radical agenda for growth, all Trussonomics looks likely to add up to is the Eighties — but more so.