The drumbeat grew louder last week, with breathless reports that the veteran New Labour figure, who has spent more than a decade in the United States running a refugee charity, was preparing to “break his silence” with a landmark speech. And then — surprise, surprise — this key acolyte of Tony Blair used the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks memorial lecture at the London School of Economics to reveal that he was actually a Burnham fanboy. Titled, unironically, “Kings, Priests and Prophets: Power and its Missing Guardrails”, Miliband spoke of backing the former Manchester mayor’s devolution agenda, claiming this “big change” was “long overdue”. He argued that centralization of power in London had inflamed Britain’s dissatisfaction with democracy alongside issues such as inequality, technology and the failure of international institutions.

He was right to highlight these challenges facing our country. Barely one-in-five British citizens feel well represented by their government, while three in four are worried about the state of their democracy. Yet this is precisely why it would be absurd for Burnham to bring back this man. For there are few people who better symbolize the arrogance, elitism, political failures and shameless sense of entitlement of the political class than David Miliband.

The boyish-looking Miliband is now 60, and seemingly desperate to come home after a disastrous 13-year stint at the helm of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). His tenure saw him rapidly expand the charity co-founded by Albert Einstein only to then drastically scale it back again, with spiraling deficits as several major donor nations of differing political complexions slashed aid spending. While a necessary realignment, given the serial failures of a bloated aid system that poured cash into conflict zones and the pockets of gruesome regimes, it triggered shock waves across the industry. There were staff cuts and predictable shroud-waving claims about disastrous consequences.

“There is a clear path through this period,” Miliband told IRC staff in a letter last year, as he announced job losses. “I am just so sorry at the price to be paid to get there.” Yet insiders told me how this charity’s bosses used the donor cuts to cover up their own ineptitude. They passed me documents two years ago showing the IRC faced a $50 million deficit due to fund-raising shortfalls, accounting mistakes and cost overruns, despite one bequest of $16.5 million. Miliband warned his top team they had found a “larger deficit than anticipated” and bemoaned there had been “no humanitarian emergency that has significantly buoyed our unrestricted incomes since the Russian invasion of Ukraine”.

Miliband had expanded his charity fast, which boosted his profile and won applause, but then the approach was laid bare by the aid cuts. As investor Warren Buffet famously said about financial crashes exposing poor strategies, “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked”. These fiscal woes came amid festering internal concerns over management. So there was disquiet over the IRC’s muted initial response to Israel’s attack on Gaza, in contrast with its forceful reaction to Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, which coincided with rumors that Miliband wanted Sir Keir Starmer to make him Britain’s ambassador to Washington. This job, of course, went instead to Peter Mandelson with disastrous consequences — although recent reports suggest Miliband still fancies this plum diplomatic posting.

Almost 1,700 staff signed a petition complaining over the “absence of prompt, resolute and non-discriminatory condemnation that we expected from our leadership”. There were claims of self-censoring statements, soft-pedaling on Israel and top-down interference, driving a wedge between the leadership and frontline staff. One top figure from the Middle East, looking upset, told a meeting she could not understand their “complicit stand”, saying the IRC was “failing” both itself and Palestinians under attack. “We have not gotten everything right, and for many, this has shaken your trust in the IRC,” admitted a senior executive.

Perhaps such unrest is inevitable in a global organization that at one point had 19,300 staff around the world. But Miliband was already ruffling feathers before he started cutting staff. He faced claims of bullying from minority staff who accused the leadership of reinforcing a “white supremacy culture”, although these were dismissed by a law firm that reviewed discrimination policies. Staff previously circulated a petition calling for top executives to be made more accountable. There were also complaints over their use of unpaid interns — ironic given their mighty salaries. 

Underlying these concerns is a clear belief among some insiders that Miliband saw the post as a platform for his self-aggrandizement. “My strong sense is that the majority of people connected to the IRC will welcome David’s departure,” said one executive, who left recently. “His 13 years at the IRC increasingly appear to have been driven by his ambition to accumulate wealth and stay relevant and connected to global centers of power, just waiting for the moment when the return to real power was finally within his grasp.”

“For many current and former IRC staff, especially in the last five years, the organization has come to be associated with a toxic culture of compliance, mismanagement of funds and teams, and retaliation against anyone who challenged David and his COO [chief operating officer]. These concerns have been accompanied by publicly documented accusations of racism, iniquity and evolving values based on their interests as opposed to the IRC’s mission. There’s no doubt that change is both needed and long overdue.” 

Such dissent — breaking into the media on several occasions — indicates at the very least deficient diplomatic and leadership skills, although it is hard for outsiders to determine the truth about internal rows at major organizations. Yet one thing is clear: David Miliband has done very well financially for himself while running his charity, even as he tours the world condemning aid cuts and pleading for more cash for impoverished refugees. 

It is instructive here to take a closer look at the astonishing sums involved. When Miliband took over as president and chief executive of the IRC in 2013, he succeeded George Rupp, a former head of Columbia University, whose package was $466,209 a year — an impressive sum for a charity chief, even by US standards. Yet in his first year, this former Labour Cabinet minister who once railed against fat cats saw this bumped up to $600,000. His pay package more than doubled over subsequent years: according to the most recent financial filings, from 2023, he was handed $1,246,992 — including a $150,000 bonus and a $55,000 housing allowance. This is “one of the highest in the humanitarian sector”, noted The New Humanitarian drily as it reported on the leadership board’s decision to take a temporary 20% salary cut while laying off thousands of their staff. He has also been promoted by booking agencies as a “wonderful” conference speaker, with fees starting at £25,000.

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No wonder staff have told me that it is “demoralizing” to be led by someone earning “a millionaire’s salary” at a time when they face intense humanitarian and financial pressures. His IRC spokespeople, of course, insist that he gets fair reward for his labors set by the charity’s compensation committee. To his critics, however, it is seen as obscene to pocket such sums from a heavily taxpayer-funded charity dedicated to helping the poor and dispossessed.

Miliband has been charitable to his friends, though. According to tax filings, the second highest-paid IRC executive is Madlin Sheerman, the senior vice-president who pocketed $550,151 in 2023. She just happens to be Miliband’s former special adviser who ran his botched 2010 leadership campaign. His former speechwriter, Laura Kyrke-Smith, was appointed head of the IRC’s British arm, collecting a six-figure salary, before becoming a Labour MP in the 2024 election. His Westminster researcher, Ollie Money, ended up as IRC’s global communications director before joining The Economist group two years ago. Even Lord Doyle — Starmer’s communications chief who sparked a furor over his ties to a sex offender after being given a peerage — spent some time in Miliband’s well-paid team, as did Miliband’s former speechwriter Ravi Gurumurthy, who now runs Nesta.

Burnham says politics in Britain is broken. He is right. Yet putting Miliband back in the Foreign Office is hardly going to fix it — and not just because of his self-enrichment and cronyism while running a respected charity. After all, his track record on international affairs is appalling. He was a firm supporter of the disastrous Iraq War, a misguided conflict that did much to demolish public faith in Westminster. Although Miliband later expressed regret for the neo-colonial misadventure, he told the Chilcot Inquiry how he believed this conflict — which sparked chaos in the region and spurred the rise of Islamic State — had strengthened Britain’s reputation in the Middle East. This was a ridiculous claim to make of a war that so tainted our nation’s reputation, even for one of Blair’s most dedicated cheerleaders. 

That conflict was useful to Vladimir Putin, who used it to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It also undermined Western arguments about the importance of backing a democracy’s defense against unwarranted foreign attack. And, at a time when the Kremlin is on the attack, unleashing covert attacks on the West in league with an alliance of autocratic allies, we should not forget that Miliband was the supine foreign secretary when Putin launched his first European land grab in 2008, sending Russian tanks into Georgia to stymie the growth of its democracy and frustrate its desire to join Nato. 

The Kremlin stirred up separatist tensions, made baseless claims of genocide, then sparked a short war that ended with Russian forces 30 miles from the capital Tbilisi and two chunks of the country breaking away as self-declared republics. Here was Putin’s template for later events in Ukraine, a clear warning for the West that smart historians will see as leading directly to the atrocities 14 years later in Bucha, Izyum and Mariupol. Miliband condemned the Georgia invasion as “entirely unjustified”, yet for all his tough talk, he did nothing. Not even a single sanction. “Isolating Russia would be counterproductive because its international economic integration is the best discipline on its politics,” he trilled. “Our approach must be hard-headed engagement.” So how did that realpolitik work out? 

Traveling the world, delivering grandstanding speeches, making new contacts and opining in interviews — you would think he would be great at diplomacy. But, according to journalist Tim Shipman, he’s one of the rudest men in politics. “I was reminded of the comment by a Labour adviser that if David Miliband was at a party talking to Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela,” he wrote in the Spectator, “he would still be looking over their shoulders to see if there was anyone more important to talk to.” Similarly today, as he seeks to escape from his IRC travails, it is like he is looking over shoulders for a more important opportunity.

Miliband often pontificates on his theory that we live in an “age of impunity”, which he defines as “the exercise of power without accountability…the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers”. If Burnham delivers his desired post of foreign secretary, Miliband will have proved this point with painful precision.

Future Works, a co-working space at the end of the Elizabeth Line, is a disconcertingly optimistic upgrade to Wernham Hogg, the paper-merchant setting of The Office. The program today celebrates its 25th anniversary — and still plays an outsized role in the national imagination when it comes to depicting the purgatory of worklife just outside the capital. “The last time something happened around here,” says one 28-year-old product designer with the deadpan voice of Martin Freeman’s Tim, “was when someone shat on the wall outside.”

But these jaded souls, once preyed upon by the likes of David Brent, are slowly being replaced. Now Slough is rallying around the entrepreneurs and thought leaders of Future Works in their bid to become UK Town of Culture in 2028, hoping to pip rival Guildford by pioneering the “creative expression” of a very different England to the one depicted by The Office.

“I’m a networker,” says 31-year-old Varun, one of Future Work’s entrepreneurs, sitting in front of multiple screens in an eerily empty room. As he launches into a pitch for his fintech startup, there are a few stray Brentisms (his favorite film is Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness) but few other signs of the former regional manager of Wernham Hogg. Unlike Brent, he is a boss first and only. He has no real desire to be a friend or entertainer, and certainly no cultural hinterland that might entail an admiration of Ian Botham or an impression of Basil Fawlty.

“Being a founder can be lonely,” Varun confesses when I give him the chance to expand on his workplace philosophy à la Brent. He’s already found himself crying in the toilets due to the stress of running a startup. That angst is appropriate: Slough, after all, doesn’t exactly inspire the more whimsical, rural turn of England’s present comic imagination, with its hits like The Detectorists and This Country. Here you can find Europe’s largest collection of data centers, plonked in the midst of a place that both tops the country’s league tables for income deprivation, and is the most ethnically diverse local authority outside London.

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Tunbridge Wells is still disgusted

By Fred Sculthorp

Downstairs, I try to see if I can find a few Gareths, or even a long-suffering Dawn. But like the notorious brutalist roundabout from the opening credit, many of these familiarities have been replaced. “I don’t think Brent would survive here now to be honest,” says Nilesh, who works as a financial consultant. “We’ve had to make a few tough decisions around firing people because of AI. And I don’t think he’d manage that because ultimately he’s a wimp.” And then there’s the town’s diversity, he says, referencing the scene where David Brent gets two Asian warehouse workers mixed up. “There’d certainly be more of that happening.”

Could the Slough of 2026 still produce a David Brent? It’s a question of national significance, given The Office’s role in depicting a certain idea of England, one that sulks outside the M25, and which is in theory home to most of us, with our dull jobs and deferred dreams. Its geography reflects Brent’s own ambitions. As he put it, “Slough’s a big place and when I’m finished I’ve got Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell.” Yet these sudden London hinterlands are now forming the vanguard of a very different English worklife. Here you can find the ominous megastructures of the AI revolution, bearing down on co-working spaces left to run the less exotic fringes of our globalized services economy, where an anxious churn — graduates, officer workers trying to reinvent themselves, newly arrived migrants — all muddle along together.

Slough, against the grain of its once-terminal drabness, now finds itself the champion of a lackluster kind of Anglofuturism. John Betjeman and his “friendly bombs” have partly got their wish, thanks to Berkeley Homes and logistics developer SEGRO, with many of the brutalist, run-down shopping centers replaced to create a new landscape of self-contained residential complexes. From a distance, some of these plastic mausoleums can be confused for one of the town’s many data centers, which have helped create a peculiar microclimate of isolated despair on London’s far-flung borders.

The irony of Slough’s recent transformation is that The Office rose to popularity in the ebb-tide of the New Labour years, a place where David Brent was left to roam in the mire of a lost future. On the eve of the millennium, Tony Blair pronounced his government had a “thousand days to prepare for a thousand years”. A timescale evidently rushed, as the country became plastered with call centers and the pastiche futurism of “pseudo-modernism”, one that produced a different kind of desperation to the crumbling postwar social contract it was intended to upgrade. For most people, Blair’s “information superhighway” still meant being stuck in an office somewhere like Slough.

And then there was Brent himself. The shock troops of New Labour were the middle managers and the Mondeo Men, those trying to straddle the blokey relatability of the Nineties with the prying managerial togetherness of “The Third Way”. Sue Nye, a Labour apparatchik and wife of the BBC Chairman who championed the programme, thought she was watching a true-to-life documentary: a mistake perhaps brought about by her familiarity with the office of then-Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Once Wernham Hogg had taken hold in the national consciousness, it seemed to pop up everywhere. When Blair visited Slough police station after The Office’s second series, he greeted staff and modeled a drug test with Brentian panache. And so the regional manager from Slough became a sort of pathology for a nation weaned on delusions of grandeur, run by a set of politicians supposed to be delivering the future but who secretly fancied themselves as rockstars, humanitarians, and your own best friend.

Now a version of the future Blair once promised seems to have finally arrived in Slough — albeit one with less comic potential. When Vineet Vijh shows me a script of his updated version of The Office, set in Future Works and co-written to boost the Town of Culture bid, it’s clear that Slough’s attempts to find its feet in this new world have ended up slightly hysterical. And in this it certainly manages to capture the country’s own changing comedic manners, less masochistic and self-deprecating, and more in tune with a different national preoccupation: trying to broker a safe and gentle way for all the different tribes that now occupy modern Britain to get along.

The humor is derived not from everyone being “trapped”, as they were in the Slough of the 2000s, but from what happens “when everyone is free”. Unsurprisingly, there is now no place for Chris Finch, Wernham Hogg’s blokey sales rep, who does not survive the updated sitcom’s desired shift from “office culture to 150 cultures”. He is now a LinkedIn influencer. Comic set pieces revolve around the office’s diversity, both in background and occupation, with running gags involving “pitches every Friday that might change the world” and “flash mobs of dancers” frustrating the efforts of the documentarians. Curiously, despite potentially thriving in such an environment, David Brent is missing entirely.

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Alan Bennett’s English grotesque

By Fred Sculthorp

“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

For the town’s population, Deeks suggests this environment can create a peculiar unease, a sense that they’re living in a future that doesn’t really want them. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t think the people living here have any idea what goes on in there”, pointing to a row of semi-detached houses that back onto a data center where the majority of England’s internet traffic is processed. “Slough is full of people who have just moved here or are just trying to get by. I think this stuff gets put here because you know they’re not going to make a fuss.”

Closer to the heart of Slough, I go in search of some more familiar set pieces from The Office, spots that might spark a bit of life into the town’s new sitcom. “No one goes out anymore in Slough,” say a pair of NHS nurses, implying that there would be no one left in Chasers, the nightclub from series one, for Brent and Chris Finch to chat up. “The people who work just seem to live in their own world, and then there are now lots of people here from places where drinking is not a big part of their culture.” Where would they set a sitcom in Slough now? The two look at each other bemused. “I’m not really sure. Perhaps you can try out the high street, which still has the odd character.”

Vineet Vijh at Future Works warned me not to go to the high street. He insisted it was not representative of his aspiring Town of Culture. It certainly contains past ruins from previous efforts at regeneration. There’s a boarded-up shop, with a flowery facade that reads: “Slough Celebrates Neurodiversity”. Graffitied onto it is an argument about immigration and the odd “Allahu Akbar” in a frantic scrawl.

Much of this will soon be replaced, with Berkeley Homes having bought up the shopping center, promising a residential-cum-leisure-complex it insists will make people want to “enjoy and actually visit Slough”. By 2039, those living in its penthouse will be able to view the Future Works by the Elizabeth Line, and gaze across the M25 towards the shimmering lights of Hounslow and Heathrow.

In the meantime, I spot an unlikely pair outside the derelict shopping center, a man who looks eerily like Chris Finch, who has just lost his patience at the job center. He’s with a woman wearing a black hijab. “Oh fuck off,” he screams at her before marching off. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. He’s just having one of his moments.” And sure enough the pair are suddenly back together, conspiring as they walk briskly up the high street. This odd couple are never going to win Slough its Town of Culture prize, but they’re certainly the makings of a more fitting drama than the one set in Future Works.

Today I find the idea of drinking cans of Polish lager to mark the passing of a former prime minister rather pitiable. From a solely political perspective, of course, it is counterproductive, for it tells the general public that the contemporary Left resembles little more than a misanthropic, detached subculture found mainly among the younger, over-educated denizens of gentrifying urban enclaves. But beyond any strategic consideration, it also signifies the strength of Thatcherism, against which my fellow Brixton revelers and I were pathetically impotent.

In contemporary discourse, Maggie’s enduring legacy is taken to be something called “neoliberalism”, a system of political economy apparently dominant for the last 40 years, and now undergoing a critical appraisal, not least because of certain Labour leadership hopefuls blaming it for British decline. In his slick Makerfield campaign video, Andy Burnham says he “saw what Thatcher’s government did to places like this”, citing “deindustrialization” and “the draining away of economic, social and political power” from provincial Britain. As Reform positions itself as the party of the Northern working class, in alliance with small traders and the Home Counties’ petit bourgeoisie, the Left delivers dire warnings of a Thatcherite revival — the better to hold onto those working-class Northerners. Farage and the Reform leadership clique are, after all, longtime disciples of the monetarist creed.

None of this is to say that my opinions on the Iron Lady have altered much. Even from a purely conservative standpoint, she caused a lot of harm to the country, much of it perhaps irreparable. Though her project invoked a parochial conservatism, it nevertheless radically altered our mode of production according to an imported set of continental (namely Austrian) ideologies. It projected a vision of British patriotism that sold off national assets by the pound, exposing a relatively coherent and regionally balanced national economy to all the volatilities of globalized, financialized capital and international trade flows, as well as leaving us dependent on the kindness of strangers and cap-in-hand foreign patronage. And while its libertarian streak was applied ruthlessly to “free market” actors, an authoritarian traditionalism and throwback Victorian morality dominated in the socio-cultural sphere and in law and order — as exemplified by the battle of Orgreave.

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Cosmic Scallies are radicalising Liverpool

By Jonny Ball

Thatcher, then, is as significant a figure in discourse as she was when she died. In that sense, it is an auspicious time to be putting on a play about her. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theater, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novella, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is nearing the end of its first run. It’s a fitting venue: 13 years ago, as I drank cans of Tyskie in Brixton, groups of fellow Scousers spontaneously emptied out of the dockers’ pub The Casa just yards from the Everyman to mark Thatcher’s death. It’s a fitting time, too, as a famous son of Liverpool promises to reverse the legacy of the city’s — and the play’s — bête noire (Burnham the Scouser has spent around a decade posing as a Mancunian — a rare boon for someone born in the nether regions between the North West’s two great metropoles, with a shifting dual identity that mirrors his political oscillations).

Mantel’s original story attracted controversy at the time of its publication in 2014. For all the brouhaha, one would have expected it to be historical fiction in the philosophical tradition of Frantz Fanon — the French psychoanalyst whose writing on the efficacy and superior morality of Left-wing political violence is still a bookshelf stalwart of many a LARPing student revolutionary. Conservative MPs led the chorus of condemnation, but, in all likelihood, they had never read the text, despite its short length. For Mantel was no frothing-at-the-mouth extremist advocating the progressive or, like Fanon, mentally rehabilitative, qualities of revolutionary murder. Her epic on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, reveals no sympathies for the cold, utilitarian, socially cleansing properties of the guillotine. Instead it focuses on some of the human costs of political upheaval.

In that vein, the Scouse IRA sniper featured in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is fundamentally more melancholic than heroic. He seeks a personal catharsis in his act, as well as political change, but it’s highly questionable whether he will attain either. The play adaptation carries this mood forward — the assassin portrayed more as a sad, disturbed reject than a hardened, cocksure ideologue. The terrorist tricks his way into the home of a single widow, whose bedroom window happens to overlook a hospital entrance on the day of a prime ministerial visit. The widow tries gently to persuade him of the errors of his ways — and it is she who carries the audience’s favor in this two-person performance.

Nor is Mantel’s choice of terrorist surprising. Such is the hold of the Thatcherite decade over the collective Liverpudlian imagination that local politicians still frequently invoke the Toxteth riots along with Maggie’s supposed plans for Merseyside’s “managed decline”. It was, in fact, her chancellor Geoffrey Howe who suggested the policy of allowing a city-wide gradual atrophy, rather than attempting to guide water up a hill in what was known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism”. Eventually, Howe’s plan was rejected in favor of a Heseltine-branded plan of city-center-focused urban regeneration. But since then, the “managed decline” epithet has stuck — a Scouser never forgets, of course.

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What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong

By Jonny Ball

The cultural influence of the era is still broad. The industrial wastelands and mass unemployment portrayed in the Liverpool-based TV series the Boys from the Blackstuff was apparently what inspired Burnham to go into politics by joining the Labour Party aged 14. It is as if our local political elites (all Labour, still, for now) are afflicted by a collective, 40-year hangover induced by the transition from a bustling, Tory-voting, mercantile port (the “Second City of Empire”) into a belligerent poster child of urban decay (“Smack City”). Though admittedly the anti-Thatcher finger-pointing might also help redirect attention from the likes of “Chippy tits”, a recent mayor who awaits trial over charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. Many in the audience of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt hope that Makerfield’s Labour populist can prove the final antidote — the acetaminophen and bacon sandwich — to cure the lasting Thatcherite headache.

The rich nuance of the play is undermined by the limited-edition tote bags proclaiming “REJOICE! REJOICE!” on sale behind the theater bar. They will have sold well. But how much can we still claim to live in Thatcher’s world when the tax burden is at a 70-year high? Where is the Thatcherite free market when a bureaucratic welfare state takes ever-increasing tax revenues from productive labor and investment, redirecting it toward the ever-expanding army of the indigent and indolent? Certainly, few business owners will see in today’s stagnant Britain a portrait of laissez-faire nightwatchman governance.

Two political tribes offer opposed diagnoses for the UK’s dismal situation, with each identifying different starting points for the Fall. For the Burnhamite Left, the decline began in 1979, when Thatcher came to power. For the Right, decline began in 1997, on Blair’s arrival. The Right posits that the source of our ills is the lingering effects of too-much-state, of an overbearing, Cool Britannia lanyard socialism. This is a story of radical constitutional renewal and the empowerment of quangos, arms-length bodies, international organizations and the judiciary at the expense of executive ministerial authority and the Crown-in-Parliament. The result is an omnipotent regulatory deep state that hampers individual initiative and state capacity alike.

But what we’re really seeing is a grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of “neoliberalism” coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism. The result combines top-down statist nitpicking with Thatcherite ownership models; corporate, Whitehall and town hall management structures amalgamating into a public-private-partnership blob, administered and lobbied by armies of LinkedIn-posting hangers-on. Blairism is, after all, a development of Thatcherism, as Thatcher herself recognized when she described New Labour as her greatest achievement.

The consequences of this Frankenstein blend are clear to see. Utilities, critical industries and infrastructure are in the hands of privateers, many of them foreign. Collective bargaining outside the public sector is virtually non-existent, contributing in no small part to a 20-year stagnation in real wages. We suffer from an over-reliance on financial, corporate, and legal services, low levels of public and private investment, and an extremely open, low-wage, low-productivity economy addicted to imported cheap labor and foreign direct investment. But we’ve matched that with a vetocracy that stymies development; with rule-by-NIMBY; with a New Labour-style dispersal of executive power across bureaucracies and professional bodies; and with often excessive meddling in the private sector. Our emasculated politicians are engaging in after-the-fact distributionism, doling out the proceeds of an old, broken growth model without knowing how to kickstart a new one. This is the legacy of Blair: a legalistic, top-down progressivism rather than anything resembling the very British socialism which Thatcher set out to destroy.

It was the One Nation Tory Ian Gilmour who held that Thatcherism had more in common with the free-trading Gladstonian Whigs than with the patrician tendency of his own party. No doubt Britain’s postwar social democracy was in a sorry state by the Seventies, requiring fundamental reform, not least a compromise with the realities of profit and loss. But the grocer’s daughter, steeped in a low-church Methodist ethos, took a polity rooted in the communitarian institutions of mass democracy, million-member political parties, the trade unions, churches, industrial mass production and security in work, housing and therefore family life, and replaced it with a rugged, dog-eat-dog, atomized individualism.

In trying to alter what she called “the object” of man’s soul through “the method” of rigid economism, she initially attempted to model Britain on her native Grantham — a staid Lincolnshire market town full of people who embodied the sturdy, middle-English values of thrift, self-reliance, respectability and quiet, Christian philanthropy. Instead we got the economy of the spiv, the City slicker, the consultant, the agency, with every job outsourced, every project put out to tender, a vast network of email-senders and middle managers vying for a procurement contract, a teat on the underbelly of our swollen PLC state.

Thatcherism’s pivot towards the great circuit of Mammon invited the criticism of even the conservative philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, for whom “the emancipation of the market from the constraints of small communities, territorial loyalty and the jurisdiction of the nation state” had more than an air of deracinated cosmopolitan liberalism.

After watching The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, I thought back to 2013, getting too drunk on Tyskie. The futility is obvious now: we’ve had Corbynism, Brexit and much else besides, but none has brought us true deliverance, and the debate on Thatcherism has never been settled, instead congealing into two different tribal mythologies. The Left hope that a charismatic mayor with a warm smile will exorcise Thatcher’s ghost, and with it that of her New Labour successors, while the Reformist Right prays that it will one day complete her unfinished revolution.

Any genuine savior, Burnham or otherwise, will have to topple the mongrel system we currently inhabit, which displays neither the features of efficient entrepreneurialism nor those of state competence and capacity. We have neither the comforts of collectivism nor the dynamism of the market, neither the cradle-to-grave carer nor the sovereign individual. Mantel understood this better than most; her assassin seeks a personal and political redemption through violence, but the lead man can’t find salvation by killing what has already metastasized. There are no easy escape routes. At least in 2013, drunk on cheap lager and high off my own supply, I knew who the enemy was.

Downing Street this week has essentially confirmed this assessment. The recurring nightmare of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal cannot be banished with a backroom reshuffle alone. In an effort to rescue Starmer’s zombie premiership, the current line is, in essence: the Prime Minister did nothing. He knew nothing. He was not told, he did not ask, and he could not have reasonably been expected to do so. Nobody told him and so the man deemed responsible, Sir Olly Robbins, has been fired.

So we’re back to an unedifying ministerial dance of defending the least bad of two options. The first is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed “our man in Washington”, despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, and with the Prime Minister ignoring his inability to pass the vetting process. The second option — and this is the official position of the Government — is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed US ambassador despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, but with the Prime Minister unaware that he had failed his deep security vetting. While the first implies that Starmer has misled Parliament and the public repeatedly, the second merely signals utter incompetence.

For a Prime Minister who lacks the ability to define his own politics and communicate a moral purpose for his government, either account is terminal. In contrast with the ideological crusading of Brexit, Corbynism, and Liz Truss’s doomed Reaganite experiment, the Prime Minister promised to tone down the big ideas, dial down the politics and lock in. He based his appeal on personal probity and his supposed abilities as an administrator. To that end, he said, “there’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.

But this “post-ideological” offer is ironically rooted in a premise that is, in fact, deeply ideological: if we strip back the partisanship, steering the ship of state is a technical problem to be solved by getting to grips with the details. Certainly, it explains Starmer’s embrace of our system of rule-by-committee. The relevant stakeholders shall be consulted.

But politics is not the equivalent of watchmaking, tinkering with the nuts and bolts of a complex machine until it ticks soundly. Rather, it is a never-ending process of managing and choosing between conflicting interests. There are (or were) people around Starmer who clearly understand this. Morgan McSweeney, for one, was fully plugged into the weird Matrix of Labour factionalism, with all its competing visions of Britain and the world. Here’s another irony, as Starmer’s aides pushed hard for Mandelson as an appointee. Whatever the Prime Minister’s own commitments to post-ideological technocracy, the people around him knew Mandelson represented a kind of politics that they themselves were invested in — the world of Cool Britannia, liberal globalization, and the transatlantic alliance.

Those two currents — the stakeholder state and the hard-nosed politicking — have long been in tension. On the one hand, after all, New Labour created for itself a kind of diffuse parallel state of arms-length bodies, expert appointees and independent regulators, neutral in theory but which nonetheless reshaped the constitution. The “old Labour” view of meddling, top-down governance would give way to a new understanding of power. “New public management theory” introduced marketization and competition into the public sector. New committees and modern bureaucracies proliferated to oversee the shift. But while ministerial authority was dispersed across this new quangocracy, Blair himself attempted to circumvent the unwieldy machine with his adoption of “sofa government”. He ceded power with one hand, and tried to grab it back with the other.

Starmer has fallen into the same trap. His instinctive legalism holds international law and an activist judiciary as superior to every state on Earth; the law must protect the individual from the unseemly power of the demos. It’s notable, here, that the Prime Minister’s whole professional life — he entered No. 10 at 61 — was spent defending the victims of government overreach. The professional-managerial classes that he represents so vividly are the very administrators of the contemporary, post-Blairite public sector, the very civil servants that may have waved Mandelson through and ruined Starmer for good.

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What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong

By Jonny Ball

One of Starmer’s supposed selling points was his experience running public prosecutions at the head of a major public body. This was the serious Roundhead to Boris Johnson’s clownish Cavalier. And yet his grip on power is as elusive as everyone since Blair. The Prime Minister is unable to live up to his promise of delivering easy efficiency through the Whitehall networks. “Mission Units” have been set up, then scrapped. Every new season seems to come with a relaunch focused on a “delivery phase” that never quite arrives.

Here, again, is another irony. For it was the PM himself who last year told the Liaison Committee of his frustration that “every time I go to pull a lever”, the machinery of government is so clogged and sclerotic that “the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”. This is an interpretation of the British state’s cumbersome, bloated nature that’s equivalent to the common spectacle of Conservatives bemoaning the dire state of public services — as if they themselves weren’t responsible.

Even so, even after almost three decades of the quangocracy, these latest revelations have the power to amaze. Defenders of Robbins have emerged to say that it is routine for ministers not to be told of the outcome of deep vetting. Permanent secretaries — the most senior civil servants — can, apparently, overrule vetting advice without the knowledge of secretaries of state or MPs. This suggests a level of dysfunction in the relationship between elected politicians and the deep state that’ll shock most Britons, giving life to Dominic Cummings’s oft-repeated claim: the Government does not run the country.

Next week, meanwhile, Robbins may address the Foreign Affairs Committee investigating the scandal. In other words, this chapter is by no means closed. Bad news, of course, for Starmer — but also his successor. For prime ministers will continue to be hoisted by their own administrative petards until they tackle a central issue of our time: the diffusion of state capacity across the bureaucracy. The spectacle of political leaders claiming impotence in the face of the state apparatus is deadly to democracy, and reversing the trend requires a reassertion of real executive and ministerial authority, to say nothing of a fundamental change in the mindset of a political class that would likely interpret such a development as an authoritarian power grab. On the contrary, it would constitute a return of the political to domains that have for too long remained in a technocratic abyss.

That’s for the future. For now, Labour MPs watch on in grim resignation. Yet there is no alternative: a Blairite health secretary with an ultra-thin majority representing clean-shaven Davos Labour, tainted both by Mandelson and by the fact that he’s disliked by the membership; a more plausible King of the North, but stuck sulking outside of Parliament; a less plausible Angela Rayner, who struggles to convince colleagues that she wouldn’t represent a serious liability in the highest of offices.

And so the Starmer era totters on. Perhaps until May, when a local election disaster awaits his hollowed-out party, or until the clamor from senior ministers reaches a crescendo, as MPs recall their fragile majorities. Until then, Starmer lurches from scandal to scandal, less the hapless child at the front of the DLR and more the passenger on a ghost train, careering wildly across the broken railroads of the British state.

As the architect of New Labour’s campaigning focus on Tory sleaze, warned his readers: the British voter’s faith in politics is squandered “when those who are elected to serve the public interest see nothing wrong in helping themselves to their own share of the consequent commercial rewards in directorships and consultancies. The idea that there is nothing objectionable about a public figure pursuing a dubious private commercial interest as long as it is declared is one of the most corrupting principles in public life today. As far as the electorate is concerned, many think we have a government that consists of business back-scratchers and a Parliament made up of politicians on the make.”

That two years later Mandelson was forced to resign for an undeclared loan from a parliamentary colleague, whose entanglement with the late press baron Robert Maxwell’s estate it was Mandelson’s remit, as trade and industry minister, to investigate, is more than just a piquant historical irony. After all, to have been once forced from office for perceived corruption and undue coziness with the interests of the super-rich may just be bad luck. By the third instance, the blame surely falls to the employer: the character of the person involved is all too well-known, and the pattern long-entrenched. As Le Monde, freed from English niceties, characterizes New Labour’s Third Man, he is “the evil genius of the British Labour Party”, a “tactician fascinated by fame and money” who “showed contempt for morality and common social rules.” The scorpion stings because that is its nature; the blinking protestations of the frog, clinging to the wreckage of his premiership, that such an outcome could not be anticipated are too absurd to be entertained.

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Jeffrey Epstein's corrupt overclass

By Mary Harrington

Instead, the greatest, most ironic contrast that strikes today’s reader is not that between the younger Mandelson’s reformist, moralizing tone and the well-established tenor of his political career, but rather the yawning gulf between his domestic reputation and the raw facts of wealth and power unveiled by the ongoing Epstein revelations. The notorious “Prince of Darkness”, the fearsome and powerful intriguer at the heart of British governance, stands revealed in his email correspondence as more Widmerpool than Machiavelli. Westminster’s ruthless operator, the terror of lobby journalism, comes across as a needy, social climbing arriviste, a grasping provincial striver dazzled by the opulent consumption of his rich friends and desperate to grab a slice for himself. So desperate, indeed, that his mentor Epstein even once rebukes him for his constant demands for favors. His New Labour memoir, The Third Man, sent to Epstein for writing advice, is, the two friends discuss, merely a CV for a role at Deutsche Bank. Epstein dangles other glittering prizes before his friend. Would Mandelson like to sell an Israeli oil field for Ehud Barak, Epstein enquires. Why not? Would Mandelson like to involve himself in post-Tahrir Square Egypt, Epstein wonders? Why not? The affairs of nations, once the engine of history, had at the End of History become mere business opportunities: it must have seemed, back in the 2000s, as if the party would never end.

The glittering, amoral world of Epstein and his associates, of the Russian oligarchs and Arab potentates and financiers who flit across the correspondence, is simply the end product of the world of globalization, and of America’s unipolar imperial moment, without which the New Labour project is incomprehensible. When we read Epstein and Ehud Barak venomously gossiping over the extravagant income Tony Blair has amassed as the consigliere of Central Asian dictators, we are granted a glimpse of the true architecture of the world New Labour sold us as unstoppable progress. “We live in the new global economy, and that there is no alternative to that,” the Mandelson of 1996 advised his readers, and this is the result. Just like Blair, whose planned post-premiership career of resolving the Palestine conflict while accumulating wealth was rather more successful at the latter than the former, it was fortunate for him that this brave new world would transpire to be so personally rewarding. Epstein was nothing more or less than a vampiric aristocrat of American empire, extracting whatever he desired from its outer reaches. Mandelson his eager courtier, risen from that same empire’s provincial backwaters. How meager and parochial British politics must seem from this exalted vantage point: it must have been hard to remember that the needs and desires of British voters ever mattered at all.

The age when a former prime minister could retire to obscurity in a quiet cathedral close ended with New Labour. Today, their second acts revolve around the imperial center. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in How Will Capitalism End?, corruption, broadly defined, is simply a symptom of financialized capitalism in a globalized world, and the decaying social fabric of its host countries the result of a world in which “the rich may rightly consider their fate and that of their families to have become independent from the fates of the societies from which they extract their wealth.” If British industry did not notably prosper from Mandelson’s time overseeing it, smoothing its wholesale transfer into the portfolios of the globalized oligarchy, so be it. If the MP for Hartlepool more rapidly and dramatically prospered from New Labour’s time in office than did the people of Hartlepool, that is the nature of things. For all that Mandelson can proclaim that the business dealings with Epstein, for which the police are currently investigating him, were in “the national interest”, the governance of Britain does not figure in this worldview as anything other than a career first act, the highest offices of the British state merely a provincial dry run for advancement in the higher world, among the richer people, who actually matter. When even the former Prince Andrew inserts himself in Epstein’s court, seeking rest and relaxation from the onerous privileges of his sinecure, we see, if not the secret harmonies of the world, then its true architecture, beneath the Westminster state’s ornately crumbling facade.

As for the little people, the truculent and aggrieved British voters whose anger was to be assuaged by the scraps from the big table, redistributed as a consolation prize for the loss of their industries and the wholesale recomposition of their cozily insular society, if their time has not yet come, Mandelson’s third downfall is the harbinger of when it will. It is ironic to recall, now that the near-revolutionary tumult of British politics is waved away by the Government’s dwindling band of supporters as a false consciousness imparted by hostile Right-wing agitators, that the younger Mandelson once spun visions of Britain’s near future as dark as anything now found on Twitter.

Imagining the future world of 2005, in which the public had failed to vote a reforming Labour government into office, Mandelson in The Blair Revolution conjured dark prophecies of the forthcoming “millennium riots”, in which “the army had been brought in” and his fictional upwardly mobile family had witnessed “their neighbors running screaming along the road”, their Georgian townhouses set ablaze. As a result, “there had been a middle-class exodus from London to the Home Counties, into hastily built private estates with perimeter fences and private security.” In the real world of 1996, the “breakdown of society in Britain”, typified by “a crime wave [that] was dismissed as exaggerated tabloid scare-mongering”, derived from the simple fact that “the nation has been in relative decline for a century”, and was baldly “a declining, post-imperial, economically second-rank nation, which is also increasingly divided and unequal”.

In his introduction to the 2004 reissue of The Blair Revolution, Mandelson lamented Britain’s “bleak ghettos depressing the spirits of all who live in them, dominated by the fear of crime and racial tension, too often becoming centers of danger and desperation”, language now anathema to his ideological heirs. The British public had begun to despise its political class, he warned: “New Labour’s task now is to ensure that public opinion does not slip back into this sullen mood — or, at least, not permanently — and that a deeper, lasting connection is made between government and governed.” Does Mandelson feel New Labour achieved this, we wonder? Does he believe his wavering place at globalization’s most-luxurious table is justified by the transformations his faction wrought? Mandelson termed his mission a “permanent revolution,” creating “a long-term transformation of Britain” in which New Labour’s ideology “embeds itself in the fabric and social architecture” so that “our changes can be entrenched”. Indeed, he notes, “We want to create institutions across British society that people can point to in twenty and thirty years’ time and recognize as distinctly New Labour landmarks.”

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Why Farage is a Burkean

By Aris Roussinos

Indeed we can: New Labour’s monuments are all around us. The tragedy of modern Britain is that Mandelson and his clique succeeded. The wreckage of our society is a testament to the success of their project, a series of time bombs buried within Britain’s social and economic architecture. The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism. The current prime minister’s project of governing Britain as if it were still 1997, taking off where his ideological forebears were so rudely interrupted by the British voter, was doomed from the start, because Starmer is fated to rule the volatile and rebellious country that New Labour created. The least popular prime minister since polling began is now condemned to eke out his mandate without power, at the helm of a fractious and moribund party that despises him, lurching from crisis to crisis, until the electorate’s final sentence of execution rescues him from his purgatorial reign.

A badly run country has become an ungovernable one, ill at ease with itself and looking inward for enemies. Lord Mandelson’s one, unintentional gift to Britain is in hastening the collapse of the rotten and crumbling superstructure of the politics he helped construct. The reams of internal correspondence soon to be released will provide Reform, the de facto party of opposition, with ammunition in its mission to undo the Blair Revolution Mandelson once flaunted. As the director of Labour Growth, Mark McVitie, rightly observes, the scandal is “the latest and most grotesque signifier of a political culture that cannot carry on in its current form”, and “what is undoubtedly worth saving in the liberal democratic settlement will not be saved by the people who have presided over its decay”. But the domestic tragedy of British dysfunction is inseparable from the country’s willed transformation into the fawning servitor of a corrupt transnational order. That it takes an American scandal to demolish the Government’s last lingering traces of legitimacy, our peripheral backwater administration haunted by the nefarious pleasures of its metropole, is only fitting. In his career’s final act Mandelson has become, just as Le Carré perceived, the squalid archetype for the British state itself.

Instead, British politics over the last decade has seen the rise of the celebrity adviser — staff who have been visible shapers of the government agenda and essential to the party leader or Prime Minister. When I was in Downing Street working for Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Chief of Staff was the former mandarin Jonathan Powell, a calm, long-serving presence who focused on the critical issues of Northern Ireland and defense and security. Personalities vary, but the elevation of Chief of Staff started with Dominic Cummings, who worked for Boris Johnson as Chief Adviser. As a named and known figure, Cummings had his own reputation as a political player, having successfully led Vote Leave to victory in the Brexit referendum, and maintained his own links with the media when inside No 10. He continued to narrate his own theory of the case to selected journalists even through the national crisis of Covid, culminating in the infamous press conference held in the Downing Street garden.

Cummings established a set of behaviors and assumptions that have continued to define the Chief of Staff role. Blaming the civil service. Attempting to strengthen the center of government. Concentrating flows of information. Briefing journalists. Suspending the whip from MPs. This, sadly, became a model for Keir Starmer’s No 10 operation. 

The obvious flaw in the Cummings model is captured by that former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short’s description of special advisers as “people who live in the dark”. She meant it as an attack on spin doctors,  but it was also good advice. The iron law of staffing is that you must not become the story. And when you do — whether you are Alastair Campbell, Dominic Cummings, or Morgan McSweeney — you will have to go. Each fell in different ways: Alastair went to war with the media, finally turning up on screen; Dom lost an internal Downing Street power struggle; Morgan took responsibility for his closeness to Peter Mandelson. Yet each had become a household name — the very opposite of lurking in the shadows. 

The less obvious structural problem is that, over the past decade, the job of Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been held by 14 different people. This, too, is part of the Cummings legacy. The reason is Brexit. That was the ultimate project of change without a plan, and it has set the template for UK politics. A profound rejection of “things as they are” to which politicians repeatedly failed to respond. Theresa May — no plan, just a hard Brexit with a “dementia tax” and restoration of hunting. Boris Johnson — no plan, and he was not saved by his swift response to the global crisis of Covid. Rishi Sunak — no plan but some spreadsheets and some welcome but insufficient incremental changes. Keir Starmer — no plan, not even a plan to make a plan.

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John Prescott never pulled his punches

By John McTernan

For a decade, voters have demanded change, whether opting for Brexit, surging to Corbyn, or delivering landslides in turn to Johnson and Starmer. What to change from is obvious: the status quo. What to change to is far more opaque, not least because neoliberal governance, or the “Treasury view”, as it is commonly known, is the paradigm within which government politicians live and think. The bond vigilantes have been beseeched to attack Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to support the government’s Budget, and now to quell backbench Labour unease. Just look at how easily the current Labour leadership turns to the bond markets for support in party management. 

There is a desperate need for Labour to break with the current political frame, which for a decade has ensured virtually no growth in wages and living standards. Yet there is stasis within the Labour party at the moment — apart from the call by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who himself admitted he has no rule in changing the UK leader, for Starmer to resign. Sure, there is a structural problem: the possible candidates are waiting for the result of inquiries. Angela Rayner hasn’t had resolution of an HMRC inquiry; others await the full publication of correspondence between Peter Mandelson and ministers. Burnham, the single most popular figure in Labour politics, is marooned outside the House of Commons having been barred from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in McSweeney’s last backroom move to protect his boss. Burnham’s candidacy in that contest would have given a voice to voters and a potential vehicle for change for the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). So this is currently a Mexican stand-off in which no-one can pull a trigger.

Yet, as the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn used to say, what matters most are not personalities but issues. The real question for anyone who wants to replace Starmer is what policy platform would restore Labour’s popularity to 25% — which would make it competitive with Reform UK. In reality, there are two options: focus on delivery or focus on change. The first of these, currently being pursued by the Starmer government as the “cost-of-living agenda”, is a cul-de-sac. Sadly, it is the path and error of the technocrat. It is more a tactic than a strategy, and it rests on making a series of small, incremental changes in the hope that those will accumulate into a meaningful difference. 

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Morgan McSweeney’s empty legacy

By Jonny Ball

The problem is that the cost of living never goes down, not least because, since the Thirties, politicians and economists have been conscious of the massive danger of deflation. So, if prices won’t go down, what to do? The Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has popularized the term “Affordability”. The concept brings increased spending power into the calculation — with more of that then things are more affordable. The record rise in the minimum wage is part of that, as is the reality of rent controls coming in through strengthening renters’ rights in England.

That’s why Labour’s second option — focusing on change, rather than delivery — is the real contest. Just look at the rise of insurgent parties in the UK. On the Left, there are the Greens, and on the Right there is Reform UK — both fueled by voters who distrust big business, believe the system isn’t working, and have lost trust in the traditional parties. 

Given these circumstances, the Labour Party needs a new political economy. Without a theory of how to allocate revenue and capital fairly, who the winners and losers are, and who their enemy is, changing leaders is pointless. That new political economy requires obeying the first law of politics — the voters are never wrong, so act on their worries. Yes, they complain about the cost of living, but the biggest element of that is housing — and housebuilding has fallen catastrophically. The only entity that can build at speed and scale is the government — so it is time for half a million council houses built on government land. The biggest existential fear for workers is the advance of AI, while for parents it’s the impact of Big Teach on their kids’ futures. For Labour, the natural party of intervention, that means swift and tough regulation.

Above all else, the party must apologize. Admit that Labour lost its way. None of its mistakes — the reasons it has lost support — were in the manifesto. Cutting winter fuel payments, attacking social security for people with disabilities, appointing the wrong ambassador — those were all done in government. Return to the manifesto and build a plan to implement big changes that will be visible and will be felt day by day, month by month, over the remaining years of the parliament. That landslide majority could still come in handy, if Labour can find a true social democratic purpose. Then there may be a Chief of Staff in Downing Street whose name we don’t need to know.

Where does the mystique come from? No country has ever allowed the journey of an American traveler to so decisively articulate its soul, not least a softly spoken Iowan with a penchant for silly place names. The mid-Nineties, as Alwyn Turner notes in A Classless Society, showed no signs of a Bryson lurking on the horizon. This, after all, was an age seemingly desperate to escape a cloying parochialism and rediscover itself in time for the new century. “John Major hankers after a Darling Buds of May Britain circa 1955,” lamented a Times leader a year before Bryson’s travelogue, “its relevance to the increasingly nasty and brutish world that so many of today’s Britain endure is something of a mystery.”

Two decades on, the reverse seemed to have happened. For if it seemed like we were edging towards Cool Britannia and Blair’s “New Britain”, the decade’s most memorable speech ended up being Major’s evocation of thick-set insularity, with its “warm beer… and old maids bicycling to communion”. Starmer’s recent party conference speech offered his own version of this collective reverie, with his “half-time oranges” and fence painting. Yet the Prime Minister could barely compete with Bryson’s more enduring take on Major’s whimsy. For it is his formula of curmudgeonly humor and nostalgia that has come to set the terms of the nation’s search for itself over the recent decades.

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How Farage seduced Grantham

By Fred Sculthorp

Our literary travelogues are an incongruous paradox: both tomes of national reckoning and overindulged almanacs stuffed with historical curios and serendipitous encounters. H.V. Morton’s In Search of England is a triumph of the genre, a book that wavers between religious experience and the triteness of a National Trust leaflet. J.B. Priestley, another inspiration for Bryson, went off again 10 years after Morton in the midst of the Great Depression with his motorcar and driver, at a time when the National Government feared communist insurrection. He discovered three Englands which both inform and overshadow Notes From A Small Island, the synthesis of which, to this day, no traveler — not even Bryson — seems able to truly comprehend.

The first of these Englands entranced Bryson with the eternal mystery of parish spires, hedgerows and village eccentrics. The second, he found tricky and drab: the towns and cities, their “left behinds” that even in the Thirties, like now, seemed lost in the shadows of the 19th century. But it was that last England that irked Priestley and indeed Bryson the most. In 1933, it represented the burgeoning ersatz of the American century: an unfamiliar, seemingly impenetrable world of suburbs, modernist experiments and individuals set free from the grasp of both provincial and industrial England. It was a place that Priestley anxiously regarded as belonging “far more to the age itself than this particular island”.

But today there’s a new third England, one which looms over the national psyche and would give Bill Bryson a nervous breakdown. It is defined by a mixture of the new arrivals of the last two decades, who have added 60% to its population growth; the critical mass of the population who live increasingly free from the old hearth of media and institutions; the generation under 30 who have spent their formative years online and to whom even Bryson’s pick and mix of patriotic fare seem alien. For any would-be traveler, this Britain can be glimpsed in its fastest changing places: Peterborough, Reading, Leicester, the suburbs of Birmingham, London’s periphery.

The nation’s popular cultural establishments, shorn of any real interest in understanding this New Britain, now serve as a cozy escape. And Bill Bryson is the patron saint of this increasingly oblivious cult. To reread Notes From A Small Island today is a bit like discovering the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the origins of every fleeting phenomena that has worked to distract us from a Britain in the midst of wholesale change. From the whimsy of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (Brits, Bryson tells us outside a shop in Windsor, are “great at pulling together”), to the self-aware griping of “Very British Problems” and the geriatric charm of a Richard Osman thriller. This is what Bryson, after all, clings to: the queuing, the self-aware eccentricity, the playing up to type, all fueled by the wistful determination to recover a happier trip to the country he took as a young man in the Seventies.

Unsurprisingly this disguised trauma tips his affection for England into a self-parody, one that has become perversely useful as a stand-in for any national reckoning. The Nineties, like the Britain of 2025, was obsessed with brokering and mediating an understanding of Englishness. This was a foreshadowing of today’s parlor game, with novelists and columnists eager to reconcile Britain’s lost prestige and power with a new identity for the 21st-century future. Inevitably it ended up as a drive towards the lowest common cultural denominator. Julian Barnes’s parody of the decade’s penchant for existential taxonomizing, England, England, was published at the height of Bryson mania. The Isle of Wight, crammed with the nation’s symbols and icons, is transformed by Barnes into a theme park for tourists and emigres, an upgrade of the old nation shorn of its divided soul and reborn for a Global Britain. Plotting this New England, market researchers compile a list that could have fallen out of Notes From A Small Island: emotional frigidity, thatched cottages, black cabs.

The theme park’s purveyor was seen by critics as a stand-in for one of the decade’s opportunistic spivs, a Murdoch or an al-Fayed. But the ultimate purveyor of Britain’s cozy, post-national handrailed theme park was Bryson. Tasked with this fantasyland gatekeeping of bonhomie and repression, the writing in Notes From A Small Island offers the drearily familiar criteria for our own way of seeing the country now: England’s landscapes are “stunning, peaceful, beautiful and very nice”. Cities, the small bits we get to see, are always impenetrable with “sprawl”. Human beings, especially those still living, barely feature.

“The trouble with English towns,” we are told, arriving on the shores of Dover before the journey even starts, “is that they are so indistinguishable from one another.” Rather than a point of interest, such gripes always seem to deliberately peter out. The disappointment of a village on the Dorset coast, once enchanted by childhood memories, is resolved by a rant about the car park and bad pub food. There are English voices, but only as catchphrases, faint caricatures muttering anachronisms from the past. Bradford is so distressing that Bryson has to stop the trip and briefly go home.

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J.B. Priestley, visionary of England

By Boyd Tonkin

As Blair took power and enacted his New Britain, one where the nation would be “young again”, the reading public only became more obsessed with Bryson’s England. In hindsight, its greatest cultural achievement was to launder England’s reactionary provincial impulse, one which Blair and the modernizing vision of New Labour sought to lance, into a sort of folksy, politically sterile jamboree. Notes remained a bestseller for the first two years after New Labour’s victory. Then, 1999 saw Bryson unleashed on television: bearded, squat, a gentle lisp, like a child’s cartoon bear for adults, holding their hand as he tried to explain post-industrial Liverpool on the eve of the new millennium. The remit for the nation’s newfound cuddly and erudite uncle steadily expanded. In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, he was tasked by BBC News with trying to explain why a pair of teenagers had gunned down 16 of their classmates.

A similar ploy tried on Australia in 2000 failed: Down Under was poorly reviewed. The soul of Oz, apparently, was too irreverent to be deciphered by a prying American tourist. But back in Blighty, Bryson’s now decade-old travelogue had transcended the sum of its parts. In 2003, while Britain was invading Iraq and the country was being plastered by the “pseudomodernism” of New Labour’s wave of civic building, the book was voted as most representative of the nation in a World Book Day poll.

For Bryson, national treasuredom and its lappings ensued: honorary doctorates at half a dozen universities, including the Chancellorship of the University of Durham and the Presidency of the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2007. Detractors, like James May, were few. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” he told viewers of Top Gear in 2004, “it’s beardy, sanctimonious, patronizing Americans in tartan trousers coming to England and trying to persuade us to turn it into a museum.”

But nothing, not even Top Gear, could touch Bryson’s rising star. By the end of the decade, he had partnered with the monarchy to present Icons of England, a collection of essays featuring everyone from Kevin Spacey to Benjamin Zephaniah, which further taxonomized an England that had become even more unfamiliar for most people over the preceding decade: village shops, canal boats and even a Majoresque evocation of the “mist”. Notes from Little Dribbling, the sequel, came in 2015 at the behest of the publisher, and apparently the nation. This almost-reluctant journey, via the “Bryson line” through the middle of the country, seemed to take place in a world he now quietly resented. The British, he noticed in the Lake District, had begun to behave in “quietly disgraceful ways” when no one else was watching.

He was the country’s last acceptable reactionary. His gripes were those of a smoldering old colonel (bad manners, litter, an inability to recall the nation’s basic facts), while he took refuge in the matriarchal decency of Angela Merkel and the “shared experiences” offered by Fiona Bruce and Huw Edwards. Blithe anti-Americanism, in an age of populism, seemed the most acceptable way to complain. The biggest change among the British, he told Stephen Sackur in a Hard Talk Interview, one where he was bluntly accused of wanting to preserve the country in aspic, is that they had become more like his countrymen, “quite self-centered in a way they never used to be”.

And still, amid England’s current woes, Bryson endures as the nation’s whisperer. “This is still a country that’s pretty devoted to decency and common sense,” he assured us after being pushed for some “Bryson Positivity” in a recent Times interview promoting his latest re-release. But this could only fall on deaf ears. England, after all, is still in thrall to Bryson’s pastoral whimsy. Nearly every bestselling travelogue in the past decade has concerned itself with the rural, the pastoral, a cult of anodyne heritage that has turned the old broadcasting establishment into a sedative. Yet at the root of these obsessions is one of the country’s unspoken anxieties we still refuse to reckon with: will there always be an unchanging national character passed down through the generations and its national touchstones, with its recognizable set of quirks, idioms, eccentricities and jokes? Or is it fading into the future of a new country — that of the third England we have always quietly feared and never really wanted? Thanks to Bill Bryson, we still don’t really know.

“Notice how muted the reaction has been to the new Hubs,” wrote the anonymous X memelord Drukpa Kunley shortly after Starmer announced his third-party deportation scheme. Indeed, there was no “return hub” discourse. But perhaps that was the point. The suspiciously twee euphemism suggests Labour has discovered a quietly revolutionary way of doing its dirty work.

On the surface the “hub” is a bastion of technocratic benevolence, an embodiment of a British state that wants to be your bestie. The word conjures images of Technicolor beanbag chairs and gel pen-wielding lanyard-wearers. Yet, scrape a little and the hub reveals itself as a formless, fickle, and malleable euphemism — it bends to the whims of whoever wields it.

Before it became a term of civic optimism, the hub had a rougher beginning. Once upon a time, the hub was a “hobbe”. From the proto-German hubbel, meaning “hill” or “bump”, the early hobbe was an unappetizing prospect. Geoffrey Chaucer used “hobbe” to describe something wretched, while a medieval English-to-Latin dictionary defined it as a tumorous swelling, a synonym for a “bube” — of bubonic plague fame. These hubs signaled sickness, not progress.

Around two centuries later, in a 1570 farming manual, English poet and country gent Barnaby Googe gave the term a new meaning. He described the hub as “the midst of the Wheele, called the Naue or Hobbe of the wheele”. Reincarnated as the bump at the center of a wheel, it became a mechanism of both physical and moral progress.

As English standardized, the hobbe became the hub, and went transatlantic. In 1858, Boston grandee Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared the city’s State-House to be “the hub of the solar system”, and you couldn’t “carry off a hub without taking the spokes with it, or you would damage the wheel”. Boston soon became widely known as “The Hub of the Universe” or simply “the Hub”. Holmes asserted that this progress was driven by an intellectual and moral WASP elite he termed the “Boston Brahmins”, positioning them and Boston at the forefront of American prosperity.

Yet it was in the second half of the 20th century that the hub’s galactic potential began to emerge. Following the war, the Western imagination underwent a profound shift, rejecting a world of essentialism and rootedness in favor of motion and interconnection.

As N.S. Lyons observes, before 1945 nations were moored in soil, faith, and kin — what Karl Popper derided as the “closed society”. After the catastrophe, those bonds began to be seen as a gateway to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” diagnosed loyalty to family or nation as pathology. Popper went further, branding the national community itself “anti-humanitarian propaganda”. The postwar settlement determined that the “strong gods” of belonging and faith were to be dismantled, replaced with the “weak gods” of openness, tolerance, doubt, and consumer comfort. This cultural transformation set the stage for the rise of the hub.

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Bringing this dream to reality would require three consecutive revolutions — in politics, commerce, and technology. First, a postwar political reconstruction to engineer openness and interdependence. Second, a global managerial and commercial revolution to facilitate this ever-deeper integration. And third, a tech revolution to eliminate friction from the system entirely.

Western leaders embedded the new postwar values into the emerging supra-national institutions. By sharing coal, steel, law, and standards, the founding fathers of the European Union, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, argued that war would be “not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. In this new era, centralization and technocracy would become the overarching political theology.

Then, to manage the emerging sprawl of global interconnection, the hub was unleashed. Amid the postwar manufacturing and consumption booms, the hub became the weapon of choice for the new managerial class tasked with holding the new system together. First, in 1955, Delta Airlines pioneered the “hub-and-spoke” system at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport to consolidate flights through a central location. The idea was simple: concentrate routes, reduce operating costs, and increase connectivity. The aviation hub model quickly became industry standard, and a model for managing all complex systems.

Logistics followed suit. Inspired by the Delta Airlines model, a young Yale student named Fred Smith wrote a thesis proposing that a hub system could enable overnight deliveries. Years later, he put the idea into action, founding FedEx and revolutionizing logistics by routing all deliveries through the company’s global SuperHub in Memphis, launched in 1981.

Finally, the Internet arrived. It would streamline not only physical infrastructure (think Ethernet hubs), but societal infrastructure too. “Technology hubs”, explained Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham, were where “rich people and nerds” clustered to build the future. And so Silicon Valley became a mythic ecosystem that could change the world. By 2000, Wired magazine was documenting a global outbreak of “Silicon envy”, observing that “high-tech hubs now dot the globe” all seeking to unlock the wealth, productivity, and magic that the hub could conjure.

Enter, Tony Blair. Despite lacking a phone and an email address, Blair wanted to emulate Silicon Valley’s boundless techno-optimism in British government. And so he waged a hub revolution of his own: launching the Policy Hub website in March 2002. This online tool was designed to centralize policymaking through shared initiatives, tools, and case studies, bringing the spirit of the hub to government. Awestruck by American productivity and desperate to modernize the state, Britain became hub obsessed. Prior to Blair, the term “hub” appeared in Parliament only 613 times in 200 years, mostly in reference to transport. In just 13 years under New Labour, it was used 885 times.

If Blair was a hub emissary, then David Cameron was a hub zealot. Amid austerity, he sought to rewire the state with a series of efficient hubs that combined services. Growth Hubs attempted to reshape local enterprise. Family Hubs provided womb-to-tomb family support. Launched in 2012, GOV.UK was the hub of hubs. It was a digital paragon of efficiency: soothing sans-serif GDS Transport font, paternalistic “nudges” drawn from supposedly cutting-edge psychological insights. All of it designed to dissolve the sprawling machinery of government into a single, frictionless one-stop shop. In just six years, hub discourse in parliament exploded to 2,067 references — doubling Labour’s efforts in half the time.

The Cameron years were defined by the mythos of the hub. If we all come together — individuals, communities, ideas and technology — there’s nothing we cannot solve. From GOV.UK and the London Olympics, to legalization of same-sex marriage, Cameron unwaveringly believed in the open society, benevolently ruled by hubs.

But Brexit was a devastating blow. In search of sovereignty and border control, the spirit of the closed society returned. Voters had rejected the hub ideology of frictionless integration. In the years that followed, successive Tory Prime Ministers attempted to invoke “strong god” rhetoric. Theresa May scorned “citizens of nowhere”; the Rwanda policy aimed to shatter the postwar consensus.

However, in practice things were different. The open society continued to prosper through none other than the hub. Theresa May doubled down on tech hubs. Boris Johnson followed with green energy, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. Rishi Sunak sought to establish the UK as a global center for AI safety and launched the Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.

This tension reveals a burning psychodrama at the heart of the British state’s self-conception. It wants to be a high-tech superpower without the pain of rebuilding its Victorian bureaucracy. It wants to make cuts to state services while sounding friendly and benign. And it wants to project global openness while addressing the concerns of an increasingly reactionary electorate. Rather than confront these paradoxes, Britain reaches for the soothing Potemkin policy of the hub. Time and again, leaders choose cuddly vagueness over the hard work of politics.

It’s now Starmer’s turn to take up the mantle. In the brand-new Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June, the Government announced its intention to invest in no less than 19 different genres of hub. Some are mere updates of existing hubs, but others are entirely new: commercial innovation, AI skills, life sciences, defense, professional and business services, and robotics.

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In just one year since Starmer entered Downing Street, “hub” has appeared 966 times in parliamentary debates. In June 2025 alone, it popped up 166 times — the highest month since records began. At this pace, the term may feature over 4,000 times before the next election. So inundated by hubs, we are numb to them. Ubiquitous and bland, they’re an instant eyeball glazer.

Which brings us back to the return hubs. The policy embodies the central paradox of the Starmer project. “Return” gestures toward something more reactionary — not just deportation, but a broader RETVRN to an imagined orderly past. Meanwhile, “hub”, of course, is the open society incarnate.

Amid the metaphysical civil war bubbling between voters, Starmer must tread a tightrope. To keep the favor of metropolitan progressives, he must demonstrate technocratic competence. To hold off Reform, he must cut immigration. If he can wield the return hub, flexing toughness while preserving a progressive surface, he might just keep hold of power. The result could be a distinctively British settlement: quietly hardcore with a cuddly demeanor. It would represent yet another evolutionary leap for the hub.

But if Starmer falls, the hub could go down with him. A leader more hostile to the hallowed open society, perhaps a Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick, may choose to kill this symbol of the ancien régime. What might come next? The answer may already be here: look no further than the meme-powered “Skullcrushing” remigration subsuming America. The hub’s wheel will turn — or it will break. Its fate is in Starmer’s hands.

Little complacencies like these are part of a long tradition. People have dreamt of some scheme to reconcile capitalism and socialism, or at least to skirt the conflict between them, for as long as the two have existed. It’s an idea that’s hard to disagree with. Wouldn’t it be better if we could have class collaboration rather than the class war? Why can’t labour and capital simply stop disagreeing with one another and work together? Why can’t we, as is so often said, have both “a strong market and an active state”?

There has been no lack of Third Ways. Many were called into existence for a definite purpose: part of the economy walled off from market competition to accomplish something specific. For a long line of romantics, aristocratic dreamers, and clericalists, the Red Peril was to be defeated by refashioning society as a rigmarole of guilds. For Bismarck, this could be carried with old age pensions and accident insurance. The Third Reich promised German industry a great army — and the permanent demand that this implied — in exchange for its practical independence. Postwar Japan wanted to move up the “value chain” in exports, and this meant tight control of capital markets by the state to direct cheap loans to star performers.

In all these cases there was a plan, or something like one. There was, furthermore, a reasonably clear set of boundaries: an idea of where the writ of the state planners should run, and where it should end — usually at the factory door.

New Labour, of course, had its own Third Way. It was disarmingly simple. In 1997, Britain was, by some stretch, the most laissez-faire major economy in Europe. The British Third Way, then, simply meant creaming off its surplus to pay for new and expanded public services. This was hardly sophisticated. It was no MITI. But it had a tight logic: the fortunes of the City of London, bound up with the fortunes of the NHS.

But it was not to last. Britain’s Third Way meant a free market, with exceptions. This equilibrium did not hold, and the exceptions soon began to consume the host. For this there were three reasons.

For one, post-1997 Britain never evolved a defence of inequality. It was a market economy, but it could never come up with an answer as to why some prospered under it while others did not. This had much to do with the cultural forces uncorked by New Labour, which were levelling in the extreme. Ideas of the natural inequality of man, or the inequality of deserts, did not survive the long rattling decades of Red Nose Day, Britain’s Got Talent, and compulsory football sweepstakes.

Nor did it ever evolve an explanation for failure. Third Way Britain in its decline was not so much a market economy, but something much cruder: “UK plc.” This meant that every corporate bankruptcy was held up as an indictment of the managers. Even in the high summer of Osbornomics in 2015, “Business Secretary” Sajid Javid was expected to appear at the insolvent Redcar steel works and own up — but for what exactly few could quite say.

To this, add the cultural monopoly of the state broadcaster, a strange anachronism unique to Britain. The result was, as far as the economy was concerned, a permanent state of alarm, condemnation, recrimination and moral outrage. An economy directed by the personal whims of Piers Morgan. It had a dull hostility to wealth and enterprise. But being entirely anti-intellectual, it was just as suspicious of the state’s ability to direct this enterprise.

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Mistrustful of politics and politicians, it was instinctually opposed to any change from above. Nigel Lawson’s monetarist reforms, or the decision to abandon the Corn Laws, would not have run. Indeed, the refrain from the breakfast shows was that economic issues were being treated as “political footballs” and should be handed over to a quango. A quango, of course, being exactly the kind of unprincipled melange of public and private that everything was now tending towards.

This was no longer a market economy. It certainly wasn’t a planned one. It was instead what E.P. Thompson called the pre-modern “moral economy”, run on crude ideas of communal obligation, just deserts, and forced generosity. It has no theory of state intervention, but will only suffer just as much private enterprise as is necessary to fund public services. Even the various centre-right governments after 2010 could only really justify free markets on such grounds.

The moral economy has no worked-out idea of what belongs to the market, and what belongs to the state. The only imperative here is community consensus, an idea of fairness. The result was an escalating series of erratic and unprincipled interventions to enforce this consensus.

Cheap moralism is its stock in trade. The government should step in to stop people being overcharged for theatre tickets. The football Super League must be broken up, and there must indeed be a “right to football”. Thomas Cook must be bailed out by the taxpayer, lest its customers be stranded abroad. An industry has profited from war, but instead of any system of regulation, there must instead be an abrupt one-time confiscation of its guilty riches. It, at the same time, meant the sham pragmatism of “value for money” (in civilised countries, this is referred to as “an audit”), which led to a public sector so mired in procedure that nothing can be procured at all.

It has a faith in the mystical power of iconvestment, or “Government working with Business”. This is not meant to yield any kind of return. These are investments made to restore some idea of inter-regional or communal fairness. The potential of certain places or groups is untapped, it is said — largely because of the ill will of the private sector. Investment, then, is the way to restore this balance within a system that is increasingly seen as zero-sum.

At the same time, post-1997 Britain has never accepted that public investment, which is not conducted on an open capital market, always lends itself to special favours and contracts for pals. Real corporatist economies like China bow to this fact. But not Britain, which clamoured for investment, but then immediately despaired of its results, accused the bursars of corruption, and called for them to be hauled in front of tribunals.

There is a low-level din of constant pointless mobilisation. Your time is never quite your own. Always lurking just outside the corner of the collective eye is the idea of conscripting the young — conscription for its own sake. Get them down the farm, or dragoon them to clean up after your nan, or, as prime minister Rishi Sunak recently put it, to learn cyber and leadership (in a rare act of grace, the two were not combined to form “Cyber Leadership”).

The highest statement of the moral economy is found in the stakeholders: the idea that politics, and the economy, should be run according to the needs of designated interests and Communities. But even this understates things. Post-1997 Britain was pathologically averse to “either-or”; it insisted in every case on both-and, and it was so continuously shocked and angered when this failed to do the trick. A market economy, though Social.

It had all the miseries of wage labour, but few of the individual freedoms that normally mitigate it. It made much of the idea of entrepreneurship, but could not even get over the trope of Dodgy Developers, and so never built any housing, or railways, or reservoirs. In practical terms, it seemed at every turn to have been chiefly set up to maintain the value of the great pension funds.

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Such an evacuated system was left very vulnerable to challengers. So it proved. One of Jeremy Corbyn’s earlier phrases was: “A society where everyone takes care of everyone else.” This was simple enough. But having dealt in these kinds of empty chestnuts for the past 25 years, it was a phrase to which the British Third Way no longer had an answer. It escaped Mr Corbyn, but only just.

The shrieking climax of the moral economy came with lockdown. Again, this had nothing to do with any supposed British tradition of statism; Japan and Sweden, two much more avowedly statist economies, did not follow such a course. Rather, lockdown in Britain was a true media-driven frenzy, very much following the pattern of the previous quarter century. Its opening act was to hurriedly throw out the standing plan for herd immunity, which had been developed by disease control experts.

Lockdown was a parody of all the ways in which the British economy had been developing since 1997. It also meant their final consolidation. The government was made completely responsible for the operation of the free market — including for its results. Wage labour carried on, but in a dull levelling atmosphere of righteous outrage, and forced solidarity. The howl of cronyism again went up, even though lockdown, which meant certain businesses closing and others remaining open by executive fiat, meant cronyism and special favours almost by definition.

Over the previous 25 years, the residual elements of laissez-faire had always been there to cover the costs of these kinds of pogroms. But with lockdown this finally snapped. £300 billion had been borrowed. There was no chance of any return on this spending; for all practical purposes the money had simply been incinerated. Ten years of fiscal retrenchment had been undone on a whim. Fiscal bean counting, “Treasury Brain”, had long been the only effective break on the moral economy. Lockdown has destroyed this tradition as well, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak being its final spokesman. In March 2020, it was now outre radicalism to ask how the total nationalisation of all wages was to be paid for.

Thus, the classic British Third Way only lasted for 10 years, from 1997 to 2007. What followed was a series of ever more wild and careening expedients until the system crashed in 2020.

This is the great context of Rachel Reeves’s rise to the Chancellorship. Lockdown debt constrains her utterly. She cannot invest; she cannot cut taxes. She cannot make economies elsewhere: that way is barred. Surveying the ruins, her only course is to fire up the moral economy anew, driving it on in a hunt for wreckers and assorted populists. This is the real meaning of “Securonomics”: a return to moral order after self-inflicted calamity.

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Like the pre-Covid moral economy, it will be a policy of caprice, prosecution, and zero-sum. But this time there will be far less money to smooth everything over. Pension tax exemptions for NHS employees, and a hunt for lockdown profiteers. A Race Equality Act that will tender government contracts to favoured groups. The declaration that “globalisation is dead” because it has left communities behind and made Britain vulnerable to global shocks, along with a concomitant policy of onshoring. When combined with the promise to re-align with EEA rules, this will mean all of the remoteness of globalisation, though without even the cheap imports. It will be less a policy of “both-and” than “neither-nor”.

Government and business will continue to collapse into an indeterminate slurry. This is, of course, something that was already largely achieved with furlough. The state will not direct enterprise, but nor will it leave it alone; it will be held responsible for all its failures, and called to intervene when it succeeds too much. There will be the fake savvy of “engagement” with business, which will in practice mean the downsides of collusion but none of the pleasures of outright corruption. Shadow Business Secretary, Simon Reynolds, assures CEOs that he will personally “make the pitch” to their investors if their books should ever fail to balance.

Reevesism will speak to the vulgar anti-politics that has always been central to the British Third Way. The economy is so important that no blundering politician can be trusted to run it — either in a liberal direction or in a statist one. The only solution is to take it out of elected hands and submit all future budgets to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a quango. This will be the final stroke against Corbynomics — but also against Trussonomics.

As a result, no one will ever speak of Reeves as a rival to No. 10, as Gordon Brown and Rishi Sunak really were. Under Reeves, the old imperial treasury is finally to be broken up; and with it will go any real civilian control over economic policy. With this, economics in Britain will boil down to that basic impulse of Blairite society: the relentless hunt for social enemies.

And yet the first thing to catch your eye as you walk into this chic, open-plan room that will be the nerve centre of Labour’s general election campaign, are the desks right in the middle of the room: those of Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, the party’s campaign director and coordinator respectively. Labour’s election generalissimos.

Both are slight-but-steely men of distinctly Irish extraction: McSweeney born and brought up outside Cork; McFadden the Glaswegian son of parents who emigrated from Donegal. Add Sue Gray, the daughter of Belfast parents who moved to London in the Fifties, and Starmer’s top team is strikingly Irish. Softly spoken but hard at the same time, each of them is expected to play a significant role in the coming Labour government.

Of these three, though, it is McSweeney who has the aura of power. He is the architect and owner of the Starmer operation. “This is his project,” as one senior Labour figure put it. “He designed it; he did the research; he drew the conclusions; and he delivered Starmer.” As such, McSweeney remains the untouchable adviser at the heart of today’s Labour party, the well-source of Starmerism.

McSweeney’s influence has become a source of much speculation in Westminster — and, of course, bitterness on the Left, much of which sees him as a kind of ruthless Machiavel who has delivered the party into the hands of the Labour Right through force of cunning and deception. And, it should be said, there is some truth to this analysis. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election campaign, McSweeney took over as director of “Labour Together”, an organisation whose original intention was to shore up the Labour coalition, only to turn it into a tool to defeat the Corbynite Left as a first step on the route back to power. Even in the days after the Grenfell tower disaster, when it looked as though the Conservative government might fall, McSweeney did not waver in his commitment to remove Corbyn as leader.

In the two years that followed, McSweeney canvassed party members to identify what they needed from a Corbyn replacement, revealing a party membership that was not lost to a militant army of infiltrators, as some believed, but one that could be persuaded to back a figure from outside the Corbynite Left as long as they were not advocating a return to the failures of the past. It was from this research that McSweeney alighted on Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary who had returned  to Corbyn’s shadow cabinet after his reelection as Labour leader in 2016 and remained with him until the defeat in 2020. With McSweeney’s guidance, Starmer offered Labour members a carefully constructed set of promises: to increase taxes on the rich, abolish universal credit, scrap tuition fees, defend free movement of people and initiate a green energy revolution.

Starmer has ditched many of them since becoming leader. Taxes will not rise, freedom of movement will not return, and green investment will have to wait until there is the money to pay for it. In the meantime, Jeremy Corbyn has been kicked out of the party, the Left has lost almost all its influence and the old Right has prospered. So, is New Labour on its way back? Pat McFadden’s elevation certainly suggests the Blairites are back at the heart of today’s Labour party. McFadden was Tony Blair’s Political Secretary in No. 10. and remains a committed devotee of the old master. His wife Marianna, meanwhile, is now McSweeney’s deputy, having moved over from the Tony Blair Institute, which Starmer has praised as “the very best of public policy innovation”. Is this, then, a Blairite reconquista?

No — and to see the McSweeney-Starmer project as a return to Blairism is to miss the point entirely. Over the past few months I have spoken to many leading figures in the party who have worked with and know McSweeney, Starmer and Blair well. Not only does McSweeney reject Tony Blair’s central analysis of politics and what Labour should do as a result, but for much of his time trying to retake the Labour Party, McSweeney was not just battling the Corbynite Left, who were determined to maintain control of the party, but the Blairite Right, many of whom had concluded it was already dead and were determined to create something new in its place.

The core of the McSweeney project, in other words, is not a restoration of Blairism, but a rejection of it.

***

In 2017, the year Morgan McSweeney became director of Labour Together, Tony Blair created his Institute for Global Change. The TBI, as it became known, merged the various charities, businesses and other assorted organisations that the former prime minister had built since leaving office into one giant not-for-profit. Central to this venture was a new policy unit whose stated purpose was to “renew the centre”.

Blair recruited a group of smart, young politicos to come up with the ideas he believed were necessary to save the liberal order. He headed up his team with the German-American academic and writer, Yascha Mounk, who had written a series of polemical warnings about the state of Western democracy and how to save it.

The central idea of the new unit was to promote Blair’s brand of “radical centrism”: the view that the real divide in British politics is no longer between Left and Right, but between those who are open to the modern world (the centrists) and those who are closed to its reality and only want to exploit people’s grievances about it (the populists). In this world, George Osborne and David Cameron are potential fellow centrists, while Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are populists.

Blair, I’m told, believes that the Labour Party is essentially a product of the industrial revolution and must dramatically reform itself to survive the technological upheaval now taking place. Radical centrism, then, is not just a tactic for winning, but an idea built on a belief in irresistible technological and social change in an era of globalisation that is eroding the very idea of a working class which Labour was created to represent.

Blair has long thought this. When he came to power in 1997, he called for a new progressive alliance with the Liberal Democrats. This, he believed, would usher in a new century dominated by what he called the “radicals”, much as the 20th century had been dominated by the conservatives. Ironically, this progressive alliance died because Blair was too strong to need it. Yet, the idea was brought back to life in the wake of the 2017 general election when Blairism seemed at its weakest — with Corbyn in control of Labour, the Conservative government struggling to enact Brexit, and only Emmanuel Macron lighting up an alternative path in France.

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In public, Blair insisted that he was not in any way “advocating a new party, organising one, or wanting to vote for one”. However, he had concluded that the Labour Party was finished, according to someone who shared his views, and was involved in discussions about a new party. “He would tell those who thought otherwise that they were being nostalgic,” said the same associate. “He felt that too many in the party could not reconcile themselves to the reality that Labour was simply irrecoverable, passed its sell-by date.”

And there were attempts to set up new parties at this time. In 2018, one alternative centrist party emerged called United For Change, backed by the Labour donor Simon Franks, which briefly held onto the notion that it could find success by capitalising on the anti-politics sentiment of the moment. It reportedly contacted political figures as divergent as Nick Clegg and Dominic Cummings to see if they were interested (they weren’t). One of its founders was Ryan Wain, now an Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute. At the same time, there was a breakaway faction of MPs from across the political spectrum, many of whom would go on to form Change UK, another short-lived centrist movement trying to slay the old political divide.

McSweeney found himself competing for donations with another group yet trying to raise money for a new “En Marche” style movement. Some Labour donors were even presented with a formal proposal for a new party, written in September 2018, which was leaked to Labour Together and various Labour MPs. Those now close to Starmer believe it came from figures connected to Blair (though not from Blair himself).

I was recently handed a copy of this authorless, 72-page “Political Movement, Planning Document” calling for the creation of a new party that was being shared with Labour donors in 2018. In its “executive summary”, the anonymous author declares: “Britain is stuck. The promise that the next generation will be better off than their parents is broken. Inequality is tearing the country apart. Housing is too expensive, earnings are static, and the quality of work is too poor for too many. The world is changing fast and we’re retreating from it. The old Left-Right binary divide can no longer provide a platform that meets the challenges of today or the future.”

Such failure offered an opportunity for something new, the author argued. “The old parties cannot face the future because they have run out of answers, energy and leadership. Now is the time for Britain to move on and face the future.” A new “movement” to bring forward “a new political class” was needed. This new political class would then “scale the social innovation that is already happening in our communities” while “incubating solutions not ideology”.

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Such solutions are then set out in distinctly New Labour language: early years education to reduce inequality; universal child care to help people back to work; a strong NHS and affordable housing. Planning reform is also mentioned, or what the author calls “rezoning land up, out and in”. Taxes should be on land, not work; the economy remain open; and “meaningless immigration caps” removed. Britain must also reclaim its role “as a global leader” by tackling international challenges such as climate change. “We can move on to this future, but only if we have the courage to face it.” As worthy as these policies may or may not be, they seem unlikely to form the basis of a great new popular uprising.

McSweeney’s view, according to those who know him well, is even harsher, seeing the document as everything that is wrong with progressive politics today, attempting to tap into an anti-political sentiment with a clarion call for a new political class wrapped in language seemingly from another era. At the core of his disagreement, however, is the document’s attitude to class. “Every century in Britain, a new force in politics has emerged as a result of big shifts in society,” the document declares. “These shifts create the new coalitions upon which a new politics can be built.” And the big shift in the 21st century?“The growing dominance of the middle classes and university graduates”. Among these “rising social groups” as the document calls them — “graduates, middle-class professionals, and ethnic minorities” — there is an openness to the world not found among those from “the once-dominant but now fast-declining groups” listed as “older white voters, the working classes, and school leavers”.

The central argument for the proposed new political party, therefore, is that class is no longer the central divide in democratic politics. “A voter’s views on multiculturalism, diversity, immigration and the internet are now a better predictor of political allegiance than economic interests,” the document argues. A majority of “open” voters in every region of the UK believe “multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, environmental sustainability, immigration, globalisation and technology” are positive. As such “for the first time in a century, a new national force in British politics could thrive”. To get such a movement off the ground, a charismatic leader was needed and an army of new supporters. Oh, and money — hence the proposal. The document suggested offering free membership to all with a higher £5.99-a-month “founder” tier with the offer: “Found the new politics for the same price as a Netflix subscription.”

For much of late 2018 and 2019, as parliament ground to a halt over Brexit and Tony Blair became ever more outspoken in his call for a second referendum to break the deadlock, McSweeney was fighting to persuade donors to boycott this proposed new party: not just because it posed an existential threat to his own attempt to take control of the Labour Party — but because he thought its political analysis was useless. McSweeney and Starmer fundamentally do not accept the idea that there is an ever greater number of “open” liberal graduates who can or should replace the working classes.

When one donor asked McSweeney why he should not support the proposal as a “lifeboat” in case Labour Together failed, McSweeney responded that, if Labour Together succeeded, the first thing he would do would be to blow the lifeboat out of the water.

***

The formative moment in Morgan McSweeney’s career came long before he took over Labour Together. It was 2008, and he had been tasked by Barking and Dagenham Borough Council with promoting community relations. Under the Race Relations Act of 2000, public authorities had a duty to “promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups”. In 2008, the Labour-run council concluded that this meant defeating the British National Party, which had gained a foothold in the area.

McSweeney found a place failed both by its Labour council and its Labour government. At the centre of the borough was Becontree, once the biggest council estate in the world, supported by the Ford car plant in nearby Dagenham. By the time Blair became prime minister in 1997, however, deindustrialisation and right-to-buy had undermined its social fabric. Homes had been bought by landlords, divided up and rented out, often to new immigrant families attracted to the cheapest housing in London. As the area became more transient, it became less maintained. As tenants came and went, landlords would simply dump their unwanted belongings in front gardens. When residents complained, the council produced pamphlets disproving this “disinformation”, and emphasising how much they had spent cleaning up the area. Enter the BNP, who simply blamed the foreigners.

For McSweeney the problem was not one of communication, but of reality. The area had got worse. Families who had lived here for generations were embarrassed that the houses next to them were suddenly a mess. They were also angry that absentee landlords from Hackney, Islington, Essex and beyond were able to act with impunity, while they could barely change the colour of their front door without council permission. In response, McSweeney encouraged the removal of the existing council leader and helped deliver one of the most popular policies in local government history: the “eyesore gardens policy”, proposed by the new council leader Liam Smith, whereby the local council sent in workers to remove the rubbish outside people’s homes — and then charged the landlords for the trouble. In 2006, the BNP had stood 13 candidates in the local elections and won 12 seats. In 2010, they lost them all as Labour swept the board winning every single seat in the borough.

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McSweeney’s lesson from Barking was not just that voters should be listened to because that was good politics, but that voters should be listened to because they knew what they were talking about. They were right about Barking and the council had been wrong. Nationally, however, a similar story was playing out, McSweeney believed. In 2010, the Labour Party had gone into the election telling voters the recession wasn’t their fault because it was caused by a global crisis; they were acting like a giant Barking Borough Council. Voters had every right to blame the Labour government for the reality of falling living standards. Something new was needed, but Labour wasn’t offering it.

McSweeney carried this analysis into his job at Labour Together. And so, while he was battling the separatists trying to create a new movement to replace the Labour Party, he was also pushing away the advances of Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, who had set up the “Future Britain Group” to stop wavering Labour MPs from leaving the party. Though Watson’s aims seemed aligned with Labour Together, McSweeney concluded that his group looked too much like an attempt to resuscitate New Labour by uniting the old Blairite and Brownite tribes which had been bickering with each other ever since the party’s defeat in 2010. And New Labour, in McSweeney’s view, was not a solution to Corbynism, but a barrier to its defeat.

If anything, according to those who know him, McSweeney believes Blair has only become more removed from the reality of people’s lives in the years since he has left power. Instead of trying to improve the living standards of the ordinary poor in places like Barking, the radical centrism he proposes now seems to be based on an idea that progressive parties would be better off if they simply assembled a new coalition of voters who were not so poor. Forget the council house tenants who voted Leave; target the landlords who voted Remain.

As director of Labour Together, McSweeney advised Starmer that the only way to win over the party membership and the wider electorate was to reject such an analysis and move beyond New Labour. This was necessary politically, if Labour was to stand a chance of winning again. But it was also a reflection of reality. Even before the financial crisis, ordinary people were not seeing the benefits from the national economic growth in the way they should, McSweeney argued. The BNP was growing in Barking before 2008.

The Labour MP for Dagenham, Jon Cruddas, told me that Barking was the canary in the coal mine of British politics — and it took a man from Cork to find it.

***

The radicalism at the heart of the McSweeney-Starmer project is that it is, in effect, trying to prove Blair wrong — but using many of the tools Blair mastered to do so. When Starmer appeared alongside Blair on stage at the TBI’s Future of Britain conference last year — widely reported as their coming together — Starmer actually delivered a subtle rebuke of his predecessor’s political argument. “The project,” he declared, speaking of his own designs on power “is to return Labour to the service of working people, to become once again the natural vehicle for their hopes and aspirations.”

There were other projects available, he admitted. One alternative was what he called the “rabbit hole of identity politics”. But the other was more pointed. “You could even completely unmoor from the concerns of working people,” Starmer said as Blair watched on. “That sounds ridiculous to me, but some people did seriously suggest it after the Brexit referendum.” Starmer here, is of course conveniently skating over his own support for a second referendum at this time, but there is little doubt where his remarks were pointing. Starmer then went on to add that, while he agreed with Blair that the technological revolution would be game-changing, there was “one place where I do take issue with Tony: the idea that this is somehow beyond Left and Right. No, for me, this is a progressive moment.”

For Starmer,the lessons of recent history are not really Blairite at all. The Left won elections, he said, when it persuaded voters that it would “deliver, no matter how volatile the external world, security for your family, your community and our country.” This, in fact, is exactly what Labour had failed to do in 2008.

Perhaps this is why Blair has never been entirely sold. Peter Mandelson, who remained close and talked to him during this period, believes that Blair was at first not convinced Starmer or indeed McSweeney, the architect of the project, could succeed. For much of Starmer’s first year, Blair thought Starmer could not possibly turn things round. Mandelson, in contrast, saw in McSweeney a version of himself. Those who know McSweeney well say he has a healthy respect for Blair, and sees him as a gifted politician who was at his best in his early years when he had a clear sense of ordinary people’s concerns. Yet, McSweeney also believes Blair has since lost touch.

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In September last year, McSweeney and Starmer flew to Montreal to attend the “Global Progress Action Summit” where the world’s leading centre-left politicians met to discuss “bold new ideas and directions in progressive governance”. The summit attracted some of the biggest names in centrist politics: Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ahern, Mark Carney, David Miliband, Tony Blair.

McSweeney hated it. According to those who spoke to him afterwards, McSweeney felt too many of the arguments on show were disconnected from reality. The world had moved on, but so much of the content appeared to be rehashed versions of Clintonism. During his session, Blair was joined onstage by the Canadian Liberal MP Anna Gainey, who claimed, almost as an aside, that populism was the product of “anxiety” — the opposite of McSweeney’s view.

Blair, in turn, restated his case that the coming technological revolution was the central issue in the world today. “The mission for progressive politics now… is to understand this revolution, master it and harness it,” he said. In essence, then, the mission is technocratic.

The analysis is Blairism applied to the modern world. Today, Blair sees the world from on high: great oceanic swells, tectonic movements, epochal changes and the like. Flying from capital to capital, talking to leaders and plutocratic billionaires, he sees trends way beyond national borders: countries rising and falling, populations changing, policies developing and technology upending everything. “He really does operate in a stratosphere no other British prime minister has ever operated in before,” remarked one of his friends.

It is not hard to see how Blair might have grown frustrated at the parochialism of day-to-day British politics, unconvinced by the importance of “eyesore” policies. And perhaps he has a point. The challenge for Starmer and McSweeney, should they enter Downing Street later this year, will be to tell a convincing story about what they are trying to do that doesn’t begin to feel small the moment they enter No. 10. They will need a project for governing, as well as for winning, taking into account the great global forces of the sort that fixates Blair today. If Starmer is to be a council leader at large, he needs to do so in imperial robes. How he does so will depend in large part on the role he finds for the keeper of “the project’s” flame: Morgan McSweeney.

New Labour has long been a convenient scapegoat for Conservatives of a particular persuasion. But this time, the accusations may have merit. The backlash that followed last year’s Supreme Court ruling — which found the Rwanda policy to be unlawful — is a direct product of New Labour and Lord Derry Irvine’s rights-based judicial reforms. Those reforms, firstly, ensured all policy and legislation-making centred around a culture of rights-compatibility. This was to be given priority over debates regarding the merits and necessity of an elected government’s policy preferences and assessment of the public interest. Secondly, it encouraged the perception of the judiciary as being unchallengeable and hierarchically superior to other branches of the state. The result, as we’re now seeing, is the constraint of an elected government that commands a majority in Parliament.

For New Labour, the aim was to ensure that domestic policy and legislation was subject to, and heavily shaped by, the European Convention (ECHR) rights found in the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), regardless of whether the domestic public interest or common good, according to a democratically elected majority government, required otherwise. As such, governments of all stripes would be forced into designing and arguing for policy that sits within the HRA’s framework and adhered to decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Other pertinent questions about the need, validity, strengths, weaknesses and democratic support for these proposed measures would become secondary.

Lord Irvine was clear-eyed about the types of rights-based reforms he wanted to introduce. He unequivocally claimed that New Labour’s HRA sought to mould not only the content of law in a range of areas, but also the law-making process. As such, it was New Labour’s specific intention to ensure government policy and legislation was framed around individual rights. To this end, the requirement for ministers to make statements of compatibility when introducing a Bill into Parliament was vital; the “responsible minister” would have to justify their decision in the “full glare of parliamentary and public opinion”. Strikingly, “Sovereignty”, Lord Irvine wrote, “will in future have to be exercised within an environment highly sensitive to fundamental rights”.

Moreover, because the HRA ensures executive and public bodies carry out their work under the umbrella of rights compatibility, Lord Irvine claimed such bodies would be subject to “considerably more rigorous scrutiny” than before — and he conceded the “special arena of human rights” would entail high degrees of judicial intervention.

While Lord Irvine, and New Labour, maintained that parliamentary sovereignty would be preserved, and Parliament could continue to legislate as it wished, the intention was to reposition the terrain for legislating towards matters of compatibility and away from concerns about public interest. If Parliament sought to legislate against the HRA grain, the question would not be of sovereignty or public interest but of rights-compatibility. Further, the duty on domestic courts to read legislation in a HRA-compatible way has led to a wide range of British government policies being reduced to such debates. The results, as we have seen, include well-documented cases of IRA members claiming to suffer a breach of the right to life, and the blocked deportation of suspected terrorists. Even government policies concerning public ownership and late-night flights from London Heathrow airport have been subject to questions of compatibility.

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Of course, while these types of cases can and often have been decided in favour of the Government, the reduction of substantive policy proposals to discussions of ECHR-compatibility, and the resulting delays to their implementation, are debilitating for domestic legislative or public interest programmes. Adhering to basic minimums of rights is important. But to confine the legislative and policy-making process so that it only or disproportionately considers HRA compatibility distorts and significantly harms domestic deliberations about proposed measures. Such a bias also reduces the role of the unique customs and traditions of the country in informing policy programmes, and relegates the view of legitimate domestic actors, such as trade unions, who may have a role in influencing policy or legislation. Designing and implementing domestic measures requires some degree of political and legislative freedom, relatively free from compatibility measures that are premised on decisions made by the supranational voices of the ECtHR.

To make matters even more tiresome for any current or future government, New Labour’s HRA created the perception that the judiciary, and their judgments, were hierarchically superior to the elected majority government in Parliament. In other words, a false impression was created that framed Parliament, and the majority government within, as being unable to question or legislate against judicial decisions. Historically, the British constitution is no stranger to judicial checks on potential overreaches of power. But it is not through enforced judgments that Parliament complies with judicial decisions. Instead, it has always been through sovereign self-regulation, conventions of restraint and respect, and, where this fails, through parliamentary scrutiny and, ultimately, electoral assessment. Despite this, New Labour encouraged an Americanised feeling of judicial supremacy by, first, reframing the role of judges and, secondly, allowing them to enter more substantive discussions about the merits of any given policy or legislative measure.

Lord Irvine confidently asserted that the HRA’s reforms ushered in a new framework and prominence for judicial authority. He understood that the British system was not like that of the United States, with a written constitution, but he believed that the judiciary should be tasked with protecting both substantive rights and the content of those rights. Here, he argued that the success of the US constitution in achieving this was a result of the power given to the courts. Strikingly, in comments that would petrify Lord Chancellors of the Labour Party’s past, Lord Irvine also argued that characteristics of the US Supreme Court would underpin the new rights-protection model in the UK. By moving away from the Diceyean common law model, “the new legislation [HRA 1998] will allow the judges to fulfil a stronger constitutional role in a wholly constitutional way”. The HRA, he argued, gave the courts the “constitutional warrant” needed to uphold rights.

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Then, after recasting the British judiciary in the same light as the US Supreme Court, Lord Irvine explained that the introduction of New Labour’s rights-based reforms would kickstart a new process of justice based on the promotion of positive rights. As such, he believed the mechanics of the HRA changed the constitution to one in which citizens asserted a positive entitlement that was expressed in clear and principled terms. This meant that British judges, for the first time, were able to make their own distinctive contribution to the protection of rights. The judiciary would now be armed with a “catalogue of new rights” and “new tools” to uphold freedom. Despite New Labour arguing these reforms maintained the position of Parliament as the ultimate arbiter, Lord Irvine specifically claimed there would be great pressure to concede ground to any decision that the court has made. This would especially be the case if a “section 4(2) declaration of incompatibility” — in which legislative provisions went against the grain and values of the HRA — was made. For those unsure what this might entail, he explained:

“The issue of a declaration of incompatibility is very likely to prompt the amendment of defective legislation. Consequently, while British courts will not possess the power to strike down legislation which is incompatible with human rights, their power to issue a declaration of incompatibility is substantial, given that, in pragmatic terms, it very probably will lead to the amendment of defective legislation. In this practical sense, the Human Rights Act does introduce a limited form of constitutional review.”

Commentators broadly agree on the potency of such a declaration, despite Parliament, in a technical sense, having the ability to ignore it. Indeed, the political pressure created by a “Supreme” Court ruling against a government tends to be so enormous that, in practical terms, the court, not Parliament or the government within, is viewed as supreme. In effect, such a measure is tantamount to ordering the Government and Parliament itself to halt or change direction — something which, prior to 1998, was constitutionally improper.

Moreover, when ensuring the legislation or policy in question was compatible with the HRA, Lord Irvine claimed judges would also be able to conduct a more substantive review of human rights and policy. He argued that the domestic courts would be able to examine whether it was necessary to limit a right, and whether a proposed limitation was appropriate. Therefore a moral approach to judicial decision-making was created. The courts would now have to be satisfied that any interference with a protected right was justified in the public interest of a free democratic society. The result, Lord Irvine explained, would be judicial decisions based on the morality of government policy and legislation — not simply its compliance with the bare letter of the law.

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Finally, although seemingly cosmetic, New Labour’s decision to disband the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and create a new, relocated Supreme Court — via the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 — lent further weight to its aim of fostering feelings of judicial supremacy. Instead of adhering to the unique commixture of powers in the British constitution, the Department of Constitutional Affairs explained the intention was to redraw the relationship between the judiciary and other branches of the state — in addition to enhancing judicial independence. Overall, then, an image starts to emerge of New Labour and Lord Irvine’s responsibility for those in Britain who have spent the past two decades appealing to the paramountcy of the HRA and finality of judicial decisions. This can be clearly seen in the responses to the Rwanda policy from civil society, commentators in the media, and politicians.

Following the Supreme Court judgment, for example, third-sector organisations unequivocally called for the Government to abandon and draw a line under the measure. Others have also criticised the Government’s response  for “disapplying” aspects of the HRA and “disabling the courts”, while reporters have framed the Government’s response as one which “brushes the historic role of our country’s courts aside”. Similarly, among politicians, legislating against the Supreme Court has been described as “an affront to democracy”, with MPs expressing concern about “the possibility that, by effectively reversing through statute a Supreme Court judgment on the facts, the Bill could undermine the constitutional role of the judiciary”.

Of course, these responses do not form a complete picture — but they do provide a snapshot of the enthusiasm for judicial supremacy fostered by New Labour. The result, as the Rwanda policy has demonstrated, is a rights-based framework that can significantly obstruct an elected government’s policy or legislative agenda. While New Labour and Lord Irvine may feel like history, we are still stuck in the stranglehold of their reforms.

***

A version of this article was published on the UK Constitution Law Association website.

In 1993, the political consultant Philip Gould wrote a paper for internal Labour Party consumption advocating a “new populism”, based on the time he had just had working on the successful Democratic Party campaign for Bill Clinton. In his later book, The Unfinished Revolution (a bible for New Labourites), Gould said his memo went down “like a lead balloon” with the party machine. However, it proved influential with the young modernisers rising through the ranks, including Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Gould went on to work on Blair’s leadership campaign the following year and then served as a pollster and trusted communications adviser in opposition and government. He died of cancer in 2011.

The day after Blair was selected as leader, Gould wrote another of his lengthy memos, its message eerily prescient as Starmer sets out his pitch to the Labour Party faithful today:

“I argued that the real political agenda was a combination of Right and Left. It was Right-wing on crime, welfare, immigration, discipline, tax and individualism, but Left-wing on the NHS, investment, social integration, opposition to privatisation and unemployment. People wanted change, but they didn’t yet want Labour… There is still a lurking fear about unions and the loony Left; there is potential concern about Labour because of its liberal social positions; there is anxiety about tax; there is almost no idea what Labour stands for.”

In 1999, after Blair’s first landslide, Gould wrote once more of this “new populism always seeking to hear the voices of those not often heard”. Crucially for him, this did not mean the unions and minorities, who Labour already paid a lot of attention to, but “working-class achievers and the middle class under pressure”. These were the people he had grown up around; he saw them as natural Labour voters who the party had repeatedly betrayed. “I came from the land that Labour forgot,” he wrote.

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To get to these people, reassure them and to make them vote for you requires a lot of work: part of what Clinton referred to as the “head game” of politics. In his foreword to the revised edition of Gould’s book, Blair himself acknowledged this: “Politics is far more intellectual exercise than people ever think… You will always end up with a strategic definition of your overall political position. The question is therefore: do you impose it on yourself or do your opponents do it for you?”

What this revealed is that, for all its faults, New Labour understood how politics works — how people in the public eye are positioning themselves all the time, whether they realise it or not. And they decided it was better to do this deliberately. In this sense, theirs was not the intellectuality of the distanced, objective observer, who is committed to truth, but that of the participant who is in a fight and trying to win it.

This desire to understand where they stood with the public accorded a central role to Gould’s polling and focus groups, to the intense annoyance of many Labour MPs. Gould himself, perhaps somewhat naively, saw this market research “as an important part of the democratic process — part of a necessary dialogue between politicians and people, part of a new approach to politics”. He saw opinion polls and focus groups as a way for ordinary people to get their voices heard in the Labour Party and in government: a form of democratic idealism that contrasts starkly with New Labour’s reputation for cynicism and technocracy while in government, as well as with the distinctly anti-democratic tendencies of its supporters in more recent times.

In reality, however, this focus on responding to the public’s concerns was easily exploited in power, by giving one impression while doing the opposite: notably on immigration. This was particularly pertinent on immigration, where they made a lot of noise about restrictions while quietly opening up new avenues: something that subsequent Conservative governments have emulated. This feeds into a more general, jarring conflict between being attentive to moderate public opinion and New Labour’s sometimes maniacal focus on change and modernisation, on defeating the “forces of conservatism”, as Blair outlined in his conference speech of 1999. Given the stale Tory governments, stale Labour Party and stale country of the Nineties, the stars were aligned for the embrace of change. In fact, it seemed to fit so well that they effectively made it into a universal ideology: thereby departing in spirit from the natural conservatism that they had recognised in most people.

This tension in New Labour between respect for the electorate and the desire to overturn much of what the electorate holds dear appears in Gould’s book as a conflict between the ideas of the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whom he studied under at the London School of Economics, and the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel. Gould notes his debt to Oakeshott, but says that ultimately it was Hegel who prevailed in his mind for being “more satisfying, although more mystifying”.

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Certainly, Hegel has much greater scope and ambition with his theory of dialectical progress and world-historical change. Because of this he has a much greater claim to authority, something we might see embodied in one of Blair’s favourite themes: “the world of change”, of inevitable and ever-increasing social complexity, technology and globalisation. This perspective is now standard in the upper reaches of public life, no doubt partly down to how it implies handing power to an expert class with a superior understanding of social change: a progressive elite. It confers a sheen of novelty and optimism onto the actions of power: of technocracy, quangofication and the ongoing project of using progressive identity politics to organise the state. It also serves as a neat means to exclude non-conformers from high society: for if you do not accept that certain changes are inevitable and cannot be reversed, then you count as someone without the requisite knowledge, as out-of-date and to be treated as a regressive outsider by the organs of power.

Here, the conflict within New Labour — and within Gould’s own mind — resolved itself in a way that would end up shutting out the people he had sought to represent. Hegel’s own promotion of the Prussian state as the apotheosis of the historical process finds itself replicated in the way New Labour followers tend to treat their own consensus as an endpoint: a culmination of social progress. In effect, they therefore reject Hegelianism as a continuing process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Instead, they treat the conflict of ideas as over and the game already won, notably on such things as mass immigration (which is to continue indefinitely). Any counter-currents can therefore be safely quarantined as “populism” and dealt with as threats to be managed rather than interesting challenges.

This transition among Blair and his followers from populism to anti-populism reflects the transition from being outsiders to insiders. Formerly, they saw themselves as an insurgent force. But now they are comfortable and indeed broadly set the tone for public life both in state institutions and the mainstream media.

And Keir Starmer’s Labour Party appears to follow cautiously in their wake. It is, for instance, notably wary of getting on the wrong side of public opinion on subjects such as crime and immigration, just as New Labour was. But it is also solidly committed to the consensus established in the New Labour years, of relying on arms-length, extra-governmental bodies staffed by fellow travellers to help push through policy choices under the guise of independent expertise. Rachel Reeves’s proposal to give the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) legal oversight over any major tax and spending decisions is a classic example. You are only going to do that if you know the body in question shares your instincts. Mark Carney’s very public endorsement for Reeves yesterday shows that the old guard of technocrats are pleased with Labour at the moment.

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Today’s Labour Party, then, does not present itself as a populist insurgency against a tired Establishment as Blair and Brown did in the Nineties. Rather, it appears almost purely in a defensive role, its task being to reconsecrate the hegemony that New Labour initially established, restoring the equilibrium of the state and of Britain’s relations to the outside world. On the latter, Starmer’s Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, one of the most vociferous opponents of Brexit, has promised a “Britain Reconnected” — effectively a restoration in foreign relations.

Where does this leave New Labour’s populist spirit? Gould wrote about the importance of “a new long-term radicalism, to ensure that progressive instincts become rooted in the institutions of the nation, just as conservative instincts were in the past”. And in this respect, his new populism clearly succeeded. However, in doing so it turned against its own democratic spirit, bypassing the people it was meant to serve. Rather than seeking to do what people want, centrists of the New Labour stripe generally seek to manage them away, imposing their own preferences and presenting them as the only sensible, reasonable approach.

In 1994, Gould advised Blair that “populism… means Labour becoming once again the instrument through which ordinary people believe they can achieve their aspirations”. It is inconceivable that Keir Starmer would embrace such an equation. Rather, his role is that of a safe pair of hands. Like many Tory leaders of yesteryear, he is trying to convey the impression that Labour will not disturb you under his rule.

But this looks unlikely. For, as Labour leader, Starmer is almost necessarily aligned to a failing, incapable technocratic state which orders itself using the same, broadly unpopular, progressive identity politics that Labour does. This all promises trouble ahead. Starmer himself is certainly not leading a populist uprising — but I think we can expect one to develop against his incoming government in pretty short order.

I thought of this as the results of the by-elections trickled in this morning, the Tories coming within a few hundred votes of losing all three seats in what would have been an unusually uncaveated rebuke. When trying to assess whether or not yesterday’s by-elections prove that the Government is destined to defeat, we cannot help but turn to historical precedent. Never has a Labour opposition overturned a majority as big as the one in Selby, we read; Rishi Sunak has only just avoided becoming the second prime minister in history to lose three by elections in one day (after Harold Wilson in 1968). Labour leader Keir Starmer reacted to the overnight results as you would expect: they were “historic”, he said.

The results come hot on the tails of Starmer’s public embrace with Tony Blair in the bowels of London’s Park Plaza hotel this week, in which the Labour leader consciously mimicked his predecessor by declaring the country needed three things: “Growth, growth, growth.” Unless anyone missed the obvious nod, Starmer moved quickly to acknowledge it. “Now you may have heard a refrain like that before,” he joked, to knowing laughter.

In some senses, this whole week has felt like a theatrical passing of the baton; exiled king recognising his rightful heir and receiving his blessing in return. Starmer had done what was necessary to win power, Blair declared. The audience whooped and cheered in what seemed like a moment of genuine catharsis, a sudden outpouring of relief. Starmer was one of them. The Pope had given his blessing. In turn, Starmer had used the occasion to show he was as determined as il Papa to win power for them, taking the tough decisions necessary to do so. Blair nodded on approvingly.

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It is not surprising that, in Westminster, many conversations turn back to Blair when assessing today’s politics — the perennial question of whether the next election is going to be a rerun of 1997 or 1992. Is Starmer the new Blair? Or the new Kinnock? This, after all, is the dominant political fable of our time, the simple, easy-to-understand morality tale of modern British politics.

The story usually runs something like this. In 1992, Kinnock had almost done enough to win, but not quite enough. The party was still too Left-wing. The Tories, in contrast, had done what was necessary to cling to power by replacing Margaret Thatcher with John Major, allowing all those quiet Tories to secretly cast their vote for continuity. By 1997, however, not only had Major’s government imploded in a fireball of incompetence and sleaze, but Labour had finally chosen a man to win. This is the story of our time and retold in Tory form as the long march from madness from IDS to Cameron. Today, the question for many is whether Starmer has done enough to win over the public or whether he has left enough room for Sunak to pull a Major.

Yet, for Marx, the whole point was that history does not repeat — even in farce, as he joked. Each new era in history is different. Borrowing old battle slogans is not a way to resuscitate the conditions of the past, but a way of dressing up our modern challenges in “time-honoured disguise” to make them less daunting, turning scary, complicated problems into familiar ones. “Growth, growth, growth,” Starmer exclaims and everybody understands. What that actually means when it comes to, say, artificial intelligence wiping out millions of white-collar office jobs is anyone’s guess.

Ironically, I suppose, even Marx was kidding himself about the true scale of historical change, constructing a whole theory to explain how the chaotic process is actually one, long predictable journey towards the light. And yet what is perhaps most remarkable about today’s challenges is not their similarities to past decades, but their differences.

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The challenge facing Starmer today is certainly closer to 1992 than 1997, in that he faces a sizeable Conservative majority rather than the marginal one Blair needed to overturn. But then, unlike 1992, Starmer faces a government which has presided over an economic crisis of its own making and so, in that respect, is more like 1997. In some ways, a closer parallel to either is actually 1964, another time a Conservative government with a huge majority found itself limping towards defeat under a new prime minister, by-election losses and scandals mounting up along the way, sapping all sense of hope from an exhausted party. This was before Wilson came in, only for him to become the man to lose all those by-elections in one day.

Once again, however, the differences are just as stark as the similarities. The recession of 1961 had been mild and the recovery reasonable. The Sixties today are notable for being a decade of sustained economic expansion with rising living standards for all. This is very much not the case today. If anything, our own period is closest to the Thirties following the Wall Street Crash.

Starmer certainly seems aware of the limitations of comparisons with the past. Speaking alongside Blair on Tuesday, he noted that even if he matched the swing to Labour that Blair managed in his landmark victory, his majority would amount to a single solitary seat. Perceptively, Starmer also acknowledged that the mood of the country was very different from 1997. Today, the feeling is less Things Can Only Get Better and more Things Can Hardly Get Worse. In fact, in one important but overlooked comment, Starmer said that unless the next government proved it could turn things around, this sense of national pessimism would turn into a kind of lethargy, It would, he said, “gnaw away at our collective sense of collective purpose and push us towards a learned political hopelessness and a mindset of decline”.

Here, Starmer alighted on one of the great — and worrying — differences between today and much of our recent modern history. In the Sixties, there was economic growth and a sense of possibility: the great white heat of technology, modernisation, Europe and all that — each an apparent answer to decline. Even in the Seventies, when the economic challenges seemed overwhelming at times, there remained, ironically, much more of a sense of hope than there is today. Without this hope, after all, there could not have been the radicalism there was — whether of the Bennite variety on the Left, or the Thatcherism of the Right, both of which believed they had the answers to the problems of the day.

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The Seventies were a time, remember, when it was a national scandal if living standards did not rise each and every year and people took to the streets to protest if they didn’t. Today, there is a sense, it seems, that nothing matters. We have had 15 years of stagnant living standards, falling home ownership and deteriorating public services. Even Brexit, our great national revolution to shake the system out of its torpor, seems to have changed very little: immigration has continued to rise, the economy to stagnate, taxes to rise. We have taken a screenshot of what existed before, only a slightly worse copy. And yet, if anything, our politics have become less radical in this time, the answers to our stagnation becoming ever narrower and more timid.

Is our national lethargy a result of our political failure, or is our political timidity a reflection of our public despair? There’s a similar mood of despair in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Published in The New Yorker in 1955, Salinger’s central character, Franny, laments how “everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making.” This seems to be the national attitude at the moment. Like Franny, everyone is just sick of “ego, ego, ego”, as she puts it, “of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something”. After Blair and Cameron and Johnson (and certainly Truss), we’re sick of people trying to do things. But we’re also sick of those who never look like they’re capable of doing anything, such as May or, perhaps, Sunak and Starmer.

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It is this kind of nihilistic lethargy Starmer is worried about and which could cost him the election. It is the same kind of nihilism you detect in Salinger’s other book, Catcher in the Rye, the great lament about change and phoney adults going around saying things they don’t believe in. “I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met,” says Holden Caulfield. “If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff.” For the same reason, the public has grown tired of their politicians, turning instead to authentic phonies such as Trump or Johnson.

In Catcher, Salinger has this wonderful metaphor, as I read it, for the slow, unrelenting progress of history which we see in politics as much as life. Holden thinks about his sister Phoebe going to the museum that he went to as a kid: “I thought how she’d see the same stuff I used to see, and how she’d be different every time she saw it,” he explains. “It didn’t exactly depress me to think about it, but it didn’t make me feel gay as hell, either.”

To me, this is much like politics, forever and always changing, shaped by the politics of the past placed in glass boxes for us all to gawp at and draw inspiration from. “Certain things should stay the way they are,” Caulfield declares in one of the great conservative laments. “You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them the way they are.” But you can’t, of course. That’s the point.

Politics would be easy if all you had to do is read a history book and find the right precedent to copy, but it’s not. History is like Phoebe, the same but always changing. The conditions which exist today are similar to the past, the challenges recognisable, but they are also unique, requiring something new. Keir Starmer is not the new Tony Blair. But that doesn’t mean he’s Neil Kinnock either.

Like Blair, Sunak has become party leader relatively young. Like Blair, he is still fairly new to the political frontline, and seeks to distinguish himself from his predecessors. But the rest of the political context is dramatically different. Whereas Labour at that time were in opposition and hungry for power, the current Tory Prime Minister fronts a party which has held office for 13 years. His focus on law and order, polling would suggest, is more a case of holding a line than of ploughing new terrain. So, what was it that made “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” such a compelling turn of phrase for New Labour? And can “tough” rhetoric boost the prospects of Rishi Sunak in the same way?

The work of US psychologist George Lakoff is useful here. An interdisciplinary academic, originally specialising in linguistics, Lakoff sought to understand why Left-wing and Right-wing thinking often falls along clear and predictable lines — even in policy fields that ostensibly have little in common. “Why,” as Lakoff put it, “does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty?… What does owning guns have to do with denying the reality of global warming?”

One of Lakoff’s conclusions, in answer to these questions, related to cause and effect. He set out two ways of thinking. “Direct” causation, he argued, emphasises immediate actions and consequences: A + B = C. This approach is favoured by conservatives; Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico, for example, is “direct” reasoning on steroids. In the other corner, preferred by progressives and the liberal Left, is “systemic” reasoning. This looks upwards, to an ecosystem of structural and societal factors; it concludes that these are the true catalyst for the social ills we face.

Apply this to law and order, and you get a clear overlay. Is the “scourge of anti-social behaviour”, as Rishi Sunak calls it, a “direct” problem, best solved by stronger policing and harsher punishments? Or is it a “systemic” one, created by the lack of opportunities which an economically unequal society creates? Should we be tough on crime or tough on its causes? Most of us will have at least some “direct” instincts when it comes to crime. Getting pick-pocketed or happy-slapped might leave even a diehard “society’s fault” liberal wanting to see some form of comeuppance. Indeed, if we think about why criminal justice is so emotive for people — and why it remains a political football in a comparatively safe country like Britain — it’s partly because it presents such an instinctive call to action for “direct” reasoning.

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If a person has killed someone else with a knife, for instance, an intuitive response is to believe both that we need to be protected from them and that they need to pay. The “systemic” argument — which would instead look at the wider contextual factors that led them to offend — will often seem beside the point. It may only be possible to make it from a safe distance away, once the immediate threat has been addressed. Indeed, George Lakoff describes how automatic “direct” causation can be:

From infanthood on we experience direct, simple causation: if we push a toy, it topples over; if our mother turns a knob on the oven, flames emerge. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation… Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation… When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

“Systemic” thinking, by contrast, “is more complex and is not represented in the grammar of any language”. As Lakoff puts it: “It just has to be learned.” This partly explains why the Left so often feels it is playing away from home. Progressive tonics may be correct, in a technical or philosophical sense. But they come to human beings less naturally.

This brings us back to Blair’s Nineties strapline. “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was so effective because it told voters you did not need to choose between “direct” and “systemic” causation. The police can get on with stopping crime while somewhere, in a classroom on the other side of town, a teacher equips their pupils to avoid it in the first place. Blair’s “tough on crime” rhetoric was an attempt to rid Labour of its reputation as a party built on “systemic” reasoning alone. The soundbite thus bridged the blank-slate logic of the liberal Left with the more common-sense approach of Labour’s traditional support and of swing voters. In the run up to 1997, this formula provided the reassurance which both groups needed.

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What is the relevance of all this, when it comes to Sunak’s current electoral predicament? In a report for Progressive Britain last year, I argued that Boris Johnson’s success in the Red Wall came down to his bish-bosh-wallop mastery of “direct” logic. The Tories had historically accepted elements of “systemic” reasoning and attempted to straddle the two. But, from foreign policy to immigration to the economy, they slowly re-styled themselves over the course of the 2010s as a “no-nonsense” party, whose purpose was to provide “direct” answers to every policy question you could care to mention. According to Sebastian Payne’s book, Broken Heartlands, Dominic Cummings told 2019 Tory strategists to frame their pitch to the Red Wall as “Blairism without caring about the causes of crime”.

By doubling down on one side of Lakoff’s equation, the Tories won the 80-seat majority which Sunak now presides over (against a candidate, in Jeremy Corbyn, who appeared to embody woolly “systemic” thinking at its worst). But they also left themselves badly exposed — especially following Boris Johnson’s very “direct” and obvious breaches of his own rules. They now find themselves adrift from any voter of a vaguely “systemic” bent, reliant on an electoral pool whose geographical spread makes them efficient in terms of winning seats, but whose age profile makes them increasingly rare. To have any hope, the Conservatives now find themselves in a position where they need to continually stimulate this group’s fear that wishy-washy, “systemic” thinking has taken over. And they need to present themselves as the guardians of “direct” solutions to every problem — from small boats to laughing gas.

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Social mores have also changed significantly since Blair’s early days as Labour leader — partly due to the expansion of higher education which his governments subsequently presided over. Support for the death penalty, for example — as good a proxy for toughness as you’ll find — fell from over 70% in 1993 to under 50% today. Third Way politics did not have to contend with such a broad values spectrum as now exists. Conservative strategists may regard the small but growing cohort of ultra-“systemic” reasoners on the Left as a gift, allowing them to galvanise their “direct”-thinking base against a phrase such as “defund the police”. But they perhaps miss, in the course of this, that the mean average of public opinion has moved too. The typical voter, I suspect, is readier to blame an issue such as anti-social behaviour on social conditions than they were in the Eighties and Nineties. In this context, policy announcements based on “direct” reasoning may bring diminishing returns as time passes.

Ultimately, Sunak’s focus on crime derives from a fundamentally different place from the young Blair’s. Whereas the latter was trying to marry two electorates and retain both, the former is seeking to hold onto one — at the expense, very likely, of further haemorrhaging votes within the other. If the Tories lose the next election, then some greater reckoning with these questions will surely be required, by Sunak or his successor. In a curious reversal of New Labour’s dilemma, the UK’s growing tribe of “systemic” reasoners will at some point need to somehow be won back — through a public demonstration that the Tories are serious about the “causes of crime”. Who knows? They may even wind up resuscitating Blair’s full slogan.

It wasn’t one of Morrissey’s more successful gigs. He was the support act at a much-anticipated reunion of Madness, a band who drew a very different crowd to him, and he wasn’t entirely appreciated. He looked increasingly displeased, truncated his set, and then withdrew from the second of the two nights, complaining about “the abysmal behaviour of a small group of loathsome yobbos”. (He later refined this to “a small selection of rather dull North Londoners”.) Meanwhile in America, tickets for his forthcoming show at the Hollywood Bowl sold out in 23 minutes, beating the record set by the Beatles. Now he knew how Jesus felt: a prophet being without honour in his own country and among his own kin.

It was ironic, then, that “Glamorous Glue” should have been, in part, a lament for a lost British culture, swamped by a wave of Americanisation. “London is dead,” he sang — to fans of the most London act this side of Ian Dury (also on the bill).

It wasn’t the Union Jack that irked the hostile sections of the crowd. Their reaction was more to do with long hours of drinking, an impatience to relive their younger days with the Nutty Boys, and a suspicion of a bloke from Manchester wearing a gold-lamé shirt, split to the waist, prancing about in front of images of androgynous-looking skinhead girls. The previous year Morrissey had said his perfect audience would be “skinheads in nail polish”, but there weren’t many of them in Finsbury Park 30 years ago.

On the other hand, it very definitely was the Union Jack that provoked the NME to devote its front cover and five inside pages — some 6,000 words — to that question of whether he’d gone too far this time. Because the flag had been seen as deeply suspect in Leftish culture for some time. It conjured up images of the Empire, now regarded as a Bad Thing in progressive circles, and it had become associated with extreme-Right groups. There was a fine line between patriotism and racism, and the national flag was seen to sprawl all over it. There was, proclaimed the NME, no room for irony when it came to “the Union Jack, with all its ambiguities”. The paper’s charge sheet against Morrissey cited song lyrics and quotes from interviews, to show that he had long been “toying with far-Right/fascist imagery, and even of racism itself”, with the flag as the last straw. Stopping short of calling him a racist, the paper concluded that “he has continued to pick away at the scab of race relations”.

Revisited three decades on, the striking feature of the NME’s denunciation is how dated it all seems for the time. The reference points are those of the Seventies: skinheads, football hooligans, the National Front. And there’s mention of previous transgressors Eric Clapton and David Bowie, whose comments in 1976 had prompted the creation of Rock Against Racism. (Clapton had spoken in support of Enoch Powell; Bowie nominated himself as a fascist dictator for Britain.) It feels like a rear-view mirror, looking back to the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when post-punk pop could be both oppositional and successful, and when the circulation of the NME was twice what it now was. It’s like the last shout of a passing era.

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Ten months later, a new Manchester band, Oasis, began circulating a demo tape, the cover of which had an image of the Union Jack swirling towards the centre as though disappearing down a plughole. “It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,” explained Liam Gallagher. “We’re here to do something about it.” It wasn’t long before the Union Jack was all over popular music, from Noel Gallagher’s guitar and Geri Halliwell’s mini-dress to David Bowie’s distressed frock-coat designed by Alexander McQueen. A new day had dawned, had it not?

In this era of cultural branding — Britpop, Cool Britannia, the YBAs — the Union Jack was flown proudly as the national trademark. The associations now were with the Swinging Sixties, when Britain was losing an empire and finding a new role as purveyor of music, movies and style to the world, when the flag had been ubiquitous, celebrated as a classic design by commerce and culture alike. In the Nineties resurgence of popular culture, the Union Jack spoke of Peter Blake and The Who rather than Enoch Powell or the Raj.

And where culture went, politics was sure to follow. Tony Blair’s speech to the 1996 Labour conference ended with a projection of the flag, much to the horror of the old Left. “It was the National Front,” shuddered Tony Benn, in his diary, “and it made me absolutely sick.” But Benn was stuck in the past as well, and couldn’t appreciate that things were different now. The title of Blair’s recently published book spelt it out: New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The Union Jack was the symbol of this reborn nation. “We have reclaimed the flag,” declared Peter Mandelson. “It is restored as an emblem of national pride and diversity. Restored from years as a symbol of division and intolerance.”

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It was fun, it was colourful, it had no baggage, none of those “ambiguities” that once troubled the NME, because New Labour memories were too short to include the imperial past. Admittedly, there was a moment when one of Blair’s speeches in the 1997 election campaign was initially written to address a longer history, but only in celebratory terms: “I am proud of the British Empire.” And even that didn’t happen, because Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, had the sentence deleted from the draft.

Meanwhile, the fear of neo-Nazis had receded so far that the Euro 96 football tournament even saw the Cross of St George adopted by England fans. This wasn’t a reclaiming, since it had never been much-used except by the far-Right. It became sufficiently popular to attract politicians, and, come Euro 2004, Downing Street itself was flying the St George Cross — believed to be for the first time ever — to celebrate England’s triumphant progress to a quarter-final defeat on penalties. It annoyed some Scots, but it was typical of Blair’s gesture populism.

Just as characteristic was that Gordon Brown should decide to fly the same flag over Downing Street on St George’s Day 2008. Brown worried a good deal that the English might take against him for being so Scottish, but his fears were just an acute form of New Labour’s wider obsession with being seen as patriotic. Seeking to spike Tory guns, Blair’s party laid claim to the entire nation. “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole,” declared the manifesto in 1997. “Our values are the same: the equal worth of all, with no one cast aside; fairness and justice within strong communities.”

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If that seemed a little vague, there was no greater precision forthcoming. Blair later talked about “standing up for British values — for example, rights coupled with responsibilities, duty, fair play and open-mindedness”, which got us precisely nowhere. His spokesperson blurred the picture even more: “Britishness to us is about issues as varied as how you manage the economy, the approach you take to issues like unemployment, your vision of society.” And Brown merely reheated the same thin gruel, speaking of “common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is.” If none of it quite made sense, you could always clutch at the flag to cover a multitude of meanderings. For a while, bolstered by the imagery of Cool Britannia, it did help deflect criticism of a government that sought greater integration into the European Union, that encouraged immigration on an unprecedented level, that allowed the US to set its foreign policy.

But the tide was turning, both culturally and politically. There was a slow Tory resurgence: from their low-point in 1997, they increased their share of the vote in the next six elections. And by the time of the 2009 European Parliament elections — when Labour was beaten into third place by Ukip and the BNP picked up close to a million votes — the talk was of recession, illegal war, MPs’ expenses and grooming gangs.

If the NME’s attack on Morrissey provided a full stop to a period of politically engaged, alternative culture, then Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics did the same for Cool Britannia and New Labour. Which is why it’s so fondly remembered by so many, a last hurrah for a happier time. The Industrial Revolution, the NHS, post-1960 popular culture — it was enough to make you feel proud of a creative, communal, cool nation.

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Things are different now. Flags are different.

On the day of the Rochester & Stroud by-election in November 2014, Emily Thornberry tweeted a photo of a white van parked outside a nondescript yellow-brick house, on the side of which hung three St George flags. The picture was captioned “Image from #Rochester”, and it was widely seen as being a patronising, Islingtonian sneer. Even as Ukip was winning the by-election, Thornberry resigned from her post as shadow attorney general, and historian turned Labour MP Tristram Hunt spelt out the official position: “We are hugely in favour in the Labour Party of people expressing pride in their national identity and national symbols.”

No one was convinced. No one believed for a second that Hunt, let alone Thornberry, would ever dream of draping a flag from their own houses. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was done in polite society, and anyway the flags — both the Union Jack and the St George Cross — were again being treated with suspicion: they were, to put it bluntly, a bit Ukip-y.

This is all the more so since the 2016 referendum, of course. The Union Jack is now seen by some — on both sides — as anti-European. A photo of it on Twitter will prompt a wave of denunciations of “flag-shaggers” (often from those with an EU flag in their profile). And since the creative industries — to use Blairite terminology — were and still are predominantly pro-Remain, popular culture takes a less celebratory line. The modern equivalent of Geri Halliwell’s frock at the 1997 Brit Awards was Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest, designed by Banksy, at Glastonbury in 2019, a much darker vision of the nation. The artists and musicians have moved on.

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All of which gives Sir Keir Starmer a problem. Post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, like Blair he’s anxious to assert his patriotic credentials. But popular culture isn’t with him, and the brazen flag-waving of the Nineties isn’t appropriate now. Instead, he treats the Union Jack with reverence, a furled flag on either side of the quasi-presidential podium for a speech, or next to him behind a statesman’s desk as he talks frankly and seriously to the nation. It’s meant to be prime ministerial, but that also means that he’s using the same imagery as the actual prime minister, both the current incumbent and his likely successor. In his glory years, Blair went further than that, arguing that it was the Tories who were unpatriotic: “It is no good waving the fabric of the flag when you have spent 16 years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.”

On the other hand, the Union Jack has made a notable comeback in retail circles. Culture and commerce have parted company. As the post-Brexit advertising for Vauxhall cars — “a British brand since 1903” — suggests, the market is convinced that there’s mileage in the old flag yet. The meat aisle in Aldi is adorned with the Union Jack, and it appears on products from milk and chicken thighs to Shreddies and strawberries — even on sugar that has been grown and refined abroad but packaged in Britain. It’s also to be found on Scotch beef, to the irritation of those Scottish nationalists who would rather see the use of the Saltire. And, presumably, to the fury of the militantly vegan Morrissey.

If Boris was, as his enemies proclaim, a Trumpian figure, it was only in the sense that he was an imperfect vessel for the revolutionary moment he was chosen to oversee. Like Trump, he was a metropolitan liberal who read the mood of the times and chose to play the role of tribune of the ignored, riding the anger of the forgotten as his vehicle to power. Like Trump, he was temperamentally unsuited to the needs of the hour: too lazy, too careless of detail, too distracted by his own personal and financial entanglements.

As with Trump, Johnson’s political foes, the liberal establishment he had betrayed, stymied his rule with all the stunts and tricks liberalism deploys to arrest democracy, here directly imported from the imperial metropole: the fictitious parallel institutions of liberal shadow governance such as Independent Sage, the same pointless, time-consuming lawfare of Twitter barristers calling themselves defenders of the rule of law, the same mass demonstrations of fevered identity warriors stoked by the opposition press for narrow political gain. No scandal was too petty, no wild accusation of fascism or dictatorial tendencies too overblown in the liberal para-state’s mission to save democracy from the voters.

For five and a half years we lived through the politics of crisis, a cold civil war in which the immediate triggers may have changed but the overarching antagonists remained the same. Boris was entrusted with the task of delivering Brexit against the opposition of the nation’s true government: the Westminster blob of bureaucrats, journalists and NGOs who ensure that, however people vote, nothing truly changes; the entire apparatus of the parallel state created by the union of New Labour legislation with a complacent and inept British establishment.

With democratic governance deadlocked by the wounded and vengeful establishment, Brexiteers were forced to choose having Brexit done at all over having it done well. To Johnson’s credit he delivered Brexit when it would have been easy not to, and he was at times willing enough to bend the rules to do so — Brexit was, after all, the result of the popular perception that the rules as they stand don’t work; that the British state functions far below its potential capacity; and the British nation is poorer, less safe and less happy than it ought to be. With a historic majority, at the helm of the country during its greatest moment of political change since Suez, Johnson had the potential to lead a radical reformist government and arrest the nation’s seemingly endless decline. Alas, the forces of inertia and dysfunction were too great.

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The Dom and Boris partnership was the best chance of defeating the Westminster rigmarole machine, the source of the solipsistic froth and exhausted defeatism that passes for British governance. In blog after blog, and then in tweets written in the awkward textspeak of an eccentric uncle, Cummings has excoriated the failings of the civil service and the lobby courtiers in savage and convincing detail. And then, with all the bitter passion of a spurned partner, Cummings deployed the very same Westminster bubble he despises and pledged to destroy as his chosen tool to bring down his faithless master.

How absurd and trivial are the crimes for which Johnson is now being brought to bay; and yet his accusers, affecting outrage over his entourage sharing a packet of crisps, are the people who say they wish we were a serious country once again, taken seriously on the world stage. And all this from the very same blob which uses a British government trip to a Ukraine on the brink of invasion to ask about office parties, and forces Johnson to back out of a phone call with Putin to answer urgent questions about cakes. The jovial cavalier was finally unhorsed by thin-lipped puritans in a scandal so petty and meaningless it provokes only blank incomprehension and derision abroad.

Surely Johnson must now realise what a tremendous waste his period in office was: he could have repealed the entire corpus of New Labour legislation and reset the nation back to 1997 in search of a better path than the stagnation and social conflict that defines modern Britain. Johnson had the power and the mandate to dismantle the entire system of overproduction of embittered, indebted graduates from third-rate universities that spawns the party’s political enemies, and to overturn the legislation establishing the liberal shadow-government that frustrates effective Conservative governance. Like the conservative journalist he at heart remains, Johnson found it easier and more comfortable complaining about woke excess than identifying and dismantling the systems that nurture it. He could have done all this without facing any greater opposition than the press hysteria he already faced, or the affected outrage about crisps and sandwiches which has destroyed his career. What a waste of time it all was.

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That such an opportunity could be squandered as the result of Downing Street domestic psychodrama is almost beyond comprehension. What a squalid betrayal, by both Johnson and Cummings, of the historic task they were entrusted with and of the voters who entrusted them with it. And how ironic that they both came to exemplify the failings of the governing class against which they proclaimed to rebel. In the end, Cummings looked too long into the rigmarole, and the rigmarole looked right back into him.

Britain’s political system is broken, and Johnson’s downfall by petty Covid rules highlights a central problem: it was easier for the Government to impose needless restrictions on people’s lives than to seize control of the machinery of the state to improve them, building the infrastructure and state capacity Britain lacks. Like the legislation against online speech which Johnson’s government is now inexplicably bringing in, or their funding of the NGO lobbies which hobble their governance, the Conservative government seems compelled to hand its political enemies the very weapons they will use against it. That Johnson was brought down by the petty restrictions he introduced may have a pleasing symmetry: that he laid his own head on the block for decapitation by the self-appointed Covid marshals of Labour’s tabloid press simply proves he was incapable of the task in front of him.

Johnson was incapable of delivering any reform in the face of hysterical opposition. Now we need a prime minister who can deliver a serious reformist program, and who can dismiss the lobby and the Blairite parallel state with the contempt it deserves.

None of the potential challengers so far fits this mould: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both promise a return to the zombie Thatcherism that vastly accelerated the state’s decline, and Tom Tugendhat is merely a neoconservative who has never yet seen a war he doesn’t wish Britain’s depleted armed forces to take part in — a foreign policy catastrophe waiting to happen.

As with Trump, the result may yet be that a more competent tribune, this time a true believer, will arise in time to finish the job. Johnson was, in many ways, a relic of the 2016 era of popular revolt against managerial liberalism and poor governance: the 2020s version will surely reflect the darkened mood of the decade. The background mood of economic stagnation, rising crime, deteriorating standards of living and sombre intimations of war is not favourable to a liberal renaissance. The difficult years we are heading into — perhaps a permanent downward trend — are of a kind likely to provoke a harder-edged conservative reaction than Johnson would ever have been capable of.

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The world after Trump

By Aris Roussinos

Just as the failure of the Trump administration has fostered the growth of a more serious and competent American Right in challengers such as Josh Hawley and Blake Masters, and Marine Le Pen’s series of electoral defeats in France has paved the way for the more radical Éric Zemmour, Johnson’s failure will perhaps lead to a more serious Right-wing challenger here in Britain, a Corbyn of the Right willing to remodel the state root and branch.

Perhaps, like the American Republicans, it will be necessary for the Conservatives to have some time on the Opposition benches to determine what they stand for, and what their vision of the Britain of the near future is. The general political and international situation is rapidly deteriorating — and the British state as it stands is incapable of meeting the demands of the times.

What was it about the final years of Blair’s premiership that ensured his political legacy? There’s the obvious point that when he became PM it was his first and only job in government and he had energy but no experience. By the time he left, he knew exactly how to get things done but was running out of road.

I was Blair’s Political Secretary between 2005 and 2007 and had a front row seat for the end of the “Blair Years”. They were rugged times. There were new opponents on the benches opposite with the election of David Cameron as Tory leader. And there were old enemies on manoeuvre on the Labour benches, as Brown’s attempts to dislodge Tony became increasingly obvious and frantic. Remember the rolling resignations of the Parliamentary Private Secretaries — Khalid Mahmood, Wayne David, Ian Lucas, Mark Tami, David Wright and Chris Mole? Probably not, but it was the “How many letters have been submitted?” moment of its day.

Eventually, Labour MPs were ground down by the relentless friendly-fire attacks and Blair stood down as PM in May 2007, a year earlier than he had planned. Yet he never became bitter. I remember a meeting in the Den, the PM’s room between the private office and the Cabinet Room, when a colleague exasperatedly said: “But Gordon just wants to be Prime Minister!” After a moment’s reflection, Tony replied: “It’s not an ignoble ambition.” Thoughtful and scrupulous.

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The only way Boris can survive Partygate

By John McTernan

The Labour Party’s internal wrangling was an opportunity Cameron seized. He repeatedly found ways to create alliances with Labour rebels to oppose government policy — the core was the awkward squad which included Corbyn who voted with the Tories numerous times. But the number of rebels was growing. It is an iron law of politics that ministers who serve loyally when in the government suddenly find their consciences when they return to the backbench in a reshuffle. Where once they had demanded the whips push through their policies, they now found their personal and political integrity required them to question — and often oppose — government legislation.

By the third term, there had been many reshuffles and the number of former ministers outweighed our majority. In response to this, I ran a small group we called the “Non-embittered Former Ministers”. We also added Keith Hill as the Prime Minister’s PPS. A former union official, he added reach to our political networks among MPs, and every week allocated the precious hour after Prime Minister’s Questions when backbenchers got to meet with the PM to raise concerns, float policy ideas or introduce guests. On one memorable occasion, I brought Shakira in to meet the Prime Minister — she was in Westminster for a parliamentary event. Tony started to explain that he knew her music and admired the way it combined Colombian music traditions with modern American pop music. “Ah”, replied Shakira — silencing us all. “So you think I am some kind of allegory of globalisation?”

But it wasn’t all about party management. There was the pressure, too, of external inquiries. This was the first time the Metropolitan Police had ever investigated Number 10 — a complaint from an SNP backbencher that should have been dismissed immediately as party politics led instead to the “cash for honours” probe. In the absence of any evidence, the Met spent 18 months trying, and failing to find any. The PM’s behaviour was respectful: he let it be known that being interviewed under caution would be a resigning matter — a contrast with the attitude of the current Prime Minister. And he unreservedly backed the few of us, including myself, who were questioned by the police. His confidence that it would come to nothing was morale-boosting during a deeply stressful period.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the end, third terms should be critical for legacy. Margaret Thatcher’s third term, despite the disaster of the “poll tax”, embedded and made irreversible many of her changes. The task New Labour set itself was to leave most of the Tory reforms, but to rebalance some and to rebuild the public square which had been brutally neglected. So, mass picketing and car park show of hands strike ballots were left outlawed, but workers rights were extended, in particular with maternity rights and the statutory right to bank holidays on top of annual leave. The “right to buy” your council home was maintained, but two million social homes were renovated to Decent Homes standards. Choice in health and education was built on, and extended, while waiting lists were slashed — with a now nearly unimaginable guarantee of an 18-week wait for routine treatment.

In turn, most of Blair’s reforms became irreversible. The National Insurance increase to fund the NHS was kept, and has been mimicked by Boris Johnson’s government. Health performance has been hampered by persistent underfunding, the pandemic, and the ill-fated Lansley reforms which are now being abandoned — but the NHS was kept on the road by appointing former Blair adviser Sir Simon Stevens as Chief Executive of NHS England.

There were also significant moments. The G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2008 deciding to make poverty history by wiping out the debt of heavily indebted countries in the Global South. London winning the bid for the 2012 Olympics. And the tragedy of the 7/7 bombings which drew great compassion and leadership from Blair.

Of course, Blair’s leadership ended in resignation, and New Labour’s third term ended in defeat for Brown. Unfortunately, for a decade party members took the quixotic view that the only reason voters elected increasingly Right-wing Tory governments was that Labour was insufficiently Left-wing. And under Miliband and Corbyn the party moved further and further away from the centre and further and further towards destruction.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

Blair didn’t despair. He made the argument about how Labour could win again. And he has consistently continued to make critical policy interventions — such as driving the argument on vaccination rollout. This strategic patience has paid off. The true legacy of the 2005-2007 Blair government is finally becoming clear. Labour’s desire to win is back. Policy ideas are unashamedly Blairite. And Starmer’s mantra “Opportunity, Security, Respect” could come straight from a Tony Blair conference speech.

History will be the ultimate judge of Tony’s reputation. It will weigh the Iraq war against the Good Friday Agreement which ended the war in Northern Ireland. For Labour Party members and activists it has thankfully settled into the realisation that Labour’s electoral record in the last eleven elections is: Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Win, Win, Win, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose. And the only way to win is to build on Tony Blair’s record rather than spurn it.

There was a new mood in Britain, evident in the buoyant state of popular culture. It was the year of Parklife and Definitely Maybe; of Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Madness of King George and Shallow Grave; the year when Antony Gormley won the Turner Prize, and when the National Lottery and Loaded magazine were launched; when Harry Enfield’s TV show moved from BBC Two to BBC One, while Paul Merton became the first alternative comedian with a residency at the London Palladium.

Cool Britannia (though the term was not yet being used) was already having it large, and over the next couple of years, Blair clung to its Union Jack coattails. “I am part of the rock and roll generation,” he explained, rather too earnestly, as he made his triumphal tour of awards ceremonies.

By the time he got into power in May 1997, though, it was all pretty much over and done with. The frothy, showy optimism of Cool Britannia was not to be the cultural tone of the New Labour years. It seemed appropriate that Radiohead’s OK Computer was released that month, a much darker, more unsettling vision of modern life than Britpop had offered. More significant yet — though few could have guessed it — Swedish television was airing the first episode of a series called Expedition Robinson.

This was a show developed by British company Planet 24. They’d earlier given us The Big Breakfast and The Word, but this was a very different proposition. This was a game show in which a group of strangers were put on a remote Malaysian island, given tasks to complete, and asked to vote on which of the other contestants should be eliminated from the competition. In its English-language versions, the franchise was to be called Survivor, but the Swedish incarnation was the first to reach the screen, and can therefore claim to be the foundation stone of what would become known as reality TV. And that was the cultural trend that would dominate the Blair years.

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The point of reality TV was not that it recorded normal life — as had docusoaps such as Airport or Driving School — but that it invented an environment and dropped people into it, poking them with sticks to see how they’d respond and encouraging them to gang up on each other. “It’s life as a game show,” enthused Granada Television’s controller of entertainment.

In this world, normality was not rewarded, the trick was to distort one’s own reality into attention-winning caricature. This was particularly so after the arrival of Big Brother in 2000, which allowed viewers to play Caesar, deciding who should survive and who be banished. The star of the first series of Big Brother was “Nasty” Nick Bateman; his exposure as a devious manipulator of his housemates gave Channel 4 its best ratings since it premiered Four Weddings and a Funeral.

The influence of reality TV spread rapidly. Unable to compete with the prize money on offer in ITV’s quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the BBC came up with The Weakest Link in 2000. The sums won were mundane, and instead the selling point was a ruthlessness new to British quizzes; the contestants voted each other off, while the aggressive presenter Anne Robinson abused them for their stupidity, their clothes, their lifestyle choices. It was a “theatre of cruelty”, said Magnus Magnusson, the recently retired host of Mastermind, who came from a kinder era of television. The show’s catchphrase was Robinson’s dismissive “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.” What she really meant, said Magnusson, was: “Goodbye! You’re getting bugger all! Fuck off!”

The press called Robinson “the rudest woman in Britain”, and reported that she was the second-highest paid TV presenter in the country. (Only David Starkey, himself never knowingly polite, was said to earn more.) She insisted that the contestants willingly entered into the bantering spirit of the game. “I’ve never had a complaint from them, only the critics,” she protested. But that rather missed the point of the criticism: that the style of the show was inherently antisocial. “The inference is that it’s incredibly funny to belittle people,” wrote veteran Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter. “In fact, it’s the hallmark of the bully and the sadist, and it ruins lives.”

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In the same way, it didn’t matter much whether David Cameron minded being asked by Jonathan Ross about his teenage years: “Did you or did you not have a wank thinking about Thatcher?” What mattered was the decline of decency in light entertainment, and in the treatment of politicians.

There was a certain nastiness, a cold cruelty, that was becoming evident in culture. The new stars of comedy were those such as Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle, causing tabloid outrage with bad-taste jokes. Or there was sketch show Little Britain, with its blackface and its fat-suits, its skits on vomiting, incontinence and gerontophilia. The most recognisable creation here was Vicky Pollard, the chav schoolgirl who gets pregnant and swaps her baby for a Westlife CD. Similarly the character who made the most impact in The Catherine Tate Show was another chav schoolgirl, Lauren Cooper, with her catchphrase “Am I bovvered?” Mocking the working class seemed funnier now than it had back in the days of Cool Britannia, when Pulp had sung Common People.

“Bovvered” was named the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2006, and the following year Tony Blair played opposite Lauren in a Comic Relief sketch, giving a pitch-perfect performance. “He is one of the finest comic actors of his generation,” gushed Tate, which was overstating the case, but certainly no leading politician had ever engaged so convincingly with popular culture. Nonetheless, it didn’t feel entirely comfortable, coming from a Labour prime minister. It was only a short step from Vicky Pollard and Lauren Cooper to the real-life ridiculing of working-class participants on The Jeremy Kyle Show, Fat Families and Benefits Street. (Frankie Boyle suggested the Jeremy Kyle audience was recruited “by firing tranquilliser darts into Primark”.)

If television was becoming harsher and more coarse, that development was perhaps being driven by the emergence of a rival medium, the first serious challenge TV had faced since its rise to cultural dominance half-a-century earlier. The internet, even in its early, pre-social media days (MySpace and LinkedIn launched in 2003), was already a noisy, demanding presence. Unregulated and chaotic, it could ignore all standards of decency and taste — not just the restrictions imposed on television, but the values at the very core of society.

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Far more extreme pornography was easily accessible online then than it is now. Amongst the ugliest was “crush fetishism”, a genre of sadistic videos that showed women in high heels trampling to death small animals, from worms and fish to hamsters and kittens. This came to wider public attention in 2002 when one of the leading practitioners, Tracey Seward, aka Stiletto, was given a life sentence at Manchester Crown Court for murdering her (human) partner.

More generally, animals didn’t come well out of reality TV. The RSPCA objected to a pig being slaughtered on Shipwrecked, to the neglect of chickens in the Big Brother house, and to Rebecca Loos masturbating a pig on The Farm. (“It was horrible,” complained one viewer of this latter episode. “I could barely watch.”) It also stopped the airing of a British version of American show Man vs Beast.

Partly the concern was about dignity — that of the viewers as well as of the animals — but there was also a suggestion that there had been a rise in incidents of domestic animals being abused and tortured. RSPCA head, and former Lib Dem MP, Jackie Ballard said: “People are becoming de-sensitised after seeing stars eat live insects and kill chickens on shows like I’m a Celebrity.”

And beyond even that, there was a fear that, as the case of Tracey Seward had shown, those who abuse animals will not necessarily stop at animals. There was to be a good deal of horrified outrage when a man killed himself in 2019 after appearing on The Jeremy Kyle Show, and the series was immediately cancelled. But it’s also worth remembering that the first person to be voted off Expedition Robinson, way back in May 1997, didn’t live to see the broadcast. He had already committed suicide.

There was, in short, a dark undercurrent to the culture of the time. By the time Jade Goody died at the age of just 27 in 2009, she had been canonised by the media, and the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury were among those paying tribute, but it was hard to forget the crowds outside the Big Brother house in 2002, with banners saying “Jade, go to Hell” and “Slaughter the Pig”. “Don’t feel sorry for her,” urged the Sun’s showbiz editor. Or, as Germaine Greer was reported to have said in the Newsnight green room: “That fat slag deserves all she gets.” The Two Minutes Hate predated social media.

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The abject failure of Cool Britannia

By Mary Harrington

When he became Prime Minister in 1990, John Major had promised to build “a country at ease with itself”, and Tony Blair — as so often — followed in his path. But the casual cruelty, the mob mentality evident in the reality TV era implied that we were maybe drifting in the opposite direction. The raucous, disruptive tone was all a far cry from the world of mainstream politics, increasingly populated by nice, shiny interchangeable young men in bland suits. And when politics and popular culture drift out of alignment, it tends to indicate a coming fracture.

“More people have voted in recent Big Brother polls than voted in the European elections,” observed Charles Kennedy, and while that wasn’t actually true (more votes, yes, but not more voters), it was shocking that in the 2004 elections to the European Parliament the incumbent government could attract the support of just 8.5% of the electorate. Voters were becoming disengaged. On the other hand, so reality TV seemed to indicate, if people felt that their verdict would actually count for something, they were more willing to participate.

So it proved come the 2016 referendum, when turnout returned to the level of general elections in the Eighties. The era of reality TV was passed now, gone the way of Cool Britannia, but the cruelty remained, directed increasingly at those shiny, young men: David Cameron, the “heir to Blair”, was voted out of the house and found himself a washed-up has-been before his 50th birthday. Big Brother contestants were given a clear warning by producers at the outset: “We tell them they will become the most hated people in Britain, they will never get a job, they will never be taken seriously again and won’t make any money out of it.” Apart from that last bit, the same was now true of politicians.

To Labour’s Right wing, Blair remains the closest thing to a living saint. The former PM is their yogi, whose “rare interventions” — on Brexit, on Covid lockdowns, on higher education — are holy writ. But for normal people, who do not dream of May 1997 each night, Blair is a scoundrel.

To some extent this is to be expected. Blair governed for a decade. His mistakes were made in the public gaze — a gaze that tired of seeing his grin in the newspaper every day or his studied sandbagging on the evening news. Thus it is somewhat unfair to compare him to Alan Johnson, a Labour figure who is liked not because of any political accomplishments but because, to most, he is an affable TV raconteur. The same applies to Ed Balls and his ongoing rehabilitation via Strictly Come Dancing and Good Morning Britain.

The hatred Blair inspires is much more reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher, a similarly divisive yet successful politician who remade both party and country. Yet a decade after her death, she sits among the most popular of all Prime Ministers. She retained admirers, even as she was savaged by her enemies, and savaged them in turn. 

Blair was much more ameliorative than Thatcher, or at least he tried to be. Here was a mainstream leader who consciously aimed for the centre of public opinion. What Blair wanted, more than anything, was to be loved. So why is he so widely reviled?

The most common answer is Iraq. Without that war, moderates often argue, Blair would be remembered as a successful national leader. But even if we remove Iraq — the gravest British military blunder since the days of General Gordon — from an assessment of Blair’s legacy, he was a failure. One could argue he is even oddly fortunate that the scale of the debacle both there and in Afghanistan overshadows his domestic record.

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Yes, there was Sure Start, and the introduction of a minimum wage (though that one belongs as much to John Smith as Blair). And yes, Blair funded the NHS properly for the first time in decades — though it belies the limits of his tenure that this was wiped out in a few years of Tory austerity.

Today, Blair’s most overwhelming legacy, and the one that affects millions of ordinary people in Britain every day, is housing. In 1997, as Labour won their largest ever parliamentary majority, the average income was £15,000 a year while the average property cost £65,000. By 2007, as Blair left office, average pay had risen to £20,000 — but house prices had surged to an extraordinary £190,000. In other words, relative to wages, and under a Prime Minister who spoke relentlessly of expanding opportunity, the cost of housing had doubled.

Given this, it is unsurprising that Gen X pundits, more socially liberal than boomers but whose cultural zeitgeist was defined by unprecedented property price rises, are the Blairite vanguard across much of the media. As any Marxist will tell you, conditions (often) determine consciousness. For Britain’s Gen X, the New Labour rise in property values — with its attendant sensation of prosperity — still feels like a successful project which merits defence. Yet the flip side to that phoney progress is today’s housing crisis, with home ownership falling from 70.9% in 2003 to 63.9% in 2018, and those between their mid-30s and mid-40s three times more likely to rent today than 20 years ago. The phrase “property-owning democracy”, on which the popular conservatism of the last century rested, is withering on the vine.

For now this remains primarily a problem for younger adults — although the ONS recently warned that the majority of older people will be living in rented accommodation in the future. Those same people burdened with thousands in student debt, another New Labour bequest, are increasingly likely to give up to half their post-tax earnings to a landlord. The Blairs, meanwhile, own a property portfolio worth approximately £35 million. Cherie Blair now oversees not one but two property management companies, including dozens of one-bedroom flats.

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The surge in house prices after 1997 was no accident. Buy-to-let mortgages increased 30-fold under Blair while his government built fewer council homes than Margaret Thatcher. And while Blair certainly isn’t the prima causa of today’s housing crisis — the policy of right-to-buy in the Eighties was the catalyst, while supply issues are a major variable — it is remarkable that something as elementary as home ownership was permitted to become a luxury under a Labour government. 

Alongside this abysmal record on housing, New Labour oversaw a historic collapse in British industry. Between 1997 and 2007, output from all manufacturing, value adjusted for inflation, fell by 3% — while a million workers lost their jobs. Despite the post-industrial paeans of New Labour this was not inevitable: over broadly the same period, between 2000 and 2006, manufacturing output rose in the US, Germany and France. Most striking of all, manufacturing as a share of the overall economy fell more under Blair than Thatcher and Major combined.

All this was presented as a cause for celebration. For New Labour, deindustrialisation was a necessity. A small bump on the road to the “knowledge economy” that Britain must become. At the the turn of the century, Blair’s ambition was that Britain would become the best country in the world for “e-commerce”. The land of Newcomen, Watt and Bessemer, transmuted to a nation powered by lattes and online shopping.

Whether Blair had the faintest idea what he was talking about is unclear. This was a man, after all, who didn’t use a mobile phone until 2007 and whose first text message to his fixer Alastair Campbell read: “This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.” So Blair’s evangelism for the digital age wasn’t the result of any acquaintance with the possibilities of the internet. Rather he had found a compelling story to distract from the continued, and indeed intensifying, disintegration of national industry. Conveniently, this same story allowed Blair to present himself as modern and the blue-collar base of his party as backward.

A mixed domestic record is leavened by a series of foreign policy disasters. Blair is synonymous with Iraq and Afghanistan, and always will be. Britain spent £37 billion in Afghanistan, and lost more than 450 military personnel. For what? Two decades later, the Taliban have returned and the country is facing widespread starvation. In Iraq, the most secular country in the Arab world at the turn of the millennium became a hothouse for sectarian militias, then ISIS. Mission accomplished.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the long-run the New Labour project, and Blair’s stewardship of it, can only be seen as a failure. The broader economic context of the Long Nineties — a goldilocks era of cheap energy, low inflation, and high growth — could not have been more kind to New Labour’s Nero. And yet, as Chinese consumer durables flooded the West, and cheap credit fell from the skies, Blair and Brown praised themselves for abolishing boom and bust. At the very least, New Labour might have built council homes, a national network of high speed rail, and prepared for climate change. They did none of it.

When asked about her greatest achievement Margaret Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour.” The real legacy of Blair is that he not only cemented much of the Thatcherite settlement but, worse, made many believe that doing so was somehow progressive. Until that’s recognised for the mistake it was, Britain’s broken economic model, not to mention its housing crisis, will only get worse.

I was born the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, 1979, and cast my first vote the year the man she called her “greatest success” scored his first landslide victory. Over my lifetime the contours of respectable politics have been defined by the joint trajectory they set. Now, 25 years after Blair’s landslide victory, it’s clear that his legacy is best understood in conjunction with hers.

Like Thatcher, Blair was animated by a powerful vision. His was also, like hers, a politics of the ideal: of elevating the abstract over the material world. And together, they’ve delivered a politics in which the ruling class has withdrawn en masse from engaging with the world as it is, preferring the world as they think it should be. Today, we live with the monstrous offspring of their combined economic and cultural politics of abstraction. Blending Thatcherite callousness for the politically weak with the providential self-righteousness of Blairism, their legacy has fused in a politico-commercial basilisk that proposes to rule us all: woke capital.

Many of those who, unlike me, remember the Seventies will tell you Britain’s economy wasn’t in a happy place back then. Britain was “the sick man of Europe”, all crumbling public services, sclerotic nationalised industries and rolling strikes. Thatcher’s leadership transformed this Britain, forcing the economy kicking and screaming away from earning a living by making stuff toward earning a living by manipulating ideas.

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Deindustrialisation was brutally swift: between the second quarter in 1979 and the second quarter in 1981, manufacturing employment fell by 17% and manufacturing output fell by 20%. During her tenure, financial services rose from 15% to 24% of the economy, while manufacturing slumped from 21% to 17%. The impact was, as is now well-documented, not evenly felt. Knowledge-industry hubs such as London, Cambridge and Milton Keynes boomed, while those dependent on manufacturing languished. My childhood in the Home Counties was comfortable; my Liverpool-born husband remembers a graffiti slogan in the Merseyside of “managed decline” that read: “WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS”.

The Old Left served as the political voice of workers in the real economy. But with the unions broken and industries privatised, that Labour Party was permanently crippled as a cultural force. Blair, though, carved out a new role for the Labour Party by transposing the politics of de-materialisation from the economic to the social domain.

Out went unequal power relations grounded in the material dynamics of labour and capital; in came unequal power relations based on abstract identity groups. But Blair’s politics of abstraction went well beyond the newfound emphasis on identities, to suffuse much less obviously political facets of the Nineties and Noughties zeitgeist. Notably, he radically accelerated the transformation Thatcher inaugurated of that quintessential material marker of place and belonging — a home — into an asset class.

When he came to power, the cost of a home was around four times the average salary, where — with a few blips — it had been for the best part of a century. Since then, with only a brief post-crash hiatus, that multiple has rocketed to eight times the average salary and continues to climb. London’s housing stock is now, notoriously, a store of value for the international overclass of oligarchs created by financialisation post-Thatcher, and subsequently courted by Blair.

In this era came, too, a joyful rush to “modernise” all the comforts of home. The ebullient aesthetic of “Cool Britannia” sought to drag everything from food to furniture, interior design and tableware, from the stodgy domains of function and tradition and subject it to the “creative industries”: a sector enthusiastically championed as a core powerhouse for the new, dematerialised, ideas-only Britain.

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By Mary Harrington

From the late Nineties through the mid Noughties, an aesthetic tidal wave swept over Britain, replacing anything even faintly suburban or Tory-coded (carpets in pubs, cream leather sofas, anything beige or burgundy for example) with “modern” lines and bright colours. Old things were all very well, but only once they’d been self-consciously “upcycled”: claw-foot bathtubs painted in “quirky” colours, or fish and chips given a Jamie Oliver makeover.

Meanwhile, Old Left rallying terms such as “community” and “solidarity” lost their grounding in physical work or geographies, and became abstractions accessible to all.

Nationhood was yanked free of anything organic, chthonic or — heaven forbid — ethnic, and given a “quirky” makeover so it, too, could serve as an access-all-areas abstraction.

There were Union Jack flags on everything, from cushions to Mini Coopers and Geri Halliwell, while “Britishness” was retooled so its previous connotations were recast as repellently “nativist” and low-status. A new vision of “Britishness” was promulgated in its place: more like a gym membership (or indeed a de-materialised asset class), compatible with free movement in the expanded European Union, and acquired simply by moving to Britain and paying your taxes.

Blair even incubated today’s ideas-only art world. Number 10 saw visits from the Young British Artists, whose controversy-courting works comprised nothing figurative or traditional, but artfully-titled pickled sharks and unmade beds: works of pure idea.

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Thatcher shifted us irrevocably toward rule by abstraction when she broke the unions and permanently disabled the Old Left’s industrial-worker power-base. And Blair, too, made his contributions to the politics of abstraction permanent — by restructuring Britain’s economy again, toward the over-production of knowledge workers.

He did this first by shifting university funding onto a loan model, then replacing the cap on student numbers with a target of 50% of young people attaining a degree. The entirely foreseeable effects of this policy have been much discussed since, and include grade inflation, credentialism, regional “brain drain”, and a proliferation of resentful, underpaid and increasingly radical young progressives, among many others.

On occasion, Tories in the current administration will gesture at fixing one of these problems. But just as Blair had no option but a leftism of abstractions, so the Tory administration that succeeded him is stuck with the machine that overproduces the unreality class. For the student loan machine serves a secondary function, as an off-the-books subsidy to areas devastated by Thatcher’s economic de-materialisation. And this is of such structural importance to the British economy that neither party can afford to turn off the spigot.

A second-order effect of this quandary is to entrench the mass immigration that accompanied Blair’s “gym membership” version of national identity. This policy is so unpopular among Britain’s rump of real-economy workers that it made a significant contribution to perhaps the strongest protest we’ve seen against the politics of abstraction to date: Brexit. But when status, funding, voice and other perks overwhelmingly accrue to the unreality class, who can blame young people from seeking the credentials to join it? And this in turn leaves a slew of vacancies in real-economy work, such as care and agriculture, that must be filled from somewhere.

Meanwhile, few among the elite retain enough of a foothold in the real economy to resist the now well-embedded cross-party domination by denizens of this world of pure idea. So, unsurprisingly, we find all manner of issues now split along the reality/unreality axis.

Lockdowns, for example, were experienced quite differently by those with knowledge-based jobs and those whose daily activities take place in the material world. Elsewhere, it’s hard to reconcile views on transgender rights between those who experience sex dimorphism as materially significant, and those who see it as a set of abstract social constructions.

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Was Blair the architect of the burgeoning 21st-century elite war on reality, though, or just the avatar for a larger trend? Similar patterns can be seen across many developed economies: across the pond, for example, America had Reaganism and Clintonism. And recent debates in countries such as France and America suggest a similar divergence between a tone-deaf elite bedazzled by abstractions, and a resentfully subaltern class that still inhabits the much-deprecated real economy.

But even if Blair didn’t force this on Britain out of nowhere, so much as steer the country according to prevailing winds, he still made a unique contribution: a distinctively Blairish sense of providential moral certainty that now overlays growing swathes of the economic individualism Thatcher inaugurated.

For if Thatcher believed markets and privatisation would deliver improved services for the British public across the board, it was under Blair that the corporate world embraced the idea that commercial and moral incentives could be aligned, for the benefit of all. The “Third Way” didn’t just involve sweet-talking oligarchs for a bit more tax take, or a slew of costly and ineffective “market” mechanisms in the NHS, but also a full-bore drive to fuse morality and profit via “social enterprise” policy, a move that tilled crucial soil for what we now know as “woke capital”.

And of course what this means in practice is less businesses doing good, than vast corporations hectoring us about abstract things that don’t impact their profits (such as pronouns) while remaining as avaricious as ever about material things that do (such as the housing crisis).

So it was Maggie and Tony together who created the conditions for the 21st-century war on reality we’re all now enjoying — a war now exacerbated by the onrushing digitisation of everything. We can thank him, too, for a set of perverse political incentives that condemn half of Britain’s youth (more, if policymakers are daft enough to listen to him today) to perpetual indebtedness and a credentialist Ponzi scheme, while stranding the other half in a grim and prospectless gig economy.

But if there’s one achievement for which his name must be cursed down the ages, it’s for that air of ineffable smugness that drifts from those getting filthy stinking rich while claiming to make the world a better place. We can thank Tony, above all, for the fusion of self-dealing and self-righteousness that now hovers over the war on reality, and deafens the unreality class to the increasingly mutinous mutterings from below.

Our son was 18 at the time and had lived his entire life under a Tory government. My mood in the weeks ahead of Election ’97 was positively gleeful. As The Thick of It‘s Peter Mannion said a decade later as Labour’s own dynasty entered its fag-end phase: “Our tanks on their lawn at last, fuck a doodle-doo!”

Did the Blair years change satire? Not really. Maybe. Sort of, accidentally. The first Blair government happened to coincide with the growth of heartless piss-taking on the internet — that was new. And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.

We saw the elevation of “spin” to Dark Arts status, even though it has been a standard political ploy since Henry VIII’s first divorce. The appointment of Thomas Cromwell Alastair Campbell as press secretary defined New Labour’s presentation style, and his method and strategies paved the way for a new satirical landscape. Here was a journalist brought in at the very top, issuing orders to civil servants, enforcing the ministerial line on public statements, keeping the spads on message. Essentially Blair’s official spokesman, but with a senior civil servant’s salary and the influence of a deputy prime minister, say, or an editorial in the Sun.

In those balmy first months of summer 1997, however, the focus was very much on Tony: his barrister’s smile, his soft-Left dress code, his political philosophy of “whatever works, yeah?”. Private Eye portrayed him as a trendy vicar, irritated by church affiliates and parishioners alike. Steve Bell did him as a glinty-eyed Thatcher clone. Rory Bremner nailed the voice and mannerisms but, like many, struggled to find an ideology to satirise. As he told the BBC in 2007: “As soon as you got a handle on some area it would just vaporise and disappear and they’d be off somewhere else…”

Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia. Post-modern Union Jacks winked at us from everywhere — an Oasis guitar here, a Spice Girls frock there. Everyone was mad for Britpop and football and ecstasy and an end to boom-and-bust. Happy days. In PR terms, pride in New Labour’s New Britain was whatever worked, yeah? Whatever made us look good and feel fabulous. Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori, as somebody should have said at the time.

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The great satirical chronicler of the rise and fall of New Labour was Armando Iannucci. Earlier in the decade, with Chris Morris and a brilliant team of writers and performers, he had entirely reset British satire, first on radio with On The Hour, then on TV with its mad descendant The Day Today. The format spoofed news stories through the prism of a news format which was itself satirised, Morris anchoring as a demented Paxman. When Blair was basking in warm hosannahs as the New Labour Messiah, Iannucci was there at the start of the Great Experiment with his new show, Saturday Night Armistice. He was there too at the end with The Thick of It as the hot air balloon deflated and Blair parachuted out, allowing Gordon Brown to navigate the last few hundred feet as the economy, with Labour in it, crashed.

Iannucci was taking the piss out of Blair even before the evangelical shine dimmed, at a time when New Labour was all about a new hope and Sure Start and billions pumped into education and health; when Blair’s public approval ratings were up there with Diana, Princess of Wales and Fatboy Slim. Armistice featured a soft toy called Mr Tony Blair whose inanities could only be heard by Iannucci. It seemed jarring to me at the time, Blair as a platitudinous gonk, but it was, as it turned out, merely prophetic. I spoke to Iannucci recently about satirising Blair in those early years. “We started portraying him as the Sun King,” he said. “That whole sense of him feeding off how good he thinks he is as a person, his saintliness, his good works. It wasn’t like we were trying to bring him down, just to pierce that sense of mass hysteria…”

In due course, the satire became less about the Mandelsons and Prescotts of New Labour. “All the ones that the impressionists would automatically do, they were all gently eased out,” said Iannucci. “Anyone with a hint of idiosyncrasy had to go. Blair wanted managerial clones of himself, safe and uniform. Thatcher and Major had tended to appoint ministers who had a bit of clout, some expertise, in their subjects. Under Blair, it was much more the case that ministers were required to do what Number 10 wanted. Message control — that was what the whole Blair thing was about…”

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He mentions Excalibur, the party’s “rapid rebuttal unit” which compiled computerised data on Labour’s opponents, allowing it to mount agile and aggressive counterattacks during the ’97 election campaign. By 1999, aggressive counter-attacks were seen as a bit tame. The party appointed a Head of Attack to lead its election campaign using Excalibur 2. “They didn’t want to make the mistake of not preparing,” Iannucci said, “and then went crazily the other way…”

As the Millennium dawned, so did something else. Satirists realised that the key strength and weakness of the government was the Blair-Campbell axis. Until now, the most famous media bulldog had been Thatcher’s scrotum-chewing press secretary, Bernard Ingham. In those days the job meant protecting your boss. Now it meant being his locum. By the time the Iraq war happened, Blair’s moral compass was already spinning in its grave. The Public Finance Initiative was revealing itself to be a massive siphon, sucking money from taxpayers to developers from here to eternity, ASBOs were already a badge of honour for young criminals, and Parliamentary oversight was becoming an afterthought rather than a statutory condition.

And every week, as the misery in Iraq increased, I thought — loads of us thought — of Bush and Blair and their prayer breakfasts, with their mad conviction that they were on a mission from God. How we’d have loved to hear the other side of those prayers.

This audacity of self-belief: how it trumped political process, how pure it was. Iraq exposed a contempt for accountability, a legacy we enjoy to its fullest with the current shower of crooks and clowns. As Iannucci told me: “Because they were crushing the personality out of the Cabinet, the subject was therefore going to be the process. It had to be. It’s why we went into the process itself with Thick. We were thinking about what happens to people when they have untrammelled power. You know, ‘I invaded Iraq because I thought it was the right thing to do’. That’s not enough — you need proof! This is what happens if anyone at any point on the political spectrum believes they have a mission, that only they can fix this…”

As an exercise in satirical archaeology I recently watched Iannucci’s Election Night Armistice. It went out live on the night in 1997 and honestly, it’s all there even before Blair slipped into his monogrammed pyjamas at Number 10. I’d missed most of it at the time because, like every other pissed Old Labour voter, I was mostly glued to the unfolding source material. But on Armistice, here was the sensationalist media taken to a logical conclusion: someone in a giant penis costume — the Sleaze Cock — was on the streets badgering senior Tories. Sally Phillips was the Whore in a Helicopter ready to invent a tabloid affair with the first MP elected.

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And some bits were comedy microcosms of the fearsome governmental narrative control we were to see in the years to come. Spin Olympics, in retrospect, was eerily prescient. Here, flanked by a Thatcher-era PR guy and a Lib Dem treasurer is 30-year-old Derek Draper, former chief adviser to Mandelson, who would go on to have a chequered career in the Labour Party. Unlike the other two — the Tory ebulliently clueless; the Lib Dem sober but useless — Draper is utterly, utterly brilliant. He understands how the game works, here and in real life. In the first round, the contestants have to spin some awful thing a politician has said: for example, David Blunkett: “I hate Muslims.” For comic effect Draper channels furious sanctimony to insist that Blunkett was talking about the way Muslims are stereotyped by the media, and deplores the way that this show itself threatens to denigrate and harm minorities.

Round Two features a random policy generator, which nonsensically burps up: “We/would like to/nationalise/Europe.” Nevertheless, Draper talks it up, arguing that individual EU nations would be improved. A Wheel of Spin is spun: Talk Tough. Without missing a beat he says “… and if they don’t like it they’ll just have to put up with it…” The wheel spins again and again. Do a U-Turn: “… though of course each nation will have control over its own affairs…” Go Negative: he does, firmly disavowing the policy without breaking his tone of sincerity. It’s a tour de force, and an astonishing glimpse of what was to come fictionally with Malcolm Tucker and the hapless ministers under his control.

So the Blair years didn’t change satire. But satire was there all along, hiding in plain sight, waiting to become real. In the dying light of 2009, with Tony now well into his new globalist afterlife, Thick scriptwriters and New Labour wonks were coming up with identically desperate policies, week after week in Broken Britain. Policies that had to sound impressive and cost nothing. The audience looked from satirists to policymakers, and from policymakers to satirists, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

It is hard to recall now, when we are used to seeing women with careers and children in Downing Street, what a break with tradition Booth represented. Blair replaced John Major, the quintessential grey man, whose wife Norma was described on the prime minister’s official website as providing ‘sterling support’ to her husband. As for the wives of previous Labour prime ministers, all been born before or during the First World War. The world had changed radically between the birth of Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, in 1916 and Cherie Booth in 1954, and nowhere more so than in relation to the role of women.

Booth is a baby boomer, belonging to the post-war generation that challenged class barriers, sent millions of working-class kids to university for the first time and embraced feminism. She was already a QC when she moved into Number 10 and it soon became clear that the Downing Street press operation was struggling to handle media interest; at one low point, it even issued a press release explaining Booth’s recent weight loss. Every aspect of her appearance was commented on, an affront to any woman who wanted to be known for her professional achievements. But Booth seemed particularly uncomfortable in her own skin.

I knew Booth slightly, having met her and Tony Blair at a dinner party when we all lived in Hackney a few years earlier. Blair had not yet become party leader but he was on the shadow front bench and one of Labour’s rising stars. Booth was born in Lancashire, one of actor Tony Booth’s eight children by five different women; he left her mother, Gale Smith, when his daughter was eight. She has talked about the struggle her mother faced, bringing up two children on her own in Sefton, just north of Liverpool. The class difference between Booth and Blair struck me at once; he displayed the easy charm of a public schoolboy but she was less at ease, almost as though she expected to have to deflect criticism. I also thought she was in the difficult position of being married to a man who would be perceived by much of the world as the more attractive of the couple.

The next day, I got a call from our mutual friend: “Tony wanted you to know that everything he said last night was off the record.” I said it had been an unmemorable evening, with the exception of a slightly baffling conversation about how many members of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood were gay. Years later, one of the other guests remarked that she had never met Blair or Booth when she lived in Hackney. She was astonished when I reminded her that she had once spent an entire evening with them.

I ran into Booth shortly before the 1997 election at a party thrown by my then publisher. There was a buzz in the room, created by the knowledge that the guest of honour was married to the man who was about to become prime minister. But the contradictions were already evident; to my generation of feminists, being known as someone’s wife was not something to celebrate. The discomfort I felt was underscored when I had a short conversation with Booth, who knew I now lived in west London. She mentioned Chiswick Women’s Aid, the famous refuge founded by Erin Pizzey, and suggested I should visit the residents. “They’d love a visit from a local author,” she told me. I winced, feeling like a character in a Jane Austen novel.

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When the doorstep photo was published the weekend after the election, Booth hated it. Almost 20 years later, in 2015, she told the Guardian that “I look back at this picture and feel mortified”, even though other people thought it was “very human”. “I was very upset when the press said I was wearing some sort of nylon thing; it was a high-quality, cotton nightie from Next and I bought it especially for the campaign… It was a lot better than you might expect from a mother of three.”

Booth’s defensiveness is hard to understand. She was 42 at the time the photo was taken and looked girlishly young, but her anxieties about class are evident in the comment about what she was wearing (definitely notnylon). Her fear that the snap would damage her might seem paranoid, were it not for an extraordinary column written years later by the journalist Liz Jones. In 2019, Jones recalled the reaction in an unnamed newspaper office when the photo “was slapped on the editor’s desk”. ‘[Booth] was in a Next cotton nightie, hair a bird’s nest,’ Jones wrote. “She was suddenly no longer Superwoman, but Everywoman: fallible. I remember the glee in the office: a fissure! Bad news always sells better than good. We discussed headlines, ways to humiliate her further; we even sent a pretty intern round with another bouquet.”

The collision between Booth’s deep-seated insecurity and the reflexive misogyny of some sections of the media goes some way to explaining the rough time she had in Downing Street. She eventually acquired a lifestyle guru, Carole Caplin, a move that backfired and created excruciating headlines. A photograph of Caplin applying Booth’s lipstick on the marital bed at Number 10 raised questions about her judgement.

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Sometimes Booth’s reaction was to lash out, but she also had a habit of over-sharing. Jaws dropped when she revealed in her autobiography that she had become pregnant with her fourth child, Leo, during a visit to the Queen at Balmoral in 1999 because she had left her “contraceptive equipment” at home. The omission was caused by “sheer embarrassment”, she said, after the staff unpacked the contents of her toilet bag the previous year. It was an astonishing admission from a woman who got a first at LSE, yet was so embarrassed around servants that she was willing to risk an accidental pregnancy rather than being caught with contraception in her luggage.

Anxieties about class and money often go hand-in-hand. One of the most damaging criticisms of Booth was that she was obsessed with money, much more so than other adults with working-class backgrounds. I once ran into her at a reception in the Speaker’s House in Parliament, where she asked what I had been writing recently. I told her I had recently interviewed the designer Vivienne Westwood for The Times. “You should wear her clothes,” I suggested. “They suit curvy women.” It was a throwaway remark but Booth’s response took my breath away: “How can you afford Vivienne Westwood?” she demanded.

“It always struck me that she was insecure,” one of Blair’s former ministers told the Guardian after the couple left Downing Street. “And that is down to her background. Everything flows from that: the need for money.” Perhaps this explains why Blair, five years into his premiership, was forced to deal with embarrassing questions about Booth’s relationship with a financial advisor, Peter Foster, who happened to be a convicted fraudster as well as Caplin’s boyfriend. Booth was accused of accepting Foster’s help to get a discount on two flats in Bristol, where the couple’s eldest son Euan was at university. Number 10 initially denied the story, but the Daily Mail published emails between Booth and Foster in which she called him “a star” after he managed to reduce the price of the flats.

Booth made a tearful apology, but the episode earned her a reputation as greedy, which was reinforced the following year when a department store in Australia invited her to “take a few gifts”. The Mirror reported that Booth helped herself to 68 items, enough to fill five boxes, and left staff at the Melbourne store open-mouthed. It was as if she had little or no capacity to predict how her behaviour would appear, and the excuse of her impoverished childhood had begun to wear thin.

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Of course, the role of prime minister’s wife was never going to be easy for an ambitious woman from a generation shaped by radical ideas, including feminism. Booth inherited an unofficial position that already felt like an anachronism, something that was underlined when she was told by Downing Street that she would have to appear on official documents as Cherie Blair QC.

And yet sympathy for her, particularly over her unfair treatment by the media, must be tempered with an acknowledgment that she made some very unwise decisions, remaining ungracious to the end. “I won’t miss you lot,” she called out to reporters as the couple left Downing Street for the last time in 2007. It was an undignified exit, suggesting that Booth had never become accustomed to the scrutiny that comes with being the prime minister’s wife.

Perhaps she made a mistake, being bounced into moving to Downing Street in May 1997 before she had had time to consider the consequences, but a more confident woman would not have cared. Booth’s reaction to the doorstep photo signalled a vulnerability that some sections of the press seized upon, creating a conflict that lasted for as long as Blair was in power. Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron were not always happy with the media but there hasn’t been such a polarising spouse in Number 10 until Carrie Johnson. Perhaps the kindest thing history could say about Booth is that she struggled to cope with a role she almost certainly never wanted.

The bright colours, narrative non-sequiturs and plinky-plonk music typical of preschool TV are perfect for that state of neural short-circuit. And the ultimate choice back in the day was Teletubbies.

Launched on 31 March 1997, Teletubbies celebrates its 25^th anniversary this week. I’ve now had the dubious privilege of meeting the show twice: first as a raver in the late Nineties, and more recently as the mother of a toddler. And it was wildly successful from the moment it landed, both with the chemically insomniac as well as its official target audience of preschool children. It’s one of the most lucrative shows in BBC history, with merchandising sales raking in billions, and by 2015 had aired in over 120 countries with translation into more than 45 languages.

But if the show has been a roaring success, it has also spurred a subculture of perverse readings, including that the Sun Baby is a demon and the  occult connection between the show and Harry Potter. Elsewhere, Teletubbyland has been interpreted as a post-apocalyptic scenario set in a bomb shelter.

And this secondary success is also richly deserved. For among many other things, it’s a brutally frank sketch of a hypermodern era that began gathering speed around the time the show launched, and has now consumed us all. And these humanoid-but-infantile Teletubby cyborgs, media devices painlessly grafted into their flesh, are fitting avatars for a uniquely modern conflation of technology and nurturing that’s on its way to collapsing the boundaries between childhood and adult life.

There were plenty of surreal children’s TV shows prior to Teletubbies. Gen Xers will remember Oliver Postgate’s Bagpuss (1974), which blended music by folk luminaries Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner with dreamy, animated storylines. Ten years later, geriatric millennials of roughly my vintage may recall the creepy claymation Trapdoor (1984) in which worms, monsters and a talking skull squirm about and sometimes eat one another in the pit under a castle.

Bagpuss captures the dreamy nostalgia and make-do-and-mend aesthetic of a Seventies era materially on its uppers and in many corners still stubbornly resistant to “modernisation”. Trapdoor is a vivid metaphor for the pitiless eat-anything-smaller-than-you morality of Thatcher’s Big Bang age. Teletubbies, though, brought the winds of change with it: no more nostalgia, and certainly no more competition. Instead, ahead of the millennium, it offered a powerfully 21^st-century vision, launched in the febrile final weeks of the election campaign that ended nearly two decades of Tory hegemony.

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The timing was immaculate. For Teletubbyland is a perfect fit for the bright, modern optimism of Blair’s New Labour: a clean, modern, aspirational world of universal abundance, where there is no longer any need for conflict or unhappiness because technology will deliver for all.

It’s pure Third Way. Teletubbyland is tidy, hygienic and futuristic, but not cold or forbidding. Bunnies roam around nibbling the lush grass and flowers, while the Teletubbies themselves live in a structure worthy of Grand Designs (launched two years after Teletubbies): a grass-roofed eco-home built into the hillside, filled with smart gadgets that cater to their every need.

Like good citizens of the End of History, the Teletubbies potter about this bright vision of what Aaron Bastani called “fully automated luxury communism” on short, directionless adventures. Their basic needs are met by automation, including a robot that cleans, another that makes food, and speakerphones that provide structure to their lives by emerging from the ground to announce what the Teletubbies will do next.

When they aren’t pursuing these mini-quests, they interact playfully with one another or consume short videos from human world, broadcast to them via a windmill-like aerial. This is picked up by the antennae that appear to be organic parts of their bodies, causing them to writhe in delight, and the images appear on screens embedded into their abdomens.

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Everything in this aimless, media-loving, robot-tended cyborg existence is overseen by the most benign imaginable surveillance device: a baby’s face, smiling and gurgling inside the warm, life-giving sun. It’s a vivid picture of a population contained within a heavily controlled environment structured around meeting their needs, where activity is mostly consumption-oriented and pre-programmed by third parties.

In this sense, it’s perhaps no wonder small children responded enthusiastically to it. The years between Trapdoor and Teletubbies reboot also saw an immense growth in infants attending nursery. In 1981, only 24% of women went back to work a year after having a baby; but by 2001, 67% did so. And Teletubbies is an accurate depiction of the nursery environments that growing numbers of infants experienced under Blair, spurred by a raft of New Labour pro-childcare policies.

In such settings, everything is carefully controlled and focused on amusement for the children. In most cases, children aren’t involved in the work of ordinary life, such as food preparation or cleaning, unless it’s a designated activity. And while care is not exactly automated, there’s more than a nod to industrial-era efficiency and economies of scale. After all, the purpose of nursery is to free up the maximum number of caregiving adults, to do things the wider world deems more “productive” than minding a toddler.

But if Teletubbies offered an upbeat picture for toddlers of the infant childcare experience, the world inculcated by this industrialised infancy has now spread well beyond the nursery setting. And this has arguably been at the expense of our ability to engage in what the generation who watched Teletubbies as toddlers would now call “adulting”.

We’re increasingly enthusiastic about innovations, such as Deliveroo, that give the impression of magically meeting our basic needs at the touch of a button, like the Tubby Custard machine. Five years after Teletubbies, the world gained a Noo-Noo in the form of the now wildly successful Roomba. And the Teletubbies’ cyborg fusion with mass communication increasingly reflects our own relationship to technology.

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A decade before the launch of the first smartphone, preschoolers all around the world were offered a vision of friendly, child-like entities laughing and playing, with what appear to be organic antenna emerging from the heads and screens embedded in their bellies. Now, 25 years after their launch, millennials check their phones on average 150 times a day and rarely go more than a few hours without a glance at the feed. Meanwhile, “wearables” such as health trackers and (if you’re a certain kind of Silicon Valley dork) augmented-reality glasses have proliferated.

And the drive for ever more intimate integration between “smart” devices and our flesh is ongoing. Elon Musk is lining up human trials of the Neuralink brain implant technology, while a majority of Americans would find implanted brain chips acceptable provided it was possible to deactivate them.

But it’s the automation of nurture combined with cyborg body enhancements that reveals Teletubbies’ most prophetic vision: a world that’s traded love in for technology – and, increasingly, even seeks to reframe technology as love.

For there are no adult Teletubbies. Whenever the Teletubbies go to bed, under their space blankets, there’s no one to tuck them in or read them a bedtime story. And today, if you wish to, you can raise your human child in a similar way: the Luka owl robot reads bedtime stories to children. The $1000 ‘Moxie’ robot even promises to help your child with “social-emotional learning” if you’re too busy to do so yourself.

Do the Teletubbies ever long for a hug from an adult? Perhaps not; they delight instead in  media broadcasts from the human world to their cyborg stomach-screens. And in the absence of adult care, they turn to one another for comfort: each show ends with a Big Hug, and the narrator’s declaration that “The Teletubbies love each other very much”.

Children aren’t Teletubbies, though. The first generation of children to be sent en masse as infants to a human version of Teletubbyland are now in their mid- to late twenties. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that full-time nursery care has no impact on academic performance, and may even improve outcomes in some cases. But other infant experiences are harder to quantify.

I wonder, sometimes, whether there is any connection between the proliferation of “self-care” content online, and the sharp increase circa Teletubbies in young adults who spent their infancy in a setting maximally geared to their safety and entertainment, but less well-resourced in terms of loving, attuned care. This is sensitive territory, as most parents are acutely torn on how to do the best for their families while making ends meet. But I still wonder.

If there is a link, perhaps it’s not so much that Teletubbies was created for ravers, as that it offers comfort of sorts to those in that delicate post-rave condition of self-inflicted chemical imbalance.

This condition can leave one both desperate for a hug and strangely unable to ask for one. And here was a show that said: don’t worry, be more Teletubby. You don’t really need an adult to care for you, any more than you did as a toddler. But nor do you need to be one – because the machines will take care of us. We’ll get Deliveroo, give each other a hug, and leave the adulting till tomorrow. Look – bunnies and Tubby Toast. Eh-oh!

Political satire has been in a confused state these past five years, since Donald Trump short-circuited it so dramatically that it is yet to recover. It became a cliché to say that the things Trump said and did on a daily basis would have had you laughed out of any writers’ room if you’d invented them. How could you parody a man who, vaccinated against embarrassment by his total absence of humour, parodied himself? Boris Johnson is a very different character — a sense of shambolic comedy is his sword and shield — but similarly hard to spoof because he caricatures himself.

After The Thick of It, Iannucci went to the US and launched Veep, bringing a dissonant note of panic and incompetence to a country where fictional presidents are usually very good (Jed Bartlett from The West Wing) or very bad (Frank Underwood from House of Cards), but generally on top of things either way. He left the show after three seasons in 2015 so that he could direct movies, just in time to avoid having to grapple with the conundrum of a president who made Veep’s Selina Meyer look relatively decent and proficient. David Mandel, his replacement as showrunner, didn’t so much solve the problem as ignore it. Veep remained very funny but it lost much of its relevance by unplugging itself from the wild new reality of Washington DC. It ended in 2019, a few months after House of Cards.

Nothing has come along to replace those shows. The old warhorses of satire roll on — Have I Got News for You and the revived Spitting Image in the UK; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show in the US (a British version of SNL is in the pipeline). But where are the dramas and scripted comedies? Politics is not where the action is.

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When I interviewed Iannucci recently, he chose Succession and The White Lotus as the most biting satires around. Both shows coolly dissect the callousness of the very rich, and show the casualties they leave behind. Inevitably, some of that wealth comes from tech. Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton) in The White Lotus is the CFO of a popular search engine. In this series of Succession, Waystar-Royco’s old-media empire is seeking a life-saving deal with Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgaard), the bored and ruthless CEO of the streaming company GoJo. The most powerful character in Iannucci’s own Avenue 5, a sci-fi sitcom about a society under pressure, is tech billionaire Herman Judd, played by Josh Gad as a vain man-baby. And it’s telling that Adam McKay, whose 2018 movie Vice was a black comedy about Dick Cheney, is making his next picture about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal.

There’s a novelty factor here. Next to most politicians, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fascinatingly weird characters with literally cosmic ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg, in his public appearances, comes off as less a human being than a beta-version AI — a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the uncanny valley. This is good material. Take Christopher Evan Welch in Silicon Valley, whose character Peter Gregory always looked as if he were on the verge of teleporting back to his home planet, Oscar Isaac’s malfunctioning hipster hermit in Ex Machina, or Nick Offerman’s glumly deranged schlub-genius in Devs. Succession’s Lukas Mattson combines a killer instinct with airport-bookstore self-help mantras and the distinct impression that he could tank GoJo’s share price with a single ill-judged tweet composed while tripping at Burning Man.

But tech gurus aren’t just a fun new toy for writers to play with. Satire follows power, and power is not where it was. In Western democracies there is a general sense that politicians are hamstrung and hopeless while tech companies are busy changing the way we communicate, think and act. After a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, for example, social media companies did far more to dampen Trump’s efforts to overturn the election than Congress did.

Iannucci told me that his final episode of Veep, which ended with a deadlocked electoral college, “seemed to me to sum up where American politics is”, which is to say paralysed. While Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda depends on the vanity of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Jeff Bezos is flying into space and earning $143,000 a minute. Which man is the more fertile source of both comedy and outrage? In Succession, Logan Roy has the power to bring down one president and handpick another, yet even he is at the mercy of Lukas Mattson’s whims.

Charlie Brooker, who rivals Iannucci as the UK’s most celebrated satirist, was ahead of the curve with Black Mirror, where politics is a sideshow if it features at all. In its very first episode, The National Anthem, broadcast ten years ago this month, the Prime Minister is a sympathetic character who accedes to a horrific televised humiliation for honourable reasons. The real villains of the episode are the people who watch it. Nosedive, the first episode after Black Mirror’s move to Netflix, is a dystopia without a dictator, where lives rise or fall according to an app. In Smithereens, Brooker finally introduced a modern-day tech bro: a pseudo-hippie with a man-bun, evidently modelled on Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has lost control of his own creation.

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Brooker is sometimes stereotyped as a grumpy technophobe (“what if phones, but too much,” as one brilliant parody put it), but the world is coming around to his point of view. Who would have thought that a social-media platform that started out by rating the attractiveness of Harvard students would end up, 15 years later, facilitating genocide in Myanmar? There aren’t many takers these days for the old Silicon Valley utopianism. Perhaps the only heroic tech billionaire in popular culture, before his death, was Marvel’s Tony Stark, but his enemies were usually also tech billionaires, so that balanced out nicely.

This antipathy to Big Tech isn’t confined to the screen. In the realm of fiction, its most dogged opponent is probably the American novelist Dave Eggers, who has just published The Every, the hefty sequel to his 2013 bestseller The Circle. Eggers has called smartphones “technological crack” and compared our relationship with technology to “being in a relationship with a very controlling, needy, obsessive person. You’re never free; you’re always paranoid. You’re simultaneously on a leash and under a microscope”.

Several years on, the social media giant The Circle has acquired an online retail platform nicknamed “the jungle” from its spacefaring founder (the thinness of the disguise is a running joke) and rebranded itself as The Every. (The novel was finished, by the way, before Zuckerberg renamed Facebook’s parent company Meta.) True to its name, The Every seeks to permeate and control every nook and cranny of human existence — all for the greater good, of course.

Refuseniks who choose to live outside The Every are labelled “trogs”. Eggers is a proud trog and The Every is an unashamedly old-fashioned novel of ideas. It goes on for too long, as angry people often do, because Eggers has so much to get off his chest. Though ostensibly about the efforts of one employee to infiltrate and destroy the company, it is less a story than a series of conversations about increasingly berserk innovations.

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In a neat satirical twist, the company cloaks its unrelenting assault on personal privacy and freedom in the language of political correctness. It is obsessed with veganism and reducing carbon emissions to the point of demonising pets and bananas. Once something is deemed “problematic”, it is not long for this brave new world where totalitarianism wears a tight smile and shame is a weapon of mass destruction. As for politics, The Every runs the world’s dominant voting software (no account, no vote) and kills the presidential campaign of its leading opponent in just minutes. To The Every, democracy is a bug to be ironed out.

Likewise in the real world, if you really want to look at how the world works, you’re better off writing about a CEO than a president. As Boris Johnson’s hapless behaviour this week showed, a politician as smoothly machiavellian as Frank Underwood or his British predecessor Francis Urquhart would be no more plausible than one with X-ray vision. Perhaps, looking back, the panicky impotence of the characters in The Thick of It and Veep was a sign that political satire was running out of road. The day somebody writes a successful new satire on politics, politicians should welcome it with open arms. It will mean they matter again.

Was there a nadir? Was it the WAG parade at the World Cup in 2006, when Victoria Beckham drank bottles of Veuve Clicquot through a straw? (“We became a bit of a circus,” one player sagely reminisced a few years later.) Was it Ashley Cole’s admission, in 2006, that he nearly “swerved off the road” with anger when Arsenal offered him a new contract with a £55,000 weekly wage? Perhaps it was Wayne Rooney’s “romp with a granny” — or was it a naked Frank Lampard, jeering at grieving Americans in a Heathrow hotel bar on September 13, 2001? England expected that most footballers would try and sleep with their teammate’s wife.

That was off the pitch. On the field, if you can endure the recollection, they were even worse. England played like a scratch team dredged from the remedial unit of a Victorian institution. They burned up at tournaments in 2004, 2006 and 2010. They didn’t even qualify for Euro 2008. The game, through the Premier League, had never been more lucrative. The reputation of its players had never been lower. In a strange way it was appropriate. If England’s footballers were hideous in the 2000s, it was because England was. If they were trashily materialistic, it was because England was too. They were no better, and not much worse, than anyone else in public life at the time. That was the tragedy. “Morally corrupt” was how a group of bishops described the New Labour years in 2008. God only knows what the Right Reverends would have thought if they’d seen Footballers’ Wives.

Now the face of football is changing. England’s players are a source of pride rather than embarrassment. In 2018, led by Gareth Southgate, their impeccable manager, they reached the semi-finals of the World Cup — a moment of full-spectrum, flags-out, boozy national unity that most fans, inured to washout after washout, never thought they’d experience. Success brought English players an earned prestige, even an authority, that they hadn’t enjoyed since Italia ‘90. No more tragedy. They were just heroes. What would they do with it?

The answer, at least partially, lies in an office on Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia. That’s where Roc Nation Sports International’s headquarters is based. Founded in 2008 by Jay Z, Roc Nation has since washed into every cove in the modern entertainment industry. They manage artists and athletes, produce TV shows and films, and run a music label. Team Roc, a division within the company, is dedicated to efforts around social justice: bailing out BLM protestors in America this summer, offering pro-bono legal support for their families, creating buzzy media campaigns, and leveraging Roc Nation’s impressive celebrity roster to boost stories.

Their work blurs the lines between politics and sport, entertainment and activism. “We don’t consider ourselves a traditional agency — we really are a movement,” Roc Nation Sports International’s president Michael Yormark told the Telegraph in June.

The movement found a standard bearer in Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, who became one of Roc Nation’s European clients earlier this year. An icon of the 2018 World Cup, and a courageous high-pressure penalty taker, Rashford grew up in a single-parent family in Wythenshawe. When he heard that schools would be closing as part of the wider national lockdown in March, Rashford, who’d relied on free lunch programmes as a child, turned to Kelly Hogarth, his personal publicist, and VP of strategic communications at Roc Nation Sports International — what could they do to help poor children secure vital meals?

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Even hermits know what happened next. Rashford’s — and Hogarth’s — free school meals campaign, mammothly popular and relentlessly sincere, forced the Government into two U-turns. ‘RASHERS FOR PM’, screamed the Daily Star, one of dozens of headlines he made over the summer, then the autumn. Old media was full of sympathetic interviews with Rashford, or commentators, such as Matthew Parris, who were scared of criticising the campaign, for fear of sounding mean. Who, after all, wanted children to go hungry in a plague year?

Only monsters: when the Daily Mail tried to peg Rashford as a hypocrite for owning multiple homes, it was like watching a giraffe try to ride a bicycle. When you own new media as much as Rashford does — with 900,000 more followers than Boris Johnson on Twitter — attacks from mere newspapers don’t work. Alongside Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling and Aston Villa’s Tyrone Mings, who both campaigned for BLM after the death of George Floyd, Rashford was suddenly leading a generation of politically self-aware England players. The normally sedate New Statesman editor, Jason Cowley, called them — without mentioning the squadrons of PR flacks writing their tweets — “activist super players”.

Footballers, not poets, became England’s unacknowledged legislators. Rashford received an MBE, and millions of school children received lunch.

Traditional broadcast and print media never did more than boost Rashford’s signal. The narrative was too sexy — star footballer routs out of touch toffs at the top — for them to attempt anything else. To understand what was interesting about Rashford, and by extension Roc Nation, you had to go to the trade press, and media companies which focused on sports PR. The Rashford campaign was the subject of huge features in AdWeek and SportsPro, and he won PR Week’s “Communicator of The Year” award. What earned Rashford praise from them wasn’t feeding children. It was the exciting way Roc Nation has fused social justice and sport in order to boost Rashford’s profile, the better for him to serve as a conduit for digital marketing operations, the spread of branded content, and the sale of boxfresh trainers.

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The bottom line wasn’t doing good; the bottom line, as SportsPro noted, was that during the campaign, Rashford’s Twitter following had grown by 65%, whereas the total social following of Manchester United — which hasn’t run any political campaigns this summer — had grown a sluggish 8% in the same period. Simon Oliveira, a long-term advisor to David Beckham, labelled Roc Nation’s efforts “genius”.

For experienced sports marketeers like Oliveira, Rashford’s campaign set a new precedent. During Beckham’s glory days, the most social justice a player would indulge in might involve being chauffeured, blatantly hungover, to a children’s hospital to sign autographs, or to a community centre to cut a ribbon. Nobody cared what Gary Neville thought about child tax credits. Complicated policy matters were for Oliver Letwin or David Laws or Ed Balls to work out. Roc Nation and Rashford changed all that. “The barriers have been well and truly broken,” Oliveira wrote over the summer. “Top-athletes, and the organisations they represent, can collectively reach more people than almost any politician and connect.”

The next horizon stretches beyond Rashford. His authenticity, precisely calibrated by the 20 “subject-matter experts” who work for Roc Nation in that Fitzrovia office, is rare. As the first “activist super player” to cut through with the public, Rashford was able to give the impression of spontaneity, relatability and unfilteredness prized by PR world, whatever the contrary reality. Other PR firms will go further than Roc Nation, and take stands on issues with far less room for consensus than feeding hungry children during a pandemic.

This represents an enormous shift away from sport as it was traditionally understood in England. It would be wrong to say that sport was apolitical, but it has rarely been a space for activism. According to the historian Derek Birely in Sport and The Making of Britain, sport had a “chauvinistic” side, but its role lay in “providing a safety valve, escape, sublimation, [and] socially acceptable outlets” for aggression. For Robert Colls, in This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England 1760-1960, sport was defined by “knowing that not everyone is political”.

That knowledge is being replaced with the more contentious model of player-activism found in American sports. English football is already embroiled in a domestic culture war over the practice of “taking the knee” in support of BLM, and an international culture war over the Premier League’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign against homophobia. Perennial plans — looking ever more likely to come to fruition — for a European Super League will cement the game’s money-making capabilities, while severing the connection between England’s biggest clubs and their localities.

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The four divisions of English football were always a parody of the class system; if the top clubs jet off, it will mirror the growth of our own transnational elite, who, like Manchester United, would rather play in Milan than Middlesbrough. Look on the bright side: United will be able, finally, to compete with the Dallas Cowboys for overseas markets on a more equal footing.

Top players in such a system will be like the American celebrities repped by Roc Nation. Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, but blandly removed from the audiences they sell their apparel and their opinions too. Maybe it will be then, when Jack Grealish is co-hosting a podcast with Greta Thunberg, or Mason Greenwood is co-authoring a popular book about antiracism with Reni-Eddo Lodge, that fans will feel a touch — just a breath — of nostalgia for Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole. They were not good men, but at least their cynicism was genuine.

It was never to be. There have been repeated lurches into the political mire, characterised best by Len McCluskey on the Andrew Marr Show defending the Labour leadership’s then position on Brexit by morphing into Corporal Jones. His desperate pleas of “Don’t Panic” to Labour MPs sounded a lot like a Dad’s Army rerun on BBC2. He conjured the unfortunate image of Jeremy Corbyn as Captain Mainwaring, John McDonnell as Sergeant Wilson and Tom Watson as private Frazer – muttering “we’re doomed, doomed”.

This wasn’t the only recent echo from the 1970s. Corbyn, apparently, is reading up on Harold Wilson for inspiration over Brexit.Which is remarkable because Wilson was the subject of constant attack from the Left during his time as Labour Party leader and prime minister. He was party leader for 13 years (1963-76), fought five general elections (defeating the Conservatives in four) and held the party together in a time of huge and competing political egos on both the Left and the Right.

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For the centre-Right of the Party, Europe was the issue – crystallised by Roy Jenkins leading 69 Labour MPs to vote for entry into the EEC against the Party whip in 1971 and the creation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party ten years later. For the Left, led by Tony Benn, it was the fight for a radical economic agenda and departure from Europe.

Wilson was accused by both sides of lacking ideology and being merely a “master tactician”. He held both wings together by leadership skills that are not recognised in today’s Labour Party: compromise, non-ideological responses to problems (often characterised as mere opportunism), and the ability to read the electorate and exploit the weakness of Labour’s opponents.

It’s hard to see Corbyn acting in the same ways. In the past two years his leadership has been dominated by rigidity over both Brexit and antisemitism that has turned both into full blown crises. It is the opposite of the way Wilson addressed the issues of his day. It is also reflective of the lessons learned by the Left that have been carried from 1979 into today’s politics of the Labour Party.

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The generation of young activists of the 1970s and 1980s – Corbyn, McDonnell, McCluskey and Jon Lansman – all earned their political stripes fighting the Right of the party. Lansman had been in the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the campaign to elect Tony Benn deputy leader in 1981; Corbyn had been a trade union official in London during the winter of discontent in 1978-9. McDonnell had been deputy leader and Finance Chair of the Great London Council from 1981. McCluskey had been in Liverpool associated with the Militant Tendency that ran the Labour Party and council in the early 1980s.

From 1978-1982 the young activists were dominant within the Labour Party. They depended on influencing supporters in constituencies, trade union branches and the National Executive to fight the power of the Parliamentary party. It was not to last. Mere Influence was not enough. In 1983 Labour under Michael Foot went down to its worst election result since 1918. It’s still the worst result in modern times and caused by the  combination of the turmoil within the party, the split away from Labour by the Social Democratic Party and the Falklands war, which made Margaret Thatcher hugely popular. It was followed by Neil Kinnock of the centre-Left being elected leader. The Left was now destined for the political wilderness until 2015.

By then the young activists were the grizzled veterans who against all expectations fashioned the victory of the Left by using social media to attract new young supporters and by creating a political campaign based on repudiation of the Conservative’s austerity programme. The Left’s leadership plan in 2015, as in 1978, was to combine radical economic policy with a different form of politics based on listening to the membership. The veterans knew they could leave very little to chance.

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When, in 2018, I interviewed McDonnell, he described how he felt about Corbyn winning the leadership, the lessons of the past and the urgency of taking power quickly and effectively:

“Get ready, start preparing now because what happens then is you realise after all those years in opposition on the Left, all those years of defeat and failure, the responsibility is on your shoulders, absolutely on your shoulders. And if you don’t get this right, the Left will be out for another generation. For God’s sake, we’ve got to get ready.”

And they have.

In 2015 McDonnell and Lansman created Momentum to have a permanent force of activists who could reinforce the leadership in both policy debates and in internal elections. By 2017 nine of the 39 places on the National Executive would be elected by the membership and the Left won all of them. This allowed them to take over the machinery of the Party such as the General Secretaryship and the committees running the disciplinary processes. In the clearest lesson learned from the days of New Labour, when parliamentary selections were rigidly controlled, the selection of Labour candidates in winnable seats is becoming the prime target of the Left.

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The Left has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in securing its dominance. It has the power and control over policy that it has always sought. It is creating economic policy that it believes will attract wide support from the electorate. It controls the machine. It has never had an opportunity like this.

So why the nervousness? Why does the fear of history repeating itself hang over it?

Despite three years of successes, the leader’s office have been faced with two issues it thought and hoped would either go away or be blamed on someone else. Anti-Semitism has become a deeper and deeper stain that isn’t being erased. Brexit has demonstrated the failure to demonstrate even a glimmer of Harold Wilson’s masterful tactics. The idea that Labour could push the blame onto the Conservatives and somehow appeal to both leavers and remainers has failed. The party has appeared weak, vacillating and confused. As the criticism has grown so the leadership’s position has hardened. The Left finds itself holding the levers of power but beginning to lose control of the internal authority it needs.

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Everything will depend on a good result when the general election takes place, and the real fear is what happens if the Left is not up to the job of winning that election. If Labour cannot lead in the polls when Theresa May is Prime Minister and if in a European election it comes fifth in Scotland and third in Wales, then the prospects against a Conservative party with a new leader getting a “Boris bounce” do not look good.

If Labour loses, the Left has a huge problem. The veterans will be facing a leadership election in which Corbyn has gone and it has no winnable candidate to replace him. There is a generational gap between the sixtysomethings running the party and the new members of the shadow cabinet who are three decades younger. Rebecca Long Bailey, a protégé of McDonnell, would be the political heir but she would also face competition from candidates who would be much more in the tradition of the centre-Left.

Emily Thornberry, Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer or even Tom Watson could win the leadership as Labour faced five more years of opposition. The greatest fear of the Left is that one of them would be the new Neil Kinnock. The leadership would return to the centre. The Left would lose its influence, power and support. It would be 1983 again and the wilderness would beckon.

Or is it?

I’m not going to argue that Blairism and 21st-century populism are much of a muchness. Obviously, they’re not. They represent either end of the open-versus-closed spectrum. And yet there are echoes: in their own way, the Blairites embraced patriotism (“Cool Britannia”), law and order (“tough on the causes of crime”) and a performative disrespect for the establishment (“the forces of conservatism”).

And, as with populism today, there were hints at a deeper philosophical challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of economic and social liberalism (at least as far as liberalism can be understood as individualism). Blairites in the UK, and their New Democrat counterparts in the US, flirted with a political philosophy called communitarianism – which, as the name suggests, emphasises the importance of community.

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Fashionable thinkers at the time included Amitai Etzioni and Robert D Putnam (author of the highly influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which was published in 2000). Their communitarianism was not anti-individualist, but was as much about the responsibilities of individuals as their rights. Though certainly not conservatives in the American sense, they were unafraid to talk about concepts of duty and virtue and how these might contribute to progressive ends.

In a timely article for Quillette, John R Wood, reminds us what happened next:

“…the communitarian spirit and the intellectual forces gathered around atrophied with the turn of the new century. One of the likely causes of this shift was the trauma of 9/11, which refocused… the country as a whole away from parochial matters of community and towards a War on Terrorism, a development that would consume our national consciousness and further polarization for years to come.”

The War on Terror would also derail Blairism in the UK. The micromanaging Brownite tendency of New Labour took over, leaving little room for community empowerment. Then the Financial Crisis erupted followed by the Great Recession followed by austerity. Economic matters reasserted their supremacy over social concerns and communitarianism was forgotten.

But the tide turned again in 2016  – when the voters made it clear that the loss of community has political consequences. Brexit, Trump and the other populist shocks of the last few years have left moderate political thinkers scrambling for a response. Wood argues that communitarianism is back in vogue – though not under that particular label.

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Communitarianism includes just about anyone concerned by the coming apart of society. It is therefore a broader category than post-liberalism and at odds with the division-sowing of the national populists. Indeed, many of the most interesting communitarians today are Left-leaning liberals (just like the first time round).

Wood gives the example of Pete Buttigieg – perhaps the most unexpected of the Democratic front runners:

“As Buttigieg himself has said, it is unlikely that, under ordinary circumstances, a 37-year-old mayor of a relatively small city would receive serious attention as a candidate for president of the United States. This is obviously true. But a large part of Buttigieg’s unique appeal hinges on his focus on the very values of localism that in other times might make a politician seem too parochial for federal office. ‘We need,’ he has argued, ‘to rally people around the sense of identity that we’re building each other up, because community is part of how people explain how they fit in to the world.'”

What Buttigieg understands is that progressive politics absolutely depends on a shared sense of identity and values – because people don’t vote for redistributive policies that benefit people they feel no connection to. He also understands that a decline in the theory and practice of the common good opens the way for divisive identity politics and political polarisation.

It’s pretty obvious that many of the voters that once made up winning progressive coalitions – including sections of the working class, older voters and religious voters – have found themselves on the other side of the culture war divide (and thus easy pickings for the likes of Trump).

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It’s not that Buttigieg and those who think like him want to switch sides in the culture war. They remain liberals (they haven’t, alas, turned post-liberal) and aren’t about to confront the culture warriors on their own side.

Rather their focus is on reaching across divides, engaging in dialogue and rebuilding trust. Wood mentions a few of the US conservatives, including David Brooks and Ben Sasse, who are doing the same from their end. However, progressives have a particular reason to do so, because they’re never going to build majority support for an activist state without sufficient trust in at least some public institutions.

In this respect, they’re well-advised to work towards this goal at the local level. Whereas the national and international politics of the social media age consists of strangers screaming at each other from behind anonymous accounts, local politics at least allows for the possibility of civilised deliberation and cooperation between neighbours. It’s so much more difficult to be rude to someone you might meet on the street.

I grew up in a small town in southern England. It was, and still is, a community-minded place with thriving local institutions. On one occasion, the local freesheet gave a less than glowing review to a play put on by the local amateur dramatics society. This did not go down well. People complained that what might be acceptable from the theatre critic of The Times about a disappointing West End show was simply inappropriate for a small community where public slanging matches were not the done thing.

Similarly, the town council, though solidly Tory since the Stone Age, was just about the least partisan forum on the planet – and mostly a means of having one’s say on parking spaces and bin collections.

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What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

The cynics might say that local democracy is more civilised because there’s nothing much in the way of real power to fight over – and if ever the real decisions were devolved then things would turn nasty. That, however, hasn’t been the experience of the decentralising reforms of recent years. And as Twitter proves on a daily basis, a complete lack of significance is no guarantor of polite discourse.

Perhaps it’s time to give up on bringing peace to the disembodied battleground grounds of the internet. If the communitarian Left and the civically-minded Right want to re-civilise our politics, then they must make sure that as much it as possible happens locally.