Andy Burnham is something different. Based on the evidence so far, he is a kind of idealist. He is driven by a vague but deeply-held idea of what Britain should be, namely a country defined by a spirit of solidarity and rooted in a strong and protective state. This vision bears the imprint of Burnham’s upbringing in a Northern milieu infused with strong local identities, a prominent tradition of working-class politics, and Catholic notions of social justice. Its aesthetics come from football and the guitar music of the Eighties and Nineties — the last eras when the nation shared broadly the same cultural consciousness. Its highest aspiration, perhaps, is to make community something more than a euphemism for an interest group. 

You can see this romantic and, in its way, rather conservative vision in most of Burnham’s stated priorities, from social care reform and public control of utilities to a defense of pubs as “working-class culture”. Bunrhamism is consistent in its enemies too: privatization, Thatcherism and the bond markets represent the undermining of state and society by the extractive forces of capital.

An idea of Britain is not the same as a credible plan, but it is welcome to see a prime minister who at least seems to grasp that a nation is a social entity held together by bonds of emotion and identity, rather than simply a receptacle for abstract values. Blair’s restless tampering with the constitution, his contempt for nationhood and enthusiastic embrace of globalization, laid the ground for many of our current crises. His managerial successors often seemed to occupy power like CEOs trying to boost a company’s stock price, or officials managing a civil service department. 

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There is, however, a reason that idealism has a bad name in modern politics. It was articulated by the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli during the Renaissance. More than the calculating ruthlessness that his name is associated with, what made Machiavelli a foundational thinker of modernity was his response to a world of dramatic and frightening change. Italy in the early-16th century had become a battleground for competing European powers, plunging the region into chaos. Its leaders had become fatalistic, Machiavelli observed, due to “the great changes and variations, beyond human imagining, which we have experienced and experience every day”. His conclusion was that such upheaval had turned principled leadership into a recipe for failure; what mattered was an ability to infer what the situation demanded. “One who adapts his policy to the times prospers,” he wrote. “One man proceeds with circumspection, another impetuously; one uses violence, another stratagem; one man goes about things patiently, another does the opposite”; and yet, success ultimately depended on “nothing else except the extent to which their methods are or are not suited to the nature of the times”.

The question for Burnham, then, is this: what good is a vision for the country if it takes no account of our historical circumstances? We are living in a Machiavellian moment, a time of “great changes and variations, beyond human imagining”. The immediate challenge is a looming economic crisis, as Trump’s Iran War and wider instability in the Middle East feeds through into surging energy bills, rising inflation and high interest rates. All of this is ramping up the cost of the government’s debt, meaning that six weeks out from John Healey’s first budget, the chancellor faces a struggle just to keep his head above water. 

Meanwhile, the tectonic plates of global politics are shifting around us. The unpredictable and increasingly hostile Trump administration has recently declared support for Irish unification. The EU could soon be upended by a Le Pen victory in France and the ascent of the AfD in Germany, imperiling, among other things, European support for Ukraine. Chinese technology and manufacturing power continues to steadily rewire the global economy. And that is before mentioning the wide range of transformative outcomes that could result from artificial intelligence.  

In other words, Burnham may prefer to focus on homelessness and vocational training, but he does not have that luxury. However compelling his image of Britain may be, his premiership will be defined first and foremost by how he responds to the challenges thrown up by a volatile world. There are already signs that he is floundering. The Treasury has told the Financial Times that Burnham and Healey did not realize how bad the public finances were, as though the subject had not been near the center of attention for the past two years. Last week, in an apparently off-the-cuff remark in the Commons, Burnham recklessly opened the door to another Scottish independence referendum, before rushing to close it again.

The deeper issue is that Burnham’s visions of Britain as it is and Britain as it should be are seemingly impervious to historical change. His judgment that the country has suffered under “40 years of neoliberalism”, implying a political economy that has remained relatively static across decades, is alarmingly imperceptive. Beginning with New Labour’s efforts to re-engineer the Thatcherite settlement for progressive ends, Britain has moved steadily towards a hybrid model in which privatization, the plundering of national assets by foreign investors, and the decimation of government services coexists with an expansive bureaucratic state that seeks to micro-manage the economy through regulation. The second half of the equation matters as much as the first, because the ever-growing expense of regulation, including that introduced by the current Labour government, has left British businesses especially vulnerable to rising costs and higher interest rates, forcing them to cut investment, hire fewer workers and, increasingly, to give up. To give one vivid illustration of these problems, 2025 was the worst year on record for housebuilding in London, with the number of new projects collapsing by 85% in a decade. Since much of Britain’s regulation is inflationary, it is also partly responsible for the government facing higher borrowing costs than comparable nations. 

In fairness to Burnham, his reductive framing of the country’s problems answers a public demand. Suspicious of politicians and beset by insecurity, voters want principled leaders and stories that explain in familiar terms what has gone wrong. As a result, the most successful communicators are those with beliefs that are both sincerely held and inadequate to the realities of the 21st century. 

This does not mean, however, that an idealist is necessarily unsuited to a volatile world. Modern history has been shaped by leaders who have pursued ideological convictions in times of flux. Such figures have a paradoxical power: their rigid commitment to their vision enables them to be flexible in reaching it. Understanding Machiavelli’s insights, they see that they must work with the tools and circumstances at their disposal. They concede that realizing a vision of society will never mean achieving a Platonic ideal, but at best, an ability to guide the process of change in a particular direction. 

Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman of the late-19th century, expressed this idea poetically when he spoke of “hearing God’s footsteps moving through history and walking with him some of the way”. Bismarck himself was probably the ultimate example of this type. Remembered as the master of Realpolitik, he was nonetheless a committed archconservative who worked to secure an old order for a new age. He unified Germany to buttress the power of Prussia, and he introduced universal male suffrage and the first modern welfare state to turn the masses from potential socialists into loyal subjects of the Kaiser. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, no less a doctrinaire Marxist than Vladimir Lenin proved endlessly adaptable in establishing the Soviet Union as the first Communist state. 

The figure in British history who most resembles this model is surely Burnham’s great nemesis: Thatcher. Though now often characterized as a liberal, it is truer to say that she recognized in economic liberalism the means necessary, at her historical juncture, to realize her deeply-held conservative vision of society, one based on personal responsibility, property ownership, and the slashing back of an over-powerful state. As with Bismarck, this meant building a coalition among parts of the working and middle classes, and pursuing a form of populism directed not at elites, but at the institutions of organized labor. 

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These precedents bear the lesson that principles and convictions are of little worth unless coupled with an ability to see beyond one’s own context, recognizing that what appears fixed and inevitable now will soon be revealed as transient. Boldness and risk-taking are indispensable, but can only succeed if they are informed by a clear analysis of history and an instinctive judgment. Burnham has shown some signs of grasping the nature of the challenge: his coup against Starmer was skillfully executed, and while it remains to be seen if No. 10 North is any more than a gimmick, his ambition to loosen himself from Whitehall’s deathly grip is admirable. He has the benefit of a public that has already accepted change in some form is coming, and numerous policy ideas which have been identified by others. These include breaking the 2024 manifesto by raising income tax, so as to begin easing the burden on businesses; means-testing pensions; balancing the renewable energy drive with more domestic oil and gas in the medium-term; and reforming the Bank of England’s role to help with government financing. 

These are merely a few of the avenues that Burnham could pursue towards his idea of Britain. More significant opportunities, and risks, could well emerge from domains that are still rapidly evolving, namely technology and international relations. Since any course he chooses will likely antagonize his party, and will take time to produce results for the electorate, the prime minister will need to keep his vision alive through political theater. Thatcher understood the value of a dramatic confrontation to demonstrate her principles and create sharp dividing lines with her opponents. Similarly, Burnham could seek a public showdown with the investors and creditors involved in the totemic scandal of Thames Water.

History shows that the politicians who orient themselves towards a particular idea of society — even a conservative or a moralistic one — can, with the necessary temperament, end up being more modern than the modernizers, more pragmatic than the managers, and more radical than those who set out to disrupt. Of course, history is also littered with figures — the Jimmy Carters and Jeremy Corbyns of this world — who have justified the common image of the idealist as the polar opposite of the realist. The danger for Burnham is that he owes his power to a likeable caricature he has crafted for the public. His idealism may therefore come to little more than clinging to the simple sentiments that have made him popular, until he is overwhelmed by events.

The inaugural Thatcher Fest is not exactly an ancient Grantham tradition. “It’s just a way of getting people into the town,” one Conservative councillor soberly explained. The festival’s events apparently offered something for everyone: Edwina Currie, Giles Brandreth, a drag queen doing a bit about Section 28. “Are you worried about protestors?” the leader of the council was asked by local news. “No I’m not, I want to know are they bringing in money, and are they spending it in the pub and the hotels?”

There were no protestors, but something the town found even more uncomfortable: a quiet trickle of devotees from all over the world. At 2pm we gathered near her statue. A dozen in all: a corporate vice executive from Dusseldorf; a young Tory boy (“he’s furious about the rise of Reform,” explained his attendant mother); a squat, belligerent woman from Sichuan who had, as she was keen to show me on her phone, been working on an amateur translation of Carol Thatcher’s memoir into Mandarin.

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This was the most immersive of the festival events, a psychogeographic retracing of Thatcher’s childhood steps: fields where she might once have tobogganed in snow; the Methodist hall where her father once preached; the walk to school where she would spend the twice-a-day half-hour hike contemplating Grantham and its incarnation of England. Walking up the hill towards Thatcher’s old grammar, the market town was resplendent, triumphant in its autumnal color, offering us for a briefest of moments that crucible of nostalgia and memory that once informed her vision of the country.

The historian David Cannadine certainly believed this was the case. “Thatcher’s social vision for Britain,” he wrote, “was in many ways Grantham writ large.” It was only through this time and place that her seemingly contradictory vision of the country could be properly understood. Her father’s shop was squarely on the High Street, literally in the twilight zone between well-heeled aspiration of England’s provincial bourgeoisie and the degradation of a nearby slum. It birthed an almost revolutionary conception of class and society: both hierarchical, with its “Burkean reverence” for petty provincial officialdom, but also one enterprising and disruptive, through which the “Victorian values” of hardwork, thrift, self-reliance and independence still ruled. Altogether, Thatcherism represented a paradoxically modern expression of an old moral order, one that continues to shape the ethos of 21st-century capitalism.

Cynicism toward Thatcher’s fondness for Grantham has reigned supreme in recent years, alongside a fondness for Peregrine Worsthorne’s quip that in “setting out to recreate the country of her father” she ended up creating the country of her son: dodgy businessman and sometime coup-plotter Mark. “Reheated Thatcherism” is now the ultimate insult in British politics, used to prod at a dying Tory corpse and undermine Reform’s push for power. But what this ignores, amid the apparently revolutionary temper of British politics, is the extent to which Thatcher and Grantham, as they exist today, still articulate our desires and revealed preferences.

As the walking tour indulged in this Thatcherite mythos, there was a reverential mood — a sense that, in an era of looming upheaval, this was the last Prime Minister to seep out of the dour realm of scripted politics into the collective consciousness. In 50 years’ time, there will be no nosing around the streets of Durham in search of Blair’s youth, no life-size recreation of Keir Starmer’s bedroom, as the local museum once did for Thatcher. Our own politics, indeed our inner lives, are still entranced by the contradictions of her vision. In the end, most Britons still hope to live quiet lives in market towns like Grantham, with their historic centers and abundant suburban shopping centers. We want good schools and meritocracy. We want prosperity and security, enterprise and community, history and an enduring relevance to the outside world.

Behind the scenes of the Grantham festival, a struggle to represent these interests was taking place. “If we lose Grantham,” Gareth Knight of the local Conservative Chairmen’s Association tells me, “I’m not sure what we have left as a party.” During this year’s Lincolnshire County Council election, Reform took 44 out of 70 seats, part of a quiet realignment of defections and local contests taking place across provincial England. Then, in July, came yet more symbolic defections, including former town mayor Graham Jeal, the man who’d worked to bring the statue of Thatcher from Westminster to Grantham.

If Thatcher’s vision for life in Grantham remains, the methods have had to change. A statement issued by the local Reform Party regarding the festival, amid its recent triumph, is both celebratory and distancing. “Mrs Thatcher,” it read, “is now an important historical figure rather than one that informs the challenges of 2025.” A new “post-liberal conservatism” is apparently the cure for Britain’s malaise: “One that spends its money wisely, backs domestic industry, and rebuilds resilience — not the managerial state that meddles in every aspect of life.”

When I asked Jeal to expand, he talked only of the excitement of this new endeavor. “It’s like working for a startup,” he says during a 30-minute phone call in which he mentions the word growth 22 times. “I think that Reform is clearly attracting people who have never voted before, so there’s a whole new constituency coming forward.” In this, Jeal’s pitch is similar to one Farage has tried out from the Welsh Valleys to the Dorset shires: a blend between lowering corporation tax for small businesses and rebuilding state capacity. It is, as sociologist Dan Evans describes, the most important class divide of the 21st century — between global and family capital — expressed in the “frenzied fear of falling from the lower middle class”.

Despite this more statist pitch, Reform has nonetheless just dropped its £90 billion program of tax cuts, after stern criticism by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Despite this, the party’s supposed profligacy offers the Conservative its final, desperate line of attack. To old Tory voters, it’s seen as a “statist, Left-wing party”, says Gareth Knight, among the few aspirational burghers left in Grantham who still cling to the familiar brand of grocer-shop accounts. It’s the Labour areas of the town, he insists, that Reform is sweeping up — and for the Conservative Party to survive here, it’s about tying Reform to the statism, and indeed, the old snobbery, of Thatcher’s distinction between those in the town “who drew salaries from white-collar employment and those who did not”

What of Labour in Grantham? In the last election, they came second, despite Reform eating up most of the Tories’ losses with a 20% swing. Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about Grantham, and indeed Thatcher’s recollection of the town, is its industrial heritage, which Reform is now trying to court. Its munitions factory saw it targeted by the Luftwaffe, and full employment continued well into the Sixties. Today, light industry still exists in Grantham and the rest of South Lincolnshire. One notable example is the area’s niche in garden conservatories: typical, perhaps, of its provincial aspirations, yet one crippled by high energy costs. But symbolically, at least for Reform, its mix of entrepreneurism, state enterprise and market town aesthetics is a way of bridging a new divide between the old Tory establishment and the Grantham’s disenfranchised blue-collar workers.

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Confronted with this rising coalition, the local Labour Party shares one thing with its old rivals: if Thatcher is capable of uniting a Tory Party potentially entering its death throes, she’s even better at bringing together an increasingly irrelevant Labour. In the Grantham Railway Club, at the “alternative” Thatcher Fest, a rejected scene from a Ken Loach film unfolds. Billy Bragg’s “Thatcherites” is strummed out by a pair of greying folk-rockers. The audience is similarly frail and nostalgic for misery and hardship. A portly, bearded retiree presents me with poems of fastidious bleakness from his travels across the Midlands via buses and estates. “Could this be about Grantham?” I ask. “Yes, of course,” he says. The German corporate vice-president has turned up from the walking tour with a half pint of Madri, surveying the scene with the sort of morbid curiosity reserved for an amateur museum exhibit.

The local Labour Party chairman, Rob Shorrock, a teacher at the local college, offers a dose of realism on Farage’s hoped-for realignment. “At least one of the Reform defectors told me he voted for Blair in 1997. They get excited at anything.” The railway connection to London, he insists, is the real growth opportunity. “There’s also a shortage of skills,” he says, underpinned by the belief that a dose of pragmatic investment of infrastructure could yet breathe life back into an old Blairite instinct.

But Grantham seems to have moved beyond such trite solutions. When I asked one festival speaker about Thatcher’s legacy and her desire to “separate the person from the politics”, she sent back a ChatGPT response of nonsensical buzzwords. That seems appropriate not just for Labour in Grantham, but for the Government’s whole understanding of how to remember the Iron Lady and her legacy. Which begs the question you end up asking everyone at “Thatcher fest”: what would the grocer’s daughter herself make of her town now? The answers vary, from tour guide Dr John Manterfield (“lack of respect, a loss of independent shops”) to the Tory Party chairman (“the success of Right to Buy, the good grammar schools”). But Shorrock, outside the din of geriatric protest, likely gives the most fitting answer for the country at large: “It still doesn’t quite know what it wants to be yet.”

He’s not the only one for whom Thatcher’s looming face recalls a conservative adolescence of furtive, Freudian desires to kill Daddy and marry Maggie — of political vigor, economic brawn, Britannia unchained, and memories of happily selling England by the pound in the name of Austrian economists and market efficiency. But all that feels very distant now. For if opposition party conferences are meant to be about rallying the troops, raising spirits for the fight against a woefully unpopular government, the troops today feel demoralized. The atmosphere is of a wake soundtracked by a aging tribute band.

For the Prime Minister’s losses have not been Kemi Badenoch’s gains. The faithful are vanishingly thin on the ground. Conference is empty; any of the sparse activity seems palpably futile. The quintessential party of government is being out-flanked on the Right by a top-down, one-man start-up act with little-or-no governing pedigree, but possessed of an appeal which speaks directly to the public’s baser, zero-sum instincts.

Gawping at ladies’ dresses, meanwhile, the Tories have clearly left the usual party-political state of self-delusion and entered a collective hallucination. Rather than stage a fightback, the foot-soldiers of the modern Conservative Party have retreated into nostalgia, yearning for the last time they were an ascendant force, forging a new national character with brutal efficiency, and taking aim against socialist Britain and the statist blob.

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Here, at Thatcher-fest, is a world in which 2008 never happened, in which the entire model upon which the Iron Lady and her party built post-1979 Britain hadn’t fallen apart under the weight of an over-leveraged, out of control financial services sector. What’s more, the conditions which allowed the economic offer of Thatcherism to develop are no longer apparent. We’re no longer an energy exporter, enjoying a steady flow of North Sea tax receipts, and we’re not experiencing buoyant growth off the back of Chinese market reforms and Reaganite deficit spending. Nor is there a cross-border trend which allows government to escape the analog economy of coal and steel, instead embracing the services and silicon chips of the late-20th century.

Taken together, the formula the Conservatives pursued for the past half-century has left us deeply vulnerable. We have an economy reliant on global trade flows and inward foreign investment with a yawning balance of payments; the UK recorded a trade in goods deficit of £226 billion last year, only partly offset by service exports. At the same time, we have privatized our assets, and left our infrastructure weak, and prioritized a growth model that concentrates wealth in London and the South East. In the regions, our industrial base withers. This was deemed to be a price worth paying, not only because manufacturing could be cheaply offshored, but also because the decline of industry tamed our once-mighty trade unions, an essential prerequisite of Thatcherite hegemony.

None of these prescriptions suits our era of geopolitical competition. Nor does the Thatcherite policy mix quell the populist backlash fermenting outside the metropolitan citadels. Even in urban areas, the primary beneficiaries of five decades of market liberalism, whereby the service industries and “knowledge economy” prospered, residents now balk at voting Conservative, turned off by the provincial “Little England” aesthetics that offend their more refined, liberal-cosmopolitan tastes. Former industrial powerhouses and factory-dominated monotowns have meanwhile morphed into something we now call “left behind” Britain, now rising in nationalist revolt. There was a brief period where a nascent red Toryism, with an agenda focused on regional investment and industrial revival, tied together a Leave-voting, post-industrial working-class with more affluent voters in the southern shires. But that Johnsonite experiment collapsed after Partygate, and, here, at Tory conference, there seems little interest in reviving a political strategy that conservative opinion writers chide as “neo-Brownite social democracy”.

The Tories, with few exceptions, have no alternative and no response to the questions of the age. Over breakfast, I overhear four delegates discussing their hangovers and fantasizing about abolishing the minimum wage. (It “has killed the service industry”, apparently.) One was giddy about Badenoch sitting behind him during one of Mel Stride’s appearances. Another was buzzing with excitement about the prospect of seeing Robert Jenrick. The shadow justice secretary is easily the most assured and media-savvy of the shadow cabinet. A former Remainer Cameroon, who now seems happier among the very online New Right, Jenrick is nakedly ambitious in a way that is unflattering.

But he is at least aligning himself with an emerging zeitgeist, aware of the scale of public discontent with a tired, failing political class, and the widespread disgust that defines the popular mood. His conference speech was full of Faragist sound and fury — “the collapse of the old order is in sight”, he told the hall, a vivid rebuke to the tradition of Burkean moderation and empiricist skepticism of continental-style ruptures that English conservatism embraced for four centuries.

In the end, though, Jenrick is no Thatcher: and not merely because he lacks her charisma as the political embodiment of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. Stuart Hall, the Marxist cultural theorist, was in awe of the magnetic power of Thatcherism in its heyday. He was fascinated by its achievements, its construction of a new social bloc, an electoral coalition around a new political and economic consensus. It turned an aspirational working-class, made homeowners under Right to Buy, away from socialism. It united them with anxious suburbanites worried about crime, along with petty bourgeois business owners sick of union militants. In tow came the City of London and the “yuppies”, ready to be unshackled from a regulatory state.

“As an ideology”, Hall wrote, “Thatcherism addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.” Its success lay in articulating grievances, exploiting crises, distilling a feeling, a mood, a collective (sub)consciousness into a political project, uniting disparate and sometimes contradictory strands of policy and political demographics into a unified, coherent whole. Thatcher’s Anglican traditionalism and old-fashioned family values sat awkwardly alongside breakneck industrial modernization that destroyed centuries-old communal bonds, replacing a culture of collectivism with a raucously selfish individualism epitomized by a new “Loadsamoney” social category. But her political skill lay in papering over these cracks.

There is nothing approaching this kind of hegemonic ambition in Jenrick, his fierce rhetoric and frenzied viral posting notwithstanding. He may be assured in his culture war comfort zones, in his diatribes on crime, migration and patriotic renaissance. But he ultimately has no answer to the 17-year economic funk in which Britain still finds itself. Thatcherism, for all its faults, was a renewal project that succeeded in transforming Britain, identifying losers as well as winners, and turning the country away from a spluttering postwar model.

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Where the grocer’s daughter met a crisis of social democracy and the collapse of postwar Keynesianism with a return to Victorian morality and Whiggish, free-trading economic liberalism, the Conservatives look at our own period of secular decline and can only flog the dead horse of her Thatcherite first principles. A financial services boom and the lifting of capital controls won’t save us now. There are few public assets, few national industries left to sell to the highest bidder. The family silver is gone.

Somewhere in the wings, figures such as Nick Timothy pursue an agenda more congruent with the times. His blue-collar conservatism talks about reindustrialization; about productive, well-paid manufacturing work; about an active, interventionist state. Combined with an inclusive patriotism and restrictionist migration policy, that’s a fruitful political positioning for an electorate tired of a libertine Left and libertarian Right. But it’s not where the Conservative Party is as a whole, and certainly not where Badenoch is, nor where Jenrick has dared go before he makes his pitch to a membership of small-state true believers.

Reform is already beginning to pivot away from the politics of the “saloon-bar Thatcherite”, embracing public ownership, aspects of the welfare state, and attacking the banking sector. A Tory activist tells me that many of his comrades are treating this year’s conference as a goodbye party, a final hurrah with the True Blue crowd, before crossing no-man’s land to Nigel’s turquoise army. This is perhaps less down to ideology than personality. Like Thatcher, after all, Farage addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. His electoral coalition will constitute a rebuilt version of the short-lived 2019 realignment, uniting left-behind Britain with more affluent, more rural constituencies. Thatcher created her voter base. Who, in contrast, are Kemi Badenoch’s people? Smoking a cig, a senior party member tells me she’s “not a leader”, and siren voices in the party are growing increasingly vocal in favor of yet another change at the top.

But, then, who are Jenrick’s people? His preferred strategy seems to be that of the Farage tribute act, a bandwagon-jump, based on the calculation that if you can’t beat them, copy them. If the shadow justice secretary takes over, he’ll merely be the fifth leader the party has elected in five years, within an organization struggling with its own identity, grasping at the straws of long-past glories but campaigning against their own 14 years of failure. The Tories are left unsure of their purpose in a world that they created but that has moved on, sailed away, leaving them stranded, downing pints in Manchester’s Midlands Hotel, wondering if their best bet is to jump aboard the good ship Reform. The Iron Lady will only sink them.

Today, all of that is gone. Now, the only families who have homes and space in London are the ones who are very rich, and an ever-decreasing subset of the poor who have managed to cling on in social housing. Everyone else, especially the children, are overcrowded. Their families rent rooms in houses, they don’t have gardens and one in every 20 doesn’t have a home at all. Instead, they bounce from one temporary homelessness accommodation to another, a miserable, distressing journey through badly maintained rented rooms and hotels. Down the street I grew up on, it costs £1,000 to rent a single room. 

In three and a half decades, then, we have undone a century of progress on housing. Yet if this process began in the Eighties, with Margaret Thatcher’s planned destruction of council housing and deregulation of the private rented sector, every politician who has had responsibility for housing and for London in the years since shares some of the blame — with vast consequences for the city’s skyline, school system and even its broad culture.

Even before she came to power, Thatcher had a vision: we would no longer rely on the public sector to house people who couldn’t afford to buy, by offering council homes at local rents. Instead, we would let these people choose a private rented home and allow people to claim benefits to make up the difference. We shifted, essentially, from a welfare system based on bricks to one based on benefits, with “Right to Buy” the jewel in the monetarist crown. 

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At the same time, Thatcher made changes to the private rented sector: abolishing both rent control and security of tenure, which guaranteed tenants a new lease once the old one expired. Now, private landlords could raise rents as quickly as they liked and evict their charges at the end of a short-term tenancy for no reason at all. This was the beginning of the end: the security and community working class Londoners had built up was based on council housing. Thatcher’s moves would destroy those communities. 

The Conservative reforms came at the worst possible economic time for two reasons. First, the rapid deindustrialization of the economy, and the construction of a new financial sector in London, meant that the capital had become the center of the country’s wealth and employment. After enduring a steady decline in population for decades, the city’s population started to rise, and rapidly too, as people moved here for work. The number of Londoners has increased every year since 1988, neatly chiming with the financial Big Bang.

Then there was the global fall in interest rates, which occurred in the Nineties after Thatcher had moved on. This did several things. The first was to wreck people’s pension plans. No longer would their savings pay out enough for retirement. So they looked for another, secure destination for their money instead. And thanks to low rates, and a new financial product called the “buy-to-let mortgage”, created with the knowledge and blessing of government, there was an easy option: property in London. Millions began flowing into buying up homes in the capital: not to live in, but to rent out to the city’s growing population. I remember watching the numbers in the property section in the local paper rise to almost silly-sounding amounts: £100,000, £200,000, £300,000. How could anyone possibly afford these sums, just to live in? 

Then Tony Blair arrived, with a big Labour majority, in 1997. Things might have changed. We could have moved away from the Thatcherite focus on benefits and private landlords, back to the tradition of the 20th century: the construction of social housing on a large scale. But we didn’t. Tony Blair oversaw some of the lowest rates of council building since the “Addison Act” created the model of local authority-owned housing in 1919. New Labour did, to be fair, pump money into upgrading some social homes: but this came with strings attached. 

For one thing, councils had to transfer their homes to private social housing providers, or set up private management bodies to get hold of it. And though the money might have offered nice new kitchens and bathrooms, it didn’t address the fundamental problems with the fabric of aging housing estates. Strapped for cash, councils turned to another option: knocking them down and selling the sites to private builders to pay for a rebuild at higher density, with higher rents and more private housing. South London’s Aylesbury Estate — where Blair gave his first speech as leader — was slated for demolition in 2005. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the city was also changing. The arrival of a London mayoralty led to the elevation of Ken Livingstone. A veteran of local politics, Livingstone had been leader of the Greater London Council, until its abolition in 1986. This time around, Ken’s biggest idea was to build upwards. On his watch, dozens of new skyscrapers were signed off: The Gherkin, The Cheesegrater, The Shard — all these icons of capitalism started their journey under the auspices of Red Ken. 

But this caused a problem. As skyscrapers became increasingly common in London, the value of land on which they could be built exploded, jumping by 30% since the financial crisis alone. No longer would developers build rows of family-sized housing, as they had well into the 20th century. The land was just too expensive to make this model work any more. And with planning laws preventing the city from expanding outwards — the Green Belt has become a kind of religion for politicians of all parties — it would instead densify: with gargantuan office and apartment blocks popping up from Victoria to Croydon. The cost of building these towers, and indeed buying the land, meant they were never going to be affordable for families: even those who didn’t mind living in the clouds. 

All the while, London’s population was growing at an even faster rate. Blair, his confidence in free market absolutism, opted against a transition period for the “free movement of people”, when the EU expanded in 2004. Now, workers from all around Europe could come to what was one of the continent’s foremost economic centers. But there would not be housing for them when they arrived. So, instead, they piled into the private rented sector, driving the value up even higher for landlords and encouraging them not to rent out houses. Rather, they split them up into rooms to maximize their income. A house in London was now an extraordinarily valuable asset, with millions of cheaply-priced loans chasing every new “opportunity”. How could normal families, who just wanted somewhere to live and school for their kids, hope to compete? 

Then came the financial crisis and another opportunity to reset. The model we had followed to this point was plainly broken: wasn’t it time to try a new one? Instead, we would double down on our mistakes. The Bank of England responded to the crisis by cutting interest rates to historic lows and pumping money into the economy via quantitative easing. This meant that money rushed to safe assets, and property investors could borrow cheaply. Property in a Western capital with high demand for housing was the new gold. Speculative developments began to pull in billions from investors all around the world. A wall of investment money crashed into London’s market, sending the value of prices soaring yet higher. Suddenly, it was very easy to get stinking rich from building private housing in London and selling it off-plan in Hong Kong. 

But what these investors did not want was “affordable housing” — which cut their profits and lowered the attractiveness of the asset to investors. David Cameron’s coalition government obliged, introducing a system of “viability” which gave property developers a way to avoid their legal commitments to building affordable housing. Residential tower blocks piled up in the London skyline with hardly a unit of social flat in sight. Boris Johnson, as Livingstone’s successor as mayor, enthusiastically encouraged this trend: signing off projects boroughs had refused for containing too little affordable housing, selling off public land to private developers, and turning over government cash to help private developers build on new sites. 

At the same time, Cameron went further than Thatcher had in dismantling social housing. Grants for new social homes were cut to a third of even the historically low post-Thatcher rates. Budget cuts were also forced through ,which pushed social landlords to junk much-needed capital investment. Property increasingly fell into disrepair. A revitalization of Right to Buy saw the remaining decent stock sold off, and new build housing was let under a new “affordable rents” regime — which was still too high for the poorest to afford. Social housing, in the traditional sense, was completely residualized, while waiting times for a council home in London boroughs stretched into decades. 

And where Thatcher had elected to move from bricks to benefits, Cameron went a step further: cutting benefits as well. He prevented claimants from receiving anything more than the lowest third of the local market rate, and then froze that rate. This meant that as rents rose, the number of properties someone on benefits could afford rapidly shrank, even as many claimants were also holding down jobs. More and more families were duly evicted, and found they had no options for somewhere else to live. 

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The scandal of Portsmouth's broken homes

By Greg Noone

The city started to sink into a permanent crisis, as young families escaped elsewhere. And if the London they left behind was physically unrecognizable from that of their parents — a cityscape of ugly prefab towers, built from plastic and steel — the capital’s housing crisis is now having a broader societal impact. So few young families can afford to live here, for instance, that the school system is collapsing. According to one recent study, London accounted for nine out of the ten areas nationally with the biggest drop in primary-age students, with Westminster Council closing three schools over the last five years. 

And even for those working-class Londoners clinging on, the situation is grim. These days, residents typically spend a stonking 41% of their incomes on rent. And if that inevitably has a stark economic impact, London’s culture has arguably been harmed too. Long gone are the days when struggling artists could find cheap digs in the city center — leaving plenty of time for music or writing or whatever else they had set their sights on. 

Over recent years, meanwhile, Covid has piled on even more pressure. In its aftermath, rents soared yet further, as a sudden surge in immigration due to post-Brexit reforms, a rise in international students, and an uptick affluent families seeking more space converged at the same moment — all while landlords were less willing to put their properties on the market. Sadiq Khan has done more than Boris to reverse the decline, starting off the first genuine program of council housing construction in the city since Thatcher. But he too has faltered, his build numbers dropping and his electoral promise of 50% affordable housing in new developments long forgotten. 

As for Khan’s colleagues in Whitehall, Labour has few answers either. New rental reforms will offer longer term security, but do little to help those who simply can’t pay the rent anymore. Extra money for social housing construction is welcome, but given the size of the challenge, it is too little and too late. The larger chunk of funding won’t be available until after 2030, which in practice means new homes are a decade away. That speaks to a broader failure: notwithstanding Keir Starmer’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes nationwide by the end of this Parliament, planning approvals lately dropped to a record low. And so we have the London of today: unaffordable, atomized, sterile. Its communities dead or dying, the keys handed over to private landlords and property developers, my parents’ dream a distant memory. 

***

Peter Apps is the author of Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, published on 25 September

I still feel there’s a grain of truth in that vision of Thatcher as a nursery dominatrix, thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love. But now I’m 57, I realize the reason Thatcher made our podium is more obvious. A powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal can act as catnip on certain men.

A new, pleasingly unconventional biography of Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? by Tina Gaudoin, places much of its focus on what sociologist Catherine Hakim terms “erotic capital” — the way personal assets, such as glamour and sex appeal, can be used to gain social and economic advantage. Instead of looking at the leader’s political legacy, Gaudoin tracks down Thatcher the woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, fashion lover, flirt, manipulator of men. The book examines how the Finchley coquette’s utilization of feminine qualities propelled her to the top job, with chapters titled “Autistic Glamour Puss”, “Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?” and “All the Prime Minister’s Men”.

For all the “Attila the Hen” labels and Spitting Image’s puppet of a beaked PM standing at a urinal in a man’s suit, what stands out now is the constant sexual appraisal of a woman who was 53 when she entered Downing Street and 65 when she left. In 1989, Vanity Fair ran a major interview with Thatcher by Gail Sheehy, which contained the following frothy passage: “President Mitterrand says Britain’s prime minister ‘has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She also has the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisers with the skill of Elizabeth I.”

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Britain’s Thatcherite doom loop

By Yanis Varoufakis

If you think Sheehy’s wildly overstating the case, here’s a tableau I witnessed at the Spectator summer party in July 1992. I arrived just as a car drew up amid a cascade of paparazzi flashes; the former prime minister, dressed to the nines, stepped out and was greeted by a phalanx of adoring young fogeys with Simon Heffer at the fore. I recall thinking I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had laid down his immaculate linen jacket for her to tread on. For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes (which didn’t alight on me) and imbibing the heady cocktail of fame, glamour and mythology still in the making.

That, however, wasn’t the first time I registered Thatcher’s erotic allure. This happened earlier, in 1988, when a friend from university invited me to join her family for a country walk. Her charming father was Peter Snow, renowned for Newsnight’s election night “swingometer”. At some point in the conversation he made reference to the PM’s sex appeal, which his daughter and I — with all the callowness of youth — found impossible to countenance. How could the 60-something villainess of the Poll Tax, with her roller-set hair and pussy-bow blouses, possibly be seductive?

Nearly four decades later, I realize Snow was just one in a sizeable cohort of media men who — if not all ardent admirers — couldn’t help but relish the way Thatcher deployed her femininity (rather as many media men and politicos now battle inconvenient attraction to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni). Peter’s cousin, Jon Snow, said of encounters with the Tory PM, “she enjoyed being a woman and I enjoyed being a man”. John Sergeant, the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, admitted on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 2005 that Thatcher “could be… sexy, almost”. He explained that it was “unusual” in the Eighties “for a prime minister, or powerful woman of any sort, to put her hand on your arm and she could do that to devastating effect. And I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”

Thatcher’s allure was carefully cultivated, as Gaudoin’s book reveals. Childhood letters to her older sister Muriel reveal a passion for cinema, but also for clothes and quality lingerie. I hadn’t anticipated quite so much bra shopping. There’s even a moment on a trip via London when teenage Margaret fibs to her parents about the day’s trajectory and absconds to Bond Street.

Over the years, Thatcher’s love of fashion and finery was honed for strategic effect. When she won the Tory nomination for Finchley in 1959, an Evening Standard headline blazed: “Tories Choose Beauty.” She would go on to appear in Vogue four times. One fascinating example of Thatcher maximizing personal effect is the private deportment classes she took from Laurence Olivier, arranged by her speech writer Ronald Millar. She was advised by the thespian to take long confident strides, and to use her eyes to seduce and flirt.

Thatcher’s use of fashion as a seductive power ploy became even more effective when she took on Margaret King as a personal stylist. The Aquascutum director sharpened Thatcher’s look for a state visit to Russia in 1987, as a guest of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaudoin describes King’s vision for Thatcher as “a kind of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago meets Sigourney Weaver as the boss in Working Girl”. The PM even wore a Lara-style fur hat. So successful was the Moscow visit that the Mirror ran a photo hoax on the next April Fool’s Day, using Thatcher and Gorbachev lookalikes cuddling up to one another in Gorky Park. Many readers fell for it.

Prime-ministerial tendresses appear to have cropped up all over. The Australian CEO and diplomat Sandy Holloway recalled attending a private Downing Street dinner for Australian leader Bob Hawke, and sitting next to Neil Kinnock who said, “You just watch how Margaret flirts with Bob.” Although, of course, that was a mere flicker compared to the flame that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Charles Moore once said that, “She had a sort of, it sounds a bit explicit to say, a sexual attraction” to the US president. It’s just as well Nancy and Denis got on too, so no one was left feeling too much of a wallflower. But the Reagan pash lends weight to Kinnock’s observation: “All of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite men and those she promoted, sometimes way beyond their abilities, looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie.”

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Interrailing wasn't all sex and sunshine

By Rowan Pelling

Gaudoin takes Kinnock to task in the book for oversimplifying Thatcher’s predilections. She agrees the PM appreciated good-looking men. But argues that “she also liked men who flattered, and those with brains, tenacity and, to put it bluntly, balls”. The chevaliers and stalwarts are there, like Airey Neave, Robin Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who inspired her immortal line “every prime minister needs a Willie”. But there’s a more fun list of bounders: Cecil Parkinson, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke, Jonathan Aitken and PR advisor Tim Bell (who boasted about putting his hand on the PM’s knee). It’s worth noting that the supposedly devout Methodist PM readily overlooked her favorites’ peccadilloes; perhaps because, in some part of her brain formed by wartime movies, she was swooning in their arms too.

Conservative women MPs didn’t enjoy the same leeway as the chaps with Thatcher. Those who succeeded — Virginia Bottomley, Edwina Currie and Gillian Shephard — did so for many of the same reasons she had: talent, graft, good hair, and persuading constituencies that they were good political housekeepers. Thatcher was never a “sister” and wasn’t even all that sisterly to Muriel, who she once alluded to in the past tense while still alive. Gaudoin makes it clear that it was the leader’s forward-propulsion and sense she was any man’s equal that rendered her an “incidental” feminist. In his 1990 TV interview with Thatcher, Terry Wogan says of male media interrogators: “They don’t seem to make any concession to the fact you’re a woman.” Thatcher flashes back at Wogan — another favorite — “Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.”

Notably, the one man who didn’t seem to attract Thatcher much at first was Denis Thatcher. Both Charles Moore and Gaudoin deduced from the Muriel letters that 20-something Margaret’s preferred suitor was a medical superintendent twice her age, Robert Henderson, inventor of the iron lung. There’s a tantalizing mention of an overnight stay with Roberts at a hotel in Eastbourne, but no indication of similar intimacy with poor, patient Denis who she was running alongside the medic. Then Henderson suddenly disappears from the correspondence and Margaret Roberts marries the man whose loyal support — and money — would allow her to fulfill her political ambitions.

It strikes me now that this long, stable, unsexy but mutually supportive marriage may, in itself, have contributed to Thatcher’s erotic glamour. For certain individuals, there are few things quite as tantalizing as an attractive woman (or man) who is unavailable, but happy to deploy their sexual energy within safe boundaries. Denis gave her that freedom and perhaps took a little for himself. I was intrigued to learn via the book of his late-blossoming friendship with Marilyn Foreman, better known as Mandy Rice-Davies of the Profumo Affair.

In the end, Woodrow Wyatt speaks for all of Thatcher’s admirers, the overgrown schoolboys who doted on matron: “I was in love with her, yes, but I suppose in the best platonic manner because — well, she was a marvelous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs.” You can’t help suspecting that for all Thatcher’s political achievements, that gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma might be her preferred epitaph.

They endured crushing electoral defeat at the hands of the Liberals in 1906, and then again by Labor in 1945 and 1997. In the early years of Thatcher’s term of office, a public opinion poll suggested that the party might have won just one seat (and not Thatcher’s) if an election had been held on that day.

Some Conservatives now derive comfort from the fact that the party was not destroyed by these travails. I have heard senior Tories in private suggest that their party is the cockroach of the political world — not an appealing creature, but one that is able to survive any catastrophe and outlive its competitors. They talk of the “will for power” and capacity to adapt. They point to the “secret weapon” of loyalty, but also to the ruthlessness with which failed leaders are deposed.

There is something to be said for these arguments. The party reinvented itself to deal with a widening suffrage in the late 19th century and the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century. It endured 13 years of opposition, two electoral defeats and four changes of leader after 1997, but still came back to dominate — indeed, for better or worse, to transform — British politics in the 14 years after 2010.

Should they panic now? Is it possible that the oldest major party in the world will cease to exist? Polls show that it has been pushed into third place by Reform UK — a party that has existed only for a few years and currently has just four MPs in parliament. The British electoral system is hard on third parties, and this tendency has, for the past hundred years, benefited Labor and the Tories.

But if another party overtakes the Tories by even a small margin, the advantage could be reversed. Tough-minded will for power has saved the Conservatives in the past, but it will have the opposite effect once the political cockroaches decide that they stand a better chance of re-election with Nigel Farage’s face on their leaflets. It is too soon to write the obituary, but it is worth examining the history of the Conservative Party if we want to understand its current dilemma.

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Will anyone miss Rishi Sunak?

By Richard Vinen

The Tories were in power, on their own or as members of a coalition, for almost three quarters of the 20th century. Their success depended above all on the fact that they wanted to win elections and they wanted to govern once they had done so. This is not as obvious as it might sound. There are politicians who prefer opposition to government; after 1968, the Tories were fortunate that Enoch Powell was such a person. Others refuse to make the compromises that go with holding power. Charles de Gaulle resigned twice, first as Prime Minister, then as President. He had not been defeated in an election, but he preferred the gloomy solitude of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to the prospect of remaining in office without being sure of getting what he wanted.

Tories, though, have liked being in government. The late Lord Carrington first held junior office in the government of Winston Churchill in 1951, then served in the cabinet of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974 and that of Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1982. For men such as this, the Tories were, above all, the party of government. They sometimes talked of resisting the “state”, by which they meant trying to restrict its spending or interference in private business, but they took for granted that their purpose in life was to defend the state insofar as it incarnated the continuity of British institutions and the assertion of British power abroad. Tory prime ministers worked closely with civil servants — especially those from the Treasury and, revealingly, the Foreign Office. Winston Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, hugely influential from 1951 to 1955, was from the Foreign Office, as was Philip de Zulueta, who served the same function for Harold Macmillan. For all the jokes about Sir Humphrey, civil servants were vital instruments of the Thatcher project. John Kerr, seconded from the Foreign Office to the Treasury, helped implement monetarism in the early Eighties. Robert Wade-Gery, seconded from the Foreign Office to the Cabinet Office, planned how the government would crush the National Union of Mineworkers.

Tory interest in government always involved a certain tension. The things they said to win elections did not always match the things that they did once they were in government. Margaret Thatcher had a particularly sophisticated understanding of this political game. In the run up to 1979, she talked the talk of Right-wing populism about race and the death penalty, but she rarely walked the walk of policy on these issues. In government, she was a model of balance. She was willing to risk an economic policy that was, in the short term, unpopular. However, when her more literal-minded ministers pointed out that the logic of their position required them, for example, to abolish the $10 Christmas bonus to pensioners, she overruled them for electoral reasons.

Being the party of government gave the Tories three advantages. First, they communicated a sense of experience and competence that attracted many voters. Second, the prospect of ministerial office could be dangled to keep rebellious back benchers in order. Third, the mystique of the prime minister’s office conferred a special prestige on the party leader in the eyes of ordinary party members. Constituency parties were ferociously loyal to party leaders.

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Reform won’t save Britain

By Dan Evans

Things have changed. The dizzying pace with which the Conservative party has switched leaders has, in itself, undermined the mystique that the office once conferred. Psychologists used to test for senility by asking their patients who Mrs Thatcher was. Now even young Conservatives might have trouble naming every Conservative leader between 2016 and 2024. Once people who might have considered themselves well qualified as Prime Minister would serve loyally in cabinets led by other people — think of Hurd and Heseltine in the government of John Major. Now every senior Tory has their eye on the next leadership election. I suspect that some ministers of the last government spent more time thinking about such matters than they did about the mundane business of running their own departments. Nothing weakens Kemi Badenoch more than the sense that she is weak. Her powers of patronage count for nothing because few of her colleagues believe she will be in place at the time of the next election.

The quality of Conservative politicians has certainly declined, but the most damaging Tory leaders of recent years were both, in their very different ways, able. Boris Johnson was the most impressive Conservative electoral campaigner since Stanley Baldwin. He was also lazy, indecisive and terrified of unpopularity. These qualities made him catastrophic as a minister — let alone as Prime Minister. It is significant that he quarrelled with civil servants and was, in the end, destroyed partly by the intervention of Simon McDonald, formerly the senior official at the Foreign Office. Rishi Sunak, by contrast, was an outstandingly able minister but a disaster as a campaigner. It is as though the two great strengths of the modern Conservative party — the ability to win elections and the ability to govern — have become divorced from each other.

None of this would matter if we still lived in a two-party system. The Tories would have been sure of getting back into power sooner or later and, given the ineptitude of the current government, it would probably have been sooner. As it is, the very weakness of Labour is also a threat to the Tories because it opens space for new parties and, particularly, for Reform, which looks as though it might be the asteroid that will finally consign the Tory dinosaur to extinction.

It may yet be that the Tories will pull themselves out of their death spiral. Getting rid of Badenoch may help — not because she is a bad leader, but simply because the drama of bloodletting might be cathartic and because her successor is bound to be stronger (Conservative MPs will hesitate before disposing of two leaders in quick succession).

It might even serve Tory purposes if Reform were to win the next election. It is hard to believe that Farage — who had never held office or, indeed, done very much in his whole life except make speeches and appear on television — would be a successful prime minister. Could Reform assemble 20 potential cabinet ministers without scraping a barrel that contains some disturbing eccentricity? Plenty of Tories will join Reform if it looks like winning an election, but Suella Braverman and Liz Truss might not add to its appeal.

A more likely prospect is that Reform will get more votes than the Tories but not win enough seats to form a government. Most likely of all is some kind of deal between Reform and the Tories. In the past, Conservatives have benefited from political alliances. Only too late did other members of the National Government in the Thirties, or the Liberal Democrats after 2010, appreciate that Tory flexibility is that of a python, which squeezes its prey tight or swallows it whole.

Talk of snakes puts one in mind of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Of all prominent Conservatives, he is the one who has most consistently suggested an alliance with Reform. Being, for now, out of parliament, he has a useful freedom of maneuver. He personally would be well suited to thrive in a coalition because he combines the style of the most old-fashioned Conservative with a willingness to countenance constitutional innovation that makes the late Tony Benn sound like Walter Bagehot. He solemnly declared that MPs could not eject Boris Johnson as Prime Minister without triggering a general election because we now live in a “presidential system” — a remark that would once have earned one of the Queen’s ministers a stern letter from an official at Buckingham Palace.

Rees-Mogg has always been ostentatiously nice about Farage, on whom he confers the Wodehousian compliment “good egg”. Before they sign up to an informal pact over lunch at the Drones club, however, Farage might be wise to remember that Rees-Mogg also once pledged loyalty to David Cameron and Theresa May, and to ask himself whether is likely to be Wooster or Jeeves in any future cohabitation.

I am sure that some prominent members of the Conservative Party will hold office in future governments. It is possible that they will do so as members of a party that continues to call itself Conservative. But the virtues that even opponents of the party would once have recognised as being represented by the Conservatives — skepticism about rapid change and a willingness to take the hard choices required by holding office — seem to have gone for ever.

A year after its landslide election victory, Keir Starmer’s government looks just as mired as Rishi Sunak’s was in an austerity trap that, like any self-respecting zombie, refuses to die. Rachel Reeves, the besieged Chancellor, deserves to be lambasted for a litany of unforced errors. She tolerates the avoidable hemorrhaging of the public purse by £9.3 billion annually, a loss that results from the poor management of Britain’s debt while fighting with backbenchers over the £6.25 billion that she wanted to take away from people in genuine need. However, Britain’s inability to escape its zombie austerity trap is structural.

Government supporters go to great lengths to reject all talk of austerity. They point to the steady rise in public spending and, in particular, the extra £113 billion in capital investment (around 1% of GDP annually until 2029) unveiled in Reeves’ recent Spending Review, which even prompted the Tories to accuse her of fiscal largesse. Be that as it may, a careful look at the numbers confirms that Britain remains in zombie austerity’s trap.

By 2029 public spending will be down on everything except health and defense. Compared to 2010, education will receive 5% less, criminal justice and the prison service 15% less, welfare and pensions 30% less and, calamitously, local government 50% less. As for the new capital expenditure, to gauge its impact it must be measured against the UK’s capital shortfall.

After decades of underinvestment, the UK’s stock of capital is one third smaller than those of comparable advanced economies, a shortfall of around £2 trillion or two-thirds of GDP. Thus, Labour’s new capital expenditure amounts to no more than 5% of what would be necessary for Britain’s productivity to catch up with comparable countries. Is it any wonder that even the usually over-optimistic Office for Budget Responsibility expects a second lost decade for half of the British people?

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Rachel Reeves, the pound shop George Osborne

By Yanis Varoufakis

Having long ago discovered her inner George Osborne, Chancellor Reeves is about to unveil also her latent Margaret Thatcher in a Mansion House speech foreshadowing a New Big Bang for the City of London. Like a copycat felon, she has chosen her crime scene meticulously. For it was there, in the City, that today’s problems took root when Thatcher stumbled on financialization as the main driver of her economic and cultural revolution.

With the rare exception of Norway, whose oil and gas revenues were plowed sensibly into public education, health and future pensions, sudden windfalls prove a curse when societies fail to invest them productively. The Dutch Disease, for example, hollowed out the Netherlands’ industrial base with a flood of natural gas revenues that pushed asset prices through the roof and increased society’s reliance on state benefits. A couple of years later, Thatcher spearheaded a British version of the Dutch Disease — on the back of financialization.

The Iron Lady came to power determined to treat a stagnating Britain to shock therapy. Her instruments of choice were austerity (mainly massive cuts in public spending), calculated destruction of uncompetitive but productive industries, and privatization. While Thatcher waited in vain for privateers to invest in productive capital, she had to find a source of growth to offset the ill effects of her shocks. The City of London was that source.

To get the City to deliver, her government did two things. They freed the bankers from most regulatory shackles with a Big Bang. And they threw tremendous quantities of pre-existing public wealth into the City’s financial circuitry: council houses and public utilities (gas, electricity, water) in particular.

The Thatcher government sold the family silver, including North Sea Oil, to spend the proceeds on generating a debt-driven asset price inflation that hid the gigantic fiscal and productivity costs of sweeping cuts which shrank aggregate demand and, therefore, undermined investment in productive capital. What do you call such conduct? I call it profligate austerity.

Growth did return. But it did so despite Thatcher’s profligate austerity and only because swathes of society’s common wealth were being liquidated at cutdown prices, before being thrown into financialization’s crucible for the City to lever it up into an unsustainably private-debt-driven, Ponzi-like economy.

Thatcher’s business model remained intact under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. If anything, New Labour boosted it handsomely by removing many of the few remaining regulatory constraints on the City, and by throwing into its financial plumbing the proceeds from deregulated public services, mainly the NHS. While their governments did use taxes on City revenues to fund the NHS and social services in a way the Tories had not, industry continued to wither in the arid shadow of a City of London that shunned industrial capital and whose recklessness brewed the mother of all financial disasters in 2008.

Politically and culturally, Thatcher’s profligate austerity was a triumph. Workers whose jobs were not culled went into debt to buy British Gas shares and their own council houses. They made a mint, jumping onto the frenzied property market escalator that transformed Britain into a financialized assetocracy, in which the fabled Sierra Man felt invested. But the bill arrived soon after.

Before long, they and their children were paying through the nose for lower quality services (railways, energy, sewage, social care etc.). Today, their grandchildren have no access to decent housing, to free education, to a functioning NHS, to good quality jobs. As for their governments, Tory or Labour, they are no longer able to support the struggling majority without blowing up public finances. All they can do is keep reflating housing and financial bubbles, suppressing wages, and delivering speeches in the City hoping to placate the markets’ confidence fairy.

Following financialisation’s Waterloo in 2008, and its New Labour bailout at the expense of the rest of society, profligate austerity gave its place to George Osborne’s passive-aggressive austerity or, as he called it, the policy of “expansionary contraction”. Avoiding deep, Thatcherite cuts, Osborne engineered the slow-motion starvation of public services, devolved blaming (e.g., councils “choosing” to close day care facilities due to Whitehall funding cuts) and off-balance-sheet trickery (e.g., Private Finance Initiatives, which were ruinous for the public purse).

Meanwhile, the Bank of England minted almost £895 million to keep the original Thatcher-Blair era asset bubbles inflated. Imagine how different things would have been now if, instead, Britain’s central bank had used this money to support the bonds of a new public investment bank that ploughed more than a trillion into new green technologies!

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Why Starmer is doomed

By Aris Roussinos

Osborne’s passive-aggressive austerity came to an end when the discontent it had caused played a key role in tilting the Brexit referendum in favor of Leave. It had to go. After period of stasis, under Theresa May, Boris Johnson was inspired by US Republican presidents: win a mandate on austerian promises to “starve the beast” (the voracious welfare state) but, immediately after, spend liberally on your pet projects while granting lucrative contracts and tax cuts to your rich mates. Alas, as Liz Truss was to discover painfully, this sham austerity requires a state that issues the world currency, not the pound.

And that’s how we got to Rachel Reeves’ touchingly delusional, social democratic austerity. In fact, its originator was Peer Steinbrück, the social democrat German finance minister who, in a parliamentary speech delivered in 2008, argued, as Reeves does now, that cutting expenditure to create fiscal space is essential for democracy — in order to preserve space for democratic choices.

Why do I call this delusional? Because, as Osborne and Steinbrück found out, and Reeves is now discovering, in societies with inflated asset prices and low productive investment, where massive money printing for the few has, for so long, walked side-by-side with austerity for the many, slushing social expenditure gives the Chancellor no new fiscal space at all. All that happens is that, like a deranged cat, the Chancellor ends up chasing his or her own tail.

Make no mistake. As Rachel Reeves is delivering her Mansion House address to the fine people in the City of London, her audience knows all this. They know that Ms Reeves, just like her predecessors, cannot balance the books. They know that the point of fiscal policy is to keep the underfunding of government expenditure at a level consistent with long-term debt sustainability while Britain’s productive capacities continue to wither. And they do not care. The only thing they care about is to keep alive the corporate and financial zombies created and sustained by the state intervention. And for this they need austerity to shift as much of the economic pain as possible from asset owners to non-owners, in the labor market, in housing, in utilities etc.

Does this mean there is no alternative? Hell, no! Britain is a rich country. Its welfare state’s bankruptcy is a political choice, a collective choice — albeit a deeply undemocratic one. One option is to continue using the state’s powers to inflate unsustainable asset prices at the expense of the majority who do not own them and who are, in the name of a fictional shareowners’ democracy, condemned to zombie austerity.

Another option is to remove the supply of goods essential to civilized society (e.g., basic housing, university education, elderly care) from markets that can never supply them efficiently, let alone equitably. Naturally this will mean that asset prices will fall to much lower, albeit sustainable levels. But that’s the price of liberating half of the population from savage private housing markets (i.e., reversing Thatcher’s vandalism of council housing), ending the pretence that there can ever be well functioning electricity markets, founding a proper public investment bank, creating decent fiscal space and, last but not least, reining in a Bank of England whose quantitative easing, and then tightening, policies have done so much harm.

What a splendid day for democracy it would be if British voters were given this choice at the ballot box. But can you imagine any political party proposing the second option being given the opportunity to present its agenda, given the demonisation that the parasitic assetocracy would undoubtedly unleash against it? I can’t.

This being ten years since my experiences as a finance minister elected to end austerity, I take the liberty of drawing a comparison. It is a difficult comparison because Greece and the UK are, obviously, ever so different. Unlike in Britain, where austerity was homegrown and chosen at the ballot box, it was imposed on the Greeks by external forces who presented it as an invading army would present terms of surrender to a country defeated at war.

Yet a chief similarity is quite revealing: two left-of-center Prime Ministers, elected to end austerity, who ended up making austerity permanent because of an inexorable desire to be liked by those who never did and never will vote for them.

The key to escaping this fate seems to me a certain disregard for what the types Rachel Reeves is about to address in the City of London think or covet.

Sir Robert Wade-Gery, the deputy cabinet secretary she tasked to help draw up the battle plans, told Lady Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore how the idea of picking a fight with Arthur Scargill’s union was dismissed in the corridors of power. “The woman’s mad,” he recalled people saying. “You can’t win miners’ strikes. All you can do is buy them off.” Yet, as we now know, Thatcher’s preparatory tactics — which included building coal stocks around the country, passing laws to curb union strength and appointing a ruthless ally in Ian MacGregor to run the National Coal Board — eventually won the day.

Her victory, after a year-long dispute, was a defining moment for both Thatcher and the country, paving the way for the liberalization and globalization of Britain’s economy, yet leaving a legacy of shattered communities as the mining industry was shredded.

No one in their right mind would wish for repetition, of such a bitterly divisive dispute. Yet, when I see leaders of the British Medical Association talk of being “excited” at the prospect of going out on strike again, it is hard not to wonder if we need a politician with the tenacity of Thatcher to tackle today’s most powerful union and help salvage public services.

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Anthony Fauci's pardon shames America

By Ian Birrell

For almost a century, the prevailing political view has been to buy off this self-serving union, rather than risk a battle with our widely-admired physicians, regardless of the costly consequences for taxpayers and any corrosive impact for patients. So, extra cash gets pumped repeatedly into health service coffers, only for much of it to end up flowing into the pockets of doctors. Yet with their productivity falling, NHS dissatisfaction rising and health projected to soak up a spiraling share of national wealth — an additional 1% of Gross Domestic Product each decade — this is simply unsustainable.

Thankfully, Westminster is shedding the strange delusion that our NHS is envied across the planet. But the latest 10-year plan, filled with familiar ideas, and talk of tackling bureaucracy by Health and Social Care Minister Wes Streeting are simply not enough for a struggling health service that — in the words of its new boss Sir Jim Mackey — views patients as an “inconvenience”. If we are to have any hope of saving the health service, we need politicians with the bottle to stand up to the arrogant and selfish doctors’ union.

It was Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, co-chair of the BMA’s resident doctors’ committee, who said so shamelessly that “the vast majority” of his 55,000 members “are excited to go again”, anticipating another wave of possible prolonged walkouts. Let us bear in mind these bolshie medics have taken industrial action 11 times over the past three years, leading to about 1.5m cancelled appointments in the chronically overloaded National Health Service before they won a bumper pay deal last year. It was worth 22.3% over two years, thanks to an incoming Labour government. Their actions cost the country £3bn, according to the NHS Confederation. Yet, now they are holding another ballot — closing on 7 July — over their latest pay demands, which are a 29% wage rise.

Nieuwoudt, a surgical trainee from Merseyside, is the joint leader of the rebranded junior doctors part of the BMA, which has been seized by a campaign group called DoctorsVote. These are Scargill’s true successors, despite their white coats, stethoscopes and suits. The medic hastily corrected himself after an outcry over his statement, insisting that he meant “excited as in energized — not excited as in looking forward to it”. Yet, his slip was revelatory. The full-time basic pay for a resident doctor hits £54,300 this year. The latest government offer — equating to a 5.4% rise — is the highest in the public sector. Even Nieuwoudt — who styles himself a “pay restoration enthusiast” on social media — admitted this was “generous” in a radio interview, before insisting that “it needs to be more generous”. But still these activists cannot wait to get out of their wards and back on the barricades.

These militant young doctors want a fresh mandate for what one is terming “terrible disruption”, based on dodgy claims that cherry-pick the data and inflation metrics. The BMA is also holding an “indicative ballot” of senior doctors in a dispute on NHS consultants, the top grade of doctors who reportedly earn an average £145,000 a year. The union wants this to rise more than one-third over the next three years — and if not, they might join residents on the picket lines (when not padding out their pay with private work in a sector thriving from patients frustrated by long NHS waiting lists).

The BMA, of course, insists it is driven by the desire to protect patients. Yet, do not be fooled: this body has always been ruthlessly focused on protecting the interests of its members — to the extent that it even fought the home secretary to stop 500 Jewish doctors fleeing the Nazis in 1938 from coming to Britain, resulting in only 50 of them being able to find safety in this country. Then it opposed the creation of the NHS that it now claims to defend so doggedly in a fight that a prominent historian waspishly pointed out lasted longer than the Second World War. Labour’s Health Minister Aneurin Bevan — accused by one leading BMA figure of setting Britain on the path towards National Socialism — loathed doctors’ leaders, viewing them as “politically poisonous”, but infamously said he had to “stuff their mouths with gold” to win support. Sadly, this approach has been adopted repeatedly by his successors.

The first significant action by consultants in the NHS was a four month work-to-rule in 1975 in defense of private work, then junior doctors walked out later that year to protect “on-call” and overtime rates. Ministers backed down both times. After Tony Blair’s government ramped up health spending, one BMA negotiator of a notorious 2004 contract for general practitioners boasted that he had led their salaries to soar 60% over three years. Dropping out-of-hours cover in return for a small cut was seen, he said, as “a bit of a laugh” — although this reform lies behind the overcrowded A&E wards and has even led to a rise in avoidable emergency hospital admissions for children. “It’s right we make our GPs the best paid in Europe,” said the Prime Minister, when put on the spot over soaring salaries.

The Tories endured a BMA strike in defense of gold-plated pensions in 2012, then a lengthy contract dispute four years later with junior doctors, whose leaders piously intoned to the public that their wave of strikes was about “safety, not pay”. Leaked WhatsApp messages, however, later revealed that their “only real red line” was over weekend payments while exposing a desire to draw out their action to tie up health bosses “in knots for the next 16-18 months”. Publicly, they said the tussle could be resolved if the government would only negotiate — yet privately, their top official said the “best solution” would be for ministers to impose a deal on them. And the chair of the junior doctors committee urged colleagues to participate in “rubbish” mediation talks “to play the political game of always looking reasonable”.

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Why we worship the NHS

By Mary Harrington

When you hear hard-pressed doctors complaining today about staff shortages, it is worth remembering also that the BMA resisted the expansion of training places for many years, arguing against “the overproduction of doctors with limited career opportunities” and demanding a ban on opening new medical schools. This stance was backed by a vote at its 2008 conference after impassioned warnings about a glut of doctors lowering standards, which would be “wrong and immoral and a waste of taxpayers’ and students’ money”, in the words of one GP representative. Since that debate, the number of full-time equivalent NHS workers has surged by at least 30%, propped up by heavy recruiting from abroad with international staff now comprising more than one-third of NHS doctors.

When the historian Rudolf Klein reflected on the institution earlier this century, he concluded that “keeping the doctors happy — that’s the story of the NHS.” Now even a Labour government accepts this system is “broken” and the public is losing faith shown by record levels of dissatisfaction. And yet will simply pour in more and more money.

No modern health service is immune to serious problems. And Labour’s instincts are right: to drag the NHS belatedly into the digital era; shift care from hospitals to community services, focus more on prevention and empower patients. But we have heard this several times before over the past two decades. Meanwhile, spending on the voracious NHS keeps on rising faster than economic growth. It accounts for about four in every 10 pounds of the daily state spending budget and is constantly prioritized over all other public services — even defense of the realm at this time of rising threat from hostile nations. And the National Audit Office predicts NHS staffing needs to increase by at least two-thirds more over the next 12 years.

Health soaks up more than double its share of public spending at the turn of the century and roughly four times more than when I was born in the Sixties. Yet, the services have often become shambolic, waiting lists are still appalling and fatal safety scandals keep emerging from maternity through to mental health services. Almost everyone has anecdotes about delayed or dire treatment, despite the best efforts of so many caring, dedicated and skilled staff. But the response of the BMA — persistently exploiting public trust in their profession while bleating about protecting the interests of patients — is to threaten yet more strikes to hoover up more cash for its members. Just as when Scargill badly misled the miners, these militant medics need to be taken down by a bold political leader for the wellbeing of our nation.

In his latest series, Shifty, he repeats this story for our own collapsing regime, at times obliquely and at others through more direct comparison. “There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move,” reads the caption at the beginning of each episode, setting up what is essentially the origin story of today’s troubled and quasi-revolutionary UK, witnessing “the last dying gasp of an old system of power.”

Early in the five-part series, we see miners hauling wooden pit props into the shafts by hand, pensioners bundled against the cold trudging through vast, alienating Modernist housing estates, and families fighting to survive in damp, freezing council flats. The effect is to conjure Soviet-style squalor and quiet collapse. Yet the cure, we soon see, is worse than the disease: “In 1986 Mrs Thatcher opened Britain to the full force of international capital,” the caption reads. “A new breed of tycoon emerged. They used the vast power of this new money to take over landmarks of the old Britain.” With his disembodied captions — a stylistic device introduced in TraumaZone in place of Curtis’s old, avuncular voiceover — he later observes of privatization, “and just like the Soviet Union/many of the old state managers were now running the companies/and just as in the new Russia they exploited the new system ruthlessly.”

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Winters of Discontent are coming

By Mary Harrington

The birthpangs of today’s UK are presented as a horror story. Discordant electronic drones and whines soundtrack the camera as it hurtles along silent corridors, abandoned factories and empty Tube stations with the superhuman speed of a pursuing wraith. At other times, there are glimpses of folk horror between the imagery of industrial decline, and a picture of some lost pastoral England that functions as a dark, bitterly ironic Anglofuturism. We see cricket matches under electric pylons, fox hunting in front of closing coal mines: like the hulk of Brunel’s SS Great Britain abandoned on a lonely Falklands shore, Britain’s industrial future is a forgotten relic. Landscapes both bleak and bucolic break up the scenes of urban decline with bitter irony: Thatcher reads a Rupert Brooke poem to the sarcastic accompaniment of Britten’s Peter Grimes, riot police break up a New Age Traveller encampment in Wiltshire’s ancient countryside, an electric storm breaks over the forbidding Belfast Hills. In undercutting the shallow myths of Our Island Story, Curtis still alludes to something older and more powerful beneath the ailing state.

The series plays on the feeling, surely common now, that today’s headlines are the fodder of some future history, establishing the background of the dark events to come. Foreboding news stories screen in the background: footage of riots in northern England play across the screen in the window of a TV rental shop, as an employee dusts the sets unconcernedly. Dark, paranoid themes — state surveillance, masonic conspiracies, the illusory nature of reality — are introduced, and abandoned, as either consciously unresolved loose ends or spinning off in strange directions. The effect is unsettling, disorientating: we are not witnessing a logical argument being constructed, but a society coming apart, with all the surrealism that entails. Northern Ireland features heavily: for Curtis, as for other dissidents, the province functions as a dark mirror revealing the British state’s true form. In Belfast, young Loyalist women clap along to songs of sectarian violence with footage of flames and the pounding tribal rhythm of drums. “When Britain was powerful it could hide its dark secrets and cruelties,” we are told, “Now as the power declined they were going to start coming to the surface.”

Curtis’ politics, always a matter of speculation, are here laid out in economic terms as resolutely Old Labour. In pursuit of a Utopian vision, the Thatcher government’s privatization and financialization schemes (in one scene, a City trader rattles off an impeccable Marxian critique of them) are shown to have established the dysfunctional political economy of today’s ailing UK. On the other issue roiling modern Britain, that of immigration, Curtis works more obliquely. Footage of skinheads and of victims of racist violence punctuate each episode as mood music, without textual commentary. An old man listens to a recording of the last evensong in a deserted Rotherham church; we see the birth of al-Muhajiroun; Morrissey wanders the Manchester streets of his childhood, saying “The place I grew up no longer exists. Now it’s just so foreign to me, and that’s sad I think.”

For all the misery he presents, there is a constant nostalgia evoked by the footage, shown in BBC employees assembling Airfix kits to cover the Falklands War, joyful house parties in the provinces. Curtis is happy to deconstruct the myths of the old Britain, yet also deftly shows that its replacement is simply… nothing. As New Labour struggle to fill the Millennium Dome with banal platitudes, we are told that “The liberal establishment had dominated British culture for 150 years/now they had built a dome that revealed a terrible truth/they no longer had anything to say about Britain and its future/and they were left with practically nothing.” As well as a farewell to the postwar social-democratic state, the recent past is reassembled as a bricolage portrait of today’s UK. Unease, distrust and paranoia are everywhere. Vigilantes film their sex-crime stings, with the captions noting, from an ambiguous vantage point, that “They didn’t trust the corrupt mainstream media to expose the corruption of the police.”

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This St George’s Day felt different

By Aris Roussinos

What does it all mean? Is it a chronicle, cataloguing the disconnected succession of events, or a history, driven by an overarching narrative? Time across the series is meaningless, chronology is complicated: narratives overlay each other like audio samples. A subplot on the introduction of the synthesizer observes of its pop-cultural fruits that “They became known as remixes. Others realized they could use the same technology to manipulate and play back images from the past/ They could remix history, which meant that maybe you couldn’t trust the past.” Here the auteur, always in love with digital media, reveals his own craft: “Is this just another feedback loop of nostalgia/repeating back sounds, dreams and images of the past? Which is the way the system controls you/and is the way this series is made?”

The most obvious, though perhaps counterintuitive, parallel to Curtis in British politics is Dominic Cummings: both reach back to historical parallels, and use scientific metaphors, to explain the current moment of regime crisis. Indeed, both Curtis and Cummings have recently likened the present moment to 1848, and both anticipate a revolutionary tumult to come. The series concludes, over footage of fiery riots and revolution, with the question “Will people come together as they have in the past and fight back?” Like the viewer he has guided to the dismal death spasms of our old political system, Curtis views its looming, so far formless replacement with a mixture of hope and apprehension, scrying a vision of the future like the soldiers in rural Northern Ireland he shows struggling to make out a Magic Eye picture. We already live in post-Soviet Britain, Curtis shows us, but something else is coming: whether it is something new or very old is a matter of interpretation.

In their memoirs, almost all of which read like giddy schoolboy confessions, the accent has always lain on personal experience, but what they describe is in fact a broader social change. “You’re not special,” they make one want to scribble in the margins. Indeed, the move from Left to Right is, in a nutshell, the story of the 20th century. It may well be an iron law of history that no society emerged more Left-wing from it. The change in meaning of the words “social democracy” is a reliable index of this world-historical shift: in the first third of the century, a social democrat was practically a communist; in the second, something of a Keynesian; in the final third, a brazen Blairite.

What sets apart Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel-winning novelist who died on Sunday, aged 89, from his Left-leaving peers is the completeness of his transformation. While he shared some vestigial commitment to democracy and equality — both of a piece with the general repertoire of Cold War liberalism — for most of his post-conversion life, he began to rapidly slough off these wimpy beliefs towards the end of his days. By then he was a poster-boy of the hard Right.

In his youth, Left sympathies came naturally to Vargas Llosa. While he was a member of the mezzanine class, an untypical upbringing in Arequipa, Peru precluded any simple identification with the bourgeoisie. His father was a martinet, who abandoned young Mario and his mother, only to brutally reinstate himself 10 years later. The return was not a happy one. A macho type, Mario’s father had him sent off to a military academy to become a man; the son’s bookishness apparently was taken as “proof of homosexuality”. The experience left him scarred and hostile to all manner of authority, parental and state included. Democratic Marxism, rejecting both the patriarchal family and military authoritarianism, was of obvious appeal.

A trio of novels followed, cementing his reputation as a communist writer of promise in Lima’s Left circles. Their presiding spirit appears to be the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who welded the class struggle with indigenous millenarianism. Vargas Llosa’s debut, The Time of the Hero (1963), took aim at the military academy, depicting a dark world of racism and casual violence. In it, the scions of the ruling class murder a hapless cadet and gang-rape a chicken. The book enjoyed a succès de scandale when Peruvian nationalists burned it as a work of Ecuadorian propaganda; the two countries had fought a war in the Forties, and any domestic criticism in Lima was taken to be malicious disinformation emanating from Quito. The Green House (1966), too, served up a small fresco, this time taking in a worm’s-eye view of the Church, military, and political class during the dictatorship of the US-backed Manuel Odría from the bowels of a brothel. Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) complicated that picture with an upstairs-downstairs dynamic worthy of Joseph Losey; the title was a misnomer, referring to a bar-brothel of that name, where an upper-class hack converses a chauffeur. Along the way, Vargas Llosa bitingly takes in the snobbery and corruption of Lima’s rulers.

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The case for idleness

By Pratinav Anil

The Seventies saw Vargas Llosa turn his back on communism, though this was no Damascene conversion. Events chipped away at his beliefs. The twin shocks of 1956 — the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising — had birthed a generation of Western Leftists who swore by “neither Washington nor Moscow”. Something similar transpired in Latin America in the mid- and late-Sixties. Thanks to the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the Brazilian military coup d’état with American support three years later, identification with the US had never been a realistic option for any self-respecting Latin American. Vargas Llosa, for one, had cheered Castro, for standing up to the gringo coup-makers.

Equally, there were reasons for disillusionment with communism. When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Vargas Llosa became convinced that here was another imperial power, only one which flew a red flag. The priggish censorship of the sex scenes in his debut novel by La Joven Guardia, his Russian publisher, likewise confirmed the impression that the Soviets weren’t exactly free speech crusaders. To Vargas Llosa, they were no different from Franco’s blue pencilers, who had scrubbed unflattering references to authoritarianism from the Spanish edition. Castro’s support for the crushing of the Prague Spring was another blow. The final straw was the humbling of the Cuban poet Heberto Juan Padilla, who had to grovel before Castro for his “Right deviation”. Padilla’s eventual arrest in 1971 made a mockery of Castro’s claim to represent some kind of happy medium, reconciling state ownership and intellectual freedom.

The ideological quandary, the erasure of old certainties, must have been difficult to process. Vargas Llosa busied himself with two comic turns, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), the latter on which his Western reputation stands. A work of autofiction with baroque touches of Iris Murdoch, it sends up his liaison with his vivacious and ribald Bolivian aunt, Julia Urquidi, 13 years his senior. “To have an affair with an older woman was very exciting,” Vargas Llosa later said. No doubt it was, for it appears to have equipped the 19-year-old with the precociousness that typically comes from such entanglements. He emerged from the affair a prose stylist with enormous reserves of sensitivity — literary assets that would for long allow him to get a free pass from the press, no matter how odious his politics became.

Thereafter, his writings took an overt political turn. A pivotal episode was an English encounter — a dinner party in 1980 attended by Margaret Thatcher, Philip Larkin, and Isaiah Berlin. By then, Vargas Llosa was already an Anglophile, having taught Latin American literature at KCL. Now, he reinvented himself as a tribune of “Andean Thatcherism” — his words. Reading Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Adam Smith, and Berlin — lodestars he later eulogized in The Call of the Tribe (2018) — he developed a deeply English skepticism of utopianism. Perfectibility was the creed of fools, he argued. Man’s fallibility demanded realism. Accordingly, he would never have any truck with magical realism, which he would equate with pie-in-the-sky utopian socialism. He was on to something: the doyens and doyennes of magical realism — the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Isabel Allende — were all unreconstructed Leftists. Vargas Llosa, however, was cut from a different cloth. Even his early communism had been a practical, nuts-and-bolts affair, no dreamy exercise in worldmaking. “I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism,” he would declare in his memoir A Fish in the Water (1993). A decade later, he had this to say to The Guardian: “that idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban.” Thus, with a single invidious comparison, he discarded any association with the Left.

The new embrace of neoliberalism rested on a casuistic logic. In his discussions of the Left, it was always its actually existing deficiencies that Vargas Llosa paraded before his readers: curbs on free speech, arbitrary arrest, and so on. Neoliberalism, by contrast, was an entirely theoretic possibility for him. Vargas Llosa spoke of the free market and free speech as belonging to a single package. It’s a quaint view, given how rarely the two have gone hand in hand in the Latin American setting. More often than not, elections there have pitched markets against democracy, the former usually with foreign (read: US) and military backing, the latter defended by the socialist Left.

Tellingly, Vargas Llosa praised Pinochet’s dictatorship for his dalliance with the Chicago Boys but upbraided him for violent suppression of labor and civil society — all without pausing to consider that Chile’s neoliberal growth had precisely been made possible by violence against the unions and wage suppression. Likewise, there was no reckoning with the practice of Anglo-American neoliberalism — reliant on an ever-expanding warfare state, public contracts, coups d’état, and prison labor. In later years, as a columnist for El País, he would pillory Leftist intellectuals for their economic illiteracy, though, on the strength of his own economic writings, the charge could easily be reversed.

A collaboration with the economist Hernando de Soto, Peru’s Hayek, resulted in a pamphlet calling for the transfer of property rights to the poor, who, with adequate credit, were to set about forming petit-bourgeois businesses. The magic bullet theory, however, failed to account for the fact that Peru’s problems were structural — that overnight, an exporter of raw materials could hardly rival the Asian Tigers, all of which had benefited from colossal state intervention. Indeed, it was only in the absence of state intervention that Peru brought about its worst nightmare. When, in 1980, the newly elected Fernando Belaúnde abandoned the land reforms of the previous government, he effectively set the stage for Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist militia that murdered some 30,000 people in the Eighties.

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By Colm Toibin

In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for president on a neoliberal ticket — austerity, privatization — losing to Alberto Fujimori in the second round. Still, it could be said that he won the argument. In the “Fujishock” that followed, the very same slate of reforms Vargas Llosa ran on were implemented by his opponent.

In the new millennium, especially after his 2010 Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa became progressively unhinged. In 2022, he threw his weight behind Dina Boluarte, Peru’s unelected president, and cheered her suppression of students and indigenous groups. The following year, he came out in support for Bolsonaro, whose “clowning around” — as Vargas Llosa put it — included conspiring in a failed far-Right coup against Lula. In Chile, too, the novelist bet on the wrong horse, praising José Antonio Kast (who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights) who went on to lose to the Leftist Gabriel Boric. More risibly, apropos of #MeToo, Vargas Llosa dubbed feminism “the staunchest enemy of literature”. A potential Podemos victory heralded a “return to caudillismo”.

The penchant for outré pronouncements revealed a man utterly out of his depth. Luckily for him, his reputation in the world of belles lettres rests not so much on his political forays as his high-minded erotica and formidable command of literary history. Happily, there coexisted two Vargas Llosas, the one a columnist and the other a novelist. His authoritarian neoliberalism scarcely intruded on his later fiction, and it takes a magnifying glass to detect minute traces of it in, say, The Feast of the Goat (2000) or The Dream of the Celt (2010). The Vargas Llosa that will be remembered is the playful chap who whispered “Henry James is shit” to his friend José Donoso on the latter’s deathbed, to which came the reply: “Flaubert, more so.” As a fan of Flaubert’s, Vargas Llosa no doubt would recognize that his tired shilling for autocratic and neoliberal shibboleths wouldn’t have been out of place in the master’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

Labour MPs recognized this when they voted him as successor to Harold Wilson in 1976, topping the best slate of leadership candidates ever offered to a British party, seeing off Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. He’s still the only person to have held all four of the great offices of state: PM, chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary. And if that’s all a bit lofty, as transport minister in Clement Attlee’s government, he gave us zebra crossings and cat’s eyes, literally changing the look of the country.

But what he’s chiefly remembered for is the wave of public-sector strikes that paralyzed the country in the early weeks of 1979. There were more days lost to industrial action that year than any since 1926 and the General Strike, and for the next two decades, the Winter of Discontent — as it became known — was the go-to line of attack for Labour’s opponents. It was the “I’m afraid there is no money” of its day. Indeed, it’s not dead yet. In January this year, Richard Littlejohn warned Daily Mail readers that the current government “would take us back to the Seventies” and the accompanying photo was captioned: “Rubbish piles up on the streets of London during the Winter of Discontent.”

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Britain's golden age of sleaze

By Alwyn Turner

This is a bit unfair as well. Callaghan’s stewardship of the economy had thus far been successful by most measures. Labour came to power in 1974 in the midst of a recession and with massive inflationary pressures left over from Conservative Chancellor Anthony Barber, who had done economic damage far beyond that attributed to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Under Wilson and then Callaghan — with Healey as Chancellor throughout — Labour steadied the ship. In 1976-78, GDP grew by an annual average of 3.2% while inflation was brought down from 24.2% to 8.3%. There was even, relatively speaking, industrial peace; more days were lost to strikes in 1972 under Edward Heath than in the first three years of Callaghan.

The key factor in all this was the partnership between government and trade unions. From 1975, a national pay policy was agreed, fixing the maximum wage increase that would be permitted, and for the most part the line was held. A decline in the standard of living was accepted, with some reluctance, by the unions as the price of restoring economic stability.

But by late 1978, the reluctance proved too great. Callaghan failed to secure an agreement with the unions, and instead the government unilaterally announced a pay policy of 5%. The Winter of Discontent ensued, Labour was driven out of office, and 18 years of opposition followed.

In his last days as PM, Callaghan predicted the dawning of a new era. “There are times, perhaps every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” he told adviser Bernard Donoughue. “It then does not matter what you say or what you do.” Though he was right that this was a critical moment, there’s an unmistakable note of self-justification, because there was nothing inevitable about the country taking the direction that it did. Had he not launched that doomed pay policy, and done what everyone expected by calling a general election in the autumn of 1978, when the economic conditions were favorable, he would almost certainly have won.

But maybe the sea change had already come, back at the 1976 Labour conference, when Callaghan himself announced the death of Keynesianism. “We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,” he declared. “I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.” For 30 years, governments of both parties had pursued the target of full employment, but now the emphasis was to be on conquering inflation. We’d been living in a cozy world, avoiding “fundamental choices and fundamental changes” for too long. “That cozy world is gone.” As Margaret Thatcher, his successor in Downing Street, was later to say, “There is no alternative.”

And there was the problem for Labour. Callaghan’s move away from Keynes took him into Tory territory. The Thatcherite wing of the Conservatives had already concluded that inflation was the real enemy, and that state spending needed to be cut. Following her election victory in 1979, Thatcher pursued Callaghan’s argument to its logical extremes. He complained that his speech to conference had been taken out of context — “misused by Conservative spokesmen to justify their malefactions in refusing to increase public expenditure at a time of recession” — but the truth was that he had prepared the way for Thatcherism and was then horrified by what transpired.

He was the last prime minister of the old cross-party consensus, a time when — in the language of the day — union leaders had “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10, and deals were done in “smoke-filled rooms”. Displaying the conventional complacency of an ancien régime, he underestimated his rival, failing to take seriously her talk of being an outsider, “a plain straightforward provincial”, her rejection of “metropolitan liberal views”, her call for “a return to common sense”. In retrospect, Thatcher looks more and more like the harbinger of the era of populism, and Callaghan her facilitator. That 1976 speech is what he should be remembered for, the start of the sea change that he spoke about.

All of which seems increasingly relevant at a time when we are in the early stages of an even bigger sea change, with a Labour prime minister again trying to navigate the death of a cross-party consensus.

The features are very different, of course. And so are the two men. Keir Starmer didn’t exactly beat the cream of the crop when he defeated Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy to become leader. He had no experience of political office at all — let alone the great offices of state — before the general election last year. On the other hand, he has a massive parliamentary majority to fall back on — the 1974-79 government started with a majority of three and rapidly declined into a minority.

Despite the differences, there is the same sense of a new political mood and, as in the late Seventies, the ideological fervor is with a populist Right. Recently this has been with the rise in the polls of Reform, but a reinvented Conservative Party that can harness public discontent remains the real threat.

That looks a distant possibility right now, but the return of Donald Trump has accelerated the pace of events. Starmer’s premiership has certainly changed in response to Trump. The biggest challenge is clearly the development of a new version of NATO, but there are domestic implications as well. The noisiness of Trump and his outriders is changing the political agenda here. In particular, immigration — the key dividing line between mainstream parties and populists — looms larger.

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Why Starmer will be dragged to the Left

By Steve Richards

Earlier this month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting had some fun at the expense of the Tories. “It must be so painful for them to watch a Labour government doing the things that they only ever talked about,” he teased: “reducing bloated state bureaucracy; investing in defense; reforming our public services; bringing down the welfare bill.” He was exaggerating for the sake of comedy, but there was an underlying truth to his boast. With that comes the danger that, as Callaghan found, the attempt to try to occupy the opponents’ ground can end up merely by legitimizing the Right’s arguments. There’s been nothing in the advance briefing about Rachel Reeves’s spring statement today that looks particularly Labour.

Callaghan tried to hold the incoming tide halfway, offering a compromise that accepted spending cuts and a (hopefully short-term) rise in unemployment while retaining the structure of the old system, most notably cooperation with unions. That proved economically effective in the short term but it wasn’t enough to save Labour. By the time the party returned to power in 1997, it had accepted Thatcherism in full. As Callaghan said: “The cozy world is gone.”

Over the weekend, a petition was launched calling for a new General Election. It has now passed two million signatures — including a surprising number of MPs. Elon Musk hailed it as evidence of Britain’s dislike of the Starmerist “police state”.

And yet, we might retort: who cares? As the PM pointed out on Monday, e-petitions aren’t how we choose governments. But, in any case, what difference would a General Election make? Surely we haven’t already forgotten that Starmer owed his landslide not to voters’ love of the Labour Party but to their hatred of the incumbent Tories. And whoever is in power, the issues they face are structural. Politics feels stuck because it is stuck. And what’s sticking it is a cross-party consensus: certain features of the political landscape are categorically off the table in policy terms.

In this sense, our predicament today is comparable with that of the Seventies. In that unhappy decade, post-war recovery proved so difficult because Britain had recently lost many of its former imperial markets and supply chains. We’d nationalised major industries, leaving the country with a vast state apparatus responsible for almost everything, and with dwindling funds to pay for it. Meanwhile well-organised trade unions responded to any effort to constrain wages in these industries by going on strike, effectively holding the taxpayer to ransom — all while a civil service raised to govern a global empire set about justifying its much-reduced existence by inventing new problems to solve. Each stakeholder had, from their own perspective, a legitimate set of interests; but the aggregate result was stasis. Rubbish went un-collected in the street. Dead bodies weren’t taken away. There were rolling blackouts across the country, as miners picketed power stations and railway workers refused to move fuel around the country.

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The bankrupt Queen of the Third Way

By Travis Aaroe

Today, this winter promises to be every bit as discontented. And that won’t change, no matter how many prime ministers we go through, so long as both parties remain committed to the beliefs and institutions that make change impossible. It’s just the pillars of stagnation that are different. In the Seventies it was national ownership, industry, and the unions. Today it’s non-contributory welfare (including the NHS), and a morality industry shaped by a monolithically progressive “third sector”, and enforced by an activist judiciary armed with “human rights”. It’s all underwritten by the third pillar: the mass immigration that keeps the whole show on the road.

Much as in the Seventies, the livelihoods of millions depend on these pillars remaining politically off-limits. And much as then, today’s settlement is running out of road, via its own internal logic. We can’t cut taxes because how else are we supposed to fund the NHS? But we can’t raise them either, because otherwise we’ll plunge people into poverty and then they’ll be on benefits, which requires raising taxes and sets off a shrill chorus from the “third sector”. Meanwhile, the wider economy that sustains it is a confected, empty thing of bum-wiping and consumer credit, kept in fragile homeostasis by increasingly punitive demands on a shrinking base of real businesses and productive workers. This is shored up with borrowing and what Starmer (like the Tories before him) calls making Britain “a world-leading hub for investment” and everyone else calls “flogging national assets to Blackrock”. In this unwelcoming climate, then, productive sector after productive sector crumples, sells up, or moves overseas. The Tories immiserated SMEs; under Labour, it’s the turn of farmers. After that, who knows? Perhaps HMRC will resort to robbing ice cream vans.

Then, whatever colour their rosette, the appetite of successive governments for deferring disaster by importing warm bodies is the most consistent revealed preference of all. Boris Johnson has admitted he opened the spigots with the aim of tackling inflation after Covid. And to date Labour seem to be continuing this long-established Tory policy, of making rude gestures at would-be immigrants with one hand while holding the door open with the other. Then, too, you can’t challenge this or you’ll set the morality industry off, and you can’t even point out its potential deleterious effects on welfare because the government doesn’t collect those statistics. And meanwhile the social solidarity and shared cultural references that comprise a polity’s real unwritten constitution continue their long, slow dissolution, assailed by the second-order effects of this human quantitative easing.

For most of today’s younger Left-wingers, Margaret Thatcher is a figure from distant demonology: an unfathomable, snooty sociopath whose context is lost in the mists of time. But she was swept to power on a wave of anger and frustration at a social contract that had ground Britain to a halt. Voters chose her because she promised — and delivered — radical solutions. In Thatcher’s assessment, Britain’s problems could only be solved by tackling the power-bases that held the country to ransom. That meant taking industries out of state hands, and kneecapping the unions who used their collective bargaining power against those industries. She embarked on her notorious privatisation campaign, then broke the unions by closing the mines and de-industrialising the country, in favour of the service economy that now dominates Britain.

Looking back, the net result was (to say the least) two-sided. It broke the stalemate and got at least parts of the country moving again. But the cost was terrible: great swathes of Britain were impoverished. She never got a grip on the Blob, but rather grew it; meanwhile, our former industrial cities have languished, our service economy is hopelessly lop-sided, and an alarmingly high proportion of Britain’s former national assets are now foreign-owned. Sir Keir is apparently salivating at the prospect of selling still more to his friends in Big Finance.

But perhaps the worst second-order consequence of her vision has been the stranglehold it still exerts over mainstream British politics. Warmed-up Thatcherism can still induce a spasm of enthusiasm among even the most fossilised Tory grandee: one need only make the right noises about “markets” and “private enterprise” to have them all lurching from their sarcophagi and rallying behind the latest (preferably female) avatar of this creed. But the aspect of Thatcher that the Conservative Party (and, arguably the country) actually needs is not the specific policy platform or indeed the possession of two X chromosomes. It’s her vision, radicalism, and courage.

This doesn’t just mean someone who likes free markets and tank-based photo opportunities. It means someone willing to exit our current care-home mentality and go directly at the sacred pillars of stagnation, based on a coherent, positive vision of Britain’s future.

That would mean making the case against non-contributory welfare, and for insurance-based healthcare. It would mean kneecapping the NGOcracy — from defunding the pseudo-independent “third sector” policy launderers to reining in an activist judiciary, and modernising the now widely loathed architecture of “human rights” that privileges the safety of foreign paedophiles over that of British nationals. And it would mean closing the borders, reforming asylum policy and naturalisation rights, and riding out the screeching that would follow from every vested interest. It would likely also mean abandoning the fiction of Civil Service “neutrality”, at least in important roles. This achieved, we might be in a position to shake out the economy so it rewards what Brits have historically been good at: inventing, making, and selling stuff.

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Welcome to Thought-Police Britain

By Mary Harrington

We might even look to the most radical policy shift of all: leaving behind the fantasy of “global Britain” for some form of re-unification with Greater Britain, which is to say the historic Anglosphere. This done, we might even stand a chance of taming Thatcherism’s worst legacy — the asset-strippers of global finance — a feat modern Britain is unlikely to manage alone.

Taken singly, each of these measures is provocative. Together, the package would be explosive. And we can also be sure that cutting all these Gordian knots would have costs — perhaps as terrible as those of unsticking Seventies Britain. But we might also ask: what would the costs have been, back then, of doing nothing? And what will those costs be if we continue on our current path? Pace Elon Musk, modern Britain is a long way from being a genuine police state. But if we continue on this track, that’s what we will have to become, to suppress with the fury that I already feel approaching boiling point — especially among the shrinking proportion of the population that makes things, pays up, pitches in, and picks up litter.

I expect several more winters of discontent before Britain’s cup of bitterness is drained. The General Election petition may be a therapeutic exercise in displacement politics, but the sentiment behind it is real and will grow more visceral before this unhappy era is over. And still our politicians are nowhere near the point of realisation. So we can expect administration after administration to fall in succession, only to be replaced by another just as hated. More petitions, more unrest, more polls. Perhaps more riots, and certainly more two-tier policing.

The only routes out are either to become what Elon Musk thinks we already are. Or, alternatively, to find a leader who is both in tune with vox populi, and also willing to ignore its protests. Who actually likes ordinary British people. And who will do whatever it takes — even the currently unthinkable — to free us from this death-spiral.

From a shortlist of four candidates, two of whom came from the solid, “sensible” Left of the party — Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly — and two from the more radical Right — Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch — Conservative MPs have whittled down the choice to the two Tory ultras proposing a more fundamental break from the past. By making this choice, the contours of the next four years in British politics have been shaped, regardless of who is ultimately chosen.

For most of the Conservative Party’s post-war history, it should be remembered, the desire for a quiet life has been the pre-eminent instinct, especially among Tory MPs. In 1955, the party replaced Winston Churchill with his reassuring deputy, Anthony Eden. In 1957, Eden was replaced by his reassuring Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, who in turn was replaced by his reassuring Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home. From Douglas-Home the crown was then passed to Edward Heath, the candidate best suited to continue Macmillan’s “Middle Way” politics.

The one candidate who broke with this, of course, was Margaret Thatcher, though it is largely forgotten now that she was not the most Right-wing of the candidates in the 1975 leadership election, challenged from the Tory Right by the aristocratic romantic Hugh Fraser who saw in Thatcher just another shade of Heathite grey. Since Thatcher’s defenestration in 1990, the desire for solid conservatism has once again largely held sway — at least among Tory MPs.

In every Tory leadership election from 2001 until Boris Johnson’s victory over Jeremy Hunt in 2019, Conservative MPs as a whole have chosen candidates from the solid Left of the party over the radical Right: Ken Clarke over Iain Duncan Smith in 2001; David Cameron over David Davis in 2005; and, finally, Theresa May over Andrea Leadsom in 2016. Even in the two leadership elections between Thatcher’s victory in 1975 and Boris Johnson’s in 2019, when the candidate of the Left was not backed by a majority of MPs, the winner still offered a form of reassuring continuity: John Major in 1990 and William Hague in 1997. Even after Boris Johnson, the instinct returned with Rishi Sunak beating Liz Truss among MPs in 2022.

There are two crucial lessons to draw from this record. The first is that since William Hague carried out his ill-conceived “modernisation” of the Conservative election rules to give members the final say in the leadership, the party has been beset by a fundamental structural problem. This may fatally undermine the victory in this election.

British parliamentary democracy is governed by the simple rule that whoever controls a majority in parliament is prime minister. In his wisdom, however, William Hague changed the rules so that the Conservative leader can theoretically be someone who does not even command a majority of support among their own MPs. On both occasions when this possibility came to pass, the result was disastrous: Duncan Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022. This is now a real possibility once again.

The final tally of votes for the three remaining candidates saw Kemi Badenoch receive 42 votes, Robert Jenrick 41 and James Cleverly 37. In effect, each candidate had the support of just a third of the parliamentary party, with two thirds opposed to them — often viscerally. No matter how Cleverly’s supporters break over the coming days and weeks, the decision is no longer theirs, but the membership’s. Based on the conversations I have had with pollsters, Tory MPs and party aides over the past few weeks, there is every chance that Jenrick will now secure enough of Cleverly’s supporters to declare himself the choice of the parliamentary party, only for Badenoch to claim the crown regardless.

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The Tory contender Labour fears

By Tom McTague

Should this happen, irrespective of her attributes, Badenoch will be forced to build her leadership on fundamentally unsafe foundations, a Tory tribune on top of an uneasy parliamentary party. This would be disastrous.

The second lesson is yet more crucial. The only two instances when MPs opted for a Right-wing ultra over a moderate opponent came in moments of perceived national crisis, when the desire for a quiet life was no longer tenable. In 1975, Thatcher was chosen as a counter-revolutionary candidate to put the post-war social-democratic state out of its misery — at least as she and her supporters saw it. The failures of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, IMF crisis of 1976 and Winter of Discontent of 1978/79 had created a sense of national emergency, requiring a different response from what had come before. In 2019, something similar was true after three years of parliamentary stasis following the EU referendum of 2016. When presented with the choice, the Conservative Party concluded — reluctantly — that radicalism was its only option for survival.

What is so striking about the ballot today is that it appears the Conservative Parliamentary Party has once again concluded that the crisis it and the country faces requires revolution. And so, the two candidates who will now go before members offer different forms of radicalism: Badenoch offers an instinctive form of modern Toryism which rails against the spread of Left-legalism and its catch all partner “wokeism”, whether in the form of equalities legislation, trans-laws or DEI requirements. Jenrick, in contrast, offers a more traditional critique of Britain’s immigration policies with promises of returning sovereignty, though with a contemporary analysis of the failure of the British state. Both are promising forms of counter-revolution, Jenrick’s of the Blairite state and Badenoch’s of the progressive zeitgeist itself.

If either is going to succeed as a truly counter-revolutionary Tory in the image of Thatcher, they will need a good dose of what their opponent is offering and more. Jenrick lacks the Jacobite dash of the true Tory radicals: Bolingbroke, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher; Badenoch the broader analytical frame that made Thatcher successful. And what both still lack is the ideological army committed to a cause that any upheaval needs. In 1975, Thatcher had her own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, plus the trailblazers that came before, including most notably the Institute for Economic Affairs. Today, it is hard to see the same kind of intellectual energy anywhere in Westminster.

That Conservative MPs have chosen this moment to gamble the party’s future on their harder instinct for counter-revolution has already raised the stakes of British politics for the remainder of this parliament. The exact form of Tory radicalism the Conservative Party membership chooses in three weeks’ time may define British politics for much longer than that.

Eden’s fate is a reminder of the challenge currently facing the Conservative Party. Policies, experience and ideology matter, but not as much as character and, above all, luck. William Hague was a formidable politician who had spent most of his life gliding effortlessly towards the premiership, only to become leader of the opposition at the wrong time, unable to do anything about the extraordinary popularity of Tony Blair.

The task today is even harder. The Conservative Party’s defeat earlier this year was not only worse than John Major’s in 1997, but the worst the Tory party has seen in its entire 190-year history. And yet, the scale of the Labour Party’s early difficulties in office has given the party’s leadership candidates hope that the situation might actually be salvageable. After all, if Keir Starmer can turn a calamitous defeat into a landslide victory in the space of five years, why can’t they?

What has struck me, in conversations with the current leadership candidates, MPs and aides, is how often they turn to Margaret Thatcher as their source of inspiration — a figure who won the premiership 45 years ago in entirely different circumstances to those that exist today. Yet Thatcher has gained an almost mythological status in British politics today, bearing little resemblance to the politician herself.

Her myth takes on a different aspect for each of the candidates. For James Cleverly, she was the leader who brought back aspiration; for Tom Tugendhat, she was the leader who brought back British power, at home and abroad. For Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, it is the provincial Toryism that she represented which most appeals, while for Kemi Bedenoch it is her status as a “global icon” of free markets.

All these accounts contain elements of truth, of course, but as the conservative commentator, T.E. Utley, frustratedly pointed out at the height of her power in the 1980s, almost all popular accounts of Thatcher underestimate the extent to which she was also, fundamentally, a far more pragmatic and skilful politician than she is usually given credit for, willing to dodge, weave and compromise to win power and then keep it. “It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal,” Utley observed.

It is largely forgotten that when Thatcher replaced Ted Heath in 1975, she was also seen as a lightweight who would be Labour’s “secret weapon”. The former chancellor and her leadership rival, Reginald Maudling, described her victory as the “darkest day in the history of the Tory party”. And polls in 1978 suggested the Tories would enjoy a significant increase in support if it were to return the leadership to Heath. What actually won her power in 1979 was not her radicalism or iron will, but Labour’s total failure in government. “We lost the Election because people didn’t get their dustbins emptied, because commuters were angry about train disruption and because of too much union power,” James Callaghan argued, lamenting the Winter of Discontent which upended his premiership. Rishi Sunak could well say the same of his own time in government.

What won her the Conservative leadership in 1975, however, was her clarity of purpose and analysis of what had gone wrong. As the Spectator observed at the time, she was the only serious candidate who was clear that “Mr Heath’s leadership of the Conservative party has been a very bad one”. For the Spectator this was enough — everything else, the magazine contended, rested on this central analysis.

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Starmer needs the strength of Thatcher

By Tom McTague

Something similar is required today. James Cleverly’s diagnosis that the party needs “unity” is insufficient given the scale of the Conservative failure between 2010 and 2024 — a period of government that was, inarguable, “very bad”. Cleverly’s focus on party unity is also insufficient given the scale of Britain’s wider social and economic failure over the past two decades, which has brought with it a sense of fatalism as public services have deteriorated along with the unquantifiable feel of the country.

Likewise, Theresa May’s machine-like incantation that “elections in the UK are won in the centre ground” simply ignores the obvious fact that she failed to win her election against the most Left-wing candidate in post-war British history, while Boris Johnson secured a majority of 80 against the same opponent. May’s analysis also ignores the even more obvious example of Margaret Thatcher, the most instinctively right wing Tory leader since 1945 and also the most successful. If there is such a thing as the centre ground in British politics, it is not how it is usually defined. Today, the centre ground combines full-fledged authoritarianism on most questions to do with criminal justice and immigration, a drain-the-swamp outrage at the political, economic and public sector establishment and a general sense of social democratic justice on issues of tax and spend.

Rather than cliches about the centre ground, like 1975 the first question is who today, of the Tory leaders, has the clear conviction that the past 14 years of Conservative rule have been “very bad”? And who offers the clearest answer as to why? From here we can begin to judge which one presents the greatest threat to Labour.

Those close to Starmer believe that Robert Jenrick has come closest to having the kind of political analysis that could be most problematic for Labour. The 14 years of Tory government were very bad, Jenrick states, because the government showed itself incapable of delivering the systemic reforms that would allow it to deliver what it promised. Only by clearing away the bureaucratic and legal obstacles binding the government’s hands can voters’ wishes be delivered — from reducing immigration and bogus asylum claims to improving economic growth and the performance of public services. This is the message Labour fears — but not the messenger. The words they used to describe him included “weird” and “extreme”. They also believe he reaches too quickly for old Thatcherite solutions to today’s problems. Jenrick has alighted on the systemic nature of Britain’s ills, but has yet to really embrace the new world to which Britain belongs — a world that requires more than reheated Thatcherism if Britain is to prosper. To those close to Starmer, Jenrick looks more like a second William Hague — or even Iain Duncan Smith — than a David Cameron, let alone a Margaret Thatcher.

By contrast, Tugendhat and Cleverly are seen as more effective messengers, but with ineffective messages. Tugendhat does not share Jenrick’s belief in the systemic failure of the British state — arguing that Britain has simply lost its dynamism because it has allowed itself to be run by the “rule of lawyers” rather than the rule of law. Cleverly, in contrast, says Britain just needs some of Ronald Reagan’s optimistic spirit. Neither troubles Labour — yet.

The candidate that Starmer’s team is least sure about is Badenoch. The size of her personality and willingness to speak her mind makes her a dangerous opponent. Her instinctive, confident conservatism also appears fresh in a way Jenrick’s does not. And yet she is also seen as potentially self-destructive in a way the others are not. She has the self-confidence of Thatcher, but does she have the discipline and political skill to navigate the challenges of opposition? After going on Times Radio to declare current rates of maternity pay “excessive” the question raised by T.E. Utley becomes pertinent once again: Is she willing to put aside her devotion to doctrine to avoid the plainly politically suicidal? If she wants to win, the answer must be yes.

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By Tom McTague

What gives the Conservative Party hope is that even as its leading figures grapple with the question of what went wrong and why, the Labour party has yet to come up with its own response.

Keir Starmer’s most compelling diagnosis is that the period of Tory rule which ended earlier this year was marked, principally, by its “populism”. This, in his account, amounts to offering easy answers to the public instead of delivering hard truths, which is why the government ultimately lost control of the public finances. Every Tory leader, in Starmer’s telling, preferred populist slogans to real reform, the apotheosis of which was the Rwanda refugee scheme.

Yet, this is not a sufficient account of the past 14 years. Of all the criticisms that can be levelled at David Cameron and George Osborne, among the weakest is that they took easy decisions and were insufficiently concerned about spending constraints. The years of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, meanwhile, contain much of Starmer’s agenda today: from its faith in the green energy transition and infrastructure spending, to levelling up, taking back control and immigration restrictions. All featured in Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference. It is incoherent to dismiss as populist a set of policies you intend to steal for yourself.

This failure of the current Government to nail down a diagnosis of Britain’s illness — and therefore also its cure — provides an opportunity for the Tories that they cannot afford to miss. The trouble is, none of the current candidates for the Tory leadership has yet come up with a good enough answer either.

The most striking thing about the answers is how American they were, with half of the candidates naming US presidents. Former Lieutenant Colonel of the British Army Tom Tugendhat picked a fellow military man turned politician, Dwight Eisenhower. Mel Stride plumped for John F. Kennedy and invoked his call to do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. And James Cleverly opted for Margaret Thatcher’s transatlantic partner at the end of the Cold War, the sunny and optimistic Ronald Reagan.

Along with its Atlanticism, the other obvious feature of the honour roll was its recency. Politicians labelled “Tories” can be dated back to the 17th century, yet all of the named heroes were alive within living memory. Of those who offered British politicians, Priti Patel chose — without hesitation — Thatcher. Robert Jenrick said the same, adding her ideological guru, Keith Joseph, and most dynamic Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, for good measure. Only one candidate gave a British answer that caused eyebrows to rise (and Wikipedia pages to be searched), but it didn’t demur much from the theme. Kemi Badenoch plucked Airey Neave, the former leadership campaign manager for Thatcher and Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who was assassinated in 1979.

As aspiring leaders of the world’s most successful political party, the exaltation of so many American Presidents — more than British prime ministers, of which the Conservatives can claim 22 since the Great Reform Act — is a surprise. It’s also unlikely to be fruitful. Developments in the conservative traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have often interacted or been in one another’s slipstream, have led them to very different places. British and American conservatisms just don’t sound like songs from the same hymnbook anymore — and when they have, most recently in the libertarianism of Liz Truss, it hasn’t ended well for the Tories.

Harking back to the Thatcher years, as three of the candidates did, is a more promising path for the next Conservative leader. Britain’s first female prime minister won three elections on the bounce, two of them with three-figure majorities, and reshaped Britain more decisively than any prime minister since Clement Attlee. But the Tory tradition is much older than the 50 years since Thatcher became leader of the party — and much richer, too. If Conservatives limit themselves to drawing inspiration from the Thatcher years — or worse, the myths that have grown up around them — they will only be scratching the surface of their party’s history and its canon of “heroes”. Instead, they should look further back. But to whom?

After the worst election result in their history, the Tories need a hero of reinvention. And as such, the next party leader could do far worse than put Benjamin Disraeli on the hero’s pedestal. In so many senses an outsider (he was descended from Jewish immigrants from Italy), Disraeli climbed the greasy pole through a process of personal and political reinvention. He transformed himself into a beacon of Victorian Britain — an Anglican, friend of the Queen, and cheerleader for the Empire — and remade the Tory Party in his own design. By the time he died in 1881, Disraeli had set the Conservatives on the path to dominate the next century of British politics.

The test of any reinvention, though, will be success at the ballot box. Here, aspiring leaders could draw upon the record of another Tory icon, Winston Churchill. On the face of it, Churchill is an unlikely hero of electoral recovery. The man widely labelled the “Greatest Briton” for his wartime efforts never won the popular vote in a general election. But after the Conservatives were reduced to 197 seats in the 1945 election, he kept buggering on as leader of the opposition. Five years later the Tories gained 90 seats and were on the brink of returning to power. No other post-war Conservative leader would make as many gains in a single election until David Cameron in 2010.

Yet if the party is to have any hope of returning to power, the next Tory leader will need to double Churchill’s success and then some. Once again, then, they will need to build a strong shadow cabinet and give its members the chance to shine. Churchill’s top team represented a broad range of Tory thinking and talent, and featured two future election-winning prime ministers.

Few, in Churchill’s team, were as able as Rab Butler, whose efforts in the 1945-51 parliaments made him a hero of the party rebuild. As head of Conservative research and policy, Butler re-established the intellectual foundations of the Conservative offer. He set about attracting the best and brightest on the centre-right to engage with the party, educated the grassroots about political issues of the day and created a comprehensive new agenda to take the Conservative Party into the second half of the 20th century.

Butler’s great insight was to recognise that the new context in which the Tory Party would have to survive and thrive was wholly different from the country it had governed before the war. To follow his lead today would be to avoid redeploying the playbooks of the Eighties or the 2000s, but to look with fresh eyes at the challenges of the 2020s. This is a much harder task. It requires analysing the mistakes the party made in office and the challenges it failed to confront. But, as Butler knew, this tougher road is the one back to office.

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By Tom McTague

Then, as now, homebuilding and homeownership were high on the agenda. And here, the present crop of aspiring leaders could find inspiration from the largely forgotten Noel Skelton. A Scottish Unionist MP and icon to many young Tories in the early 20th century, Skelton pioneered the concept of “property-owning democracy” in conservative thought. In The Spectator in 1923, he called for Conservatives to set out a vision for the country as “master of its own life, made four-square and secure and able therefore to withstand the shrill and angry gales which, in the new era’s uneasy dawn, sweep across the world”. He was very much addressing the challenges of the interwar years, but his ideas have had a permanent resonance in Tory politics, especially in a country that today has too much precarity, too little home ownership, and too few people who feel they have something worth conserving.

What Skelton set out in the pages of a magazine, Conservative politicians refined and helped make a reality later in the century. Chief among the stars of this story is Harold Macmillan — a hero of delivery. In 1951, Churchill asked Macmillan to “build the houses for the people”, warning it would “make or mar” his political career. His job was, as many Conservative leadership candidates claim to recognise, to deliver on what the party said it would do. It said it would build 300,000 homes a year; and he did so. Even Thatcher, whose own views weren’t always aligned with her predecessor, praised his record: “He didn’t say ‘no, this can’t be done or this will be blocked by the civil service’. He did overcome. He dominated his civil servants — they didn’t dominate him.”

If the Conservative Party wants to dominate again, its next leader must dig deep within the conservative tradition — to Thatcher, yes, but on to Macmillan, Butler, Churchill, Skelton, Disraeli and scores more, as well. A party as old and successful as the Conservatives can find ample inspiration for its future in the heroes of its past. It just has to look for it.

A more apposite comparison, I think, is the period of state failure that marked the tumultuous period in British life between the imposition of direct rule in Northern Ireland in 1972 and the miners’ strike of 1984. This was a time when the state appeared to lose its authority to govern, and its willingness to do so, as war in the Middle East led to recession, political strife, international retreat and finally industrial confrontation. The trade unions entered into a war to the death first with James Callaghan and then Margaret Thatcher.

Too often Thatcher’s premiership is understood as a battle to curtail the state, rather than what it really was: the battle to reassert the state’s supremacy. In the years before her victory in 1979, the British state had repeatedly failed to impose its will, from the strikes which brought down Ted Heath in 1973-74 to the IMF bailout in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79. For all the u-turns and incoherence of Thatcher’s actual record as prime minister, the source of her political success was that she was willing to pay a higher price than anyone previously thought possible to reimpose the authority of the British state at home and abroad. 

This is the political reality Starmer now faces. In such moments, the job of the prime minister is to play leviathan; to impose order so that civility can return. The state must reassert its authority and, crucially, its primacy. Little platoons are all well and good, but not when they have tooled up.

During the recession of the early Eighties, Thatcher doubled down on her programme of austerity, even as it drove unemployment to levels previously seen as morally unacceptable. In 1982, she went to war for a set of “small islands inhabited by three sheep”, as François Mitterand described the Falklands, not because they offered any real advantage to Britain but because of the principle that they were British. And then, in 1984, she used every means at her disposal — formal and otherwise — to break the miners’ power and take the war to the IRA after they tried to assassinate her and her entire cabinet; the most serious attack on the British state since 1945.

As David Edgerton notes in his sweeping account of post-war Britain, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, “the key difference in the politics of the Eighties from what went before was the preparedness of government to fight dissenters very hard and to exert the rights of elected authority very strongly”. What marked Thatcher out as something different, Edgerton argues, was her willingness to press on “in the face of odium” and in so doing transform the self-confidence of the British elites. “In the Seventies there emerged the idea that the United Kingdom was becoming ungovernable,” Edgerton writes. “The answer was, of course, ‘rolling back the state’, rhetorically speaking, but it also involved making the state more autonomous, more powerful.”

Today, there is a similar sense of British state failure; not quite that the United Kingdom is ungovernable but that it is slipping that way, with the state unable to impose its will or that of the people it serves. This is not just a question of this week’s explosion of racist thuggery and violent counter-rioting — important though this is — but the seeming inability to perform even the basic functions of a state: providing prison places, timely court hearings, adequate sentencing and enough police to patrol the streets. Even simply ensuring there is a functioning health service, uncorrupted police force, humane asylum regime and working borders seems out of reach today.

Too many areas of Britain today simply do not work. These mobs did not form in Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge, but the cities that have been failed for decades. Just as my colleague Aris Roussinos has argued we use euphemisms to hide the reality of what we can all see in front of our eyes, we also ignore our basic failures of government. No one can say that Birmingham, Belfast, Liverpool, Rotherham or Sunderland — the centres of violence in recent days — are beacons of good governance and prosperity. Few can say that of Britain more generally.

This is not a crisis that Starmer is responsible for. What we are witnessing is a breakdown of order which has exposed the anarchic ethnic strife hiding in plain sight. The past week stands as another appalling indictment of British state failure. How has it come to this? How have we allowed gangs of balaclava-clad (and Nazi tattooed) men to form pseudo-paramilitary mobs in our cities?

One of the most worrying aspects has not just been the breakdown of order, but the fact that the breakdown is seemingly between groups, neither of whom any longer trust, respect nor fear the police nor the law it seems — a scene more reminiscent of Northern Ireland than recent history of mainland Britain. An irony of Thatcher’s premiership, in fact, is that the one place where she was never able to fully reimpose the authority of the state was in Northern Ireland, whose uneasy communal truce was only reached after her departure.

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As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher championed monetarism only to quietly abandon it, decried European integration while signing the Single European Act and portrayed herself as the Iron Lady while reducing defence spending from 4% of GDP to 3%.

What she offered, though, was a display of willpower to reimpose the authority of the British state. Any prime minister who has since offered the merest hint of losing this authority has suffered. The only time during Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister when his personal poll ratings dropped into negative territory came during the fuel protests of 2000. Blair’s own authority never recovered from the anarchic disorder which resulted from the Iraq invasion in 2003. In contrast, David Cameron’s ratings soared in the wake of the riots of 2011 when — supported by Keir Starmer, then director of public prosecutions — he responded with a display of indignant strength, condemning “criminality, pure and simple”, which he said would be “confronted and defeated” with the full force of the law. “If you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment.”

In his message to the public, Starmer offered a similar line, condemning the “far-Right thuggery” while warning anyone who had participated in the violence: “I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder.” Yet, it was slow to come and stilted and unconvincing when it did, read from a piece of paper rather than flowing from a place of anger. He needs to be quicker, fluent, less rehearsed, and more emotional. He must also find a way to deal with the rise of the “Muslim Defence League” and the constant baiting from Elon Musk. Both demand displays of strength, conviction and authority. People will remember how he deals with these challenges.  

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Too often the role of prime minister is misunderstood — even by prime ministers themselves. Theresa May, who, like Starmer, was a hard-working, serious, respectable politician, suffered as she struggled to meet the performative demands of the office. When a suicide bomber murdered 22 parents and children attending an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017, she chose to dispatch her Home Secretary to attend a commemorative service so that she could bunker down in No. 10 to manage the crisis. This decision was taken for perfectly noble reasons, but it was wrong. It was her job as leader to mourn and explain, not simply to manage. May offered herself as the embodiment of strength and stability but was unable to match the rhetoric and paid for it. In the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, she became a shell barely able to function in the role.

Starmer, scarcely one-month into the role, must understand the task at hand, the connecting thread tying together each of his “missions” for government — authority. If he is to succeed with any of his pledges, the Prime Minister must use this crisis as an opportunity to define his purpose and to play the role demanded of him: from discord to harmony, as someone once said.

Yet Israel, too, has very little to show for its incursion, launched with sudden fury, but no discernible exit plan. As the IDF has withdrawn the vast majority of its troops, the Hamas leadership remains intact, the group can still fire rockets into Israel and is still killing Israeli soldiers on the ground. Netanyahu’s fragile Right-wing coalition — which survived months of mass protests even before Hamas’s brutal October rampage — is increasingly unpopular within Israel, with 71% of Israelis desiring him to step down.

Even as Netanyahu, against the Biden administration’s expressed will, pledges to launch an assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees have fled, his own defence minister openly contradicts him, asserting that no date for the operation has been set. When even the most committed American supporters of Israel, such as the New York Times’s Bret Stephens, and Thomas Friedman, feel compelled to state that “In a thousand years, Jews will remember Netanyahu’s name with scorn” for his “utterly insane strategy” which has “locked Israel into a politically unwinnable war”, it looks increasingly apparent that Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War will be remembered by history as a diplomatic and strategic error of historic proportions.

Yet there is very little reflection of these dynamics to be found in British conservative discourse which, for parochial culture-war reasons, committed itself to Israel’s ill-thought-out campaign early on and now finds itself held hostage by Netanyahu’s ineptitude. Like much of Britain’s talk-show populism, as a political strategy it is not a very popular one: even a plurality of Conservative voters now believes Britain should withhold arms sales to Israel, a debate roiling our moribund Conservative Party. While the optics of simultaneously dropping aid on Gaza and arming Israel indeed look absurd, in truth British arms sales represent only a miniscule fraction of Israel’s military capabilities, with the increasingly heated debate on both sides existing in a purely symbolic realm. Britain has no cause to enter this war, yet our political class seems determined nevertheless to reap all the domestic turmoil involvement would bring. Indeed, the full-throttle support for Israel’s war displayed by Suella Braverman or the Daily Mail columnist  Boris Johnson is worthy of analysis for its pure novelty. It signifies a partisan approach to the Middle East’s most intractable conflict that is a startling divergence from a century of British, and particularly Tory, policy.

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For a party that has failed to escape Thatcher’s long shadow, afflicted in its dotage with a cargo-cult weakness for matronly blondes of dubious merit, perhaps what is most remarkable is how far the current Conservative Party’s aspiring populist wing diverges from Thatcher’s own approach to the conflict. Following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a disaster that she correctly foresaw would birth new and harder threats to both the Western order and Israel’s own security, Thatcher placed an embargo on British weapons sales to Israel, a policy that was not lifted until 1994. Her rationale, as she told ITN, was that Israeli troops had “gone across the borders of Israel, a totally independent country, which is not a party to the hostility and there are very very great hostilities, bombing, terrible things happening there. Of course one has to condemn them. It is someone else’s country. You must condemn that. After all, that is why we have gone to the Falklands, to repossess our country which has been taken by someone else.”

A famously unsentimental woman, Thatcher framed the conflict in terms that seem strikingly empathetic to today’s eyes. In 1985, she visited an “utterly hopeless” Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, where, as she recounts in her 1993 memoirs, The Downing Street Years, “I talked to one old lady, half blind, lying in the shade of a tree outside her family’s hut. She was said to be about 100. But she had one thing above all on her mind, and spoke about it: the restoration of the Palestinians’ rights.” For Thatcher — perhaps counterintuitively, viewed through the prism of today’s Conservative party — the “plight of the landless Palestinians” was a major foreign-policy concern. Under her helm, the British government worked hard to bring about a peace deal, though her efforts were frustrated at every turn by both Israeli and American intransigence: as she “scrawled” on one cable from the British ambassador in Washington: “The US just does not realise the resentment she is causing in the Middle East.”

Striving to find a workable peace, Thatcher asserted the only possible solution to the conflict was an approach which balanced “the right of all the states in the region — including Israel — to existence and security, but also demanded justice for all peoples, which implied recognition of of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination”. Writing of her visit to Israel in 1986, the first by a British prime minister, Thatcher remarked that “The Israelis knew… that they were dealing with someone who harboured no lurking hostility towards them, who understood their anxieties, but who was not going to pursue an unqualified Zionist approach.” Instead, she “believed that the real challenge was to strengthen moderate Palestinians, probably in association with Jordan, who would eventually push aside the… extremists. But this would never happen if Israel did not encourage it; and the miserable conditions under which Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza were having to live only made things worse.”

The British-Jewish historian Azriel Bermant’s excellent 2016 book, Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East, makes for enlightening and perhaps discomfiting reading in the light of the Gaza War. An idealistic supporter of both Anglo-Jewry and Israel, whose own daughter Carol volunteered on a kibbutz, Thatcher nevertheless approached the country with a critical detachment. With a keener eye to Israel’s internal dynamics than Braverman or Johnson, Thatcher viewed the Right-wing Likud leaders Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir with distaste, as former terrorists against the British state with whom she was forced to deal by circumstance. Her preference throughout was for the Labor leader Shimon Peres who she viewed as a moderate, committed to a lasting peace settlement. To Thatcher, peace would entail not an independent Palestinian state — she thought this unviable, and most probably undesirable — but the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza under the rule of Jordan’s Anglophile King Hussein.

Yet when Thatcher signed on to an European Community declaration of support for Palestinian statehood, just days after the PLO confirmed its commitment to the destruction of Israel, and was condemned for this by the Labour leader Jim Callaghan — British attitudes on the conflict were yet to assume their present form — Thatcher responded in robust terms. “The words in the communiqué I support entirely,” she told the House. “They concern the right of the Palestinian people to determine their own future. If one wishes to call that ‘self- determination’, I shall not quarrel with it. I am interested that the Right Hon. Gentleman appears to be attempting to deny that right. I do not understand how anyone can demand a right for people on one side of a boundary and deny it to people on the other side of that boundary. That seems to deny certain rights, or to allocate them with discrimination from one person to another.”

Strikingly, Thatcher condemned Israel for its annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria, for its attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear power plant, and for its seizure of Palestinian land for settlements, including the housing of Soviet Jewish refugees: as she told the House in 1990, “Soviet Jews who leave the Soviet Union – and we have urged for years that they should be allowed to leave – should not be settled in the Occupied Territories or in East Jerusalem. It undermines our position when those people are settled in land that really belongs to others.” Indeed, as she later remarked in her memoirs, “I only wished that Israeli emphasis on the human rights of the Russian refuseniks was matched by proper appreciation of the plight of landless and stateless Palestinians.” With such sentiments, it is doubtful that today’s self-proclaimed Thatcherites would find a prominent place for Thatcher herself in their nascent faction.

While Thatcher’s views on Israel were balanced by the need to placate opinion in her 20% Jewish seat — the stated “Finchley factor” frequently cropped up in moments of self-doubt — her moderate stance on the conflict was sustained by the diversity of opinion then held by British Jews on Israel’s conduct. As Bermant notes: “Within British Jewry, the consensus on Israel had been seriously eroded with the invasion of Lebanon and, particularly, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” with the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, releasing a statement condemning the massacre, while “an editorial in the Anglo-Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, called on Begin and Sharon to resign in the wake of the killings”. In some ways, it could be argued that British Jewish opinion on the Palestine question back then was more akin to the conflicted attitudes expressed by American Jews today, while Thatcher lamented the then hardline American support for Israel, which she felt distorted US policy in self-defeating ways.

Yet just as Labour’s about-turn on Israel followed the 1982 Lebanon invasion, American attitudes to the country are today undergoing a historic convulsion, with what are sure to be significant consequences to Israel’s future security. The Biden administration is under increasing domestic pressure for its support for Netanyahu’s campaign, with even organs of middlebrow liberal opinion like The Atlantic, CNN and the Daily Show turning against Israel’s war and America’s support for it. The increasingly radical American Right is also turning against Israel, expressing dissent in often markedly antisemitic ways. In this dramatically shifting political landscape, the discourse in Britain’s media sphere seems strangely parochial, partly a reflection of American conservative fashions a generation ago, and partly an expression of Britain’s own anxieties over mass immigration, projected, like Brexit, onto more comfortable rhetorical ground.

Cameron’s largely moderate stance on the conflict, supporting Israel’s right to strike Hamas after its October brutalities while emphasising Britain’s opposition to Israel’s immoderate violence against Palestinian (and now British) civilians, and its commitment to a future Palestinian state, is broadly the correct one, even if the Conservative party’s Overton Window has drifted closer to Likud in intervening years than Thatcher would have permitted. Thatcher herself, as Bermant notes, “underlined that Israel’s policies were having a problematic impact on the geopolitics of the region: it was very unhelpful that the United States was being perceived as ‘Israel’s lawyer’, while the Soviet Union was being seen ‘as the friend of the Arabs’” — a dynamic Putin is happily exploiting this today, while America’s stock dwindles in both the Red Sea and the court of world opinion. Instead, Bermant observes: “Thatcher argued for Britain and the EC to play a role as ‘a third party’ which was ‘not bound by US or Soviet policies.’” Though perhaps, as I argued at the beginning of the war, it would have been better for us to stay out of the matter entirely: better for Britain, better for the Palestinians, and ultimately better for Israel and its Western advocates.

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When the war ends, when journalists are allowed into Gaza as the full civilian toll is unearthed and counted, the more outlandish expressions of solidarity with Netanyahu’s campaign made by Right-wing pundits will surely come to be seen as a needless, unforced error. As Bermant recently observed: “the Netanyahu government refuses to spell out its objectives for the end of the Gaza war and has allowed the most extreme elements in his government to exert influence over the management of the war… Israel’s prime minister has yet to come out against those in his government who have called for the displacement of Palestinians and the Jewish resettlement of Gaza.” The results have been, and will be, precisely what any detached observer or sufficiently critical friend would have expected.

Losing the American support on which its continued existence depends, with France now mooting sanctions against Israel, and a simultaneous genocide case working its way through the Hague, Netanyahu has dramatically worsened Israel’s strategic position. Within the context of this self-inflicted diplomatic injury, the focus on Right-wing discourse or campus radicals or pro-Palestine protests looks, at the most charitable interpretation, wrongheaded.

Perhaps the last word is best left to Thatcher herself. Summing up her years-long engagement with the region, she noted that “the United States, which was the power most responsible for the establishment of the state of Israel, will and must always stand behind Israel’s security. It is equally, though, right that the Palestinians should be restored in their land and dignity: and, as often happens in my experience, what is morally right eventually turns out to be politically expedient. Removing, even in limited measure, the Palestinian grievance is a necessary if not sufficient condition for cutting the cancer of Middle East terrorism out by the roots. The only way this can happen, as has long been clear, is for Israel to exchange ‘land for peace’, returning occupied territories to the Palestinians in exchange for credible undertakings to respect Israel’s security.”

More Likudist than the vast majority of Israelis, more uncompromisingly heartless than Thatcher herself, the Tory commentators who claim the Iron Lady’s mantle would do well to reflect on her example.

I remember it well as it was my birthday, and my friends immediately started to make stickers and badges. I went back to my Mum’s house proudly sporting an “Enemy Within” sticker on my pregnant belly. A Thatcher-supporter, she said I was a reason why women should not be given the vote.

Back then, everyone I knew in London supported the miners. We hated Thatcher and understood this to be a battle between the capitalist state and the working class, an attempt to crush union power once for all. If you ever had doubts, you didn’t show them out of solidarity. This still carries for those who want to romanticise the strike as the last great civil war. War changes lives forever and the miner’s strike changed this country forever, its ghosts popping up in Billy Elliott, Pride and Sherwood.

Today, a three-part series starts on Channel 4, Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain, and, 40 years on, it makes for essential viewing. Through interviews with striking miners and scabs, with those working in the shadows to defeat it on the government’s behalf, with the police and with reams of extraordinarily violent footage, this is intense, visceral stuff. To reckon with the defeat of the miners — and it was a huge thrashing — is to gaze on a gaping sore that some argue leads all the way to Brexit. But reckon with it we must.

In 1984, Britain was home to 173 working collieries, but the richest seams of coal had already been mined and it was becoming more expensive to reach what remained. The answer was mechanisation, which meant redundancies. Thatcher wanted three things: a confrontation with “the Yorkshire Stalin”, Arthur Scargill; to close inefficient pits in order to grow the economy; and to break the strongest union. The National Coal Board said it would close 20 pits; Scargill told his men that it would be 70. And so they downed tools.

While the strike was indeed about jobs, the documentary reveals that it was also about so much more. Going down the pit was the most money a lad with no qualifications could make. But nor was it just about wages. It was about something more intangible: a sense of self, of masculinity, of community. Or as they said 40 years ago and keep saying in these films, it was about “the future”.

In some pit villages, there was no alternative. The pit was not simply somewhere men worked but the centre of their clubs, associations, their entire world. The soot-covered nobility of the miner’s face is easy to mythologise. But this was horrible, filthy, backbreaking work. When actual miners turned up at the benefits I attended, working-class heroism became flesh with all its less noble needs, and middle-class activists gave themselves to the cause in more ways than one.

What Scargill had on his side was his ability to command flying pickets; his refusal to hold a national ballot, though, meant the fragmentation of the workforce. The Nottinghamshire miners, for instance, wanted to keep working as they considered the strike unconstitutional without a national ballot. The result was that, in some pits, strike-breakers were bussed in on coaches with grills over the windows for protection. It allowed Thatcher and the Tory press to paint the strike as nothing more than mob rule based on violence and intimidation. And so an industrial dispute became an existential one, a battle between good and evil. The revelation that NUM funds were sequestered, as part of its dodgy dealings with Gaddafi, only further undermined the cause.

The identification of miners with their own local area rather than their whole industry is what for some Marxists call the “deterritorialisation” of capital. This division was further exploited by David Hart, the sinister figure who appears as Stephen Sweet in David Peace’s fantastic novel GB84 and is often referred to as “the Jew”. This super-rich, Right-wing libertarian told Thatcher that a deal didn’t need to be struck, that the miners could be defeated. He set about funding and aiding those who wanted to go back to work. An actual enemy within? Certainly, this was the state intervening in a highly suspect manner. The government distanced themselves from him as soon as possible.

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Their other shocking intervention, and one they couldn’t distance themselves from, were the new “techniques” of policing. The police were now being sent across the country, and actively and brutally working to protect the interests of “capital”. This was not a neutral peacekeeping force. They could now use roadblocks to turn away anyone they deemed to be a flying picket. They could beat up miners and then arrest them; their own police footage shows them at The Battle of Orgreave where they corralled minors into a field and then charged at them with baton-wielding mounted police. This was a battle alright, medieval and one-sided. The breaking of heads, the breaking of will, the breaking of collective action. It hurt; it clearly still does.

The strike may well have taught us something about power and the strength of people standing together, but where did that idealism go? The pits were always going to close. There are just six mines left, the rest of our coal imported. Was it a fantasy that all these men could even keep their jobs in that time of deindustrialisation?

To see the fate of those abandoned places is heart-breaking. Heroin moved in, as it always does. Oh and fancy Bang & Olufsen shops. Those with big redundancy payments like to splash out on something fancy for their homes, something they can control.

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The sadness of all this was apparent when I was interviewing ex-miners in a working-men’s club in the late Nineties, and every man described himself as “retired undefeated”. They had, in other words, been made redundant after the strike. Now they were at home mostly looking after the kids, though they did not want to say that. They had turned down jobs in service industries because they were from a generation who thought that men’s work was manual work.

It was a Sunday lunchtime in the club, so there were strippers. Only a few women were there, and the men called them “pudding burners” — as they were out instead of making the Sunday lunch, as they should be. I wondered a bit about what kind of community we were all busy “protecting”, having seen the remarkable resilience of the miners’ wives during the strike. It turned out that many of the women now had two or three jobs and were getting by. They had adapted in a way some of the guys just couldn’t.

Perhaps all this has something to do with the difficulty of admitting that you were once on the losing side — and the fact that it’s still hard to understand what that even means. Something bigger than the closure of certain coal mines was at stake here. It was, after all, as much a story of demoralisation as deindustrialisation. This country lost the idea that the working man or woman could ever really win again, and that wound still weeps.

There was, of course, a public inquiry. It concluded that most of the diagnoses by Higgs and another paediatrician, Geoff Wyatt, were incorrect. Higgs was subsequently banned by her local health authority from dealing with child sex abuse cases. But this scandal is not what it seems, and it destroyed far more than the careers of two medics. It baked into child protection services a scepticism of children’s accounts of their own experiences.

The campaigning journalist Beatrix Campbell has followed the Cleveland case since it broke in 1987. A year later, her first book on the scandal, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse — The Cleveland Case, was published. In it, Campbell examines how Cleveland council made child sexual abuse a priority, engaging with medical experts and innovative diagnostic procedures, only to be met by a backlash from statutory services. Children had not been abused, it was decided. Rather, the scandal was a witch-hunt against parents.

Now, her new book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Legacy of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Case, revisits the scandal — with the proof necessary to back up her earlier suspicions. The 30-year rule allows certain government documents to be released publicly three decades after they entered the National Archive. Thanks to this, Campbell found evidence that “there was a cover-up, and that the doctors and social workers were not wrong about so many of those children having been sexually abused”.

Shocking failures led to the government inquiry coming to a completely false conclusion. For instance, the only international expert consulted was Dr Ralph Underwager, who in 1992 helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — an organisation that claimed counsellors and parents were manipulating kids into believing they had been abused. Underwager became mired in controversy when, a year later, he gave an interview to a Dutch paedophile magazine in which he said that paedophiles should “boldly and courageously affirm what they choose”.

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Campbell also found evidence that the Government knew at least 80% of the diagnoses of these children were correct — but hushed it up because the Treasury had warned that dealing with this abuse would be expensive. Saving money was more important than saving children. Local MP Stuart Bell set the agenda, saying it was simply “not possible” that all these children could have been abused. He became, says Campbell, “the advocate for accused adults”. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister at the time, made clear her deep mistrust of social workers, and of feminists. Two days before the inquiry was announced, she was asked if she would “allocate extra funds to deal with the rising rate of child abuse referrals”. She replied simply, “no”.

Support fell behind the police — who, Campbell argues, were the main culprits in enabling abusers to evade justice. “Cleveland had a macho, misogynistic police force,” she says. And, as has been proved time and time again, “asking a patriarchal service to police patriarchal behaviour is pointless”. Cleveland was unlike other authorities, “for example in Leeds, where there was a very well-developed, collegial culture between police, paediatricians, social workers, rape crisis centres”. In Cleveland, by contrast, police “were pretty much told they didn’t have to liaise with other professionals over child sexual abuse, and that was a complete disaster, and one that was repeated in many subsequent child abuse scandals”.

The media also failed, quickly falling in line with the government. National newspapers called for the blood of social workers, and the local Evening Gazette ran a “Give Us Back Our Children” campaign. Ultimately, no perpetrators were identified, let alone charged or convicted. Following the inquiry, 27 families sued the NHS, as well as the council and individual medics, costing the state £1 million in out-of-court settlements.

Campbell tells me that what she finds most cruel in this whole story is that the children at its heart — whose difficulties had prompted responses by professionals — were then subjected to a very public inquisition. Only a handful of those children have ever come forward to tell their stories, and just one has done so both before and after reading her social service records. When, at the age of 40, Minnie* first approached Campbell out of the blue, she asked: “Are there a few of us, like me?”

In Minnie’s eyes, Marietta Higgs — who one journalist at the time of the inquiry described as “the most hated woman in Britain” — was a hero. Minnie met her after being referred to social services at the age of 10, following her brother’s revelations about child sexual abuse at the hands of their sadistic stepfather. Minnie was examined by Higgs, who found signs of rape. Higgs made Minnie feel safe. “She was my saviour,” she says.

For Campbell, this is what a good child protection system looks like: “The abused child who describes an experience of feeling saved.” And yet, the name of Marietta Higgs has long been used as a warning against overactive imaginations in social workers, doctors or other advocates for children. It has been evoked to discredit victims who choose to speak out later in life, as Minnie has.

The disgrace of it is that, when her name was first being dragged through mud, secret documents that vindicated Higgs’s conclusions were circulating around Westminster. A confidential dossier put together by the Northern Regional Health Authority was sent to the Ministry of Health in 1988 and presented to Parliament. It exonerated Higgs and accepted that around 70-75% of the diagnoses were correct. Campbell got hold of the document while updating her original book on Cleveland. She assumed that Higgs had read it, but when she visited her at her home in 2017, discovered she had not. Higgs has since retired.

One of the many disappointing things about the Cleveland scandal is that it had been preceded by a moment of enlightenment, largely triggered by feminist activism: people working in health and social services had been paying better attention to testimony about sexual abuse. Campbell sees the scandal as “a devastating example of a backlash against what feminists had achieved: as a result, all of that learning was thrown away, squandered, and condemned”.

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By Hina Husain

As a result, the campaign by Cleveland parents, and the public humiliation of the doctors at the heart of the scandal, focused on the accused adults, rather than the vulnerable children. Jean La Fontaine, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics who specialised in the study of sexual abuse, told the inquiry:

“Whenever we come to consider this issue, the children seem to get lost in the system. In the public inquiry, and before it, we heard a lot about parents’ rights. Perhaps it’s one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children’s voices have not been heard.”

The legacy of this, which lasts to this day, is tragic. “It shaped the entire approach to child protection politics for three decades, and was completely catastrophic,” says Campbell. Services today are still heavily influenced by what happened in 1987, in that few children are believed, and it is almost impossible to secure a conviction when they are. We just have to look at the so-called grooming gangs scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere to see how children are routinely disbelieved. “We now have a situation where, if you want to sexually abuse children, you can just do it, because you will get away with it,” says Campbell.

This could have been stopped in 1987, when there was a unique opportunity in Cleveland to bring the prevalence of child sexual abuse out of the shadows. Instead, it set back the issue significantly. It plunged Britain back into a dark age, by telling future generations of abused children that if they spoke out, they would not be listened to. It also created professional anxiety among doctors and social workers, who feared being treated as Marietta Higgs was.

Campbell met endless obstacles in the course of her reporting, from unobtainable documents to the influence of “false memory” organisations on the general public. Campbell even found herself arguing with her publishers’ “sensitivity readers”, who were offended by the description of “anal dilation” being used to detect whether the children had been anally raped. “I am offended at child rape, and those that seek to cover it up,” she tells me. The truth is gruesome, but that doesn’t mean we should hide from it.

As for the Cleveland children, they are now well into adulthood. Aside from the small number that have ever spoken out, where are they now? “We don’t know what happened to them because there was no follow-up,” says Campbell. “It would be like 121 children falling off a cliff in a bus and surviving terrible injuries, and nobody was interested in how they managed.” We can only hope her reporting is the first step towards the public hearing these children’s stories again — and, this time, believing them.

*This name has been changed.

By contrast, only a small number of Grinches with long memories and cynical dispositions point out that Churchill opened his wartime premiership with the promise of nothing but “blood, sweat and tears”. (His government of 1951, by contrast, promised to “set the people free” and ended up being, even in the eyes of his greatest admirers, an embarrassing shambles.) As for Reagan, his success owed at least as much to fear — of the Soviet Union, of national decline, of urban disorder — as it did to hope. Rambo not Rockie is the film to watch if you want to understand American politics in the early Eighties. We Grinches would point out that the most successful politician of recent times, Donald Trump, trades on the feeling that “carnage” is just around the corner.

Of course, the Left has a particular problem. It is, or has been, about selling change. Left-wing candidates have usually sought to persuade their supporters that things can get better, whereas British Conservatives argued that change was likely for the worst.

This brings us to the current state of the Labour Party. A few years ago, it looked as though Starmer would be Neil Kinnock — painfully leading his party back to electability but not quite fast enough to get elected himself. Now everything is going right for him. He is ahead in the opinion polls; his party is disciplined; his opponents — the SNP as much as the Conservatives — are falling apart. Prudent commentators talk of the dramatic swing that would be necessary for Labour to get an absolute majority in parliament, but my own money is on something close to a landslide.

This is not, though, quite the same as saying that Labour should be optimistic. In his conference speech last week, Starmer blamed the Tories for “kicking the hope out”. But this is not a hopeful time. Tony Blair came to power in almost uniquely propitious circumstances. Norman Lamont lost the Tories their reputation for economic competence with the sharp drop in the value of the pound on Black Wednesday of 1992, but Labour inherited the benefits of Ken Clarke’s competent Chancellorship that followed Lamont’s dismissal. Blair also reaped the results of patient negotiation by the Major government in Northern Ireland. This was good news for the province but also for the climate in Westminster: for the first time since the Sixties, senior ministers could walk the streets without a phalanx of nervous-looking bodyguards.

Conditions beyond the reach of the British government’s policy were also good. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that peace and democracy seemed to be on the rise. Almost everywhere except North Korea, spending on armaments dropped in the Nineties. World-weary commentators had spent years saying countries that had lived under Communist rule would take decades to adjust to liberal democracy but, as it turned out, the Czech Republic — one of the more repressive countries in the eastern bloc during the Eighties — was a liberal democracy within a few years. Even China seemed to have moved away from the repression of 1989, which was why the handover of Hong Kong did not, in the short term, produce the exodus that some had expected.

Compare this with what is likely to hit the next Labour government. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, he will face the worst circumstances that any new British prime minister has faced since May 1940. The sadistic relish with which Jeremy Hunt references economic figures makes one suspect that, first, he has given up all hope of buying the next election with tax cuts and, second, he does not even want to buy the next election because he knows that the consequences of Brexit and Covid may still be making themselves felt in five years’ time. And that’s not to mention the larger, sometimes existential, problems that the next government is going to face: Putin, Trump, China, climate change.

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So, the model for an incoming Starmer government should not be Blair’s victory in 1997 but Thatcher’s in 1979. She was not swept into power by a wave of hope; she floated in on a tide of despair. The Labour Party was exhausted after five years of trying to rule with a tiny minority. One of its most important leaders, Roy Jenkins, had effectively given up on the party. Not that the Tories were bouncing with excitement. At the time, the body thinking most usefully about the future of the Conservative Party was The Authority of Government Group: it met in an atmosphere of Eeyorish gloom. Its members thought that the power of the unions, among other things, might make Britain ungovernable — they were particularly worried by the prospect of future miners’ strikes, which they thought they would be unable to “win”. Some of them privately admired the Callaghan Labour government of 1976 to 1979, and doubted whether they would be able to do any better if they were elected.

Britain today is gripped by the same kind of pessimism that prevailed in the late Seventies — and Starmer needs to recognise this. The Labour Party should act within its constraints rather than acting as their job is to cheer everyone up with a group sing song. Indeed, nothing will undermine the Tories more than their recent, and most un-Tory, displays of optimism. Rishi Sunak’s new slogan seems to be “Long-term decisions for a brighter future”. If I were a Labour strategist, I would plaster the country with photographs of a grinning Boris Johnson having his cake and eating it.

Labour should play down expectations. It is often said that the public have lost faith in politicians. This is the exact opposite of what has happened. They have lost respect for politicians but, in some respects, this is precisely because they have too much faith in them. The public has come to treat politics as 17th-century peasants treated witchcraft — as a source of unlimited, if often malign, power. The fact that the NHS has long waiting lists in the aftermath of Covid is assumed to be the result of incompetence or bad intentions by ministers, rather as crop failure would once have been regarded as the result of some unpopular old woman putting toads in her cauldron.

Thatcher’s great achievement was to persuade people that there are many things that a government cannot do much about. Furthermore, when a government can do something, it invariably means making ruthless decisions about the balance between harm and good; as Nigel Lawson, quoting the French politician Pierre Mendès France, put it in his resignation speech: “To govern is to choose.” For Thatcher, this insight was applied to the economy: subsidies were withdrawn from industries that were bound to fail. The area of brutal choice for Starmer will be the environment.

Currently, the Labour leader is running scared from the result of the Uxbridge by-election, where opposition to Sadiq Khan’s measures against the most polluting cars seemed to account for an unexpected Tory victory. Starmer is also given to spouting nonsense about how everyone will benefit from a “Green industrial revolution”, when the truth is that protecting the future of the planet — or even just protecting the lungs of children who are unfortunate enough to live near the Westway flyover — is not going to come from a cosy, win-win solution. People, particularly vociferous middle-aged men, will be made to stop doing things that they want to do. Similarly, Starmer, who campaigned so energetically against Britain leaving the European Union, can hardly now plausibly claim that there is a “good Brexit” — especially at a time when the public seems to be losing faith that such a thing exists. Starmer should level with voters: his negotiations with Europe will be an exercise in damage control.

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Will the working class strike back?

By Richard Vinen

The other lesson of 1979 is that parties should not be sentimental about their voters. Many Tories were heartbroken that Scots abandoned them in that election: it is said that “Rab” Butler told Thatcher that she would have Scotland engraved on her heart as Mary Tudor had Calais, lost to the English crown in 1558, engraved on hers. But it was a small price to pay for winning seats in Essex or the Midlands. Labour should write off part of the Red Wall vote. Losing Birmingham Northfield, a working-class seat that used to revolve around the Longbridge car plant, is a small price to pay for holding every other seat in the city. There has been much talk recently of the “woke elite” holding “luxury beliefs” when it comes to, say, immigration — but “woke elite” in this context really means an educated middle class that is larger than ever before, and politically engaged. In truth, there would be no more self-indulgent luxury for the Labour Party than to hold on to a diminishing group of traditional working-class voters out of nostalgia, as if Left-wing politics is a Hovis ad.

Of course, there are some respects in which the first Thatcher government is a bad model for Starmer. Thatcher was lucky because Britain became a net exporter of oil early in her government and because General Galtieri was stupid enough to give her an opportunity for an easy military victory and, thus, a much higher level of electoral support. This meant that, for her first few years, Thatcher just had to survive, whereas she could afford to be radical — even, sometimes, optimistic — after the 1983 election. It is hard to imagine fortune smiling in this way on any British government in the next few years — and easy to imagine scenarios, such as a Russian attack on Poland, that would make a sizeable dent in Starmer’s good luck.

Unlike Thatcher, Starmer cannot afford to wait. He should take brave and controversial decisions early on — prioritising those, such as making some serious progress on the HS2 rail line, that would be hard for any subsequent government to reverse. Because for all his optimism, he cannot bet on a second term. Perhaps, in short, the best hope for the next Labour government would be to start with as little hope as possible.

For a party that is trailing in the polls and uncertain of its direction, hostility to Net Zero has an obvious allure. As a rallying cry, it can speak both to the tax-cutting, libertarian wing of the party and to its culture warriors, eager to renew the fight against experts, elites and international organisations. It offers a bridge between the tech-bro-utopianism of the prime minister and the concerns of motorists and lower-earners, who are facing rising emissions-costs. For many Conservatives, Net Zero smacks of subsidies, price guarantees and market interventions: a centralised re-planning of the economy that owes more to socialism than to science. And while the Uxbridge by-election centred on air-quality, not Net Zero, it offered a glimmer of electoral light to a party raking through the ashes of its recent poll-ratings.

But climate scepticism does not (yet) have a monopoly on Conservative thought. The Conservative Environment Network lists more than 200 MPs and peers on its website, drawn from across the party spectrum. The conflict over Net Zero, then, is not a contest between the “woke” Left and the “radical” Right. It brings into collision different visions of Conservatism, in a struggle for ownership of the Conservative tradition.

Tory environmentalists can point to a strong record on the issue, stretching back to the Fifties. It was Conservative governments that created the Department of the Environment, the National Parks Authorities, the Environment Agency and the Hadley Centre for Climate Research. Tory administrations introduced the Clean Air Acts, the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Environment Act, as well as the Landfill Tax, the Road-Fuel Escalator and, in England, the Plastic Bag Charge. And it was a Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, who made Net Zero a legal obligation.

When global warming first entered public consciousness in the Eighties and Nineties, it was Margaret Thatcher who sounded the most trenchant warnings. Addressing the World Climate Conference in 1990, she accused the world of “playing with the conditions” of life. “We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin”, endangering “the biological balance … on which human life depends”. This was a distinctly Conservative environmentalism — even taking care to warn business that “there will be no profit… for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet”.

For Conservative environmentalists, this is not simply a record to defend. It is a reminder that there are powerful strands within Conservatism that can be mobilised against its climate sceptics. The first is the instinct to “conserve”: the idea on which both “conservatism” and “conservation” are founded. For the Conservative intellectual Roger Scruton, global warming engaged “a fundamental moral idea to which conservatives attach great importance: the idea that those responsible for damage should also repair it”. He drew inspiration from the writings of Edmund Burke and his call to partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. For Burke, the living were but the “temporary possessors and life-renters” of society. As such, they had a moral responsibility not to “commit waste on their inheritance by destroying at their pleasure”, or “to leave to those who come after a ruin instead of a habitation”.

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That belief intersected with an emphasis, drawn from Christian conservatism, on “stewardship”: the belief, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, that humans were not the lords of creation but “the Lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged… with preserving life itself”. As she told the Conservative party conference in 1988: “The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy — with a full repairing lease.”

For much of its history, the Conservative Party was pre-eminently the party of the land; rooted, not just in the “landed interest”, but in a patriotic commitment to the natural environment. As Stanley Baldwin put it: “England is the country and the country is England.” Its sights, sounds and smells — “the corncrake on a dewy morning… the wild anemones in the woods of April” — should “be the inheritance of every child born into this country”. Scruton called this “oikophilia”: the love of home, understood not as nostalgia, but as a desire to pass on the heritage into which we were born. It was an impulse, he noted, that had mobilised millions behind the cause of environmental protection, through bodies such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Conservatism also has a tradition of thinking critically about markets, though it has been less visible in recent decades. For Scruton, markets were not a “quasi-religious” institution but a means to an end. In so far as they tended to equilibrium, markets were a useful “social organism” that contributed to “the maintenance of the social ecology”. But if costs could be dumped on “future generations”, or if “waste and spoliation” were treated “as cost-free externalities”, markets would become “anti-social and exploitative machines”.

Scruton offered a passionate, Conservative critique of the view that “growth” was always to be prized: “Growth is good only if it does not fill the sinks. In this sense much of the growth that we have seen since the Second World War has not been a gain but a loss — a vast appropriation from the future of assets that are being used up and not replaced.” Even Thatcher insisted that “free markets” would “defeat their object” if they did “more damage to the quality of life through pollution” than the well-being they promoted by “the production of goods and services”.

In this spirit, not with the laissez-faire insouciance they’re remembered for, the Thatcher governments intervened directly in markets, using taxes to discourage leaded petrol and banning products containing harmful CFCs. This owed something to Thatcher’s respect for scientific opinion: as she warned in 1988, “a nation which does not value trained intelligence is doomed”. It also marked her aversion to debt and her belief in “precautionary action”. If it was wrong to burden future generations with the costs of borrowing, it was equally wrong “to leave environmental debts for our children to clear up”. She compared climate action to household insurance, warning that it would be “more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.

This was climate politics as good housekeeping. It was also ecology as national security. “Spending on the environment”, Thatcher told an American audience, “is like spending on defence — if you do not do it in time, it may be too late”. In the decades that followed, the security implications of climate change would become ever more pressing. The 2021 Integrated Review, published by Boris Johnson, listed climate change alongside terrorism as a threat to security and prosperity. It was in response to such warnings that Johnson named “tackling climate change” as his “number one international priority”.

What does this mean for the future? Climate change asks new questions of all political traditions, but Conservative environmentalism has rich resources on which to draw from across its intellectual firmament. For those who are not Conservatives, the results may sometimes be frustrating. Conservative environmentalism may be more drawn to market solutions, or more sceptical of international agreements. The localism prized by Scruton may seem hopelessly inadequate to a global crisis, while the commitment of the Conservative Environment Network to “grow our economy faster” will alarm for whom “growth” itself is the problem.

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Liz Truss still haunts the Tories

By Robert Saunders

Conservative environmentalism will not look the same as its Labour or liberal equivalents — but that is precisely why we need it. Faced with such an awesome challenge, conservatism can bring a set of tools, ideas and insights that would otherwise be missing, in a mutually enriching exchange. As John Stuart Mill reminded the liberals of his own day, “from points of view different from his, different things are perceptible; and none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than those who do not see what he sees”.

If Conservatism turns its back on the climate question, it will be a dereliction of the Conservative tradition and those who claim to represent it. In 1936, in a debate over German rearmament, Winston Churchill, issued a warning that is as resonant today as when it was first delivered:

“Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger… The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”

“We cannot avoid this period,” Churchill concluded; “we are in it now”. Conservatives, and everyone else, should rise to the challenge.

Are things as bad as they were in 1978? Not on the surface, at least. Back then, the dead were left unburied and rubbish piled up in the streets as the government and trade unions entered into a battle to the death that both would lose. But today, like then, spiralling inflation is tearing at the fabric of society, forcing policymakers to squeeze the life out of the economy just to contain rising prices. And this time, it comes after 15 years of stagnant living standards; in the Seventies, life for the ordinary worker had improved year on year thanks to strong unions who could squeeze real-terms pay rises from employers.

Britain’s post-war economic history could be seen as one long battle against inflation and the search for an “anchor” to stop the doom loop of stop-start, boom and bust. In the Sixties and Seventies, both Labour and Tory governments adopted a “prices and incomes policy” believing that the way to control inflation was to manage people’s pay rises and what companies could charge for certain goods. This collapsed with the Winter of Discontent and the election of Margaret Thatcher, who came into power with her own grand theory, monetarism, which also failed.

Next, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was taken up — only to spectacularly collapse in 1992, along with John Major’s economic credibility. At this point, we formulated the “inflation target” and then outsourced the problem to the Bank of England in 1998: a monetary policy committee of technocratic experts was allowed to set interest rates which would keep inflation to this target. With this, we believed we had solved the problem.

For most of the next 20 years, inflation was not much of a story. First came the boom years of Blair and Brown when, apparently, the business cycle had been abolished — an era Mervyn King referred to (tongue firmly in cheek) as the “nice” years of “non-inflationary consistently expansionary” economics, his point being that no such thing existed. This was in 2005 and King was worried about rising oil prices fuelling inflation again. But then came the crash of 2008 and the subsequent years of austerity and stagnating living standards, cushioned only by the record-low interest rates which have now spectacularly come to an end.

Today, with inflation almost in double digits, the Bank of England is squeezing the economy hard, ratcheting up interest rates. Sunak, meanwhile, is hinting at further wage restraint on public-sector workers to put even more downward pressure on the economy in order to hit his own political target to halve inflation by the end of the year.

This, some might say, is merely the Bank doing its job: force-feeding the country some necessary bitter medicine. The problem, in other words, is not the system, or even those in charge of the system, but conditions beyond their control.

But the Bank can’t have it both ways. Were those decades of low inflation really thanks to its good judgement? Or could other structural reasons have played a part? After 1998, China flooded the world market with cheap goods; immigration from poor parts of Europe soared; and trade unions were no longer powerful enough to protect their workers’ living standards.

Many regard the period between 1992 and 2008 as Britain’s golden age, when sensible politics reigned; inflation was low, the economy grew, deficits were sustainable, debt was low and Britain’s place in Europe was settled. This was the post-Maastricht, post-ERM settlement: Britain was in the EU but outside the euro, conveniently placed within both the European single market and the great global financial system — a trusted, stable, liberally regulated investment opportunity, perfectly placed to boom in the 21st century. After decades searching for our anti-inflationary anchor, we had found it. We had solved politics. Many people still yearn for this settlement to be rebuilt.

And yet almost every plank of this settlement has collapsed. The financial system blew up in 2008, shattering the British economy and, with it, the New Labour political settlement on which it was built. A few years later, the eurozone crisis revealed the diplomatic weakness of Britain’s place outside the single currency, precipitating David Cameron’s failed attempt to renegotiate the terms of British membership, leading to Brexit. Our faith that the Bank of England could control inflation is one of the last remaining planks left in place. And now that looks close to breaking.

There are good arguments that our current spike in inflation is a blip caused by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But there are other reasons to believe it might be here to stay. China, for example, is no longer simply a mass producer of cheap goods, but is turning itself into a high-skilled, hi-tech manufacturing superpower — a kind of super-Germany. Meanwhile, the great power rivalry between the US and China is bifurcating the world economy, throwing up protectionist trade barriers which will inevitably drive up the price of goods. And finally, the free movement of workers from Europe has ended with Brexit. In short, the three structural reasons which might have kept inflation low for 30 years are no longer in place. And this is before taking into account the energy transition to “net zero” which most Western governments are currently pursuing.

If we are entering a world of persistent inflation, high interest rates and the return of stop-start economics, you can bet that, as night follows day, the search for a new easy fix will commence — a new “anchor”. If only we returned to the EU, our problems would be solved, some will argue. If only we replaced the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee with better people; if only we returned to some kind of collective pay bargaining; if only we unilaterally abandoned our trade barriers. If only, if only, if only.

The truth is we have far less control than we like to admit. To think that we have solved the inflationary conundrum by outsourcing it to the Bank of England is as hubristic as all the other assumptions we made about the end of history in the Nineties.

Britain’s central bankers can’t solve the inflation problem in isolation. It has one set of tools — interest rates — and these are blunt instruments at best. In both the Seventies and Eighties, it quickly became clear that monetary policy alone was not enough to deal with inflation; fiscal tightening was also necessary. And even then, sudden shocks in the global economy completely changed the domestic picture, whether the oil price rise of 1973 or oil price crash of 1986.

The other lesson from history is that the battle to control inflation is, by its nature, political not technocratic. Whichever method you choose to keep it under control, the burden necessarily falls on one group in society over another. In the Seventies, unionised workers protected themselves with good pay rises, while those living on fixed incomes, like the elderly, were badly hurt. Over the past 15 years it has been the opposite. Today, meanwhile, it looks like the burden will fall on those with mortgages — a group that has largely avoided the pain until now.

While inflation seemed under control in the Nineties and early 2000s, few paid much attention to the distributional consequences of the system, but today the whole structure is back under scrutiny. And so it should be. Not only is the Bank’s competence fair game, so too is the system itself, resting as heavily as it does on interest rate rises over other tools.

With an election on the horizon, we may find ourselves in a new world where the Bank of England is working to meet a medium-term target set by a government whose other policies are making it harder to reach that target. This was briefly the case under Liz Truss, when she tried to put rocket boosters under the British economy regardless of the inflationary consequences. In doing so, she was not acting like her hero, Margaret Thatcher, but far more like Ted Heath in 1972 who ordered his chancellor Anthony Barber to unveil an expansionary budget in time for Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973, wrongly believing a virtuous cycle of growth and modernisation was on the horizon.

Truss is unlikely to be the last prime minister to find themselves in conflict with the Bank. Will Sunak really be able to avoid the temptation of an inflationary tax cut before the next election? Don’t bet on it. And if he does cut taxes, prepare for the squeeze after the election — and the stop-start cycle begins again.

The eternal truth is that there is no magic cure for Britain’s economic ills — no framework which solves our problems forever. Governance is art, not architecture: the management of circumstance, not the building of permanent structures. Inflation is back and so too are the politics of inflation. Strap in for a bumpy ride.

Britain’s waters are in a foul state. Official statistics show that there was an average of 825 sewage spills a day last year — including in the Environment Secretary’s own Suffolk constituency, where the water contains levels of e. coli more than 20 times the limit for bathing. In England, just 14% of rivers are rated ecologically “good”. In January, an NHS worker caught hepatitis while wild swimming, and last summer, dozens of beaches in England were closed due to toxic waste warnings.

The result is that the seemingly old-fashioned issue of sanitation — a problem most of us thought we’d solved around the same time as cholera — has once again become a political flashpoint. Half the British public now see protecting rivers as an important voting issue. In the May local elections, both the Liberal Democrats and Greens specifically targeted sewage as a swing issue — and saw their biggest gains in years. The Conservative seats newly up for by-elections should take note: Nadine Dorries’ former constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, for one, is currently in uproar at the sorry state of the river Ouse.

This is part of a wider trend: the environment is now regularly among the top four issues most important to the electorate — beating issues such as crime or childcare. It is even more of a focus in Conservative-held swing seats. And there’s a reason why sewage inspires such strong emotions — beyond the fact that it’s ruined the wild swimming trend. The scandal is in many ways a perfect microcosm of Britain’s political woes of the last decade: austerity, failed privatisation, corporate greed, climate apathy. After all, what good is a government if it can’t keep our shit out of our streams?

If you want to understand how this country’s waters got into such a mess, an obvious place to start is in 2010, with the coalition government. Its austerity policies slashed spending ringfenced for environmental protection by 80%, gutting the Environmental Agency’s ability to monitor our waters and, crucially, enforce punitive measures against polluters. It’s hardly surprising that, since then, sewage spill events into British rivers have doubled.

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But one could go back even further. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that, in 1989, privatised water utilities in England — making it the only country in the world to do so. The water companies were granted regional monopolies, debt-free, the argument being that they could run the system more competitively than the state could. In reality, many water companies have spent the decades since loading themselves with debt, deploying increasingly byzantine financial engineering to avoid corporation tax, and paying billions to shareholders and millions to their own executives — all the while under-investing in infrastructure and hiking prices for customers at rates considerably above inflation. Handed a money tap, they simply turned the spigot.

But if you want to get to the real heart of our sewage crisis, it makes sense to go back even further, to the summer of 1858, and the now infamous “Great Stink”. One of the things that period dramas never capture about Victorian England is the stench. It’s hard to imagine: tanneries filled the air with the scent of urine-soaked hides, and soap-makers with the smell of boiling bones. Carriages clogged the roads, leaving them caked in horse manure. But worst of all would have been the smell of human shit.

Before the widespread adoption of sewers, people used privies — holes that emptied into a cesspit. For centuries those cesspits were cleaned out by nightsoil men, who would come by and, for a small fee, dig out and cart your waste away to farms on the outskirts of the city to be used as fertiliser. In the 1840s, led by sanitary reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, the British government passed a series of measures to try to clean up the capital. Among their reforms: mandating the connection of cesspits to the city’s sewers.

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It was a deadly mistake. Rather than clear the air as Chadwick had hoped, the solution channelled an ever-greater deluge of foulness into the Thames. By the 1850s, the river was unimaginably polluted. Dickens called it a “deadly sewer”, Benjamin Disraeli a “stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”. In the summer of 1858, London boiled. The water levels in the river fell, leaving the waste within slathered up the banks. The smell fell foul across the city; there were reports of people feeling sick from miles away. Parliament ordered the curtains doused in lime chloride to mask the stench, with little effect.

The Great Stink led Westminster’s flailing political classes to finally act. They appointed the Joseph Bazalgette — one of the great British engineers of his time — to design a massive new sewage system for London. Bazalgette’s plan was astonishing in scope: it resulted in the laying of 720km of new sewer lines and the creation of the Victoria and Albert embankments, reshaping the city and its connection to the Thames. The resulting reduction in exposure to unclean water likely prevented millions of deaths; it’s thought that the introduction of sanitation in the 19th century added 20 years to the average human lifespan.

But Bazalgette’s design had a significant flaw; it was a combined sewer — that is, the main underground pipes were designed to carry both wastewater from buildings and rainwater collected by the city’s drains, to help dilute and flush out the system. During unusually heavy rainfall, they would flood; with such instances in mind, the sewers were designed with outlet valves called Combined Sewer Overflows, which would expel excess flow directly into waterways, untreated. Here is where our current sewage crisis stems from.

When Bazalgette designed London’s sewers, overflows were supposed to be a rare event. But various factors have conspired to make them commonplace. One is the all-engulfing expansion of concrete: new roads, pavements, and building developments block rainwater from entering natural soakaways — trees, soils, wetlands — that would otherwise absorb it. Another factor, inevitably, is climate change, which increased the occurrence and intensity of storms — and therefore flooding.

Today, there are around 100,000km of combined sewers in England alone, and around 15,000 overflows. Modern sanitary engineers hate them, but because so many of the central “hub” sewers are combined, introducing new models often doesn’t make a difference. To prevent spills, water utilities have periodically built storm overflow tanks, designed to hold excess sewage until it can be treated. But due to systemic under-investment by water companies, there is at present simply not enough capacity to store it all. For my book, Wasteland, I visited Mogden sewage works in London, which serves an estimated two million people: it has a series of storm tanks installed, and yet in 2020 alone it released enough sewage into the Thames to fill 2,768 Olympic swimming pools.

Water companies often use their ancient infrastructure as an excuse for not solving their pollution problem. It’s certainly true that replacing our combined system would be a Bazalgettian feat; a government-commissioned report, published in 2021, estimated that eliminating storm overflows in the UK would cost up to £600 billion, and increase household bills by up to £999 a year. (Not that we would have to replace the whole system to make the situation more bearable.) It would also do nothing to solve the other primary culprit behind our spoiled waters, the rampant phosphate pollution by industrial farms. The current plan, in London at least, is to divert the existing combined sewers into something even bigger: the £5 billion Tideway Tunnel currently being dug under the Thames. Thames Water estimates that when the “super sewer” is completed in 2024, 95% of raw sewage that pollutes the river today will no longer flow into it.

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But the fact is, just continuously expanding the old system isn’t going to work. This is one of the central dilemmas presented by climate change: do we press ahead with novel but potentially expensive technological solutions, or do we look back, and find inspiration in the natural world? China, for example, has met the sewage challenge by embracing so-called “sponge cities”, in which natural soakaways, permeable pavements, and wetlands are being built into city planning in order to soak up storm water and prevent flooding.

But swales and reed beds are not going to replace our traditional sewage infrastructure any time soon. Solving this problem can’t wait. With summer droughts becoming more common and storms more intense, protecting our water supply is only becoming more vital. Whoever wants to win the next election is going to need to convince the public they can turn the situation around, and fast.

And so I continue to live in a very strange mezzanine flat with a tin foil-effect, orange, dappled wall we are not allowed to paint over, praying they don’t raise the rent next year because there’s not much further east in this city I can go.

Problems with the housing system in this country track straight back to Thatcher’s “Right To Buy” Housing Act in the Eighties, which offered such irresistible purchase terms to council tenants that a huge amount of the country’s public housing stock went private almost overnight, and there it has stayed. We are not building enough homes, and the ones we are building very often loophole their way around the wet tissue paper of affordable housing regulation, to create stacks of dizzyingly expensive grey newbuilds — often over the exact same spot where thriving community blocks once stood.

A buy-to-let boom in the early Aughts winnowed the housing stock even further, and now look where we are: people are queuing for rental viewings, outbidding one another on houses for sale, writing earnest letters about how wholesomely they will live there. Housing prices stay high and stable, justifying the mythical “market rate” — a number made up, and reinvented every six weeks, by estate agents — which means rents go up in turn, which means people renting save less, which means their buying power diminishes even further. Then came the pandemic. I don’t know a single person whose rent hasn’t gone up since, and gone up drastically.

So those are some of the problems. But the main one is inter-generational communication. It’s in the mud. How do you explain to a generation who saved for a deposit for three years that cutting back on brunch isn’t going to be enough? All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In threatens, at least, to close that communication gap. Like me, Yates has lived in a lot of buildings (25, to my lowly 13): flats, houses, temporary accommodation, studios above car showrooms. Like me, Yates has written a lot about housing — as well as youth culture, politics, and music (an early chapter details how the thin walls of the since-demolished Green Man Lane estate meant you learned about music based on what your neighbours like listening to). Unlike me, Yates maintains her cool. I recently ruined a polite lunch with an elderly relative with one of my “landlords are scum” tirades, which went on far too long and changed absolutely no one’s mind.

Renting used to be a viable way to exist in this country. Figure out which parts of the city or country you actually like. Have 10 housemates and live on the cheap and pursue something dumb and creative for a couple of years. Don’t move in with that boyfriend you’re not sure about just because your tenancy agreements are both up at more-or-less the same time. It now just means paying the most money you’ve ever paid for anything, every single month, for something that mostly sucks and is actively stopping you getting on the fabled British dream, the housing ladder. And then you get an e-mail in January saying: rent’s going up again.

It would have been easy for a book about the bottom-to-middle unfairness of the housing system to turn into a manifesto shouted into an echo chamber, but Yates remembers to be funny while explaining how messed up it all is. She takes in the wonder of having a plant in your house, for a generation who rarely gets to actually plunge one into the soil of a garden; the small beauty of that one trinket that when you unpack it makes a place feel a little like home; the frequent movers’ aversion to collecting too much stuff. These details are important. The strange rift between those who rent now (in hell) and those who rented then (during the three years required to save a deposit) often strips out the sheer reality of being alive — of the comfort of home, of peace and quiet, of making friends with your neighbours, of forming stronger and more useful communities with years-deep bonds.

Those who float above the rental market have forgotten what it’s like to come in from a long day of work to find three random people in your front room because your flatmate says so. Or: how one person’s decision to abruptly move out and give you all only 20 days’ notice threatens to ruin the next month of your life and potentially bankrupt you. Or: not telling your GP you moved because you like them and getting a new one is a nightmare. Or: how renting feels like moving a cardboard box from house to house, never fully unpacking, because your role in the system isn’t to live a life and steal some peace at the end of the day, it’s to keep the value of the property you’re in nice and high by making it look like you were never there at all.

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In the chapter on her time in halls at Goldsmiths, Yates describes coming home from an exhausting catering shift to one of those pounding pyramid-of-tins parties that only students can throw. Her anecdotes always have a point. She makes it clear that, though the cheap furniture is the same for every student, the experience for those from working-class and middle-class backgrounds is vitally different: The Best Years Of Your Life don’t apply to everyone. These details, again and again, help push the central thesis of the book: living with a roof over your head shouldn’t be this hard, exhausting, and expensive.

This book is one that needs to be pressed into a lot of hands, then. Because we only hear about the housing crisis when mortgage rates go up. There is still a generational divide between what rent means as a system, and what it actually is now. Twenty years ago, my sister was able to rent a flat for a year on her own “just to see how she liked it” — this is fairly unimaginable to me. But the theory of renting still works — and the practice of it did for a long time in this country. Something has broken, though. Why can the fabled German rental market — with its infinite tenancies and rent-hike regulation — work so normally and so relatively well, while ours is just an Old West shoot-out? Because everyone still thinks the problem lies with avocado toast. The communication here has to change.

All The Houses… wouldn’t work if Yates didn’t finish up by making sensible, workable, viable suggestions on how to fix things, which she does: rent controls, “Right To Return” policies for communities dislodged by tower block regeneration, annual housing MOTs written into law and adhered to before a landlord can raise rent — which should be capped, by the way. We should actually enforce affordable housing targets, build more and safer social housing, and write housing administration lessons into the curriculum. There are radical solutions and there are community-driven ones, but there isn’t a clear one, and when the system is working so well for a privileged few, there’s not enough agitation to change it. This is why “stop going on holiday!” is somehow the dominant form of housing ladder advice.

If you’re living in a mortgaged property right now, and feeling fairly safe and secure about it, go kiss your doorframe for me. Pat your stairs and look out of your windows. Refresh your e-mail inbox and enjoy the fact that it didn’t just tell you that you’re being evicted. You’re one of the lucky ones. But don’t you think having a home shouldn’t be based on luck anymore?

It would be unfair to suggest that the same was true of his journalism, but his stint as political editor of the Daily Mirror, starting in the late Eighties, was not distinguished. He was tribally loyal to Labour, and these were dark days for the party, which had lost three elections in a row and was shortly to lose a fourth, in 1992. His response was to fill the paper’s news pages with relentlessly partisan abuse. As a hack, his best-known contribution to political debate was starting a rumour that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants. (“I am only 90% sure of the accuracy of the claim,” he acknowledged.)

Perhaps some of the bitter triviality reflected his own thwarted hopes. In the run-up to the 1992 election, he was widely touted as the front-runner to become Neil Kinnock’s press officer should Labour win. But when Labour didn’t win, Campbell had to wait instead for the election of Tony Blair as leader in 1994 before getting the summons to become his press secretary. The job title didn’t reflect the role, Blair hastened to add; “it’s much more than that,” he said.

So it was to be. Campbell was generally referred to as a spin doctor, a relatively new term that had crossed the Atlantic in 1988 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary the following year. The job of the spin doctor, according to Peter Mandelson, the first British figure to be so described, was “to create the truth”. There were limits, though. “They can cajole and protest and manipulate and bully if they want,” Campbell explained. “They can explain their master’s thinking. But the master’s thinking and actions are what count.”

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That was the role occupied by Bernard Ingham when he was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, but many felt that the master-servant image was no longer entirely accurate. “When you heard Bernard Ingham speaking, you heard Margaret Thatcher,” observed ex-Labour aide Joy Johnson. “When you heard Tony Blair, very often you heard Alastair Campbell.” It was a common perception, and Blair did little that might correct it; in his memoirs, he wrote of Campbell: “He was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego.”

In any event, Campbell was — with Blair, Gordon Brown, and Mandelson — one of the Four Horsemen of New Labour. Following the election triumph of 1997, he accumulated still greater power. He ran an ever-expanding empire of press officers and political advisers at the expense of the civil service, he attended cabinet meetings in a way that his predecessors had not, and he took on the role of party discipline at Westminster: in a symbolic move, the press team moved into 12 Downing Street, traditionally the preserve of the Whips’ Office. Charges of control freakery were widely aired.

He was, everyone agreed, supremely good at his job. A large part of that job, however, seemed to include dragging politics down to the level of his commentary at the Daily Mirror. “Alastair tabloidery,” Blair called it, the tendency to pursue headlines rather than deliverable policies. “Political coverage in this country is a joke,” Campbell complained in 1999. “Most of the national media treat politics as a soap opera.” He made his contribution to that.

He contributed too to the growing distrust of politicians. Blair had been elected as the alternative to Tory sleaze, but by 1999 The Sun, which had backed Labour in the general election, was calling the prime minister “Tony Bliar”. Much of the criticism was aimed at Campbell’s media operation. Back in 1996, he’d appeared in a libel case and been castigated by the judge for being “less than completely open and frank”; he was “not a witness in whom I could feel 100% confidence”. By the turn of the century, there were many who agreed with that judgement.

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It came to a head, of course, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. An intelligence dossier was released to justify the war, and when the BBC queried the degree of political interference in its preparation, Campbell decided that the best form of defence was attack. The ensuing battle cost the jobs of the BBC’s chairman and director general, and the life of the UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who killed himself after being identified as a source for the story. “If Alastair Campbell hadn’t started his war against the BBC, then Dr Kelly would still be alive today,” said Sky’s political editor, Adam Boulton, while the headline in Campbell’s old paper the Daily Mirror was: “Spun to death — Iraq expert driven to tragic ‘suicide’.”

Campbell resigned in 2003, but returned to run the 2005 election campaign, completing Blair’s remarkable hat trick of victories. After that, though, the magic seemed to have been lost. He helped with the unsuccessful elections of 2010 and 2015 and was an adviser to the equally unsuccessful People’s Vote campaign to get a second referendum on Brexit. Nonetheless, it was Brexit that gave him a new lease of media life: he became editor-at-large of The New European, and launched The Rest Is Politics podcast with fellow Europhile Rory Stewart.

Now comes a new book, But What Can I Do?, about the deplorable state of politics today. His analysis will come as no great revelation. He’s sympathetic to the idea of a written constitution; he thinks social media “has done much to harm thoughtful public debate”; he deplores “the culture war distractions of the radical Right”; he recycles lame gags about “Kamikwasi Trussonomics”.

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As a state-of-the-nation address, it comes with inbuilt obsolescence, with all the temporary nature of journalism, full of references to what happened “last autumn” or “last November”. Despite which, it seems stuck in 2018, so that former US president Donald Trump gets five times as many mentions as current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It feels like reading yesterday’s papers.

Much of it is a rambling, sometimes ranting, denunciation of “the Trumps, Johnsons, Netanyahus, Putins and Bolsonaros”, the populist leaders who have wrecked the democratic process. That’s a fairly disparate collection of individuals, but Campbell argues that there are common traits. Populists, he writes, are those who denounce “the elite”, and use the polarising language of “us” and “them”. And they’re not just to be found on the Right; there are also “populists of the Left”. There are those who divide the nation into “the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism”, while railing against “the cynics, the elites, the establishment”. Oh, hang on, that was Blair in a 1999 conference speech, which doesn’t get a look-in here.

These new populists are also barefaced liars. When did this casual attitude towards the truth start, one might ask? Certainly not on Campbell’s watch; he’s keen to point out that there were “several official and parliamentary inquiries” into Iraq, “none of which concluded that I lied”. In fact, not even his political enemies were deliberately deceitful in the old days. From Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May, he says of the prime ministers before Johnson, “none were in my view liars”. This wasn’t always his view. “Truth. Remember that,” he challenged in 1992. John Major and Norman Lamont “lie because it comes easy to them and because it is the only way they can survive”.

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He sometimes sounds like one of those academics who is triggered by the sight of a Union Jack and takes to Twitter to announce that we’re now living in a fascist regime. Mention referendums, for example, and we’re straight onto Vladimir Putin staging a rigged vote in the occupied parts of Ukraine. In 1975, Thatcher quoted Clement Attlee’s description of referendums as “a device of dictators and demagogues”; Campbell notes this approvingly, but forgets to mention that it was New Labour that made referendums part of normal politics in the first place.

Similarly over-wrought is Campbell’s claim that the British Right-wing press “would not look out of place in North Korea”. To be fair, though, it does take him until p. 34 to go for the inevitable comparison, segueing effortlessly from Nigel Farage to “Europe in the Thirties”. But once it’s out in the open, we get an entire chapter on “The Threat of Fascism”. This would all be more convincing if we hadn’t been here before. “Britain is being run by a dictatorship,” was Campbell’s implausible verdict on Major’s government in 1992.

One could go on. He’s shocked — shocked! — at the sight of Johnson’s government “attacking the BBC”. That’ll be the same BBC that he denounced as a “down-market, dumbed down, over staffed, over bureaucratic, ridiculous organisation”, even before the War of the Dodgy Dossier.

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But the point is not just that Campbell is wildly forgetful of his own time in politics and journalism. It’s more that, by airbrushing the past, he’s avoiding the issues. He leaves the big questions unasked, let alone answered. Why did Farage’s populist rhetoric about “the elite” resonate with so many? Might it be because of the extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the super-rich during New Labour’s time in office? Was disillusionment prompted by a government that the public thought was on their side proving instead to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”?

If you’re looking at disengagement from the political process, it’s worth considering the 2001 general election, when turnout was so low that the number of abstentions was greater than the number who voted for Labour.

In Campbell’s analysis, however, the rot only set in with the global financial crisis of 2008, an event so massive that it warrants an abbreviation: the GFC. His coverage is so brief, however, that those initials only get used once. Maybe he doesn’t like to dwell, lest he has to explain why Britain was so exposed to the banking meltdown that started in America. After the event, Gordon Brown complained that a “shadow banking system had proliferated without politicians being aware of it,” and it’s hard not to think that the man who’d been chancellor for a decade perhaps should have been aware of it.

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On a personal level, Campbell’s problem — the reason he worries about whether he’s “Dadsplaining” — is that he’s been overtaken by the world he helped to create. He would obviously disagree, but surely Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are part of his legacy. So too, perhaps, is Brexit itself. Partly because even Campbell’s famed tabloid instincts failed to alert him to the impact of the huge rise in immigration. But even more for squandering the chance of moving closer to the European Union.

Because the biggest issue in Blair’s first term — even if it was ducked — was the single currency, and the imminent arrival of the euro. Should Britain join this venture or not? Blair was in favour. Gordon Brown was not. Nor was Rupert Murdoch, whose views carried some weight. And Campbell? Well, he wasn’t much fussed one way or another. “I was not that bothered about the euro,” he wrote in his diary. “It didn’t move me like a Labour v. Tory battle did.”

Maybe he should have cared a little more. Regardless of whether one thinks it would have been good for the country, being part of the single currency would have been transformative. It would have tied Britain so closely to Europe that it would have made a Leave vote very unlikely, indeed would have made a referendum unlikely.

Without Brexit, though, where would Campbell be now? His belated rallying to the European cause has been the re-making of his reputation, wiping away much of the stain of Iraq. As he was during his time at the Daily Mirror, he’s now fighting rearguard actions for the losing side, and it’s a role that suits him admirably. The player of the pipes might not call the tune, but he does get his voice heard.

This didn’t happen when I was growing up. One of those men would probably have been welding in a shipyard and the other passing his father through the cage doors at the pithead of the village colliery as they changed shifts.

The ex-coalfield communities of Durham are ghost towns today, their once vibrant high streets boarded up and dead. I don’t believe there is a shop or business in my village or the surrounding towns and villages that has not been burgled at least three or four times. I have a letting office in the high street that was hit three times last year. The factory unit I run my building business from has its doors pulled off at least once a year: the last time, only two weeks ago. My brother owns the last pub standing and has a list of 46 crimes committed on his premises — from serious assault to car crime — none of which have ended in prosecution. Why? Because there was no investigation. Even the undertaker’s shop has had its doors kicked off in the middle of the night, for the sake of a Help the Heroes charity box. He had buried a veteran that day. The thieves took his hearse and ram-raided the local café and made off with the till before parking the hearse in the North Sea. The dentist’s surgery, smashed up, the only remaining butcher cleaned out of meat in the dead of the night, a sandwich shop robbed and burned out, the hairdresser’s shop ransacked, the hardware shop constantly hit despite its owner taking most of his stock home every night in his van.

The last time my shop was robbed, I rang the police. I was put on hold for over one hour before being told, if I wanted an attendance, I would have to apply by email and at the present time it was taking them about three or four weeks to get an officer out. My friend and neighbour had his house burgled just before Christmas. The criminals took his children’s Christmas presents he’d hidden in his wardrobe, put them in his wife’s car and drove off. A few weeks later his wife spotted her car while doing the school run and followed it to the house of a known criminal. She rang the police and was informed after a three day wait that the case was now closed. My friend made an official complaint, which resulted in the police eventually visiting the address weeks later, only to report that the known criminal had proved it was his car despite my friend still having the original documents for the vehicle in his possession. Case closed.

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Few around here contact the police anymore. That stopped years ago. Looking at my village and the surrounding towns and villages today reminds me of the film Shaun of the Dead. The untidy queues of dehumanised zombies shuffling into the steel-shuttered shopfronts of the only thriving businesses left, the chemists, have the place I grew up in looking more like a Forties death camp than modern day Britain. This new “underclass” go there twice a day, some three, to take their supervised dose of the taxpayer-funded legal high, methadone; a heroin substitute.

The ex-mining villages and towns of East Durham have the highest rate of people on sickness benefit in the UK, the highest rate of people on invalidity benefit and by far the highest rate of people who have been on invalidity for the longest period of time. The people around here have the lowest percentage of car ownership in Britain. The highest rate of unemployment. The lowest home ownership and believe it, if you can, over the last decade, while life expectancy for men around here has not gone up or down, for women it has dropped. This is the only place in Britain where the life expectancy for women is dropping. Another friend of mine is an undertaker in Hartlepool and told me that he now has just as many clients under 35 than elderly. My brother’s daughter was one. She was kicked to death for a drug debt of £50. She was 32, witty and highly intelligent.

I’ve heard many so-called experts over the years say it is difficult to link the social depravation and high levels of crime directly to Thatcher’s deliberate policies of deindustrialisation. All I can conclude from this is that there is no such thing as an expert.

A little over 100 years ago there was nothing here; just fields. Once coal was discovered, the villages were built immediately. My forefather’s bred for cutting coal. Then came Thatcher.

I left school in 1982, just as Thatcher was riding high on a popularity wave after single-handedly taking back the Falkland Islands despite never pulling on a pair of boots or leaving London. I was not taught anything at my comprehensive school that might have prevented me from going down the pit, on the contrary, I was only ever given the skills required for when I inevitably found myself at the bottom of that 1,500-foot shaft. As coal could not be cut by pen, it had been decided I and many around me should remain illiterate. I clearly remember a whole bunch of us going to our village colliery to sign up for a miner’s life. We were told to fill in application forms. The few writers helped the many non-writers and we were asked to return in exactly one month. We did but the gates were chained. The mine closed. The dole queue I joined the back of was four and a half million souls long.

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The ship building industry was put to death soon after. British steel fell. British rail disappeared, British Gas gone, British telecom, still there, but belonging to someone else. The national Grid, chopped up and sold for a song. Even the very waterways, pipes, and drainage systems laid by our forefathers, snatched away. British aerospace with its airports, sold off. And last-but-not-least, our Royal Mail, snapped up for a fraction of its worth by wealth investors. Ours one day, gone the next.

Thatcher had been busy slipping through new legislation while the wider British public were glued to images of burned-out ships from her South Atlantic war. The miners could no longer be supported by any other group of workers. “Coming out in sympathy,” was banned by legislation so radical that even some Tories had the decency to abstain. The new laws ran rough-shod over hundreds of years of hard-earned worker’s rights.

I don’t believe any beast, person or group of people has ever survived having their heart ripped out and my community and surrounding communities are no exception.

It was like a political bomb went off on that day as we gathered, shocked and bewildered, at our pit’s locked gates, killing some, blasting some of us to the four corners of the world whilst leaving some poor souls blackened, lame and smouldering in the ashes. As for me, I left, travelling the world in search of a better life. “Deserting a sinking ship,” you might say. However, after coming back, years later, literate and witnessing not just a lack of progression but a shocking regression, I wrote a book that hopefully might create, at least some awareness, of what the poor souls here suffered, and the survivors are still suffering today.

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We have seen a string of inert careerist politicians come and go since Maggie, each one as inept and bland as the last. The working people here have nowhere to aim their vote, their will unrepresented. It seems the trapdoor under the old likeminded and relatable working-class politician has snapped opened, leaving not only an empty stage but a gapping vacuum where no one new would dare stand. The majority here, who on-the-whole still consider themselves of the Left, feel neglected. They admire straightforwardness, bravery even, yet their beloved Labour party was and still is a coward.

So, as for now, the tsunami of poverty, deprivation, alcoholism, divorce, depression, and addiction to illegal and prescription drugs is still gathering momentum. “Bad life syndrome,” the local health workers are chastised for calling it here. Thousands of lives, lacking aim, opportunity, or fulfilment, treated with pills and powders.

Recently, NHS nurses have been striking over pay, but it doesn’t appear to me that they have any real public support. It seems the tortoise head of pan-bashers who made their trendy din of appreciation during the pandemic have retracted into the safe shell of their homes; their silence, deafening. The rail workers, the teachers, the university staff, doctors, ambulance drivers, healthcare workers, airport workers, civil servants, the post office workers and more have all been involved in industrial action this year — separately. Despite them all belonging to one much larger group. The working classes.

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It is hard to believe one person in the top job could change the personality of a nation. From a once caring and united community-driven society to the fractured and divided, “I’m alright Jack, ‘loads ov money,” dog-eat-dog existence we are enduring today, but it happened. And it happened in my lifetime.

There is a new breed of politician today, claiming that British industries were put to death on grounds of the environment. This is completely untrue.

The way worker’s rights along with British industries were irradicated and the conscious effort it took to achieve this should never be forgotten. For a so-called developed nation to have treated and still treat its subjects with such contempt was, and still is, a disgrace and deserves no forgiveness. Margaret Hilda Thatcher died in the luxury of the Ritz Hotel, London, of a stroke in 2013. On the day she died and on the day of her funeral, nobody I know worked. We put up flags and bunting, flocked to our few surviving pubs, drank lots and danced into the night. You probably have difficulty understanding this depth of hatred and that I can understand. But if you had walked under my skies on the same pothole-laden paths as I, then believe me, you too would have drunk beer and danced with me long into those nights. And just to be clear, we did not celebrate because we were naïve enough to imagine that because of her death, things might now get better. It was spite.

These were the exceptions rather than the rule in the cultural establishment. For the most part, there was an early dislike of Thatcher that rapidly hardened into hatred. She was, said TV dramatist Dennis Potter, “the most obviously repellent manifestation of the most obviously arrogant, divisive and dangerous British government since the war”. Or, in the words of Jonathan Miller, she “was loathsome, repulsive in almost every way, with her odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism”.

No previous prime minister had attracted these levels of opprobrium, but more striking still was that she exerted such a strong cultural fascination even before reaching Downing Street. There were jokes about her in sitcoms such as George and Mildred and Fawlty Towers when she was leader of the opposition, and she warranted a mention in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s 1978 poem “It Dread Inna Inglan”: “Maggie Thatcher — on she goes with a racist show, but she has to go.” She went on to set a modern record both for the length of her premiership and for the number of negative appearances she made in comedy and music.

Part of the dislike came from the fact that Thatcher herself appeared so little interested in the world of culture. She was, said Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music, a “stupid mindless Philistine”. Even the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, a friend and devotee, who liked to think of himself as an eminently civilised man, concluded sadly: “She has no taste.”

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That wasn’t quite right. As a teenager, she’d been a regular cinema-goer, dreaming of dancing like Ginger Rogers and enthusiastically reviewing the movies she’d seen in letters to her older sister. (“I can’t say I liked it,” she noted of the 1941 adaptation of Love on the Dole.) But her taste never seemed to develop much further.

As an adult, she had better things to do, and the arts were strictly peripheral in her life. She was a guest on Desert Island Discs in 1978, and opted for obvious pieces by Beethoven, Dvorak and Verdi. A decade later, when she was asked about her favourite books, she said she was currently re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Fourth Protocol, a novel in which she herself featured (favourably, in this instance). The impression was that she didn’t know much, and cared slightly less. She was more clear about what she didn’t like; she dismissed Francis Bacon as “that artist who paints those horrible pictures”, which may have been the truth but wasn’t the whole truth.

It was all so appallingly middle-brow and — to use that insult of Miller’s — suburban: the most damning of all adjectives in British cultural circles. To make things worse, she disapproved of state funds being used to prop up uneconomic businesses and made no exception for the arts. After all, Andrew Lloyd-Webber was a man of the theatre and he managed to stand on his own two feet without relying on government hand-outs. “Why can’t you be more like Andrew?” she demanded of Hall, who was beginning to regret his 1979 vote. As Jim Hacker said in her favourite TV show, Yes, Minister: “Why should the rest of the country subsidise the pleasures of the middle-class few?” For her enemies, this wasn’t a culture war so much as a war on culture.

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As was sometimes the case with Thatcher, however, the rhetoric was not matched by reality. During her time in office, spending by the Arts Council in England and Wales increased by over 20% in real terms. (It fell slightly in Scotland.) There were major new initiatives, as well. One of the biggest projects of recent decades — the building of the British Library — was undertaken on her watch, and there was also the introduction, after decades of lobbying, of the Public Lending Rights scheme, which rewarded writers when their books were borrowed from public libraries.

And then there was Channel 4, launched in 1982 and charged with catering for minority tastes and interests. Jeremy Isaacs, the chief executive of the new channel, understood this as meaning “minorities” in a Ken Livingstone kind of way. “Should black Britons, should the young, should feminists, should homosexuals see themselves, canvass their ideas, on television?” he said. “I see no reason why not. They are of this society, not outside it.” That wasn’t what the government meant. “You’ve got it all wrong,” the Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit told Isaacs. “Golf and sailing and fishing. Hobbies. That’s what we intended.”

It was too late, and the new channel became in its early years a beacon of anti-Thatcherism, giving a platform — among others — to alternative comedians, who suited both the tone of the channel and its tight budgets. Altogether, noted The Times, Channel 4 was “just the sort of thing to inflame that school of opinion, so strong in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, which believes that the Left is in control of the nation’s television”.

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The same law of unintended consequence also operated in Tebbit’s most substantial contribution to the arts. As the dole queues lengthened to three million and more, he launched the Enterprise Allowance Scheme under the slogan: “Inside every unemployed person, there’s a self-employed one.” If you’d been unemployed for at least 13 weeks and could find £1,000 of capital (possibly in the form of a bank loan), then the government would pay you £40 a week for a year to get a business started. The income was tax-free and was substantially higher than the current rate of unemployment benefit.

The intended recipients were the self-employed; plumbers and window-cleaners were the oft-cited examples, and it was reported that an early trial had helped “such diverse activities as a kissogram service, a hang-gliding school, a private detective agency and a lampshade manufacturer”. But there were also applications from people working in the creative industries. In 1984 a group from Solihull, Eye Do It, became the first pop band to release a single under the scheme, with “I Lost My Mind”. That didn’t make much impact, but others were more successful, including artists Tracey Emin and Rachel Whiteread and comedians Alan Davies, Harry Enfield and Sean Lock.

Inadvertently, Tebbit had turned into one of the great patrons of culture in modern Britain. Again, though, there was little gratitude on display. “We weren’t children of Thatcher; we hated her,” insisted McGee. Viz comic, on the other hand, which was another beneficiary of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, always seemed to have an ironic affection for her; as late as 2009 it pictured her on a “True Blue” cover of Playboy magazine with the headline: “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Tits Out! Out! Out!”

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The cultural antipathy to Thatcher continued throughout her premiership, but it changed as it went on. The evolving mood was captured most concisely in pop music. Her first term saw the high point of Rock Against Racism and of protest songs. Mass unemployment produced the riposte of UB40’s “One in Ten” (1981) and the Specials’ “Do Nothing” (1980). The B-side of the latter was a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”, which had gained a new relevance: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.” The Beat went with the more direct “Stand Down, Margaret” (1980).

She didn’t heed that advice, and after her re-election in 1983, the tone became more fearful, with a spate of anti-nuclear hit singles by Iron Maiden, Culture Club, Sting and Genesis. The real trend, though, was away from politics and towards charity. The Live Aid concert in 1985 featured Paul Weller’s band the Style Council performing politically engaged songs “Walls Come Tumbling Down” and “Internationalists”, but the central impulse was one that chimed perfectly with Thatcher’s espousal of Victorian values of faith, self-help and charity. Elsewhere, the most memorable song directly addressing Thatcher in 1985 was the Exploited’s punk anthem “Maggie”, not so much a protest as a howl of impotent rage: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you fucking cunt!”

And then, as the years wore on and on, a sense of fatalism descended. Thatcher looked immovable and the fantasies started of her death: the Blow Monkeys’ “(Celebrate) The Day After You” (1987), Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” (1989), Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” (1988). There was still a visceral hatred, but no hope, just a weariness. A decade after she left office, the same theme was to be found in “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher” in Billy Elliott: The Musical (2000), cheerfully celebrating that we were “one day closer to your death”. On 8 April 2013, the day she actually died, the audience at the show was asked if it should be excluded from the night’s performance; overwhelmingly, they opted for it to be left in.

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And still, the cultural fascination continues. In the forthcoming movie Reagan, Lesley-Anne Downe will become the latest in a long line of actresses to give us their Margaret, which can be traced all the way back to Janet Brown in the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only (1981). Best known was Meryl Streep’s incarnation in The Iron Lady (2011), which in turn inspired the pornographic satire The Iron Lady Garden (2012), with Rebecca More as Aggie Snatcher.

It’s been a long, strange affair, this relationship of Thatcher with the arts. She knew it sort of mattered, which is why, in her first conference speech as Tory leader in 1975, she denounced “those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure”. (The context made it clear that she was talking specifically about the BBC.) But it wasn’t really important enough, and there were so many other dragons to be slain.

So while she was busily rewriting the political norms on public ownership, trade unions and the economy, she was losing all the cultural arguments. And since cultural artefacts have a longer shelf-life than do inflation rates, they have increasingly shaped the memory of Thatcher. The further we get away from her, the more public attitudes are shaped by hostile depictions of her and her policies. She still looms large, even for those born after her defenestration in 1990, but she’s seen more and more negatively.

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It is worth remembering, though, that when it really mattered, Thatcher’s instincts were absolutely sound. For most of the Eighties, Salman Rushdie was one of the loudest voices of condemnation. Hers were “the politics of the Victorian nursery”, he mocked, and in The Satanic Verses (1988) he referred to her as “Maggie the Bitch”. That was the book that saw Iran offer a $6 million bounty to anyone who would kill Rushdie. In the ensuing tumult, Thatcher saw only a simple principle. “It is a fundamental matter of freedom of speech,” she said. Whatever else she thought about the role of the state, she was sure that one of its duties was the protection of its citizens from foreign governments, and for the best part of a decade — until he withdrew it — Rushdie was given full-time police protection.

He and she only ever met once, at Scotland Yard. Given their very different characters, it seemed unlikely that they could ever find a personal rapport, but somehow a connection was made. “She was very touchy-feely,” remembered Rushdie. “She was, like, pawing at me, and I thought, ‘I’m being groped by the Prime Minister!’”

These were not cheap attempts to exploit the weakness of the Conservatives during the 49 days of Trussonomics, but part of a sustained strategy to plunder Thatcher’s legacy. In a major speech on crime last month, Starmer quoted her directly: “The rule of law is the foundation for everything. Margaret Thatcher called it the ‘first duty of government’. She was right.” Predictably, these last three words deeply offended the Labour Left. The fury on social media was nearly as great as when he banned Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election. In both cases the outrage was the point. What better way to prove you are a different sort of leader from Corbyn than to follow Tony Blair and admit that Thatcher got some things right?

But 10 years after Thatcher’s death, Starmer could, and should, go further — and learn other lessons from her success. The first is the most straightforward: know your enemy, identify them, and fight them on your own terms at a time of your choosing. Politics, in Boris Pasternak’s words “is not a walk across an open field”. People — bad people, and vested interests — want to stop you. And while you can’t avoid conflict, you can be prepared for it.

Labour can’t afford to just sit back and watch the Government fall into disarray; it needs to put them in the wrong and keep them there. Margaret Thatcher used the “Winter of Discontent” as a stick to beat Labour for a decade, through a combination of rhetorical reminders and legislative action that weakened the unions. Today, Starmer and his team need to constantly remind voters that the pain they are currently feeling over the cost of living and the collapse of basic standards in policing, the NHS and public transport are Tory failures. This is the theory behind Labour’s new wave of attack ads. Put your enemy in the wrong and keep them there. Are Labour’s social media ads fair? Perhaps not. Are they effective in framing the conversation? Absolutely. Just as Thatcher used Saatchi and Saatchi and brought the modern techniques of marketing and advertising into politics, so Starmer’s team are using modern channels to tie the Tory failure on crime to Sunak.

Less straightforward, but more important, is the need for Starmer to echo Thatcher’s commitment to a fixed world view. For many on the Left and Right, Thatcher was a divisive figure — yet she also commanded a grudging respect. This could be summed up in the phrase: “Whatever you think about her, you always know what she’s going to do.” Decisiveness is a powerful asset for a leader. It is not simply that, in the words of Pierre Medes-France, “to govern is to choose” — nor is it that drift, dither and indecision is weak. Rather, the power of decisiveness stems from the power of decisions to create a framework and a filter that serve as a test for any policy proposals. When David Willetts ran the No. 10 Policy Unit for Thatcher, he made his team ask a simple question of any new policies: “Is there a more market-oriented solution?” And there invariably was. Similarly, New Labour had its own — less ideological, but appropriately pragmatic — test: “What matters is what works.”

To succeed, Starmer needs his own framing test. And this requires him to look at the horizon. Thatcher and Blair both addressed the fundamental questions of their time. For Thatcher, it was the sclerotic economy; for Blair, it was the need to rebuild public services. Right now, the cost of living is dominating lives, and tackling it is urgent, but it will pass through the economy in the coming years. For Starmer, his office-defining challenge will be climate change. Labour has already placed its big spending bet on decarbonising the economy — £28 billion a year of investment. But if Starmer wants this to actually happen, his No. 10 operation has to keep asking: “Does this get us to Net Zero faster?”

Hugo Young called his magisterial study of Thatcher One Of Us, after the question she asked about senior appointments. Are they “one of us?” Are they going to be part of the project? One of the hardest things in politics is achieving genuine change. And as so often, Machiavelli got it right: nothing is more difficult than “to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things”, since a new leader “has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new”. At a dinner some years ago, Lord Howell, who had been a Cabinet minister in the first Thatcher administration, turned to me and said: “When you were Tony Blair’s Political Secretary, I bet you had the same problems as we did.” I expressed some confusion, so he clarified. “I bet you never had enough Blairites. We never had enough Thatcherites. We had to fight all the time to make the changes we needed to make. We were always outnumbered.” “Yep! Same.”

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Here is Starmer’s third lesson. He must surround himself with true believers and get a grip on the machine from the outset. To borrow Dominic Cummings’s phrase, that means a “hard rain”. The civil service and system of public appointments have been thoroughly politicised. It is not merely the well-publicised furore about the Chair of the BBC — it’s the same across all public appointments, from the Charity Commission to NHS boards. Some old-fashioned voices are already calling for Labour to depoliticise public appointments if they get in, but these should be ignored for the sirens they are. Change needs change-makers, and Starmer will need an army of them. From health to crime to energy, reform as fundamental as Thatcher’s transformation of public services is needed. And while parachuting in allies may make for crude politics, it also makes for success.

Finally, Starmer can also gain some solace from the example of Thatcher. Opinion polls and focus groups consistently find Sunak more “prime ministerial”. The same was true in the Seventies, when Jim Callaghan routinely outpolled Thatcher. But it didn’t matter. As Callaghan observed: “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.” The brute reality is that Prime Ministers invariably look more prime ministerial than opposition leaders because they have the trappings of office. As soon as an election is called next year, those trappings will swiftly disappear.

And when that inevitably happens, Starmer will face a choice. By then, Sunak’s Conservative Party will have evacuated the ground bestowed on it by Thatcher. Will Labour be bold enough to step in and seize it?

British reactions to Thatcher’s death raised all sorts of questions. A Korean journalist told me that he had spent all afternoon trying to find someone who would admit to having voted for her, and came to wonder how she had won three elections. Meanwhile, the burning of effigies in mining towns seemed to me uncomfortably reminiscent of the head shavings inflicted on French women accused of “collaboration” with the Vichy government: misogynistic violence by men seeking to allay the humiliation of their own defeat. “Ding Dong the Witch is dead” was sent to the top of the British music charts: this, too, seemed simultaneously sexist and naïve. Britain was not a fairy-tale village that would live happily ever after if freed from a spell cast by one woman.

The focus on Thatcher as an individual in 2013 contrasted with the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism as a system through much of the Eighties. The term “Thatcherism” was first used, in a systematic way, by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today, in an article published in January 1979, before she had even been elected. It referred to “Thatcherism” nine times and only once to “Mrs Thatcher”. Hall, married to the eminent feminist historian Catherine, understood how personal attacks on Thatcher slid into sexist sneers. But his austerely impersonal approach was also representative of the Left’s at the time, which emphasised structures. Whereas I sometimes wonder whether my younger colleagues today are aware of anything that is not reported in the Guardian, Hall’s generation of Left-wing intellectuals were assiduous readers of the Financial Times, and always on the look-out for a “crisis of capitalism”.

Early Left-wing writers on Thatcherism were rarely sentimental about what it replaced. They had disapproved of the Heath government of the early Seventies — particularly because of its attempt to implement legislation that would have restricted trade union power. Equally, they often recognised that Thatcherism was part of broader wave of political rethinking that sometimes encompassed the leadership of both major political parties. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan, from 1976 to 1979, had been marked by both a degree of social conservatism (not for nothing was Callaghan a parliamentary representative of the Police Federation) and by a move to a more free-market kind of economics. Peter Jay — Economics Editor of The Times — was the leading British advocate of monetarism. He influenced people in both the Labour and Conservative Party, but he was himself a member of the former, and Callaghan’s son-in-law.

Now, sixth formers are ritualistically trained to write about the end of the post-war consensus; but they are rarely taught one simple fact: in the early Eighties, the fiercest attacks on consensus came from the Left. It was Labour who fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that would, among other things, have meant British withdrawal from Nato and the European Economic Community. Some on the Left had even felt a grudging admiration for the radicalism of the first Thatcher government. They shared its distaste for condescension that some citizens experienced when they dealt with powerful agencies of the state. Like Thatcher, they disliked the complacency that they associated with established politicians of both parties.

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Everything changed after Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983. The challenge of Thatcherism demanded that the Labour Party ease its way back to the centre ground. The Tories, too, saw that there was not much point in ostentatious radicalism, once the major victories of the early Thatcher period had been won — particularly after the National Union of Mineworkers had been broken in 1985. They were now presiding over a new consensus, in which weaker trade unions and the sale of council houses were widely accepted. Privatisation, a word that they had barely dared use as late as 1979, was commonplace. Thatcherism had triumphed.

But Thatcher’s personal style — her flamboyant awkwardness and her obvious distaste for her political enemies — did not suit the new mood. She was never comfortable with consensus, even when the consensus in question was one that she had helped create. The personal myth of Margaret Thatcher began to diverge from Thatcherism. Earlier in the Eighties, for all her strident tone, Thatcher had been a politician, intuitively conscious that she needed to compromise and sometimes even retreat if she was to survive and achieve some measure of what she wanted. Later in the decade, she was increasingly prone to present herself as a kind of British de Gaulle — a national saviour who was above politics.

The emphasis on Thatcher as a person created problems because, as the writers behind Marxism Today had rightly sensed, Thatcherism had not really been about Thatcher. Her government had contained able and powerful ministers who pushed through different aspects of its policy. Indeed, Thatcherism was built on a kind of coalition that involved compromises and alliances between different kinds of people with different priorities. Keith Joseph was the most prominent political thinker behind the whole thing but useless at practical politics. Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker were indifferent about — in Walker’s case hostile to — some of the economic theory that underlay Thatcherism, but both men delivered spectacular practical results.

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Not surprisingly, Thatcher’s emphasis on her own personal significance and her alienation from the mundane compromises of domestic politics annoyed her colleagues. (It was an alienation that was increased by the fact that she came to think of herself more and more as an international stateswoman rather than a British politician.) It helped precipitate her eviction from the leadership of her party and thus from Downing Street. Thatcher’s fall was, though, a revolution within Thatcherism rather than a revolution against Thatcherism. The economic policies of the Thatcher government continued. Indeed, in policy terms, Major was more Thatcherite than Thatcher: he privatised the railways — something that she had hesitated to do — and closed the last British coal mines.

Thatcher’s fall further divided the cult of Thatcher as an individual — let’s call this “Thatcherianism” — from the policies of Thatcherism. Thatcher had been on the Conservative front bench for most of her political career. Now for the first time she was freed from the constraints of practical politics. She became more extreme and was deeply bitter towards party leaders, especially Major, whom she believed had betrayed her. The myth of her martyrdom was cultivated by a small number of loyalists who had followed her into political exile, as well as by younger people who came into parliament too late to have direct experience of what the Thatcher governments had actually done.

“Thatcherianism” began to acquire its own political identity, separate from Thatcherism. It revived the social conservatism that had been part of Thatcherism in 1979 but had largely disappeared from the policies of the Thatcher government by 1989. Most important, it pushed a ferocious hostility to the European Union — particularly after Thatcher presented herself as the standard bearer of opposition to the Maastricht treaty in the early Nineties. This was quite a break with the past: it had been Labour that spoke of leaving the European Community in 1983. Thatcherites had welcomed West-European unity as a means of resisting Communism and promoting free markets. Thatcher was always emotionally ill-at ease with Europe but, during most of her years as prime minister, she was also realistic enough to know that emotion is a bad guide to politics. As late as 1988, she would regarded leaving the European Union as bat-shit crazy.

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In an odd way, the rise of a personalised “Thatcherianism” cult played into John Major’s hands in the early Nineties. The intemperate, ungracious nature of attacks by Thatcher and her remaining allies occluded the extent to which the Major government was really continuing her economic policies. It also contributed to the sense that Major was a moderate and consensual figure — and this, in turn, helped make policies that might once have seen as highly controversial seem like a new kind of common sense. Tory frontbenchers in the Nineties managed to imply that they had moved on from the savage conflicts of the Eighties and that it would be unreasonable to hold them responsible for the policies of the Thatcher governments — governments in which many of them had served as senior ministers.

Of course, the success of Thatcherism extended beyond the Conservative Party. The truth is that large parts of the British establishment — civil servants, Labour politicians and even the occasional trade unionist, such as Frank Chapple — regarded much of what the Thatcher government did, notably breaking the miners, as necessary. There was also a more general shift in public opinion and behaviour. Dozens of small-scale actions — buying shares in privatised companies, voting for demutualisation of buildings societies (or taking the bonuses even when we voted against) — made most of the British middle class complicit in one way or another. Indeed, it is extraordinary how the free-market pervades everyday life in modern Britain. I am writing these words in Delhi. When I first came here, in 1984, the notion of haggling over money when, for example, one took a ride in an auto-rickshaw, still seemed odd. Now we are, in effect, haggling over money every time we book an Uber online.

Andrew Gamble was the single most important person to write on Thatcherism for Marxism Today. When he kindly came to speak to my students about this part of his career, he remarked on the brief commercial success of the magazine after it was stocked by W.H. Smith. The students asked whether this meant he got paid more. He grinned ruefully and said that he — and, so far as he knew, the other contributors — never even thought to ask about payment. Things have changed. A friend of mine gave a television interview after Thatcher’s death. A child of the Eighties herself and with a keen entrepreneurial instinct, she was much impressed that the leading public intellectual with whom she shared the studio negotiated ruthlessly about his appearance fee. Finally, the cameras went on and the interviewer asked what Thatcher had done to the country. The leading public intellectual paused to compose his features into an appropriately solemn expression and said: “I am afraid that she made us all much more selfish.”

A few years after Winn’s excavations, the first furnaces were built, and the Domesday hamlet of Scunthorpe started producing pig-iron. The borough’s old crest features a blast furnace belching flames, with the redolent motto: “The Heavens Reflect Our Labours.” Soon, the county’s companies started turning the iron into steel. By the end of the First World War, Scunthorpe produced 3% of the UK’s steel, some of it armouring the first military tanks, invented in Lincoln; by the start of the Second, it was producing 10%, some of it used in D-Day landing craft.

Since then, Scunthorpe metal has gone into everything from Sydney Harbour Bridge to the London Eye. But this elemental industry is rusting away. British Steel has recurred in the last decade’s headlines, almost always linked to job losses. Now, up to 800 of its remaining 3,200 steel jobs are at risk — a painful reversal for Lincolnshire.

Scunthorpe’s steel was for many years a magnet, attracting workers from all over Britain, and sometimes overseas — Germans before the Second World War, Eastern Europeans afterwards, Asians in the Seventies. In 1960, almost a third of Scunthonians (around 20,000) were directly employed in steel. A BBC documentary from that year, Scunthorpe is Booming, shows a town of bustling streets, with optimistic interviewees talking about all the things they could buy thanks, directly or indirectly, to steel — cars and foreign holidays and “tellies” — although a few did express reservations about the social effects of all this dynamism. Industries sprang up to cater to steel’s ever-lengthening supply chains, and all these new consumers — including Golden Wonder crisps. (Some locals claim the cheese and onion flavour was invented in the town.)

It was Steve Cook who cast Scunthorpe’s last ingots, in 2000. He started at British Steel in 1968 with just four O-levels, and retired in 2007, having risen to the rank of Quality Manager. Sitting in his immaculate house within earshot of the furnaces, he exudes quiet pride: “Scunthorpe was renowned for making one of the best steels in the world, and the name British Steel was synonymous with quality.” He recalls an avuncular employer, which sponsored his studies in metallurgy, then provided a job for life. The town, he remembers fondly, largely revolved around shift-times, with hooters announcing shift-changes. Streets would fill with men on bicycles and then as suddenly empty again, an almost instinctive mass movement of those who were busily forging the future. Now the town’s commuters, faces fixed to their phones, are living in worlds of their own.

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Not everyone enjoyed their time working in Scunthorpe steel. Conditions were hazardous in the early days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steelworkers would work 12-hour weekday shifts, and 24-hour shifts on alternate Sundays, with no extra pay even on Christmas Day. Veterans of the Twenties recalled their lunches being layered with fine iron grit. There were frequent accidents: on the worst day, in 1975, 11 workers died when one of the town’s iconic “Four Queens” furnaces blew up. As recently as 2021, a fireball erupted unexpectedly at the British Steel works, although luckily no-one was hurt. Last year, a 27-year-old worker was killed falling from a crane.

And not all the social impacts of the works were positive. Influxes of large numbers of young single men, and the Tartarean thirstiness of their work, resulted in problems with public drunkenness; as early as 1860, extra constables had to be drafted in. Employers took a zero-tolerance approach, with workers liable to be sacked if they had any alcohol on their breath — except for one steelworks, which ran what must have been a highly lucrative “wet canteen” into the Seventies.

A community spirit nevertheless emerged, grounded in shared experience and Methodist morality (nearby Epworth was John Wesley’s birthplace), and reinforced by institutions. Technical colleges and grammar schools, a hospital, a theatre, and an array of social and sporting clubs all began to appear, most famously Scunthorpe United, founded in 1899, and nicknamed “The Iron”. Workers wistfully recall a steely solidarity, with its own vocabulary — casters, feedstocks, gangue, sinter, trunnion — and a confidence borne of mastering dangerous elements for their own and everyone’s benefit. Steelworkers took on an almost mythic quality at times in the popular imagination, brilliantly skilled men silhouetted against incandescent orange, controlling leviathan cranes that swung 130-tonne ladles filled with 280 more tonnes of molten menace. Today’s call-centres, industrial parks, and offices are pallid by comparison.

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When British Steel was born, in 1967, as the British Steel Corporation (BSC), there was much excitement about “the white heat of technology”. Innovations would, it was argued, remould the tired old post-imperial country. BSC emphasised quality over quantity, investing constantly in technical research. Britain had always been a world-leader in steel — but the pace of change had sped up. Some of the cars snapped up by Scunthorpe’s happy Sixties shoppers would have weighed a ton and a half of mostly British-made steel, but cars were becoming steadily lighter and smaller. There was less and less demand for Scunthorpe’s product, even before the whole motor industry went into the doldrums, along with British shipbuilding.

Then as now, successive governments failed to capitalise on British technical ingenuity. Ted Heath hoped that the new local authority of “Humberside”, into which Scunthorpe was lumped in 1974, might be an English Ruhr. But BSC always found itself fighting, often unavailingly, against cheaper Asian imports and other countries’ tariffs. The would-be Ruhr sometimes seemed at risk of becoming more of an American-style rust belt.

Enter: the Iron Lady. In the first two years of her reign, Margaret Thatcher appointed the uncompromising Ian MacGregor as chairman of BSC. Two of Scunthorpe’s four ironworks were closed. A December 1979 announcement of swingeing cuts at Scunthorpe was dubbed “Mr MacGregor’s sick Christmas card” by the town’s mayor, and led to a 13-week strike. But MacGregor was up for a fight, and ultimately, he won. In 1980, BSC had employed 166,000 nationwide, and lost £1.8 billion every year; by the time MacGregor left in 1983, it employed 71,000, and annual losses had been cut to £256m. In 1985, it recorded its best results since the Sixties. Scunthorpe was a crucible of a new economic order, melted and remade by monetarism — but there was a human cost, as in the mining communities of the North. Unemployment nationwide was almost three times what it is now.

Meanwhile, the nation was losing its grip on the industries that built it. Now a profitable company, BSC was privatised, before being absorbed into the British-Dutch Corus Group — the biggest steelmaker in Europe and the third-largest in the world. Corus was itself taken over, just in time for the financial crash, by the Indian firm Tata, which ended up selling it in 2016 to a venture capital firm for £1. After reintroducing the nostalgic name, the firm sold the plant on in 2019 to China’s Jingye Group, which now operates as British Steel. With every takeover, hundreds of jobs were lost; since 2007, Scunthorpe’s annual steel production has halved from 5m to 2.5m tonnes. This most substantial of great British industries is now forced to trust in overseas investors with no stake in the borough, and its rooted community relies on boardroom decisions in Beijing. Britain’s steel production is, after all, something of an afterthought from a Chinese perspective; in 2019, the UK produced just 7m tonnes of steel, compared with the 996m made in China.

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The now barely British British Steel, reeling under high energy costs, is a pressure point for the Government. On the one hand, there is the wish to protect jobs in a “Red Wall” seat, won for the Conservatives in 2019 by the granddaughter of a steelworker. On the other, there is a national commitment to Net Zero carbon emissions, and steel accounts for around 14% of UK industrial emissions. Recently, British Steel has threatened to shed at least 260 jobs at Scunthorpe, and maybe as many as 800 — a quarter of all the jobs left — unless the Government gives it money to invest in greener electric furnaces. The Government has offered £300m, but negotiations appear to be foundering, because the money is thought insufficient, and comes with preconditions about guaranteeing employment for a decade. If all these Scunthorpe jobs do go, many Scunthonians fear they would be followed inexorably by others.

The Government claims to be committed to the industry, although support sometimes seems uncertain, and no new measures were announced in the latest budget. Steel does not contribute much directly to the UK economy — just £2 billion in 2020, when it accounted for 1.2% of manufacturing output and 0.1% of UK jobs. Still, there is strong ongoing and projected demand for steel — for projects ranging from HS2 to healthcare, flood defences to the military — and much of it could be produced here. Better to have our needs met in Scunthorpe than Baoshan, surely.

Industry veterans are sceptical about the Government’s Net Zero priorities. David Amoss, who spent 30 years working in Scunthorpe, points out: “The steel’s still got to be made and it may as well be made in Scunthorpe as in the Far East. I find this carbon footprint thing an absolute distraction and a nonsense. Not that I don’t believe we’re destroying our own planet, but if we don’t do it someone else is going to.” Steel that is not made here will just be made in another country, perhaps one with weaker environmental safeguards, and boosting their economy instead of ours. Steve Cook concurs: “From a global point of view, it’s just shifting the problem elsewhere.” Besides, closing down both furnaces could cost more than £1 billion.

Manufacturing has long been a victim of modern Britain’s focus on service industries over making things the world both needs and wants. “If steel does go, as a manufacturing country we’re buggered,” says Amoss. “I fail to understand how any country can really exist with any sort of wealth if it doesn’t make anything and consumes a lot.” To those who built their lives around industries like steel, today’s Britain can seem an unkind as well as unwise country, ungratefully casting off its past and recklessly mortgaging its future in the interests of expedience and profit.

The story of steel in Scunthorpe is unique, but it echoes that of the North’s, or Wales’s, mining communities. Our nation is replete with towns like this: so strongly associated with its industry that it is almost impossible to envisage existence without it. After 150 years of unglamorous and unrelenting endeavour, Scunthorpe’s whole reason-to-be has suddenly become ethically suspect, its Britain-building citizens at risk of being abandoned. Can a forward-looking national realism, drawing on an old sense of obligation, compete with today’s green and globalised agenda? This time-tempered town is not the only one nervously awaiting an answer to that question.