President Trump built his 2024 re-election bid, in large part, on ending the border crisis and reversing mass migration. On the first front, external enforcement, he has unquestionably succeeded, as even Democrats grudgingly admit. Yet his broader efforts to reduce illegal and legal immigration have encountered resistance, often in unexpected places. Some of the fiercest opposition has emerged in areas of policy not obviously connected to immigration, while some of the most successful has come from within his own coalition.

This owes to the paradox of mass migration: as the share of foreign-born newcomers swells, voters become more determined to shrink it, while governments become less able to do so. Reversing mass migration, in other words, is hard. Really hard. Because migration entrenches itself and remakes recipient societies in indelible ways.

Public opinion in the late Biden years reflected the mounting frustration. In early 2024, Americans cited uncontrolled immigration as their no. 1 or no. 2 priority for three consecutive months — the first time they’d done so for multiple consecutive months in Gallup’s monthly trend assessment. Later that year, in June, Gallup found that 55% of Americans wanted immigration decreased, the highest share in more than two decades.

Trump took such polling as his new mandate. Immediately upon taking office, the president handed down sweeping executive orders to shut down the border, boost interior arrests of illegal and criminal immigrants, and (less concertedly) restrict legal immigration. 

Nearly two years later, the results show Trump partially delivered on that mandate. Illegal crossings at the southern border have dropped by more than 90%, while legal immigration has slowed considerably. Fewer visas are being issued, and immigration processing has slowed considerably, with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services completing 74% fewer naturalizations in July 2026 than at the same point a year earlier. 

But nowhere has Trump’s agenda been more aggressive, or more controversial, than in interior deportations. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates that interior deportations surged to roughly 120,000 in 2025, up about 150% from the 47,732 immigrants Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed from inside the homeland during Biden’s final full fiscal year.

These results have been obtained despite serious opposition from Democrats in Congress and Democratic-controlled states and cities, where many of the administration’s most intensive ICE operations have taken place. The administration’s aggressive interior enforcement tactics in particular have triggered intense media scrutiny and street-level backlash, contributing to public concerns over how arrests and deportations are being carried out. 

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A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around 60% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Yet disapproval of Trump’s enforcement tactics doesn’t appear to translate into broader opposition to his effort to curb immigration. The same annual Gallup survey that tracks Americans’ immigration preferences found earlier this year that a whopping two-thirds of Americans favor either maintaining today’s much lower levels of immigration or reducing it further. Americans may be uncomfortable with some of Trump’s hard-line tactics, but they appear to quietly favor the result.

By the standards of Western politics, Trump’s achievement — partially translating voters’ long-standing demand for lower immigration levels into actually lower inflows — is something close to a miracle. Across Europe, voters have for decades demanded less immigration, and elected governments promising to deliver it, only to watch as more and more newcomers flooded the system, squeezing workers’ bargaining power, straining social services, and contributing to social incohesion.

Spain’s case is instructive. In 2024, a national poll commissioned by the El País newspaper found that a clear majority of Spaniards believed the country already had too many immigrants. Yet mass migration persisted and in early 2026, the government launched an extraordinary regularization program initially estimated to convert roughly half a million illegal migrants into legal residents. By the time applications closed in June, nearly 1.2 million people had applied. 

Then there was Brexit and its aftermath — perhaps the clearest example of the betrayal of voters’ desire for lower immigration levels. In 2016, a majority of British voters took the extraordinary step of rejecting the political and economic order that had governed their country for decades. Regaining control over immigration was at the center of the Leave campaign. 

Yet even exiting the European Union, it turned out, wasn’t enough. The Tory governments ostensibly charged with overseeing the implementation of Brexit did the opposite. The annual number of people immigrating to Britain surged to 1.3 million in 2023, up from 589,000 in 2016. 

The truth is that since the current era of mass migration began more than a decade ago, no other major Western country has yet managed to reverse the trend and sustain substantially lower levels of immigration despite widespread public demand to do so. Trump’s partial success in sustaining substantially lower immigration for nearly two years remains, for now, an anomaly in the Western world. And even that effort is partial, tentative, and vulnerable, as we will see.

The reason is straightforward. Immigration at sufficient scale doesn’t merely add people to a country. Over time, institutions and industries adapt themselves to their presence. Businesses — especially in sectors like hospitality, food, construction, and personal services — become dependent on migrants’ cheap labor. In parallel with this, government agencies and nonprofit contractors build programs around migrants, which these days generally means poorer populations from the Global South. 

Those dependencies eventually create political pressure of their own, as employers, service providers, and local governments push national elected officials to protect the economic arrangements that have developed around migration. Immigration restriction therefore comes to mean more than stopping a flow of people. It means disrupting interests that have grown dependent on that flow.

Trump’s second term offers revealing examples of how this works. His immigration agenda has faced the resistance one expects from Democrats, including mass protests and federal lawsuits. Yet the greatest obstacles to his efforts to restrict immigration have not come from efforts to protect migrants themselves. Instead, they have come from federal elected officials in both parties seeking to protect the industries, labor markets, and government programs that have grown dependent on their presence.

Consider the 2025 government shutdown. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained plenty for Democrats to oppose on immigration, including tens of billions of dollars in new funding for ICE and the administration’s enforcement agenda. Yet when Democrats chose to force their most consequential confrontation with Trump, immigration enforcement wasn’t at the center of it. Health care was. Democrats blocked government funding for six weeks in what became the longest shutdown in American history, demanding that Republicans abandon the health-care provisions of the bill and preserve enhanced Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) subsidies that were scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

Here the paradox begins to reveal itself. The Biden-era immigration surge had become intertwined with the enormous expansion of government health subsidies. The CBO estimated that by 2024, the Biden surge had added roughly 600,000 migrant recipients of heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, private health insurance through ObamaCare. That was on top of another 300,000 foreign nationals receiving full Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits. 

The CBO projected that the insurance-premium tax credits for the surge population would add $66 billion to the federal deficit over the following decade, while Medicaid and CHIP spending would increase by another $40 billion. Much of that government spending ultimately became revenue for private health-care companies. ObamaCare subsidies pay premiums for plans sold by private insurers, while much of Medicaid coverage is administered by private firms. As migration increased the number of people eligible for subsidized coverage — aided by the Biden administration’s expansive use of parole and other humanitarian statuses that moved migrants into categories eligible for welfare benefits — it also expanded the market for the companies paid to insure them.

Here Trump’s immigration restriction efforts encountered an indirect kind of resistance. The fight wasn’t directly over migrants themselves, but over the flow of federal funding to private markets that had expanded alongside the growth of the migrant population. By the time Trump sought to unwind the enhanced subsidies, only four years after their creation, insurers had already adapted to the enormous market they created. Cutting them meant removing millions of subsidized customers and billions in revenue — a disruption significant enough that Democrats were willing to sustain the longest government shutdown in American history to prevent it.

In blue cities, meanwhile, mass migration — legal and illegal — functions like a permanent jobs bill for various groups, including public-school teachers amid otherwise declining enrollment; lawyers and other laptop workers in the NGO sector facing AI and automation; Left activists looking for a streetfighting cause to compete with the pleasures of Netflix and legal weed; and public functionaries struggling to justify their salaries amid out-migration from blue cities to suburbs and exurbs, and from blue states to red. 

Put another way, as UnHerd’s Michael Lind has argued, mass migration provides a subset of the urban professional classes with a reason to maintain and expand the government agencies and NGOs that keep them employed.

Which brings us to the Right. Republicans’ resistance to portions of Trump’s immigration crackdown reveals the same paradox from the other direction. Where Democrats faced pressure from industries that had come to serve migrants as federally subsidized consumers and program enrollees, Republicans faced it from industries that had come to depend on them as cheap labor.

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When workplace enforcement raids increased in 2025, Big Ag — one of America’s most forceful cheap-labor lobbies — warned Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that farmers and ranchers risked losing workers. Rollins took their concerns to Trump, who briefly directed immigration authorities to pull back enforcement at farms, hotels, and restaurants. 

More recently, even as it has removed temporary protected status for Haitians and others, Team Trump held off terminating protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, apparently following intense pressure from the construction industry. In both cases, Trump found himself caught between the populist voters who elected him to enforce immigration law and Republican-aligned industries that had spent years building their businesses around the wage arbitrage made possible by inviting what Marx called a “reserve army of labor.”

The Trump administration and some congressional Republicans, moreover, have moved to expand guest-worker presence in migrant-heavy industries, most notably agriculture. A subset of the GOP, in other words, is prepared to tolerate high migrant flows in some regions, so long as the newcomers are tied to specific employers, can’t organize or vote, and continue to do jobs “Americans won’t do” (which is just cheap-labor-lobby speak for: jobs Americans won’t do at poverty wages).

The upshot is mixed. Trump’s first two years have demonstrated that it is possible to end the age of mass migration. They also show the extraordinary political effort required to do it — and the multidirectional resistance. His most difficult battles have not always been with the liberal opposition, but with businesses, government programs, and other institutions that spent years adapting themselves to high immigration and now have an interest in its continuation.

Understanding this paradox matters as Western societies are at a breaking point after years of governments failing to respond to the growing demands of their people. A politics focused narrowly on reducing immigration numbers misses much of what sustains mass migration once it has taken hold. The more important target may be the sectors that have come to depend on migration. Industries, nonprofit agencies, and other institutions often play a quieter but more influential role in frustrating the changes voters demand. Reducing mass migration therefore requires more than changing immigration law. It also requires voters to elect governments willing to confront the domestic interests that have grown up around it, forcing them to adjust to lower levels of immigration.

There is a cost to waiting. If these interests grow powerful enough to completely prevent governments from translating public demands into policy, the consequences will extend beyond immigration itself to the very legitimacy of representative government.

When I hitch a ride to the newly liberated villages east of Kharkiv — now the target of Putin’s latest offensive — my companions are surprisingly upbeat. Our driver, Sergey, is from Saltivka, a suburb of Kharkiv most destroyed by the war. “This is a special territory,” another passenger jokes, “you can listen to songs in Russian on the radio.” He puts on a scratched CD and the car is filled with raspy Russian prison chanson.

Beyond the reach of Ukraine’s cities, this is a land that lives by its own rules. Mud and road signs are painted over to confuse Russian forces. Out of the fog emerges a checkpoint with a silhouette of a soldier. Once we drive closer, we see that the soldier isn’t human — it’s a mannequin in a soaked uniform. A human soldier is already approaching, he glances at the “VOLUNTEERS” sign on our car and waves us through.

Normally, during the summer months, these villages play host to “Dacha season”, when the nation’s young families escape the cities while school is out. Perhaps this connection to childhood was what made villages feel so safe when Putin’s forces invaded in 2022. As Timothy Snyder has observed, many Ukrainians initially fled to villages as they instinctively seemed safer than cities.

They were wrong. Undefended, villages bore the brunt of the first months of occupation. In Kharkiv, the Russian Army came from the northeast, subduing Izium, Liman, and finally reaching Kharkiv itself. In October 2022, the Russians were swiftly driven out of the Kharkiv region. Only rusty burnt armour, torture rooms, and cold fog remained.

Once again under Kyiv’s control, many villages remained neglected, like they were for decades. Before the invasion, the village was already dying, succumbing to global urbanisation, inequality, and poverty. As the BBC reported 12 years ago, “none of the government programmes aimed at solving the situation has yet produced real results”. Not much has changed — according to 2021 data, dozens of villages emptied out in Ukraine every year. The reasons are the same as in the entire post-Soviet bloc: isolation, lack of infrastructure, low pensions, and a lack of economic opportunities.

And now, there’s war. The invasion has turned villages into isolated islands amid an ocean of battles and minefields. Some residents have to survive on vegetable gardens and humanitarian aid. Pensions don’t always arrive, and volunteers complained to me about the lack of support from Western NGOs. It’s common to hear the complaint that, while a road in Kyiv hit by a missile can be repaired within a day, in rural areas, homeowners have to repair their burned-down houses themselves. “Nobody is going to do anything in the villages, power lines are broken, there’s no electricity, no water. It’s survival,” Sasha, one of the volunteers for Zlahoda, says.

As we pull up to the first village on their list, we are greeted by lush greenery. Vines, flowers, trees everywhere. We are some 100 km southeast of Kharkiv. Even in the fog, you can feel the excitement in the air. After all, the volunteers are the only chance for food, flour, medicines and hygiene products. The standard humanitarian kits are simple, some contain only pasta and canned meat, but even that helps when the only food available is what grows in the garden.

Several elderly people and middle-aged women wait under a concrete bus stop. They are in complete news isolation, unaware of what was happening on the front lines and in the world. In many villages, news still can only be heard if you’re lucky to catch a connection or through “transmitters” — people who bring news, deliver medicines, and letters. “What’s happening out there, my dears?” asks one grandmother.

According to many in the village, the Russian army provided little humanitarian aid. “They gave us a handful of salt, and candy… there was no medicine,” says one resident. Many, however, are reluctant to talk about the occupation, and accounts are often contradictory. In one village, one family claims they lived in their basement and didn’t see any Russians, while others rented out their rooms to enemy soldiers.

In the east, the problem of collaborators looms large. Many in the occupied territories quartered or fed Russians, willingly or not. “Some are afraid that the occupiers will return and kill or humiliate them,” says one resident. “And some even married occupiers. Some children were born under the occupation — their mothers went to Russia to give birth. Now they can’t register their children as Ukrainians.” Suspected collaborators are hunted down and are handed lengthy prison terms — while many say that the allegations are sometimes trumped up or fabricated.

As the aid is distributed, one woman starts sobbing, choking on her tears. “They destroyed our home; they killed my son. He was at the checkpoint…” Another grandmother, in her early nineties, drags the boxes towards her home. She speaks in rich surzhyk, a regional blend of Russian and Ukrainian, and complains about the Russians: “I remember the Second World War, of course. I was 15 then… But I’ve never seen soldiers like [the Russians]. They took everything… They took telephones, cars, motorcycles…” But she is also critical of Kyiv’s response. “The Russians left us without a pension. How are we supposed to live? There’s nothing good.”

Sasha, the volunteer, echoes her sentiments: “If a private house falls apart, it’s your problem. There’s no work. Building materials have become more expensive. There are no hardware stores in the villages, and you have to bring it from the city.”

When we visit the neighbouring village, a whole crowd gathers at the bus stop, hiding from the downpour. Opposite the stop is a school which, Sasha bitterly remarks, was recently renovated with an EU grant. “The village still has nothing,” he adds later. “People can’t get anywhere. The police go around conducting surveys, looking for collaborators. There’s no water. You can’t wash or bathe. There are wells, but they’re a mile and a half away. Villages were dying out even before the war. Now, there’s nothing to be done.”

Near the village sits an abandoned Russian artillery position, burnt down by the Ukrainian army. The view of the hills is beautiful. Even in the gloom, the landscape breathes with strength and beauty. Flowers, grass, trees and hills verdant against the scars of battle.

We wander among these scars, the remnants of the Russian world — shells, a torn boot, shapeless metal. Olha, the volunteers’ leader, walks with us, taking photos. “My dad died,” she says at one point. “His head was torn off. They wiped his village off the face of the earth. We still can’t bury him… But this work helps me to stay sane. If it weren’t for this, I don’t know how we could have survived all this.”

But the work is harder now, she adds, referring not only to the renewed Russian offensive, but to the growing sense of fatigue in the West. While a number of the villages now have electricity and internet connection, the group’s funding is drying out. “Our credit cards are over drafted,” she says. But they keep on going, as Olha says, because there is no other choice. She recalls a conversation with Kolya, an elderly aid recipient from one of the villages we visited: “How are we living? Well, what can you not see for yourself? But we just have to live. We’ll endure. We’ve endured worse.”

The women did not hold back. Every day I turned on my phone to a deluge of Isis slogans, religious memes and terror threats. Images of destroyed western cities were particularly popular. I was told that terrorists such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the Boston bomber) were heroes. My new contacts would make jokes about blowing up London. They bantered about beheadings.

These women had been holed up in the Kurdish-run desert camp since the fall of Baghouz, the last Isis enclave, in March 2019. They wanted money — and were getting it. With the help of Isis women who had already managed to return to the EU or Turkey, they were spearheading a fundraising campaign to “free the sisters” from the Kurds. Their rhetoric was typically fiery, and the groups used encrypted apps such as Telegram to organise donations. Since then, I’ve watched as their language has softened — and begun to poison the West’s mainstream media.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, family and friends of Isis members began to gently craft a new narrative about their women. They had never supported the caliphate. They were innocents forced to travel there by men. They were, in their own way, victims. These grown women had been “trafficked” into Isis territory. Ignore the fact that many of them bought their own tickets.

This narrative was being peddled by a cluster of online groups, which had sympathetic names such as “Repatriate the Children”. The funding behind them is questionable: in Ukraine, where I am now, some organisations supporting Isis families were connected to Russia. Most claimed to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of minors, many of whom had been born in Isis territory, were injured and, yes, should have been repatriated — albeit to countries many of them had never even visited. But soon the remit of these groups broadened. They began to speak of “women and children” in a Syrian “refugee camp”.

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A number of NGOs have fallen for this narrative — as has the Western media. Where reports once condemned evil Isis brides joking about beheadings, now they depict the plight of innocent Isis brides who just want to come home after a terrible ordeal. Last month, the New York Times ran an article on the repatriation of Australian Isis families headlined: “After years of ‘Hell’ in Isis Detention Camp, 17 Australians Return Home”. The story celebrated the return of 13 children, as well as four grown women who were almost certainly committed to Isis once, even if they aren’t anymore. It also featured comment from the ecstatic patriarch of a large Sydney-based family from which several adults have fled to join the caliphate. There was no mention of those for whom Isis made life “Hell”: the Yazidis, who were brutally enslaved, and the Kurds.

This NYT report appears to be the result of three years of lobbying to ensure that anyone who makes the terror group look bad is utterly erased. The truth is, the women of Isis are rarely passive victims. I have visited the section of al-Hol that houses foreign women and children several times. It is many things, but it is certainly not a refugee camp, unless the women are refugees from a terror state many of them travelled thousands of kilometres to join. It is a prison camp full of inmates who support an extremely dangerous ideology. (That’s not to say the camp doesn’t deserve criticism: the conditions are inhumane, and children in particular should never have to experience them.)

The first Isis “bride” I encountered, shortly after Baghouz fell, was a woman in niqab who started to shout, condemning me and everyone from my country for destroying the caliphate. More women gathered around us, triggering a ritual with which I would become quite familiar: exhausted Kurdish women from the YPG, a group that not only fought Isis but were then tasked with guarding them, brandishing their AK47s and telling me to move. I was “exciting” the inmates, who, I was warned, could become aggressive. During my visits, I saw women making beheading gestures. They often spat at our feet.

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My observations weren’t unusual. Colleagues ran headlines describing the camps as “toxic” and the inmates as “radicalised”. Women screamed on camera about the glorious legacy of Isis ideology and scoffed that they would never go to prison. The Guardian described al-Hol as an “incubator for Islamic State resurgence”, and reported several brutal murders carried out inside the camp.

But a year after the fall of the caliphate, Covid-19 raged across continents, and foreign correspondents with experience in Syria were refocused. The international news cycle was now in a furious pandemic-obsessed spin. Pro-Isis lobby groups saw their opportunity — and started to change tack.

Women inside the camps were instructed to tone down their language. Twitter accounts that had previously called for the beheading of journalists like me now took a more humanitarian approach. And it wasn’t long before NGOs adopted this rhetoric. Human Rights Watch started to issue press releases with titles such as “’Bring me back to Canada’: plight of Canadians held in Syria for alleged Isis links”. That particular publication includes quotes from Kimberly Poleman (“Let me be who I am, a Canadian”), who met an Isis fighter online and travelled to the caliphate in 2015. A year earlier, Isis’s Yazidi genocide of August 2014 had been well-documented. Poleman could hardly claim to be ignorant about the crimes of the organisation she was going to support.

But, disturbingly, Yazidis, Kurds and the caliphate have slipped out of NGO press releases, which instead focus on the rights of foreigners held in “filthy conditions”. Meanwhile, aid organisations have reduced their services in the Yazidi camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yazidi girls held as sex slaves by Isis receive messages on social media apps from Isis supporters telling them they are coming back to get them. Some girls refuse to leave the sprawling, under-resourced camps for this reason. Meanwhile, young Yazidi boys, having been groomed by Isis to fight and dig tunnels in Mosul, spend their days shooting things in online games. Many local aid workers are terrified of these children returned from Isis. “Can you take them to your country?” one camp worker asked me, when I visited.

Journalists, like NGOs, have also lost interest in these Yazidi victims, while anything featuring Isis brides continues to receive exposure — which, perhaps cynically, is why I believe some NGOs continue to champion foreign repatriations. Headlines generate interest, interest generates donations. No one seems to realise that Isis itself is perfectly capable of supporting its women — it may have been defeated territorially but it still has a lot of money in the Middle East, and a well-organised global network of supporters.

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More than anything, these last three years have felt like a bizarre experiment in how to whitewash the actions of terrorists. The time, effort and resources that went into reframing women who supported slavery — and openly told journalists they wanted to kill them and destroy their societies — is remarkable. Late last year, those of us who covered Isis for years joked that the next narrative to take over would be “save the innocent men!” And then, like clockwork, CTV News ran a piece about the British-Canadian Isis fighter Jack Letts that described him as a “bright teenager”. A few months later, the Guardian ran a piece headlined, “The UK government’s hypocrisy is keeping Jack Letts and his mother in purgatory” — in which the Brit is described as an Isis “volunteer”, rather than a fighter. The piece again omits any reference to the victims of Isis; lines are blurred, language is changed, and suddenly a man who joined a terrorist organisation is “a symbol of this government’s shameful unwillingness to confront the hardest of its responsibilities”.

Yet despite all this, you might find it strange to learn that I have campaigned for the repatriation of Isis members. Ireland, my native country, still has one naturalised citizen in Syria. I have advocated for his repatriation and subsequent trial — because Ireland is one of the few countries to have successfully prosecuted Isis members.

Former soldier Lisa Smith travelled to Syria twice and was ultimately sent to al-Hol. In July, she was tried in Ireland as a fully-grown adult whose actions have consequences. Joining a terrorist organisation that enslaved an ethnic group and sold young girls for sex is an action that deserves punishment. NGOs and journalists might see a softer narrative as a means to ensuring children are removed from prison camps, but there is no excuse for whitewashing the crimes committed by the women of Isis. The cleansing of their story will undoubtedly provide a template for terrorists — and only serves to embolden the well-resourced group, who are quite frankly laughing at us all.

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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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.